Do you think the lizard brain, the reptilian ancestral central nervous system, the amygdala, looks for patterns?

The manager of the department where I had my first real desk job, Raleigh Bates, liked to wear white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up, white socks and black leather shoes.

A new friend who takes dance lessons, Kirk, and somewhat resembles Clark Kent, the fictitious nom de la paix of Superman, also likes to wear white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up, white socks and black leather shoes.

Raleigh grew up in the 1950s when his favorite clothing style was fashionable in pop culture.

Kirk lives in a time when 1950s clothing styles are fashionable in retro subculture.

Pretty much any clothing style you can imagine is available for wear in this day and age.

What fashion trends will drive our subcultural trends on Mars?

Will form follow function?

Do the driest, most introverted, anti/nonsocial people you know, including ones with Asperger syndrome or autism, care about the clothes they wear?

How will the offspring react to tomorrow’s resource allocation issues when cotton, polymers, dye, metal and other components of clothing are priced proportionally higher than the food they need to eat?

And when the converse is true, even for Converse shoes?

= = = = =

Time to give my tiny brain a rest.  I can tell by the way I am struggling to compose sentences in semicorrect grammatical forms that I am reaching the end of a trail of happy thoughts.  Self-monitoring is key.  I’ll leave you with these words from Ashleigh Brilliant, received via email:

ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

Notes for Compassionate Connections, (Santa Barbara Channel 17 TV) July 30 2013

Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening –­ or good whatever time of day it happens to be where you are. This is a rare opportunity for me, and our hostess has been kind enough to tell me that for the next hour I am free to say whatever I like to whomever is watching. I must say this is an opportunity I did not seek — and before tonight I had never even met this remarkable lady. But now that she has brought you and me here together, we must try to make the most of it.

But what would that mean? Quite honestly, the first thing that comes to my mind is that this is a glorious chance for me to tell you about all my problems and ask for your help. That would satisfy me tremendously –­ but it wouldn’t be fair to you. You have enough problems of your own. Still I can’t resist just giving you an inkling of some of mine.

On December 9, I’ll be 80 years old, and that’s a problem in itself. It’s supposed to be a milestone, but I feel it more like a mill stone, hanging about my neck. I have one outstanding talent — doing clever things with words –­ particularly writing very short sayings, which I am also good at illustrating. And I actually managed to make a whole career out of selling and licensing these little creations in various forms. But that was so easy for me, and I was so prolific, that I finally had to stop doing new ones because I had glutted my own market.

This has left me looking for a new career, or at least for new ways to spend my time ­ and that is actually my major current problem.

Just to fill in the picture a little, I’m originally from England, but have been here in Santa Barbara since 1973. I have lots of college degrees, but no children. I also have a great lack of close friends, and very little remaining family except my wife Dorothy, whose physical condition, unfortunately, is not as good as mine, leaving her largely housebound, depending on various caregivers, of whom of course I am one – although happily she has managed to make it here tonight.

OK, that’s enough about my problems, and probably more than you even wanted to hear.

Let’s take our next cue from the title of this program series “Compassionate Connections.” I have no idea what that means, but my Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th edition, gives an uncharacteristically beautiful definition of the word “Compassion”: It says “Sorrow for the sufferings or trouble of another or others, accompanied by an urge to help; deep sympathy; pity.” If that’s what this program is about, maybe it wasn’t such a mistake after all for me to start by telling you about some of my own sufferings and trouble ­ especially if anybody out there actually does have an urge to help.

But how can you help me? There is one person I know in this town who claims, repeatedly and emphatically that he really does want to help me. He’s my psychiatrist. The trouble is, he has only one answer for any problem I might have. That answer can be expressed in one word: PILLS. Sometimes some of his pills really do seem to help to some extent. But if they don’t, his answer is always MORE PILLS.

