Orgone Research

It’s cold outside. So cold in fact, that it reminds me of the time I got frostbite.

I grew up in Missoula, which doesn’t get as cold as some of the other cities in Montana, like Butte. My father was from Butte, and he would regale me with stories of how cold it would get. I think he told me it was -64 Fahrenheit on his birthday once when he was a child. The all time record cold temperature in the contiguous United States is -70 Fahrenheit set at Rogers Pass, MT on January 20, 1954. But the coldest I ever remember Missoula getting was a relatively balmy -20 Fahrenheit.

When I was in high school I used to ice skate. I followed my father’s lead and chose to use speed skates rather than the hockey skates that all the other boys used. Back in the 1970’s, the primary “rink” was a pond at McCormick Park. The pond was fed by an irrigation ditch that was itself fed by the Clark Fork River. This led to a bit of a problem in that the flow from the ditch would change over the course of the winter, and would cause the pond’s surface level to change. Huge cracks would develop in the ice. The parks department was utterly clueless on how to take care of an ice rink, and would only flood the surface of the rink once or twice a season, if that. They would NEVER scrape the ice shavings off the surface. When they would flood the rink, it was with a fire hose, not a garden hose, which resulted in huge wave-like ripples on the surface. When you were out skating you would have to do your best to avoid the huge cracks, simply by memorizing where they were and try to avoid them.

But to their credit, the parks department had erected floodlights, so people could skate at night. They put in a big loudspeaker and played the radio.

“Blinded by the light
Racked up like a douche
You know a runner in the light
Some silico-sister with a manager, mister
Told me I got what it takes…”

There was usually an adult attendant in the warming house. I remember one time going out to skate on a Friday or Saturday night. As I came inside to change into my skates this college-aged attendant asked me: “Why aren’t you out on a date?”. Yeah, way to go guy, thanks for making me feel even worse about never having been on a date with a girl…

The speed skates had no insulation. They were simply one layer of leather. I assumed that keeping my feet warm was my own problem. I tried all sorts of combinations of materials. I remember getting some silk socks which were very thin and formed the first layer. Then it was usually ordinary socks, then wool. I remember getting some “space age” type socks which I believe were basically aluminized Mylar woven into some other fabric. The whole “space blanket” thing was very popular back in the 1970’s, and I think these were some sort of funky byproduct. They didn’t keep my feet warm worth a damn.

I had heard that you could put powdered chili pepper in your socks and it would keep your feet warm. One night I tried it, putting the powder in my socks before I took off for the rink. My parents allowed me to drive the family car, a wretched French Renault 12. When I got to the rink I found it was closed! Well, my parents didn’t expect me back for a while, so I decided to visit my friend JC, and older guy who drove a cab. He lived out at the Shady Grove Autel, a collection of rental bungalows in a dodgier part of town. By the time I got to JC’s my feet were burning, as they hadn’t been exposed to the cold. I don’t remember that he was home, either! I never tried the hot chili powder trick again…

Eventually I came to expect a pattern; I’d get out on the ice, my feet would get painfully cold, then they would stop hurting because they would go numb. Then it would be OK. I’d skate for an hour or two. When I’d finish skating, I’d change back into my shoes, and the feeling in my feet would come back.

One time I went skating and everything went as it normally did; my feet got painfully cold, then numb, then I kept on skating. But this time it was different. I changed back into my shoes and got into the car. Driving back home I began to grow concerned; the feeling in my feet still hadn’t come back. By the time I got in the house I was quite frightened.

Not knowing any better, I filled my sink with hot water and alternately put each foot into the basin. That still didn’t work. I went upstairs into the study where my father was reading. I told him what was going on. He didn’t seem particularly agitated, but suggested I had frostbite. He said what I needed to do was put my feet into a tub of COLD water, then very slowly raise the temperature. But of course my mother had to get in on the action. She became rather frantic and called a friend of hers who was a nurse. The nurse said to put my feet into LUKEWARM water. Now my father knew this was bullshit, but our family dynamic was all fucked up, and only rarely did my father ever put his foot down to stop my mother’s irrationality.

