Marianne Williamson

Writing about Sports

Bill Ward:

Sports was never really about sports, but about the people who played them. The best thing about the sports is its humanity. Write the humanity.

Bill Plaschke

Judgments

Anne Lamott:

I didn't know how to let go of judging people so quickly, on how they look, or dress, or speak, so I couldn't stop judging myself.

Yes. My daily struggle...

About this time yesterday, I was down on our finger in the harbor taking care of my boat. A couple, a man and a woman materialized, just out for a look-around stroll. The man appeared to be about ten years older than I and the woman a mite younger than he. Both of them looked every inch sailors, but they were dressed like New Englanders, not Californians. They were both of lean stature and weathered face. He was sort of dependant on her for moral and physical support. I initiated a conversation. He had circumnavigated the earth twice under sail. I expressed my respect for that. His boat was in Mexico, her boat was in Maine. They had never sailed together, and I got the impression they would never be able to. But they clearly loved each other and they embodied the words my minister said to me from his pulpit Sunday:

As we age, we should aim to get better as opposed to getting bitter.

Heard on NPR This Morning

Interview  with James Ellroy:

Ellroy: "I'm looking for the guy who invented sex."
Interviewer: "Why?"
Ellroy: "I want to find out what his next project is."

Taxes

Tax the 1%

Make that 76!!

Ezekiel J. Emanuel makes a compelling argument. Please read it all here! Here are some salient excerpts:

Rather than saving more young people, we are stretching out old age.

. . . .over the past 50 years, health care hasn’t slowed the aging process so much as it has slowed the dying process.

. . . .a key issue with aging: the constricting of our ambitions and expectations.

. . . . My view does have important practical implications. One is personal and two involve policy.

Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either. Today, when the doctor recommends a test or treatment, especially one that will extend our lives, it becomes incumbent upon us to give a good reason why we don’t want it. The momentum of medicine and family means we will almost invariably get it.

My attitude flips this default on its head. I take guidance from what Sir William Osler wrote in his classic turn-of-the-century medical textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine: “Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old man escapes those ‘cold gradations of decay’ so distressing to himself and to his friends.”

My Osler-inspired philosophy is this: At 75 and beyond, I will need a good reason to even visit the doctor and take any medical test or treatment, no matter how routine and painless. And that good reason is not “It will prolong your life.” I will stop getting any regular preventive tests, screenings, or interventions. I will accept only palliative—not curative—treatments if I am suffering pain or other disability.

I am 75. I have reached Emanuel's goal line. Touchdown! But now I am entering the endzone. Does that mean I'm celebrating? I don't know. But this week I have purchased the only item which was ever on my bucket list. And it's been on that short, short list a very long time. Expensive. A stretch. Definitely out of my comfort zone. But there it is...

Inherited Wealth

Heard this in an interview by Terry Gross on NPR yesterday:

Terry Gross:

. . . . . thinking about the psychological impact of inherited wealth, the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang on to it, the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire, the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich.

Can you talk about the downside of that kind of legacy of money?

Edward St. Aubyn:

Generating their characteristic disguise as the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation and perfect taste, the defeated, the idle and the frivolous, and their opponents, the standard bearers, all living in world that the dense glitter of alternatives made it hard for love and work to penetrate.

And as we know, Freud famously said that love and work is what keeps us sane. So the downside of this world being talked about there or being thought about . . . is that it's very difficult for love and work to penetrate it.

Why is this so evocative for me? Guess I'll have to read the last volume of Edward St. Aubyn's autobiographical novel? And find out? I think so....

Eight Bells

It's hard to talk about Lewis. He was a dependable crew for us for a few years. He was good foredeck. Fearless in stormy seas, as I remember. On the subject of  spinnaker/no spinnaker, he would always say "Put it all up! Let God take it down." He always said he would solve problems. Trouble-shooter. That's what he said he was. Lewis also found me a very crewman, who's turned out to be a golden and valuable, almost indispensable bowman. I am eternally grateful.