There’s another person who I’m sure wants to help me. She’s my counselor. Unlike the psychiatrist, she has no power to prescribe medicines. So her help takes the form of TALK ­ and I must say that talking about my problems with a kind, conscientious person who really seems interested and concerned about me often seems more valuable than just taking pills. Incidentally her last words of advice to me before coming on this program tonight were “HAVE FUN!”

But neither of these professional types of helpers (and of course I have others, including many different varieties of medical specialists) can take the place of what I really feel I need most, and that is good old-fashioned FRIENDS. I have hundreds of the new-fashioned modern kind, that is, my email friends out there in the electronic universe. And I am only on the tip of the iceberg of so-called social media. My attempts to get involved with Twitter and Facebook have so far been so discouraging that I have more or less withdrawn from them.

But this is where FRIENDS could help –­ especially friends with more computer knowledge and skills than I have. Once or twice, I have been lucky in this regard. A year or two ago, I actually had a next-door neighbor who was not only a highly skilled telephone engineer, but was very willing and happy to help me with the problems I kept having with my iPhone. And he and I had some other pleasant things in common, including the fact that we were both British. But unfortunately, despite all his skills, he wasn’t able to get a job adequate to his talents in Santa Barbara, and had to move away to Silicon Valley.

And speaking of Santa Barbara, which has been my home since 1973, everybody knows what a great place this is to live,­ if you can afford it: the beautiful natural setting between mountains and ocean, the virtually ideal weather, the wonderful cultural facilities, the parks, the beaches, and so much more. But what people don’t know about are the many ways in which this is not such a paradise ­ and is in fact steadily becoming worse. For one thing, the traffic is a nightmare, which fortunately I don’t usually have to endure, since I do most of my travel on foot or by bicycle. But I myself was still a victim of this horror, being hit by a car while in a marked street-crossing. This happened 2 ½ years ago. I got a broken leg and other injuries, and am still suffering some of the effects.

At the same time, our public transport is visibly deteriorating. And you wouldn’t believe how difficult and unpleasant it has become, and how much longer it now takes than it used to, just to drive to our nearest big city of Los Angeles, which is only 100 miles away. Also that same freeway, which is our main artery both south to L.A., and north to San Francisco, cuts our town in two making it much harder just to go from the East to the West side of the city.

Of course before that, there were the railway tracks, which still more or less parallel the freeway, but at least you could go across the tracks on practically any street when a train wasn’t coming. Now the freeway, much more than the tracks, also forms a sort of social barrier, and when I go from our East to the West side of town I often feel that I am entering what we used to call the Third World. Anyway, there are buses and trains – and of course bicycles – but the whole transportation system is a real mess, and often, the best way to get around is by walking, which, despite my accident, I still do a lot of.

Another grim fact about Santa Barbara is the ghastly number of human derelicts to be seen upon our streets –­ otherwise known as our “homeless” population. Nobody is doing very much about this because, as with many other social problems, this is “the land of the free” and people have a right to be idle, dirty, and unsightly in public places if they want to be.

In other ways too, things are getting bigger, but not better. Our airport, the hospital, the University all seem under the compulsion to “expand or die.”

And some of my own worst bugaboos are scarcely even noticed, let alone discussed, by the public at large. One of these is the utility poles and wires which still deface some of our finest neighborhoods, like the one in which I live, up near the old Spanish Mission.

Another one is NOISE which includes the right to use all kinds of offensive machines at virtually all times of the day. Some of the worst of these are the carpet-cleaning monsters, which park in the street, and make all their noise not inside the house where they’re working but outside where they disturb the whole neighborhood. Another atrocity are the shredding machines which eat up vegetation thrown into them, at the price of a hellish racket which can last for hours. Then there are the gardening devices, which make a mockery of the idea that gardening is a pleasant peaceful pursuit.

More than a decade ago, I led a local campaign to ban one of the worst of these machines, the gasoline-powered leaf-blowers, which do nothing to make anything cleaner, but just blast the dirt around. It took 3 months of my life to gather a required 9000 signatures, and we were actually successful in getting the issue on the ballot and getting it passed by a majority of voters. But if you think that solved the problem, you haven’t walked much about this lovely town lately and heard the air still being shattered by those obnoxious devices, even though they are now illegal. Of course the law is hardly enforced by our overworked and underpaid police department.

