Occam's Razor

The downside of sobriety

So I am having lunch with my new friend Valerie at a local Red, Hot and Blue. We are enjoying the food and enjoying getting to know each other a little better. Our relationship so far has consisted of my patiently building a website for her business. We started to trade brief synopses of our lives. As two white Anglo Saxons as well as Unitarian Universalists, we discovered that we had a fair amount in common. We are both married and with children, although in her case there is also a grandchild. I’m still involved in a long process getting my twenty year old daughter out the door.

Val, a seeming model of decorum, at least confessed to having let her hair down a few times growing up. In the early 70s, like many of her classmates, she had smoked some weed and did other naughty things. I went back and frantically examined my childhood, and adolescence looking for similar naughty things I had done. I couldn’t turn up anything other that would qualify as more than a minor venial sin.

It’s not that I am without sin, because like most sinners I have done my share of it, but I could rarely find anything egregious to confess to the priest. There were times I was forced to go to confession when I made sins up. What priest would believe me if I said I hadn’t sinned since my last confession? I was blessed/cursed with two freakishly sober and responsible parents. They didn’t smoke. They didn’t drink, except perhaps a sip of wine at a wedding or at communion. Neither had ever been drunk, although my mother had brothers who were drunks. That is in part why she married a teetotaler. Moreover, I had little in the way of older siblings willing to be bad examples. I had one older brother who developed a taste for European beers and for a brief time smoked cigars in college. That changed of course when he met his wife and reverted to a more natural clean and sober style. He did so with such a zeal that he made my father look like a sinner. Vice was just not part of our upbringing. The neighbors did not help either. They did most of their sinning indoors, rather than in the streets.

When my turn came to grow up, I too stayed unnaturally unsoiled. To this day, I have never put a cigarette to my mouth, lit or unlit. I do drink alcohol, but only a few times a year, occasionally to the point where I feel slightly lightheaded, but never to the point of public drunkenness. I occasionally smelled pot in the hallways at school and saw students take furtive tokes. Yet, I never felt the desire to join them; in fact, I felt something like disgust watching their behavior. While I never embraced puritanical behavior, even in the days before AIDS I felt little desire to jump into bed with any woman on the first date, no matter how attractive she was. It was not like I saw any virtue in chastity. It helped I suppose that I inherited my parents’ natural shyness, so I was not particularly inclined to make the first move.

So here I was this afternoon, age fifty plus, in many ways unsullied by vice, being clean and sober (not to mention proper) with my new friend Val enjoying a meal at a Red, Hot and Blue and wondering whether I had missed something. It is likely I will never know. I did suggest to Val that perhaps it was not too late and she should take me to a bar or tavern and get me stinking drunk and silly. Perhaps once in my life I should get in a bar fight, or puke out my guts into a filthy restroom toilet, or engage in some weird indiscretion I would later regret.

I am not sure I could. Because the downside of all that righteous living and sobriety is you are afraid to take many chances. Most people who gamble lose and often lose big. Sometimes they win big, and revel in their momentary wealth. In any event, whether they win, lose or both, they seem to be living a broader life than the one I lead. Instead, I live a risk-averse life, usually moving toward an area that I perceive to be safer. Six years ago, this need for safety caused me to switch jobs from one in downtown D.C. to a much safer location a few miles from home in the Northern Virginia suburbs. With my window looking down on the National Mall (where I daily watched freight laden trains running in and out of the city), it did not take much for my imagination to conjure up a vision of some terrorist stuffing a boxcar with explosives, and taking me out, much like Timothy McVeigh took out over a hundred people in Oklahoma City in the mid 1990s. Better to find another job.

“Be prepared,” is the Boy Scout motto. That was also my father’s motto (an ex Boy Scout himself). It seems to have worked well for my father, who is in remarkable health at age 83. Yet, is there any point to making it to 83 if you spend much of your life simply trying to optimize your survival and comfort, rather than grasping life by its reigns? Is it better to have a shorter life lived well than a long live lived in a pedestrian fashion? How many others have an earthquake and sewer backup rider on their home insurance policy and umbrella insurance just in case someone wants to file a lawsuit against them?

Since alcohol no longer agrees with my wife, I am hoping my new friend Val will finally be the one to corrupt me. I have no idea where the local bars are, but I suspect she can find out. Perhaps she could introduce me to a drink that is both tasty and likely to have me quickly lying on the floor. Perhaps under the influence I could let my mouth get the better of me by trading political opinions with the Republican by my elbow. Perhaps I would wake up in the morning hung over, hurting and regretful, but knowing for some small period, I had walked outside the bounds of my self-imposed safety zone.

I hope Val will hurry up. I’m not getting any younger and I don’t seem to be able to do it by myself.

April 13th, 2010 at 05:26pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2010, Sociology | 2 comments
Tags: Sobriety

Father’s Day

This original work of fiction was first written in 1981 for my mother, long before I met my wife or had any idea I would be a father. I was all of 24 when I wrote it. It has been revised a few times since then, most recently in 1993. I know one grown man who said it made him cry. It may be the best work of fiction I have every written. I should write more fiction. Enjoy. (c) 1981, 1988, 1993 by m...@occams-razor.info.

His vision was breathtakingly real.

His heart pounded. His heaving chest, anxious for more air, throbbed in furious pace with his heart. He felt the bite of cold metal bars sear his hands. A crisp Fall wind on his face felt like a peppermint in his mouth. He was hanging, hanging from parallel bars. His hi-topped monotoned sneakers fell like deadweight toward the wrinkled blacktop of the playground below.

Suddenly he was up to his ankles in water. He walked slowly up a sparkling brook bounded by grassy knolls. A lock of his dark curly hair swayed back and forth in front of his eyes as he walked. He looked through the water and found his feet were tightly buckled inside a pair of black galoshes. They carried him slowly upstream, disturbing sediment and minnows where he walked. A powerful undertow made his every step slow and laborious. He raised a boot to move forward but the current nearly made him lose his balance.

Now the brook vanished. His heavy eyes cast a sleepy glance over a windy and snow covered suburban street. His torso was warm despite the arctic weather, thanks to a new wool sweater beneath his husky overcoat. But his uncovered head offered no comfort from a savage northerly wind which flowed through his hair. “Crimeanetties! It’s cold!” his boyish voice said. There was nothing he could do but stumble forward with both gloved hands buried deep into his coat pockets. He wondered how long he could negotiate four heavy textbooks in the crock of one arm before they spilled onto the snow. He forced himself forward again. If only he had remembered his stocking cap! A tear involuntarily emerged with the full force of another gust on his face.

He was in school and inside it was gloriously warm. Even so he found himself pressed against a radiator grate. Its heat desensitized him to the frightful noise from his arriving classmates. A cold, half opened eye noted his fourth grade teacher, Miss Devonshire, hunched over her desk grading papers. He glanced out the window. Row upon crooked row of townhouses wound around the nearby hills like a terraced garden. Virtually all of them put out a trail of white smoke into a frosty blue morning sky.

A cry from somewhere … shrill … insistent. He turned away from his class, only for a moment.

It was too late. They had grown. Their half-innocence, their soft-as-cottonball faces were supplanted by long chins and studious expressions. Their hair was much longer and unkempt. But it was their clothes which really seemed strange: bell-bottom trousers for the boys and tightly wrapped miniskirts for the girls. And beads, lots of beads draped around the neck. The boys had long and powerful legs with huge bony feet stuffed inside suede shoes. Their legs flopped out from beneath their small desks and into the aisles.

It was incongruous to keep hearing this muffled but insistent crying…

So he stepped back.

For an indefinite moment he was delicately suspended between two worlds, both real. Each had the firmness of a cobweb. In one world Mary Alice Jordan was fiercely scratching her leg above her sandal strap. In the other an unfocused eye dimly read a luminous dial saying it was just before two in the morning.

Someone next to him was slowly turning in bed. From far away a shrill cry was piercing the silence. His wife was turning in bed again. Her semi-conscious hand fell comfortably over his shoulder.

The crying was continuing, distant but still insistent.

“Honey. It’s your turn.”

Snap! The cobweb gave way. He was sitting on the edge of their bed, his two bare feet apathetically but dutifully planted on the floor.

