HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH – Page 7 – "ABSURDITY IS THE MOTHER OF TRUTH" (Albert Camus, I Think…)

The Difficulty of Change

Modern Hawaiians, I am told, are not particularly religious. They will tell you, however, that there is a goddess of fire and volcanos, Pele by name. She lives on Kilauea and from time to time makes the mountain blow its top. That explains a lot as we are finding out. There was a time when it explained everything because, after all, she was a goddess. Things have changed. Pele is no longer a goddess. She has been demoted to a mythological figure, a creation of man’s mind.

The ancient people of Iceland also believed in a god of fire and volcanos. They named him Surtr and he was in charge of making the mountains spew lava. He is no longer a god either, only a mythological fiction of the mind. To be safe, though, maybe the people of Iceland should thank him for supplying them with free hot water.

We must not forget Hephaistos, the ancient Greeks’ mythological god of fire whom the Romans called Vulcan. No need to say more about him. He, too, has been demoted. The last time he was still a god was two thousand years ago when he made Mount Vesuvius erupt.

But things have changed, we think. Mythology makes for a humorous story perhaps, but you cannot take it seriously. At least not when it comes to volcanos. For that we need the truth. I can’t help the feeling, though, that myths are more comforting than truth and so we hang on to Yahweh, a god “at whose touch the mountains smoke” (Psalm 104:32), something we love to recite in churches. Plus ça change, the French say: the more things change, the more everything remains the same.

Maybe not all that much has changed since Pele, Surtr, and Vulcan were at the helm.

Picture credit: Gunnar Gestur, www.demilked.com

On Things That Do Their Thing By Themselves

I always had a car that I steered myself. If the past is an indicator of the future this will change. My car will steer itself. The idea makes me nervous.
But in general I am not opposed to automation. I love our robot vacuum cleaner. He (I think it’s a he) goes by the name of Bob. Just let Bob loose in a room. Thirty minutes later the floor is dust- and doghair-free and Bob has rolled himself into his charger unit, awaiting further orders. Now, that beats the way I used to do housework.

One chore I particularly disliked was to clean the oven with a certain super caustic spray. A notice on the container implied that one should not allow this product to touch anything, including the oven I suppose. No more of this nonsense. We now have an oven that cleans itself if you just move a lever on the door an inch to the left. The job takes a few hours but it is worth the wait. The only drawback is that you are left with a heap of ashes. Something funereal about this.

I don’t have much use for department store doors that open as I approach but I can see their usefulness at Christmas time when one has all three arms full of packages. On the other hand, I do like my automatic garage door, the one that self-stops on closing when any impediment such as a child or a dog is in danger of being crushed. This could be helpful. I should have tested this on Betsie, our toy poodle, but I did not have the nerve. Lights that turn on when they sense some movement are very popular. They even come on when so much as a leaf blows by. Or when you yourself tiptoe by, hoping not to be heard by the neighbor’s sleeping Weimaraner.

I have my doubts about alarms that are supposed to go on when there is smoke. Mine has never spoken yet except once when I forgot I had some butter melting in the skillet. I smelled that out in the garden before I ever heard the thing beep.

As a writer I love the computer software that automatically checks my spelling. I am not much of a photographer. I am grateful to the person who invented my self-focusing camera. I am the cook in my family and I truly appreciate toaster ovens, microwave ovens, rice cookers, and such that are semi-automatic. They turn themselves on if you set the time. If you forget this step the raw rice will be sitting there waiting patiently when you come home at dinner time. I speak from experience.

But all of these helpful appliances are still robots at best, devices that do what they are programmed to do. They have no brains, no intelligence of their own. They cannot make decisions as to what I should cook, for example, and how to cook and season it. The camera can only focus my picture. It cannot tell me if I am taking a picture of the right thing. That takes thinking. What is missing is artificial intelligence, a subject that is much discussed these days. Given the fact that even regular intelligence is rare enough, I suspect that AI still has a long way to go. That is why I would draw the line when it comes to self driving, life and death split second decision making cars.

