The Fun We Had

I’ve been thrust into social distancing, working from home, etc. I consider myself lucky because my wife was recently relieved of caring for her aunt, and so has moved back in with me. So I’m not completely alone. Still I miss the little conversations I had with coworkers during the day. Oh yeah, so far I still have a job. So, I’m really lucky.

My mind soon turned to some science fiction I had read as a child. It always does. One was a mystery about a murder in a future society where Spacers, on colonized planets like Solaria, dislike seeing each other face-to-face, instead preferring viewing each other on holographic screens. Hardcore SciFi fans probably remember The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. I had to do a little digging. I remembered the name R Daneel Olivaw, which led me to all the rest. The R meant that Olivaw was a humanoid robot, but the detective was a human, named Elijah (Lije) Baley. They had previously worked together in The Caves of Steel, which my mother and I both read. These two novels are now considered part of Asimov’s Robot series, beginning with the short stories in I, Robot, and hew to his Three Laws of Robotics.

So these spacers – living far apart on low population planets – hated and avoided being in each other’s presence, making grudging exceptions for procreation, and even more grudging exceptions for being interviewed by Lije Baley. Conversely, they had little modesty while being viewed holographically, which seems unsurprising in the age of selfies and dick pics, but made for spicy reading material in 1956. Spacers were also not averse to being around robots – in a later book, one woman considered herself married to a robot. I guess we aren’t at that stage, though I have seen reports of guys who are very attached to their adult sex dolls, like Julietta and Saori. Man, how did I get there?

The other story I thought of also turned out to be by Asimov, his 1951 short story, The Fun They Had. You can read it from an instructional PDF, with a series of questions afterwards. Essentially a young girl of the future is surprised to learn that students used to gather in schools led by human teachers, instead of learning at home from machines.

The Fun They Had strikes home more than ever, as I am currently designing buildings for colleges and universities, most of which have sent their students home, and are rapidly implementing distance-learning for the time being. One of our core beliefs in campus planning, architecture and other services, is that students learn a great deal from residential life as well as from the academic curriculum that we usually see as the goal of education. I suppose I did, though I didn’t know it at the time. So while I suppose there may something to be learned from distance-learning as well, especially if that becomes the norm in business, I can’t quite imagine colleges churning out students that view each other, but rarely ever see each other.

On Friday afternoon, many of my coworkers logged in for social gathering via the Go-To-Meeting app. It was fun. Some had pets in their laps. Several of us were drinking beer and wine. We said goodbye to two employees leaving for other opportunities, one of whom was drinking tequila. We ended up wearing funny hats, which had nothing to do with drinking, of course. But again, I do still miss the small interactions when I am simply walking around and asking someone how it is going. I suspect that will be true for college students as well, when all contact is intentional rather than incidental.

Resistance Training & Babylon 5

While on vacation a few weeks ago, I used the vacation club’s weight machine and free weights. I tried a variety of exercises, and found that using the cables seemed most suitable for training swimming muscles. (SwimmingWorld agrees.) Then last weekend I watered plants for a friend, and seeing his powerblock sets and barbells made me think again about adding to my one kettlebell.

I stopped by Dick’s to look at free weights, but after a while noticed the elastic resistance bands. These are a lot more portable than any sort of weight set, are said to be less likely to cause injury and are comparatively inexpensive. So I got two handles and a red 50 lb tube, all by Fitness Gear. I’ll go back for the door attachment next weekend. Not sure if it is a good idea to install a wall attachment in my apartment.

Bob and Brad, the most famous physical therapists on the internet (in their opinion, of course), have several youtubes on resistance training. I watched the one on training at home or while traveling. So I have added some of their resistance routines between the stretching and the kettlebell core training that I do while watching old episodes of Babylon 5 on Comet TV.

Bicep Curls (standing on band).
Crossover Curls (standing on band).
Tricep Curls (standing on band).
Push one leg sideways (standing on band).
Squats (standing on band).
Lunge Down (one foot on band).
Stretch Arm Sideways (holding band tight to elbow).
Stretch Arms Open (holding band short).
Behind Head Triceps Pull (holding band short).

One of my work friends used to rave about Bab5 when it was first broadcast, but my kids had control of the TV back then, so I had to do without. Thanks to Youtube TV, and Comet, I have watched the first four seasons in order, on my own schedule. I’ve read opinions that I shouldn’t watch Season 5, but I will.

