Tale 22

Psyching Out the Trick
(a tale for the wide-awake)

“...he could help them find and hold on to the fragile plot thread,

and hopefully that would guide them through the rest of the labyrinth,

just as Ariadne’s thread had worked to get Theseus

through and out of the Cretan bull-man’s – the minotaur’s – Cretan labyrinth.”

enlarged image of an ancient Cretan coin preserved in the British Museum, London
portraying a labyrinth and the Greek letters KNO (cno or gno)[1]

Dr. Lorenzo, with the assistance of Sammy Martinez, would get together with high school, college or university students from time to time and ‘help’ them find ‘tricks’ for tackling Tales of Waring in a way so as to appreciate the book and enjoy it more. Usually the aim was to help them find their bearings in that ‘complex and multi-faceted mental world of young Dr. mj’, where all too often so many new-fangled and high-level forces could be operating at once, that high school and even college students would become lost, even overwhelmed, or put straight to sleep, as they would complain during his ‘help’ sessions. The Dr. would make sure from the beginning of such a teaching session that his audience understood that students in ALL high schools, colleges and universities complained right to his face, before, during AND after his little help sessions with them, about their difficulty comprehending “What on earth is this book supposed to be about!?” and “What is it you are trying to say, if anything!?” as they sometimes put it. He always gave them permission to feel what they were feeling about all of his books. It was a good starting point for learning, he liked to say.

The people he worried about were the ones who had no interest whatever. “When a revolution is happening,” he said he knew from the late sixties, the best question to ask is, ‘What the hell is happening???!! and WHY??!!’”

And since he had learned long ago, that failure to understand the book quickly was almost universal, he would start such a help session by pointing out that it often assisted a reader if she or he possessed a little understanding of a few advanced levels of the Western world’s major fields of knowledge: in order to understand well young mj’s more complex books. He would begin to list a few of these specialized fields of knowledge until so many students were groaning or laughing loudly and even shouting, he could assume they finally realized that he now understood and sympathized with the pain they were suffering that he had helped cause. He would list for the group’s benefit, in any order: cultural anthropology; Native American ethnohistory; psychotherapy; psychiatry; Jungian analytical psychology; comparative religion; Western world literature, starting with the many character-building stories in the Bible and the bizarre but life-like and always meaning-rich tales of ancient Greek mythology; Calvinist Christian Biblical hermeneutics; Carl Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious; the day-to-day practice of Hindu and ancient Greek polytheism; Western medicine; Native American medicine; Italian musical terms like rubato and a cappella, and so forth: any ridiculously abstruse thing he could throw into the crazy list, that seemed halfway pertinent. He had been known to mention ‘the effects of hallucinogens on the nervous system’; Western world ethics; racial discrimination; Native American shamanism; Gandhian non-violent revolt; national politics in one hundred and two different developing countries; and hundreds more; if he had to; BUT: if he had not gotten a laugh by the time he said ‘Calvinist Christian Biblical hermeneutics’, he knew he was in ‘deep shucks of corn’. That’s what he told them; and that by itself always got a laugh.

Now that they were loosened up, he would explain that, indeed, it might help to know such things in order to keep up with young mj mentally, throughout the night of the first interview; so much so that without such knowledge anyone, and especially a young and inexperienced reader, might feel overwhelmed and lose track of the fragile plot thread. He was sorry he could not teach them these fields of knowledge in an hour, because they were fascinating and important fields; but he could help them find and hold on to the fragile plot thread, and hopefully that would guide them through the rest of the labyrinth, just as Ariadne’s thread had worked to get Theseus through the Cretan bull-man’s – the minotaur’s – Cretan labyrinth. And in the beginning, this apt analogy had gotten more laughs than he had expected, since fewer than he would have liked knew the darnedest thing about Greek mythology.

‘Yes, there is a plot structure to Tales of Waring’, he would say defensively; even though many critics had claimed there was NOT, and had ranted that Tales of Waring ‘rambled from pillar to post without the guiding thread of plot, or adequate story structure of any kind’, as the New York Review of Books had said. To help students structure their understanding of the plot, therefore, Dr. Lorenzo would divide the labyrinth of the book in half, putting Parts I and II in the first half, and III and IV in the second, then would compare the plot thread in the first half with the plot thread of the second, for the two were quite different.

