The brain is in a box. It only knows of the outside world through the senses. We used to think that reception was perception. The senses report to the brain and the brain gets the correct information. It’s not like that at all. What do you see in the following picture?

Young people tend to see a young woman and older people tend to see the older woman. Why? One of the tasks that consumes a lot of the brain’s resources – and one we take for granted – is figuring out how to get through the day. I mean literally.

Everything we do is enormously complicated. We have to gauge the distance to the staircase, how much power we will need in the legs, momentum, balance, etc. If you were to try to figure it out on paper it would take all day.

The brain is an extremely expensive piece of equipment. Pound for pound, it draws ten times more energy and resources than other systems. Therefore it is always looking for ways to cut costs. Our brains save a lot of time and computing power by seeking out patterns and filling them in. We have all these senses supplying the brain with way too much information, so the brain ignores a lot and makes assumptions about the rest. It’s not reality, but it works better. If it recognizes a pattern it will fill in the rest – not based on observation – which is hard – but from memory of previous experience – which is easy – but less accurate. This is how we finish someone’s sentences for them – or not. We see a young face, or an old one based on what we expect to see, not what is really there. Here is an example of how filling in a pattern can be wrong – over and over again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01LMFFpAWYM

Since we know that faces are convex – they stick out at us, in a two dimensional image we will interpret a face sticking out, whether it is or not. We make patterns in other ways. We associate personality traits with appearance and body type.

Heroes aren’t ugly,

and Villains are rarely good looking

unless you’re Kate Blanchett.

Real heroes are often not very attractive.

Perceptions can be influenced by other things.

Take a good close look at these lines. Which one on the right is the same length as the one on the left? Depends on the circumstances.  In a famous experiment, when most people in a room (who are in on the experiment) insist that it is A or B, 1/3 of the subjects will go along with the crowd. Some had doubts and bowed to peer pressure but some were actually convinced that their own perceptions were off. You can convince people to ignore the information from their own senses about something that is right in front of them. People will be swayed by a crowd. Can you imagine how easy it is to sway people if the evidence is NOT right in front of them.

For example, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes. Like her or not that is a fact. The count was done several times. But if enough people say that somebody else won the popular vote enough times from enough different media sources the true memory will be supplanted by the false memory in a lot of people, and they perpetuate the problem. This alternative fact (which in the trade we call a lie) will now become the truth for them. This is how false memories can be planted, unless you are very careful. Sadly, once false information is accepted it is hard to eradicate. Our reward system kicks in on our formed opinion, cherry-picking information that reinforces the opinion, and ignoring information counter to it. It is hard to keep an open mind.

We make associations (mental patterns) and go along with the crowd to save us mental work and time. Most of the time this works pretty well, but it is subject to error, and increasingly manipulation.

The best thing is thinking for yourself. This is why reading a speech is better than hearing it in a crowd. It’s one on one, and you can form your own opinion without peer pressure or the swagger of the speaker. Your brain has a better chance of determining “Does this make sense?”

This is hard to do when we are surrounded by so many distractions, both invited and not. Also, people have gotten out of the habit of thinking for themselves just as they have fallen out of the habit of doing things for themselves and for the same reason. It’s hard. Let’s find out just how hard.

Wherever you are, try writing your name with your non-dominant hand. The circuitry to write with the other side of the brain is already there. You can definitely get signals from any part of the brain to any other part, but the circuitry to make that particular series of moves in the correct sequence has never been used like that before on this side of the brain. The route exists but which one is it? The brain is going to try all kinds of random neural pathways to get the job done and most of them are going to be wrong. It will be tragic. It’s like finding a path through a forest that is totally overgrown, and this one is in three dimensions. Likely you will be using way too much force. Your dominant hand will keep edging up to help saying, “Oh please boss just let me do this already.” But every so often a random command will – just by chance – be the right one, and you’ll feel that it’s right. You’ll get that little eureka moment that you get whenever you’ve accomplished something difficult. Not only do you feel that victory, your brain releases a neurotransmitter that says “That’s it. That is the sequence of moves right there that made that letter,” and the neuron circuit that did that move is strengthened, the rest are not.

I have my students brush their teeth with the other hand. After three days, they are OK. After three weeks, they are just as good with one hand as the other. What has happened in the hand? Not much. What has happened in the brain? This:

Your neurons grow new branches. Synapses along the right path get more resources and get physically bigger and they stay that way, sort of like upgrading to high speed internet. Then you build on that. For a simple task like brushing your teeth the following day it will still be hard – awful really, but you will have a rough path to follow. The third day it will be almost acceptable. Writing is the same, but since it is more involved it will take more time.

Once the circuit (called an engram) is built it endures, hence the expression, “It’s like riding a bike.”

You shouldn’t be surprised at the random nature of building neural networks. That’s how nature does things. An oak releases thousands on thousands of acorns. Very few make it. The number of species that lived and died out is far greater than the number of species that made it to today. Nature experiments randomly, and things that stick survive. Neural networks that do the job also survive.

Due to our limited perspective, we see some amazing creation of nature and cannot understand how something so sophisticated – like the human eye – ever got created by random chance. It was random chance and the pressure of natural selection. There are examples of every phase of eye development; creatures with light sensitive cells on the surface, then ones in pits for more protection, then ones with a cornea for more protection. Over billions of years there are a lot of random changes but only the models that worked survived. If we could see all the all the experiments that failed it would make more sense, but they’re not around. It’s called survivor bias. We see what worked and are floored by it, not seeing all random trial and error that went into it.

Eyes are an expensive peripheral that are disgarded if you don’t use them. Fish and shrimp and reptiles that migrated into caves and stayed there for generations have lost the ability to see. They have vestigial eyes that don’t work. Some snakes have tiny vestigial legs on their skeleton. If you don’t use it. You lose it.

It’s not the neurons you have it’s what you do with them. When you challenge yourself to do something new (learn something), your brain makes new connections and reinforces old connections in different patterns. The brain resists this because it costs energy and the brain is already very expensive to run. Most of us seem to be preprogrammed to be a bit lazy. A good way to exercise the mind in a way that many people find enjoyable is reading.

When I was a kid, everybody used to read all the time. New York was the most literate city in the world, probably because we were all stuck on the trains and there was nothing else to do.

One of the strongest indicators of intelligence is how much a person reads, even if they are reading trash. You still have to use your imagination. Think of the word – images in motion. You also have to focus for more than a sound bite. Now you don’t have to do that. Images are supplied. Now everybody is on their phones passively watching, and doing nothing as their brains atrophy. Watching sports instead of playing sports, playing candy crush instead of doing the crossword, looking on social media to see what everybody else is doing, without doing anything ourselves.

Meanwhile all the science

and art

and inventing

and thinking

was done by a doer, not a watcher.

