The renowned Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor astutely grasped the basic dilemma of all human life when he uttered his immortal observation that “…the chief objective of life is not to be in the majority but to avoid joining the ranks of the insane.”

Let me assure you, that’s one tough objective to achieve, these days! Especially if the rest of one’s world is insane.

As I near the razor sharp verge of the final chapter my own life (the beginning of one’s 8th decade of life), the absolutely ineluctable verity of that remark by Aurelius in his Meditations has finally permeated every last nano-molecule of my existence. And as socialist intellectual Noam Chomsky recently noted in his 2024 work, The Myth of American Idealism, not only was Aurelius preternaturally prescient in his 2nd Century CE discernment, he may even have vaguely suspected that ‘intelligent life’ quite possibly is an evolutionary mistake (whether he was aware of evolution or not) and that our entire planet is subject to the whims of a race of congenitally clever but insane life forms.

After decades of casual study of my fellow post-Simian humanoids, I must sadly come to the conclusion that the beautiful, life-giving planetary body we know as Earth is neither a God-created haven of imperfect life (imperfect images of a God), nor a biophysical quantum simulation by some advanced race of creatures whose machinations defy our most remote understanding, but actually a Galactic Lunatic Asylum for the irremediably insane.

Sadly, and in marked comparison to H.G. Wells’ meek domestic food source for his cannibalistic, post-Apocalyptic Morlochs (the ‘Eloi’), we are also completely unaware of this conditional requisite of our existence and continue to blissfully conduct our affairs as if we possess a franchise on the greatest reserves of sentient wisdom and sagacity conceivable.

***

The pup and I have just returned from our daily early AM walk, which is about 2 miles or so in length, and which takes us through a neighborhood park and past an independently owned, local coffeehouse. It is an important part of our ambulatory ritual to stop at the latter (which has the curious name of ‘VENUS’, go figure?) after all her sniffing and squirting has been taken care of, where the pup gets her mandatory croissant and I partake of my obligatory Espresso Dopio.

It is a moderately cold late winter morning here in the armpit of the Confused State of Californication (affectionately known as ‘Suckatomato’ by locals and ‘Sacramento’ by the rest of the state)…about 35 degrees F…and as I clutched the cup of hot espresso in my hands, sipping the life-giving elixir of all true spiritual Bohemians everywhere, many thoughts suddenly sprang forth unbidden from my memory vaults, where they are usually stringently incarcerated (it’s a Category 5 inmate thought-containment facility, after all).

They say that human memory is often prompted by external stimuli such as cold temperatures, climatic moisture and…above all other factors…those offered up by our olfactory senses. That certainly is the case with me, as the elements of steaming espresso in combination with the chill cold and subtle aromas of cold-resistant flora nearby (such as damp tree bark, certain flowers, etc.)...as well as ambient auto exhaust fumes...suddenly transported me back to the cold, diesel-exhaust-aromaed alleys of Geneva’s ‘Vieille Ville’ (Old City) of mid-80s Switzerland. It was a poignant flashback to younger, fulfilling adventures of my earlier life, when I was still discovering the rest of the myriad worlds of culture that lay beyond the borders of our commercialized, crassly formularised, Disunited States of America.

I very much miss those days of circulating not as a Norte Americano Gringo tourista, but as a reborn citizen of the archetypal Western World, sniffing out remnants of my own ancestral Old World cultural origins (French/German and Irish Gaelic roots) and experiencing what formerly passed for the European ‘Grand Tour.’

They were delightful times and not just due to my still being youthful and somewhat naïve, but due to the fact that I was not yet a fully jaded, unrepentant, pessimistic and skeptical observer of human foibles but a joyful participant in life’s myriad pleasures, drinking in the confluence of Europe’s traditional, multinational cultural wellsprings like the heady draught of seminal sensations that they comprise.

I was in no hurry (in contrast to the pup, who was badgering me for yet another croissant...her canine contract strictly limits her to only one per outing, a constraint she all too well is aware of). Each small sip of that delicious espresso was to me like a pharma concoction of pure norepinephrine and undiluted dopamine. It’s really hard to define it much better than that, as each caffeinated bite of the drink (the female barista who prepares my espressos at Venus is an absolute Maestro) produced more chemoreceptor keys to open the locks that normally bar the doors to my memory cells.

