11 Years Ago Today: Spiritual jocularity

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 22, 2010.]

Mert really does sound almost exactly like Charlie Thomas. He called again yesterday, to thank me. He and his friend have reconnected by telephone and he is happy.
    “Morris,” he said, “do you believe that the Good Lord works in mysterious ways?”
    “No, Mert, I don’t believe any of that.”
    Even though [Mert] then said, “Ha! I don’t believe that!,” it’s true. I don’t believe it.

But Mert’s question made me realize that the texture of Wednesday (and of much of the next two days—and perhaps of today again) is in some ways similar to that of the days of my Youie Summer (1989). But with one saving, essential difference.
    In 1989, I believed that the things that were happening were “signs from UIE,” or Universal Intelligent Energy¹ (pronounced YOU-ie [“or YAH-weh?” my son suggested], and aka “God”). Now, I don’t believe that; now, I can just “be spiritual” naturally (if my friend Bill is right in labeling me so; perhaps it just means that I’m able to accept things as they are, and laugh about them) without any supernatural entities clothed by magical thinking.
    I liked to say “Praise Youie!” If I were to say it now, it would be ironically, and also perhaps a bit self-reverently, out of charity for the sad, manic person I was that summer.
    But in not very long, it won’t make any difference what I was then or what I am now. Or any of us after we’ve been dead a while.
_______________

1. In late spring of 1989, I had been reading Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, in which he of course referred to Einstein’s famous equation. Let the following excerpt from Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis (which is included in Hitchens’s Portable Atheist) serve to make the connection:

   ...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc², relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.

One Year Ago Today: Unique new evidence for divine intervention

Remember: “God” backwards spells “Dog”

By Moristotle

[The first official “poop patrol” report for the Collington Farms development in Mebane, North Carolina, was published on December 22, 2017. During the year ending today, Siegfried and I have collected approximately 1,144 piles of poop. The number is approximate because errors are inevitable, and it is occasionally unclear whether one pile resulted from only one poop, or whether two piles were produced by a single poop.]

By the half-way point of our walk this morning (about 3/4 of a mile into it), Siegfried and I had found (and I had collected) seven piles of poop (presumably dog poop). Hot damn! We had just tied the record set only a few days ago. It had more often been four or five piles, sometimes six.

Ten Years Ago Today: Realism...or magical optimism?

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 24, 2008, without the image.]

This morning [ten years ago] I read in the New York Times a very short op-ed piece, “The Power of Negative Thinking,” by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ms. Ehrenreich assails the pie-in-the-sky optimism that I myself subscribed to for many years:

As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen.

On the eighth day...

This turd is not a local finding, but “a strange
sort of copros” that recently appeared on a
driveway in Los Gatos, CA, whose owner [of the
driveway] sent me the photo to see, “given
[my] expertise,” whether I could “id the
originator” – I could not.

Of the Poop Patrol

By Moristotle

I don’t think I knew, when I published “Unique new evidence for divine intervention” on December 22, that “the Poop Patrol” might become a daily thing. But for one week and a day, anyway, it has, and I have filed daily reports on both the official and the unofficial Facebook group pages (official by virtue of the approval and moderation of the community’s homeowners association’s board of directors).

Unique new evidence for divine intervention

Remember: “God” backwards spells “Dog”

By Moristotle

By the half-way point of our walk this morning (about 3/4 of a mile into it), Siegfried and I had found (and I had collected) seven piles of poop (presumably dog poop). Hot damn! We had just tied the record set only a few days ago. It had more often been four or five piles, sometimes six.

Thor’s Day: Delivery

Youie summer

By Morris Dean

[Originally published on July 3, 2006]

During weeks of manic inspiration in the summer of 1989, I received spiritual revelations so striking that I began to keep a journal to record them. Their significance seemed to demand that I share them with others. But a sad technical job at a large corporation felt at odds with that calling, leaving me only an hour or two out of each day at home with my wife to inscribe my insights.

Is today Saturday?

Today's the sixth day of retirement, and every one of them has seemed like Saturday. It's a good thing, except I'm never sure which column to take my pills from.
    Today is Saturday, isn't it?

