On self-defeat, part 2

I just wrote about how Wife's whole life—so it seems—has been one long exercise in self-defeat. This is a line of thought I started after looking at the journals she left behind when she vacated Son1's apartment.

But my reflections didn't stop there. Oh no.

Father undercut himself the same way. I've talked here and here about how he undermined his own authority as a businessman. I don't know the details of his stint as a university professor, except that he failed his first tenure review (after three years) so his contract was not renewed. Decades later he found a letter he had written to the Dean after his contract was canceled, and read it to us over the dinner table. As a piece of rhetoric or invective—as a letter that burst into flame upon reading—it was a remarkable piece of work. But by that time I was already an adult, and in fact I was a manager with employees of my own. And what I thought privately (though I never said it aloud) was, "Gosh, if that's where your head was at the time, I'd have fired you too." The letter was all about him, and never mentioned the needs or strategies of the university. And even if he didn't care about the university, anyone who wanted to play the employment game should know enough to pretend to care. Not Father. 

After he retired from business, he tried to make a living as an actor. There he was dogged by a special kind of bad luck that repeated over and over. Time and again, he would get a part in something very small whose schedule neatly prevented him from auditioning for something large and rewarding. To hear him tell it, this happened so often that he could almost count on it. Now was this self-defeat? I have no idea. All I know is what I heard from him, and he made it sound like random bad luck each and every time.

On the other hand, we've all heard the saying: Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. I just don't know which "enemy."

In other words, the topic of self-defeat is one I probably need to spend some time with, because I've lived around it much of my life. First Father, then Wife. That's definitely why I need to think about it. Right?

Ha. I should be so lucky.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have discussed my own self-defeating behaviors many times. Good luck seems to be wasted on me. And I never had the skill to advance up the corporate ladder. I hide myself, and I seem to court failure. You can multiply other references throughout the blog without breaking a sweat.

I think this is why Kimberly Steele told me (three years ago!) that publishing my book "is going to be an act of will that will act as one of your major tests in your life." I have spent too much of my life trying actively to fail. I have worked at defeating myself, and I have surrounded myself with masters at self-defeat. So the challenge is, Can I pull out of such a dramatic dive? Can I get my ass in gear and make it happen?

The questions about Wife matter to her therapist, but I'm not her therapist. The questions about Father are of biographical interest, but after all he's dead. The questions that have to matter to me are about me. 

I have achieved two long-term goals in my life. The first was my marriage (and children). The second was my separation. What comes next? Now that I'm a senior citizen, what long-term goals can I still accomplish? And can I do them without ruining myself in the process?

Those are the questions that matter now. I suppose I should be grateful to Wife's old journals for making me think of them.   

           

On self-defeat, part 1

I've been thinking more about those journals that Wife left behind, when she moved out of Son1's apartment.

She must have been writing them under the guidance of some psychotherapist, or at any rate under the guidance of some psychotherapeutic ideas—ideas that she might have read somewhere, or might have gotten from a therapist in the past. The journals specifically talked about her experience of compulsive thinking, and she set up tables to work out concrete examples.

• Column 1: Initial idea.
• Column 2: Compulsive idea that it triggers.
• Column 3: Rational idea towards which she should redirect herself.
• And so on ....

Examples included:

• Initial idea: "I hurt Hosea by my infidelities and by overspending the budget."
• Compulsive idea: "I am a terrible human and don't deserve to live."
• Rational idea: "I did cause pain but it will be manageable if we work together on it." [Actually I don't remember this entry, but I assume it would have to be something like that.]
• I don't have more examples, because you remember I left the journals there.

It all looks like a very logical therapeutic approach. But the single most important fact—overwhelming everything else—is that it didn't work! Self-understanding counts for bupkes unless it results in meaningful changes of behavior, and Wife's behavior never changed! So all these journal entries were just masturbation, nothing more.

During my most recent visit, Son1 mentioned as an aside (as if it were an obvious point, while explaining something else) that Wife still suffers from these compulsive ideas. Someone criticizes her and right away she falls into a spiral of ranting, "Oh I'm a terrible human and don't deserve to live!" Then whoever's talking to her backs off, because he (or she) didn't mean the criticism to be quite that extreme. And therefore nobody ever succeeds in talking to her about behavior that she actually has to fix.

As I typed those words, I found myself thinking, "Nice work, if you can get it."

And indeed, in the short run it seems like this uncontrolled and disproportionate response is an effective tactic to prevent Wife ever having to face any serious criticism. It insulates her. If narcissism means having to preserve her self-image at all costs, it's a very sturdy form of narcissistic defense, ... even if it is awfully remeniscent of Russian roulette. 

In the long run, of course, the tactic is self-defeating because it means she never confronts the habits that make her fail. So she never learns new habits instead, and she continues to fail. At this point, Wife has failed:

• As a musician. (Good enough to be a church organist, not good enough to be a professional.)
• As a scholar. (She dropped out of one graduate program for complicated reasons, and then failed her Qualifying Exams in her second program.)
• As a businesswoman. (She alienated several employers and they fired her; then her health collapsed while she was still working for the last one and she had to go out on permanent disability.)
• As a church-goer. (I don't know as much about this. But she transitioned over the years from Wiccan to Baptist to Mormon. She was pretty open—to me and the boys—about joining the Mormon church because they look after you. But I think I remember her saying a few years ago that her bishop had actually thrown her out of the church for some reason. Maybe freeloading.)
• As a friend. (Wife keeps making new friends and then keeps alienating them. She tried to contact her friend Leia to say goodbye before leaving town, but no such luck.)
• As a wife. (OK, maybe I'm prejudiced on this point. But read the first ten years of this blog to see my perspective on the question.)
• As a mother? (Whatever else is going on, Wife has clung to her identity as a mother of two wonderful boys. But the last long email I got from her makes me think she is reconsidering what that relationship really looks like.)

