Rules to Quit (or Reduce) By

Rules to Quit (or Reduce) By 

 1. If the only reason to finish the drink/bottle is to hide the drink/bottle, expose yourself instead by leaving the undrinked. 

2. The moments you are not fighting the urge are softest before the first drink. A defensive position is delaying the first drink to later… for you… 8, 9, 10, 11pm 

3. Acknowledge the link between killing your liver and slow suicide. And that includes delayed suicide postponement. Some people might overdrink due to depression, reducing suicide… or imbibing in slow-suicide. 

 4. Recognize relapse as revenge by the monkey on your back. The yin-yang, chain-pull, of your body dopamine negotiation is better described in the Mayo Clinic. 

 5. Accept that if you die at 100 or die at 80 is a Seinfeld Frogger Score if you are not living everyday in enjoyment

6. Being honest to others is integrity, it's a life value, it's forever, it's the pages of days of the book of your life on the shelf. Both the inebrieted pages and the dishonest pages you can only edit while you write them, lying about them doesn't edit them.

Memorializing A Dream, the Morning After

In the dream last night, I somehow gave some kind of guarantee or at  least a positive reference that a baby chimp would be safe, playing with human toddlers, on a very small island daycare, in a somewhat shallow stream.

I didn't know anyone at the daycare (though I seemed to be falling in love with two women there at the very end of the dream), and I didn't know the human "parents" of the baby chimp. I don't know why I felt the presumption to vouch for the safety of the chimp.

In fact, it even bothered me in the dream itself. I asked myself why I had said that I knew the infant chimp could interact safely with human toddlers?

So I waded back out to the island later to see whether everything was ok. I was told by the daycare providers (tb lovers) that the chimp was sitting aside from the human kids at the edge of the river. So I picked up a half a breakfast sausage that was floating as litter in the stream (which somehow I felt responsible for having put there, though I do not remember eating the other half of the sausage in my dream).

When I came up from behind the sitting baby chimp to offer it the half breakfast sausage, I discovered the baby chimp to be sitting in a lotus position. It seemed in very deep meditation, perhaps impossible to disturb. I thought it had achieved some kind of Nirvana; the baby chimp's eyes were not only closed, but seemed covered in baby skin that was rippled in concentric circles from where a staring pupil would otherwise float.

I went back to hug and kiss the two women running the daycare; they were so happy with me for having recommended they accept the chimp that they were smitten, as I was smitten by their youth and good looks.

I remember only a couple of other times remembering, visualizing, trying to keep a dream I'd had at night. One time was from a short serial "Danger Island" in the Saturday children's rock band show "The Banana Splits". I'd gone to sleep feeling shame that I was scared to watch "Danger Island", as the other kids (Jeff, Bruce) on the street were talking about it positively. I decided to purposefully try to dream about it... and seemed to succeed except I wound up in a cave being bitten on my leg by a vampire I had tried to kick (but he turned invisible). I woke with a start, both scared by the vampire's tingling bite, but also relieved that I had safely achieved the adventurous dream state, as I had intended when drifting off the night before.

There is another snippet of a dream I seem to vividly remember. I was on a hospital bed, draped in white sheets, and a frizzy white haired doctor (resembling Einstein) was lecturing me the facts about the surgery I was about to undergo. On the other side of the table where I lay, a small wild brown cottontail rabbit was imitating every hand and head motion of the doctor. The bunny was comically aping every gesture, and I began to smile and look more at the rabbit than at the doctor. At the end of the doctor's lecture, I began to sit up - but it upset the cottontail bunny rabbit, who clearly had not finished his own lecture, and was trying to push me back down on the bed with its tiny paws. So I had to lay back down and watch the bunny continue aping new doctor motions, silently, until it had presumably completed its medical lecture (as I was able to sit up again).

I haven't ghost blogged in awhile. There's rarely a trace of a single reader of the ghost blog, the exception being when I mentioned a friends name (Robert D). I used to rely on the anonymity of thousands of google pages, but as google has gotten wiser about SEO optimization and now filters many pages that are produced as hail-Mary passes, it's more likely that a non-advertised blog like this one may actually wind up on someone's google search, e.g. searching where their own name winds up.

