So Tiger wants his privacy; indeed, he called his yacht, Privacy. I don’t follow golf because I generally don’t follow anything. The latest tempest in the teapot is the conflict between Tiger’s “image” and his right to keep his mouth shut about what happened in his suv. The media vultures are all over him. Legally he doesn’t have to do anything. The police are investigating a fender bender as if Tiger and his wife crashed Obama’s state dinner. The lunacy of this culture is appalling. Earlier in the week the local newspaper carried an item about a demented woman who saw the image of Jesus on her iron, replaced it with a new one and put the anointed one away in the closet. I tore out the article, if that is what it is, from the paper as a classic example of what is crazed about religious conditioning and how easily the dumb, demented and dumbfounded believe in anything. I’d retrieve the item and quote from it but it is downstairs and is not worth my effort as I blog along. They carried a picture of this cretinous human being — and the iron, a reminder of how ridiculous the species is. Imagine this modern relic moved to some church next to the thumb, ulna, or finger of a saint, objects for the faithful to bow to, to revere and to pray to. Imagine praying to a starch stain looking like a dim and faded portrait of Jesus surrounded by 10 or 15 nozzle holes, like an apse-aura, about his head, a Romanesque arch at that.
I go to my death a free man, free of heaven and hell.
I am suffering a sweetly mild depression as my latest blood test is a mixed result, forebodings are all about. And tomorrow I go to a urologist for my yearly digital exam, the intimacy brought about by an inserted digit, a press of the prostate and the doctor’s assessment of its glandular condition. The PSA is very low which is good, given that I had a prostate procedure in 2003 after enduring years of PSA tests, a very inexact measurement of the gland’s state of health. Since coming to Nevada, I had to find new doctors — a dentist, an internist, a urologist and a lab. I am through my third barber who used a metaphorical bowl about my head and sheared me like a bound lamb. The last “stylist” was a Glenn Beck fanatic who hated Obama. I had to move on because I tasted her metallic hatred in my mouth. When you move to a new state or neighborhood, roots are cut. I am unimpressed by the doctors in Nevada — too much time playing the slots.
Which brings me back to privacy. I share what I can with Jane. Essentially I am a very private person but when you write the irony is that you have to expose your feelings and how curious all that is. Blogging is not privacy. I don’t worry. There is an essential secret self to us all which we keep in abeyance unless like Kathy Griffin you are an inverted personality gathering your jollies and shekels by revealing all that you contain within, giving emptiness a poor name. What is hilarious to me is that what is revealed is often so bereft of content and meaning. I associate this culture to the empty coke bottles on a curb. What if I revealed to you that I never went to a rock concert or never attended a football game in my life. What revelations! Please judge them, make of them what you will. Using a cliche I have been hearing of late, at the end of the day, you know nothing about me but you know a great deal about you if you look inward for the first time.
Perhaps the secrets we have about ourselves are condemnations we feel about what we have done or “committed” in the past. What is a secret, after all? And why is it a private thing? Being a Jewish Wikipedia, I will attempt a definition: — a secret is a judgment of self, a lie with some truth about it; it is a measure of self-disgust. Allow me to squeeze this lemon a bit more: – a secret defines our distance from the next person; it is a self-difference we cherish while all along feeling the uncomfortableness of it. To give away a secret, I think, may make the person feel less or inadequate, all over again. By keeping private, we retain what little this world gives us before it gnaws and tears away at our being. I will work on my definition.
Americans, this culture, apparently, detest secrets, especially by celebrities; after all, we humor them and we cater to them because we want them to cavort before us like seals; we want to judge their human errors and we want them to globally reveal all so we can have a measure of parental tsk-tsking. Privacy is anathema in this culture and it is as insensitive as walking into a child’s room without knocking. A person who does not have a private self is an empty self. The inner-directed individual is becoming as rare as certain desert tortoises. I am waiting for the next Kathy Griffin special in which she picks up the lid of her toilet bowl to show America her inner workings.
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