Short Circuits (35 page)

Instruction manuals are another form of logic which totally, completely escape me. I try. Really, I do. I'll buy something requiring “some assembly,” carefully take out the manual, set it and the 4,792 various pieces out in front me. I get perhaps as far as the period in the second sentence in the manual, and I'm totally lost. Where's my logic when I need it?

I really don't have trouble with those things ruled by the laws of science. I may not understand them, but I accept them, if only because I don't feel competent to question them in depth. But it is those things dealing with the human mind and human reactions and responses where the problem comes in. I am constantly dumbfounded by the ease with which most people simply ignore or walk around bottomless chasms of illogic as though they weren't there.

Religion is only one example of how willing people seem to be to accept the most ridiculous premises without the slightest question. Perhaps it is because logic requires a certain amount of question-asking, which in turn requires thought. Much easier to simply accept whatever you're told. Even the most cursory glance at a newspaper, magazine, or television program demonstrates that when it comes logic, the most basic rules of common sense simply do not apply.

Just as The Golden Rule is given universal lip service and is generally universally ignored, so is the totally logical caveat, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Whether it is naivety or greed or a combination of the two, in almost any conflict involving them on the one side and logic on the other, don't put your money on logic.

While I'd love to take the high ground and claim that my life operates entirely on logic, I'm afraid I can't do it. A certain amount of illogic seems to just be a part of the human character. It's the overwhelming disproportion of illogic to logic that worries me.

Did that make any sense?

* * *

WHY AND BECAUSE

I am constantly asking questions to which no one seems to have what I consider to be a logical answer.

“Why” is, even to a child, a very logical question, and my agnosticism stems directly from the dearth of acceptable “becauses” I received to them in Sunday school. Most of the things I was told there struck me, even then, as totally illogical, and they still do. I have always been willing to accept many things on faith, draw the line at mindless acceptance.

My parents were not particularly religious, but my mom thought it would be good for me to be sent off to Sunday school each week. I attended, as I recall, an evangelical church of some kind, and it was not a match made in Heaven. The minister and congregation were of the “we are but dirt beneath God's feet” school, and that concept alone totally alienated me. If God created me in His image, how could I be dirt under His feet? Even in the days before computers, it did not compute. If God is Love, how was it that so many of the people who presumed to speak in His name taught—and teach—hatred and intolerance?

I was constantly reminded of Al Capp's “Li'l Abner,” in which a group called the Lily-Whiters had a marvelous theme song: “We are the Lily-Whiters, brave and pure and strong! We are the Always-Righters; everyone else is wrong.” That pretty much summed up organized religion for me.

The fork in the road, for me, occurred one Sunday, after the usual scaring-the-hell-out-of-everyone (literally) lesson on the evils of just about everything, and on the fires of hell which were lapping at our feet every second of our existence. The teacher went on to contrast this with the glories of Heaven, in which there was never, ever, a single problem or an instant of sadness.

I made the mistake of asking the teacher what I thought was a perfectly logical question: if my best friend somehow goes to hell and I somehow go to Heaven, won't I miss him and be sad because he isn't there with me? The question was greeted with a deer-in-the-headlights stunned silence quickly followed by an out of hand dismissal. That was clearly the end of my formal religious instruction.

I've often wondered how they would have reacted had they known I was gay?

So the church and I parted ways with a mutual sense of relief and I have never willingly entered a church since. (When I do, for funerals or weddings, I am intensely uncomfortable.)

I have no quarrel with those who truly find comfort in organized religion, but I believe (and we are talking here about beliefs) with all my heart and soul…and, yes, I do believe I have a soul…that if everyone were simply to live by the Golden Rule, there would be no need for the Lily-Whiters of organized religion. We could all gather on Sunday morning to socialize and address questions of how to deal with the very real problems confronting mankind: hunger and disease and poverty and rampant social injustice. We should and could concentrate our energies on improving the world in which we are living rather than chasing a dangled carrot of what might come after.

