Polaroids are back in fashion. We took about 50 of them on our recent trip to the ancestral homeland, including various rusting hulks of old farm machinery, my grandmother’s Hobbit house poking out of a hillside, and the Wall of Ancient Magazines in my parents’ house. They aren’t hoarders, but they were both born during the Great Depression, and they have strong feelings about throwing stuff away.
The documentary Beyond Hoarding points out that anyone who lives in the same place long enough in our materialistic society is at risk, because most of us only downsize our collections when we move.
Most of the people that we meet in middle-age who have it, remember that it started in their teenage years. And by the time you're in your late age you have collected quite a number of things and if you can’t get rid of any of them, then you're certainly going to be in trouble. — Gail Steketee, PhD, Co-Author of “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things”
There’s also apparently a strong genetic component, based on twin studies.
The results of the twin analyses suggest that genetic factors account for approximately 50% of the variance in compulsive hoarding, with nonshared environmental factors and measurement error accounting for the other half. Environmental factors shared by siblings growing up in the same family did not contribute to individual differences in the liability to compulsive hoarding, suggesting that these factors may be less important in the etiology of this trait.
Aside: in looking up that figure, I found this letter on “Curricular Hoarding” in the American Journal of Pharmacy Education,
As practice evolves and scientific advancements are achieved the natural inclination for educators and administrators is to add new content to existing curricula. Often pre-existing curricula that may be outdated or no longer relevant may go un-checked leading to excessive coursework and program completion times. Faculty may also have emotional or other attachments to certain topics or content and that may serve as an additional or independent barrier to removing extraneous material. To avoid and curtail curricular hoarding of material it may be prudent to periodically engage in reviews of material assessing them for not only adherence to accreditation standards but also in terms of their on-going appropriateness and relevance to contemporary pharmacy practice. These exercises may be especially important today given the rate of information creation and dissemination in the modern digital age.
which I find highly relevant to the college classes I’ve been teaching.
Mother’s Day Weekend
The International Paranormal Museum and Research Center occupies the basement of an old library building on Main Street in Somerset, Kentucky. It’s a collection of newspaper clippings and movie posters, along with some artifacts, many of which have more to do with natural oddities like Siamese twins and serial killers than the paranormal — like glass vials of dirt from the graves of people like Charles Manson and Ed Gein from Mindhunter. The “research center” consists of two six foot tall bookcases, a wingback chair, and a reading lamp, across the room from Gladys the haunted mannequin.
I would never have heard of this place if it hadn’t been for the web series Hellier, which was enough of a cult hit that lots of other people find their way downstairs as well. At least three other groups came through during the half-hour we were there on a Saturday afternoon. However, none of them had seen Let’s Do Blood Magic! , which also shot there. Neither had the girl at the register, who was interviewed in the film. She remembered the group, and signing the release, but she had no idea it was for anything more than a personal YouTube channel.
Tickets were $4 apiece, and we did spend about a hundred bucks between us on novelty swag and presents for loved ones. I also signed the petition to save the historic former library building above the museum. That is certainly the most I’ve ever contributed to downtown Somerset. You might think they’d appreciate it, but apparently the town/county does not enjoy the attention of the paranormal peoples. They’ve torn down the pyramid shown in Hellier, and have blocked up some of the caves and gated off the entrance to Soule’s Chapel, shown in the LDBM! movie. That insistence on Christian conformity is one of the main reasons I left the area.
Tattoo Apprentice
We ate lunch at the Mellow Mushroom out on 80 and took a pizza back to my sister’s house for board games with her eldest child, Andrea, and her new husband, whose nuptials I attended last fall.
My child’s guilt over missing that momentous occasion was one of the things that prompted this most recent trip.
Cousin Andrea has a new giant Lord of the Rings tattoo on her upper arm, which she traveled to Salem, MA, for. I think. Old fart that I be, I’m sort of confused by this whole tattoo culture, though for professional reasons I was very interested to learn from her and my kid about the system of formal and informal apprenticeships that supports it. I plan to explore that some more and see if micro-credentials would be a welcome addition. Stay tuned. Or point me in your definition of the right direction.
Barbies in Boots
Sunday we looped out further south and west to see Cousin Matthew, who has appeared here twice, as a teenager, in podcast form. Now that he has finished med school and is doing an endocrinology residency at Vanderbilt, I should definitely do a catch-up Q&A with him.
Nashville is supposedly the third-fastest growing city in the nation, the Austin of the east, with more construction cranes in its skyline than you can shake a six-shooter at. Also lots of blonde girls with fake tans wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.
We stood in line at a barbecue place, got “walking beers” to carry around through the blazing sunshine amongst the Sunday shopping crowds of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood near the university, and stood in line again for ice cream and air conditioning, chattering the whole time. We kept it light for the most part — books and movies and games (oh my). Matthew has a regular trivia night but can’t find the time for a tabletop campaign.
I mention gaming because we spent multiple long car rides listening to podcasts, including an old SF favorite of mine called Girl in Space, which the kid loved, and a gaming one called Pretending to Be People, whose opening narrations remind me somewhat of Welcome to Night Vale.
We didn’t listen to the campaign but to a Call of Cthulhu one-shot called “Bleak Prospect,” run by the author.
