Hermosita

I board the surf-liner headed south ..hop in my sister’s lexus ..zip through the streets of Irvine to Woodbridge .. where there are no corner-malls ..only town centers and village squares, which I believe were planned by the same group of students who did the Hobbit-land dormitories at UCI. We have wine and dinner ..then watch women’s half-pipe and men’s figure skating.

The next morning we go out for bagels and coffee ..and watch school kids walk past the shop and wave. We wave back and a tune comes to mind “.. where the children go to summer camp/and then to the university/where they’re put in little boxes/and they come out all the same.” Wicked of me.

We take the 405 to the 91 to Pier Street to Hermosa Beach ..a funky little town with lotsa’ clubs and great places to eat and hang-out. We cruise the strand before the show and I talk incessantly about boring shit.

We’re standing in line talking with some girls from 7th and Redondo ..then we’re seated in a small dinner theater, two tables away from the stage .. listening to a pianist, who was conceived during an affair, and consequently raised by his mother and father/step-father, who remain married. I know this because he wrote a song about it called ‘greatest mistake’ ..which turns out to mean ‘best mistake’.

Sarah Bettens, who we came to see, has been sitting at the table next to us for I don’t know how long. On stage she plays: ‘can’t get out’ ‘..not an addict’ ‘..shine’ ..and somewhere along the line she goes into ‘damage done’ by Neil Young ..and for a moment I’m transported. After the show, I see a chance to chat with her ..and take it. She’s attentive and responsive ..making me feel like there’s nowhere else she’d rather be ..and I can’t help but think, what a great musician ..and lovely person she is.

On closer inspection

“The meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence which is perceived is rapidly forgotten and the memory is then for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence.” ~ J. Sachs, 1967.

In the 1960’s, psychologists broke away from the long-standing traditions of behaviorism, and the field of cognitive psychology emerged. This act of secession was inspired by advances in fields such as neuroscience, cybernetics and linguistics. In the area of language development, psychologists adopted linguistic principles, introduced by Noam Chomsky, as a method for measuring verbal learning and behavior. These principles were more consistent with natural observations of language development. Chomsky’s model recognizes that language is expressed on at least two different levels ~ a ‘surface structure’, representing the audible/visible properties of a sentence (i.e. morphemes and syntax) ~ and a ‘deep structure’, representing the underlying semantic relationships conveyed by a sentence.

What they found is that the deep structure of a sentence is what people retain. Surface-structure is purged within milliseconds and no longer available for recall. The resulting memory is not a literal transcript of written or spoken language. It is more like a coded network of related concepts and ideas derived from the original sentence, as well as from the past experience of the listener. What we come away with is a feeling of resonance and familiarity, based largely on beliefs and experience ..and not necessarily the meaning intended by the speaker [link]

An early ancestor

HOMAGE TO THE
TREE SHREW

It is interesting to learn how much the tree shrew can tell us about human nature. They were one of the first primates on the evolutionary branch leading to humans. Neuro-anatomical studies reveal that they were also the first primate with a significantly more elaborate and differentiated visual system. Psychological tests show how this development gave them the ability to perform two tasks with equal skill: 1) focus attention on features of interest (while filtering out irrelevant features) and 2) swiftly shift attention from one interesting (or alarming) feature to another in a visually heterogeneous environment.

We take these contributions for granted now, but both abilities were not equally present in mammals before the tree shrew. It is an adaptation that had survival value, allowing them to track prey without losing sight of their predators – a trick of nature that makes them equally suited to act as hunters, as well as survive being hunted as prey. We appreciate these contributions when something goes wrong, resulting in one form of attention-deficit or another. I think we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to these little beings. They mark the beginning of neocortical evolution in man.

Presented at seminar in sociobiology

3D head

A model for the fabric of the mind has been tentatively settled-on. It’s one that characterizes what’s inside my skull as a 3-dimensional network of delicately connected instances of prior experience and feeling. Under ordinary circumstances, signals from the senses produce ripples that spread out over this fabric, like stones on a pond, activating network-connections until a clear mental representation is formed. However, when something goes wrong, and there’s a disturbance in the fabric, activation may become amp’d and diffuse ..compounding insubstantial phenomena until, what may have started out as a gentle hummingbird .. becomes a ferocious beast. Sometimes I think it’s only a matter of degree between clarity and delusion ..especially when I consider how many times I mistook a perfectly innocent remark as hostility.

Bird man

Where I live you can’t separate the water from the weather ..or from the people for that matter. I have salt water running through my veins ..and white water on the brain.

Now I hear that giant tropical squid are buying property off the coast. Prices are low and they have fewer competitors. Their closest relative is the octopus, whom we know can learn from experience. Squid communicate by displaying different colored patterns on their skin. Like a lexicon of tattoos ..or alien communication ..we haven't got a clue.

