Driving back from Hayward, Wisconsin, where I was fishing for Muskie last July, I had an interesting experience.  I took back roads for the first two hours, watching the transition from northland to farmland, paying close attention to roadside retail, building construction, trees, foliage, birds and cloud formations.  I was by myself.  The window was down.  No radio or tape was playing.

At Osseo, I got back on the highway and started paying closer attention to the sky.  About two months earlier, my attention had turned to trees and clouds.  I have been examining these two things in more detail than has been my custom in the past.  The clouds above Highway 94 north of Madison were extraordinary.  My attention became riveted starting about 3:00 in the afternoon.

The clouds were mostly very high, and the horizon was relatively free from nearby tall trees or buildings.  Several kinds of clouds were on display, appearing in several shades of gray and white.  A rain front was to my right and rear as the front moved from Minnesota toward Illinois.  Patches of blue sky mingled with dark clouds, wispy clouds, puffy clouds and distant, flat fields of clouds.

In front of me,…

There is this thesis that I’ve been playing with.  Like the experience physics theorists have described, it seems too beautiful to not be true.  Nevertheless, Stephen J. Gould has described the trap biologists sometimes get themselves into, the dogged pursuit of a beautiful thesis that turns out to be false.

The thesis I am now exploring has been developing since late 1997.  It has grown deeper with time.  Earlier immersion in works by William Irwin Thompson and Riane Eisler prepared me for what followed.  It started out as an exploration of how Darwin’s theory of sexual selection juxtaposed with Chris Knight’s explanation of matrifocal human evolution.  This insight was joined by Gould’s description of heterochronic processes, associated with Norman Geschwind’s studies of cerebral lateralization and Annett’s discoveries regarding handedness distributions.

Darwin, Knight, Gould, Geschwind and Annett each offered pieces that suggested an integrated whole.  Sexualselection.org describes the thesis, introduced in 1998.

I struggled to write a larger, cogent overview of the thesis but a combination of deep disappointment around failed attempts to start conversations with academics (many polite responses, little enthusiasm) and the need to make a living (my former business took a dive) propelled me to put my theorizing…

Healing hearts can take a lifetime.  For many of us, it seems like a central responsibility in life is paying attention to our selves, mirroring our selves, listening to our selves in ways that we can finally feel embraced.

This can take a while, particularly if our personality structure tends toward self obsession.

For me, forgiving myself, being present to myself, respecting the feelings that I experience has been necessary to be able to be open to others, or at least to feel myself feeling open to others.  I suspect I love more often than I am aware of, engaging in stealth affection, hiding my attraction to others from myself.  I can’t imagine how it is that so many people love me if they haven’t experienced that I, at least to some degree, love them back.

Where am I going with this?

When I am aware of what is going on in my chest, where affection seems to center itself, it is usually asthma.  I have been pumping adrenaline into my system through inhalers, on and off, for 50 years.  It is no big surprise that I tend to dissociate from chest experiences, feeling like every hit of albuterol is…

I’m finding myself drifting in the direction of not having the operation to prevent the rupture of my cerebral aneurysm.  It’s been a week since meeting with the surgeons.  They told Marcia and me that a cranial intervention made the most sense.  The choice was between an arterial approach, operating from inside the aneurysm, strengthening its walls, or opening up my head and addressing the problem from the outside, where it is possible to see the tiny arteries (peripherals) that, if damaged, could cause a stroke.

They conducted a procedure (described here) about three weeks ago to gather information that would tell them the best route to go.  They discovered that if they were prevented from adjusting the aneurysm in the way that they wanted to during the cranial intervention, they could shut off my left carotid artery, relieving the pressure on the aneurysm.

The chance of rupture is about 2.5% in any given year.