The choices you make influence whether you become more or less intelligent over time. If you challenge your body with exercise and your mind with exercise they both get stronger. It doesn’t come for free. Study, reading, sports participation, social interaction, teaching, learning a musical instrument, working on problems, helping people; all of these are activities which stimulate and challenge the mind. Watching images fly by without doing anything does not. Everybody needs downtime, including me, but it is a matter of balance. It is no accident that we now have binge watching to go along with binge eating and binge drinking. Netflix has it set up so that the next episode of whatever comes on in a few seconds. The next thing you know it’s nine hours later. You just spent a big chunk of your day watching other people do stuff while you have done – nothing.

I’d rather be in the room with the doers. They are far more interesting.

It was always thought that massage worked its miracles through increasing the circulation. The logic was that the cells would have more oxygen and nutrients and would be able to dispel wastes and carbon dioxide. In a better environment the cells could perform better at maintaining themselves and their matrix. It sounds good but it’s mostly wrong. Massage only increases circulation for a few hours at best. So why do we see increased rates of healing for days after a single massage? It all comes down to the cytoskeleton, the header image in this essay.

The cytoskeleton is an organelle of protein filaments and tubes which give the cell its structural integrity and serves as an intracellular transport network. In this gorgeous three minute short  on the inner life of a cell, the cytoskeleton is seen as a grid like structure where filaments and tubules can be made or destroyed at will by enzymes. Make sure your sound is on.

It also shows organelles moving along the cytoskeleton. Among these are mitochondria slinking off to the right a little like an inch worm. Dynamin molecules are also seen pulling a vesical behind them much as a tug would tow a barge. At the end of the short, the white blood cell reorients its cytoskeleton so that it can squeeze through the seams in the capillary wall to enter the body spaces (presumably to fight an infection.) The grid like pattern of the cytoskeleton is what we find in healthy cells. This makes for a very efficient transport network so the cell can move its resources and energy production organelles to where it needs it the most to do its job. This is a cell with maximum productivity and minimum energy cost. However, not all cells are like this. Cells in distress and cells at injury sites are often found with a chaotic cytoskeleton that looks more like a Jackson Pollock.

Just try getting any work done in there! A cell like this will have a hard time moving its organelles and materials around internally to do its job. Basically it will require more energy to do less. Since the cells regenerate themselves and their surrounding tissues this is bad news for healing. This is why a diabetic patient might get decubitus ulcers. Your skin is constantly breaking down but if the rate or regeneration matches the rate of degeneration the outer cells fall off and are replaced by inner cells with no appreciable change in appearance or integrity. But if the rate of degeneration exceeds the rate of regeneration eventually the patient gets a hole in their body. By applying gentle friction around the margins of such a lesion the skin grows faster and closes the wound. How?

The cells do not just sit in the matrix of the tissues. The fibers of the matrix link across the cell membrane to the filaments of the cytoskeleton. When you tug on any tissue of the body, the movement goes all the way down to the cellular level. Before and after micrographs of cells that have had friction applied to them show that the cells somehow use the energy of the massage to reorient their cytoskeleton into a more efficient grid-like pattern. With a more efficient infrastructure the cell can now do more with less for days to come, increasing the regenerative abilities of the body to the point where it can catch up to and overtake the degeneration until the wound is healed. The heavier strokes of a massage alter the client’s cells by the billions. The body is already self-repairing. Massage simply increases the regenerative abilities of the body from the cellular level up. Healthier cells do more for you, no matter what stage your own health is in.

For those of you who want to read more on the cellular effects of massage you can read some extremely thorough research papers on the topic here and here.

As the tissue matrix tugs on the cytoskeleton, so the cytoskeleton tugs on the structures within the nucleus, including the chromosomes.  It is possible that massage alters genetic expression itself, but at this time I have not found anything in the literature. If anyone has, please let me know.

We appear to be the same from day to day and month to month, but that is an illusion. Every second you are losing two million red blood cells. Every hour forty thousand skin cells fall off of you. Half the dust in your apartment is yourself. However, you are also replacing those cells, and billions of others. For every cell you lose, a new one takes its place. So every day you do pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. Different parts of your body replace at different rates. Your skin is completely replaced every month; your skeleton about every two years. The body is a marvelously self-repairing and self-regenerating machine. All of this takes energy and resources. Before the age of about forty you have resources to spare and the regeneration can keep ahead of the degeneration. The reliable and unchanging nature of the body gives one the feeling of immortality during this period. Eventually though the ability to regenerate falls behind the wear and tear, and that’s how we age.

What to do? One strategy is to decrease the wear and tear as much as possible by doing what everybody knows you are supposed to do and about one in four actually does – avoid junk food, soft drinks, chain restaurants, smoking and drinking too much. Do exercise regularly and get out into nature. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t require a Dr. Oz diet. It does require moderation and persistence, which I guess only one out of four people have. All of these things will slow down the degeneration of the body as much as possible.

But what about the regenerative side of the equation? Is there anything you can do to increase your regenerative capabilities? Yes you can. Getting eight hours of sleep a day is a good start. Most of the rebuilding we do happens in sleep. Another useful thing is to reduce stress. When a person is stressed out much of our resources that should be going into regeneration go into being stressed out instead. Stress and regeneration compete for body resources.

One of the biggest problems with stress is its interaction with the immune system. The immune system is very expensive to run too. It defends us from infections and orchestrates the inflammatory process whenever we are injured. When a person is stressed out on a regular basis the immune system gets cheated of resources and starts making immature white blood cells. These immature WBC’s end up causing excessive inflammation and interfere with the body’s ability to regenerate itself. Diabetes, arteriosclerosis, stroke and heart attack have all been linked to too much inflammation from an overworked underpaid immune system.

Massage to the rescue. The two main hormones that mediate inflammation are epinephrine (adrenalin) and cortisol. Many, many studies have shown that massage decreases the amount of these circulating stress hormones by 50%. It also lowers blood pressure and the heart rate. It stimulates the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that calms us down and should be running the body most of the time. These effects of massage are not permanent, but it is definitely a step toward reducing stress and putting more resources toward rebuilding the body then breaking it down. Massage on a regular basis helps the body to maintain itself.

Does regular massage increase the life span? Probably, but it would be difficult to prove. There is a large body of evidence that stress reduces the lifespan by exacerbating inflammation and making all those diseases mentioned earlier worse. That is well established. But stress also does something much more sinister – it damages the telomeres in your cells. The way you regenerate yourself is by mitosis – body cells divide to replace cells that are lost from wear and tear. So why don’t we live forever? The cells accumulate genetic damage over the years to the point where they can no longer divide. Your ability to replace lost cells is diminished and you eventually run out of cells. That’s how you get old. That’s how you die. Aren’t you glad you chose to read this essay?

One of the important parts of a chromosome is the telomere at the tip. It is responsible for orderly cell division. The telomeres get frayed at the edges and eventually don’t work anymore. While that doesn’t kill the cell the cell can’t divide anymore so other cells have to pick up the slack, wearing them out faster. Stress is known to cause degradation of the telomeres. It accelerates the aging process! However, there is an enzyme called telomerase that can repair the telomeres and give new life to an ailing cell. So the formula would be get regular massage – rebuild your telomeres – your cells divide for longer and you live longer and healthier.