If you run into an asshole one day, well, tough luck, you ran into an asshole. If everyone you meet, all day long, is an asshole—it's because you are the asshole.

What this means, in turn, is that Wife's whole life is one long exercise in self-defeat. And it didn't have to be. It was all avoidable. I mean ... maybe her bad health was baked in from the beginning. But the dysfunctional personality, that squandered every opportunity she was handed? That seems to have been something she did on purpose. And it is sad.

           

Visiting Son1 and Dorcas

Yesterday morning, I visited Son1 in his apartment, now almost two weeks after Wife vacated it.

Partly I was motivated by morbid curiosity: what did the place look like? Partly I was motivated by an acquisitive itch: did she leave behind anything I wanted? And partly I just wanted to be sociable. Normally I don't see my kids very often.

The place looked more jumbled than usual, but a lot less crowded. Most of the furniture was gone out of the living room, and all the nice bookcases. The living room rug was still there, and I know that came from somebody in Wife's family because at one point (back when we all still lived together in a house) one of her nephews tried to extort it out of her. Lovely family. Son1 remarked that there is literally no place in Wife's new digs where it will fit. 

Of course we talked about Wife, and how she reacted to the move. (I notice in passing that half the time Son1 refers to her by her name, instead of saying "Mom." He still says "Mom" once in a while, but the change is striking.) Son1 said that he thinks part of the long-term therapy which she needs is to have all her useless, ancestral junk stripped from her, so that she has to reconstruct her life without it. I didn't say anything specific, but I was thinking that this was exactly what D and I thought way back during the Housecleaning From Hell in December 2008 and January 2009, that I've described as "Second date." (The account stretches from here to here, but you can pick this one as a good solid example of our thinking.)

We talked about Wife's drinking. He thinks she has accepted the designation of "alcoholic" because it gives her an excuse: if she's an alcoholic, then nobody can expect any better of her. I remember how bitterly she hated her own father's alcoholism, and how long she denied that her mother had the same problem because she didn't want it to be both of them. If she's now decided simply to accept the same diagnosis herself, that's a huge change. Of course it has been decades. (Her mother died in 1994. I think her father died in 1978.)

I don't remember all the other things we discussed. For a while we talked about trivia like our respective work, or unusual air travel.

In the end, I did go and look at the wreckage left in what had been Wife's room. One bookcase was still there, with a few books randomly strewn across it. There were a few (the minority) that looked interesting and weren't garbage; Son1 said I could take them. Apparently the criterion for which books to take was "What fits in the truck?" because Wife had done no packing or sorting before Son2 arrived to help load the truck.

Among the contents of the shelf, I found notebooks that Wife had kept. I didn't take them, though now I wonder if I should have. They seemed to be laid out according to one or another psychological theory for dealing with instrusive thoughts, and the entries were dated. This one dated back to 1993. That one dated to 2011. (The layouts were different from one to the other, I should add ... probably she was working with different therapists during those years.)

What I found most remarkable was the amount of guilt that I saw expressed in her notes. When writing in her own journals, she could freely admit that her infidelities caused me pain, and that her crazy overspending caused me distress. She could admit that they were wrong. But then those admissions triggered automatic thoughts of total worthlessness that made her mind spiral out of control. Apparently she was trying to learn ways to stop the automatic spiralling.

But I guess she never did. At any rate, she never got to a point where she could admit to me that she knew what she had done, and that she knew it had hurt me, and that she was sorry. If I were in the room, she'd fight me.

Those journals were a remarkable discovery. I still don't really know how to feel about them. And I wonder if I should have taken them, or if it is better to let them be swept away with the juink?

           

Looks like a big year

It looks like this is going to be a big year.

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I went to the Ecosophian Convention in June. That was big, right there.

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I mentioned a while ago that I'm back to work on my book. My goal is to self-publish successfully this year. I don't expect to make a lot of money at it, although it would be nice if Fate proved me wrong. But it explains an obscure, niche topic. The natural audience is probably not large, and I've never been very good at publicizing myself. The goals that I hope to achieve include:

• proving that I can set and achieve a long-term goal;
• learning about the self-publication process, so I can plan to publish some of the other stuff bubbling in my head;
• opening up the possibility for my sons that they can achieve things in life above and beyond holding a regular job, because it is always easier to do a thing if you see someone else do it first. (To be clear, my own father was rather weak on the "holding a regular job" part, so that was the first thing I wanted to model for them!)

But there is more. Turns out that the world doesn't revolve around me. 😀

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Wife moved from living with Son1 to living near Son2. Son1 and Son2 organized the whole move between themselves, and are handling the aftermath.

Son1 will be moving in with Dorcas soon. Son2 proposed to Beryl.

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Debbie has had multiple spells of atrial fibrillation. Already this year she has had a device inserted into her heart to help regularize its behavior, and she is on medication to help with that as well. We still talk regularly every Friday afternoon, but more and more those conversations tend to drift over to talking about death. She's still making plans for the future, but more and more she talks about wanting things to be in order by the time she is no longer there to order them.

-----

Because Debbie has been thinking about death, she has been pushing our Unitarian Sangha to establish a Care-Taking Council. I wrote about the very first steps ... setting up an exploratory committee to review the idea ... back in 2025. But most of the activity will take place this year.

Also related to that, this spring our Sangha held its first ever Day of Mindfulness. We are slowly stretching out of a fixed and unchanging shape that we've held for some 20 years.

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Marie's favorite nephew was arrested by TSA. Turns out he was on a cruise with his parents (Marie's sister Cuñada, and her current husband). TSA explored his tablet, and found pornography on it. Some of the pornography involved subjects below the legal age of consent. This translates to five years in prison—automatically—without the possibility of parole. Marie is beside herself—partly at the fate of her nephew, of course, but partly because of the nature of the offense. She has not said so, but my guess is that years ago (before we got back together and she started to re-evaluate her attitudes towards sex), she would have approved of such a law. Today she hates it because it endangers Nephew. There are probably other complexities as well ... Marie generates emotional complexity effortlessly.

