reminiscence – Page 8 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 2025 Events and Some Thoughts

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Week started January 20, 2025. There will be several very worthwhile events, many of which are listed here.

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Humanities Medal, will deliver the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Lecture on February 5, 2025 at the University of Iowa Medical Education and Research Facility (MERF); Prem Sahai Auditorium. General admission is free although it’s a ticketed event, more information here.

I was searching the web for articles about whether and when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Iowa and found one that sparked personal memories of defeat, which Dr. King talked about when he visited my alma mater, Iowa State University in Ames in 1960, where he said:

“The Negro must not defeat or humiliate the white man, but must gain his confidence. Black supremacy would be as dangerous as white supremacy. I am not interested in rising from a position of disadvantage to a position of advantage.”

This quote was in an article entitled “Mentality Has Outrun Morality” in the January 23, 1960 issue of the Ames Tribune.

It reminded me of two episodes in my life which left me with a strong sense of defeat in the context of racism.

One of them was ages ago when I was a young man and somehow got involved in a pickup game of basketball with guys who were all white. I was the only black man. This was in Iowa. The members of my team were those I worked with. The opponents were men my co-workers challenged to a game of basketball. I had never been in such a contest before. I think we lost but what I remember most vividly is a comment shouted by one of the opponents: “Don’t worry about the nigger!” I sat on the bleachers for the rest of the game while they played on. I remember feeling defeated—and wondering whose team I was really on.

The other incident was also long ago (but I was a little older), when I was a member of a debating team at Huston-Tillotson College in Texas (now Huston-Tillotson University, one of America’s HBCUs). We were all black. We were debating the question of whether capital punishment was a deterrent or not to capital crime. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with my opponent. He just kept a running speech going, punctuated with many “whereas” points, one of which I’m pretty sure included the overrepresentation of black men on death row. I had never been in a debate before. My professor remarked that my opponent won the debate by being bombastic—for which there didn’t seem to be a countermeasure. I remember feeling defeated—and wondered if I was on the wrong team.

There’s a lot of emphasis on defeating others in sports, politics, religion, and the like. On a personal level, I learned that defeat didn’t make me feel good. I’m pretty sure most people feel the same way.

Dr. King also said “We can’t sit and wait for the coming of the inevitable.”

I’m not sure exactly what he meant by “the coming of the inevitable.” What did he mean by the “emerging new order”? Did he mean the second coming? Did he mean the extinction of the human race when we all kill each other? Or did he mean the convergence of humanity’s insight into the need for cooperation with the recognition of the planet’s diminishing resources?

I don’t know. I’m just an old man who hopes things will get better.

Did You Know They Won’t Be Making Yardsticks Any Longer?

Anecdote alert! Sena just got back from shopping and had a priceless little story about shopping for a yardstick for measuring window film to apply on a door window. I suppose I should say that the title of this post is a dad joke that some people might not get.

Sena asked a Menards worker where to find a yardstick. She said the guy looked like he was in his thirties. His English was probably a little rough. He looked puzzled and directed her to the lawn and garden center. She clarified that a yardstick was something like a ruler. He replied that they didn’t carry school supplies.

Another worker was in the same aisle and chuckled. He directed her to where the yardsticks were.

You know, I haven’t seen a yardstick in a long time. We don’t own a ruler although we have a tape measure. Just to let younger people know, a yardstick is typically a piece of wood 36 inches long (which is 3 feet), marked off into inches, and used for measuring things.

The worker who didn’t know what a yardstick was could probably relate to football games because the length of the field is still divided into yards—but only if he’s a football fan, I guess. But you don’t measure distances to a first down on a football field with a yardstick. . Incredibly, they measure it with a chain between two sticks. None of your lasers for the officials.

We had a yardstick in the house where my brother and I grew up. You could also use it to reach stuff that rolled under tables. You could make comparisons by saying “By any yardstick, blah blah.”

And you can make dad jokes about yardsticks. By the way, the company that makes yardsticks won’t be making them any shorter either.

Big Mo Pod Show: “Blues: The Universal Mixer”

We listened to the Big Mo Pod Show (Sena stuck with it for about the first hour anyway) last night and then I got a mini-education in the forms of music, at least, as it relates to timing and rhythm. The theme was “Blues: The Universal Mixer.” Frequently, the blues show and the podcast remind me of previous eras in my life and lead to a few free associations.