—–

Gary Howell had no intentions of settling down. He had dated many women but he felt both intimate and distant with them. For the most part his dates were satisfied with simple things like heartfelt whispers and passionate embraces. They never mentioned the word “love”, which suited him fine. He had plenty of school ahead of him. He had no time to fall in love.

But there had been special moments. One had been a moonlit summer stroll with a coed named Wendy along a quiet wooded path close to campus. His third date with Evelyn Offenbach recalled only the heady rush of manliness he felt when he rushed around the front of his car to snatch her door open. Once, for one fleeting and terrifying moment, he believed he was in love with Evelyn. But the feeling passed.

His first date with Sara Ann Coughlin had been an afterthought, a way to pleasantly unwind after concluding a tedious project at the lab. Sara struck him as an over-average sort of lass, and therefore an ideal date. Fun to be with, but no fuss. Her jet black hair was inordinately curly. She had a lean frame, deep sunken eyes and a too pointy nose. And Sara Ann had absolutely no taste in clothes. She preferred muted colors, rumpled sweaters and clogs (when they were in season.) Perhaps it was her consistently dismal apparel that made him think she was at the brink of poverty. That or the way her heels had become so worn she stood crooked.

During the dinner one of her false eyelashes made an unexpected appearance in her salad. Gary found himself trying to restrain a laugh and not succeeding. Sara gasped then threw her arms up in mock dismay at her horrible faux pas, much like an actress of the silent screen. Then she smiled sweetly, straightened herself and deftly removed her other eyelash. “Gary, you’ll have to forgive me. I will never be very good at being pretty. And I keep swearing I’ll never wear these things again. This is why, in case you’re interested!”

On their next date they journeyed to the cinema where they shared a large bucket of popcorn and each other. Their buttery fingers inadvertently found each others in the darkness. Instantly Gary forgot the movie. All he could think of, all he could feel was the joyful press of her hand in his. It was small and delicate hand and somehow familiar. Like Sara herself. It seemed impossible to remember any time so fantastically far in the past that she had not been there.

Their dates were riotous fun. They joked, they poked each other in the ribs, they pigged out on ice cream cones at Baskin Robbins, they talked, Lord they talked! But not often in words. A thousand lovely and delicate feelings were spoken from a mere sideways glance or a broken sentence. Some part of him was infuriated with Sara for causing this elation within him. He was a confirmed bachelor, dammit. He was studying for his Masters Degree, and it was good that Sara was graduating so he could concentrate on his studies. But a day apart from her was an eternity. A few minutes between classes doing something as dopey as holding hands sent him overflowing with energy and his spirit soaring.

How could it be that he could be so enamored by a woman, such a plain woman, as Sara Ann? So swiftly she grabbed hold of his heart yet so gently that he was hardly aware it was happening. The girl of his dreams was supposed to be tall and intellectual and refined. Sara Ann was none of these things.

He was not in love with her.

Oh god yes he was hopelessly in love with her.

In time his feelings did lessen slightly as familiarity set in. But they never went away. And one day he was surprised to find himself saying that he loved her, and she smiled shyly back and said she loved him too. He knew of no reasons to marry her except that he loved her and wanted to always be with her.

And even after a marriage and a child nothing really dimmed their magic.

—–

Until he discovered his mortality.

His death was something he had always been intellectually certain would happen someday. But he did not worry about it because he had never felt old.

There had been warning signs. Getting married was in itself a sobering experience. It had been very strange to suddenly be referred to as “her husband”. When Sara announced she was pregnant he spent the better part of a week trying to accept the fact that he was capable of something so fantastic as reproduction. Adolescence had clearly come to an end.

But this feeling was altogether different. It was so powerful it caught him in mid stride as he ambled down the boardwalk by the lake. For a terrified moment he thought he felt his heart stop. Then it began to race abnormally. An involuntary shiver shot down his spine. His prescription bag spilled onto the dock. He stood for one long and painful moment hardly able to move with one hand cupped over his palpitating heart. From his brain the message was urgent and insistent. You are getting old, Gary. And you are going to die.

This is silly, he thought. I am still young! I am only twenty seven! But the message was overwhelming. You are getting old. You will die someday.

On a bench overlooking the lake, amid the squawk of the ducks and the splattering from the fountain, he grimly forced himself to do the arithmetic. He had lived over a quarter century; a full third of his life was over and unrecoverable. What he could remember of his past seemed squeezed into his brain with the brevity of a Fox-Movietone newsreel. The lesson was obvious: the rest of his life would fly by just as fast, maybe faster. And there was nothing he could do. He could not even slow it a bit.

“I’m not getting old,” he decided uncertainly. He stumbled forward, almost forgetting to retrieve his prescription. Alone in his living room, sunk deep into the loveseat, he stared blankly out into the cluster. The room was quiet although he was dimly aware of the chirps from the birds behind the open window. He was alone. God, he was so alone. He wanted Sara’s caresses on his cheek, he wanted to be held tightly and told that he was special and he was loved and especially that he was not going to die. But Sara had gone with their daughter Vicki to the pediatrician and would not be back for hours. And he also knew even Sara could not really help him. Nothing was forever, not even Sara.

His heart continued to race for a long time. But the utter terror of that moment would never completely go away.

—-

“Gary. Please. The baby.”

With considerable effort he got on his feet. One hand firmly clasped the nightstand to secure his balance. With a conscious lunge he moved through the darkened bedroom and hallway and into his daughter’s room.

He cautiously lifted his child into his arms, subliminally aware of the press of her hot and vibrant flesh against his. He stroked her on the head while she continued to cry. “Don’t fuss. Bottle’s coming soon, I promise. It’s okay. It’s okay.” With his free hand he found her formula and placed it in the microwave. The timer rang. He tested its temperature with a dollop of milk on his hand. Just right. Into her tiny mouth. Her crying finally abated into grateful swallows.

Now they were in their darkened living room. Vicki was cradled in his arm busy swallowing her formula. There was a delightful pattern of moonlight on the carpet, otherwise the room was as dark as it was quiet. What little light filtered through the trees seemed as soft and gentle as his daughter’s suckling. She was then as he would always remember her: close and snug against his chest. In the dark room she was mostly hidden deep in the shadow, yet there were hints of her angelic appearance. He could make out faint impressions of her tightly sealed eyes and her small pouty lips. She hugged the bottle so gratefully.

And — how sweet! — she placed one hand around his small finger. She knew him even at six weeks: the man who gives her food, the kind gentle man who hold her bottle so steadily, the man who loved her so dearly: her father.

Father. He expected for a moment this thought would again unleash the terror of his mortality, but it did not. The gentle press of his daughter’s impossibly tiny fingers overwhelmed this morbid reflection.

It was two-fifteen in the a.m. and time had finally frozen. Just my daughter and I, he thought. The silence was as beautiful as a symphony. The oddball hour was curiously invigorating.

And as he sat nursing her he suddenly felt the warmth of his Mother’s arms and the moist, half-forgotten press of her lips on his cheek. How many years had that been? How long since she had died so suddenly? He was not sure; he knew it did not matter. Mom was here now. He sensed her gentle kiss again, now on his forehead.

He withdrew the empty bottle from Vicki’s mouth and gently smothered his daughter with his own gentle embrace. She reached forward and pawed at the stubble on his cheeks, but his abrasiveness did not seem to frighten her. Suddenly she was full and wanted to yield to instant sleep. She did not want to be put over her father’s shoulder. She was oblivious to her own burping and the stream of saliva flowing onto her bib. She fell asleep in mid pat.

At length she was back into her crib. He gave her a gentle kiss on her forehead. Would she someday remember too?

“Gary? How is she?”

“She’s fine.” Their words were swallowed up by the silent walls.

“Umm, did she take her formula?”

“Uh huh.” He slipped between the sheets again and unconsciously snuggled up to his wife. Oh! The press of her warm flesh against was still lovely to feel!

The silence and her warmth yielded to sleep.

And slowly he felt the cobwebs of the other world again and he had returned.

January 16th, 2010 at 01:10pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, The Arts | no comments
Tags: Fiction

I believe consciousness is eternal

Over the years, I have sporadically tried to explain my theology or lack thereof. It has resulted in arguably weird posts like this one. Last night I tried again at the occasion of another monthly meeting of my covenant group. The topic of the month was big questions. We started with one that will usually draw a different answer from every one of my fellow Unitarian Universalists: Do you believe in God?

