Welcome
~ into the Abwelt / die 
"I have been to the mountain top;
I have seen the promised land.
It is the light at the end of the tunnel:
It is a Vietcong with a flashlight." (BMcC[18-11-46-503]; cf: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. speech)
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Why do people get more upset about killing something that's just an idea (a set, in logic) than about the killing of real persons, whose individual mortal minds are the only place where immortal ideas can exist? Why do people identify as being members of a group instead of as being unique individuals? You can have the tribe/
"See if there's anything good on." "Why bother?"
This page is not about Adolf Eichmann or the Nazi Holocaust or Stalin's Gulag or even (POTUS №45) Donald J. Trump.
There was, actually, a pretty interesting TV docudrama on the Mossad mission to capture Eichmann – it must have been on The Smithsonian Channel, because, other than CNN, it's the only TV channel I watch (I used to watch The Smithsonian Channel, for: "Air Disasters", which I highly recommend).
Anyway, Eichmann turned out to be a rather interesting dude to capture – He worked, apparently as a blue-collar worker, in a Mercedes-Benz factory in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He himself apparently did not own an automobile. He lived with a woman (his wife?) in a ramshackle less-than-a-house, a block from a stop on a public bus route, out in "the boonies," where somebody could have waited at his bus stop for Godot (a place rather like where I lived as a 3 year old, "Bloomfield", Baltimore, Maryland, USA). He (and my parents) did have electricity, it looked like. The Mossad agents waited for Eichmann. Nobody waited for myself or my parents.
This page is about something probably more banal than whatever may have transpired at Villa Eichmann.
"the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away"(Job1:20). This sounds like a zero sum game. My social surround of origin gave less; what did it have to take away? The bottom line of the balance sheet of my was childrearing is in red ink.
"And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matt 25:40)
"Why are you doing this to me?" (These words were captured by a surveillance camera in New York City's Bellevue Hospital. They were spoken by a woman doctor, who was being murdered by an intruder)
"What you tell me you are writing [here in my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) personal website] is an analysis." (my (BMcC) psychiatrist, paraphrased because I do not recall verbatim)
I (BMcC) am not here going to expose the all the things I am most ashamed of in my life, but I am going to allude to them. In my
opinion, they form something like the above picture: A black cube, but not a shiny one: a dirty one → the event horizon of a psycho-social black hole (singularity). And around it circles and emulsifies
the Abwelt of my social surround of origin. "Abwelt" is a word
I have invented by prefixing the latin prefix: "ab", which means: away from or deviating from or something else not eagerly sought for,
to the German word: "Welt" which means: world, a place in which humans or animals can live and reproduce their species
and perhaps even have some rest and enjoyment as well as Darwinean indifference.
Let me begin with a hole down which Alice did not go: Once I was badgered into humiliation by a licensed clinical psychologist who dictated to me that I in a state for which I should be ashamed of myself, and should rise up to have: dignity, and, because I am weak and vulnerable, that meant I should give up all security in my life including, literally, the bed in which I slept, to rise to, at best, find a rented room somewhere to maybe go mad and kill myself in this by-her prescribed unnecessary abandonment: dignity, as she so nobly denominated it.
This "psychologist" (who would have been worthy in my opinion to succeed Sigmund Freud's toadie Dr. Karl Abraham who got off on denying coal miners' disability claims) had the insensitivity and lack of empathy to do this.[1] This is true. I was not in a position to tell this [unspeakable, IMO]: "What do you think you are: God Incarnate come to earth at the End of Days to judge the quick and the dead? Satan get thee hence!" I had to eat it and just more or less kept my mouth shut and stammer and whimper – I did not explicitly "take the 5th" (survivors of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis died after they took a gulp of sea water to quench their horrific up to 5 days' dehydration in the Pacific Ocean) –, until the 50 minute therapist hour – maybe it was a therapist's two hour – she was getting paid to do this to me ended. I was relieved when finally she stopped being paid and therefore let me exit the front door of her office/lair (which, to myself as a small fish, was the lair of a moray eel; I had not gone there voluntarily). I would welcome opportunity to ask this person, entirely politely:
"Excuse me, Madam, but may I respectfully enquire? Yes or no, please. Are you training to be Judas Iscariot?"
