Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Autobiographical
Those Were the Days
Listening to a Sinatra tape on my portable tape recorder—there are some of ‘em still around!—and thinking some smug thoughts! No doubt folks who liked songs before the 1920s and after the 1980s have a nice repertoire and good memories—I think—but the mid-20th century was blessed with evocative and poetic songs. Oh, of course, some […]
To Blog or Not to Blog
To paraphrase Hamlet’s soliloquy, in the play by Shakespeare, but things are different today: I have become more aware of “blogging,” which is another way of publishing my random thoughts or writing. What ego! What conceit! to think that anyone out there would care in the least about “random thoughts,” no matter how well-put. To […]
To Dance a Thousand Flames and Call Them “Self”
This phrase and picture came at me some years ago and re-presented itself recently in light of a growing awareness that I serve as a vehicle for innumerable roles. Some of these include dishwasher-guy (a not-particularly-super-hero), amanuensis (I just take dictation), encourager of others (often international students), etc. The point of course is that “Self” […]
Tooting Your Own Horn
“To think: I did all that…” a fragment from Frank Sinatra’s theme song, My Way. A little of this—maybe 7 – 12%—is good. More begins to become sort of “narcis-sistic.” Less is too deferential. More is tiresome for others; 20% is annoying; and if you toot your own horn at 30% or more you become […]
Turn the World Around
Harry Belafonte co-wrote a song and performed it on the televised Muppet Show in the late 1980s: “Turn the World Around.” (You can see it on YouTube.) “We come from the mountain,” the song goes. “Living on the mountain; Go back to the mountain, turn the world around!” Then the song repeats for fire instead […]
Tweetum-Tweetum
I think that’s the call of a Cardinal-bird. A walk on a late Spring morning, with Allee, who is recovering from an appendectomy. (It was done with one of those little ‘scopes that go in through the belly button.) Wow. In the olden days she would have had to stay in the hospital a couple […]
Two-Thirds Human!
Yes, imagine that I am indeed 2/3 human! More, I’ve established credentials, so that makes me okay. All this is to compensate for the part that most folks don’t understand: I’m 1/3 elf. Now let’s just say that I have imagined myself in this fictional but meaningful story. I would daresay that whatever we imagine […]
Unaffiliated Idealism
If I had to give a name to my “religion,” this would be it. I realized only recently that I did indeed have a spiritual path as a teenager: “unaffiliated idealism.” (I had no name for it then, though.) As a lad I collected and cut out nickel-priced used copies of Readers’ Digests, and similar […]
Unconscious Depths
I was reminded of the depth of subtle programming in a gentle and amusing way, by realizing that the persistence of songs in my mind—I think they’re called “earworms”—in the week following my participation as one of over a hundred people in our Sun City Chorus singing our Christmas Concert. The songs carry on, after […]
Understanding Understanding
Reading in the March 2014 Smithsonian an article about Carl Sagan, on p.71, he says, “I think I’m able to explain things because understanding wasn’t entirely easy for me. Some things the most brilliant students were able to see instantly I had to work to understand. I can remember what I had to do to […]
Unfolding Consciousness
.Consciousness is progressing gradually, unfolding, ideas building on each other. Things take time and their processes operate on multiple levels and in multiple dimensions. Much of my work has gone in the direction of facilitating this unfolding consciousness, at whatever pace. A bit of encouragement here, a boost there. It’s a very slight intervention I […]
Upon Reflection
I’ve done a lot, learned a lot, loved and been loved a lot. I like the words of the song, “My Way,” which was Frank Sinatra’s theme song, though for me I have to confess that it should often have been called “Thy Way.” I was forced to do some things I didn’t really want […]
Waking Up a Little More
I’ve been waking up to ways I’ve been asleep or veiled in ignorance or self-deception, and one of the things I’ve woken up to is the idea that lots of other people are as caught up in illusions as I’ve been. Everyone has a somewhat different combination of thousands of illusions and self-deceptions. Digging out […]
We Got Off Easy
It’s not just watching television! As grandparents grow older, there’s hosting family in trips out to eat, or at home. Clothes for grandchildren. Kids who are in financial straits or crisis. Paying off cars. Worrying about kids’ family’s debts. Attending sports, graduations—it goes on and on, filling one’s whole life. In our case, we have […]
We Had It Easy!
First, there’s a funny skit by Monty Python’s Flying Circus where four guys try to out-brag how tough they had it as kids. As a child of parents who lived through the depression, a common complaint we heard our parents make was “You kids have it easy! We had it tough!” School was more demanding, […]
Whassup (Early 2018)?
I’m doing my last edited book on non-psychotherapeutic applications of psycho-dramatic methods, which are really just the application of the technology of “enhanced” simulations to psychotherapy. The enhancement comes from the technique of the “double” (or “voice over”) which allows the audience to know what the role players are thinking or saying to themselves. I’m […]
Whassup in Spring, 2015
This is an autobiographical note. It occurred to me to email friends and suggest that they pick up on my blog, starting with this. I’m having having cataracts removed and lens replaced! This used to be a grueling procedure, having to lay still face down for days, maybe over a week at a time—that what […]
Whassup?
Of late I’ve noticed: muscles are contracting; the earth is rotating (duck!) ; neurons are depolarizing (firing) : stomach and intestinal contents gurgle (in medical terms,t that’s called “borborygmi”) ; air is circulating ; fluids are flowing ; there is beauty being experienced ; …and pain ; chemicals are reacting ; hearts are beating ; […]
What Keeps Me Going:
First thing is singing, often an improvised marching tune, or anything. It might be a simple note that I begin to vary and watch what begins to come. The notes are then amplified into a basic tune. Be-boo-bop, no particular words. Occasionally I might insert the words to a spiritual chant, such as Om Namah […]
What’s Up This Month
Oh, my, sometimes I think my mind is like an artist’s studio, an “atelier,” with various papers or books, presentations being prepared or books someday to write or revise, blogs to post, papers to complete on my website. It’s not one thing after another, it’s a little bit of this, and then, now that I […]
When I Was Twenty-Nine
As I did for the age of 17 (on another webpage), I continued to doodle. At 29 I had entered my post-medical school specialty training in psychiatry and there were seminars, class lectures for the twelve of us (or thereabouts, as I dimly remember) at Stanford University Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry. Looking back, the lectures were […]
Where is Adam?
A friend asked me this: I think she was trying to “feel an authentic connection.” Ah, not easy to respond. Here are some free associations from the moving “pool table” of my mind: I am an illusion, a structure of a life, a sprinkle of narcissism that really functions to coordinate my many parts of […]
Where the Weird Things Are
When my son David was little he had a fear of monsters for a while. To treat it—this was when he was about half-past-2—we role-played a book he enjoyed, Where the Wild Things Are. I worked on the key element of the book, looking into their yellow eyes without blinking once, and saying firmly, “Be […]
Who Am I?
I have a very diversified portfolio of roles. I’m thinking of reorganizing my website to reflect this, because there is a gradual decline in the degrees of investment of time and energy given to the more professional roles and a gradual increase in the levels of activity in more playful and life-savoring roles. At present […]
Why I Don’t Go to Movies
(Well, sometimes I do, but it takes me days or more to get the stuff out of my brain. On occasion, I want that stuff in my mind, but mainly not. Otherwise, they all seem like variations on this chart I saw in Time Magazine 3/7/16 p. 31 (created by John Atkinson, Wrong Hands […]