So into a tub of lukewarm water my feet go. Soon enough sensation in my feet started to come back. But not in a nice way. So here I take full responsibility for my own actions; because I had initially exposed my flesh to HOT water, my nerves were screaming out in pain. I kid you not; this was arguably the most intense physical pain that I’ve ever experienced in my life. Worse than breaking my arm falling off a wall in LA. Worse being hit in the eye with a rock thrown by that drunk asshole in front of Charlie B’s in Missoula. Worse than any skateboard fall. Worse than Sheli Story’s right hook to my eye.

The pain was so bad that I called my friend Elliott who worked at the Trail Head sporting goods store. I thought he might have some magical cure my father didn’t know about for the excruciating pain. He kind of laughed it off, and suggested whiskey, which was not an option for me at that time and that place.

Frostbite is no joke. If you feel your hands or feet start to go numb because of the cold take warm shelter as soon as possible! If your extremities have been numb for more than a few minutes, and the feeling isn’t coming back, put them in COLD water. VERY SLOWLY warm them back up. If you plan on spending significant amounts of time exposed to the cold, investigate frostbite and hypothermia and be prepared.

The last time I was in Missoula there was no more ice skating allowed at McCormick Park. What do Missoula kids do in the winter these days? Probably just play video games…

When I was a child, my mother gave my brother and me each a Hudson Bay blanket. My mother had been a child in the Great Depression, and the experience clearly made a profound impact on her. I grew up constantly hearing her tales of deprivation, which induced in me a sort of guilt when I would receive gifts, or even drink lots of milk. My mother told me that her family didn’t have fresh milk in the Great Depression, due to a combination of primitive refrigeration technology and poverty. They had to make do with condensed milk.

So I was told that the gift of the Hudson Bay blanket was a Very Valuable Thing, a thing of such value that one must be given to my brother AND me so as not to demonstrate overt favoritism. At least that was my interpretation of why my mother made such a big deal of giving one to each of us…

My mother told me that my brother had once written an essay for school on the venerable history of the Hudson Bay blanket, and may have even delivered it as an oral presentation. Clearly there was some serious mojo going on with this blanket.

But deep down, I never quite “got it”. The thing looked cool, all white with the boldly colored stripes, but it was made of wool, and as such was all scratchy. It didn’t seem substantially warmer than other blankets, especially the down comforter I had, encased though it was in an ugly brown satin. I also had a blanket my mother called a “thermal” blanket. There was something odd about this blanket, in that it was crocheted or woven in a manner that produced a myriad of holes. Even as a child, my nascent skepticism was aroused; weren’t all blankets “thermal” blankets? Wasn’t holding heat the idea in the first place? And why should a blanket be full of holes?

But Western Montana is a cold place, and I was grateful to have lots of blankets. I would arrange the layers so the Venerable Hudson Bay Blanket would be somewhere in the middle, so it wouldn’t scratch me.

By the time I got to college, I began to go through a sort of ascetic phase. I gave away many of the things I owned, and at one point I started to eat a lot less. At the time, I think I was trying to impress my first so-called girlfriend with how much will-power or self control I could exert. I call her my “so-called” girlfriend, because she refused to have sex. Yup, her refusal was a gigantic ego-shattering, self-esteem destroying, frustrating mind-fuck.

But eventually I came to my senses, and began running into women who liked to, you know, “get it on”… One night I was by myself at the Top Hat bar in Missoula, probably watching yet another R&B boogie band cover “Mustang Sally”. In walks Christy. Christy worked at the Kinko’s where I did all my photocopying. She was older than me, one of Missoula’s classic old-school radical feminists. I’m not sure exactly how she perceived me; she helped me photocopy a great deal of information I had gathered on autoerotic asphyxia, and even bound it all together for me into one large binder. This was the binder that I later loaned to Rick Linklater. I think she may have perceived me as some sort of “new wave” guy, some sort of unexpected by-product of what the hippies begat.

She walked up to me and hugged me. These days, that’s a benign greeting, and certainly not always one with sexual overtones. But to me, at that time and in that place, it could only mean one thing: She liked me and I must pursue her sexually!