For now I would set my goal a little lower. One morning not long ago I went on my morning walk. My oatmeal was not quite ready, so I had turned the burner off as I left. On my return I was surprised that the fire department had not been summoned because my house was filled with black smoke. That is why I can’t wait for artificial intelligence to come to the kitchen. I badly need an intelligent cook pot, one that “perceives its environment and takes appropriate action,” to use the language of the experts in this field. A pot that would have seen that I had accidentally turned the burner dial on HIGH instead OFF, a pot that would have made an intelligent adjustment.

I have a new pot now, but it is not any smarter. Neither am I, alas. Just the other day I went through a stop sign that I knew was there. I just did not perceive it. Maybe that intelligent car would be of help, after all.

Figurines

JUST A STORY, BUT ADMITTEDLY CLOSE TO REALITY

Dear aunt Ella died, in her sleep. She was always good to us and she knew that we had an eye for art and sculpture. That is how we came to inherit her splendid collection of porcelain figurines. It so happened that we had an old cabinet with glass doors we had been thinking of selling or giving away. It was made of depressingly somber dark oak. But potentially it was perfect to display our new collection of figurines. It was not an expensive piece and the thinking was that it would not be a crime, esthetically speaking, to redo the cabinet in a lighter color. In other words, I was volunteered to paint it. It is a well- known fact that in homes where married people live “volunteer” is a transitive verb.

What color, though, would be right? A creamy white was one suggestion. I objected since the walls of the room are already creamy white. There would be no contrast. The cabinet would blend into the wall and visually disappear. My argument was accepted.

Red was mentioned. We already have a small red library or sofa table. But that red is so bland and diffused that it was impossible to find a matching chip in the paint store. And a bright red cabinet in the dining room? A little bit too much contrast, I thought. So that suggestion was discarded.

The original idea had been to paint the cabinet in a lighter color, to get away from dark colors. Blue was suggested. Some of us, me for example, thought that blue was a dark color unless you are thinking of powder blue. We were not thinking of powder blue, however. Defying logic, we were going to lighten up the room by painting the cabinet dark blue. Not dark dark blue, but not powder blue either. Lots of contrast with the wall, however.

It was almost fun to paint the plain wooden outside, two coats with a drying day between. But there were glass doors with ribs that were meant to simulate smaller panels. To paint 3/16 inches wide ribs without spilling any paint on the glass was a challenge, and it also had to be done twice of course. I did not let this bother me. I already had grey hair.

On to painting the inside then. To keep it light we selected, yes, a creamy off-white. The inside had no ribs to worry about and was finished in record time. The off-white inside of the cabinet contrasted beautifully with the blue outside. We should have measured the pieces first, but when we began to install our little collection we discovered that one of the precious figurines was just a little too tall to get her head under the shelves. The only thing to do, short of the guillotine, was to move one of the shelves. The shelves rested on cleats that had been installed by the manufacturer about ninety years ago. They did things solidly in those days. To move those cleats in such a way that the re-installed shelf would not wiggle or slope was a procedure I will not further describe lest my language offend any one.

But we got it done. Our beautiful figurines had a palatial new home. The figurines were mostly off-white and blended perfectly into the off-white interior of the cabinet. Absent contrast, they became virtually invisible.
What does one do in such situations, other than letting go a few nasty words? Get rid of Ella’s white figurines and buy our selves a bunch of blue ones was one idea, and it nearly landed me in divorce court. Or perhaps re-paint the inside of the cabinet blue, sacrificing the idea of lighting up the room in favor of more contrast for the figurines. That made sense. Off came the doors again, out went the figurines — careful, you (me?) broke a finger off one of them already! Take out the shelves. Paint the inside back panel of the cabinet blue, two coats, drying day between them. I was developing a routine. As I finished it was late and I was tired, and tired of painting.

