Ghost

A ghostly looking woman, who said she believed in reincarnation, but does not intend to die anyway, told me that she had read in a flyer handed out by Jehovah's Witnesses, that God answers all prayers, except that God operates on a different time from the human time. (Makes sense?) I only nodded, and she then asked me what my astrological sign was.

Recently, I reported to a friend that Anglican Archbishop James Ussher had estimated in 1650 that the Earth was created October 23, 4004 BC (Julian), 9PM, and my friend asked: "In what time zone?"

Walking across the second floor pedestrian bridge between buildings yesterday afternoon, cold rain falling on both sides, I felt like a ghost myself, faltering, devoid of energy, life. I took the elevator down, stepped into the gym, and in the locker room met my old Chinese friend H., who immediately asked where I had been. I briefly mentioned personal problems, and he patted me on the back.

Today marks exactly two months since the shipwreck,

The newspaper reports that Roman Polanski, under house detention in his Swiss chalet, is editing there his latest film entitled Ghost. Tiger Woods in the meantime, is hiding on his yacht, named Privacy. The other day I told somebody that I wished I had had their problems.

Strategy

"I do have a strategy," Reagan said after one detailed briefing on the challenge of the Soviet Union: "We win, they lose!"

(From a Wall Street Journal article From Berlin to Baghdad by Fouad Ajami, Tuesday 11/10/2009.)

King Kong

Up, down, up and down, up then down, like a rollercoaster, someone described my present life to me. It's not what they call a bipolar disorder, it's what country singer Randy Travis called on his first album the storms of life. One friend's family is all shaken up because a brother committed suicide hanging himself in his guitar shop, another acquaintance is traveling to Brazil to marry his sweetheart. Happy, lucky man. Normal reactions to events. Me, I'm on a rollercoaster. Events of two, three years ago are ancient history now, and even their lingering consequences don't bother me any more, but events of the past 5 months are what has been throwing the ship on the rocks. Metaphor mix minestrone.

You were like King Kong four weeks ago, said a friend reacting to my story, you were on top of the Empire State Building, before the airplanes flew in and knocked you down to earth. Lower than the earth, I tell him. I find myself in Hades, abandoning all hope. You're vulnerable now, says the friend whose relative killed himself. Indeed, I answer, I have four opportunities every weekday to jump in front of a train. See a professional, advises he, echoing a close relative. I recently wrote another friend living abroad that among Californians faith in therapists runs deeper than faith in God Almighty. I refuse to confide in a stranger with a diploma hanging on a wall. Done that once.

In the state of utter despair, you realize for the first time how little matters in the world where your life is concerned. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today a memorial service is being held for the victims of the Ford Hood massacre. Headlines and news of disasters, killings, accidents, anniversaries, flu vaccinations, medical discoveries, arts events, births and deaths, celebrity rumours, nothing changes the situation you fell into, nothing affects it, improves it, worsens it. You're alone.

Nix!

Stevie Nicks, the lead singer with Fleetwood Mac is a technophobe, who doesn't own a computer or a cell phone.

"I believe that computers have taken over the world. I believe that they have in many ways ruined our children. I believe that kids used to love to go out and play. I believe that social graces are gone because manners are gone because all people do is sit around and text. I think it's obnoxious."

Q: If you and I were having lunch, and I pulled out my cell phone ...

A: I'm gonna put my hand on your hand and say, "Turn it off, for now. Just give me an hour, of you, I really want an hour of just you, and your heart. I don't want you talking to someone else while we're having lunch." It's love, you know, it's relationships. I don't want love and relationships to be lost, and I feel like that's happening.

POETICS

In the tiny Berkeley apartment where Jim Powell has lived since 1992, there's a California license plate on the wall that says "POETICS." Powell didn't buy it, but found it years ago while clearing litter alongside Interstate 880 in Oakland.

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"You know on the roadside you'll see a sign that says, 'This section of freeway cleaned by 'so-and-so'? So a group of Deadheads I knew decided to clean the mile beside the Coliseum. Caltrans gives you an orange Day-Glo vest and gloves. You go down there beside the freeway and everything is covered with 14 layers of diesel soot.

"Someone found that license plate in the ivy in one of the cloverleafs and said, 'This belongs to you.' Whoever owned that plate had their car stolen. And the people who stole it ditched the plate into the ivy. So that's my 'poetic license' and it's a stolen poetic license, which is appropriate," Powell says with a grin. "Your poetic license should come to you that way."

MORE...

Socialism in America

A Russian immigrant's view.

Philip Townsend

Philip Townsend is a British photographer who photographed many British rock groups during the 1960s and 70s. He was the first to photograph the Rolling Stones at the request of their then manager Andrew Loog Oldham. These revealing shots from 1963 are on display at the Morrison Hotel Gallery website. (They are copyrighted preventing me from showing them here.)

Meanwhile, here's a photograph of the early Rolling Stones from another source. It is rare in that it shows them smiling. It must have been taken before their manager at the time Andrew Loog Oldham decided that the group members should not be photographed smiling, presumably to distinguish them from that other rock and roll band of nice non-threatening boys. (The Stones projected a bad boy image.) Subsequently, the Stones would not be photographed smiling until most recent times.

Tiger Nervous

"The day I'm not nervous is the day I quit."
-- Tiger Woods

"All I wanted..."

Read the article written by Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III describing his experiences. Link

Chesley "Sully" Sullenburger

Interesting statements made on television by Chesley Sullenburger the pilot of the Airbus A320 airplane who emergency landed on Hudson River in New York on January 15.

He didn't pray.

"I imagine somebody in back was taking care of that for me," he said, referring to the panicked passengers and flight attendants in the plane's cabin. "My focus was so intensely on the landing, I thought of nothing else."

"The physiological reaction I had was strong and I had to force myself to use my training and force calm on the situation,"

"It was the worst, sickening, pit-of-your-stomach, falling-through-the-floor feeling I've ever felt in my life. I knew immediately it was very bad."

Afterwards.

"The first few nights were the worst. The second-guessing would come: It made sleep hard."

"One of the hardest things for me to do in this whole experience was to forgive myself for not having done something else, something better, something more complete,"

About being called a hero.

"I don't feel comfortable embracing it, but I don't want to deny it. I don't want to diminish their thankful feeling toward me. Something about this episode captured people's imagination. I think they want good news; they want to be hopeful again, and if I can help in that way, I will."

Abraham Verghese

Read this article about a doctor turned a fiction writer, Abraham Verghese.