It was initially hard to watch Capt Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) give all his rah-rah speeches without recalling Capt Sherrypie of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, a very low budget Finnish parody of both Trek and Bab5 universes. But eventually I forgot about both that and his turn as the government spy Scarecrow. Now I wonder if I should cosplay as Londo Mollari. Peter Jurasik plays the politically-absorbed ambassador so consistently over-the-top it is hard not to like him.

Losing Weight; Maintaining Muscle

I posted a few months ago about being pleased to have lost fifty pounds.

Well now I have lost seventy pounds, and have maintained it for about a month. My diet is about the same, with only two intentional changes.

First, I am no longer eating fruit with lunch. I’m just not as hungry for sweets midday.

Second, I am eating more protein after exercising. I am eating larger portions of meat at dinner after swim practice, and either a vanilla yogurt with fruit, or some hard-boiled eggs. For weekend breakfast after running or biking, I am eating more eggs in my omelets, and adding more meat and cheese.

Why? Because my wife always worries about me, and she was concerned that I was losing weight too fast, or as she put it, “you’re just melting away.” My stepson theorized that by doing mostly aerobic instead of strength training, my body may have been burning away muscle mass. I was initially not concerned because I have been lighter than my current weight as an adult. I was only training about an hour and a half each day, and I felt that there must be an anaerobic component to swimming, cycling and running. But, I’ve learned the hard way that I should listen to my stepson, and I am at the age when men often begin to lose significant muscle mass. I also noticed that while I have become much smoother in the water over these last few months, I haven’t yet regained that much speed. And, there were little flaps of skin dangling from my upper arms – whether from losing fat or muscle, I don’t know.

So I did some research and found that the body is constantly burning mostly fat but also constantly breaking down lean tissue, like muscle, tendons, ligaments, etc. The body uses what you eat to replace the fat and lean tissue. The body needs enough calories to replace everything, or you lose weight. The body also needs the right types of foods to replace what it breaks down, or you lose what gets broken down. In particular immediately after exercise, the body will need protein to rebuild muscles. Hence the added protein in my diet after workouts.

I also decided to address my stepson’s concerns with specific strength training. The apartment complex already has a full set of barbells, and a simple lifting machine, but for my pre-practice warmup, I bought a kettlebell. I felt that it would be best to work on my core strength first.

There are any number of youtube videos with specific kettlebell exercises, but that big swing routine felt a bit scary. So I first tried a very safe looking basic routine, Kettlebells 101: How to Get Started + Beginner Kettlebell Workout with Brittany van Schravendijk. I went with her weight recommendation and bought a 16 kilogram Ethos kettlebell.

Basic Kettlebell
-Dead Lift (from between heels).
-Two Arm Clean (to neck height).
-Goblet Squat (hold clean during squat).
-Overhead Press (clean to over head).
-Halo (circle head each direction).

Following Brittany’s most basic advice, I’ve also concentrated on keeping my back flat while sitting at work and while riding my bike. That has helped to relieve some lower back pain.

Later I found a more advanced routine, Enter The Kettlebell, by a proud-to-be-Russian fellow named Pavel Tsatsouline.

Advanced Kettlebell
-Two Hand Swing.
-GetUp.
-One Arm Clean.
-Press.
-Groove.
-Lower the Kettlebell.
-Snatch.

Tsatsouline’s workout is a lot more aggressive, so I have something to work towards.

Sunny

For a recent article in The Real News, interviewer Taya Graham starts off, “We all know men like to pay for sex.” Seriously?

I’d say that a far more acceptable generalization would be, “We all know men like sex, and some are even willing to pay for it.” But that is still a generalization, because while some of us may care very deeply about the exploitation involved, others simply want at least some bit of romance in their hookups. Some really believe it is sinful, or at least a bad idea. And others are simply too poor or too cheap or too afraid of getting caught.

I forget when I first learned – probably from TV – that some women traded sex for money, but I suspect I first thought more deeply about prostitution while reading The Catcher in the Rye, through the characters of a pimp, the elevator operator Maurice, and a young hooker calling herself Sunny. As I look back, it was quite an accomplishment for the reclusive JD Salinger to have permanently soured a sexually curious young high schooler on the idea that there was any glamour in paying for intercourse.

After my freshman year of college, working for the county, two of us summer interns were surveying the police offices, and saw a woman handcuffed to a chair, awaiting her turn before a magistrate. She could have been there for any reason, but somehow from her dress and demeanor we had the idea that she was a prostitute. My coworker couldn’t stop staring at her until she scared the bejesus out of him by flashing a big, toothy smile.