The preceding paragraph approaches the boundary layer of the psycho-social black hole I am not going to go into here. I won't even go into it with my psychiatrist, because I believe he does not have the resources or if he did he would not deploy them to save me from it. I've been on both sides of the psychotherapy session. As a therapist, would never have had the self-righteous arrogance to tell a patient to go to hell in this life to deserve any sense of dignity (at this point, the Homer Simpson chorus sings: "Duh"; this matter is that simple). This one did, and fortunately I forget her name so that I cannot name her – I do remember she was a middle-aging white female --; she did live in a rather lovely house, built on rock (may it crumble with or without her in it), with artwork that might have had some cash value, and which somebody was helping underwrite by what $he wa$ doing to me. My plight did not make a dent in her by the State of New York licensed Teflon-icity.[2]
As I learned in being a computer programmer: Managers do not much appreciate being presented with problems that do not yet have solutions. Good managers sometimes have their Maalox bottle on their desk. As the title of Akira Kurosawa's film goes: The bad sleep well. I present my manager here with a problem and its solution. Managers do like that kind of problem, and good managers help the presenting employee to help them with implementing the solution. In this case: Help me get up and out of the situation that caused me to have Post Trauma Stress Syndrome (PTSD[3]); help me have a better life before I am dying (since I do not believe in an afterlife, it won't matter to me when I am dead).
As elsewhere here, I am not into "surprise endings". You, my reader, need read no further to get my "Net": All the things in my life of which I am most ashamed derive from causes in my social surround of origin. It is true that I did not have to do these things. But my choice would in each case have been at best "eating it", and, for the rest and the most part, becoming roadkill – at least being "cancelled": abandoning hope of anything other than Sophocles' "all bitter things" in my then young less than life to be. It simply is not right, in my opinion, for middle class adults in a First World country who have more than enough resourres to feed both themselves and a child, to tell the child they are going to do what they have not yet thought up because he has not yet displeased them enough to require then to think it up, but which they had long since started working on: here.
I will end this document which I wish I had never had occasion to even imagine anyone writing, with the most harmless (I lucked out!) and in a way even amusing item – at least everybody thought it was amusing at the time, and that consequently saved me from bring punished for it –, on my to-be-ashamed-of list:
In perp (aka: prep) school eleventh grade chemistry class, up on the teacher's raised presentation platform, a fellow student was doing something or other. I picked up a retort (example, above right), which was filled with noxious, probably yellow color gas. I aimed it at fellow student's head, blew into the top hole, and the noxious gas ejected the long end, enveloping fellow student's head in a cloud of the gas. Fellow student fell down on the floor. After a few seconds, fellow student rose again, apparently without lasting bodily harm.
So I lucked out and was not arrested and found guilty of criminal assault and sent to an institution for juvenile offenders. Everybody (except the one who had been gassed, maybe), including the [Yale B.A.] Chemistry teacher, laughed. Why did I do this? I do not exactly know why. I think it was due to repressed, blocked chronic despairing rage at what the school and my parents were chronically doing to me.
I did not volunteer to be in any chemistry class or in any classroom with noxious chemicals. I did not even fantasize becoming Dr. Victor Frankenstein. I just wanted – I didn't want anything, except I vaguely didn't want to be hurt; and being subjected to being graded [I was not a slab of insensate fresh slaughtered beef] in school courses was, for me, a way I was being hurt, every day, although, even as mostly a "straight A" student, I could not likely have thematized this at the time.
I was a sensitive child (I didn't ask to be born that way: "It is what it is"), and: mea sua culpa, i.e.: "I apologize to 'you', my oppressors, for feeling hurt by what 'you' (parents and tor-mentors/'masters') are doing to me."
