Some news stories keep me awake nights because I understand them; others because I don’t

(May my readers in other countries pardon my use of the word "we." It just seemed too weird to write "the United States" over and over.)

Is it by accident that we are fighting “for freedom” (ours and theirs, presumably) in the oil-rich Middle East while ignoring slavery, starvation, and genocide in the jungles and deserts of Africa? What if those people had oil—or were even white? I mean, we did finally get it together to intervene in Bosnia, yet only thousands died there as opposed to over a million in Rwanda.

Why did conservatives continue to defend the War in Iraq after it became clear that George Bush invaded the wrong country on spurious grounds, yet they are now outraged by Obama’s efforts to insure that everyone has medical care? I could better understand their outrage over the one if they were also outraged over the other. As it is, what is the message here, that killing people by mistake is okay, but saving lives isn’t? Or that anything a conservative president does is acceptable, whereas everything a liberal president tries to do must be defeated?

Conservatives demand to know how Obama plans to pay for health care reform. It is a good question, but why have they never asked this about our two wars in the Middle East, wars that have been going on for seven years at a cost of $915.1 billion?

Residents of conservative states are the poorest and least educated people in America, and they are also the least able to afford medical insurance. Yet they are the very states in which opposition to healthcare reform is strongest. Why is this, do you think?

Pfizer was recently ordered to pay $2.3 billion in fines and penalties for fraudulent advertising. It was Pfizer’s fourth conviction in seven years, yet no one will go to prison, and the fine only represents three weeks of corporate profits. Every major pharmaceutical company has run into similar problems, but since the profits exceed the fines, they keep at it.

Ronald McDonald runs charitable residence houses near hospitals for the families of seriously ill children, yet Ronald doesn’t insure his own rank and file workers—or their children. This enables him to look like a philanthropist even while dumping sick children on the taxpayer’s doorstep.

The Supreme Court is expected to abolish corporate spending limits for political ads before the end of the year. Imagine how it would affect the current healthcare debate if those in favor of reform had to compete with the likes of Merck and WellPoint for attention. Through their lobbyists and political contributions, such firms already exert an undue influence on legislators. When the day comes that they persuade legislators to outlaw free speech on the Internet (to protect us from terrorists, no doubt) their control of information will be complete.

Another fairly recent Supreme Court decision that dispossessed the individual in favor of the corporation was allowing local municipalities to take away the homes and businesses of individuals and give them to corporations. A third was ruling that corporations have the same free speech rights as individual citizens.

The irony of such decisions is that the raison d'être of the Supreme Court is to interpret the Constitution, a document that was supposedly created to protect the rights of the individual.

Yet another example of our government working overtime to screw the individual is that lawmakers denied Medicare and Medicaid the right to negotiate drug costs as do private insurers. Drug companies were said to be exceedingly grateful.

Such things go almost un-noticed by the press, as if to imply that they’re not relevant to our lives. So, Michael Jackson’s death is relevant?

The problem is that the press provides us with the information we want rather than the information we need. For example, thousands of people—including 191 Americans—have been killed in Afghanistan since January, yet Michael Jackson’s death in June has gotten more press coverage this year than that entire country. Given our apathy toward the things that matter to our welfare, the question becomes one of what we, as a country, deserve.

When a person joins the military, it would be well to tell him or her that, oh, by the way, if you should die for your country, your country won’t even notice, and absolutely nothing good will come from your sacrifice. In fact, the war in which you die will probably just fizzle out eventually, and, like the war in Vietnam, be judged by historians as a waste of time and resources.

No one doubts the mass corruption of the governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the only reason for protecting them is that they’re on our side whereas their enemies are not on our side. It was the same with the Shah in Iran, Batista in Cuba, and the Contras in Nicaragua. I don’t remember a time when my government didn’t support evil regimes—even when those regimes overthrew elected governments—as long as we thought they wouldn’t turn on us.

Did you know that private charities hold fundraisers to pay for plastic surgery on disfigured veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan? If the government doesn’t care about the “heroes” who were supposedly injured while “fighting for our freedom,” why should we think it cares about us?