He told Sammy Martinez that he was elated when he finally discovered this approach, after about four such help sessions with high school students, this approach of: (1) equating himself with the minotaur, and (2) the students with the lost hero Theseus; and coming back around then, after having constructed such a bewildering labyrinth for them (by writing the book) to actually helping them through the labyrinth by behaving, even though he was the minotaur, as if he were Ariadne, by providing them with the lifesaving thread they needed to escape from the labyrinth he had constructed for purposely entrapping them. If one of them did not know the Theseus-Ariadne-Minotaur myth, he would tell it to them quickly: that myth about a young hero and heroine; and a bull-man who wished, by definition, to kill the hero Theseus so that Theseus could be offered as sacrifice to the gods. It electrified the atmosphere every time, from that point on. His Theseus gimmick got him a million miles with students of all levels, he claimed, and he would ‘milk the gimmick for all it was worth’ the rest of that hour.  

Young Dr. mj throughout the night of this first Blackburn interview in June, 1974, he would say, was trying to preserve and promote his fairy tale perception of things, the way young people always had, in all cultures down through time. That was a unifying theme for the book, and was the basic gist of the plot thread throughout. But the second half of the book was vastly different, he would say, from the first half; because once the three people in the Blackburn living room had finished with rollicking booze stories they had felt forced by conscience to take a serious look at why nice, decent people who loved the finer things in life, like Bill and Betty Ann and all of the other Pennsylvanians, should have had to find it so hard to work for Fred Waring without developing a mental illness such as alcoholism. The three of them together had made that decision out loud, at the end of the first half of the night – and book – and the beginning of the second: the decision to change the direction of the interview. And that decision to EXAMINE young mj’s fairytale version of reality, he told the students, was going to DESTROY the fairy tale forever.

The first half of the book was pulled together, then, as the Dr. would always say, by the plot structure of mj’s original great driving wish for the night: to ‘land’, meaning ‘record on tape’, the ‘Great Golden Fairy Tale’ of Fred Waring. Their fairy tale life which the two couples had enjoyed together in the shadow of Fred Waring was a general tale too long to tell in all its detail;[2] but the ‘Great Golden Fairy Tale’ was a specific tale which captured and represented the general fairy tale life he felt they had been living. It was a specific story which the omniscient narrator of Tales of Waring (and even mj at one point, out loud to Bill) explained here and there in some detail, within the telling of the overall story of the interview. It was the real story of the real courtship of Bill and Betty Ann; the obstacles that the demi-ogre Fred had come up with, so as to make it difficult for them to marry; the wedding in Fred’s living room finally; and in the end, their honeymoon trip to Washington, D.C., along with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians to do the 1972 annual White House Christmas Concert for President and Pat Nixon and the president’s cabinet and staff.[3]

Unfortunately for mj, however, the response of Bill and Betty Ann to this dream of mj’s to tape such a ‘golden fairy tale’ on this particular night, was not to his liking. They shocked him by showing him, by words and actions, that THERE WAS NO FRED WARING FAIRY TALE. This experience was a universal experience of youth the world over, Dr. Lorenzo said: to find out, for example, that each one of your parents was the product of incest (he picked this exaggerated example to loosen them up, he told them, hoping against hope it was not the case for anyone in the world, let alone someone present); or that their beloved youngest sister was ‘from one of the times when their mother was prostituting to feed her children’; or whatever: to discover, in short, some real embarrassment of a story of things, after years of living under some delusion or illusion of a fairy tale. And so, on this night, Bill and Betty Ann were wanting mj, the ‘poor kid’, to know that the ‘fairy tale’ image he’d had of Fred until now had been a sham and a camouflage. Sadly, the real truth of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, which they proceeded to reveal, was something that shocked him so much during the early part of the storytelling evening, ’poor kid’ (he loved to repeat, hoping for laughs) that it set off in him a full-fledged grief reaction which lasted the whole first half of the interview – and book. But by the end of the first half of the evening he was getting his wits back enough to notice that Bill was actually angry at Fred, a very unusual situation.