Designing a research project to prove this would be difficult. You could take 1000 stressed out people and give 500 of them massages once a week for life and follow them throughout life and see who dies first. That would be an expensive study but if there are any researchers out there reading this I volunteer to be a subject getting a massage once a week – for the advancement of science of course. A faster way to go would be to use rats. They don’t live as long and you could control things more easily. Take 1000 healthy rats of the same age and stress them all out evenly, say force them to watch three hours of Fox “News” every day. Then measure their stress hormones to see if Fox is doing its job. Half of these rats also get massage a few times a week, so you would need “rat massagers” (I’m sure there is a workshop on this somewhere). Then you could follow their stress hormones. Measuring the effects on the telomeres directly would be difficult to do but you could measure it indirectly by their lifespan. I would wager the massaged rats would live longer and that would prove the theory.

Now you may say that the rats might not be stressed out by Fox. Maybe some rats are jerks and they’d actually like it. That is certainly true for adults. Some people watch it on purpose. In that case we could administer mild shocks to supply the stress.

Joking aside, rich people live longer than poor people, partly because they can afford better health care, but partially because they can afford to take better care of themselves. For example, they can afford massage once a week. If you are one of my massage students reading this, you know plenty of therapists to trade with. Would you like to live longer and healthier? If the answer is yes, set up a trade.

Another major way that massage changes the body is to alter the cellular structure. That’s in the next post.

Why do we need bones anyway? The octopus does just fine without a skeleton. In fact a skeleton would cramp its style. You don’t start with a bony skeleton. While you were floating in your mom’s womb you had a soft skeleton of cartilage, just like the fish from which we evolved. So what happened? The salt water fish started to exploit a new environment – fresh water. They swam up the rivers since fish gotta’ swim, as the old saw says, and there they encountered a problem. There was not enough calcium in the water, and whether you are a fish or a frog or a person you need calcium to live. Without it you can’t do nerve impulse transmission or muscle contraction or blood clotting. Long story short without calcium you would be dead before you hit the floor. Seawater has plenty of calcium. In the ocean you easily absorb it through the food and even from breathing through the gills so it’s never a problem. Certainly not for a pufferfish.

But in freshwater you can’t rely on a constant source. If you want to make it as a freshwater fish you’ve got to have some reliable way to store calcium for times when you can’t get any – a calcium bank as it were. So some fish adapted by storing calcium in their skeleton. They also came up with calcitonin and parathyroid hormone which keep the blood calcium levels balanced by making calcium deposits or withdrawals from the bone calcium bank. To this day, purely salt water fish like sharks have a cartilage skeleton, and freshwater fish like salmon and trout have a bony skeleton like us.

For more on this picture see “The most beautiful science book ever.” 

Another quality of a bony skeleton is rigidity. You can resist gravity. One fine day a fish hauled itself on land, and that gave rise to the amphibians, then the reptiles, then the mammals. It is ironic that in fixing a problem so they could survive in fresh water, the fish came up with a solution that allowed them to leave the water completely. In a way, we are all fish out of water. But that’s the way evolution works. There is a challenge. You find a solution or you die out. Often that solution opens up whole new possibilities that take life in a completely different direction. Dinosaurs invented feathers for insulation, and we still use feathers for that today. But feathers also allowed for flight, which gave its owners the edge they needed to survive the great extinction that knocked the other dinosaurs out. The only living dinosaurs you see today are in the sky.

There is a disadvantage to bones reinforced with stones. Calcium is heavy and it costs a lot of energy to move that bony skeleton around. If the bones were solid mineral they would be a lot stronger, and three times heavier than they are. Imagine dragging that across the planet’s surface every day. Therefore the body wants the skeleton to be strong, but only as strong as you need it to be. There are teams of osteoblasts (which increase the bone matrix) and osteoclasts (which break down the bone matrix) constantly altering the structure of bones to make them only as strong (and heavy) as is absolutely necessary. How do they know what is strong enough? Electrical fields. The bones are piezoelectric, meaning when a force it applied to them (like supporting your body) they generate electrical fields. That stimulates the osteoblasts and osteoclasts to strengthen or lighten the bones to match the forces they are generally exposed to and trim away excess mass. In the following pictures you can see the lines of force that run through a bone by the lines of reinforcement in the matrix. Those little beams of bone (called trabeculae) are not laid down randomly, they are built to resist that force. In this picture of the interior of the head of a femur I’ve drawn in lines tracing where the main force is directed. The weight comes off the pelvis and is directed to the shaft of the femur much like the weight of a cathedral roof is distributed to the walls. The bones even use little gothic arches, visable in the shaft toward the bottom of the picture. The patella, on the lower right shows no such organization becasue forces on the patella are evenly spread around.

Xrays reveal the same internal structure for the femur as it takes the weight off the pelvis.

In this picture of the calcaneus (heel bone), the lower left is almost solid bone material because that is where the heel strikes the ground. The shock is then transmitted up and to the right, indicated by the arrows. Another arrow traces lines of force from the lower right where the calcaneus attaches to the plantar fascia, supporting the arches of the foot. This line sweeps up in a big curve much like the cables on a suspension bridge. The arches are suspended by tension in the bones and fascia. The right central part of the bone is almost hollow as there is no need for strenght in an area that gets little force.

If you work out you put more force on the bones and muscles and they get heavier and stronger. Less force, less strength. On the space station there is almost no gravity and the bones suffer from severe osteoporosis.

By the time the astronauts come down they have almost no bones left and they have to be carried off the capsule. Once under the pull of gravity the bones rebuild (mostly.) Your whole skeleton – every cell, every fiber, every grain of mineral – is replaced over the course of about two years.

Bones will adapt to whatever you are doing. If you exercise they get stronger, if not they weaken. An added bonus to regular exercise is that when osteoblasts are stimulated they release hormones that create proteins that aid the hippocampus – the main engine of memory. This may be why exercise has long been linked to improving memory.

Jogging jogs your memory.

This is the famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River to launch a sneak attack against the British in New Jersey. Although a great morale booster, it wasn’t an important battle. Yorktown, four years later, was the battle that ended the war and created America. It went like this. Britain ruled the sea, and she was able to use that advantage to move her armies around in America. One of these armies had been having a successful time ravaging the South, but it was time to move on, so the army assembled at Yorktown, Virginia to get picked up by His Majesty’s Navy. George Washington heard about this (on fb?) and hatched a plan. He’d march a French Army (which they’d loaned us) and the whole Continental Army from West Point to Yorktown (not easy). Meanwhile the French fleet would blockade Yorktown so the British could not escape by sea (very not easy.) He’d surround them and force them to surrender. There were several problems with this plan. The first was logistics. In the days before texting it would take weeks – sometimes months – for a message to get from the soon-to-be US to France which was where the French fleet and the French Army were getting their orders.

