Unclaimed and Disappearing

    Clearing out more things was easy in the beginning, old tax receipts and records, even old patent applications and items I knew that were now even less likely to come to fruition...books I had planned to write, screenplays I actually did write but never pursued (after my initial one was turned down, but then I was only in my late-20s and easily discouraged), a folder full of "award-winning" ideas (again, I was young and full of ambition).  Of course, there was a lot of shredding due to so many of the receipts and papers having things such as bank numbers or information that hackers might dig through if they somehow got to my trash bin in the middle of the night (okay, perhaps I'm watching a few too many detective movies where crooks rummage through the garbage).  But after several trips of dumping both the stuff that I could recycle and the now-shredded dots of papers, there had actually been little progress.  It was once again a reminder to me of just how much "stuff" I had accumulated.  No minimalist here, obviously; in fact it seemed as if other people had somehow left their junk here for me to store.  But some good did emerge from this little exercise...such as my mother, who passed away nearly three years ago.

    The question comes up, how long do you keep someone's records, including your own?  This question goes well past those pesky tax returns, insurance papers, and closed accounts, but also banking info (several of my mom's banks had advised me to keep her limited checking accounts open in case I received an unexpected bill).  Things such as her Social Security and her military accounts didn't worry me because those agencies tend to lock things down immediately.  But the stray bill from the podiatrist (one arrived nearly two years later...the nerve), was cause enough for me to leave things alone for a bit and just leave much of her records in "storage."  But with her stored records now approaching the three year mark, I decided that it was probably time to pull all of that out and go over what remained.  And that was when I discovered that I had waited a bit too long...the bank had "escheated" her remaining  money (the term they use, although one can't help but notice the word "cheated" embedded in there).  Here's how a private firm with the American Bankers Association described it: At the most basic level, unclaimed property is any financial obligation that is due and owing to another party (customer, vendor, employee, investor, etc.) that has not been claimed by the owner after a specified period of time.  While there are more than 100 types of unclaimed property, the most common examples relative to banks include savings accounts, checking accounts, certificates of deposit, property held in escrow or the trust department, and the contents of safe deposit boxes...All of these accounts are “at risk” of becoming unclaimed property when they are deemed “dormant.”...Despite the pervasive nature of unclaimed property laws, most Americans are unfamiliar with the concept and the simple reality that banks are legally required to turn accounts over to the states if account owners are “inactive” -- until, of course, it happens to them.  And it will happen.  According to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA), annually over $7 billion in unclaimed property is collected by state governments nationwide.  To further illustrate the point, according to national news reports, some states report as many as 1 in 7 residents has unclaimed property of some kind.  Yikes!

    So the question became, how long before the banks delete their own records once they turn over such accounts?  And how long do the states hold that money?*  It was a bit of legwork but it turns out that I had missed the time frame by just under a month.  The bank had apparently sent a notice to my mother's old address which was returned as undeliverable so the fund was labelled as dormant (duh, we sent the bank her death certificate over two years ago and we were listed as beneficiaries with corresponding addresses).  Of course, such lost monies pales against the backdrop of federal government loans that somehow had little oversight and headed out the door in $10,000 increments to places such as Nigeria and Russia, said Bloomberg Businessweek (they were meant as emergency help for our small businesses).  A five-minute online application, a box checked that you have at least ten employees, and the money was headed your way in a few days (wait, overseas??).  Or the other "relief" money (a billion dollars) meant to provide personal protective equipment to front line workers that instead went to the Pentagon and was used "to produce jet engines, drone technology, body armor, and fabric for soldiers' uniforms," said The Washington Post.  And then there's this bizarre story of the Social Security trust fund from the magazine above: The trust fund isn’t invested in gold bars or ranchland.  Its only holding is special securities issued by the Treasury.  In other words, Social Security has lent $2.9 trillion to the Treasury, which spent it all.  Now Social Security wants its money back to cover benefits.  So starting this year, it’s redeeming some of those special Treasury securities.  To raise the money to pay Social Security, the Treasury draws on general revenue.  Ten years ago, Social Security Chief Actuary Stephen Goss correctly stated in the Social Security Bulletin that redemption of the trust fund would require the Treasury to “collect additional taxes, lower other federal spending, or borrow additionally from the public.”  But Congress has another option.  It could allow Social Security to issue bonds—in other words, to borrow from the Treasury.  Over a period of decades, the borrowing would likely grow into the trillions of dollars.  But this would be one arm of the federal government owing money to another, the equivalent of your left pocket owing money to your right.  If Social Security borrowed from the Treasury, the Treasury would have to raise the money to lend to Social Security by raising taxes, cutting other spending, or borrowing.  But of course, that’s what the Treasury is already doing as Social Security redeems some of the special Treasury securities in its trust fund.  Confused yet?  It makes my mom's unclaimed funds seem like child's play...

