Not working….

It’s a day when everything—including this blogger—is not working.

Well, I have those days. Yesterday, when I should have been resting, I industriously compiled the largest post I’ve ever written. Today, I am fretting.

It’s the damn iPod. Why is it that I absolutely crave every Apple product, and then instantly hate them the moment I start to use them? Do I have a secret aluminum fetish?

OK—news of the day. The iPod (curious—computer seems to know that word….) that put—or conversely shuffled—music into my ear, has died. And curiously, the death took the form of refusing to display anything except that annoying little apple with the bite taken out of it. It was the techie equivalent of the children’s “nyah nhay NA nyah nyah.”

(Incidentally, and just to fill up space, did you know that that sequence of sounds exists in ALL cultures? And that kids use it the same way? Just one of those facts that fill my brain, shoving out where the house keys are….)

Well, I took the iPod to Radio Shack and they said they might—a shake of the head here—be able to fix it. So now I have a new iPod—not the Touch but the Classic. The new Touch, it seems, has gotten all fancy: camera, video cam, email, I don’t know whatnot. The Classic, I’m happy to report, has but four buttons, three of which I will probably never use. I did check, there appears to be no nemesis—the dreaded shuffle button.

Unless, of course, it’s hidden somewhere on the elegant aluminum sheath, and I activate it….

Right, so spending 250 bucks made me hungry, and I go to the café where a completely annoying woman is screaming into her iPad. She’s on Skype, or rather she’s dragging us all onto Skype—her Skype.

OK—and am I being paranoid in thinking she was using up all the Internet? Because for some reason the connection was terrible. She was closer to the modem, if that makes any difference. (If I’m right, please tell me. Otherwise, no….)

Well, my new iPod has now come to life. Because I have iTunes already installed, it’s synched its way through my library—those 2500 “songs” that are motets, arias, cantatas. It has greeted me cordially by saying “Welcome.”

So what am I supposed to do? Say “Welcome” back?

The manual, I think, which was artfully or zenfully hidden in the bowels of the box, beneath the iPod and above the little gadgets—ear buds, cable, dock.

The little manual, of course, doesn’t deign to do words. Just little pictures. I study these for a bit. The USB cable has to go into the USB port.

Thanks, Apple!

Oh, and don’t submerge the device in water….

Guys!

Well, I press the round button in the center of the dial. And Welcome goes away! Now what we have is a little list on the left side of the display. The first item says “cover flow.” Right, so what happens if I click it? I do, and discover the covers of every album I own doing the stupid Robert Burns (or whoever—Ms. Taí will know) effect that Apple loves so much. (Speaking of which, shouldn’t it be aPple?)

Guess what! I now have Beethoven’s Ninth symphony playing!

I know why—it’s the first “song” on the iTunes library. Why?  Because iTunes has decided to organize itself by artist. The mezzo in the last movement is Agnes Baltsa.

Agnes—A—get it?

I was always perfectly happy to scroll by Baltsa in the past, but now there’s a problem. I cannot scroll. I put my finger on the display—no luck. I press the down button, but that’s “play / pause.” There is absolutely no way I can get my way down the list to “playlist.”

Oh, and guess what!

There IS a shuffle button!

Worse, Apple has again hidden the volume button. On the Touch, it was on the side of the chassis. On the Classic? Who knows….

Hey, guess what! The stupid little black wheel turns out to be a dial! I just started whirling my albums all around—Now I’m hearing Zelenka!

It’s so typical Mac—I’m right back in high school and EVERYBODY knows where to get dope except me. I’m buying it off the undercover cop….

Well, I know what I have to do. They’re expecting me, the boys at Radio Shack. They probably have a pool going on how long it will take me to come back in the door, swearing under my breath, and ranting that their stupid product is defective. They’ll sigh, customers will look on in interest or disdain. It will develop that the volume button has been there all along, or that merely flipping my wrist in just such a way will roar the machine to epic volumes. I’ll learn all of this and forget half of it and have to go back and the boys will explain it all over again.

Of course, I will swear never to buy another stupid aPple product again.