Imagine making a plan with the knowledge that it would be two months at least before your partners gave a yay or nay on it. From the French point of view, they would have to commit their fleet and Army for months and get orders out to them. The French fleet was in the Caribbean guarding her possessions there. While that fleet was away helping us, it was possible the British would show up and take over the French possessions. That kind of thing happened all the time. While they did serve their own purposes by sticking it to the British, they did so at considerable risk and expense. A large part of the cause of the French Revolution was France never recovered from the expense of helping us out. So you really have to hand it to the nascent American government and the French to pull this whole thing off at all.  Moving all those ships and men across such vast expanses over such long timeframes with such slow communications was really nothing short of a miracle. The other problem was naval battles are not something the British tended to lose, and that’s where cooties come in. The commander of the British fleet on the North American station (with the amazing name of Mariot Arbuthnot) got sick and was recalled to Britain. His replacement was new on the job just when the French fleet showed up to blockade the British in the Chesapeake Bay. The two fleets slugged it out and the French Navy won, allowing George’s plan to succeed and America to be born. If the cooties had not intervened on Admiral Sir Mariot Arbuthnot, we might very well still be part of the British Empire. Between our wall and their Brexit, it’s hard to tell the difference.

One day my car was stolen. I went to the precinct to file a report. The desk sergeant was very helpful. “Oh, it hasn’t been stolen. It’s been impounded.” He had a computer you see.

Where I live now (Queens) you can park on top of a fire hydrant and nothing happens, but this was when I lived in Brooklyn, and they have this thing called rule of law there. Apparently, I was in violation. I could swear that the car was fifteen feet from the hydrant, but maybe it was fourteen feet and ten inches, or eight inches, but per the NYPD it was fourteen feet and not enough inches. Getting your car impounded is a New York rite of passage. In other tribes you have to sit on a fire ant hill for an hour or hang from a tree by leather thongs run through your chest or hunt a lion with your bare hands but here we know the true meaning of pain.

I was initiated into the rite years before when my friend’s car had been impounded. Danny had this habit of buying a car that was half dead and then killing it completely. This particular embarrassment was a dull brown Malibu classic. It might have been another color in its youth, but the rust had effaced its joie de vivre. I was with him when he acquired it. As we were driving it home green smoke began to pour out of the dash board. I really thought it was going to explode. As acrid smoke filled the car I yelled for him to pull over.

“No. No, I see a Thursday spot,” he said and began to execute an illegal U turn. I say began because the car died evenly in the center of Metropolitan Avenue right on the double yellow line, smoke pouring out of it like a carrier on the losing side of the Battle of Midway. For some people this would have been enough but he actually kept this car for a while, enamored of its ugliness. He christened it “The Love Boat” It was about as sexy as a suicidal slug.

This was the car that the NYPD hauled away one fine day. To extricate a car in such circumstances you must pay the fine, the towing fee, and rental to the pound for each day your car is there. In Queens there was an extra bonus round. The place you paid all of this was on the opposite end of the borough from the pound itself, and since you obviously had no car, you had to take busses to get to these charming destinations. You’d better pack lunch, and dinner. Danny figured the cashectomy of this transaction would be two weeks’ salary, which was two weeks more than “The Love Boat” was worth.
“Let them keep it,” he said.
“It doesn’t work that way,” his father replied. We were at his dad’s apartment. His father sat on his Barcalounger and took a draw on his pipe as deliberately as the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland drew on his hookah.

I think his dad took a certain sardonic pleasure in the mishaps of any of his five sons. It was his revenge on them for living. “They have your car. They know who you are. They will let it sit there and accrue debt for a few months, then they’ll sell it at auction, for scrap in this case.” He drew another puff. “Then they will bill you for the difference and throw in a few legal fees for abandonment and being a bad person. If you don’t pay they will garnishee your salary. If you duck that they will garnishee your social security. If you die before that they will dig you up and sell your organs.”

Like a good fried, I drove Danny to his destinations of pain. It took all day anyway. The pound itself was an education in unpleasantness. Every car there was damaged. They could not ALL have been that way on the street. People complain about the city being inefficient and slipshod, but they were very thorough here. Not one car was spared.

So, it was with considerable trepidation that I set out to extricate my car. It was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a place neither I, nor my car, nor the impound, nor a Rockefeller could afford now. (Although if the impound was still there you could get artisanally crafted doughnuts for only $45 while you waited.) At least the offices to pay the fine and the car prison were in the same place. Brooklyn is a little more organized.  Even so it was a process. You had to stand in a long line to get the forms required to stand in another long line to actually pay all the fines so that you could stand in another long line to get your car.

I was doing this carrying my fourteen month old daughter, Cezanne. Nobody ever says her name right, even in France.  She was in her car carrier since, being an optimist, I expected to drive out of that place the same day. A baby in a car carrier gets heavy after a few hours, but that was not my biggest concern.  She was teething, and nothing was more inconsolable then Cezanne when she was teething. She’d get this look on her face like she was mad at God – which she was. Then she’d cry. Then she’s really rev up and start bellowing like a volcano on a bad day. I’d been on flights where they threatened to land the plane and arrest me if something wasn’t done. As any parent knows, there is not a lot you can do. But a lot of people are not parents and they just glare at you like you beat the kid from dawn till dusk. She had fallen asleep on the bus to the pound and I was in mortal terror during the long hours waiting in line that she would wake up and go off like Vesuvius and I’d get arrested and be put in jail with my car. So there I am on this endless line with this perfectly quiet ticking time bomb.

We got through the first line to get the forms without incident. I bore up like everybody else and got the occasional compliment about what a cute baby I had. Single gentlemen listen up. If you can rent a baby, do so. They are like a magnet for women. Once the ice is broken, you can explain that you are an uncle or you found it or something. If she woke up it would be THE END but so far, so good. It was on the second line that I encountered a New York icon, the next superhero in the Marvel franchise – Mr. Irate Crazy Frothing-at-the-Mouth Taxi Man.

I think you would need the patience of Gandhi to remain calm as a taxi driver in New York. You never know who is going to get in your cab and even if ninety percent of them are reasonable the other ten percent are the ones who make your existence a living hell. On top of that it is always a hassle to get around in this town and even when normal people are trying to get from point A to point B, there is pressure. Likewise if ninety percent of the cab drivers are reasonable it is the other ten percent that make your ride a living hell. This was a cabbie to remember. I rather suspect that he was never part of the reasonable ninety percent. On top of that his cab, and therefore his livelihood, were impounded. On top of that he had been on the wrong line (the one outside to get his car) and only discovered this by starting at one end of the line and going to the other – a long process. He snapped. He stormed into the room and cut all the lines to confront the civil servants behind their bullet proof glass. By his logic, since he had been waiting on the wrong line (and would have to wait on it again later) he should just get served now. He went from one window to another, blustering and frothing in at least two languages and scaring the bejesus out of whatever unlucky citizen happened to be in front of the window.

