Joseph Jay Schiller

An Autobiography

November 15, 1997

Authors note: In considering what the contents of an autobiography should be in my case, several considerations arose. First, my public life isn’t very uncommon or interesting, so that should be de-emphasized. Second, since my private life, or more properly my spiritual life was to be the subject, I would necessarily have to identify those individuals that influenced me and I found that some of them influenced me in a negative way. Writing about the details of these events could potentially harm or at least discomfit them and their relatives, so I determined to avoid using names and to mention the nature of the event only generally and then only when it was crucial to understand the alteration of my personality that ensued. Leaving this much material out results in a rather brief autobiography, but since the main purpose of this document is to introduce my other writing and to try to make clear why I think as I do, if that goal is achieved then it is long enough. I am by nature a reductionist and therefore not really suited to writing since that work is mainly characterized by expansion on the subject at hand. What I am interested in is understanding and I believe that to be most easily achieved when the subject is presented clearly and succinctly.

Chapter 1

Childhood

I was born on March 2, 1936 at about nine PM at the Swedish Hospital in Seattle Washington, USA. I am of European extraction; English, German, and French.

My father was an independent dealer in children's toys, and at that time, very successful. His education was limited, probably not reaching to high school graduation. He was an extremely selfish person, and only lived with me for, at most two years of my life and that at the beginning. He was sensual in orientation, inclined to excess, and morally challenged.

My mother was somewhat better educated, as a hopeful writer she took some college courses in her attempt to better her chances of success. Both families were decidedly lower middle class, though my mother's side was in decline, while my father's side was ascending. I also had limited contact with my mother during childhood.

Both parents aimed higher than their reach allowed in their efforts to achieve success and both defined success in terms of class and wealth. Neither was very religious. My mother would qualify as a feminist.

The first two or three years of my life were spent living with my parents in a rather grand estate in North Seattle. I have no significant memories of this period. In one I can remember observing largish gold colored fish from a stone bridge over a creek running through the grounds of the estate.

Prior to the beginning of WWII, my father ran into hard times and I found myself living, first with my grandmother in Seattle, then in Palo Alto, where I remember my father buying a yellow Ford convertible, then with my aunt in Chula Vista, California for several months, then for a summer on the beach near Santa Cruz, from which I retain several fishing memories and one of vandalism resulting in full body poison oak infection. After that came a period in San Francisco, during which my parents announced their impending divorce, as the war began. I clearly remember that this event happened in a taxi ride through downtown San Francisco. I don't recall my feelings at the announcement except that it seemed to be the end of the first part of my life.

At the age of five, I and my sisters were boarded out at Miss Wallace's boarding school in Piedmont California, a suburb of Oakland. From this time forward I have fairly complete memory.

Miss Wallace's was a Victorian mansion with about twenty children in residence and several more day schoolers. My education up until then had been patchy, mostly baby sitting, and it was assumed that I had already been taught to read which I hadn't. So, when the teacher realized this she tutored me in phonics and I then picked up the skill with great ease and was soon hiding out to read about King Arthur and his associates. From that time forward, I had a reputation for being rather stupid, while in actuality I was unusually and comprehensively bright. I was average in athletics and somewhat deficient in group sports. An attempt was made to force feed me on piano lessons, which I successfully resisted.

My best friends at Miss Wallace's were the cook and handyman. There were some minor sexual events, both in the autoerotic and heterosexual categories. In a number of cases I tried to impose my will on this little world, without any notable success. I learned about death and found it an ineffably sad prospect, not my own but the loss of my relatives. I was much attracted to the opera, which we were exposed to from time to time as a part of our education. A teacher took a romantic interest in me, to the horror of Miss Wallace, and then had an affair with my father, which I only learned about much later. The bills for Miss Wallace's were never completely paid.

At the end of the war we, my mother and two sisters and I, returned to Seattle and took up residence with my grandmother, who was looking after my invalid uncle. Mother was only intermittently in residence and my father seldom appeared. None the less, my life was rather happy, Nana (my grandmother) being a superb homemaker and an adequate substitute mother.

During this period, the subject of sex arose from time to time, but only to my great confusion. Others seemed to have far greater awareness in this area than I. None the less, I did have autoerotic moments, from time to time. Public school was part of the regimen, but made no great impression on me. Queen Anne hill in Seattle was solid middle class and a very pleasant place to grow up.

However, change came upon us again when my mother decided to move to New York in pursuit of her career and she decided to take my younger sister with her, send me back to my aunt, who now lived in Bly Oregon, a very small town in the south of about 500 souls. Her new husband operated the water company there. My other sister remained in Seattle, perhaps because she was thought to be sufficiently independent. I think she soon moved in with a girlfriend who had a small apartment near the local business district.

Bly turned out to be a culture shock. The locals were fond of dismissing city folk as inferior to the country variety on the grounds that they couldn't deal with the closeness of nature and had no grasp of obtaining one's food from her. This gave me an immediate and intense feeling of inferiority and the status of being an outsider. To compensate, I somehow decided that my best response was to be entertaining and to aim for the lower social strata, even though my guardians occupied the upper class of Bly, since my uncle was self employed and his income, though not grand, was assured.

After solving these immediate problems I set about learning the manly arts so much in demand among young boys in this town. If my uncle couldn't find the time to train me, I set about learning what I could on my own initiative. This meant hunting, fishing, and skiing, mainly, though it also involved group sports at the local high school, but I was so poor in that area, it only served to enhance my feelings of inferiority. Isolation declined in importance, though I found, having adopted a sort of clown persona, I couldn't easily get any respect, which I found I had a great need for.

In the sexual arena, I found myself slow to enter into puberty, but, when I finally did and discovered orgasm in the bath tub, I began some serious investigation. This included some homosexual experimentation along with some of the heterosexual variety. Neither were of any great success, so I developed autoerotically. I observed that my uncle was sadly frustrated and confused in this area. I had, of course, made the common discovery that sexuality was undertaken with no instruction or even mention within the family. One was expected to make one's own way by trial and error. I have always considered this to be culturally singular, given that sexuality is the central fact of life.

I continued to find school a bore and a necessary evil. The course work was seldom interesting, usually only when a book of literature rose above average. The social requirements were confusing and problematical. Sports were not my forte.

I did have close friends, some better than others, but, the closest was a lower class boy who taught me to smoke as his primary contribution. He also gave me to understand that masturbation was normal, and that was crucial information not easily obtained.

Perhaps the most significant experience of this period occurred on a goose hunt with my uncle and the principal of my high school. The hunt took place at a local reservoir and the strategy was to be to place the three hunters at intervals down the dike away from the reservoir and await the departure of the resting geese for their daily trip to the grain fields. There was no way to know if they would depart to the north or south, so we only had a 50/50 chance of getting a shot. My position was directly over the outlet from the reservoir, a large pipe with a valve. The outlet had caused a small pool to form directly below me at the base of the dike. A stream bed led from there to a pond on which a flock of ducks were swimming. I could hear the ducks communicating among themselves, but, because of the strategy of the goose hunt, I was not interested in the ducks. Eventually, one of the ducks rose from the pond and circled it twice gaining speed. He then flew over me at low altitude but extremely fast. I didn't move because of the geese. The entire flock then rose from the pond and flew to the puddle directly below me and only twenty yards away. This proved to be too great a temptation and I shot both barrels, killing three and scaring the geese away from us, thereby ending the hunt. Naturally, my uncle and the principal were curious about my reasons, so I interpreted events in this way:

The ducks wished to move to the puddle because of some unique food source there but were unsure what I was and whether I was a threat. They therefore developed a strategy to put me to the test. One of their number was dispatched with instructions to fly over me low and fast to see if I would demonstrate deadly intent by attempting to down the duck. When I didn't, they concluded that I wasn't a threat and moved to the puddle. If that is a valid description of what happened, it is the clearest case of strategic thinking in the animal kingdom I ever heard of and I immediately knew that it was not in accord with the general theory of instincts relied on by the scientific community to explain animal behavior without giving them similar capabilities to those of humans.

Eventually my relationship with my uncle, so fulfilling prior to puberty, became problematical after, and I sent a letter to my mother complaining about the situation, which she responded to instantly by sending bus tickets to her new home in Oxford Mississippi. I thought it rather odd to send a sixteen year old across country alone, but didn't find the experience very difficult. She and my sisters met me in Memphis, driving an ancient Plymouth sedan and transported me to Oxford, trying to prepare me for what was in store. Her husband, whom she had met as a result of a joint enterprise in New York, had acquired a professorship in music at the University of Mississippi located there. This I also thought odd, since there seemed to be a noticeable class disparity between mother and her husband.

On the trip, I decided it would be well to drop my role as an entertainer and try to find some other method of gaining acceptance in the local social milieu, in hopes of gaining some respect. My sisters introduced me to one or two locals of about our age and I used that as my starting point, but soon discovered that they were problem children of one sort or another and began to look elsewhere. It turned out, for technical reasons only, I was ahead of my class in credits acquired and therefore was scheduled for early graduation. School here was no better than in Oregon and that idea therefore didn't depress me. Football was required of any socially aspiring male student and this I had discovered in Bly was beyond my capabilities, so I made excuses as well as I was able.

It also became apparent that this part of the country also had its pretensions. In the South, it was well to be born locally, since if you weren't you were probably associated with the North and were therefore disreputable in some way. This was in the segregation period of southern history and so one was coerced into participating, even though, to me, it felt strangely artificial though appealing egoistically. During this period I made one trip back to Portland Oregon to spend the summer with my father and work for an uncle. My father was on his fourth or fifth wife and still subject to great fluctuations in his economic life. The summer was generally successful and allowed me the opportunity to vastly increase my driving skills.

I had by now experienced efforts to seduce me by homosexuals twice. Once at a young age by a drifter in Bly and a second time when, on stopping in LA on a bus trip, one came up to me in the terminal and tried to lure me away. In the first I had no idea what was occuring but in the second I knew exactly what was going on and, in my usual polite way fended him off.

After graduation from high school, I was forced into college because I had no other plan for continuing my life, even though I was not at all interested in continuing what I considered to be a boring activity of modest use to one's future life. I therefore did poorly, failing most courses while getting an A in a jewelry making course. This was the final semester since I had graduated from high school mid term, so, not having anything else to do for the summer, I decided to try to repeat the previous year's experience by visiting my father again. This turned out to be a failure since he had no contacts willing to hire me, so after a few weeks of inactivity, perhaps at his urging, I decided to enter the U.S. Air Force.

Chapter 2

Young Adulthood

I didn't find the Air Force culture very surprising, having anticipated it fairly accurately from the movies. Basic training was stressful, as intended, and anticipating that, I was very attentive especially for general instructions regarding how to get through it successfully. The TI, a young and handsome Chicano, was generally excellent and advised us to fade into the woodwork, as it were. By that he meant that the clearest path to success was to do what we were told in an unremarkable and not particularly noticeable way. This advice I took to heart and found it useful. The leaders of the flight of which I was a part ended in the stockade for corruption by selling excuses from harsh duty like KP.

We were offered the chance to train as TI's and I volunteered because I liked Texas and as a natural expression of conservatism. However, I learned something significant about myself when the examining sergeants asked me to face the wall and march an imaginary flight around an imaginary parade ground. I found this impossible to do because of the sense that I would appear ridiculous shouting instructions to the wall. This was, of course, exactly what the sergeants were looking for and I was rejected.

Instead I soon found myself dispatched to Great Falls, Montana to train as a radar operator. Radar operators have in general two tasks, to detect unknown aircraft in the vicinity and to control interceptors. The second task is performed by officers, while enlisted men perform the first. The distinction between officers and enlisted was something of a problem for me, because I felt myself to be officer quality, though not qualified. During this period I established a close relationship with a black male and suffered some criticism for doing so.

After about a year, several of us who had come to Montana direct from basic training were sent to Biloxi, Mississippi, to get the formal training required for the specialty. We had not been sent direct, as would be more normal due to the capacity limits of the school. Nothing of great significance happened there except perhaps my taking a trip to Georgia with a classmate who wanted a weekend at home. Unfortunately we had to chance the possibility of a surprise inspection and the inspection did occur, thereby causing us to get an Article 15. This is a non judicial punishment not considered serious for enlisted men, though it is career killing for officers.

Upon graduation from technical school, I was sent to Nagoya Japan. This was yet another culture shock, but, since I had no idea what to expect, not the sort that occurred in Bly when it turned out to be nothing like my preconceptions. In Japan I was given great freedom and expected to make my way from place to place on my own. This was a new and generally pleasant experience. The facility to which I was attached was a very small compound, probably leased from the Japanese. We had Japanese servants to make our beds and serve our meals and do our laundry, so this was also new and pleasant, though giving the impression of American superiority, which, being untrue, led to confusion.

The first thing I became aware of was the fact that prostitutes worked as waitresses in all bars, an interesting fact for a young male virgin with a somewhat stronger need for sexual expression than average. I soon took advantage of this opportunity, which I judged to be only slightly better than masturbation and always involved gambling with the possibility of disease. The ability of the military to deal with venereal disease was by now very effective because of penicillin, but they also showed very scary movies about what happened to those contaminated, so this produced anxiety and less fraternization than would otherwise be expected.

None the less trips to drink Japanese beer were common and after a few beers the dangers of sex seemed to become less formidable.

My job entailed shift work, which was arranged in three day segments, day, evening, and night, followed by three days off. It also entailed an hour bus trip into the country to reach the radar site. One such trip led through a parade of people celebrating human sexual fertility. They carried banners painted with pictures of both male and female genitalia, which shocked me and demonstrated that sexual attitudes could and did vary dramatically from culture to culture.

I also met another airman from near my home in Mississippi, which gave us a natural basis for establishing a relationship. He was very attractive to me in a macho sort of way and I agreed with him that our relationship should place him in the superior role. This is, of course, done indirectly through body language and subtle events like doing errands for him. The distinction was quite subtle since my inferiority was to be of the slightest variety. Two are always stronger in a relationship than separately and he and I were both of officer quality, so we did better than others and advanced more rapidly too. He advanced more rapidly than I, as was appropriate to our relationship. None the less this rank structure would prove to be inaccurate and that inaccuracy would eventually doom the relationship.

At this point I had another rare subjective experience. About an hour after retiring for the night a fire drill occurred and I found that, while I was perfectly sensible and understood what was going on about me, I was utterly unable to speak. I could formulate the words in my mind but could not command my mouth to utter them. I have since concluded that the hemisphere of my brain controlling speech remained asleep while the other one was awake.

I was uninterested in absorbing any Japanese culture, being satisfied to perform my job effectively and have as much fun as possible. I experimented with romance a little, but there were so few candidates, nothing came of it. Eventually I discovered a bar that matched my personality well, genteel, relatively classy prostitutes, and I made myself a regular there, hoping to reduce the chances of contracting VD in this way.

My second experience that I would identify as incompatible with the common view of nature happened in Japan with regard to fear of venereal disease. After several months in the country and after several brothel experiences I contracted a malady known as VD warts. In my case warts appeared surrounding the base of the head of my penis. Not knowing what this meant I went to the doctor who gave me the name but no other information. He treated them by burning them off with low grade acid, in response to which they immediately grew back. This had the effect of ending my sex life in Japan until I was notified of my impending departure for the States, at which time, they disappeared with no effort on my part. My interpretation of this event was that the warts appeared as an unconscious response to the danger. When the danger disappeared, so did the warts. This implies to me a strategic response to the environment very reminiscent of the ducks.

At one time I got involved in a poker game with some sergeants and they ganged up on me to try to extract as much money as possible by continuously raising the bet until I was forced out. I considered that cheating and refused to pay what I had lost in that hand. I had demonstrated before leaving the game that I did, in fact, have the winning hand by overturning that of my competitor. They tried to intimidate the money out of me but I refused and they gave up.

My friend had arrived in Japan after I and wanted me to extend my stay so that we could end our Air Force enlistments there and return home together, but I was lonesome for home and decided to defy his request. This demonstrated that our relationship had some rotten timbers in it when he found this act to be treasonous. None the less, I returned home and spent the last six months at Lake Geneva Wisconsin. Interestingly, this turned out to be my family home on my mother's side, she having lived there in her childhood.

The six months were quickly over. I had bought a car from my stepfather's brother in law and planned on going to The University of Mississippi, having learned in the Air Force that officer's had degrees. I was highly motivated by this time to spare no effort to get a degree in something.

It was now early summer though and my friend had returned from Japan so I immediately drove to his home in a nearby town to renew our relationship. He seemed to have forgotten about my treason and we set about the task of drinking and carousing and seeking sex as our idea of fun at that time. We thought we would go to Florida to get jobs doing home construction until the fall semester started, and then we would both enter the university. This plan was much disturbed when I met and fell in love with one of the local girls. I found Florida harder work than I was prepared to do and I wanted to pursue my relationship with the girl, so finally I prevailed upon my friend to return to Mississippi with me. Since we were using my car, he probably felt he had no choice.

After a couple of weeks of romance we again settled on a plan for getting a new job. My aunt from Bly had moved to Santa Cruz, California, and I was anxious to see what fun was to be had there. I talked my friend into the idea and he invited another friend to accompany us. We drove to California, I visited my relatives with great pleasure, but no desirable jobs were to be found and eventually we were forced to return. Instead of going directly back to Mississippi, we decided to visit my former base in Wisconsin so that we could see old friends from Japan there.

In the interests of saving money, we drove non stop, trading off driving chores. This led to shortness of temper and when we went to drink beer with our friends upon arrival, not having slept soundly for three days, nobody should have been surprised that an argument developed that led to my dropping my friends and leaving for Mississippi alone. This was unwise in every respect, destroying my relationship with my friend and exposing me to the possibility of a wreck through lack of sleep. None the less, I arrived, having to stop for twenty five cents worth of gas at the last town before Oxford, that being the end of my money.

After resting, I quickly resumed my romance with the girl from my friend’s home town, which quickly turned into a heavy petting relationship but went no further. Since she intended to attend a different college than I, I changed my plans to be near her.

I then got my first experience with the inadequacy of the unconscious in modern life when, thinking about my girl while driving to her home and allowing my unconscious to drive, it made a typical mistake. When it came to an intersection with a stop sign, it stopped the car and looked both ways but failed to register that a truck was coming and drove right out in front of it. I was thrown from the vehicle and slid across the highway but no serious damage was done to me. The car was a loss.

The relationship ran its course and ended halfway through the school year, and having no other interest in this school, I transferred to Ole Miss. My grades had been excellent, though I worried that course work would be more difficult at the premier university in the state.

At Ole Miss, I decided to major in Mathematics since I had discovered the previous year an unexpected talent in this direction. I quickly identified two very attractive males with whom to bond and my Ole Miss career got off to a great start. I was intimidated by fraternities and considered their cost unjustified, and so avoided them, as did my friends. I was financing college with the GI bill, so money wasn't a problem though there wasn't any extra. I didn't feel that my class background fitted me particularly well for college, though by now was sure I was intelligent enough for it. As usual I felt something of an outsider.

I found no suitable romance interest, one that provoked the proper feeling, but a good looking girl had attached herself to our group so I started a relationship with her as a sort of training exercise. I found her incomprehensible, since she almost never spoke. Her conversation was completely utilitarian. We did enjoy a mutually satisfying sexual relationship, though, since she was a virgin no actual penetration occurred. Once, when this girl was unavailable to attend a cocktail party being given by my parents I decided to ask a girl who was too plain to excite any romantic interest and was astounded to find her much more enjoyable to be with.

I moved through college as quickly as possible, attending summer and winter since there was no suitable summer activity anyway. At the senior level I began to find mathematics becoming incomprehensible. I was never able to determine if that was a result of inadequate instruction or me reaching the limits of my aptitude in this subject.

Another feature of college at this time was the rising involvement of students with drugs. I didn't experiment but all of my friends did, mainly with a drug called Dexedrine or speed as we would call it today.

After college, having no specific interests, I determined to emulate an officer I had worked for in the Air Force and so reentered with a view towards becoming a navigator. I didn't have the vision necessary for pilot training and wasn't sure I could handle it anyway. Navigating was more intellectual and I was pretty confident that I could succeed there.

Chapter 3

Family Life

After gaining officer status at Officer Training School, I was sent to Waco, Texas for navigator training. There, I established a complete new set of friends for this new phase of my life. As was typical of me, I never carried friends forward from phase to phase of my life. This was not a conscious decision, it was the way of life that seemed natural to me. I was still more comfortable with male friends than with females, and anyway, female companionship was hard to come by. My new friends were exactly the same as I, in terms of ethnicity, but were generally higher on the social scale, I felt. One of them was from a wealthy middle western family but the rest were very middle class.

During this period, I visited my sister in New Jersey where she lived with her husband and young children. She introduced me to a German immigrant acquaintance, who I was immediately attracted to and she demonstrated a reciprocal attraction. However, the time was too short and the distances too great to allow the relationship to develop.

After gaining my wings, I was sent to Dover, Delaware to take up duties navigating cargo transports between the US and Europe, mainly. I was disappointed to find that navigation was also one of the more boring activities man can indulge in. The weather conditions one is exposed to provide some interest, though it is of a generally negative sort. Flying, in general, requires an act of faith on the part of the flyer. One has to believe in the airworthyness of the vehicle and the competence of the pilots. Of course that faith is normal, but, if it is destroyed in some way, flying can never be a comfortable occupation again. Being a pilot is best, since faith in oneself is normal and hard to destroy, so it eliminates one of the elements on which the passenger is dependent. If crews stayed together, this would help, for all of the dependable pilots at least, but that is not the case in the current Air Force.

Many of my friends from navigator training were also at Dover, so we established a new clique there.

Before long I was visiting my sister again, since she was so close. She introduced me to a friend of hers and I soon found myself in love. This woman was a single mother and very sexually attractive to me. She was also in need, both financially and because of her young three year old daughter. This combination of elements was more than I could resist, so after a few months of an intensely sexual relationship, I proposed marriage. She accepted and her upper middle class relatives, who lived nearby, decided to provide the marriage ceremony.

There were problems. Her mother was in Florida and didn't attend, her father was out of the picture, and my mother didn't approve. My bride had been divorced for some time and there appeared to be no interest on the part of her ex husband.

Immediately before the marriage, she confessed that the father of her child was married at the time and their bigamous marriage was done out of state in order to provide the child with a valid birth certificate and legal rights to support. This alarmed me, but I felt I was in too deep to back out, so the marriage proceeded. It was apparent that she had enormous determination to see that the marriage worked and I couldn't resist the temptation to create a gratitude in her for extracting her from difficult circumstances.

As will be appreciated, I was quite naive regarding sexual relationships, even though I was nearing thirty at the time.

Also occurring at this moment was the loss of one of my friends from navigator training in an aircraft failure accident.

These two events, marriage which provided me with something I didn't wish to lose, and the loss of a friend, which made the aircraft seem an object of misplaced faith, produced an increase in the normal level of anxiety associated with flying, to the extent that it became for me, an unpleasant experience. I cast around for some solution, even going to the Pentagon in search of alternatives, but could find no way to avoid continuing what I was doing.

My marriage got off to a good start and before long my wife was pregnant. I was having a good time developing my water skiing skills on a nearby near perfect lake for the purpose. So, all in all, things were fine. I had to repress my anxiety about flying, and was gone from home about half the time, but, other than that I had little to complain of. And, in retrospect, I think being gone half the time was actually ideal for the marriage. The relationship could never attain that level of intensity that most day in/day out marriages do.

President Kennedy was assassinated about then. I thought it an interesting event and watched the funeral, but wasn’t affected emotionally.

At about this time the Air Force decided to conduct a statistical survey of officers and sent me to San Antonio to be tested for astronaut training. One phase of this test involved hanging me face down in a parachute harness, which had the effect of pinching my arteries closed and cutting off my blood circulation. This sent me into unconsciousness very rapidly and when the experiment was complete they rotated the platform to release the pressure. This produced a feeling in me of euphoria and a strong desire not to return.

My son arrived in the usual way without complications and shortly thereafter the opportunity came to transfer to the West coast because of the deepening involvement in Viet Nam by the US. I jumped at it since I would be stationed near the place of my birth and a number of relatives. Upon arrival in Tacoma, I, along with most of my friends from navigator training, found a pleasant living environment with the only real difference from a work point of view being the destination of most flights, Saigon. It seemed to be as safe as the places we had gone to in Europe, and many of the stops in the Pacific were pleasant places to visit: Hawaii, Wake, Guam, The Philippines. Saigon wasn't so pleasant, but we could only stay there for three hours at a time because no beds were available, so we flew over from Manila in the morning and back in the evening.

At one time, on route from Wake to Japan, we developed a runaway propeller. This is a dramatic event, since if the prop isn’t stopped it will continue to wind up until it comes off. The noise was terrifying. It was stopped and we were intercepted by an amphibious plane and escorted back to Wake.

I visited Taiwan and Japan from time to time. It was interesting to see how Japan had changed. It had become very much Americanized but the bar/brothels were no different, though I didn't participate now, being married.

I had, by now, bought my first home in Tacoma and life was bouncing along in a most agreeable way. I fished a lot in Puget Sound. We worked on improving our home. The children were developing in a normal and healthy way. Unfortunately the anxiety of flying didn't improve and in fact became more intense. It seemed that the better my life was, the more I had to lose, and the worse flying anxiety became. Because of the boredom of flight, I wasn't any better than average, as a navigator, and, from time to time I suspected, I was worse. This didn't accord well with my self image and I determined that my best path would be to separate myself from the Air Force as soon as possible.

So, I began to look for employment elsewhere and before long was given the opportunity to try computer programming at Boeing. I left the Air Force as soon as I was able and began commuting to Seattle to be trained for software development.

I soon discovered that I had talent in this direction. I found programming to be extremely interesting, challenging, and fulfilling. There was something about devising an intellectual machine and seeing it do, eventually, exactly what you wished. The learning necessary to this task was enormous. The computer, an extremely complex machine and the tools necessary to exploit it were not easily consumed, especially since the computer itself was an object completely outside of my experience.

None the less, I was soon part of a team of software developers working on a purchase order system for Boeing. It was an enormous project comprising about twenty developers and suitable management.

On the other hand, I began to notice problems with my marriage. Work was so demanding, I frequently fell asleep at night and once even in the middle of a conversation at a dinner party my wife meant to use as an entry into a social group. Socializing in this way I found extremely boring. People, being more or less strange to one another, relied on small talk as a non threatening way to establish relationships. But, small talk is boring, and unless you are working on a relationship, which I had no interest in, it was not something I wanted to subject myself to, any more than necessary. It wasn't apparent to me that these people had anything to offer that would be useful to my family.

Anyway, sex was still good. We had neighbors, a lawyer across the street that was useful. They had children too and seemed to me a good sort of people. But, it was apparent that my wife was becoming dissatisfied. I wrote it off as a phase she was going through and waited to see if it passed.

After about a year at Boeing, having learned enough to make myself marketable and perceiving that advancement was going to be slow there, I identified an opportunity in Palo Alto, California and decided to take it. It involved a reasonable increase in salary and seemed to offer more interesting and varied projects on which to work. In addition it was a small company specializing in software development, and so seemed to offer more advancement potential. We had lived in Tacoma for about four or five years, by now, and it seemed a reasonable time for a change. It also took pressure off the marriage relationship since so much energy had to be devoted to the move.

So, we moved, I driving and my family following by air. Unfortunately, while I was making more money, housing prices were much higher in Palo Alto, so our rental was not as nice as the home we had left. However, before long the next house on the street became available and it, after some work was approximately comparable to what we had left. The weather seemed an enormous improvement and the industrial park in which the company was located was lovely, immediately across the street from one of the great universities in America, Stanford. So, the atmospherics were ideal. I didn't really pay any attention to the stress on my family, since moving was so much a part of my life, I thought it perfectly normal.

Before long I became involved in a project at work that was drastically underbid which naturally led to all members of the team working much longer than normal hours. This immediately brought the relationship problems in my marriage back out into the open. At about this time my wife brought home an album of music by a popular band of the time called The Beatles. The album was called Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. On listening to it, I was astounded. It was very compelling music with an incomprehensible mystical quality to it. It seemed to be drug inspired, though I had no experience with drugs and didn't know what that meant. I assumed drugs had a similar affect on the user to alcohol, though they seemed to be addictive from the government propaganda then circulating.

The war was still in progress and anti war demonstrations seemed to be becoming more and more frequent. Somebody at Berkeley, or Berzerkley as it was now known in my circles, had started a dirty speech movement, by which he seemed to mean that he wished four letter words to become a part of ordinary conversation. Of course they already were and had always been among men, as far as my experience went, but were inappropriate between the sexes according to my education.

After a year, with the bad project I had been working on, I concluded that software development was problematic as the basis for a company due to the extreme difficulty of estimating the time necessary to complete a project. In addition I had become doubtful about the prospects for the company. So, these problems, along with marriage problems led me to the conclusion that my best hopes lay with what I had left at Boeing, and that leaving and returning offered me the opportunity of declaring in which group I wished to work there, and I knew where the best opportunity lay. The move also provided a convenient way of moving from Tacoma to Seattle which never seemed practical when there.

We drove back to Seattle and found ourselves in slush when we passed through Olympia. I was driving a VW bug and when I attempted to pass a slow moving tractor trailer rig my wheels lost contact with the surface. Since I was in a banked curve the car slid in front of the truck and he hit us and forced the vehicle into the ditch. No injuries occurred, but my children’s faith in me was severely damaged. I dismissed it as bad luck.

Chapter 4

Seattle Again

On arrival in Seattle, we rented an old two story house in an aging section of Ballard that was near my oldest sister, though further than necessary from Renton where I would be working. In fact it involved an hour commute, but it was scenic since one could drive around Lake Washington, and eventually I got into a car pool, which provided interesting conversation, generally of a political nature.

I had arranged to be included in the group responsible for system software, as opposed to applications, which was a difficult area in which only the more adept software specialists were allowed to work. I immediately gravitated towards an important inventory control project aimed at helping to manage the 747 development effort. I had a lot of success in that project and my value to the company became widely acknowledged within a relatively short time. However, that also meant devoting more time to work than was usual, which I was happy to do since it meant more money and my home life wasn't improving any.

Time went by. We bought a nice house in a newer and nicer neighborhood further from the city center. One day, on the commute, when conversation was particularly animated, I drove through an uncontrolled intersection and crashed directly into a car traveling through the intersection from the street immediately to my right. The damage to the car was heavy, though nobody appeared to be injured. We got the car towed away and went on to work with one of the other members of the group, but that afternoon my knee became so painful I couldn't work and on going to the hospital discovered that I had broken my kneecap. This resulted in nine months in a full leg cast. After two car crashes in a relatively short time, I began to wonder what it meant.

This was the time of the moon landing. I watched it carefully and was very interested in how it might impact life. Obviously, technology was going to dominate.

My wife got a job at the hospital, not so much because we needed the money as to fill her time. Both children were in school and housework wasn't a fulfilling enterprise for her. The house we had bought was particularly agreeable and everything seemed on the surface to be sunny, though I knew my marriage relationship continued to worsen and I continued to work long hours. One day my wife failed to come home at the usual time and also failed to call. I had no idea where she was but didn't seriously consider the possibility of an accident or other problem that might need my help. I guess I must have known the probable reason for her absence. Our relationship had been in decline for a long time by now. She arrived in the early morning hours and I decided to attack the problem immediately, rather than to let it pass. I questioned her about her wishes, regarding our marriage. Whether she thought it had any future or if she was inclined to terminate it. I was determined to try to maintain it and to force the family through this reverse if there was any possible way. She was evasive and refused to commit to anything, so I suggested marriage counseling, to which she agreed. I allowed her to decide on a suitable professional and we left it at that.

At about this same time I befriended an acquaintance at work. He was a Swede, given to small boat sailing on Puget Sound. I had never tried the sport, too expensive. So, before long I found myself sailing and, since he was a user, being introduced to the pleasures of marijuana. This was at the height of anti war protests and the University of Washington was one of the main hotbeds of anti war sentiment, so it was no surprise that marijuana use was quite common here. It was not very common among family men working for major corporations, however, and I immediately became more sympathetic with anti war feeling. I had set up a jewelry shop in my basement and it occurred to me to use my skills to construct a nice peace symbol pendent which I liked to wear, even with a suit and tie. This couldn't have thrilled my superiors at work, but I had become essential to their success, so they overlooked it.

Several movies influenced me strongly at this time too. The Graduate, and Easy Rider were the most important, but in a different way 2001, A Space Odyssey was important. My wife and I also went to a local stage version of Hair. I was particularly impressed with Captain America in Easy Rider and acquired a poster of him which I put up in my den.

To me, marijuana had a profoundly different effect than did alcohol. It did produce a similar floating sensation to that produced by alcohol, but it also seemed to intensify hearing acuity and since I was now listening to Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Waters album, the experience was heightened by making the words and music much more clear and comprehensible. The associated emotions were equally enhanced.

My wife's choice of a therapist was particularly good. I liked him a great deal and when he suggested that I submit to a period of therapy in a local halfway house, after some reflection I agreed. This was a mildly interesting experience, but, since I didn't see what it was supposed to accomplish, I don't think it had any very noticeable effect. We also took advantage of a popular style of therapy of the times, group therapy, and that led to an encounter group at the home of the therapist. This was intensely interesting, producing in me reactions I was surprised to see. Mainly a regurgitation of feeling for my lost friend from Dover days and some implication that my wife rather than I was mainly responsible for our predicament. I was also surprised to see how common our problems seemed to be, from the quality and number of pairs involved in this experiment.

About this time too, we saw Arthur Godfrey pitching vasectomies on TV and my wife allowed that this was a much more desirable form of birth control and that she wished I would avail myself of it. After pondering the idea for a while and reflecting that I didn't expect to wish for more than two children in future, I agreed. I had already agreed to formally adopt my daughter.

Things seemed to be more or less on the mend, though I found it very hard to avoid using marijuana as an escape from the stress and pain. Work continued to go well and had become less demanding. We had been formally transferred to the 747 project which was located in Everett, so the commute was different and somewhat better. At this point my wife went out of her way to demonstrate that her affair had not ended. This produced a great ice storm in our relationship which led to my experiencing the most intense anxiety attack of a most startling nature. I wouldn't have guessed that one's psychic life could have so profound an effect on one's musculature. Shortly after that, my wife attempted suicide and I was offered the opportunity to return to the company in Palo Alto I had worked for before.

All things considered, it seemed a distant possibility that removal from the situation might produce the opportunity to sail through these troubled waters, so, after asking the advice of our therapist I determined to take the chance. I was certain the marriage was doomed if I didn't do something and I wasn't ready to throw in the towel yet.

Back in Palo Alto, I found the company had moved to new quarters and the owner was taking a personal interest in day to day operations. He had hired an associate of mine at Boeing who was making a tremendous impact on a large insurance corporation in San Francisco and he hoped that I would produce a similar impact on a new contract he had negotiated with a defense contractor in Los Angeles. Had I known of this plan beforehand, in view of my new sympathies with the anti war movement, I might not have taken the job, but I didn't and anyway, the job was an effort to take pressure off my marriage. The result was, however, that I ended up living in a hotel in LA on weeknights and only seeing my family on weekends. This was not what was wanted, but there didn't seem to be any way out of it. Depression gathered and I finally determined that I would have to go to the president, an overbearing 65 year old ex IBMer and tell him I would not be able to continue. I used the excuse of deepening doubt about the war effort and the repugnant feeling associated with working for it. This was true, though not as serious as that. My family was the real reason.

I had recently hired a man from another high tech company in the neighborhood, an immigrant from New York. He was a very attractive personality for me and we soon became fast friends. He had lived through a disastrous marriage and divorce which had led to his move to California, so I listened to his experience which paralleled mine in many ways. He also had used marijuana as a crutch to get through the experience, though he said that eventually marijuana had turned on him and he had had to give it up. I didn't understand what he meant by that. I had found an employee at work that sort of advertised his involvement with drugs through his costume and used him as a conduit for my supplies.

The children, up until now, didn't seem to notice the problems between their parents, though, I suppose on some subconscious level they did. Eventually my wife made another attempt on her life and when under the influence of marijuana, I seemed to receive a revelation about the meaninglessness of these experiences from any wider perspective. This experience resolved me to leave my family. I rationalized that with my wife attempting suicide from time to time I would be more valuable to them separated from them, since the possibility that she might succeed would be eliminated.

So, I gathered together the clothing I would need, took the car and went to visit my new friend to discuss what the best move from there would be. He said that he and his girlfriend were thinking about renting a house and when they did he thought she would accept the idea of the three of us living together. This plan worked out and I found myself living in a semi hippie life style, with the barest essentials in the way of furniture and accessories. I gave the car to my wife and tried to get along without for a while. That didn't work very well so I bought a motorcycle.

We began to associate ourselves with counter culture people of various stripes. Another male friend from work had a sister that maintained a home by herself in Marin County in decidedly feminist style: natural food, unpretentious clothing, and hospitality towards drug use. We used that place for more serious drug experimentation, LSD and mescaline. I also found the means to establish a sexual liaison with her, and then I also ran into an old acquaintance of my wife's who I found to be sexually attracted to me. She was particularly attractive and forced me into a separation problem with the woman from Marin County. My new friend, her brother, was a rock climber, so I decided to pursue that hobby as a way of maintaining my physical stamina and as a means of confronting fear. We also established a relationship with a couple from San Francisco, the male half of which had totally disconnected from the mainstream culture. He had an artistic side and refused to work for money, relying instead on his girlfriend's income. He also wasn't averse to satisfying his needs by shoplifting. This eventually turned me away from them, as I found I couldn't accept that sort of behavior. They also nearly got me busted for drug possession, but, in the end I was able to successfully dissuade the cop from pursuing his suspicions further.

I found under the influence of mescalin, considered to provide one with a religious experience by the American Indians, that the question of most concern to me was death. I therefore used my conscious will to direct my unconscious experience towards this question and found that it was a question easily answered in this state and, while I could not retain my understanding when the drug wore off, I could retain the knowledge that I had understood and that my impression was that it was not a question of particular significance. The feeling was rather like, "Ah, yes, this isn't something to lose any sleep over."

Shortly after this I found out what my friend’s fear of marijuana was based on. One night while smoking, I found myself fantasizing and awoke to the realization that I had no control whatsoever over my fantasy. That it had taken on a life of its own and I was going along for the ride with no possibility of escape. This produced in me extreme paranoia and, when I recovered I concluded that drug use was no longer an escape and in fact was no longer even possible for me. Several years later I retried the experience and it was repeated in an even more dramatic way.

Then, I became of so little use to my company that they laid me off and since the country was in a recession I couldn't find a new job, and so had to rely on unemployment compensation. My wife and children had moved in with my wife's brother so this wasn't a disaster for them, but it did lead to a new crisis in my psychic life. Finally, one morning I felt I had gone as far as possible down my current path and decided to turn to God for help. To my great surprise, this strategy worked. God responded immediately and my perspective on the world changed dramatically. The world even looked different in some undefinable way, sort of harsh and raw and over bright. I concluded that I had misevaluated religion and determined to investigate it more thoroughly from the inside. I joined the local Catholic church and asked to be baptized. I also began earnestly to read the Bible.

I found that God had a gift for me. This was symbolized by a dream in which I floated high in the sky and looked down on a vast parade of humans marching into the future. I concluded that I would now be able to view humanity objectively, which turned out to be the case.

At about this same time my rock climbing friend gave me the autobiography of Carl Jung, the famed psychiatrist, who, until then, I had never heard of.

Chapter 5

Jung

The gift of the autobiography of Jung was extremely fortuitous at this particular time. In retrospect, if my friend never did another thing for me, I would have to view him as one of the most significant figures, on the positive side, of my life.

Jung seemed to view life from the same perspective as I, and wrote in a style I found easy to comprehend. In addition, his subject matter seemed to me to be the crucial one. If one could master the intricacies of the mental process, he was also likely to gain mastery over his life, or so I thought at the time.

Jung strongly emphasized the dream life as crucial to the journey of self discovery, so I immediately made efforts to capture my dreams, write them down, and attempt to interpret them according to the methods used by Jung.

I also continued to buy and read books by Jung and continued to read the Bible, having decided by now to read it straight through, cover to cover. I attended church regularly, also, and received instruction, too. My instructor, a local priest, was very cold and intellectual and assured me I would never get to the bottom of it. Depending on what he meant by "it", I think he was wrong there.

I determined about then that my life style was incompatible with my new pursuits and resolved to buy an old car and move to a conservative apartment building nearer a new job I had recently managed to get hired for. The job was in the area of my expertise, so was no great departure from what I had been used to, though it was my first experience with the manufacturing end of the computer business. My method of getting it was to make myself available to a company that marketed temporary workers and when they failed to get a contract which they were offering me for, I went back and offered myself as an independent, which brought the price down considerably. The company quickly decided to make me a permanent employee and I continued with them for about ten years.

Since I was now employed and the medical benefits included fifty percent coverage of psychiatric help, I decided to take the opportunity to see if Jungian analysis of my personality might not speed my efforts to completely understand the Jungian psychological model as it applied to me. By good fortune I came across a particularly appropriate choice of an analyst. He was very likable and assiduously maintained the proper doctor/patient relationship that is crucial to the success of the effort. The great advantage of psychological professionals lies in one's freedom to explain to them the precise nature of your personal subjective reaction to life, without editing. This is because they are professionals who will respect your privacy and will not enter into a personal relationship with you. The result is that you lose much of your fear of offending that normally causes you to edit your comments to other people in your life. Professionals also have the advantage of comparison, since they have many patients.

By this time also, my wife had divorced me in an action that I didn't attend or make any effort to defend myself from. The result was that half of my income had to be sent to her. I wasn't very upset with this since I was concerned for my children and knew they would benefit from it. I was concerned about the impact on my children of anticipated excesses in my ex wife's life, but didn't see how I could have any impact on that.

Then my ex wife decided unilaterally to remove herself and my children to Seattle, making it very difficult for me to have any contact with them. In retaliation I decided to cut off her income and to await her reaction. I didn't know exactly what she might do, but I concluded that they would undoubtedly get by for a few months, probably by going into debt though. Eventually she concluded that the best approach was to sue me and I got a lawyer this time. We settled immediately before the judge would have rendered his decision and while the move had to remain a permanent thing it was decided that the children would visit me in the summer and I felt I had made my point. Arrears in child support were dismissed and I resumed sending child support money. My wife had my home and car in Seattle and the home had some significant equity built up in it by now.

I had attempted to get the church to annul my marriage altogether in order to allow me to marry again in the church should that become a possibility. But, they gave me to understand that that would involve exposing the nature of her relationship to my daughter's father, so I concluded that I didn't want that to occur, since it might be damaging to the children.

I had no romantic relationships during this period, and I found the life rather lonely. But, I persevered in the study of Jung and found myself amazed as I began to understand the meaning of dreams. Who could be responsible for the profundity of these productions? Certainly it wasn't I. There had to be something or someone else who had access to my thoughts and memory and played them back to me in a colorful and dramatic way that exposed what was really going on, rather than what I thought was going on in my life.

In fact, in one dream my unconscious, as Jung terms it, commented on my preoccupation with my dreams and the fact that I was altering my behavior as a result of my understanding of them. The dream represented my driving across the Ole Miss campus on my motorcycle, but with my college roommate sitting in front of me blocking my view even though I was steering. I thought it interesting that my psyche would choose this particular individual, who was given to beer drinking and constant procrastination, as its choice for the best character in my life to represent the unconscious. But the point the dream made was crystal clear to me. The unconscious was particularly unadept at the manipulation of objects of recent invention and relying on it would surely lead to disaster. After that I was more circumspect in applying what I learned from my dreams.

My dreams, by constantly representing my life in a symbolic way, allowed me two perspectives on its events and also when they were in conflict allowed me to isolate those features of my interpretation of life that were self serving and egoistic. This is a great advantage to those for whom reality is frequently hard to identify in one's subjective life.

In Jung's view, contrary to the ego, superego, id structure of his mentor, Sigmund Freud, the psyche was composed mainly of the ego and the unconscious. The ego might be split, if complexes existed and was better termed the conscious complex. He was also much impressed with the introvert/extrovert spectrum along which egos placed themselves and, in fact, invented the terminology. To me, this structure was undeniably accurate, and with this knowledge I was immediately capable of identifying and categorizing all subjective events in my life. None the less, I still needed to discuss my entire fund of personal memories with my analyst in order to properly evaluate them in terms of this new understanding.

Before long my wife came back to California, leaving off my children with me. My daughter was now well into puberty and to my profound surprise and great discomfort I found her sexually attractive. I wrestled with this fact for a few weeks, and since I had recently taken up drawing as a hobby, decided to use her as a model in hopes this would lead to some useful resolution of the problem. When I asked her to pose nude however, she objected and so I insisted as a father's prerogative though taking care to only draw in the presence of my son. They both questioned me regarding the propriety of it and my daughter became somewhat sullen. The following day my ex wife burst in and took the children and also attempted to take a drawing, no doubt to use as evidence or perhaps as a means of blackmail. I tore it from her and she departed in great haste.

By now, I determined that I was going to have to adopt some strategy if I was ever to succeed in attracting another wife, since I had not come into contact with any suitable candidate since the separation, which was now about four years in the past. So, I cast about and decided to involve myself in two activities. First, I had discovered an attempt to establish a new school of psychology in Palo Alto which I began attending, and I caught an advertisement for a little theater group nearby that needed participants. I had acted some in college and thought I could pass as a theater enthusiast.

Both methods worked. I wasn't really passable as an actor. Somehow, over the years I had become rather more subject to stage fright and this resulted in a rather stiff performance. But, they were sufficiently desperate for volunteers that they used me anyway. This allowed me to meet my future wife. I also met a suitable candidate at the psychology school, but given the choice, decided that my theatrical acquaintance showed the most promise. They were both married, but there was an obvious problem with my future wife's marriage.

I started the relationship in an unusual way. I was actually pressing another woman who was single and had dismissed my future wife since she was married. But, at a cast party I found myself stymied in my efforts to pursue a relationship with the other woman because of her greater interest in the husband of my future wife. I therefore decided that this would allow me to attempt to gain the interest of his wife and I immediately sought her out. We struck up a rewarding conversation in short order and soon moved to a more private location to continue it. Eventually, I raised the question of her husband's activities at the party and she reacted with an expression that seemed to represent the irony of her situation.

I suggested that I was prepared to aid her in an effort to raise a feeling of jealousy in him, if there was any feeling for her left in him and she seemed to agree that that was probably a good strategy. We thus began a little light petting to see what might result. The answer was nothing. Her husband soon disappeared with his romantic interest and I concluded, since this woman was exactly what I had in mind as a suitable wife, to press my suit. We were all involved in the same play as actors, or in her husband's case as an assistant director, so there was plenty of contact and soon the petting sessions became more intense.

When the play was over I began to take her to visit my friends. I wasn't very enthusiastic about hers. They all seemed to me to exhibit an excess of flakiness, by which I mean they didn't appear to be attached to the ground. They didn't appear to take life seriously and were also excessively selfish. However, I was perfectly content to continue my involvement with them as long as it aided in the progression of our relationship.

Before long I discovered that my future wife was pregnant. This rocked me back for a while, but she took a trip to the middle west about that time to visit her mother and assist her in a move and this allowed me to evaluate my feelings for her. I soon found that her absence was a source of great pain to me and that, therefore, the fact that she was pregnant was neither here nor there as far as our relationship went. I realized that, should I convince her to marry me this certainly meant another child to raise, since I had no idea that she would share the child with her, by now ex husband, any more than she had to.

Her mother and I both attended the birthing, in fact I had participated in her birth classes and held her hand during the delivery as it was the fad in those days and seemed to me to be important to her. I didn't much care for the experience and was astounded to find the baby a bright shade of blue. However, the event went off unremarkably and we soon returned to a new life in which I had to share her with the child. This, I attempted to do with good grace, though I found it rather burdensome, from time to time.

I began to press her for a decision regarding the possibility of our marrying. She had difficulty making a decision and wished to procrastinate as long as possible, until I felt I had to raise the level of pressure. So, after yet another suggestion that we wait, I observed that I guessed that she wasn't ready for marriage, implying that this would lead me to reevaluate our relationship with a view to restarting my search for a suitable wife. She didn't want that to happen, so she agreed.


Chapter 6

A Second Marriage

Life had become pleasant again. Marriage, especially in the beginning is full of small pleasures, even though one knows that reality will soon return and life will once again adopt its normal difficult nature. Certainly I expected problems in my marriage; it was apparent, for example, that my mother in law disliked me and disapproved of the marriage. But, for now, that didn't seem to be overwhelming. She lived in Colorado which was sufficiently far away that I didn't expect a great deal of contact. It soon became clear that she intended to spend Christmas's with us, and thus we had to find some sort of polite relationship in order to make these, usually month long episodes bearable. We tried a number of different arrangements, in some of which she rented accommodations, but nothing separated us from the fact that we didn't have much use for each other.

None the less, I was the husband and father and she was only the mother and grandmother and I intended to enforce that status. This, no doubt, was her main objection to our relationship. I had great difficulty in determining the role of my wife's father, who had died naturally several years before. I knew they had lived on a farm in western Kansas and from all reports that my wife had had an exceptionally fulfilling childhood experience. I took it that her father had performed admirably as husband and father since he was referred to with the aura of sainthood, especially by her mother.

In our religious instruction prior to marriage my wife had startled me by declaring that she was not looking forward to marriage problems because she was confident that I would make her aware when she strayed from a proper attitude towards our marriage. This unsettled me somewhat, since it implied too great a dependence, I thought, though I was grateful for her confidence.

My friend and I continued rock climbing during this period and in fact climbed some pretty serious routes in Yosemite. But, it had become clear to me that I was only mediocre as a climber and the main importance of it continued to be the opportunity to confront fear and assure myself that it was possible to perform in that state.

I had by now concluded that I was somewhat more intensely sexual than average. This wasn't any great surprise, since my impression of my father was that he was the same and it isn’t difficult to understand. Since life is spectral, that means that every feature of it is also. This means that the production of semen in the male and the communication of that fact to the brain will vary from weak to strong over the whole population of males. Since I now had two long term sexual relationships to compare, I could see great differences between my current wife and my former one. My first wife had been sexually aggressive and demanding, while my current wife was neither, but was rather sexually passive and viewed her sexual role in terms of duty.

I had determined by questioning her that she had lost interest in sex with her first husband and had avoided it for long periods. I wondered at her pregnancy coming at the absolute end of the relationship and concluded that she had at least unconsciously attempted to get pregnant because of the possibility that it would rescue the relationship and perhaps because she thought it possible that she wouldn't get the opportunity to have a child again. It turned out she was correct in this judgment since I was now sterile. I wondered if this was part of my first wife's plan with regard to my vasectomy.

As I worried over my current marriage relationship and my former one and tried to comprehend the reasons for what had happened, I began to see, given the constant feminist propaganda we were subject to at the time, that that must be playing a role in my life, even though neither my wife nor I would have identified ourselves as feminists.

The Jungian view of the unconscious, containing archetypes as he called them, like the characters in fairy tales seemed to offer an avenue to gaining some kind of appreciation of attitudes that could influence our perceptions of feminism. This led me to investigate fairy tales and to analyze them symbolically, in the same way that I had learned to do with my dreams. This immediately cleared up the actual meaning of Sleeping Beauty, for instance. Since we only dream about ourselves, and all of the characters are manifestations of different features of our own personalities, it became clear that Sleeping Beauty was actually a representation of our feminine sides, whether we ourselves are male or female and that our masculinity was necessary to awaken our femininity through love. This implied that the tendency of femininity is towards passivity while the opposite is true for masculinity.

Jung calls the masculine personality the animus and the feminine side the anima. He points towards loud opinionated women and labels them animus possessed, by which he means that they have lost control of their personalities to their undifferentiated and unsophisticated masculinity. Not a healthy condition.

Gradually, I began to see that feminism was actually an ideology and one that was contrary to our traditional ideology, Judeo/Christianity, which in this context was better referred to as masculinism.

Then, I saw that the struggle between these polar opposites could be used as an explanatory principle to gain a new understanding of history. So, once I had worked it out and saw that this meant a revolutionary change in American life, I determined to attempt to write it down. I succeeded in capuring my view on paper and as I now reread it, twenty years later I find it still represents my views pretty accurately. I have vastly expanded on it by now, though. I now call this book three, The Theory of Ideology, in a more complete work called Millennium.

My brother in law died at about this time. I went to Mississippi for the funeral, which turned out to be an emotional experience for me. I was astounded at how lifelike he appeared in the coffin. My sister handled it with good grace along with her children. She had a copy of the Bahgavad Gita she had acquired from some aspirants at the airport, I think, so I decided to read it while there. At this time my appearance was more suited to California than Mississippi, and I was startled when a family friend of my sister’s went out of his way to put me down for my, in his view, pretentiousness. This was the second time in my life to experience this particular social interaction. I was dumfounded that people actually practiced such rituals. Very impolite, I would have said.

At this point, my ex wife informed me that she had sold the house and intended to go to South America to visit an old friend and wished to stay up to a year and asked if we would consent to keep the children. I, of course, agreed, and my wife also, since she viewed it as a duty. At that time she didn't know them at all well, having only seen them for short visits in the past.

My daughter was now about sixteen and fully mature physically. I no longer suffered from sexual attraction to her, for which I was profoundly grateful. I concluded that my actual attraction to her was affected by a Jungian archetype called Kore. Kore represents the virgin female just entering into puberty and therefore capable of conceiving. This is important because of the difficulty of guaranteeing that one's sperm will cause a pregnancy when other sperm may already be involved. This state of sexual affairs, of course, has existed for most of the history of mankind.

My son, at this time was about ten or so. He was still relatively passive, taking whatever life had to offer without much comment. Both of my children had great doubts about me as a father, by now, though were practical enough to know that that was their lot in life. That they weren't going to get any other fathers and that I would have to do, however good or bad I was. I think they looked on my wife as a great unknown that they were going to have to adapt to. They weren't burdened by preconceived hatred for her as so many children seem to be.

The year of their residency went along in what I would have called a normal way and I was grateful for my ex wife's decision, since I was doubtful about the normalcy of their lives with her. During the following summer my daughter's romantic interest from Seattle came to visit. I was doubtful about him, since he was totally without intellectual capability, but I didn't see where I had any traction to influence her, even though I suspected that the relationship included sex, so I passively allowed it to run its course. My wife acceded to my judgment, though she also suspected a sexual relationship which she strongly disapproved of. We both, of course, hoped that pregnancy would be prevented but were unable to express our views without making it known we knew, or thought we knew, which would force us then to try to prevent it. Because of the feminist movement we thought there was no chance of doing that, and that the only result would be to create a conflict intensive environment, which would be bad for all.

We were living in my wife's home which she had gained control of in her divorce. This seemed to me only fair since I had lost my home to my ex wife, but I saw that my mother in law disapproved. By now I was working for a German company since I had migrated there when they wished to continue the project I was working on after the demise of the company I had been working for. My income had improved to the point that I found we could afford to drive a newish mid price car and move to an upper middle class neighborhood. So, we bought a very nice near new home at the absolute outer limits of our ability to pay. I thought it a good investment since homes appreciated in value near Silicon Valley at a very rapid rate.

When the project I was in charge of at work was completed the company asked me to continue my employment with them in Germany. This appealed to my sense of adventure and I determined to go there for three months to see what I thought was likely to come of it. It was a very negative experience that continued to cost me in various ways for some time to come and I determined that it wouldn't be a good move. I felt very uncomfortable in Germany, perhaps because I was older. I felt homesick for my own land. I didn’t at all like feeling an alien. I therefore called on my old friend, whom I had hired early on in my second California experience and had lived with for about a year, to see if I had any chance of being hired by his current company, a computer manufacturer enjoying great success. I succeeded in getting a job, with his support, and began working there with great hopes that I had finally found a permanent home in industry.

While in Germany I had the chance to compare their culture with what I had seen in Japan and noted a sharp difference. While the Japanese were only too willing to absorb American culture, the Germans held on to their own with great tenacity. They even refused to speak English with me, though they knew it vastly better than I did German. I think they viewed their relationship with America as competitive. That, in some ways, the war had never ended. The Japanese, on the other hand, knew the war was over and that they had lost.

My children had by now returned to Seattle, and my marriage was succeeding beyond expectations. There was never conflict between my wife and myself. This was because she understood the traditional marriage model and allowed it to exist in our family. My stepson was a significant feature of family life and beginning to develop a noticeable personality. He was a happy child and seldom caused any problems. I had always been a firm believer in the idea that an opportunity for corporal punishment should be looked for at about age five or six and then administered with great solemnity and care, and that that would be sufficiently traumatic to make a deep impression which would overshadow a child's decision making from then on in a positive way, and that it would also forestall the need for corporal punishment in later life. I had used this idea with my first two children and used it on my stepson too.

My wife and I had had some positive experiences in the theater during the early years of our marriage, but the group we worked with was more and more afflicted with dissension, so I concluded that the time had come to extricate ourselves from it. I didn't state this change of policy to her explicitly, but instead started reducing my commitment gradually. She took the idea and did the same, though not to the extent of terminating any relationships. But, the upheaval in the lives of the people involved effectively did that naturally.

We experimented with many of the feminist fads of the times, but none of them survived. We became continuously more conservative about our life style and continue to be so to this day.

I had concluded after my divorce that, as a policy, I intended to limit my business life to forty hours per week. This limited my potential for success in the business world but enhanced my chances for success in family life and therefore was a good trade, I thought. It did lead to boredom, however, so, when an attractive start up computer company offered a product for home use, I resolved to buy one and see how it compared with the business computers I was used to, and how I might be able to exploit it for personal and professional gain.

This turned out to be my favorite all time computer from the perspective of programming. This machine offered the potential to know it totally even though it had more capabilities than other computers I had used, though far less power. But, it had enough and the enormously important new capability it had was graphics potential, even color, which allowed the possibility to create interesting games. This I found an interesting possibility and since I was capable of programming in machine language, which is essential to graphics based games, I was particularly suited to explore this possibility. So, I determined to write a game.

I wanted it to contain both of the features most common in games of the day. Both the graphics based hand/eye coordination aspect and the mystery solving common to text games of the times. I also wanted it to be qualitatively superior to any I had thus far seen. I decided on automobile driving as the type of experience to exploit and a sort of spy version of Silicon Valley business as the milieu in which to set it. The game turned out very well, meeting all of my design goals, allowed my step son to observe the development effort and understand what I was trying to achieve, and took about two years of my life, part time, to complete. One design goal it didn't achieve was marketability. I was never able to interest any game marketing company in it.

At about this time my son came to visit for the summer. I found him to have entered a stage of development characterized by an utter unwillingness to communicate anything except the most basic functions of life: where to sleep, what to eat, how to plug into the stereo. At about the same time my aged father, with whom I had no significant relationship, and whom had became immobile due to a hip fracture and a lack of desire, also arrived on my doorstep. I tentatively decided to put him up to see how he would adapt to life in my home. I was unsure whether or not it would be possible to keep him as a member of the family for a time, which I assumed he would prefer since the alternative would have to be some sort of institutional life.

These two events, happening at the same time, placed an inordinate strain on the family and required me to try to prioritize what was desirable and possible. To me, my father came last, since relationships, like economics, require give and take. My father had not seen fit to give to my family consistently, any giving I did for him must needs be altruistic, since there wasn't much if anything to pay back. On the other hand my son had claims on me, and if he could be brought around to see that he could expect to gain if he could see his way to give, then mutual benefit would accrue to us all.

It quickly became clear that my father was going to be a nursing case in which his crusty personality provided no sense of value to other members of the family and that their sense would be that they were giving to him only to maintain their relationship with me, and that therefore the situation would not work and had to be changed. So I located an institution of medium care to which to move him. I was doubtful this would work either, since he didn't seem able or wish to make any effort to care for himself, but he needed the opportunity before the final step, the nursing home, was resorted to.