My bet is that most Americans can answer that easily. Ninety percent or so will say yes and the other 10% will say no. Many of the ninety percent though will put asterisks next to their answer. The whole question though is very hard to answer because you first have to ask: what kind of God are you asking about? Paternal? Maternal? Non-sex specific? Singular or polytheistic? One that listens and responds to your prayers or one that is absent? A God that cares about you in particular? Or a very removed God who has hosts of angels, archangels, sub-archangels and other intercessors that handle prayers from relatively meaningless people like me?

My forebrain may be too developed because I could not give a definitive answer. I remain sort of the agnostic I decided I was some thirty plus years ago. I neither believe nor disbelieve in the paternalistic God that I was introduced to by my Catholic parents. I can say that I never particularly felt the personal presence of God. For me, attempts at prayer are like radio waves; they bounce off the clouds and come back to me. When the Magic 8-Ball replies, to the extent it replies at all, it says “Reply hazy, try again.” I do feel spiritual at times, for example, when nature reveals itself in all its majesty. The experience is very mystical when it happens, but doesn’t feel like God is tapping me on the shoulder saying, “See, here’s all the proof you need that I exist.”

No doubt to some I am being unforgivably ambivalent, but I have developed a certain comfort in my murkiness. I know many people feel the presence of God and I think that’s fine. I don’t mean to say they are deluding themselves, but at the same time I cannot take their testimony with whole cloth when it is not my experience nor the experience of millions of others, including Mother Teresa. I take some comfort in physics, which is slowly peeling away God’s mask.

I suspect God’s existence or non-existence is just one of these questions that is impossible to satisfactorily answer. I do not think there is any definitive answer because we can only perceive what we can experience through our very limited senses. Moreover, our lives are relatively short.

I have read enough about quantum physics to feel strongly about a few things. What I believe is eternal is consciousness: mine and yours. I think consciousness is eternal and like energy itself cannot be created or destroyed. So I very much believe in the soul. I see my soul much like a driver and my body like a car. My body’s brain is like a steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedal. I use them to move my body through life. At some point in the future the car will refuse to start. At that point my body dies. However, my soul, the driver, is still around. Perhaps at that point I exit the car and look around the car lot. I pick out another car and use it (the new body) to continue to experience the universe.

This is really not as crazy as it sounds. String theory may be a theory, but it is a very well developed theory with lots of sound empirical evidence. What science does teach us is that energy is never destroyed. It is merely transformed. If string theory is correct then we also know that everything is irrevocably connected to everything else. Buddha understood this 2500 years ago. It also essentially means that individuality is an illusion.

So who or what are we then? I think what we are is a singularity: a point in space-time (or perhaps more accurately, a time-series in space-time) where an infinite matrix of superstrings intersect and it is different from some other point. So you might say we are both individuals and we are all part of the same thing. What is unique about living is that it provides the illusionary experience of individuality. We may prefer this illusion, similar to the way that some people prefer chocolate.

To the extent that I can formulate a belief in God, it is just the suspicion that I am not separate from God, but intrinsically a part of God and God is a part of me. It’s not a question about being separated from God. How can I be separate from something I am already a part of? I am irretrievably part of everything and plugged into the universe as are you.

I am consciousness. You might say I am a thought racing around the mind of God. Each of us is a thought of this larger collective being. A thought is both permanent and transient. We may only think a particular thought in one moment, but the thought is stored in collective memory. It is always retained. That thought is my consciousness and is what I call the eternal me.

Where we came from, I don’t know. I don’t see the point in speculating. As Bertrand Russell once pointed out, if everything is caused by something else, then something caused God, which begs the question and points to the fallacy in the argument. Consciousness exists because I experience it. I think it continues after death and I choose to call this eternal part of me my soul. I suspect I live multiple lives and inside this consciousness I call myself time simply does not matter. It does not matter how many lives I have experienced or will experience. However, I do think that it is this experience that feeds the consciousness. Perhaps over many lives we do grow in understanding and maturity.

I believe in consciousness because I feel it and ultimately I can only trust what I feel. I can look at science like string theory to support parts of my beliefs, but I also recognize that because the universe is immensely complex so our understanding of reality is going to be poor at best too. If “I think, therefore I am” then “I feel there is an immortal part of me, therefore it exists” is also valid. At this point in my life, it not only feels right, but it need be no more complex than this.

November 10th, 2009 at 08:59pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Metaphysics, Philosophy | 2 comments
Tags: Consciousness, God, Religion

On the movable walkway called life

As you may have noticed, one consequence of being born is that you eventually must die. It may seem unfair, but that’s just the way it is. We are all prisoners in our own unique time stream. We step onto our time stream (we assume) at birth, although some part of it begins at conception.

Yes, our life is undoubtedly a time stream. It is like one of those very long movable walkways that you find in large airports that carry you inside or between concourses. Its speed is constant. During the time you stand on the walkway, you stay in one place while things move around you. Eventually the walkway ends and the journey stops. We get off the walkway when we die but while we are on the walkway, we are its prisoner.

Unlike the movable walkway, we are not entirely sure how we got on it in the first place. The walkway behind us is quickly shrouded in mist and the walkway ahead, except for the first couple of feet, remains a dense fog. However, we can look to our left and our right and enjoy our limited view.

Unlike walkways in airports, this walkway is very wide. In fact, we cannot see either of its sides. Yet we know we are on the walkway because things are happening all around us. Suns rise and set. Seasons pass and return. Things that looked shiny and new last year lose their luster this year and in a dozen years are often dysfunctional or obsolete. Trying to find the edges of the walkway is as futile as trying to sail off the edge of the world. Space and time curve all around us. We cannot see the curve but we sense it is there. We feel its truth: that we are a singularity in a matrix called space-time. Ephemeral things, some alive and some not surround us. They are often beautiful. At its best life resembles a magnificent kaleidoscope. We often feel like we are sitting in a theater and our life is unfolding on the screen.

It is natural to wonder what happens when the movie that is our life ends. Are there credits? Were we really its producer and director, or just the unknowing actors? These may be impenetrable questions, but sages and common people have pondered them for time immemorial. The atheist believes that when our movie comes to and end, the lights go out and we are simply nothingness. The theist believes there is a producer. Some believe there is a producer and director. The producer is called God. The Christians call the director Jesus. The Muslims call him Muhammad. The Hindus believe there are many producers and directors and they often slip between their roles. Some of these directors coach us more than they coach others. The Buddhists think that like the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, when you pull back the curtain you find another human like yourself (perhaps yourself) at the control directing the special effects. The agnostic doesn’t know if there are producers or directors. He does not exclude them but has a hard time trusting what he cannot see. The humanists are unconcerned about how we got on the walkway or where it will end, but is only concerned about the state of the walkway right now and how we can all live more happily in the present

In general, the longer you stay on the walkway the more you feel the past fade. You see the collection of things you have surrounded yourself with disintegrate before your eyes. You watch people, many of them loved ones, mysteriously drop off the walkway altogether, particularly as they age. The more you witness these events, the more certain you become that your walkway will end for you too at some murky time in the future. A relative handful finds the walkway very annoying. They take their own lives, figuring wherever they end up, if anywhere, is less painful than the present.

How should you spend your time while you remain on the walkway? This too is a topic of great concern for the people on the walkway. Some people are much more concerned about the next walkway. They advise that we should spend much of our time on this walkway preparing the next one. For theists there are generally two walkways that occur after death: one toward heaven, glory and salvation and the other toward hell and misery. To the Buddhist, our walkways sort of cycle backs on itself. They are confident that after death we are quickly deposited into another walkway. While our memories of our last life will be erased, we will carry our personalities and predispositions into the next life. Nirvana is the act of getting off the time stream altogether. Meditation and living simply are the keys. Enlightenment is the goal. You reach nirvana when you have achieved full enlightenment. Then they assert the carousel finally stops, you can dismount, exit and see what, if anything, is real.

