Bif Poppi!

The word is out. Big Poppi added a few chemical compounds to his system and it may have helped him hit the ball a bit further.

That is about as surprising as a birthday party for a six year-old.

Now everyone is yelling about the "integrity of the game." Right, sure.

First, during the last fifteen years, was there any ball player of note who was not taking some kind of enhancers? Jed Lowry maybe. He's hitting .187. Brian Daubach?

But I love the part about the integrity of the game. This is the way the game is played. Any game in America. Did Karl Rove worry about the integrity of the U.S. Attorneys General. AIG didn't seem to have too many concerns about the integrity of the insurance game. How about Enron. Bank of America, Countrywide. United Health Care, which has paid millions of dollars in fines for defrauding Medicare. How about Haliburton? The War in Iraq? General Motors?

Does Fox News worry a lot about the integrity of what they report? Does Rush Limbaugh validate all, or any of his facts?

Even the American Psychological Association has been walking a very fine line about allowing psychologists to design brain-washing and torture techniques to help the government break laws and be unethical to fight terrorism. Integrity?

Lawyers? Do I need to say more? Stock brokers? Mortgage salespeople? Who do you trust? Rabbis selling body parts, priests playing with young boys. Presidents and interns?

How about professors who take Provigil to stay awake and finish journal articles, or students who take Adderol? Is that cheating.Is that OK if you have ADD, but not if you don't. What if you rush off before finals and get an MD ti give you a diagnosis for a week?

Is it OK for me to have that caffeine boost at eleven every morning? Does it make me a better therapist, or would it be more honest if I was falling asleep?
Baseball remains an American game. it reflects our culture. If someone is going to pay you $20 million to hit home runs, you are going to do what you can to hit home runs. You don't think any of the owners knew about McGuire or Sosa? Everyone knew, and everyone liked it.

I was at the game last Friday. Big Poppi came up and hit a fly ball to right. It was four feet short of the bull-pen. If he was juicing, it would have gone out. I paid $80 fuckin dollars for those seats. Can you believe that. $80 for a baseball game. If Big Poppi's had taken those drugs and hit the ball ten feet further, I would have been have been a happy customer. Isn't that what integrity is about? Giving the customer what he paid for?





















4

her list

A new client came to see me yesterday. She said she had been searching for a new therapist and that several people had mentioned me. I guess I'm a superstar in a crazy world.

She related her life history and it is pretty awful. She has been trying to get herself stabilized for years, and has had about four previous therapists. She cried, and was pretty anxious, but we did OK.

As she left she gave me something she had written. She said she knew that she would spend the session crying and not be able to say all that she wanted, so she had written it out for me. She handed me about six pages.

I like it when people put effort into their treatment. They have to do more than I do if they are going to change, and change is difficult.

She listed things that she was hoping to work on, and then she listed the reasons why she had left her other therapists, and other factors that have held her back and made her life difficult.

As I read it, I was impressed. But then I kept reading and I began to see that this poor woman has become a professional victim. While it is true that the world -- her family, her school mates, her one terrible relationship, her three terrible bosses, have all contributed to making her life difficult. While I am sympathetic, I felt like she was making a case for me to pick up the load.

I don't want to do that. I am going to have to tell her that the next time we meet. I will try to do it in a manner that will let her see that this is her life to lead. I'm afraid that she isn't what she is looking for.

I'll let you know.

She's gone

I can talk freely here because I know she doesn't have a computer.

She is an older woman who had a very unfair start in life; she and her mother shared a room and a bed for the first eighteen years of her life. Her father lived upstairs and worked two jobs. Her mother lectured her constantly about sin and warned her about the evils of men.

She was engaged to a man in the Navy. He came home from the sea and they were married. The marriage lasted three days. She sent him home realizing that she could never go through with it. She never did.

I saw her for five years. We met at the same time very week. She was always there, she always had things to talk about. She had insight into her situation and was often good with self-effacing humor.