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I'm in a fight with my professional organization. I don't know why I care, and some days I don't. It's not like I'm working any more. My membership expires this month. Maybe I'll just let it go. Still, if I do, that's another milestone for this year.

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At the end of June, Schmidt wrecked his car. He described it this way:

"Driving to town for groceries and prescriptions.  Just a mile or two out of town, got distracted trying to let a wasp out the window, drifted just enough to hit a mailbox that (due to prior vandalism I suppose) was anchored with steel and concrete like a damn skyscraper and totally wrecked the car.  Flipped, rolled, slid... good thing I'm in the habit of doing only 60 on that part of the road!  Seat belt & air bags did their job and I crawled out the (pulverized) passenger side window with just some cuts and bruises.  Somebody came along just as I got out and used his cell phone to call 911 -- I was still dazedly trying to collect myself and wondering how to use my phone without  my glasses (knocked off and god-knew-where).... Cue EMTs, Highway patrol, tow truck -- tow operator finally found my glasses for me (way in the back of what's left of the car) so I can see again."

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My former boss wrote me that he is afraid of being laid off, because the huge company that we both worked for is doing lots of business except not in his country.

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Numerologically, 2026 is a "1-year" because 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1. According to John Michael Greer, 1-years are: 

"Ruled by the Sun, this is a number of new beginnings and opportunity. This is a time of practical action and constructive change.  It's a good time to take direct action and to start new things in motion, so long as they aren't complex or evasive. Move ahead forcefully during this year."

All-righty then!

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Have I forgotten anything? Maybe. Probably

Is there more that I don't know about? Gosh, I hope not!

           

Proud, I guess?

Last weekend—well, Monday actually—Wife moved out of Son 1's apartment to go live by herself near Son 2.

I told you this was coming in this post and this one, both from a few months ago.

Anyway, it finally happened. Nobody told me anything about it. I learned a little bit by texting the boys and asking things based on my assumptions ... whereupon I learned that my assumptions were all wrong and they were several steps ahead of me.

In this whole operation—well, up until this morning—the only thing they have asked me to contribute is money: not work, not thoughts or planning or suggestions, not decision-making, not physical presence (even if only to manage Wife) ... nothing else. And the cash was specifically intended for her first-and-last-month's-rent deposit in the new place. For what it is worth the sum they asked for was too small to cover that. I guessed that they would probably need more, so I buffered the amount I gave them ... and it turned out to match what they needed very closely.

Other than that, they handled it all. They organized a plan whereby: 

• Son1 moves in with Dorcas. (Remember that Dorcas owns a condominium free and clear.)
• Son1 sends to Son2 the money he would otherwise have spent on rent. 
• Son2 uses that money to pay Wife's rent ... and the apartment is rented in his name, not hers.
• Son2 stops in to check on Wife from time to time, to make sure she has food in the house and isn't drunk off her ass or doing crazy shit.

They also worked out a complete plan for the move.

• Wife had filled two storage iunits, plus she had her stuff all over Son1's apartment.
• Son1 rented a 15-foot U-Haul trailer for the weekend.
• Son2 flew to be there for the weekend.
• The two of them spent the weekend loading the U-Haul with as much stuff as they could make fit.
• Sunday night they put Wife on a plane to Son2's town. I assume Beryl met her at the other end and gave Wife a place to stay, because otherwise Wife would have been completely helpless.
• Monday morning, they drove the truck to Son2's town. It took all day.
• Tuesday they unloaded the truck. I guess they returned it. Son1 flew home.

Today I got a note from Son1 (copying Son2, so everything was above board), asking if I can pay for Wife's rent for one month, because she had so much junk left over that he will have to keep his apartment rented another month just to clean it out. And he can't pay two rents at once. I said, yes, I think I can.

What do I think about all this?

• On the one hand, stereotypically, I think I'm supposed to feel bad at being treated as a source of cash and nothing else. What am I, chopped liver?
• On the other hand, I can see that my body has deteriorated over the years. I have nowhere near the energy and strength that Son1 and Son2 have. This is just a simple fact.
• On the third hand, and related, I'm relieved not to have to deal with the consequences of Wife's crazy accumulation and hoarding yet again. Been there, done that. 
• On the fourth hand, it feels truly, truly weird that there was a major event involving Son1, Son2, Wife, and lots of work ... and I was left out of it.

I asked if it would be helpful if I came down to order pizza or something, while they were working. One of the boys (I think it was Son 1) said it would be better if I stayed out of sight. So I dropped it.

Then the next thing I knew, Son1 was texting that he had gotten home safe and sound a couple of days later.

So how do I feel, in the long run?

I'm glad that they can plan something this complicated together, and that they can see a common perspective well enough to agree what to do. Son1 is 29, but turns 30 later this year; Son2 is 28. I think back to when I was 30—or 28!—and I'm not convinced I could have been this mature about planning the relocation of a parent. Nor am I sure that Brother and I could have seen things similarly enough that we could have worked together so well. Actually I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have.

So I guess I'm proud of the boys: for their initiative, their diligence, their common understanding, their ability to work out and agree on the details (better than many professionals I've worked with), and their commitment to see it through.

I still feel really weird at not having been involved at all, but perhaps I just need to thank my lucky stars. Besides, it's in the past; so after a while I'll forget. Right?

Meanwhile, please pass the brandy.

           

Volatility

I mentioned in my last post that I've started to work seriously (once again) on this book I hope to publish professionally. Of course we'll have to see how far I get. But in some ways the exercise of working with a professional editor has already been very educational.

A couple of days ago, I wrote you that my δαίμων appears to be alive and well and still in business, even though it has been so many decades since I was in school.

And today I came face to face with my old, familiar volatility.

