Reeking Havoc's...'s profileReeking Havoc's LairPhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
|
July 30 Governor's Program for Gifted ChildrenLast weekend was the 50th anniversary reunion of GPGC. The last time I saw these friends of mine, we were all about 14 years old. That was in 1967, forty years ago!. I wasn't sure what to expect: would anybody I knew be there? Would anyone even remember me? In fact, they welcomed me with open arms. This was a wonderful encounter. As someone said, "At other reunions it's 'Who's got the Porsche? The big job? Still looks the best? Here, nobody cares about all that." I felt that here, too. I think we all knew the pain of being outsiders. We were the nerds with glasses everywhere else, but in GPGC we were among like-minded kids and adults, and it was a slice of heaven (and it was another slice this past weekend!). Saturday was the graduation ceremony for this year's crop of gifties, with performances by the gifties classical orchestra and the chorus. They were stellar, and at the end all the alumni and retired faculty were called onstage to sing one of Dr Middleton's favorites, "The Impossible Dream". Ordinarily I would ignore any music that lacks electric guitars, but this was downright touching! Some of the Class of 1967, L to R: Me, Robert, Nancy, Dan, "Junior", Ross, Zart, David, Susan April 06 PsilocybinExperimental research points to psilocybin, the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms", as a promoter of spiritual experiences. My own research decades ago found the same result, and the same warnings... March 31 I've been at Beliefnet lately......where I was blogging for a while as "Church of Some Other Way" until technical problems kept me from accessing my own page. You can visit it, but I can't add anything to it anymore. Now I'm blogging as "Jahweh" there, trying to stay in character... March 09 Handy bedtime tip for better sleepDo what I did: get a cat bed at Walgreen's drugstore. Right now they are selling a two pack of small pet beds for ten bucks. I bought this with the idea that it might make a good pillow for me. I'd been needing something with neck support and a thin cushion for my head, and this cat bed works! It's about as big around as a max-size pizza, with a thick roll of cushion around its' perimeter. That gives neck support. The pad in the middle, where the cat would sleep, is just the right thickness for my head. I tried it last night, and slept better than I have on my $90 Tempur-Pedic memory foam pillow! Yay! I have a great pillow that cost me $5, plus a spare for my cat (or my wife's Pug dog Truffie) to sleep on. No more neck stiffness in the morning! February 24 Be it forever known...I like some things about Cajun culture, but I hate accordion music. January 23 Roxy and the TruffhoundThey have identical coloration. Sometimes we mistake one for the other... Gekkos are good luckGekkos are good luck when you find them in your house. I took this picture tonight in the bedroom. That looks gekkish to me... January 13 That dog...When last you saw Roxy in this space (April), she was about 18-24 inches long and about 25 lbs. Not anymore... January 07 the TruffhoundWe have a new dog. She makes noises like a little pig, and it's cute and comical. She sounds like a pig rooting for truffles, so this is our "Truffhound". I got a picture also of my cat, Jean-Luc, getting into the chili pot. The Countessa says, "That's not funny." I guess she's right, but at least I know now why that last batch of chili tasted like fish... December 16 RH's Houston vacationWent to Houston this past week for a getaway, stayed with my "Sis" who had a borrowed condo in the museum district. I saw: a former coworker from the psych hospital, who now resides in Houston, the Lucy exhibit at the Natural history museum (I didn't want to leave), the Carl Jung Center one block from the condo, the Health Museum (a disappointment, it's just a grade school anatomy lesson), and a film at the planetarium about black holes (nothing there about the Illudium Q36-Explosive Space Modulator!). Next day it was the Chung Mei Buddhist Temple (found it after making a wrong turn), and the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, which is a Hindu temple featuring ornate marble carvings of deities but no walls. We shivered in the breeze (no shoes allowed in the temple) while the guide told us happily about the religious significance of architectural details in the domes and columns. We shopped for organic food at Whole Foods Market where I got a sixpack of Blue