I was her third therapist during a twenty year period. She said she was amazed that I had expected her to make changes and she that had been able to do so. She became much more assertive,she learned that she didn't have to act sweet and charming to people who treated her badly, and she learned that if she didn't want men to come-on to her she shouldn't flirt with them. She was able to deal with the world and move to a better living situation. She asked for help when she needed it. She even made one good friend.(She ran away from that relationship twice, but I kept sending her back)

But I was expected her growth to continue, and she didn't want to give up being bitter and resentful about things that happened fifty years ago.

When I hurt my eye she got scared that I wouldn't be able to see her every week for the next ten years, even though I only missed one week. Last month I told her that in august I was going to take three weeks off. Two weeks later she came to our session and told me that it would be our last meeting. She had made an appointment with someone else. She was worried that I was going to be gone too much and she needed regular therapy.

I think she wanted me to be shocked and upset. She said her last therapist cried when she announced that she had found me. I spoke to that woman who told me what a marvelous patient she was.

But, the truth is, I was kind of elated. Five years is more than enough. Medicare shouldn't pay for forever, and I was thinking of moving her to at least bi-weekly after the summer. Also, she didn't want to free herself from more of her limitations. She was comfortable using her anxiety as an excuse.

Now, if she wants that, it is perfectly understandable, but she doesn't need therapy to do that.

I realize, that this should be viewed as an issue in treatment, and should be worked through. It is about her fears of abandonment, of losing someone close to her. She should not take my actions in my as a reflection of how I feel about her. There are reasonable limits on different types of relationships. They are not all or nothing.

I didn't feel like doing all of that. I will let the new guy do it. I'm not perfect all the time.


She's gone. This week I used the hour to get a cup of coffee. I have someone scheduled in that slot next week.

Advice

This is what I've learned, from my own experience and from dealing with any health care system anywhere.

The best advice is that if you want to stay healthy -- don't get sick.

Once you get sick you get sucked into the system and then you have a tough time getting out.

I'm still walking around with one eye, knocking things over and wondering when it's going to knock me over. Stress. I've been taking eye drops and then I developed a rash on my cheek, which was probably from the drops. I showed the doctor and she acted like she didn't know and said I should see a dermatologist.

Right, sure, see another doctor. I just make sure the drops don't spill.

Once you go to the doctor and they start running tests "just to be sure" looking for things you never even thought about and now you're worried for two weeks. They forget to call you and tell you that there probably isn't anything wrong, but maybe another test would make it clearer.

Enough, enough!

Eat right, take walks and smile.

City politics

I have had many, many clients who have been in the government of the beautiful and hard working city in which I have my practice. Like any city, there is a great deal of nepotism, chronyism, pettiness and politics that overshadows those who are dedicated and caring city employees. For the most part I don't mind, at least people are working and getting paid, although now about 15% of the workers are being laid-off.

But right now I have three clients who are in the middle of dealing with the city and are not only being screwed, it is happening in such a manner that is obviously grossly unjust, unfair and out of order that any place with some kind of self-respect and dignity would be so terribly embarrassed that all parties involved would be thrown out on their ass -- but no one seems to be batting an eye.

In one case I am seeing a woman who had worked in a department for fourteen years. She is a talkative and breezy woman whom almost everyone likes. He attitude helps her do her job and relate to the people she has to deal with. But two years ago she got a new supervisor who seemed to feel uptight with the way this woman was outgoing and chatty.
A couple of months ago the big boss came in and told my client she was being put on paid leave, but that she would have to leave the building immediately. He said he couldn't say why. Three weeks later she was called in for a hearing in which she was charged with all kinds of things that she had no memory of ever doing, some of which, if she really did them she should have been fired on the spot, but no one had ever said anything, nothing was documented, and no one else could be found who had witnessed it.

She denied it all, asked for the union to do an investigation. Two weeks later she got a letter saying she was being fired. The union was never given any evidence. Word got back to her that the new supervisor who had wanted to get rid of her was known to be very involved, in an extra-curricular manner, with one of the men high up in the administration.

The other two cases are very similar. Petty grievances, jealousy, and incompetence seems to be the rule and not the exception. I could tell you more stories, that I can't tell.

