Thinking About Everything: A Medley of Whimsical Musings

By Dennis Ford

Humorist Dennis Ford has seen it all. After all, he lives in New Jersey.
As a teacher and bookseller, Ford contemplates some of life’s great questions—all without leaving his car. These include:
• What’s the funniest word in the English language?
• How plastic surgery can turn devils into hotties.
• The case of the perfectly fitting police uniform.
But Ford doesn’t stop there. He also devises a master plan to win the war in Iraq and ease the burden on the military, explains how to apply for membership in the Society of Goths, and backs up his belief that while Jesus may have been resurrected, he most certainly wasn’t crucified.
Politics, religion, psychology, and popular culture—it’s all fair game. Ford takes on everything, shooting from the lip and saying out loud what everyone else keeps to themselves.
Stop taking life so seriously and consider the lighter side of things in Thinking About Everything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 4, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595613915

Dennis Ford

Dennis Ford is the author of nineteen books, including the recent novels Tracks That Lead To Joy and World Without End. He lives on the Jersey Shore, where he walks the beaches and thinks about ghosts.

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Copyright © 2008 Dennis Ford.

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iUniverse rev. date: 10/29/2020

For my Mom,

Who read these entries,

And the two hundred fifty that didn’t get a passing grade

For Bluesman Mike Lindner,

For the honor of reading fifteen years of inspired lyrics

And for County Road 539,

A friend in traffic thick and thin

This book is the product of seven years and one hundred fifty thousand miles driving between my home in Little Egg Harbor and the great Barnes & Noble Distribution Center located first in Dayton—that’s New Jersey, not Ohio—and later in Monroe.  (The Distribution Center in Monroe is so huge it can hold the entire city of Liverpool with room for suburbs.)  I realize that being by myself commuting through the Pine Barrens on County Road 539 for nearly three hours a day was a potentially precarious situation.  I risked being in what Ambrose Bierce called bad company.  I’m proud to say I never cracked up.  The long rides through the pine forest gave me the opportunity to rehearse my psychology lectures for the courses I teach part-time at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.  They also gave me the opportunity to step outside of myself and to think about things in general—to think about everything.

Oliver St. John Gogarty wrote to the effect that you become less conscious of the journeys you make as you pay attention to the things outside of yourself.  I can add to this—the more conscious you become of the things outside, the less conscious you become of yourself.  The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life can get mighty tiresome when you’re alone in the woods with an hour of trees left to traverse.  When you’re snug in your 1998 Saturn XL and know the road down to the location of the littlest pothole, it’s not bad form to reach outside of yourself and let your mind rove through this mysterious and marvelously complex world.  The two hundred fifty entries that follow are the written records of those mental flights, journeys done at the speed of thought and mostly within the posted speed limit.

1. 

Folie a deux is a mental disorder in which a paranoid delusional system is shared by two people.  I think of this diagnosis whenever I recall Shaughnessy, my former lab partner, and the psychological troubles he had in the junior year of college.

Shaughnessy and I weren’t friends, we weren’t really acquaintances.  I knew him from class and from seeing him in Hobart Hall.  We were both psychology majors, so we took the same courses in the same time slots with the same professors.  It so happened we took Experimental Psychology with Professor von Ripps.  Through random assignment I got him as a lab partner—I preferred Julia, but I got Shaughnessy instead.  That’s the story of my life—I think if I had better lab partners, I would have gone farther and made a success of myself.

As part of the course requirements we had to train white rats (Mus norvegicus albinus) to bar press under various experimental conditions.  This took no great effort—it’s amazing what a pellet of rat food can accomplish—but it meant being together with Shaughnessy several hours on a daily basis.  Things were going well at the start—the rats had progressed to a variable interval schedule of reinforcement in no time.  Shaughnessy wasn’t much of a conversationalist.  He didn’t follow sports.  He didn’t read fiction.  He wasn’t up on world events.  He pretty much just sat there and watched the rat through his reflection in the glass of the Skinner box.  This was fine with me, since I was able to use the time to study for other courses and to daydream about the lab partner I didn’t get.

