— Paraphrasing the racist, murderous Gen. George Armstrong Custer, U.S. Cavalry, butcher of Native Americans. The Lakota would not scalp him after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, because you don’t scalp a dog. Sorry if the Custer family takes offense at this, but your ancestor was a PIECE OF WORK.
The difference between me and Gen. Custer is, I’m RIGHT! Ask anyone who lived through WW2, like my parents. They weren’t great people, but they knew a Fascist when they saw one, and they fought them with their brains and their hands. And if you can’t find anyone, read the books they left, like “The Diary of Anne Frank” or the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, the U.S. Army’s greatest cartoonist! And while you’re at it… FUCK TRUMP! FUCK TRUMP! FUCK TRUMP!FUCK TRUMP! FUCK TRUMP!
There… now I feel better. VOTE, AND VOTE FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURES!
This is the only photo I could find of Robbie Robertson that depicts any trace of his Native American ancestry. For a musician who was half-First Nations, and proud of it, that strikes me as odd.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons, Nicholas Jennings.
She broke down / on the highway / miles from nowhere / it had no number. / She was lost / a long way from home.
Robbie Robertson, musician and activist, died Friday, August 11. Maybe to some of you, he’s best remembered as the leader of the The Band, the nameless but very talented group that fronted for Bob Dylan on his last couple of tours. If that’s all, okay. You remember hits like “Up On Cripple Creek,” “The Weight,” and their cover of Joan Baez’ odd tearjerker for the Lost Cause, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Their performance on Dylan’s last tour even inspired Taxi Driver director Martin Scorsese to shoot a documentary, The Last Waltz, which was, coincidentally, the name of the tour. So Robbie was kind of a famous rocker, for a while.
She was fed-up / with the routine / when you got trouble / with a man. / She blew town / with a vengeance!
But I bet you’ve never heard Robbie’s “lost album,” by far his most complex, subtle and sophisticated work, and one which deserves much wider recognition and play than it has historically received. I am referring to his masterpiece with the Red Road Ensemble, Music for ‘The Native Americans.’
Painted Desert, peyote rain / Lord don’t let me go insane! / Skinwalker, skinwalker / Who am I? Who are you? / I was only passing through / Skinwalker, skinwalker!
I worked on the Navajo Nation for almost 8 years as a reporter, winning some awards. I lost most of them in Hurricane Charley, 2004 for those who don’t/can’t remember, and only a very durable plaque, awarded by the Associated Press in 1995 for “Best of Show, Investigative Reporting,” remains. Fortunately, the vivid memories I have of driving through miles of emptiness near towns like Crown Point, Mexican Hat and Shiprock, a full moon rising huge and gibbous in the rear-view mirror, have proven more durable. All I had for accompaniment was Robbie’s beautiful, soulful, inspiring and sometimes eerie music. And that was all I needed!
A strange encounter / to be sure / He was wicked / He was pure / Hear him calling? / He’s calling for you!
Robertson was Canadian, which makes him officially “First Nations,” the name the aboriginal people use in our northern neighbor, rather than “Native Americans,” which is what you call an American Indian if you don’t know their tribe! They much prefer to identify themselves as Navajo, or Cherokee, or Sioux, thinking that somehow White Culture will notice those unsubtle distinctions as much as they do. For instance, you can officially join the Cherokee Nation (which has its own unique alphabet, invented by a Cherokee) if you are only 1/128 Cherokee blood — which means if one great-great-great-great-great grandparent was Cherokee! The blood quotient for the Navajo Nation is far stricter: 50% Navajo, meaning one of your parents is Navajo, and the other better learn to speak at least a little Navajo, or they’re in danger of being thought of forever as a bi’laga’anah — a white person, an outsider.
Come with me / into the mystic/ Come with me / into the night / We couldlive / Live forever!
Robertson’s mother, who was Cayuga and Mohawk, had him out of wedlock with a Jewish gambler. Like my mother, she fell for a Jew; only Mom, a tough RAF nurse who was enduring the Blitz in London, placed her bet on a dashing young Jewish lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. (Us Jews really get around! It’s a dirty job, subverting the Aryan gene pool, but somebody’s got to do it! Just look at the mess they made of the 20th Century!) Robertson was raised in a Victorian neighborhood in suburban Toronto, and assisted for a short while in a freak show! This later lead to him producing and co-starring in the 1980 feature film Carny, alongside a young Gary Busey and Jodie Foster! So once again, Robbie was famous, sort of. I mean, those co-stars are bankable! (I confess I was nowhere near the film when it was playing, but Music for ‘The Native Americans’ wasn’t composed until 1994, which seems like 10,000,000 B.C., now.)
Painted Desert, peyote rain / Lord don’t let me go insane! / Skinwalker, skinwalker / Through your eyes / I can see / You have left your mark on me / Skinwalker, skinwalker!
I started writing this post on August 12, 2023, the day after Robbie died. Two months later, I am still trying to finish it! This is the nature of the non-fatal, but chronic illnesses I am enduring: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and undiagnosed vertigo. Just for laughs, the gods threw in some Latin, Perugia nodularis, which means “itchy bumps” in English. This condition is more annoying, time-consuming and painful than anything else, as these bumps frequently result from ingrown hairs, or ingrown hairs surrounded by a sheath of solidified dead bacteria, or pulpy overgrown blood vessels, or small, odd-shaped pieces of cartilage or keratin poking their way from my inside through my epidermis, on their way to being pried out of my skin and disposed of. If I don’t take the initiative, the wound just doesn’t heal. It hangs around for months, but if I remove the infectious agent cleanly, it heals in days, and with little pain.
Painted Desert, peyote rain / Lord don’t let me go insane! / Skinwalker, skinwalker / Takes you to / a sacred place / Drinks a tear from your face / Skinwalker, skinwalker!
This problem is annoying, but the vertigo and CFS eat up time that I know must be rapidly running out at my age, time when I could be creating somethinguseful, beautiful, or informative, and all I can do is wedge myself into a corner of the couch, watch Roku or YouTube, hope I don’t fall asleep and wish the room would stop spinning! So I am going to finish this blog post today, October 14, 2023, come Hell or high water, and publish it, even if I leave it incomplete! I tried a month ago, but my repeated SAVEs to the desktop didn’t capture the whole article, and I lost about half of what I wrote because I couldn’t pay sufficient attention to what I was doing! So, if this post ends in the middle, know that I reached my limit and was not able to type, or write, or think, any more. Yeah, type, not even write cursive, with a fountain pen, like I learned to do in Mrs. Notose’s 1st grade class! (She was Filipino, short-tempered, and whenever even SHE pronounced her name it sounded to our young, innocent ears like “Mrs. No-Toes!”) And YES, it is really a BITCH!