I was about to say that I am not surprised, but I guess I am, even I, who have seen or heard almost everything, am a bit surprised by how once the bar gets set very low, everything falls apart. When the incompetent people rise to power their instincts are to protect themselves from those who can point out their flaws. They band tightly together and everyone in the community suffers.

I guess we used to call this The Bush Administration, now it's just on a local level, but it's just as insidious.

summer clients

I don't know if I have said this in this space before, but hey, how many new ideas can I have, in the summer I get fewer calls for new clients but the ones I do get are way above average of the intensity and confusion scale.

For a couple of weeks now I have been seeing a very charming, warm, caring woman in her mid-fifties. She is tired and worn out. But now she has to raise two of her grandchildren because their mother, her daughter, has never grown up or settled down and now lives in a neighboring city with a guy who sells drugs.

Then she shows me a letter from her son, who is in jail, and has been for seven years. The letter explains that he is evil, and still angry and when he gets out of jail he knows who he is going to kill first.

Her other son was shot by the previous boyfriend of his girlfriend. After being paralysed for three years he couldn't take living that way so he killed himself.

There is even more, but the point is that this is a perfectly reasonable, kind and caring woman. She says her husband is a nice guy, who tried to be a good father, but by now has just withdrawn.

I really don't know why all of this has happened to her. I think it helps to know that her father killed himself, as did two of his six brothers, but I'm not sure.

Fate, genetics, bad karma, or just tragic?

grumpy

I don't know where you are but everyone around here is grumpy. I get the worst of it because most of my clients are grumpy anyway. They are a not too happy a bunch, that's why they come to see me. My job is to cheer them up, and juggling doesn't always work.

But now everyone is damp, cold, moldy and sick of it. We haven't seen the sun much, and when it comes out it quickly goes away, which makes everything worse. I don't know how people survive in Seattle, although I hear it's nice out there now. Maybe it has to do with expectations. I guess if you live in Alaska in the winter, you know what to expect. Maybe all there is to do up there is get drunk and vote for Sarah Palin.

But it is supposed to be summer here now. It's supposed to be hot,and sunny. These are supposed to the the days that reward us for March. Instead it seems like March.

Everyone is angry and looking for someone to blame. It takes its toll on relationships, on businesses, on travel, and on everyone's view of how fair and considerate the world is. If people don't feel they are being treated fairly, they respond by being mean.

It all goes back to Reagan. When he and his advisers were first told about climate change they scoffed and put on sun glasses. Now we have 100 heat in 40 states and New England has had rain on 20 of the last 24 days.

Everyone is grumpy.

One Great Weekend

The wedding went Great!

What more can I say. My youngest kid, the tall, bald one, has been with this very attractive, strong-willed yet socially charming, while still being smart and ambitious, young woman for a couple of years now. He finally felt like he was ready, and that the time was right. She took over after that and made the arrangements.

About 100 of us drove up into the mountains. The rain stopped just long enough. Not being very religious they had a J.P. The J.P. made no pretenses at pontificating. She said do you take her, and do you take him. They said yes and then we had a party for the next six hours.

What more can you do?

Now I'm two for two in the "hope they marry great people" department.

Nothing left for me to do but wait around for the next chapter.

(I also want to thank Logo, along with many other of you, for the occasional comment. It's good to know someone's out there in virtual land.)

can't and won't

It is still so difficult to tell the difference between can't and won't.

With most medical problems, such as if you break your leg, catch a virus or rip your cornea, the problem is clear, and except for indirect causes, such as skiing, killing sick people, or smoking, you don't feel like the difficulty was your fault. It's different with mental problems.

People often come to me and they are filled with anxiety. They can't get to work, it makes them terribly jittery. flustered, and confused.

So we work together to find the stresses in their lives, both long term and short term. Then we teach them techniques of how to deal with anxiety, racing thoughts, negative anticipation, catastrophic thoughts and irrational fears. Often, we add some medication to the mix.

I try my best to get them ready to relaunch into the world. I feel that almost all of my clients try too, but sometimes, nothing really changes. They remain too consumed with fears, too trapped by their thoughts, too much just stuck in a bad place.

So, we try again. We do some variations, new explanations, new drugs, new ways of breaking down the obstacles, new ways to try and relax.

