La Familia

I learned in the past week that my brother and my parents are reading this fairly regularly.

It was my intention long ago to have a wider audience; however because Dennis was the only responder, I thought that no one else was reading, hence I pretty much gave up on writing for any particular audience. Dennis is easy to write for because he is such an intellectual omnivore; and like myself, only a part-time amateur philosopher and a discriminating consumer!  I have also learned from Dennis how to find stuff on the internet; I once asked him what color the sky is on Mars--and he found it!  A whiter shade of blue, it seems.

I am primarily grateful that some of my family finds my thoughts at least interesting and I hope also occasionally entertaining.  Because my blog has been written for what I see have been selfish reasons, that is, it entertains myself but also gives me a chance to try to explain myself to myself, which of course we know is largely impossible because we are impossibly subjective towards ourselves, hence need others for getting our ego/id under control, and not being totally appalled by what we find inside of ourselves--our "black dragon" as I used to say of meself.  Counselling helped but once I was married that has turned out to be counselling plus!

But now that we have gotten this far--I think that the blog will have to change-- be patient with me folks. "We all offend in many ways." I also apologize for any previous offences found in these posts as they are written off the cuff, weren't written with my family in mind; yet as  my Dad often said, you write what you know; and no person who writes can avoid being reactionary in the widest sense of the word--more on that some other time.

It may be that the new opportunities outweigh the considerations of wanting to be hyper-private. As has always been my wont.

I used to be impenetrably shy--one reason I got into medicine is to "treat" that, one person at a time. I think, after a long period of continuous exposure to a rich palate of humanity, I have met with some success--thus can be more transparent than in the past.

There is the paradox of wanting to be known, and wanting not to be known. I find that people in general are more or less a mass of contradictions, not subject to reason, pure or other. So what ego and superego do is to gradually pick out a persona, push that forward in hopefully a reasonable and socially/culturally acceptable way, while at the same time culling out the unacceptable and hopefully the impractical.  But most of us don't do this in any organized fashion so we have to settle for a "burning man" construction, jerry built as we go along. This makes for a very fragile superstructure. This also makes the proposal: "one is what one is" kind of a time bomb. There are a lot of things inside of me that really don't need to be encouraged! In a Christian matrix, one can call this "the flesh."

One last related observation. Being "understood" is a very mixed bag! And highly overrated. Yet there is the temptation to make oneself known to be better understood. And that is not without its value; depending at least as much on the state of the reader as of the author. Eric Burdon of Animals fame once sang a song with the refrain. "O Lord please don't let me be understood." Hmmmm. We also value "transparency"--but largely the talk show variety.  It will take some time for me to explore what my responsibilities are now.