So I did. We walked and talked, and of course I tried to ply her with alcohol. She seemed fearful of beer, on the grounds that it had yeast in it. Yeast was bad, somehow. I tried to explain to her that commercial American beers were both filtered and pasteurized, and so had little or no live yeast remaining. But this was really my introduction to the fact that she had a whole slew of “new age” and pseudoscientific beliefs. She claimed to have “allergies” yet wouldn’t accept that true allergies are a histaminic response, not the sort of generalized malaise she complained of. She was a believer in astrology.

Eventually we had sex. The first time was awkward and not very fun. But this created a History between us, and for her History was political. All the psycho-social ramifications and implications of this political act had to be discussed ad nauseam. But Christy was a smart gal, and in general I liked her company. Many of the women I met who were my own age were vapid and shallow airheads, and I knew deep down I could never relate to them. But I was beginning to see the weird angry-hippie-feminist side of Christy as well. I remember her telling me about how human society began as a Golden Era, run by women, and called the “Matriarchy”. But then evil men took over, and society became a “Patriarchy”.

This was news to me, as I had always assumed men had pretty much oppressed women from the get-go, and that things had gotten better for women rather late in human history, mostly in the industrialized countries. But I had come from a hard science background, so the concepts of “Matriarchy” and “Patriarchy” were completely novel to me. I had no easily accessible resources with which to investigate her claims.

Certain more tangible things began to get on my nerves. She boasted of once having destroyed a man’s Aerosmith LP because it contained the lyrics “You can’t catch me, ‘cause the rabbit done died”. But rabidly horny guys will put up with all kinds of things, and I was a rabidly horny guy. So we had sex a second time. This time things were better planned, and it proved to be the first time I ever saw a diaphragm. It looked pretty cool, actually, and of course I wondered how it might fly if thrown like a Frisbee…

So we start going at it. At this point in my life I think I’d had sex only about 5 times, so I still quite the n00b. I don’t remember how long I lasted before I came. But surprisingly, my erection didn’t go down! This was a bit of a surprise, so I just kept on going. This time around some sort of weird equilibrium was achieved, and as it happened I didn’t stop until the sun came up. I think we had been going at it for 5 or 6 hours. Alas, I was only able to pull off that stunt the one time, but it reminded me of all those old blues songs that included lines about “all night long”. Hmmm, I guess it really was possible…

By the way, for those reading this in 2009, this occurred in the 1980’s, long before phosphodiesterase inhibitor drugs were available. Indeed, no drugs or freaky devices were involved, other than probably just some alcohol.

Being that Christy worked at Kinko’s, she wasn’t a wealthy person. At one point she complained that her house was cold. I offered her a blanket, which she accepted. Since her primary need was simply warmth, I decided to give her my Hudson Bay blanket. This act had a two-fold fallout. My mother was aghast that I had given away what was to her almost a family heirloom. I found this attitude strange, as it seemed to be directly at odds with her Christian religion, which ostensibly placed a high value on charity. I refused to confront my mother with this contradiction, as by this time I took great pains to avoid arguments and confrontations with my mother.

I was not entirely surprised that the radical leftist recipient of this gift had even less understanding of its material value than I did. Back in the 80’s I had no easy way of finding out how much such a blanket might really cost. But a quick Google search tells me that buying one today might set me back $300! I’m sure it didn’t cost my mother that much when she bought it, but I don’t disbelieve her claim that it was expensive.

The final straw with Christy and me came while we were eating ice cream. We started talking about the SLA, and Christy began to deliver an impassioned screed about how bank robbery really wasn’t such a heinous crime! This was a mind-blowing assertion, as I had come from such a completely different moral background. My father had been the assistant Attorney General for the state of Montana. He was largely responsible for re-writing Montana’s state constitution in 1972. He taught law at the University of Montana starting in 1965 until his semi-retirement in the early 1990’s. My law-and-order upbringing was directly at odds with Christy’s radical leanings.

After that I’d see Christy around Missoula from time to time, but it was all over between us.

Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to that damn blanket…

I was born in 1962, seven years after my brother Paul Evan Crowley. I have no other siblings. I could never relate to my brother while I was growing up, in any sort of way. I assumed this was simply due to the big age difference. As I got older, I came to believe there was far more going on with my brother to account for his coldness to me. When I was a child, my mother claimed that when my brother and I were both adults we would become the best of friends. That never happened. Why not?

