Manderson’s Bubble

Instead of traditional book learning, I wanted to teach my university students how to understand the life of one single poor person. When you hold the world in your palm and inspect it only from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant—you do not realize that things get blurred when seen from an enormous distance. I opted instead for “the worm’s eye view.”

–Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor

It was September, 1975. Gunhild prayed every morning and every night, and often throughout the day as well. She would pray for all those that she knew, starting with her immediate loved ones, extending onward to personages known only through the news whom she considered to be “good”, such as the President. All of her known world, essentially, was included in her daily prayers. She was living alone at the time, having moved out of her sister Helga’s apartment in Los Angeles after the earthquake in 1971. Gunhild was terrified of earthquakes, and would often warn my parents about the impending “Big One,” much in the same way she was always warning us of the coming of the apocalyptic end of days, for which she was joyously awaiting the advent of The Rapture.

At this time she was probably living in Tuscon, although she may have been in Albuquerque, St Petersburg, Dallas, or Chicago. Helga referred to her sister as a “gypsy”, and true to this title, Gunhild seemed to have an aversion to settling for too long in any one place. Fiercely independent, and also terrified of airplanes, Gunhild traveled by train or Greyhound wherever she went. She eventually settled mostly in Tuscon, as her allergies seemed the least affected by the climate there, and there weren’t any earthquakes.

Anyway, to get back to the story, to that September day, wherever she was. She was in her apartment alone, and she had just got back from running an errand. She was walking from one room to another when she heard a voice tell her to “pray for the President.” She walked around looking for the source of the voice, but the radio was off, and no one was there. She thought to herself, “but I’ve already prayed for the President today.” But she shrugged and decided that it certainly couldn’t hurt. So she kneeled down right then and there and prayed for the President, for his safety, for his health, for his wellbeing.

Later she turned on the radio, and heard that an assassination attempt had just been made on President Ford in Sacramento. The would-be assassin, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, had pulled out a Colt .45 on Ford, but strangely, though the weapon’s magazine had rounds in it, there were none in the firing chamber. Almost as if one part of her wanted to kill the President, but another side of her didn’t really want to shoot him. She later told The Sacramento Bee that she had deliberately ejected the bullet that morning from the chamber, and the police found the .45 bullet laying on her bathroom floor. She didn’t plead in her own defense and was sentenced to life.

My grandmother was not one to lie, by the way. If she says that she heard a voice say “pray for the President,” then she heard it. She also was not one prone to any sort of silliness or flights of fancy, at least not until the onset of Parkinson’s in her late 90s, at which point such flights were quite understandable.

There is no doubt in my mind that the “voice” that my grandmother heard so audibly and forcibly came from within. It was a warning of intuition so sharp and immediate that she heard it as sourced outside of herself. This story makes me wonder about the power of prayer; it has been fairly well established by medical science that at the very least, prayer can heal simply through the placebo effect of calming the patient and providing a community of support. But what about the power of prayer to directly influence, psychically, the actions of another, even that of a complete stranger?

Stay tuned for more of my grandmother’s tales of the paranormal.

My grandmother and her sister—Gunhild and Helga—were what were once known as ‘witches’, and now known more aptly as psychics. However, they would have both had a conniption fit if they were referred to with either of those phrases, for they were both devoutly religious. My grandmother was a strong influence on my life, and I’m surprised I haven’t written much about her here before—perhaps because she is so close to my heart and upbringing that I don’t even think to speak in a detached manner about her. She left behind a lot of materials, both written and spoken, that I want to sift through when I finally get my stuff out of storage, and I will then write in detail about her amazing life and stories, as I think it’s about time.

But right now I wanted to introduce you to a story that she loved to tell, because it is all about me, and after all, that’s what this blog is mostly about, right?

When my father excitedly called his mother with the good news that another baby was on the way–two girls had already been born–my grandmother said, “Oh, I already knew about that.”
“And how did you know that?” my father inquired, bewildered.
“Helga has seen it in a dream, and she’s not sure, but she thinks that it is going to be a little boy.”

Yes, indeed, a full year before I was born, my great-aunt Helga had had a dream in which she foresaw my birth. She had not seen it fit to announce this dream to my parents, but she obviously believed enough in its veracity that she called and shared it with her sister Gunhild.

