Pain and Pot

I wrote a month ago about some digging I was doing, and how well I seemed to be tolerating it. Well, that came to an end, and as a result of that work, I’m in constant pain, especially in my right shoulder which grinds with every movement and often feels as if it’s about to slip out of joint. I was prepared for the pain, but I wasn’t prepared for the noises and the loss of motion that makes everyday activities (opening blinds, making beds, lifting a coffee cup) angst-laden and downright scary.

Marijuana is the only drug that helps much (both with my pain and my attitude), and it’s the only drug that doesn’t put me in fear for my life (the chart only lists a smattering of the side-effects of my current narcotic), so I’ve been high pretty much all day everyday for weeks. The pot relaxes me, although it also makes my mind leave the vicinity of my body rather easily. For example, I took my first hit of some new bud while making breakfast yesterday, and immediately wanted to listen to music. There I was in the kitchen recalling that the iPod was in Peggy’s room when, voila!, I was holding the remote to her iPod player. Unless thought alone moved that remote, I had gone to her room and gotten it, yet I had no memory of doing so, and it wasn’t even what I wanted. “Oh, well,” I said to myself (it’s good to stay relaxed at such times because the other option is to feel as if a malevolent force had yanked your brain right out of your head and buried it) as I poured honey on Peggy’s oats, forgetting that Peggy doesn’t like honey on her oats. 

These are extreme examples, but they point to the nature of marijuana-induced forgetfulness. What I usually find is that when I want to concentrate, I can (sometimes better than normal), but when I’m doing mindless chores, my thoughts are more likely to be somewhere other than on the task at hand. This is good in that it makes boring work agreeable, but it also means that I can’t hold myself to quite so high a performance standard because I’m really not “all there.” As for work that requires concentration, I can conduct business, balance the checkbook, use power tools, and figure out how to get back into my Blog when Google locks me out. I’m high as I write this blogpost, so you can see that the drug doesn’t make me altogether stupid. In fact, it can make me smarter, at least in understanding my own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. Sometimes, I won’t even know I’m mentally or emotionally stuck until I use marijuana, and I feel as if I’m standing in a room dimly-lit by the setting sun on a gray day, when suddenly a huge bank of fluorescent lights come on. 

Being high on a relatively innocuous drug is hardly the worst of the possibilities when my desperation to do real work (meaning physical work) has resulted in my inability to do so much as drink coffee without pain. If the choice is between being high versus being in more pain than need be and despondent to-boot, I’ll choose being high. It’s a strange way to live, but with luck, my shoulders will recover somewhat, and I can become active again. If not, I’ll probably become active again anyway because I don’t do well with sitting around.

5 Things: none of them about religion

Ellie has lived next door for nine years, and is like a sister. In a few months, she will move 1,000 miles away, and Peggy and I are both very sad.

Walt came by last week. He was best friends to both Peggy and me for a lot of years, but hasn’t been our friend for about eight years, and it wasn’t an amiable parting. If I hadn’t sent him an occasional email during the past eight years to ask how he was, we wouldn’t have heard from him at all. He came by to tell us that he was diagnosed the day before with malignant melanoma, the tumor reaching two inches across before he saw a doctor. Peggy and I went to the hospital today to wish him luck as he went into a hastily arranged surgery. We arrived to find his wife berating him, and his father-in-law looking like he wanted to cry. I added to the ambiance by sitting in silence reading the obituaries (as with the tombstone in the picture, many of the deceased were my age) while feeling sick, sad, and distant. Only Peggy offered any real support. 

Six weeks ago, I had sudden onset fatigue so severe that I couldn’t stay out of bed for more than an hour or two at a time. I seriously thought I might die so, not knowing what the problem was, I immediately stopped taking oxycodone, Neurontin, Ambien, marijuana, and Cymbalta (I’m back on marijuana and Ambien). In the wink of an eye, I fell over an emotional cliff. Now, I still have the chronic pain problem for which I was taking all the drugs, plus I have fatigue, fever, sweaty scalp, depression, irritability, tremulousness, scratchy eyes and throat, and a tendency to drop things. All this, and I still don’t want to go a doctor because I get tired of the same shit happening. To whit, the first doctor sends me for various tests (some of which might be dangerous), and then I get tossed back and forth between specialists (and their tests) for anywhere from a few months to a few years. After shelling out $4,000 before insurance pays the first penny, having up to three surgeries, making countless calls to insurance companies and billing offices, and being put on even more drugs, I still have the problem. If I’m lucky, it’s just not as bad as it was. Of course, by not going, I could end up like Walt. I know that, but still I don’t go.

