Delusions, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention...


But, of course, I will:

I will always be a child, and my parents will always be my parents.

My country’s leaders are wise and good.

Thunder is caused by the devil beating his wife over the head with a frying pan.

The police only want to help me.

Pretty women are angels with hidden wings.

My country exemplifies bravery, generosity, and every other virtue.

Claw-hammers and Colt .45 revolvers are wise, and wise things don’t want to hurt me.

All airplanes and some women are beautiful, and beautiful things can’t hurt me.

If you have enough money, you can hire experts to do anything. For example, you could throw a very small rock into the middle of the deep woods, and the right experts could easily find that very rock; or you could get your head blown-off by a shotgun, and they could put it on again.

Behind the woods are the backwoods, and people who look like Lil’ Abner live in the backwoods, but you never see them because the backwoods are too far back.

Having sex with enough women will protect me.

Jesus is real, and he loves me.

Jesus’ father is real, and he wants to send me to hell.

The Holy Ghost is a vapor that does whatever Jesus and Jesus’ father tell him to do.

Doctors know too much to make mistakes.

I create reality as I go along, and it stops existing when I’m gone.

Everything is alive and knows what is going on around it.

My belongings appreciate me for taking such good care of them, and they miss me when I go away.

My houseplants enjoy getting a shower.



I am over most of these, but I’m hardly delusion free, and that’s only counting the delusions I know about. What do delusions offer that they keep me enslaved against my will, and how do my delusional beliefs compare with the delusional beliefs of others? For example, how do religious people—once they are grown—hold, not just to isolated delusions but to a thousand interrelated and often contradictory delusions, and not only NOT try to recover from them, but try to cling to them more fiercely; and how is it that I have been able to escape those kinds of delusions, but not others—the last three things on my list, for example—even though I recognize their delusional nature?

Off we go, into the wild blue yonder... (from the US Air Force anthem)


It’s easy to get an airplane off the ground once you get used to steering with your feet and working the gas with your hand. The hard part is getting the plane back onto the ground. Most student pilots do their first solo after 15-20 hours of flying, but I knew a guy who never soloed,  and I didn’t want to do it either, but my reasoning went as follows: (1) I can probably get this plane back onto the ground without killing myself and without too much damage to the plane. (2) If I refuse to solo, I will be a coward, and I will be disrespecting my instructor’s judgment of my readiness. (3) I have no choice but to solo. (As I prepared to taxi onto the runway alone for the first time, Peggy came running over and asked for my car keys because she had left hers at home, and wanted to be prepared in case mine ended up in a tree somewhere.)

Twice, during my brief flying career, the engine quit, and I had to make on-field emergency landings. Another time, I smelled smoke from an electrical short, and had to make another on-field emergency landing. On a third occasion, I accidentally put myself into a spin while I was doing something that my instructor had warned me against doing alone—practicing approach stalls. Back then, at least, most VFR pilots (the lowest level of pilot; Visual Flight Rules as opposed to Instrument Flight Rules) weren’t taught spin recovery, so when the plane’s nose instantly went from pointing 20° upward to 85° downward and the ground started spinning up at me, I got busy trying to remember what I had read on the subject. If I had been a poor student, I might have died, and I never got over that fact, although I kept flying. Indeed, the first thing I did after I got myself out of that spin was to regain altitude and do another approach stall. After I recovered from it, I flew back to the airport, made a bad landing, and found that I was having a little trouble walking.

I now feel stupid for having done that last stall, but most young men live by rigid rules regarding courage, and can torture themselves for years if they break one of them. This means that it sometimes seems easier to a man to get out of a bad situation by risking death than by playing it safe and having to live with doubts about his courage—and therefore his manhood. (This naturally raises questions about what constitutes courage. After all, if one man charges into machine gun fire because he fears censure more than death, while another feigns a mental collapse because he fears death more than censure; who is really braver?)

After I logged about 200 hours, I sold my one-sixth interest in a Cessna 150 because I was preparing to move. By then, I had learned three things about flying that kept me from going back to it. One, if you live in the American South and you fly a small plane VFR, you can never count on making it back home in a timely manner if you travel very far because the area is so prone to overcast, scattered thundershowers, and 250 mile long thunderstorm fronts (These fronts are too high to fly over, and no one in his right mind would fly a small plane within thirty miles of one because of the likelihood of being hurled 35,000 feet into the air, having his wings snapped off, and then being slammed into the ground). Two, it costs a hell of lot to fly even if you share expenses, not so much because of the original investment in a share of some old and tiny airplane, as because of maintenance costs. The sad truth is that airplane labor and parts cost more than the same do for cars, plus the government requires frequent inspections and lots of periodic maintenance (like a motor rebuild every 2000 flight hours). Third, you’re a danger to yourself and others if you only fly occasionally, and this means that, to be a safe pilot, a person has to spend a lot of time in the air when he had rather be doing something else.

