Test Results!

The website similarminds.com has an online personality disorder test. Here are my results:

Personality Disorder Test Results Paranoid |||||||||||| 46% Schizoid |||||||||||||||||| 78% Schizotypal |||||||||||||||||| 78% Antisocial |||||||||| 34% Borderline |||||||||||||| 58% Histrionic |||| 18% Narcissistic |||||| 30% Avoidant |||||||||||||| 54% Dependent |||||||||||||||| 62% Obsessive-Compulsive |||||| 22%

Take Free Personality Disorder Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

This doesn't show how I compare to the rest of those taking the test. But I was more schizoid, more schizotypal, more borderline, more avoidant and more dependent. I was less than the rest on everything else.

Of course, I'm not going to stake my mental health on the results of one internet survey. I'll see if I can find another one for a second opinion.

21st Century Schizoid Man

I learned something new this week, thanks to one of my Facebook friends.

I had always thought 'schizoid' was just a slang term used to describe someone who appeared mentally ill, or even just very eccentric. But now I know it has a clinical definition, as summarized by Wikipedia:

"Schizoid personality disorder (SPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of interest in social relationships, a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle, secretiveness, and emotional coldness. SPD is not the same as schizophrenia, although they share some similar characteristics such as detachment or blunted affect and there is increased prevalence of the disorder in families with schizophrenia."

The article goes on to describe signs and symptoms:

"People with SPD are seen as aloof, cold and indifferent, which causes some social problems. Most individuals diagnosed with SPD have difficulty establishing personal relationships or expressing their feelings in a meaningful way, and may remain passive in the face of unfavourable situations. Their communication with other people at times may be indifferent and concise. Because of their lack of communication with other people, those who are diagnosed with SPD are not able to have a reflection of themselves and how well they get along with others. The reflection is important so they can be more aware of themselves and their own actions in social surroundings. R. D. Laing suggests that without being enriched by injections of interpersonal reality there occurs an impoverishment in which one's self-image becomes more and more empty and volatilized, leading the individual himself to feel unreal.

"According to Gunderson, "people with SPD 'feel lost' without the people they are normally around because they need a sense of security and stability. However, when the patient’s personal space is violated, they feel suffocated and feel the need to free themselves and be independent. Those people who have SPD are happiest when they are in a relationship in which the partner places few emotional or intimate demands on them, as it is not people as such that they want to avoid, but both negative and positive emotions, emotional intimacy, and self disclosure.

"This means that it is possible for schizoid individuals to form relationships with others based on intellectual, physical, familial, occupational, or recreational activities as long as these modes of relating do not require or force the need for emotional intimacy, which the individual will reject."

And there's more. The whole article is here.

It caught my attention because it seems to describe a more extreme version of myself.

"The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fourth edition, a widely used manual for diagnosing mental disorders, defines schizoid personality disorder (in Axis II Cluster A) as:

A. A pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings, beginning by early adulthood (age eighteen or older) and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:

1. neither desires nor enjoys close relationships, including being part of a family
2. almost always chooses solitary activities
3. has little, if any, interest in having sexual experiences with another person
4. takes pleasure in few, if any, activities
5. lacks close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives
6. appears indifferent to the praise or criticism of others
7. shows emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affect

B. Does not occur exclusively during the course of schizophrenia, a mood disorder with psychotic features, another psychotic disorder, or a pervasive developmental disorder and is not due to the direct physiological effects of a general medical condition.

"It is a requirement of DSM-IV that a diagnosis of any specific personality disorder also satisfies a set of general personality disorder criteria.

"In the draft of the DSM-V it is proposed that schizoid personality disorder should be represented and diagnosed by a combination of core impairment in personality functioning and specific pathological personality traits, rather than as a specific type.

Fewer than 1 out of 100 Americans meet the standard for Schizoid Personality Disorder.

Here's some more from the Mayo Clinic.

By the Way...

If anyone wants to send me a willowy, ethereal young zen student, who's also impressionable, gullible and profoundly codependent, and who maybe looks kinda sorta like Stevie Nicks, that would be so special.

