Now I live two blocks away, one block off the Haight, and my apartment complex has this awesome, fancy doorbell system that calls my cell phone to buzz open the lobby door. When I see the right number calling, I answer the call, press “9″ and in goes the delivery man. It works great.

So a few days ago I had my iPhone in the back pocket of my jeans and, oh!, it fell in a coffee shop toilet when I sat down to pee. After a couple days of the rice trick failure, I surrendered myself to fate and late last night I ordered a refurbished iPhone from AT&T.

Just over 12 hours later it dawns on me: I need a cell phone if I’m going to buzz in the delivery of a cell phone.

The Long Goodbye

In those days, extended family cared for the oldest. Now, in an age when family members are separated by hundreds of miles, we leave it up to nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. And the need has never been greater. The fastest-growing age group in America is the eighty-five-and-older cohort. As the population ages, healthcare costs continue to outpace inflation. Many older people have seen a sharp decline in their retirement investments since the 2008 economic collapse and are rapidly losing value in their homes. American political leaders are not preparing adequately for the huge demographic shift caused by the aging of the boomers, who began turning sixty-five in 2011. Many of them are retiring at the same time they are dealing with parents who are still alive.

Costs for long-term care are skyrocketing because only 3 percent of adults carry long-term care insurance. As a result, middle-class people without Daddy’s pension income are bankrupting themselves and then applying for Medicaid to pay for a nursing home in which they may languish for years.

End.

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you will go. You will not be you anymore. Not exactly. You will be a corpse, a cadaver, a decedent, a “loved one.” You will be remains. The death industry employs more euphemisms than politicians do. Someone will find what’s left of you. A child, spouse, or parent. A nurse or passerby. Whoever it is will call for help. At home, at work, or in the street, he or she will dial 911. In a hospital, hospice, or nursing home, someone will call your doctor, who will check one last time for vital signs, declare you dead, and fill out the proper forms. A nurse will remove your clothes and close your eyes. (Not just for modesty’s sake: Rigor mortis hits the eyelids fast.) He or she will tie a tag bearing your name, which you can no longer speak, onto one of your toes, cover you with a plastic shroud, and wheel you to an elevator and thence to the morgue. In most hospitals it is in the basement. You will be rolled from the gurney into a refrigerated drawer. The door will close behind you. It will be dark and cold, but you won’t care.

Before they protect their predators, victims of trauma (defined as any experience “which by its nature is an excess of what we can manage or bear”) protect themselves by not consciously expressing what happened to them. To articulate, or to say, is to put together, to draw fragments of an experience into a coherent narrative, a potentially devastating process if the experience was so overwhelming as to have been, like the author’s own past, “shattering.” Before a thing is consciously (if not audibly) voiced, it has yet to be acknowledged or owned; it has yet to be believed.

To learn that “the unconscious is structured like a language” is to see this aspect of the self as radically different from the way it is popularly misrepresented, as a murky soup of dream fragments and primitive urges from which it’s possible to fish out the occasional insight, a kind of primordial chaos from which higher consciousness distinguishes itself.

For Freud, Lacan and Rogers, the unconscious is as complex and sophisticated in its organization as is the conscious, and as individual: each psyche requires its own lexicon. Within this mysterious realm that the Jungian analyst Alan McGlashan called a “savage and beautiful country,” Lacan’s voice does hold the power of an archangel’s, and Rogers’s ability to listen and perceive has an equally rare authority. It isn’t everyone who can hear what we don’t allow ourselves to say.

There are used copies of the book on Amazon for under $5.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently. [...]

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.

How has it come to this — that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

If I like it in its small form, I will also knit a much larger version. Almost everything I knit becomes a gift*, and every time I visit Deron and Amy I am reminded how special it is to surround yourself with your own creations. Thanks for the inspiration, friends.

* I get to keep the holey, mismeasured projects.

italian designers isabella lovero and enrico bosa of en&is studio have updated ‘megaphone’, a ceramic passive amplifier created for the iphone and ipod touch. using no electricity, the sound waves are reverberated and distributed throughout the space. originally only available in white, the polished black and hand-painted gold versions further accentuate the contours of the form.

both the ceramic body and the solid wooden stand is developed and hand-made in italy.
although the black finish is applied in the same manner as the white, the gold version requires skilled decorators to paint the surface in the 24kt precious metal, after which it is fired in 720°C (1328°F). the high temperature assures the glazing is cohesive and the material is long lasting. the high gloss finish found on all three options are to help the sound resonate while the stand lifts the frame off any surface, increasing the vibrations emitted from the object.

Comic books have long relied on mental disorders to drive their most memorable villains. Consider the Batman line, in which the Joker, Harley Quinn and other “criminally insane” rogues are residents of Gotham City’s forensic psychiatric hospital, Arkham Asylum.

Introduced in 1974, Arkham grossly confuses the concepts of psychiatric hospital and prison. Patients are called “inmates,” decked out in shackles and orange jumpsuits, while a mental health professional doubles as the “warden.” Even the antiquated word “asylum” implies that the patients are locked away with no treatment and little hope of rejoining society. [...]

Of course, DC Comics, and comic books in general, are hardly the only source of these stereotypes or the only contributors to discrimination. At the same time, they are widely consumed, whether in the original form or as story lines for movies, TV shows and video games. Modernized mental health depictions in the Batman titles alone would reach millions of people worldwide through its billion-dollar-grossing films and blockbuster video games.

That’s why DC Comics should seize the opportunity with The New 52 to move to the forefront in transforming mental health depictions in comics. To start, writers should stop overemphasizing a link between violence and mental disorders to explain criminal behavior.