Tuesday, January 17, 2023

 Tuesday, January 17, 2023

   Wow! What a morning! I woke up long before the alarm went off at 5:30 am. I did my exercises but didn’t doze the way I usually do. My mind was at work. The first thing that came to mind was my relationship with Mike. In some critical way, we were on the same page. More precisely, our brains were synchronized.

    Brain synchronization is something we crave. Research has shown that when people hear the same lecture, all their brains show the same firing pattern. It’s why we value common activities in person, like team sports, singing in a choir, a pep rally, or being part of a murderous mob. Sadly, that last one has the same effect on our brains as the other activities. That’s what makes mobs so dangerous.

    I felt that commonality with Mike. I’m not quite sure what aspects of us produced the synchronization. Lord knows we were as different as day and night in much of our thinking. Mike read to fully understand what a great mind had to say. I read to find ideas that would affect my thinking and my life. I didn’t care if I understood what the author had to say. I still don’t get the importance of it. If they were alive and needed me to understand their thinking, as Wittgenstein needed others to understand the difference between seeing and saying, that would be another thing. There has to be a purpose to fully understand what a dead white man said a hundred years ago. It’s not that I don’t think I could benefit from a greater understanding. I do. If someone has an idea worth pursuing, I will read books by them. I want to have my thinking illuminated by theirs. I follow an instinctual feeling about what is right for me.

   As I write this, I can hear the problem with my approach if I apply it to what is currently going on in my life. I am embracing confirmation bias as a way of thinking. Confirmation bias is when we only accept information that affirms what we already believe and reject information that contradicts it. We all suffer from that to a certain extent. I prefer information that gives me new insights, even blows my mind, and shows me a whole new way of seeing the world and myself in it. How accurate is that view of myself? Your guess may be better than mine.

   The difference between Mike and me might be that one of us was a deductive thinker and the other inductive. But I don’t believe that is true. Both of us were inductive thinkers. Mike limited his research to the texts of famous thinkers and writers. I was a phenomenologist. I observed behavior directly and drew conclusions.

   We were both affection junkies. God forbid I had lived with someone who didn’t share that need. I had forty-five years of it. How lucky was I?

   The other thing I thought about as I lay in bed this morning was an incident from over fifty years ago when someone falsely reported me as a 

venereal disease contact. It took me years to figure out who did it.  

      My first thought was of Mike’s ex-wife. He assured me she would never do anything like that. Jean, my Hanai sister, is now one of my best friends. We love each other. She wouldn’t have done something like that to Donald Trump. Mike, Jean, and I were all concerned with questions of ethics. Mike and I shared a philosophical approach to the subject. I don’t mean we were casual about ethics; quite to the contrary. Ethical behavior was fundamental to both of us.    

   I took me many years to figure out the culprits. It was hard to imagine someone I knew well doing such a thing. HK worked for the health department in the VD section. JF called me while Mike and I were on vacation, telling me I had to come home immediately because I had been listed as a VD contact. Really? Why was she going through my mail? Why did she open the letter? I wouldn’t assume I should open the letter to check the information. Lastly, when I came home from my visit to the health department in shock because they zapped me with a heavy dose of penicillin, DF was clearly distressed to learn I hadn’t refused the shot. I hadn’t realized they would administer it without getting the results. I was in shock about the whole thing.

    The only reason for doing it was to force Mike to break up with me. If he had, my whole life would have been ruined. Thinking about it makes me so sad. My life would have been so empty without him. I spent forty-five years loving someone and being loved. I can’t think of anything I could possibly value more. I think dwelling on what might have been easier than dwelling on what no longer is. God, I loved that man. I loved my life with him. I hope I made him half as happy as he made me.

    There is no longer any question in my mind about who reported me. HK initiated the idea, and JF gleefully got on board. DF joined in with a wan smile. SG, HK’s wife, walked away, saying, “I want nothing to do with this. You do what you want,” recognizing she could do nothing.

    They completely underestimated me and Mike. I had been single for thirty-three years and quite active when I met Mike. I told him I didn’t know if I could be sexually faithful. He said, “If you have to, go ahead. Just come back to me.” This is from a man who was utterly committed to sexual fidelity at all costs to himself.  

    Mike laughed when I told him I had been reported as a VD contact. “If you had, you would never have kept that information to yourself.” He understood I was a compulsively honest person.

    The question in my mind is why they did it. At first, I thought HK did it as revenge or something he thought I did to his wife. Both HK and SG had been commune members. They met there. They bonded over the mutual discomfort in their interactions with me. When HK  was assigned to a California VD office for a year, SG stayed in a little room in the commune with banks of windows on two sides. She was freezing cold in the winter. I didn’t understand why. It hadn’t been that cold during the winter before.

     In the spring, she asked me how to open the windows fully. I discovered they had never been latched when I went to unlatch them. I laughed. I would have laughed if it had happened to me. I laugh at absurdities. She had closed the windows but didn’t latch them. That neither one of us thought to check was ridiculous- an absurdity. I thought my attitude might be why HK initiated it.