An early ancestor of the bird is the huxleyi dinosaur. Around 155-million years ago, the adults of the species were horrified when their offspring started coming home with their feathers styled into bright-red Mohawks.

..and they’ve revised the Diagnostic Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Now my obsessive interest in subjects outside the mainstream puts me on a spectrum of autistic disorders.

Toon town

Lately it seems like I’m living in a cartoon. I used to get this way on occasion, usually after sharing a spliff with my neighbor, but now it’s more like everyday ..spliff or no spliff. I watch Señor Jim walking home. He looks like a two-story dinosaur. He lives in a tudor-style house that looks like its made out of gingerbread. He just finished chatting with Dr Jones who, as the name implies .. looks like Indiana Jones. I’ve even started greeting him that way, imitating the low booming voice of his adversary Dr. Belloq in the movie. Fortunately he gets a kick out of it. Dr Jones is a vigilante. He patrols the neighborhood on a bicycle .. or sometimes on a stakeout with night-vision goggles and automatic weapon. He’s trying to keep Orange County developers below the LA County line. Unfortunately he sometimes blows the head off an innocent neighbor adding a deck. Today, however, it’s infiltrators from within that have got him on-edge. This could be anyone from high school students to dirt-bike riders. Apparently some guy named Sperling is bank rolling the operation. Dr Jones is not short on conspiracy theories.

I continue on a path leading to the County Bowl. ..stopping along the way to chat with Marleña through the window of a house that looks like something out of hobbit-land. She tells me Sugarland tickets go on sale tomorrow .. people are already camping out around the Bowl. David and Julianne appear out of nowhere ..dressed in saffron threads and ugg boots. Looking like a swami and goddess. I put my hands together in gassho. They say they walked down the steps of the Bowl ..but now they are looking for a trail to climb back up. The terrain looks kind of steep and overgrown to me ..so I offer to drive them back. Not a problem, David says ..and I hear Julianne go “here it is” ..and they vanish. I turn to ask Marleña if she saw anything remarkable about that ..but she’s disappeared too.

NYC

Usually when someone tells me what they expect to see in a place they’ve never been before ..I think it says more about the place where they’re coming from. Like, what else do they have to go by. But, more often it's like, what a stupid generalization I go by. Joey is a screenwriter from NYC who I met last night at the baths. When I asked what surprised him most about California, Hollywood in particular, he said he expected sharper teeth. Not sure what he meant, I asked him to tell me more. He goes “I expected sharper teeth because Hollywood always seemed like such a far-away fairytale place ..sitting inside of a fort ..surrounded by a moat ..guarded by sharks.” I laughed my ass off. What an illustrative mind ..! Not much about NYC there, expect, perhaps, the part about the sharks. But then again, that’s another stupid overgeneralization of mine ..it comes from watching too many TV shows..

Charlie II

It’s my nature to try and make sense of outwardly irrational behavior like the kind that happened with Charlie last night [link].

Information, rattling around the brain, is followed by a process that clears waste from the transmitter-sites (synapses). There’s a maintenance-network (glial cells) that picks-up whatever chemicals are left behind by the re-uptake process. A milliseconds delay in that action is long enough to produce a gap in transmission. A few gaps can lead to false impressions ..too many gaps .. hallucinations and delusions. It’s the nature of the brain to fill-in missing pieces, which often goes well ..but it is based on a principle of probability ..inserting the most likely, but not necessarily the most accurate, elements of a missing scene. This may distort events ..or momentarily launch them in another direction. The brain is self-correcting however, and can usually recover ..unless too many gaps occur consecutively. Then these excursions begin to create a story of their own. When fabrications get superimposed on actual events ..other people’s actions appear distorted and confounding ..facial gestures are skewed and incomprehensible ..voices blend and words and phrases arrive out of sequence. Suspicion mounts ..creating anxiety that only exacerbates things by accelerating the process of mis-information. The first sign that things aren’t going well is an outburst of non-sensical speech. The way to tell if they’re kidding, or not, is by the sight of sweat ..sometimes accompanied by clenched fists. When others don’t know what to expect, they get concerned. When they re-direct their attention .. breaking with the ongoing chain of events ..it looks like a bunch of faces looming up and bearing down on our sufferer. This can create panic. Panic is often met by the arrival of police officers, which can create a disturbance so charged that it shuts down consciousness .. until the next thing to appear are doctors, with masks and syringes, holding you down while trying to coax a more tolerable stream of events into place.

I realize that nothing I write in these boxes contains anything close to the boundlessness of life .