Sim model Seraphine: Riot Games AWW

    But forget all that (as most of us do); what was more important than discovering my mother's "lost" accounts was that the true cost of shredding the last of her receipts and papers meant that any record of her would now be basically wiped out.  Soon, she too would be "escheated" from the annals of life on Earth.  There we were, my wife and I, realizing that before long that would also be our fate, little more than a forgotten photo or a distant and faded memory, our papers and history and life simply squashed out like a bug.  Except...we have memories.  If you occasionally watch the PBS Newshour, you may recall the feature In Memorium where families send in reflections of their relatives who have died because of the coronavirus; at the very least it humbles you because even the most ordinary-looking person has accomplished so much, from heading a community group to forming large organizations.  It reminded me of a comment by author Elif Shafak (the most widely-read author in Turkey, and still alive) whose recent novel begins: I became Frederick B. Blumhagen Professor of Theoretical Physics at MIT in 2004, just after I turned thirty-three.  This was the year after Neel Jonnnal and I published out AdS/CFT model for spark guon plasma as a dual black hole in curved five-dimensional space-time.  What??  

    No matter how one looks at it, our minds appear locked into having a beginning and and ending; we're born and then we eventually die, life ends, at least on this dimension and this physical arena.  So we go from baby to child to teenager to adult, and for many of us, repeat the process by propagating more life.  As one grows older, the ending of one's time here seems to accelerate; as Vladimir Lenin put it: There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.  For my wife and I, one of our more enjoyable shows are the interviews done by Dan Rather, who just celebrated his 89th birthday and continues to host rock stars and others with his show, The Big Interview (I should note that the show is now in its 8th year).  Of course for aging oldies such as myself, it is a bit shocking to see former celebrities as Robert Plant and Merle Haggard now looking substantially older and rougher as if life had run them through the grindstone; but what is more striking is Dan Rather himself.  His calm demeanor reflects his questions, and his face seems to never leave that of his guest; no peeking at notes or eyes looking down...he just sits there and listens; the results are that guests seems to relax and open up as if they want to talk and tell their "story."  But isn't that true for any of us?  If someone asked you to talk about a part of your life, about how you came to where you are and what you now look forward to --and that person sat there quietly but was truly interested-- wouldn't you begin to blab away?  And talk away you would if that person, despite his or her stature or accomplishments, was as humble as a bug on a rock.  Said Rather in an interview in Esquire: I can be dumb as dirt.  But at least I’m smart enough to know that I’m never going to be the smartest guy around.  I never apologize for the education I had.  The public schools in Texas gave me about all the education I was capable of absorbing.  I don’t always learn fast, but I learn good.  This has happened repeatedly during what passes for my career.

