Well, the special birthday zone, embracing my 9/6 birthday and the 10/26 birthday of my first male lover, Larry Schourup, a time suffused with delighted memories of our coming together in the spring of 1969, the way that changed both our lives, and how it led to a lifelong affectionate friendship, rewarding for both of us (we exchanged e-mail yesterday, 57 years after those days).
Archive for the ‘Memory’ Category
The birthday zone
September 4, 2026Billions of dollars in parrots
August 26, 2026Little Poll Parrot
Sat in his garret
Eating toast and tea.
A little brown mouse
Jumped into the house
And stole it all away.
— nursery rhymeIf you like the parrots and getting caught in the rain
If you like making love at midnight under the trees on the cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape
— The Parrot Song
Well, yes, tariffs (by Canada, against those levied by the Grabpussy administration of my country), not my misheard parrots. But I was taken by the idea of billions of dollars in parrots, bright parrots in the air.
And so was led down the psittacine path of associative memory. Some highlights on the path …
Mental blocks
August 25, 2026
turning point 2
July 30, 2026A follow up to today’s earlier posting “turning point”; again, a lightly edited version of e-mail to family and caregivers.
phantasia
April 21, 2026A brief notice.
A recent issue of the New Yorker recommends an earlier piece in the magazine, on an aspect of our mental lives, on mental imagery (experienced in the phenomenon of phantasia) — with which we can compare mental sounds (experienced in the phenomenon of auralia) — and how it works (or not) in different people:
Annals of Inquiry: “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound: Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits — how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives” by Larissa MacFarquhar on 10/27/25 on-line; published in the print edition of the 11/3/25 issue, with the headline “Phantasia” — on aphantasia (lacking these mental perceptions) and hyperphantasia (having extraordinarily vivid mental perceptions), with considerable reporting on the lived experiences of aphantastics and hyperphantastics
More questions for anauralics
April 15, 2026Following up on my 4/13 posting “A host of voices”, on
an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes
focusing on auralia, on hearing sounds in the mind, and on anauralia, its lack (in a small percentage of people), in various contexts:
in silent reading, in the voice of an internal adviser, in recollected speech or music, in auditory hallucinations, in speech or other sounds in dreams
I had my University of Arizona colleague Heidi Harley as an exemplary anauralic (while recognizing that each person has their own profile of mental-percept abilities); what she can tell us is important, beause it appeared then, and still does, that there’s not much research on mental sound (or mental imagery), in perceptually deficient subjects (anauralics, aphantastics) or even in perceiving (“normal”) subjects (auralics, phantastics), though it looks like there’s an enormous amount of variability.
Now: two further contexts to consider.
Three nights on the hormonal rollercoaster
March 4, 2026A journal of the nights of 3/1-2, 3/2-3, and (last night!) 3/3-4, during which I experienced the deepest lows and the greatest highs of hormone-driven states of being.
Meanwhile, somehow, the rest of life went on: washing up, getting my meals, ordering groceries and household supplies, mourning the deaths of old friends and admirable people, seeing doctors, getting exercise, scheduling appointments, writing blog postings, singing, fretting (pointlessly) about being completely uprooted and moved to an assisted living facility, getting income tax materials together, keeping in touch with friends (especially those in crisis or grieving, but just to renew connections going back as far as the 1940s), trying to recollect my work and activities in the 1960s (as intellectual history now potentially of significance), fending off assaults on me as an icon of DEI, answering e-mail, all while trying somehow to cope with the state of the world, which seems threatening to degrees once unimaginable, and in the face of grievous memory losses that will take months of labor to recover from (at the moment I am damaged goods, with a somewhat fried brain).
The three nights, expanding on notes I made at the time. (My memory for new things is very unsteady, so that I write stuff down. Then I have a huge pile of notes in which I have to find whatever it is that I need. So I have to try to remember where the relevant notes are. It’s all vexing, leading me to weep in frustration. But I persevere.) (more…)
Yummy grub from around the planet
November 12, 2025In full:
Thanks for all the good conversation and yummy grub from around the planet
My first report on a two-day visit from my old friend Ellen Kaisse, who flew in from Seattle to San Jose. Intended as help in my preparing to move to an assisted living facility — and we got some of that in — but for me it became mostly a wonderful time talking about our lives these days and trying to recover accurate memories of our pasts (so that there will be at least one more posting about the fragility and pliability of memory) — a vacation from my anxieties and sorrows, punctuated by three breaks for food (two lunches and one dinner), carefully chosen to be favorites of mine — I am now an experienced browser of restaurants for home delivery — that I was pretty sure Ellen had never had before and would also fit her dietary constraints (she doesn’t eat mammals).
This is the food report.