FURY

Anger is never without a reason,
But seldom a good one.
Benjamin Franklin

Whenever I go back to the San Francisco Bay Area, I am immersed in non-stop road rage.  Drivers swerve around you, hit the accelerator to get ahead of you, blast their horns to tell you to get out of their way and spew hate all over the highway.  I find myself getting just as angry as the other drivers as I try to weave my way through 6 lanes of traffic to get to my destination.  I come home exhausted, despising humanity and hating myself for succumbing to the hysteria that clogs our roads.

It is a glorious relief to come to peaceful Brighton where I walk everywhere, smile at everyone and love treading the streets. Humanity charms me when I am here and I find myself enjoying the kindly hustle and bustle on North Street.

I have always thought that road rage was so foreign to those who use public transportation in Britain, that they would sooner stage a massacre than be rude to another person.  Besides, it is not in the British personality to be rude or overbearing.  The people in this country are obsessed with being politically correct.

Or so I thought.

I just spent two weeks in London living in Stockwell and taking the tube to Leicester Square. That was when I was exposed to Tube Rage.  If I dared to try to tap my oyster card on the entrance gate during rush hour, I risked black and blue marks, mangled hips and fractured elbows.  When I approached the escalator, I was so terrified I shut my eyes and prayed to the almighty that my foot wasn’t crushed and I was not hurled down the moving staircase because I forgot to stand on the left.

It turns out that all this pushing, shoving, jostling and crushing is not due to rudeness at all.  It is the result of poor ventilation.  In fact the director of the British association of Anger Management warns that lack of oxygen is sure to cause uncontrolled acts of aggression.

What a relief!! I thought all those people shoving me around were ageist brutes who didn’t care that I am elderly and frail.  How wrong I was! When the British push you out of their way, it is a silent cry for air.

Which brings us right back to Brighton where fresh air is always swirling about us, filling our lungs with new oxygen from France.  I boarded a train at London Victoria and two people hit me in the shin in their rush to get to the coach first. One lady smashed her suitcase into my hip and another yanked my shoulder into a vertical position to reach the aisle seat.  The minute we all got off the train in Brighton, everyone was smiling, inhaling the lovely oxygenated air and loving one another.  A gentleman carried my case to the station, a lady held my arm lest I trip and two lovely young men with grandmother complexes bought me a coffee.

The oxygen cure would not work in America however.  It isn’t the air that infuriates them; it is the government.

DRUG-ADDLED FISH

Tell me what you eat, and
I will tell you what you are.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

I am very careful about the food I eat because I know that what is in it goes into me.  I will not eat red meat because I was a huge fan of Elsie the Cow, Porky the Pig and Mary’s three little lambs.  However, since I never had an aquarium or cuddled something aquatic, I have been relying on fish as a staple to my diet.

I am amazed to learn that the reason I feel so relaxed and at peace with the world after a salmon dinner is that the fish on our planet are all becoming junkies. We are dumping our medications into the landfill helter-skelter and our Prozac, Vicodin and Demerol are being transmitted from the fish in the sea into my bloodstream.

I find this excellent news.  It has the potential to save me an immense amount of money when I am moved to escape my current reality. If I eat my perch and dine on cod I will be calm and collected, if a bit loopy, when disaster strikes.  I will not panic…I will be properly tranquilized by my dinner.

There is more good news to come.  Evidently, all that drug consumption has made our fishy friends sterile. The morning after pills we didn’t need and the birth control pills we discard are affecting the reproductive powers of our aquatic friends.   This is bad for the food supply I admit and terrible information for the pharmaceutical companies.  We no longer need rely on the pill or the morning-after remedies (some of which are disgustingly unpleasant) to take care of any repercussions from a night of pleasure.  All we need do is eat a generous helping of plaice for dinner.  (You can even deep-fry it and it will still fix you up). If you decide you would like to have a family, forget estrogen or in-vitrio fertilization.  Eat meat.

Ah, how times have changed.  Back in the uninformed early fifties, I had two exquisite Siamese Fighting Fish: Herbert and Tarrington.  They were lovely to watch, swimming from one side of their little bowl to the other, munching on algae and sparking in the sun.  But one day Herbert got into a snit and ate poor timid Tarrington. He digested him whole and didn’t even spit out the bones.  Had he lived in this knowledgeable century of ours, I would have scooped up some water for the nearest stream and cured his inappropriate behavior just like that.