In my experience, belligerence may work in the private sector, where no matter how unreasonable, the customer is always right. Civil servants are under no such misconception. They do not aim to please. Special orders do upset them. One needs an act of congress to get one dismissed, so they are basically unassailable.  If you are very nice to them, they may deign to take care of whatever petty and completely unimportant problem that you in your imprudence may have acquired. Then again, they may not. In this case they continued their operations very slowly and deliberately, completely ignoring crazy taxi man. They were after all, behind glass. We weren’t. He eventually gave up his direct attack on the civil service citadel to turn his fury on the people in the line, especially the person at the front – me.  He wanted my spot. He wanted it with foam coming out of his mouth. If I refused him there was a distinct possibility of violence. In that turn of events I would have to put Cezanne down or throw her at him. I am aware that some readers might raise an eyebrow even at the suggestion of using a baby as a weapon, but have you considered that a baby in a hard plastic carrier is a pretty good weapon? With that handle you could get a nice angular momentum going. At the very least I would have had the element of surprise.  I weighed the possibilities, but somehow Cezanne had managed to sleep through this whole thing, and this strategy might wake her. At end of the day I was more afraid of her then of him. So baby cum artillery was out and caution was adopted as the better part of valor. He had already taken the first spot so I let it go. The next window came free and up he went.

I had been dubious about his approach all along. Is there that much difference between cutting by going to the window and cutting by seizing the front of the line? But one never knows in a city office so I looked on with real curiosity. By chance the next window to free up was the manager’s window. The cold, imperious look in her eye gave me to suspect that this was not going to be the taxi man’s day at all.

When he came over she said, “You again. You have cut off a whole room full of people and that man with a baby.” He started to sputter and bluster again. At that moment a cop walked in. Since he didn’t have any business of his own there I figure she must have summoned him a few minutes before.  She continued, “Arrest that man for disrupting civil servants in the performance of their duty and being a general menace.” The constable approached the bench. This had a marked effect on the demeanor of the cab driver. He started begging for mercy with the same incoherent ranting with which he had been threatening Armageddon.  She put up her hand to silence him and pointed to a chair in the back of the room. “Sit down there!” He sat down in the chair and considered the floor, whimpering softly. She addressed her minions. “No one attend to that man until everyone else is taken care of.” They all nodded. “Officer, thank you. You may go.” Then she said “Next,” very slowly and quietly so that you could hear every letter in the word.

It was with not a little apprehension that I approached the window. All my papers were in order. I’d checked them three times, but there is that arbitrary nature to all doings in the municipal government that fills one with a nameless dread in such situations. You think you’ve got it all covered but then some unseen calamity strikes you down; the parking ticket that you paid and they didn’t get, the back taxes that you owe when you actually don’t, the registration problem with your car, the regulation that took effect sixty seconds ago, or that expired sixty seconds ago, the fact that you are breathing. It could be anything. And of course it’s none of those things, it’s something you didn’t think to worry about. I put my time bomb down very delicately and pushed all my paperwork and my driver’s license and my receipt of payment and my passport and my birth certificate and my old boy scout badge and a letter of dispensation from the Pope under the window. I would have pushed Cezanne under the window if I thought she’d fit. The public servant scanned it all and her eye stopped on my driver’s license.

She looked up at me for a long moment and said, “Your photo ID does not look like you. Are you sure this is your license?” My heart stopped.
I let out a nervous laugh. “Well, of course it’s my license.”
“I see now. You do have a dimple when you smile,” she said. Without looking down she took her stamp and affixed it to my freedom. “You may go. Have a nice day.”

Under stress I often become forgetful, but I did remember to collect all the papers and the baby before I walked out. Extricating the car proved easy. It wasn’t even damaged! I cleared the gates of the Navy Yard feeling very much like Odysseus – right into downtown Brooklyn rush-hour traffic. We inched along. I began to hear a rumble from the back seat. Well, it would have been too much to ask the gods to get all the way home. My little volcano was awakening. Babies have to be mounted backwards in the back seat. If I was a baby, I wouldn’t like that arrangement very much. Very boring. (There are so many weird things about babyhood I don’t know how anybody gets through it. It must be like being stoned all the time. Everything is unfamiliar and novel and exciting and crazy and intense and disorienting.) She woke up crabby, and teething. She started to rev up. I couldn’t get home. I couldn’t pull over. The only thing I knew would work in such circumstances was putting my finger in her mouth so she could gnaw on it. So on we went, her happily gnawing away, and I driving left handed in the rush hour with my body bent over like an abstract sculpture. Could have been worse. Car could have been a stick.

There are two realities. There’s the way things are, and then there is the way we would like them to be. We are all the star in our own show of life, but it is sobering to reflect that we have small supporting roles in all the lives around us. We would like to be the center of the universe, so we made a whole mythology to support this. God made man in His image, put the earth at the center of the universe and gave us the animals to name, making us godlike. For centuries science has been removing one bastion of specialness after another – not without resistance. First the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, then the sun wasn’t the center, then there wasn’t any center at all. At least we were still God’s special creatures.

Then along came Darwin. At least we were still way different from the other creatures – still special, and a whole cottage industry sprang up to catalogue our specialness. We’re the only one with opposable thumbs, we play, we use tools, and we have language. We are intelligent and they are not. We have subways and they don’t. There were problems with this line of reasoning. We kept finding exceptions to the rules, then like falling back in a war we would redefine the rules only to find more exceptions. Then along came Jane Goodall.

There seems to be an insecurity that if animals are raised up we are diminished in some way. I disagree. I think we are diminished if we hold to a false reality. Intelligence for me needs two ingredients:

1) Curiosity  

2) Sense of humor   

A lot of people are not intelligent by those measures.

Jane Goodall was the first one to study animals on their own turf and their own terms. She observed them using tools, like twigs to get out ants. Any animal that can use a tool is thinking in the abstract. Even crocodiles do it. They will take a twig and submerge leaving the twig above the water. A bird tries to grab the twig for a nest and the crocodile grabs the bird. They only do this during nesting season, knowing that it is a waste of time otherwise. They are inverted fishermen. Crocodiles will observe the bird’s behavior and plan accordingly.

One day a young chimpanzee was not feeling well and was trailing behind the tribe. It was teething. The mother went to a willow tree and pulled the bark off, giving it to the baby. Salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, comes from the willow. Chimpanzees know pharmacology.  This is not an isolated example. Scientists have observed primates using many kinds of herbal compounds including antibiotics and intoxicants. They also know how to use them. Some leaves are chewed, some not, some are picked at specific times. They also have cultures. Different groups know about different kinds of drugs and tools. This information is probably handed down.

