Our Humanity

A typical Sunday morning, and I have burned the last piece of French toast, the one with that extra bit of yellow, not quite enough for another whole piece, but enough to make this one really good.

What do you do with a burnt piece of French toast? Do you just leave it there in the fry pan? Do you put it on the serving plate, charred side down, hoping no one will notice? Will anyone eat it? Can you throw it out?

You try the squish of egg, the one hanging off the crust, knowing it is burnt. And it tastes that way.  

Now what do you do? Logic dictates: Throw that piece out. But if you're a waste not, want not kind of person, like some of my green friends, then that's not so simple. You don’t just throw things away.

So you set the disgraced toast tenderly upon the platter with the others, perhaps burnt side up to show respect.

But there is another option, as there are in most things. A person could slide open the silverware drawer, select the sharpest knife, slice away the chaff and knuckle-ball it to the garbage. I choose this option, and predictably my brain rebels.

That wouldn’t have been thrown away in a concentration camp. And here you are, throwing it away.

You might suggest that this obsessing over toast is really about saving and recycling, brought on by my mother's impending move, having to move so many material things out of her house. In the eight months since my father’s death, she has lived alone. We, her children, are herding her into a new living facility, “independent living” it is called. My mother-in-law, still in her own apartment, calls what we are doing the warehousing of the elderly.

We think of it as hedging the odds, safety. And company.

Mother, too, fights the move for as long as she can, and summoning my father's ghost, digs in her heels. Ultimately, to get us off her back, she agrees. As the months of emptiness fill her hollow home, by time the house is sold, she is more than ready to go.

Nothing is easy, and the process demands some remodeling of my house, too, all for the best. I absorb some of her furniture as she down-sizes, and pack things away for garage sales, Ebay on a rainy day. At this point, both of our homes qualify as disaster zones. We need hard hats, seriously.

In the wreckage, my radio -- a two speaker mini-monolith -- is dissembled. It is hard to make breakfast with no one to talk to, so I wrestle with the wires until I hear Krista Tippet, NPR, crooning. She is interviewing a man who grew up fast in a concentration camp in French-Indochina, now Viet Nam.

Xavier Le Pichon* has become a famous geophysicist, the man who discovered plate tectonics, and that the frailties and flaws of the plates beneath the earth are essential elements in living geological systems. His writing is not just theory, but a world view. Frailties and flaws are essential to humanity, too. What makes us weak also holds the keys to our development, our psychological growth, our humanity.

I whisk cream into eggs, captivated.

“Our humanity is not an attribute that we have received once and forever with our conception,” Dr. Le Pichon explains, “rather it is a potentiality that we have to discover within us . . . progressively develop or destroy throughout confrontation with the different experiences of suffering that will meet us through our lives.”

As I set an embarrassingly charred griddle to the fire, Le Pichon waxes on about the plight of the elderly.

“The way to build a society is to integrate people in a way in which they interact,” he says. “Each of them can find out that each of them can have their place, that their life has a meaning; that they are needed by others. So often I found that older people have the impression that they are not useful, nobody needs them, and they opt to . . . go. They opt to go.”

He sighs. He is thinking that under severe mental and physical stress they can lose the motivation to go on living, do not see anything positive about frailty. It is depression he is talking about, the longing to die.

The conversation shifts to the economic down turn. Le Pichon isn’t impressed with the American struggle, the whining, perhaps, something we see as natural, even functional. He might agree that the verbal expression of our pain is good for us, but has another perspective.

“I was in a concentration camp and life was hard. All the babies were dying of hunger, but we were together. . . even under stress if you find a way to create a community that makes sense to your life, then it (your life) becomes extremely important.

My mother was a strong woman. When they would get the message from the Japanese governor of the camp, when he would let us know he planned to shoot most of the people the next day, my mother said, I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. But today you have to learn your lessons, so come. ”

Who could help but smile? She sounds like a Jewish mother. Maybe strong mothers are all like this. No excuses, not even genocide; what happens tomorrow is immaterial-- today a person should learn. My mother will like this story, my kids will, too.