So, this is not a matter that requires an immediate decision.  The aneurysm has no symptoms, though it could be related to headaches.  They’re not sure.  If I choose an operation, there is about an 8% chance of stroke.  The doctors recommend…

Well, the surgeons recommended cranial intervention.  Operating through arteries from the inside of the aneurysm risks damaging the tiny “peripheral” arteries that are inside the aneurysm.  They can see those arteries from the outside.  They can’t from the inside.  There is approximately a 10% chance of serious problems, mainly stroke.

This continues to be an astonishing adventure.  Dread and anxiety are, of course, part of the process.  What surprises me is the increased experience of being in the now as I pay far closer attention to the changing of the seasons, the spiritual in the everyday and my relationship with that part of myself with no personality, history or individual focus.  I am feeling humbled.

Ten years ago, when Marcia was having serious uterine pain, the doctors weren’t sure what it was, but they said cancer was a possibility.  There was about a two-week period of not knowing what was going on before the operation, which revealed that the symptoms were from endometriosis and were not life threatening.  During that two-week period, I felt far more dread than I have during my own life-threatening experience.  I was more upset than Marcia by what was happening.

Regarding the aneurysm, Marcia seems…

During work or life, I don’t generally write down ideas when something occurs to me to write about.  It’s so clear that my conscious self has so little influence on what I do that I just give in to what emerges.  I continue to be astonished at what comes out.

Just now, seeking to find one of those ideas that have been floating around in my mind for the last few days, I realize it is the shape of the idea that I am looking for.  I’m not trying to remember the words but the form.  If I can grasp its form, the words follow.

I’m one of these people that remember phone numbers by the way they look, feel and sound.  The keypad on the telephone has a shape when I punch the numbers.  I recall the pattern, the motion I make and the beeping melody.  The number sequence is the result of other sense interventions.

I go to the brain surgeon today.  He will tell Marcia and me which intervention he recommends for the cerebral aneurysm behind my left eye.  All interventions have risks, but supposedly fewer than 10% of the operations result in stroke.  I’m wondering how…

Marcia and I live in an old row house 12 blocks from Chicago.  The maple in our tiny backyard is massive, making it impossible to grow vegetables and fruits.  With the abundance of shade, Marcia attends to plants and flowers.  I miss growing pumpkins, strawberries and sunflowers.

We have six birdhouses, some with families.  The tiny sparrows emerged in late spring.  Looking out the back door one June morning, I saw a baby sparrow on a branch, a tiny bunny in the grass and two new squirrels beneath the bird feeder.  We keep the four bird feeders filled.  This draws lots of life besides the sparrows and finches.

Elia saw three raccoons on our steps at 3:00 a.m.  Two were tiny.  Possums wander through.  One May morning we were alerted to something unusual in the backyard when several squirrel alarms went off, a sort of clicking, squawking noise.  There was a coyote standing amongst the birdhouses.

The last place we lived, near Damen and Roscoe in Chicago, I dug up the backyard and turned it into a garden and tortoise run.  Five box turtles wandered amongst the strawberries, tomatoes and cucumbers through spring and summer.  I’d rarely see them, though…

The carotid artery balloon angioplasty procedure occurred yesterday.  To get more detailed information on the cerebral aneurysm I have behind my left eyeball, they shut off my left carotid artery for 45 minutes while observing the repercussions.  What was required was snaking two long wires from my groin to my head.  One shut off that blood flow; the other snaked around through my brain to watch that effect from the aneurysm perspective.  The procedure required my being fully awake.

I think they call it a procedure, not a surgery, because there is no attempted intervention.

I was awake the whole time in order to answer questions so that the doctors could make sure the procedure was not causing a stroke.  There were two anesthesiologists.  Their job was to keep me aware enough to answer those questions.  I was told about halfway through the procedure that I would not remember any of it.

Right now it is the following morning.  I remember all of it, clearly.  I’m waiting to be told I can go home from the hospital.

From the time they began until they finished was almost three hours.

At the very beginning, literally while I was being wheeled into…

On weekends over the last two months, I’ve been writing down the story of a series of dreams I had that began 17 years ago and lasted almost a year.  The dreams were referring to events I’d forgotten that happened to me when I was very small.  It wasn’t until the last dreams in that series that it was revealed that there had been something hidden.