A year later, during another summer job for the Corps of Engineers, I first heard prostitution – along with drug abuse – justified as a victimless crime. My fellow intern Alan was just as young and callow as I was, but he seemed confident that it was simply a blameless business transaction.

The following year, at another summer Corps job in Southern VA, I was at a crowded bar with three fellow college interns, when a good old boy offered to introduce us to some whores. “If you want,” he said. “I don’t give a shit.” We all laughed a lot, and I thought, “Uh, no,” but one of my comrades wanted to know more. “Are they pretty?” he asked. Now the GOB had a thick local accent, so we thought he replied that they were fat, but when my friend said, “We don’t want fat!” he clarified, “No not fat, fair! They’re fair.” Fair. What an elastic term. We laughed some more and let the subject drop.

In the Real News article, Kate D’Adamo takes the mainstream liberal viewpoint that prostitutes, now called sex workers, are primarily just workers, and should enjoy the protections of society. She admits that trafficking is bad, but believes that the decriminalization of prostitution in New Zealand has resulted in the, “healthiest sex industry in the entire world,” with low rates of violence and sexually-transmitted disease. The International Union of Sex Workers asserts that sex work is an empowered choice.

The mainstream conservative viewpoint is that prostitution is a sin, but a lot of them are sinners. In practice, when a prominent conservative is caught soliciting, he must claim to be truly sorry, return to the arms of family and religion, and hope that the prostitute mysteriously hangs herself, all of which happened with former Senator, and now lobbyist, David Vitter. That was before serial sex consumer Donald Trump was president, of course. More recently Robert Kraft simply relied on his lawyers to have the video evidence suppressed. His massage parlor madam was not so lucky.

A third viewpoint is the so-called Swedish or Nordic model, in which the customers and pimps are vigorously prosecuted while the sex workers are referred for counseling and job training. This viewpoint considers prostitution a form of male violence. As reported in The Guardian:

A statement signed by 177 verified sex trafficking survivors from Sex Trafficking Survivors United (STSU) suggests that: “Without the buyers of commercial sex, sex trafficking would not exist. If we start penalising and stigmatising the buyers, we could end sex trafficking in our lifetime … prostitution is not a victimless crime; it is a brutal form of sexual violence.”

A few mornings ago, I turned on my cell phone to find two similar text messages, supposedly from young girls (21 and 23) who supposedly live near me and supposedly want to find older sexual partners. Seriously?

Don’t Do That

In the old joke a patient says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” The doctor replies, “So don’t do that.”

I’ve been swimming with a masters team for almost two months. I haven’t had a coach on deck since I swam in college, and it does make me try harder when I know she could be watching. But I still concentrate on technique. After I started practicing in April, I thought to reconnect with the Total Immersion website. When I used to follow rec.sport.swimming in the late 1990s, I was strongly influenced by posts by their founder Terry Laughlin. His ideas about “slippery” swimming – modifying one’s swim posture and longitudinal balance to slip through the water more efficiently – made sense to me. I defended him online, and attended a TI swiminar at the Madeira School near DC one weekend.

I’m not sure I would have kept up with swimming without Terry. I used to have a difficult time getting back into any sort of practice after some sort of life break. Several years after college, I started swimming again because I wanted to do a triathlon. I was in pretty good shape from running and biking, but some voice in my head was always finding excuses to stop at the next wall. And this repeated itself, getting worse as I got older. It would take weeks to get in any sort of shape, and I would inwardly dread going back into the pool.

But since learning better form and particularly better breathing, I have found that I can get back in the pool and manage a thousand yards or meters of steady swimming without feeling like I’m desperate for air, or feeling like my arms were too heavy. So I was stunned to read on the TI website that Terry had succumbed to cancer two years earlier. I met with him once in New Paltz, and we used to read each other’s blogs, but even with social media we lost touch.

Only two of us showed up for a recent swimming practice, and coach had us swim an 1800 meter set of freestyle in a light rain: 3 x 200 build; 6 x 100 mixing fast and easy, and 12 x 50. As usual I tried to remember to hide my head, press my buoy, enter the water with patient hands. Our coach had suggested I try a four-beat kick instead of my TI-style two-beat, so I do a very light flutter kick between rolling to breathe on each side.

In the showers my lone teammate, a proficient and strong swimmer despite his big belly, complained, “After all this I should be losing weight, but now I’m going to go home and fill up on junk.” That, but for the influence of my wife and stepson, could have been me. I thought, “So, don’t do that,” but quickly realized just how long it took to get to where I wasn’t doing that any more.

