Sunday night thoughts

 I'm thinking tonight about how we change over time.  A friend gave me a letter I'd written to her 42 years ago, and I was amazed at how full of energy and optimism and sheer joie de vivre it was.  What happened since then?  

Partly, life.  Things have gone wrong; the high hopes I had then have been dashed.  Partly, a growing cynicism about life and mankind.  I was an optimist, then.  Partly just being worn out.  Confectus aetate, the Romans called it--worn out by age.  Loneliness.   I've lost touch with dear friends, and some of them have died.  I miss them.  Making new close friends at my age is hard.   

To me, now, the vibrant enthusiasm for life of me forty years ago seems both tiresome and absurd.  How to regain that youthful liveliness?  Is it possible?  Can I go back to the mental state I enjoyed then?  My body has aged, and I know that can't be reversed.  But my mind and my character remain.  Somehow I must regain the full-on optimism and hope that I had then.  But how?

End of an era

Uzz at about 2 years old

We got him in August 1999, coincidentally at more or less the same time I first started to use the internet.  He was a miniature Jack Russell/Fox Terrier cross and was just 8 weeks old.  We called him Rusty, but that quickly became Uzz.

I'd been made redundant, so I was at home, and it was August and freezing (still winter, here).  So I carried him around with me, tucked into my jacket, which could be tightened at the waist with a tie.  I used to pull the string tight, and he slept supported by my jacket against my warm tummy.

I adored him and he adored me.  When I came home, he'd dance around and whimper with excitement.  Later, he got deaf, so the loud welcoming barks I used to get at the gate whenever I came home stopped.  But still, even old and half-blind, he would know I was home within a minute or two from my scent, I suppose, and he would leap off the sofa to welcome me.  

In the last year or so, he'd become senile.  He was distressed even when I was home, and often howled, in a deep tenor howl when I wasn't.  He had kidney disease.  One keeps on postponing the inevitable, but the final straw was when he wee'd on the floor (his weeing had got more and more copious, a clear sign of kidney disease) and there was a drop of blood in it.

On Thursday we took our little champion down to the vet to be killed.  At the vet he barked several times, with the sharp imperious bark he used to use when he needed help: "come tuck me in!"; "open the door!"; "I'm stuck, help me!" (when he fell behind the sofa--he liked to lie on its arm in the afternoon sun).   But this time we weren't going to help him, the "get me out of here!" bark wasn't going to help.

He was so distressed the vet gave him a sedative before the long green injection, and we caressed and stroked him then and then when he died and then after he was dead.  I wept and when he was gone and we were alone, I sobbed, as I haven't done since my father died.

I had him for 16 years, a quarter of my life.  He was my friend, loyal and faithful and forgiving.  He forgave me my grumpiness, he helped lift my depressions, he didn't mind that I was old and fat and cynical.  He loved me unreservedly and unconditionally.  Would that my human friends were like that.  Would that I was like that.  I try so hard to be a decent loving person, and in the end it's a dog who shows me how.

Salve atque vale, mi amice.    I can't tell you how much I miss you.

Loneliness

Photograph: Feri Lukas/Rex

A profound piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian, The age of loneliness is killing us.

Some quotes:

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man”, he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults. Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50, and is rising with astonishing speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. We cannot cope alone.

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.

British children no longer aspire to be train drivers or nurses – more than a fifth say they “just want to be rich”: wealth and fame are the sole ambitions of 40% of those surveyed. 

We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is loser. We no longer talk about people. Now we call them individuals. So pervasive has this alienating, atomising term become that even the charities fighting loneliness use it to describe the bipedal entities formerly known as human beings. We can scarcely complete a sentence without getting personal. Personally speaking (to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist’s dummy), I prefer personal friends to the impersonal variety and personal belongings to the kind that don’t belong to me. Though that’s just my personal preference, otherwise known as my preference.

[Read more here]

I'm lucky. Even though I have no real friends (I lost 2 of the straight friends I had when I came out to them), I have a wife and one child back home, and 2 other children whom I see often.. But I am bisexual.  I have a close family,  What about those who don't?  What about gay men, never allowed by a judgemental society to get married?