Making clear what the dreams unearthed has been requiring my describing the main characters of my childhood and events in my adult life leading up to the dreams.  The writing has involved my being honest with myself and candid about the behavior of close relatives.  I’ve also discovered that there are only so many synonyms for terror, the emotion that seems a theme throughout the piece.

Sixteen years ago, after the primary dream revelations, I sat down with friends and family to describe what had likely happened.  A particularly odd second set of revelations proceeded to emerge.  Somehow, over the course of my adult life, I’d picked as close friends people that had been sexually abused as children, friends that never shared with me those experiences.  Upon my telling them what happened to me,…

I get into these spaces where I feel driven, pushed to perform, in a relatively relaxed kind of way.  I pace myself.  I exercise, meditate, eat pretty well and pay attention to my body to some degree to make sure I can continue to perform.  I push.

With time I’ve grown accustomed to my rhythms as I have to what my body won’t digest and so get good results from the time that I am awake each day.  There is fear that acts as motivator.  There is also a sense that I am a mere moment, inches away from union, from significant understanding.

For example, I go through stages where I won’t watch movies while I exercise.  I don’t want to waste time on entertainment when I could be learning, absorbing, getting clues to the way the world works.  I watch academic lectures on DVD instead.

I crave connection and so continually explore my world for evidence of connections I can’t see.

My tendency to be aware of the boundaries between life and death has been enhanced by my having become aware that I have a brain aneurysm and by the possible surgery for the brain aneurysm.  It feels like…

When I was a young child, I was terrified by death.  As a boy in my room in the dark with the night-light and my dog, I’d make sure all doors and drawers were closed and that my hands did not stray too far away and be grasped by monsters.  Anxiety, and often terror, was familiar.

The experience of feeling frightened so frequently over such a long period of time generates a kind of intimacy that itself creates an unexpected product.  The world acquires a vast presence that feels accompanying.  It’s not a pleasant feeling of an attendant familiar.  The variations of fear that include nervousness, anxiety, fear and terror began to inform who I was and how I experienced my self.  A hypersensitive theory of mind resulted, preceded at first by my having little idea of what another person might be thinking or feeling and then evolving to a certainty that what another person might be thinking and feeling had to do with me.  I see strangers.  I see them look at me.  I assume they are thinking something negative about me.

How I felt, informed how I believed the world to be.  Frightened of so much, the world…

People can be so vain that they believe that being thought vain would be an assault to their persona.  So, they compensate by making sure that they appear unkempt in both the way they look and how much they seem to care when others regard them.

People who are aware that they are deeply narcissistic, ashamed that this is the case, might be appalled that someone thinks they are narcissistic, and so they pay close attention to their behavior, encouraging the exhibition of sensitivity and compassion.

I’ve noticed in my male friends and in myself varying degrees of obsession/compulsion as we now begin the process of winding down our lives.  We are stalked by a deep desire for sex and/or immortality.  I’m not even exactly sure how the two are different.  At a younger age, the craving for sexual union was far stronger, but there were undertones of desire for immortality.  But when one is growing older, the desire for immortality, if anything, seems to have intensified.  And, now that I think of it, sexual fantasies now often culminate with the making of a baby.  This was never the case when I was young, though when young I engaged in…

Well, on Monday Marcia and I sat down with the brain surgeon.  The aneurysm in the second MRA was not larger than the test from six months ago.  It is truly staggering that the Evanston clinic used a different calibration protocol than the Chicago office, resulting in a large enough size difference that the chances for a rupture in any given year was off by almost an order of 10.

Regardless, with a worst case scenario of a 50/50 chance of rupture in the next 20 years (there was an even far worse prognosis by another surgeon), I’ve decided to have the operation sometime this summer.