One evening Shaughnessy suddenly walked over and, looking around to see he wasn’t being watched, announced in an earnest tone of voice, They’re coming to get me.  This kind of statement elicits the immediate reply, They who?  I have to be honest—I never found out.  They started out to be a certain experimental psychologist in the employ of the Dark Lords.  They shortly progressed to the other majors in the psychology department.  They then progressed to the janitorial staff and to the campus police.  Then they became the city and county police.  By the time Shaughnessy took a leave of absence in tranquility base they included his neighbors and everyone in the second ward.

Shaughnessy’s delusional system involved the belief that he was going to be forcibly removed from the campus and sent—well, I don’t know where.  I don’t think he knew.  I suppose it was someplace terrible.  This belief sometimes involved delusions pure and simple.  Other times, it involved chronic misinterpretations of whatever was going on in the classroom or in the lab.  Whatever their origin, these delusions and misinterpretations perplexed Shaughnessy, mightily.  He was not sure of their validity and he was always trying to validate the suspicion that they were coming to get him.

Shaughnessy was hypervigilant, but his emotion was flat—we might say hyperflat.  The only emotions he exhibited were fear and, one time, grief—this was when he learned the rats were going to be sacrificed at the conclusion of the semester.  He must have thought he was going to join his specimen in the big laboratory in the sky.  He froze and paid strict attention whenever a student came into the lab.  He also froze and paid strict attention whenever a student left the lab. If someone looked at him for a split second too long, this entered into the perplexity.  If someone failed to look at him, this entered into the perplexity.  If someone spoke in a soft voice, this too entered.  So, too, if someone spoke loudly, or if someone paid attention to him, or if someone ignored him, or if someone passed by, or if someone didn’t pass by, or if someone was walking toward him, or if someone was walking away from him, or if someone was reading a book, or if someone wasn’t reading a book, or if someone was taking notes, or if someone wasn’t taking notes—it didn’t matter.  Everything was grist for the paranoid mill.

The issue of folie a deux enters into this in Shaughnessy’s persistent attempt to validate these beliefs.  He had an inkling they were delusions, and all in his head, but he wasn’t sure.  They were real to him and he wasn’t sure they weren’t real to me.  So, he asked me, literally dozens of times during our lab work, if I shared his interpretations of events.  Dozens of times a day, hundreds of times in the course of a week, thousands of times in the course of the spring semester, I told him that he was wrong.  They weren’t coming to take him away—I understand this was difficult to accept in a place where people wore white coats and weren’t selling ice cream.  It was good to know you, Shaughnessy, but no one’s leaving.

The repetitive validation process got so bad, I was tempted to agree with him just for the sake of getting him off my back.  That’s the point with folie a deux.  I didn’t share his delusions and I never once validated his beliefs.  If I had, I would have confirmed his suspicions.  I wasn’t privy to his academented belief system, I didn’t share it, and I wasn’t about to agree with him, which was lucky for him.

I suppose it was lucky for me, too, since we could have slipped into a mutual delusional system.  We were sufficiently isolated in the lab to nurture any sort of nonsense.  I would have validated his beliefs, and he would have validated mine, and they would have been much the same beliefs, and they would have been wrong beliefs.

Not that any of this mattered in helping Shaughnessy get better.  I’m not under the delusion that my standing like a rational seawall in the riptide of a psychosis helped Shaughnessy to get well.  At best, my refusal to share his psychotic views may have kept him from sinking into a permanent psychosis, or so I like to believe.  Unfortunately, I lost track of Shaughnessy after graduation, so I can’t say with certainty whether they ever came for him.

Throughout this miserable experience I was struck by the fact that his delusions never changed despite constant refutation.  Paranoia is certainly no accurate prognosticator.  He was constantly, continually, completely, wrong, but that little mattered.  He repeated the fixed idea, found out that he was wrong, and then repeated the fixed idea, quite as if he were a prophet with honor.

A behaviorist interpretation might be advanced to explain his predicament, but that wouldn’t help.  Yes, I was paying attention and, yes, I was acknowledging his beliefs, but it can’t be very reinforcing to be constantly wrong.  And it can’t be very reinforcing to call attention to oneself in so demeaning a manner.  If I were a different sort of person, the Psychology Club could have had a field day playing pin the diagnosis on Shaughnessy.