Later — I didn’t finish this, so here it is. Do yourself a favor and buy, or at least listen to, Robbie Robertson’s Music from “The Native Americans.” If this album doesn’t haunt you, make you smile and thrill you, you’re dead on the inside.
Shiprock pinnacle with autumn foliage, Navajo Nation, Four Corners region.
Hey Gang — a recent Google search for Marco Pereyma, a very advanced fine-arts photography student I encountered my freshman year at New College of Florida (1969-1970), led me, like Indiana Jones finding the buried ruins of Lucasfilm, to this story in the NC newspaper Captain Jack, vol. 1, #8, Jan. 12, 1970. For you arithmetically challenged, that’s more than 53 years ago!
The King of the Blues made quite an impression on me; I think the only concert I’d ever been to before that was some kind of charity benefit featuring a very down-home Eric Von Schmidt and his acoustic guitar, and if you know who HE was, aside from a local Sarasota talent, you’re the new nominee for Hipster Supreme! (Hint: He painted the only authentic painting of Custer’s Last Stand, based on the actual battlefield terrain and the testimony of survivors. [Sioux survivors, that is!] It made the cover of Smithsonian Magazine, and Eric told me that I have the only photos of him creating it! Woo-hoo!)
This concert was long before B. B. was being celebrated as an all-American musical icon in the Mainstream (read “white”) Press. I’ve wracked my brains trying to remember when I first heard about heard about him, and I can’t. That title — “The King of the Blues” — seemed mighty ambitious, maybe even a trifle presumptuous, but at the end of the show I was ready to bow down and acknowledge His Majesty, and his queen, Lucille (which if you’re not up on your B. B. King mythology was the guitar he always played, because it saved his life of several occasions! He wasn’t into trashing his instruments, like, say, The Who did, every performance. Generally speaking, Black musicians in that period couldn’t afford to, and weren’t inclined to!)
Why do I refer to Marco Pereyma as “a very advanced fine-arts photography student”? Well, several reasons:
He shot with a Nikon F 35mm SLR. It was Stanley Kubrick’s favorite still camera, it was very hip, it was indestructible and the lenses were so sharp the camera came with spare Band-Aids in the box.
Marco never consulted a light meter, he just set whatever lens opening and shutter speed he needed for the light conditions and adjusted the film development accordingly. This resulted in some very weird negatives!
These he then printed on Agfa Brovira #5, a type of B&W enlarging paper so contrasty it made everything look like a visit from Mormon missionaries. There was black, and there was white. Shades of gray? What are you, a Communist?
Professor Herb Stoddard, who was apparently the ONLY faculty member at NC qualified to judge photography, LOVED Marco’s photos and praised him extensively! Except for the few who failed his classes, Stoddard gave the rest of us one-word evaluations: SATISFACTORY. No more, no less. Satisfactory! That was what my father paid $10,000 tuition a year for, and YES, THAT WAS SOME BIG MONEY BACK THEN! If I’d gotten smart advice from my mother, I’d have accepted the FULL SCHOLARSHIP I was offered from Cornell and asked my dad to spend some of the difference on a good 16mm. movie camera, maybe a Bolex R5 or a Beaulieu RPZ-16, and a tripod. But my mother didn’t give me good advice, she was more interested in hurting my father than my getting an education.
Marco was one of the most striking persons, physically, I ever met. He made an indelible impression on you: tall and toothpick-thin, with a shock of almost-albino hair and the coldest, hardest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen to that time. And I felt that way until I met Philadelphia futurist and murderer Ira Einhorn, and saw his eyes, like two oysters on the half shell, on ice, in a bar.
Finally, although I cannot remember her name, Marco had a small, cute and incredibly attractive girlfriend who’d pose in the nude for him! I’m sure Professor Stoddard loved his photos for that reason, too! And you knew they were getting it on, because she smiled at everyone, and Marco moved with the grace and stealth of a big cat. Which I suspect he was.
Marco was so talented, I wonder whatever became of him? Why didn’t he enter the ranks of great American photographers, beside Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks? Did he get sucked into the meat-grinder known as Vietnam, or did he simply lose interest in his grainy Tri-X film, his fisheye lenses and his sexy girlfriend model?
Does it matter, now, after more than half a century has passed? Yeah, it still does. You have to hang on to people, to grab them as the current swirls them by and rope them to you somehow, so you don’t lose them downstream, over the falls. That was unlikely to happen with Marco, as both his manner and his methods left me cold. I was always looking for the shades of gray between the black and the white. But my search did yield a great review I forgot I’d written, and a couple of pictures of the immeasurably talented Mr. King himself, so I guess it was worth it, huh?
An early Bolex 16mm camera with a reflex 17-70 Som Berthiot lens. My film mentor, Hack Swain, said the lens was a Coke bottle, and only 1 in 3 were any good! This is the same camera I dragged to May Day 1971, in Washington, D.C. I was one of very few student filmmakers at that event to return with my camera and film intact!
In an effort to log some history, and also to chronicle my own exploits, I present this article from an old, old issue of the slick, slightly left-of-center magazine NEWSWEEK, which is still hanging around in digital format! This was the first article I’d ever seen, at the tender age of 11.5, that mentioned dolphins in connection with extraterrestrial aliens — which, in essence, is what the dolphins are, living in our own oceans instead of those of Jupiter, Uranus or Xagramorfagel (if you haven’t heard of the last one, don’t worry, it’s going viral any day now!). My favorite novel at the time being Robert A. Heinlein’s Star Beast, about a pet alien and his boy, I was, of course, extremely eager to make a dolphin’s acquaintance, as I was sure they had nothing better to do than hang around, waiting for me to show up! Here, then, although I do not know the author’s name, I present the first article I encountered to mention dolphins in connection with ET aliens!
Newsweek: Space & The Atom Oct. 22, 1962, pg. 51
FIVE PEEPS AND A TWEET
Man’s first contact with extraterrestrials may never come — or it may be only a beat in history away; his giant radio telescopes could pick up a message from space tomorrow (July 22, 1960). But when it comes to working out a system of interspecies communication with a species that may not even exist, man is still in kindergarten. This lack has long worried space scientists, who think that the parties at each end of the “telephone” might have everything to say to each other and no common way to say it.
One suggested way of surmounting this embarrassment is to practice communications with other species on man’s own planet, but which species? In answer, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has made its choice, and not surprisingly it is the bottlenose dolphin. Under an $80,700, one-year grant from NASA, communication with the brainy mammal will be explored by the dolphins’ old friend, Florida neurophysiologist Dr. John Lilly, who has been studying them since 1955.
