Rambling personal narrative with no actionable leads

episodes of rageful envy of everyone else in the world that had been spared. My wife escaped into an alcoholic flirtation with her major professor; my sons grew increasingly ensconced in the generous and kind neighborhood homes of their playmates. | metered as many hours as possible in equity growing, long lonely days in a small, dark, couch filled, university office, listening to Beverly Hills, Brentwood and West Los Angles citizens as they psychoanalyzed their mysterious lack of emotional fulfillment from materialistic fulfillment. Legend has it that Gautama’s sudden insight about the universality of this sated, bored condition occurred in 528 B.C. after 49 days of sitting in the lotus position under the bodhi tree, now called ficus religiosa. In contrast with Buddha’s illumination, my psychoanalytic training- induced, Freudian-Darwinian instinctual conflict, driven by fears of starvation and castration, drew me tighter into the world of meaningless, coin flip probabilities. Our house was a block away from a West Los Angeles synagogue and we knew the Rabbi and his family well. Our sons played together frequently. The Rabbi tried to bring comfort to me on my death watch, with hours of discussions about trans-individual, ethnic belonging and a deeper foray into philosophical humanism. Both felt completely irrelevant to my condition. As an intern tending to those dying at night in Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans, it seemed to me that Jews tended to die more noisily than Catholics. For my personal escape from low-lying dread, | needed the metrically linear time of chronos to become the metric-free, topological, continuous surface of the twisted circular ribbon of a Mobius loop, with the view from each moment a kairos, a stretchable infinity of each moment’s internal multiplicity of times. The ruthlessly reasonable Hebraic historicity, configured by the tooth-for-a- tooth, Mosaic and Roman falion law, the reciprocal, economic, exchange-calculating brains of Barkow, Cosmide and Tooby’s The Adapted Mind (1992) and the terrifying stories of the Five Books of Moses, made the hopelessness of this sinner’s plight inevitable. It felt like my dichotomous choice of God-type was between One of merciless fairness and the He and She of unconditionally forgiving generosity. The mind set of logical problem solving applied to the question about which of these two represented the true character of God lead to a momentarily distracting, metaphoric 94 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013594