Moon Lager, and the Rice Epicurean market, where Sis bought a perennial favorite treat, See's Candy. Friday night I got to race at Slot Cars of Katy, formerly Pasadena Slot Car Speedway. The owner and his wife remembered me from my half-dozen visits over the years since the early 1990s. Friday night I came in better than last place, which was good enough for me considering I had no time to practice and my 10 year old car had to be hurriedly rebuilt... We came home by way of Galveston and rode the ferry to cross Galveston Bay. Sis saw dolphins and got spray in her face, the wind was gusting about 40-60 mph. Once back on land we found a hole-in-the-wall bar for supper, the "Beach Rock Cafe". We had some delicious chicken finger baskets and watched country music videos on the bigscreen TV. Then we listened to the old salts make vulgar repartee with "Patty Crabcakes", the hostess/cook/bartender. She told them she was one of the items on the menu... November 01 I have a friend who...This item under construction: I have a friend I've never met. She visits me often. I have a friend I met in junior high. He's now an illustrator for books, and has published a number of comics. I have a friend who plays in a grammy award-winning band. I don't care for his genre of music, but I like him and his wife a great deal. I have a friend who gets in bed with me and my wife, he happens to be a cat. I have a friend who lives in a state way up north, in a big cabin, with big dogs. I have a friend who had a chance to marry me long ago but turned me down. In later years I could have killed us both in an auto accident. I was showing off and we woke up hanging upside down from our seatbelts. In the ambulance she held my hand! I'll always be grateful for that gracious act of forgiveness. I have a friend whom I have kept at a distance for years. How peculiar! I don't think either of us could expect to talk about this to the other's satisfaction.. I have a friend who married a guy I introduced her to when I broke up with her in 1971. They moved to Washington state and had kids. I've only heard from her once since then, but I like to think she is happy. I have a friend with whom I was married for 19 years. She no longer walks this corporeal realm, yet now she is everywhere. I assume she watches over me from time to time.... I have another friend who also passed on: he and I used to trip together, and spent lots of time talking about everything you could imagine. We went separate ways when he began to have his Dad's mental illness and paranoia, such a sad thing to see him decline. I hope he's at peace now. I have a friend who is married to me. I'm happy to say that kisses and saying "I love you" happens several times every day. April 20 New puppy at our houseRoxy is a female English Mastiff. When grown she may weigh more than me. Right now she's about 10 weeks old, and 25 lbs or so... November 25 Reconciling compassion versus my anger toward GOPI've tried for quite a while to reconcile my fury towards George W Bush and his GOP with my belief that all people are incarnations of God. I had remained at an impasse with myself until one night at bedtime the Countessa asked me what I would do if I had George Bush as my patient in the psychiatric hospital where I work. It didn't take much thought, "I would do the right thing; I would do the best job I could for him." That is, I would treat him with compassion, it matters not what I feel...it's what I do that counts here. That's good enough. I feel reconciled, even if my occasional rages against this machine go on... November 12 Strange dream last nightLast night I had a dream that my wife ("Dubious Countessa") and I were in some kind of trouble together, trying to get away.
Not only that, but the dream would wake me up, I'd doze off again, then it would resume. I knew it was a dream in progress, and I wondered as I dozed into scene 3 whether the Countessa might be having the same dream at the same time. At one point I heard her whimper in her sleep, but she eased when I snuggled closer.
I'd forgotten about it until, while I was writing my previous blog entry over morning coffee, she said, "I had a series of disturbing dreams last night. They kept waking me up..." October 22 An utterly objective self-description......is what I will attempt here, but of course it is simply how I see myself.
It occurs to me today that I haven't ever told my vast readership what kind of person I am, apart from what they might glean from reading my erudite postings or screwtinizing my profile on this page.
