Pills and Pop-Ups, Inc.

 

The pills arrived on Tuesday, but sat on the counter downstairs for two days with neither of the women in the house noticing. I finally learned they had been delivered when I got asked to rate the completed transaction to our address. My wife finally found the bag (I’d been expecting a box) and brought it up. I explained what the pills were, the story of Bill Gates’s obsession to take down the disease that had stolen his father, including the extraordinary lengths he had gone to in researching the causes of decline in memory and cognition, and the walls he had to break down in Big Pharma to discover that nothing offered as medicine worked and they knew it didn’t and were prepared to defend against any real palliatives if they were found. How Gates did his own research, found an answer and built the process for making an effective treatment available. I told her the pills were the first three months of what should be a year long regimen that was scarce because it depended on ingredients that were limited in quantity and needed 6 months to renew after each harvest.

She nodded, paying token attention, until I asked her if she was willing to give the pills a fair go for three months. Then she hit the ceiling. She thought I’d gotten them for me, and she wasn’t going to take any unknown medicine, given her lifelong experience with allergies. I showed her the blown up photos I had taken of the bottles’ dosing and ingredients label, which clearly stated, “contains no allergens,” and she said, “You got them without asking me. You take them.” (In fact, she was sitting next to me while I listened to the entire hour-long Gates video, placed my order online and entered the credit card information to pay $207 for the first third of the necessary treatment to secure lasting improvement.) She fell silent. When I tried to reopen the conversation, she said, “Why are you doing this to me? You know how allergic I am.” I said, “I’m doing this because I’m the one who cares about keeping you here with us. You are losing your memory at an alarming rate. That’s a fact. The pills can roll it all back.”

More minutes of silence. Then, “Give me the pills. If I break out:from what’s in them, that’s on you.” (She’s also historically allergic to cats, ice cream, and chocolate. She eats ice cream and chocolate every day and is surrounded by cats. Old age has tempered her allergies, but they’re still a good excuse for avoiding what she doesn’t want anyway.) 

She has now had the first and the second dose. The anger, the volatility, is part of the symptom set, aggravated by Whwt has always been a hair-trigger temper. It is not her way to apologize, but when she has decided she was wrong, she returns to a friendlier demeanor. Now comes the waiting.

That’s that side of the memory problems I described a couple days ago.

I tried finding some computer solutions to the other big memory problem. Found a lead that turned out to be a prohibitively costly bait and switch. As I ponder my next move, I tried to confine my work to stuff requiring minimal use of disk. How I wound up getting myself back in storage misbehavior yet again. I’m working on it. Honestly. Here’s an excerpt from much lengthier content in my Apple Notes app:

Background on the latest prodigal topic hog…

5/26/26: How I got onto this. The IPR post about Pop Music. Computer problems decimated my ability to do graphic work in the short term (at least). Music topics make the lowest demands on my disks, just link the YouTubes and go… In a music frame of mind, turned to it again for last night’s (i.e., wee hours) go back to sleep background and settled on Diana Krall, whom I had followed briefly years ago. Found her in the ROKU categories files as a live concert offering 2 hrs long. Woke up to no more Krall but a documentary about, ugh, the Eagles. Backed right out of that to the ROKU music files. Looking further down the row of choices found a doc about The Velvet Underground, and thought maybe it was time I learned a little more about them, osmotically at least. Never did go back to sleep. Found a Warhol obsession named Nico in a central role during the band’s startup period, and the rest is as you see here. 

Never even heard of Nico before. I had more or less ignored Lou Reed and Andy Warhol both, to the extent that I didn’t even know Warhol was heavily involved in launching the Velvet Underground as a band with a record contract, not just a New York glam fad. It was largely Warhol’s identity as artist-cum-promoter that made me suspicious of him, in addition to his creepy affect. Reed I more or less missed because of timing. He never made the commercial hit list in the dorm halls of Mercersburg. Had him pencilled in more as unacknowledged white precursor of rap than proto-punk, since I had always considered the American roots of punk a false start derailed by the sexual androgyny of the New York Dolls and early David Bowie performance art. Punk entered my ken with The Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Brit cultural revolt against Beatles—>Boston (‘More Than a Feeling’). I liked Lou Reed a lot, just didn’t follow him or study his real role in the birth of punk music. I was happier making up my own version of punk, which borrowed more from Anthony Burgess than actual history, apart from the Sex Pistols’ proud boast that they didn’t know how to play their instruments, as if that were a credential. 