We get together, me and Mom, as it happens, later in the day. I have picked her up for dinner; we’re ordering Chinese, something she loves. But I want to get to the recycling place before dark. We have collected four huge garbage bags of plastic, metal and paper, and the bags look terrible in my living room. My daughter-in-law, who has popped in to see what’s going on, is about to leave, but she volunteers to stay with Mom for awhile until I get back.

My mother glances over at me, commands her beloved granddaughter, “Go with her."

I make a face. “Why? She likes being with you.”

“It might be dangerous over there. I don’t want you going alone.”

“It’s in the parking lot of a city golf course, Mom. It’s fine. Nothing’s going to happen. Maybe I’ll get hit by a golf cart.”

She thinks awhile. “Okay. But be careful.”

The crazy thing is that after I leave the recycling place, slowly crossing a very busy intersection, I hear the horrible scream of peeling rubber, a horribly loud, pre-horrible about-to-crash sound that I have never heard so near, so loudly before. It is so very, very close to me that I think. . I’m going to die. I can’t believe this.

The screech goes on for probably fifteen interminable seconds. I will still hear it in my head, days later. And then, nothing.

I have pulled over somehow to the right hand lane, and a car of kids, gangbanger-looking kids, smoking, laughing, shoots past me. My heart consumes my attention, beating to get out of here, maybe move to another country, and I’m dizzy, stop to collect myself; determine not to tell anyone. After all. Nothing happened.

Then why do I feel so bad?

The irony is that I have been trying to convince my mother to give up driving. She won’t need a car where she’s going. The community agency takes residents wherever they want to go, even the suburbs, the malls, Old Orchard. I’m a whole five minutes away. But she wants to take her car with her. It is a symbol, something else we want to take away.

“I can drive,” she says. “I can drive.”

“I know. But it’s such a hassle,” I say, not kidding. “And city traffic isn't suburban traffic. It is life-threatening, being on the road these days. There's a reason for those insurance premiums.”

“But I need my independence. I don't like the thought of relying upon you to drive me around."

And then she says it, "I don’t want to be a burden.” Which infuriates me.

“Burden!?” I blurt out. “You don’t want to be a burden? Let me tell you what’s a burden. Me worrying that something will happen to you, or to someone else, while you’re behind the wheel. Now that's a burden. Worrying that I’ll have to deal with your pain and suffering. Worrying about the financial stress of two or more lawsuits that I won’t have time for.

"And let’s not forget," I continue, voice rising, "people will whisper, behind closed doors, What was wrong with those people? Why didn’t they take away the keys? What were they waiting for?" The tirade ends.

She is silent.

This begs an evolutionary solution, a humane solution, one that determines our humanity. But it seems to me, to evolve, to be humane, we both have to stay alive.

therapydoc

Dr. Le Pichon

* You can get the download of the interview on American Public Media
On the website we learn that Xavier Le Pichon and his wife raised their children in communities of the disabled and mentally ill. He is professor emeritus at the Collège de France in Aix-en-Provence, resides at La Maison Thomas Philippe, a retreat for families struggling with mental illness.

My Generation

For better or for worse, the new TV show, My Generation, is canceled.

As it turns out, this is a tremendous sociological coup for everyone, the cancellation of My Generation, a show marketed by ABC in such a way that a person of acute sensitivities and sensibilities did not need to see.

Watching the show was not on my to-do list, did not make it to Google Alert, did not even rate a  'don't forget to record this one' on a napkin, but someone told me it was already legend, had a huge following, which I guess, in the end, it did not.

A couple of weeks ago I took a walk and passed a bus stopped at a stop light.  And on that bus,  splashed across the entire length of the vehicle, drawing one's eye in such a way that nobody can look anywhere else but, is an advertisement that hypnotizes in the way that the Calvin Klein underwear ads once did, perhaps need not anymore. The riders, human faces of all sorts, excellent faces, staring at us or into Iphones only a foot above the ad, framed in cloudy but in the right light, decipherable glass, are insignificant. (This is a process statement for those of you who study process in your family therapy or psychology classes, laced with content for those who ventral process).

The enormous face on the ad, in a knowing pout, is a seductive brunette.  

You may have his hand, but I have his heart.

The caption is a glorification of the art of seduction, validation that partner-capture is okay, indeed it  is a competition, who knew, and may the best woman (sure, it has to be a woman, perhaps the networks first mistake) win.