The next minute, as Geneva faded reluctantly away into the temporal miasma, I found myself further virtually transported to the roof over Mr. Piet’s original 1970s vintage ‘Coffees & Teas’ shop, located on Berkeley’s Walnut Square complex on Vine Street, where a small coterie of the coffee faithful (mostly all undergrad philosophy students at Cal, by the way) would enjoy an early cup of Piet’s brawny brown nectar early each morning before attending classes at nearby UCB. Quite often we were joined there at the tables by our UC philosophy prof, who clearly enjoyed cultivating his thirst for caffeine as much as his desire to stimulate the thirst of his students for philosophic wisdom of the ages.

Being Berkeley, fog was almost always an omnipresent component of the heady mix of our feckless youthfulness and experiential questing and the uniquely stimulating chill of the thick fog banks, crossing the bar from Potato Patch Shoals through the Golden Gate and heading almost in a straight bee-line for our Berzerkeley roof-top hangout, gave the setting a semi-magical quality.

The Potato Patch fog unfailingly brought with it the irrepressibly delicious scents of the salty, littoral Pacific Ocean, mixed as it was with the distinctive aromas of the East Bay’s coastal riparian and tidal flats;  whiffs of such exotic, man-made smells such as wafted up from the smokestacks of the nearby Cutter Laboratories plant, the Sherwin-Williams Paint factory, and of course the automobile exhaust fumes drifting off highway 580 (as cars queued up for the Bay Bridge transit), further added to the unique eau de Berkeley scents.

It’s impossible to attempt a specific analysis to explain how all those wildly divergent aromas and smells came together back then to comprise the early AM Berkeley olfactory ambience that so pleasurably assaulted our senses on Piet’s roof; suffice it to say, moments like that were singularly unique to Berkeley and likely not to any other Pacific West Coast environment found, north of Lompoc and San Luis.

***

Fog has always been a huge part of my life. When I was a child, one of my most vivid memories growing up in San Francisco was the heady scent of dripping wet Coastal Oak and Eucalyptus bark, as the moist fog embraced and enveloped the trees in the Presidio’s wealth of arboreal splendor. To this very day, that same combination of damp, early AM coastal tree perfume evokes a profound recollection of my formative days spent as a small child of 4 or so, walking around the Presidio, hand-in-paw with my Da.

Da was a Major on the US Army’s 6th Army Headquarters staff and had quarters there, so my school-marm mum and I were afforded the luxury of having all those magnificent trees and their ethereal pheromonal exudates constantly at close hand, wherever we strolled. I somewhat pity those who have never had the privilege of having grown up on the lovely, singularly spectacular California mid-coast area, near all those stately, fog-shrouded giants. It was (and is) a blessing conferred on so few these days, after all.

***

But let me qualify my professed affection for fog a bit here.

There are several different types of fog, of course. One is the coastal (sea) fog I so love, those gray banks of sea mist that bring the richest scents of the glorious Pacific Ocean inland to mix with the natural perfume of our state’s floral and arboreal settings. Coastal fog is also known as ‘Sea Fog’, as it is generally specific to oceanic coastal locales and hugs the ground (or ocean surface), not rising more than a few hundred feet above mean sea level at most.

Pilots know this quite well and value being able to rise above whatever fog is about, over the ocean, where and when they fly along the coast; the tricky part is knowing where the ceiling lies under that thick gray blanket so as to permit a safe descent through it!

Another kind of fog that I am most definitely NOT so fond of is what we call ‘Tule Fog’ (also referred to as ‘Valley Fog’. Valley fog occurs inland, generally specific to depressions where there are natural, peripheral geologic ‘walls’ (such as encircling hills or mountains) to contain it, and results from moisture given off by vegetation in that geographic low-lying area. This sort of fog forms when the dew point reaches a specified index relative to temperature fluctuations, and quickly forms over agricultural fields and crops.

Tule fog tends to be very frigid, most often bitterly cold, with a penetrating chill that may hang around for quite some time, unless there are sufficient convective air currents to clear it away. Interactions between ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of air pressure, as well as solar (radient) heat all exert a substantial effect on all of this, logically enough.

When a thermal inversion effect has formed, Tule fog may last for as much as days or even weeks, and can be…at least to my regard…most unpleasant. [A thermal inversion may also occur in the California summer, when a high pressure area acts to keep accumulated thermal heat buildup from dissipating, forming a virtual cap over it like a lid on a saucepan.] The combined effects of winter cold and fog in the Great Central Valley of our state tend to make Tule Fog feel a lot more frigid than a thermometer reading alone might suggest.