Had some glancing bumps into Warhol and Reed I could have paid more attention to but didn’t. The in-vogue-after-his-death artist Philip Core was a member of my Harvard final club, a ghostly presence in black who nevertheless sketched delightful drawings commemorating club dinners, which we hung with others from the past in the men’s room. I never got over the fact that Core had gone to Middlesex prep school with my roommate and ten other members of my Harvard class, all of whom were beer-drinking jocks whose only mention of Core was in connection to his, um, off-putting effeminacy(?). Now I can’t think of anyone from that group whose accomplishments amount to anything compared to Philip Core’s. His most famous painting is of Andy Warhol playing chess with Marchel DuChamp.

Painted in 1976, about when I wrote ‘Shammadamma’ and ‘The Parade of Volumes.

He also painted a portrait of Lou Reed, which is how he wound up becoming friends with both men. I think it’s interesting that Core and I were members of the Phoenix at the same time, but I honestly can’t remember any conversation I ever had with him.

Funny, given how I go on about how the universe pops things up to my attention. I don’t always listen so well, I guess, unless some of the pop-ups are set to go off much much later, like now, when I’m older and still somehow working. There was a distinct pop-up with regard to Lou Reed, maybe a little over 10 years ago, after his death, when I acquired an Internet stalker who tracked me on my Instapunk sites and insisted she knew I was Lou Reed, still alive and in hiding. I answered her several times because she was very persistent and more and more convinced she was right the more I denied it. I didn’t see any resemblance myself.

That’s a joke. Don’t think she was talking about looks…

I think I eventually banned her, which I almost never do. 

Which brings me to what happened as a result of my watching ROKU’s offering of a Velvet Underground documentary describing the group’s origins and history.

The Headline: A woman named Nico

Warhol was an inspiration and investor in the founding of Velvet Underground, whose Lennon-McCartney/Jagger-Richards creative duo was Welshman John Cale and Lou Reed of New York City. During the effort to produce an introductory album, Warhol imposed on the infant group a female singer who was a glamorous member of the Warhol factory of artistes. Both men resisted but had to give in if they wanted their album produced. Here’s an extremely odd video of the VU song ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ with vocals by Nico but consisting mostly of footage showing Nico listening to her own recording of the song:

It’s hard to realize that she is doing the singing, because the voice has an androgynous timbre not immediately congruent with the appearance of a model/movie star/femme fatale of the sort Nico self-evidently is. 

Her association with VU does not last long, but Nico does. She goes through many incarnations as the mistress of famous men (Alain Delon, Mick Taylor, Jim Morrison, et al) and as both a singer in multiple genres and a drug-addicted woman with anger issues. But until her sad sudden death in 1993, she remained a borderline celebrity with a knack for attracting attention from journalists and cultural critics of all kinds. No one ever figured her out. 

The drier Wiki version is here.

Turns out she was Alice Hate before Alice Hate was. All kinds of striking parallels. I’m happy with a real life precursor feeding into my own story out of time, effect before cause as it were. I certainly can’t and wouldn’t take credit for the resemblances as if I’d known about her. Better this way.

Through the looking glass?

And my take, channeling Warhol’s famous dotted Marilyn portrait:

I, of course, have my own involved backstory for Alice Hate, which does not need Nico for justification or confirmation. Nevertheless, I am stunned that Nico exists, an inspiration, obsession, and legendary beauty embedded in the environments that also gave rise to my punk writers and their martyred queen.

Compare:

Top row, Alice. Bottom row, Nico.

It’s not like Nico didn’t have her own Alice moments…

There’s still only one face at the exact heart of the Undernet (blow thru the warnings) after all…

So much for my digital frugality. No hope for me, I guess.

Memory Problems

Somebody trying to tell me something? Here I am, waiting for my wife’s miracle memory pills, and now my iPad and iPhone are both officially in crisis mode for storage issues. Neither can upload OS point releases, and neither will let me do even routine system monitoring and maintenance before I remove many gigabytes of files. Digital version of failing memory, eh?