I should explain.

Back when I was a child—or a teenager, or an undergraduate—my emotions were often volatile. It was one of the things that I understood to be distinctively true of me. When I learned the word mercurial, I latched onto it as a self-identifier. As a little child I had played at being Mercury, in and around playing at Batman or Superman. And then I learned that the word which best described my emotional life was derived from this same Power! How delightful. How apt.

The process of growing up was, for me, one long, long process of suppressing that mercurial volatility, of learning to distrust myself, of learning to slow down and wait. And of course in many ways that was a good thing. Certainly I learned over the long years of marriage to Wife that I couldn't just say the first thing that popped into my head! Nor could I with D, for much the same reason. By the time I was involved with Debbie, I had learned enough about my own dynamics to ask for—and get!—"the right to say it wrong." I described that years ago as "the assurance that, if I said something which upset her, I could take it back and try again and she would stop being upset." All of this was valuable progress in growing up, in becoming a mature adult instead of an immature prat. All of it was valuable progress in slowing down.

Except of course that all of you—anyone who reads this blog—knows that it's all an act. I never really slowed down my emotions. All I did was to slow down my external affect. I don't react as fast as I used to. But my emotions still bounce around. You know that, because you have to listen to me. So you are perfectly well aware that I will rage and whine and pout over developments that I end up accepting with (so far as anyone can tell externally) calm and grace. As I say, you know it's an act.

Sometimes I pretend to myself that I've made a kind of progress. And maybe I have. Maybe control over one's external affect really is a kind of progress, whatever is going on inside. But, as I said at the beginning, working with this professional editor has brought me face to face with my old, familiar volatility.

As I described in my last post, she sent me a development edit of the whole manuscript. And there were some changes that just sent me around the twist. Instead of marking up the same manuscript document, I funneled all my feedback into a separate document where I could write, "No! You're wrong, WRONG, WRONG!" Fortunately my painfully-learned habits of maturity kicked in last night, so that I didn't send her anything until this morning. Then this morning I wrote a cover email saying, "By the way, I think you're wrong about a few things but you are also write about some others." I attached the document and clicked Send.

Observing myself this morning, I noticed several things.

• Part of me wanted to stop and not send her all that feedback, in order to avoid the conflict that might ensue. Of course that would have meant that I had wasted the entire weekend, and where would we go from here if I couldn't send her my feedback?
• Another part of me chastised the first part, saying, "This is how you always get in trouble in relationships too, by failing to make a stand early when you should. Better to say something now and have done."
• A third part of me wondered, "Can we treat this email as an experiment? How does she handle criticism? If she handles it well, then you can keep working with her. If she handles it badly, that's an early sign of future trouble."

I thought it a remarkably interesting internal conversation.  

Fortunately the outcome was an anticlimax. Her response was very measured and reasonable. I answered her in a similar vein, thanking her for her answer and focusing on plans for the next step. And all the drama blew over, just like that.

But my renewed awareness of my own emotional volatility—and the interesting three-sided dialogue I held with myself this morning—those things have stayed with me.

           

My daimon

Decades ago—back when I was an undergraduate, in the Carter and Reagan Administrations (or call it the Late Pleistocene, for simplicity)—I used to talk about having a daimon (δαίμων). I'm not sure I meant it literally ... though, to be clear, I'm not exactly sure I meant it figuratively either ... but I used it as a shorthand to describe the inner experience of my approach to my studies that led me to have such a ridiculous academic record. I even had a little story that I would tell along with the claim, as a kind of set piece to explain how scholarship felt to me. It went like this.

Whenever I come back to school after summer vacation, there's a period of time when I really can't study. There's just too much else going on that's more interesting! There are friends to visit with, and there are trees to walk under. There are bright colors outside, there are concerts to attend, and there are pints of Häagen-Dazs at the local 7-11. Why would I want to study? Of course I realize that I have to, and the longer this goes on the more worried I get. What if I can't make myself sit down and study ever again?

And then one day, it's as if I can feel a switch go click inside me. Suddenly all the bright colors wash out till they look like the reflection cast by fluorescent lights. Suddenly everything I eat or drink tastes like coffee. Suddenly I'm just not that interested in going out and exploring the city any more. And suddenly studying is the easiest thing in the world.  

Of course I never meant this literally. My food didn't literally taste like coffee, and I didn't literally lose interest in visiting with my friends. But at a certain level of abstraction, it served as a useful "as-if." And there was indeed something interesting going on when that "switch" went click. There was something that happened that clearly separated the time when I could not focus on my studies, and the time when I could (so it seemed) do nothing else.

That was a long time ago. It has been a long time since I had to study like that—at any rate, since I had to study for months on end—and so the experience kind of faded away. I remembered the story, because I tend to remember stories well. But I wouldn't have identified it as part of my current experience.

But lately I've been trying to make some progress on the book I've told you about. The book that, as late as April, I said I hadn't touched in almost a year. Back in May I contacted someone who gave me a quote on development editing. At the beginning of June, not long before I left for the Ecosophian convention, I sent her a complete manuscript to work on. She sent it back, fully edited, a couple weeks ago—and asked for my feedback.

And what with one thing and another, I have been unable to look at it for more than a few minutes at a time.

Of course there are lots of Good Reasons. I have a regular schedule of blogging to maintain. I went to visit my mother for the Fourth of July. (Son1 and Dorcas visited as well, plus Brother and SIL. It was quite the event.) I had to do my laundry, and to buy groceries. Lots and lots of Good Reasons.

Yesterday, I wasted most of the day on Twitter. So today I told myself for sure that I had to work on reviewing my editor's changes. I sat down and forced myself. And even so, I kept getting distracted by the damnedest stuff. It must have been two hours after I made myself focus on the work, before I'd gotten more than a page or two into it. 

