When I was 7 years old, we lived out in the country. My friend Wes knew about an old house that had been abandoned by a dentist. The dentist might have unexpectedly died or been killed, I can’t quite remember. We rode my pony (that I had bought with egg money I had raised) out to the homestead which was several miles from our houses. The abandoned property was in a forest of oak trees and the ground was always littered with oak leaves and acorns. The old board and batten house was locked up but outside there were many wooden tables one after another that were standing in the open outside behind the house in this oak forest, the occasional sunlight piercing through like rays in a cathedral. These long wooden tables were covered with stacks and stacks of little cases. Opening the cases revealed dental molds of people's complete teeth. It looked like they were used for making dentures. We would ride out there and sit in the shade and tell stories and talk and spend hours looking through these teeth and read the names on the labels and wonder about the people from years gone by that had had these molds made by a long gone dentist.

But that's not the strange part of the story.

The strange part is that a dozen years later, around age 19, I lived about 50 miles away from there. My friend Dee and I would go hiking in a valley near the interstate. It was a lovely area with yellow waist high grass that one forded as they ran through. You could duck and hide easily. I remember one time during these walks Dee ran into a coiled rattler snake she almost stepped on. It raised its head and started rattling. She started talking to it, “Hello there, I bet you are as scared of us as we are of you, aren’t you sweetie? It’s OK...” After a few minutes of this the snake calmed down and stopped rattling.

There was a small river there and a handmade wooden car bridge across it that led to a really neat playhouse that the unknown but awesome father had built. The playhouse had many rooms, two stories, electrical hookups and a small kitchen with a sink. It was really the coolest playhouse imaginable, but it was decades old, abandoned and falling apart. I would sometimes go sit there and draw in my sketchbook.

We found the related house that had been confiscated by the state when they put in the Interstate. The house was sealed up and there were notices on the doors that it had been confiscated by the government in an eminent domain action. I always respectfully ignored the house. Dee was not that way though and when I showed her the house she went up and kicked in a door. We then looked through the house. There was no furniture, but in one room was an abandoned meth lab. The other rooms were empty. I remember the ochre carpeting that indicated the house had been contemporary in the 60s or 70s.

We came into the garage as the last room. It was the only room that was not empty. In the garage, packed in cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling against every wall were thousands of little cases containing —— dental molds.

Last night I was reading an article that mentioned that three staple crops of the ancient Hohokam culture (the people of the southwest that lived in communities such as Casa Grande) were corn, mesquite, and pitaya. I hadn't heard of pitaya, so I looked it up, it is the fruit of the cactus Hylocereus undatus, known in English as Dragon Fruit. (Pitaya is used to describe the fruit of certain other cacti, that of the Organ Pipe Cactus is called Pitahaya Dulce.) I've had various cactus fruits but seen or heard of pitaya, even though I fancy myself an expert in exotic fruits and there are few I haven't heard of.

Today, following an unrelated link, I stumbled into a recent comic strip that featured the pitaya.

I recently saw Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. It's a challenging and dark, but brilliant film. If you haven't seen it, you should see it before reading this or anything about it.

Very clever films give you a lot to think about and analyze. If you think enough and watch many times you can get at clues to the hidden meanings and broader themes of the film.

Other films in the art genre are made nonsensical to prevent this analysis of finding meaning.

This film is unique from either in that it does has deep meaning, but the film has been intricately designed to prevent you from finding it, and should you eventually realize that, then you have unravelled the puzzle of the film.

Kaufman said to one interviewer, "The film is not about what I think it is about, it is about what you think it is about." An obvious analysis of that statement is that the film is open to interpretation and different people might read different things into it. However, Kaufman's statement is a trap. He wants you to think that is what he is saying, in order to mislead you. But actually he told you the truth, just in a misleading way. The film is about what you think it is about. It is about your process of trying to find out its meaning. The plot reflects this as well, the film itself represents the search for meaning, and the impossibility of finding meaning. You may not know what is real. You may not interpret things correctly. What is the purpose of your life? Even thinking we know, we can not ever really know. Peel away one level of the onion of meaning, and there is another within, just as intricate.

Despite the film's intentionally constructed imperviousness to analysis, its intricate design rewards rewatchings, which are necessary in order to understand things such as how calendar time is managed as a structural element.

When the goats are young kids, they are exuberant and energetic. They run to and fro, leap in the air, and frolic. They dive into milk bottle or follow a butterfly passionately, then run away distracted by the next thing that comes along. As they get older, this type of life vitality decreases gradually but continuously, and finally, a very old goat moves more slowly and deliberately and is not interested in running to and fro, except as necessary to escape a predator.

Obviously the same process is seen in other animals and in humans. In Chinese Medicine, the life energy chi can be very strong even when one is an old person. There is also the youthful energy yong, which decreases with age as part of the natural life cycle. It's not just in China though, every culture in the history of the world is aware that children are more wildly energetic, and easily distracted, than old people.

Until now. In our culture, children being themselves is now a diagnosable disease called ADHD. That children are not as serious and focussed as adults is seen as a medical condition which is treated using powerful amphetamines, which are known to cause irreversible brain damage and permanent, negative, behavioral changes in everyone, especially children whose brains are still growing.

In China, no one would try to block the yong that is appropriate for youth because it is seen as in balance for that time in life. If you did block it, Chinese medicine, thousands of years old, predicts the results would be symptoms of premature aging. And what do we see in amphetamine users? Premature aging. We've all seen the booking photo sequences that show the progression that starts with an attractive young woman, and after 3 or 4 years of amphetamine abuse, she is a wrinkled, toothless, worn out old hag.