I've never been able to comprehend how normally intelligent people so readily accept illogic on the basis of “faith.” Maybe, again that's one of the reasons I'm agnostic…I just can't do it. The same people who readily understand that laws of the physical universe prevent pigs from flying totally accept without question the proposition that Jesus ascended bodily into Heaven. I'm really sorry, but the word “faith” utterly dismisses logic.

It is not easy to think for one's self, and my main problem with organized religion is that it assumes this responsibility. (“Oh, don't bother yourself with those niggling little ‘why's'…here's what you think:….”)

Faith and logic can find a comfortable balance, the fulcrum of which is the simple word “why?” We should all use that word more often.

LOOSE CHANGE

THE ICE CREAM CONE

There is a gigantic gap between empathy and sympathy. Of the two, empathy is far better. Sympathy too often teeters on the edge of condescension. But the problem with empathy is that it implies one's having had a similar experience.

I seem to insist, in these blogs, upon returning to themes perhaps too often visited before, all of them, in true egocentric form, focused on me. I really can't tell if I return to them as a little boy seeking an adult's sympathy for my personal boo-boos or, as I would really prefer to think, as a reminder of how many astonishing aspects of our daily lives we never give a moment's thought, and simply take for granted.

I of course cannot address how those who experience truly severe, life-changing physical traumas deal with it, and when I think of those who have lost a limb or survived horrendous burns I am truly ashamed of myself for spending so much time bewailing my own petty problems. But I do think it is important for each of us to stop every now and again, when we're in the course of doing something we do so routinely every day, to appreciate just how very, very lucky we are.

Most of my complaints, as you've undoubtedly noticed if you've read more than a half dozen of my blogs, center on the simple act of eating—one of the most natural and frequent of human activities. We all do it every day. We open our mouths wide to take a huge bite of something, chew, enjoying the taste, and swallow. So? So have you ever given even a moment's thought to the infinite number of actions actually involved in just that one bite of food? Jaw muscles must open the mouth wide enough to take the food in, then work to chew. Saliva must be produced to mix with the food as it's being chewed to enhance the food's flavor, help process and moisten it for swallowing, and then to somehow alert the brain to when it is time to swallow.

I became excruciatingly aware of how amazingly complex such a simple act is following my successful bout with tongue cancer in 2003, about which I've talked often. I've mentioned that the 35 radiation treatments necessary to kill the cancer also totally destroyed my salivary glands, and until I no longer had them, I was totally unaware of how vital they are to the processing and taste of food. Being effectively unable to swallow properly during and long after the treatments, I was fed by a stomach tube for seven months. Not using jaw muscles to open and close the mouth other than to talk for seven months effectively combined with the effects of radiation to pretty much atrophy them. I still, despite extensive therapy, am unable to open my mouth wide enough to eat a sandwich or to stick my tongue out far enough to properly wet my lips. These were things I had done without a single thought all of my life—things you still do. Have you
ever
consciously thought about them?

Perhaps it is an example of the human tendency toward optimism (or the refusal to face facts) that after six years, I still have not gotten used to it. I simply refuse to believe that I will never again eat as I used to…as you do now. During an out-of-town friend's recent visit, we went to Chicago's Navy Pier and stopped for an ice cream cone, which I realized I'd not had for a very long time. I soon was reminded of why. Being unable to stick my tongue far enough out of my mouth to lick an ice cream cone, I had to try to eat it in bites, which, due to my inability to open my mouth wide enough to do it properly, meant that with each bite I had to wipe ice cream off the tip of my nose. Plus I too-late remembered I'd been advised not to eat ice cream at all, since when it melts enough to swallow, those prone to aspirating liquids—a common problem in neck and tongue cancer survivors—it often ends up going down into the lungs.

Par for the course so far, but hardly the end of the tale. Though I have no salivary glands, there are apparently a great number of smaller, liquid-producing glands which kick in while eating, probably in an unsuccessful attempt to compensate for the lack of saliva, with the result that when I open my mouth to speak while and for some time after eating, the liquid tends to pour out all over the front of my shirt, which it of course did in this instance.

So I excused myself as best I could, got up from the table, tossed my three-bites-taken, $6.75 ice cream cone (things are not cheap on Navy Pier) into the nearest trash can, and found my way to the nearest washroom.

