The trip from San Francisco was pretty uneventful. I normally take one of three routes, the 580 to the 5 inland route, the Pacheco Pass variant, or the Lost Hills jog through Paso Robles, the road that claimed James Dean.
Yesterday I decided to take a different alternate return and take the 126 through Santa Paula eastbound. I love the Fillmore, Santa Paula area. It is a lot like Fallbrook but the ranches are bigger and the avocados grow on flat ground. Either they have root rot resistant rootstock or porous ground without the clay we have down here, Fallbrook aguacates tending to grow on steeper slopes. Anyway it is a beautiful area, not despoiled yet by the rich folk that have started to ruin places near bye like Ojai and Montecito.
My new travel plans also allowed me to stop at one of the most hallowed fast food mexican restaurants in this world, Superica in Santa Barbara. Located on Milpas St., Superica has an incredible menu. I had a tri tip taco with fresh tortillas, marinated pork steak and a quesadilla with chorizo. The salsa is a smoky habanero that is just fantastic. I washed the whole thing down with a pulpy aqua de sandia, spanish for watermelon water. Delicious. The line for this place always runs out the door and I try to stop by every time I am in town. If you haven't been there, it is worth the trip. Entrees generally run from $2.50 to $3.50.
It was a beautiful day and I enjoyed seeing the lovely ocean views driving down near Pismo Beach. Was also especially wonderful to come back home to my beautiful wife and cat.
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The show was tough. For the second week in a row I did almost no business until 10 minutes before the thing shut down, when I consummated two nice transactions. Test me, test me lord. Couldn't make it easy, could we? Puts your writer in the best of moods, especially when I see my cohorts ringing up sales like nobody's business. But all's well that ends well and I did manage to make the whole thing work and also buy some beautiful stock.
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Speaking of food, did you read about the Laker forward, Derrick Caracter, who was arrested for harassing and abusing a waitress at a New Orleans IHOP? Hey Rookie. You make $473,000.00 this year and you're eating at IHOP? Ever hear of Mother's? It's a New Orleans institution. What'samatter - Waffle House closed? Stuckeys? No wonder they put that weight clause in your contract. And don't push waitresses around either.
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My favorite cook, Chef Melissa Rossi, made me a wonderful meal at her home up north and I would be remiss if I didn't mention it. Leslie always says that she would rather eat Melissa's leftovers than the hautest of the haute cuisines in the world. I agree. We started off with taramasalata or fish roe salad and burratta with crackers. Couldn't stop eating it, almost got full. The Berkeley made burratta is much better than the import I am getting at home. The cream filled center is much more pronounced. This was the best chile relleno I ever tasted, along with divine grilled chicken. I don't even like chile relleno and I loved these stuffed poblanos. The meal was topped off with homemade tres leches cake replete with mango and coconut sauce. Totally deelish. Muy dulce.
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I read an interesting article by Gregory Rodriguez in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. Rodriguez talks about the schism between white people as being the dominant source of discord today rather than fractiousness with other races. Traditional whitey versus progressive whitey. What I really liked the most about the article is that I was introduced to the concept of the "enmity or narcissism of small differences."
This is a concept first postulated by the British anthropologist Ernest Crawley and then codified by Sigmund Freud in his 1917 work "The Taboo of Virginity." Basically what it says in a nutshell is that people who have minor differences with us are much more of an irritant than those with which we have a major gulf.
Freud moves from the Oedipus and the Castration Complex into the realm of social anthropology with this work. I know that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but I had never heard about this volume on the narcissist and find it somewhat illuminating.