    So, I'm shredding records, details of my mother's life and after awhile I change directions and jump to a few dozen photos.  There we were, my wife and I some thirty years ago, our animals, our old house and furniture, my dark hair.  Then there we were, pictured with our mothers.  I said to my wife that in a fashion, those photos summed up life; we live it fully and leave our tracks, then become a photograph, and then...well, poof.  But we don't need photos, my wife said; we have our memories.  Or do we?  Said a piece in Discover, our "memories" are now traced (with the help of new technology called optogenetics) to neurons called engrams.  First, a brief explanation of optogenetics from Scientifica: The story of how optogenetics works begins with the humble green algae Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii.  This simple organism uses photosynthesis in order to create the energy it needs to live.  To make this process as efficient as possible it has an eyespot.  This light-sensitive part of the cell tells an unassuming single-celled alga which direction light is coming from so it can move into a better position.  In order to activate the eyespot, C. Reinhardtii moves ions across a membrane through ion channels.  When light of the correct wavelength hits these channels it causes a change in their shape; opening them so that ions can flow across the membrane... Neurons are triggered in the same way (by moving ions from outside the cell to the inside). Once a certain number of positive ions have crossed the cell membrane, a threshold is reached which causes the neuron to fire.  Basically, it's beyond our comprehension (imagine different colors of light --that is, what limited wavelengths our eyes can see-- activating signs and engines and thermostats, and on and on).  All of this brought me to psilocybin, or "magic" mushrooms...

    Once in the body, psilocybin converts to the chemical psilocin and from there, well, who knows what happens.  Here's how biologist Merlin Sheldrake put it:  As Michael Pollan reports in How to Change Your Mind, most of the people who take psilocybin don't interpret their experiences in modern biology' mechanistic terms, or molecules moving around our brains.  Quite the opposite.  Pollan found that many of those he interviewed had "started out stone-old materialists or atheists...and yet several had had 'mystical experiences' that left them with the unshakable conviction that there was something more than we know -- a 'beyond' of some kind that trancended the physical universe."  These effects pose a riddle.  That a chemical can induce a profound mystical experience appears to support the prevailing scientific view that our subjective worlds are underpinned by the chemical activity our brains; that the world of spiritual beliefs and experience of the divine can spring from a material, biochemical phenomenon.  What was even more interesting (to me, and if I correctly interpreted it) was that the converted chemical doesn't add anything to our brain, but rather blocks certain receptors.**  Basically, those actions and "visions" and feelings are always there but being overriden by our "learning."

    The "photo" you're peeking at on this page is of a virtual person, a creation from a game company of a popular character.  A "reality" our minds want to make real, in a sense.  But after reading a tiny bit of the complicated inner workings of our brains and our memories and what we "see" or think we see, I somehow don't feel as if my mother's life is being shredded into oblivion.  Trying to understand something so far beyond our comprehension is perhaps just an exercise in frustration.  Perhaps as Dan Rather said, we learn what we're capable of learning. and that is enough.  I agree with my wife, that we have our memories, real or not, distorted or not.  The photos may be real enough, but shredding them doesn't shred those embedded engrams; and since it all actually originates from alga and fungi (which comes from where?) well, why worry?  Michelle Obama once said: Success is not about the money you make, but the difference you make in someone's life.  My mother made a difference, and for me, that remains good enough, engrams and all...

*If you're at all curious, each state has its own "unclaimed property" division and the initial seach is quite easy; it's the paperwork to further that claim that proves a bit daunting.  The state of California's representative told me that it can take up to a year before any "escheated" funds are even recorded into their system, and up to 240 days after that before any claims are processed.  Each bank is different, and the same applies to stock funds; inactivity is inactivity and some funds will simply add "charges" until whatever you've had in there is basically just used to pay the fees (until it is gone entirely).  In the case of Fidelity, the "charge" in just one year was $500, and thus wiped out my mother's $320 in stock.  Who knew (to be fair, it was in their minuscule print somewhere on page 7 or 70 or 700 so check your accounts).

**If you wish to delve further, a bit better explanation of how psilocybin is thought to affect our sense of "self" came from Discover...