In effect, California’s interior tends to suffer inordinately from protracted summertime ‘high pressures’ and extended wintertime ‘low pressures’, again varying largely due to changing atmospheric pressure differences and the movement of the tropospheric jetstreams high above, that greatly influence weather dynamics beneath them.

Suffice it to say that unless you live along California’s coast or in the high and dry desert regions of the Mojave area, you tend to suffer a lot from the vagaries of these ‘Central Valley’ effects. Those deluded souls who still think of Californica (sic) as a climatic paradise often discover this unhappy fact rather soon, if they relocate to the state’s central interior from another region or state.

For my money (and for that of the wealthy, these days), Coastal California is the only place to be to really enjoy California’s legendary (but actually semi-mythical) sunny weather. (The great secret of Californica coastal living is that the Pacific Ocean acts as a great weather ‘modulator’, keeping the temperature year round in a near-balmy, pleasing state along its shores.) But be prepared to pay though the nose for the privilege of decamping to California’s increasingly pricey coastal areas, as homes, rentals, vacation spots and even rude thatched huts have now risen steeply to be costly beyond all reasoned imagining.

***

Very recently, I recall having run across a comment made by someone on-line (I think it was on the on-line QUORA website and likely a ‘bot-prompted question’ at that) questioning why older people tend to look back on the past with such enormous nostalgia.

It was an interesting question, of course, since it does seem to be a pre-conditional, assumptive rite of advanced age that “Things were so much better in the past (than they are now).” To today’s younger generations, it seems almost axiomatic and incontestable that us card-carrying, certified geezers all regularly bewail and bemoan the ‘good old days’. To some degree or another, it is likely quite true . But why is that, one may well ask?

Well, folks, the reason for this is that by and large they actually WERE ‘good old days, or at least far less complicated in comparison to today’s increasingly difficult times, mindful of the unrelentingly harassed quality of life that most of us have been forced to live by the formularised actions of Corporate America, economic effects of which affects nearly every conceivable aspect of our existence (in league with the unholy litany of ‘Diversity if our blessing’ woke ideology).

Those ‘earlier times’ in reference were still chock-a-block full of innocence, harmless naiveté and unlimited (if often baseless) hope and idealistic, dreamy possibilities. In contrast to today, hope is now regarded as a non-contender by all but the congenitally dull and socially stupid. Idealism, for its part, seems the wholly franchised property of rabid leftist ideologues who have reinvented whatever reality there used to be and substituted in its place an enforced state of social conditioning (read: brainwashing) that engraves a dollar sign on everything from your toenails to granny’s made-in-China (by imprisoned Uyghurs) unmentionables.

Thanks to the sleaze-factor facility of today’s smartphone social media, good taste in social and behavioral values has all but become extinct among those under about age 30 or so. A new form of pornography has risen up to replace previous (bad old) male-chauvinistic standards of sexuality with a new, amorphous form of  casual pop-culture porn that recognizes no such thing as ‘fixed birth gender’ and celebrates unreserved copulation with just about anything that has a hole large enough to insert a large pickle in it. [What’s that popular saying? “If it has a hole in it, it must have some purpose...!”]

Bodily desecration consisting of wall-to-wall tattoos, disfiguring body piercing of various kinds, and clothing fashions that make less and less effort to disguise the female mons pubis, and ta-tas progress to the point where ‘bad taste’ is more rampant than the incidence of leftist progressive female elementary school teachers in K-12 settings.

Yeah, it lumps down to a massive, national disintegration of taste, deficit class sophistication and disenlightened social discernment, that in large part has been heralded and enabled by DEI/Critical Theory/woke ideologues, working in cahoots with the big corporations that are bent on exploiting all that puerile vulnerability with a collective adeptness that defies rational ‘splaining’ (to borrow Desi Arnaz’s timeless utterance).

***

As for the decline in American sexuality standards, I have a theory about this (don’t I always?). And that is that traditional, legacy Christian American standards of decency themselves are largely to blame for today’s youthful impulse to breech the limits of acceptable good taste with such reckless abandon as they exhibit.

American Christians (specifically evangelicals) have traditionally been so ashamed of the human body (after all, don’t sexual admonishments come straight out of the Christian Bible?) that for ages they’ve observed standards of ‘normatively modest’ public (or is it ‘public’?) decorum wherein (given that the human body is inherently shameful) acknowledgement of anything beyond the coy suggestion of sexuality is strictly verboten (not to mention an unpardonable affront to traditions of conservative Christian modesty)!