These examples of animal intelligence are explored in Intelligence in Nature, a surprising and thought provoking book by Jeremy Narby. For example, you’ll never think of the term “birdbrain” the same way again. Birds such as crows display what psychologists call, “Theory of Mind” where a bird can get into another bird’s head and figure out (in the case of crows) how to deceive it. Crows are all great thieves. Crow A has a nut. He hides it while Crow B is watching then moves away from it, ignoring it until crow B goes away. Then he moves the nut to a different hiding place. In another example there are birds on the ground feeding, therefore vulnerable. They post a few sentinel birds on branches to watch for predators. If a predator comes the sentinels make a particular call and all the birds take off. But other birds can learn that call too. They make the call and clear all the other birds off to feed unmolested. A typical grey parrot from a pet shop was taught a vocabulary of over 1000 words. He knew what the words meant. He could pick out objects and colors by name, and distinguish the numbers one to six. When he had had enough work in the lab he would say “No,” and turn his back on the researcher. If you’re not looking for something you won’ find it. People assume parrots are just “parroting,” missing a chance at a much deeper relationship. It makes one wonder about parrots that tell dirty jokes. “Did you hear the one about the primate taking a selfie?”

Lest you think there is no intelligence in plants, the acanthus tree is a favorite food of giraffes. When giraffes start to feed it secretes toxins into its leaves to stop them. It also releases pheromones into the air which warn all the other acanthus trees that the giraffes are at it again. The trees that get the message pump toxins into their leaves proactively. The giraffes display their intelligence by going to new trees that are upwind of the original tree and therefore uninformed of the danger.

One of the most intriguing and disquieting examples of plant intelligence is of a parasitic plant called dodder that can walk – sort of. The parasite smells its way to vegetation that is wants to prey on, sending shoots in that direction. It will wrap a feeler around its victim, gauge the plant’s health, and only wrap its other tendrils around the victim if it is healthy enough to make it worthwhile. If the plant is sickly, dodder moves on, letting older parts of itself die off.

Plants don’t have brains, they just act that way. How can that be?  Since we think with our brains, it is hard for us to imagine other structures that would do this, but in other life forms we see learning, teaching, language, planning, deception, intent, culture, grieving, cooperative hunting, and play.

Play is a great example of intelligence. It is an activity that has more to do with delight then survival. Dolphins don’t have hands but they make do by grabbing fronds of seaweed on their fins and swimming past other dolphins who try to intercept them, like football. As you might expect, killer whales have a blood sport. They will take some penguin that they have already injured and toss it back and forth over the water, playing catch. Sea lions do the same thing with the hapless sunfish. Some people read a purpose into this like increasing hunting skills, but the more obvious reason is that the exercise of power is enjoyable, just ask a cat with a mouse – or a schoolyard bully.

Whales may also have language, we just don’t know what they are saying. Each whale has songs unique to that creature, and they like to spread their song around. The ocean is like a layer cake, with different depths having different temperature and densities. Sound made in one layer tends to be trapped there so the sound travels horizontally in that layer for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. It’s like a party line for whales. When they feel like talking, they dive down to a deep layer of the ocean and sing to each other. Whales may also have names. Pods of killer whales have call signs unique to that pod, and they add a call sign unique to that whale, like a first name and last name. Killer whales in captivity imitate the language of the lesser dolphins. Are they trying to communicate with them? Humpbacks do. The gregarious humpback whale has been observed approaching whales of other species and imitating their song. Humpbacks have also been observed working together to protect themselves and even other species from killer whales.

As I began researching animal and plant intelligence I found myself gorging on the huge selection of scientific papers on this extensive and rapidly expanding topic. The examples seem to be as common as life itself. If you like to stretch your mind to encompass a greater, richer world, find a hammock and plunge into Intelligence in Nature. Maybe your dog will even read it to you.

The body likes fat. It likes to be fat. It rewards you for doing things that make you fat, like sleeping and eating. The body likes muscle and bone, but to a much lesser degree. Why? Fat serves as a calorie reserve for hard times, which were a lot of times when we were evolving. Fat gets you through famine. Fat is also easy to maintain. You don’t need a lot of extra calories to support those tissues. They are metabolically cheap. Fat is like an extra gas tank that doesn’t take too much energy to haul around. Muscle and bone are a calorie drain. They are expensive tissues to maintain, sucking up calories even when you are sleeping. This is one of the reasons people with a lot of muscle find it easier to keep the weight off. They draw more calories even while asleep. The body’s survival strategy has always been to trim down muscle and bone to only what you need on a day to day basis. If you don’t prove to the body that you need them, they get reduced because they cost too much in calories to maintain. Muscle does not turn into fat, but muscle can thin out, and fat can fat in.

When a person exercises they expend energy in the form of calories but they also put a strain on the muscle and bone. Body tissues are piezoelectric. That means when you put a strain on body tissues they generate an electric field. This electric field signals the cells to build more muscle and bone. As you exercise you build muscle and strengthen bone internally. If you stop, there is no more electric field and the cells stop putting on muscle and bone. Muscle and bone eventually reduce to whatever you need to get through the day. You have to exercise twice a week to maintain what you have, more if you want to build up. Muscle and bone don’t fade away to nothing because we are still exercising somewhat by dragging our bodies across the surface of the planet. Where there is gravity there is resistance. The body reinforces itself to resist strain exerted on it. The more the strain, the more the reinforcement. This x ray of the foot reveals the internal structure of the bones.

If bones were solid bone they would be stronger – and three times heavier. That’s a lot to drag around. Instead the bones are mostly hollow with fine filaments inside to reinforce them. The filaments are aligned in the best way to resist stress on the bone. Note that most of the filaments in the calcaneous (heel bone) are running parallel from the heel to the ankle, matching the lines of force on the foot when the heel strikes the ground. Even as you read this there are groups of bone cells eating away unnecessary filaments and other groups building new filaments to resist stress more efficiently. The whole skeleton is replaced every two years or so. Its unchanging appearance is but an illusion.

The astronauts don’t have this resistance and their bodies suffer for it.  Their muscles and bones start to weaken after about three days. Who needs bones in space? Despite exercising a lot most of them end up with severe osteoporosis. When they come back to earth they often have to be carried off the space capsule on a gurney. Back on earth their bodies recover, but not completely. Going to Mars sounds like fun, but unless somebody comes up with artificial gravity like the Starship Enterprise,

we aren’t going anywhere. In the year or more in space it would take to get to Mars an astronaut would turn to jello. NASA has all sorts of strategies for this problem. They have resistance equipment on the space station but it’s not enough.  Nothing beats dealing with gravity 24/7. (Those strap on electric stim machines they sell in the TV guide so you can “exercise” in the Barcalounger while eating nachos don’t work either.)

The body likes exercise somewhat. Muscle and bone is good for some things; you could run out to the candy store for example (or away from a predator). The body rewards us for exercise with endorphins and serotonin, more feel good neurotransmitters, but you have to get going. Like most people, I never want to exercise, but I know that about five minutes into it my blood is up and then it’s good, or at least ok. I always feel better afterwards. You do have to get over that initial hump though. It also takes a certain amount of discipline. Like a diet, you need to make it an integral part of your routine.  Diet and exercise are lifelong. That being the case, try to find something that you like. I like nature so for me it’s swimming, biking, hiking, and skating. Some people like dancing, some are attracted to martial arts.