Sure enough, soon along came little Manderson, his peepee a-flapping in the florescent hospital lighting, popped out on the exact day, as a matter of fact, that his sister had come out two years prior.

So I was henceforth referred to by my grandmother as “the dream boy,” and she was so impressed with her sister Helga’s prescience that she felt the need to share this story about me to complete strangers. She would wrap up the story by pointing her finger at me and dramatically stating, “And there he is!” I was an extremely shy child and this always made me feel mortified, though perhaps vaguely proud, as if I’d somehow done anything other than just be birthed. She even felt the need to reiterate this story at Helga’s memorial, and as she wrapped up the story with her standard climactic finale, leveling her wobbly finger at me, all the random nursing home folk that had come by for cookies and gossip at the advent of another death turned around in their seats to get a peep of this mystery “dream boy.” I smiled weakly and hesitantly waved my hand at them, feeling that perhaps I was a disappointing sort of child to have been predicted. This trauma, perhaps, may explain my prior hesitancy in bringing up the story on these pages.

Gunhild’s sister Helga was a quiet lady who lived on her own in Los Angeles, and she tended to speak to my grandmother in Swedish and keep to herself, so I don’t know what other psychic events may have transpired in her life. But my grandmother had bucketloads of stories that could either be termed psychic events, or manifestations of God, depending on your inclination. I will re-tell some of these stories as time goes on, as they are simply too priceless to not be shared.

My grandmother has been on my mind some lately, so I had been remembering some of these stories, and I figured that I might as well share my little “dream boy” snippet. As you can perhaps imagine, having this story told about me constantly tainted me for some time with a slight insecure messianic complex, as I felt the need to somehow live up to that sense of promise and prophecy. I felt that I had to have some kind of purpose, that I should have been announced telepathically before even forming within my mama’s fallopian tubes. Now, however, the story is simply one of humor to me, in remembrance of my grandmother and her sister’s playful psychic abilities.

How do we descend into the thick of it, the thickened, coagulated density of emotion necessary to destroy illusions like a bird descendant upon its prey? By what authority, by what necessary quality, trait, experience do we find the strength to proceed intact through the cutting throng of desire and anger? How can we sever through doubt and despair, conveying truth and beauty to their highest destination point of divinity, through vehicles so dumb, so shredded by toxic interference, as our bodies?

There would seem to be two fundamental points of answer: possession of the confidence (point 1) to proceed beyond the superficial and into intuition (point 2). There are many other outlying tenets, no doubt, such as focus, humility, devastating life experiences and/or the ability to attune oneself so finely to pain that it becomes akin to bliss. But if we allow the complexities of circumstance and personality to fall to the side for the moment, these two points become apparent. Point one, confidence, being the conveyor, the arrow through the surface worlds, penetrating within. Without confidence, belief, conviction, knowledge, there is no means of fulfillment, no facility to proceed progressively to inner sanctums beyond surface tangents of perversion. Point two, intuition, being the explosive fruit onto the scene, the fecund address of the potential needs of future and present. The voice that speaks beyond oneself within oneself that knows exactly what must be done to preserve the delicate balance of life and death, of space and form.

How difficult to possess these jewels in tact, in full, in every moment of everyday, to reach across the void of ourselves true to form eternity. Our world crumbles out of balance all around us, within and without, flying apart at the handle that we hold so blithely, so close to our hearts. Do we possess the strength to listen? Do we have the faith for empathy? Do we have the knowledge to learn?

Females got them all kinds o’ products that they apply to their faces, their hair, their skin. It’s probably mostly a slew of completely nonessential crap, but at some point, a guy kinda notices that in general, women tend to take fairly good care of themselves, at least in terms of immediate appearance. There was a point in my development, years ago, when I suddenly rejected the idea that female skin is fundamentally different then my own. And I was tired of having clogged pores and dodgy skin. So what were the womenfolk doing that was different then simply washing their faces with soap and water? I decided to look into it, surreptitiously, and observe, in an anthropological sense, how women took care of their faces.

I learned about the concepts of cleansing followed by exfoliation, toning, and moisturizing. It’s not quite as alien to guys as it might seem, given that men have to take care of their faces somewhat in terms of learning how to shave. Applying aftershave is toning, and applying an aftershave balm is moisturizing.

