394261 14: A fiery blasts rocks the World Trade Center after being hit by two planes September 11, 2001 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Not too long ago, one of my regular readers spoke of seeing a bunch of military tanks practicing for a martial law takeover. In America, I am hearing of an increasing number of incidents like this. I try to avoid the news, but there’s an increasing and unavoidable sense of panic that our nation may be on the brink of a removal of all our freedoms as martial law becomes the norm rather than the exception. It’s very frightening.
But what I really want to talk about is the feeling of unreality and dissociation that accompanies seeing something like what my reader did. She said when she saw the tanks, she felt as if she was dreaming. It didn’t seem real…
After posting Julie Gautier’s underwater dance video “AMA” the other day, I was led to watch some of her other short films. She is not only a talented underwater choreographer, dancer, and freediver, she is also an incredible filmmaker.
Gautier’s husband, Guillaume Néry, is a championship freediver (diving without any breathing equipment), author, and public speaker. Here is the video Julie made of her husband diving into Dean’s Blue Hole, located in the Bahamas. A blue hole is basically an underwater sinkhole, and they are common in the Bahamas. This video was filmed entirely on one breath.
That tempting dark blue is just nothingness all the way down.
In “Free Fall,” Nery slowly makes his way down a gentle incline of pure white silty sand toward the edge of the sinkhole (Dean’s Blue Hole is 663 feet at its deepest point). He stands at the edge of the abyss for what seems an eternity, and finally dives down into the darkness, and it seems just like he’s flying. When he lands, it’s not at the deepest part of the blue hole (I don’t think reaching 663 feet is possible for freediving — no one can hold their breath that long); I’ve read it was around 300 feet or a little over that. But who cares? It’s still mind blowing. It’s really like another planet under the ocean, with a different sort of “air” that allows you to fly down into canyons, and rock climb back up to the top with ease.
“Free Fall” is quite possibly the coolest video I have ever seen. What’s so amazing about it is no special effects whatsoever have been used. Everything you see here is exactly as it happened, from Julia’s perspective (who was filming it and probably also there to provide her husband with an oxygen tank, if any problems developed).
How can something appear to be so completely exhilarating, and at the same time be so utterly terrifying? The darkness and depth of that blue hole is spine chilling, but when the camera pans upward toward the sunlight filtering down deep into the darkness, I had to catch my own breath in awe.
The song (“You Make Me Feel” by a group called Archive) is pretty great too. I think it’s just perfect for this video.
If Trump’s ultraconservative pick Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, we women are vulnerable to losing all our rights — and I’m not just talking about abortion. It may well include birth control as well, and a lot more. There’s already a horrifying new Arkansas law that was just passed last week. The law says a rapist can sue a victim if she seeks to obtain an abortion. Rape victims in our culture are being newly demonized, just as they were in patriarchal times in the past, of being temptresses who “teased” or tempted the man to rape her, because, you see, men are incapable of controlling their lustful urges. It’s always the woman’s responsibility to tame them.
I hear more and more horror stories about pastors at fundamentalist and evangelical churches who tell abused wives that the way to solve the issue is to “get right with God” and “submit” to their husband. Of course we all know how well that works out in real life. It doesn’t. Many of these women end up emotionally or physically destroyed, or dead. Such women are often forced into leaving their churches in order to stop being shamed for being an abuse victim. If they leave their abuser, the church will usually shun them rather than offer any kind of support, even if children are involved.
This regime would like to erase everything women achieved during the 1960s and 1970s. Ideally, they would like us to lose our voting rights too, bringing us back to the early 1900s.
All this is only the tip of the iceberg, of course. Life for women who are not wealthy, white, evangelical Trump supporters is going to be hell on earth, and that’s what they want for us. This regime is misogynistic and hates women. They don’t want us to have any kind of voice or any autonomy at all. They want us barefoot, pregnant, and subservient to the patriarchs who get to tell us what we can and cannot do.
We all know what will happen if Kavanaugh gets confirmed. I’m not going to name what those things will be. We all know. It may take some time, but it will happen.
I’m not giving the man the benefit of the doubt. At first I wanted to, but after seeing his cold and heartless reaction to the father of the murdered Parkland student (and then calling Security to have the man removed), with his assistant making the “white power” symbol with her fingers right behind him, the message was loud and clear.
Here is a picture of some young Afghan women in the the early 1970s, before the Taliban and Sharia law came and changed everything. They look like any women of the free world, don’t they?
Until the conflict of the 1970s, the 20th Century had seen relatively steady progression for women’s rights in the country. Afghan women were first eligible to vote in 1919 – only a year after women in the UK were given voting rights, and a year before the women in the United States were allowed to vote. In the 1950s purdah (gendered separation) was abolished; in the 1960s a new constitution brought equality to many areas of life, including political participation.