Sometime in my early 20s, I remember being profoundly shaken that I was aging. Before entering adulthood, old age was so far enough away that it was abstract and hence nothing to worry about. Grabbing the reins of adulthood made me feel that life was in reality fleeting. Now in my 50s, I still feel the steady passage of the years. It feels like I am at the bow of a ship heading into the wind. The wind tears across my face but the infinite sea ahead is as mysterious and impenetrable as ever.

Strangely at age 52, while I remain leery of death, it no longer seems as fearful while at the same time it feels more tangible. I now accept that I am born to die and that’s just the way it is. It is natural to be inquisitive about dying and death, but to be obsessive about it the way I was in my twenties now seems a great waste of my life’s energies. Whatever movie I am in, it is not a bad movie and it gets more engrossing as the years pass.

Today, it feels more natural to be in the moment than to peer into an impenetrable far future. I see progress in myself and in my life. Some part of me longs for the immortal feeling of youth again, but some other part of me is also glad it is in my far past. I am more comfortable, more ordered and find more meaning now than I did thirty or forty years in my past. I feel grounded, but not rooted. My feelings will probably continue to change as I age, but right now, I accept life for what it is. I accept that it must end and feel that embracing the present is the healthiest thing for me. The movable walkway is my home, so I had better enjoy it and take care of it as best my limited skills will allow.

July 25th, 2009 at 11:16am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2009, Philosophy | no comments
Tags: Death, Life, Space-Time

The illusion of fidelity

(I am in Salt Lake City attending the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I have attended a lot of seminars and worship services and heard a lot of sermons. Although not an ordained minister, in the spirit of this extraordinary week of learning, I offer my own sermon for your consideration.)

Death and infidelity are in the news. Michael Jackson’s death (whose cause is at this time unknown) has had the effect of directing more traffic to my site, principally to this 2005 post where I said I believed he was a pedophile. A jury subsequently disagreed with me but no one would dispute that Jackson was one odd bird. I am not too surprised he died early. Bizarre people like Jackson often do. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards may be exceptions to the rule. Even I cannot deny Jackson’s talent. He was more of a rubber dancer than Fred Astaire and he oozed talent and creativity.

Also entering immortality is the actress Farrah Fawcett, who burned an indelible impression in the minds of forty or fifty somethings like me. Her swimsuit poster with her toothy grin and cascading blonde tresses was ubiquitous in teenage bedrooms and college dorm rooms in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fawcett though was something of a surprise, eventually shedding her bimbo image and proving herself an excellent actress in made for TV movies like The Burning Bed (1984). General box office success unfortunately proved more elusive.

Both Jackson and Fawcett are my peers, so their untimely deaths make me wonder if I will draw the short straw from life too. There is no way to know. I have done much to lower the odds of dying in middle age and there is much more I could do. I get enough Buddhism from my wife to know that death is in our nature. At best it can be postponed. We all ultimately return to the stardust from which we came. It is our destiny. We are impermanent. In fact there is nothing permanent except change.

Perhaps the stars are aligning strangely because in the news we have both untimely celebrity deaths and newly revealed cases of infidelity among prominent politicians. Is it just circumstance or could there be a link between these prominent deaths and all the recent episodes of infidelity in the news? I think there is a relationship.

I believe that the animus of infidelity, at least in middle age, are not so much character flaws but aging. As our date with death becomes more real with every passing year, inevitably you have to examine your life and the choices you made and wonder if the fit is still good. I am certainly not the same person at age 52 that I was at age 28 when I married, nor is my wife. Unlike South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his wife, my wife and I exchanged no traditional pledge of sexual and emotional exclusivity on our wedding day. I was perhaps a bit prescient even then that if I made such a pledge I would eventually prove myself a liar. Perhaps Mark Sanford and his wife would have been smart to do the same thing. It is hard to say for sure but in my case I suspect by not excluding sexual relationships that fooling around lost much of its allure. Of course it is also far easier to avoid infidelity when mindful of the consequences of doing so in this modern age, which could easily be disease and which could potentially be deadly. In my case fear of death helps triumph over the seven year itch.

My wife and I are clearly the exception. For most married people, the idea of keeping the fidelity door even slightly ajar is a ghastly idea. It is not so much an issue among Unitarian Universalists like me. My suspicion is that vows of sexual fidelity are more likely written out of marriages performed in Unitarian Universalist churches than expressly stated. I did promise to love my wife with all the energy I could muster. Based on my experience this may be much harder than traditional vows of sexual and emotional exclusivity. Paying close attention to her feelings and listening to her with an open heart day in and day out for twenty plus years have been at once both a joy and a burden. No fleeting sexual liaison could or should mean as much as this enormous effort of sustained time, attention, caring and concern, which continues nearly twenty four years later.

Most infidelity though is not really about the sex, but about the heart. Affairs that are strictly sexual but lack emotional depth are generally forgivable. Those where cares and concerns move from the spouse to another generally result in divorce. It is clear that Mark Sanford’s affair fell into the latter category, given by his own admission that he spent five days in Argentina crying. Why did he do it? Why did Senator John Ensign, Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer or Former Senator John Edwards? I have seen pictures of their wives and in each case I think it cannot be because their spouses are ugly hags. Most are exceptionally attractive and personable women. I suspect the infidelity is due to the anxiety of watching sand drop through the hourglass of their lives and wondering, Is this it? I suspect that in most cases they found their relationships with their wives enriching, but not enriching or exciting enough to wholly fill their emotional and sexual needs or to close the gap of anxiety created by their aging.

The honorable thing of course is not to have an affair, but first divorce your spouse and then put yourself on the market. This is nice in theory, but hard to do in practice, particularly if you have children and especially if you are a politician. Politicians rise by selling an image of themselves, and you believe that voters must buy into the image of a superman in order to trust you with their vote. You must be smart, personable, persuasive, a terrific husband, a wonderful father as well as a man of faith, character and deep convictions. This is fine but of course it is almost always an illusion. Almost no one possesses all these gifts. Even if they do for a time, sustaining it for a lifetime is often very hard to do. We have our nature and our mortality working against us.

I hate to break this to all the heartbroken wives (and husbands) out there, but at some point fidelity in a marriage is almost always self delusion. You are most likely to find fidelity in someone who is simpleminded or whose emotional needs are easily satisfied. If you find someone like this, it helps if you are the same way yourself. However, if you marry someone who is ambitious like any politician of stature and they never fall off the wagon, consider yourself exceptionally fortunate.

Men buy into fidelity because it is the price they have to pay to live with a woman. A wife gives a man not only steady sex (a very hard thing for a man to get) but also a social stature and connections that cannot be acquired as a bachelor. Many pledge fidelity with the highest intentions only to discover that they did not know what they were pledging. How could they really, since they had not experienced the reality of a long term marital relationship? In a way, marriage is like giving a new driver the keys to a new and shiny Camaro that he lusted after but requiring them to never drive another car.

Fidelity will always be tentative. It will always be a daily decision by each spouse to continue to be faithful. In reality philanderers like Mark Sanford emotionally left their marriage long before trading furtive emails with distant romantic prospects. Fidelity can perhaps be realized through the application of sufficient doses of societal guilt, but this is a technical fidelity, not fidelity of the heart. Fidelity of the heart, when it is achieved, is realized only through the sustained commitment by both partners to invest enormous amounts of emotional energy (time) in the relationship. It requires daily mindfulness, daily intimate communications and it often gets harder the longer the marriage lasts. Even then there is no guarantee that with the application of regular high dosages of emotional energy that it will succeed. Every day in a marriage offers the potential for infidelity.

Why is this? It is because time changes all things, including people. We buy into marriage and the notion of fidelity because we want to believe that at least one aspect of our life can be unbreakable and unchangeable and endure even beyond death. This is the promise and illusion of love. While love itself is real, it can be realized only through the flawed talents of ordinary people. The nature of the universe of course is just the opposite. Nothing is permanent. Nothing endures forever. The participants in a marriage are going to find that who they are will change over time. Hopefully both will change in ways that will keep the relationship flourishing and engaging. But there are no guarantees and as time progresses the odds are stacked against the spouses.