Consider, if you will, the formularised scene in any movie you can think of (old or modern) wherein the man & womb-an (sic) lie in bed next to each other, apparently having just gone the whole magilla from a few tentative pecks on the mouth to full-fledged, lustful penetration (of any available orifice). While the manly, chavinistic male may bare his profusion of chest-hair with perfect nonchalance, the female is obliged to have her ta-tas coyly covered with the bed sheet.

But let’s reflect on the absurdity of that scene just a bit longer. They’ve just finished panting, poking, lusting-after and licking every square inch of each other’s bodies, fer crissakes, and yet the amply endowed wench has to hide her more pointed assets from the film-viewer’s view or the Hollywood censor alarms klaxons start blaring ‘MAYDAY!’

Contrast this arguably weird behavioral norm (it’s a standard Hollywood algorithm, so well-known screenwriter Rob Long tells us) with the typical European film, which features full-body, total-nudity sex, bereft of any coyness, visual disclaimers, guilt, hesitation or restraints.

In today’s American television programming, this standard even results in circumstances wherein almost all commercial television stations ‘blur-out’ tits, asses, crotches, butts and/or penises, even on ancient Greek and Roman statues! And nothing, I can assure you, is more aggravating (or sophomoric, in my opinion) than watching a film depicting the glories of ancient Greco-Roman statuary than bluring over stone crotches, alabaster tits and sculpted asses.

Incredible! I can’t even begin to state how philosophically ‘ignorant’ it is to pretend that a statue of historical significance such as a masterwork of Michelangelo’s sculptural level of artistic perfection must have certain parts of its anatomy blurred out (so as to not offend and good little God-fearing Christians in the audience), etc., etc., etc.

And yet, that fear of offending Puritanical Christian decency is still enforced today in all American films and entertainments. There are therefore typically two versions of any American film shown on both continents: one that has been highly censored (for prudish ‘Mercan domestic viewing) and its Euro counterpart wherein everything ‘hangs out’, unencumbered by the merest vestige of modesty.

Europeans consider (and always have considered) the human body to be an exquisite expression of aesthetic art and nothing to be ashamed of, therefore no sense of shame tainting a healthy expression of human sexuality is to be found in any of their films (not expressly made for or by American producers). Complex psychological plots are far more a part of the averaged French film, for example, than coital close-ups and yet they manage to positively exude sensuality!

And that, precious readers, is one reasonable explanation for the culturally devastating ‘post-shock effect’ that feigned American sexual coyness frames this perversely unnatural display of natural human bodily function within. You may quote me here, if you wish, but more simply put, traditional (Christian) American standards of sexual normalcy are anything but NORMAL! 

*** 

Moving right along here...as long as America is governed by these ‘deviant’ Christian behavioral perceptions cited above, as long as America continues to be ruled by such anthropomorphically twisted (if naively well intended) concepts of proper behavioral sexual conduct, the fantasyland circumstances of our lives shall simply continue to promote cultural ignorance and encourage endemic mass stupidity throughout our collective society. 

Hopefully, as Americans begin to feel more comfortable with their bodies and attain greater acceptance of their inherently sexual behavioral proclivities, the less unhealthy and comically exaggerated emphasis will be placed on perfectly normal bodily features like breasts, sex organs, and display of same. We are, after all, and despite our claims to be somehow elevated above the rest of the mammalian species we share the home planet with, just another (slightly smarter) form of (slightly) sentient animal life.

Once “God” has been safely removed from the equation and we collectively learn to relax considerably and interact more naturally with each other, we may be able to develop a bit of higher behavioral consciousness superior to that which now prevails. However, I remain convinced that that evolutionary fly-in-the-ointment flaw Noam Chomsky noted ("...that intelligence may actually be an evolutionary mistake...an enormous error of mutated genetic development that could and likely shall ultimately result in our making our race extinct!") as a distinct conceptual possibility, may actually come to pass, perhaps sooner than we think.

Fortunately, I shall not be around when that all-too-likely outcome manifests itself but I laud Chomsky’s prescience in perceiving this catastrophic but overlooked miscalculation in humanity’s evolved nature, and also for his frank setting it down in front of us to consider, in his writings.

One additional benefit (of ‘sexually maturing, in a cultural context), I suspect, will be that until that Big Red Button is finally pressed by some minion in Marcus Aurelius’ ‘ranks of the insane’, at least our younger generations shall be slightly less confused by the mess we older humming beans have made of the human life experience for them, when the big mushroom-shaped-clouds suddenly envelop and enshroud them.

We’ll see...or not!