Until the next sleek little device comes out….

P.S.—Jimmy, whom I know better than my own brothers, has just shown me the little dial thing. And when you have achieved the herculean task of actually making the thing play what you want it to play, then all you have to do is swing the little unlabeled dial again, and that becomes the dial volume.

Wouldn’t tell me where to get the dope, though….

Schubert revisited

Well, I’ve heard of impaired doctors, impaired drivers, but impaired bloggers?

Which is to say you might read this post with the Morton saltbox near to hand. 

I’m loopy.

Legally loopy, I’m happy to say. Nope, not writing from Amsterdam—I’m here at my familiar desk, with the wearingly constant sound truck of the guagüita de los dulces iterating mechanically its jingle for the gazillionth time.

I spent the morning doing the second part of the dental implant surgery. And any snippy thoughts I ever had about Michael Jackson’s craving for IV hypnotics I now retract, and with shame.

The stuff is wonderful.

It’s a bit like the old television sets that slowly, in the space of just ten seconds, go from whatever inanity you’ve grown tired of to just a small white dot in the center of the screen. And then….

…nothing.

Well, who wouldn’t crave the stuff?

Right. So, I lurched home in a taxi, stood wonderingly about in CVS until a white lab-coated lady put bottles of pills in my hands, and told me to go home. I dimly realized that home was up, so I started, well—up.

Did recognize the corner jewelry store, and took a chance on a left….

Worked.

Well, an old nurse knows what to with pills in bottles, and soon I was medicated and in bed. Of course I took the Percoset—hey, anything guys pay good money for up at the punto has gotta be good, right? And is it sane to wait for the pain to arrive? Would you stand around watching until the A-bomb mushrooms, just to see how bad the radiation was?

Right—so that was the plan. Spend the afternoon in bed. Justifiable—surgery is surgery. I have a friend who spends one entire SUNDAY each month in bed, and ardently—defensively?—defends the practice.

Made it to 1:30….

Right, so what to do. I cannot do Sudoku until Raf climbs the hallway stairs in five hours. The house is a mess, but any slight mismovement (dammit, computer, I’ve just been through SURGERY—gimme a break!) of my hands might imperil the achingly tender sutures in my mouth. (And I challenge any Impudent Reader to dispute THAT!)

So I set myself to consider Raf. It was he, you remember, who diagnosed the disjointed mishmash (hah! got away with that, so what’s the deal with mismovement?) I had produced in Iguanas as a blook. Then I went on to ponder Jaime, who had pointed out that reading on an iPad becomes a different experience. Sure, there had always been illustration in books, but in a blook, there can be music.

And there is. Handel, twice; Samuel Barber; some other stuff, I think.

Well, I’m sure somebody has gotten in before me, pitched his stake, done it better. I come late to most things.

Then I got to worry about Toney, a young nephew who adopted us several years ago on the strength of Raf’s bacalao. We raised him gently, delicately, we did—the anxious gay uncles, and then sent this quite beautiful youth out to combat the wicked world. We watched, our hands clutching lace handkerchiefs pressed to our swollen eyes, as the taxi took him away.

Feeling the need for home, or perhaps just hungry, he appeared two weeks ago. We put the codfish in the water.

And set him to work. Look, I need reviews for Iguanas. No reviews, no listing in Amazon, no visibility, whaddya got? A book that goes down—hello cliché!—like that preacher’s daughter into the electronic graveyard of cache.

So we put him to read Iguanas. OK—review for bacalao. Questionably ethically—but hungry men sink low.

Right, so he liked it. And made insightful comments. And decided I really should crank out a novel. And told me what the theme would be, and provided as well the name of the main character.

What didn’t he do?

Toney, honey?

bacalao = review.

I don’t know a thing about fiction. I don’t know a thing—I think—about writing. 

Well, I feel bad about that. Anybody who has a Facebook page called “Marc Newhouse—writer” (I nixed the word “author”—after all, writing describes a discrete, simple task—author felt like a stretch, somehow….) should really try to figure what he’s doing.