I recently thought I had reached my goal of losing fifty pounds, but realized that my old Taylor scale had become inaccurate. Since getting a new EatSmart Precision CalPal scale, I have lost fifteen pounds more, though I am only ten pounds lighter than my previous goal. So I’ve lost at least sixty pounds. My wife thinks I am melting away, but I know that I am still thirty pounds heavier than my lightest adult weight. That, however, was when I was still under thirty years old, running three to six miles every day, and getting no upper body exercise except tennis. So being that light again isn’t a goal. I figure I will reach a balance point between diet and exercise.

I’m not sure what to call my diet. A few years ago I was trying to follow Dr Terry Wahl’s paleo diet, eating lots of greens and some meat. Then my stepson and my wife were trying to do a keto diet. Though I used to follow Nathan Pritikin, and am still suspicious of the word ‘ketosis’ I have inched closer to what they eat. I just watched a video by Joel Fuhrman, who calls his approach Nutritarian, and it sounds familiar, too. Fuhrman compares eating poorly to hitting your hand with a hammer, complaining about the swelling, but then doing it again day after day. “So, don’t do that.” [Note 2019.06.18: My stepson now describes himself as Nutritarian. Keto, he believes, is for big people trying to lose lots of weight and he is just trying to stay healthy.]

Essentially I eat the same three meals every day:

Breakfast:  Steel Cut, Non-GMO oatmeal. I have recently switched from the 365 Brand to the more expensive McCann’s steel cut oats, or maybe Bob’s Red Mill. I cook two cups of oats, and eat it all week with a small dollop of real maple syrup. I drink filtered water with a touch of RealLime added. On weekends I will make a four-egg omelette with farm-raised eggs, gouda cheese, tomatoes, finely chopped lettuce and sometimes ham.

Morning Snacks: Organic bananas

Lunch: Sandwich of Dave’s Bread, one slice of organic cheese, two slices of Applegate luncheon meat, a slice of organic tomato and some sort of green or reddish lettuce. A half-quart salad with slices of apples, that may also include asparagus, broccoli, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, peapods, scallions, zucchini or the like depending on what I have. I add in some dried cranberries, too. I drink water from the office dispenser. Then I eat some fruit like, red grapes, navel oranges, peaches, nectarines or an apple.

Dinner: Sometimes a grass-fed ground beef or buffalo burger with cheese, tomato, pickles. Sometimes organic chicken thighs with steamed carrots or broccoli in Kerry butter. Sometimes I finish with fruit in vanilla Siggi’s or Brown Cow yogurt. For some reason it is getting harder to find vanilla yogurt. On cold days I will make whole wheat spaghetti with organic red sauce. I love alfredo, but it is too rich. On weekends I treat myself to a Red Oak beer or an Angry Orchard hard cider with dinner. Also sometimes on weekends I will snack on Boulder Canyon potato chips while watching millionaires play tennis.

I have stopped eating restaurant food unless it is an office or social event. I have stopped buying frozen pizzas, or any other prepared food, too. I have also switched from Whole Foods to a local coop called Deep Roots Market. Since Whole Foods was purchased by Amazon, it has become really difficult to tell what is and is not organic in the produce section. They simply post signs saying ‘grown in Chile’, or ‘imported from Canada’.

Less Sugar, High Anxiety

I recently posted about the effects of demineralized water on my equanimity. But lack of minerals may have been only part of my problem. A few months ago, I began eliminating sweets from my diet, which helped me reach my goal. For years I had been rewarding myself at lunches and dinners with cookies, cakes, chocolate bars or ice cream, or some combination thereof. I bought and ate the best organic sweets, but they still contained a great deal of sugar. Statistics from The Diabetes Council indicate that US citizens consume over 126 grams of sugar per day.

A theory goes that we prefer sweetness because it indicates consumable carbohydrates in ripe fruit while sourness indicates unripe and bitter indicates spoiled or poisonous fruit. Refined sugar is, of course, very sweet, and it is difficult to find prepared foods that do not contain refined sugars such as high fructose corn syrup. As described in The Conversation, it is easy to get addicted to high levels of sugar in your diet:

Like drugs, sugar spikes dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. Over the long term, regular sugar consumption actually changes the gene expression and availability of dopamine receptors in both the midbrain and frontal cortex. Specifically, sugar increases the concentration of a type of excitatory receptor called D1, but decreases another receptor type called D2, which is inhibitory. Regular sugar consumption also inhibits the action of the dopamine transporter, a protein which pumps dopamine out of the synapse and back into the neuron after firing.

