fishy thinking

It's a fish eat fish world out there.



I wonder what fish say to one another, and whether or not one gender bullies the other.

Fish use gestures, colors and pheremones to talk. I'm guessing they say stuff like... are you ready?

"Huzza huzza!"

"Piss off!"

What else is there to say, in the broad scheme of things?

I fancy you. Leave me alone. Beat it. That kind of sums up everything.

At its most basic life is quite simple.

See the posts by Zoot and Fiona on the same picture.

Tardigrade thinking

This afternoon Glo and I went out on the ocean. Haven't done that much since I left the navy, come to think of it. In Kaneohe Bay, on the windward side of Oahu. Saw one turtle, no sharks, waded around on a sandbar for the better part of an hour. It was very uplifting. While strolling across a huge, barely-submerged sand bar, I got to thinking about what was living three or four feet below the sand, and that, of course, led me reflect upon tardigrades.

I used to have an interest in tardigrades, back when I was teaching grade anything at all in British Columbia.

In the spring when the bloom was on I would recreate every swamp in the area in a huge collection of aquarii (?) in the back of my classroom. I'd round up every microscope in the whole school and whatever age kids were being subjected to me would spend weeks studying daphnia, copepods, mosquito larvae, caddis fly larvae, whirligig beetiles, diving beeteles, freshwater snails, leeches... everything we could find. On a few magnificently memorable occasions we found amoebae or parameceums. (I'm just adding an 's' at this point. I have no idea what's the correct pluralization.)

Parameceums were cool but amoebae were the coolest by far. They slithered through, between, over, under, and around like pale grey ghosts, ectoplasmic entities without shape. Form without shape, come to think of it. Interesting. Linguists, does that work?

But we never found a tardigrade. I knew they existed because, along with all the microscopes, I had stolen every book in the school on swamps and ponds and freshwater life, every field guide to anything even close. I read about, and then became eager to find a tardigrade. Never did, though.

Tardigrades are also called water bears, because they look a little teddy bearish. They are, in scientific terms, a phylum of their own. There are 35 phyla, into which all living things are divided. Vertebrates (think "animals" as we loosely use the terms... bunnies, lizards, humans...) are one part of one phyla. Tardigrades are their own. There are about 750 species known.

There is a beautiful video of a tardigrade in motion, which you can find by clicking here.

Hobbyist thinking

You know those applications that you fill out, the ones that ask you to list hobbies and whatnot? I'm always interested by what interests people, and often surprised.

Tae-Bo, for example. This appeared on the application of a young man I was interviewing for admission to a private school. Tae-Bo is a workout regimen developed by somebody claiming the name Billy Banks. It was for a time adverstised through late night infomercials. This boy was about 16, and he was really stuck into it.

I can't, at first blush, think of anything I've ever done that would qualify as a hobby. In fact I've not thought much about what makes a certain pastime a hobby as opposed to a passing fancy, a time-filler, a distraction. Probably they are all more or less synonymous.

I looked for lists of hobbies, and found one that is a pretty short list to my way of thinking, but diverse. The usual - woodwork, drawing, candle making... and then plumbing appeared, something called DIY, and French Literature.

I got to thinking about the things on the list, some of which I have done from time to time, and I realized the ones I liked most (not that I ever stuck with any of them) had the quality that they transported me out of my daily routine for prolonged periods of time, and left me feeling relaxed, accomplished, and re-energized. They were fulfilling and in some strange way rewarding.

Plumbing began to make sense. Nothing more satisfying than clearing a plugged sewer line or installing a new toilet. And then looking for more of both.

DIY, it turns out, stands for Do-It-Yourself, which is a TV network that showcases programs on, well, figure it out for... you know...

At this particular moment, waiting for the zoloft to kick in, a hobby is most desirable and I am glad to have discovered blogging.

Blogging is a little more accessible than French Literature, n'est ce pas?

Amazing thinking

Wow!Some things are amazing. This solar picture is, but it has nothing to do with the subject of this blog, funnily enough. (I'll explain the chimp in a minute.)

Laughter is amazing. What a curious physiological response it is. The study of it is called gelotology, from the greek "the study of geloto." Really. Geloto means laughter. In the gelotolgy sub-culture there are many gelato jokes, gelotologists being a good-humored group.

There is some evidence to support the notion that laughter exists in non-human species, including primates, dogs, and rats. In all species it seems to be contagious and inspires light-hearted, playful behaviour from those who hear it. (Of the same species, I presume. I cannot claim that the sound of rat laughter ((which always sounds derisive to me)) inspired me to behave in a frolicsome manner. Quite the contrary.)

I recall reading of a strange research project conducted years ago. Some Anthropology professor sent his poor grad students into the subways of New York to test the responses of people to chimpanzee threat displays. (I'm sure there was a large grant behind this - why else would you do it? And who but a grad student would agree to do it?)