So that was just a general introduction to the personal development I underwent in defeating sexist notions of taking care of my skin. I realized that there is nothing wrong with wanting to have clean, healthy skin. This is not a topic, however, that I would discuss at the bar drinking a whiskey with the guys. Hey guys, what kind of toner you use? What? You don’t know about toner? Shit, brother, well let me clue you in to some beauty secrets. . .” Taking care of our skin is just not really something that guys generally discuss amongst each other.

I have discovered, however, that when it comes to talking about the art and techniques involved in shaving, that suddenly all the beauty secrets begin to come spilling out of the closet. Guys love to talk about their shaving techniques. It’s really a touching thing to witness, actually, after all these years of self-repression and denial. I discovered an on-line community, Badger & Blade, which demonstrates this very well, when I was in the process of learning about ‘wet shaving’, since I was having major issues of razor burn with electric and cartridge razor shaving methods. I mean, guys are chattering away about their colognes, their aftershaves, how many times they swirl their whisks to achieve the perfect crests in their preferred shaving creams . . . It makes you realize that guys have just been holding all this shit back, just waiting for the proper forum with which to express their skin care discoveries.

That is also the forum where I learned about ‘the oil cleansing method.’ This is where you mix up castor oil with other oils such as coconut oil, sunflower seed oil, or olive oil and rub it into your face, then ’steam’ it out of your pores by opening them up with a hot washcloth draped over your face for a couple of minutes. It’s cheap, effective, natural, and simple. Given my penchant for self-sufficiency and non-toxicity, it felt like just the right thing to do. After having done it for a few weeks now, I can definitely recommend it. When I moved out to the East Coast, my skin wigged out, because I was used to dry climates, and now I’m in extreme humidity. I was breaking out like I was a teenager again. The oil cleansing method has re-balanced my skin. And it also leaves the skin feeling like its breathing, relaxed, and alive, not all taut and stretched out like harsh acne soaps do.

So there’s not even any reason to rely on your conventional array of expensive and probably toxic cleansers and moisturizers. All you need are the oils you want, which you can mix yourself, and then probably a toner on hand to finish it up. This can save you a lot of money down the road. And this method of skin care, best of all, is gender neutral. It’s just about the simple conception of oil as the most basic and essential of skin functions.

I have been looking back over some of my more recent posts lately and realized three things: 1) my writing and/or subject matter has grown increasingly dull; 2) my audience has grown increasingly silent and/or fled cyberspatially elsewhere (I still get a healthy amount of hits each day, but a large percentage of that is now from searches on guns, of all things); 3) I’ve been preaching in a generalist fashion a good bit more than is healthy. (By the way, there’s always something edifying about making impromptu numbered lists. It somehow seems automatically intentional and organized.)

So I hereby propose a conscious effort to steer this here ship back to some semblance of worth. I will write either more strictly on subjects that I can speak with more authority about—meaning myself and my mundane existence—or else only speak more broadly about those subjects that appear to be of some interest to the general public such as love, death, mental masturbation, and the other fundamentals of existence.

I do use the palette of this blog to “try out” ideas and thought tangets, as it were, so essentially what I’m acknowledging right now is that some of these forays and tangential excursions as of late have fallen far short of the goal of being worth your fleeting perusal. So, dear invisible reader, oh you IP addressed hit in the dark, I will henceforth write less for fickle me, and more to tickle you. If at all possible. Tally ho!

–Your neighborhood Blog Writer

After being at work all afternoon and evening and finally arriving at her last subway stop, she finds a baby pigeon stranded there. She obtains some paper towels from the subway station workers and spends the next half hour frantically trying to catch the baby so that she can take it back up outside. When she is unable to capture it, she walks back home and comes into the apartment—where I am waiting wondering why she is so late—sobbing at the baby pigeon’s tragic fate.

Who could not love this girl?

New York, New York, no denying its a dense thicket of human and infrastructural networking nestled in veneer of steel, tile, concrete, and glass. One can easily feel submerged in its structural grandeur, its art deco apartment buildings, staircases into the swampy depths of the subway, plated cars pushing a foreshadowing wind through the hair of scattered denizens waiting to be lost again in the motion of crowded progression towards some omega point of hidden comfort awaiting in a box somewhere in a ubiquitous, guarded gray unmarked building.

