The Phase
23 January 2010
FYI… a number of circumstances have kept me from posting these last few weeks, but hopefully I am back to regular posts…
Starting in early July of 1996 just prior to her seventh birthday, our daughter Emma had her world disrupted by a series of calamities over the next two years that profoundly shook her world and led eventually to a severe separation anxiety that she, her mom and I would come to refer to as “The Phase”. Somehow I think giving this issue a name and referring to it almost as an entity unto itself, helped Emma finally put it behind her and move forward with her life. continue reading »
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Posted by Cooper Zale |
Categories: Context | Tagged: children and breast cancer, going through a phase, separation anxiety | 
Since this is the time of year when we indulge in this kind of stuff I’m going to join the fray. We are now ten years into the 21st Century (and the 3rd Millennium of the “Common Era”). As a person who has always been a big sci-fi fan and focused on the future, my anticipation of the “21st Century” (through the last forty years of the 20th) was always filled with thoughts of great forward-looking human achievements and a human race focused positively on the future and leaving behind much of the crap from the past. I must say I was disappointed as things unfolded in 2000 with Bush’s election, the events of 9/11/2001 soon after that, and much of what’s transpired in reaction to those events since. 
So how does a 5000 year old system of ranking and hierarchy with men inexorably at the top perpetuate itself through hundreds of generations and never get written off as archaic and crumble into the dust of history? Why was I so embarrassed in my late forties when I was deftly tossing a football with several slightly younger men (enjoying a moment of perhaps jocular camaraderie), who then threw it to my teenage son and were aghast when he threw it back to them, as it were, “like a girl”? What ancient warrior ethos had I violated in not properly training my son, an ethos that still somehow held sway somewhere in my subconscious? What gives this system its staying power, and does its longevity speak to its continuing merit? 
I was introduced to the word and the concept behind it as a teen by my mentor slash “guru” and “feminist aunt” Mary Jane. She was (and still is) a brilliant and radical feminist, disguised in the muggle world as a cookie-baking mom of four kids who befriended my mother in the late 1960s through a mutual friend. I recall Mary Jane, ever the provocateur, showing up at some of my mom’s numerous and boisterous parties dressed in a maroon monk’s robe wearing a large women’s liberation medallion (the women’s symbol with a clenched fist inside the circle) hanging from her neck where one might expect to see the Christian cross on a real monk. The words she made up to convey her arguments were just as calculatingly provocative, including her term, “patriarchal pimperialism” to describe male control of women’s sexual lives and behavior. 
I find this concept from the theories of economics and enterprise a very useful rule of thumb in helping me approach my life and make both big decisions on my life’s course, as well as day to day decisions while charting that course, including looking back and evaluating in hindsight what I have done or chosen not to do. I think perhaps as a society and participants in an economic system, we have lost touch with this rule of thumb along the way, which I believe has led to a large degree to our current economic turmoil. 
Our son Eric lives out back in our guest house and our daughter Emma still has her bedroom in our house, so they are technically still “in the nest”. But they both are now so wrapped up in their own busy lives that we only manage to sit down and have a good conversation with them about what’s up maybe once a week. Since our daughter has such a busy schedule of work, various classes, and a boyfriend, we can go for days without seeing her at all. If it were not for our current severe recession, combined with the sky-high rents on apartments here in Los Angeles, our nest would be completely empty. 
Based on this whole provocative discussion centered around the word “fuck” and all its uses and connotations (see the version of 
Just an initial heads up here… if you have a problem with people talking about the “F word” and actually spelling it out in their piece, then read no further…