Apparently, that is what America wants for many of its children. A short, brain damaged life. A futile attempt to contain yong.

But why? Is the profit of the pharmaceutical industry so important that we must sacrifice our very children to it?

Here are some things I've been reading lately:

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Naturalis Historia by Caius Plinius Secundus
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse

Sometimes I think about my old friend Pete. He was a real friendly guy, very tall, was a great person to have fun with. I think I met him in 7th grade or so, and last saw him when he was 22 or around there and he was doing pretty well at that time.

One day when he was around 21, he asked me to read to him a letter he had gotten, and so I did, and then he thanked me and admitted he didn't know how to read. I thought that was pretty interesting since he had graduated from high school without any problems and asked wow, how did you do that. He said it wasn't really an issue, it was never necessary to know how to read. This was an astonishing claim and I wondered if there was some exaggeration about his lack of skill. Some brief questions revealed that he was totally illiterate. He couldn't read at all.

How did he manage to pass tests, I asked. He said that he was just able to do it.

Why didn't any of his teachers have special classes for him or anything? The answer was that in 13 years of schooling, none of his teachers had noticed he was illiterate. He certainly would have been glad to get some help in this, but the topic never came up in school and he didn't even think such extra help was possible in any case. This was a top rated school in a very well regarded district.

I found the situation very interesting for two points.

First, it appeared that reading was not a necessary skill in schools, and perhaps in life.

Secondly, I found it very enlightening to know that a student could make it through 13 grades, which is 1+6+6*6 = 43 separate teachers, and none of them had noticed in any fashion that he was completely illiterate, and all passed him. He never repeated a grade or a class.

A few years later, I worked as a math and physics tutor at a community college. I was the only one in the program able to teach calculus. This worked out fine because most of the demand in the program was not for calculus, but for very basic skills. How basic? I had access to placement statistics. Around like 70% of students needed remedial math. About 50% of students placed only for the bottom most class for math. This class, which was called Concepts of Numbers or some such, how to count to 100, which number is bigger than the other, and what is an integer. The second class after that got into addition and subtraction, fractions and powers of ten. I would say these classes corresponded to kindergarten and first or second grade respectively. I was not able to teach these classes because I would not know where to start with this when dealing with an adult college student, but I did observe and interact with those that did, as well as hundreds of students in the student body and most students genuinely did not know how to divide numbers or what fractions were. Most could actually count and do addition and subtraction given paper and time, but they made mistakes. This was a pretty good community college in a good area.

A few years later, when I was at the state university, I observed similar levels of math competency, though the numbers that were at this level were smaller, more like 20% of admitted students did not know fractions or how to divide. But that was an exclusive school that only took the 5% of top high school graduates, and required high SAT scores for admission.

Years after that, I tutored in a program for homeless people and saw similar levels of competence, which led me to realize that lack of education was not a problem for homeless people since their skills level was average for the population.

From these and other experiences over the years, I realized that the normal situation in the US for the majority of graduates is that they know how to add and subtract and count, and can do multiplication. But they do not understand fractions at all, and can not do long division at all. Algebra is completely beyond most high school graduates, even though they took two years of it and passed.

I could see that people probably had abilities only that were necessary, and knowing how to divide is simply not something people do. Fractions are only understood to the extent that if you need 1/2 cup of flour, you fill the cup up to the mark that says 1/2. Dividing a recipe in two or doubling it is not possible, except to measure that 1/2 cup out twice.

I was not sure how students could pass algebra though and not have any ability or understanding of it a couple years later. Had they simply forgotten?

The answer came when I worked teaching high school math and computers. My math students had completed "advanced algebra" and were prepared for a challenging textbook in geometry. The results were disasterous. It took me a half semester before I figured that the reason most of the students could not solve the problems or understand things is they knew no algebra at all, but believed that they did since they had passed, often with high grades. In asking them in detail about how things worked, I discovered that algebra was taught by the teacher assigning problems, then giving the answers, then guaranteeing that only the homework questions would be on the test and only as multiple choice questions.

Students were shown:
y + 2 = 6, y = ?
The next day, they were told:
y + 2 = 6, y = 4
was the answer. They memorized it and picked c from a list with their #2 pencils:
a) y=0
b) y=2
c) y=4
d) y=6

If you asked them instead to solve this problem:
y + 2 = 5, y = ?
... they could not solve it. They were completely stumped. They complained the question was unfair to have on a test because that was not one that they were 'taught' in class.

This was the only way for the students to 'learn', other teachers told me. In this case, 'learn' meant to pass the multiple choice test. And how they did that was not by learning concepts of algebra, but by memorizing the correct answers, and then being able to recognize them from a list of multiple choice. Students had developed excellent abilities to memorize useless and arbitrary data in order to succeed, and their teachers were happy with these results.

So at last I understood how my buddy Pete had managed to pass all those tests.

I have an old friend from school who is bummed out because he didn't accomplish what he expected when he set out to accomplish an important goal.

It got me to thinking. This seems to be a common human thinking pattern that we all go through, especially those of us who struggle with the blight of perfectionism. We get disappointed in ourselves because we don't match up to our own absurdly high standards involving impossible goals we set for ourselves. These standards are far and above what we would expect anyone else to do and it's a miracle if we even come close.

Does it make sense to do this? The first part sounds good — setting high goals for ourselves gives us something to do and helps us focus on accomplishing things. But when these best laid plans oft goes awry, then instead of looking at what we didn't accomplish and getting bummed, depressed and paralyzed, why not look at what we did achieve, be happy that the universe walks forward, and move on to our next adventure?