Yeah, I know all this sounds like one huge bid for sympathy, and I'm sorry if that how it appears. It is merely the most direct way I could think of to give you a vague idea of something you've never experienced and hopefully never will, in hopes you will stop to give thanks for what you have.

Now go have yourself a Big Mac with fries for me.

* * *

ALICE GHOSTLEY

Everyone who remembers Alice Ghostley, please raise your hand. If you're old enough to remember the old “Bewitched” show, she played Esmeralda…and also appeared on “Designing Women.” Once you saw her, you never forgot her face or her voice.

I first saw her on Broadway in the revue
New Faces of 1952
(which also launched the careers of Eartha Kitt, Robert Clary of “Hogan's Heroes” and a number of other rather well known performers). Alice was wonderful, and I can still sing…albeit badly…every word of her solo number, “The Boston Beguine” (“
I met him in Bos-ton, in the native quar-ter; he was from Har-vard, just across the boar-der....
”).

She died last week of colon cancer at the age of 81, and I am truly saddened by her death.

So very, very many celebrities…once household names…whom we watched in our favorite movies or listened to on radio: so much truly incredible talent…are now all but forgotten. Danny Kaye, Kay Keiser, Lionel Barrymore, Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, Sidney Greenstreet, Phil Harris, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Mollie, Hattie McDonald…there's not enough room to list them all.

Each one of them brought pleasure to tens of millions of people, and it is awesome (to me) to realize that not only are the stars now gone, but most of the entire population of the world who were alive during their heyday!

I do not grow old alone: I'm part of an entire generation…a huge block of, again, tens of millions of people who are now the same age as I, if they are alive at all. All the beautiful young men of my own generation, for whom my chest ached, are now no longer young nor beautiful. My friends, my family, everyone who in my heart and mind are exactly as they were so many years ago have also been subject to time's rational but unkind forward march. Is it any wonder why I so resent reality?

When I sit behind the information desk at my part-time weekend job at the Century Shopping Center, I watch the beautiful young men coming and going from Bally's gym (oh, and there are of course beautiful young women as well, though they are largely invisible to me, just as I am invisible to younger gay men), I find no comfort in their total, blithe ignorance of the fact that as I was once them, they will be me. Life comes equipped with blinders, and the young have absolutely no doubt that they will be young forever. Or, if they are aware of it, they consider it so far down the road it isn't worth giving a thought. The grasshopper and the ant.

And if you never had the pleasure of seeing and/or hearing Bea Lilly, or Fanny Brice or Rosalind Russell, or Richard Egan or Robert Stack or…you have been robbed. There are few things more irritating than hearing some “old fart” saying “Now, in my day…”, but don't sell them short. Fifty years from today, who will remembering the likes of Britney or Kevin or P-Diddy-Whatever or The Smashing Pumpkins? It ain't the same, kid. It ain't the same.

Alice, I miss you.

* * *

GRATITUDE

Gratitude is something far more commonly felt than expressed. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that the words “Thank you”—the two words most used to express gratitude—are an automatic social and cultural response to even the smallest favor, from a “gesundheit” to being handed a receipt at a check-out stand, and often seem inadequate.

“Thank you” is just the thinnest surface layer of gratitude. Under “Thank you” lie an infinite number of layers, depending on the degree of gratitude felt, and the deepest layers of gratitude can never be adequately expressed.

Gratitude is a tree which grows from the seeds of kindness, and kindness is freely given without thought of repayment. But I consider gratitude to be a form of acquired debt which must be repaid. Far too many people, if the concept of gratitude being a debt even occurs to them, repay it with I.O.U.s or promissory notes.

I realize that I do far more bitching and moaning and complaining than is warranted by circumstance. I talk endlessly about what is wrong with the world (and there is much to talk about), yet very seldom express my equally boundless gratitude for the positive things in my life and in the world.

First and foremost, my gratitude for having been given, and still having, the gift of life cannot possibly be put into words. That gratitude is followed closely by my gratitude for my relative good mental and physical health. Despite my share of physical problems, I realize that compared to what others go through, mine, as Humphrey Bogart says in
Casablanca
, don't amount to a hill of beans. Which doesn't stop me from complaining anyway. I am what I am.