In short, this means that repeated access to sugar over time leads to prolonged dopamine signalling, greater excitation of the brain’s reward pathways and a need for even more sugar to activate all of the midbrain dopamine receptors like before. The brain becomes tolerant to sugar – and more is needed to attain the same “sugar high.”

After the dopamine receptors have become less available, signalling from normal levels of sugar consumption fails to “reach” the dopamine receptors – until you reacclimate. In the meantime, you can suffer the symptoms of dopamine deficiency. Medical News Today offers a long list of symptoms, but in myself I noticed:

trouble sleeping or disturbed sleep
feeling inexplicably sad or tearful
mood swings
feeling hopeless
feeling guilt-ridden
feeling anxious

I initially chalked these symptoms up to low zinc in my drinking water, but they may have been from low dopamine, or from both. Fortunately I seem to be acclimating, but it was a strange couple of months.

Goal Met; New Goals

Almost two years ago, I moved back to downtown Baltimore from the suburb of Mt Washington. I had moved out to satisfy my wife, who didn’t like being in the city, but she seemed unlikely to ever come back to live with me for more than a week here and there, so I decided to get closer to work. That meant that instead of commuting ten miles each way by bike or bike & light rail or walking & light rail, I would only be a mile from the office, and closer to everything downtown has to offer: theatres, farmer’s markets, and the occasional political rally.

But in giving up all that daily bicycle exercise, I began to put on a little weight. And then a little more weight. The office had free meals for lunch n learns, and bagels and donuts on Fridays. The farmer’s market had good organic food, but also sweet organic cookies and breads. I was feeling a bit lonely and sad, which I now think had to do with drinking all that RO water, and looked forward to my sweets.

So I decided I needed to lose weight, and first turned to the dieting app, LoseIt, which I had used with some success before. I wanted to lose fifty pounds in 2012, and ended up losing about thirty-five, maybe forty, which I maintained with all that bicycling.

Over a few months, tracking food and exercise got me down about forty again, and then I moved to North Carolina. My new office did throw a lot of holiday food at us, but I generally maintained all through the last Xmas season. But I got tired of LoseIt. Even though it was easier to use as an iPad app, recording the same meals over and over got terribly boring.

I began running again, but just once or twice a week. What really got me to lose the last ten or fifteen pounds was giving up sweets altogether, which was difficult. Whole Foods has all sorts of organic and free trade treats, but I had to train myself to simply not see them. Food Lion has really tasty oatmeal raisin cookies, but likewise, I just stopped even noticing them. I also cut back on restaurant pizza and calzones, which I used as a sort of weekend comfort food and reward for running.

And just a few weeks ago, I went through my cabinets and threw out chips, wheat thins, alfredo sauces … anything with canola oil or trans fats.

So now I have lost fifty pounds, and it feels very good to finally meet that goal. So my new goals are to try to regain some of my foot speed and to get back in the pool with a masters team again.

Reverse Osmosis and Regrets

About a month and a half ago, I was on Facebook, and in a moment of weakness and curiosity, looked at the profile of an old girlfriend. She was the first great love of my life, but left me to marry someone else. I thought I had gotten past that disappointment – I have been married to a wonderful woman for almost two decades – but I saw one picture that brought painful memories flooding back. I had seen pictures of her with her husband before – quite a while ago – but this one was at her daughter’s wedding, and my first thought was, “she really looks happy.”

My wife used to work as a caregiver, and several years ago had to return to her hometown to look after her adult son. Then she began caring for her mother, and now for her aunt, too. Consequently I have lived mostly alone for several years now. Even so, we have a good relationship. Skyping every day helps a lot, and I visit her about once a month. I have, though, moved to a new job in a new state, farther away, and I while I like my new position and coworkers, I do miss the friendships at my old office.

After a few days and fitful nights of this girl living in my head rent-free, and my gut being tied in knots, I told (confessed to) my wife. I prefaced by saying that I had no complaints about her, and really loved her, then recalled Mark Gungor’s very funny but somewhat true Tale of Two Brains video, which I had sent her years ago. I theorized that I had been keeping all my memories of this girl in a box for almost four decades, which for some reason had now come open. My wife is (probably has to be) a very patient woman. We talked about it some more on my next visit, but she was concerned that I seemed especially anxious and needy. ‘Usually,’ she said, ‘you just accept things and move on.’