But then, sometimes, not much changes.

Then, I, the experienced, all knowing, all caring therapist, can only say:

"HELLO" this is all I have to sell. I don't have any more magic.

I begin to feel like I am dealing with a "won't" instead of a "can't." A some point in psychological treatment, the client has to take the risk of making the change. I try to arrange the changes so that they are not fatal.

But, who knows.

so many have slipped away

Even I, after all these years, still get a bit surprised by how many people there are right here in this land of opportunity of ours that just can't cut it, don't make it, can't do it, drop out, give up and flop.

I don't know if it is more than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. I remember when I was just beginning my training there were still State Hospitals, Institutions, Insane Asylums, which were full of folks who had been dropped off by their families or picked up on the streets. Once you got stuck in one of those it became very difficult to work your way out.

Then better medication came along in the late sixties and early seventies and these people were moved out into "the community." Most of it was done as a reason to save money.

So now there are many people, more that anyone who goes about their daily business

I think there may be more of them now because the world moves faster, expects more peices of paper, electronic transactions, passwords, ID numbers, menu responses, and real-time transactions over virtual networks. Once you fall behind it becomes difficult and costly to catch up. Once you build resentments, take it personally, and become defiant, you get trampled, inundated and pushed aside. Spindled, folded and mutilated they used to say.

It seems that once this mind/brain thing that we have been given starts slipping over the edge it gains momentum for the long slide down, and then stays stuck in the mud at the bottom of the psychic ravine.

Sometimes a parent, sister, or niece will try to bring one of these folks to my office with a note attached that says "fix this person." It's like towing a car to the mechanic after the engine has seized up. Except in these cases you can't go to the junk yard and get a replacement part.

Oh, I forgot, Igor did that.

mortality lurking

One thing that has happened since I have been limited by losing the use of my eye for a while is that I get more anxious when my clients come in with their tales of illness and loss.

Today one of clients was talking about how she has to fly home to see her father. He had not been feeling well and now, not surprisingly from the information she was getting, has been found to have cancer that is in several locations. He is five years younger than me.

So many of my clients come with problems dealing with their aging parents. I search for reasons to reassure myself that what is happening to them is not happening to me.
Usually I could brush away the fears pretty easily just because I felt good. I was energetic, active and rolling along.

Now, I feel pretty good, but I am limited, can't see things coming up on my right side, and I get skittish and feel a bit vulnerable. I can still take anybody on, but they have to stand a bit to the left and promise not to hit me in the head. Not exactly the battle cry of the warrior.

And my clients have to deal with really terrible things -- cancers, Parkinson's, ALS,which is totally awful or Huntington's disease which may be even worse. Also, the girlfriend of the son of one of my clients was killed by a truck in a parking lot in a random accident. The next hour the cousin of that client died when his truck rolled over somewhere in Texas.

The Reaper seems to be lurking in every corner once you start looking for it. No wonder everyone is anxious.

Can't get like that I guess. It does no good. Live until you die, and until then deny mortality. Pitch as if you are unhittable, dance beneath the diamond sky, howl at the full mood, drink the sweetest nectar.

And eat plenty of blueberries, watch you weight, get enough sleep, moderate exercise, and call you mother -- if she is still alive.

Jury duty 2

I came back the next day. I tried to tell them that I felt like they were penalizing me because someone else had hired someone to kill his ex-wife. I told the officers that due to my having to see the doctor for my eye I knew they could not seat me on a trial that is going to last a month. I told them I had eight people scheduled to see me.

Of course, no one cared. Their job was to call the numbers, in order, and my number was 151.

After four more hours of sitting, reading, writing some notes, and talking to the last ten people waiting to be called, I got sent into the court room.

I sat in the witness chair and the judge read the statement I had put on the form. Where the form asked if I had any dealings with the court system I had written that as a psychotherapist, over the last thirty years I had seen patients who were policeman, court clerks, lawyers, probation officers, corrections officers, as well as many people who had been arrested, tired, sentenced, and several after they had been released from prison.

The judge asked my if hearing from all those people had influenced my opinion of the legal system.