Meanwhile, I’m still struggling to build a workable relationship  with the $60 tablet system I got from TEMU. It has oodles of disk space, but I’m getting a feeling the motherboard doesn’t have the processor speed to handle the manipulation of large files effectively. 

Not afraid to do the work, as I think you know. Just not yet sure what work to do and whether or not it will restore my freedom to deal with nontechnical issues instead of continuous troubleshooting.

I have two or three posts slated for this site underway but now stalled by the, um, memory problem.

Just reporting…

How the world feels to my wife, and me, at the moment.

So I was listening to Ry Cooder on YouTube…

I’d been looking for what to play on the teevee to put me back to sleep at 3 am, and Ry Cooder was sounding just right with his slide magic guitaring and unpretentious voice, but YouTube wasn’t cooperating. After each song, the transition was to an infomercial kinda thing you had to click on to skip, which meant I couldn’t sleep to Ry Cooder. Then after ‘Vigilante Man,’ there was another option than the infomercial. A small grainy photo I recognized right away. Tom Waits. Knew the song, love it, but this time for the first time I knew it was my Old Man Song…

At this moment, everything about this video is perfect. Back to my nap time…

A Word About Intentions

You can be guessing about what this is while I race through an intro sorts.

I know I’m still on the hook for Part 2 of ‘The Reality Divide’ still gathering some of the necessary materials. Problem with project is it forces me to look harder for source content I’ve squirreled away somewhere without ID’ing it properly for keyword searches. An Apple thing. Also a me thing. Always relied on my memory, and now it’s catching up with me. But the looking, the searching, is a good thing, however temporarily distracting and frustrating it is. As I post here about things that are an important part of the sum, the list of what I have to put up here keeps growing. I’ve identified big chunks of my creative history that still have to be documented, sometimes the ‘what’ but often the ‘how’ I used to stay zealously mum about because I thought that was a job for readers. I have no confidence in the readers of today. They can’t begin to understand what I have done, what I do, because no one else’s scope of material is nearly as wide as mine or as continuously interconnected. I’m a one-off. The more I post here, the more I realize that in specific terms.

That’s not vanity. It’s just facts. I’m not trying to convince you of anything here. I’m relying on this site as a necessary discipline. Even subtle deadlines are enough to overcome the temptation to find something (generally an inspirational graphic of some kind) by accident, add an ID note to it, and promise to come back later for the tedious part of assembling related pieces into a shape that will be useful longer term.

Why I thought it was necessary to explain something about intentions. An explanation that will be helpful when I post Part 2 of ‘The Reality Divide’. 

The oldest and most inflexible part of my mission as a writer is to leave a record of what I’ve done and what I didn’t finish because time caught up with me. I’m doing this for the ones who will have to rediscover language and the classics and the eternal indispensable theme of literary writing, which to explore and share the meaning of life as a source of energy and endurance.

I criticize them, but I have learned a great deal from the masters of the 19th and 20th centuries. Before he festooned it with self promoting pronouncements, Hemingway laid down the dictum, Write the truth of what you’ve seen and experienced as accurately as you can. He used thot dictum to write what may have been the best novel yet written, The Sun Also Rises. What’s so great about it? He shows you just how much you can leave out and still be on target with your theme. Fitzgerald said, There are two different kinds of writers, ‘putter inners’ and ‘taker outers.’ He was the latter. I’m the former. Why it’s impossible to parody Fitzgerald. To make it convincing, you have to write in exactly his beautiful voice. Any satirical embellishment blows up the whole enterprise. Early Hemingway is the same. Great for learning from by copying, but not for the sake of humor. Strangled laconicism is just nonsense. It was only Max Shulman, father of Dobey Gillis(?), who realized when Papa had made himself a target. His short novel ‘The Featherbedders,’ is the best Hemingway takedown ever. No point in even trying to compete with it.