It’s winter in Oregon. Month after month of almost nothing but gray and drizzle, except for a couple of periods during which the sky clears for a few days, bringing with it wind, cold air, and a sun that stays too near the horizon to be really cheerful. Peggy enjoys life here and has no trouble with the weather. I like many things about Oregon, but it’s only her desire to be here and the presence of a few friends that keep me.

Peggy and I getting rid of a lot of things today, mostly keepsakes. I am very pleased about this because I am finding it increasingly difficult to clean house. We celebrated our 41st anniversary in December. She has been a good wife.

It was a Hitler kind of week

I unintentionally lost seven pounds in six days last week, my only other symptom of illness being fatigue so severe that it kept me in bed for much of the time. Because I regularly take pills for nerve pain, pills for arthritic pain, and pills for sleep, along with marijuana and strong narcotics, my first thought was liver or kidney failure, so I stopped taking everything. I knew I would be in more pain, but I had no idea how bad it would get. My shoulders, my back, my hips, the hand that I broke last summer, and my upper legs and knees, were all screaming at me, and I could do nothing for them. When I couldn’t sleep in bed, I moved to the recliner that served as my bed for eight months out of the twenty-four that I was having surgeries, but I couldn’t sleep there either.

I didn’t want to go to the doctor because there are a lot of bad colds going around, but when four days passed, and I was little improved, I decided that I had to go because I wasn't holding up well under the pain, and because I thought I might be so ill that my life would be jeopardized if I waited. He took some blood tests, and I went home to await the results, practice having made me fairly stoic about such things. Peggy came down with a cold that night. The tests came back yesterday, and to my very great surprise, they were normal. The doctor speculated that, whatever the initial problem had been, my later fatigue and weight loss had been due to narcotic withdrawal, so I’m back to taking pills and eating marijuana cookies (but no narcotics). If not for the pain and fatigue, I would have enjoyed seeing the universe without a haze around it. I hadn’t realized how absent from the external world I had become, even though it had been a welcome absence for the most part. I mean, between hurting bad and being loaded, which would you choose? Duh. 

When people talk about the redemptive power of suffering, I think they’re full of shit. They’re invariably people who have no firsthand experience of what they’re talking about, at least when it comes to bad chronic physical pain. Imagine that you have the worst toothache you’ve ever felt, that it’s untreatable, and that the only thing that will even reduce the pain by half might cause you to sicken and die. Is there anyone on earth who imagines that he would gain from that? If there is, bring him over, so I can slap some sense into him. My life is a war of attrition, and every year I lose more hope, feel more pain, and become more disabled, and I’ve yet to meet anyone in my situation who is doing any victory dances. 

I can’t say that pain hasn’t given me insights, but they’ve been insights about how really bad life can hurt, how little can be done about that, how little support anyone can give, and how utterly tedious it all becomes, both to the sufferer and to everyone he looks to for support. I never dreamed that my life would turn out like this. Quite the opposite. I thought I would be strong and capable almost until I died, and now I’m wondering how much longer I will able to clean house. It took me three days last time, and it’s not even a big house. 

I think it likely that the only thing that keeps me alive is Peggy (I’m grateful for this), but she is also the person who suffers the most because of me, and that alone is enough to bear. I can only justify my life by bringing good into hers, and I rarely feel that I do particularly well. I have observed little difference in whether pain is physically or emotionally based because either way, the struggle to overcome (or to at least adjust) is likely to be longterm, intense, and a pain in the ass of ones partner. I guess I can give myself credit for doing the best I can, but how would I really know?

P.S. Yes, I understand. I could be worse off, much worse off. I probably know that better than those few who try to remind me of it because living with pain has improved my ability to sense pain in others. It’s like if you bought a red Toyota Camry, and all of a sudden you notice how many red Toyota Camrys are on the road. But, more than that, you have become deeply interested in red Toyota Camrys. Rather than bore me, people who tell me about their pain fascinate and encourage me.