Of course there are times when you do not want to dull your senses.  You long to heighten your awareness of life around you.  No need to waste hard-earned cash on speed, cocaine or ecstasy. Just run to the nearest fish grotto, pig out on sea bass and you are ready to party!

The only ones deprived of this safe avenue to contentment are vegetarians. They will have to rely on prescription medicines for their highs.  The poor among them will reproduce like bunnies if they don’t give up sex entirely.  It doesn’t seem fair does it?  They have already given up so much that makes life delicious.

Fish, to taste right, must swim three times –
in water, in butter and in wine.
Polish Proverb

FAT AND THIN

Thin people are beautiful
But fat people are adorable.
Jackie Gleason

There is a study out trying to figure out why lesbians tend to be overweight and it is totally misdirected.  It isn’t lesbians who tend to be plump, it is good cooks and who was the best cook ever?

Answer:  Your mother.

No one in the world made better macaroni and cheese or apple pie. When your mum made you breakfast, no restaurant could match it and certainly your dad couldn’t do much at the stove except for an outdoor barbeque or one fancy company dish like his famous crab cioppino.

The truth is that it isn’t lesbians who have to fight their weight, it is anyone, male, female, straight or gay who loves to cook. If you have a way with food you are going to taste what you create…and those itty-bitty spoonfuls of chocolate custard or Alfredo sauce go straight to the hips.

Look at our own darling Andrew Kaye. He has never cooked for me (yet) but he knows good food.  He savors the texture, recognizes the bouquet of herbs and spices and respects dramatic cuisine.  His silhouette is certainly not angular.  It is just round enough.

For my part, I refuse to go to a skinny persons house for dinner.  I am not going to waste a meal on someone who doesn’t present each dish with a bit of flair and an eye for flavor.  I made that mistake only once.  A woman who shall remain nameless in case she figures out why I am always busy at dinnertime when she calls, invited me over for a gala holiday celebration. She was the type who spent mornings at the gym, bench-pressing hundreds of pounds.  Afternoons she worked out on the trampoline and evenings she did Zumba.  The truth is I should have known what to expect.

I appeared, bottle of wine in hand with an empty, expectant tummy and what did I see?  Pizza delivered from the corner shop, pre-sliced mass-produced bread and instant coffee. I know you won’t believe me, but the only spread available was marmite.   There wasn’t even background music to hide the gagging of the guests.  I immediately feigned a headache and hustled over to the nearest Waitrose for a gourmet experience.  A dinner is a terrible thing to lose…especially if you skipped lunch.

So I am campaigning for people to stop casting negative aspersions on corpulence.  Give me someone with a decent amount of curves and a good wiggle to their walk and I will immediately lobby to share a meal with them.  If you are lean, buff and tanned I would not dream of touching your soup, much less your flambé cherries jubilee. Show me a comfy, well-padded cheerful person in a flowered apron and I am right there at her dinner table.  I promise to bring the wine.

OH, YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!!!!

People are obsessed with…
Hairless, fatless Barbie Dolls.
Gaby Hoffman

A U.S. study has concluded that the dolls you play with influence your career choices.  When American children play with sexy Barbie dolls, they want to grow up to do girlie things like go to Hollywood and get humped by the stars but when they play with dolls made out of potatoes, they think there is no limit to what they can do with their lives.  It all goes to show that image is everything.

You have to admit that when you see curvaceous women in movies and on television, they are always doing very feminine things like flirting with policemen or dancing provocatively in revealing undies.  You KNOW instinctively that women like that never pay for a meal or have to take a bus home.  It is the thick-ankled, ladies in print dresses with no visible cleavage, who end up locked to a stove and a Hoover in their prime.  And what fun is that?

Every med student who specializes in plastic surgery instead healing the poor knows what a money-maker that pre-conceived notion is. Ordinarily clever women will blow their grocery money on a shot of silicone to puff up their lips, just to be like the toys we played with as a child.  If we change our playthings, our self-image will change as well.  We won’t give a toss about Barbie’s or Ken’s silhouette. We will thirst for the bumps and curves of a root vegetable.