I have previously shared my frustrations with the legacy of James Joyce, for whose early works I feel genuine admiration, affection, and gratitude. The Dubliners is extraordinary and deathless, dark as it gets to be. Why I got pissed off when I ran into the wall with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. My take on them was that they represented a prolooonged middle finger at literary fiction as a genre. Here was his message the way I read it: “Where I am going you cannot follow. I can dive so deeply into the ephemeral passages of consciousness that they are automatically behind the reach of those who will, dog-with-a-bone-like, pretend they can decode them for less learned and scholarly readers. They will get PhDs focused solely on learning how to read my books and their innumerable local/universal references.”

Here was his coup de grâce.

I already showed you the opening round of my rebuttal:

I can defend my use of the ideas represented in the lefthand column. I don’t believe Joyce could. The graphic up top is a sample of manuscript changes the author was making on a daily basis as Ulysses was being typeset for printing. That’s not the work of a writer fleshing out the depths of a multilayered and meticulously realized scheme of themes. It’s an exposé of a writer now writing and rewriting off the top of his head and getting taken in by his own opaqueness. (I’ll elaborate on my graphic at a later date.)

I don’t have anything in my writing history that resembles the graphic up top. But I do have correlative experience that also bears on the question of intentions. My work with graphics over the years is a lot more like what we see in the Joyce galley proof above. Look this over while I explain below.

I snapped the photo because for once they were all there, the processing steps, 

in neat rows and columns for a change. Hardly the biggest one 

I’ve ever done but fresh on my mind.

For much of my life I felt deprived by the fact that I hadn’t inherited my Dad’s talent for drawing. (I know that should be in the draft MS of the previous post, but I already have a list more of ‘Views’ that need to be put in. Yesterday, I just stopped because I knew it was enough for now. How it’s always been with the writing. When the next sentence isn’t waiting in my head I stop and resume only when I know what that sentence is. Why I have continually scorned writers who cling like babies to the bottle when anyone suggests typewriters are passé and an impediment. On the typewriter I used to retype whole pages to change one word. Computers set me free. With the text processing tools they provided I could revise continuously, back and forth in real time, until the last sentence I typed finished a completed work. When I got to NCR, I received a workstation so advanced it could literally recover an entire accidentally deleted document one keystroke at a time. One day I needed thwt ability on a long strategy piece I’d been writing. I sat there and watched myself write it onscreen. Character by character, it proceeded relentlessly, stopping at abrupt intervals to scroll up to an earlier paragraph in need of revision for consistency with what would follow. When it got to the end of recovery, the document was done, all in one go.

How the writing’s always been. Computers save me the retyping 400 words to change one word delay. Graphics have been another matter altogether. Where I learned the bruising process of the medium pushing back hard at your own talent limits. Things I just couldn’t do because I couldn’t draw well enough or the software wasn’t powerful enough or I didn’t know how to use what it could do without feeling like an amateur. But computer software was a necessary crutch given my conviction that images have an indispensable role to play in breaking through the walls that Joyce others crashed into on their quest for the “next dimension” in writing.

But since the visuals and the sounds and the mixing of media are part of the wall set that has to be broken through, I came belatedly to realize that being William Blake was never in the cards for me. If I could draw like that I wouldn’t have gotten my hands as dirty and my fingers as banged up doing the wrench work on my picture graphics and videos. And that’s a very good thing. The intrinsic constraints of the tools I have to use force me to use my imagination in ways that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to me.

The pushback and imaginative workarounds also bleed back into the writing required to finish off whatever the project is. Nowadays, I spend far more time on computer graphics than on the writing. That’s my give, the one thing I know for sure how to do in service to my intentions.

Back to the jumble of graphics shown above. They were all used to create this Facebook reel yesterday.

GP: “RINO Brian Fitzpatrick Defends His Push with Democrats to Stop 

Trump’s Weaponization Fund – Says He’s Not Afraid of Trump, Admits 

He’s Pandering to Liberal Voters.” Always was a sad sack lockstep lefty. 

Ran as Republican to win House seat in rich red suburb of Philly. 

Creep? Yup yup yup.