Buy a Porn Star an iPad

There is a story on The Daily Beast today about how porn stars are using Twitter. Apparently they have some special Twitter porn service that doesn't do anything but manage porn star Twitter accounts, which in itself is an interesting exercise in entrepreneurship.

But the part that caught my attention, 'way down in the story, was how porn actresses use their Twitter accounts to solicit, and receive, gifts from fans:

“On the place on Twitter where you can put your website I put my Amazon wish list,” says DeArmond. She also likes to tweet out her wish list. She says three packages—jewelry, shoes—a day is normal in her mail.

...

Not to be outdone, Kristina Rose says: “I got an iPad yesterday. The fan had it engraved on the back to say ‘Slutwoman A.K.A. Kristina Rose.’ I love Twitter.”

As I've written frequently, infatuation literally means 'made foolish.' And I've been made foolish a lot. A whole lot. But holy shit, I've never been made this foolish. Let's skip the part about being porn actresses. They could be rock stars or anesthesiologists – it wouldn't matter. Buying someone you don't even know, have never met and will never meet gifts off her Amazon 'wish list' – knowing full well she's just trolling for them? That's crazy.

I guess I'm seeing this as sort of the flip side of the coin for the gnarly old zen master pressuring young female students to fuck their way to enlightenment with him.

Recovered Memories

When I was three or four years old, I had a set of those wooden blocks that kids always had back then.

I don't remember flushing them down the toilet, but I do remember my dad pulling the toilet off the floor mount to fish them out. I remember being fascinated by the big hole in the floor, and wondering where the water went. (Even now, I don't know. Where does the water go when you pull a toilet off the floor?)

He was pissed off, of course, but I don't remember him being outrageously angry. He didn't yell at me or spank me or anything.

And tonight, for some reason, I had a flash of something. Fifty-five years later, I sort of remember knowing as I flushed those blocks down the toilet that they would be gone forever, that I would not get them back, and that, for some reason, they had to be gone, and that I had to deprive myself of them for some reason.

I wonder why I thought that. It sort of makes me sad to recall it.

New Stuff

I broke down and bought a new computer last week. My old day-to-day computer, a dual G5 PowerMac, was almost eight years old. It wouldn't run the current version of the Mac operating system, and therefore cannot run a lot of current Mac software.

I hope the new Mac keeps me set for the rest of my life.

Meditation update

I continue with the meditation practice. Not hitting it seven nights a week, but four or five. I'm still trying to just be comfortable. Lotus and half-lotus are beyond me, as I've mentioned, and I probably won't live long enough to ever be that flexible again.

Hell, I'm doing it all wrong, anyway. Here's Brad Warner's instructions on how to do zazen correctly.

Here's some more instructions from the Albuquerque Zen Center.

Nothing is ever easy, is it?

I started out thinking I would just sit, focus on the breath, observe thoughts, etc. I didn't know there was all this put-your-left-foot-in turn-all-about do-the-hokey-pokey stuff involved, too.

I like the way Liza Rose gracefully rises from the zafu. I could probably do that, too, thirty or forty years ago. Here's how I do it now: at the end of twenty minutes, I fall over on my left side. Then I just lie there for about ten seconds. After that, I slowly stretch my legs back out. That takes six or seven seconds. My legs don't go numb, or even hurt that much, anymore; they just don't want to move. I could no more stand straight up after twenty minutes of meditation than I could flap my arms and fly.

Of course, the whole purported purpose of the lotus position is to keep you from falling over. If I couldn't fall over, I would have sat there trapped for days after the first session and eventually died of dehydration. I would probably have been considered a great master for doing that.

Last night, I tried doing the seiza position taught in martial arts schools. This is what my friend Ms. W&E does. It was even worse. Both my feet went numb after about fifteen minutes. Plus, when I sit in seiza, I'm up so high I don't have a lap. So there's no place to rest my hands in a mudra.