1. I am quirky and silly when I am with people with whom I am comfortable and my mood is good.
2. Otherwise I am reserved, and even shy. A born introvert.
3. I am quite sane, more so than many of my social worker cohort. Why is that? My wife is saner still...
4. My cousin's wife, born of Chinese parents in Hong Kong, once told me one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me about me:
"(My husband) is tough on the outside and tough on the inside, but you're soft on the outside and tough on the inside."
That still gives me such a good feeling, even after the passage of a decade or so...
5. I am insecure. I fret every workday over the possibility of making some kind of mistake, or of forgetting something important. This is what keeps me from being as sane as my wife...
6. I am religious, as you have surely noticed. If there is anything conventional about my beliefs, it is that I assume the existence of some benevolent entity who supecedes the whole universe and whom I refer to as "God". All my other religious beliefs flow from a core assumption that every human being including myself is God living in the world, and that compassion is the measure of all righteous behavior. (for more on this, click "ChurchofSomeOtherWay" in the Categories box, upper left part of this page)
7. If I hadn't been a psychotherapist or clergy, I would have needed to be a race car driver.
8. If I hadn't been a Hippie, I would have been a Goth, because black has always been my favorite "color", and I like having skulls for jewelry and on my clothes.
9. My Dad has said that even when I was two years old, I was in control of myself. Rarely did my parents have to spank me for my behavior. It was usually enough if they cast an angry look in my direction. August 18 Gratitude...I wish to here express my gratitude to loving relatives and friends who have given and will continue to give their support to my Dad, my brother and myself... and also to God for the life of my Mom who did the same with grace and dignity until a few days ago.
August 06 My experience of Christian Youth MinistryWhen I was about to graduate with a bachelor's degree from the Centenary School of Church Careers in 1977, I went on a handdful of interviews to find a job with a Methodist congregation as a youth minister. I quickly found out that my Episcopalian wife, a med student, did not fit their plan. At the time, church congregations assumed that a youth minister's wife would be part of the package they were buying for their $11,000 a year. Considering that my wife was not interested in converting to Methodism or spending all her time helping me do my job instead of going to med school, this path was beginning to look uninviting.
In addition, congregations that could afford to budget this whopping expense were often big enough to qualify for a second ordained minister who would do the youth ministry chores along with helping the lead minister do his work.
When I added further to this my growing awareness that youth ministers were usually pushed out the door once some small but vocal cadre of parents began to object to some aspect of the youth minister's ways, (average elapsed time 1 to 2 years) and the sum of it was that I dropped all notion of pursuing this career path.
My wife Anna (demised in 1995) went on to become a psychiatrist. I went to work in a dental lab, then became an experimental associate in a psychiatric research lab, an executive assistant at a psychiatric hospital, then a jeweler. While doing all this I discovered in the mid 1980s that I am a Buddhist...
Much water has flowed under the bridge since my youth ministry internship. I have some fond memories of the friends I made then and the many things I learned. Many of these would be placed in the column labeled "outgrowing naivete''. It was with intense interest that I read this article about the changes in youth ministry practice since then. (see also: GROUP magazine)
With my Master's in Social Work and my 9 years' experience in inpatient & outpatient counseling, youth ministry and my qualifications would be a much better match now. ...except that I can't not be a Buddhist. I could do the job just fine I think, for almost any congregation of nonfundamentalist Christians or Jews, but I will not hide who I am. If I do the job well, some of the young people would likely get interested in my beliefs despite the fact that I would do nothing to actively proselytize there. They would ask questions and I would not withhold answers (doing so would only whet their interest anyway). ...and you know how an answer given can call up more questions! It would be unacceptable to the congregation should some young ones announce their adherence to Buddhism after interacting with me.
So for me, this will forever be "the road not taken"...