For many years, I've debated - been torn by - the temptation to use this method to send an apology method to someone.  A couple of people in particular. I know I did something that really disturbed an old friend I was in love with; she called me and told me not to write her any more letters, that she really needed not to be reminded of me, that something sex had indeed been very good in our relationship year, but that she hadn't forgiven me for something else I'd done that was very wrong.

I was very grown up on the call, and it seemed the right thing just to agree with everything, and not respond with the very curiosity I was desperate to expose. What specifically (of many dumb dude at 21 year old things I did) had scarred her? I felt stupid for not knowing what that one thing was that she referred to. I remember feeling frightened that she thought I'd done something I had not done... But this was her turn to speak, and even now I feel I was more mature for just accepting her truth on the call, nodding on the phone like a silent rabbit.

When she had stopped writing me letters back (I had left to Cameroon for the Peace Corps, she remained at Carleton College), I knew something was wrong. Well, of course, we had broken up at the hotel in Philadelphia where we last met (and had the most disappointing sex we'd probably ever had, to underline this was over). I thought maybe she was upset overall (her roomate Jenny had tried to commit suicide, and Nina had left Carleton). But no, she'd been clear... something - one specific thing - that I'd done was something she could never forgive.

And I still don't know for sure what it was.

Thirty something years later, I remember the conversation about as vividly as a childhood dream, which is to say, not reliably. I remember writing a letter from Peace Corps - when I wrote many, many letters every week (perhaps the precursor to the blogs), just as I had kept diaries and journals in high school and college (all lost in many moves). 

In one of the final letters (she wrote one saying she was stopping the letter writing after I had sent several in a row in increasingly obvious awareness that she'd had enough) I'd gotten drunk and wrote a lot of crap about whether or not I would sleep with another Peace Corps volunteer from Long Island (Nina was from Manhattan); in the letter I described the other gal as very fat and that I was struggling between my male desire to *** anyone with two legs, and my obvious unattraction. Probably made it sound like the other woman was some kind of victim below me. (In fact what I was really attracted to was her wit and very sharp tongue, she could dish out twice as good as she received, a verbal scorching ninja - I was attracted to powerful women in those years, and still am today). But I wrote the letter, sealed and mailed it without re-reading it the next sober morning, with the dull intent of soddening my hopes. By hope, I know I meant the stubborn love I was disgusted with myself for hanging onto. Like being afraid to watch "Danger Island", I was like a child, my heart still focused on someone who I'd agreed would NOT be a good life partner, and who had by that point clearly signalled she had moved on, far on.

Anyway the point of this whole blog is to bury the final paragraph, which is the conversation I'd want to have if I thought Nina was open to it. It has been on my mind for decades - I suspect I know what the other unforgivable thing was, and I think I have a good answer. But there's no real reason to provide that answer... she has closed the book and moved on, and if she found something to put an end-point on a relationship that we'd both agreed would be endless frustration (clue, if your intendee has broken up with you and gotten back together with you 3 times in 6 months, it's not a firm foundation). We had both had the adult conversation the night before my flight to Cameroon. I loved her, but thought it was going to be a rocky relationship. I was only willing to stay - abandon my trip to Cameroon - if she convinced me that night she could love me as much as I loved her. She said she was more afraid to let go of me than certain she would not change her mind and break up with me again. And we parted, civilly, my heart broken, but my mind alert that the broken heart would heal and be better off some day in the long run.

Then I ruined it with a couple of the letters above. But on to the final paragraph, which I think there's actually an important lesson to, which is more or less the reason to write it down.

I'm a very religious person who never attends church; I'm a severe doubter of organized religion, but believe deeply that prayer and meditation is good for the soul. I don't believe much in praying for things, but believe I'm enlightened today by the investment I made in meditation and prayer years and years ago. Like dreams, some of my meditations and prayers stay with me.