If you look at the woman on the first zazen link and the woman sitting seiza in the third link, you will notice that they are both rather willowy. Probably ethereal, too, but without the floaty clothes, it's hard to tell.

I think you probably just have to be willowy to do this stuff. Me doing it is like performing brain surgery with a butter knife out of the kitchen drawer.

Keith Olbermann

I am a big fan of Keith Olbermann. There was a time when he was almost the only progressive voice in the ‘mainstream media.’ Moreover, he was one of the few people on television willing to swim upstream against ‘the narrative’, that sort of conventional wisdom embraced by the punditocracy.

But Olbermann made himself a target. He promoted the impression he was bigger than his employer, and all but untouchable because of it. I suspect executives at NBC and GE, and perhaps Comcast as well, had the impression he was ‘out of control’, and encouraging a sense among other MSNBC staffers that he, and not management, was the ultimate authority in day-to-day operations.

So, in spite of the fact he rescued the network from obscurity, and remained its most popular personality with viewers, they fired him.

There are people at FOX News, of course, who make Olbermann seem like the very model of a sober, reasoned newscaster. But although Glenn Beck may suggest that various political figures need to be “shot in the head”, you will never hear him imply that he is bigger than FOX News itself.

I hope Olbermann turns up somewhere else doing what he did at MSNBC.

Maybe It's Just Me

I'm still trying to understand this story about the 70-something Zen master in New York who has been accused of sexually exploiting students for fifty years.

I was talking about this with a friend whose Buddhist beliefs are a mix of Tibetan and Theravada. I gave her a synopsis of what I'd read, and she said, "Oh, yeah. That happens all the time."

I know it happens frequently, I told her, but I didn't understand why women would agree to this.

"Well, if he's a teacher, that's a powerful attraction." She didn't say she'd done it herself, but I sort of had the sense that was hanging over her comment.

I still don't get it.

If your Zen teacher suggests to you that the two of you hook up, and maybe opens his robe to give you a look at the goods (as this guy apparently did), why would you not just say, "Well, thanks for the offer, but there are about fifty Zen masters in New York City, and I'm sure that at least some of them are not old perverts, so I'll just see you around."

Maybe I just have a weird attitude about sex. I'm not a Victorian. I don't think I'm a prude. But I wouldn't think, "Gee, maybe I oughta fuck this gal, so she won't be mad at me or not let me come to meetings." I would just go somewhere else.

Cold

18 degrees outside right now. Grateful again to be inside and warm.

Meditation update and other notes

The meditation practice seems to be improving. When I last posted about this, I mentioned that it seemed to be getting harder rather than easier. But I may have just hit some bump I needed to get over. I'm doing better now, and I enjoy it enough that I don't have to force myself to sit.

My meditation space is in the back bedroom, all the way back in the far southeast corner of the house, away from the street. It feels very quiet and secure back there. I have to remind myself that the sense of security is false. It's all really very fragile, and inevitably headed toward its end someday.

A house around the corner from me burned the other night. It had been vacant and boarded up the whole ten years I have lived here. I had seen indigents climbing out a window one morning several years back; I assume they had slept there overnight.

Recently the owners began rehabilitating the house for eventual sale or occupancy. But the fire left the place a charred shell. What's left will fall down soon if it isn't demolished. That's the fourth house fire in ths neighborhood over the past decade, and by far the worst.

Snow is in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow.

Here's How I Roll

For as long as I've been able to drive, I've preferred major city streets to interstates, and neighborhood streets to major city streets. So, when I go somewhere, I frequently take a meandering route rather than the fastest, most direct one.

This makes some of my regular passengers crazy, although most eventually get used to it.

I'm sometimes absent-minded when I drive, and moreso when I have a passenger. Ms. HRP, Diane, Nurse Kathryn and even my ex have all been accustomed to having to remind me when to turn, or to point out that I'm actually getting farther away from my intended destination instead of closer to it.