I told her that I have kind of a distorted view. I said that from what everyone has told me of what happened to them, and how they behaved, and answered questions, that I have come to believe that everyone lies.

The judge smiled and simply said, Thank you, you're dismissed.

I waited nine hours for a ninety second interview. Where is the justice in that.

jury duty

I had to miss a day of appointments today, but this time I scheduled it.

I had agreed to do my civic duty and show up to be a member of a jury. When I got there I found out I was in Superior Court and all trials would last from three days to weeks. I got sent to a room with about 100 other folks to be selected for the jury of what turned out to be a murder trial. It was a case I had read about and if I didn't have work and have one bad eye I think it would have been quite interested in witnessing how the drama played out.

They took so long to question each potential juror they didn't even get to me. I told them that I couldn't serve because my eye was busted and I have to go to the doctor next week, but I have to tell it to the judge. So now, I have to go back tomorrow morning and try and beg off.

It was interesting to watch my fellow citizens sit around for five hours. What has changed most since the last time I had to go was that fewer people read a newspaper and more play video games, either on their phones or on little hand-held gamers. Most people just seem to stare out into space. The only people who were talking were guys hitting on the more attractive women, although that changed in the later hours and more people just began to talk about how everyone was just sitting around.

The lack of newspaper knowledge was evident again wen the judge opened the meeting with some general information. Of the one-hundred people there I was one of two people who had heard anything about the case.

The most striking thing to me was just how people can just zone out. Everyone seemed relaxed and friendly, and vaguely interested at what was going to happen. But they also seemed to enjoy having a forced break in their hectic lives. They could take advantage of the time and do nothing, nothing at all.

I can never just sit. I read an entire New Yorker, especially about how conservative and privileged Chief Justice Roberts is (at least it was court related). I guess I'm not good enough at just chillin'.

client envy

I am adjusting to my one and one-quarter vision for the next few months, but I am functioning, going to work, doing all of the stuff I need to, and some of the stuff I want.

This week I caught up with one of my clients. She is an attractive, rather volatile thirty-nine year-old divorced woman. She has a rather responsible job with one of the larger public bureaucracies, which she seems to manage very well despite the instability in the rest of her life.

Last week she got home late from work and then received a call from her current, sometime boyfriend. He is about fifteen years older and works odd hours doing vague things that are probably just over the line from being legal. So at ten-thirty she goes out with him, pushing passed her mother who stood questioning at the door.

It was the night the Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins were all on TV. I guess the boyfriend had too much money riding on the Bruins, so when they lost he got in a bad mood and started dumping on my client. She told him to shut-up and when he didn't she demanded to be taken home. But he kept it up in the car, so at a red light she got out, slammed the door and walked away.

She realized she was about three miles from home and it was around midnight, so not wanting to walk, she went into another bar that was lively and close by. There she ran into the ex-husband of the woman who was now married to her ex-husband. He was there with a few friends. She sat down and had a few drinks with him.

An hour later, as the place began to empty out, the four of them left and found another place downtown. There she met three old friends from long ago and she had a few drinks with them, leaving the other group behind. When it got to be closing time there, they all went to a "private club" downtown, where they drank until three. She then got a ride home from a guy there, who I think she had dated while she was still married, ten years ago. He took her home, and probably stayed the rest of the night, but she was not too clear on that and I didn't push for details.

She said the next morning, which must have been about an hour and a half later, she got up and went to work, making major policy decisions.'

Now, from this behavior, I can give this woman about four different diagnoses. But, I wonder, is this a problem or is it just a good time?

Bonk!

Been a while for me. Most of that is because two weeks ago, at first game of my long anticipated return to he mound for the Pub Team softball. Bonk. It came from out of left field -- except I was talking to the first baseman at the time.

The ball hit me on the side of the head. That really wouldn't have been a significant blow if I hadn't had cornea transplants 40 years ago. The old stitches ripped apart, the eye bagan to fall apart, and now, two weeks and one two day stay at the best eye hospital in the world later, I am on the mend.

I have good vision in one eye and will most likely get as good vision back in the other eye - in eight or nine months.