Dr. Lilly, who is convinced that “man will communicate with another species in a decade or two,” has long considered the dolphin the most likely possibility. His reasons: Dolphins’ brains are larger and more complex than man’s; they talk to each other in a high-speed language of whistles, click, squawks and blats; and they can produce an eerie mimicry of the human voice, even copying subtle inflections (one recently mimicked the Southern drawl of Lilly’s assistant). Dr. Lilly is now feeding tapes of dolphin sounds to a computer, which will sift them for a meaningful pattern. “It is possible that their intelligence is comparable with ours, though in a very strange fashion,” he has said. “They may be a group with whom we can learn basic techniques of communicating with really alien intelligent life forms.”
Say It With Shapes: Such technologies would obviously be of vast assistance to space scientists. Although few expect that man will ever drop in on the residents of another solar system (the trip could take centuries), they haven’t given up on earthbound communication. Before the advent of radio, all suggestions for signaling extraterrestrials were optical in nature: Flashing messages with large mirrors and searchlights, or cutting vast geometric patterns out of forests and farmlands. [Italics added for emphasis, this seemingly suggests “crop circles” a full decade before they were first reported by UFO investigators!]
Far more practical schemes accompanied the development of powerful radio transmitters. The problem is what to translate. One of the most elaborate schemes is that of Hans Freudenthal, a Dutch mathematics professor writing in English. Called Lincos (for Cosmic Language), it depends upon the supposedly universal concepts of mathematics. First Freudenthal would teach the extraterrestrials the idea of “greater than” by sending five peeps, followed by a different signal—perhaps a tweet—and then three peeps. This would be repeated, using several combinations of peeps, until the listeners had equated “greater than” with the peep signal. Similarly, the concepts of “less than,” “equals,” “plus,” and “minus” could be taught. Eventually, Freudenthal hopes to transmit an elaborate mathematics language, then go on to the tasks of sending lessons in physics, physiology, and even ethics.
TV Images: A simpler sounding plan—the transmission of TV images—has been suggested by Dr. Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, W. Wa. It is based on the principle that television pictures can be broken down into tiny dots of light. The different intensities if the dots can be translated into correspondingly differentiated such as dots and dashes, frequencies, or numbers, and sent as radio signals. Drake hopes the aliens would understand this principle and reconstruct our television pictures from the signals.
Yet both these ingenious plans, and many like them, rest on the fragile assumption that the extraterrestrials think as we do. Perhaps they do: then again it is conceivable that mathematics and inductive reasoning may be as foreign to them as their worlds and bodies might appear to us. Here lies the potential value of the dolphin—a creature operating in an environment perhaps as alien to humans as that of Mars. Even the slightest clue to how such a creature thinks could eventually lead to radically different approach to placing interstellar “telephone calls”—or a new method of analyzing space static to discover is someone is trying to call us.
But this is a long way off. “Right now we don’t expect any dolphins to teach us how to talk to Martian ants,” a NASA official cracked last week. “We’re simply trying to decode their own talk.” What happens after that, of course, depends on what they have to say.
###
Analysis: This article, and several others like it in LIFE, Look and other popular publications opened my eyes (and ears, don’t forget the ears) to the possibility of communicating with dolphins! As an avid science fiction reader, I was delighted with the idea that our seas might contain a comparable form of non-human intelligence. I eventually got much more than I expected, by about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, with Dolly!
The last paragraph of the article is particularly telling, and sad. The famous anthropologists Dr. Gregory Bateson & his wife Lois Cammack had joined Lilly in the Virgin Islands to see what was going on, and, a year later, “See if you’re smart enough to decode their talk before you try to teach them ours” was Bateson’s parting shot. He later wrote “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” a book which I tried three times to read, and failed miserably each time.
And this is what Lilly’s most vociferous critics complained about his research, quite properly: HE NEVER PROVED THAT DOLPHINS EITHER USE OR COMPREHEND LANGUAGE BEFORE HIRING MARGARET HOWE (LOVATT) TO TEACH THEM ENGLISH! In scientific terms, this is serious cart-before the horse-putting, and it is an obvious no-no! Why, then, did Lilly pursue it so devotedly?
It strikes me, from both reading his writings and my personal experiences with him, that Lilly had to some degree an obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is common in scientists who strive under pressure for a high degree of accuracy, often to several decimal points. It’s also indicated in Lilly’s own autobiographical novel, “The Scientist,” in his descriptions of his lonely, rather isolated upbringing and childhood.
I can’t really say how Lilly handled major disappointments, because I never observed him doing so. But one of the privileges of whiteness, wealth (which Lilly had in relative degree) and education is that you’re insulated, to some degree, from failure. It may be that, as the evidence that he was on the wrong path accumulated, Lilly stuck more and more strongly to his abortive theories because he had to, to support his rather expansive ego. To admit he was wrong would be uncharacteristic of him, until much later in life.
There was also the practical aspect that Lilly had, with the establishment of the Dolphin Communications Laboratory, taken on the care and feeding of three, 400-lb. (180-kg.) adolescents who could smack you through a concrete wall, if they wanted to. It’s a big responsibility, and I don’t think people are going to give you much money just to study dolphins to see if they maybe, possibly, HAVE a language!
Finally… finally, sometimes a scientist, like everyone else, has a strong hunch that things are heading the right way, that they can disregard everybody else, that they can break the rules and still win! Such feelings are hard for a logical, rational mind to resist, precisely because they are not rational nor logical. But neither having a strong hunch, nor following it to the bitter end, makes one automatically right! Appearances can be deceiving, and as often as not, it is ourselves we deceive.
What matters to me is, I found something I wanted to pursue, and I have pursued it all my life. Maybe not as a scientist, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t made remarkable discoveries, such as this: WE HAVE HAD LIVING BESIDE US, UNNOTICED, FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, ANOTHER SPECIES OF LIFE THAT ROUTINELY ENGAGES IN MANY OF THE SAME HIGHER-ORDER FUNCTIONS THAT WE HUMANS DO: COMPLEX PROBLEM-SOLVING, SOCIAL AWARENESS, INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP IDENTITIES, ETHICS, THEORY OF MIND, and has enough imagination to realize that in some ways this odd, upright ape with the clever fingers IS RATHER LIKE ITSELF, in that our minds have strange and significant similarities!
We humans, as the dominant species on Planet Earth, need to acknowledge that a non-technological species, which cannot even open a can of beans or unfold a Swiss Army knife, is Number 2, and in the ocean, they are, and always will be, Number 1! Due to their 12-million year head start on us in the Large Brains Department, and their incredible record of sheer SURVIVAL over that time, we should be approaching them as older and wiser beings, with the respect and deliberation they deserve. Let what nature writer Loren Eisley called “our long human loneliness” finally be over, as we are re-admitted to the order of Natureby our old friends, the dolphins!
The author as he appeared in the 1970’s, eavesdropping on a chat between a dolphin and a Martian ant, whose appearance is thanks to NASA. Biden’s going to announce it next week, no, REALLY!
