It’s All Random

Random Good Luck and

Random Good Genes

Still alive at 85. Why?

Good genes and good luck. I was born a white male to two (striving) middle class parents in the hills of Berkeley. Coulda been born black to sharecroppers in Jackson, Mississippi. Why am I still alive? Give me no jive about hard work, and the will of your pretend god in the sky. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Why?

Rickey has so much to say to so many people that he causes a great deal of confusion during the lesson. He should spend more time on his work and less time being the class clown.

– Third-grade report card

Why was I not born in 1924 ? I coulda been a 20-year-old soldier thrown into Nazi machine gun fire on Omaha Beach June 6, 1944. I made it twenty yards up the beach when I got my head blown off, never again…

to see…

my friends back in Berk – lee.

Or… maybe…since I learned to shoot in the Boy Scouts, I became a tail gunner on a B-17. Over Germany, our plane was brought down by flack. 

Who remembers Rick? Who cares? His parents and a few friends in Berkeley.

Fred and Connie would’ve received a Purple Heart.

This didn’t happen. Why? Good luck and good genes.

I’ve lost a boatload of friends. Tim. Jim. John. LuEllen. Don. Kelly. Jerry. Robert. Why not me? Good luck. Good genes.

No cancer.

No aneurysm.

No Parkinson’s.

No heart attack.

No stroke.

Must be god’s plan. Ha, ha, ha.

Or, maybe a …. joke.

Louis Armstrong (therapy) expressed the feelings I couldn’t, and put me in touch with ones I didn’t know I had.

– Tom Greening

I am moments? weeks? months? years? from returning to the uncaring eternity of darkness from which I came. We all are.

Why didn’t I go to Vietnam to be ground to pieces in McNamara’s war machine? Good luck and good genes.

What does this mean?  Nothing at all. The pitiless, uncaring, cold, dark universe is waiting.

Drove my Chey to the levee

but the levee was dry.

 – Don McLean

A friend in my men’s group went to his chiropractic session to get an adjustment…last week. He had seen this 52-year old chiropractor for decades. The next day his good friend the doctor dropped dead in his office. Boom. No warning. Gone forever. Larry is devastated.

Humanity doesn’t need more sharpness. We hunger for beauty, and meaning,

for stories, and for love.

– Galen Rowell

In elderhood, I write books, take photos, dig in my garden, and put on shows.

How come I can do this? Why am I not dead? Good genes and good luck. Random.

With modern medicine, I struggle to save the vision in my left eye. Right eye still works fine. Ophthalmology is really cool. Good genes and good luck.

His mother told him, “Someday you will  be a man,

and you will be the leader of a big old band.

Many people comin’ from miles around

to hear you play your music when the sun go down.”

 – Chuck Berry

I ask my nurses, doctors, and passers-by on my street, “What is your story?” Carl Jung told us, “After 50, your main challenge is to answer the question, ‘What is my story?'” In the face of a rapidly approaching eternity of darkness, all we have… is each other.

If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.

– Annie Leibovitz

Put the chairs in a circle and listen.

As the first rays of light come through your window, be thankful for yet another day. Let’s listen to each other’s stories. Your attention to my story is a gift of unimaginable value. Thank you.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, 

and common sense tells us that our existence   

is but a brief crack of light 

between two eternities of darkness.

 – Vladimir Nabokov

From the Archives

The Amazing Dr. Allen Wheelis

A professor in grad school recommended How People Change by Dr. Allen Wheelis, a San Francisco psychoanalyst. I really liked his work, and have returned to it over the years.

Some of my favorite Wheelis quotes * (Warning – If you’re easily depressed, don’t read these quotes – nothing but doom and gloom, which is why I like them).

On Sex

What I regret now is lost sexual opportunities. Only that. Only that makes my youth seem wasted. As death gets closer, only carnal pleasure seems real. It’s brutish, it’s dirty, it guarantees nothing, but it doesn’t deceive.

Desire increases with despair. Hunger for women grows as the capacity to satisfy diminishes.

Near at hand was my sister, her dark brown hair hanging over her shoulders.  She wore a sleeveless nightgown, and I could see a curve of breast. I felt a vague stirring of desire and unrest.