Conservatives say that we should support the troops even if we despise the war. The problem is that troops make wars possible. If those who will join the military today took the trouble to become informed beforehand, they probably wouldn’t join. The most that can be said for them is that they’re awfully young, terribly naïve, and woefully ignorant.

The thing that I find most distressing about my country is its smugness. Even though we are the most obese, the least fit, and one of the most debt ridden nations on earth, and even though our scores continue to drop in regard to education, longevity, vacation time, infant mortality, and other lifestyle standards; we still congratulate ourselves on being “the greatest nation on earth.” Greatest how? That’s what I would like to know.

Three things

First Thing

I saw an abandoned rubber tree by a curb a few days ago. It was big, ungainly, and in a broken plastic pot. I didn’t want it, but I was touched by how tenaciously it clung to life, so yesterday I biked back to see if it was still there. It was still there all right, still on its side. As I stood looking at it, I thought, what the hell, I’ll just bike it home. Having to hold so much weight in one hand was a problem, but wind resistance was an even bigger problem.

I live in an area in which large loads are often seen on bikes, but never have I seen anyone with a rubber tree. No one else I passed had either, I suppose. First their mouths would drop open, and then they would laugh. There IS something funny about a rubber tree, even when it’s not being taken for a bike ride. “Oops, there goes another rubber tree.”

Second Thing

I went on a raw food diet six days ago. I ate mostly raw foods for years in the ‘90s, but I eventually got bored and went back to a regular diet. Now that I am in pain all the time and looking at multiple surgeries in addition to the four I’ve had in the past 18-months, I decided to go back to raw foods for a month and see if I can tell any difference.

It’s hard to eat enough raw food to keep weight on, so I’ve dropped from 169 to 163. I also feel positively stoned. It’s like looking at reality from a different and more interesting angle. I used to feel the same way when I fasted. Fasting brought me in touch with an inner purity that made it hard to eat again.

Raw foods aren’t exactly effervescent, but they do sparkle in my mouth.

Third Thing

Yesterday, I went to see Mark, my orthodpedic surgeon, for my six-week appointment. I’m 5 1/2 months out from surgery on my right shoulder, but still in pain. Here’s part of what I wrote to him by way of an update.

The pain is such that I can no longer exercise even with three pound dumbbells.

The pain is appreciable at night and mild during the day (most days the joint just feels a little stiff; other days, it hurts all day). The pain becomes worse the longer I am in bed.

The left shoulder also keeps me awake at times, especially if I’ve been active. My middle and upper back also hurt a great deal. I bought a Temper-Pedic type mattress, and that seemed to help for a couple of months, but now the back pain is worse than ever and bothers me no matter what position I am in. I anticipate a move back to the recliner if it gets worse.

I need two prescriptions. One for Percocet [oxycodone and acetaminophen] and one for Restoril [a sleeping pill]. I take two to three Percocets most nights, and I change ice packs every 1 1/2 to 4 hours. I also take Benadryl for the itching caused by the Percocet, but it still interferes with my sleep. Since acetaminophen now appears to be a greater health risk than formerly believed, I would prefer straight-up oxycodone.

Both the Percocet and the Restoril have the added benefit of helping me to avoid going into a funk when I wake up in the middle of the night and brood about my shoulder problems.

He blamed arthritis for the continuing pain in my right shoulder, injected it with cortisone and lidocaine, and said I will need a joint replacement within anywhere from a few months to a few years. I said I still wanted to have surgery on the left shoulder this year, and he said that would be fine if we can get rid of the pain in the right one—otherwise, he’ll operate on it instead.

Mark seemed to be leaning toward a full-joint replacement because the partials have a 20% chance of failure within two years. He said he wouldn’t consider a full replacement as a first option if I was twenty years younger. I told him not to consider it now either.

Mark has a new baby and said he was sleepy. I hope he’s getting better rest before my next surgery. Peggy said not to worry because medical people—she’s a nurse—are used to rising to the occasion no matter how they feel. I found little comfort in this, partly because mine will be a complex surgery. The bottom-line though is that I trust Mark. I don’t care how dire a situation is, if you trust your doctor, it makes it seem about half as bad. If you don’t trust your doctor, you’re screwed, especially if your doctor pool is limited.