I must have gone to bed but I do not remember that. I should have loved to hear what Professor Freud might have said to my dream that night: I was in my underwear, and in front of me I had a collection of little white figurines, lots of nasty little people with impertinent beady eyes, which I was angrily splashing with red glossy enamel. There, take this! Take that! And I was splashing a lot of red paint on myself in the process when my wife walked in and, thinking I was bleeding to death, let out the mother of all screams. Except it was actually me who was screaming in my sleep. Which woke my real wife up, wondering if I had lost my mind. I was too tired to explain.

Just as well, because another problem had arisen. It was all much too blue. So why don’t we take out the shelves again and repaint them cream color. Just the shelves, not the background. Well, maybe the side panels too. It would help lightening the room and would not diminish the contrast.
It was then that it occurred to me that a bunch of those nasty little red people with cream colored feet that I dreamed about would make a perfect display. Cram them in, a hundred of them, fifty to a shelf if need be. That should be enough contrast for anybody! I suppressed the urge to scream, however, and kept that idea to myself.

Winner, Losers

I don’t know how many reputable philosophers are on record as having said that the universe and even life itself are essentially absurd. The Bavarians, a sturdy tribe of Germans settled around the city of Munich, the city of beer where I once used to live, sum it up in one of their pithy sayings: “Saufst, schtirbscht; saufst net, schtirbscht ah!” It is hard to be so succinct in English but a reasonable translation would be “Drink too much you die, for shame; don’t drink at all, die all the same.”
Beer drinking is not one of the things that are foremost in my thoughts. But I also run into such absurdities in other contexts. The economy came to mind, the marketplace. There is no such thing as a perpetuum mobile. To keep things moving requires that you put something in. If everything stopped at the status quo antes there would be nothing to sell or buy. We would all be dead. Just losers, no winners.

If you are in commerce and you have something to sell you must find a way to attract buyers. And if you want more than a hand to mouth break-even existence you need many more buyers in order to buy more things to sell to even more buyers. It is a veritable chain reaction until we run into limits. Now we have a dilemma: everything we buy creates waste, pollutes, or harms us in other ways and we would want to cut back, not consume so much. But suppliers can’t survive unless we consume stuff. Most of us grew up believing that there are no limits. The power companies, for example, helped us to think of more ways to use more of the energy they sold. I remember a Southern California Gas Company presentation of the then new icemaker refrigerator where the young lady presenter showed us novel ways to use ice cubes. Put them in drinks; use them for compresses if you burn yourself; give them to houseplants for easy watering, and so on. More consumption was thought to be good for the economy.

Today, though, the limits are obvious. The power company now offers us advice on how to save on energy, i.e. to save money by saving energy. It’s a noble thing to do, of course, but it strikes me as absurd when a supplier urges consumers to consume less. Ultimately, of course, this hurts the supplier. Business shrinks. Employees become surplus humanity on food stamps. We are sorry for those workers and start looking for scapegoats. At election time voters prefer politician who promise to save their jobs. As if any politician had the slightest idea how to do that. The more efficient we become the worse it gets. Should a factory now scrap their robot machinery and hire people instead? They cannot afford people unless they outsource to a poorer country where labor is cheap. But that is not what angry voters want. They want their own old jobs back. And those jobs do not exist any more. The economy, I say, is absurd.

I take a pill every evening. It controls my symptoms. I buy refills every month. It is an ideal situation for the supplier. But I, the patient, would like a pill that cures me, that leaves me with no more symptoms to control. It would be ideal for me but counterproductive for the producer of my trusty daily pill, obviously.