The 5 songs reviewed by Big Mo and Noah are probably recognizable to many listeners. As usual, I have to search for the lyrics because I seem to have an inborn tendency to hearing mondegreens. And as usual, I don’t always pay the most attention to the songs chosen for the podcast.

But Big Mo did a little teaching session about rhythm forms, which he related to a couple of songs on the list. One of them was “Wait on Time” by The Fabulous Thunderbirds. I happened to notice that a couple of lines in the lyrics of “Wait on Time” reminded me of another artist who didn’t make it to the list on the podcast but was on the blues show playlist last night. That was Junior Walker and the All Stars. Their song “I’m a Road Runner” was one of my favorites because it reminded me of how I ran all over the hospital as a consult psychiatrist. But I can’t relate to the song as a whole.

The lines the two songs share are:

“Wait on Time” lyrics:

“Well, I live the life I love
And I love the life I live
The life I live baby
Is all I have to give”

“I’m a Road Runner” lyrics:

“And I live the life I love
And I’m gonna love the life I live
Yes, I’m a roadrunner, baby.”

Although the lyrics are similar, the themes are different. The guy in the song “Wait On Time” is promising he’ll get back to his lover someday. On the other hand, in the “I’m a Road Runner” lyrics, that guy is making no such promise and is actually is saying just the opposite.

Big Mo pointed out that there is a common rhythmic form in blues that easily mix with other forms of music, including Latin forms (I don’t understand that music lingo but I think I hear and feel what he means). He mentions that Bo Diddley mixed certain rhythms like that into his music, which surprised me because I didn’t know that. It may be why I like Bo Diddley.

Big Mo didn’t play “I’m a Road Runner” last night but played another hit from Junior Walker and the All Stars: “Ain’t That The Truth.” Just an aside, that tune is mostly instrumental and has a total of only 4 lines apparently, which express a common blues sentiment about relationships:

“Say man, what’s wrong with you?
Oh man, my woman done left me
Say it, man, play me some blues, jack
Get it, baby
Ain’t that the truth”

Several artists covered “I’m a Road Runner” including but not limited to the Grateful Dead and Steppenwolf. Bo Diddley did a song called “Road Runner” but it was not the Junior Walker tune. There’s a YouTube video relating it to the cartoon Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.

I’m not a roadrunner by any definition, but I learn a little something new just about every time I hear the Big Mo Pod Show.

The Flowers Are Doing Well

The Christmas Amaryllis/Hippeastrum flowers are doing well.

I’m getting older and often I wake up early in the morning feeling anxious and a little blue. I look at the news headlines about people who die and often they’re my age or even younger. Maybe the Christmas holiday does that.

When I get this feeling of dread, I try to think of what I can be grateful for. It’s hard to think of big dramatic experiences. If I sit still long enough, it’s the little acts of kindness that drop down like snowflakes, slowly.

The grade school teacher who took the time to figure out I needed eyeglasses because I couldn’t see the blackboard.

The preacher who sat up all night in a chair with my sick mother when my brother and I were little kids and didn’t know how to help her.

The company that hired me for my first real job when I was a teenager. If they hadn’t done that, I might have become homeless.

The guy who took me to an autumn outdoor art show where he was exhibiting his paintings on a brisk autumn day. Man, it was cold.

The guy who took me to a Minnesota Twins baseball game in the summer. Man, it was hot.

I remember a couple of best friends. We weren’t friends long—but it was long enough.

The friends who supported Sena and me on our wedding day. I still remember it with gratitude 47 years later.

And looking at the flowers helps.

Dirty Deepfakes

I saw an article about the unreliable ability of humans to detect digital deepfakes in audio and video productions (Mai KT, Bray S, Davies T, Griffin LD. Warning: Humans cannot reliably detect speech deepfakes. PLoS One. 2023 Aug 2;18(8):e0285333. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285333. PMID: 37531336; PMCID: PMC10395974.).

I was a little surprised. I thought I was pretty good at detecting the weird cadence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) speech patterns, which I think I can distinguish pretty well. Maybe not.

