Playing with What You Got

Garbage-in/Garbage-out? An old expression for a troubling fact of life that makes so many of the processes of life not more understandable, necessarily, but explainable. Some examples? ........... I don't have a world class sense of humor ... neither did my Father. Coincidence? or Garbage-in/Garbage-out? ................. Indeed, for years, now, when I shave, I see my image coming back but it's complex. It's not the me of my Second or Third Quarters of life and looks curiously like my Father. Maybe not so curious. I taught in an art institute for quite some time ... purportedly a course on certain relationships between non-representational art, the students' work, and theoretical Mathematics. When the students were 'bored' because I was ... well ... being 'boring,' they would doodle and draw pictures that 'bore' a striking resemblance to Uncle Carl, my Dad's uncle, who looked a like like him and had been dead since before these 20-somethings had been 'born' (see, hoe annoyingly and punily punning I can be ... Garbage-in/Garbage-out.) ................................ A Dokteur in Vienna nearly 100 years ago said this was inevitable. He claimed that poart of the growth process in children had to do with taking in 4 kinds of Garbage. (1) Like my Dad. (2) Totally different than my Dad ... totally, Man! (3) Like my Mom. (4)  Totally different than my Mom ... totally, Mam! ............... If he was right, if we unconsciously "learn" (so to speak) from our parents, what are we to do. ..................... By the way, it doesn't end there ... I guess one can say: it doesn't end. My poor kids carry around pieces of me ... my sons may be shaving me already and my daughter may occasionally be troubled having said things that sound like me. Who knows .... 'only the shadows that we've joined in creating know.' .............................. So, here I am stuck with -- inter alia and among other things -- grandpa's invisible samovar and sayings hanging around my neck and coming out of my mouth (respectively). The albatrosses of living things. ............................... There was another dokteur, Leopolt Szondi was his name. He claimed that we get troubled when we don't accept our fate and our psychic family heirlooms. (He's long dead, so if I take liberty with what he called Schiksalanalyse ... Fate Analysis, he can't object, anymore ... as my Dad might have said.) ................. By the time someone begins Playing in the Last Quarter and even much earlier, most of these heirlooms are in place. Can we make peace with them? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? An old Rock song said ... "I feel like letting my freak flag fly!" .... Fly high, Mom and Dad .... while I've created some of my own, I'm still flying your banners .... God have mercy on my children ... and theirs.