July 22 I was born with a car fixation.Dad told me recently that when I was an infant in the crib, I had a little blue toy car. If it fell from my grasp, I'd wake up and cry until it was retrieved and given back to me. Now it all comes back to me...It started with that exhilarating ride to the hospital in dad's big 1950 V8 Buick, and culminated in my exit from some tight dark stifling space into the daylight and air...Going fast has felt like freedom to me ever since. June 25 My experience with VoodooWhen I was with my late first wife, much of our time together was filled with a lot of stress from financial problems, her illness and our personal immaturity and bad decisions. During this time, we somehow acquired a "witch's egg", which is a multicolored glass orb about 8 inches long, roughly egg-shaped, with a pinhole at one end where the glass blower had cut off the stem.
The card that came with it said that evil spirits are drawn to its' beauty, enter through the pinhole, then get dazzled by the multicolored swirls inside and are unable to find the way out. We hung it up in our unaffordable townhouse, and soon things seemed to get a little bit better. Not that all our problems went away, but we were beginning to get a few good breaks in contrast to the previous stretch where everything that happened seemed to work against us. Hmmm...I'm not a superstitious person, but...
So the thing remained with us for years. After her passing in 1995, I moved to the New Orleans area to attend Tulane for my master's in social work. The egg was suddenly a conundrum to me. I had by this time seen "Ghostbusters" and realized that any kind of storage device for evil spirits could be a problem of potentially immense proportions. I was quite sure it was full to near-bursting with the evil influences responsible for my earlier struggles (they of course could not have been caused by me!).
I couldn't give it away to some unsuspecting acquaintance, that would be unethical. I couldn't throw it in the trash, it would break open somewhere along its' way to the dump. Not knowing what else to do, I kept it carefully sealed inside an extra-thick styrofoam chest, the kind used to transport organs or blood. The lid was securely taped shut and the box placed in a closet shelf in my apartment on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain in Kenner.
During my internship at a psychiatric partial hospitalization program (located about a mile from Anne Rice's house), I asked a colleague and New Orleans native what to do. She referred me to a Voodoo priestess, Sallie Ann Glassman, and told me that Sallie is a leading practitioner of Voodoo. Interestingly, she was not a native of New Orleans, but had moved there from New York and is of Jewish origins.
I wrote down the name and phone number, but never found the time to look her up before making the move to another part of South Louisiana.
The toxic egg was still with me in 1999, the year I married Countessa and we moved into our present home.
Now, there are some individuals in Cajun South Louisiana who are called traiteurs and are practitioners of a kind of folk medicine that combines prayer, herbs and a kind of special blessing bestowed on them at birth by God. The lore is passed down from one practitioner to another in direct succession.
Countessa found one in 2000 at Camp Bluebird, a 5 day retreat for cancer survivors that is held twice a year. He told her to put the egg on the ground on a moonlit night, recite a prayer over it, and the spirits would be drawn into the ground where the Earth would cleanse them. This she did (with a prayer in Hebrew) while I was at a psychotherapy conference in Anaheim, then threw it into the kitchen garbage.
Problem solved!
For more on Voodoo as currently practiced, try this link to an article where Sallie Ann Glassman is mentioned. Seeing the item was what reminded me of my witch's egg episode... See also, Vodou in Wikipedia.
In an unrelated side note: Countessa's grandmother is an old South Louisiana Catholic lady in her 90s. She lives on Social Security in a little ground-level efficiency apartment in Franklin. She keeps the place relentlessly tidy, and at the time of one of my first visits to her home she had numerous smooth rocks, all painted white, marking the perimeter around the flower beds encircling the place.
I jokingly remarked that that would keep the evil spirits away. She has never forgotten that remark, and has said on several occasions that she will leave the rocks to me in her will. She is serious about this! I guess there is nothing else for me to do but to accept them when the time comes, and place them around our house in the spirit for which they are intended.
It'll probably work good, too!
* Just a thoughtful tip about Voodoo: Never leave a voodoo doll of your neighbor where the cat can find it. The noise nextdoor will keep you up at night, and you won't know why...
|
|
|