The failure of refutation must lie in the cognitive domain.  To a person thinking clearly, constant refutation of a fixed idea would lead to some effort at self-correction.  This process of self-correction was impaired by the psychosis.  It may be that this impairment led to the psychosis or was itself the psychosis.  I’m not sure whether the psychosis was responsible for the failure of self-correction or whether the failure of self-correction was responsible for the psychosis.

2.  Negative correlation is the situation in statistics in which two variables have an inverse or reciprocal relationship, such that high scores on one variable are associated with low scores on the other variable, and vice versa.  I explain the concept to students in the Borough of Manhattan Community College introductory psychology course by the following example—there is a strong and predictable negative correlation between eyesight and intelligence.  This example is always followed by smiles from the people with glasses and guffaws from the people without.

I go on to advise the students that if they want to appear intelligent—whether or not they are—they should wear eyeglasses.  And I tell them that wearing eyeglasses is a way to avoid getting punched in fist fights.  You can’t hit a man with glasses, as we used to say when I was a kid.  This statement is followed by guffaws from both bespectacled and un-bespectacled students—the bespectacled students guffaw louder.  To a person, they inform me that times have changed since when I used to be a kid.  You most certainly can hit a man with glasses.

I reminisce with the class that when I was a boy I could never be hit because it wasn’t fair to fight someone who couldn’t see without his glasses on.  Besides, everyone was poor and no family could afford to buy a second pair of glasses if the first one got broken in a schoolyard scrape.  I could lash out in fights, but I could not be lashed in turn.  I could punch, but I could not be punched.  I could strike, but I could not be struck.  These social courtesies always put me at an advantage, except for the time the other kid in the fight was wearing glasses.  We didn’t know what to do.  We couldn’t hit one another with our glasses on and the fight wouldn’t have gone beyond the level of wild misses if both of us took our glasses off.  I think we agreed to insult one another and then go home and watch Lassie.  I got off an insult that made him cry—I called him four eyes.

And I reminisce that I always carried glasses in the days when I was wearing contact lenses.  One time in the Blue Water Tavern I got into an argument with a barfly over whether drinking nonalcoholic beer counted as drinking beer.  When the argument got hot and heavy, I asked the man to please wait a moment.  I reached in my pocket, took out my glasses, and said, This is better.  Now I can see whom I’m arguing with.  I was thinking I could say whatever I wanted because he couldn’t hit a man wearing glasses.  He was full of the drink, however, and didn’t seem to notice, or to care, that he was going to hit a person with bad vision.  Complaining about the unfair advantage, I told him I would fight him, Even though I can’t see a thing without my glasses on.  I challenged him to step outside, which he immediately did, cracking his knuckles into fists as he barreled through the swinging doors to the sidewalk.  I promptly slipped out the back door.  I wasn’t about to lose my contacts, break my glasses, or worse, over the ontological qualities of nonalcoholic beer.  Besides, I hold a fifth-degree black belt in the martial art of Tai Flee.

3.  Some of the things we don’t see anymore—because of leased cars—are bumper stickers bragging about family vacations.

4.  There is no doubt that Barnes & Noble rocks as a corporation.  It follows that its competitors, such as Borders and Books-A-Million, pebble.

5.  In an issue of the New York Press—a paper so awful, fish refuse to stay wrapped inside—a columnist mourned the lack of class in the Clinton presidency and the general decline in taste and dignity in society.  He bemoaned the homogenization and cheapening of culture and offered as evidence the observation that patrons wear the same clothes dining in the finest Manhattan restaurants as they do in McDonald’s.  This is a point of view in which I concur.  The mall in Paramus is the same as the mall in Atlanta as is the mall in Chicago as is the mall in Salt Lake City and so on and on and on.  The same books, the same movies, the same music, the same clothes, the same toys, and the same opinions.  Every place is the same.  What’s the sense of going anywhere, if every place is the same?  Better still, we can stay at home and order our lives on the Internet.  But homogenization of culture is not my point.

There’s another theme lurking in the column.  Our culture has homogenized in another way.  It has become a more desperate, brutal, violent, and evil place—everywhere.