Unfortunately one of the defining characteristics for both my brother and me was that we were “uptight”. My brother had it much worse than I did, and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to reverse the bad programming that makes me “uptight”. I see the same pattern in a lot of clever people; the same mental talents that are expressed in strong verbal skills are tied in with anxiety. If you begin to define yourself as different from, or superior to, other human beings due to verbal skills, then your life becomes a constant struggle to maintain this self-imagined superiority. I think this struggle was at the root of the anxiety that infected my brother and me.

My brother had other demons. He was most likely a heavily closeted homosexual. This is understandably a strong claim, and one I don’t make lightly. He never married, nor ever had any girlfriends or female dates, as far as I know. As clearly as I can remember, only three friends of his ever come over to our house. I know for a fact that two of them were gay. One of them, Tracy, became wealthy through ownership of Missoula and Portland porn stores.

I always liked Tracy, and ran into him in Seattle some years back. I even visited him in Portland somewhere in the late 1980’s. I asked Tracy if he ever had any sexual contact with my brother and he told me he did not. I believe him. This suggested to me that my brother was attracted to gay men, but was unwilling to follow through.

My brother never developed any of the stereotypical Montana hobbies such as hunting, fishing, hiking, or skiing. His aesthetic tastes ran to the French language and gourmet cooking. He would speak privately to my mother in the stereotypically “gay male” manner, yet with everyone else it was rigid, clipped, and over-enunciated.

Now at this juncture, lest I be accused of being insensitive to gays, let me state flat out that I have no problem with anyone being gay, my brother included. I suspect that if my brother could have come to terms with his own sexuality, he would have been a much happier person. Why was he unable to come out?

Probably because he was a hard-core Christian.

When one thinks of hard-core Christians, one usually thinks of fundamentalists. Strangely my brother was actually a Lutheran… As well as his religion, most of his social life revolved around his church activities.

I started out as a Lutheran myself, but I was always lukewarm. I attended Sunday school, but never studied the Bible. By the time I was confirmed, I had become more cynical about attending church services, and found them deathly boring.

I eventually became an atheist when I was about a junior in high school. This caused a major rift between me and my mother, who was also a Lutheran. Atheism was also the final cleft between my brother and me. Whereas before he was simply cold to me, now he decided to exhibit “good Christian love” by completely shunning me.

I moved to Seattle when I graduated from college in 1987. When I would return to Missoula to visit I would usually receive just a perfunctory “hello” from my brother, and that was it.

My brother was totally consumed with academic success. I think he made it through Hellgate High school with more or less a straight “A” average. He graduated with high honors in three majors from the University of Montana in fours years! He went on to get his Masters degree from Georgetown University. He then started working on his PhD. At this point his history becomes unclear to me.

He taught high school French in either Helena or Bozeman or both. This puzzled me, as I thought getting a PhD pretty much excluded having a simultaneous full time job. Between 1987 and 1997 I would ask my mother how Paul’s PhD was coming along, and I would get vague, dissembling answers.

Then things got strange. At one point my mother shared an odd anecdote with me. She said that Paul had befriended a cop in Bozeman who had taken Paul out for some recreational handgun target shooting. Sounds like healthy fun to me but knowing my brother, this was grossly atypical! The strange upshot of the story was that my mother included the detail that my brother had experienced a “falling out” with the police officer…

I imagine it goes without saying, but my parents were of the old school persuasion whereby any sort of discussion of human sexuality was utterly anathema. Montana at the time had sodomy laws on the books, the penalty being 10 years, a 10,000 dollar fine, or both. To this day I can’t bring myself to broach the subject of Paul’s lifestyle to my father…

Missoula, Montana is a divided place; being a liberal arts college town, it became a left wing Mecca within a right-wing redneck state. Attitudes toward gays are still in the dark ages for a large part of the populace. Virtually every night that I would walk across the Higgins Avenue Bridge in Missoula rednecks would yell “hey faggot” out the windows of their cars or trucks. No, I’m not exaggerating; this didn’t happen just once or twice, this was ALL THE TIME.