You who read this blog regularly will remember that I had a period last summer when my pain level dropped by 90%. It lasted for about three months, and since then, the pain has kept getting worse. Those three months were the first time in a few years that I had seriously dared to hope, and when the pain came back, they just made it the harder to bear.

A second experiment with posting in the moment

Given how much I bitch and whine, Peggy might not realize that I try to spare her from the worst of what I feel, but I can’t do it today. I had a horrendous night last night that followed a day spent trying to recover from another bad night. Dilaudid didn’t help, so I lay awake for hours and I am just about through the roof right now. I smoked some pot an hour ago hoping it would help, but unlike yesterday, I’m experiencing something similar to a bad acid trip. I feel like I’m caught in a nightmare, and I don’t have the strength to find peace in the storm. I work everyday to stay calm and hopeful, but when I’m really hurting, really exhausted, and really without any means to control the pain without knocking myself out, I just can’t find it in me. I’m unfit for anything but to shake and cry, yet, there’s something here for me. I know it, but I can't find it even after years of looking.... I've heard enough Mary Wells and going to listen to some Goulet. Before marijuana, I didn't care about music. Now, it's one of my main comforts, it and plants.

Drugs and addiction

It’s a rare night that I can sleep without drugs. For pain, I take Cymbalta, Dilaudid, oxycodone, and Neurontin. For sleep, I have Ambien, Dalmane, Restoril, and marijuana. All of these drugs have overlapping benefits and they work best in combination, but with the exception of marijuana I seldom mix them because of the increased risk of side effects. Also, except for marijuana, I never take any of them during the daytime. The one exception was when I took oxycodone two weeks ago for that anxiety attack caused by the Cipro.

My most effective painkiller/sleep aide, is Neurontin. Oddly enough, considering how strong it is, Neurontin doesn’t make me high unless missing doorways and bouncing off walls counts as being high. To avoid tolerance problems, I save it for when I’m desperate. For example, I hardly slept three nights ago, and when that happens, I go for broke the next night, so I took three doses (900 mgs) of Neurontin at once and spent the next several hours flat on my back. One of the ways I minimize pain is by turning over a lot, so when the pain finally awakened me, I was hurting pretty bad, but the drug still had enough kick (about 16 hours worth altogether) that I was eventually able to get back to sleep. 

Last night, I was so tired that I did my best to sleep without drugs, but that only lasted for five hours before I took a 10 mg Ambien, which is my short-acting favorite. Taking so many drugs means that I'm pretty much permanently snookered. I'll give some examples of the annoyances this causes. One. When I got up this morning, I couldn’t find my sunglasses, so I finally left the house without them. When I got home, there they were, right where they were supposed to be, which was the one place I didn’t look. Two. I’ve already looked once today, and I still can't remember if this is 2011 or 2012.

I’m going to address addiction since some of you expressed concern about it following my last post. I was surprised that one person was especially worried about marijuana because I consider marijuana to be the least harmful drug I take in terms of tolerance, dependency, side-effects, or—in the case of narcotics—addictiveness. It strikes me as exceedingly odd that the least scary drug I use is the only one that's illegal. Marijuana can be habituating, of course, but then so can jogging or eating ice cream. Narcotics are a whole other animal because they bring about permanent changes in the brain and hellacious withdrawal symptoms. As I write, I haven’t used marijuana for five days (I sometimes get tired of being high) without the least problem. If I used narcotics as often as I normally use marijuana, I would be under medical care for withdrawal.

To further compare narcotics and marijuana; I prefer marijuana because it causes me to think about the world in deeper and more interesting ways, ways that are so profoundly true for me that they seem to be coming from the core of my being. The drug rarely leads me to euphoria while it not uncommonly makes me anxious, dysphoric, and sometimes downright miserable. I often go for months during which I start most days with marijuana and coffee and then continue to use marijuana until bedtime. I do this because I like the mental stimulation but also because pot works far better as a sleep aide if I use it all day. Sleep is my major challenge not just because of the pain but because I have four separate sleep disorders—insomnia, sleep apnea, nocturnal myoclonus, and nocturnal bruxism.