When I was younger, I used to drive like a bat out of hell down residential streets. As I've gotten older, and become a homeowner myself, I've learned to have more regard for safety and quiet in neighborhoods. Plus, I'm rarely in a hurry to get anywhere. Even if I'm not in my own neighborhood, I try to drive like I live there.

Taking residential streets keeps me out of the traffic. I'm not as distracted by billboards and other signs. I like looking at homes, and checking out paint schemes and landscaping. Sometimes I'll make an unplanned turn just to see what's to be found down an interesting-looking street.

I guess it's obvious I live in an older neighborhood with grid streets. I've never liked cul-de-sacs, and I wouldn't live in a neighborhood that has them.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Y'know, it seems like about two-thirds of the things I post here are just rehashes of things I've already posted.

It's felt that way for a couple of years now.

Going Downhill

People told me when I retired that I would start mentally 'going downhill' within a matter of months. It has taken longer than that, but there's no question in my mind that it's happened.

I have always been sort of a fuzzy, scattered thinker. I guess having a job forced to me to focus my thoughts for at least part of the day. Now, there's nothing to do that, and it shows in the general slippage in my overall presence of mind. It's been very gradual, but I certainly have the sense that I'm less organized, less motivated, less everything than I was four years ago.

This has had some benefits. I don't have as much stress as I once had, for one thing. It has also helped me embrace eastern philosophy. I think the study of zen and tao is not especially compatible with the disciplined 'gung ho' mental approach working Americans are expected to have. Especially with taoism, I think you have to be prepared to reject a lot of American 'values' that are cherished in the workplace.

But there is a down side. I really have no concept of the passage of time anymore. My doctor told me last week I needed to come in for a checkup, as I hadn't come in at all in 2010. I could have sworn I was there last spring, but in fact, it was fall of 2009. It actually seems like it was only about five months ago.

I also need to pay my property taxes. I live close enough to downtown that I just drive to the courthouse rather than mailing a check. I do this once a year, but it seems like I do it every 90 days.

I hate doing this stuff. It's not the money; I just can't stand the repetitive task, even if it's once a year. And yet, my life is the same from day to day, and the repetitiveness of daily living seems to calm and comfort me. I usually eat breakfast in one of two places. I may go for a walk around the same park. I seldom travel more than two miles from my house, and never more than 20 miles.

I do not feel at peace with the world. My view is very dualistic. It's me right here, and a lot of crazy shit out there.

I've finally worked out my human contact quota. I can currently stand 120 minutes of human contact every 72 hours. Waiters, store clerks and the like don't count toward the total. If I go more than 120 minutes with my friends, I start to get overwhelmed and have to withdraw.

I have this sense of an overall decline in my sense of being present in the world. But, I was never all that wild about the world anyway.

I Don't Want To Think

I just do not want to think. About anything. Nothing interests me. Nothing enthuses me. What a ridiculous situation we humans are in.

If I could detach my intellect from my physical body and fly amongst the stars and galaxies, that would interest me. For awhile, anyway.

But all this pointless blather here on earth does nothing for me.

Deja Vu All Over Again

For about the past two years, it's felt like about two-thirds of the things I post here are just rehashes of things I posted previously.

I'm not sure that's true, but it feels that way.

Nothing You Could Call a 'Relationship'

Years ago, a friend gave me a tape of a lecture on relationships by a self-help guru. I think the lecture was intended for recovering alcoholics and ACAs, but I'm not sure of that.

Anyway, among the bits of advice he gave was this: “Don't try to make connections with people you're attracted to.”

That seems sort of nonsensical. What are we supposed to do — hook up with people we're not attracted to? In a word, according to this guy, yes.

His reasoning was that those of us who grow up in alcoholic families can't make intelligent choices about relationship partners. We're drawn, at some subconscious level, to recreating the atmosphere that existed in our childhood homes.

I've had discussions on this subject with friends, and most agree with the premise. Where we disagree is on the subject of whether a person can reprogram himself or herself to be attracted to a different kind of person. My position is that we can't. I believe we can be educated to recognize when we are attracted to an incompatible person, but I don't think we can change the attraction.