If you are social, take classes or find a workout partner. Keep trying different things until you find what works for you. It doesn’t have to be huge. A twenty minute walk at a good pace three times a week does wonders. Even a little exercise, if done on a regular basis will have real effects.

The piezoelectric effect mentioned earlier is found in many materials including collagen, a major structural protein of the body. The Body Electric, by Dr. Robert Becker and Gary Selden is an excellent book for all the wonderful things electricity does in your body.

Why is it so easy to eat and so hard to work out? People invariably need no coaxing to eat. They look forward to it, consume mass quantities with gusto, and even look back on the meal with a certain fondness. One out of five people force themselves to exercise, and the other four out of five people don’t work out at all except in front of the fridge. It’s open and bend and reach and up and close and open and bend and reach and up and close, repeat. There are whole professions dedicated to help people work out. Not so with eating. You don’t find eatotonics classes where we all get together around a big table with a horribly enthusiastic cheerleader egging us on. Hard to imagine a personal eating trainer at dinner. ”O.K. O.K. That was good. Lift that fork again! C’mon! You can do it! Three more reps and we’re done.”

There are exceptions. Some people don’t eat enough and some people do work out too much, but the overwhelming tide of humanity goes the other way. When given the chance of working out or watching other people work out (sports on TV), most people will do the latter, and eat while they are doing it. Since everybody knows you are supposed to exercise and not overeat, why does the average person do just the opposite?

We are the victims of our own success. In the beginning, when the world was young it was also hungry. Humankind grew up in the East African rift valley over the last million years or so. Estimates are, to get enough food those early hunter gatherer societies would walk six or seven miles a day.

You didn’t need a coach, you had a built-in coach called hunger. Hunger is an excellent coach. Exercise was provided by the lifestyle and nobody liked it then either, so we invented ways to avoid it ultimately inventing the car. We have gotten so good at it that by now you have to schedule exercise.

People in cities that were built up after the invention of the car (cities like LA, Dallas, Phoenix) get no exercise unless they seek it out, and the general population is not in good shape. You can’t even walk around because cars require big roads and big parking lots so everything is spread out.  LA has sidewalks, but I don’t know why. My first time out there I went for a walk.  I was the only pedestrian for miles. Eventually a police cruiser started to follow me, I suppose because I was involved in the suspicious act of walking. Without a car, you can’t exist in these places. People in cities that were built up before the invention of the car (Chicago, San Francisco, and all the big eastern cities) get more exercise and the populations fare a bit better. Without cars, the cities are more dense and you can walk from place to place. Many people don’t have cars. The cities solved the problem of getting around with subways and busses, which you still have to get to. Most New Yorkers climb many flights of stairs every day just to get to work. Even so, they are hardly clocking seven miles.

Since we used to walk all over, why no urge to do it now? Simple, then as now, the internal urge was to conserve energy. Food was hard to come by and what you could depend on was sometimes it would be really hard to come by – famine. Famine was always around, and for much of the world it still is. The survival strategy then would be to get as many calories as you can whenever you can and expending as few calories as possible to do so. The ultimate expression of this universal desire is driving to the Olive Garden.

If they could figure out a conveyor belt to take you from your car to a booth they would do it. There are drive through deli’s in California where attendants put anything in your car you like. Not only do we want to eat as much as possible, we want to eat as much food with as many calories as possible. Carbohydrates (sugar, high fructose corn syrup, bread, cereal, crackers, cake, pasta, potatoes) are a great source of calories and fats (butter, cheese, oil) are even better. Too improve a carb, just add fat. Bread is improved with butter. Bread is really improved by deep frying it and rolling it in granulated sugar – churros! Pasta is improved with a cream sauce. Potatoes are improved with sour cream and butter (even better, deep fry the potatoes in oil to make fries and smother them in melted cheese!) Heck, you can even fix vegetables with fat. Salad dressings (ranch, blue cheese, creamy Italian) are more than half fat. What does asparagus need? Hollandaise sauce which is fat squared! What can we do for this broccoli? I know, lets pour some melted cheese on it. Hungry yet?

This particular desire for fats is driven by a neurotransmitter called cholecystokinin, a mouthful of a word that causes you to eat many more mouthfuls. Cholecystokinin is THE BEAST WITHIN YOU.

Plants generally don’t have fats. Animals have fats, and they want keep them. If you want a fat now you need do no more than walk into a convenience store. If you wanted a fat in the old days it would be attached to some animal who was running away from you. You’d have to sharpen a stick, make a strategy, walk even more miles then try to kill it and if it was big it just might kill you. What a pain. You can almost see Thag looking out of his cave on a winter morning at some wooly mammoth who is looking right back at him as if to say, “Just try it.” Thag turns to Mrs. Thag and says, “Can we just have pasta tonight?”

We used to need a strong incentive to hunt down those fats. Cholecystokinin is a neurotransmitter that can control your mood. The stomach releases it when you eat food with fats and that makes you feel good. Everybody has their own comfort food, and every one of those foods is laced with fat. Nobody looks at rice cakes as a comfort food. Wrap them in bacon and you are getting closer.

Not only do we have a sweet tooth, we have a fat tooth. We still have the cave man drives that we used to need to get calories, and especially fat calories, but now we can get them easily, and we do. We’ll take things that already have plenty of fat and add more fat to it. “I’ll have the double bacon cheeseburger with fries. Supersize me.” Dominos sold a lot more pizza when they doubled the cheese on it. Now they even have cheese inside the perimeter crust.

Our sweet tooth is sharpened by the bacteria in our gut. If we eat a lot of carbs, the bacteria in our gut that breaks down carbs is getting more nutrition, so it is fruitful and multiplies. Since more is better it will secrete its own hormones and neurotransmitters that make you crave even more carbs, thereby ensuring its own food supply. It’s not so much that you think with your gut as your gut often thinks for you.

If you are having a hard time accepting the idea that gut bacteria – the micribiome – are influencing your behavior this sort of thing goes on all the time. We have a dynamic and shifting relationship with the civilizations we carry within us. Various species within the intestinal biota can be “good guys” one day and “bad guys” the next, so such labels are not so useful. Think of it more like the UN. Everybody has their own agenda and sometimes these agendas coincide and sometimes they do not. If you are curious about this topic, I recommend I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong, a fascinating walk through the various relationships within ourselves.