The way I see it

When Sarah Palin spoke of her affinity for the “Joe Six-packs of America,” I envisioned the millions of people who believe that an opinion expressed by besotted barflies has a better chance of validity than one presented in a doctoral thesis. Their premise is that anything beyond rudimentary knowledge overcomplicates decision-making, and that the resultant loss of clarity leads to liberalism. I heard it presented in church from the time I was in diapers. “Better to be poor all you life than go to a secular university, read the godless filth that godless professors call literature, study their godless science and their godless philosophy; and lose your soul.”

Led by conservative talk show hosts, the Joe Six-Packs are on the ascendancy. Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Medved, Lars Larson, and Michael Savage, are well known to me because I used to listen to them for hours each day. I quit because, despite their appeal (commercial talk radio is based on personality; public talk radio on issues) and their entertaining theatrics, there was no attempt at fairness. Their tactic was to trash the enemy, no matter how blatant the illogic or skewed the facts. If you believe your listeners are morons, there’s no need to make sense; and the fact that such talk show hosts are immensely popular implies that their assessment of their audience is largely correct. NPR at least tries to represent all sides, giving them time to answer questions, and prohibiting them from talking over one another.

Yesterday, I heard the leader of the Christian Coalition, and, as with a great many conservatives nowadays, I felt embarrassed for him. If there is any intelligence or integrity on the part of the most vocal segment of the right, I’m unaware of it. They seem to believe that democracy is great as long as they win, but if they don’t win, all bets are off. Then it’s time to “take back America,” and this would appear to leave room for pretty much anything—except working for the common good. Other than hysteria, I don’t know what the right has going for it. Unfortunately, hysteria seems to be serving it well, and that is a hard lesson to swallow.


After I wrote the above, I visited a blog in which the owner was bemoaning the lack of compassion on the part of those who oppose health care reform. One reader wrote that she was among them, whereupon there was unleashed against her the most vituperative torrent of abuse I have ever seen on any blog. Another reader and I spoke against it, thinking that, surely, others would join us. They did not. In fact, they joined in the name-calling, ending any possibility of a rational discussion. Even though the dissenter gave up after being called a parrot and a hate-filled bitch, one reader complimented the forum on its openness to opposing viewpoints—after all, no one had been physically beaten.

Experience has taught me that it is a rare day when either side to a debate has a monopoly on righteousness, yet how much sadder is that lesson when the worse cruelty is inflicted by those who claim to be on the side of compassion? Islam calls itself a religion of peace, yet how many people will be murdered today amid screams of Allahu Akbar? The second tenet of Christianity is to love your neighbor as yourself, yet how many millions of their neighbors have Christians killed, tortured, or ostracized? So would it be, I fear, with “compassionate liberals” if they had the power. The worst atrocities are always inflicted by those who think their side represents everything good and the other side everything evil.

Where my species is concerned; no enlightenment is possible, and no lasting good can ever come. For every gain there is a loss, and we extol the Gandhis and the Kings loudest when they are dead and can no longer threaten our smugness. Our lives are so very, very short that I should think we could do better. Perhaps, we are still too evolutionarily primitive. Perhaps, the truly compassionate are but aberrations. I cannot think it otherwise, and I despair.

What happens to a fantasy come true?

At night. Late. Quiet. Alone. In bed. I ponder the daylight world of color, shadow, music, plants, people. They don’t seem real in the darkness. They seem like a drug trip. I think, “Maybe this is what death is like; awareness without stimuli, as if the world were a long ago dream.”

Lately, as I lie in the darkness, I ponder Marit Larsen. I want to be Marit Larsen when I grow up.

Why?

Because she’s young, rich, healthy, intelligent, talented, beautiful, famous... Okay, I’m intelligent too, and I’m talented too (not widely appreciated for it, but talented nonetheless). But I’m also soooo old; I don’t know what my first sixty years were about, and I don’t know what to do with my last twenty. If I were Marti Larsen, life would be soooo good. Or not. I’ll admit it; I don’t know her; I just know about her.

I saw Edie Adams in an old movie last week, only I couldn’t remember her name. I just knew that I knew her. Turned out she was the woman who did the Muriel Cigar commercials in the ‘60s. Women don’t come any prettier. Then, she got old and not so pretty. No, not so pretty at all. Grace Slick was the same way. I feel cheated when women do that. Women create life—right? So what the hell are they doing getting old and dying? I expected better from them.