Speaking of memory, I spent about an hour this morning going through most of the rest of the boxes I brought home from the office. One of the items I found was my leather-binder collection of congratulatory letters written to me and presented on the occasion of my 25th anniversary at IBM (January 16, 1992), where I remained another five years.
    I hadn't looked at them for twenty years. The comments that struck me the most were thanks for my cheerfulness, helping people, sharing everything, professionalism. They were, by and large, of the same sort I have received lately from my colleagues at the University. Very touching. But sad, too—not because I'm retired now and can't be cheerful or helpful or sharing or professional any more. I can still be all that, and I'm sure I will be, for though I may have become a bit cynical over the past few years (I think it's true), I'm basically who I am and can't change the fact that I'm cheerful, optimistic, helpful, etc.
    But being reminded how much other people appreciate these things has made me more thoughtful, more aware of an excellent reason to be cheerful and so on. That is, aside from the immediate personal satisfaction I derive from it all.

Now, after my second retirement, I'm more aware than ever that what matters most is our present moments and what we do and who we are in each of them, one by one. I hugged my wife when I came in from the garage and told her so. I almost wept.
    I've consigned all those letters of twenty years ago to the recycling bin (along with scores and scores of letters and postcards from a number of people—including school friends Jon Price, Chuck Smythe, Jim Carney, Bill Silveira, high school teachers Morris Knudsen, Lois Thompson, Al King, sisters Patsy, Flo, Anna, Mary, Mama, cousins Billy Charles Duvall, Lisa Duvall Carter, friends Thom Green, Lucia McKay, Harriet Mabbutt, Sverre Vik, Barry Wright, new Bulgarian relatives Veska & Jordan Ravnopolski, Milka K...as well as several other letter writers whose names didn't even dredge up a face at this point. It was such a walk down memory lane, it hurt after a while.
    Two things are interesting to me about the cache of letters.
    First, what were they doing in my office? I'm still thinking about that one. But I imagine that the answer will provide justification enough for letting go of them now.
     Second, the letters were from roughly the same period, with its 25th Yale Class Reunion in June 1989, Youie Summer, its aftermath of Chronic Fatique Syndrome the following year, our son's marriage and departure for Bulgaria. At times, life has taken its toll of me, and it may be taking a toll now.
    I reckon I'll find out.

11/11/11: The same, palindromic day all over the world

Yes!—at least, it's the same-notated day in North America (month/day/year), Europe (day/month/year), and China (year/month/day). (For a more precise accounting, by country, see Wikipedia.)
    I prefer the Chinese convention for file and folder naming, so much better for sorting reliably by date:

[20]10-01-08
[20]10-11-11
[20]10-12-14
[20]11-01-15
[20]11-03-07
[20]11-08-14
[20]11-11-03
[20]11-11-11

    In North America, the files would sort this way:

01-08-[20]10
01-15-[20]11
03-07-[20]11
08-14-[20]11
11-03-[20]11
11-11-[20]10
11-11-[20]11
12-14-[20]10

    And in Europe, this way:

03-11-[20]11
07-03-[20]11
08-01-[20]10
11-11-[20]10
11-11-[20]11
14-08-[20]11
14-12-[20]10
15-01-[20]11

    Our Chinese predecessors understood sorting.

I'm reminded by this superfluge of 11's that Youie's number, when I was manically besotted with magic and deity, that Summer of '89, was 11. Wouldn't today have been the day to go Youie-manic?
    No, today is as good a day as any not to fall down that rabbit hole. Retain your rationality, young and old.

November 11, 2011,
11 November 2011,
2011 November 11—

they're all the same day on the planet to which we all belong.

By the way [my wife just reminded me], today is the grand opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, located in my Arkansas sister's hometown of Bentonville. WalMart heiress Alice Walton's name is barely mentioned on the museum's website, but she's behind it all, as described in the June 27 New Yorker article, "Alice's Wonderland." 11/11/11! Go, Alice!
_______________
Further reflections on Crystal Bridges

She was suffering from religion

A very strange story (strange even in the weird world of religious belief) came to my attention yesterday.
    It was reported in The Washington Post on March 31, 2009 ("Deal Includes Resurrection Clause," by Dan Morse, with subtitle "Mother to go free if son rises from dead"):

Accepting a plea bargain that her attorney described as unprecedented in American jurisprudence, a 22-year-old Maryland woman yesterday agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of other defendants in the death of her son under the condition that charges against her be dropped if the child rises from the dead.