In Part I, I discussed the Caldwells, a married couple of scientists who authoritatively declared, in their 1967 book The World of the Bottlenose Dolphin,“Dolphins are not little humans in wet suits.”
They said this in an attempt to lay to rest what they felt was rampant, emergent pseudo-science about the “intelligence” and “spirituality” of dolphins coming from the John C. Lilly/Paul Spong camp of non-marine-biologist dolphin researchers, who experimented with then-rampant psychedelics, played jackhammers (Lilly) or wine glasses (Spong) to their subjects, and communed with them — psychically! (Or so they claimed.)
This series discusses some of the many striking similarities we DO share with dolphins, in this essay, self-recognition and self-awareness.
If David and Melba were alive today, I wonder how they would dismiss these similarities? Like debunking astronomers who claim, without actually researching, “No astronomer has ever seen a UFO,” (Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek and Carl Sagan come to mind, among others), marine mammalogists come up with all kinds of fantastic explanations for the advanced reasoning capabilities displayed by dolphins, and their insights into situations, especially power-structures, even human power-structures, which must be very similar to their own to be recognized as such!
About 25 years before the two scientists who ran the mirror experiment arrived on the dolphin scene, a former atomic physicist named Horace Dobbs took to SCUBA diving with Donald, a “lone wolf” dolphin who hung out in the cold waters off Cornwall, in southwest England. He wrote a book about his experience, Follow a Wild Dolphin, and in it he described what happened when he introduced Donald to his mirror image. The following film shows the results better than I can describe them!
In the film, Donald seems perplexed, and rightfully so: his eyes are showing him something threatening (another male dolphin) that his echolocation cannot get a lock on! What appears deep to his vision is merely a thin, flat panel when he plexes it (a term I have come to use as convenient shorthand for a dolphin using echolocation to locate or identify an object or person). So, in frustration, he gives it a good whack with his snout, sending the shattered fragments to the sea floor, where they now glint back at him malevolently from many sides. He has, in his frustration, only made the problem worse!
Score: Mirror 27, Dolphin 0! Round Two…
Self-awareness, or sapience — being able to think about your own thoughts — is rare in the animal kingdom. It was assumed, for the longest while, that no animal other than Homo sapiens possessed this characteristic, which is most eloquently expressed by recognizing that the face we see in the mirror is our own!
The dolphin-in-the-mirror experiment was definitively conducted in 2001 at the Baltimore Aquarium by two perceptive scientists, Lori Marino and Diana Reiss, for their joint PhD. project on animal cognition. By covering the mirror and marking the animal subject in an out-of-the-way place with a harmless grease marker, the two scientists were able to watch to see if the subject examined itself when the mirror’s cover was removed, a sure sign it knew the reflection was of itself, and not another threat or rival! (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.101086398) Their experiment is rightly famous!
As an example of the lack of this ability to recognize one’s reflection, I will relate the plight of a male cardinal, whose nest was perilously close to a parking lot at Babcock Ranch, where I worked as a tour guide. The bird wasn’t in any danger from the cars; however, their outside rear view mirrors were filled with a dreaded competitor, who was somehow always there whenever the cardinal stopped to take a look! I don’t know how many hours it spent fruitlessly battling this intruder, but it was pretty obvious that the instinct to attack things that resembled itself did not evolve in the presence of the looking-glass. Talk about a fruitless task! The cardinal never realized he was fighting his own reflection! He was trapped by instinct, a process that not only operates below cognitive thought, but long before it can get its shorts on!
Experiments with jungle-dwelling mammals show similar results. Leopards, gorillas, baboons, even most chimpanzees, all either attacked their own image in a stainless-steel mirror, or tried to avoid it. In short, we may say that the mirror aroused anxiety in them — I think that is anti-anthropomorphic enough to qualify as a valid assertion, don’t you? Only a few species of non-human animals showed consistent awareness of their mirror image, the ability to use the mirror to locate a mark on their bodies that they could not otherwise see, and examine it! Indian elephants and bottlenose dolphins were two of them. No surprise there, huh? Both have brains up to several times larger than human, with more folds on the substantial neocortex!
But among the NON-MAMMALS put before the mirror, several AVIANS — the last surviving category of DINOSAURIA! — showed critical mirror awareness, with brains roughly the size of shelled walnuts! How the ding-dang-doodle do they manage that with such tiny little brains? I refer to the Corvids, including magpies, crows and ravens, and the Psittacines, that is, the parrots and macaws, whose intellectual achievements have been shown to be closer to an 8-year-old child than to what we used to mockingly call a “bird brain!” Turns out we were unwittingly complimenting birds, much the way Motorola complimented Sony when a Motorola employee bought the first transistorized shirt-pocket radio!
One factor shared by all, save one, of these creatures (the pachyderms), is the desensitization, and even total loss, of the brain regions devoted to smell. Most birds have no sense of smell, nor do any of the cetaceans; they don’t have the brains for it! Smell to them is like echolocation to us, a theoretical concept.
The olfactory sense must have been the last, and most recent, to evolve in the Permian period, when insects and amphibians were first colonizing dry land. While life remained immersed in water, the sense of smell was subsumed under the sense of taste. It’s pretty much a moot point to me whether sharks, for instance, taste blood with their tongues or “smell” it with some kind of olfactory apparatus associated with the nostrils, they can reportedly detect blood in the water at 1:1,000,000 dilution!
That’s one part in one million, sucker. Keep swimming, that shark needs exercise!
(NOTE TO SELF: Check to see whether sharks do, indeed, have nostrils, or whether they smell with their gills.We wouldn’t want to lead people astray, would we? Oh, no, no, NO! Inaccuracy! Dishonesty! Guilt!)
This specific change in the cetacean and human brains will the the subject of Part III of this article, Can’t You Smell That Smell? It should be published in the next month, if I keep feeling as forward-moving as I do now… of course, my progress is only measured by how many steps backward I must take for each one forward!
Another interesting feature of these self-aware creature’s brains is that they feature a special type of nerve cell, or neuron, that doesn’t appear in the brains of un-self-aware creatures. It’s called a von Economo neuron, after the 1926 discoverer, or more casually, a spindle cell, based on its shape.