Perhaps it is better to be like the Buddhists and live in the moment, appreciating the richness of each day with your spouse. When infidelity comes knocking on your door, it is going to pierce your soul like a knife through the heart. What is really dying though is the illusion that you can remake the ways of nature. The pain of infidelity though does not have to last forever. People can and do move beyond its pain all the time. Something will come along to replace the feeling that will be hopeful and more healing. This too is a part of life. Hope, loss, suffering and the rebirth of the spirit come with the territory of being a human.

All souls are adrift on an endless sea. Seas may be calm or stormy but the sea cannot be calm forever. It must churn itself up into a frothy white at some point. So too must souls.

June 28th, 2009 at 11:05am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy, Sociology | no comments
Tags: Infidelity

America loves “socialism”

One of the more baffling attacks during the recent presidential campaign were stern warnings from John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin that the election of Barack Obama would lead to socialism. Pretty much anything Barack Obama proposed in the way of new government programs amounted to socialism. Health care reform: socialism. Raising taxes on those who make more than $250,000 a year: socialism. According to their campaign, Obama’s programs were designed to take away your freedoms and give the government more power. These tactics seem to have worked to some degree. Since Obama’s election, gun sales have gone way up. Despite promises from Obama to the contrary, gun owners believe that Obama will take away their right to bear arms.

Ironically, the Bush Administration, through its own ineptitude, is moving us closer to real socialism than anything that is likely to happen during an Obama Administration. This is because many Americans have no idea what socialism actually is. They confuse new government programs with socialism.

In a true socialist state, the government controls the means of production. If you want to see socialism at work, take a trip to Venezuela. President Hugo Chávez Frías has nationalized the country’s oil industry, its telephone industry and dozens of other industries. He is working to nationalize the country’s health care system too. If we had socialism in the United States, there would be no GM, Ford and Chrysler. Instead, we would have the Agency for Automobile and Truck Production, which would probably be part of a new Department of Industrial Production. Yet, because of the market meltdown, we are moving in that direction. As a condition for providing bailouts to banks, investment firms and other industries, Congress demanded an equity stake in many of these firms. After all, if these institutions revive and become profitable in time then after providing all those billions of tax dollars to keep them afloat, taxpayers should enjoy their share of the profits.

Still, having a major equity stake in a company like AIG, or a bank like WaMu, is a long way from managing these institutions. Given that these institutions collapsed from their own mismanagement, it is unlikely that federal overseers will do a worse job of managing them. Nor are federal bailouts unprecedented. We have done it many times before, with Chrysler in the early 1980s and with many savings and loans later that decade. Sometimes, as in the case of Chrysler, taxpayers actually got their money back. In general, the government has no long-term interest in owning these companies. It wants to make sure the American taxpayer is not fleeced, if possible, before returning them back over to the private sector. That is not socialism; that is being fiscally responsible to the taxpayers.

If programs that redistribute wealth are socialism then clearly Americans are comfortable with socialism. The whole point of government is to redistribute personal wealth. We could have eschewed taxes when our country was formed. We learned that it is hard to protect the nation by hoping many unpaid farm hands toting guns would show up when faced with insurrection or invasion. We form governments to handle common societal problems too big to be solved individually. Duh!

No Republican or Democrat that I am aware of (except possibly for a few cranks, like Ron Paul) has called for abolishing our social security system. An attempt by the Bush Administration to just tinker around the edges (their proposal to allow younger workers to redirect some of the money going into social security into private accounts) was soundly rejected by Congress. Now, with the collapse of the financial markets, just the idea is laughable, never again to be resurrected. It turns out that mortgaging our retirement on risky and uncertain financial markets is unacceptable. We want some assurance of a reliable income in retirement.

After forty years of success, Medicare is also not going to be abolished either. Currently it is the primary means for older Americans to get health care after retirement. It is in effect a national health care system for senior citizens. It has had its issues over the years, but has been widely embraced by Americans since it was enacted during the Johnson Administration. Indeed, it has been expanded. The apparently “socialist” Bush Administration, as one of its early initiatives, expanded the Medicare system to include a new prescription drug benefit.

Moreover, if we are going to promote rugged individualism, what is with all those hundreds of billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies? Most of that money goes to predominantly red states. How many farmers who voted for McCain/Palin are anxious to lose their subsidies and take their chances in the free market?

No, when Republicans rail against expanding the size of government, what they really mean is they do not want to expand it for those they feel are not “enfranchised”, i.e. not “real” citizens (people like them). This means they are perfectly okay with programs like the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, but are leery about programs that, say, subsidize housing for the poor. The way Republicans see the world, the poor need to be more miserable, because if they are more miserable then they will have more incentive to escape from poverty through their own wits. They will become little Horatio Algers by working their fannies off and moving to the middle or upper class, just like George and Louise Jefferson. Then maybe they will be part of the enfranchised class and get more of those nice federal benefits, like that sweet home mortgage interest deduction. Never mind that most of those who do move from the lower to the middle class do so only because the government lent a helping hand. (My wife and I are examples. Our first home was financed with the help of FHA. We are now prosperous upper middle class adults.)

These “socialist” programs continue year after year because they are popular and they generally seem to work. If they were not they would be abolished. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Americans tend to like government programs in general. If there is a disconnect, it is that while Americans want these programs, they do not necessarily want to pay for them. This really is the root of our deficit spending problem. As I discussed elsewhere, deficits simply drive down the value of the dollar overall, so deficit spending tends to be counterproductive in the end.

We are about to see the return of a progressive administration. Yes, we are going to see bigger government, just as we got it under Bush and every administration in memory except possibly under Carter. While government will grow, government is likely to change in different ways under an Obama Administration, with less money being wasted in military adventures and more money being directed to solve problems closer to home. We will not mind that much either. We will not even care if our taxes go up, so long as we get national health insurance as part of the deal. What is most important is the net effect on our wallets. If we can find a way to get health care less expensively through a government managed program, we are going to embrace it. Simply having the certainty that health care will be there when we need it, whether we are employed or not, will be an enormous relief to the vast majority of Americans.

If this is socialism, Americans say: bring it on.

November 9th, 2008 at 02:52pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Politics 2008 | 3 comments
Tags: Socialism

Conservatism’s harvest

It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

William F. Buckley
First Issue of NATIONAL REVIEW
November 19, 1955

Granted, the late William F. Buckley’s idea of conservatism as it should be practiced differs substantially from those of our current president, whose approval ratings are now at 28%. Based on ever-rising gas prices, a tanking stock market and increased unemployment his anemic approval ratings are likely to collapse even further before his term expires in January. Still, both Bush and Buckley, like many conservatives, based their conservative philosophy on the assumption that what worked before has value, so change should be resisted.

The problems with conservatism have been borne out in the last eight years and should be plain for all to see. Just because you want societal progress to stop, does not mean that it will. Human behavior is that way. We act like a stream. Sometimes it crests. Sometimes it ebbs. Sometimes the stream overflows its banks. Its currents will transform the land around it. The stream, like society, is ever dynamic and changing. It is only when its image is frozen in our mind that it appears static.

Based on many millenniums of observing our species, we can safely assume that we humans will continue to be irascible folk. We will continue to defy neat categorization. We will continue to do dumb and stupid stuff. We will increase our population beyond the planet’s ability to sustain us. We will fight bloody wars for ethnic, racial and economic reasons. We will also do amazing stuff, like putting our species on the moon, making scientific breakthroughs and generating visionary and inspiring leaders that transform nations and the world.

Law, morals, ethics and governments exist to try to bring order and predictability to human affairs. These artifacts though work only to the extent that they fit within man’s current condition. When they do not they are easily overcome by our natural human behaviors, which on a mass scale can rarely be controlled for long. Moreover, when you try to counteract these natural human forces, the effect is invariably counterproductive. The damage of trying to fit the square peg of the past into the round hole of the present over these last eight years is all around us.

We are witnessing the train wreck of a principled but unworkable ideology called conservatism. Giving tax cuts to millionaires did not raise the boats of the middle classes, any more than it did in the robber baron age. Funding abstinence-only sex education has not reduced teen pregnancy. Voluntary cuts in carbon emissions have not reduced pollution. Freeing the free market further means fewer people are watching for foxes in a much larger and more complex financial henhouse. Proactive wars fought with 20th century tactics make us more insecure and prove financially ruinous. Less government, while potentially emboldening freedom, also means less oversight and exploitation. Its result is a nation that today more resembles a patch of weeds than a garden. What we are witnessing today is simply the natural consequence of conservative government refusing to give any ground to modern realities. We are witnessing that the tactics that worked for us fifty years ago are now foolish and counterproductive.