When I am sick I see my doctor. Sick people are the stock in trade of physicians and hospitals. Healthy people less so. We all deserve praise for professing to embrace the idea of preventive medicine. But what if we all turned out to be perfectly healthy tomorrow morning? All of us, except the few that get involved in accidents. They will not generate enough income for more than a few doctors and one hospital per town. I see a paradox in that. Physicians do not know yet how to make us all well. But should they find a way, their own existence would be endangered. Some dilemma.
On the other hand, it has all happened before. When the automobile made the horse obsolete all drovers, farriers, and horse traders lost their jobs. Even the horse butchers of Paris slowly disappeared. I remember two of them on rue Chappe in the 18th arrondissement. In the late Forties one still had a shop sign in the form of a horse’s head, a tête de cheval, signifying the nature of his business. Most of these shops are gone now. Their supply of merchandise has dwindled, and so have the customers. But as far as I have been able to determine life goes on. A few doors down the street from where the horse head used to hang you find today the busy Cafe de Chappe. Prominently displayed on the menu the owner lists his Steak à Cheval, a very common item in Parisian brasseries consisting of an egg straddling a ground beef patty “like a rider on a horse.” I am not sure but I think he meant this as a joke. I have convinced myself that, while sad, it is a hopeful sign that most young people cannot possibly ‘get’ this splendid pun. As it did on rue Chappe, life goes on everywhere, at least in the short run. Was not Charles Darwin in the 1830’s worried about Thomas Malthus’ prediction, namely that there was no room for more people? And is it not now two hundred years later? And isn’t Malthus just about the last thing we worry about in our day to day lives? Bless Alfred E. Neuman and his dictum: “What — Me Worry?”. Yes, that’s us. I suspect that there is method in Mad.

When Two Sides Aren’t

There is a story in the Bible about some skeptics who questioned Jesus about the need to pay taxes to the Emperor. They did this only to see what he would say. But Jesus did not fall for the trick. He told them to look at a Denarius, a penny. Sure enough, on one side of the coin there was the emperor’s picture. That tells you, Jesus said, that you must pay your taxes (Mark 12:14). He did not say anything about the other side of the coin but added that ” you must also give to God what belongs to God”.
We do not know if that phrase about God had anything to do with the other side of the coin. What might have been pictured on the other side? Probably nothing about God or even religion. It could not have been a cross because Christianity had not been invented yet. It could have been a picture of some heathen god but as far as I know Jews were pretty strict in their belief in one sole God, namely their’s. The picture of any heathen god they would not have taken seriously. For all we know it could have been an elephant. There was such a coin but I doubt that it was still in circulation at the time, nor can I guess how that would have been interpreted in the context. So much for the two sides of the biblical Denarius.

Nevertheless, coins do have two sides and they usually show symbolic pictures on both sides. The quarter I hold in my hand shows an eagle on one side and the profile of President George Washington on the other. Which side is heads, which tails? That is entirely up to us. I assume that most people would declare the side with the President’s profile to be the recto, to borrow a term from the printing trades, and the eagle the verso. So if Jesus were to look at my coin he would say that George Washington represents America and ergo I must pay my taxes. The logic appears to me to be somewhat tenuous but I would go along with it. And the eagle on the verso might mean that we are free, free as the birds, and I am for that. But Jesus never let anyone get away easy. I bet you a nickel that he would tell you that the eagle on the quarter’s verso stands for the federal government and that it means “or else”, i.e. if you don’t do the recto thing the IRS will come after you. So in the last analysis this quarter is special: it has only one side.
If you did not know this you have obviously not filed your tax return yet.

E. R.

We were about the same age. In my (and her) younger days E.R. stood for Elizabeth Regina. I am still the same fool, and she is still the Queen. But we are both older now and ER, at least for me, has come to mean Emergency Room. I do not know how Buckingham Palace handles such situations. For us commoners it gets tricky when you are sick because being sick is not an either-or decision like, say, being alive or being dead. You cannot be “just a little” dead. A woman cannot be “just a little” pregnant. In sickness there are variations. You wake up feeling sick, for example, but you take a Tylenol and by noon you are all right again. There was no need to call the doctor. You were just a little sick.

But then you may also wake up wretched. Your breakfast does not stay down. You go back to bed and sleep all day. And the following night. But the next morning you are better. You had almost called the doctor but now you are glad you did not. You would feel like a fool if you had made an appointment. This time you were just plain sick but it passed.