    She was charged with first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in the death of her son Javon, who was deprived of food and water because he didn't say "amen" before breakfast.
    Even more curious (perhaps) is the fact that, after Javon died,

he was placed on a couch while everyone knelt down and prayed. Ramkissoon [Javon's mother] also danced around her son, prosecutors said. The boy's body was later moved to a back room.
    At one point, two members measured Javon's body and bought a suitcase. Members believed that if the body could travel with them, it could be resurrected at a later date, said Steven Silverman, Ramkissoon's attorney. The group members left the suitcase with a man they had befriended. Police eventually discovered it in his shed in Philadelphia.

    The canny prosecutors tried to protect their part in the plea arrangement by stipulating that

Ramkissoon could not get out of her obligations if she asserted that Javon came back as anything other than himself.
    "This would need to be a Jesus-like resurrection," Margaret Burns, the spokeswoman, said after the hearing. "It cannot be a reincarnation in another object or animal."

I learned of the Ramkissoon case from Sam Harris's latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, which I am currently reading. On p. 158, he comments:

The boundary between mental illness and respectable religious belief can be difficult to discern...Despite the fact that this band of lunatics carried the boy's corpse around in a green suitcase for over a year, awaiting his reincarnation, there is no reason to believe that any of them suffers from a mental illness. It is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.

    Harris had, on p. 157, already put this in the context of what constitutes a delusion:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders...defines "delusion" as a "false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary." Lest we think that certain religious beliefs might fall under the shadow of this definition, the authors exonerate religious doctrines, in principle, in the next sentence: "The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith)" (p. 765)...As any clinician can attest, delusional patients often suffer from religious delusions. And the criterion that a belief be widely shared suggests that a belief can be delusional in one context and normative in another, even if the reasons for believing it are held constant. Does a lone psychotic become sane merely by attracting a crowd of devotees?

     Richard Dawkins, too, for his 2006 book, The God Delusion, was cautioned by the psychiatric profession about his use of the word:

The word "delusion" in my title has disquieted some psychiatrists who regard it as a technical term, not to be bandied about...I need to justify my use of [the word]. The Penguin English Dictionary defines a delusion as "false belief or impression." Surprisingly, the illustrative quotation the dictionary gives is from Phillip E. Johnson: "Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself." Can that be the same Phillip E. Johnson who leads the creationist charge against Darwinism in America today? Indeed it is, and the quotation is, as we might guess, taken out of context. I hope the fact that I have stated as much will be noted, since the same courtesy has not been extended to me in numerous creationist quotations of my work, deliberately and misleadingly taken out of context...The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as "a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder." The first part captures religious faith perfectly. As to whether it is a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion."

For the sake of "full disclosure," I'll tell you that I myself suffered from a religious delusion (involving the deity Universal Intelligent Energy, whom I knew as "Youie") during the summer of 1989, when I was so convinced that I would win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes that the day my name was to be announced that evening on network television (NBC, as I recall) I boxed up all of my personal belongings at IBM so that I could resign and leave quickly the next day.

Fortunately for Ms. Ramkissoon,

If she testifies truthfully against the other defendants...prosecutors will recommend that she be released from jail, placed on probation, and provided treatment that could include "a process of deprogramming."

    I overcame my own tendency toward religious delusion, first by learning (with the help of my wife) to monitor and control my mood swings, then, fifteen years later, by reprogramming myself through applied skepticism to finally opt out of religion altogether.

Spiritual jocularity

Mert really does sound almost exactly like Charlie Thomas. He called again yesterday, to thank me. He and his friend have reconnected by telephone and he is happy.
    "Morris," he said, "do you believe that the Good Lord works in mysterious ways?"
    "No, Mert, I don't believe any of that."
    Even though he then said, "Ha! I don't believe that!," it's true. I don't believe it.