 

It’s gotten 159 views since I put it up yesterday evening. I’m not that pleased with it, but this is the hurly burly of social network jousting over politics. This one was personal to me because I’ve been painfully aware what a glib, condescending political whore he is since I used to hear him as a regular guest in the Dom Giordano talk radio show in Philly. He was a Republican member of Congress from a red suburban district and he defended every bonehead move made by Democrats in Philly and on Capitol Hill. He didn’t care people knew he was RINO. He knew how to win elections and make political deals of advantage to himself. Dom got mad every time and debated him extensively in absentia after every appearance, but he kept right on appearing. WPHT.  One time home of the despicable Uriah Heep calling himself Michael Smerconish. Only good thing they had was Rush. Who knew better than to interview jerks and liars.

So I saw the picture Gateway used, and I knew I had to smack him. Lots of ways to play with an image. I don’t actually care if the viewers get what I’m doing visually. If they don’t recognize a substitution, I’ve already  made one tiny dent in his facial recognition quotient. This time I did what I often do. Ask myself who he looks like, who he reminds me of. First thought was Sad Sack, the cartoon soldier. Not usable but the soldier idea.. I thought of McHake’s Navy and his band of incompetents. Then thought of Gomer Pyle, feckless tool of his noncom in the unit, obviously dumb as a post, but something similar in the facial features. Scrolled through hundreds of Gomer pics, only a few of which were in color. Then I spotted a B&W still from the TV show that might be serviceable. Now the work begins. 

It took a total of five freeby graphics SW apps to complete the job. One to colorize Gomer, one to clip him from his background, multiple iterations of that to trim the face just above the eyebrows so it could be plated over most of Fitzpatrick’s. When it fit, roughly, multiple iterations of two other apps to match the Gomer face to the shade and contrast and saturation of the target pic. Then another trip to the cutting app to smooth the edges of the implant. Next, choice of an advanced filter that does the most to conceal any visual facial discrepancies. More processing to set up the file to be used by the AI animation/sound file app. Then the Revive transaction, without headline so as to evade their new NSFW protection of lefty loudmouths, and a result which can be clipped for use as a FB Reel but not here. Blogger won’t run it without the Revive logo.

There’s no point in writing the FB intro for the feel until it’s ready for posting. That’s about 30 seconds worth of composing and a little more for persuading AutoCorrect to display the characters I typed. TA DA.

Why so much time and effort for an admittedly indifferent jibe at another carbon copy corruptocrat? Because along the way I learn more about my target for future reference. Also because there’s no longer any point in refuting the dumb shit they say in interviews on CNN/MsNOW or transcribed by 5th Columnist Pam Key. (My Moby Dickless obsession at Breitbart). Making fun of them, crudely, often, and with utter disregard for the truthfulness of any accusations I make up along the way is what the Democrats deserve. Actually taking some talking point seriously enough to refute it logically and factually is just playing their game. They don’t bother with facts or logic. Why should we be the only ones in what has become the runaway atmosphere of a down-at-the-heels circus on fire, with wild animals running amok everywhere?

The long term intention survives, redoubled. Those who find the ruins of our era later may find both the serious and the slapstick remains of a cultural nervous breakdown and learn the invaluable lesson that humor is always a weapon against lies, cruelty, violence, and the tyranny of small men (and women) in high places.

Latterly, a reminder that my MS about Dad could also benefit from a “putting in” of the endearing fact that after denouncing both shows sight unseen from their promos, he was forced to watch full episodes “Hogan’s Heroes” and “Get Smart” because I insisted on my ZTV rights as a kid. He laughed uproariously at both sows all the way through and became a devoted fan as long as they lasted on-air.

Humor is wonderful thing. He had that. I got mine from him, and I need to say so.

Documentation. A hard thing but a good thing…

A Way to See the Obstacles

Told you I was processing. Bad week with Pat memory issues and volatility. Made the purchase I described. Sitting right next to her. Played the whole endless video the more expensive panaceas use to make sure you are really really serious about needing help. Gates persuaded me. If there’s someone powerful enough to penetrate the titanium curtain the protects Big Pharma it’s Gates or Musk. They have the clout. Gates spent millions trying to save his Dad to no avail. Made me think of my own family encounters with declining age. So he embarked on a massive multi-billion dollar project of his own. Believable account. (I haven’t been to a doctor since I accidentally put my hand through a sash window trying to open it in an 18th century house in Greenwich more than 25 years ago.) Big Pharma is making vast amounts of money selling useless products to dying people with insurance. Already knew that. They tried to buy Gates out of his research discoveries, then to discredit his research, and (I like this…) he just kept getting madder. Now he’s trying to prove he’s right. Slick, state-of-the-art marketing approach. No problem. He can afford it.