Examples are legion.  We have only to open the morning papers to learn that The Press of Atlantic City is printing the same stories as is the Orlando Sentinel as is the Bergen Record as is the New York Daily News.  I’m not talking about the big picture in Africa or in China or in the Middle East, but about the local atrocities of who’s murdering whom in what gory way.

The example that comes to mind to demonstrate how times have changed for the worse is an airing of an old Fugitive episode I happened to catch on the tube.  This is the famous series staring David Janssen.  In this episode the fugitive is picked up by a nun.  The sister wears the old-fashioned full-body habit long out of fashion, so you know the episode predates color television.  (We used to call nuns who wore this kind of medieval garb penguins.)  She is fleeing a guilty conscience—she refused to help a troubled soul who subsequently committed a bad deed—and she is considering leaving the order.  She and the fugitive encounter a number of violent individuals along the trip.  There’s a violent storekeeper who tries to cheat Dr. Kimble.  There are two teenage punks who try to beat him up.  And there’s a posse of gun-toting hombres who mistake the fugitive for a thief and aim to shoot him.  The sister arrives on the scene in timely fashion in all three incidents and chastises the offenders.  She even slaps the face of one of the teenage punks.

The sister’s aggressive righteousness would never be tolerated in today’s culture.  No nun would slap a person today, certainly not a stranger, without putting herself in danger of being slapped in turn.  And the sister’s moral outrage at the offenses these thugs tried to perpetrate on an innocent man would not be shared.  Rather, the sister would be the butt of humor in today’s plot lines, her garb especially.  At best, her outrage would be construed as a hangover of an authoritarian age.

At the end of the episode the fugitive survives to hitchhike another day.  And the sister decides to return to the Church.  Her decision runs counter to what current programming would show.  If the story were written today she would be shown leaving the order for the material world.  Staying in the Church would be seen as cowardly—or as the symptom of a mental condition.

6.  There is a saying to the effect that things that don’t kill me make me strong.  I think the philosopher Nietzsche made it up—it could have been that guy who used to sit outside the firehouse and wave to the automobiles.  Regardless, my experience does not support this statement.  I have found the contrary to be true.  Things that don’t kill me make me sick, tired, and ache all over.

7.  No one outside Dallas County believes in the literal existence of two men named Cain and Abel.  What these brothers represent is, however, anything but fictional.  The tale in Genesis may never have happened, but it is not a fable.  The tale points to a grim spiritual and psychological truth.  Very nearly on the first page of the first chapter of the story of humankind lie depravity, cruelty, and murder.

In 1991 hikers in the Italian Alps found the well-preserved mummy of a man who died approximately five-thousand years ago.  Called the Iceman, this Neolithic traveler is the oldest intact human body and most studied mummy in science.  State-of-the-art forensic investigations revealed that the Iceman was a small muscular man around forty-five years of age at his death.  He may have been a person of rank in his tribe, since he carried a sturdy copper ax.  Pollen residue in his clothing revealed that he died in springtime.  His last meals included goat and deer meat, as well as grains and plants.

No one knows where the Iceman was headed or where he was coming from.  He died above the six-thousand foot level and may have been descending rather than ascending, as was initially thought.  (His clothing contained pollen from trees that grow above the level where his body was found.)  He wore three layers of clothing, bearskin shoes, and had a kit for starting fires.  Along with the ax, he carried a dagger and a bow.  The bow was incompletely notched and the arrowheads were poorly cut.  The thinking today is that he was in a hurry wherever he was going and left without preparing proper weaponry.

In June, 2001, X-rays revealed that the Iceman had a triangular arrowhead the size of a quarter embedded beneath his left shoulder.  Further research found that the arrowhead had cut a half-inch hole in the Iceman’s subclavian artery, which connects the arm and the heart.  It was a lethal wound, resulting in death within minutes.  The Iceman had been murdered.

It’s not known why the Iceman was murdered.  It was not for religious reasons and it wasn’t in a robbery, since the ax was left with the body.  It’s certain that someone pulled the shaft of the arrow out of the wound, possibly because the murderer did not want to be identified.  Favorite conjectures at a distance of fifty centuries—this is a cold case, if ever there was one—include the possibilities that the Iceman was murdered because of political considerations or because of a personal grudge.  Both conjectures are supported by the hastily prepared nature of the Iceman’s flight and by a hand wound he suffered a few days before his death, as if he had been in a fight.