The plot in the second half of the book, then, floundered for a few pages, Dr. Lorenzo would say; but only until mj hit on the ‘brilliant’ idea, at that point in the interview, of psychoanalyzing Bill without Bill’s knowing it. In this way he could get to the true and actual Freudian psychoanalytic root cause of Bill’s anger at Fred Waring, and of Bill’s wish to quit working for Fred. The great goal in mind was of helping Bill, his psychoanalytic patient, as it were, just as any psychoanalytic psychotherapist would have done with any patient, to uncover the thing in Bill that was causing the problem with Fred, so that Bill could work on ‘his problem’, repair the damage he had caused with his imperfect boss, and go back to work happily again with Fred. This great overriding wish drove mj’s actions throughout the second half of the night – and book. And so, the book’s second half was a description of how mj had gone about attempting to attain his goal of helping Bill want to work for Fred again, and of helping him see that it was possible to do so. It told the story of how Bill had responded to this noble attempt of his friend’s to help him understand his problem and save his job and income, lost money which the family of three (and two dogs) badly needed.    

The KEY to understanding the protracted and sometimes tedious psychoanalysis in the last half of the book, as the Dr. would explain, was Bill’s anger, the anger already mentioned. By the midpoint of the book, the end of the first half, in other words, young Dr. mj had finally managed to uncover that Bill was angry at Fred, surprisingly, an unusual thing for Bill, as mentioned already, and a new piece of information for mj. Dr. Lorenzo would explain that he was repeating these points for the students present because it was easy for a reader to miss the anger and thus lose the thread of the plot; and the reason it was easy to miss, was the fact that Bill Blackburn routinely denied himself any outward display of angry emotion in public, even with best friends. Bill rarely let personal relationships move him to anger in the first place. Even less was he willing to show such anger. And least of all would he ever show the persistent, nagging kind of anger he was starting to show toward Fred more and more as the night wore on. It was an extremely unusual event, as mj saw it. He knew his friend well enough to know that if Bill was steamed, there had to be a very, very good reason. Bill was not the kind to stew over a small thing. In truth and in fact, he had never seen Bill Blackburn angry for any reason in the world, in two whole years, hanging out together day after day, until this night of the first Blackburn interview.

Granted, Bill had joked the first day they had met (in the summer of 72, on the unfenced lawn between their houses), that working for Fred had ‘turned my hair prematurely white’; but that had been a joke, not an angry statement, so mj had taken it lightly, as Bill must have meant for him to take it at the time. Bill Blackburn had an extraordinarily sunshiny disposition normally. That was the side of his personality he had shown mj constantly since the day they’d met. Bill had hung out with mj in a funny world of joke and uproar the whole two years, a world mj had found healing, in fact, given all the positive energy that flowed from the man and floated around him. And that healing energy could impact anyone nearby who might be open to receiving and using it, basking in it, or benefiting from it in any way. He gave off such positive vibes, as mj had felt since day one, it was hard to imagine anyone NOT liking Bill’s sunshine and enjoying the hilarious healing uproar Bill generated almost constantly.

Dr. Lorenzo always asked at this point if there were any in his high school or college student audience who hoped to become doctors. There were almost always at least two or three hands, and he would ask the future doctors to pay special attention to what he was going to say next, though all needed to understand it, of course, in order to follow the ‘fragile’ (according to the critical press) plot thread. He explained that because he had been a new and young doctor in 74, still ‘wet behind the ears’, and ‘half-baked’ in the sense that he had only done one year of formal psychiatry residency as of yet, not the three required, he had not known any better than to try to practice psychotherapy on his best friend without telling him. The second half of the book had to be understood in medical terms, therefore, because psychotherapy, or psychoanalytically based psychotherapy, whatever you called what he was doing that night, was a medical procedure. And mj, from this point on, was looking at everything as a young doctor would look at it.

This had been a huge mistake which he would come to regret later, he always felt obligated to stress, for he was anxious that the high school students learn from this point; and yet the mistake he had made was a mistake typical of the Western world when addressing people or peoples they did not understand, as he had not understood Bill that night. It was typical of U.S. Americans to think that the problem lay on the other side, and to see those incomprehensible people over there ‘in the Middle East’, or 'South of the Border', or wherever, as ‘a problem’, rather than to see their own selves as a problem. Doctors almost never saw themselves as the cause of a patient’s problem, even though all too often they were; and so, thinking in such a way, medically, was an ‘excellent trick’ for not having to look at one’s own true and imperfect self, as he always pointed out.