Depression

Again and again people say (or imply)  that depression is the same as sadness.  It isn't.  It isn't the same as grief, either.  Or loss.  Or unhappiness.  Of course all those things can lead to depression, and you can feel them at the same time as you are depressed, but they are not depression.  Believe me, I know.
 
Depression is the absence of 'colour'.  It is 'greyness'.  Everything seems too much trouble.  There's no point in doing things.  There's no purpose to life, no meaning in life.  There's no joy, no ecstasy, no bliss.  There's just grey.

Sadness and grief and loss and unhappiness are not grey.  They are 'coloured'.  You feel them.  And how!  They hurt, sometimes terribly, and deeply, and for a long time.  There is pain.  Depression is not the same as pain.

What is true though, is that you cannot 'snap out' of any of them.  That offensive exhortation by the happy (and cretinous) is useless and only shows the speaker's ignorance and lack of insight.  With luck and time and relentless hard work they may in the end go away.  In my case, my grief and loss have diminished.  But low grade depression remains.  In effect, the joy has gone out of life.  It's not a lethal thing, I think.  But it makes it hard to care about so many things.  And it leaves you with so little energy!  When I think of how much energy and get-up-and-go I had when I was younger!

So tonight,  to ward off the blahs, I will watch an episode of Poirot and drink a glass or two of wine.

Bugger!  I feel better already!  :-)

Saturday night thoughts

I'm sharing a bottle of Piper-Hiedsieck with my lady.  Normally we imbibe much (much) cheaper champagne.  But tonight we have something special to celebrate.

But (as usual, when I have a glass or two of champagne) I am led to think about the sorrow of life.  We have this friend, Julie.  Her children were at school with ours.  We met at kinder, primary school dos, high school, and after, at the supermarket, shops, going for a walk.  She was always such a happy laughing joyous person.  She wasn't a great beauty, but you didn't notice that, because her inside was filled with light.  And then her husband left her.  He wanted to "find himself".  He "needed space".  For a long time after that she looked physically ill, like someone with cancer or severe heart disease,  She aged 20 years in a year.  From being happy and convivial she became a recluse.  She doesn't want to see ppl or talk to them.

Only young people (or therapists or counsellors) think that life is good and that being a good person will bring its own reward.  She was a good person, and life kicked her in the teeth.  And now she is desperately, unbearably unhappy.

God is so fucking good.

Oppressed ...

... today by the suffering of life, by loneliness of so many people in the world, by grief and loss, by betrayal and illness and death.  I miss Nimbo and Sharpie and ... and people too.

I should be more philosophical I suppose and be glad of the good things too.   Usually I am, but tonight ... it's too hard.  Well.

Onwards and upwards.

Source. Click to see magnificent full size

Saturday night thoughts

In The Curse of Chalion (which I will review here one of these days), Bujold says at one point, 'a young woman looking forwards and up not backwards and down'.   It is a characteristic of youth, or at least more fortunate youth, to look forward in the expectation of up.  But surely most ppl my age look back.  And down.

Friends who are gone, for whatever reason.  Failing health.  Things you always thought you would do, but didn't: take the number 1 tram in Budapest, for example; or visit the forests of Washington;  or see Venice; or climb Sneeukop one last time with someone you love.  Things you will now never do.  Failure.  Loss.  The realisation that love is transitory and ... not enough.  The awareness of your own arrogance and folly when you were young and the certainty (given your own experience of life) that you will surely be foolish and  make more mistakes before you die.

The greed and short-sightedness which ignore the inexorable logic of global warming, to postpone as long as possible the necessary and inevitable steps needed to fight it.

Yet such are the ironies of life that your horizons contract as you age, and what you need to make you happy is less.  That is not to say that I don't sometimes find myself staring into the distance filled with melancholy.  Of course I do; life is filled with grief and loss.  Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus.  Yet as you look back and down there are simple, ineffable, pleasures: a bowl of home-made mushroom soup.  Music.  The deep love which grows between partners in a marriage.  Family.  The first hope-filled creamy green spikes of the daffodils, knowing before we do that spring is on the way.  I am very conscious after recent health scares that I may not have much more time here.  Yet I am happy.  How odd.