The body is well designed for the hardscrabble existence it evolved in. It is not good for the land of milk and honey. When you go “on a diet” you are going against the grain. One thing is certain. All extreme diets fail. Unless you want to suffer and gain weight don’t go there. They all advertise about how much weight people lose but everybody on them gains it back within a year. A workable diet is what you do eat, not what you don’t eat, and cutting out your favorite stuff will only make you want it more. Also, your body interprets extreme rationing as famine and decreases its calorie use which makes you tired and crabby. So eat what you want, just not as much as you want to. (That said, junk food is not a good idea.) Decreasing eating by a little bit is way more effective because it has to be something you can sustain forever. If you link that with moderate exercise the weight will come off. Exercise is at least as important as diet, probably more so. This is easier said than done. Behavior modification seems to be about the hardest thing in the world. Ask anyone who smokes.

My next post will address why we don’t have an exercise tooth to go with the sweet tooth and the fat tooth.

We think we know ourselves, but do we really? When something surprising happens we often surprise ourselves. So it was with me as I was to find out late one afternoon on the Lower East Side. I used to teach an anatomy and physiology workshop for massage students who were preparing to take their New York State Board Exam. I’d rent a big room for a weekend in the Ukrainian Sports club (the only sport I ever saw there was cards.) For $100, I would run them through their paces over two rather grueling days. I’d get about fifty students, and that was a nice chunk of change in the nineties. As a prop I used a disarticulated skeleton, basically a back pack full of bones. I had a small satchel for the tuition, your basic bag of money. I also had a container of matzo ball soup from the Second Avenue Deli. The Second Avenue Deli isn’t on Second Avenue anymore. Then again, Madison Square Garden isn’t in Madison Square anymore. We do this to confuse the tourists. Why the soup? There was a child coming into our lives, and pregnant women often have peculiar culinary desires. This one was Shelley’s, and since she was bound to do most of the heavy lifting when it came to labor and what not, the least I could do was pick up some soup when I was in the right neighborhood.

I was pretty tired, but feeling ok. I had just finished the workshop. I had a back pack full o’bones, a bag o’money (quite a lot of it), and a box o’soup. There was no reason why the remains of the day shouldn’t be spent in the comfortable embrace of a martini the size of my head. But one should never completely relax in NYC. Anything can happen, and often does. As I walked out the door onto Second Avenue there was a sudden blur five angstroms in front of my nose as someone flew by at about warp eight. As the figure pounded up the block I wondered, “Who is chasing you?” I looked down the block to see none other than my old pal Waldo charging up with a two by four.

Waldo is well over six feet tall with the kind of big bony face you have to have if you are the crazy villain in an old sci-fi movie. He looked nothing if not impressive in the afternoon light, but looks can be deceiving. I knew him to be a fairly reasonable homo sapien and if he was after someone with a two by four, they likely had it coming. He owned Big Bar around the corner. I figured something bad went down in the bar and Waldo was simply displaying his most sincere disapprobation of such. As these wheels were turning in my head what came out of me, in my best Alpha voice was, “Hey Waldo! You want me to get him?” Who said that? That was an unauthorized communication! I’m not getting involved in a bar fight. But as my rational frontal lobes launched an investigation into what vestigial dinosaur idiot neural remnant was responsible for the words coming out of my lips, Waldo roared, “YEAH!!!!” Ours not to reason why. I set out in hot pursuit of the official bad guy.

One might think that encumbered as I was with a box o’soup, a bag o’money, and a bag o’bones I would have trouble overtaking the perp. It was a challenge. The bag o’bones on my back were rattling like castanets and a big bone, probably the femur, worked its way through the top of the bag and was hitting me in the back of the head with every stride. Likewise it is not possible to run flat out and keep the hand that bears the soup perfectly still. After a good fifty yards a froth began to emanate from the top of the box and I had that sinking feeling that one gets as ones balls are disintegrating.

Notwithstanding the impediments, I am in shape, and he, poor fellow, was not. Before we got up to St. Mark’s church

I was close enough to see that he was disheveled in a way that said, “Heroin addict.” In the Lower East Side they were easy to spot as pigeons, and just as common. I have nothing against heroin addicts. Some of my best friends have been heroin addicts, and that is why I have never tried it. I’ve tried other things,  but

:

I have been horrified and saddened at what I have seen it do to people; people I know personally to be a strong and smart. For some of them, it burned their lives to the ground. Others did manage to claw their way out, but none of them emerged from the experience entirely intact.

While sympathetic, it doesn’t mean I want to touch one of them, certainly not as skanky as this guy. However, it is a fact of life that you cannot grab someone without also touching them. I transferred the soup, which was quite agitated at this point, to the money hand and grabbed the assailant by the wrist and brought him to a halt. The two of us then performed what can only be thought of as a sidewalk pas de duex.

Though I had him by the wrist I sure didn’t want to have him any more than that so I was leaning away from him. For his part he was leaning away from me for reasons that are probably obvious to the reader. When two men of about the same size are pulling away from each other it is easy to end up in a bit of a stalemate. This did not work for my partner who lurched sideways. Always the congenial partner I lurched also and the two of us began to orbit around our one point of contact. It was such a natural thing it was hard to tell who was leading. And then came Waldo.

He raised the mighty two by four high over head and arced it down at my partner with the obvious intent of smashing his brains out. It was then that I had a childhood memory. My dad was a cop, and I remember him mentioning at some point that homicide, while often desirable, is a felony, and that I should never do it, at least not in a way that is obvious and discoverable. It occurred to me that the bashing out of brains on the sidewalk was discoverable, maybe even obvious. My good friend Waldo might go to jail, and I did not want that to happen to him. In retrospect, I could have gone to jail too, as an accessory, but my brain was rather busy and hadn’t the time to consider every little ramification of the unfolding drama. I did the second totally unexpected thing of the afternoon. I let go.

When in the course of human events one person dissolves the physical bands connecting him to another, and the two men are leaning away from each other while spinning, the laws of physics take over. We flew apart, the two by four whistling down in the air between us. I fell back until I bounced off a building,

and the junkie staggered into Second Avenue until he bounced off a cop car.

For all the times in my life I have asked, “Where is a cop when you need one?” I must observe their timing was spot on that day. They had seen the altercation and were pulling over to investigate when one half of the altercation came to them. The junkie rolled across the hood, landed on his feet and took off, followed by the NYPD, Waldo, and me. He barely made it to the opposite curb when he fell and several little bags of a highly suspicious nature fell out of his pocket. The Force descended on him pronto.

As they were cuffing him I had another thought. The soup, frothy though it was, could be easily explained; the bag o’bones and the bag o’money not so much. The femur rested affectionately against the back of my head, quite, as it were, out of the bag. I made a gesture of slicking down my hair and forced the femur back in the bag with one suave move just as the constable glanced up. He looked at me quizzically for a moment, but was preoccupied with his new catch. Quick thinking was called for.

“Officers, do you need any assistance?”
“Ah No. No. We got it.”
“Good work. Finish your tour safe. Waldo, see you later.

I departed the scene as fast as discretion would allow. It was only when I got to Astor Place that my legs turned to water. When I got home there was dialog:

“Oh Honey, what happened to my Matzo ball soup? The balls are all dissolved?”
“Oh Honey, it’s a long story.”