Eclipse

Envious of those of you in the American West: you have a “ring of fire” annular solar eclipse near sundown today.

I expect pictures. 

Haiku Movie Review: The Last Airbender

Cool powers, fruity

plot; Jedi, Eastern clichés:

Grasshopper grows up.

(Editor’s note: Cool themes. But from the accents, all the Asians and Anglos come from San Francisco and the Indians from Michigan. Whenever the Water Master speaks, mentally add the word “Dude” to the end of his sentences.)

Time To Go

This year has been pretty unstintingly dreadful….

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Good and Evil

How To Talk To Humans

How tempting to say “You’re poison,” or “You angel.”

We might as well say to one another, “Ah… So that’s how I see you. Help me see you.”

Or in the grip of the murderous hate or the insanity of jealousy or the great passion, “Shall I sweep the kitchen, then?”

Maybe that way all things come back to truth, unaddled by our weird eyes.

Radio Time Machine

If you like music, you have to get the Radio Time Machine app. I did 1956 for awhile, then 1968: currently stuck in 1973.

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From my iPhone

Mantra For Saturday

A bit too long to be a mantra, but short enough to remain a guiding thought for Saturday.

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Email Question

When you talk about “relationship addiction” you’re NOT talking about being addicted to one person, right?

That’s correct.

Being obsessed with a person is not at all an indication of relationship addiction, though it might well result from it.  Sometimes addiction produces the opposite effect, an excessive coldness towards someone with whom youve been very close.  

Diagnosing relationship addiction from an obsession (or even a couple of relationships) would be like diagnosing alcoholism from a Christmas bender; you can’t tell based on that, and it doesn’t really rise by itself to the level of evidence.  Rather, that diagnosis gets into patterns of behavior as well as into ways the brain functions under the influence of a thing, compared with how it functions when the thing is not there.  

Bayou Boogaloo

NOLA Paddle Boards. Saving for this purchase…. You stand on them and paddle.

Got to spend some time tonight by Bayou St. John at one of New Orleans’ cooler free festivals.

The amazing Mia Borders played a killer set, as always; Papa Grows Funk did a few really long, cool breakdowns.

It was cool and clear, and there were acres of craft tents and food tents.

There’s something about New Orleans in the springtime….

The festival continues today and tomorrow.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: Beyond Haiku

Marigolds: Maggie Smith, Ronald Pickup, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton (Yes, We Know Who You Are), Celia Imrie, Judi Dench, Tom WilkinsonLife holds no more promise for you, if you’re named “John Madden” and you’re given an all-star Brit ensemble cast to direct that includes Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.  

Can anything with both Judi Dench and Maggie Smith ever be really bad?  The answer is, “No,” and that knowledge will sustain you through the rather drab and formulaic first forty minutes or so of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  I can’t promise you’ll have the deepest cinema experience of your life, but there’s a quiet gentle touch to the movie that I loved: it doesn’t rip you wide open.  It suggests feelings, like memories, rather than pounding you with them.

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The Care And Feeding of Your Relationship Addict: The Madness of the Gods and the Hope For Long Term Love

A general look at relationship addiction as it corresponds to (or doesn’t correspond to) healthy relationships, the patterns that identify addiction, and the addict’s best hopes for a healthy relationship.

Excerpt:

We all have good reasons for the things we do, or think we have them. But these choices of whom we attach to and detach from are being made at an incredibly deep level of the brain, and if the thing goes unacknowledged, no relationship is ultimately safe from it. If the right neurochemical switches are thrown, the addict might do almost anything. Addicts report almost a powerlessness in making the choice to detach from someone they’ve loved: it’s as if the choice is made for him or her, both to attach and to detach, and that powerlessness justifies their clean detachment from the problem-person who has not met their needs.

Hopefully you can see a bit more clearly how this differs from the simple need for relationships: it’s a patterned and habitual need that you cannot identify from your feelings but only from your history, and some faith in the scientific evidence that your relationship history comes from your neurological makeup and not from accident. One wounded ex-partner is inevitable. Two is bad luck. Three is a pattern. Five? Something’s wrong with you: and I’d count to five before committing to the diagnosis.

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