Why Friends Can Make Men Live Longer

An intriguing article

A single good friend can make as much as a 10-year difference in life expectancy.

I first heard about the male deficit model, the sociological theory that men are lousy at friendship, a few months after my friend Matt moved to Seattle.

The male deficit model holds that men tend to drift apart whenever the activity they share ends. Matt and I, for instance, spent hours and hours surfing together in San Francisco. But then I became a father and no longer had much time to spend in the water, and we began to see less of each other. Our friendship rekindled only after Matt and his wife bought a fixer-upper in my neighbourhood, and we had a blast demolishing the walls of his old kitchen. Then, when he had a kid, we’d push our strollers around the neighbourhood.

I thought it was a great friendship, if I thought about it at all. But then Matt’s wife, Jodi, accepted a job offer in Seattle. Matt and I told ourselves nothing would change. Jodi and Liz even arranged a surprise ‘‘bromantic’’ (their word) surf trip to Baja that winter. When Liz told me, I had to laugh: it was like Matt and I were little boys, depending on our mums to plan a play date.

But then, in perfect accordance with the male deficit model, reality set in. First, Matt cancelled our farewell beers-and-barbecue session; he was too busy packing. Then, a month after the move, Matt came back to town on a three-day work trip but was too busy to drop by. A month later, he came down for a friend’s 50th birthday party, and I saw him for all of 10 minutes - at the party.

Feeling stung and sensing our friendship was toast, I told Liz I was thinking about cancelling the Baja trip.

The male deficit model is based on 30 years of research into friendship and relationships - most of which shows that male friendships are less intimate, more competitive, and less satisfying than female ones. ‘‘The older we get, the more we accept our essential friendlessness,’’ writes psychologist Stuart Miller in Men and Friendship.

So your social life could be better. Big deal, right? Actually, it’s a bigger deal than you might know.

That’s because nearly all research into healthy aging has found that the key to a long, happy life is not diet or exercise but strong social connections - that is, friendships. Loneliness accelerates age-related declines in cognition and motor function, while a single good friend has been shown to make as much as a 10-year difference in overall life expectancy. A huge meta-study performed in part at Brigham Young University, which reviewed 148 studies with a combined 308,849 subject participants, found that loneliness is just as harmful to health as not exercising, smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and alcoholism, and fully twice as bad as being obese. Still more startling is a 2010 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that looked at 2230 cancer patients in China. Social wellbeing, including friendship, turned out to be the number one predictor of survival.

Some of this stems from the fact that isolated people tend to exercise less, eat poorly, and drink too much. But some researchers believe that loneliness has a negative health impact all on its own. In numerous studies over the past 30 years, John Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and the pioneer of the biological study of loneliness, has found that lonely people have chronically elevated levels of the stress and fear hormones cortisol and epinephrine. In a 2007 paper published in Genome Biology, he even demonstrated a correlation between loneliness and the activity of certain genes associated with systemic inflammation, elevating risk for viral invasion and cardiovascular disease.

And yet the capacity of men to combat loneliness - and improve their health - by building strong friendships seems to be steadily eroding. Cambridge professors Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, writing in The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century, point to a current tendency among adults to build stronger, more intimate marriages at the expense of almost all other social connections. In a study of contemporary childcare arrangements,  they found a deep sense of loneliness among many parents, especially men. ‘‘Almost every father we spoke with explained that he had lost contact with most of his male friends,’’ they write. And lest you believe family is company enough, the 2005 Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing showed that family relationships have almost no impact on longevity. Friendships, by contrast, boosted life span as much as 22 per cent.

And don’t think you’re immune because of the great relationship you have with your wife. A team of researchers from around the world analysed a vast mobile phone database - 2 billion calls and 500 million text messages - and found that by the time married women hit 45 or so, they demote their husbands from first to second place among their most important relationships, typically in favour of a daughter or a younger female friend. It turns out our wives are going to dump us without even leaving the marriage.

Read more here

See also Straight Guys Loving

Saturday night thoughts

On my second glass of Grant Burge champagne.  Not as nice as Charles Heidsieck, but a third of the price.