One of those - and they are many - was a day in high school when I had been thinking about a rather meaningless "baptism" at a summer Christianity Camp my grandparents had sent me to. I was asked to come down to the foot of the pastor if I was ready to receive Jesus as my personal savior and be baptised in the spirit of the Lord, and declare myself "Born Again".  I did it like I'd have done a chore, pulling weeds or mowing a lawn. And now, some years later in high school, I'd been reading the Bible and it occured to me that the childhood "Born Again" experience was bull***, a lie. To test the truth, I suddenly grabbed my small green Gideons Bible, ran into the Arkansas woods (it must have been spring or fall, I know the leaves were fallen but it wasn't cold), and randomly as I could opened the Bible to a page and prayed that it be significant, a miracle or at least a proof of prayer and the Christian God's intent.

For context, at that point I'd already read and accepted the Tao Tse Ching, The Bhagavad Gita, and other religions as "different paths up the same mountain".  I could never by that point have been judgemental of other religions or other paths. But still, I felt like I could not go on circling the mountain horizontally, skipping across paths, making myself feel superior by knowing more other religions, yet not committing to the plodding uphill sacrifice and denial of selfishness all of them wisely demanded.

The Bible opened to the parable of the mustard seed. Jesus was saying that the seed of the spirit (the Atman, if you're Hindu) would grow differently in different souls... and yield fruit Some Tenfold, Some One Hundred Fold, according to how we nurtured the seed with our faith. Some seeds would be stolen by crows (greed), some would die in the desert (lack of faithful practice). But I felt that High School afternoon a commitment to nurture my seed, and grow to be wise. I wanted to be a Prophet. I was convinced that if I strived to be Perfect, and failed, I'd still wind up closer to the bullseye than if I merely aimed for goodness.

So, in that context, I knew my faith - my idiosyncratic Christian who rejects every church faith - would be important, a north star so to speak, for my life. I thought (after a terrible heartbreaking breakup by my first fiance from Arkansas, when I was admittedly all hat and no cattle at religion or goodness, probably a lousy boyfriend and certainly terrible at sex) that this gal Nina was very special (and she was), but was a non-believing Jewish gal from West side rent controlled apartment in Manhattan. I was a Christian boy from the Ozarks. We didn't have a lot in common except for exceptional simultaneous orgasms. Remarkable, yet not a great foundation for a long relationship. We spoke about them as an "asset", but I wanted to explore whether we were compatible spiritually, for the sake of raising children, because I was beginning to see I was deeply in love and might ask Nina to marry me. 

So this one day, as an "experiment", I asked if she'd be willing to say a prayer to ask the Lord Jesus to be her personal savior. I wondered whether it would be like my silly childhood born again oath, or if she'd really be willing to pursue what was still an ongoing soul search on my part, a commitment to some kind of spiritual path to enlightenment.

She did it. And a few days later, she told me that it was really across the line and bothered her greatly that she'd done it. She was a grand-daughter of a holocaust survivor, and while not an observant Jew, she saw nothing of value in the "experiment" ("on me") of Christian prayer. 

I accepted it, and accepted it as proof that the Bible in the woods page in High School was luck, and that my boyhood arm-twisted come to the alter hocus-pocus born again BS was what she'd now experienced. I never made this attempt ever again on anyone, not my current wife, not my kids. I still feel grateful that my past prayers and meditations have paid compound interest, and cannot help but feel that they provided a basis for my very happy life.  

So here's the final paragraph. If indeed that "born again request" prayer with me and Nina was the thing she'd never forgive me for, if it was somehow a "spiritual rape", a #metoo for Jews, then I'm deeply sorry. If it would help to apologize by making this blog discoverable (using names) or public on the web, I'd be happy to do so. If it were helpful for her to know that the "experiment" really was on both of us, not "on her", and that I was the one changed forever by it... if that made her feel more confident in her past (and perhaps the rejection of the experiment was part of her self confidence building?) then I'd hit Publish. But my wiser self thinks that I'm better left in the distant past as a bad dream, as the vampire she escaped, and not as the wise and innocent Nirvana chimp. 