Regardless of the motives, we have the truly disappointing situation that the really existing Abel of the Alps had been done in by a fellow human being.  What is very nearly the first documented incident in history turns out to be a murder.  It can’t get any more glum than this.

8.  When the stores ordered books, it was always two boxes of this genre, four boxes of that genre, and ten boxes of the other genre.  Ever finicky, the Paramus store would order individual books—eight of this, thirty of that, sixty of the other.  Now, that was fine.  We needed the business in any quantities.  I noticed that no one ever ordered odd numbers of books—five boxes of this, nine boxes of that, seventeen boxes of the other.  And Paramus never ordered seven or thirty-one or fifty-nine books.  It was always even numbers of books, and that’s odd.

Is there something strange about odd numbers?  Is there something weird?  Something sinister?  Can odd numbers be the southpaws of the number world?

Let’s ask the number five, How does it feel to be odd?  Let’s ask the number nine, Do you feel weird?  Let’s ask the number thirteen—we better skip over thirteen and ask fifteen instead, Do you feel strange?  And we can ask nineteen, Just what’s so different about you?

Maybe we’re facing a Whorfian-like bias in vocabulary.  We’re prejudiced against odd numbers because they’re called by an unlikable word.  If we called odd numbers by a different word—say by the term noneven—they wouldn’t be considered odd at all.

9.  On the religious radio station the preacher said that the Bible is the final authority in any argument.  This view is not acceptable outside the realm of salvation and it may not even be acceptable in that realm.  In the material world we say that experience decides, but this is not entirely correct.  Experience doesn’t decide, individuals decide what is and is not the case.

It’s a foolish thing to rely exclusively on one’s own powers of decision.  We can easily be wrong and are, in fact, more often wrong than we are right.  But relying on experts can also be a foolish thing.  Expertise can be faked and it can be pathological.  Never mind the fringe fields.  There are examples in all the legitimate sciences how wrong experts have been.  Experts in medicine, in psychology, even in chemistry and physics, have been shown to be as wrong as any individual glorying in misguided isolation.

10.  Chamber pot is a term we don’t often hear in the twenty first century.  I used it in a joking manner at a family gathering and no one knew what it meant.  (No, Richard, it doesn’t mean smoking dope in the living room.  Your parents would never allow that.)  Ever the helpful relative, I explained the meaning of the term.

In the days before indoor plumbing hosts provided their guests with small porcelain pots so they wouldn’t have to trek to the outhouse in the middle of the night.  In the event nature called all guests had to do was roll up their nightshirts and sit down to business.  When morning came the guests left the pots in the corridor.  The butler collected the pots, carried them outside, and dropped their contents in the pasture.  Thick grass sprouted; so did weeds.  Cows strolled by and ate the turf.  When they grew fat, the cows were led to slaughter.  Juicy cuts of rump roast soon appeared on the dining room table.  Guests consumed the roast, along with mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, and homemade apple pie with scoops of vanilla ice cream on the crust.  The cycle proceeded anew.  Chamber pots were passed out, the butler put on gloves, herds of cows stamped out of the barn, snorting grayish puffs of breaths in the crisp morning air.

This cycle would have continued eternally, except that someone invented toilets that flush.

11.  I tell the students in psychology class to make sure their essays show agreement of number—that is, nouns and pronouns have to agree.  A typical example of a violation of number is, "In order for a person to earn a living, they must work."  I advise students to use plurals to avoid this kind of error and I say the following, If you are in a relationship, I want you to drop the other person.  Get out of the relationship and fall in love with plurals.  Let plurals become your new girlfriend or boyfriend, as the case might be.  Plurals never let you down.  Plurals are your friends.  Plurals want to be more than your friends.  Plurals want to be your significant others, plurals want to be intimate with you, plurals want to be your lovers.  You can never go wrong loving plurals.  Unlike with pauses, plurals can never get you pregnant.

12.  The religious radio station has been broadcasting an interesting series on the Resurrection.  This series takes a slightly intellectual approach, although we know what the conclusion will be, this being a religious station.  I got to thinking about the Resurrection and about what else it might be, if, in fact, it’s not the physical resurrection of the Savior of the World.