This brings me around to my response to blogblah!'s comment to a previous post:

If by "successful" you mean only a relationship that's filled with laughter and dancing, great sex and lasts forever, we're all failures.
On the other hand, if by "successful" you mean any relationship in which you had some good times, a few laughs and a bit of snogging, you've had some.
The only relationship I know of that you've had that's been a bit of a "failure" is the one you have with yourself because you spend so much time with him even though you don't care for his company, which is a shame because you're really a pretty fun, smart guy and rather pleasant to hang out with.

First of all, thanks for the compliment.

But actually, I wasn't talking about relationships at all. None of these ever reached the relationship stage.

I think I've mentioned this before, in conversation if not here, but my tendency has always been to suddenly fall for someone after I've known them awhile — like a couple of years or more.

This rarely works out. In fact, it so rarely works out that I saw a cartoon about it on the web back in November. The guy makes his impassioned confession of adoration to his long-time platonic friend, and she responds with a sweeping condemnation of the guy's whole life — based entirely on his inability to provide conflict and drama — that I swear is an almost word-for-word recitation of what I had been told, and told more than once.

Part of the cartoon guy's problem - and mine — was that the guy's friend was a drama queen. She didn't want a 'relationship,' as I understand the word. She wanted some guy who would keep her life in constant upheaval so she could dish to her girlfriends about how dramatic it all was.

This, unfortunately, is the kind of woman I always fall for. Sometimes it's evident right from the start, and thanks to therapy and accumulated life experience, I can keep myself out of harm's way. But once in awhile, the signs are so subtle that I don't see them consciously until after I've already formed some emotional attachment.

So, here's what I know: if I find myself strongly attracted to a woman I've known for awhile, I've made a bad choice and I need to walk away. Once in awhile, I decide, ‘to hell with it, let’s see what happens.’ And the results are always the same — nothing you could call a 'relationship'.

I am too old for this stuff now.

Speaking of Bad Relationship Experiences

Teenager Passes Out Marrying Cow He Had Sex With

“In his defence, Alit admitted to the act of bestiality but claimed the cow, which he believed was a young and beautiful woman, had wooed him with flattering compliments.”

What kind of beer do they sell in Bali, anyway?

The Meditation Thing

I have been trying to sit for 20 minutes every evening. Instead of getting easier with each passing day, it gets harder. What started as minor discomfort in my right leg, right at the hip, has grown into distracting pain. At the end of the 20 minutes, it hurts to stretch my legs back out.

Some discomfort is to be expected, but I suspect this goes beyond what is normal. I also wonder why it is in one leg but not the other.

Tonight it was so uncomfortable that I stopped after 15 minutes.

So, dzaster...

...how is it out there?

A Quiet Mind

There is a famous story about a man who approached Bodhidharma with intent of becoming his student. "My mind is not pacified," he told the monk. "Master, pacify my mind."

"If you bring me that mind, I will pacify it for you," Bodhidharma replied.

"When I search my mind I cannot hold it," the student said.

"There," Bodhidharma answered. "I've pacified it for you already."

The house is turning into a mess again. I did a little house cleaning today, but only a little. When I try to clean, my mind sort of freezes up. I'll look at the stuff, ponder what to do with it, and perhaps throw a few things away. Then I get simultaneously bored and overwhelmed and just walk away from it.

When Kat comes over here to clean, she just wades into it and does it. There's no existential crisis attached. Even my ex-wife has come over and cleaned for me, and does a faster and better job than me.

My mind is not pacified. If it were, I would settle in to these tasks and do them.

I do not understand how Bodhidharma's answer to the student applies to my situation, but I think it must in some way.

I spent an hour or so this evening indulging in some self-pity about my failures in relationships. I think I have written about this before, but here it is again, anyway. I've always screwed up with the women I was really interested in. Always. This has inevitably been followed by weeks or months of soul-searching and agonizing about my flaws and shortcomings.

I finally learned from zen that I needed to stop analyzing and re-analyzing. I learned to see that the thing didn't work out, note in my mind that I was having some reaction to it, then move on.