Obviously I've now written quite a bit here, so I will make it discoverable in a ghost blog but hope that the only people ever to find it and read it will be helped by it or find it interesting. I have a thing, an affectionate love, for certain people which is not stalking and isn't a betrayal of my one true and wonderful wife who is mother to my children and my partner forever. But when I felt love for 3 or four other women, they were tattooed or scarred upon my heart (one more traumatic and less affectionately so), but as for Nina, I do remember her with deepest affection, but can only imagine she remembers me with despite. At best, with rolled eyes, not anxious to be reminded. I'm a big boy and can live with that without disturbing her. Some dreams are better forgotten the morning after. I didn't see it as trying to change you, I saw it as would you be willing to explore new spiritual places with me, because I was thinking about proposing marriage to you... it was hard to move on because I'm wired like that. But we broke up well, and I've kept my separate peace for decades. Hope this doesn't screw it up now that we are in our 50s.  Memorializing a dream, decades after.











Nina Levine Portland Oregon Nina Hildy Levine

Play Theory and GroupThink combine with Misunderstood Statistical Risk

Last night we had dinner with a couple of my wife's friends.  There was a gay German couple our age.  My German friends were the best to debate with, and although my wife's always afraid I will get into politics with her work friends, I just can't resist a really good argument.

We started out talking about Syrian refugees coming to the USA.  Our intellectual friends were all for it, applauded bringing our share into Vermont, and shaking their heads at the fear and rejection of Angelina Maerkel's policy in EU.

I agreed.  The way I expressed my agreement was that people don't understand statistics.  The "shark attack" scares people because it's in a headline.   They all agreed.  There are real statistical risks, and peoples math skill lag behind their impulse to be herded by fears of things that don't actually threaten them.

I'd been doing dishes for 20 minutes and hadn't said much, so the table nodded and I kept the floor.

To make the point I asked them "Do you remember what happened in 2004?

They weren't sure what I meant.

"Do you remember more than 200,000 people being killed? Two hundred thousand.  That's a real risk, that dwarfs all the shark attacks and terrorist attacks and airplane disasters, even most wars."

One of course knew now that I was talking about the Indian Ocean earthquake-tsunami, and the others then said "of course".  All agreed that nothing in the news came remotely near the devastation that occurred that day, and agreed people remember individual (and insignificant) risks.

Of course, one murder or terrorist attack or motorcycle accident is too many, but everyone agreed that most people can't follow trendlines, only headlines.  We all agreed that a large amount of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, "Red State Hate" was from ignorance of statistical risk.

Then I added, "And liberals do it too.  We all have a tendency (Play Theory) to agree with people who we socialize with.  If you divide kids on a playground," I added, "and gave each group it's own colored shirt, and got one group to say 'Elephants are better than zebras', and the other group leader to say "Zebras are better than elephants,' that the kids will invariably take and hold the opinion of their "team"."  

Everyone agreed.  Time to throw a curve ball.

"I think one of the biggest exaggerated risks are guns, and the solutions that gun control represents."

Here I got pushback.  One of the Germans said "I cannot back you there!"  He felt very strongly that gun ownership in America was irrational and represented a crazy level of danger, said Americans were irrational about owning guns.  I could tell all agreed with him.

So I gave the statistical case why the threat of gun ownership had been exaggerated.

First, in the "total gun deaths" figures shared, the number one is suicide.  Suicide is tragic, but isn't a threat to me.  They agreed suicide should be taken off the table.  Then I said that Japan had the lowest level of gun ownership and highest level of suicide.  That got some demurring noises, but I agreed to move back to the risks I feel that other people own guns.

Second group of gun deaths was (particularly in Mexico) gang vs. gang, criminal vs. criminal.

Here a guest said he agreed, but that domestic violence, guns owned by a family used against a family member was significant tragedy.

So are motorcycles and ATVs, I said.  If another family owns one, they are more likely to have a kid die on one.  But that is not a risk to ME.  The risk to ME of being killed by someone who owns a gun, I said, is pretty low, not on the Tsunami scale.  Gun deaths in the USA had actually declined steadily since the 1970s, etc.

A friend at the table asked my opinion of conceal and carry laws, like at the university in Texas.  Would I accept that idea at Middlebury College?

I said right now it was a local community decision, and I didn't see any argument yet for the federal government to reverse the university of Texas policy.  Maybe it would blow up in their face, but I said I understood the rational "don't mess with Texas" argument that a neighborhood where most people likely possessed a gun might not be robbed at the rate of a neighborhood that had banned guns.  I didn't say that I believed that - I reminded everyone that we were just talking about how a group has groupthink, that even educated people can form very strong feelings of risk over something which isn't really demonstrated to be a significant risk... the same as Syrian refugees in Vermont.