And again, lest they miss this crucial message of his (to be found in Tales of Waring, and throughout all of his writing, for that matter), he would always dwell on the idea of ‘trick’ for a while before moving on. He would explain that the Western world had developed a ‘masterful bag of dastardly tricks’ down through the centuries, tricks for making people of other cultures feel ‘small’, tricks just like this one, very clever devices for not looking at themselves as a possible source of international tensions, and for always throwing the blame on the other people in question. And almost always, interestingly, the ‘other people’ in question were a ‘non-Western nation or group of people’, ‘Muslims’ being an example both recent and ancient, or ‘Blacks’ another example. But, he added, certain American presidents, and he wouldn’t mention 'recent' names ('since 2016'), had done even worse, for they had even been so stupid as to treat European allies and other Western ally nations in the same disparaging, disrespectful, unenlightened, and undiplomatic way.

He had learned these tricks the hard way, he said, from living with Mexicans in their homes in Mexico and groaning ‘loud and long’ when he realized how HE HIMSELF would use the ‘tricks’ with Mexicans again and again UNCONSCIOUSLY, all too often automatically and without even thinking, until it was suddenly too late to undo the consequences, the major damage he had caused a friendship or acquaintance. Hispanics among his audiences always LOVED this part and would come up to him afterward to tell him so to his face; as a result of which he had developed, by 2005, a huge following among young Hispanics not just in Europe and the U.S., but throughout the world, where, by this time, most of his books had become easily obtainable in Spanish through underground channels, cyberspace, and University and other book stores.

Another of the ‘tricks’ (he would explain), in use ever since ‘Western’ civilization was born, roughly around the years 300 to 700, or the early ‘Middle Ages’, had been to hide behind, in this case, not a ‘doctorly mask’ but a ‘priestly mask’: that is, the ‘Western world’ saw the other side as ‘the problem’ because of religious factors. Again Latin America provided an excellent example, for, just after Columbus, many Spanish priests and friars in Mexico and other New World Spanish colonies had at first considered the natives to be literally ‘sub-human’ until a priest named Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) convinced the Pope, decades later, to finally come to the natives’ rescue and officially declare them human (!). Which his infallible eminence did (!).[4] After previously and also infallibly and eminently having thought them incorrectly and ethnocentrically to be sub-human. So figure that one out! Though they built fabulous pyramid cities for studying the stars, planets, sun and moon! And in the meantime millions of dastardly, unthinkable and inhuman deeds had been committed upon these nice, very human people in the name of religion, meaning Roman Catholic Christianity. Since Christians had always historically claimed to possess the only true religion, rarely if ever granting non-Christian religions even the slightest credence, this supercilious attitude had always served as a very helpful device for ‘projecting blame’ for problems onto outsiders, i.e., always seeing the other side as the problem, maybe even by calling them ‘devils’; or ‘reprobates’; or ‘subhuman’. All three of those put-downs worked equally well for granting Europeans permission to maltreat or enslave their colonial subjects.

“How could followers of the ‘one true religion’ possibly be the ones to be blamed for international or inter-racial tension or misunderstandings?” Huh? Was it not impossible by definition?

Dr. Lorenzo loved to ask high school and other students this provocative question, to see how they would react. He needed some devices for making them remember this help session of his, and especially this argument, which was crucial to the world’s future. Maybe older generations could not be re-educated at this point in time, but this youngest generation might be reachable. That was his feeling.

“How could followers of the ‘one true religion’ and 'the only right form of government on the planet’ be the ones responsible for international or inter-racial tension or misunderstandings?”

The ‘Western world’ had a ‘bag of tricks’ for claiming superiority and hiding their own darker and less perfect nature from others and from themselves, so as to go on feeling on top, he summed up; and one hour was not sufficient to explore every trick in the bag, but he would list a few of the main ones briefly: ‘wonderful’ western medicine, as mentioned; the ‘perfect’ Christian religion, as mentioned; the West’s development and implementation of ‘perfectly’ democratic institutions and governments; its incredibly vast knowledge of science, with its ‘final word’ on the nature and origin of the universe; its gradually successful granting of the universal ‘freedoms’ and ‘inalienable human rights’ listed in the U.S. Constitution; its incredibly super-advanced technological inventions; its incredible wealth and military power; its booming and global entertainment industry; its massive global entrepreneurship; and so forth and so on. And he challenged the students to pay close attention ‘for the rest of their lives’ whenever a politician or anyone in the Western world went on a rampage against some individual or group; he challenged them to ‘psych out’ just exactly which one or ones of these ‘tricks’ the politician or person or group or nation (be it Spain or the U.S., or whoever) was utilizing at the moment, either consciously or without even realizing, in order to throw blame for something onto another group, culture, or sub-culture: the ‘doctor trick’ of calling it ‘illness’; the ‘priestly trick’ of calling it ‘sin’ or ‘moral or spiritual imperfection’ or ‘reprobate’; the ‘scientist trick’ of calling it ‘superstition’ or ‘unscientific hogwash’; the ‘superior-genetics or racist trick’ of calling it ‘subhuman’, or 'genetically less fit for surviving intense competition'; the ‘court judge’ trick of proclaiming it (e.g., fleeing persecution and seeking amnesty in the USA by crossing the border wherever possible and by whatever means) as ‘nothing but illegal and immoral’, etc. etc. And he would even write these words on a big board, if there was one.