As a child of California now swimming through the tidal press of NYC, it can at times be an alien, out-of-body experience, to find myself carried along forward into some frontal lobed consciousness of the masses, dimly lit intuitive corridors of the citied species, swaying pendulous through the streets with a chip on my shoulder. But here am I, finding my way, learning how I must perform when the chance opportunity is flittingly opened, to dive heedless headfirst into the fray without hesitation, after eons of pent-up waiting.

Rats will be seen rocketing quietly about from the corner of your eyes, they move quickly through the background landscape of your conversations with a see-sawing motion of their bodies, unmistakably unbalanced yet somehow poised, self-confidant, that dastardly eternal persistence inherent in their step. Also now, during the summer months, fireflies will fleetingly appear in flashing arcs against the dusk, a magical sight to someone wholly unaccustomed to them. I feel like a child every time I witness them dancing their temporal and unintelligible flights in the onset of another humid summer night.

And that’s another thing foreign and alarming to me: the humidity, the heat. The sweat puddling down my back as I sit in the apartment. The unexpected flashes of lightning and rolling thunder, a catharsis of rain, almost immodest in its passion and hurried release. The other day I was caught in an inopportune downpour that began innocently with a mild drizzling, proceeding thence into ponderous heavy drops, still spaced enough that one could pretend to hide beneath a tree, then suddenly twisted into a literal outpouring of liquid sheets from the heavens. Without any cover, it became quickly apparent that it was useless to try to deny it. I was soon soaked completely, and my contacts were beginning to slide down my eyeballs. And then it began to rain yet harder, against all understanding or belief, it came down like something known only through hearsay, like tales of monsoons, hitting the concrete so hard it almost came back up. I then wandered about through a Whole Foods, dribbling puddles of water everywhere.

Another thing is the mosquitoes. I am hoping that it is possible to develop some kind of immunity after some time, as so far when I venture into the park across the street, I get bit an average of 7 times, each one swelling up to a half-dollar size and itching like beejesus. I am frequently struck, when the temperature is 90 degrees or higher outside and the humidity is thick, by the sense that I am in the Amazon jungle.

I am now honing in on a job, wending my way through 2nd rounds of interviews to see which offer might hopefully be made, which path my life will take. It has been a process fraught with depression, stress, and the sheer inertia of despair, but the sense of change stirs somewhere in the air, like the firefly flashing its silent message of joy. Or is it warning? The channel runs ever onward, and the decisions I can make at this point are only responsive; I am at the mercy of the flow.

There are certainly moments too many to count when I realize that the city is welcoming and even forgiving beneath its exterior shell of aggression and constant movement. It is like how I learned to look at hiking down boulders and rocks when in Tahoe: the rocks look hard, and they certainly can be hard and perhaps fatal if mistakes are made and they are taken for granted. But if you look at them like something soft, something pliable that you can trust, they will support you, they will be as supportive as pillows to your knees. You can run like water along their points. Giving everything to every step, your weight presses the rocks down into balance, even when they shift, you move with them. So as with rocks it is with the city. Running with its appearance, trusting in its integrity, it supports you and moves you forward.

Alright, so would someone like to explain to me this now common media pundit snippet about irate Hillary Clinton supporters who now say they will vote for McCain? What the fuck? It just doesn’t make any sense. Anyone who supported Hillary Clinton would recognize that Obama clearly supports many of the same initiatives, and relative to someone as contrary McCain, is in fact nearly indistinguishable on the political spectrum of things.

It makes one wonder if this supposedly substantial percentage of voters now claiming to vote for McCain in the absence of Clinton is simply a creation of the media. And if there are any voters out there that exist who would vote in such a manner, well, let’s just say that they must be extremely confused people, with perhaps little capability of utilizing the critical faculties of their noggins.

Why can’t we look at people based on the color of their minds, the fruit of their perspectives, their intriguing meshed inner map of happenstance and outward trajectories of decisions, the varying shades of individualism interwoven within the living fabric of all that exists? We’ve got people convinced that somehow the color of their skin defines their capability and outlines their personality. That the accoutrements of one’s gender defines their ability to succeed or perform. That we’ve got to talk a certain way, act a certain way, perform a certain way.