The problem? Writers writing about writing write wrong. (Sorry, just sort of feel into that…onomatopoeia? Alliteration? Hyperbole? ¿Bíjte?)

It’s a form of sadism. “Don’t come whining to me,” snarls Toni Morrison. She teaches full time and writes in the summer and fall, and only Trollope beats her for fecundity.

Oh, except for Joyce Carol Oates, often described as “the word machine”, who has written over 100 books for the world to nibble upon. “If I waited for inspiration, I wouldn’t be much of a writer!” she growls.

Why do I feel that dumping 100 plus books onto the world’s bookshelves is at least grandiose if not frankly—blatantly —narcissistic?

Well, to a brain swimming in narcotics, all this hectoring, this thrashing of the pedagogical riding crop seemed to much for me. Easier just to go to the damn computer and write.

And then I realized!  

I had screwed around with creative writing! Back in the days when I was just crawling out of the pantoja or morass of depression and agititation (oh anybody can see that that’s agitation / irritation! Really!) of job and Franny loss. Reaching into the very farthest galaxies of my imagination, it was about a agonized, near catatonic, sardonic guy into classical music confronting a nincompoop psychiatrist.

I justify this as following the old line—write what you know!

But it was—following Jaime’s insight—an interesting experiment. Was it any good? Did it work?

Be gentle, Good Reader. I wasn’t at my best….

(PS—my own psychiatrist, whose single diploma in his office is from Harvard, is excellent and insightful. His predecessor, who put me on massive Klonopin and disappeared—enjoying those festive navidades we do so well? Sin comentario….)

Session Two

The patient appeared less hostile on the second visit—no doubt the therapeutic effects of the Haldol were starting. I tried to put him at ease.

“And how are we feeling today?”

“We don’t know, do we? How could we? I barely know what I am feeling, and cannot, of course, speak for you. How are you?”

“ Is your preoccupation with Schubert, the…err….Viennese composer continuing?”

“I’m hardly preoccupied,” he said. “Deeply interested, of course. Well, who wouldn’t be? Everybody should be interested in Schubert.”

“I don’t know the composer,” I said. “Perhaps you could fill me in?”

“Certainly I could fill you in. Would you like the Wikipedia version or my version? Or perhaps,” this said with a sneer, “for a doctor who is only schooled, the Wikipedia version might be the only one possible….”

I had forgotten his dislike of the word perhaps. 

“A bit of hostility still remains,” I said, deciding to confront him at last.

“I am not hostile. I admit to acerbic. Rebarbative as well. Prickly, should the previous words be too advanced for a Harvard graduate. But hardly hostile.”

I let this pass….

“Schubert?” I say.   

“Ah, Schubert,” he says, his face relaxing. “Viennese, as we know. His father, a school teacher. The mother, the daughter of a locksmith. Dates: 1797 to 1828, he died at age 31—having two years less than Mozart. Cause of death: typhoid fever, though he was also afflicted with syphilis. A terrible businessman, who barely got anything published, and that on unfavorable terms—unfavorable for him, not his publisher. Known perhaps best for his lieder—art songs, in German. Prolific—600 plus songs, nine symphonies, 15 quartets, a string quintet that is assuredly one of the greatest chamber works in the whole canon of Western music. Six masses, and 21 piano sonatas. He dies in virtual obscurity, broke, but surrounded by friends who deeply admired him. Oh, and just incidentally, he composes the two greatest song cycles in the world. That enough?”

“It seems a bit manic,” I venture.

“Your word, doctor. Mine would be possessed, a genius that may never come again….”

“Thank you,” I said. “So now I know Schubert.”

He jumps to his feet. 

“You know NOTHING about Schubert!” he roars. “I’ve been giving you the briefest sketch of his life. People spend their LIVES trying to understand Schubert, and there are mysteries that will, I believe, ever remain locked. What have you ever heard of Schubert’s music, my good philistine doctor?”

“Not much,” I say. “Didn’t he write the Unfinished Symphony?”

“Of course,” says X. “Dismissed by some, beloved by the masses. I personally like it….” 

Ahh—perhaps the basis for a clinical bond!