Now, my wife had also gotten me to buy a book on nutrition, Healing is Voltage by Dr Jerry Tennant. I needed to think about something else, so whenever I woke up with internal chatter, I opened the book. The key idea is that our cells work best at a particular pH level. You may remember from Biology class that a pH of 7 is neutral while lower is acidic and higher is basic, or alkaline. But pH also stands for ‘power of Hydrogen’ or maybe ‘potentia hydrogenii’ and in that it is the reciprocal of hydrogen ion activity, Tennant claims that it is also a measurement of electrical voltage hence, Healing is Voltage.

Our blood and most of our cells should be slightly basic, between 7.34 and 7.45. Seawater is a bit more basic, between 7.5 and 8.4. Urine is slightly acidic at 6.0, skin even more at 4.7 and gastric juices are strongly acidic at 3.5 to 1.5. When the pH of our cells is abnormally low, say 6.48, he says they are ripe for becoming cancerous. When the pH is a bit high, say 7.88, he says our body is ripe for making new cells – which is how we repair ourselves.

Anyway, I’m reading this book, and in Chapter 5: Nutrition is a section called Water. Good water is alkaline, it says. Carbonation, fluoridation and added sugars make water too acidic. I gave up carbonated beverages years ago in favor of bottled water, and in 2010 switched to a Clear2O filter pitcher (like the more popular Britta). In 2016 I began drinking water from a three stage filter from a company called Reverse Osmosis Revolution. This filter did not include a reverse osmosis stage, but it did filter out many contaminants. I was bike commuting ten miles to and from work, so I drank a lot of water.

In 2017 I moved to downtown Baltimore, and switched to a four stage system with reverse osmosis, and began bringing that water to my office, still on my bike. So except for office tea, I was drinking almost entirely RO water. So I figured that was all good. But later in  Chapter 5: Nutrition, Tennant writes:

“… zinc is one of the most important elements in the body. Without zinc, you can’t make stomach acid. Without stomach acid, you can’t digest your food. Without nutrition, the body can’t repair itself. In addition, without zinc, you can’t make neurochemicals like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine.”

I was getting a bad feeling that there was little or no zinc in my RO water. I knew that low serotonin levels were often connected with depression, which seemed to be exactly where I was headed. That same day I skyped with my wife and stepson, who in repairing his own precarious health has become a self-taught expert on nutrition. He said that drinking ‘dead’ water was bad, and that he always added a dash of sea salt to his RO water. He may have told me that before, but I certainly heard it this time. I found this article, Demiwater and Health, from a water treatment firm that strongly advised against drinking ‘demineralised’ water.

“The contribution of water to uptake of some essential elements for humans is important because the modern diets are often not an adequate source of some minerals. Moreover these minerals are often present in water as free ions, so they are more readily adsorbed from water compared to food.”

In addition, demineralized water will leach minerals from your body as it passes through your system, and even from your food as you cook it. In avoiding metal and organic contaminants, I was also blocking necessary minerals at a time when – due to running and biking – I needed them the most. And in the subsequent depression, I opened the largest gaping wound in my psyche.

Naturally I began adding mineral-rich Himalayan and sea salt, and some lime juice, to my RO water. I also began taking mineral-rich multivitamins recommended by my stepson. I began to feel better almost immediately.

Revisiting that breakup was painful, but probably for the best in the long run. I called an old friend, who was all-too-familiar with the situation, and told him that once I got past all the denial, anger and bargaining that I should have done thirty-odd years ago, I felt that I had a better idea of what actually happened.

Another article I ran across divides our reasons for failure into a pyramid. At the top are tactical fails. I inherited the really bad habit of stonewalling from both my parents, and for some reason my girlfriend always let me get away with it. I remembered several times in college when she should have dumped my sorry ass. She did have the unproductive habit of citing past grievances during our arguments, which of course led to the silent treatment, and so on. My wife says that I still do that, sometimes, but that we do seem to discuss the important issues.

Next down the pyramid were strategic mistakes. It occurs to me that I didn’t have a strategy; I thought, “we were in love and love was everything.” I got a lot of interesting projects at work, but was very bad at managing my money. I also relied on her for my social life.

And at the base were mistakes of vision. My vision was that I wanted to be a creative architect, try lots of things and eventually have a family, though due to family divorces I was hesitant about marriage. Her vision was different in that, I think, she expected to marry someone very hard-working and financially successful, like her father, and she didn’t want to wait until her thirties. After one particularly bad phone argument she reconnected with a classmate who was already very successful. I tried to win her back, but she just didn’t seem to respect me any more. They got married, and I went into denial for over three decades.