Looking back, I’m glad I flew a little, and I’m glad I survived because as dangerous as it looks, I found it to be even more dangerous for someone of my limited experience who was flying a raggedy-ass old plane. Of course, it could be that my various close calls scared me more than was reasonable, but maybe that was for the better. You wouldn’t think that adding an up and down dimension to the usual left, right, and forward, would make much difference, but it wasn’t just the up and down that was disconcerting, it was that I was moving through an unstable element. In case you haven’t been in an 1,100 hundred pound plane with a 34-foot wingspan, I should mention that small planes bounce all over the place, and the moment the pilot gets them adjusted in response to one air movement, another wind, updraft, or downdraft hits, and they have to be adjusted all over again to forces that can neither be seen nor anticipated.

Me being an atheist and all, you might be wondering if I was ever scared enough to pray. The answer is that I was plenty scared, but if you truly don’t believe, you don’t believe, so you’re unlikely to pray no matter how scared you get. I won’t say that no atheist ever prayed in a dire situation, but I’ve never known of any. Of course, it was also true that I never had something go wrong in an airplane that left me with enough leisure to pray. It’s a wonderfully focusing moment when you suspect that the only things between you and death are luck and experience, and you can’t control the former, and you have little of the latter.

How I missed the war


I get a lot more done when Peggy is away because her presence is a distraction. During this absence, I’ve been roofing our new deck during the day and making crackers and soups at night. When I’m working in the kitchen, I watch films one after the other. Tonight, I watched two war documentaries. The first was The Corporal’s Diary, which was about an American soldier who died in Iraq, and the second was Heroes of Iwo Jima. In a few minutes, I’ll go to bed and continue my nightly reading of a newly-released book entitled Survivor: Auschwitz, the Death March, and My Fight for Freedom, which is surely the last first-person account of a Nazi death camp that the world will ever see.

When I was younger, I sometimes experienced regret that I had never gone to war because I saw it as a rite of passage like no other, and because it enables men to bond closely with other men. Yet, I went to great lengths to avoid the only war I had a chance at. I’m not sure whether I did this because I thought that only suckers voluntarily went to Vietnam, or because I had no stomach for any war. I suspect the former because, unlike World War II, which made at least a little sense to me, and during which those who didn’t fight were viewed with suspicion, I never felt the least inner desire or societal pressure to go to Vietnam, although I felt a lot of pressure from the draft board, which was forever eliminating my latest exemption in what seemed like a cat and mouse game with me being the mouse. When it seemed as if the cat finally had me cornered, my doctor wrote to the draft board saying that I had passed several kidney stones, so I was reclassified from 1A (kiss your ass goodbye) to 4F (we wouldn’t draft a worthless fucker like you no matter what) for a year, and by the time that year ended, the war was winding down. I was surprised to learn that I had suffered from kidney stones, but I wasn’t about to argue.

Tonight, as I cried my way through Heroes of Iwo Jima, I glanced over at Brewsky and was startled to discover that he was watching me with an expression of consternation unlike any I had ever seen in him, and I knew it was because he didn’t understand my tears. I very much wanted to tell him what was going on for me, but how does one describe feelings about war to a cat? Not very well, I shouldn’t think. When the war films were over, I watched another documentary, The Cruise, which was about a NYC tour bus guide. This guy had depth, honesty, creativity, sensitivity, eloquence, and a unique world-view, which is to say that he was everything I would like to be when I’m around people but am not. Of course, it’s a lot harder to be all those things given that I mostly avoid people. Like this morning, I got to feeling lonely, what with Peggy being gone, so, it being Sunday, I thought about either visiting the new Unitarian Church or calling someone about getting together, but I decided against either because they seemed like too much work. That decision being out of the way, my friend Cliff called to ask if he could come over, but I didn't answer the phone. About an hour later, I called him back, and we took a walk. It was good, but there’s such a wide gap between myself and others that I sometimes think about seeing people in the same way I think about taking medicine. I know it’s good for me, but it’s not altogether pleasant, although it can sometimes be very pleasant indeed, which is another parallel between people and drugs.