The Doctor's Opinion

 Good evening,

    I'm thinking about ideological staying power tonight. Per my AA sponsor's request, I'm reading this book that might as well double as an apocryphal text of the bible. You see, this book was written in 1938, so no one's claiming this thing was the voice of Yahweh or anything; but at the same time, the book was written in 1938, and medical standards and ideals have evolved. 

    We start the book with a long opinion piece written by a doctor, aptly named: "The Doctor's Opinion". I can save you some time by spoiling the end of the chapter, the doctor's opinion is to read the book. It is also the doctor's opinion that alcoholism is an allergy, and that a psychic change is necessary to cure an addict. This is at a time when nightshade was the standard treatment for addiction.

    This is usually where I start tuning out. Actually, "Copyright (c) 1939" is where. I know I can save time by pursuing more recent information. And don't get me started on the bible. At least we had printing presses and social security numbers in 1939.  There's so much stupidity in the bible that could just be filtered out at this point, (did you know Noah lived to 950?) and there's non-canonical apocrypha that's amazing (one of them is a treasure hunt!). How does humanity decide what stays and what goes in the most influential book in history?

    For a while, the answer was simple: The Pope, whose official duty is the office of shepherding the apostles and bishops. So it was basically interpreted by group consensus, with no one checking anyone's work. Then King James (long may he reign) decided to translate it to English which involved changing every important character's name to something less... jewy.... Hence Thiago becoming James (and hey that's the King's name! He must be divine) Seriously that would be like George Bush declaring one day, "James is a nerd name let's call him Blake" and for 400 years we printed bibles like that. 

    So the bible's a mess. The New Testament really fell victim to the whims of powerful men living before the enlightenment when 'we said so' went against nature. But now it's 2023, and I'm reading the medical opinion of a doctor from the 1930s thinking about what it has to say. Which... honestly, isn't much. It sort of reads like a modern doctor explaining in simple yet undeniable terms to get vaccinated. In fact, I never hear "The Doctor's Opinion" quoted or discussed in any substantive detail.

    I think the fact that there is a doctor's opinion is more compelling than the writings in that opinion. The passage is in the very beginning of the book, and in the same vein as "Let there be light" the concrete has set. It's a meme, an idea that can quickly be transmitted to someone else, memorably, no explanation needed. And the thing I love most about memes, is they fall prey to natural selection. 

    The New Testament of the Bible never traveled down this path. After a few hundred years of different books popping up claiming to be the actual word of God the priests got frosty and decided "BOOM! 27 books! Three cubed! It's done! We will revisit this never!" The die is cast for all eternity because 3^3 is just too sticky for all those worshipping a trinity. 

    But the Old Testament, as well as the Mahabharata, Epic of Gilgamesh, Illiad, Norse Sagas, etc. all traveled down the Oral path. Oral myths and legends were written down after evolving. They were memes, told with faulty memory, and thus subject to selection pressures and evolution just like everything else alive. Memorable parts remained, boring parts forgot, fat trimmed, symbols strengthened, and in the end the hope is to have the same meaning left on the other side of time. We still call the largest island on Earth the same name given to it by a Viking marketing campaign. 

    I'm playing devil's advocate with my usual train of thought, I feel like I have to when faced with dogma. I think most intelligent readers can parse out that the meaning in the bible and Jesus Christ matters more than the fact that his name was actually, almost certainly, Josh (Ye'hoshua, yeah I hate it too but look it up). And while it's humorous to read the opinion of an old-timey doctor who is just god-damn CERTAIN that alcoholism is an allergy; his opinion is still there, outlasting his body and mind by decades in the very front of this fucking book. 

    I'll wrap up by asking when you, dear reader, learned to say "bless you" in response to someone sneezing? What book is lying around on coffee tables that spells out clear-as-day "make sure you bless people who sneeze!" It's nowhere in the bible. Once plagues started breaking out circa 750ce some pope in Rome decreed it be that everyone say bless you after a sneeze. But we've been doing it way longer than that. 

    Sneezing makes an appearance in the Greek myth of Prometheus, of all places. According to one very-difficult-to-trace account, after receiving the spark of life the world's first man sneezed. And Prometheus said unto him, "bless you" (tpffuh thank you). 

   Speaking of the Greeks, Aristotle wrote a book called 'Problems' in which he tries to apply logic and reason to the "bless you" enigma, to no avail of course, and I like to imagine him with bloodshot eyes shaking his head saying, "I guess we've just always done that".

The ancient Rabbis had no better answer. But they still did it. In Rome, before Rome was Rome, it's written in ancient pagan shrines as a habit of utmost necessity for the Saturnalia harvest. The fucking native Hawaiians had a phrase, "sneeze and you shall live" which of course is to be said after someone sneezes. 

    Pacific Island cultures are about as causally disconnected from Aristotle and Rome and Rabbis as you can get. The idea of blessing someone after sneezing has THICK roots. You can look at a table on Wikipedia of every culture's response to a sneeze, almost every language that still exists: Zulu, Khmer, Lojban, Navajo, Tamil, Yiddish. It's like, the way we react to an immune response is the one thing we can agree on as a species, which is weird. 