Life is vulgar. Pursuit of the vulgar is loyalty to life.

On Death

I distrust the wisdom of old men. I suspect a cover-up. They’re headed, mapless, into the same dark that awaits us all. Attending my mother’s death, I preview my own, try to get the feel of it, take its measure. But cannot, can never get this matter settled. I accept what’s coming only in the sense of acknowledging its inevitability, not in affirming its propriety or rightness.

Dirty old men are dirty because they are hanging on to life. Sex is the life force, and the nearer they come to death, the more urgent their desire. Laughter, dancing, sensuality – this is life. Guilt, anxiety, depression – this is death.

On Therapy

You must proceed alone, on nerve. You are not entitled to much hope – just that you have a chance. You may take some bleak comfort only in knowing that no one can be sure you will fail, and it is your own resources of heart and mind and will that will have the most bearing on the outcome.

His patients get better and get worse. Most of them derive some benefit from his efforts, but character changes little. He is forced, reluctantly, toward the conclusion that psychoanalysis is not what it is represented to be, and he begins to be troubled by a vague sense of fraudulence. Everything you’ve done and said has indicated your understanding, and your willingness to accept me as a decent human being. No one else has done so much.

A patient says:

I’m fed up. A whole year I’ve been at this. A mixed-up, mired-down, miserable, wasted, goddamned year. Two hundred hours of supine introspection. And for what? What have I gotten out of it? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. I’m twice as miserable as before.

Words. You do nothing. You’re just a listener – a subtle, crafty listener. If I were you, I’d cry in shame. One of these days, I’m going to find the guts to walk out of here and not come back.

On Marriage

Do not dwell on the shortcomings of your marriage, or on the unfortunate personality traits of your wife. Dwell rather on what is right about it. All marriages are unhappy. None of my friends and none of my patients have a happy marriage. An unhappy marriage is the normal state, not a deviation. What you have is the human lot. But don’t expect much. And remember, there is no occasion for grievance.

On Father

My father and I have never parted. He made his mark on me and speaks to me still. He tells me I have been summoned to give an account of myself. I will be found wanting, still after all these years a low-down, no-account scoundrel. That judgment will be binding. I shall not now or ever be permitted to regard myself as worthy.

As my father sank into darkness, my world filled with light. The eyes that have seen through me all these years are closed, the face that relentlessly condemned my flawed and wayward character is waxen and still.

*  The Quest for Identity, 1958

      How People Change, 1973

      The Listener, 1999

Photo Show Coming: Jazz, Blues, Rock

Coastal Arts League in Half Moon Bay will feature some of my photos during the first quarter of ’25.

The theme will be music: singers and instrumentalists. I’m rootin’ around in my old files to make the final selections. From about 200 wonderful images over the decades, I have room for 10 or 12. Here are some of my favorites. Stay tuned for more details…  

About the Election

Liberal friends, “How can anyone vote for this scumbag asshole? He is not qualified in ANYWAY to be president of this country.” 

RG: One word: Columbine. In 1999, two young killers murdered 13 students then killed themselves. They went after the “popular kids” who had belittled them. Trump voters are enraged by how they have been screwed by the coastal Ivy-league elites for decades, and called “deplorables” in “fly-over” states. They are so angry they will vote for a fascist dictator who will be their “retribution.” The more Trump does evil, outrageous things, the more they support him.

So when you think “Trump supporters,” think “Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.” People will prefer death over unrelenting, grinding, constant humiliation. They will demand “retribution.” Let’s remember, Hitler was elected. 

Unfortunately, with Project 2025, Trump will eliminate the very government programs that make life bearable for his enraged base. His power will become absolute. Ironic. 

Abortion – Why is this issue so red hot? Simple. Elites’ labor supply. Poor girls’ uteruses become “cheap labor incubators.” The elites couch it as a “life-affirming” or a religious issue. Let’s get real. The billionaires and corporate elites don’t give a shit about babies! What hey DO give a shit about is future slave labor for their fast food joints, and cannon fodder for their armies. Pro-life. Ha, ha, ha.

Louis D. Brandeis – We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

FDR: “I welcome their hatred.” Kamala, please channel the great Franklin D. Roosevelt.