Narcotics differ from marijuana in that they do induce euphoria, although I find them boring in terms of thought stimulation (who needs to think when he’s euphoric?). I’ll use an analogy to describe how I envision narcotic addiction. Imagine that you’re rafting down a slow and muddy river. The hot air is stifling and the scenery boring. You too are stifled and bored, and you wish with all your heart that you could feel like you were getting somewhere, but your entire life has come to seem like a failure no matter what you do. Then you come to a whirlpool (narcotics), but you don’t realize it's a whirlpool because it's so wide. You’re just pleased to find that you’re moving, although you can’t really remember why you ever wanted to be someplace else. The breeze in your face is cooling, and the same scenery that bored you a few minutes ago is now fascinatingly beautiful. Happiness seems so simple and natural, and sadness so twisted and complex that it's hard to imagine that you were ever unhappy. By the time you see Death at your side, you might be too far gone to turn back. I’m not talking about me, but neither do I remain cocksure that addiction only happens to other people, people inferior to myself. When you're desperate for a way out, even a bad option can look better than no option.

My narcotic mainstay is oxycodone (when it comes combined with acetaminophen, it’s called Percocet) because I’ve been approved for a years’ worth without even having to go back to my internist. I limit myself to 30 mgs at a time (the starting dose is 5-10) three or four times a week. Unfortunately, I feel less euphoric and get less pain relief from thirty than I once got from ten, but I'm afraid that if I take a higher dosage even once, I’ll be tempted to do it again. Why did I set 30 as my limit when my prescription calls for 10-20? Because I was taking 30 when I got scared, and since I was handling that okay—except for the hellacious constipation—I stayed with it. Narcotics are so insidious that even though 30 no longer gets me high for more than a half hour, I crave it on my narcotic-free nights. On the nights I do take it, I have trouble waiting until bedtime to do so because the rush initially makes me too happy to fall asleep, so I want to be up doing fun things. There's nothing like high on narcotics and marijuana and then baking crackers while watching a movie. Yep, that's right, I can carry on real well even while real high, so well in fact that even Peggy can't even tell if I've had anything.

I sometimes imagine that narcotics are talking to me. They say they’re my friends, and that there’s really no reason for me to be in pain when all I have to do to feel better is to take a few milligrams extra. They assure me that, just as most people can safely relax in the evening with a few drinks, so can I relax with a few narcotics. Besides, don’t I deserve a little euphoria? Hell, I’m in pain; my brain—the one I once took pride in—is a turnip; I can’t do many of the things that I used to find meaning in; I look like shit, having gone from 180 pounds of muscle to 160 pounds of skin, bones, and a little round belly; and, worse yet, I have no hope of ever escaping the pain or ever regaining my strength and intelligence. As a matter of fact, the whole goddamn rest of my goddamn life looks pretty fucking bleak, and even after years of pain, I still don’t have a clue how to handle that. Narcotics tell me that they’ll handle it for me and make me deliriously happy.

The words that I say to myself are a bit different… "Why can’t I handle this better? I know people who are worse off but appear to be doing fine. Why can’t I be like them and cut through adversity like a knife through warm butter? And why, when I spent years trying to stay healthy and more years trying to regain my health, am I like this while people who are older than I and never gave a thought to diet and exercise are doing fine?"

So far, I haven’t been tempted to take a higher dose of narcotics or to take them during the daytime (except for two weeks ago when Cipro took me to the doorstep of panic). I’m helped in this by reminding myself of what George Peppard (see photo) said about drinking: “You have problems, you think drink helps, then you have two problems.” I never knew him, and he has been in his grave for years, but I sometimes imagine him beside me, looking the way he looked toward the end of his life when his arrogance was gone. I don't only want to be strong for myself and for Peggy; I also want to be strong to honor his memory because every little bit of inspiration helps, and George Peppard's tortured existence and eventual triumph has certainly inspired me.

The bareass truth is that I need drugs to sleep, mostly because I’m in too much pain to sleep without them, but also because I’ve taken them for so many years that normal sleep is all but impossible. Yet, drugs are robbing me of myself almost as much as the pain is, not because I’m addicted but because when you take mind-altering drugs everyday, you start to lose sight of who you are. I’m desperate to give up drugs as a way of life, but I’m desperate for sleep too, and I can’t have it both ways. You might look at my situation and think you could do better, and I hope you could because you might have to someday, but where I am is where I am despite the years I’ve put into trying to either get well or get strong. 

I just came off a five-month break from even trying to help myself—well, except for diet, drugs, writing, physical therapy exercises, and buying potted plants. When I started getting scared about how much I was looking forward to narcotics, which wasn't too long ago, I signed up for a Qigong class. My classmates are mostly old ladies, and I'm having trouble keeping up with them. I would have already quit the class, but where do you go after Qigong? It would be like dropping out of kindergarten. 