Why? Because we are not the same people that we were fifty years ago! For one thing, we have roughly doubled the number of us on this planet. This has affected how we think and behave. Increased travel and trade have mixed us up more, allowing us to live less insular and more connected lives. At least in the first world, we are much better educated than previous generations. We are less industrialized and more technology based. We have moved on from the past because the past no longer fits us.

Consequently, when conservatives govern we get huge disconnects. The Supreme Court tells us we have the constitutional right to own a gun even though we have no need for militias and the Indians are unlikely to attack. Today, most of us have a neighbor within shouting distance, not miles away. Not surprisingly when you put more of us closer together and you allow us to have guns, more of us are going to be victims of gun violence.

Effective government must adapt to fit the context of its times or it proves counterproductive. It must address today’s issues with tactics likely to work within the current environment, not with solutions that worked for a different age. Some like to call progressivism a philosophy. It is not. Liberalism is a philosophy. Progressivism is not the least bit ideological. Progressivism is pragmatic. It comes down to this: deal with the reality of what is before you by working with its dynamics rather than against it. As you might expect, I am a progressive.

William F. Buckley spent a career eloquently articulating the case for conservatism. Yet conservatism works only to the extent that its constituents do not change. Feudalism kept society stable and worked for centuries. Modern day feudalism, such as practiced by the Taliban or the Bush Administration, no longer works. One size no longer fits all.

In my fifty years, things have changed enormously. There are times when I too pine for the way things were. The order I perceived in the past provides a feeling of comfort. This is probably because I had few cares. I had my parents to worry about the real world for me and for them it was likely as messy as mine is today. I also know that time has passed forever. I would not now give up my computer, or my cell phone, or my unleaded gas, or my hundreds of entertainment choices to feel this way again. As I age, my world will continue to morph just as it always has.

Conservatism at its roots amounts to the desire to revert everyone to a myopic and unrealistic view of the past that was always more image than reality. Life was simpler for me in 1957 when I was born. However, to get that feeling of simplicity I would not want to return to the era of the Cold War. I would not want the pervasive racism that our country had back then. Nor would I want its pervasive conformity. I would not want my spouse to be a Stepford wife who had few career opportunities beyond that of mother and housewife. I would not want homosexuals to live in shame and in the shadows. I would not want just three television stations (all in black and white) and a few commercial radio stations. I would want the feeling of neighborhood and family connectedness that I had back then. I think we are recreating these for the times that we live in. In today’s world, these feelings are extended toward a larger community in cyberspace. My wife is one of many people whose social circle dramatically expanded with the Internet. Now they are very much her real friends. Fifty years ago, she would never have met any of these people.

We need to realize that while huge changes have occurred in our lifetimes, there have also been huge amounts of progress, much of it for the better. Fewer of us live in poverty. Our health care is better and we live longer and more meaningful lives. Most of us will not spend our final years in poverty. There is less discrimination in the workplace and in society in general. It is easier for us to be, as Martin Luther King prophesized, judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin. Barack Obama is a modern manifestation of King’s progressive vision.

We should want the best of both the past and the present, not just the past, and be mindful that what is new can be good as well as bad. I hope that by creating a better present, the future will unfold to be a happier and more enriching experience for all of us. I do know, as you should know also from the past eight years that trying to go back to the way things were done, is very damaging. Like communism, conservatism is one of these great ideas that stimulate the imagination but just do not work in execution. My hope is that after these last eight years, we will, like its great proselytizer William F. Buckley, give it a civil burial and move on.

July 16th, 2008 at 06:41pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Politics 2008 | one comment
Tags: Conservatism, Neoconservatism

Mother Teresa on the couch

It is rare that I am riveted by a news story. Yet this story (and its many variants) had me riveted. It appears that Mother Teresa (the Roman Catholic nun who founded the Sisters of Charity, and who spent fifty years caring for the least of our brethren, mostly in the slums of Calcutta) largely did not feel the presence of the God she served.

What is next? Will we see secret diaries of Adolf Hitler saying how much he loved and admired the Jews? The irony is that Mother Teresa’s feelings, articulated only to a series of confidential confessors over many years, seems to be one of the reasons that she will be elevated to sainthood. It appears that in the eyes of the Catholic Church, being disconnected from the Jesus she believed means she suffered, like Jesus on the cross, so that makes her even holier. Perhaps her experience is somewhat akin to the forty days and forty nights that the Bible says Jesus spent in the desert tormented by the Devil. For Jesus though, forty days and nights was enough. Mother Teresa spent more than fifty years consumed by her humanitarian work while rigidly towing the Catholic line. Yet she did this apparently without the consuming zeal of a religious devotee.

Well knock me over with a soda straw! Yet, some part of me was unsurprised. I have discussed Mother Teresa in bits and pieces in a variety of other blog entries. While I cannot but help admire her and feel astonished by the scope of her humanitarian work, some part of me was also appalled. Perhaps I could understand her if it she found passion in her work, but apparently, that was not the case. She loathed it. Seeing such wretched people day in and day out for fifty years, by her own admission, filled her with immense inner pain and suffering. And yet she soldiered on, put on a happy face and towed the Catholic line all while feeling nothing from the God she worshiped and served.

Just who was Mother Teresa anyhow? Judging from her works the answer is clear. She was a humanitarian the likes of which will probably not recur for many centuries. Judging from the divergence between her public words and private thoughts, she was also something of a hypocrite. I hasten to add that her hypocrisy was not the type deserving chastisement. Hypocrisy is typically manifested as selfish or immoral behavior while pretending the opposite. That was not the case here.

It appears that Mother Teresa was a hypocritical humanist. Humanists like Mother Teresa and me generally do not feel the presence of a personal God in our lives. We believe that relieving the suffering of our fellow humans is nonetheless a worthwhile goal. We believe that all people have inherent worth and dignity and that includes rich and poor, as well as the moral and the reviled. Mother Teresa followed the Catholic faith, but appeared to receive no enrichment from it. Receiving the Eucharist, for example, sparked no closer feelings toward God. She followed and advocated the teachings of the Church but they did not provide her with the passion that motivated her to do her work. Rather than taking care of the wretched out of a feeling of passion, she did her work because she said she said she was called by God to do so.

What does it mean to consume your life doing something that fundamentally disagrees with you? Is this virtuous or insane? If I started cutting myself like many teenagers do I would be up to my armpits in therapists. It is generally understood that actions that are self-destructive are harmful. In her confessions, Mother Teresa acknowledges that her actions wreaked a dreadful psychological toll on her. Her actions helping the poor were clearly virtuous but the 24/7/365 nature of her work suggests to me that most clinical psychologists would say she was also mentally ill.

Perhaps it must go this way if you are angling for sainthood. Mother Teresa went out of her way to not draw attention to herself. She was obsessive about being used as a means for people to find Jesus and Catholicism. If she were to take any pride in her accomplishments, she would perceive this as sinful in itself. The primary criteria for sainthood then seems to be the ability of the human will to persistently engage in actions perceived by the Catholic Church as beneficial yet contrary to our human nature. In other words to be a saint, you have to unlearn or deny yourself the right of personal happiness.

Yet it appears that as much as Mother Teresa tried, she could not stop feeling like a human being. Underneath her saintly demeanor was a thinking and passionate woman. Where she “succeeded” was in ruthlessly repressing her own human nature. This strikes me as tragic.

Some years back I wrote about toxic shame. I was introduced to it by the noted therapist John Bradshaw, who wrote this book on the subject. Bradshaw’s thesis was that shame can reach a toxic level, wherein it colors all of our actions. Instead of being a human being who can take joy in life, many of those inflicted with toxic shame become (in his words) human doings. Clearly, Mother Teresa was a human doing. It is now also clear from her confessions that she took no personal joy in her work. How she ended up this way is something of a mystery. However, if I had to bet, I would bet that her childhood was very rough indeed. A casual Wikipedia search did not return much information on her early life. Her father died when she was eight. She was born in Albania (Macedonia at the time), which is a poor country, known for large families. I would bet that her childhood was harsh and women were not valued very much. I also bet she did not get much in the way of parental attention. For whatever reason, she left home at 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto and never saw her family again. Her motivation for helping others might be a result of the lack of personal attention that she craved during her childhood. Obviously, I am speculating here, but it seems logical.