I sincerely believe I would have been a happy person, and never have hurt anybody or anything, had people not chronically damaged, deprived and hurt me, especially, mirabile visu, had they been playful and authentically happy with me (per François Rabelais, Louis I. Kahn, Jan Szczepanski, Edmund Husserl, Henri Matisse, et. al.) Among other things, they could have sent me to a perhaps relatively progressive, coed, probably mostly jewish school (Park School), instead of a day/boarding carcel named after a person whose post-severe concussion guidance was that it was better for a man to marry than to burn. It would not have co$t more money than the persons had; it would have required height of spirit which, for whatever reason(s), they lacked. Credo quia absurdum.
My net: If "they" had nurtured me, I would not have done this act of which all my later life I have been ashamed. Maybe they didn't even need to nurture me, for they may not have been capable of that. Maybe had they just provisioned me and otherwise left me alone, that might have been good enough. They had enough money to do that. My parents may not even have been aware that they were hurting me so badly – like FGM parents who mutilate their daughters because their social surround has taught them that this is the only way their beloved children can become honorifically human.
The foregoing is not, however, in my opinion, the absolute rock bottom of the barrel. That, for myself, is perhaps exemplified by this: When I worked at The Baltimore Museum of Art, there was, across the street from the museum, in Wyman Park, a life-size bronze equestrian statue of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. I liked the statue; I visited it to take a break in my work (it was just a few seconds' walk away). I could have cared less about Lee+Jackson being traitors to the The Union or pro-slavery. I had no intentions of being a traitor or owning slaves. For me, the statue said that an intelligent human being [Jackson] could have in their life another human being [Lee] whom they could respect.
In recent years, Political Correctnessers demanded the statue be removed (preferably destroyed) because Confederates < 1863CE espoused slavery. The Baltimore city government acquiesced to this demand. The Political Correctnessers replaced the Lee+Jackson statue, which was not esthetically too bad, with another statue which meant something acceptable to them. I have seen a picture of this new statue and it disgusts and repulses me as an ideological defacement of all women and all humanity (I also find it esthetically hideously ugly); this statue depicted a black woman in the last trimester of pregnancy with a large litter. This statue, also, was eventually removed, and now all that remains is the original statue's plinth, like an open post-surgery wound on Wyman Park.
Here ends this document. Your thoughts, my reader? Thank you for having the "stomach" to read it. It is part of my self-analysis. bmcc.edd@gmail.com
 My (BMcC) stalag picture. SSS number: 18-11-46-503. Stone wall topped with sharp pointed shards surrounds institution for wayward orphans. My childhood took place inside invisible walls of ignorance and societal negligence. My parents may have meant well, but they did not know how to raise their child and their so-called society did not help either them or myself. What they did find and paid money for were self-righteous prigs in the guise of an Episcopal school that valued lacrosse above their Savior on a cross. IHS. |
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I will not cite specific examples here because every one of the many all too many of them is an instance where I did something not worthy of myself because of how they degraded me. I will use a varible: "X". I do or see X. Ther eis a response which, upon reflection, I would do which would be worthy of myself and increase my sense of self worth, call this response "Y". But I think of Y only after some time has elapsed and it would either be difficult or impossible or pointless or other wise not convenient and unappealing to myself to do Y by the time I realize what Y is. However, Y should have occurred to me immediately upon X happening. The time lag between X occurring and me realizing what Y is results in me doing something unworth of myself, call it "Z" which I do to try get away from the toxic introjects in my mind. Z is probably not what the toxic introjects,i.e.: my childrearers would have wanted the lump of social life as which they cognized me to do, call that: "Q". I never wanted to do any Q things because they did not appeal to me in any way. But the Z things falsely promise me respite from the toxic introjects. I always lose.