But Mert's question made me realize that the texture of Wednesday (and of much of the next two days—and perhaps of today again) is in some ways similar to that of the days of my Youie Summer (1989). But with one saving, essential difference.
    In 1989, I believed that the things that were happening were "signs from UIE," or Universal Intelligent Energy¹(pronounced YOU-ie ["or YAH-weh?" my son suggested], and aka "God"). Now, I don't believe that; now, I can just "be spiritual" naturally (if my friend Bill is right in labeling me so; perhaps it just means that I'm able to accept things as they are, and laugh about them) without any supernatural entities clothed by magical thinking.
    I liked to say "Praise Youie!" If I were to say it now, it would be ironically, and also perhaps a bit self-reverently, out of charity for the sad, manic person I was that summer.
    But in not very long, it won't make any difference what I was then or what I am now. Or any of us after we've been dead a while.
_______________

1. In late spring of 1989, I had been reading Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time, in which he of course referred to Einstein's famous equation. Let the following excerpt from Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis (which is included in Hitchens's Portable Atheist) serve to make the connection:

   ...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call "Einstein's famous equation," E=mc², relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.

Synchronicity?

Yesterday I published an entry on intellectual property. This morning I read yesterday's newspaper and discovered that Ian McEwan has published a new novel, Solar, a portion of which I had read (and commented on back in December). A couple of sentences from Hephzibah Anderson's review (on Bloomberg News):

The story pivots on a freak accident that catapults a tubby physicist, Michael Beard, to the forefront of the race to find a sustainable energy source. Pursuing this worthy goal in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change, the balding British boffin will clock thousands of miles and resort to intellectual property theft and worse. [my emphasis]

Isn't this just a coincidence? Or is it a Jungian synchronicity? A synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.
    Or some emblem of divinity saying something like "God is watching over you"? In my manic excitement during Youie summer, I took all of the innumerable coincidences I was noticing as just such emblems. (There didn't seem to be anything of any more precise significance that they could possibly mean.) Coincidences have provided many a man and woman an assurance that life is not a matter simply of chance.

How could it be a coincidence [they ask themselves] that I could publish "Intellectual property" the very day that the personally most interesting book review in the local newspaper should use that phrase, and not just casually but by way of characterizing the pivot of the book! This cries out with significance!

Uh, yeah, but what significance? Remember that Carl Jung espoused the procedures of I Ching [The Book of Changes], a "system of divination" in which the adept meditates on potential meanings of chance juxtapositions.

Any juxtaposition can be used creatively to find hidden significance. We can, for example, open a book (any book, a dictionary, say, though a Christian might favor the Bible or a Muslim the Qur'an) and place our finger down at random on a verse. If we then read the verse (or the definition) with the expectation that something of personal import will be suggested, then it is highly probable that something will indeed come to mind.
    Note, though, that this works for almost any occasion. But we don't do it on just any occasion: it takes something like a striking coincidence to push us in that direction.
    Nevertheless, what might I make of this "intellectual property" coincidence? Do I have a valuable intellectual property in Moristotle that I am giving away free on Blogspot? Or should I focus on Michael Beard's theft, mentioned in the book review? Beware, Moristotle, quit including overlong quotations in your blog from the intellectual property of others!

Realism...or magical optimism?

This morning I read in the New York Times a very short op-ed piece, “The Power of Negative Thinking,” by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ms. Ehrenreich assails the pie-in-the-sky optimism that I myself subscribed to for many years:

As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen.

I believed this so ardently in 1989 that I suffered an excess of mania and on its magic carpet sailed for most of the summer, believing that I would win the Publishers Clearing House $10,000,000 Sweepstakes and publish a best-selling book that would tell the world how Youie (a.k.a. “God”) Herself revealed these wonders to me in advance.

Over the years since 1989, I came to see that the psychotherapist who helped me when the inevitable happened and my carpet crashed me into depression was right, it really was mania and not divine revelation.