And a third disgrace which I seem to be almost the only inhabitant to notice or want to do anything about is LITTER, which seems to be everywhere, sometimes just in annoying bits and pieces, sometimes in clumps and clusters, often spread over vast areas. People driving by in their cars hardly notice these blots on the landscape, but that miserable minority of us who pass by on foot are constantly offended by discarded food-wrappers, cigarette detritus, bottles, cans, papers, plastic bags, and all manner of other rubbish, much of which is probably thrown out of those same cars by ignorant drivers. I myself of course pick up stuff which I find particularly offensive. But lately I have discovered a device which I want to tell you about because if more of us carried one – which is easy to do, because it folds up – there might be a little less of a problem. It’s a picker-upper or “reacher” sold under the trade name of “Gopher” that’s G-O-P-H-E-R. It’s quite cheap – only about $10 – and if you carry one of these and something to put your collection in, before you dump it in some appropriate container, you can soon become an excellent litter-collector, and a good citizen for which unfortunately there are few rewards, and in fact many people will look at you with disdain because they consider such an occupation just about as low as you can go on the social scale. In fact judges often impose such work as a penalty. But I now have a dream of forming a whole contingent of people who will join me in this honorable pursuit. I already have a name for my band of people fighting blight: the Santa Barbara LITTERATI.

But speaking of plastic bags, as I did a moment ago, I now have to tell you that in the minds of many of you environmentally minded people I am on the wrong side of this issue. Because I actually LOVE plastic bags, especially the kind which are given freely by supermarkets to carry home our purchases, and I would hate to think of them no longer being available.. I can think of no invention which has so many good qualities. It is light, strong, compressible, reusable. It can be transparent or opaque. It’s so cheap that it can be given away, extremely durable and resistant to corrosion, capable of being made in all type of shapes and sizes – a masterpiece of human ingenuity. Yet there is now a strong movement to ban them, largely because they form such a big part of the litter which I hate, not only on land, but also at sea, and constitute a great danger to wildlife. I am well aware of all these arguments, but I say it is not the plastic bags which cause these problems, it’s the people who mis-use them

But I’d better not get too far into that kind of reasoning, because it puts me in the same camp – where I certainly don’t want to be – of the people in this gun-loving country who say “GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE – PEOPLE DO.”

Instead, let me get into another equally controversial issue – that of racism. In this part of America there is just as much of it as anywhere else, but here the people mainly in question are not the so-called Blacks, whose problems stem from being transported across the ocean against their will, but the so-called Hispanics, who took this land from the Indians, and then in turn had it taken from them by the Yankee Americans. Today they form a huge underclass – maybe by now a majority, and they still do most of the labor which would otherwise have been performed by slaves. For example, there are the so-called caregivers, who are mostly Hispanic, who tend to the patients, who are mostly white, in nursing homes or in their own homes. I have had personal contact with this situation lately, because of the hired caregivers who come for several days to tend to my wife at home. They are of course all Hispanic, and they work for wages probably less than non-Hispanic caregivers would get, if any could be found. Recently I said to my wife, almost as a joke, “Why aren’t there any white Jewish caregivers?” — and then I realized that we do actually have one – white, and Jewish – but he is the boss of the others – and when he himself works as a caregiver, he charges considerably more.

And, while I am being such a curmudgeon, let me complain on a more personal note that there is another class of citizens, besides pedestrians and plastic-bag lovers, who are being discriminated against locally – and these are the epigrammatists – of whom admittedly I may be the only one. I’ll give you just two examples: One is the Arts and Crafts Show which is held along our beach front every Sunday. Believe it or not, when I applied to exhibit and sell my own work there, they passed a special regulation which was specially designed to keep me out. It says “When the use of words is the principal feature of the permit holder’s art, the work is prohibited.”