But during coups and Soviet occupation in the 1970s, through civil conflict between Mujahideen groups and government forces in the ’80s and ’90s, and then under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan had their rights increasingly rolled back.
This is what happens when religion and the state merge. The end result is always oppression of women and groups of people deemed to be “other” or “sinners.” There are no exceptions to this. Mixing religion with politics always ends badly, especially for women and those who do not submit easily to the regime.
In the 1970s, women in Afghanistan, like American women (and women in all developed countries) were discovering new freedoms, finding their voices, and being granted new, hard won rights. The young women in the photo above look happy and carefree. Most likely, they had no idea that in a few short years, all that would be lost.
Another image of young women in pre-war Afghanistan, 1970s
I’ve always wondered what it must have felt like to be an Afghan woman during the early Taliban years, as the regime began to remove women’s freedoms and rights while enforcing draconian new laws on them that were much harsher than the rules men were expected to follow.
It must have felt quite a bit like what it feels like today to be a woman in America.
The Handmaid’s Tale seems like it could be prophetic: a peek into a possible future for American women if Christofascist politics isn’t stopped in its tracks right now. I can’t even watch the show. I find it too upsetting. The book was enough for me, but boy, was it eye opening.
This video may be one of the most beautiful, sublime, and unusual things I’ve ever seen. It’s a short film called “AMA” by underwater dancer/freediver Julie Gautier (I found it while watching a series of other diving videos, which I’ve been kind of obsessed with for a couple of days for some reason). I promise this video isn’t as disturbing or depressing as the last one I posted, though you may find the emotions it evokes rather sad (I did).
It was filmed at The Deep Joy/Y40 in Padua, Italy, which is recognized for being the deepest swimming pool in the world.
I’m amazed by the length of time this woman can hold her breath, even though it may have been carefully edited to look seamless when it may have actually been filmed in separate takes.
I’m not going to try to interpret what story she is telling here. In Julie’s own words under the video:
“Ama is a silent film. It tells a story everyone can interpret in their own way, based on their own experience. There is no imposition, only suggestions. I wanted to share my biggest pain in this life with this film. For this is not too crude, I covered it with grace. To make it not too heavy, I plunged it into the water. I dedicate this film to all the women of the world.”
I was browsing nature videos on Youtube the other night, and I stumbled on the below video. I watched the entire thing, and was simultaneously fascinated and horrified. The footage of this 22 year old diving instructor (who should have known better than to scuba dive in one of the most dangerous diving locations on the planet without the proper equipment or with a diving partner) falling to his death on the ocean floor is incredibly scary and heartbreaking. TRIGGER WARNING: If you are bothered by footage of actual deaths in progress, I don’t recommend watching this video.
On April 28, 2000, Yuri Lipski, a 22 year old Russian diving instructor, decided to dive in the (in)famous (but very popular) Blue Hole off the coast of Egypt, in the Red Sea. It was his last dive. Because the entire dive, including his death, was recorded on camera, he became the most well known casualty of what has become dubbed by many “The Divers’ Graveyard.”
One of the basic rules for scuba divers is to never dive without a buddy, and to make sure you have the proper equipment appropriate for the depth you plan to dive. Only the most experienced divers who are equipped with special tanks containing an oxygen/helium/nitrogen mix (oxygen alone becomes toxic at great depths) should ever attempt to dive to depths greater than 130 feet (40 meters).
Yuri apparently dove alone to depths exceeding the recommended 40 meters, in order to pass under the much desired “arch” which is a deceptively deep underwater cavelike structure (and to a diver appears much closer than it actually is), to get the best views. Or at least that’s the theory, since Yuri never lived to tell his story. Whatever really happened, he soon lost control and began hurtling toward the ocean floor once the water pressure became too great for him to be able to achieve buoyancy and rise to the surface. He was carrying too much camera equipment and only one standard oxygen tank, a grave mistake. There was no way he would have been able to return to the surface once he got much below the “safe zone.” Not only because there was too much water pressure for him to be able to achieve enough buoyancy to return to the surface at that depth, but also because he would have died anyway from a condition called the “bends” (decompression sickness) even if he had been able to rise before his limited oxygen ran out. If he had tried to go through the “arch,” he also would have ran out of oxygen long before he could make it back to the surface and drowned. Yuri’s fate was sealed from the get go.