Nobody could like this I'm thinking, knowing that that's not true..

But, you might think, if a person is in a good marriage, rests comfortably in a safe, secure, supportive relationship, the best of all possible s-words, and the r-word, why then, how can, a bimbo, threaten this? More to the point, why be sickened by a media event that explores relationships like this? Shouldn't someone draw attention to the fact that all marriages are vulnerable because people are human? 

THE ANSWER:

There are marriages that are secure and solid, safe, the rubber bands so thick that the literal death of a mate does not affect the integrity of the relationship, not in the mind of the survivor. And then there are the rest.

It is the rest that we need to talk about, if only for awhile, and no, we're not going into everything, not even talking about abusive partners who cheat and brag about it, or mentally torture, or suffer huge character deficits (AA language) or as we way in the biz, personality disorders that will take forever to turn around.

When one partner opens the marriage, even covertly, with no intention of hurting the other, perhaps, for this is usually the case, but the other finds out, for the other inevitably will find out, there is permission, a big fat letter from an unapproachable court, no appeal,  a din, (Hebrew, rhymes with tin) a judgment, that this is something that we do in this relationship, we have sex with others. The seemingly irreparable crack is reparable, but the scar remains.

And when the extra-marital relationship has petered out, the other woman, the other man gone, the thrill, the glitter in abatement, the fissure might still fizz, crackle, and the jury is out, if either partner will now feel free to indulge in extra-marital relations, for this is only beginning, a new marital norm, and sometimes there's no stopping this boulder of a rolling stone.

You may have his hand, but I have his heart?! #


therapydoc

The Post Script:  The truth is that most marriages survive infidelity, with or without therapy, and some defined as open marriages seem to work out quite happily.  We're dying to hear more about these.  It is the subject of much hard work in marital therapy, repairing relationships that have cracked under the strain of too many intimates, and it only takes about a year for both partners to feel that the marriage is on the mend, barring those severe character defects mentioned above, and a lack of desire to change them.

It's Not You, It's Your Bedbugs

It’s hard for me to relax, you know, sit and watch teev, read the newspapers. But Saturday mornings I catch up with many of these, newspapers, a week’s worth of WSJ, even if it’s just to scan the headlines. When you skim it all on a Saturday morning before shul (rhymes with bull, Yiddish for synagogue), you reduce the odds that whatever you read will upset you.  There's just not enough time.

Today, however, by the time FD and I catch up after our respective jaunts into the community, I'm still upset from what I have read, and greet the poor guy with

Did you read that incredibly insensitive piece in the Wall Street Journal about bedbug phobias?

He has not.

And it is likely that you have not either. It seems that my favorite newspaper is reaching to satisfy the populist psychological appetite, which is fine, the more the merrier; the reviews of academic findings can be captivating.  A new regular, Jonah Lehrer, for example, specializes in decision making, reminds us that if decision making is hard for you, it is because you are actually mature.  You see all kinds of alternatives, lots of gray.  Gray is something we like, the people of my cloth.  Lots of gray, lots of leeway, as much as we can live with.

And I like that he recommends (this week, Kant on a Kindle) that we read things that make us think.  He differentiates between processing with the ventral route versus the dorsal stream. Chick lit readers go the ventral route, it is correct to assume, don't like to have to reread many sentences.  Those who prefer Kant, however, flex the dorsal muscles, mixed metaphor not mine, don't spleen me.

Anyway, Amy Bonnaffons passed her editors with a tongue-in-cheek dig at variants of both Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and other serious anxiety disorders, phobias.  She writes a Dear John letter to her ex, Mark, technically a Dear Mark letter, page 13, section A.

The piece, I'm sorry, doesn't belong in a newspaper that professes serious journalism and a mission, apparently, of psychological edification of its readership. Tongue and cheek is fine*, but when it comes to being cheeky about disabilities, not.

Ms. Bonnaffons writes:

Dear Mark,

This is really hard for me. My hand is shaking as I write. . . Mark, I don't think we should be together anymore. It's not you—it's your bedbugs.

I know they've been gone for six years, but since you told me about your 2004 infestation I can't get it out of my mind. . .