But then, on the other side of this two-edged sword, when applications were opened for the position of Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate, I made a big effort to get selected – not for the money, which I think was $1000 for the two-year term, but for the prestige, and for the recognition that my work, although very short, never exceeding seventeen words, really was poetry – although I also submitted many example of other types of poems I had written, and many supporting letters from people well-qualified to judge literary merit. Of course I was turned down by the selecting committee, whose members all represented what I might call our local poetry establishment.

Indeed, the only relatively secure place my work seems to have found in our community, apart from the postcards on racks in local stores, which I mostly service myself, has been our local daily newspaper, where it appears six days a week – and for this I remain sincerely grateful.

Oh yes, there is one other place where I get a little respect — a small white house with a green roof and a white picket fence, at 117 West Valerio St., which has been my business headquarters ever since we moved here from San Francisco in 1973, and where we still have one faithful assistant, Peggy Sue, who has been with us for well over 30 years. This is the only place in the world where you can get instantly (or as fast as Peggy Sue can pull them out) postcard copies of any one or all of my 10,000 published messages, in addition to all my books, which include a series of 9 volumes of what we proudly call my Brilliant Thoughts.

Some of you who are watching may have little or no idea of just what these creations are, so I will take the liberty of giving you the titles of a few of my books, which at least are examples of what they contain:

I MAY NOT BE TOTALLY PERFECT, BUT PARTS OF ME ARE EXCELLENT.

ALL I WANT IS A WARM BED AND A KIND WORD, AND UNLIMITED POWER.

WE’VE BEEN THROUGH SO MUCH TOGETHER – AND MOST OF IT WAS YOUR FAULT.

I FEEL MUCH BETTER, NOW THAT I’VE GIVEN UP HOPE.

I’M JUST MOVING CLOUDS TODAY – TOMORROW I’LL TRY MOUNTAINS.

All 10,000 of these messages together with their illustrations — many of which I did by hand, others I adapted from a wide variety of copyright-free sources– are available on a single CD which I sell for $105, and which is actually, apart from Social Security, my principal source of income.

But, speaking of copyright, I must tell you that this has been one of my chief concerns ever since I began this strange career. Until I came along, the sort of things I wrote were usually just dismissed as Graffiti, and it wasn’t thought or believed that anybody could claim to own them as a form of intellectual property. But I changed all that, especially with a Federal Court case in 1979 which decided in my favor against a company that was without permission, and against my strong objection, using my words on a series of Tshirt transfers.

So now that I own all these fabulous creations, the question is what to do with them. The truth is, I’ve never really known what to do with property in general. Dorothy and I once went to Western Australia with the idea of buying some land there, which we actually did, and which we still own. But we’ve never done anything with it. I used to joke that the main reason I wanted to own some property was just so that I could have occasion to utter that famous line I’d often heard in the movies: “Stranger, get off my land!”

And indeed that’s how it has been with my copyrighted material. The chief benefit it has brought me, at least financially, has been from suing or threatening to sue other people who were using it without my permission. Not a very edifying form of livelihood – but I do also have, or have had over the years, many legitimate users of my work – technically called “Licensees,” including the man who published all my books, a wonderful friend named Howard Weeks, to whom I would like to give credit tonight, although it won’t do him much good, since he died earlier this year. That unfortunately is also the case with many other people who have helped me achieve whatever it is that has got me to this high eminence of being a guest on Compassionate Connections.

So let me honor a few of those who happily are still living – and first and foremost I would put my wife Dorothy who, despite the tremendous differences between us, which would jump out at even the most casual observer, has always believed in my talent as a creative artist – and in fact at the very beginning of our relationship she expressed her faith in me by buying a number of my paintings – which I was only able to regain possession of by marrying her.

