A REVIEW OF IT SUCKS: I WANT TO LIVEWOULD HELP GREATLY IN EFFORTS TO GET THE WORD OUT THERE AND SELL 1T.
It’s the one I put together in honor of my friend Nick Spooner who died of a brain tumor just before COVID-19 hit. I attributed the authorship to him because it centers around his Facebook entries from diagnosis to death. The title is based on the fact that his last entry before the end was, “This Sucks.” The entries themselves are of interest as they trace his struggles to maintain daily life while adapting to the anticipation of his death. But it’s so much more, what with my intro and comments by a friend and his sister. A quick read (101 pages.), I recommend it for people who may be teaching courses in death and dying, or in gender studies, or just plain people who care. I’m including the link, hoping that will make it easy for you to find.
From King Lear to Carl Jung; from mud week to the verge of chaos and hope, a topical memoir of my psychological life told in story and vignettes as if around the kitchen table. On My Way Out: My Life of Psi, a 72-year career and still counting.
Based on the following description, would you read this book if some agent/publisher should get interested enough to see that it turns into a real thing?
“Is there such a thing as a “kitchen table theme memoir?” If so, then this is it — chats and vignettes around the theme of my very personal experiences as psychology and I interacted with the world. Expect a no holds barred account of seventy-two years as a professor, therapist, wife, divorcee, parent, colleague, author, human being in a very complicated world. And be as surprised as I am with the way it all came together up to this point as I approach the tail end of life – a life still vigorously and demandingly keeping me awake at night.”
I’d like to call it On My Way Out: My Life with Psi, but maybe it should be On My Way Out: From Variables to Vibes.
(This is a first stab. All suggestions are appreciated.)
From what I know of the people working to ban abortion, they are also people who believe that any costly regulation/legislation should be supported with a careful plan for payment. I think, too, they are usually folks who believe it’s important for fathers to take an important position vis-à-vis the family. So here’s my question. Why are there not active demonstrations and regulations to guarantee that those who sire the embryo/fetus should also be identified and required at least to provide lifelong financial support to the new person. That should be relatively easy given the availability of DNA identification.
If the sanctity of newborn life is so important that women can be forced to endanger their own health and life, why isn’t there a concerted effort to be sure that the newborn result is guaranteed a healthy environment. That would require parental leave, supportive and secure housing, sufficient income to provide healthy food both to the infant and to the caretaker parent(s), a stress-reducing life situation, and education on the limitations and needs of infants. Maybe I’m missing something. I find that I’ve been assuming that those who lobby for banning abortion are doing it out of love for the unborn, but maybe love has nothing to do with it. Maybe sanctity doesn’t necessary imply love and caring. But then, what does it mean? Help me on this one, please.
Consider those who are so caring for the sanctity of life that they would require the protection of all possible fertilized embryos or at least those who meet a dictated timeline no matter what the circumstances. Why are they not actively lobbying for the assurance of the health and safety of those fetuses during their first nine months of uterine existence? That would, of course, require the funded best care of the pregnant parent including stress reduction, healthy diet, safe and secure housing, childcare to free hours to earn money for the family’s future, and the best of prenatal medical care.
ANSWER: 245 pages (depending on the font) of some 64,000 words of On My Way Out: My life With Psi, the tentative title of a manuscript beginning to search for an agent/publisher. Stories, vignettes, opinions, emotions of 72 years of psychological process and change as filtered through me, professing, practicing, and writing told through chats as if sitting together at my kitchen table. And how the ending has surprised me as interests first expressed at the age of 13 have come together in the end! Well, not really the end. Call it the stopping point for now as I plan not to renew my Minnesota license to practice. That doesn’t stop me from sharing my knowledge through what I had hoped to call PsychBytes. But I just discovered that business title is already taken, so I guess I’ll have to find something creative to call it. Oh yes, the manuscript touches on some important just-plain-history along the way.
NOW, WHAT’S WRONG WITH SITTING ALONE IN MY ROOM? “Improvements” have run away from me in the blogger world as I’ve been consumed with writing (and some other stuff I do) so it doesn’t seem to allow easy replies from any of you who might read it. If you know me well enough to have my email address please feel free to email a response.
My next project here is to change my photo. I wish I still looked as young as the current one suggests, but honesty requires an update – a photo taken as COVID restrictions were coming to an end.
Maybe my major communication-by-blog problems have been solved. Thanks to you wonderful folks who were willing to go through so much to respond to me. I think I’ve replied to you just now on the blog. Please let me know if you got the reply and if responding to it was easy.
By the way, If you see my blog via Facebook, I think you could make that easier in the future by clicking “follow” on the blog itself. You’ll then get notification by email. I’d be so grateful if you try that and let me know if it works.
If this basic problem has been solved, I’ll go back to the [really very helpful] support folks for help in updating my “information about me,” including a somewhat more honest photo to reflect the years I’ve added.
Then, oh joy! I might be able to get back to writing On My Way Out: Becoming Psychology (working title) and finding an agent. I won’t publish it unless I do find an agent — can’t afford to self-publish, and besides, self-publishing has its limits about where people can buy it.
Life used to be so simple. I just wrote my blog content in a word document, copied the word document, came here, logged on, clicked on “new post,” pasted it, and added some “tags” to help draw attention to it. Then the Word Press system began to offer more and fancier options, very helpful new things, I’m sure. The first thing I noticed was that one was to enter stuff in “blocks.” But I didn’t take time to play with it — just continued in my old fashioned ways by choosing “classic editor.” And people sometimes responded (not as many as I would have liked, of course), and I would hit “reply” and we’d have the start of a conversation.
But then things changed. In order to respond to your comments I had to give my name and email every time. Obviously that’s not conducive to easy conversation. And I responded to the idea of “blocks” as if encountering a rattlesnake in my living room.
In the meantime I’m trying to carve out time to work on my next (I hope) book — tentative title On My Way Out, so I kept postponing getting smart about how to use my blog. The result — panic — as the new blog methods felt like monsters casting a shadow over my computer and I began to feel more and more like a fat little kid with buck teeth, glasses, and old fashioned Scandinavian braids.
So now I’m asking you to help — or at least to cheer me on — as I try to get more productive with communicating with you this way. Basically all I want you to do right now is to let me know you’re here with me.
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