And there are some experts who are concerned about AI’s ability to mimic written and spoken grammar—but it continues to make stuff up (called “hallucinations”). In fact, some research shows that AI can display great language skills but can’t form a true model of the world.

And the publisher of the book (“Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry”) that I and my co-editor, Dr. Robert G. Robinson, MD wrote 14 years ago is still sending me requests to sign a contract addendum that would allow the text to be used by AI organizations. I think I’m the only who gets the messages because they’re always sent to me and Bob—as though Bob lives with me or something.

Sometimes my publisher’s messages sound like they’re written by AI. Maybe I’m just paranoid.

Anyway, this reminds me of a blog post I wrote in 2011, “Going from Plan to Dirt,” which I re-posted last year under the title “Another Blast from the Past.” Currently, this post is slightly different although it still applies. I don’t think AI can distinguish plan from dirt and sometimes makes up dirt, simply put.

And if humans can’t distinguish the productions by AI from those of humans, where does that leave us?

Amaryllis Star of Holland On the Comeback Trail!

Today, Sena got another Amaryllis Star of Holland bulb. We got one a couple of years ago and it grew like you wouldn’t believe.

The last time we got one, the stalk grew to about 18 inches and sported spectacular blossoms. The stem tended to bend this way and that for some reason.

I wrote the fractured story from Greek mythology about the Amaryllis in 2022, which I’m pretty sure you’ve forgotten by now. I’ll just remind you:

“A little story from Greek mythology says that a maiden named Amaryllis had a monster crush on a shepherd named Alteo, a first-class heel who ignored her but loved flowers. She tried stabbing herself in the heart every day with a golden arrow for thirty days but at first that only led to a lot of trips to the local emergency room. But on the thirtieth day, a gorgeous flower grew from her blood. That’s the only thing that got Alteo’s attention; can you believe that jerk? They got married and honey-mooned at Niagara where they both got smashed on fermented winterberries, jumped out of the Maid of the Mist boat, crashed into a rainbow which turned out to be a wormhole portal to another galaxy where they finally sobered up by eating beef jerky from Sasquatch, who is an interdimensional creature as everyone knows.”

You can check my sources for accuracy of the yarn-if I were willing to give them to you, which I’m not.

We’re eager to see how things go this year with the new Amaryllis.

Little Autumn Promenade

Yesterday, we took a stroll on the Terry Trueblood trail. It was a little breezy and warm for late October.

The fall colors were gorgeous and there was a lot going on. We saw a woman with her toddler flying a butterfly kite. It sailed on the wind beautifully. We saw the quilted hearts hanging from the trees. They’re very cheering. In the wind they looked like they were waving at you.

The woolly bear banded caterpillars were out. I don’t think you can really tell how hard the winter is going to be by looking at the color bands. But it’s fun to talk about.

And then we thought we saw ladybugs. But they could have been Asian lady beetles. It’s hard to tell them apart. The latter often don’t have spots at all. We noticed that they seem to sort of push up their hinders until they’re almost upside down and they may shove each other around.

There’s a pretty vigorous debate on the web about whether the Asian lady beetles are the bad guys and the ladybugs are the good guys. We know they can crawl all over you.

The oddball thing was that we found a baby booty hanging on one of the sign posts. It had an image of a ladybug on it. Or was it an Asian lady beetle?

When you’re in the autumn of your life, it might be time to stop asking too many questions.

Thoughts on the Big Mo Pod Show 034: Laughing in the Face of Death

I heard the Big Mo Blues Show just (Halloween theme) this last Friday night and was not surprised to see that one of the songs discussed on the Big Mo Pod Show on Saturday was Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Devil’s Son-in-Law.”

When I first heard it, it got me chuckling because I didn’t understand hardly a single word until the last line. It was babbling. I can remember googling the term “Peetie Wheatstraw and unintelligible,” which revealed I’m not the only one who thinks he’s unintelligible. It’s a mondegreen mine field. It’s a good thing the lyrics are available.

I want to hastily point out that he’s not always unintelligible—but William Bunch aka Peetie Wheatstraw is speaking in tongues on that song. For comparison I listened to another song, “Sweet Home Blues” and I could understand just about every word in the lyrics.