You can hear Yuri wheezing and struggling to get enough air into his lungs as he hurtles toward his death. He seemed to be aware of his fate though one cannot be sure. It seemed like he may have been suffering a seizure as he hit bottom but was still aware of his surroundings because he checked his diver’s computer and finally ripped off his oxygen mask. It must have been absolutely terrifying . He was suffering from a serious medical condition known to divers called narcosis, caused by the intake of too much oxygen. Narcosis causes a diver to enter an altered state similar to drunkenness but which may also include hallucinations like a psychedelic drug. It seriously impairs a diver’s judgment and can itself be fatal.
This excellent documentary explains the science of why narcosis happens and speculates about what actually happened to Yuri Lipski before he died and what he must have experienced in those final moments. It also explains why the Blue Hole in the Dahab region of Egypt, which is easy to access (it’s right off the beach), having calm waters and usually good weather, is deceptive in its “easiness” but is actually one of the most dangerous diving spots on earth.
On the vastness of “short” distances in ocean waters.
I love the beach and the ocean, but there is something incredibly creepy about deep ocean water. The weird thing is, Yuri sank only 330 feet. Yes, I said only. When you stop and think about it, 330 feet really isn’t that much — except in a body of water like the ocean. Here’s a thought experiment. Think about something that is 330 feet away from you. That’s just a little bit longer than the length of a football field. It’s not even a tenth of a mile. Most highway exits exceed this length. If someone was standing 330 feet away from you, you would probably think they were fairly close, within shouting distance. You would definitely see what they were wearing and be able to recognize who they were (if you have decent vision).
Most of the ocean is much, much deeper than this. The deepest part of the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is more than 37,000 feet, which is much deeper than Mt. Everest is tall! There are other trenches and abyssal plains that are also incredibly deep, miles deep, not just feet. So, 330 feet is a tiny fraction of the deepest waters in most oceans; it wouldn’t even be a decent sized hill on land! And yet, when we are talking about the ocean, it seems to make little difference if the depth you fall is 330 feet or 33,000.
Yuri’s fall seems to take an eternity, and the blackness descends fast, since sunlight rarely penetrates much deeper than 200 to 300 feet of water or so. If the water is murky, it can become black at even shallower deaths. The pressure above you is insurmountable at the kind of depths Yuri descended to. 330 feet is over twice the maximum depth that even the diving experts recommend without special equipment. It was not survivable, and yet…330 is almost nothing when compared to most of the ocean. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench it is just as black as the bottom of this Blue Hole whose bottom is only 330 feet. The only difference is Yuri would have been long dead before reaching the bottom of the Challenger Deep , which is a SEVEN MILE DESCENT! It would have taken a couple of hours, at least. Yuri’s fall took just over five minutes, yet must have seemed like an eternity. By my calculations, he must have been falling at just over 60 feet per minute, or one foot per second (that’s pretty fast).
The surrounding waters were already very dark when he passed the last visible diver in the background. We can’t tell if that other diver had descended deeper than the recommended 130 feet but chances are good that if he did, he had the proper equipment to handle it, which Yuri did not.
I cannot tell which moment was “the point of no return”– that is, the point at which Yuri would not have been able to rise to the surface again. But watching this and realizing he almost certainly was aware of his fate and there was nothing that could be done chills me to the bone.
It’s incredible to me that you can be merely 330 feet from the surface of the ocean, and perhaps only yards away from other people, and yet when you are enveloped in the dark waters of the ocean at this depth you might as well be alone in the universe. Other than floating alone in space, I can think of nothing more existentially lonely and terrifying than sinking in total blackness to the bottom of the ocean, even if that bottom is a mere 330 feet down and mere yards away from safety. In the ocean, such distances might as well be light years.
Yuri Lipski may have died too young and in a horrifying way, but at least he died doing something he loved more than anything else in the world. Diving was his entire life. I hope he is resting in peace.
The end of summer always brings me sadness — and I mean that quite literally, since I suffer from the mood disorder SAD (seasonal affective disorder) that always sets in around late August and usually sticks around until sometime in late January or early February, when the days start to become noticeably longer.
It seems incongruous to me that it is still so swelteringly hot (we hit 90 degrees F today) and yet signs of fall are everywhere: Halloween (and even Thanksgiving and Christmas) products and decorations in the stores, kids going back to school, the presence of school buses on the roads when I drive to work in the morning, a few falling leaves here and there, and that tired, wilted, look the trees and shrubs get before they begin to turn their fall colors (around here, that usually means dingy brown). And, of course, the dreaded Pumpkin Spice Everything.