So I have sympathy for my brother in this way; he grew up in a sex-negative family environment, in a homophobic state where gay sex was a crime, with a hard-core religious mindset.

There is a particular attitude seen in a lot of gay men; a sort of free-wheeling haughtiness and superiority, especially toward straight men. I’ve had gay men tell me TO MY FACE that gays are “vastly cooler” than straight men. You see this when gay men accuse other gay men of being “bitchy queens”. The problem is that they can’t perceive the same haughtiness in themselves.

My brother had this in spades. An absolutely pathological, haughty self-righteousness. Couple this with a world class anal retentive personality and you have an unsympathetic character, to say the least.

When I visited my parents in 1997, I was told that my brother had fucked up his back, and was unable to work. He had moved back in with my parents, and was living in my old bedroom in the basement. This situation didn’t seem too outrageous, as he had gained a great deal of weight, which I assumed factored into back problems.

One day in late January 2006, I got a message from my father on my phone answering machine. My brother had died.

As soon as I spoke to my father, I asked him what Paul had died of. Shockingly, I was told he had died of liver failure, secondary to chronic alcohol abuse! Furthermore, I was advised that Paul had actually lost his job due to alcoholism, thus necessitating the move back to my parent’s house.

My parents were total alcohol abstainers. There was never any alcohol use in the house except for one party thrown for a bunch of my father’s legal associates. But I started drinking when I got to college, and stopped in early 1998. I totally understand the attraction alcohol has to someone afflicted with anxiety. I still struggle with anxiety, and I have absolutely no doubt my brother did too, and undoubtedly his struggle was far worse than mine. I keep a copy of my brother’s death certificate on the bulletin board beside me. Morbid? Perhaps, but it helps remind me to be healthy and happy in the here and now.

My point in all this retrospective rambling is simple: human sexuality cannot be bottled up, it must be allowed to express itself in healthy ways or really fucked-up, pathological things happen to people. Being a “closet case” is not a trivial matter. Religious fervor is no substitute for coming out.

My first rock and roll record was Waterloo, by Abba. A 45, of course, and inexpensive enough that my mother was willing to buy it for me. This must have been about 1974, and I would have been about 12 at the time. I never had summer jobs as a child, and not much of an allowance, so I depended on the good graces of my mother for little luxuries. She had grown up in the Great Depression, and she often reminded me of the deprivations she experienced. Later on I was allowed to buy Cher’s Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves, and I think Ringo Starr’s Photograph. Terry Jack’s Seasons in the Sun was in my collection. So far, so good. But then a subtle shift occurred when I got The Night Chicago Died by Paper Lace. This time my mother expressed to me that she found the music a little bit “hard” or perhaps “coarse”.

My mother was a Lutheran, though she didn’t talk too much about religion back in those days. She was not one of those stereotypical Christians who thought rock music was the music of the Devil. Rather she was more of the elitist snob, who felt that The One True Music was classical. But she had a weakness for schlock, and owned records by the Tijuana Brass and Bert Kaempfert. We even had Whipped Cream and Other Delights in our house! She watched Lawrence Welk with some degree of reverence.

Young people today may not appreciate the intensity of the “generation gap” that many people my age experienced growing up. Long hair and rock music were not just part of the maelstrom of popular culture like they are today. For many people back then they were extremely potent and divisive symbols.

A strange and sadly comedic episode occurred at the Crowley house one day, as my mother complained that rock music was intrinsically inferior because “you couldn’t understand the words”. True enough for some songs, but the lyrics she couldn’t understand were those to The Night Chicago Died. The specific line was “and I asked someone who said, ‘bout a hundred cops are dead”. I heard the word “cops” fairly clearly, but my mother couldn’t. She enlisted my brother, whom she claimed had very acute hearing. My brother listened carefully, and pronounced that Paper Lace was singing “cubs”.