As I told my wife and my friend, I am still grieving a bit, but feel that I am finally ready to let go of the resentment. More importantly, I feel more determined to make my marriage even better.

The Passing of a Playboy

I’ve been intrigued by the reactions to the death of Hugh Hefner – the founder of Playboy Magazine. Erotica goes back thousands of years on cave walls, in paintings, sketches, and later in woodcuts and engravings. Since the invention of halftone printing there have been magazines like PhotoBits, first published in 1898. Pinup girls like Bettie Page used to pose for such magazines, which were usually sold discreetly to adult men, who usually concealed them. Playboy was the first high-quality, mass market men’s magazine to feature nude pictorials, and the first of the type that many women and children ever saw on the shelves. My father concealed his Playboys, though not very well, but we had neighbors whose parents were less conscientious.

I subscribe to the self-described progressive outfit The Young Turks (TYT), who have one show called, “Old School.” During a recent broadcast founder Cenk Uygur announced Hefner’s passing as breaking news. Even though they have vastly different backgrounds and business models, Uygur seemed to feel a connection to his fellow entrepreneur/publisher:

Cenk: What’s funny is that I just got a little emotional. I almost teared up, I didn’t, but … what do I know about Hugh Hefner. I interviewed him once. He was nice…. He was part of America, man.

Malcolm Fleschner: He was an iconic figure in America.

Cenk: I just got really, really sad.

Malcolm: There is only one Hugh Hefner, there is nobody like him, and there never will be again, we’ve lost him, whatever you thought about him, he was a uniquely American figure and had a massive impact on our culture …

Cenk: If ever a person was iconic, it was Hugh Hefner … Man, he lived a good life.

On TYT’s Pop Trigger, a younger group, Brett Ehrlich, Grace Baldridge, Daron Dean, and Jason Carter also covered Hefner’s passing, and extolled Hefner as forward-thinking, even while acknowledging his objectification of women. On the TYT main show, Ana Kasparian, Ehrlich and Baldridge again seemed to take Hefner for granted as an exponent of social progress, despite his flaws. On their recurring youtube show, Reality Rescued, TYT’s roving reporter Jordan Chariton even tossed out that he had first masturbated to Playboy, shocking poor Emma Vigeland.

I had seen many of my father’s copies before December 1967, but will always remember a Playboy pictorial on erotic Art Nouveau engravings by Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt, Franz von Bayros and Norman Lindsay which my younger self found much more provoking than remote and detached photos of Hef’s carefully selected bunnies. I could probably buy a copy, but it probably wouldn’t live up to my memories.

Even though he was a vocal champion of (many) liberal social values, Hefner fares less well with liberals than the TYT progressives. In a New Yorker article, Hugh Hefner, Playboy, and the American Male, Adam Gopnik writes:

There was a time when his excursions into the Playboy philosophy, which was not quite as ridiculous a document as its title makes it sound, were, though never taken seriously, at least seen as significant. Now, they seem not merely quaint but predatory.

For The American Thinker, Rick Moran writes, Hugh Hefner is Dead:

What was Hefner’s role in this transformative America? Actually, he was a lot less impactful than certainly Hefner would have us and the media believe. He did not initiate the sexual revolution. We can thank the Pill for that. Rather, Hefner rode the wave of changing morals and mores by creating bankable images of nearly nude women, along with sharp political and cultural commentary from some of the best liberal writers in America. He made it cool to be a cad and reinforced the male fantasy of consequence-free sex.

And The New Republic decries, Hugh Hefner’s Incomplete Sexual Revolution:

What derailed the male revolt was the female revolt. Women reasonably asked themselves: If men like Hefner were abandoning the traditional claims of chivalry, then what were they offering? The answer: a patriarchy without any promise of protection—a raw deal.

Without a trace of irony, today’s intersectionally woke neoliberals signal their virtue by pointing out that Hefner profited from wrapping himself in the social revolution at the same time that he was sexually exploiting his lowly-paid female employees.

Interestingly, a woman architect really appreciated Hefner. Writing for the AIA journal, Architect, Karrie Jacobs penned, Playboy Magazine and the Architecture of Seduction in 2016, quoting Beatriz Colomina:

… Hefner made [midcentury modern design] mainstream. That’s the point of the exhibition, that Playboy did more for modern architecture and design then any architectural journal or even the Museum of Modern Art. At its peak, it had seven million readers.