Because we spent so much driving time on Nashville, Sunday night we had to camp at a lake outside of Knoxville. Got in after dark, but the tent went up pretty smoothly in the glow of Lilo’s headlights. The gravel under the tent was rough, though, even with my wife’s space-age foldable foam layer under the sleeping bags.
Sunrise over the banks of cloud behind the lake looked really cool through my cataract, reminding me of a shitty poem I wrote when I was about my kid’s age, one line of which went
Flickering clusters of refractive indices, splintering light
Despite the late night, the lack of camp coffee, and the disappointing kolaches we had gotten the evening before from the Buccee’s in Crossville, the kid was sooo happy.
I was too, publicly. But inside, I was deeply unsettled by the conditions my parents were living in. The bathrooms were gas-station bad, and I found black mold growing in their water pitcher. How long had they been drinking that? Make a sanity roll . . .
I’m not blaming my brother. He’s taking care of them more or less by his lonesome, as my sister still has two teens at home plus her own numerous and serious health problems. He’s also trying to run a farm on top of those caretaking responsibilities. So I shut my (&^# mouth and picked up a scrub brush. Not a great solution, but the best I could come up with at the time.
Titwillow, Titwillow, Titwillow
The American Masters episode “Groucho & Cavett” captured the secret spirit of my weekend better than I can explain. Those washed-out clips from shows broadcast before I was born. Those silly little songs and hours of barely funny couch-banter:
Groucho: Don’t change the subject. What did you eat, while you were in Washington?
Cavett: I don’t know, a couple of shrimp —
Groucho: — anyone I know?
Cavett: Well, no, but a couple of meatballs told me to say hello.
Dick Cavett was born towards the end of the same year as my father, 1936. In this documentary, facing the camera and reminiscing about a man who’s been dead since I was seven years old, he looks like the Crypt-Keeper in a turtleneck. Or should I say toitleneck?
As a kid, I knew Groucho mostly through homage, in Bugs Bunny cartoons and various impoisonations by Hawkeye on M*A*S*H*.
I did see a couple of the movies while I was in college, as did many of my generation, but I can’t say I was a fan, exactly. I definitely did adopt that style of insult humor, though these days I am careful to apply it mostly to myself.
The Old Man’s Friend
“and I don’t mean pneumonia,” he said, waggling his eyebrows, and his cigar . . .
According to another PBS article,
The turmoil of his last few years are all too familiar to adult children everywhere who are concerned with the welfare of their elderly parents and other relatives.
Groucho’s “girlfriend” and consort, Erin Fleming, was accused of elder abuse and, to make matters worse, his relationships with his son Arthur and daughter Miriam … were strained for various reasons.
I make jokes about starting a heroin habit on my seventy-fifth birthday, to guarantee that I don’t have any of those issues. Or maybe I should just move to a country where elders get more respect.
In Japan, age is seen as a spring or rebirth after a busy period of working and raising children. One study found older adults in Japan showed higher scores on personal growth compared with midlife adults, whereas the opposite age pattern was found in the US.
Or both. I’m sure they have heroin in Japan.
Japan is unique in the world when it comes to its taste in drugs. Stimulants – overwhelmingly methamphetamine – make up 80 percent of all drug use.[7] This makes Japan a real outlier. Not only is it the only country where methamphetamine use trumps cannabis – it trumps it by a country mile. Some drugs which are popular in other parts of the world are virtually unheard of in Japan. For example, in the mid-1980s, heroin-based arrests increased by 25 percent – from 29 people to 36.[8] Cocaine, similarly, has gained very little market share.
OK, maybe not Japan, then.
Though that quote does explain a lot about anime . . .
Rat Park
Rural America, including the part of Kentucky I’m from, has had a series of drug use epidemics, from cocaine in the 80s to meth in the 90s to prescription opioids in the 2010s to being quite possibly the fentanyl capital of the nation now. Of course, the DEA continues to spin this situation as a battle between good and evil on their website and in their . . . museum?
Welcome to the DEA Museum. Admission is free, and there's something for everyone.
Their funding depends on it. The Addiction Industrial Complex is a topic for another time. Today I’ll just return to that Open Democracy article for a moment.
But while explanations based on supply don’t work, explanations based on collective pain do work. In Britain during the Gin Craze, there was a large pool of people in terrible distress, for very good reasons: they had been humiliated and broken and had yet to find a tolerable new way to live. The addiction epidemic wasn’t caused by the availability of the drug, as it had been available before, and it would be available after. It was explained by the fact that a large number of the country’s people found it intolerable to be present in their lives, and sought out powerful anaesthetics.
That same article reminded me of one of my favorite neuroscience comics, which I’ve used with students for years.
The basics are that rats in cages will self-administer drugs to the exclusion of all else, but rats in enriched environments with toys and playground equipment and social opportunities refuse drugs. They’re high on life.
Wrapping Up
So we’ve got lots of miserable people, people “who find it intolerable to be present in their lives,” looking for any kind of escape — mythology, drugs, even death.
What if, instead, we just learned how to be present?
https://apnews.com/article/mash-tv-auction-alan-alda-a68b956e3311f59ae8be516b927ce881?taid=64a5f84d5e5078000177810c&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter