Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Whassup?
Heathrow Airport: Mind-Blowingly Vast
A few days ago we came home from a trip to England—to the British Psychodrama Association’s annual conference where Allee and I presented the keynote workshop—and again came through Heathrow Airport. This blog is about the recognition that Heathrow is not only the 4th busiest airport in the world, but the first ranked in the […]
Heavens to Murgatroyd
This old essay circulating on the internet many years ago, was sent by an old, old friend: Remember the name, Murgatroyd. Would you believe the email spell checker did not recognize the word Murgatroyd? Heavens to Murgatroyd! Lost Words from our childhood: Words gone as fast as the buggy whip! Sad really! The […]
Hello and Good-Bye
I’ve just written birthday cards to friends and relatives and I realized that these may be among the last few score or hundred that I ever write. If you’re not in email contact with my descendants, you’re “out of it,” literally. Postal mail, greeting cards, are going the way of penguins and parrots. It may […]
History of Medicine: Now Playing
Thinking about my medical school class reunion, I flash on the branching of the Great Story, the history of the cosmos , out of which come the history of the evolution of humanity, and with it, – the history of consciousness evolution, which branches in many directions, such as the history of various endeavors, farming, […]
Hypertrophic Technolog-osis
(This is a neologism, a made-up word, describing the problems of those who interface with technology. Hypertrophic is a big word meaning over-grown.) I have a friend who, though using handheld devices for a fair length of time, may not have been all that familiar with all options. For example: What is the real meaning […]
I Blog
I don’t have anything else to do; I’ve done it enough for almost 80 years. Now I want to sit back (literally) and comment on it, and few people may care. Maybe you. So I’m doing it for you. I realize that we are socially embedded creatures who need at least a figurative if not […]
I Get To!
I feel privileged to be trusted with doing the laundry and the dishes. These chores appeal to a simple part of me that express my willingness to help. But I also get to do so much more! – sing songs that I’ve loved from childhood, such as “It’s a Grand Night for Singing,” etc. […]
If I Was Smarter…
In the olden days, when I was young…. Well, now that I think of it, when I was middle-aged, too. Indeed, a couple of years ago I still was making mistakes that I don’t make as often nowadays. Am I getting smarter? And if I would have been smarter, what would have come of it? […]
Inanition
This word is defined as a loss of vitality. It can be from malnutrition, perhaps mixed with physical exhaustion, but the term also speaks to a state of vitality—or the loss of momentum thereof—of an individual, group, organization, or even political dynasty. The word seems fit as I notice trends in culture, certain fashions dying […]
Krazy Kat Redux
This summer Patrick McDonnell’s comic strip did a take-off on George Herriman’s comic strip, Krazy Kat, for those who might not have gotten the classical allusion. There are so many of these. I pride myself on recognizing many that may have been relevant to the educated class in my era, but then I realize that […]
Life Enlargement
We have in fact been enlarging our awareness of what’s happening through international news, the internet, astronomy, microscopy, imaging, travel writing, etc. Now I want to make a category for it! The idea that we can enlarge our lives through what was psychodrama—I call using the method for fun and not psycho-therapy “action explorations”—is here […]
Limitedness in Epistemology
I have been lucky enough to encounter a fair number of deep philosophers who consider the way the world is, and I have also developed my notions. Beyond the contents of the notions or myths or theories about which I guarantee you we can never know, there is the problem of epistemology: i.e., how do […]
Little Paradigm Shifts
I was thinking about mailing boxes of books and realized that scanning books on has become almost cheaper than mailing overseas. This floored me, as I realized that electronic copy technology has overtaken mail. Shipping costs make it relevant to compare what it might cost to ship versus scanning-on and emailing the copies. It occurred […]
Living Subjectively
Once again I have been reminded of the fact that we all live subjectively, and we select out and resonate to songs, nature, whatever in idiosyncratic ways. This is great fodder for the existentialists: No one can truly rise to absolutely complete empathy with another, even if we try. While we may become truly close, […]
Lolling About
What a great activity: Lolling about, sort of going La la la la, like a silly. This is a perfectly plausible form of leisure, but there’s an art to it, maybe. I mean, what’s good lolling and what’s better, or even great lolling? These are frontiers to be investigated, but I fear they might not […]
Miscommunications
“I know you believe you understand what you think I said but I’m not sure that what you heard was what I meant!” (I encountered this line on a button back in the early 1970s when lots of slogans were put on lots of buttons. T-Shirt printing wasn’t so easy then.) What we say that […]
More About My Brain-Cell Projection
My friend Allan wrote about the picture of the cell shown here on my blog a few days ago: “Hmmm. If it’s a single cell, it’s got a lot of inclusions. Think supercomputer with each cell an organic integrated circuit module. That should push your brain components into the yantabyte range of memory and storage […]
More on the “War Against Drugs”
I’ve noticed a number of recent articles in current journals—Time, National Geographic, etc.—that speak to the argument for the legalization of marijuana and the counter-push, the “War” against drugs. Tobacco and Alcohol are excluded from this “war,” please note, in spite of the extensive damage they do to health. In a recent book titled the […]
More On This Blog, and On my Website
My son has been transferring more of my website web-pages onto this blog, so you can have more fun browsing around. There are also lots of other papers and cartoons and such still on my website. There’s even another related website that is a companion to my anthology, Interactive & Improvisational Drama. Check it out. […]
Moreno and Jung: Confabulating
An acquaintance of mine is writing about J. L. Moreno (the creator of psycho-drama) and Carl G. Jung, the founder of analytic psychology. It might be more correct to say that she has written about their associated theoretical system and how these systems have evolved over the years. It should be noted that Jung emphasized […]
Movin’!
ll has been a-flurry! We sold our house in Sun City Texas and are planning to move to mid-coastal California, San Luis Obispo, half-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The railroad stops there, and we hope to use it more. So much “stuff” to pack. It’s our precious treasures! It’s our crap! It’s mixed. […]
My Dharma
It occurred to me that I’m twenty rows back, supporting those in front. I’m still part of the 0.01% of the vanguard of evolution, at least in this part of the cosmos but yet not the leaders. Nor do I need to be, nor want to be. Higher conscious-ness than mine carries with it more […]
My Offspringing Kidlings
I was feeling apologetic about my inability to really get into kids, stimulated by a comparison with Allee (my wife) and my daughter, who are more people people. Allee said, Your writings are you “offspring-ings” and I later had the thought, “Verily, the are my “kid-lings.” (Well, I didn’t say verily, but you get the […]
Mysteries in Nature
There was a lovely scene in our back meadow this morning. A little fawn scampered up to his mother and began to nurse. It took about ten minutes! After about four minutes the mommy ewe reached around and liked the baby’s bottom. What’s that about? Meanwhile the fawn is eagerly licking and thrusting its head […]
New Information
In the olden days it was sufficient to learn new information. We were sort of expected not to play with it. But nowadays the thing with information is that many bits invite a shift from assimilation to accommodation—which means that to really “get” the new information, we must creatively adapt it to our interests, needs, […]