Once in awhile, though, I lapse back into analysis and self-pity, as I did this evening. I saw it for what it was, which was good, but I continued to indulge it, which was not good.

Ten or twelve years ago, when I was much more active on the Well than I am now, I wrote page after page after page of self-criticism and analysis of my failed love life. At one point, I was the single largest user of disk space on the Well's conferencing system. There were users who posted more frequently, and users who had been there three to five times longer, but I outpaced them all in sheer tonnage of text. And it was all about my inept love life.

I mention this because I had the temptation this evening to revert back to that form right here. I was going to post a careful outline of all my inadequacies. But I caught myself in time. No inadequacies. No analysis.

Only don't know.

Even what I've written is too much. 'As soon as you open your mouth to speak,' the zen proverb says, 'already you've made a mistake.'

Master, quiet my mind.

Missing a Night's Sleep

I didn't go to bed Thursday night. I had slept until about 11 that morning. When 10 pm rolled around, I didn't feel tired or sleepy, so I just didn't go to bed. And I just kept on going until about 8 pm Friday. I was sitting at my computer reading blogs and Facebook, and realized that I hadn't eaten anything all day.

I decide to go to the Taco Bueno near my house and get tacos. I almost fell over when I stood up, and almost fell again going down the front steps. But I made it to the car, made it to Taco Bueno and home again.

My hands began shaking — so badly that I actually shook the first taco to pieces. But I got it and three more down, did some more Facebook, and finally went to bed about 9:30 pm Friday when I could no longer get my eyes to focus.

I woke up Saturday morning with a sore throat, and have been experiencing cold-like symptoms all day. I was a little groggy this morning, but other than that I seem to have suffered no ill effects from missing a night's sleep.

It just doesn't get any better than this.

gizmodo.com: Cockroach Found In Woman's Colonoscopy

How Does This Happen?

There's another story circulating in the Buddhasphere about a teacher sexually exploiting some of his female students. This one is a little different in that the exploiting has been going on for about fifty years.

Fifty years.

The teacher is now in his seventies, and is still apparently able to seduce, threaten and/or coerce female students into having sex with him.

I'll be damned if I know how.

I'm trying to not be glib about this. It's serious business. But I can't imagine what power a gnarly 70-year-old zen geezer with a shaved head could have over women that would lead them to have sex with him, especially since they seem to regret it almost immediately afterward. Am I just naive?

This is obviously not just a Buddhist thing. David Koresh. Jim Bakker. Cedric Miller, who was doing threesomes at Bible study. Earl Paulk, whose nephew and successor was later revealed to be his son from an affair he had with his sister-in-law. Some of these guys were charismatic, in the secular sense of the word, but others were just oily little snerts from the get-go.

And yet, somehow...

I simply don't get it.

Then again, there are apparently women who have fucked Newt Gingrich. So I guess anything's possible.

Well, shit. Gerry Rafferty's dead.

In the early eighties, I worked in another city. I had not gone there entirely by choice. I had been fired from my job (again), and I took refuge there because someone was willing to hire me.

I worked in an office with several people who had come there from other cities and towns. Of all the people with my job title, only one was local. The rest of us hoped to be just passing through, on our way to greener pastures in a couple of years.

It was, in fact, a basically journeyman profession. Across the country, hundreds of young men and women like us were doing their two years here, three years there, in hopes of eventually striking the big time in a city like Los Angeles or New York. In the meantime, we toiled away in medium and small cities and towns, paying our dues.

And on many evenings – most evenings, in fact – my coworkers and I would head to a local watering hole, have entirely too much to drink, get maudlin and depressed, and ask the bartender to put on our anthem, Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street:

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well another crazy day, you'll drink the night away
And forget about everything.

This city desert makes you feel so cold
It's got so many people but it's got no soul
And it's taken you so long to find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything.

You used to think that it was so easy,
You used to say that it was so easy
But you're tryin', you're tryin' now.
Another year and then you'd be happy
Just one more year and then you'd be happy
But you're cryin', you're cryin' now.

