reflections – Page 2 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Big Mo Blues Show Christmas Music Featuring Peter Green

Last night was the second time John Heim (aka Big Mo) introduced the song “Silent Night” by Peter Green and the Men in Blue using the title in German, “Stille Nacht.” He also played it last Friday night, saying “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” in what sounded like perfect German. I immediately liked this version.

I might be remembering this wrong, but when I was a kid, I think I somehow got assigned to sing “Silent Night” when I went out caroling (in a horse-drawn sleigh, no less!) with the members of our church. It’s a good thing smartphones weren’t around to record that.

I remember last week trying to find it on the Big Mo Blues Show playlist but I couldn’t. Then I tried to find it by searching the title in German. I forgot or didn’t hear the name of the band. I gave up looking for it and I wondered why he said the title in German.

So, after I heard it again last night and looked for it on the playlist, I found it right away on the web.

I have never heard of Peter Green, so I looked him up and found a Wikipedia article about him. His original name was Peter Allen Greenbaum. I found out that Greenbaum is a German surname (originally Grünbaum which means greenery or green tree. As an aside, Heim is also a German name. It means “home.” For many people (just listen to his Shout-Outs list!) the Big Mo Blues Show is home.

Those are just observations I find interesting and maybe point to a clue why Big Mo pronounced the title of the song “Silent Night” in German.

Anyway, the Wikipedia article doesn’t say anything about Peter Green’s ancestry. He was born in 1946 in London and died in his sleep at the age of 73 on Canvey Island, Essex.

He was a gifted blues rock guitarist and singer-songwriter and was founder and original leader of the band Fleetwood Mac. He was a very influential figure in the British blues movement. Some thought he was greater than the other often-mentioned blues guitarist, Eric Clapton.

Peter got some coaching early in life from his older brother but was essentially self-taught by the age of 11. In the mid to late 1960’s people were calling him “The Green God” which was similar to what many were calling Eric Clapton (“God’).

Around 1969(70) Peter started to develop signs of mental illness and during the 1970s he also used LSD several times. Eventually he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Like other people who develop psychiatric illness, it was probably difficult to settle the chicken/egg question of which came first. He attributed much of his mental health issues to his use of LSD. He was hospitalized and treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in the mid-1970s.

However, by the 1980s, he returned to the music scene. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. He was described as being more interested in expressing emotion in music rather than displaying dazzling technical skill. He influenced many musicians.

Merry Christmas!

Swearing as a Performance Improvement Method?

I read this article about swearing being a good thing to do to increase your workout performance or whatever. There’s a link to the study that a researcher says supports that conclusion. I mean this story is talking about really bad words being good for you. It reminds me of a time when I was a pre-teen kid and broke my wrist falling out of a barn loft. I don’t remember exactly how I got to the emergency room. We didn’t have a car so our next-door neighbor must have driven me with my crooked arm and my hysterical mom to the hospital.

My mom was in the emergency room with me. When I cut loose with a torrent of really bad words, nurses had to practically carry her out because she fainted. This was right after I asked the doctor if it was OK if I swore and he said “Go ahead,” injected anesthetic—and immediately started to manhandle my wrist. I don’t think I ever swore in front of my mom before that.

I don’t remember if the swearing helped me withstand the pain or not. I don’t think so.

There was my other trip to a hospital for chest surgery when I was in my early teens. I had a chest tube after the operation. My roommate had undergone some kind of abdominal surgery. We had a lot of stitches and were in a lot of pain, which was bearable if we didn’t move at all. It even hurt to breathe. But the other factor was the TV in our room. It was way across the room and there was some kind of comedy show on. It was really funny—which made us feel really terrible. We could barely move and even had to talk quietly, yet this funny show made us laugh, which expanded our chest and abdomen areas, stretching the sutures. It was excruciating.

Even swearing would have hurt, not to mention laughing out loud. We really couldn’t stand to laugh and it was too bad I can’t describe the sound of two guys trying not to even chuckle. If you e4ver watched Loony Tunes cartoons and remember how Elmer Fudd sounded with he laughed—that was how we sounded because we were trying to suppress laughing. It was funny but pitiful. My roomie finally made this desperate slow motion move out of bed, crept to the TV and shut it off. I was so grateful. Neither one of us ever swore.