Ehrenreich's article concludes:

When it comes to how we think, “negative” is not the only alternative to “positive.” As the case histories of depressives show, consistent pessimism can be just as baseless and deluded as its opposite. The alternative to both is realism [emphasis mine] — seeing the risks, having the courage to bear bad news and being prepared for famine as well as plenty. We ought to give it a try.

I hadn't thought in these terms, but one way for me to think of the turn my thinking about god and religion took last year is as a turn to realism. Of course, you may dispute whether this is valid, because what is real is, ultimately, a matter of belief, perhaps even "religious" belief.

Of course, in terms of what I myself believe is real, I think I did turn from optimism (God exists and will take care of the righteous, who will live forever in heaven, their young, sexy bodies restored) to realism (we're all alone here, bud, the atoms in our bodies will be recycled, and our spirits evaporate with them). Of course, many people shudder violently at that view; to them it's the rankest pessimism. They cling to their magical optimism.

25 years later: ready to let go

We'll be downsizing soon (moving to a smaller house on a smaller lot), and I've spent much of this weekend removing from our attic the rest of the boxes (mostly) that I didn't bring down last weekend. Much of the stuff I found up there had been...well, "stuffed" is the appropriate term...stuffed up there soon after we moved in in 1983. And not thought of since. Until today. And today we're mostly doing what we might have done twenty-five years ago: throwing it away.

I'm naturally wondering what we thought we were keeping it for. Probably not for any practical reasons, but just in order to buy some time to distance ourselves from the past it represented so that we'd become ready, someday, to let it go. And today, indeed, we're not feeling much attachment to any of the stuff at all. We're long since ready to let it go and be done with it. Dusty boxes, moldy paper...faded or forgotten memories.

My wife did set aside her tassel from the mortarboard she wore for high school graduation (45 years ago), however. And I set aside my "Youie Journal" from 1989, intending before I recycle the paper to try to read and understand what I was experiencing that manic summer when I imagined that The She-God fancied me.

Magical Thinking

In 1990, after I came down with CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and its usually associated depression, I started seeing a psychotherapist. My "Youie Summer" of 1989 was then still recent and powerful in my psyche, so naturally I told him about it: the marvelous coincidences I had experienced, the wondrous signs I had seen. How taken aback I was when he characterized my experiences as "magical thinking." It had never occurred to me that that was a psychiatric term:

A conviction that thinking equates with doing. Occurs in dreams in children, in primitive peoples, and in patients under a variety of conditions. Characterized by lack of realistic relationship between cause and effect.^*

Of course, now that I've suggested that much of our thinking about God amounts to magical thinking, I'm wondering if it really is. And I'm wondering in what sense much of the thinking we humans engage in every day as we try to stay afloat might also be "magical thinking" in the psychiatric sense.
_____________________
* John F. Abess, M.D., his Glossary of Terms in the field of Psychiatry and Neurology. Note to myself: read The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion.

Quoting Walt Whitman

My "Youie" portrait was a quotation...

of the frontispiece engraving of Walt Whitman, age 37, for Leaves of Grass (steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison).
A couple of years earlier (1987) I'd heard a lecture by Joyce Carol Oates, at an Emily Dickinson conference in Chapel Hill, in which she'd said that "Dickinson, like Whitman and Rilke, was a poet of the soul." "Youie," I thought, was a revelation about soul.

Photographs from "Youie" year

Today I changed my profile photo, from the one on the left...to the one on the right.

The two photos were taken within a few weeks of one another about seventeen and a half years ago. The one on the right was taken at the 36th International Technical Communication Conference, May 14-17, 1989, in Chicago, the month before what I know as "Youie Summer" began—and during which the photo on the left (that's a Stetson) was taken. In retrospect, I could see signs in Chicago that something like "Youie" was coming. I remember sitting in the lobby of my hotel meditating and feeling tingly premonitions.
A lot has happened since 1989, since that manic summer. My journal, Youie: You Must Change Your Life (the subtitle taken from the last line of Rilke's poem, "Torso of an Archaic Appolo"), consumed my manic energy and, its central "prophecy" unfulfilled, left me depressed and vulnerable to a half-year bout of chronic fatigue syndrome. Followed by a heart attack (apparently provoked by an allergic reaction to a powerful antibiotic). Toastmasters and a run at public speaking. Brain surgery for a pineal tumor. Hurricane Fran and a dozen big trees down in our yard, all close enough to have hit the house if they'd fallen differently. Retirement after employment with one company for thirty years. Brief but interesting stint as a telemarketer of pre-paid cremation. New job in public postsecondary education administration. Literary agency. Web design. The Moristotle blog. Encounter with the writings of Sam Harris. Awareness that the foregoing list is arbitrary. It mentions no dogs, leaves out my wife of almost 41 years, doesn't mention my dear son or my dear daughter, or any of my wonderful friends. Nor the death of a sister, or of our mother.
Must stop. Becoming too emotional.