A chimpanzee threat display looks quite a bit like human laughter - wide open, grinning mouth, lots of teeth. When you see a chimp making such a face , as you did above the solar picture, I'm guessing you would smile, thinking erroneously that the chimp was laughing. Or am I the only one?


Here is the value of modern research. When the grad students sat across from someone in a subway in New York, imitating such a face and holding the pose for some length of time, few people grew frolicsome, if any. All the rest said piss off, or rude words with a simlar intent.

A stellar response by any measure. Amusing to reflect upon, amazing because it really happened.

Renard thinking

I saw a red fox when I was about 11 years old. It was trotting through London on its way from one park to another. It looked perfectly at home, checked for traffic before crossing the street, didn't pay much attention to the passers-by. Only I thought he was unusual, as far as I could tell. Perhaps he was visible only to me.

According to Wikipedia there are over 20 million of them scattered around the world. I spent an afternoon north Aarhus, Denmark a few years ago in a forest with a fox warren right there - all sorts of entries and exits scattered about. Despite my efforts to blend into the background and be invisible I saw no foxes. They out-invisible'd me.

Like a fox, the rest of this blog will seem to be invisible.

Depressed thinking

There are few straight lines in nature. Right now I think this does not speak well for nature, which is a chaotic, pathetic excuse for a system unless you're the sort of person who likes chaos or its exuberant cousin creativity.

I find myself of two minds about nature, curved lines and creativity. One mind manifests when I am at the top of my game, healthy, alert, engaged and active. Then I am a nature nut, a chaos champ, a creative fountain of ideas.

The other manifests itself when I am at the bottom of my game, depressed, anxous, stupid and ill. Then I need straight lines, defined borders, organizational predictabilty to the point of boredom. I need security because I need control.

When I first saw the sculpture above at the Chicago Art Institute I thought it was wonderful. Now it looks quite terrifying to me.

Depression and I go back a long way. I cannot say we are old friends, but we are well acquainted. It always surprises me when people refer to depression as a mental illness. I never think of it that way. Winston Churchill called it "that black dog that lurks in the corner of every room." I think of it as a storm of black cloud just over my horizon, rarely visible, but sometimes, sometimes it creeps in and I realize it is suddenly upon me.

It is suddenly upon me. I know my blogging about it will distress my children because they will not like to think of me suffering from anything at all. But I can manage depression, and I will blog about it because so few people who suffer depression ever dare tell anyone about it. They suffer in dreadful silence thinking that something is wrong with them, (there is but not in the way they think,) they feel confused ("I have nothing to be depressed about!") and/or weak ("I feel so stupid!")

It's a very very common disease and very treatable.

The hardest part, I think, is realizing what's wrong. This time around it first showed up as an inability to complete very simple tasks like making lists or paying bills. Combine that with a growing sense of dread - anxiety growing to fear with no particular object, just the fear itself, palpable, oppressive, cruel in the way the ocean is cruel - it is completely unaware of your existance. The fear couldn't care less about you. It simply swallows you whole.

This time I caught it early enough, I think, to avoid the worst of it. I was sitting in my office yesterday bewildered (again) about my inablilty to address this one simple task that I've been putting off for weeks. The task will take an hour or less. It requires no intelligence, but it requires the ability to choose. And I suddenly remembered that, for me, that has always been a symptom of depression, the inability to make choices, even simple ones.

Then a whole bunch of other things popped up on my radar screen. Last weekend I had found it necessary to promise myself that I would accomplish one thing - either mow the lawn, pay the bills, anything at all just so the weekend wouldn't be gone without my having accomplished something, anything at all. I accomplished nothing. The previous weekend had been exactly the same. And there has been an undercurrent of fear in my belly for a long time now, fear with no object.

If I leave this untreated I can predict exactly what will come next. Over the next few weeks my ability to think will diminish - I will become stupid, really, unable to follow thoughts or conversations. Then the idea of suicide will begin to cross my mind. In the early stages I will recoil from it, but after a while it will begin to look like an old friend. After a while it will become welcome. In the meantime the entire atmosphere of my life will continue to darken until all is black, all is heavy, all is suffocating and poisonous.

I've never got past that darkest point without getting better. It's not so hard to figure out what would come next.

Yesterday, after I realized what was happening, I called my surfer-dude doctor friend. He's a good listener, and asked a lot of questions. He sat back and said, "Well, there's no question that you're suffering a significant depression." Notice that he did not say "severe." He's right. It's significant but not severe. Nice catch on my part! He went on to say that, if I could look back and start identifying problems starting two weeks ago, the depression has been growing a lot longer than that.

Depression is a chemical issue, not an illness of the spirit or a failure of the heart. It is a chemical issue and is treated effectively with chemicals. I started taking zoloft yesterday. I feel better just knowing what's wrong, and that it's being treated. In a few weeks the zoloft will kick in and the darkness will lift and I'll be fine again.

I won't need straight lines, I will love to look at the crazy Chicago sculpture, I'll embrace chaos, I'll generate ideas and I'll look fondly on the nuttiness of nature again.