    Scientists can look at rocks, and fossils, and meteorites and gather snapshots of life that existed before any human or mammal, or bible. Linguists can trace back cognates in the various languages spoken along trade routes and come to conclusions like there sure are a lot of Sanskrit sounding words for 'boat' in Aramaic. 

    But we will never know the first person to answer a buddy's sneeze with a blessing. It's the slime mold of ideas. Someone did it once thousands of years ago, and now practically everyone on Earth does it daily. So, does The Doctor's Opinion really matter? To me, no probably not. It matters about as much as someone saying "bless you" after I sneeze. It only really impacts me in the fact that it only still exists because countless dead people have kept it alive. So I say "thank you", and I move on.

Signals and Systems

    I recently watched a lecture on flow and it really conglomerated a lot of observations I've made over the past month or two. I've been reflecting on some of the happiest and saddest moments of my life thus far, and not-so-independently realized it's far more valuable to reflect on the most meaningful. If we were to measure the happiest moment of someone's life, per the chemicals and connections in our brain, it would probably be the first time being fed after birth. But we don't remember that; it's meaningless, not in a survival sense, but it's meaningless to us.

   I think my happiest memory - ever - was driving down Sheikh Zayed road between the skyscrapers of Dubai with Karen on our honeymoon. It was at night, just after Ramadan so there was a crescent moon, we went through a 6-lane tunnel and came out to all the Burj's lit up; the song "Waiting for Love" played in the background. Every aspect of that memory and my description of it has meaning. The waves of sound synchronized in just the right way through the car speakers, the hundreds of cars on the massive freeway and their lights dancing in the peripheral, the inability to see the tops of the buildings, the moon at a specific time of year; they all seemed to be signals to us to be at an energized peace. THAT is what got cemented into my head to enjoy for the rest of my life. I don't remember shit about being born. 

    Even darker times, times in Cambodia, times deployed, times in rehab, I can for some reason conjure good memories be they happy or sad or angry. This bothered me. "No goddamnit. I'm not supposed to remember being deployed or in rehab better than when my son was born." So I did what I do and started reading and watching and reflecting. 

    The first thing that I noticed was at rehab with my friend Aaron. We would joke and shoot the shit... like ALL day. We had a well oiled flow of conversation, and of laughter. People would gather around wherever we were sitting just to listen to us bullshit for 15 minutes between classes. It was after about a week of spending all day together that I realized our laughs had synched up. 

    What the fuck does that mean? I mean the rhythm of our literal laughs, our loud bursting cackles, had become synchronized. He or I or someone else would say something funny, we'd look at each other, and every subsequent "ha" was like the beat of a metronome. I noticed it because I made fun of it, "Dude we're turning into crows..." which made the why of it all click: BIRDS DO THIS!

    If you're reading this you've hopefully been introduced to the sandhill cranes that we share real estate with. They like to laugh. Well, I don't know if it's a laugh but it's a loud bursting cackle that they like to do together. If you can mimic it or play the sound from a speaker, they will start to anticipate the "call" cackle and answer with the "response" cackle in synch with your next "call". Sometimes there'll be five of them in a group in the morning, all circled up cackling in unison like they're summoning Cthulhu. It's very interesting to watch. 

    I'm starting to think that's the purpose of laughter, a reflex in communication. It's communicating "I get it, I understand the group of people around me well enough to understand that now it is time to laugh...riiiiiiiight...now." I think yawning is similar and maybe even dancing. 

    There are a lot of social behaviors both birds and humans share. Flying in formation is one of them. Have you ever seen a massive flock of starlings fly in warped disposition, making each bird a pixel in a turbulent macro display? It's an example of emergence that is borrowed from by the Air Force in the simplicity of "ok you go here, and I'll say this, and then I'll go here and when I do that you go back over there". But it's not simple, it's complicated. It's a football play, a symphony, a dance. 

    There's a problem of course, which ends up solving itself, in that it takes a ridiculous amount of practice and communication to fly in formation. And when you're flying a plane right next to another plane you don't have much time to correct or communicate. Radio calls are things that are quick to say and very recognizable: "Two" for acknowledge, "Knockitoff" to split up, "cakaw-cakaw" etc. Things have to be time efficient, but that means you don't have time to spare for thinking about it. It becomes reflex, like the birds drawing figure eights in the sky without even being aware of it. 

    The time investment it takes a bird to fly in formation with thousands of others, or a human to learn a complicated dance as a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader, is tremendous. It becomes a filter for those higher echelon examples, but even at it's most basic it's a signal to everyone else: "I've made the effort, thus I belong." 

    There's a lot of research that shows that these signals matter - they are meaningful. A palm tree is a signal that you're someplace warm, the smell of sand and salt is a signal you're on vacation, a Michael Jackson song is a signal that the year is 1985, or at least that's how it feels. A son or daughter's eyes have a quaint familiarity signaling it needs care - your care. 

These signals are meaningful, the Almighty CNS has decided that, and they are layered. That's the best answer I could come up with as to why I remember driving to a hotel in Dubai better than the actual happiest moment in life - which was probably a long time ago, and must not have mattered much.