Left, normal neurom showing multiple axons and dendrites; right, a von Economo neuron, having just one of each. Photos from Smithsonian Magazine.Whaddya think, I sliced up somebody’s brain? Sheesh! “It’s okay, he wasn’t using it anyway!“
Neurologist Constantin von Economo, trying to look badass in 1920’s road gear. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Von Economo neurons aren’t found in the brains of monkeys. They are found sparsely in the brains of primates, somewhat more densely in the brains of elephants, more densely in cetacean brains and MOST densely in human brains! “Aha,” you exclaim, “human exceptionalism shows itself once again!” But I must demur! More than the basic fact of density/cm3, it’s how often these neurons get used that determines their degree of functionality! You can own a Cray supercomputer, but if you never turn it on, you’re going to do better math with the Calculator app on your iPhone!*
( * DISCLAIMER: The author does not own any stock in Apple, nor does anyone in his family work for Apple or have an interest in Apple. He is simply the humble owner of an iPhone, and appreciates the fact that it was so damn easy to figure out! Even for an all-thumbs 1950’s child like himself, yes!)
What exactly these von Economo neurons do is something of a mystery, but it is thought that they help transmit signals quickly across uninvolved regions of the brain, the idea being that since they only have one dendrite, they are able to respond more quickly than typical neurons, with multiple dendrites. They seem to have some effect on one’s sense of self, self-image and relations with others, but what shows most clearly is their lack. John Allman, a brain researcher at CalTech Pasadena, says “It is very clear that the original target of the disease (frontotemporal dementia) is these cells, and when you destroy these cells you get the whole breakdown of social functioning. That’s a really astounding result that speaks to the function of the cells about as clearly as anything can.”
In other words, what the von Economo neurons do, and how this affects the behavior of their owner, is not clear, and the brain-boffins are whistling past the graveyard! I mean, I read several Inter-Web articles on the damn things, and neurologists can barely agree on where these cells are found (between your ears, duh, but in only ONE LAYER of the brain), and whether they are REALLY different brains cells, or just look different.
(I DIDN’T KNOW BRAIN CELLS DISCRIMINATED BASED ON APPEARANCE, BUT I GUESS THAT’S THEIR JOB, EH?)
So what does this all boil down to?
Simply this: there are valid, biological reasons why dolphins appear to show such unusual animal behaviors as mutual aid-giving, social learning, and collective, cooperative behavior — like when the dolphins of Manaus, Brazil, help the local fishermen net fish, and eat what spills out! Parsimonious scientists suggest that these are just “spillover” behaviors, that the dolphins are reacting more-or-less instinctively toward us, without any real consideration of who or what we are.
But the fact is, most dolphins, even wild ones, show an intense, personal interest in us, when they get the chance. They don’t flee, like most wild animals do in the presence of humans; instead, they interact with us in a curious, often playful way, and sometimes even challenge us to play their games, make their noises, share their food, or even move utterly beyond the bounds of being human! And frankly, the idea that they are doing all those things INSTINCTIVELY…
…well, and purely confidentially, I think it stinks! But we’ll deal with that in Part III.
Image: “The Consciousness Connection,” by Jonathan Burton, New Scientist, 2012
COMING NEXT: PART III, Can’t You Smell That Smell? How dolphins lost their noses and part of their brains but gained blowholes! STAY TUNED, FELLOW DOLPHIN LOVERS!
You don’t understand, how can you possibly understand? Society has changed so much, and everything is different! Now, weed is widely accepted as a medicinal herb, it’s in everything from blunts to unguents to smoothies! Let me use a recent experience to try to explain to you what SMOKING WEED was like, ‘way back in 1970, and why your GRANDPARENTS still want to draw the curtains and light a stick of incense when they spark:
SARASOTA, FL. — My brother Hugh, 17, his friend Gary and two girls, all seniors in high school, decided to drive out to Myakka State Park in Gary’s beater car and spend a day communing with Mother Nature — the green, flammable kind, in addition to the trees, birds, squirrels and alligators. Because Gary had a prior for possession, my brother stuck the couple of joints they’d rolled in his sock. They were going to smoke them when they got good and ready!
They got to park, found an open field and began to just run around, play, turn cartwheels, do somersaults — an unusual, but typical, outburst of teenage energy and enthusiasm, and an entirely natural one, because they hadn’t yet set flame to Zig-Zag. Their behavior, however, caught the attention of a State Park Ranger, who monitored them through binoculars from the nearby woods and decided they must all be tripping on that LySolic acid Dramatic-us, or whatever it was young people did back then. You know, Commie stuff! They were probably draft dodgers, at least the boys, and the girls — well, the girls were obviously the kind of young ladies who would sleep with draft dodgers! So he did the natural thing, pulled out his shotgun, stepped out of the shadows of the cabbage palms and yelled “FREEZE! YOU’RE UNDER ARREST, HIPPIE SCUM!”
Or words to that effect.
Long story short, it was my brother who ended up staying in the Sarasota Juvenile Detention Center at the county taxpayers’ expense that night. Our mother was attending a adult degree program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, so I went to the JDC and give Hugh a big hug, which startled him almost as much as the park ranger had! I think he’d been more expecting a punch in the jaw from me — but not for using pot, hell no! The one thing I am not is a hypocrite, and I smoked at least as much as he did!
FOR GETTING CAUGHT, THE STUPID LITTLE SEWER-SNOID!
I mean, they could have appointed a lookout! Or Hugh could have eaten the joints (I note that it’s much more difficult to dispose of a metal or glass pipe this way, although silicon would be okay, if somewhat rubbery), or even wrapped them in plastic wrap beforehand and stuck them up his ass! (An early member of environmental organization Greenpeace once saved an irreplaceable roll of 35mm film documenting French police brutality by hiding it in her vagina. True story!) There were JUST ALL KINDS OF WAYS OF HANDLING THAT SITUATION that my brother and his fellow-travelers did not employ, probably because they, like most people, believed the oldest lie in the world:
IT CAN’T HAPPEN TO ME!
Why is this statement a lie?
Simple: BECAUSE IT ALWAYS HAPPENS TO US! ALL OF US, NO EXCEPTIONS. WE FUCK-UP, AND WE DIE. TWO ABSOLUTE TRUTHS OF EXISTENCE! WE’RE ALL HUMAN, ALL MORTAL. PERIOD, CASE CLOSED.
Quit worrying about Hugh! Other than that one night in jail, he never served any time. Because he was 17 and a minor, the judge just sentenced him to 6 months’ probation, and the arrest was expunged from his record when he turned 18. As our mother often said of him, “He could fall in a barrel of shit, and come up golden!” She had a very colorful vocabulary, did me Yorkshire mum!
TIME PASSES… 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020…
FADE IN: RECENT PAST, APRIL, 2023, INTERIOR MALCOLM’S HOUSE, PORT CHARLOTTE.
Pre-dawn lighting. MALCOLM’S living room is dark, and a black dog, EPIC, unseen at first, is barking. MALCOLM, naked, cursing at the dog, ENTERS from the BEDROOM and crosses to the window. Parting the blinds, he squints outside.
CUTAWAY: A silver truck is parked on the grass in front of Malcolm’s house. The engine isn’t running, and the cab is empty.