“So perhaps we could have your version of Schubert?”

“Mine is of little interest,” he responds. “My good doctor, have you no curiosity? Wouldn’t you like, for once in your life, to enter into a masterpiece? To experience something that is greater, truer than anything you or I will ever do? I could play you one song—ONE song—that had he written nothing else would have established him as one of the greatest composers of all time.”

“I’d like to hear it,” I say, though really, I don’t much like classical music.

“Nothing easier,” says X, and pulls his iPhone from his pocket. He fiddles with it, and then shows me the following clip from YouTube. We listen, and blessedly, it’s short.

“So,” says X. “You now have been initiated. You have heard one of over a thousand compositions of Schubert. Your impression, please?”

“Well,” I say, “speaking clinically, it sounds deeply sad. Depressive, I would say.”

“You know, doctor, I am far less interested in your clinical impressions than in your reaction as a man, a person. But I am perhaps being unfair. No one can grasp the song without knowing the lyrics. Let’s listen again, this time with the lyrics, German and English.”

He hands me the liner notes.

Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder; Nieder wallen auch die Träume Wie dein Mondlicht durch die Räume, Durch der Menschen stille Brust. Die belauschen sie mit Lust; Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht: Kehre wieder, heil’ge Nacht! Holde Träume, kehret wieder!

“And now,” he says, let’s turn to another singer, with the lyrics in English. Much slower, and a bit more operatic. Well, it would be—Fleming, of course. But here, she does a fine job
.

We listen again. And I am still more mystified. 

“The title of the song, by the way, is Nacht und Traume—Night and Dreams. Tell me, my good psychiatrist, isn’t that rather up your alley? You do do stuff with dreams, don’t you?”

“I’m feeling a little out of my league,” I say.

“I’m delighted to know that,” says X. “It’s a poem that is seemingly simple, and yet Schubert brings out the most amazing depths in it…. Consider it just as a poem.”

Holy night, you sink down; Dreams, too, drift down Like your moonlight through space, Through the quiet hearts of men; They listen with delight Calling out when day awakens: Return, holy night! Fair dreams, return!

“Really, not much to it. But I listen to it often, on those many nights when Holy night does not  drift down. I suffer insomnia, you see….”

“Ahh,”  I say, “a sedative may be called for. Something more than the Dalmane. But tell me, what does this song, this poem, mean to you?”

Again, as he had in the first session, X dissolves in tears.

“Dreams,” he says, weeping. “Have you never had dreams? And had them die? And wish, more than anything else for their return? This is Schubert, in his moment of darkest sorrow—lost and yearning—imploring God to return him to his path, and restore his dreams. And filled with despair, he manages to suggest the possibility of hope, of redemption. A feeling I, frankly, do not share”

Clinical note: Will add halcyon 2 mg. for sleep.

Chain letter from an Unchained man

You’re gonna hate me for saying this but…

…went to the beach this morning!

Oh, and also got up at 8AM.

And I know where you are, my friends who are lost and still in my heart. You’re in a cold grey box, sitting looking at the dirty blue-clothed wall that separates your little workday world from your co-workers.

A storm passed by the island this weekend. Did the customers go nuts? Did fights erupt in the store? Old ladies attack each other with their canes over cans of salchichas?

You know, I don’t know. And really, I care only vaguely.

I’ve been freed, you see.

And I return bearing a message.

There is another reality, another world. And all will be well. 

I know you’re dreading it. I know because I did it, both the dread and the subsequent reality. There’s something about hearing that your job position has been eliminated that fucks up the day….

Ever see a bird fly hard into a glass window?

From the other side comes this advice: write the email to all your friends and family immediately. That’s all you have to do—for the rest of the day.

Oh, and go buy a good bottle of champagne. You’re starting a new life.

You’ll have the weekend to figure out what to do on Monday morning. Here’s what you won’t do.

Flop onto the couch and turn on the TV.

Ditto the Internet.

I went to the beach, that Monday morning when Raf left the house and there were ten hours to fill with…

…what?

Well, that was the question, wasn’t it?