You have to be patient with me. Yes, it was perhaps excessive to require your grandmother to wrap her sofa in plastic before our visit and to put on that hooded poncho and face mask before I hugged her. . .She has so many health problems already that she might not notice a little itch here or there. . .

I won't even ride the subway anymore. Who knows who might have sat there before me? It's exhausting to commute on foot every day. . . especially when I need to sidestep constantly in the more crowded areas to avoid accidentally brushing up against a stranger's clothing. . .

You get the idea.  Is this funny?  It isn't for those of us who have treated people who suffer with these thoughts, behaviors.  Can you imagine having a germ phobia and reading this?  It could be that Ms. Bonnaffons really does suffer from obsessive thoughts, and that she has compulsive behaviors that are dysfunctional, so dysfunctional that they distance her from others, obliterate her potential for intimate relationships.

I doubt it, somehow.  But it's my job to tell you, Amy, it happens, and funny, it isn't.

therapydoc
 
*For an example of fine, in the same paper, on page 11, section C, by Joe Queenan suggesting that bloggers deserve stimulus money. If the government forks a few bucks our way, we’ll surely buy “more IPads and Droids, netbooks, and tickets to see Pavement.”

There's Advertising, and There's . . .

I shouldn't be doing this. No time for this.

But a public service announcement is important. People need public service announcements.

And therapists have a mandate to warn.

Like if you tell me that you would really like to kill your sister I am mandated, by none other than the State of Illinois, to warn your sister. Yes, to give her a jingle, a poke, and say, "Watch your back. Your sister's intention is to kill you." Or tell the cops to do something of the sort.

Because anyone can get a gun, a sword or some other household weapon. You never know. It is why some of us ride with the principle that it is best not to make anyone angry. Do not ruffle. The less ruffling the better.

THE STORY:

I get up before FD and nudge him, announce that I will make the coffee and get started on lunches, which, if you must know, consist only of bagels with cream cheese, a large slice of tomato, small slices of cucumber, and green onion. You really don't need lox if you have green onion.  Oh, and a couple of chocolate chip cookies.

But while the java's dripping, a concoction of hot water, lemon juice, and honey will feel good.  This is a transgenerational tradition-- although my father often used fruit preserves which he jarred himself, instead of honey. As the water boils I mix a Metamucil aperitif. You get used to the taste.

At some point in this otherwise boring routine, the fatal attraction to email becomes overwhelming. I pop open something from a man representing a group of therapists. It is his second try. He would like to pay me to advertise his website on Everyone Needs Therapy. His website might be legitimate but his spelling is atrocious. And I doubt the veracity of the whole thing, frankly, suspect a scam. Not accusing anyone here, just worried is all.

Here's the pitch:

. . .could you please give us the best price for a small summery to add your . . . site for a period of Monthly . . . We will make payments Via PayPal so if interested, please mention your PayPal id.

Regards, ________

Regards to whom? And my PayPal id. Really? ID in lower case?

FD is getting dressed in the closet complaining that the size he wears in undershirts is always out of stock at Target. He is an average man, he tells me, and this is wrong. They shouldn't run out of the size that most men wear. That's what average means, you know.

Disregarding this, I tell him there's a new Internet scam, one that could hurt bloggers, my people.

FD goes on about the undershirt situation which he will do until he feels the empathy, the love, which I accomplish with further inquiry into the undershirt situation.

"You're an average-sized man, but you wear a Large?"

"Yes."

"Well this makes you a Large man, not an average man, as you say.

He cannot argue with this reasoning nor cares. But the same logic, in reverse, explains why I am a size 4.

"Do you think I need a shower?" I ask him. I'm not in the mood but it is a tradition, showering in the morning, and traditions are important. My hair has grown out of control and needs conditioner. Since I discovered that Suave (translate cheap) is a fantastic conditioner, doors have opened. This is confirmed, that doors will open for you, too, in People Style Watch. The shiny ad for Suave claims to be as good as a salon conditioner!

See. Now that's a product worth advertising on your sidebar. A conditioner for crazy hair. Or Metamucil. Another fine product.

FD does seem happy that I've decided to shower. After all, he fixed the furnace (they usually need thermocouples) and having heat in the house makes the idea much more attractive. I tell him about the blogger scam.

"Just your PayPal id?" he laughs. "Why not a copy of your birth certificate?"