The possibilities are limited.

We can pretty much ignore the conjecture that it was a hoax.  There doesn’t seem to be any motivation for a group to have perpetrated a hoax.  The Romans certainly had no motivation and the Jews didn’t.  The possibility that the earliest Christians, who were not Christians as we understand the term but very much of the Jewish faith, pulled off a hoax is also remote—in some ways more remote than the possibility of a physical resurrection.

Another conjecture is that the Resurrection was a clever theological maneuver passed off first by a group of rabbis and then by bishops.  This would make the Resurrection a kind of sacred eat your cake and have it, too story line, in which Jesus is God, but dies, but rises from the grave.  So, there.

We can see the cleverness of this maneuver from our advanced perspective two millennia later.  But there’s a weakness in this conjecture.  The eyewitness testimony of the Resurrected Savior as reported in the gospels is very dark, very obscure, and very mysterious.  The Savior’s best lines and best miracles happen before the Resurrection and not after.  This is very interesting.  If rabbis or bishops were fabricating a story, they would have endowed a resurrected Jesus with the best lines and with powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary saviors.  In fact, the opposite occurs.  Jesus walks and talks and eats and does nothing that can compare with the impressive events that take place before the Resurrection.

The walk to Emmaus may be taken as exemplary.  Two disciples are walking to Emmaus and a stranger joins them.  Suddenly, the stranger is revealed to be Jesus.  But Jesus has nothing special to say, nothing memorable or inspiring, and that’s not what we would expect if clergy were creating a story whole cloth out of nothing—and I don’t mean the whole cloth of the Shroud.

A third conjecture is that the Resurrection was a complex mass delusion and hallucination.  This is the likeliest of the non-spiritual interpretations.  And it’s the most understandable given the perilous physical and spiritual states of the followers of Jesus.  Many people who suffer the loss of a loved one have eerie dreams and experiences shortly afterward, and it’s possible that’s what happened to the holy men and women cloistered in Jerusalem.

In a paper I once wrote on the banshee of Irish legend I entertained the possibility that the specter of a wailing woman originated in a form of familial egotism and keeping up with the townland O’Joneses—if one family reported hearing the banshee, then all families were obligated to report hearing it for reasons of familial self-respect.  The same may have happened in Jerusalem.  A few people had eerie experiences about encountering Jesus and, before you could shout Glory Hallelujah, everyone was reporting eerie experiences.

I’ll be the first to admit that this conjecture has difficulties.  The eyewitness accounts insist on the physical appearance of Jesus—he eats and drinks and is touched.  Not exactly a wavery visitation by a wailing ghost.  No one stays converted for years for reasons of egotism—the first disciples had only to scatter to discard the stories they made up—and no one suffers martyrdom for what they know are fairy tales.

13.  How times have changed in academia.  In the library there are two signs on the circulation desk.  One sign advises the procedures for checking books out.  The other sign reads—No eating, no drinking, and no shoes or feet on the furniture.

14.  In a recent issue of Scientific American no less a personage than Microsoft’s Bill Gates claimed that in the near future robots will become as ubiquitous in our lives as computers are today.  Gates suggested that the robotics industry is in the same stage of development as the computer industry was in the 1970s—about ten humble years from exploding into our homes and offices and taking over our lives.  The major impediments to this explosion lie in the diversity of operating systems—Microsoft would like to chip in and standardize the software—and in navigation.  It seems this generation of robots has a habit of bumping into walls.  However great the obstacles engineers and programmers face in getting the kinks out of the coils, the immediate result of the article was, no doubt, a deluge of investments in firms that build robots.  A billionaire informing us that robotics will be the next big industry can’t be ignored.  I doubt that anyone bumped into a wall rushing to the broker with orders to buy, buy, and buy.

Robots currently serve important functions in industry, where they have sent assembly line workers to the unemployment offices, and in the military, where they cross mine fields and infiltrate buildings to check whether briefcases contain bombs or ham-and-cheese baguettes.  Gates would like to see robots in our homes, performing everyday chores.  A diagram in the article shows the coming world will be a tidy place.  Robots will clean our floors, fold our laundry, and