It’s now been proven that sexual orientation is a formation of the brain before thought. There is no will, no choice in the matter. What appears can and often will contradict what is.

In the United States, we have furthered and maintained the myth of an identity known as the ‘black’ or ‘white’ person. Is the type of genes that one possesses relevant to anything but one’s healthcare provider? The color of one’s skin only becomes relevant outside of such concerns in a society that has bigotry at its core. The classification of black and white should not be used to subdivide cultural identity. We are all citizens of our country, with common goals and standards. Our perceived differences should merely lie in geography and ideologies, not in genes.

We live in a world based on diaspora. The identity of the citizen of a country is no longer based on the color of one’s skin nor even necessarily on the language one speaks. We create artificial subdivisions based on wealth and seclusion, and use excuses like racial identity to explain away inequity.

There is no escaping the conclusion that we all share common goals and agree to accept the standards of capitalism and democracy and human rights. Beyond that, why are we divided? Beyond that, why are we afraid? Beyond that, why do we classify ourselves as limited due to our appearance, when all of the evidence around us points not to what we look like, but where we happen to live, or what we happen to belief in?

All this hullabuloo during the presidential campaign has revolved around race and gender politics. What a petty misdirection of our attention from the issues that truly matter, and what concerns us all. It’s like everyone is patting themselves on the back because a woman and a black man are finally considered viable candidates for president of the United States. But guess what people? Wait to pat yourselves on the back until the day comes when we dismiss race and gender as completely irrelevant to the realm of politics—and to any other realm of public domain.

“What is a weed?

A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are moments when you feel saturated, laden with some invisible hue of refracting light that channels up from your gut to the space between your eyes, and even in the midst of the compressed rush hour crowd in a subway car, standing swaying in the jagged braking of the subterranean train with your hand wrapped warmly around the bar, even then, you feel some eyes catching into you, catching onto you, understanding briefly that there is something there they can’t touch, yet knowing, intimately, like the back of their dreams. Your aura transcends the scene and there could be some background chorus echo cradling the silence and contextualizing it into something grander, musical, emotional. And then some man in the back of the train yelling into someone’s face, seething with an anger that is almost biblical. Heads turn to ascertain the gravity of the situation. Just another crazy, spinning off in some schizophrenic void. That once was you, minus the verbal vitriol. You, energy spitting shotgun into the aether-sphere of the damned, uncontainable, ungrounded, lost. You once knew what it was to be forsaken. It is the flipside of the controlled ecstasy that can flood into your veins unforeseen now daily. Much better than a needle, you know how to look forever into the future, in order to escape the unbearable suffering of being stuck eternally in each moment. To steel yourself in ambition, put your faith in evolution, knowing always that there will be upwards growth, eventually, with patience. The payoff is the ecstatic sense of concrete in your blood that comes suddenly, swiftly, grounding you into a sense of infinity embedded in your skin. This light that breaks open momentarily in the depths of mundanity, unseen by anyone, your breath solid as a rock, unbreakable as water, you can make it through everything.

Flat surfaces superimposed in 3D alignments against the horizon, hard edges, challenges unsought for that must be met at every seeming second. On the street level, your illusions stand for nothing but what you’ve truly bought into. You sense shame, a fundamental smotheredness. Aspects of yourself that you cannot defend are attacked by glances that you have left unmet. You yearn for an openness that is only earned through pain. The sense of being incomplete surrounds you—the dissonant shards of failure due to negligence are strewn across the surface of the streets. Are you beautiful enough to join in its din? Are you pure enough? Are you enough of steel, enough of integrity, enough of acceptance? This is the challenge of the street. You must deliberately shed, sufferingly, your protective mundanity, the blinders that allow your days to fast forward into oblivion. Can you feel it, fully, the force of the untouched, the anguished power of the unsaid?

To walk, balanced, swaying in fecundity, through the broken corridors of the streets. The beat that drops assuredly through crooked time. Your flow is rapture, your channeling deliberate, your connections run deep. Integrity. Spirit. Vulnerable as the stars, naked in the frigid night, shaking out the past.