That’s when I learned how scary it was, to lose the chain. Yes, it keeps you from moving on. It also grounds you.

So don’t be scared—my message to you whom I saw so many Monday mornings, and then one Monday morning didn’t.

It will all be OK.

I’ve done it, you can too.

Don’t worry about it, as I did. When the people from the Home Office came, put me in a little room, and asked nicely, “Now, what is it exactly that you do?”

That I found disconcerting.

The email—how many students had I “given service” to?

Besides a little suggestive—given service indeed!—it seemed more like writing on the wall than email.

Look at these videos instead. Laugh! Relax! The day will come and they will free you!

And since it’s Monday morning, send this link to absolutely everyone you know!

Well, well—I promised you a chain letter, way up there in the title. So here goes:

BEWARE!

DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN!!!!

You have until 11:59 PM today to send this link to EVERYONE!

Mary Elizabeth Scornfeld, age 23, laughed at this email and deleted it! At precisely 12:01 the next morning, she rolled out of bed and fractured her spine on a bowling ball she had stupidly left by the side of her bed. She remains at Dwindling Days Health Care Center in a permanent vegetative state. (Or maybe it’s Fading Light Nursing Home—anyway, she had it coming!)

Her sister, as well, received and deleted this email. Two weeks later, she took off for Venice, and was eating pasta at an outdoor café. Busy flirting with a hunky Italian guy, she didn’t notice the pigeon who flew overhead, and did what pigeons do. Well, I don’t need to tell you where it landed! She died an agonizing death and good for her! Serves her right.

Still not convinced?

How about rehab nurse May Ellen Shnittke, engaged in a little late-night lechery with her 300-pound paraplegic patient, whom she had gently placed on top of her! Well, he was doing what men do, when all of a sudden he stopped.

Dropped dead!

Then she realized—she was trapped!

And that’s what scared HER to death!

I could write more—but you got a task or two to do.

1.     Watch the videos

2.     Laugh

3.     Send the link to EVERYONE you know

And…

DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN!

I'm Gay

Words I said to Johnny yesterday afternoon.

Barely missing a beat, he replied, “thank you for that information.”

Lawyerly reticence—do they teach it in law school, or does it just develop over the years?

“Well, do you have an issue with it?”

I had to know.

“Nope,” he said, completely casually, “other stuff about you, I have an issue. Being gay is no problem.”

Well, two can be reticent just as well as one.

I don’t go there….

Besides, I know perfectly well what he was thinking. My sartorial sense—or maybe no sense or nonsense. Don’t know.

And don’t care. You got an old horse blanket in the barn? Send it along, I’ll wear it to the next gala at the Met.

John? He combs his hair before going to sleep….

Well, it had been a melancholy morning, there on the beach with Franny and Dido. Mental health dictated a tuna sandwich at the café. And that’s where I heard that it was National Coming Out Day.

Right. Wanted some coffee, so I asked Gayla if it really was Coming Out Day.

“Yeah,” she said.

“OK,” I said, “I’m gay.”

“So am I,” she said.

A fact about as obvious as her skin color….

“Right,” I said.

Five hours later.

“Shoot, we forgot that it’s National Coming Out Day,” says Raf at the computer. And then plays a clip—a guy talking about how we have to come out to everyone.

“Our parents,” he says

Check!

“Our children….”

N/A.

“Our bosses…”

Came out to Susan Chambers, the Executive Vice President for Human Resources at  Wal-Mart Inc….

I don’t have to go on, do I?

I passed the test. Which is why, yesterday, I realized there’s pretty much nobody in my life, however marginal, to whom I could come out.

Yes, even the cashier at the supermarket.

Once, Webster came to visit us. He’s gay, he’s a wonderful viola de gambist (making that up, but you’ll tell me if I’m wrong, right?), and likes bacalao. So there we were, and the cashier who has never been anything but sunny and cheerful is completely flat.

“I’m totally worried about Inés,” I say to Raf. “She just wasn’t the same in the grocery store today….”

What was wrong?

I realized the next day. Raf and Webster and I were walking past the grocery store, and I glanced in to see Inés at the register. Then it hit.