Thinking about theodicy.   Thinking about a woman we know.  All she wanted all her life was to be loved by her father.  But he never loved her. She never came up to scratch.  His "love" for her was always conditional. So she found someone to love her (a bloke who smokes a lot of dope, is currently in jail for a parole violation) and is now pregnant by said boyfriend.  What can we do to help her?  All we can do is show her we love her and we care, no matter how much we mistrust her new boyfriend.  But she will never fill the black hole inside, and no matter how badly her father treats her, she always goes back to him.

God is good.

[Cartoon from this website]

Anniversary

Thinking of you, my dear.  It's five years today since you died.   Dligo tson.

Friend

Mates -- Alex Cunha, Nils Butler and Marlon Teixeira

This word has so many meanings.  Like "love".

We don't have enough words to convey and describe the subtle gradations between someone you barely know on Facebook, who is your "friend", and someone whom you would trust your life with.

For me, a friend is someone I love, and who loves me.  I'm not talking about sex or desire -- too often "intimate" is a euphemism for fucking.  Intimacy is something you have with real friends.  A friend is someone I trust in important things.  But most of all, a friend is someone I can be myself with, someone I don't have to pretend with.  They love me in spite of me.  With them,  I don't have to drag out my Mr Jolly persona.  If I am taciturn, well, I don't have to bother to chat mindlessly.   And so on.

Most people don't see friends in this way.   "How to choose friends for success".  "How to get better friends"  As if they were accessories.  You know, a good handbag or elegant shoes or a super haircut.  Using each other.

We are programmed both to love and to want sex, and sometimes these needs conflict.  But as I get older, it becomes more and more clear to me that love is what matters.  Without it we shrivel.  We can, if we have to, provide ourselves with all the sex we need, if we are truly talking just about sex and not about the bond that sex often builds between people, a bond which justifies the word "love".  But we can't manufacture or buy love.

Meh.  It's late (for me), I'm dead tired and worn, and I'm not thinking too well.  I'm off to bed.

Saturday night thoughts

By Amy Gutman, from Annex Galleries

Alcohol affects different people differently.  Some have said that it allows the real you to show, so if you become violent, it's because you are violent, really, and alcohol has just removed your inhibitions.  If you are a morose drunk, that is the real you, they say.  If depressed and lachrymose, well, you're just letting your hair down.

For the last many months I haven't been drinking.  My body just kept sending too many signals to me that it was bad for me.  But it was good for my spirit.  It made me happy, usually, and (but only occasionally) melancholy sometimes.

It's been a beautiful spring day, today, but I've had a headache all day.  I seem to have a headache every Saturday.  Maybe it's a reaction to my workweek.  I don't know.  Even now, at 8.30 on Saturday evening, I'm still headachey.

Of course, we never have visitors any more, except on red letter days, our children.  And we seldom go out at night--too tired, too poor.

And my mild depression makes me unable to write.  So I will be watching Miss Marple, and drinking a mug of warm soy milk, and hobbling on my stick to and from the kitchen.  When did I become an old man?

Anyway, gentle readers, môre is nog 'n dag.  Tomorrow is another day.

Loneliness

Our civilisation (if that is the word) is good at satisfying people's material wants.  Well, some people's.  But it is extraordinarily bad at keeping us happy.  Because happiness doesn't come from material things.  It comes from love and affection and friendship.  In the US, one-person households has gone up from 17%  in 1970 to 27% in 2012.  In Sweden 47% of households are inhabited by one person.   Some of that is later marriage, as young people leave home but don't get married as they used to 40 years ago.  But there is also, offsetting that, the boomerang phenomenon: adult children who return home, like my eldest, after having lived away for many years.

We weren't meant to live alone.  Our ancestors in the African jungles, and primitive people in many places still today, live in tight-knit communities, where old people had an important place in the life of the community.

I see so many pensioners alone.  "Sheila" wanders round our little shopping centre talking to everybody because she has no friends and is desperately lonely.

We've got it all wrong.  Maybe we should trade our glossy oversized cars for friends.  Instead, we have dogs.  Or goldfish.  Tragic.

“Alone. That’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and Hell is a poor synonym.”