First, the surgeon will conduct a rather surreal test where they run a balloon up my neck, diverting the activity of the left carotid artery while running blood vessel submarine telescopes up my arteries, through my groin.  They’ll take videos of my aneurysm while monkeying with the carotid artery, which includes shutting it off.  They’ll follow that with more brain scans with radioactive markers.

All this will occur while I’m fully awake with so I can provide information on the effects of the procedure, responding to questions while they examine the video.

With the…

There are lots of unresolved riddles circulating around the various patterns that I sift through while looking for relationships that suggest how human evolution unfolds.  Actually, it’s more like sifting through patterns or relationships feeling for answers, waiting for a “thunk” experience when the tumblers all line up.  Often, I sense an answer is sitting waiting, and I wander in a particular direction; it sometimes takes me weeks to get there.  Sometimes the solution leaps upon me, and I had no idea it was hiding.  I’m only half aware I carried a riddle seeking answers.  The surprise can occur while writing.  I can start an essay and somewhere over the course of the piece a connection is made that was not there even one sentence before my fingers were typing out the insight.  At other times, an unraveling can occur while I’m involved in an unrelated, pleasant kinesthetic experience such as taking a bath or sitting on the toilet.

Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote a book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, that is the closest thing I know of that explores how insight or the “ah ha” experience occurs.  I often find myself as fascinated by the process of pattern…

Marcia noticed it before I did.  In deep thought, seeking answers to difficult problems, I tap out intricate percussive patterns by clicking my fingernails or by tapping my fingers, often to subtle swaying of my body.  I think thoughts by making music, percussive music, tying together the different mental threads.  I seek assimilation of the feelings in my body, the sounds that those feelings make and the words in my mind representing ideas mating to create unique progeny solutions.

My son, Elia, noticed that he and I both unconsciously, constantly, tap out on the steering wheel percussive riffs that seem to reflect unconscious mental activity.  Marcia has noticed how often he and I engage in evidently unconscious rhythm patterning.  She’ll observe us both quietly standing and tapping fingers to a hidden dance, occasionally both of us listening to the same invisible tempo, unaware that we’re both moving to an identical flow.

There was a point in my life when I practiced sensory acuity.  I was training to become a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  I remember sitting in the back of a bus headed down Broadway in winter Chicago.  I placed myself in a trance while observing the shoulders of maybe…

I have an old compulsion.  It’s not clear when it emerged.  This constant urge is characterized by my seeking ways to make two or more things not obviously connected, connected, in as few steps as possible.

In high school, I wrote papers that sought to integrate subjects or themes at best only tangentially related.  In chemistry, I wrote a piece on motorcycle engine engineering.  In English, I penned a short play using characters from three books I was supposed to be writing a book report on.  I sought to push the boundaries of what intuitively seemed related.  My teachers criticized me for a seeming inability to follow directions and write a paper on a single subject.

I remember creating a drawing in art class with a middle-class man’s head on a T-Rex body, and I titled it “Alfred K. Prufrock.”  That drawing summarized what I was seeking, a way to integrate opposites so the world made sense.

I longed for a world that revealed integration.  Seeking relief from anguish and self-recrimination, I often dissociated to a degree that allowed a matching of opposites in my imagination that refused to ally themselves in my emotions.

I felt torn.  I sought unification.…

I think I was in seventh grade when I remember thinking to myself that it seemed that my immediate circle of friends and I were unusually entertained by jokes having to do with crap, poop, farting and the various bathroom evacuation processes.  Paul, my best friend, and I seemed particularly amused by crap jokes.  Paul recently died of Parkinson’s.  It was maybe five years ago that I realized that Paul had Asperger’s.

I did not have Asperger’s, though I was definitely maturational delayed.  Still, a number of my friends were very smart, very strange and immature for their age.  It wasn’t until after SAT and other exams were taken that I discovered that several in my group of friends were not just smart, but scary smart.  Several tested highest in New Trier High School, one of the highest testing schools in the country.  There was more than one candidate for Asperger’s among the folks I knew.