“Come in to the store, I gotta see something.”

“We don’t need anything…”

“Not the point.”

Reach for a package of gum, stand in line, and tell Raf to introduce Webster to Inés.

“Ay mi’jo, ¡mucho gusto!” she beams, and gives him a kiss!

Moral—don’t bring your tricks into the grocery store! This is a respectable establishment.

That might be the real point of coming out. It’s not just that staying in the closet leads to a double life, shame, a message you don’t want to give yourself. Coming out puts you on the social and emotional map. It grounds you, places obligations on you—even in a place as trivial as a grocery store.

By the way, today is International Coming Out Day. So for the 27 people from the UK, 14 from Russia, 9 from Trinidad and Tobago (think I know who those are!), 6 from Germany, 4 from Canada, 4 from France, 3 from Gabon (gonna have to look that up—sorry), and 2 from Bangladesh who have visited the blog this week….

…I’m gay.

By the way, I had figured that, with no one left to come out to, I might just as well start the thing over again….. 

Two singers on the beach

Who knows what brought it on? 

My mood was perfectly good when I left on the morning trot. Was it the music?

Well, English folksong can be a bit melancholic. And there is something otherworldly about the singer, Alfred Deller.

Deller was born in 1912, sang as a boy soprano, and never got around to changing. Yes, his voice broke, and he no longer could naturally sing soprano. But he had a beautiful falsetto, and there was the tradition of countertenors singing in the cathedral choirs.

But Deller went on to champion early music on authentic instruments, as well as what WikiPedia calls “historically informed performance.” Michael Tippett hears him, Benjamin Britten creates the part of Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Well, it’s a haunting voice, as you can hear. But maybe it wasn’t the music, or even the voice.

The weather?

Yes, it started to rain quite hard, but I found shelter next to an abandoned tennis court near the beach. And yeah, I like rain.

Well, the English folksong disc petered out, so I turned to “An Evening with Jessye Norman.” I’m putting all of my CD’s that I never listened to when I worked at Wal-Mart into iTunes. So I’m hearing things I haven’t heard in decades.

OK, first track—Dido’s Lament.

That might be when it hit.

Remember me, but forget my fate. Six words, but oh, how Purcell milks them. And Jessye Norman isn’t afraid to step up and face an emotion or two. So there I was, thinking why on earth was I giving all of my time and energy, those last years of my mother’s life, to Wal-Mart?

Yeah, I would take 15 minutes or so twice a day to call her, yeah I made the trips every three months, yeah I told her she could live with us and she said no. 

So what was she doing, those last terrible years?

More often than not, I fear, sitting in her chair by her stove.

Alone.

Why didn’t I move to Wisconsin to be with her, I thought. What the hell was I doing those mornings on the bus, walking into work at 6:30, leaving at 5?

Ever hear of Raf, she replies. She talks to me, sometimes.

And now I’m crying and in the water and I’m saying ‘I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry’ and she says don’t be. I had to have that time to be ready to do what I did. That’s what let me stop eating and drinking. Now be quiet. You were a wonderful son and remember what I said yesterday?

Yeah, it’s a triumph. That’s what you said after the recital with Gunnar, and that’s what you said yesterday about Iguanas.

Yes, a triumph.

And what have I told you today?

Remember me but forget my fate.

Yes.

Will this mourning ever stop, I ask her. You didn’t go through this with your mother, did you.

I wasn’t as close to her as you were to me. And it’s much better now than two years ago. You know that, of course.

Of course.

Now stop it. Enough. What did I sing to you?

Remember me, but forget my fate.

And I plunge into the ocean…

…and then float.

News Flash!—Heaven Exists!

Well, that’s certainly a thing to know. Great! Excellent! A problem that has vexed mankind—where do we go when we’re no longer going—has been cleared up by none other than a Harvard neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, who intends to tell us all about it in the next issue of Newsweek.

Why isn’t there a regulatory agency to prohibit people from making damn fools of themselves?

Disclosure time—the words “damn fool” and the thoughts may not be mine. They were Joan Didion’s, borrowed from her grandmother, to describe Bishop Pike.