MALCOLM (to dog): “You bitch, you woke me up for THAT? Fuuuuucccckk…” He stumbles back to the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
DISSOLVE TO: The same door, later that morning, better lit. MALCOLM steps out, wrapping a tattered gingham bathrobe around himself and tying the frayed sash. He moves to the window and begins opening the blinds.
REACTION SHOT: EXT. LOOKING IN THROUGH WINDOW at MALCOLM. We see the truck, still on his lawn, reflected in the glass.
MALCOLM: “Fuck! Is that fucking thing still here? Fuck it…” He rubs his chin thoughtfully, looks up at the truck.
CAMERA PANS EXT. TRUCK, showing it’s in nice shape! Clean, no dents, looks like it’s owned by somebody who values it.
INT. MALCOLM at the WINDOW. He drops his hand from his chin, turns from window.
MALCOLM: “Ahh, I won’t call the cops, not yet! That truck’s not abandoned, it’s too nice! I’m sure somebody will be here with a tow truck soon, in the meantime… (YELLS) HEY EPIC! DO YOU WANT TO GO FOR A WALK?”
INT. CLOSE UP: EPIC emerges from the bedroom, carrying her leash folded-up in her mouth, wagging her tail in eager anticipation.
DISSOLVE TO: EPIC and MALCOLM, now dressed in camo shorts and T-shirt, walking on the sidewalk.
DISSOLVE TO: MALCOLM and EPIC return to his front door. CAMERA PANS to show truck still there. CAMERA PANS BACK to Malcolm.
MALCOLM: “Damn, still there! Well, time for our morning smoke, Epic. (He unlocks the front door.) Care to join me?”
EPIC: (Eagerly) “WOOF!” (They both step inside. Door closes.)
JUMP CUT TO: Door opens again and Malcolm steps out with a tray in his hand. On it are some tasty looking buds, rolling papers, a grinder and other accessories. CAMERA PANS to the silver truck just as a tow truck pulls up alongside it. The TOW TRUCK DRIVER gets out and begins to prep the silver truck to be towed.
EXT. DAY MALCOLM, still at the door, watching the tow truck driver at work. DOG NOISES from inside.
MALCOLM: (Turns back inside, yells to dog, offscreen ) “If I’ve told you once, Epic, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t be greedy! Take small tokes, not big ones! You can hold it better that way!”
DOG HOWLS. MALCOLM shakes head, CAMERA FOLLOWS him as he closes the door and sits in a chair at a patio table, puts the tray of weed down on the table, begins to load the grinder.
REVERSE ANGLE on MALCOLM’S face, intent on his work. He looks up at a noise of a truck door opening. CAMERA ZOOMS BACK to show a passenger get out of the tow truck’s side door, dressed all in black with a lizard-skin belt. He is a 20-something HIPSTER with a scraggly beard and hair pulled back in a bun. He walks around to the front of the truck and bends down.
CLOSE UP: The tire HIPSTER is looking at is flat. Very, very flat. As flat as your sister when she was 11.
MALCOLM looks up from rolling a joint.
REVERSE ANGLE over MALCOLM’S shoulder showing the HIPSTER sighing over the flat tire.
Holding the freshly rolled reefer in one hand, MALCOLM gets up and begins to walk toward the HIPSTER.
HIPSTER: “Yeah, I got troubles all right! I took the truck out last night, ran over a bottle or something, it ripped the tire all to shreds! So then I go to put the spare on, and guess what?”
MALCOLM: (Pensively) “It was flat too?”
HIPSTER: (Somewhat derisively) “No shit, Sherlock! So now we gotta take it into the shop, two new tires and probably a rim to boot! It’s going to cost a bundle!”
THE TOW TRUCK DRIVER begins to winch the HIPSTER’S truck up the ramp.
MALCOLM: “I feel sorry for you!” (Raises joint to lips, lights it, puffs a couple of times.) “Seems like Murphy’s Law in action! Well, here, maybe this will make you feel better…” (MALCOLM proffers the joint to the HIPSTER, who hesitates, for some reason. MALCOLM looks him up and down. NOISES from tow truck. Yeah, he’s a hipster, all right!)
MALCOLM: “You do indulge, don’t you?”
HIPSTER: “Uhhhh… yeah.”
MALCOLM: “Go on, I’ve got a cannabis card! I just bought this yesterday from my favorite pot shop, it’s fine sensi, brother!”
HIPSTER: “Is that Sativa or Indica?”
MALCOLM’S lower jaw falls open. He cannot believe what he’s just heard!
MALCOLM: (Angrily) “What do you care, buddy? It’s good dope, do you want a hit or not?”
HIPSTER: “You don’t know?”
MALCOLM: “It’s a hybrid… just take a damn hit, will you?” (Nervously, the HIPSTER takes the joint and tries to hit it, but it’s out. MALCOLM re-lights it for him, and the HIPSTER takes a quick, shallow hit, a real Bill Clinton hit, and passes the muggles back to Malcolm.
MALCOLM: “You know, back in my day, we didn’t ask what kind of dope it was, we were just so glad to…”
TOW TRUCK DRIVER (interrupting) “That does it, hey, you ready to go? Let’s roll!”
HIPSTER turns away from MALCOLM without a word and gets into the passenger side of the tow truck.
REFLECTION SHOT: MALCOLM framed by the tow truck’s outside mirror. It drives away, and the camera pans to MALCOLM’S face, the joint hanging from his lips. He squints after the truck, a Clint Eastwood scowl twisting his face.
MALCOLM: “I’ll be damned, he didn’t even say ‘Thank you!’ What a total turd!” (He inhales deeply and holds it, pondering humanity’s fate in a cold and uncaring cosmos. He slowly lets the smoke out his nostrils and looks up, glassy eyed, into the CAMERA, blinks a couple of times before speaking.
MALCOLM: “I ask you, Kids of Today, you who have grown up with so much privilege, what is this world coming to when you can can’t offer someone a hit of weed, without them demanding to know its’ lineage?”
MALCOLM looks down, takes another hit, turns around and begins to walk back toward his house. EPIC, off camera, HOWLS again.
MALCOLM (going toward front door): “Shut up, you damn dog, or I’ll fix your wagon!” He goes inside as the CAMERA ZOOMS BACK, revealing the tire tracks in MALCOLM’S front yard.
PORT CHARLOTTE, FL — Recent allegations that the U.S. has recovered parts, wreckage and even intact vehicles of extraterrestrial origin, made by a former government employee turned whistleblower, should expand interest in a controversial local author’s 2015 story about the attempted retrieval of a crashed alien spaceship and its surviving crew member.