The next stage is when you are real sick. Your throat is scratchy and you shiver although it is not cold. You have no appetite, your belly aches, and you are too weak to lift a spoon, almost. Now comes the question: do you call the doctor? Before you do pause a moment to think. If you have lived long enough you know that anything you do, even calling the doctor, has consequences. There are several possible scenarios. Either you diagnose yourself and go to the emergency room. As you probably know, that alone is a stressful event and it takes all day to get out again, in the best of circumstances. It is also embarrassing because minutes after you touch 911 you hear the siren. An ambulance rushes around the corner, followed by a lumbering full-sized fire engine and, for all you know, an ambulance-chasing TV transmission van to set the neighbors wondering what happened to the man who lives in the corner house.

Or you call the doctor. With a little bit of luck, as the dustman sang in the musical comedy, he is in and will see you at 2 pm. All is well. But how probable is that outcome? You now do not have much to lose, actually. You either stay sick, maybe die. Or you put up with the ER. Or you chance it and call the doctor. Good thinking. The last time this happened to me I did just that. The nurse answered and told me that the doctor was out of town but “with your symptoms”, she said you have to go to the ER immediately. “I will call them ahead so they know you are coming”, she added. Stuck! There was no way out.

“As I lay dying”, to steal a headline from Faulkner; well, just “waiting” of course, I met my nurse, her assistant nurse, and the nurse of the day. There was no nurse of the night. They connected me to many wires, poked me, and squeezed me, and then covered me with a warm blanket and left me. I then had several hours of leisure to observe the goings-on in the ER corridors. Eventually the doctor of the day came to see me, examined me, and assured me that I would live. He prescribed something to take twice a day for five days and then released me. In the ER this means two more hours of waiting because it requires paperwork, many pages of it, and signatures. It was getting dark already when the word came that I was free to get up and go home. “Go home and rest”, they advised. They did not know that one cannot rest much when one has four hungry howling dogs at home waiting for their dinner. “And drink lots of fluids!” As if there is anything else I could drink. “And call your regular doctor tomorrow.”

“Here we go again” is all I could say to that.

CTE

Due to our unfortunate involvement in the Middle Eastern wars we have become familiar with CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Soldiers exposed to heavy blasts and explosions often suffer serious concussions. They may survive the hit but the trauma may leave them with a damaged brain involving changes in some biochemical processes that will slowly but surely lead to deterioration of brain functions. As the adjective “chronic” suggests the condition is irreversible and, so far, incurable. The symptoms are devastating but may not appear until years after the incident.

Needless to say, our soldiers did not deliberately expose themselves to the danger of slowly losing their minds. They are heros whom we sent out to fight in defense of our national interests. Most of us, of course, stay home. There is a bumper sticker that says “We support our troops.” It is probably too lukewarm a tribute when you consider what could happen to our troops years later as a result of brain damage incurred in the line of duty.

There is another part to the CTE story. The victims in this story are also afflicted with CTE but they are not heros fighting for anybody’s country. They are merely athletes, mostly football players, strong, skillful, admired, and often well paid men. But while the soldier in the field is wounded in the service of his country many, if not most football players suffer equally serious concussions with the same symptoms and consequences while, and this sounds absurd to me, while playing with a ball! It is called a game, but it looks more like the fight-to-the-death gladiatorial games the ancient Romans were fond of.

To the fans, of course, football is not trivial at all. Football games are watched and cheered by thousands, sometimes millions. And so, although it is more like a business, it is also still a game and a spectators’ pastime which has taken on the aura of a national, even patriotic, ritual. There is a Greek word, eisegesis (as opposed to exegesis), used by textual scholars to characterise interpretations that introduce the interpreter’s own ideas beyond what the text says. Applied to the issue of football, we have on the one side, simply stated, a ball game, albeit a dangerous one. On the other side we have the fans who interpret the same set of circumstances as a patriotic ritual, something that merits flags and national anthems.

My prediction is that the game will go on, football forever, ignoring the threat of encephalopathy. We will manage to convince ourselves that it cannot by as serious as all that. We spectators do not risk anything. The players do. Just as we do not go to war, soldiers do. Football is a well established tradition and we will continue to rely on our own interpretations of what it means and what it is good for. We may be dealing with a third kind of CTE which I would call Continuing Traditional Eisegesis.