And then after a while—"suddenly," as they say—I was deep inside the work and couldn't think about anything else. I got all the way to the end of it (using one review protocol), and then started over using a second. I got about a third of the way through before I decided to break for dinner. At this rate, I should finish (using the second review protocol) some time tomorrow.  

When I first noticed that my distractability had evaporated, I was simply grateful. 

Then I remembered the story I used to tell.

And I thought—maybe, just maybe, my daimon hasn't left me. Maybe he has just been resting. Maybe he is still there when I need him.

It makes for an exciting story.

           

Apparently "Tanatu" refers to pedantic extremists!

So there I was, minding my own business and wasting time on the Internet, and I decided to google the name that I post under. And I discovered something remarkable. Apparently there is a Muslim hadith explaining that the "Tanatus" shall be ruined!

Wait, really? Who are these doomed Tanatus, anyway?

Well, it turns out that the Fatwa Department of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has a website which very helpfully answers exactly this question. Allow me to quote the question and a selection from the answer.

QUESTION: What is meant by the term ”Tanatu`” and what is meant by the Hadith: “Ruined are those who insist on hardship in matters of the Faith.”

ANSWER: All perfect praise be to Allah. Blessings and peace be upon Prophet Mohammad.

In principle, the term ”Tanatu`” means probing into a matter.”Motanatioon” refers to those who probe into matters unnecessarily.... Ibn Atheer stated: “ (Motanatioon) in the above Hadith are those who probe into matters and insist on hardship in what they say.” [An-nihayah Fi Ghreeb Al-Hadith Wa Al-Atharr]. The term “ Tanatu` “ was used by the Arabs to describe those who show off in their speech and employ awkward words when addressing people so as to win their hearts, and this is forbidden in Islam. [In other words, pedants.]

Later, it was used to describe whoever insisted on hardship in matters, whether by words, or deeds, and so they become far from moderation and balance, which are the spirit of Islam. Some instances of “ Tanatu` “ are: inquiring about non-existent juristic issues, and details of the unseen which none knows but Allah, such as the Spirit and The Day of Resurrection." More meaning go under the term Tanatu' as follow: proclaiming the legal illegal, innovations in religious matters, and insisting on hardship in religious practices, doctrines and thoughts.... [In other words, extremists.] 

Moreover, Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) said (What means): "The religion (of Islam) is easy, and whoever makes the religion a rigour, it will overpower him. So, follow a middle course (in worship); if you can't do this, do something near to it and give glad tidings and seek help (of Allah) at morn and at dusk and some part of night". {Bukhari}....

There's more, but that should give you the gist. "Tanatu" refers to niggling detail when it comes to religious doctrine, to agonizing over every jot and tittle, and to making the compliance with doctrine a matter of pain and anguish for everyone else. Just the word for people like me whose compulsions for pedantic exactitude are so obvious. Now if only we weren't all coming to a bad end!

In the spirit of ... umm, ... scholarly exactitude, the exact reference for this hadith is: Sahih Muslim, Book 34, Number 6450. You can find similar explanations of the text here or here. They all agree that Tanatu is a bad thing.

Oh well. Maybe there is still time for repentance.

           

You can just do things!

A long-expected party

The Ecosophian community is an informal collection of people who follow the books and blogs of John Michael Greer. There is no formal organization; nobody collects dues, or organizes formal events, or publishes meeting minutes. But if you check out either of his blogs—Ecosophia, or Toward Ecosophy—you'll find many of the same people commenting over and over. And of course there are plenty of people (I'm one of them) who rarely comment or post, but who read the materials regularly.

For a few years now, there has been a social gathering of ecosophians in Providence, Rhode Island, on or around the summer solstice.In the past, this gathering generally took the form of a big potluck. I remember seeing the announcements and thinking, "Gosh, wouldn't that be fun!" Of course I never went, because I don't live anywhere near to Providence. There was no simple or easy way to pop over and bring a contribution to the feast, so I didn't think about it beyond that.

You can just do things.

Last year, Greer traveled to Glastonbury, England, in early June. He announced his plans the previous November, and in the end his visit turned into a kind of impromptu convention. People gave talks and workshops. There were (by all accounts) good food, good beer, and good conversation. Of course it sounded like a delightful time in the run-up before it happened; and it sounded even better afterwards. But I'm an American, after all. Glastonbury is a long ways away. I toyed with the idea of going there, but I didn't take it very seriously. So in the end I stayed home, and read about it after the fact.

You can just do things.

Then after the 2025 potluck, the man who regularly organizes the events in Providence proposed that "next year" (meaning 2026) he wanted to change it up a bit. Why not hold a convention in Providence, just like the one in Glastonbury? Surely we have people on this continent who would like to give talks on some ecosophian-related topic? Or workshops? It can't be that hard. So he put out an announcement in July of 2025, for the following year, to get people's attention and start them thinking.

You can just do things.

Wife's view of her move

This evening after dinner, I was sitting at my computer browsing through some old posts and trying to get up the energy to write you about my trip last weekend. In the process, I realized that I used to inject a lot more drama into my posts than I do today, by the simple expedient of quoting Wife's perspective on whatever was going on.

Of course, mostly I don't interact with her any more. I drive to visit her at Son1's apartment a couple of times a year (see, for example, here and here). And even when I find something funny to email her, she very rarely responds.

But back in late May I sent her some information about a Japanese cat, who was made station master of a local train station, and who (after dying) was enshrined as a Shinto goddess. You can find her story here. This email triggered a response (though very little of it had to do with the cat). Writing to me the same day that I got this phone call from Son2, Wife told me all about her thoughts on Son2's upcoming marriage to Beryl, and about her fears related to moving. Here is what she said about the move.

Dream with Father

This will be short, because the dream happened in the middle of the night. I woke up to pee and repeated the core bit to myself but didn't write it down. Now, in the morning, that core bit is all I remember.