Yes, the word “cubs” made absolutely no sense at all. But bigger conflicts and stranger interpretations were to come. Not surprisingly this began for me with puberty and high school. I remember reading in Skateboarder magazine in about 1977 or 78 that some particularly cool skateboarder liked “Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and Hendrix”. By this time, I had been given a hand-me-down 8-track player. I scraped up enough money to buy Led Zeppelin’s Presence. It was immediately obvious that this was something vastly cooler and more profound than Cher, Abba, or Paper Lace. I became a life-long fan of hard rock.

Unfortunately my new-found appreciation of hard rock deeply conflicted with my mother’s growing disdain for it. I was allowed to own the records and listen to them, but was subjected to her constant and irrational arguments.

Somewhere around 1980, I discovered the book Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key. It made quite an impact on me. Unfortunately though, my critical thinking skills at the time were in a nascent stage. Certain concepts struck me as plausible, but Key’s analysis of rock music seemed farfetched, even then. I seem to remember reading about George Harrison’s song My Sweet Lord, as the background vocals clearly say “Hare Krishna”, “Krishna, Krishna” and related lines.

I remembered that my mother had this song on a 45 disk; she bought it because it was a Good Christian Song. To tell the truth, I don’t think I had listened to the song very critically until I read Key’s analysis. I put the record on, and sure enough, the Krishna stuff was there, plain as day!

My mother had a bad habit of promoting a particular logical fallacy, namely that superior perceptual capacity is equivalent to superior ability to discern value. The problem is that “value” is a metaphysical concept, an arbitrary human invention, not the subject of science or mathematics. In fact this is the core conundrum of all aesthetic thinking; at best one can argue meaningfully about whether concepts are logically consistent, but you can’t point to a “good” in the universe like you can point to a chunk of aluminium.

My mother claimed that she had once taken something called the “Seashore Test” and had done particularly well. It was an audiology test. Now I have no doubt that audiology is a genuine science, and that meaningful date can be gathered. There are plenty of perceptual tests in psychology that are grounded in good science. I didn’t doubt my mother’s claim. So I was curious how she would react when I told her that My Sweet Lord was really about Krishna. Payback time!

At first I just told her. Understandably she didn’t believe me, so we went into the living room and put on the record. At first I couldn’t believe my mother couldn’t hear (or perceive) the background vocals. I think I put the record on again, this time lip-syncing along with the “Krishna, Krishna” vocals.

Unbelievably, my mother still couldn’t hear it! At this point I had one of the first epiphanies of my life. I realized there were only three logical possibilities. The first was that she genuinely couldn’t hear it. I don’t think this was the case; she was not hard of hearing. It wasn’t as if the sounds were at 16,000 Hz and too high to hear, or super-faint. The background vocals are clear and obvious.

The second possibility was that she was lying to me. I don’t believe this either, though I must accept it as a possibility. My parents were both profoundly moral people. Our family never “joshed” each other, never “told stories” even if they were revealed as such later, and absolutely never bullshitted each other. It was a very rigid upbringing emotionally, and very much out of step with the rest of the world.

No, what I think was really going on with my mother was that she was in denial. Clearly the situation was too much for her; for the first time in our series of never-ending musical arguments I was absolutely and unequivocally correct. Her vaunted perceptual skills had failed her, and rather spectacularly so. And I’m sure it shocked her that what she thought was Christian was really Krishna!

Of course she had to come up with some kind of rationalization; “There’s too much noise” or “You can’t understand what they are saying”. Frankly I don’t remember what it was…

This was the first time I had seen a human behave like this, and it happened to be my mother. It came as a shock to me, and I began to feel bad that I had hurt or confused my mother in some deep, dark, and strange way.

As I grew older, I became much more of a skeptic about all sorts of things. Skeptics see the kind of denial that my mother exhibited all the time. Evidence for extraordinary claims is scrutinized, and sometimes it’s clearly shown to have a prosaic explanation. For most people it becomes like that old V8 Juice slogan; “I could have had a V8”. When you see the prosaic explanation, you think, “Oh my goodness, that’s so simple, how could we have possibly believed it was evidence for Bigfoot/Orbs/Ghosts/ESP, etc”. Yet there will ALWAYS be true believers who madly cling to the original belief.

The hardest lesson that I take away from the My Sweet Lord episode is that intelligence does not guarantee good judgment. I could see that early on with my mother, and as the years go by, I see it in myself.