The sad part is that even school boys and college students are often encouraged to play this macho “sport” of football. Is it worth the risk? Or is it time for “Friday Night Lights Out” as someone suggested in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (2/8/18). My guess, though, is that this will go on, encephalopathy or no encephalopathy. Unless, perhaps, mothers of sons start a protest movement.

PS. Women are known to do such things.

Frost on the Wall

“Trump renews wall demand” [Headline in Los Angeles Times]

When I came to the United States as an immigrant in the early fifties people were very much into education. Empowered by the G.I. Bill, veterans crowded the colleges. “English”, which included American literature, was a required subject then, and every body knew who Robert Frost was. When I first read the line “I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference” I thought that it was so very American, so much like “I did it my way”. When he writes “Something there is that does not like a wall”, and when Cole Porter sings “Don’t fence me in”, are these not arch-American sentiments you could not express better any other way?

But that was six decades ago. The culture has changed. Who, after all, would read poetry on their iPads, really now? Perhaps our culture does not encourage us to use the right half of our brain, where we store wisdom, as opposed to the left where we keep our facts. Or perhaps our values have changed. Maybe we do love walls, after all? It pains me, the self-appointed defender of all that was good when I was young, to now have to admit that we may have to update our very poets. But can you imagine Robert Frost admitting that “Something there is that does love a wall”? And should we really join Cole Porter and sing “Do fence me in”? And while we are at it, should we improve Ronald Reagan’s powerful speech? What if he had said “Mister Gorbachev, do keep up that wall”?

We are new to this wall business. Other nations have walls. The Chinese love their wall as a tourist attraction. Hadrian, too, was very happy with his. Kept the British out of Londinium. He thought. Oh yes, and the Roman Limes, the 500 km wall that was supposed to keep the Germans out of Frankfurt. Those, of course, were bigger projects. But watch out, World! We have not even started yet. Ours will be much bigger.

What, however, if the prophet Carl Sandburg saw something we have not seen yet? In his Chicago poem “A Fence” he writes: “As a fence it was a masterpiece… (but) passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.”

Meanwhile, though, while we are on the subject of reviewing our poets let us also look at what Shakespeare had to say on the subject. In his Midsummer-Night’s Dream the villagers are about to perform a play. One character, Quince the carpenter, is the self-appointed director. In discussing the necessary stage props he speaks these memorable words: “Then, there is another thing: we must have a wall”. He also specifies that there has to be a cranny in that wall “for Pyramus to whisper through” (and tell the people on the other side, perhaps, that they must pay and that we hope they do?)

Funny how Shakespeare always emerges as the most current of all poets if we tweek him a little.
(c)2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman Picture credit: easyfreeclipart.com

PS: For $25 an artist, Christoph Buechel, takes visitors to see the eight border wall prototypes. “They may have significant cultural value”, he jokes. (I think)

Looking Me Over And Checking Me Out

I had not been really well for a while. So I went to see the doctor. Didn’t get to see her right away, of course, but her nurse took my blood pressure and pulse. To attach the oximeter clip she asked to “borrow my finger”. Ok, I said, but I do want it back. She also took my temperature. Through the ear, if you ever heard such a thing. A young man in a white coat then introduced himself as the doctor’s PA. He brought a small laptop computer with him and asked me many questions, from what I had for breakfast to how often I get up at night, keyboarding my answers into the device.

Then the doctor entered, in a cheerful mood. First she studied the PA’s notes and then asked me more pointed questions. It was a long conversation about how the body works or, sometimes, does not work. And then the fun started. She examined me, looking at everything beginning at my big toe, the one with the fungus infection, and ending with my nose which is constantly stopped up, causing me to sleep with my mouth open. After listening to my heart, though, she became serious. We must do a stress test, she said. By “we” she meant “me” of course.