As the saying goes, “You either get tough or die.” I’m not all that tough, but then I’m not dead or on a psych ward either... I grieve my life. Although, for years now, my experience of it has hardly been in the league of a walking death, it seriously sucks. My chief support has come from Peggy, my doctors, and you. Two bloggers who were dying (Renee and Nollyposh) gave me a generous portion of their time and compassion, and that still helps even though they're gone. I wouldn't be surprised but what many a life has been saved by a single act of kindness on the part of someone who had no idea of the significance of what they were doing.

My experience with marijuana versus narcotics for chronic pain

Oxycodone is at least a little useful for relieving my pain, plus it makes me very, very happy. Some people say that narcotic happiness isn’t real happiness, but the only difference I can see in how drug happiness feels versus how natural happiness feels is that drug happiness is usually deeper, mellower, and disconnected from the events of one’s life. The problem with oxycodone—and all narcotics—is that if five milligrams will take you to heaven today, you’ll need 25 the day after tomorrow if you keep taking it. I think of the drug as like a Siren that—thanks to my genetics—has been unable to pull me beneath the waves. As an example of people who weren’t so blessed, I’ll mention two addicts who held up local pharmacies at gunpoint but didn’t take money, just oxycodone, Percocet and Oxycontin (the last two being products that contain oxycodone).

Marijuana interests me more than narcotics and works as well for pain, but I never become accustomed to losing what little control I have over my thoughts as they are cycled rapidly from happy absorption in almost anything, to befuddlement, to extreme anxiety, and back again. Despite such feelings—if not because of them—I enjoy the drug (god help you if you're ever in chronic pain and sincerely despise psychoactive drugs), and I’ve enjoyed learning to carry on a normal life while using it. I do handyman projects; go to doctors’ appointments; conduct business on the phone and the Internet; cook, shop, do housework, and take care of the yard. If marijuana took away my considerable desire to be active, I wouldn’t like it nearly so well. Oxycodone does make it all but impossible to carry on a normal life plus it leaves me feeling groggy, which is why I only take it at night, and never more than twice a week. The rest of the time, I either take marijuana alone or I mix it with Neurontin, Dalmane, Ambien, Requip, or sometimes Dilaudid, which is a bit stronger than oxycodone. Ironically, I’m able to live more like a normal person when I’m drugged than when I’m straight because drugs are less distracting than pain and sleeplessness.

Many users believe that marijuana has made them better people. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I doubt that there’s anything to it. I get along more harmoniously with others—including Peggy—when I’m high because I’m more patient, tolerant, and sociable, but I have no confidence that this would continue if I stopped the marijuana. On the downside, the longer I use marijuana, the harder it becomes to express myself through my writing. I discard post after post, and when I do put something online after days of editing, I continue the editing even after most of the responses have come in. Other downsides are temporary memory loss, a feeling of floating out of reality, and the impossibility of accurately judging time and speed. As with many useful drugs, medical marijuana is a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

During my adult years in Mississippi—in the seventies and eighties—I only had two friends who weren’t pot smokers, them being alcoholics only, but I never saw anyone too stoned to stand. Now, it happens to a lot of people, not because they want it but because sophisticated growers have succeeded in making marijuana so strong (just ¼ of one of my little marijuana cookies packs quite a punch) that you can get in over your head before you know it, especially if you’ve been away from the drug for years. Marijuana’s strength combined with its inability to kill me (well over 100,000 Americans die from legal narcotics each year) are two of its most attractive attributes. I have every confidence that, however bad marijuana’s long-term effects might prove to be, I won’t die from it, and when you take as many drugs as I do, that’s a significant recommendation. With this as with many things, our national policy is the opposite of what makes sense to anyone who is looking at the issue from the inside.

...I hate smoking anything, so I cook my marijuana. First, I run the dried leaves though a blender until they look like green flour. I put two ounces of this flour (twice the suggested amount) into a crock-pot with a pound of butter, and cook it on low for about eight hours. I then double the amount of butter in a Betty Crocker sugar cookie recipe, being careful to weigh the dough so that each unbaked cookie contains exactly one ounce. The main challenge to eating marijuana is simply getting the amount right, which is why I only use the one recipe. I wrote about the results of eating too much in my entry of August 8, 2011.