If so, then clearly many have benefited from her feelings of toxic shame. She inspired a new religious order, which continues to carry on with her work. Nevertheless, to be able to give out such love, yet to have been denied the kind of connection that she needed to feel from her God (and likely her family) strikes me as unbelievably tragic. Mother Teresa lived 87 years but it appears she was denied the love and intimacy she needed to feel like she was a human being. Instead, she became a human doing.

While I think humanitarianism is a noble cause, I do not think it should wholly consume anyone’s life. If it does, it should be because a person is truly passionate about it, not because someone feels they should do it. I suspect if Mother Teresa were alive and Dr. Sigmund Freud tried to psychoanalyze her, even he would throw up his hands in despair.

Mother Teresa for me remains an utter contradiction, at once both holy and someone for whom I feel even more compassion for than the wretched people she served. I hope her utter selflessness in her life earns her great spiritual reward in heaven. The irony is that, based on her own confessions, she would not enjoy such spiritual rewards. She would feel unworthy to receive them because they would dim the glory of the God she worshiped, but for whom she felt no passion.

August 25th, 2007 at 11:09am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Sociology | no comments
Tags: Compassion, Humanism, Love, Mother Teresa

The Illusion of a FWB

So, do you have a FWB? If you are like me (i.e. married), you may not know what a FWB is. I had seen the acronym around though. A simple Wikipedia Search quickly satisfied my curiosity.

A FWB is a “Friend with Benefits”. He or she is a person of the gender you are attracted to whom, in addition to being a “friend” (a rather amorphous term) also puts out for you. I have to admit, at first blush having my own FWB sounded great to this old married dude. Providing my wife went along with it (“It’s just sex dear, it’s not like I am in love with her. We are just good friends.”), it could be very convenient. If my wife is having another one of her interminable migraines and I am feeling a bit randy, I could just call up Judy, or Ashley or Kim, and, good friends that they are, would say, “Sure come on over for a quick roll in the hay.” Afterwards (since I do not smoke) we could play cards or talk about Lindsay Lohan’s latest adventures in rehab. Oh, by the way, shall we pencil in going to the art show a week from Saturday?

I suspect the number of married people with FWBs is tiny. It seems to be the single folks out there, usually recovering from the complications of a failed relationship that are drawn to finding a FWB. After all, a FWB relationship has many of the positive sides of a relationship without any of its downsides, like the emotional wreckage. Just as having sex with a condom (hopefully) protects you from sexually transmitted diseases, having sex with a friend protects you from all those nasty relationship issues. At least that is how the FWB theory goes. It is not like having sex with a bunch of strangers at an orgy. You are having sex with your friend, and since he or she is your friend, well, they would not lie to you about anything like having herpes or AIDS would they? In addition, since they are your friend, and they care for you, well, they will be circumspect and avoid becoming intertwined into a deeper emotional relationship with you.

Meanwhile, while you recover from your latest failed relationship, you are not left high and dry. There is no need to resort to your vibrator, or your right hand or the love doll in the closet to respond to Mother Nature’s urgings. While your emotional wounds heal, you can get the sex you need with your FWB. Since you are just friends, when you do not need him or her anymore and find that next special someone then everything is cool. Their feelings will not be hurt when you drop them as your sexual partner. Moreover, in the event your next relationship implodes, your FWB will be there. Well, maybe.

That, as best I can decipher it, is the lure and logic of a FWB. A casual search of Washington Craiglist personals today shows that women in particularly are looking for FWBs. (Men often say they want a FWB, but from their postings it appears they just want a woman who will act like their whore.) Oddly enough though, they do not have one already, so they have to advertise for one. Just some guy or gal to “chill” with. This seems to involve have a few beers in a sports bar, maybe seeing a movie together and then going back to your pad for some harmless conjugal sex.

Even though I am married, one of the reasons a FWB appeals to me is because I think it would be great to have someone into casual sex who liked me as a person and who (here’s the amazing part) is not struggling with their own personal issues. I do not know about you but here I am, age 50, and I struggle with personal issues every day. So does my wife. So does every person I know beyond a surface level, i.e. my friends. We are all embroiled in a certain amount of toxic crap. But not my FWB. She would be special. She would have her head together. That is why, if I need a FWB, I expect that she will be a psychologist or social worker. In my mind, only psychologists and social workers truly have their stuff together. So I am thinking if I need a FWB I will go around town and leave my card at the office of each female social worker and psychologist in my area between, say, age 40 and 50. Do you want a FWB? Call Mark at 703-555-1212. Let’s meet for drinks at the local sports bar. According to my wife, I give great back scratches. Also, I like blogging, classical music and politics. We can have great sex when we both feel like it and no commitment! And we can keep meeting at a sports bar occasionally just to chat. That should intrigue them!

It is just that the more I think about it the more I suspect that psychologists and social workers are in some crucial aspect of their lives also messed up. In fact, the only human beings who (allegedly) were not messed up were messengers from God. Unfortunately, both Jesus and Mohammad are long dead. Moreover, I seem to be attracted to women. Finding my FWB is going to be tough.

I have not had much casual sex. It is probably just me, but I am not very successful divorcing sex from having human feelings for the person I am making love to. The couple of times I tried casual sex left me feeling empty and a bit dehumanized. For me it was like drinking soda that had gone flat. I was left to conclude that those people who tried casual sex had not gotten the real thing: sex within a caring relationship, which if you can get it is amazing. However, if you are having sex with your friend, isn’t that a caring relationship? Well, maybe. When I think of myself having sex with some of my female friends what I suspect would happen is: (a) even if I were single, there is no way I could convince them to have sex with me in the first place; (b) if we did have sex then our relationship would change fundamentally, and probably not for the better; (c) it would be significantly inferior compared with having sex with someone I love; and (d) both of us would likely end up more screwed up than we were before we became FWBs.

If you are in a FWB relationship feel free to leave me a comment telling me that I am all wet. I would particularly like to hear, not about the FWB you coupled with last week, but the one that you coupled with five years ago. Are you still friends? Or has your friendship been reduced to sending Christmas cards once a year? Do you still feel the same about your friend as you did before you made love with him or her? Overall, was your FWB relationship healthy or hurtful?

I will leap to a conclusion and suggest that for the vast majority of you the answers will be no, no and yes. And I will also bet that for about 10% of you, one of your “friends” left a calling card that, if it can be cured, required a trip to a doctor or health clinic. If they did not, I will bet that another 20% of you are or have worked through this issue with a therapist, or wish you had the money to do so.

I believe that sex and the relationship between two people cannot be divorced, as much as at times we might want to be. If they were, perhaps we could better deal with the wacky stuff life throws at us. We might be able to fool ourselves for a while, just as we can pretend that there are no dusty bunnies in our house even though we have not dusted in a year. I suspect if you have a FWB then you have merely sold yourself on its illusion, rather than acknowledge its less than perfect reality.

Perhaps rather than posting that ad on Craigslist for your FWB, maybe you should be finding a therapist instead and discover why you want a FWB in the first place.

July 27th, 2007 at 05:07pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Sociology | 3 comments
Tags: Psychology, Relationships, Sexuality, Therapy

Unlamented

Las Vegas attracts many of life’s losers. If people are going to gamble on living then why not die here in this neon filled city that epitomized the extremes of American living? In 1998, my wife’s father, a man who I never met, died indigent and homeless here in Las Vegas.

His death was suspected for many years but for a long time could not be confirmed. He had a habit of disappearing for a few years then reappearing. When he reappeared, it was usually not a joyful experience. Generally, he was petitioning his siblings for two things: money and shelter. He must have been something of a smooth talker because over many years he talked them out of thousands of dollars. They wanted to believe in his rehabilitation. He promoted cockamamie business schemes involving their money, all of which eventually failed. About this time that he crept out of town.