Whom of course we’ve all forgotten about.

Though I shouldn’t, as a gay man. Because Pike was an early champion within the Episcopal Church of inclusion for LGBT folk.

Right—good for you, Pike!

Now then, back to the rest of him, which would be about 99%. Or so I thought. But there’s a lot to like about Pike—he marches on Selma with Martin Luther King, he’s strongly liberal (not hard to be in San Francisco, but OK), he’s on the right side of history.

Even his vices—he’s a chain-smoker and a drunk—are, in my eyes at least, all too understandable.

So why am I calling him a damn fool? 

For the same reason that I think our Harvard-man-of-the-heavens is a damn fool.

Remember The Other Side?

Well, I didn’t until I WikiPediaed (I don’t like your attitude, computer!) him. Here it is:

In 1966, Pike's son Jim took his own life in a New York city hotel room. Shortly after his son's death, Pike reported experiencing poltergeist phenomena—books vanishing and reappearing, safety pins open and indicating the approximate hour of his son's death, half the clothes in a closet disarranged and heaped up.[6] Pike led a public (and, for the Church, embarrassing) pursuit of various spiritualist and clairvoyant methods of contacting his deceased son to reconcile. In September 1967, Pike participated in a televised séance with his dead son through the medium Arthur Ford, who served at the time as a Disciples of Christ minister. Pike detailed these experiences in his book The Other Side.

Right. Actually, Pike was sufficiently thorny to risk heresy trials—has a rather medieval ring to it, doesn’t it?—four times in the early sixties. Eventually he was “just” censured by his fellow bishops in 1966. So he resigned his position after that.

You may remember his last stupidity. That would be his death….

In September 1969, Pike and his third wife Diane drove into the Judean Desert, searching for proof of the historical Jesus. With typical Pike bravado, they were unprepared for the journey; and, when their car broke down and became stuck, Diane Pike told her husband to stay in the shade of the car to protect himself from the heat of the desert sun, and not to go anywhere. Diane walked down a wadi to a grocery to seek help. The men there asked where she'd come from. She pointed to the wadi; they said "That's impossible. No one can do that." Help was obtained, but by the time they arrived back at the car, they found that James had wandered off, in violation of instructions, and later his body was recovered. This account came directly from Diane Kennedy Pike's verbal account to a group she and her partner Oso Lorrance were leading to Egypt, Jordan and Israel in 1975[7] and, following his wishes and those of his family, buried in the Protestant cemetery in Jaffa, Israel.[8]

Typical bravado? Well, typical something, yes. Bravado, no.

OK, let’s jog back to Dr. Alexander, our Harvard man. His story is that he was in a coma for a week or so back in 2008. And he took a tour around heaven—which, with complete lack of originality, is absolutely identical to the New Age twaddle we’ve been afflicted with for the last 40 years. The white light. The female guiding spirits. The immense void, filled with the presence of God, the essence of which is…

…you ready?

…I need to hear you gasp after I tell you….

PURE LOVE!

I copy and paste now from Yahoo (just to give WikiPedia a break…).

Alexander says the messages he received from those beings loosely translated as:

"You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever."

"You have nothing to fear."

"There is nothing you can do wrong."

Right. Just one question for our good doctor….

Anybody checked your gag reflex lately?

It’s almost enough to make you long for the old fire-and-brimstone-you-miserable-sinner days. Or perhaps the God-is-the-supreme-gentleman of the English vicars. Sorry, I still think—I may have endured one too many Wisconsin winters—that people can do, and perhaps routinely do, wrong. I fear many things, some perhaps rightly. (Ever lost your mind?) 

Loved, cherished, dearly, forever?

Look, I had an OK relationship with my Mom. I live in a strongly matriarchal society. And yeah, some doors got open by an invisible hand, the dead finger was on the smoke alarm. She’s out there, that Franny of mine.

My take on it?

She’s stirring around, just the same as always.

Just don't know where, or what it's like....

Dr. Eben Alexander—kinda looks like Robin Williams, doesn’t he?