adrenaline

The Waterstones at the end of High Street

I went to Waterstones (a UK version of Barnes and Noble) today to satisfy this deep craving for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , of which I have been suffering from for weeks. I walked in briskly, half because I had a meeting to go to in about fifteen minutes and half because of a deep seated habit I have cultivated from being from New York. The moment I walked in I noticed a small crowd of about twenty dumpy sort of women with crazy frizzy hair and young mothers gathered around an impromptu stage. Naturally, attempting to avoid it, I rushed down the stairs to the science-fiction section, detoured only by my terrible sense of direction. I bee-lined it to the proper shelves and snatched up my main objective, and after a second of thought, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe too.

I paid for them at the information desk downstairs and thought for no real reason, except I was feeling sort of lonely today, to ask about the apparent event. It was a book signing. And although none of the three cashiers could remember the title or the author of the book they were able to tell me that the book was by a formally homeless man, and about his adventures with his cat, Bob. (A quick Google search when I got back home revealed that the book is called A Street Cat Called Bob: How One Man and His Cat Found Hope on the Streets by James Bowen.)

Because I have this natural inclination to open my mouth and say stupid things, I shared my inclination towards fear of cat-people. The three cashiers felt free to complain about several customers, one of which had raised a ruckus about the cat’s refusal to sign her book ‘properly.’ (Apparently having a paw print off of a ink pad was not enough, and the cats inability to hold a pen in its mouth and make legible marks on her ratty book was a snub.)

“You see, this is why I came to this country,” I said strengthening my American twang, “to get away from this sort of crazy shit.”

“Yeah well,” said the bald cashier, “I’m from South Africa, there we just shoot ‘em.”

I’d like to think that Douglas Adams would approve of this story. That on my way to buy his book, there was a cat signing books, albeit inadequately.

“

Decades later, in the neurobiology class I teach, I always spend some lectures on the physiology of aggression. The hormonal modulation of it, the areas of the brain having some influence over it, the genetic components of it. Somehow, each year, it takes more and more lectures to cover the material. There aren’t a whole lot more facts known about than about the neurobiology of schizophrenia or language use of parental behavior, just to name a few of the other topics I cover. But somehow almost embarrassingly, I spend more and more time talking about aggression. I think each year I lecture longer because of that man with his head tied to the dam and because of how long I stood there looking at him, unable to leave. I think it is because of the ambiguity of aggression. It is the most confusing emotion to me, and with the defenses of an academician, I clearly believe that if I lecture at it enough, it will give up and go away quietly, its simultaneous attraction and repulsion will stop being so frightening to me. Parental behavior, sexual behavior, those are usually pretty unassailable positives. Schizophrenia, depression, dementia- definitely bad. But aggression. The same motor pattern, the same burst of viscera and neurotransmitters holding razors, and sometimes we are rewarded as with few other behaviors, and sometimes we have been unspeakably harmful. A just war, a nation freed, and a head jammed in the hole of the concrete. I stood watching for hours, mesmerized, as if to see how long it would take for this man to be washed away, bit by bit, into the Nile.

— A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky, pg. 91

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Don’t you bother about growing up. Just allow yourself to be exactly what you are, as fully as possible and for as long as you want. If you follow this advice, the growing up will take care of itself in good time.

— The Daseinsanalytic View of Man, Medard Boss

“

You think you have to be afraid of those blood thirsty impulses. Well, that’s only a second error on your part. Suicide is always only a mistake in seizing the wrong medium. You feel compelled to effect a physical cutting open of your body. You have an urge to see your actual blood run because you don’t dare, as yet, to open your heart and let your feeling flow. You don’t even trust yourself far enough to admit to either one of us that you like me because I try to stand by you.

— The Daseinanalytic View of Man, Medard Boss

“

No matter how far we run, how much we eat or drink at the midnight buffet or how comfortable our hammock by the sea is, we are still burdened by the discomfort of having to be ourselves. And so even in Key West we still dream of Margaritaville- even while on vacation, we long for a complete escape, one which carries us further afield than our own being.

—

McKenna, Erin and Pratt, Scott L. (2009) Jimmy Buffett and Philosophy(Popular Culture and P

hilosophy).Chicago. Open Court

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In order to defend this opinion I must say briefly what in my view literature is, and what its relation is to the rest of human life. One who is not a literary critic ought perhaps to refrain from discussing this subject, particularly in a literary journal. The expert may be able to show either that my categories are false or that my whole view has been stated long ago, and much more aptly. However, when fools rush in, they may with their mangles remains pave the way for angels.

— Olaf Stapledon, pg 188 of An Olaf Stapledon Reader, the freak

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Justin Barrett coined the acronym HADD, for hyperactive agent detection device. We hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent. I catch myself momentarily harboring savage resentment against some blameless inanimate such as my bicycle chain. There was a poignant recent report of a man who tripped over his untied shoelace in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, fell down the stairs and smashed three priceless Qing Dynasty vases: ‘He landed in the middle of the vases and they splintered into a million pieces. He was still sitting there stunned when staff appeared. Everyone stood around in silence, as if in shock. The man kept pointing to his shoelace saying, “There it is: that’s the culprit”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (paperback), pg. 214