Charlie

An unexpected turn of events occured at the poker game this evening. Charlie stood up and slammed down his cards, one by one, shouting (in beat to the rhythm of the slamming cards) “This ..is ..not ..the ..hand ..I ..was ..dealt ..Goddamn bunch of thieves!!!” This shocked the shit out of us. Brian went looking for his bat, while I go: “OK Charles, tell me whose hand you think it is ?” He bellows “The cards I had went up to 0.732 ..these are only around like 0.53” I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked at his cards ..queen of hearts ..seven of spades ..two of diamonds ..they did look random, which is kind of like a 50/50 proposition. I thought about the winning hand he had a while back ..a full house. “Charles, you’re thinking about a hand you already played.” He goes “No fucking way, Jose ..” spraying food everywhere “..not even the same ballpark ..but let me tell you something ..I am foursquare against these goddamn revisions and .. hey, what the hell’s inside my mouth (mouff) .?” “Doritos” I tell him, hoping feedback might help him feel a little more grounded. It was a little too late. We took the mountain roads back to my place, with the top down, freezing cold ..but hoping it would put psychological distance between home and the scene back at Bri’s. I even offered to give him my share of the winnings. He had no idea what I was talking about. I thought it best to leave it that way.
 

continued here~>[ link ]

Looking back

I put on a pair of hiking boots, goggles and miners’ cap ..and follow a trail leading back into my mind. I'm looking down the long haul of history ..the light from my miners cap illuminating the dark ..and the goggles pick up energy that ordinarily passes outside the reach of consciousness. I watch a lunatic pacing the street shouting something ..and I realize he’s ruminating over a disagreement that I thought I had forgotten a long time ago. Farther down ..I enter a passageway that leads to a hallway at a place where I use to work. I greet everyone I meet ..then duck into an office where someone is shouting at a computer and swearing it wasn’t his fault. I duck out of there before he sees me and starts swearing that it was my fault. Back out on the street, I crank up the resolution to see how far these goggles will take me ..and locate the stoners I used to hang out with in high school. I stumble over a field of mental instability, anxious to see them again. They’re getting high before class and they pass me the pipe. A haze builds-up behind my eyes lids and wisps of long forgotten memories drift by. I’m watching Blues Image playing at the Gem .. photons are flashing ..I cross a bridge, under which a brightly colored stream passes. I follow a thousand steps to the beach. I walk through the tide pools and enter a cave. Now I’m floating in Grecian pools carved smooth out of the coastal rocks and stones. Ocean water pours over the sides ..and the level rises to a pool of infinity where there’s no sign of separation between me ..the sea ..and the rest of humanity.

Dreamwork

I had a vivid dream last night. This morning I hear the echo of Fritz Perls going: “Make sure you take ownership of the different parts of your dream.”

The dream: I pull off of the 605 freeway ..park in a gravely construction yard and walk toward a trailer-office. Inside, there’s a guy in his twenties, dressed like a hiker, carrying a gun in a holster. He’s asking the clerk behind the counter for directions .. saying he wants to see more of California ..he turns to me and asks for a ride. I reply (telepathically) “No ..because of the gun that you are carrying.” He relies (telepathically) “Yes you will ..because of the gun that I am carrying.” I concede, thinking “Hey, I’ll make it a trip to Big Sur.” As we head down the 605 freeway, toward the coast ..he asks me why we aren’t heading up the 605, and toward the I5. I say (verbally this time) “Hey ..you want to see California, right ..not just another freeway.” He sits back with a satisfied look on his face. As I’m on that long swooping connector-road at the end of the 605, heading into Long Beach ..we hit traffic and come to a halt. He looks nervous and asks what we’re stopping for. I tell him I’ll go have a look and get out of the car ..surprised that he doesn’t object. Underneath the overpass, I walk into another trailer-office, where a surveillance-team is huddled around a computer. It’s somehow apparent to me that they’re tracking my carjacker, and I feel relieved ..telling them he’s right above us. I climb back into the car, the undercover cops are somewhere behind, and without a word, my carjacker flies out the passenger door ..on a surfboard. As he hovers above the traffic, I ask the cop how he does that. He looks at me and says “we don’t know” and I feel surprised, wondering how come they don’t know that if they’ve had him under surveillance.

Dreamwork: I am the car ..I am the gravely construction yard ..mechanical and characterless. I am the young man ..I am the gun ..calm and controlling. I am the surfboard .. flying unfettered. I am the surveillance-team ..secretly tracking my impulses. I am the cop ..confused and un-comprehending. I am the question ..asking myself how come I don’t know these things about myself. I raise my head up from the desk, and think: “I just might take that trip to Big Sur after all.”

A blurb about dreamwork can be found here ~>Fritz Perls