Not fitting into that class of super smart folks, I’d grown up focused on comic books, reading hardly anything else until sixth grade.  My father was a talented athlete.  My focus was baseball.  I was terrible at baseball.  Nevertheless, I had a passion for…

“Well, we could get stoned before we decorate the tree.”

My wife, Marcia, had just spoken words the rest of us had not expected to hear.

The kids, 18 and 17 (boy and girl), had, before this comment, been communicating a respectful dismay with slack shoulders, shallow breaths and averted eyes.  They, of course, would rather be doing anything (with friends) than trim the tree.  I’d already concluded that silent, passionless cooperation was the most that my wife and I could hope for.  But Marcia’s words had ignited sudden, deep inhalations and bouncy demeanors in the two teens.

“OK,” I said, and I smiled.

With a giddy, awed reverence the kids indicated that purchasing and decorating the tree would be a special day for them.  Then they noted how horribly expensive marijuana was now compared to when Marcia and I were familiar with the prices.  I handed them a 20.

It’d been over 20 years since I had last smoked pot.  I’d been drunk twice in that same period–the last time at Easter supper three years ago.  This occurred because a massive toothache, untouched by medication, had condemned all my attention to my mouth and there were no dentists on…

I’ve never had a hard time being playful, exactly.  I’m not exactly sure.  I don’t create much time for the opportunity to play.  I work a lot.  And, I guess, I take myself too seriously.

For example, there are things I’m ashamed to admit to myself about myself.  That it mattered that I turned 50 six years ago was such a thing.  The last week before the event–the event was a party my wife convinced me to accept–was filled with a succession of occasions for anxiety.

Like the line of mourners that file by the bereaved family, an orchestral spectrum of neurotic, middle-aged, Jewish male symptoms gathered and nurtured over a 30-year adult life–one by one–paid respects as the days counted down to the zero hour.  Three hours before midnight, a anxiety attack cheerfully assailed me.  I was convinced I was having appendicitis while simultaneously aware of the high predictability of my having this anxiety attack–the finale to a Mahler symphony of a week’s worth of abdominal percussion and a host of other somatic idiosyncratic experiences.  To list the instrumentation of this work would sound to my ears like dinner with grandma when I was a boy.  I’ll spare you…

My wife’s ex-brother-in-law believes that he is an alien from outer space.  I am told that he likes to discuss this at family events, making small talk seem even tinier.  Confusing the metaphor with the thing represented is not uncommon in our culture.  Perhaps this is what makes the crazy people so irritable–that it’s so obvious that the “sane” are also closet nuts, taking seriously the oddest things.  Still, it feels to me like passing a wreck on the interstate when I pass time with someone deeply into psychosis, where the metaphor and thing represented have merged.

My mother used to live with a woman who believed that she was Jesus Christ.  Both were living in a mental hospital at the time.  My mother met many fascinating people in the mental hospital.  When she was being a mother–between hospital stays–I think she was bored and intimidated by the sane people.  I suspect she only truly became comfortable with me when as a teen I became intimate with altered states.  Perhaps my mom felt most understood by those whose identities were most in flux, who felt at least slightly paranoid and suspicious of society and culture.

After three years of college–having…

I was a sales rep working with my sister when the recession of 1981-82 began to impact my profession.  It wasn’t until it officially ended that it slammed with both fists into the urban and suburban Chicago gift market, where I was making my living selling mostly greeting cards to local stores.  Stores that had been trying to hold out until the recession ended observed how little better business was when it was officially over.  They gave up trying to pay bills they were way behind on and closed their doors.

I lost almost a third of my client base in the 1981-82 period.

The 1990-91 recession is a blur.  I was going through a divorce.  A very large percentage of business was now coming from chains instead of small stores.  As long as the chains bought, business was OK.