In the case of my son, failure also loomed. He felt no need to contribute to family life by making any effort at all to establish relationships with any of us. In fact his attitude matched my father's and in both cases apparently emanated from the feeling that the world, and especially me and my family deserved no consideration. In my son's case I could understand such an attitude at his age, though my father was much more difficult. One had to wonder about his childhood and the fact that he had lived all this time without changing. My son spent all of his time in the home with earphones on. That would have been put up with for a while in hopes that time might make clear to him that he would have to contribute in some meaningful way to life in the family. However, he immediately began, when outside of the house to find activities that endangered the family. Relationships with other children in various sorts of destructive moods and sources for recreational drugs.

Thus, I had to cut short his visit and send him back to Seattle, which was undoubtedly his goal. I didn't feel it responsible of me to risk my family for his salvation, especially since he was utterly unreceptive to any efforts I made.

Before long it also became clear that my fears regarding my father were also well founded and I had to move him to a nursing home. He resisted faintly, but knew he had no realistic choices. Father didn't last very long in nursing care. He contracted influenza and died. My older sister came for the funeral, though very little emotion was attached to it.

My son's condition was so commonly reported in the media, it presented no special wonder. I knew it resulted primarily from the divorce, but knowing the genesis of a problem doesn't always provide any sense of a method of overcoming it. In this case, time was needed and the hope that his natural gifts would see him through. I continued to send him gifts on special occasions as a means of reminding him of the potentiality of a relationship with no reciprocity until he reached age 18, at which time I concluded that he should make his own way until he changed his mind.

Some time prior to this I found myself summoned to Seattle to see my daughter, who had also entered into a rebellious state of mind and after getting into sufficient trouble to gain the attention of the authorities found herself in a halfway house for troubled teenagers. I visited her there, in the presence of some kind of therapist, for the purpose of allowing her to curse me for several minutes, after which I departed at the suggestion of the authorities and returned to my home.

All of this is rather easily traced back to my ex wife's determination that she was able to and should maintain her own individuality within the marriage relationship to the point of questioning the motives and intentions of her husband. This sets up an adversarial relationship not conducive to tranquillity or the stability needed for child rearing unless the husband is willing to assume a passive posture. Presumably she became convinced of this from feminist propaganda. It may work in some cases, but presumes good judgment on the part of the woman, obviously not one of my ex wife's strengths. Anyway, it led me to wonder what could be at the bottom of feminism. Since in practice it was so destructive, was that its motive, or was that only a side effect?

Eventually my daughter found her way to a seminar produced by an inspirational believer in the value of positive thinking, which convinced her to try this approach. She became utterly positive about every aspect of her life and devoted to smiles and good cheer. I was very doubtful but it seemed to work for her, so I wasn't going to react negatively. Before long she established a permanent relationship with a divorced man and finally we were all invited to their wedding, which they organized on their own. Soon after, my first grandchild was born.

On the job front, my hopes for a permanent home were dashed when I discovered that I had a personality conflict at my current place of employment. I found that I required respect, which I had taken for granted at earlier places of employment and which I got too little of here. I therefore left for another job, which also didn't work and then left for yet another. This place, a startup, was to my liking, but after completing the project for which they hired me, they underwent a downturn in business and concluded I was too expensive to retain. By this time I had forced my salary above what my credentials called for and I found no further opportunity in Silicon Valley and determined for a number of reasons that a major change was called for.

My mother had communicated to me a wish that I would see my way clear at some time for a return to Oxford, as it would be a help for them in their declining years. Then I spun out on the freeway at rush hour, narrowly missing a bad accident and that crystallized my feeling that life in the fast lane was becoming too dangerous. I therefore decided to attempt the move to the south with no prospects at all in sight. I determined that the sale of the house would provide time to return to school for an advanced degree and if we eliminated all debt and lived frugally, perhaps I could make a place for myself at my alma mater. The idea of country life had, by this time become a powerful attraction to me.

Chapter 7

Oxford

My wife and I drove, caravan style to Oxford, stopping at her mother's home in Colorado. I drove a pickup truck with the two dogs in the back while she drove the car with our son switching back and forth from time to time. We stayed in camper parks after leaving Colorado. We had shipped our furniture.

On arrival in Oxford we stayed with my parents for a short time, until we found a suitable place to rent. Mother had actually located it prior to our arrival and it was a great choice, meeting all of my requirements, though I was rather taken aback to see how run down it was. None the less, the price was right, and nobody else lived within sight. It had its own well and septic tank and was located six miles from town.

I immediately interviewed the leading professors in the Department of Computer Science and determined what would be required for a master's degree in their department and then enrolled. I also expressed interest in working as some sort of assistant and was given a job grading papers. Very little income, but it was a start and anything I got, I wouldn't have to take from the proceeds of the house sale. The house had sold rapidly, though not for as much as I had hoped.

Since I had been exposed to and in some cases worked extensively with every subject covered by the degree program, I didn't have much doubt about succeeding and determined to make every effort to get a 4.0 gpa.

It soon became apparent that the house we were living in was too small, and contained elderly subsystems throughout. There was no central heating/cooling, the plumbing was decayed, the lighting was only adequate, no grounding of electrical wiring was included, there were only 1200 square feet in the entire house. None the less, the location was ideal and the house could be fixed since it was basically sound. I soon decided we could live more frugally yet if we bought the house and quickly settled upon a price with the owner, who lived in a house he had recently built near by. We paid cash so as to maintain our cash flow at the optimum, given the circumstances.

We then immediately set about upgrading the house as well as we could using only our own labor and purchasing only minor hardware items like faucets and paint. I also began mowing the large lawn and repairing it. The previous owner had been given to digging it up for some reason, and dropping hay bales in the holes. The well house was in an advanced stage of decay and would eventually have to be replaced. It also turned out that the house was infested by a particularly vicious family of fleas, and had to be fumigated once we discovered the source of the welts on our bodies. This was, of course, a dramatic change from our upscale 2500 square foot, deep pile carpeted, cathedral ceilinged home in San Jose, but it was comfortable and had a warm homey quality that our San Jose home had lacked.

Politically, I had become very conservative after my conversion and so was enjoying the tenure of Ronald Reagan as president. This produced some tension between me and the ultra liberal university of course, but in the interests of pragmatism I avoided discussing it much. I did however find a kindred spirit in the form of a retired Marine Corps Colonel, who was an instructor in the department and also held in check his disapproval of the liberalism of the school. This relationship would become very beneficial to me in time.

Before long, I also found myself instructing underclassmen in the department. I was quite nervous about this prospect because of my experiences with stage fright, but discovered that it wasn't much of a problem in this environment. Extemporaneous speaking isn't the same as reciting memorized lines. I had mixed feelings about teaching. The courses I was assigned were very basic and didn't require much preparation on my part, but I just didn't feel at home in this role. I think I did a pretty good job and was given progressively more difficult courses to teach, but, I found it vaguely disquieting to be constantly on stage, as it were.

My relationship with the Colonel continued to improve and I came to find out he was in line for a job as business manager of a new research facility soon to be established at the university. I immediately began to wonder if there might not be a role for me there.

We decided to upgrade our house in a major way and started looking for a builder and designing what we thought we wanted. This led to a plan that doubled the floor space and added three new rooms. We also wanted central air and heat and I wanted a front porch while my wife wanted a bay window, so we incorporated all of these features in the plan and I drew on my computer as accurate a representation of it as I could. After discussing it with anyone that would listen we found that the son of a neighbor was a builder and we thought that that would be as safe as anything. We were anxious to hold the cost to a minimum and he was also used to this sort of contract and knew how to cut corners.

He was willing to work from my drawing and before long had a crew on site and had begun the job. I arranged for a loan to pay for it since I was nervous about eliminating our savings without a permanent job. The bank was also nervous about loaning me the money in those circumstances but they finally agreed. We, of course, were deeply involved in every aspect of the construction and I completely replaced the plumbing in the process. We were determined to arrive at some reliable situation with the water well, but it was a long time getting there. There were actually two wells, one professionally done with a high rust content and one an amateur effort with less rust, and an ancient pump which froze and broke before long. Our neighbors were also running their newly built home off our deep well, which had a reliable immersed pump.

Our son had, with some difficulty, adapted to the local schools. The teachers required a much more polite demeanor than he was used to in California and he had to get used to the southern relationship to African Americans, which he found difficult. When he got into a fight with a black girl, I was alarmed and asked how he would have responded if she had cried, "rape!". He didn't know how to respond to that and I hoped it instilled in him some sense of reality and fear. We bought a small boat and I taught him to fish at the local reservoir.

Eventually I was awarded my degree and was also able, with some luck to maintain the 4.0 gpa I had hoped for. I had by now become a regular instructor teaching a full load of intermediate courses of fair difficulty. The pay was inadequate and by now my friend had taken the job as business manager of the new research organization. The specialty was physical acoustics. I asked him if there was any opportunity to do some contract programming or system management for them and he said he would ask the director.

The director was willing and before long I found myself exploring graphics workstations with a view to making representations of acoustic energy in graphic form. The scientist in charge of the research area I worked in had bought a medium scale computer for the purpose and it became clear he needed a system manager for it, since there was some lack of confidence in his student assistant. So, I did everything I could to make myself seem an essential part of the proper exploitation of an expensive computer.

This, it turned out happened in the nick of time since the university had hired a new department chairman in Computer Science and he was unhappy to have a person with such weak credentials as mine teaching in it. There was also a feminist in the group with some animosity towards me, whose credentials were even weaker than mine, but she was the wife of a professor. So, after one semester of overlap, I succeeded in getting a full time commitment at the lab as a contract employee. This was completely insecure, of course, but I thought it would last for a while.

By now, the new house construction was complete and it had turned out very well until it came time for finish work inside. The work there was incompetent, but the money was almost gone and I decided it would do for a while. We could always improve it in the future if and when more money became available.