I had seen multiple varieties of decline in my own family. The one closest to my own experience thus far is my Dad. Thinner and thinner, dental pain growing into more than a nuisance, memory not gone but reconfigured with holes that can still be patched but for how long? Physical frailty, increasing isolation aggravated by his wife’s parallel decline, a recurring mood of the world going to hell and I’ll be well out of it. Cancer took him. I made a last minute approximate peace with him at the end, but I never gave him a book. I gave my Grandpa Miesse a book but not my Dad. He’s the one, though, who made the rule about no family business no matter what the other writers do. Thing is, I know the book is there. It’s scattered in fragments all through my other works, not too revealing unless I pull them together into a whole of their own. Not coincidentally, May19 was his birthday. I imagine he’s glad not to be here.

Processing, you see. Supposedly only a few days till Pat’s pills arrive. No better processing for me than an instantaneous project I’m not sure I could pull off. I thought recurringly of Donald Barthelme’s Views of My Father Weeping. I admired the writing; I’d tried out the Barthelme voice myself as a young man (surviving example called ‘Portents’ in Punk City. I’ve deliberately avoided rereading the Views story because good as it was it also seemed a kind of cheat. An act of conscience, not revelation. Still, I looked it up and was immediately confronted with this amazingly relevant web display:

When I clicked on the little illegible box in the second column, I felt the ‘Serendicity.’  He was an Edward Hopper addict just like me. That business of sitting in a chair looking out a high-story window. I felt a cover coming on. I make lots of book covers, many of them my own contemplated books that already have a shape in my head and require only a difficult bounding exercise and tedious computer work to assemble and publish at Kindle. So I gave into temptation, did the covers front and back, and came away with a title of my own for a whole book about my Dad.

Barthelme and I had more in common than a fraught relationship with our Dads.

I knew about the fragments/wholes relationship because I have spent my life creating both. Trickiest part? How do you know when your assemblage of fragments has become a whole? There must be an understandable frame within which the selected fragments have a reason for being on theirmown and in contribution to the whole — which turns out to be more than the three dimensions of the wood and paint and finishing nails enclosing the Mona Lisa. 

So I decided to go ahead and just take a whack at it whike I’m waiting on delivery of three bottles of pills.

**********

Views of My Father Living

By R. F. Laird 3

**********

Frontispiece

My Dad’s flying jacket from WW2 still hanging on a coat rack in our current master 

bedroom. War changes a man and the sons and daughters he gives life by surviving. 

The white smudges are housepaint. He couldn’t throw it away, but he could 

try to reduce the strength of its embrace. 

Did he? You tell me.

**********

Preface

This won’t be your usual sort of book. It owes its shape to two sources, Barthelme’s selected image of a window from a painting by Edward Hopper, who is one of my own favorite artists, and a film tour de force called “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould” (trailer). Both represent a degree of detachment from the varying perspectives embodied by the separate selections included. In any biographical effort of a person now deceased, the worst possible outcomes are the “My Most Unforgettable Person” lovefest of a Reader’s Digest essay and the vindictive/sly/condescending hit job of, say, Griswold’s “Obituary of Edgar Allan Poe.” This collection of pieces from more than 50 years of writing is not a summary judgment on the man who sired and raised and contended with me until his death at the age of 77 just before the turn of the millennium. He is not a symbol of the Greatest Generation, but he was part of who and what they were and did. I was too close to him to presume that my perspective is the definitive one. It is one perspective, hopefully fair in the choices of what was placed inside the frame from stories, poems, extemporaneous audio recordings, and essays written for a wider audience more interested in cultural perceptions than family gossip. My Dad despised gossip and the people who engaged in it. All the gossip I gleaned about my parents’ social circle was not from their lips but the children of more vulgar friends in the same social set. Not that there won’t be some revelations here. There will be. Let’s get to it.