From Alain De Mijolla and the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis:
In his article on "The Taboo of Virginity" (1918a) and on the subject of man's "narcissistic rejection" of woman because of his castration complex, Freud isolated for the first time a particular reaction that he later saw as the driving force behind racism. He wrote "the practice of taboos we have described testifies to the existence of a force which opposes love by rejecting women as strange and hostile. Crawley, in language which differs only slightly from the current terminology of psychoanalysis, declares that each individual is separated from the others by a 'taboo of personal isolation,' and that it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them. It would be tempting to pursue this idea and to derive from this 'narcissism of minor differences' the hostility which in every human relation we see fighting successfully against feelings of fellowship and overpowering the commandment that all men should love one another" (p. 199).
He returned to this idea without naming it in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) when discussing hostile sentiments with regard to whatever is strange: "In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel towards strangers with whom they have to do we may recognize the expression of self-love—of narcissism. This self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration. We do not know why such sensitiveness should have been directed to just these details of differentiation" (p. 102)
Not until Civilization and its Discontents did Freud give the notion the full meaning that it has today: "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other—Germans and South Germans, the English and the Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of 'the narcissism of minor differences,' a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier. In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts" (1930a [1929], p. 114).
After Freud the notion entered psychoanalytic discourse without much further study. Otto Fenichel described it as a stumbling block in identification with the other that is destined to surpass hostile sentiments (1934). The idea is mentioned in other papers to illustrate incomprehension between adults and adolescents or disagreements between psychoanalysts despite their belonging to the same group. Glen O. Gabbard in On Hate in Love Relationships: The Narcissism of Minor Differences Revisited presented the most thorough study of it. Gabbard stresses the experience of disappointment when, in spite of the aspiration for similarity, we find differences in the loved object, and he links this disappointment to preoedipal and oedipal experiences that punctuate the processes of separation and autonomy.
With the exception of this last work, the notion has been used essentially to explain the hate relations that develop between humans or groups of humans that, by all appearances, have much in common.
More on the narcissistic disorder from Sam Vaknin from Buzzle.
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I read somewhere recently that the goal of the computer industry is to keep us all constantly connected. I react to the email ring on my droid like a drooling pavlovian dog. Had to get off Facebook because it was so time consuming. Like this blog. I flaunt my twenty year vacation from tv but I am in bondage too. Anyway I don't think that the person who postulated that premise was too far off. Our online dithering is on equal footing with the physical realm for many of us, your author notwithstanding. Soon the devices will be implanted into our bodies somehow. We will be reduced to body snatched simulacrums, living in a robotic nether world. Wait, we already are?
The world is connecting up at warp speed. Technology has both toppled empires and given big brother a microscope on all of our personal communications. The unforeseen consequences of this linkage have yet to be envisaged. But it surely doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the next trick will be finding out how to disconnect and cover our tracks quietly and artfully.
My friend, the writer and fitness trainer Roy Cohen, in acknowledgement of the growing enslavement to the "connection," has foregone all electronic devices this month. No phone, blog, email, computer, video game, television, kindle, or any other such contraption will invade his Walden's pond. Hats off to you Roy! Would it be okay if we just run a string between two frozen orange juice cans? Just in case we need to talk...
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I still don't see how the Wikileaks disclosures are gong to do much besides put people's lives in jeopardy and needlessly expose diplomatic assessments and relationships that are the province and property of the people in our State Department. The idea that opening up a cannon sized hole in our foreign service apparatus for all to view will benefit anybody but the enemies of our country is ludicrous.
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I have driven by the sign on the I -15 freeway north for several years, the one I post in my banner photo. Why would you call your business "pus"? Shouldn't some vice president have whispered nay in the owner's ear?
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And finally, look at the Mt. Rushmore masterpiece this talented artist has crafted in Cheez-it. Sacre Bleu!
4 comments:
by the looks of him, he's consumed his fair share of Cheez-it...as for I-Hop, when he played for the Lakers, it was Smush Parker's favorite eatery, also, swear to God; important facts i can't remember, useless trivia sticks with me...
[the]"existence of a force which opposes love by rejecting women as strange and hostile"
Was Freud Referring to your castration complex of Diane?
Who's asking?
The notion of psychological "forces" is a bogus 19th century construct.
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