But in the case of Tales of Waring, he said, all they had to remember was that ‘young Dr. mj’ had specifically but without thinking pulled out of Western civilization’s ‘bag of tricks’ for fooling everyone the ‘doctor trick’; and had tried to nail the Bill-Fred ‘problem’ or ‘illness’ on his own best friend, Bill Blackburn. 

Granted, it was true, the great Fred Waring, he went on, had bucked against Bill’s wonderful, positive, emotionally healing energy at times, apparently, as mj would comprehend increasingly during the interview. And that would have to amount to a huge point against Fred, when it came time to add up points later, as the night wore on. It was a factor that was likely to leave their working relationship problem looking as if it had come from Fred’s side more than from Bill’s, of course.

But meanwhile, it remained young mj lorenzo’s job, all the same, as he saw it (since he had fallen ‘head first’, as the Dr. loved to pun, into this wonderfully self-deluding trap of thinking like a shrink-y psychiatrist-doctor), to be sure whose blame it was, this anger of Bill’s, and to medically diagnose its likely cause, in the very same way any doctor would diagnose the cause of any symptom of an underlying illness; and that, traditionally, had been: by ‘ruling out’ as many possible causes of a set of symptoms as the doctor could think of, narrowing down the list of possible diagnoses to as few possibilities as he could, so as to finally, hopefully, nail down the one actual cause, so that the ‘illness’ could then be ‘treated’, and the ‘problem’ (Bill Blackburn and his anger, in this case) ‘fixed’.

While Bill Blackburn had a list of stories to tell, to prove his point, young Dr. Lorenzo also had a list he was working through as the night progressed, a list of possible diagnoses, possible theoretical explanations for Bill's anger. This was how a doctor thought when confronted with a 'medical' problem.

Most good doctors considered surgery an intervention of last resort, of course, Dr. Lorenzo explained; lesser interventions were always preferred to drastic surgery, which could prove lethal; you wouldn’t extract a tooth surgically if you could fill it or crown it, for example; removing a part of the body was almost always a more dangerous and disabling intervention than fixing it medically; and what’s more, surgery was malpractice when it came to diagnosing and treating ‘family’ disturbances of a psychiatric nature; usually you could not just surgically cut somebody out of a family and throw them out on the garbage dump to see if a problem went away or to solve a problem, the way you might cut out a big growing tumor from an abdomen, let’s say; that’s why doctors down through the ages, and especially psychiatrists, had developed this special way, just mentioned, of diagnosing the cause of psychiatric symptoms, which were almost always much more subtle and complex than the average medical or surgical problem. That was why they had developed the approach he had just described, that of ‘studying the differential diagnosis’, which entailed, first (and here he would ask their permission to repeat himself and always be given it): (1) making a list of as many possible causes anyone could dream up as ‘reasonably likely to be the cause’ for the symptom or symptoms, and then (2) ruling out, one by one, as many of these theoretical causes as one could, so as to pare the list down, one by one, to the likeliest culprits, and ultimately – ideally – to a single culprit. And then, treat it in place, not by extracting and ejecting an entire organ still possibly needed by the whole.

The surgical approach would have extracted Bill from the situation with Fred, exactly the method Bill wanted to use. Whereas mj wanted to avoid surgical extraction, as too violent an act for his fairy tale, and take a subtler approach, a cautious and deliberate medical or psychiatric approach, trying to ‘treat’ the ‘problem’ in place, in situ, with Bill still working for Fred at the old Castle Inn, as always. For after all, Bill did need the money, and had no other job to go to.