I worshipped them (the pretty ones anyway) from my earliest memories. It could even be that my earliest memory is of a woman who visited my family, and with whom I wanted to sleep so I could absorb her magic. I wasn’t allowed, and I screamed in protest. There it was, infinite joy right in front of me, and I couldn’t have it. I didn’t know about sex, but I knew that the universe could be mine if only I could press my body against hers in the lonely darkness.

Now, Peggy won’t sleep with me (I snore, I kick), but Peggy can’t give me eternal bliss anyway, so I can live with it. The only women who have that power are the ones who exist solely in my imagination—even though they’re based on real people. Nothing kills a good fantasy like having it come true.

I continue thinking as I lie in the darkness: Okay, if I could be Marit Larsen, what would that look like? Well, I couldn’t just be me in her body; I would have to be her, and this means that EVERYTHING that is, was, or ever will be me would be destroyed. Would I still do it? No. I wouldn’t. I say to myself:

“She too will die. I know that. I look at her, so young, so full of life; but, no matter, she will grow old, and she will die, and then she will be no more. Odds are, it will happen forty years after my death, but what is forty years in the scheme of things?”

Still, she looks like a goddess. I know better, but the little boy in me can never completely give up the old fantasies. Reality is simply too hard to look full in the face. Yet, in the wee hours, I DO look reality full in the face, if only because I can’t turn away. I hate the wee hours.

The thing that is both sad and grand is that I have at least rationally given up on magic. Women can make me feel damn good, but they can’t save me; they can only distract me. Why is such knowledge grand? Because to look to women for salvation was a heavy burden to lay upon human flesh. Men sometimes kill when their goddesses fail them.

When I was young, and I knew guys that were old and rich, I envied them because I knew they could get women that I couldn’t. Now that I’m old (and not really rich, but not poor either), I too could get women that I couldn’t have gotten on charm alone when I was young; but I don’t want them. Funny that I ever thought I would.

Now, even if I could get them on charm alone, I wouldn’t know what to do once I had them. I could fuck them, for a while longer anyway, but what would we talk about? Funny I should keep coming back to that. Peggy and I can talk about 38 years of shared experiences, or we can talk about the years that we didn’t share but that we did both experience. Marit Larsen is a 26-year-old Norwegian.

Me: “So, Marit, did you ever see that mermaid statue thingy in Oslo?”
Her: “Herregud!!! What is it with Americans and geography? The Little Mermaid is in Copenhagen. Me and my Mom saw it a long, long time ago, like in the 90’s.”
Me: “I first saw it in a book in the 50’s.”
Her: “Wow! My parents weren’t even born yet.”
Me: “Hey, I’ve got some DVDs of Have Gun Will Travel. Do you want to watch them?”
Her: “What kind of music do they play?”

Whatever shot I might have ever had at Marit Larson is gone. Watch her video. Try to see her as I see her. She looks angelic, but she’s not an angel. I know that, really I do.

P.S. For best results, double click on the video to watch it on the YouTube site.

Careers, affairs, and other marital considerations

Peggy holds the most respected job in America, and I the most despised. Registered nurses outrank doctors and professors. Househusbands fall below politicians and car salesmen. Indeed, most people don’t believe househusbands exist; they think we are simply men who mooch off our wives. Such was how my mother saw it; she called Peggy my “meal ticket.”

I got the job in 1978 after I built our house in the Mississippi woods. The plan was for Peggy to work and for me to do everything else, which at the time included gardening, preserving foods, adding finishing touches to the house, and working part-time as a writer, carpenter, candle-maker, and housepainter. After we moved to Oregon in 1986, I continued being the houseperson, but I also continued taking outside work, although Peggy never liked it because she had to help with the chores. My last job was as an on-call handyman for an office suite; when my boss left in 2001, I did too.

A major part of my househusband tenure has been remodeling the houses we’ve owned, and this points to one of the awkward aspects of my job. Namely, it doesn’t have an adequate label. Househusband implies cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry; but not remodeling, yard work, investment management, and car care. When I am asked what I do, I either have to go into a long description or offer an inadequate title. Now that I’m sixty, I just tell people I’m retired. Not that they ask much anymore because they assume I’m retired based upon how frigging old I look.