“My novel ‘Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair,’ opens with four members of an elite but woefully inadequate government black-ops unit trying to locate a reported UFO that’s crashed in the foothills of the Rockies, outside of Durango, Colorado,” said writer Malcolm J. Brenner. “What follows is a rather improbable science-fiction story, told in three-and-a-half timelines, of interplanetary intrigue, cosmic war and lust, both human and alien. It’s also the story of my second marriage, backed up by an authentic newspaper clipping.”
Brenner, just turned 72, is the author of two other self-published books, one of which has achieved some notoriety. “Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover” is his thinly fictionalized novel of courtship and eventual seduction by a marine mammal of unusual abilities, one of them being interspecies telepathy! First published in 2010, it’s since sold more than 2,500 copies in 18 countries, Brenner said.
The plot of “Mel-Khyor” revolves around the surviving alien’s attempts to repair his AI-augmented spaceship and escape Earth, with the help of Susie Louise McGonagle (a pseudonym), whose family happens to own a vacation cabin just down the trail from the crash. Susie is shocked when the alien, called Mel-Khyor, tells her if he and his Ship are about to be captured intact, he is under orders to disable the Ship, and then kill himself, to prevent humans from obtaining advanced, star-traveling technology!
“Needless to say, Susie springs to his aid, then wonders what she can do to repair an alien spaceship,” Brenner said. “It so happens that the Ship learns to interface with her, so that she effectively becomes part of it, repairing itself!”
As unlikely as this scenario sounds, Brenner recalled, it originates in some pillow talk he and his fiancée had in New Mexico, after watching an early episode of the then-popular 1990’s cosmic-paranoia show “The X-Files.”
“She was sleepy, and that episode about UFOs must’ve jogged her unconscious,” Brenner said, “because she mumbled some words as we were going to bed, and when I realized she was talking about an actual, first-hand encounter with an extra-terrestrial alien, my blood froze.”
Further research revealed the timing of his ex-wife’s encounter, the night of August 2, 1978, coincided with reports of an unusual meteor falling over Canada and plunging south to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where it apparently exploded harmlessly 15 miles up, but with the force of a tactical nuclear weapon. The U.S. Air Force confirmed that the object, a bolide, was not man-made; Brenner believes the blast may have been a decoy intended to discourage searchers from looking for the survivor.
“If so, it didn’t work,” Brenner noted wryly.
It now seems that statements and allegations made by David Grusch, reportedly a former employee of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and a decorated Army combat veteran of Afghanistan, confirm that the U.S.A., and other nations, are in possession of wreckage, debris and even intact vehicles of extraterrestrial origin. Grusch was a liaison with the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force for three years, and later a leader of the NGA’s UFO/UAP analysis unit. He is well-spoken-of by members of the intelligence community who know him. (Source: The Debrief, June 5, 2023.)
Referring back to his ex-wife’s experience, which he admits to sometimes doubting, Brenner said “It’s not the lack of extraterrestrial vehicles, it’s the lack of pilots who can actually fly them! These craft are, according to my ex-wife, controlled by a very sensitive, sophisticated artificial intelligence which merged, in some way, with her mind. The alien did that so he could interrogate her, but the net effect was that thereafter, she and the Ship were mentally linked, giving her the ability to work as its eyes and hands in repairing it,” Brenner explained.
“Flying one of these vehicles is going to require someone, like her, who has already been tuned-in to the sapient Ship and can do the equivalent of a ‘Vulcan mind-meld’ with its supercomputer,” Brenner continued. “It isn’t going to be easy, and if you don’t have what amounts to the computer’s password, it isn’t going to be fun, either!
“Such people are going to be in demand, to the point where our government might intervene to get them to cooperate, for National Security reasons,” Brenner mused. “I told my wife that her best protection from that would be to go on Oprah Winfrey’s show and tell her whole damn story. That way, if you ‘disappear,’ at least somebody with some clout will notice!” However, she rejected the idea.
Brenner has steadfastly refused to identify his ex-wife, or tell of her current whereabouts. “Somewhere between the Mississippi River and the eastern border of California,” he said when asked if he knew where she was. “She has relatives back East, somewhere, so she might be there, too.
“Please note that her son, in his late 30’s, served as a U.S. Army Ranger in the 10th Mountain Division for several years, surviving a brutal fire-fight in a conflict zone. I know for a fact that he will brook no intrusions whatsoever on his mother’s privacy,” Brenner warned would-be busybodies.
Brenner’s third book’s a memoir, “Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood,” documenting the trauma inflicted on him by a sadistic pedophile psychiatrist and a cold, sometimes-brutal mother.
“Mel-Khyor” and “Wet Goddess” can be bought on Amazon, and an audiobook version of “Mel-Khyor” is available on Audible and other sellers. “Orgone Box” is at present only available as an ebook from Smashwords, but Brenner hopes to be able to reprint it as a trade paperback soon. He is working on a non-fiction book about his time as a newspaper reporter on the Navajo Nation.
Brenner’s web site is http://malcolmbrenner.com. He can be reached at malcolmb2@centurylink.net, or by cell phone at (415) 640-5013. Brenner strongly suggests you text him before calling, as he receives a lot of junk calls and sometimes answers them rudely.
Below is the Durango Herald’s clipping referred to above, documenting the alleged meteor’s fall.
And finally, a review of “Mel-Khyor” from the Florida Weekly.
That’s all for now, folks!
An “unidentified flying object” appears over the desert near Highway 50 in central Nevada. Photo taken with a 35mm Olympus OM-1 SLR camera, Kodacolor film, 35-70mm Zuiko zoom lens. Exposure f11 @ 1/125. Date: September, 1992.
NOTEZ BIEN: This post somehow went out yesterday restricted only to my subscribers, so thanks, both of you! But I meant it for the sweating masses of the Third World, the laboring ignorant peons that make up the bulk of Earth’s population, the ones who haven’t bought any of my books yet, and I don’t know how it got so restricted! Here it is again, now available to anybody who can read, which I hope includes you, dear reader! Enjoy, or enjoy again, if you got this yesterday. More to come!
Fellow-travelers, greetings from the edge of the Great Beyond! As I gaze into the abyss (and perceive, just as Friedrich Nietzsche warned us, that it gazes back at me), visions of the future form in my slightly foggy mind.
Visions of… you! Yes, you, doing something… something obscure, uncommon… something odd, very odd, in this, the 21st Century, the era of people so distrustful they would rather catch a deadly virus than take the vaccine against it!
You are seated atyour computer, reading an ebook!
A very naughty ebook, I might add. How do I know? Certain subtle signs… or not so subtle, if you’re a guy. I never bothered to count, but I seem to have approximately equal sales to both pitchers and catchers, if you catch my drift?
Or maybe it’s a book that makes you uncomfortable, for some reason. It’s a brutally honest tale of childhood, helplessness, and sexual abuse… but far be it from me to dictate your tastes in erotica or pornography!