The other thing this swearing for power reminds me of is the movie Signs, which starred Mel Gibson as Graham Hess. It was about an alien invasion and in one scene, some people/aliens (they don’t’ yet know what) are running around the house and Graham’s brother Merril (Joaquin Phoenix) are getting set to chase them. Merril tells Graham to yell and curse, although because Graham is a former Episcopal priest, swearing is beyond him:

All right, listen, we both go outside, move around the house in opposite directions. We act crazy, insane with anger, make them crap in their pants, force them around till we meet up on the other side.
Graham Hess: Explain “act crazy”.
Merrill: You know, curse and stuff.
Graham Hess: You want me to curse?
Merrill: You don’t mean it. It’s just for show. What?
Graham Hess: Well, it won’t be convincing. It doesn’t sound natural when I curse.
Merrill: Just make noises, then.
Graham Hess: Explain “noises”.
Merrill: Are you gonna do this or what?
Graham Hess: No, I’m not.
Merrill: All right, you want them stealing something in the house next time?
[outside light comes on]
Merrill: On the count of three. One…
Graham Hess: All right.
Merrill: two… three!
Graham Hess: Ahh! I’m insane with anger!
Merrill: We’re gonna beat your ass bitch! We’re gonna tear your head off!
Graham Hess: I’m losing my mind! It’s time for an ass-whupping!
[Merrill and Graham meet each other]
Graham Hess: I cursed.
Merrill: I heard.

Anyway, I think we have to make a distinction between cursing about something or cursing at someone before we start claiming, like the author of the study says:

“Swearing is literally a calorie-neutral, drug-free, low-cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance.”—psychology researcher Richard Stephens of Keele University in the UK.

Pearl Harbor Day Today

Today is Pearl Harbor Day and it reminds me of the time we made a trip to Hawaii in 1997 and visited the USS Arizona Memorial. There was a guy named Norm in our tour group and he and his wife Lee (Leota) made friends with me and Sena. They were in their seventies at the time. Norm wept openly when we stood inside the memorial and viewed the names of those killed in the attack. I don’t think he served in WWII. He would have been only 16 years old at the time. I think he was just very affected by the loss of so many lives. Standing in the place where so many died can make us want to cry. You could call it normal—and it is sad. We exchanged Christmas cards with Norm and Lee for years afterward until they passed.

Today is Our 48th Wedding Anniversary!

Today is our 48^th wedding anniversary! I looked through a bunch of photos last night and probably picked all the wrong ones—but I doubt it’ll matter. It has been 48 years, so I’m unlikely to learn from mistakes now.

We were married at the Little Brown Church in Nashua, Iowa. We were nervous, but got through our vows, rang the bell, and cut the wedding cake. We are thankful for friends who were there for us and shared the joy.

We’ve been to a lot of places and had a lot of fun. Times are not always easy. We get through them.

I’m happy and grateful for this funny, crazy woman who wins a lot of cribbage games with me and does more for my soul than I can ever say.

Autumn is the Time to Slow Down

We visited the Terry Trueblood Trail and relaxed. The temperature was in the 60s, just a little on the breezy side. Everything seemed to move slower, except for the lady bugs which tried to keep warm by landing on us everywhere they could. I thought they would get into my rolled up blue jean cuffs, but amazingly they did not.

There was a small, brave patch of asters hanging on for dear life, literally. We both loved the red tree and you can tell which one it is in the video. I should know what kind of tree it is, but for now I guess just seeing it was good enough.

The cedar waxwings were flitting around maniacally and sometimes that means they’re getting smashed on fermented berries. But I didn’t see that there was enough on the branches for a party.

A pelican lazily swam across the lake in a way that suggested that it’s OK to just relax. What’s the hurry?

We might have seen one of the last northern shovelers (a dabbling duck) still hanging around. It’s like it was saying, “There’s still plenty of time.”

Whether that’s true or not, slowing down doesn’t hurt at all.

Thoughts on Retirement, MIB Style

Sena alerted me to an article about the 28^th anniversary of when the first Men in Black movie hit the theaters in 1997. The author praises it and says it’s still pretty good.

I can’t remember the first time I saw it, but it was probably not in 1997. I was in my second year of being an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics (now called University of Iowa Health Care). I was too busy to do much of anything except run around the hospital responding to requests for psychiatry consultations from medicine and surgery. I did that a long time.

I’ve been blogging since 2010. I cancelled my first blog which was called The Practical Psychosomaticist. I then restarted blogging, calling it Go Retire Psychiatrist. One blog that pays homage to my career and to the Men in Black films is “The Last White Coat I’ll Ever Wear.”

It’s part reminiscence and part comedy in the style of Men in Black dialogue and jokes. Since I retired, I have not been back to the hospital except for scheduled appointments in the eye and dentistry clinics. I don’t know if I’ve ever reconciled myself to being retired. If someone were to tell me “We have a situation and we need your help” (think Men in Black II), I would probably say something like “There is a free mental health clinic on the corner of Lilac and East Valley.”