The research lab was in the process of having a completely new facility constructed with federal funds made available by our very powerful member of congress. After a year of contract work, I determined to try to convert to a permanent employee and asked my friend the business manager if he would take it up with the director. He did, and I was hired with the concurrence of the research scientist I was working for, who agreed to underwrite half my salary. Now I was making about half my salary in Silicon Valley, instead of the third I had been making while teaching. With the reduced cost of living, mainly in the form of mortgage payments, we had a workable budget after only about three years of effort. And, during those three years, only in the first year had we been totally dependent on our savings.

This marked a new phase in my employment. Moving into the new facility involved establishing a presence on the internet, which had not been available to us before. This meant keeping all of the employees on the network too, and establishing an email capability. All of this was quite new to me.

At about this time, my stepfather died from cancer. There was a trying time attempting to get him suitable care as he declined but it was managed. The funeral was a pleasant experience, he had achieved some recognition both locally and nationally for his music. My mother had some difficulty with the transition and after a period of mourning departed to try a life with my sisters in the east.

The first thing to appear on the network was the News. This system appeared to be a conversation between interested people about every subject that can be thought of. On tasting it here and there for a few days, I found the level of discourse to be pretty low and the really unique thing about it seemed to be that participants felt no need to restrain the conversation within the bounds of politeness. The language being used was of the coarsest that can be imagined. I found a few of these conversations being moderated and that seemed to eliminate the impolite at the level of coarseness, but it didn't improve the generally impolite nature of commentary or criticism. I lost interest in it.

The next thing I found on the network were concentrations of photographs of everything that could be imagined. The quality varied quite a lot and there was censorship to keep out pornography according to the definition of pornography held by the site manager, apparently. Soon complaints within the academic community appeared stating that pornography was trickling in and if something wasn't done about it a flood could be expected.

The real area of interest for us though, was email, so I established a mail server on one of our computers. The software was free and one could download it off the network. Then it had to be compiled on the machine in which it was run and then properly configured. Soon we had a reliable mail server available to anyone in the department. This meant that the machine had to stay running and we couldn't afford to do experiments that might cause it to fail.

Then new software appeared from NSCA that established something called the World Wide Web. This was actually a server and a viewer with an associated language. The language was intended to allow anyone to establish an internet site, or home page containing information of interest that the user wished to make available to the public. The server managed the data and the viewer was provided to anyone so that they could look.

This was the first really new computing idea to occur for a long time. email was an old idea though it had never been implemented so widely before. I began to look at home pages as they appeared. One of the first was a site called Yahoo which allowed one to search the WWW for a subject of interest. I began to think that, perhaps I should make a home page to contain my writing.

For some time I had been reacting to the news by writing letters to the editor of the university paper. My views weren't very politically correct since I was a conservative and sometimes, especially when I commented on feminism, the reaction was intense. Once the feminists even demonstrated against my column. These letters led me to write short essays for my own amusement and they had begun to accumulate, so I began to think that I could make a home page that included all of them along with the short book I had written years before on the conflict between masculinism and feminism.

Also, there began to appear on the internet, sites that were devoted to discussions of politics and other subjects. I found one, called Town Hall, in which the discussion was polite and at a level sufficient to make it interesting, so I decided to participate. I immediately found that, though I was conservative as were most participants, my views were generally as unacceptable to them as they were to the feminists on campus.

I decided to go ahead with my home page. It looked like a technology I would need to understand to answer questions from my users.

As I began to construct my home page I was also interacting with several people on Town Hall. One of those, a woman in Houston, found my writing on my Home Page interesting and informative for her because of my description of feminism as an ideology that was in conflict with her religion at a very basic level. I think, in her view, I could provide her with further arguments bolstering her Christian ideology and weakening the arguments of feminists. As a result, she read all of my material as it appeared and questioned me via email on some of the more abstract points. This was very helpful for me and allowed me to refine many of my ideas, which led to more and more essays.

I found this relationship strange in many ways. It seemed unusual to try to relate to a person whom could not be visualized. The relationship took what I thought to be a wrong turn from time to time and even ended, temporarily, once. As I became more of a feminist, I lost value as a strengthener of her ideology, but the relationship continues for other reasons, not completely clear to me.

Chapter 8

Family

By now, my children were all grown and doing admirably. My daughter had made a success of her marriage and had two daughters. She lives near Seattle with her family and successfully manages both family and a career in a law office. Her husband has turned out to be a very stable family man, and they have also apparently managed to weather their first marital crisis, always the real test of a marriage.

My stepson has graduated from my alma mater and accepted a commission in the Air Force. He likes his job and informs me he hopes to extend his service.

My wife and I recently attended the marriage of my son to a young and attractive Korean/American. She is training for an MD. My son manages a fast food outlet and maintains he will eventually complete a formal education, though that is a distant goal. The marriage was very pleasant, though trying as I was thrown back into contact with my ex wife and her brother. Many years have passed and our relationship seems to have matured quite a lot.

My wife and I continue to have a mainly happy and fulfilling relationship. It has become clear, over the years that we are opposites in many ways. She is very feminine and I am very masculine, with all that that implies. She pursues and values most, relationships and I, understanding, which leads to conflict from time to time but nothing very threatening.

My wife's mother has moved to the south to be near us. Our relationship has matured into one of mutual respect, if lacking in warmth. It is a great challenge for my wife to care for her appropriately as she approaches 100.

My mother has returned to live in Oxford too. My relationship with her, never very good, hasn't improved much. She fails to understand me and I see that she can never change. She was treated poorly by feminism and never was able to master it.

Chapter 9

Home Page

The first step in the construction of my home page was to learn the language, called html or hypertext mark up language. I found it to be typical of older text processing systems I had come across over the years. In general, one writes in English using special escape sequences to specify formatting options like using a bracketed b for bold. In addition special escape sequences are provided for accessing other code anywhere on the Internet. This means that, at any point in the text it is possible to insert highlighted text that can transfer the reader to any other site on the Internet where supporting information can be found. It is also possible to include pictorial information, sound, and even movies. Special coding sequences allow the viewer to enter information which can then be saved by one’s home page in disk files. Many special formatting options allow a home page to duplicate any arrangement that one might find, for example in a magazine.

As I began to construct my home page, it became clear to me that organization would be crucial. A home page must be logically organized or it will end up only confusing the reader. I decided that a hierarchical organization was the most clear and so worked with that idea in mind. I would have an introductory page, followed by a map capable of transferring the reader directly to any document, rather like a table of contents. After that would come a page identifying all of the major sections that would transfer the reader to the section of interest on demand. Then a table of contents identifying each individual document within the section and then the actual document.

I then thought of the information I wished to present, currently my book contrasting feminism and masculinism and a group of a hundred or so essays. I decided it would be well to write an outline that organized my thoughts as presented in the already existing material in a sequential format. This would allow a reader to grasp the general meaning of the material in a shortened and straight forward format without actually reading it. Then, if he found it interesting he could move forward to the essays which I would organize according to subject and finally to my book.

On rereading my book I found that my argument in essence identified a spectrum on the left end of which was feminism characterized by feminine values: chaos and passivity and on the right end of which was masculinism characterized by its values: order and creativity. This, I saw, was the basic realization I had had several years before, as a result of my experiences and my study of Jungian psychology as I mapped it onto the rise of feminism in the West. I also saw that it was capable of explaining the ideological meanderings of humanity from the beginning. I then decided to represent that fact graphically and to place all of the main religions on the spectrum to make it as clear as possible and to rename my book The Theory of Ideology. A theory because nothing of a purely spiritual nature can really be proven. All one can do is to demonstrate that it has internal consistency. The result can be found here.

After that, I decided that to demonstrate the validity of my theory I should review current events in terms of my theory and place these reviews in a separate section by that name. The result of this effort can be found here. As the reviewing went on, I became aware that many of the reviews were on the subject of human overpopulation of the earth. So, after several of these reviews accumulated, I decided they should occupy a separate section entitled Metaphilosophy. I chose this name because it seemed to me that standard philosophies were incapable of dealing with this subject because it hadn’t become clear that overpopulation was a problem until the current century arrived. There had been one discussion of the problem in the last century by Malthus, but it hadn’t been paid serious attention until this century.

The next realization occurred when I noticed that many of the criminal events that I reviewed could be explained by the Jungian Theory of Complexes, so I decided to rewrite his theory taking into account my theory and to place this in yet another section called A Theory of Complexes. A number of the reviews seemed to involve scientific speculation, so I created another new section by that name. Finally, I decided I would like to reconsider the notion of Utopia.

This then was the contents of my home page for some time. I had, by now become a feminist myself and began to see that I was steadily becoming more liberal. I had long wondered about what the effect of feminism would be on religion. It was clear that feminism had basic conflicts with what in the west is known as The Old Testament of the Bible. These conflicts are most notable in the requirement that humans grow in numbers and dominate nature, but also in the rejection of homosexuals. I had also concluded that Christ could be seen as the first feminist in the modern era in the west, but that there were serious problems with the Pauline description of family life in The New Testament book entitled First Corinthians. This led me to investigate what is being called New Age religion.

Most of this material is thinly disguised mysticism, but some of it resolved into a new appreciation of Eastern Philosophy, especially Buddhism and Taoism. I found Taoism to be a near perfect prescription for passivity and pacifism. There was also an emphasis on Paganism, especially in the form of Greek Mythology and then there was the scientific Gaia Hypothesis. I decided to collect all of these trends in a new section entitled religion. With that, we have arrived at the present.

I am now dealing with retirement. This is a difficult transition for a man. The life of a man seems to me to start with training before entering a competitive phase and at retirement the competition disappears. For the natural world, this means death. So, for our unnatural world, creativity is the only answer. I have never understood the cultural belief in the postponement of death. I understand it ideologically and I guess people combine that with the desire to survive and endlessly propagandize themselves about the desirability of long life, when to any casual observer the quality of life obviously declines constantly as one ages. My personal hope is to die in bed on my seventieth birthday. I would be inclined to warn my readers that the manufacture of heroism through saving lives is ill conceived and as with any fantasy assumed to be truth, will lead to negative consequences.

I don’t mean by this to suggest that I believe in suicide, though I can believe that that becomes desirable in some circumstances. My perceptions of the psyche suggest that it wouldn’t be possible unless it is realistic. I am only suggesting that the artificial postponement of death is a doubtful enterprise.
Family