Anyway, somewhere in the middle of a dream about something else I saw Father. He was at a moderate weight, which means he was thinner than he had been for most of the time I was alive. He saw me and moved to get closer, which I interpreted as wanting a hug.

I gestured to stop him, and then told him that if he hugged me, I'd have to kill him. He backed off without complaint, though he looked very disappointed. 

At the time, I thought of it in terms of setting and enforcing clear boundaries between us ... which I suppose you could say it was.

Without context, that sounds like an incredibly harsh way to set boundaries. But I realize I have talked about my relationship with my father in posts before now, and in context—also considering that this was a dream—I don't feel like it was so crazy. You can find some of those posts at the following links: from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2023.  

           

Fearing for your children's future

Tonight in the UU Sangha I attend, we started reading a new book for our dharma study, a book by Thich Nhat Hanh about Fear. So during the discussion period, people began discussing their fears. And I heard several of them express fear for their children or grandchildren.

Debbie, for example, is afraid for her grandchildren because her daughter Mattie, and her son-in-law (Mattie's husband), are such martinets, and always yell at their sons (Debbie's grandchildren). Debbie said she's not afraid of dying for her own sake, but she's afraid of the consequences for her grandsons if one day suddenly she's no longer there for them. (To be clear, there's no imminent threat. Debbie's in her early seventies, and she has various ailments that are consistent with her age, including periodic bouts of long COVID and atrial fibrillation. She also has celiac disease, that seems to be slowly morphing into a more generalized autoimmune sensitivity. But she's not on a timeline, with "X years to live"!)

But then another member is worried about his children, too. (I'm pretty sure I haven't given him a name yet.) His kids—a son and a daughter—are legal adults but just barely. They were both adopted out of a dreadful situation, spent their whole childhood being oppositional, and regularly make terrible decisions. So their lives aren't going well, to nobody's surprise. And he's deeply troubled by this.

I think there was someone else too, but I forget the details.

Of course this is common. At some level, everyone who has kids wants those kids to have a wonderful life, free of the spectres that so routinely blight the lives of Other People. That's why I was so upset at the idea that Wife was going to live with Son 1: I wanted him to be able to have adventures in his life (if he wanted them, of course) and I figured there would be no adventures if he were looking after her. As a secondary concern, I feared that living with Wife would ruin his relationship with Wife, although I figured that he was honorable enough he would never throw her out on the street. (Turns out that I called that secondary concern exactly.) 

Wife will be moving soon!

I got a call this afternoon from Son2. Right away he asked if I had a few minutes, because he wanted to discuss a number of things with me.

It was 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, and I was just finishing up breakfast. (I spent too much time this morning pissing around on the Internet.) So of course I told him Sure, I've got time. What's up?

Well.

You all remember Dorcas? Son1's girlfriend? It turns out that not only is she a Ph.D. candidate, but she owns a condominium. Free and clear. No remaining payments. Son1 has decided that he would rather live with her than with Wife (his mother). Maybe that's not a surprise. So he's going to move out of the apartment that he currently shares with Wife. Wife can't afford the apartment on her own, so she has to find somewhere else to live.

Apparently Son1 and Son2 have been discussing this topic at considerable length for some time. At this point, the plan is to move Wife to an independent apartment within walking distance of the house that Son2 and Beryl currently rent. Son2 says that they will stop in a couple of times each week, to make sure that she has meals prepared ahead, and to make sure that she is still surviving OK. He plans to make up a list of non-negotiable demands: that she regularly take her medications, that she not drink, and a bunch of others. If she violates those, then they'll put her in an assisted-living facility where she has no freedom whatsoever. Son2 admitted that the main reason for not putting her in one right now is that they cost too much. I pointed out that Wife would hate an assisted-living facility because she values her freedom so highly; but I added that in general, the less freedom she has, the better her quality of life will be. This is because she reliably makes terrible decisions. Son2 agreed.

Why is she moving to be near Son2 and Beryl, who are far away in a different state? 

Because Son1 is really, really sick of her. Apparently in the very first conversation, Son1 assumed she would have to be near him. But as soon as Son2 remarked that—logically—she could be near either of them, from that moment Son1 took it as settled that she would live near Son2 and not near him.

There was probably more. I don't remember right now. Son2 called me in the first place to ask some details about Social Security and Disability. I told him what I remember, but suggested that he should double-check the details. He said he will.

I also told him to keep me in the loop on the topic of paying Wife's bills. I explained that I'm on a strict budget this year—in fact I'm taking home (in retirement income) only 77% of what Son2 is (and that doesn't count Beryl's earnings)—but I also figured that somehow I still have some responsibility here, at least as long as my sons think they do! I'm the one who married her, after all. I'm the one who saddled them with her as a mother. It's true that I spent thirty years paying her bills more or less single-handedly. But I can't just let it be their problem.

To put it another way: when they can wash their hands of her, so can I.

This evening I got a long email from Wife where she talked about this development, and spent considerable time complaining about it. Maybe I'll put all that in another post. 

           

Forgetting

I was talking with Debbie the other day. In and around everything else, I told her about my last visit to see Mother ... and about my concerns that Mother is getting so forgetful. (I didn't go into details. On the other hand, she dealt with her own mother's decline, so she understands the idea.)

Anyway, in and around talking about how much of a change this is in Mother, since she used to be sharp as a tack, I suddenly remarked on something else.

I have a regular weekly call with Marie. And over the last few months there have been a number of times—two? three? four? something like that—when she has mentioned casually some discussion we had a few months earlier and I haven't remembered it.

So what? Right? How big a deal can it be?

This is where I start to sound unspeakably arrogant. But you have to understand that, for me, what I am about to say is not arrogance but simple reality.