She also wanted to check on my electrolytes. I was hoping that I would not need any more potassium because I find those bricks so hard to swallow. When I mentioned my leg cramps her response was to prescribe more potassium and also magnesium, which is even harder to swallow. Then, of course, she was interested in the condition of my cholesterol. Thank God my angiogram had shown that my arteries were clean. This is important because I like butter and cheese which are no-nos for people with clogged pipes. The recommendation was to go ahead, eat cheese but only Comte which happens to be the most expensive cheese on the market. The doctor picked that brand because it contains less salt than other brands. I must stick to my sodium restrictions to keep my blood pressure low. My oatmeal is now cooked without salt which makes for a bland breakfast, the punishment for having a defective heart.

But there are also rewards. Since I need to gain weight I get to dribble extra olive oil on everything I eat. I now eat my bread, not the biblical way, in the sweat of my face, but dunked in oil as those smart Italians do with their funny Mediterranean diet. Evviva la dottoressa!

But then she also ordered a glucose tolerance test, an electrocardiogram, and an ultrasound examination of my varicose veins, something that is done by a specialist technician called in for the purpose. For my next visit I was asked to bring a urine sample. It should be the first in the morning. Also needed was a stool sample, the last of the day (as if I could predict such events!) Oh yes, and be sure to be fasting for your sigmoidoscopy. I do not feel any symptoms in that neighborhood but we do this to be sure, I was told. Also on my list of to-dos were tests for tuberculosis, flu shots, rabies shots, and a bone density scan. Heaven help me, I thought. Why did I ever submit to all this? Can I even afford to be that healthy?

It occurred to me that I probably made this appointment in a fit of senior madness. The doctor apparently was thinking along those lines, too. Why else would she have added a brain scan to the list? I do not remember if she said MRI, MRA, or MEG. But whatever it was, they were going to stick my head into a huge donut and look for my brain. I gave in.

That was several weeks ago now. I have not heard from the Lab. I suspect they looked but found nothing and were too polite to tell me that nobody was home. This could be an embarrassing revelation. On the other hand, when I read in the newspaper every morning what all happened yesterday, what weird things people did and said for all the world to hear, I am consoled. Apparently I share this condition with a lot of others.
(c)2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman. Picture credit: clipart

Curriculum Vitae

In the Blackfriars area of London, just South of St. Paul’s, stands a tall sculpture called “The Seven Ages of Man”. It invites contemplation for two reasons. It reminds us, first, of the fact that youth does not last forever, that we cannot escape getting old. The second remarkable fact is that Richard Kindersley, the sculptor, has made no effort to cheer us up: all seven portraits he has piled up into a column, from baby to nonagenarian, show the most serious faces possible. I believe that he was saying that life is tough, nothing to laugh about. Or, to use contemporary street language, that life sucks.

Good Lord, if we were all that pessimistic? What would we do for fun? On the other hand, I do find voices that echo those sentiments. In Southern Germany, for example, where I spent my childhood years they have a saying that goes somewhat like this: “All my life I work like a maniac and in the end? There I lie, only my stiff legs sticking out”. I do not expect any of my readers to be fluent in German, but in case any do read German I must give you the German dialect version to be fair, for the humor of the original does not come through in translation. Here it is: “Dei Lebtag schaffscht wie a Dackel und am End schtreckscht die Baa naus”.

Not all Germans, by the way, see life in such harsh terms. The more bourgeois version of the above goes like this: “From the cradle to the shroud there are forms one must fill out”.

We are all free to elaborate on that. I could try to imitate Ogden Nash and suggest: “From desperately crying newly born to one slowly but perceptibly wilting and visibly worn.” Or if you are in a hurry, “From womb to tomb”.

Due to a temporary condition requiring rehabilitation in a place established for that purpose I had a chance to observe the many specially designed pieces of equipment that occupational therapists use to help people “relearn” to get in and out of bed or deep chairs, or to sit down on the toilet and, more difficult, to get up from same. The latter task is facilitated by a specially designed restroom which a large sign on the door advertises as the Training Toilet.

And there goes, we might say, the last shred of dignity and decorum as we now sum up the ages of man: “From baby’s toilet training we recoiled at, to weakening old folks’ rehab’s training toilet.”