When it Comes to AI, What Are We Really Talking About?

I’ve been reading about artificial intelligence (AI) in general and its healthcare applications. I tried searching the web in general about it and got the message: “An AI Overview is not available for this search.”

I’m ambivalent about that message. There are a couple of web articles, one of which I read twice in its entirety, “Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?” The other, “AI, Health, and Health Care Today and Tomorrow: The JAMA Summit Report on Artificial Intelligence”was so long and diffuse I got impatient and tried to skip to the bottom line—but the article was a bottomless pit. The conflict-of-interest disclosures section was overwhelmingly massive. Was that part of the reason I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole?

I recently signed an addendum to my book contract for my consult psychiatry handbook (published in 2010, for heaven’s sake) which I hope will ultimately protect the work from AI plagiarism. I have no idea whether it can. I delayed signing it for months, probably because I didn’t want to have anything to do with AI at all. I couldn’t discuss the contract addendum with my co-editor Dr. Robert G. Robinson MD about the contract addendum because he died on December 25, 2024.

I found out today the book is old enough to find on the Internet Archive as of a couple of years ago. One notice about it says “Borrow Unavailable” and another notice says “Book available to patrons with print disabilities.”

All I know is that an “archivist” uploaded it. The introduction and first chapter “The consultation process” is available for free on line in pdf format. I didn’t know that until today either.

Way back in 2010 we didn’t use anything you could call AI when we wrote the chapters for the book. I didn’t even dictate my chapters because the only thing available to use would have been a voice dictation software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It was notorious for transcribing my dictations for clinic notes and inserting so many errors in them that some clinicians added an addendum warning the reader that notes were transcribed using voice dictation software—implying the author was less than fully responsible for the contents. That was because the mistakes often appeared after we signed off on them as finished, which sent them to the patient’s medical record.

Sometimes I think that was the forerunner of the confabulations of modern-day AI, which are often called hallucinations.

Now AI is creating the clinic notes. It cuts down on the pajama time contributing to clinician burnout although it’s not always clear who’s ultimately responsible for quality control. Who’s in charge of regulatory oversight of AI? What are we talking about?

The Zamboni Can Help Skaters Only a Little

Hiked out to the mall today and watched the Zamboni smoothing out the ice-skating rink. It can help skaters a little.

It was pretty crowded this afternoon and there were several beginners. They’re easy to pick out because they fall a lot and tend to pull themselves along using the handrails along the sides of the rink. I think a few made the most contact with the ice not so much with their skates as with their knees and elbows.

I can’t remember if I had as much trouble turning left and right as one guy. But I’m pretty sure I fell just as hard when I first learned how to skate. He did fine in a straight line, but turning was his downfall—literally.

There was a short kid out there who was fast and nimble. He was evidently a hockey player and somebody was training him.

There are certain balance aids like stacked pylons. A little bitty girl used those twice for about 2 seconds each and figured she’d had enough.

There were more experienced skaters, but all of them were learning—and falling. They just picked themselves up and tried again. I guess that’s the main thing.

Protecting the Universe from the Scum of the Earth

The title of this post might sound familiar to those who have seen the movie Men in Black way too many times, like me. There’s a trailer poster from the 1997 MIB movie showing Agents J and K holding huge space guns and the title is “Protecting the Earth from the Scum of the Universe.”

There are reasons to invert the title; all you have to do is read the news headlines. And one of them is on a story posted in the Guardian entitled ‘Bored aliens’: has intelligent life stopped bothering trying to contact Earth?

Whoa! When exactly did they start?

In a nutshell, the author is citing an astrophysicist’s notion that we should consider embracing a novel idea called “radical mundanity” which in this context says that maybe extraterrestrials are not much smarter than earthlings. That could be one explanation why nobody has seen what the majority of humans would call clear and convincing evidence that advanced civilizations exist out in the galaxy.

I guess “clear and convincing evidence” means ETs should be walking up to us and asking for directions to the nearest good rib joint.

I guess terms like “radical mundanity” and “radical empathy” are in vogue because radical rationalization is an old earthling habit that fathered both.

In fact, common sense suggests that something like radical practicality might explain one pretty funny quote from MIB. It’s the one in which Agent K is demonstrating the universal translator to the soon to be Agent J and confides that earthlings are not supposed to have it, and then goes on to explain why:

“Human thought is so primitive it’s looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies. That kind of makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

Interesting why Agent K says that the low opinion some ETs have of humans is something to be proud of. Maybe that because of radical admiration, which is what we often have for slick villains clever enough to steal something like the universal translator—since radical criminality is so rampant everywhere on earth.