   Then I thought it might have been because of Mike. While he loved me, he was also somewhat of a prick in the bad ole days. He saw most people as a waste of space. I can see he related to the other members of the commune with an air of contempt. He often spoke disparagingly, even to me. I thought he was being funny. He used to say to me, “What does your little, measly heart want?”  I thought it was a form of affection. It only came out several years later that, no, he was dead serious. What!!!??? Are you kidding? It took me several more years, but I was able to knock that contempt out of him- convince him it wasn’t good. Afterward, he was like a born again. He often referred to his bad ole days when he was arrogant. Once he dropped it, he dropped it altogether. He exceeded me in his compassion for others.

    The question is still, why did those people report me as a VD contact? HK has been coming to mind a lot of late. (Usually, when people I am not in contact with come to mind a lot, I discover afterward they were also thinking of me. A most annoying vulnerability.)  

    There is another possible reason HK had it out for me. HK, L, and I made a trip across the country together. It was an arrangement of convenience. I knew L from graduate school in Wisconsin. I do not remember why I was in touch with L then. The objective was to see the country. The relationships were a matter of convenience.

   We traveled in a Volkswagen bug. I’m not sure if it was HK’s car or L’s. We made the trip on the cheap. We bought a three-person tent and slept in it every night. Seemed reasonable to me. Two days out, HK and L became sexually involved. Huh? Never occurred to me as a possibility. HK held no appeal for me, and L was engaged to be married in September. They became a couple in more ways than sexual. They conferred with each other, making plans and leaving me out of it. I accepted the situation and pretty much stayed to myself. What was I going to do? They didn’t approach me to confer with me about anything. I just kept my mouth shut and made do.

    When I walked along a road in Big Sur, a young blonde man came running up behind me. We talked and became involved with each other. He was a blonde Adonis, a straight Tab Hunter. But that wasn’t his appeal. His appeal was that he liked me. We exchanged numbers. It must have been 1972, well before cell phones. He visited me in Brooklyn at least once. He showed up at the commune. I can’t remember if he called first.

   I remember throwing the I Ching for him the night before he left to show up at a military base for training. Death came up. I remember being upset and saying it could be some change in his psyche. A week after he left, I got a call from his parents. A car had run a red light and sideswiped his car. Everyone was killed. His parents said he talked about me a lot. Huh? Did I underestimate him? Who was he? I didn’t see him as a deep or complex person. Pleasant but not good for the long haul. I was shocked on so many counts to get the news. The I Ching, his death, that his parents thought I was significant enough to call me to tell me. It was all pretty distressing.

  I thought about Roger this morning. I let his energy merge with mine. It’s probably the first time I really let him in. I plan to focus on this more. It’s the least I can do.

   Back to why HK reported me as a VD contact: At some point, HK explicitly asked me if I would have sex with him. I said no. I never found him attractive in any way. He may have done it in revenge for being spurned. Who knows? I will probably never be clear on that issue. It was over fifty years ago. I’m still appalled that I had people in my life capable of this act of malice.

   I Googled HK, JF, and DF to find out where they were. HK died in 2016. It looks like SG & HK had a child; she was born before SG turned 45. JF is gone- breast cancer. DF is thriving.  

   When I first found HK’s name, I read that someone with that name was implicated in an embezzlement scheme. When confronted, he went home and died of a heart attack. I had a surprising response. I was in grief for him and his wife, SG. While the possibility of him being involved in corruption wasn’t too much of a surprise, this man was prepared to use a government agency to wreak his revenge. That he went down a rabbit hole of corruption wasn’t a surprise. But that was not my reaction. I was heartbroken. 

   But it wasn’t the HK I knew. My HK died in 2016. The other one died in 2021. I was relieved.

   Before you think I’m so kind of a fantastic, forgiving person, I didn’t have the same reaction when I heard of JF’s death of breast cancer. I thought, “Good!”  I have no idea why I would forgive HK so much and not JF. They were both involved; the instigators would be my best guess. Who knows! May they both rest in peace.  

    Elsa and I went to Aunty P’s to get more Kangen water. Today, Elsa waited until she was sure we were heading up to Aunty P’s house before she got herself in position to leap out of the car the moment we arrived. Aunty P was sitting on the lanai with her two-year-old grandnephew, Zion. She cared for him while Judy, his grandmother, gave his 7-year-old brother a reading lesson. Zi played with Mr. Potato Head, tolerating Elsa’s demand, and he threw the stuffed mouse again and again.

   Aunty P had to go out and buy another mouse after Elsa ate the insides out of the last one. That freaked me out. How was she going to pass that mass of stuffing? She did.

    When Aunty P, known to me as Paulette, went into the house to fill up my containers with water, Elsa went in with her. I heard Paulette shout, “No, Elsa!”  She went into her house and peed on the floor. She’d been running around for a good forty minutes outdoors. She waited till she got inside to pee. Oh, boy!  

    Yvette closes her door when Elsa comes down to her part of the property. Elsa loves to poop in her house. She will poop in mine only when desperate. Today, I finally opened the doggy door we had put in in anticipation of bringing two Portuguese water dogs with us. They died before we moved, but the doggie door was already in. It’s behind a dresser.   I had to push the dresser aside to get behind it to the door. Now, I have to teach Elsa how to use it.

   Carol dropped off fifteen lilikoi. Some are yellow. Most are a rust color flecked with yellow. I’ve never seen that before. I find them sourer than the yellow ones.