Until then. Don't stand on my right side as I will either ignore you or walk right into you.

The lesson from all of this is that if you live long enough, and push your luck long enough eventually, usually, you get caught.

The solution of course is to be Dick Cheney, and expect that everyone is coming after you and everything is a danger. Then you can sit in a bunker with a shot-gun on your lap, drinking pomegranate juice and remaining hyper-vigilant that no one, or no thing can even begin to threaten you.

Of course, this may sometimes lead to shooting your friend in the head, but who can you really trust anyway. My real friends know not to make any sudden moves. A sudden move means you're a terrorist.

time passes

Yes, the picture is of Italy, in Tuscany, just outside of Lucca. Not a bad place to be.


I got back from being away for a week and then had the pay-back week, which often, but doesn't always happen. Seems like too many people needed attention, and too much water was delivered and no one else could do anything about it. We almost ran out of paper too. Can't anyone else take care of anything?

Today I drove into the parking lot of the building in which I have been working for the last ten years. It is basically a medical building. For ten years before that we were in a nicer building in a nicer office, but it was full of software designers, and unless they were clients, and many were, it made people uncomfortable, and they got rid of us when they finally could.

The parking lot sits on a bit of a rise and I can see the morning sun shining on the gray, red and brown buildings that make up the downtown. It's a hard-working, sometimes prospering, sometime suffering small city. Sometimes it feels as if I know at least thirty per-cent of population, even though I don't live too close to here and hardly have time to leave my office. Those I don't know I have heard about. I get before it reaches the paper.

I have been here almost thirty years. It's kind of weird to think that I have devoted so my of my life to this. Yes, there are more things I hope to accomplish, and probably will, but when I think of "what have I done with my life?" this has been pretty much it.

It's very interesting, and I still enjoy it here, although I sometimes wish the city was a bit more prosperous, but how many cities are these days? But it was kind of a weird moment to think -- this was what it was.

so much stuff

I was away, now I'm back.

It was too cold for too long up here in the North, so we took off to the South to find the Spring, and for the most part we did. It was a bit breezy in Augusta when we were there, but all the flowers were ready for the big tournament, everything was in bloom. We drove north to the Blue Ridge Mountains and found a bit of snow, but that faded the next day and it was warm and friendly. Those mountains are beautiful and accessible and fun as you can still get creamy, cheesy grits, that you can't find up here.

But then I returned and had to catch-up with the bills, the paper-work, the cleaning, the shopping, the sorting and the arranging. It all kind of sucks.

I have a couple of clients who refuse to do that. Yes, they are in debt, on the verge of being homeless and live in clutter, some in filth, but I can see their point. There is so much stuff to do, just to stay where you are. It is so time consuming and boring. Someone should do it for me!

I see how much time, expense and effort it takes for a family when one of their members can't, or won't do their part, at least for themselves. It can exhaust everyone. At what point do you cut them loose and let them sink, especially it it is your own kid.

I am very grateful that those who I have brought into the world have been able to fly off on their own. They seem to be quite able to slog through the necessities of getting their stuff done.

However, they best not forget from whence they came.

Liars and drunks

Me, Me! After all these God-Damn years I still get sucked in.

He is 53 years-old for Chrissakes. He has been seeing me for almost two years, the length of his probation. He got put on probation for trying to hit a cop. He tried to hit the cop because the cop was laughing at him when he was staggering down the front stairs of his house screaming at his neighbors. Then the cop flipped him on his chest, cuffed him, and brought him to jail. It was his third arrest in ten years for drunken/disorderly so they put assaulting a police office on top of it. He got two years probation. He had six weeks to go.

Sure, he had some slips, and he told me about some of them. How many he didn't tell me about I can't know. He found a bottle he had hidden and slurped it down and threw up all over his wife. He had a few other such moments, but they all ended privately.

Wednesday he was in my office. He spoke about how much his life had improved since he had stayed sober. He was employee of the month. He was building chairs in his basement. He showed me pictures. He said he would never work with ban-saws if he was drinking, he would cut off his hands.