I said the largest risk is that people in the liberal Northeast expressing an opinion of Don't Mess With Texans who own guns would result in a more conservative politician being elected.  That the NRA knows that gun sales go up when the topic comes up, and keeps introducing the topic, getting a liberal reaction, and gun sales go up and liberals take the bait every time there's a gun death, the same as conservatives take the bait every time there's a crime by a Muslim.

Neither the Muslim or the Gun belong in the headlines, because headlines can CREATE trendlines.

I talked about the famous "Teen woman suicide epidemic" of several decades ago, when each time a teen girl committed suicide, the headline was "Yet Another!", an editorial "how to stop this alarming trend?" of teen women committing suicide.

Some editors decided to do a test on "copycat" theory.  They stopped putting the suicides on the front page, and both the perception of the risk - and the risk itself - went down.  The epidemic was over.

I kind of look at "Muslim terrorism" and "Gun crime" as pretty low risks whose main danger is that people will over-react to them.

Had interracial marriage been combined with "gun control" laws, conservatives whose opinion of interracial marriage was primarily "elephant v. zebra" groupthink, agreeing with conservative friends and family, might never have died of its own natural trendline.  There are probably more interracial marriages in Arkansas than in Vermont today, and no one gives a shit, because the opinions weren't deep, and the opinions weren't deep because there's really no risk to us of someone else getting married.

The risk to LGBT rights (like marriage) is primarily due to a false association that a "liberal" who supports LGBT rights will ALSO try to take my handgun away.

Everyone excused themselves.  It was late, and they wanted to go home

Value of Species

Does the longing, regret, and appreciation by humans give the Black Rhino its value?

If no humans know, or are aware of, a species, has it less value?

Or does the most value of species derive from the most diversity (number of species)?

Moby Acoustic

Intelligence and Boiling Water

The stove has been hot, the water sits still
In the black pan.  I lean over
Slowly they appear.  Tiny bubble spots
on the bottom of the pan.  They grow.

Slowly one is larger.  Slowly, another.
The tiny bubbles are not yet a boil.
Our definition of water's awareness.
They have the potential, and left alone
they will become a boiling bubble.

Is intelligence the detection of truth
Like a tiny bubble before boiling?
Is the tiny spot with the bigger bubble
smarter about the heat?  The first
to know...

Theory of Time and Prophesy

Start with the premise that A can be more enlightened, or more intelligent, or have more information than B.

I probably know a lot more than a goldfish.   No doubt there are things a goldfish knows instantly that I don't, like water oxygen levels or temperatures.  But between human and beetle, or experienced and educated human A vs. baby human B, I postulate that not every perspective is equally enlightened, and that the basis for dialectic and scientific method.

In the economy of intelligence, Adam Smith's tribal spear makers analysis would still mean that enlightened people who engage in thought with people who are 50% less efficient at thinking will still be ahead of those who are insular in their thinking.   That's a reasoning basis for what seemed common sense to me when I decided NOT to be a monk in India or Nepal.   I loved god enough, but the value added by monkdom seemed to me as limited to one's own "shiny conscience" and did not add to karma.  I instead decided to make a difference about things I learned to care about from Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall, and other nature programs.  That is the subject of my other public blog, Good Point Ideas.

As a thought exercise, I think more than That Thing, therefore...?  I don't know the end of that sentence, but it sounds arrogant and anti-egalitarian.  Except for my imagination.  It is not difficult for me to accept a premise of a higher Thought, a more Enlightened Being.  Something that is as far above me intellectually as I am to the beetle and goldfish.   And I would no more recognize that Entity or Being than a goldfish recognizes me.   If a goldfish decided to "worship" more enlightened beings, it would not even know how to think about them, and so it is with the Higher Power I imagine and construct in my hypothesis.  I am B, what is A the more enlightened, if I remove the limitations of human mind.

The term enlightened I will accept prima facia, and use it to explain how greater enlightenment is measured.  A brighter and brigher light actually has diminishing returns.  What gives the greater light more value, at a certain point, it the distance and time it enlightens.