I gave a lecture at Cornell at the beginning of this research. At the end of the lecture, a woman said to me, “Now I understand why my father, who never went to a museum, who never had any idea about art or architecture or design, had an amazing collection of midcentury furniture.”

And then I had a correspondence with her. She asked him, “Where did you get all this furniture?” And he said, “Playboy told me to buy it.”

That is absolutely spot on. Along with the girls, and the interviews, and the fiction, were descriptions of the Playboy Pad: apartments or houses that would reflect well on the bachelor’s good taste, with lists (and costs) of the Barcelona chairs, Burberry raincoats, Fleischmann’s Preferred Blended Whiskey, Miles Davis albums, Blaupunkt hi-fi sets, etc that midcentury human male bowerbirds could purchase and arrange to attract a mate.

 

 

Addicted

The world is crashing around us, and all I want to do is watch that old music video, I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On. Not for the pouty models that pretend to play instruments. I love Robert Palmer’s take on (what is almost a Prince) song, and I like the four dancers working it. Nothing about that video seems to relate to the song, but at least he isn’t being chased by a man in a gorilla suit, like Cherrelle.

OK, Congress seems to have an awful choice between leaving the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as it is, or passing the American Health Care Act (AHCA). The ACA has slammed many enrollees with much higher premiums, but all indications are that the AHCA would be much, much worse for everyone except the very wealthy. So far it doesn’t seem that the bill’s supporters have the votes. Of course, having health care isn’t the same thing as having good health care, but the AHCA would cut many preventative care measures, and weaken Medicaid.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans voted to allow internet providers to monitor and sell their users’ browsing histories. The House has not yet voted on the measure. To some extent the internet already knows my browsing history. If I browse a particular tee shirt, or bike part, or book, I will see ads for exactly those items in popup or sidebar adverts for weeks. I presume that is the result of cookies rather than someone data mining at my browsing history.

We went to a local department store a few weeks ago to find out why they aren’t sending a statement, and found out they no longer have a service office. Brick and mortar retailers like JC Penney, Macy’s and Sears are slowly going under, but online retailers still think we have money to spend. They think if only they can look at our browsing histories that we will buy more of their stuff. They’re wrong. Employers are paying us less and less, and our credit cards are all maxed out. We browse stuff, and think that would be nice, but then we look at our bills and decide to do without. The big treat for us these days is Chipotle; Panera costs too much.

Establishment Democrats feel that the fact that from 2005 to 2009 Paul Manafort secretly lobbied for a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin proves their Russia allegations. But after giving him tens of millions of dollars Oleg Deripaska soon accused Manafort of fraud. There are no signs they were on any sort of terms when Manafort briefly managed President Trump’s campaign from March to August of 2016. But I’m With Her Dems still hope that the Deep State will use Russia to take down Trump.

Way too many of us are addicted to opioids. I was in the ER last year, and got intravenous morphine for a UTI from a big kidney stone. The effect was like a comforting wave of warmth starting in my chest and rolling over my face and arms. For the first time in days I felt good. But in the morning a middle-aged woman was prowling the corridor yelling, “Where is my medicine? You’re supposed to give me my medicine! You’re not doing your jobs!” The nurse told her she wasn’t due for forty-five more minutes, but she couldn’t wait, and just yelled some more. Whenever I looked at my bottle of pills, her voice came back to me.

But we’re addicted to more than opioids. When I ride the light rail I see smartphone addiction. Hell, I see pedestrians walking, and bicyclists riding and motorists driving while looking at their smartphones. I think we’re addicted to easy.

Back to my addiction. Photographer Terence Donovan made Robert Palmer and those five models famous in the music video for Addicted to Love. He dressed up Julie Pankhurst, Patty Kelly, Mak Gilchrist, Julia Bolino and Kathy Davies to look like Patrick Nagel girls, and had them pretend to play guitars and keyboards and drums behind the dapper Mr Palmer. His sex object look was controversial, but the video was an unexpected and iconic hit. Donovan used at least one of the models, Patty Kelly, again in I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On, and added those four dancers wearing what look like bridesmaid dresses.

Donovan went to the well again for Simply Irresistible, with more models, more dancers, water pouring over models in swimsuits, but all kind of a muddle. I’ve read that Palmer began to feel that his singing was being overshadowed by the models, though at a reunion the Addicted girls all said he was very professional during the shoot. I had forgotten that Palmer sang Every Kinda People, one of those songs that doesn’t need a fancy video, and is worth hearing again every so often.