Then one of us comes up with the idea, one that all of you might consider if you're tapped in this possible con.

You write back to Seth, or Paul, or John, or whoever it is who taps you, and you ask for his PayPal ID (capital I, capital D). Ask this person to please fill out the following form:

His
Name:
Birthday:
Address:
Cell:
City and Hospital of Birth:
SS#:
Driver's License #: (and a copy, with pic, natch)

and any other identifying information that you can forward to your cousin, who works for the FBI, not that he need worry.

I'm calling PayPal.

Regards,

therapydoc

The Repost on James J. Lee and Schizophrenia

For those of you who never saw the post below, I brushed it up.  Please let me know if you're still not receiving the emails from Feedburner, btw.

James J Lee, Schizophrenia, and the Population Explosion

Old Yiddish Saying:  When things come in threes, it is likely they are blogworthy

 Yes, I made that up

            therapydoc
 

I’m riding my bike to work, pass a woman in her ninth month talking to herself.  Surely she has a Bluetooth in her ear, but from my angle she really looks like she's talking to herself.

And just last week, after shopping, loading groceries into the trunk of my car, a friendly young man parked next to me remarks with a huge smile:

“I swear, I thought you had some kind of mental disorder, talking to yourself like that in the store. I thought, 

Someone should tell her kids! Do they even know!?'

Then I watched you, kind of followed you a bit, and I could see that you were okay, that you had to have been on the phone."

That's reassuring.  Not suffering from schizophrenia, just on the phone.  Thanks for your concern?

When I was a teenager, a mobile phone, or "communicator," was something that Spock used to reach McCoy, the stuff of science fiction,  the technology of Star Trek.  Off television, however, even to an untrained mental health observer, an animated conversation with an invisible other someone, indicated psychosis.  Something very wrong.

And it was a little scary, seeing that psychosis, for every once in awhile a person is going to see a naked person in the middle of the street, or someone walking, gesticulating wildly who is not on the phone. We are afraid of this because intuitively, we tend to be afraid of what we don't understand.

The irony is that the person with a psychotic disorder can be much more afraid, more anxious, fearful of invisible dangers, the voices speaking only to him, shrieking, spewing hate and rage, negativity.  And under the influence of fear, like most of us under stress, that person is capable of lashing out, usually to self-protect.

A couple of summers ago, riding home from work,  I caught the eye of a woman walking toward me.  She was on the sidewalk wearing mismatched brightly colored clothing.  (I'm drawn to bright colors like a moth to a light.)  When she sees me looking at her she flashes a ferocious glare; I feel the fire.  Then she spits as far as she can, misses me by a foot. Violent psychic energy, aggression.  Strike first.

Believe me, as soon as I caught that look in her eye, differential diagnoses were clear in my head.  I didn't need a DSM. 

A person with severe mental illness who is lashing out violently is more often than not doing so in self-defense.  She  might even be hearing threatening voices.  Tell everyone or you will die!  Show the world!  Make a difference!  You scum, prodigy of scum, you filthy human!  Show your worth!  Very rough on the sense of self, having your thoughts interrupted.  Most of us have trouble with our negative thoughts.  Magnify that intensity by fifty or a hundred.  That's how it is with very severe illness.

And we do have to be better at recognizing this, befriending people who are suffering, finding them resources.

James J. Lee, the gentleman who marched into the Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, Maryland last week,  had explosives on his person.  He listed his demands on a blog.  He demanded that the Discovery Channel  agree to change its programming, that the station become more environmentally sensitive, more green, more inventive, proactive about population control. He thought humans filthy, babies the ultimate source of destructive pollution, the giraffes, the lions, benign.   From his blog: 

Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what's left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.

. . .  It is the responsiblity of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES! Population growth is a real crisis. Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. It's like a couple are having 30 babies even though it's just one! If the US goes in this direction maybe other countries will too!

Also, war must be halted. Not because it's morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures. FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS! Humans are supposed to be inventive. INVENT, DAMN YOU!!

In therapy we might say, You sound angry.

Most of us don't need a prophet to know that our world is in trouble. The heat wave across these past two months should tell us something.