Indeed, we can restructure our children’s ambitions by giving them potatoes to play with instead of human-shaped dolls.  They can dress their little tubers in frilly dresses or put them in macho uniforms with matching caps and carry them around to cuddle and talk to when Mummy and Daddy won’t listen.  If you start a child early enough, his goals in life will become far more realistic. Young women will ache to become thick-wasted, faceless entities with little protrusions on their skin like the playthings that comforted them when they took a nap;  boys will no longer gobble up porn with its images of hairless, busty women and muscular, well-hung men.  Instead, they will go crazy with desire when they see a local farmer yanking a yam out of the earth.

I envision a new world where the elderly with their aging bodies and shapeless silhouettes will suddenly become the most sought-after centerfolds in magazines and on the screen. Estrogen-deprived women with moustaches will turn on men with potbellies and bowing legs and anyone who dares to eat chips will be accused of cannibalism.

So take heart all you people with bad measurements and loose body parts.  Your time will soon be here. If you wait long enough, your image will be ”in.”

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The Theory of Everything

Directed by James Marsh

This is a beautifully made film about the life of Stephen Hawking, who, at the beginning of a promising career in theoretical physics, was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).  His doctor told him there was nothing he could do for him and gave him two years to live (in 1963), but he is still alive today, and continues a very productive life as a theoretical physicist.  He was lucky.  He had an exceptional woman who loved him, was willing marry him and take on the arduous task of caring for him, dedicating herself to keeping him alive and giving him the best life he could have under the most unfortunate circumstances.  If it wasn’t for her, he would be long dead.  They raised three children together and he is one of the leading theoretical physicists in the world today.  This is not a tragedy from any perspective.  It is a great story of multifaceted triumph of the human spirit against tremendous odds.

The film does a number of things very well.  The characters of Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife, Jane (Felicity Jones), are very well drawn.  Superb acting brings the characters to life with great vividness.  The film also very effectively portrays the formidable task of caring for someone with a progressive, degenerative disease.   My family went through this in a ten year decline of my mother with Parkinson’s Disease and other ailments.  My father insisted on keeping her at home and caring for her himself, which he did with unswerving devotion all the way to the end in 2010.  I was there at one point when she was slumped in a wheel chair with her head down refusing to eat, and the nurse told us her body was shutting down and she would probably not last two more weeks.  My dad told me to go uptown and get some jars of baby food, which I did.  I brought them back, he fed them to her with a spoon, and she ate it.  In two days she was eating normally.  She lived another four years as a terminal patient.

The point is that having one person who is totally committed to caring for such a one who is disabled and hopelessly declining can greatly extend their life and vastly improve the quality of their final years.  It is not something you can buy; it is not something you can manufacture; it is not something that can be done by institutions.  The value and advisability of such a herculean effort I will not discuss.  It is something born out of inner necessity — love, if you will — on the part of the one who takes on the task, like someone who decides to climb Mt. Everest, or sail across the ocean.  One cannot force a person to do it, but a person who has set his or her mind to the task can hardly be dissuaded.  It is an obvious, unquestionable dedication that does not quail before the most insuperable challenges.  I think it is what Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote that whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.  Jane Hawking shared this fathomless inner drive for selfless dedication.

As I watched the film I wondered how this woman was produced.  She is unlike any woman I have encountered in my adult life.  I am sure it had to do with the fact that she is English, and that she came of age in the early 1960s, but I feel there has to be more to it.  Over many years I have had dealings with many young American women, and my observation is that as you get close to them, you find great question marks over their lives.  Particularly in their dealings with men, sex, marriage, motherhood, all of the classic aspects of femininity, are very problematic and confusing to them.  Their heads are full of illusions and conflicts and uncertainty to the point where they are just not equipped to deal with intimate personal relationships.  It is very typical and does not require extensive documentation.

The girl in this film is not like that.  She is absolutely solid in her personal identity, her sense of herself as a woman, and what she wanted for her life.  She is remarkably free of serious psychopathology.  She had an unshakable self confidence in her ability to deal with the arduous undertaking that she was embarking on.  And she achieved what she set out to do.  She got her Ph.D., she raised three children, and she cared for Stephen with unflinching dedication that enabled him to have a long, productive life far beyond anyone’s expectations.  If there is a Nobel Prize for superwomen, she should get it.