The problem with Lewis was chemistry. After a couple of years, he and I parted our on-board companionship. By mutual and unspoken consent. Ashore, Lewis & I continued to celebrate our friendship. He always had a strong and warm smile & hand shake. Besides sailing memories, we shared a diagnosis. Prostrate Cancer. He was a significant younger man than I. I always thought he had more time than I. But he passed sometime today. (The note was up on the board tonight.) The business between us was unfinished.

MoveOn Dot Org Rally

Planning to meet up at Congresswoman Lois Capps office today, mid-morning.

Dear Congresswoman Capps:

In some parts of the country, state laws cutting early voting opportunities and implementing misguided voter purges have deterred citizens from the ballot box. In other regions, poor election administration has left people standing in line for hours in order to vote. Our democracy must be centered on principles of one person, one vote. The Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014, has already been introduced. Please support this critically important measure!

Ralph W. Rawles

Santa Barbara CA 93109

Doberwoman will accompany me. Yep, she's being used as a political pup today.

Delayed Mail

Hi John,

I am writing to you across four decades of life and death. I am aware that you passed away a couple of decades ago from lung cancer. You may have well been a chain smoker when we knew each other. I don't know. We all smoked back then. I smoked a pipe back then so you boggarting joints might not have made a big impression on me.

In 1970 you were Associate Professor of Government and International Relations at Claremont Graduate School. You became my advisor on my dissertation, which had already been stillborn for six years. It is so painful for me to remember this now. Then I could not face this. I could not face myself.

You were a breath of fresh air. Open, authentic, honest, fearless. You were comfortable in your own skin. Comfortable with change. You had sparking blue eyes, earrings, Kaftan, boots and ambience of genial testosterone. It was rumored that you were bi-sexual! Did that threaten me, too? I was afraid to have a cup of coffee with you.

Your initial impulse was to restructure my dissertation project into something of more limited scope. You were invested in me helping myself. How could you help, you wanted to know. You set up due-dates for me to get things done. When I didn't have them done, You called. I was afraid to answer the phone. But I tried to keep my distance, fight you off. I did not want my dissertation saved. I did not want to be saved. I did not want to face myself.

You wanted to get to know me, even tried to get me to invite you to go sailing. And that was not a dishonest or insincere suggestion, I realize now, in view of the fact that you eventually became a surfer-dude in New Zealand.

In 1970, many of us students needed direction. The country had gone to hell. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy had been killed. The Republicans stole the presidency, escalated the Vietnam war into Cambodia. Kent State was about to explode. You were younger than the other professors. You 'got' us. You were looking for directions your students could re-direct their thought in order to avoid the absolute corruption into which America had fallen. You mirrored my extent mistrust of an academic intellectualism which denied the humanizing influence of emotional experience and reflection.

If I had opted to let you into my life, who knows what might have happened? Would I have turned my dissertation over to you? Should I have surrendered my dubious work to you? That's how some grad students got through: serving as a willing mouth-piece spokesman for their advisor. Would I have become one of your satellites?

I don't know. But I would not have settled, as I did, for decades of working as a fake high school teacher.

You bent over backwards to help me out of my shell. I never said good-bye, or thanked you for your efforts. I do so now.

~~Wann

Dream

Morning after that new/novel, excruciating pain in my left leg experienced last night while I was wrestling with the docking station. Woke up with a dream.

I was seeing a new physician. I suspected I had a heart condition. This was my second appointment. He was presenting the results of their tests from the first visit. He was saying I was all clear from my feared diagnosis. But he enquired as to how much tension I was under. I allowed that my life wasn't that well balanced. (Thinking of my intensity-driven competitive and segmented compartmentalized life. But, I volunteered, my brother was much better off. His life was spontaneous and well balanced. He worked hard, played hard, and had lots of friends.

The way things were? No. The way things 'should have been? I'm not saying things would have turned out differently if he had lived. I'm just sayin' . . .

Family & Friends

It's really cool when your entire family become like your friends and all your friends become jelled like your 'another' family.