I was starting a new profession when the 2001 recession hit.  My small website design firm grew quickly right through the downturn, adding on several new clients every month.  I was in the business of offering small, inexpensive sites to small businesses that didn’t have a website.  It was as if a recession wasn’t even happening.

This recession is feeling…

A profession ago, I ran a repping firm, Lehman and Associates, in Illinois.  I represented close to 100 manufacturers and publishers over 19 years.  The second half of that career, from about 1989–1999, I handled mostly the chains.  My staff worked the sole proprietorships, driving from store to store, hauling in maybe 50–75 pounds of samples, mostly paper.

The paper we carried into shops was mostly greeting card samples, catalogs of greeting cards, calendars and the products of other giftware firms.  We’d spend from a half hour to three hours with store owners going through the product lines, often card by card.

The chains didn’t care to look at samples.  They let me pick out what would sell the best.  What the chains cared about was how much discount they could receive, special terms such as delayed payment dating and free shipping.

Regarding dating, they pretty much paid when they wanted to, sometimes in fewer than 90 days.  Shipping was often free.  Discounts were the painful part.  Those discounts often came straight out of my commission.  I was negotiating with the money I would receive after returns were subtracted.

I would commonly write an order in the winter and get…

I’ve been guiding Rosanna, my research assistant, on the gathering of information on matrifocal societies across the planet.  We are seeking patterns that support or contest my hypothesis that social structure is directly related to maturation rate, specific disease and condition proclivity, hormonal thresholds, handedness and cerebral lateralization.

A problem is that there is little information about these societies in connection to the variables that we’re tracking.  Few studies have been conducted.

So I expand the list of possibly related features.

Recently added to the list are frequency of twinning, language structures with a heavy emphasis on the present tense and the structure and content of their mythologies.

I am deeply hesitant to get into mythological structures or content.  Even though that is how I originally disappeared into the rabbit hole of this twelve-year project, I don’t see much chance of academics accepting correlations between a culture’s stories and its disease proclivities as being a useful set of connections.

We’re playing a little bit with age of pubertal onset as a relevant variable, but this is often influenced by environmental factors such as diet.  Pubertal onset has vast implications regarding particular diseases and conditions, aesthetic capabilities and social structure affinities. …

I am a paid professional specializing in search engine optimization.  I happened into this aspect of my profession by mistake.  I decided to prepare seven town directories for the seven communities just north of Chicago that I was targeting.  There were close to 1,800 retail and service outlets in those towns.  In my usual obsessional fashion, I proceeded to photograph the exterior of the almost 1,100 independent businesses and prepare for each a one-page webpage within one of the seven directories.  Four stores objected.  The rest got a web presence at no charge.  For the chains, I just linked to their national sites.  This was in the year 2000.

The idea was to integrate all local commercial activity onto the web.  For the stores and services that contracted with me to build and maintain a multipage site, I was providing a bonus image with a picture in the directories.  I estimated that to keep the clients, I had to bring them traffic.  The directories performed that job, bringing my clients business (at no extra charge), thus helping to make it possible for me to keep my clients long term.

Something very odd was happening while I built out these directories,…

I emailed to professors a link to “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” and I’ve received several dozen responses.  Mostly folks have said they haven’t read it yet but would get to it or that it’s not exactly connected to their discipline.  Several have suggested I walk the conventional path and submit to peer-reviewed journals.  It has been suggested I specialize in one discipline.  Some expressed enthusiasm for the thesis and have shared it with colleagues.  No minds blown.  Some tentative relationships are forming.

I’m definitely having difficulty translating the thesis into a brief enough format that it’s consumable in a fifteen-minute sitting.  There is a consensus that “Introduction to the Theory of Waves” is trying to do too much in too short a space.  Several have recommended that a book is required.  I’m not seeing the sense in writing a book that no one would read.  First, this website would have to stir a fairly robust response.

This site is composed of hundreds of short pieces, maybe half having to do with the base thesis and evolution, exploring various little parts of the many connected aspects of the thesis.  “Introduction to…