It is probably true that she was naive and that her self confidence was inflated.  My own experience with my father caring for my mother evinces the need for outside help.  No matter how determined and self reliant one feels, the task of caring for a person with extreme disability overwhelms the capability of a single person.  A reliable support network is necessary.  My father eventually accepted this against initial resistance, and the film shows that Jane Hawking also built a support network in the face of the toll it was taking upon her.

The film does not dwell on the conflicted aspects of the relationship between Jane and Stephen nor on the toll that the weight and burden of caring for him took on her as he progressed in his illness.   Rather, it emphasizes her sturdiness and resilience and unflagging dedication to Stephen.   It is an inspiring, touching story that is relevant to many people in the United States and around the world.  There is enough of the physics to get a flavor of Stephen Hawking’s work, but the film is not about ideas.  This is a human drama, a romance, a story that is intimately personal.   It is an achievement of the highest quality, beautifully filmed and masterfully told.  It should become a classic.

DOING IT

Independence is happiness.
Susan B Anthony

The world is filled with unhappy people and I believe that is because we no longer experience the joy of doing things for ourselves.  Think of it.  We don’t use our hands the way we used to any more.  Time was when we used them to open a door, turn on a faucet or dry our hair.  Now the only thing we use them for is to roll a joint or prove a point. Flushing a toilet once demanded a hands-on effort.  Now, it is a one finger operation and often, it involves simply standing up after the job is done.

I am so old I remember when we brushed our teeth with great vigor using our muscles (no batteries).  We dried ourselves with a towel and we got down on our hands and knees to wash the floor.  We used a scythe to cut the grass and experienced the bliss of being in the glorious outdoors with the sun on our backs and our arms swinging to the rhythm of our hearts.

We no longer need to use our fingers to type a message much less actually pen a note to a loved one or the milkman.  He too is only a memory.  He has been replaced by a refrigerated case at the supermarket.  When we want to know how to get from here to there, we simply speak our request into our electronic devices and technology responds.

Now, we no longer have to drive our cars and that is a terrible loss. Google has taken away the joy of the open road, windows open, top down, accelerator slammed to the floor. Remember the sense of freedom, the power? Oh, the sheer exhilaration of flying down the highway, traffic whizzing past you and all of life awaiting at your destination?

Sure.  We won’t have as many crashes. Far fewer people will be mutilated or murdered on the road.  But is it worth the sacrifice of the joy of connecting with the immense force of your vehicle knowing you alone are its master?

And what does this loss of control do to the human psyche? We no longer feel in control of our destinies.  When doors open with a sensory device and cars take us to our destination by a route of their own choosing, we no longer can steer our unique course through our individual lives.  What has happened to the sense of self we once had when we swept the floor with a broom and decided for ourselves if that dust bunny deserved to be dismissed to the dust bin?

I laud progress and respect technology, but if I have the choice I would rather use the force of my will to guide me through my life. When I malfunction, I can change direction; but when technology fails, the car stalls, the dishwasher floods and I get a concussion speeding through a closed door.

MY FAMILY, MY DOG

There is no psychiatrist in the world
Like a puppy licking your face.
Ben Williams

When Daphne sits on my lap, my blood pressure drops 30 points.  Why bother with Lipitor?  Daphne is not dispensed to me by a pharmacist although she is definitely good medicine. She is a five-pound Chihuahua with blue eyes and an attitude.  However, when she sits on MY lap, her blood pressure elevates…and no wonder.  She is at work; she is doing her job.

Daphne’s mother dresses her in high fashion: ruffled skirts with matching knickers and booties, a warm hoodie to wear when she and her mum are on the slopes and a bright strawberry vest to welcome spring.

Daphne has a stubborn anal gland that does not process her food properly and her mother has spent hundreds, nay, thousands of pounds on Daphne’s alimentary canal, to no avail.  At last, her mother resorted to holistic remedies and feeds Daphne a nightly soupcon of pumpkin and rice to soothe her aching bottom.