Another sign that summer is at its end is the closing of public swimming pools. Even though it’s still as hot as the inside of a locked car in Miami, the municipal pool has closed its doors until next Memorial Day. I found that out when I drove over there this afternoon, hoping to enjoy a quick cool down in the water. Instead of the welcome sight and sounds of people splashing happily in the refreshing turquoise water and the occasional whistle from the lifeguard, what I found instead was a completely abandoned concrete building guarding the pool, which was half-drained so whatever water was left looked as refreshing as thick green pond scum. The surrounding chain link fence with its rusty Master locks keeping the gates closed completed the desolate look. The fact I was sweating balls under the blistering sun and the sky was a deep bright summer blue dotted with fluffy cumulus clouds made the sight seem even sadder somehow.
There was also not one person in sight.
I took a few photos so my visit there wouldn’t be a total waste of time.
I enhanced the above “closed” announcement on the main building with a sepia toned filter for a nostalgic effect.
In the above photo, I used a color enhancing filter, making the water a more lurid green and the sky even bluer than it actually was.
Abandoned pool and lifeguard chair in black and white.
In spite of my earlier post, I did start watching some of the highlights from John McCain’s funeral proceedings today. It’s important that I did, and I’m glad I did, and do you know why?
Here in the Upside Down — in post-trump bizarro world (the lower case t is intentional) — I’m sitting here with tears streaming down my face over a man I did not vote for, whose party and politics I never supported, and it feels very cleansing. Weird.
All I have to say about that is this.
I pray the beautiful and moving eulogies of Meghan McCain, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and others somehow break through the ignorance and fog to inspire some Trumpers to finally see what we have lost.
The death of John McCain may represent the end of honor and integrity in politics, and yet his moving sendoff may be exactly what America needs to recover and gain back our great loss — and once and for all discard the manufactured chaos, divisiveness, and insincere, phony idol- and symbol-worshipping that has come to pass for patriotism in the Trump era.
Whether you agreed with his politics or not, John McCain was and will always be remembered as a true American hero and even more than that, a good and honorable man, and that’s why you see so many Democrats and liberals grieving along with old school moderate Republicans and never-Trump conservatives today. We all recognize what true patriotism really is, what goodness really is, and how important honesty and integrity are — and we grieve the unsettling and tragic absence of these values among those who hold all the political power.
John McCain’s funeral feels almost like a funeral for the Party of Lincoln, and though I never was a fan of the GOP, today I mourn what that party used to represent, and proudly honor a man who even after his death is sending a message to all of us who would open our ears and our hearts to what being a real American really is all about.
There may be hope for us yet. Watching all the McCain tributes felt like taking a trip in a time machine back to the pre-Trump political age. Honor and integrity and true patriotism is not dead after all. It’s just that those values aren’t currently held by the people with the most power. But I have to believe goodness, honesty and integrity will always win in the end.
Other than Meghan McCain’s moving tribute to her father at his funeral today, I’m not even watching the footage of this sad event. I’ve reached a point where I simply have no more capacity to cope with more unpleasant news. For almost two years, since Trump’s election, politics has been my #1 concern, so much so that it has squeezed all my other interests into much smaller compartments.
There is more to life than Donald Trump. I have been allowing him to live rent free in my head and it’s driving me crazy. He has a way of doing that. It seems like he’s everywhere, but is he really? No, it just seems that way. I think those of us who suffer from PTSD due to narcissistic abuse are especially prone to the kind of hypervigilance which can turn into obsessive thinking and a need to constantly scan our environment for dangers.
Taking a break doesn’t mean I’m no longer going to be part of the resistance. Of course I will! Morally, I feel like it’s imperative that I continue to participate and write about my experience and observations about what I see happening in my country. If we all just decided to pretend Trump doesn’t exist and ignore him, we will definitely fall into totalitarianism. Complacency and a pervasive attitude of “oh, Hitler can’t be THAT bad” or “there’s nothing I can do anyway” is why Nazi Germany happened. Germany learned the hard way but their democracy was restored and today they appear to have been inoculated against another descent into fascism. We might have to learn the hard way too, but I’ll be damned if I become a part of the problem. So I’ll continue to resist and write about politics.
However, obsessing and allowing Trump to live rent free in my head is messing with my sanity, and if I’m insane, there’s nothing I can do to help anyone, least of all myself.
So I’ve been doing other things: watching nature shows, taking walks, enjoying music, and spending time enjoying my family. I haven’t watched the news in a few days because I need a break from it. If it’s important enough, I’ll hear about it. Soon, I’m sure I’ll start following the news again because I must.
But it’s okay to take breaks from it once in a while and realize that no matter how bad things are, or how bad they get, there is still much more to life than the news and Trump. Trump will never “trump” my mental health.
394261 14: A fiery blasts rocks the World Trade Center after being hit by two planes September 11, 2001 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) 
Lucky Otters Haven 