The childrearers assigned to me by Fate should have kept their Scheißestückwelt to themselves and, if they could not or would not help me be myself, have just got out of the way and done something else with themselves. But they did not do that. This is what I mean by saying they destroyed my reflexes: Without them trying to make me be a thing (lump of their Falstaffean: "food for powder") which I was not, I would have been myself and maybe there would never have been a time-of-fear gap between X and Y. My reflexes might have been intact; reflexes are not something a person can recover once they are lost, because they are precisely prethematic, and while effort can thematize things, it cannot put the cat back in the bag or bring a dead cat back to life. IHS
One result of the destruction of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) reflexes is that when a them says something unhelpful to me, often I do not have the presence of mind to immediately come up with the exact correct retort to put them in their place. Either I say something that just gets me in more trouble (when what I'd like to say is something like: "Stop hurting me!"), or I say something sort-of relevant but I only later figure out the hit-the-bullseye response (Esprit d'escalier-osis), so they escape being put in their place. As the title of the old Kurasawa film had it: "The bad sleep well" -→ when they should suffer for the rest of their life in the Purgatory of what their words did ot me and never get another peaceful night's rest.
The other result is that when I see something I THINK is interstng in a book, I fail to bookmark or otherwise record it's exact location for later retrieval on the spot and then I can't find it again. Again, a them will elude justice because I can't find what I am looking for to throw back at them when they may ask for it at some future date. Or it may be something I like of which their destruction of my reflexes will deprive me, as collateral damage.
I never have New Year's resolutions. But my Every Day resolution must be: "When you see something, shithead, log it immediately!" Maybe it's never too late to help an old dog recover a trick its handlers untaught it.
Another problem which I have due to the childrearers to which Fate assigned me is that I was not strong enough to be a hermit but I also could not tolerate "the Them". I was stuck in a lose-lose situattion of wanting and needing happropriate human interaction but having the forced options: (1) nobody and nothing [maybe being run over as abandoned road-kill in the street, or having to interact with "the them", which/who just wanted to satisfy their selfish selfless agendae and use me a coal for their boiler. RMS Titanic. What I needed were loving, caring, sensitive, educated creative, preferably financially well-to-do persons with whom I could have playfully grown vertically ("up"). I did not get any. What could I, a small child without even a safe house to escape to, do? I became dysfunctional and self-destructive because I could not put a stop to them impinging on me, but even that would not likely have been enough, because, as said, I did not have the strrength of character to be able to happily live my life in total solipsism.
So I try to talk with "the them" as if they were persons who would be worth talking with and that results in them disapproving of my ideologically incorrect shoughts, i.e, I do not just flatter them all the time. And since they have power over me, their disapproval is not just water rolling off a duck's back: Their disapproval can hurt or destroy me. I need to keep very clear boundaries and only talk at them in character strings that they will input as normal ideologically approved character strings. So what then am I to do with what of my mind I have left? Write here, for the time being. Not what I would have hoped for in life, but better than them lobotomizing me or frying my brain or chemically castrating me (remember Allen Turing) to make me like themselves or at least not anything that would potentially make them uncomfortable about their pretense that they are who they pretend to be and not what they are (each one of them, a: Scheißestückchen). It's tragic, sad and a massive waste, which last word, of course, is what I would title the Gerat American novel if I would write it: "Waste". 
I say something meaningful at them, it does not matter what (but is felt good to me to say something meaningful; discharging static electricity...). They do not hear because they are engrossed in some HBO violence-softporn which is making noise in the room. My words have not been heard (fortunately); I leave. Everybody is at peace, or at least they are engrossed in themselves and not being upset by my insensitive and other mentally ill (i.e., not ideologically acceptable) characteristics not affirming-their-beliefs thoughts. The empirically incorrect epithets that come back from them being offended by a semantically insensitive sentence are remarkable, and very frightening.
"Don't you understand that this is a free country? You are completely free to be exactly like us, including getting your hair cut at any barber shop you want, and using any efffective chemical underarm deodorant you freely choose, too! What's wrong with you?" The latest one: "You have dementia!" (Said by a licensed mental health professional to a powerless person who cognitively intact enough to displease them)
"That's insensitive" plays the same transactional role in their discourse in real life, as "That's unmutual" played in the lives of the people in The Village in Patrick McGoohan's TV series "The Prisoner". Be seeing you!
| No person or social formation (e.g.: government or institution) should cross the line beyond which a person's body and/or soul is compromised. Show respect! Keep your distance! Never again! | " |  |
![Click her[e] for a bigger perfect conversation.](w/images/e/ef/PerfectConversation2.jpg){kind=link}