But more, much more than this (as Frank Sinatra sings) she always did things HER WAY – and that included the way our business was run. It was always very important to her that we pay all our taxes – in fact, she admitted (and this is just one of the many strange things about her) that she actually liked paying taxes. So I had to let her manage that part of the business – and eventually she managed practically all our financial affairs This rendered me free of all financial concerns, which was wonderful, except that I never had any idea what was going on in that area, because Dorothy had no training in book-keeping or accounting, and all our affairs were really just between her and God and the Internal Revenue Service – and I frankly think that at some point God gave up in despair.

So now, in honor of Dorothy, I would like to sing what I know is her favorite song of mine, and may be her very favorite of all songs. [Sing CAN-CAN.]

There are so many others to whom I owe so much – but let me modestly give at least a smidgen of credit to myself, Ashleigh Brilliant (yes, that is my real name.) It was I, for example, who thought of limiting my works to a maximum of seventeen words. Why seventeen? Yes, I knew about the Japanese haiku, but a haiku has to have exactly seventeen – and that was seventeen syllables, not words. Anyway, to me the important thing was not the specific number, but the idea that I was creating a new form of literature, and that it must be defined by certain rules, including a limit on length. I actually chose seventeen by counting the words in the ones I’d already been writing. I found that none was longer than 16 words – so I thought “I’ll just give myself one more word, for emergencies.”

But while we are talking about haiku, let me share with you one of the very few I myself have ever written, and have never before performed. The occasion was some kind of a haiku-writing contest when I was a faculty-member on board the so-called “Floating University” of what was then Chapman College back in the 1960’s. In those days, I must explain, I had no beard, and I used a rather noisy electric shaver. To understand the poem, you also have to know that we used to be summoned to our meals by a gong, which of course it was very important to hear, even if you were shaving at the time. So here is my Electric Shaver Haiku.

Hair-eating shaver:

I too have appetite!

(Your buzz drowned dinner-gong.)

So choosing a limit of 17 words, was how my career as an epigrammatist got started. But I didn’t even know I was an epigrammatist until I’d been one for several years. I actually didn’t know what to call my little works, which I liked to think of as each being a separate poem. That gave me the idea of calling them “Unpoemed Titles,” – which I did at first, and if you’re a collector, you’ll find that some rare specimens of my very early postcards still bear that designation. But “Unpoemed Titles” didn’t seem commercial enough – and I think it must have been the success of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” which gave me the idea of calling them Pot-Shots – although as a matter of fact, Schulz always hated the name “Peanuts,” which had been forced on him by his publishers. He himself always preferred his own original name for the strip, which was “Li’l Folks.”

My first postcards came out in 1967, but it wasn’t until 1979, when my first book was published, that I found out what I’d been writing. It seems that every new book, for the benefit of librarians and catalogers, has to be classified as to its contents by the Library of Congress – and this is part of the information that you see on the reverse side of the title page. In my case, my book “I May Not Be Totally Perfect, But Parts of Me Are Excellent” was given the primary classification of “EPIGRAMS” – a word so unfamiliar to me at that time that I had to look it up. Good old Webster’s defines Epigram as “a short poem with a witty or satirical point…Any terse, witty, pointed statement, often with a clever twist in thought.” What I liked about this definition was that it was also very complimentary. I was glad to know that I was officially “clever” and “witty.” It went well with my surname of Brilliant, which is also, luckily for me, very complimentary.

But I also discovered that there is a word for the people who write epigrams – and that’s how I found out that I was, and had been for a long time, an EPIGRAMMATIST. I felt like the character in one of Moliere’s plays who says “Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it .”

Lest you think, however, that my whole life has been given over to this one pursuit, I want to assure you that I have a Ph.D. in American History from the University of California at Berkeley – and I have a song to prove it. As you saw with the CAN-CAN, I like to take melodies that have never had words put to them before, and try to write appropriate lyrics. One challenge I set myself was to take John Philip Sousa’s rousing march “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and try to condense into it the entire history of America from Columbus to the Space Age, leaving out none of the important names, dates, and facts. This of course was impossible – but now, for my finale, here indeed it is: [sing STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER.] ##