That would pretty much be the end of this line of thought (if I had any sense). But if you reason that most ETs would be leery of earthlings, why would so many of them travel to this planet? Part of the answer (of course) is in MIB. It’s Agent K’s explanation for why so many of them do.

Agent K: “Back in the mid-1950s the government started a little, underfunded agency with the simple and laughable purpose of establishing contact with a race not of this planet… They were a group of intergalactic refugees wanting to use the earth as an apolitical zone for…creatures without a planet. Did you ever see the movie Casablanca?”

“Today there are approximately 1500 aliens living and working Manhattan and most of them are decent enough; they’re just trying to make a living.”

OK, that’s only part of the story, maybe mostly the radical empathy part. Getting back to radical mundanity, which is how we got started on this crooked tale, where does this put earthlings and ETs? Maybe we’re headed toward realizing that every bright dot in the sky is not evidence for visitors from somewhere out in the galaxy or beyond. Maybe trying to get to Mars is not such a hot idea. Maybe we can try to get along with each other on earth without waiting for ETs to stop us from slaughtering each other. I don’t know as much about this approach as I should, but I think it’s called radical acceptance.

Big Mo Pod Show: “Across the Blues Universe”

I heard the Big Mo Blues Show last night and the Big Mo Pod Show today. The podcast song selection was part of the Lunch with Chuck portion of the show, which I don’t know a whole lot about. The Lunch with Chuck thing I’ve heard Big Mo talk about and I think it involves a real guy named Chuck who talks music with Big Mo sometimes, although I’ve not heard an actual live Lunch with Chuck program during the blues show. And it might be another Big Mo running joke.

Big Mo Pod Show 079 – “Across The Blues Universe”

The other thing I want to mention is that I heard Big Mo talk last night just before the Lunch with Chuck thing about something like a “fish psychic”. I think it’s a new comedy bit like MayRee’s Hand-Battered Catfish and Shorty’s Adult Diapers. I can’t remember the whole fish psychic bit, but I’m pretty sure he’ll do it again, maybe even next Friday. I think it’s another faux advertisement, and it might be about some kind of fish psychic who can help you catch lunker bass and the like.

Anyway, I learned something from the pod show today. I’d never heard of something called “race records” which is one term Lightnin Hopkins song “Mojo Hand” led to. Race records were 78-rpm phonograph records marketed to black people back in the days of the victrola, between the years of the 1920s to the 1940s, well before my time.

The other term new to me is the title of Hopkins’ song, “Mojo Hand.” The podcast discussion mentioned that mojo hand referred to African American voodoo charms, one of which happened to be a lucky charm, possibly a dried monkey’s paw. The song is actually about using voodoo to keep a lover from being unfaithful. The song means more now that I know that.

Another thing I learned today was that the song “Feel So Bad” (recorded in 1966) by Little Milton has a lyric in it, “feel like a ball game on a rainy day” that was repeated by boxer Muhammad Ali when he found out he had to wait 6 weeks before the Rumble in the Jungle match in 1974. That was because Foreman had to heal up first because he suffered a laceration above his right eye during a sparring match.

What I also didn’t know was that the Rumble in the Jungle had political overtones. There is an article entitled “Remembering the Rumble in the Jungle” subtitled “The 1974 Rumble in the Jungle was freighted with symbolism regarding American racial politics and the pan-African struggle in the context of the Cold War.”

One more thing I learned from the podcast is related to the song “Wine O’Clock” by Shemekia Copeland. He called this song a women’s support tune and, unlike my disagreement about this issue in last week’s podcast, I tend to agree with this song being about women supporting each other or at least understanding their burdens in a society marked by gender role disparity.

What helped me reach this understanding is an article entitled “What makes up wine o’clock…” published in 2022.

Wright CJC, Miller M, Kuntsche E, Kuntsche S. ‘What makes up wine o’clock? Understanding social practices involved in alcohol use among women aged 40-65 years in Australia. Int J Drug Policy. 2022 Mar;101:103560. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103560. Epub 2021 Dec 29. PMID: 34973490.

The abstract reminds me of the discomfort with the idea of women (or anyone regardless of gender) using alcohol to cope with socially designated roles.

“Think I’ll have another glass; the world can kiss my ass; tick tock, it’s Wine O’Clock.”

I sometimes learn a lot more than I expect from the Big Mo Pod Show.