5 May 2019
[Above photo: I always liked this picture of Jordan with his mom. On the lawn at Satemwa (Malawi), the spectacular coffee/tea plantation and gorgeous colonial-era house, now a B&B. We were there for high tea. 19.5.2017 ]
I’ve always marveled at spiders. In the early morning, especially with a fog, all the ground-dwelling spiders are revealed in our meadow on Beach Island. And they are everywhere, yet you’d never see them or know a spider lived in the meadow if not for the moisture condensing on their small, funnel-shaped webs. I hate breaking trail and feeling yet another spider web cling to my face. In Malawi an orb weaver, an immense and fabulously-marked spider whose body was the size of my entire thumb, set up house—actually, a death-trap—outside the place we rented for the Scot volunteers. The strands of the massive web were golden in the light and as strong as silk. Apparently they can catch, and keep, small birds who mistakenly zoom into it. A friend from my internship, Mac, was a southerner whose mother was a Vanderbilt. [When you talk about the wealthy, its important to mention lineage.] He sat on my couch once, saw a spider, and jumped up shouting, “Mother!”. It’s true! My daughter, as a college student, once called her mother, shouting that she couldn’t leave her apartment to go to class because there was a spider on the floor by the front door. The size of a spaniel? No, just a tiny spider which she outweighs many thousand times. She did have a terrible insect (presumably spider) bite at one time and had to see the doctor several times for a necrotizing lesion. But I think that was after her terror. Her reaction is not uncommon: naked fear at seeing something so tiny whereas the spider, I’d guess, doesn’t entertain a proportionate fear of us, we who can crush them with a pinch, a swat, or a stomp. Thanks to E.B. White for Charlotte’s Web, trying to rehabilitate the poor spiders’ motives. Could they be more cruel that we? They just kill to survive; we tear children from their mothers and put them in cages for months—or years—for cynical political gain. I doubt the children are drug-runners or rapists. Nor their parents.
The rains have begun. With drama. Lightening all around, with thunder and torrents. To walk through them must feel like trying to keep one’s footing in a downspout during a downpour. In the service of full transparency, I have been in my apartment during these deluges; they recur during the day. But I will be exposed to them this week. I pity the street vendors who must quickly toss plastic tarps over their wares. For mangos and durian, my current fave’s, no problemo. But for the vast arrays of cooked meals—-yikes, what a trial to endure this every year. For me, it’ll be a nuisance only. I’ll line my daypack with a plastic bag so that my electronics aren’t ruined.
The mid-term is tomorrow. It will come and go and no one, me included, will remember it in a year, yet imagine the wasted energy in the students’ anticipatory anxiety. I grabbed a short clip from the internet to show during our discussions of Anxiety Disorders: FEAR Vs ANXIETY. It demonstrates, with impressive visual and sound effects, the body’s response to fear, triggered by a genuine external threat. And the identical physiological response to anxiety, triggered by…..our thoughts. Fear, like pain, can be a good thing, a warning we’d best change course if we don’t want to lose a limb. Anxiety in small quantities is a good motivator, keeping us alert and on our toes, thinking quickly when we give a public talk or need to shorten sail during a blow. But excessive anxiety can cripple us, like too much water can kill us. My guess is that all the students will do well. Some questions are tough but important to know, some are give-aways and important to know. All the material is relevant. Enough. This has entered my third blog so I guess I have a bit of anxiety about it, myself!
My internet is currently down. My cable has been unreliable, as well. Is it the moisture in the air? I never would have gotten cable but the landlord threw it into the package, assuming I would want it. I flick between watching a water moccasin eat a rattlesnake to watching the AG lie as he carefully tiptoes through the tulips in defense of his chosen boss—certainly not the American people or the Constitution. It recalls Bill Clinton, who squandered so much, saying, “I did not have sex with that woman.” Having seen a recent interview with Monica Lewinski, it is clear how he tossed her under the bus rather than fess up to his purile “slips”. I complete the evening circuit with Colbert or Seth Meyers or John Oliver, grasping for a laugh. How I wish it were funny rather than deeply sad. It feels as if our 243 year experiment with government of, by, and for the people is ending here. The culprit? Limitless money in elections, which allows the rich to have their way with the Congress, the laws, the courts, the tax system. Ours was a shining house on a hill for awhile, though really we were always supporting cruel and corrupt dictators—the Shah, Ne Win, Diem— who did our bidding and killing those we thought would not—-Allende, Lamumba, Mossadegh, and so many others. DT just does his thing stupidly, openly, and naively, praising Duterte, Kim, and Putin. It now seems incredibly dumb of us to think that most people who amassed or possess great wealth would want to share their power in order to uplift society as a whole. Who is less likely to be truly idealistic than someone who has sought, and gathered, heaps of money? There certainly have been exceptions but overall the trend is steadily downwards, just as with our degradation of the earth, sea, and atmosphere. Money, a metaphorical battery storing all that power, is actually the root of a lot of Evil. What if our coinage was strings of shells or those huge stone disks in Polynesia? It could be pretty funny, actually, watching the wealthy hoard their stuff while we surf, fish, dance, and drink coconut milk.
Don’t you just wish a torrent would differentially wash through the drainpipe—it feels like a sewerage line to me—-of our government, washing out DT and his corrupt, sycophantic minions? Especially the Pious Shadow and The Chinless Rasputin. The AG feels like one of those large lumps that stubbornly require a plunger to expel. But without basic change to the way elections are funded, the scale shall always tip toward the interests of the wealthy and the corrupt of the world.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 