BROKEN WINDOWS

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

This just in from my aunt who returned yesterday from a two-week trip out west:

'In San Francisco - with the recall, etc. - we saw signs for Larry Flynt that read "a chicken in every pot, a chick in every lap." Ha! Rather illustrates the overall chicken-shit mentality that has produced this "recall"....Maybe Larry has a place in this crazy mixed up scene after all.'

Who could say "No" to the recall?! Gotta be nuts.

11:22:28 PM |

Destructive memory. The thing that separates us from non-rational animals, my friend tells me, after a particularly interesting session of her Human Evolution class. Our mind destroys memories arbitrarily, it seems, throwing out the old to make room for the new. We questioned why we keep phone numbers from 1985 and not the title of the movie we saw just days ago. There is no control over it, they say. The mind destroys what it wants to.

The body and mind, so separate, it seems, with one remembering one thing and the other another. I remember seeing a documentary about hypnosis. Actually, it was not only about hypnosis, but also about how our bodies hold onto memory. It was a scratchy, beat-up film of veterans from the Good War who had been prisoners of war, tortured or held captive for months and sometimes years. In the scene I remember, one such man lay on a steel table, his eyes closed, hands to his side. His hypnotist had dragged him back to his captivity; within minutes, his arms began to welt, his legs shook uncontrollably. Across his wrists the rope marks appeared. Soon his forehead contorted and a vivid red band rose up, stretching across from one temple to another. The memory of the leather strap that once held him down, the narrator said. The memory locked in his skin, his muscles, deep inside where memory becomes non-memory, only reflex.

10:00:58 PM |

"Down here, we don't feel education is for the masses."

(Overheard by a cab driver friend, said by a Garden District patroness.)

3:06:24 PM |

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Friday Baja Blogging	8/12/05
The Most Powerful Woman in America	8/11/05
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