NOTE: The hyperlinks in this Preface are a good way to test how you will return here if after following some link you can’t seem to back out of it to where you were here. You know your own device better than I ever will. I recommend you make a notation of the site you’re reading this on, give up early if you feel lost and simply return to the document. Probably a 30 second trip with practice. Good luck.

**********

[# TBD] Views

1. Child Seats

2. A True Story from TBB’s Book of Rationalizations.

3. The Guy in the Picture

4. The Gatsby of Greenwich and the Lords of Salem

Be patient. He’s there throughout…

5. Inside Lord Laird

I answered a query for info about Dad and they inserted a link directly to my post.

6. French Test, 1963

Life changing for all of us

We watched him fly us safely through the mission.

The beginning of inevitable and widening separation

7. The Mercersburg Hurry-Up to Harvard and Destiny

From my post More Thoughts on Orchestration’:

“I was twelve when my dad drove me to Mercersburg for my interview. We drove through the little towns in central Pennsylvania in the TR3, singing together with made-up lyrics for each ‘burg. Admission wasn’t an issue. Their question was whether it might be appropriate to enroll me as a sophomore because my SSATs pegged me at grade 12 in academic capability and I’d had years of French and Latin at St. John’s. My dad said no. I was a 5’0” squirt and already at least a year and a half ahead of my chronological grade level. So I was enrolled as a freshman (“Junior” in their system) taking courses in Latin 2 and French 2, and an A-level class in English. I never failed to make high honors at Mercersburg (90 general average or better) until the final marking period of my senior year, when I had indulged in the Senior Slump of tradition. I applied to just two schools, Harvard and Yale, because my acceptance had been assured by both before the application deadline. I entered Harvard as a sophomore in the Fall of 1970, apparently still in hurry-up mode.”

The most fearsome teacher. Latin for two years.

Then, in that first year, my Dad’s Mercersburg vanished.

The drugs and the politics arrived all at once. I knew it was epic. My Dad never got it.

From my post More Thoughts on Orchestration’:

“Rewind time. My dad had lightly applied the brakes in 1966. That turned out to be a momentous change factor in my life. A turning point that has affected everything since was the  Mercersburg Chapel Walkout of 1969, when I was not a senior yet but an ‘upper middler’ who had just been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Mercersburg News, for many years one of the highest rated prep school newspapers in the country. My response was to put out the only ‘Extra’ in the paper’s history, put together in less than half the usual time, and capturing the events and the opinions of both students and faculty for the permanent archive. 50 years later I was contacted by members of the Class of  ‘69 who had been ringleaders in the walkout, and they wanted to invite me to their 50th Reunion to discuss my memories of that and why I had opposed their own participation in it. As I had. After hearing their convenient memories and rationalizations of their actions back then, I refused their invitation. They were who I feared they would be.

8. A Widening Gulf…

From my book The Reckless Twenties…

A short story called “Pup.”

From my AfterPunk website a post titled “Opening the Coat”

Truthfully, we rarely spoke of anything important later on…

From the Boomer Bible Website:

9. Retirement

From my 2024 IPR post “Wheels Within Wheels”:

“All human organizations, whatever their charters say, are themselves inhuman. This does not mean they are inert. They possess the artificial (i.e., ‘imitation’) intelligence of rules and algorithms usually best approximated by game theory. Everyone who participates in the organization is subjected to incentives for advancement and penalties for opposition to the reality the organization accepts. The incentives are promulgated from the top, the most powerful game players in the organization. What is rewarded? Loyalty, obedience, subservience to those in charge, results that a superior can take credit for, whether the supposed accomplishments are real or contrived. What is punished? Refusing an assignment or an order, insisting on ethical responses to circumstances that will embarrass the organization or cost it money, organized opposition by subordinates to a plan, policy, decision, or presented supporting data, going outside the organization to correct a wrong or a grievance, whistleblowers. Why certain kinds of complaining, like sexual harassment lawsuits, are lifetime career killers in entire industries. 

 

How does the larger community within which these organizations operate prevent ethical and performance catastrophes from destroying companies, firms, and other powerful entities within a nation’s power structure? Historically, this has been the mission of formal education and, perhaps more importantly, the role of Dads in the nuclear family. 

 

Dads? Really? It’s been forgotten for quite a long time now. There was a division of labor between fathers and mothers, hopefully with considerable overlap between the two. Mothers were the constant proof of unqualified love for the child, the master of what happened inside the home and its routines; much of the adulation once accorded to motherhood itself was reinforcement of that ideal female role. The child comes first, before the parents, before comfort, before things. The house was her nest for raising and protecting her young. The mother was willing and usually able to protect the child from all kinds of danger, and the newspapers were happy to run stories about the mom who lifted a car off a child’s foot. That kind of thing.

 

Dads weren’t as good at the unqualified love obligation. They were usually the breadwinners and often not home. They were also the recipient of the situations they faced when an angry mom told the child, “Wait till your father gets home.” Simple spankings, before they were ruled out of bounds by child psychologists with delinquent kids of their own, were Dad’s job. While the mother applied ice to the black eye administered by a bully in school, it was Dad who surreptitiously took the kid out to the back yard and taught him to counterpunch in self defense. And to seize an occasion as soon as possible. It was also Dad’s responsibility if the bully happened to be his kid to put him in the car and take him to the house of the victim and apologize, in full view of the bullied child’s parents. (I have seen this done. It’s not an invention of screenwriters.)

 

Sunday School and other church-related rituals for children had a role to play as well. Complemented by parental support, not just as a drop them off and pick them up chore. What was the lesson today? Do you understand it? Conversation. Listening to the answers, answering the questions. The abiding lesson has to be that there is right in this world and wrong in this world. It is everyone’s responsibility to do the right thing. Including parents.

 

How is this part of the defense against organizational influences proceeding? I was shocked when I read the Twitter responses by fathers to the Hunter Biden pardon. How many said Biden’s fault was lying that he wouldn’t do it, although they, personally, would issue such a pardon for their son because he was “my son.”

 

I know damn well my Dad wouldn’t have pardoned me. And I wouldn’t do it myself. You see, it is as much part of the Dad’s role to protect the world from his son as it is the mother’s to protect her son from the world. Children are not supposed to have a license to cheat, steal, break rules in sports, use foul language, be rude to their mother, or hit girls (no, girls shouldn’t do it either). All of these can be punished without a belt or food deprivation. My paternal grandfather told me he spent so much time “sitting in the corner” that he read the Bible cover to cover two times over. My own Dad accomplished quite a lot of correction with a Look. It wasn’t a threat. It was a communication of anger and disappointment. 

 

The schools are supposed to play a parallel role in loco parentis. Bullies are far more unacceptable than a bullied child who defends himself or herself. What do teachers (say they) usually see? Just the punch thrown alongside the locker of the one who claims to have been retaliating for bullying. Who gets punished? The one who’s not used to concealing hostile acts. Bullies are much more skilled at alibiing one another and carrying out their worst assaults in secret. And we wonder why the bullied ones return to school one day with semi-automatic pistols for the bullies AND the sheep who watched it all and never told a teacher. And the teacher who turned a blind eye to all of it. The lesson about never being a whistleblower is taught in school, early and unforgettably. The teacher also never sees the secret price paid by the whistleblower in the bullysphere.

 

Universities, particularly professional schools, have an enormous obligation to insist on comprehensive ethical instruction for students of law, medicine, business, education, journalism, and even those in preparation for ordination. The ethics of professions are more important by far than the money or advancement they offer, because honor is not a commercial property to be traded for promotion or career safety. Sadly, the universities have also lowered their admission standards and dumbed down their curriculums accordingly. We really are stupider now (See Context document, 2023, Part 3)

 

When my father retired from his 37 year career with a major chemical company, he told his director that he had worked through most of those years without being lied to, even when the news was bad. The director suggested that he had been naive. My Dad said, “Fuck you,” and walked out. I had never heard him use that word myself.”

 

From the Boomer Bible Website:

10. Three Flavors of Greenheads…

From my website Afterpunk, a post titled “What I Feel, Pt. 2”

From Youtube:

From my website Instapunk Returns, a post titled “I’m Changing My Spirit Animal”

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That’s a complete draft for now. I mentioned obstacles in the title. Don’t know of any platform that could or would publish such a multimedia potpourri. Don’t know if you can read the PDF files I created with Acrobat. Don’t know much at the moment.