What’s the book’s title, you ask? Alas, the spirits refuse to adjust the focus on my Beyond-O-Scope, and it’s too blurred to read. But I do know what you are thinking!
You are thinking “Good grief, what a piece of shit! I disagree with everything this author has to say, in this or any other book he or she has ever authored, and I have developed a profound personal dislike for him or her! Furthermore, this writing style sucks donkey dicks! It’s somewhere between reading Vladimir Putin’s annual speech to the Duma, and the science-fiction novels of A. E. Van Vogt! I can’t believe the publisher paid… oh wait…”
And then you remember that you are reading a self-published ebook, and there are no editors, proof-readers or publishers standing in-between you, naked, and the writer’s wounded, bleeding, pus-oozing, maggot-infested ideas.
Nothing at all!
And you smile… yes, smile… because YOU, lucky human, BOUGHT THIS BOOK ON SALE, at discounts ranging from 25-50%! At that rate, even this sordid, cliché-ridden piece of monkey excrement is a bargain!
And bravely, brushing the flies off the carcass of Western literature, you turn back to your screen and read on!
I told you I would not dictate your tastes in sexually titillating reading, and I won’t. But let me politely SUGGEST this:
If you buy my ebooks from Smashwords (adult filter set to “All Erotica”) between March 5-11, including the memoir “Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood” at 50% off ($3.49), and/or my non-fiction interspecies romance novel, “Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover,” at 25% off ($5.24), YOU WILL NOT BE BORED AND WILL NOT REGRET IT!
Your precious time will be spent reading only carefully-crafted words picked for the peak of perfection, woven into epic, thunderous, yet strangely tender tales, stories that seem hauntingly familiar yet unutterably alien, true stories that no other writer dares tell, and tells as well as me, the one and only Malcolm J. Brenner!
Wait! My astral vision is coming back into focus, somebody has turned the knob, cleaned the lens! I see clearly now, the fog is gone…
…In the future, I see you reading an ebook I wrote. You are nodding, smiling, perhaps chuckling a little, sipping a cup of your favorite beverage and carelessly nibbling an oatmeal cooking with raisins, oblivious to the crumbs falling into your keyboard… and you are HAPPY!
And I am very, very grateful! Thanks, readers, comrades, fellow-travelers, and anybody else who appreciates my stories, or buys them to burn in a self-righteous bonfire! The joke’s on you, asshole, your kid has purloined a copy and is reading it under the covers at night, by flashlight! — Malcolm
The report of my death was an exaggeration. — Mark Twain
Hey there, fellow Malcolm followers! (Yes, I am a follower of myself! That makes sure SOMEBODY reads these blog posts, aside from the FBI.) Been a while, huh? Like, March, almost two (count ’em, 2) years ago? Deux ains? Dos años?
I haven’t updated this blog since then, and doubtless both of you are wondering, “What the hell happened to Malcolm? Did he fall off the edge of the world, or get eaten by a Bigg’s orca whose echolocation mistakenly identified him as a nice, plump seal?
“Was he abducted by the good aliens, the bad aliens, or the aliens we just don’t know about? Shanghai’d into the white slave trade, chained to a desk, churning out cheap porno novels for the Yakuza or the Sinaloa Cartel? Did he take some drugs and go mad, because, you know, drugs (the bad ones, anyway) do that? Or did the dolphins carry him off to some deserted island, to study him in greater detail?
“Alas, we’ll never know! R.I.P., you crazy motherfucker! You wrote the best sex-with-a-dolphin novel I ever read!” — Anonymous Hipster in San Francisco
It is tempting to envisage such improbably romantic scenarios, but sadly, it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! What REALLY happened was… I got sick. Real sick! And I couldn’t write to save my life.
I suffer from vertigo, which is a VERY debilitating condition, and CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), which is more of the same. CFS feels like crushing tiredness and the absolute imperative to sleep, but when you awaken you don’t feel any more rested than you did before you nodded off! And my vertigo, which has so far defied diagnosis despite a brain scan, is so bad sometimes that it nauseates me. If I sit on the rotating office chair at my desk, I’m unstable. It’s easier, and safer, to slouch on the couch.
Then there is also the Perugia nodularis that afflicts my skin, but that’s so gross, let’s not go there. I use a lot of gentamicin ointment and adhesive bandages, leave it at that. What does the name mean? It’s Latin for “itchy bumps.” You had to ask, didn’t you?
These maladies make it very difficult to organize and focus my thoughts in a way that promotes the kind of easy, clear writing I like to produce. It’s been this way since 2016, and in the spring of 2020, with COVID-19 stalking us like a hungry predator, I simply couldn’t write anything anymore. I felt crushed, isolated and depressed.
In short, I felt just like everybody else! My attention span was shorter than a goldfish’s, my balance was all in my ankles and often the room would spin like I was riding some demonic merry-go-round. Other days, I felt more energy, pretty normal! But if I exerted myself, like I wanted to to get some freakin’ things done around here, I paid for it in spades for days afterward.
Recently, in order to cope with this condition, I’ve had to learn how to not tax myself, how to pace my efforts, and not to expect too much out of me.
The good news, health-wise, is that aside from these annoyances, I don’t seem to have any of the really deadly or debilitating diseases of old age. No cancer, heart disease, senility, Alzheimer’s, emphesyma, liver problems… the list of things I DON’T have is probably a lot longer than the list of things I do!
So I count my blessings and offer prayers of thanks to Fortuna, the Roman goddess of Chance, who appears to me as a magnificent serpent with a purple Mohawk (no, I don’t know how that happens!). And she tells me I’m a fool to make any offerings to her, because she’s merely a mask on the macro qualities of the inherent quantum instability of the Universe at the sub-micron level.
“Below 10 to the minus 23 centimeters, everything is random.” — Dr. John C. Lilly
And Wet Goddess? I sold out at Christmas! My remaining stock wasn’t that huge; fortunately, demand was only a fraction of last year. I now have another 48 copies on hand (sold one, sending one to Thea, who gave hers away to a friend), ready to go. I have been especially gladdened by readers who are ordering additional copies to share with somebody else! That’s great!
I really don’t care if I sell a lot of books, or make a lot of money at this self-publishing game. What I really care about is that the ideas I am promoting — that we humans are not alone ON THIS PLANET in possessing self-awareness, deep thought and curiosity about the other inhabitants of the world — become more widespread in society at large, and more acceptable to the (sometimes) rational minds of scientists.
How much time I have left in this world, I do not know, and I’m pretty sure I won’t live to see the changes I would like to bring about come to pass. It should be enough to ignite the torch, and leave it to my daughter’s generation to carry it forward. Think peace, and a happy New Year to all my readers.
Malcolm J. Brenner 