It's a big deal. What I am used to—for decades now, really for my whole life if it comes to that—is that if someone references a conversation we had some time in the past, I remember it! Verbatim. I am used to remembering conversations from a decade ago well enough to be able to say, "Wait, is that what you thought I was saying? Oh no! It's true I used those words, but then I followed up by saying this other thing in the very next breath. And in context I was talking about something totally different." Even if the conversation was ten years ago or more, it would make no difference. I must have made that exact declaration to Wife dozens of times over the course of our marriage, because she was always pulling out some lunatic opinion ... insisting it was mine ... and then justifying herself with, "But you said ...!!" 

And now when Marie tells me that I recommended she buy a bell on this or that website—advice which she took—I have no recollection of the discussion. Sure, it sounds logical. I might have said it. I don't dispute that I said it. But I have no memory of saying it.

My memory used to be flawless. Unimpeachable. The final authority in any dispute. Now? As far as I can tell, now my memory is still pretty good, but no longer perfect. Now it's pretty good, but more or less normal.

How the mighty have fallen.

I know, I know ... it's arrogant to go on like this. And self-centered. Rude. Antisocial. "Not to mention other adjectives," as Tom Lehrer once put it.

It's also depressing. I'm getting old.

In other news, I'm starting to feel it in my knees every time I go up or down stairs. Even a year ago, I think that wasn't true.

Maybe if I lost weight, that might help my knees. Would it help my memory?

           

Son 2 is engaged!

Friday morning, I got a call from Son 2. Wow, two calls in less than a week? What's the occasion?

Turns out he wanted to let me know that Amazon had just made a delivery ... to deliver an expensive package he had ordered not long ago ... containing the engagement ring he had ordered for Beryl.

This is not a picture of Beryl's ring, but just some
random ring I found on the Internet. But that's OK.
I haven't seen Beryl's yet, but this will do.

Aha. Wait ... engagement ring?

Yes, exactly.

And then he told me the story behind it. He burbled. He was clearly—and rightly—very excited. Thrilled. Dancing on air.

And I'm glad for him. As disappointing as my own marriage was in some ways, there is nothing quite like the thrill when you are just about to embark on it. I'm glad he has been able to experience the "dancing on air" feeling.

The back story? Well apparently they've been talking for a while about getting married. Son 2 said that Beryl told him a while ago, If you don't get around to proposing to me this year, I'm going to propose to you next year. And he added that "getting around to things" is often an observable problem for us Tanatus; it's very easy for us to decide that things are good-enough, and just stay in a rut for the longest time before taking any action to change it. So clearly Son 2 chose to break out of this mold, and take decisive action.

He sounds a lot like me, back forty-something years ago when I decided to propose to Wife.

On the other hand, Beryl was out in the field for work right now, and he had not gotten her agreement before buying the ring. Did I mention it was expensive? Now the odds were naturally in favor of her accepting. And they had discussed in general terms what kind of ring she would like, if he were to get her one. He used that discussion to inform his ordering.

So at the time he called me, he was in possession of a Very Expensive Ring, with only a strong hunch that she would say Yes.

Spoiler alert: Of course she said Yes. That was the sum of this morning's text message. So I passed the word to Mother, to Brother and SIL, to Debbie, to Marie and Schmidt. We all agree it's a very exciting time. And, as I say, I'm glad for him.

Do I expect the marriage to go well? I have no idea. They've been together for more than four years now, but I still don't know Beryl very well. When I was courting (living with) Wife before we were married, we lived in an apartment that was just a mile from my parents' house and we came over often for dinner. We were together for a year before the wedding, and by that time my parents had gotten to know her very well ... for good or ill. Son 2 has taken deliberate steps to make sure that didn't happen to him and Beryl. So most of what I know about her is that Son 2 is thrilled to be with her. And I am aware that after a while the romantic thrill passes.

So a little later Friday morning, I pulled out my Tarot deck and asked the question, If Son 2 marries Beryl, will it be a good thing in his life? It's a yes/no question, so I laid out the kind of 5-card reading that I describe (for example) here or here. This reading gives three answers: if they are all Yes or all No, that answers the question; if they are mixed, then the picture is more complicated.

To repeat the question: If Son 2 marries Beryl, will it be a good thing in his life?

Answer: 2 Swords reversed, 5 Wands, Page Pentacles reversed, Queen Cups reversed, Chariot.

• That works out to No, No, and No. 
• I read the individual cards as follows:
• 2 Swords reversed: Son 2 has picked a definite direction, instead of letting himself be paralyzed by sloth or indecision. Doesn't make it a good direction, but it's definite.
• 5 Wands: Family fights. Between the two of them? With her family? With his family? I have no idea.
• Page Pentacles reversed: The book I use glosses this as "Surrounded by people with ideas in opposition to his own," which might explain the family fights (if, for example, his in-laws prove hostile). But this is also the reverse of the card that showed him going to graduate school, so I suppose it might also mean No professional advancement, or Loss of money. Tarot is multivalent that way.
• Queen Cups reversed: My book glosses this as, "Her imagination runs away with her." Is that Beryl? Or does it refer (despite the sex) to Son 2? Does either or both of them have unrealistic expectations for the marriage? (I mean, probably. I think most couples do.)
• Chariot: He may succeed through very hard work, and the marriage may be a steadying factor in his life. He may exercise a lot of control to keep it out of a ditch. But he'll have to.      

Now of course there are a lot of disclaimers that belong here. I've been reading Tarot for a few years, but I wouldn't say I'm brilliant at it. Many of my own readings are a little mystifying to me still, or else they make sense just because my own life is so small and closed, so simple and repetitive. Also, it is supposed to be hard to read Tarot accurately when you are emotionally involved in the outcome. Well, I was. When I shuffled the cards to lay them out, I was still giddy with a kind of contact-high or contagious excitement from our phone call. And in the other direction, my own marriage obviously didn't go that well ^{[citation needed]}, so maybe I'm at risk for worrying too much about him. All of these things are possible.

But mostly I just felt like this reading described my marriage. I blundered into it by making a willful decision to go ahead, I had to learn to exert enormous control, and indeed it did stabilize me. At the same time it exposed me to plenty of fights, plenty of opposition, and plenty of runaway imagination.