That led me down the rabbit hole about the artist in a web search that seemed to have no end. I should probably say Brer Rabbit hole since most of my searches pointed in the direction of a character called Peter Wheatstraw, Petey Wheatstraw, as well as Peetie Wheatstraw who had variations in their identities, most often in the context of African American folklore.

I’m not going to attempt a summary of my web search on Peetie Wheatstraw; there’s too many twists and turns. You can start with the Wikipedia article. But from there, you can get trapped in Brer Rabbit’s little tunnels, which can run in different directions.

William Bunch was a blues artist in the 1930s who adopted the moniker “Peetie Wheatstraw.” While Big Mo says it’s sort of another name for Satan, I found confusing references by writers who claim that the Peter Wheatstraw character comes from Black folklore. There are those who believe that novelist Ralph Ellison wrote about a character in his book “Invisible Man” named Peter Wheatstraw and said it was the only character in the novel that was based on a live person—William Bunch.

Is that true? And did Ellison ever meet Peetie Wheatstraw (William Bunch)? I can’t tell from the web articles.

I was prompted to get my copy of “Invisible Man” out after reading a scholarly online essay mentioning the Peter Wheatstraw character, “Re-visioning Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for a Class of Urban Immigrant Youth” by Camille Goodison, CUNY New York City College of Technology. I couldn’t remember Wheatstraw at first, but there he was in Chapter 9.

Goodison reveals there is a lot more texture to the Wheatstraw character then just as a moniker adopted by William Bunch. Wheatstraw is probably more complex than the devil. He has many sides to him and could be helpful—but mostly in an indirect way. His guidance is full of riddles and there doesn’t seem to be a solid way to cut through the metaphorical morass. As Emily Dickinson advised, Wheatstraw may tell the truth—but tells it slant.

I still don’t know why he mumbles the song.

Thoughts on The Big Mo Podcast 033: “A Balance of Old and New”

This is just a short piece on the Big Mo Podcast last Friday night and his comments about one of the songs he played that night. It made the list of 5 songs he and Producer Noah discussed a couple days later.

Big Mo’s had great comments about all the songs, but I took special notice of those about one of them. It was James Carr’s big hit in 1966, “Dark End of the Street.”

The most important thing about it is that I remember listening to it when I was just a kid. I was too young to understand the meaning of it. But his voice grabbed me. That’s really the only thing I can say about it. His performance still has the power to raise the hair on the back of my neck, even though I can’t identify with the lyrics or connect the theme to any life experience I’ve had. I suspect many people feel the same way.

The other reason I connect with the song other than Carr’s voice is his life story. He was said to have suffered from a psychiatric illness, the nature of which seems like it was never clearly identified. I’ve read a few web articles and terms like “bipolar disorder,” “depression,” and other similar references come up. His psychiatric diagnosis is the least important thing.

Carr’s life story is hard to read, despite what little there is of it to read about. It’s painful. The version on the Black Past website encapsulates what you find in several other articles: Tulino, D. (2018, February 21). James E. Carr (1942-2001). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/carr-james-e-1942-2001/.

But to get the real point about James Carr, all you have to do is listen to that one song, “Dark End of the Street.”

Reading My Old Book in a New Light

Sena bought me a wonderful new lamp to read by and it improves on the ceiling fan light I wrote about the other day (And Then a Light Bulb Went Off).”

The new lamp even has a nifty remote control with which you can choose the ambient feel. There are several selections, one of which is called “breastfeed mode,” a new one on me. There’s a light for that?

The lamp arrived at about the same time I got a notice from my publisher for my one and only book, “Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry,” that people are still buying—after 14 years! My co-editor was my former psychiatry department chair, Dr. Robert G. Robinson. As far as I know, Bob has dropped off the face of the earth. I hope he’s well.

Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry is probably about the same as I left it when I retired 4 years ago. I walked all over the hospital trying to help my colleagues in medicine provide the best possible care for their patients. I put in several miles and stair steps a day. I saw myself as a fireman of sorts, putting out fires all over the hospital. I got a gift of a toy fire engine from a psychiatrist blogger in New York a long time ago.

Now I walk several miles on the Clear Creek Trail, like I did yesterday and the day before that. I have shin splints today, which tells me something—probably overdid it.

So, I’m taking a break from walking and reading an old book in a new light.