Listics

There once was a woman who swapped me out for my academic adviser. I subsequently dropped out of grad school and went to San Francisco where I sat on the floor at Winterland with Hells Angels and hippies crumbling hash into tobacco and hand rolling some fairly potent cigarettes to share while we immersed ourselves in the Grateful Dead. I belong to a generation that titrated psychedelics measured in micrograms onto sugar cubes and ingested our own chemistry experiments. It wasn’t all bad.

The woman in question had a rough patch back in those days, an unwanted pregnancy with that feckless adviser, a pregnancy that she chose to terminate. This was reported to me recently by a common acquaintance who, when I asked him what news he might have of her, displayed an uncommon tactlessness, gracelessness, and lack of good will by sharing gossip that had better remained private, gossip that was rooted in a private matter that the feckless adviser had shared with him back in the day. There was a lot of sharing back in the day. Anyway, fast forwarding more decades than I care to count, the story continued. According to our mutual acquaintance, the woman had profound regrets regarding her choice to terminate that early pregnancy. She had found god and wanted to engage the now distant professor in some kind of spiritual healing ritual. Priests and that whole elaborate catholic take on a hierarchical afterlife were involved. Some mortification and ritual were required to get the babe into heaven and to clear the stain of sin from the souls of the parents. I don’t know if she was able to draw her former lover into that scene, nor do I quite understand why his presence would have been required for what sounds like a depressive exercise in self abuse. Whatever.

When I read this post at La Vache Qui Lit, I was reminded of that story… the story of the loss of an imaginary child and an obsession with setting things right. And I was led to so much more:

Alice Miller… two reactions to the loss of love in childhood, depression and grandiosity; the inner prison, the vicious circle of contempt, repressed memories, the etiology of depression, and how childhood trauma manifests itself in the adult.

Mohawks, skins, trendies, punks, hippies, everything… sadobabies

For your own good… “they gave me thorazine because they said I was hyper”

“…even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood no longer must remain shrouded in darkness.”

…signals depolarize the dendritic arbor and provide a crucial component toward synapse modulation and long-term potentiation. Furthermore, a train of backpropagating action potentials artificially generated at the soma can induce a calcium action potential at the dendritic initiation zone in certain types of neurons. Whether or not this mechanism is of physiological importance remains an open question.

It was all about making “an effort to look flamboyant in an attractive, luxuriant, beautiful, narcissistic way”

Laurie Frisch…

The Indian Adoption Project operated between 1958 and 1967 under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, with support and funding from the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA). CWLA participation bestowed an air of legitimacy on the practice of removing Indian children from their families basically because the “white man knew better,” and while adoptive placements under the Project itself were limited, it is estimated that more than one quarter of all Indian children were removed from their families and placed into white adoptive and foster homes or orphanages before the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.

Selling dolls that have been cunningly crafted to look so much like babies that you would have to smell them to know whether or not they are alive smacks of something perverse. I don’t get it. Buying these objects seems similarly perverse. I want to name mine Firenze Ghia.

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