Imagine a beetle is crawling slowly along the length of 100 meter rope, cable and hose, interconnected.   The rope, to the beetle, is really only "visible" for a fraction of a centimeter.   The concept of the rope changing to wire, then to hose, is beyond the beetle, and the memory of the past rope is unknown.  If I am in a completely dark room, and told to measure every centimeter and describe it, every knot or kink or change in color, and I have but a small candle, it will take a long time.  I need to handle every part of the rope, bit by bit, to examine it with the candlelight.  Faster and more enlightened than the beetle, my knowledge of the 100 meters is bound to be superior at the end of the exercise.  The beetle's senses may know something I don't, and Adam Smith would recommend I exchange information with the beetle if I can.

Now imagine rather than a candle, someone has a powerful torch or flashlight.   Or a brightly lit room.  Or someone has experience, or a greater amount of time to experience the 100 meters of rope/wire/hose.  My B is less than their A of knowledge.

What I then do is imagine a higher intelligence which is as much beyond me as I am to the beetle.

My biggest advantage over the beetle is my speed and the light given my eyesight.   The Higher Power is exponentially speedy at assessing the 100 meter length.  It is as if Higher Power can see the entire length in one instant.

Imagine a novel.  I can read a page a minute.  The Higher Power reads the entire book in a second.

50,000 years, my highest aspiration of conscience, is way too long for me.  What prophets do is find a way to make other people care about what they care about, by making us care about the Future.  A beetle prophet somehow knows something about the future of walking on wire, or walking no rubber hose, which the beetle on the rope does not know but will someday, or some hour, encounter.  I believe ants do this in their long chains on the rope, using social information to achieve a level of digital intelligence which may approximate or even surpass the man with the candle.

My writings and insights are like digits of information passed by ants in a colony.   It isn't the same as God or a higher power, it's a two-dimensional projection in Plato's Cave.   But my biggest limitation is time travel.

To a God, my entire life, which I can only see a few moments at a time, and only through memory and hindsight, is a string or rope, which God can see in its entirety.  Does this mean the future is ordained?  If the end of my rope is at the same time as now, or my life runs so quickly through the projector that I cannot even tell the plotline, does that negate free will?

No.  We cannot change our past anyway.   That does not mean we didn't have a choice in the past.  But what we did, we did, and the quality of that life is the quality it is.   What free will is has been misunderstood.  It is the process of self discovery and self awareness, to be at our highest potential given the rope/wire/hose we are on.  I may find a future rope has a cancerous liver and is much shorter than I had anticipated.   I may find my rope cut short in a plane accident.  At that time, my rope is the quality it is.  It's a shorter rope than another, but maybe it's better quality.  

And freed from reading one page at a time, or one length of rope by a candlelight, God can see the entire length of my life at once, and see it in time at the same time and comparison of a rope from another time, on another shelf.

This vision or philosophy does not make all humans equal.  But it judges us all by the integrity of our lives.  We all may have moments of weakness, of loss of integrity.  But wire, hose and rope are also used for different things, and sometimes integrity means we just need a rubber band and not a chain, and the appropriateness of this person to the job they perform means they have the right strength, flexibility, and length.

My life's rope, my string, can only be seen by a power with perceptions beyond my own.   I cannot judge my life or the lives of the billions of other ropes inside the darkness of night.  But MY inability to judge them all does not make them all matter less.  A prophet tells people what kind of rope to build, what to be, how to measure our lives to meet the needs of a future.

In southwestern (Hopi or Navajo) culture, my great grandfather explained, there is a parable of heaven and hell.  At the end of our lives, we come to a fork in a path, and one way leads to heaven and one to hell.  But there is no St. Peter, each must choose his own way.  My great grandfather said he thought that sounded unfair, that it was left to chance, that there needed to be some sign to tell the righteous which path to take.

No, the wise chief told him.  There is no sign.  But the people who spend their entire lives making the right choice and the best choice will make it then.  And the people who by habit make the worse choices, try as they may to psyche out the test, try as they may to try a contrarian double reverse on their own impulse, somehow, through force of habit, will choose the bad path.  It is a heaven and hell without a last second of divine intervention, but with no one else to blame for lack of mercy.