I am someone who is accustomed to a certain level of privacy/loneliness/personal space. Some of this comes from having lived most of my life in Southern California, the sprawl capitol of the nation, wherein we travel individually in cars acrost mile-wide expanses of tar in the suburbs. My travels in South America served to introduce me to the concept of living in compressed communities, with local transportation often a matter of being shoved into a Korean mini-van with sacks of potatoes, chickens, scantily clad women, and old men with hats, virtually sitting in each other’s laps. I thus gained the understanding that having privacy and personal space can be a matter of privilege that many people do not have a concept of nor access to.

It is therefore fitting that I now reside in the densest metropolis in the United States, where personal space is most directly equated to public space. I also am currently living in a situation where I have little privacy, as I am staying in somebody else’s living room.

I bring this up because all of this directly impacts my blog. You may have noted already that most of my posts since moving unto NYC are matters of externality. I traditionally write with a focus primarily within, as I feel that is where the locus of development lies. But I find it hard to sit down here and really turn inward. It has made me realize just how reliant I am on the possession of personal space and privacy, a privilege I have oft took for granted.

Just to give you an example of the level of problems I have with this: I have never been able to write with someone looking over my shoulder—even if it is just the possibility of being able to look over my shoulder, such as sitting with my back to a window to the street. It’s almost like I feel that there is something subversive in the act of writing, something that I need to hide (until I’ve finished writing, of course, whereupon–apparently–I wish to post it for the whole wide world to see). I don’t know where I acquired this fear. If we were to follow this neurosis further, we would discover that I also have an aversion to displaying true emotions and spiritual depth in any public manner. I used to consistently be asked by strangers whether there was something wrong in places like the grocery store or at work, because my face tended to be so neutral in reacting to my surroundings and situations that people took it for anger or sadness.

I’ve gotten better about projecting a more apt public appearance, but my bashful writer’s block is still in full effect (I also have a bashful bladder as well, unable to pee when there is either too much pressure or other people about—but I know I ain’t alone on that one). So either I will adapt to being more capable of turning inward in public spaces with no privacy or physical space, or I won’t be able to write much of depth until I acquire my own apartment, which god knows when that will occur.

I’m working on it.

As you can tell from my frequent subject matter, I am highly concerned with issues of personal, social, and economic development, focused specifically on issues of human rights, sustainability, poverty, and spiritual insight. One of the encouraging things I’ve been realizing lately is that many of the fundamental insights which I have developed in my own mind are already in application in the real world. Now that I’m at a point in my life where I am reaching out beyond myself, and can safely maneuver beyond my ego, stubbornness, and insecurity, I am finally recognizing the enormous amount of networks and organizations that are in existence, actively disseminating and applying information in their communities. I am now overwhelmed with the amount of learning that I have to sift through.

I admit that there is still a part of me that wants to reject others developments, so that I can find my own way, find my own insights and developments to claim. I want to have something powerful and uniquely my own, something new, something revolutionary. But of course, it is simple conceit to imagine that anything I could come up with hasn’t already been done, as well as to imagine that I could possibly create some philosophy to right all the worlds wrongs. Humbleness is required in affecting change.

Once I recognize this essential humility and get beyond my ego, I’m finding a lot of reason for hope and positivity out there. It’s easy to feel like you are isolated and that nothing is changing when you think of all of the world’s problems, especially when you read the daily news or just watch TV. But now that I’m looking around and reaching out, I’m realizing just how many groups, schools, non-profits, individuals, and even businesses are out there doing a lot of amazing work towards understanding the root sources of problems, guiding individuals into supportive communities, and finding methods and solutions that are practical and that work. It’s encouraging. And it’s making me extremely eager to start discovering the tools that others have been using and find a way to combine them and apply them in my own life and community. To get involved, get my hands dirty, get my heart dilated.

My goals: I want to find a way to connect public policy directly to individuals and communities and render its processes transparent. I want individuals to have access to funding to green roof gardens on their buildings, install rainwater harvesting systems, utilize graywater, and compost all of their communities’ foodwaste. I want everyone capable of starting their own business. I want plastic to reflect its true cost and become prohibitively expensive to produce. I want chickens and goats to infiltrate our cities. I want to combat poverty, rats, and pigeons. I want practical, immediately applicable, and effective solutions to all of my society’s problems, and I want them now.

Updates on how I am progressing towards these goals will be forthcoming.