—	Stephen King

True empathy

Years ago I got to talking with a woman on the train, who recognised me from TV (you didn't know I was on TV, did you?)  We became acquaintances, sharing anecdotes about our lives, our children, our jobs.  Sometimes we gave each other lifts home from the station.

I always rather envied them.  They were well off.  They went every year on weeks-long overseas holidays to France and Italy and Switzerland.  They went to opera and ballet.  They did things.  But then, about a year ago, I saw her and her  husband in the station car park. He looked ill.  They told me that he had lung cancer, not because he'd smoked, but because he'd worked, decades ago, in an office of smokers, in the days before people were forced to go outside to smoke.  Just a few months ago, on another meeting, they remained upbeat.  The treatments were working.  Alan was getting better.

Yesterday I met her in the supermarket.  I knew at once what had happened.  You could see it in the way her body slumped, in the terrible grief in her stance, in her eyes.  I didn't even have to ask what.  I knew.  How long ago, I asked.  A month, was the answer.  Then a burst of courage.  Well, I must keep going.  Nice to meet you, Nick.

I know what grief feels like.  And I don't believe until you have experienced grief yourself that you can fully understand the grief of others.  Perhaps we humans can only really get the suffering of others when we have suffered ourselves.   When you have nursed your sick child through the night you will never again be dismissive of other parents' worries about their own children.  When your marriage has been under strain, you will know and understand what others are going through when theirs is similarly afflicted.  And when someone else suffers intense and incredible grief, you will be able to understand fully only if you have lost loved ones yourself.

As I spoke to her, I felt the lump in my throat and the unshed tears in my eyes.  But I wondered afterwards whether the grief I felt was just a memory of my own, in other words was selfish (even narcissistic) or whether I was truly feeling for her.

Who knows?  It's all too easy to deceive yourself, and to fancy yourself to be a better person than you are. And yet I am unable to shake the memory of that grief-ravaged face and the cringing posture; body and soul bending away from the blows of life and the horror of death.  Perhaps the only mechanism our minds have to have insight into the minds and characters of others and into their feelings and sufferings is our own mind and our own memories of those we loved and lost and what we felt.  Maybe that is the only way humans can see into the soul of other humans.

What's the saying?  Hope for the best, be prepared for the worst?  The best, surely,  is a compassionate and empathetic insight into the hearts and souls of others.  The worst is to say, "well, when I ..."  We humans are surely a mixture of both, neither unalloyed compassion nor unbridled selfishness.  But there are times when I wish it were not so.

Je me fous du passé !

Thinking tonight about love and loss; about ppl who changed my life for the worse; about how I no longer trust love or friendship because of a handful of ppl I thought better than they were; about betrayal and despair and loneliness. 

Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
Ni le mal; tout ça m'est bien égal !

Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
C'est payé, balayé, oublié
Je me fous du passé !

Avec mes souvenirs
J'ai allumé le feu
Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs
Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux !

Balayées les amours
Et tous leurs trémolos
Balayés pour toujours
Je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
Ni le mal; tout ça m'est bien égal !

Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Car ma vie, car mes joies
Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi

[From http://lyricstranslate.com/en/je-ne-regrette-rien-i-dont-regret-anything.html#RKTj2CClOTUKR5lU.99 ]

Loneliness

Peanuts

Omnia vincit amor

The world is full of sorrows. Ppl -- and dogs -- you love die. Friends stop being friends. You fail to do all the things you hoped to do. But, somehow, if you love and are loved, it's bearable, sometimes even wonderful. Omnia vincit amor. Love conquers all. Them Romans knew a thing or two.

Saturday night thoughts

A couple of glasses of wine, and I am taken back to the loss of so many whom I loved.  It's a beautiful summer evening outside, and that somehow makes it worse.  My mother, my friend Henrik, my friend Anneliese, the little dog I loved so much.  Grief is part of life, no?  The price you pay for loving, for being happy.  To be happy is not enough.  The Gods must make you pay.  So They send grief and regret, sorrow and loss, pain and suffering.  We are but playthings in some vast game, threads in the Tapestry of Life, and happiness is a chimera


Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. 
Tu réclamais le Soir: il descend, le voici:

I loved him

I loved and lost. Yeah.
Perfect he was not but
 I loved him. Then. Always.