Around the year 2000 after many years of no one hearing from Bob, one of my wife’s aunts entered his name into the Social Security Death Index. When his name and social security number came up positive, some basic facts about his death were gleaned. Date of death: September 14th, 1998. Age: 67.

Earlier this year I happened to speak to one of his sisters, my wife’s Aunt Pat. I informed her that her brother had died. She expressed neither surprise nor sorrow. However, she did take the time to get a copy of the death certificate, and she sent me a copy.

The death certificate filled in a few holes about his last days. He died at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, Nevada. Henderson is a town just outside of Las Vegas. His place of residence did not list a street address, but Searchlight, Nevada was listed on the death certificate. Searchlight is a town of about 500 people an hour’s drive south of Las Vegas. There is not much in Searchlight, but it is the birthplace of Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Bob must have died indigent because the Clark County Social Services Department was listed on the death certificate where his parents’ names would normally be. The certificate showed he was never married but here too the facts were incorrect. He was married to my mother in law for many years. In addition, he sired not only my wife but also my brother in law. He died of “end stage cardiac and pulmonary failure”. In other words, his heart stopped, but he was likely suffering from some form of congestive heart failure. He was reputedly quite obese as well as an alcoholic.

Among his entire family, including his former wife (my mother in law) there has been a noted absence of curiosity about Bob. When I broached the subject with them, what I usually heard was that he was just a bad man. The less said about him the better. Yet I found myself wanting to know more about Bob. For better or for worse he help shaped the woman I married.

My wife essentially grew up without a father. In the first six years of her life, her father did live in the household. However, he was not the nurturing type. My wife does not remember much about him in part because she was so young. What she does remember is not flattering. He was loud. He and her mother argued a lot. Perhaps that is how she acquired her introversion. Perhaps it was safer to be alone in a room reading a book than to deal with the ugly reality of two parents yelling at each other.

By early grade school, her mother and father were divorced. Her mother had custody, but her father had informal visitation rights. Her father’s idea of daughter-father time was to take her to bars to meet his friends. Since her brother was nearly ten years older than she was, she spent much of her formative years living with only her mother. There was no June Cleaver mother waiting for her after school with milk and cookies; she had to work. In the mid 1960s, she was the only child of divorce in her entire class and felt its stigma.

Trying to know her father so many years later is a challenge. Bob apparently was loud. He argued a lot in front of the children. At times, he had trouble maintaining a job. He was obsessed with his son excelling in sports, but not enough to bother to attend any of his games. My mother in law claims that he never physically abused her, but her son remembers differently. He recalls one episode when he was so angry that he put his fist through a wall. For a day or two, my wife was an innocent six-year-old girl embroiled in a nasty marital dispute. Her father essentially abducted her for a few days. Her brother, then sixteen at the time, threatened to kill their father if he ever showed up in their lives again. Apparently, he took his threat seriously and disappeared. He reappeared only to sympathetic siblings that hoped for his rehabilitation.

I had this image of Bob as fat, a drunkard, coarse and abusive. However, a discussion about Bob with my mother in law this week (we were in Phoenix, Arizona) portrays a somewhat different man. He did not always drink to excess, but when he drove a beer truck, he had more opportunities to imbibe, so that may have started his addiction. That and perhaps his loveless marriage seemed to tip the balance toward dysfunction. I imagined him running around with other women but that was not the case. He wanted to desperately to save their marriage. My mother in law wanted it to end because she was not in love with him. Much of his emotional abuse was manifested as reckless attempts to keep their marriage together. He had a hard time coping with the reality that there was no way he could win back her love. Moreover, my mother in law was doing quite well in the workplace by the standards of Flint, Michigan. She could provide for her children on her own income. She was eventually able to purchase her own home and even furnish is with brand new furniture. As she entered her teens, my wife had a home in the suburbs at last with her own bedroom and supportive neighbors. My mother in law made the best life she could for her daughter.

Nor was Bob a bad provider. He managed to stay employed in decent blue-collar jobs throughout his marriage. It appears that the divorce and his messy abduction of my wife triggered a long descent. He lived in Denver for a while, close to one of his sisters. I have heard that he probably had adult diabetes. He may have lost a leg because of his drinking. He sounds like a man who was probably clinically depressed for much of his life. Like most people born in the 1930s, he chain-smoked.

Talking with Aunt Pat I learned something of his family of birth. He was raised in a poor North Carolina household. The family eventually moved to California. He grew up in a family full of marital strife and high drama. Perhaps I assumed he was a philanderer because he had the opportunity to learn it from his father. His father and mother eventually divorced. Bob became the family’s black sheep. Aunt Pat was pulled toward the other extreme. She embraced religion. Now in her early eighties she remains a devout Adventist who despite her background managed to add a PhD to her name. Pat also sponsored my wife for several months when she moved to the Washington area. Were it not for Pat’s loving heart, I would never have met my wife.

Only my mother in law offers a different perspective of Bob from the other stories I heard. He was a good provider when they were married to each other. He only actually hit her once, and he just pushed her. She was not physically injured. She just did not love him. She wanted to be free of him. In particular, she wanted to follow her infatuation with the man who was her boss.

It appears that their divorce instigated Bob’s long, slow and painful downhill spiral. Eventually he ended up homeless in Searchlight, Nevada. He ended up sick but made it to a hospital in Henderson, Nevada. He died there ignobly and most likely alone. With no one to claim his body, the Clark County Social Services Department took up the slack. They paid for his cremation. His remains are now deep in a county crypt somewhere in here in Las Vegas. They can be released to the family if sufficient documentation is provided and for a $200 fee.

While I am forwarding these details to Aunt Pat, I doubt anyone will claim his remains. No one mourned his passing. In fact, everyone seems glad to know that he has exited this world. With Bob gone, their lives became just a little less stressful too.

I wonder how long the Clark County Social Services will hold on to his remains. We arrived in Las Vegas today, where my wife and daughter will attend a convention. I was going to try to track them down along with any records maintained by the county that may exist. However, after a couple phone calls I know not to bother. There is no place to go to see what is left of my father in law. There is no county crypt with his name on it that I can photograph. They will not even release his records, not even to family. It is prohibited by HIPAA regulations. There is a possibility that I could retrieve his hospital records, if a local probate court grants the writ, but it is unlikely it would shed much information about the last years of his life.

Therefore, I fill in what I can with sketchy information, anecdotes and a certain amount of reasonable conjecture. I should be angry with my father in law too. I should be angry at his abduction of his own daughter. I should be angry at how he used her, a vulnerable child, as a pawn in a larger personal war. Nevertheless, I am also now aware that in many ways Bob was acting out the behavior he witnessed inside his own dysfunctional family.

I do not know how long Clark County in Nevada will hold his remains. They will likely not stay in county custody forever. Perhaps in fifty years, perhaps in a hundred, Bob’s remains, like the many of indigent homeless men and women who have the misfortune of dying out here in the desert, will be unceremoniously dumped into a county landfill. After all, there are plenty of new desperate and homeless people in Las Vegas. Others wandering the streets here tonight are doomed to also share his fate.

Everyone just wants to forget about Bob. Perhaps I should too. Perhaps instead of keeping his death certificate, I should throw it out with the garbage. “Every man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind,” the poet John Donne once wrote. My Unitarian Universalist values call me to respect the inherent dignity and worth of every human being including less than stellar humans like my wife’s father.

It is nice to know that Bob was not entirely a bad man. Most likely, he was just a lost man, who never knew love and consequently did not know how to show it. It is good to know that he loved my mother in law in his own inept way, even if she did not feel the same way. It is good to know that even though he never paid child support, he helped support his family for a number of years. It is also sad and a bit pathetic that his life devolved the way it did.

This leaves only me, lamenting only not knowing the man who sired the woman I love. I wish I could have a conversation or two with him and hear about life from his perspective. It may be that after such a conversation, like his son, I would want to kill him. Instead, I feel an unrequited mild curiosity. It might be the hardest thing I would ever do, but if he were alive here in front of me, I would try to give him a hug. Somehow, I do not think he ever received one.

There is just a cardboard urn of his ashes somewhere here in the Clark County crypt. There they are likely to remain forever unclaimed.

July 13th, 2007 at 01:37am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2007 | no comments
Tags: Families, Parenting, Relationships