Way down the street there's a light in his place
He opens the door, he's got that look on his face
And he asks you where you've been, you tell him who you've seen
And you talk about anything.

He's got this dream about buyin' some land
He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he'll settle down, it's a quiet little town
And forget about everything.

But you know he'll always keep movin'
You know he's never gonna stop movin'
Cause he's rollin', he's the rollin' stone.
And when you wake up it's a new morning
The sun is shining, it's a new morning
But you're going, you're going home.

Gerry Rafferty died this morning in England, after a long illness and years of alcoholism. He was 63.

Also...

Following up my previous post, I think what I got from those experiences is how fragile we are. We break easily. And inevitably, we do end. The end is sometimes violent, and even when it is violent, it is also often perfunctory. The first two corpses I ever saw had essentially been thrown out of a car like litter.

I was a cynical and negative guy before I saw any of this, but the experience probably helped reinforce my thinking.

I Saw Dead People

Recalling the story of the homeless man who died sleeping in the dumpster led me to remember the first time I saw dead bodies. It was probably in 1974.

The victims were a man and a woman who had been shot, then dumped down an embankment alongside a county road. They were there for two or three days before being discovered.

I eventually got so used to seeing dead people I didn't think much of it anymore. Two other instances stick in my memory now. One was a young woman who died while trapped in a wrecked car. She died as the camera was rolling, zoomed in on her face. In watching the film later, we realized she had died only because she had stopped blinking her eyes.

The other instance was another accident in which four young men were killed when their car was involved in a wreck and burned. They were probably dead before the fire spread, but there was no way of knowing at the scene.

There were many others, more than I can remember. People who were shot. People who died of drug overdoses. One man who was crushed by a vehicle that fell off a jack. A child who was hit by a van from which she'd just gotten out.

And, finally, I was at my father's bedside when he died of pancreatic cancer.

What I saw, of course, was nothing compared to what firefighters and police officers see. Nurses who performed triage at the scene of Murrah Building bombing saw more dead and dying in one morning than I saw in 25 years of my career.

When Prince Siddartha began to explore outside the shelter of his palace, he saw a corpse and had his first realization of the impermanence of life.

I can't tell you how seeing so much death affected me, but I assume it did in some way. I wonder how I would look at the world today if I had been more distanced from death and tragedy all those years.

Fifteen Degrees Farenheit

The temperature outside is 15.

Many years ago, like around 1976 or ‘77, I watched police pull the body of a homeless man from a dumpster downtown. He had climbed in the dumpster to escape the cold wind on a night like this and had covered himself with newspapers and flattened cardboard boxes. Hypothermia killed him while he slept. His eyes were closed, his hands folded across his chest. His face was calm and peaceful.

I don’t think of that often, but I remember it clearly.

At the time, those of us gathered around the dumpster pretty much shrugged it off: another ‘bumsicle’ found on skid row. Looking back on it with the benefit of thirty additional years of life experience, I view myself as being closer on the socio-economic ladder to that guy than to the millionaires who live in the exclusive neighborhoods. I’m grateful to have a warm place to live. I don’t think it’s all that far a fall from my state of grace to where he ended up.

Where Did That Come From?

I'm lying here in bed, trying to go to sleep. I was sort of drifting off, when suddenly a mental picture flashed in my mind.

I was on a landing at the top of a flight of stairs at the back of a house. I was inside, on the second floor, but the stairs extended outside. They were wooden, and painted a light green. They had no hand rail. A tall tree stood just beyond the stairs. It was tall enough that the top of it as at my eye level.

The sense of vertigo I got looking down the stairs was so strong that it completely reawakened me.

I have no idea where this mental image came from. It doesn't resemble anything I recall ever seeing.

Slept Through It

...but not well. I tossed and turned a lot. Heard the fireworks going off downtown, but I stayed in bed.

The high today is only supposed to be 35, so the creatures will be staying indoors today, whether they like it or not.