Youie Summer

[Youie Summer came along two years after I wrote the sonnet posted yesterday.]

During weeks of manic inspiration in the summer of 1989, I received spiritual revelations so striking that I began to keep a journal to record them. Their significance seemed to demand that I share them with others. But a sad technical job at a large corporation felt at odds with that calling, leaving me only an hour or two out of each day at home with my wife to inscribe my insights.

Early in July, I entered the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes and regularly chanted affirmations that I would win. Something told me that my entry number contained a sign that the prize money would be mine, so I translated the number according to a pairing of digits and consonants that I used as a mnemonic device, and indeed it turned out that the entry number signified that the ten million dollars would be a grant-in-aid for me to write full-time for Youie.

Youie. A couple of weeks earlier I had been playing around with Einstein’s E=mc² to try to find a similar formula for spiritual energy, which I abbreviated UIE, for Universal Intelligent Energy. Pronounced as a word, UIE sounded like “Youie,” which I soon noticed contained not only “you,” but also “I” (Spanish “yo), “we” (the sound of French “oui”—also “wee”) and “yes” (literal “oui”). The name was thus revealed to me to be a mystical invitation to affirm joyously that we are one. My son had already pointed out the name’s similarity to “Yahweh,” the name revealed in the passage in The Second Book of Moses where the burning bush tells Moses that he will lead his people out of bondage in Egypt, and Moses asks who he should say told him so, if the people should ask. (I thought that I may even have discovered the secret pronunciation of Yahweh’s name.)

Unfortunately, simply winning the sweepstakes wouldn’t guarantee that everybody was going to read about these wondrous revelations. But what if I could prove that I had known in advance? Then I would no doubt appear on Oprah and people would flock to bookstores to own the story.

On July 26, one week before the winner would be announced on television, I had the manuscript notarized and I posted it to myself by certified mail. Earlier that same day, I had seen a neurologist about recent dizziness and muscular fatigue. The neurologist seemed to be someone I could talk to, so I told him about my journal and of a fantasy I’d had about needing surgery and being excused from my job for a few weeks. He asked me whether I might be “trying to do too much” and whether my “thoughts seemed to race.” He told me that my symptoms probably stemmed from “all that was going on” and would clear up by themselves “after this gets resolved.”

The manuscript arrived in the mail on Tuesday, August 1. On Thursday, the day of the announcement on The NBC Nightly News, I packed up all of my personal belongings at work so I could flee quickly after quitting my job the next day. My wife didn’t know about my entering the sweepstakes—it wasn’t something I could tell her about it until after I had won. Later that night, I could at least be glad that she hadn’t been in the room to see my reaction to the revelation that there would be nothing to tell her.

The following summer I fell asleep on Interstate-40 while driving home from work and spent the next five and a half months on medical leave with chronic fatigue syndrome. In January 1996, during a hard freeze, I fell down twice playing in the forest with Ruffy, our golden retriever. That evening, about to go for a walk with Ruffy, I slipped and sat down hard on an icy step. I got up and we went for our walk, but I returned to the house speaking incoherently. The neurosurgeon later surmised that the jolt to my spine had caused an ancient, slow-growing tumor in my pineal gland to start bleeding. After a six-month leave for brain surgery and rehabilitation, I was informed by my manager that I hadn’t been very productive during that time, and he advised me to take early retirement to avoid an unfavorable performance evaluation.

I felt relieved but also angry that it had taken something stronger than my own volition to deliver me out of the land of Egypt.