Back to our Neo-Yiddish, the threes.  We have:

(1) Many of us seeing schizophrenia everywhere, or so it seems, like new psych students who have just learned about different psychotic disorders,

(2)  Some of us impulsively labeling James J. Lee soon after the Discovery Channel lock-down last week.  It was suggested, in that short post, that students study his blog, Save the Planet Protest, and the news stories that unwittingly review the variables that perhaps contributed to his last selfless act, for he was gunned down before he hurt anyone, i.e., homelessness.

Down came the post before most of you read it, for after all, James J. Lee's disorder did not have to be schizophrenia.  He might have suffered from a different psychosis.  The blogger feared activists and nihilists who might misinterpret remarks, and she had no emotional energy to argue.  The psychic energy that can be characteristic of psychosis, untreated, is remarkable.  The psychic energy that can be devoted to a cause, not all that dissimilar-- without a psychotic disorder.  No need for resistance exercises at the gym.

Mr. Lee will be remembered, at least by me, as the Angry Prophet of Doom.

Then, a few hours after taking down the post, I called a friend for book suggestions, started reading   (3) One Thousand White Women, The Journals of May Dodd.  Libraries are full of good things.

What is this?  One Thousand White Women is a novel by Jim Fergus about life in the United States in 1876 (really 1854).  The Cheyenne, determined to make peace with urban sprawl and the pollution of white men, offered Ulysses S. Grant an option for assimilating the red-faced with the pale-faced. 

Suffice it to say that it is a biological solution and I just can't spoil it for you.  I just started the book, but it is captivating and very funny.  And then there's this quote!

Little Wolf, the Sweet Medicine Chief , is speaking to a specially appointed commission of Congress on behalf of the Cheyenne:

The People are a small tribe, smaller than either the Sioux or the Arapaho; we have never been numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a certain number of the People, just as it can only carry a certain number of the bears, the wolves, the elks, the pronghorns, and all the rest of the animals. For if there are too many of any animal, this animal starves until there is the right number again. We would rather be few in number and have enough for everyone to eat, than be too many and all starve.

He goes on to say that for this reason his children must become members of the white man's tribe, thus offers his modest proposal.

His ideas about population growth, actually, are not all that different from Mr. Lee's.

So what makes Little Wolf an environmentalist and Mr. Lee a person suffering from schizophrenia, a man who just thought he was an environmentalist?

Little Wolf contains his anger, is very controlled, even when the men on Capital Hill practically throw him and his entourage on a train back west, rejecting his amazing suggestion.  He's tried to be empathetic, to give the white man the benefit of the doubt.  He is educable, this white man.  An empath, Little Wolf is highly evolved.

The Sweet Medicine Chief reaches out to a culture clearly foreign to him, a people who leave a wake of upheaval and destruction, who ravage fields and the habitat; a people out of touch with the balance of nature, uninterested in learning, particularly, capable, the Cheyenne believe, of empathy and change.

Quite a book.

Unfortunately, without that-- lose empathy, lose the ability to intuit the feelings of others, and lose the sensitivity it takes to look within, to see the enemy inside, rather than blame, and we're all clueless, out of touch.  Or more to the point, sick like  James J. Lee,  spewing hatred and negativity on his blog in an insular psychotic rage. 

We don't know if Mr. Lee had been treated for the illness, or even if he heard voices. We don't know and never will, probably, if anyone told him to call attention to the problem of population growth and the destructive nature of human beings, or not. But he probably had it, 295.30, Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type. A tough disorder to live with, or another delusional psychosis.

I know it like in the same way that I know why that woman spat at me when our eyes met.

And what that means, I guess, is that as a society we've got to be doing more to recognize and help people who have mental illness.  No, I don't know how.  But we've got to try to do more.

Lee's website: http://www.savetheplanetprotest.com

And the Discovery Channel, Discovery Communications


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Apologies and Housekeeping

Sometimes some of you get a notice that I've posted something, only to find that it's gone.  You visit and see  nothing new.  That's because I've reread whatever it was and decided it wasn't ready for prime time, so down it goes. 

I appreciate the visit anyway, you should know, and the communication, the questions. 


It happened this week, so even though I should be making someone a lunch, I put up the Garage Sale post below, cleaned it up a little.  Has anyone ever cleaned a sixty year old garage?  It's not pretty.

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