And so, as he would explain, since mj at some point along the way had made the crazy decision that Fred and Bill and Betty Ann and the Pennsylvanians and Dlune and he were all one great big inseparable fairytale ‘family’ living together a shared fairy tale life, and that he would have to be the one to ‘heal’ – (note the language of superiority, he would remind them; were they remembering the ‘tricky’ assignment he had given them of ‘psyching out’ which ‘trick’ was being used to feel superior?) – to ‘heal’ – the rift between Bill and Fred somehow, therefore, if at all possible, since no one else in ‘the family’ seemed to want ‘the (understood: ‘medical’) job’ of putting this Humpty Dumpty fairy tale back together; then at a certain point in the evening he found himself left with no medical or psychiatric option but to ‘check out’ every other possibility still remaining on the list of ‘differential diagnoses’ before he could ever rest with a growing suspicion that ‘the problem’ might lie on Fred’s side mostly, not on Bill’s. This was the course they had to follow, and it constituted the plot thread of the second half of the book.

The rest of the ever wackier evening, therefore, had consisted of a series of occasional and ever less advised and more far-fetched attempts by this strange fairytale “family’s” unofficial, self-appointed, wet-behind-the-ears shrink, mj lorenzo, to test one Freudian psychoanalytic angle after another that might explain the ‘illness’, the conflict between the two men, Bill and Fred, before he could ever come around to agreeing with Bill that the problem lay on Fred’s side, not Bill’s, as Bill was asking him to believe; let alone, ever could come around to agreeing that Bill should stop working for Fred (and be extracted from the situation, instead of treating the problem in place).[5]

It was clear what Bill thought about it all: the problem was Fred’s, not his own, and it was a problem of Fred’s crime of moral turpitude, the way he had treated Bill: that’s where things were headed, mj realized gradually, as the evening wore on; Bill was building a case for ‘moral turpitude’, behavior inherently vile in an adult human, behavior grossly unacceptable in any adult human on the planet.

Mj, however, felt he owed it to his imaginary lifelong (imaginary) friend and co-conspirator in the making of high art, Fred Waring, to offer the poor man every far-fetched fairytale chance in the world to be absolved of Bill’s charges, whatever those darn charges might turn out to be when Bill finally wrapped up his night-long case; before he could accept any claim that poor ol’ put-upon Fred Waring, the once universally revered – and now derided – Great White Father of 50’s U.S.A. TV choral music, and one of poor mj’s greatest artist-heroes since childhood, should have to suffer the ignominy of being tried and found guilty of a crime of moral turpitude, in a book written by him, mj lorenzo.

These were a few of the main forces then, in not so tiny a nutshell – as the Dr. would tease the poor high school or college students who were trying so nobly and respectfully to understand his very strange and complex world – the forces that explained and made up the rough outline of the night’s events from the middle of the book on.

There were many other big things happening too besides medical-psychiatric psychoanalysis;[6] but once they had this psychoanalytic thread in hand and could follow it throughout the second half of the labyrinthine nightmare (book-) world of that night, it would be easier to notice some of those other things as they popped up, because the presence of this thread constantly and firmly in hand would (hopefully) calm and reassure them enough to do so.

“And,” he would say, “I hope you enjoy ‘my educational book’ ‘even better’ from now on, than you already have.”

This would provoke a laugh-it-up brouhaha, usually, since most of the students, most of the time and regrettably, had not been enjoying his 'educational' book one tiny-weeny little fraction of an iota.

And he knew it.

And they knew that he knew it.

Speaking of the second half of it, mainly.[7]

And now they knew as well as anybody could know anything in this world for certain, that the author not only knew, but sympathized.

And so they were satisfied, and at peace, and could move on and read it.

And maybe even benefit from the education.

Because people were talking about Tales of Waring and mj lorenzo’s other books all of the time(!), all over the world(!), as young students complained to each other. Internet, twitter, facebook, TV, and movies. His books were a must know, obviously, if you wanted to know “what the heck was going on in this crazy mucked up world(!).” That was what they told each other, pretty much all of the time. Who else was willing to deal with the subject of religion, just to name one thing, they said, and who else but Dr. L. could do it with even a tiny ounce of humor???!![8]

Ariadne (left) watches as Theseus kills the Minotaur
with a short Bronze-Age sword to the jugular;
the metal sword is triumphing over the Minotaur's stone;

Theseus is winning via superior technology
as the Bronze Age is now replacing the Stone Age

on a first century B.C. jar preserved in the British Museum, London[9]