I am also infinitely grateful to having been born into the family I was. There are no words or combination of words capable of conveying my gratitude to my parents. How could there possibly be, when I owe them so much? Every member of my family, from my grandparents through my aunts, uncles, and cousins, have never been anything but completely loving and supportive, and I realize that there are, tragically, many people who cannot say the same. And though my parents and most of my immediate family are now gone, my gratitude to them for having them to enrich my life remains undiminished.

Beyond the circle of immediate family is another circle, of friends. I am grateful to have been blessed with an extended family of wonderful friends who shore up my fragile ego and are unfailingly there when I need them. That they also put up with my…shall we say, “minor eccentricities”…and constant complaining is proof positive of the incalculable value of friendship.

One problem with expressing gratitude is, in fact, in finding how to do it properly and proportionately. Too-frequent and too-effusive expressions of gratitude soon lose their effectiveness and become the equivalent of a “thank you” given someone who holds a door open.

I've come to the conclusion that perhaps the best way to express gratitude is not through words but actions. Small gestures: a phone call, a sincere compliment, an invitation to coffee or a movie or dinner can speak more clearly than words. Something so small as being willing and making yourself available to listen to problems which may not directly concern you.

Gratitude is too often overlooked as a real and valid emotion, yet it, our individual awareness of it, and how we each respond to it, help to shape and define us as human beings.

And in case you were wondering, I'm grateful to you for reading my blogs.

* * *

COLDS, SPECIFIC, AND STOICISM, GENERAL

I have, at the moment of this writing, a cold. Like most of my colds, I was perfectly fine yesterday morning, just minding my own business when it snuck up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. And when I turned around to see what it was, it slammed me into the wall, the force clogging my sinuses to the point of being unable to breathe through my nose and making sleeping in larger than three minute segments next to impossible. My brain has largely been removed and replaced…temporarily, I would hope…with chunks of brick and broken concrete. Were I to fall into deep water would undoubtedly immediately sink to the bottom.

So what am I doing trying to write a blog under such conditions? Well, it's rather like continually blowing my nose hoping to clear the nasal airways sufficiently to breathe: I don't want to totally lose the power to think, though it is a battle, so I force myself to write. Though I'm not particularly sleepy, part of me wants to just go lie down “for a minute or two,” knowing full well that not only would it not be for a minute or two but that when I got up again I'd be even more tired than I am now.

Because, as I've mentioned, I try to have a backlog of blogs stored up like cordwood beside a fireplace, by the time you read this I will undoubtedly be back to normal and debate whether I should even post this, now that the cold is gone. I will, of course, simply because I find it nearly impossible to just throw away something I've written.

I don't like colds. I don't like being anything other than as I normally am (which is once again a reason I am so disturbed by the fact that the medical treatment without which I would not be alive turned me into someone I never was before). However, when I am however slightly out of sorts, I do have a tendency to pamper myself shamelessly…lying on the couch reading, for example, when I know I should be sitting here at the computer writing.

Those who are fortunate enough to almost never experience anything but good health tend to overreact when illness does come along. I cannot remember, quite honestly, when I last had a headache, or a seriously upset stomach (and I don't have either now).

A friend from grade school, with whom I reestablished contact after 50 some years, lost his wife recently. She had been ill for a number of years, her activities seriously curtailed, with frequent trips to various doctors and hospitals to determine exactly what was wrong with her. But she never complained. The way she was was simply the way she was, and while she most certainly would have preferred it to be otherwise, the fact that she could not change her condition largely inured her to it. So what right do I have to complain about a common cold?

There is much to be said for stoicism, in major crises and minor irritations, and I greatly admire those who adopt it.

Stoicism in a culture, such as is practiced by many Asian societies, is often a deterrent to progress: accepting things as they are means there's little point in working for change. But individual stoicism can be an invaluable asset, if it is accepted that there is nothing at all we can possibly do to alter one instant of the past, but that that should not stop us from working for a better future.