As for cost, I get my marijuana free from a generous and idealistic grower, but if I had to pay for it, it would run $5 to $8 a gram on the legal market (to be legal, you have to register with the state, and you can’t make a profit). One ounce contains 28 grams, so this comes to $140 to $224 per ounce. Again, this is on the legal market, so it should be relatively cheap. I have no idea what the black market would charge. Critics of the Oregon law argue that every Oregon drug addict and his cat are trying to get a medical marijuana card just so they can buy pot cheap—or grow it themselves—and not worry about getting busted. In this scenario, a druggie would learn what he needed to say to a marijuana doctor (a doctor who spends her days recommending patients to the state of Oregon for billfold-size marijuana permits) to qualify for a card, pay the doctor a few hundred dollars for the consultation, mail another $100 to the state of Oregon, and, voilà, get a permit. I’m sure this happens, but it doesn't justify scrapping a program that is vital to the welfare of thousands of people. When you hear the government claim that marijuana is a dangerous drug with no medical uses that can’t be better served by a prescription drug, you can rest assured that it's lying.

Thoughts about medical marijuana

Now that I’ve been on marijuana for months, I have to ask myself how good it is for pain. I would say that for long term use, it’s as good or better as narcotics and sleeping pills and a lot less scary. However, nothing significantly reduces my pain; it just makes it easier to bear by either getting me high or knocking me out, and marijuana has the advantage of taking me far higher with far less risk than other drugs.

Now that I’m used to it, I can put away a fair amount of pot and still conduct normal activities, and when the high wears off, I don’t feel hung-over. For weeks now, I’ve been more or less high all day everyday (I start my mornings with marijuana and coffee), and the most notable differences are that I’m happier, and Peggy and I are getting along better. I’m not an easy person even in the best of times, and what I’ve been through over the last several years has been, up to this point in my life, the worst. Peggy and I haven’t had a fight since I started the pot. Marijuana makes me float through my days, my heart filled with peace and goodwill but also a high degree of compassionate candor.

Maybe marijuana should scare me more, but I’m not finding the science to prove that it’s that bad. The worse downside—and it’s truly annoying—is short-term memory loss. As for what this looks like, I’ll give some examples. (1) Unless I’m still doing it, I probably can’t tell you what I was doing five minutes ago. (2) More often than not, when I walk into a room, I have no idea why I’m there. (3) I will become so absorbed in a long and intricate train of thought that I’m barely aware of the world outside my head, that is until all memory of what I was thinking leaves me completely. (4) When I’m really high (late at night usually), I sometimes forget such essentials as my name and address, and I don’t just mean my street address, I mean the state I live in. Such experiences have helped me to understand what early dementia must be like. Yet, pot doesn’t turn me into an idiot; it simply suppresses my left-brain even while it makes my right brain explode with perceptions and insights. Marijuana, at its best, has the power to bring me face-to-face with pure being.

As annoying as it is, I can overcome the short-term memory loss enough to function fairly well even in business situations. I’m helped in this by the fact that I’m more interested in, and sympathetic toward, other people when I’m stoned than when I’m straight. I would even suggest that people like me better when I’m high, although I do tend to say more off-the-wall things more—the kind of things we all think but feel embarrassed to talk about.

I have no idea where I’m going with my marijuana experiment. On the one hand, I like pot a lot, it is grown for me at no charge by someone I love, and Peggy and I agree that we get along significantly better when I’m high, but on the other hand… Well, I’m not sure what’s on the other hand. It just seems a little odd to stay stoned all the time. Decades ago when I smoked pot, I never smoked more than a joint a day, and it was usually closer to two or three joints a week. Now, on any given day, I use more marijuana than I would have used in a month back then.

Do I still want to be using pot a few years down the road? I don’t know what I want to be doing a few years down the road. Sometimes, I don’t feel that I have enough years left to bother about. Time flies faster everyday, and I just sit here and watch it with a sense of wonder at how strange life is. To think that we exist here in this unimaginably small spot in the universe for an unimaginably finite fraction of time. Against this backdrop, what should any of us do? Just hangout and try to make our time here pleasant for everyone, I guess. Such an outlook would eliminate a lot of misbehavior if we all took it to heart, and that’s what I’m trying to do.