Oh, wait. Maybe that's where the disclaimer belongs. Maybe when I laid out the cards, they showed my my marriage and not Son 2's. That would explain why the message looked so familiar.

In any event, I won't tell them what I read. That could turn the prophecy self-fulfilling, when in fact it might just be wrong. I guess we'll see, ... over the next thirty years or so.

I hope it's wrong. And I wish them both well. 

           

"A very Hosea-like way to react"

Son 2 called this afternoon! It was great to hear from him, and it's not like I was getting anything else accomplished anyway. He said according to his call logs we hadn't talked since January. I though we had a call a month or so ago, but I'm not going to argue. As I say, it was great to hear from him.

He started by asking me what's new ("Nothing much. What's with you?"*) and then we started to talk about a problem he's been having at work. Right now today he thinks it's getting better, but he's got a new boss and he's been having a bumpy road getting to where they can communicate successfully. So we talked about it for a while.

We have done this before, and in fact in this conversation he remarked on that. I told him there was nothing strange about it ... it's just that "dealing with the workplace" happens to be an experience he and I have in common, so it makes sense we'd discuss it. I said, "If you told me you had a great idea for a new Tabletop RPG you wanted to lead, I'd be happy to listen but I wouldn't have a lot to contribute to the conversation."

But then we talked more about his new boss. He said that she drives herself too hard, trying to accomplish things that she doesn't need to do because (so far as he can tell) they're not part of her job. Certainly his old boss didn't do any of those things. And she's chronically stressed. But he has also figured out (through trial-and-error) that he needs to be very cautious about offering to help. If the offer lands just a little bit wrong, she's likely to get offended.

Then I had an idea. 

"You know, a long time ago I had a job that they should really never have hired me for. I didn't know how to do it and they had no provision for training me, but the boss decided 'The vibes are right.' [That's a quote!] Also they all thought it would be easy, because the last person to hold the job (who had left to go on maternity leave) made it look easy. But she had grown up with the company since they were four people in a garage, so of course she knew everything already. Anyway, I was tossed into this job and started drowning.

"But the reason I bring it up is that even though I didn't know how to do any of the core tasks, I did learn pretty quickly how to do some of the peripheral stuff. So when I started to panic, I'd go do a lot of those peripheral things. I'd know they weren't the most important thing, but at least I knew how to do them. So I'd focus on the stuff I knew how to do, because when I got stressed I had to do something rather than sit and do nothing. And I wonder if your new boss is in the same boat?"

We talked about her some more, and I'm not sure that's really the best diagnosis for what's going on with her. But I was struck by something Son 2 said, when I described that ancient job of mine.

Right when I said, "I had to do something rather than sit and do nothing," he interjected, "Because that's a very Hosea-Tanatu way to react to that kind of situation."

"I'm sorry. What?"

"That's what you do. You dive in to do what you know. Some people would just figure, 'Hell, they haven't taught me what to do yet, so I'm just gonna sit here till they do.'"

It has been 35 years since I held that job, and that had never occurred to me before.

I don't know how to generalize the observation. In other words, I don't know what to do with it, or how to connect it to anything else that I know about myself. But I figure if I record it here tonight, maybe I'll have some insights about it later. 

__________

* OK, that was a cheap shot. I apologize. I do keep busy—well, kind of—and I'm not at the point yet where I identify with that song. 

           

Mother is aging, 3

Last weekend I drove down to Big City to visit Mother. (I'm writing this on May 2. I visited her April 25-27.) It's starting to worry me, how much she is aging. (See by comparison this post, or this one, or this one.)

The ostensible purpose of the visit was to go through some of Father's old clothes, to see if I wanted any of his old shirts so that she could clear them out of the closet to make room. Father died almost eleven years ago, but it always took my parents a long time to get around to things. Well, we found something like two dozen shirts which both fit me and more or less matched my taste. (Brother and SIL had been there the day before, and had pulled out only two or three.) So I was able to clear a lot of space out of her closets, and it saved me the trouble of having to buy more shirts. That's not where the problem was.

First story

The first morning I was there, I woke up before she did and wanted to check my email. But my computer couldn't find her network. I looked around and saw that she had a new router. But unlike the old one, it did not have the network's name and password on a sticker. So I waited for her to get up. The after breakfast, I asked her about it.

"It looks like you got a new router."

"Oh yes, I did."

"What's the network ID and password? I want to check my email, and I can't connect."

"Isn't it on the router?"

"No, I checked." (But she went to check anyway, which was fine of course.)

"They never gave it to me."

"That's not possible. They have to have given it to you."

"Well they didn't! You know, Brother and SIL were here when they installed the router. Maybe the man gave it to them."

"What?"

"Oh yes. They handled it completely. They did all the interaction with him. So they must have gotten the password from him."

"But then they would have given it to you."

"Well they didn't! I don't have it, and I never got it."

"That's crazy. You have devices that connect to it. All those devices must have been reprogrammed with the new password."

"You'll have to talk to Brother and SIL."

"OK, but they're not here. I can text them, I guess, but they might be busy."

"Well that's what you have to do."

So I texted Brother. I also poked around on Mother's desktop computer to see if I could find any place the new wifi password had been stored. Mother went to get her handwritten password book, and looked up the name of the service provider. There was no entry, and she showed me that to prove that she had never been given the password. I never heard back from Brother. Finally I paged through the rest of her password booklet. At the very end, under "Wi-Fi," was the new password for her new network. I tried it, and it worked.

So I texted Brother, "Never mind. She found it." But wow. How is it possible that she could have concocted this story that they never gave her the new password? Was it a confabulation? For that matter, is it true that Brother and SIL were the ones interacting with the guy from her Internet service? Or did she make up that part when she needed a way to explain why she "never got" the password?