Daphne is well aware of her privileged position in the family.  She dines with us at our table.  We do not consider her germs as lethal as those of her former daddy or all her cousins…some with four legs, some with only two.   We all know her preferences and we do our best to keep her as happy as her presence makes us.  She does not like the rain; she considers walking on the other end of a leash demeaning; she loves to watch movies and never so much as woofs lest she disturb the others watching with her.  We know that Daphne is absorbing the action on the screen because she often weeps at a sad ending, and she still wails when she remembers what happened to poor Jackie Robinson.

We who know and love Daphne think she is unique but it appears that she is no different than any other dog in any other home anywhere in the world.  One look at her stimulates human oxytocin, a bonding hormone that increases our trust and attachment to those close to us and makes us suspicious of strangers.  The fact is that the longer Daphne stares at me, the more I love her and want to shoot that yapping little dachshund next door. This explains why we think nothing of spending half our wages on Daphne’s attire, rushing her to a doctor at the slightest hint that she is not in perfect health even as we ignore our own coughs, tummy spasms and exploding lungs. She is far more than part of our family…she is the very adhesive that keeps us together. For, although we all  have spats with one another over toilet seats left up or down, toothpaste tubes squeezed wrong and dishes unwashed, we all unite in our love for Daphne.  It is she who keeps us human.

Percy is a Corgi without a tail.  He stares at me with the same intensity Jewish men look at me.  You know: something is missing and he doesn’t remember how he lost it.  The interesting thing is that the more Percy stares at me, the more I adore him.  I cannot say the same for Jewish men.

Dorothy is a shih’ Tzu with a raging metabolism. When she sits on your lap, you can feel the heat of her tiny little body warm you right to your toes. When her blood pumps through her veins and burns her calories you will swear the house is on fire.  Dorothy’s mother says she has saved 1000 pounds a year on heating bills and her only cost is dog food.  That, after all, is Dorothy’s fuel and it is a lot cheaper than petrol.

Dogs are miracles with paws.
Susan Kennedy

DIRT

Dirt gets no respect.
My boyfriend

More than 1 in 12 deaths are caused by the dirt we breathe.  Man made particles are clogging up the air and getting into our lungs and our bloodstreams.  Indeed, they are messing up our health and threatening our environment.

But what can we do?  We have to breathe and manufacturers need to make filthy engines to run our lives.  Sometimes we need to compromise our values in the name of progress. I believe a filthy life is worth the risk.

We need to experience a certain amount of dirt so we can recognize clean.  My gran ate a mud pie every morning until she was 10 years old.  “Sometimes I added a bit of tree bark for flavor and once in a while a cricket to give it crunch,” she said. ”My mother never knew because I snuck one in right after my morning dump, but she did ask uncomfortable questions when my teeth got a funny tinge.   We didn’t have whiteners in my day.”

My gran lived to 110 and on her death-bed she begged for a bit of dirt with her last breath.  We fed her two dust bunnies and a clump of sod from her African violet and she left us with a smile on her face.

Pregnant women in Wales craved coal to eat with the same intensity that New York mothers-to-be ached for a dill pickle.  Babies born in Wales showed no ill effects from their mothers’ blackened diets.  Indeed, Welsh choirs often attribute the purity of their tone to the anthracite in their systems.

I believe we are depriving ourselves of the very essence of life with our determination to purify everything we touch, breathe or feel.  An apple with the film of air, dust and insects nesting on their skins has twice the flavor of one tossed and whirled in a sanitizing bath of disinfectant and wiped with a sterile cloth.  A hand roughened by the soil of the day has far more warmth than one damp and sticky with hand cleaner that reeks of disinfectant.

Even natural human reproduction from conception to birth is riddled with mess, drippings and germs.  I, for one, prefer the old fashioned way to sanitary lab controlled in vitro procedures. If the cost of passion is a bit of risk and a possible germ, I am up for it.

Down and dirty is the way to go if you are to experience the lust and excitement of a rich full life.  If you are afraid of foreign objects compromising your health, you are doomed to a life filled with fear and your every moment will be preoccupied with prevention.  A clean germ free life is bland, boring and repetitive. To me, soap and disinfectants are for cowards. I’ll take my chances on the  feel of an unwashed handshake or the warmth of an unsanitary cuddle. They are so worth the risk.