He also told me how his attitude had changed in so many areas. Last week his car window had been smashed by some punks driving the streets. He told me how clearly he remembered how angry and vengeful he used to feel. So many times he had chased people for miles if they had cut him off. He had confronted people whose car doors had scratched his car. On Wednesday he was telling me how crazy that behavior was and how he relieved he was that he had finally out-grown it. Now he could just shrug it off and remember things he had done when he was a punk kid.

Thursday afternoon I received a call from his wife. She told me that Wednesday night he had been arrested for sitting on his porch and waving bee-bee gun at people. He was drunk and screaming that they had best never touch house and car again.

They arrested him and threw him in jail for thirty days for violating probation. He will probably lose his job.

Usually, when I see someone with an alcohol addiction, and they stay in treatment, they stay sober. I have had many people who drop out and go drink, and that's it. But to have someone who seemed so insightful, so convinced and convincing, yet so addicted.

He had taken all the pills, he had gone to all the programs, he was chairing a meeting every week.

Just say "no."

You can say no 10,000 times, and when the sun goes down you take that flask out of your hip pocket and think no one will notice.

Donald Barthelme

There is a new biography of Donald Barthelme that was reviewed in the NYT this weekend, and has been getting a lot of notice. I probably won't read the book because I already have too much to read, and I mostly only read reviews anyway, but it was good to read that Donald Barthelme is being fondly remembered.

I remember reading his stories and then buying one of his books of stories in the early 80s and reading them over and over, slowly. It was exciting. I knew he was trying very hard to do something, and I felt from the energy of the story that whatever point he was making was a big step. It was something of a turning point, probably very self-consciously.

I don't think I ever really got the point. I don't read enough for that. It was post-modern. It was beyond avant-guard and it was very descriptive of how I felt about the world, and probably still do. But it didn't really make much sense, which was I guess, part of the point. His stories had a beautiful flow, but no story, not even a narrative, hardly a character.

Each sentence was beautifully written, and constructed. But each sentence usually didn't seem to have that much to do with a sentence that was two sentences away.

Reading the review of the new biography made it kind of clear what I had kind of known, that his life was often a mess. A long time ago I had read about how he and his brother lost thousands of dollars gambling in Biloxi. He drank an awful lot, and had been married four times, which is different from me.

I kind of admire people who struggle like that, to find the edge. It takes it's toll.

I have clients like that. I try to find the balance between encouraging them, but making sure it's they who really want to go there, and not just me.

exploring on and on

There was this guy named Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician who died in 1825. He was one of the first to imagine how a huge IBM mainframe super-computer could be really helpful. He was excited by science and he felt that if someone could get all the information of where all the particles were in the universe and what direction they were moving, then he could predict everything that was going to happen.

It makes sense. There are supposed to be laws of science, they are supposed to be constant, and therefore if we know everything we can predict everything. No one really expects to know everything, but the more we can know, the better we can do.

I have been struggling with that a great deal lately. There are lots and lots of things coming out of new science and technology that could add clarity about what any of clients are doing and why. There are new brain imaging techniques that show what parts of the brain are operating. There are ways of taking blood levels and hormone levels that can show what physical state they are in. Physical and mental correlate much more than you think.

Then there is all this genetic information pouring forth. How much of what we feel and do was determined way back when our parents chromosomes joined? I certainly have evolved to look so much like my father. He also was a blogger in his own way, as I have a few of his tiny notebooks with all kinds of notations.

But now I have read a article about a computer scientist named David Wolpert. He has written a "proof" which demonstrates that you can't know it all, especially if you are part of the system. You can't measure the weight of the earth if you are standing on the earth, you can't know the limits of the universe if you within the universe and, I assume, you can't know exactly what is happening in someone else's mind by using your own mind.

I think that is true, no matter how many machines you have to measure brains, bodies, hearts and heads. It's kind of frustrating, because I always know when I am talking to one of my clients that something more is happening and I don't know what it is. If I knew I could be more helpful, more effective.

On the other hand it is kind of comforting. When I think about it, I really can't predict with any certainly what I will do tomorrow. So how much can I expect to know about anyone else?

Some, but not all.