Women who understand how much I do for Peggy often ask her if they can borrow me for awhile—or they tell me that they would like to take me home with them. Peggy doesn’t know how to scan a credit card because I do the shopping. She doesn’t know how to look up a library book because I get them for her. She has no idea how to go anywhere because I either take her, or I go with her and give her directions. I set my mental clock each night so she won’t have to wake her up to an alarm. I make her bed; I cook her breakfast; and when she comes home, I have her supper ready. If she needs an appointment, I arrange it. If she needs business transacted, I do it.

I went to the dentist with her on Wednesday and held her hand while she was having her teeth cleaned. On Thursday, I sat by her side during her bone density scan and learned as much I could about osteoporosis. Later that day, I went to the doctor with her because she had a blocked salivary gland—I did most of the talking. Prior to these visits, I filled out her medical forms and printed an updated copy of her medications. Afterwards, I took her home, and then I picked-up her prescription.

I take care of Peggy like she is a cross between a child and the queen of England. In return, I don’t have to deal with the hassles of pleasing an employer, and I can schedule my time pretty much as I wish. Other than societal disrespect (which really isn’t an issue anymore) my job only has four downsides. One is that I am dependent upon Peggy for my income and my health insurance, so if she should die or lose her job, times would be hard. The second is that I do all of my work alone and miss the feeling of being part of a team. The third is that my work hours aren’t clearly defined, so I always worry that I’m not doing enough. The fourth is that Peggy is my de facto employer, and she can be a hard woman to please.

For example, she recently had a Corian top made for a table in her bedroom, and I mounted it from below with four bolts and nuts. Peggy got down on the floor and, by moving her head from side to side, noted that the sides of the nuts were not lined up with the walls of the room. Most people would consider me a careful craftsman, but I never feel that I make the grade with her. It’s not that she gets upset or gives me a hard time; it’s just that she can’t let go of something until it meets her standards. Her hobby is collecting antique clothing buttons and arranging them on perfectly laid out cards, for god’s sakes. Extreme detail is her idea of relaxation; it is my idea of torture.

The more in touch I become with my own mortality, the more I try to teach Peggy things that she would need to know if she were alone, things about our finances or how to do stuff on the computer, for example. But Peggy is incredibly resistant to such information. Even though I’ve repeatedly shown her how to get to the dentist, her best guess this week would have landed her two miles away. It’s as if she thinks she can keep me alive by making me indispensable.

I’m just the opposite. I assume that she could die at any moment. I worry about her driving to work. I worry about her riding her bike. I worry about her flying across country to visit her family at Christmas. I worry about her skiing each winter. And I really worried about her climbing mountains. Yet, I have no control over these things.

Despite what might sound like a lot of hovering on my part, I never even try to say no to anything Peggy wants to do because it’s not my place to run her life; it’s my place to assist her in running her own life. She gives me the same freedom. If I decided to spend the next month camping alone in Montana, Peggy would support me. In past years, I’ve been gone twice that long and traveled thrice that far, but I’ve since lost all desire to leave home. Everything I value is right here.

Does this mean you regard Peggy as your soul mate?

I would say both no and yes. No, in that it’s a flawed concept. How many people did any of us get to know well enough to consider marrying before we chose the person we did marry? I had precisely three girlfriends after age 18 and before I married Peggy at 22. All three wanted to marry me, but Peggy was the only one I wanted to marry. How many women did I fail to check out before I married her? Millions. And what are the odds that I might have gotten along better with at least one of them? Probably thousands.

The way I see it, the goal isn’t to find the best woman in the whole world (whatever that means), but to find a damn good woman and love her as best you can. Sure, I’ve had girlfriends since I’ve been married (which means that my best hasn’t always been that good), and I’ve sometimes wondered if I wouldn’t be happier with one of them, but I always came back to the thought that Peggy is a woman of kindness, loyalty, intelligence, and integrity, whom I know well and with whom I am highly compatible in important ways. Ergo, how much sense would it make for me to run off with someone whom—in all honesty—the main things I know about are that she’s pleasing to look at, fun to talk to, and hot in bed? A new girlfriend always looks better than an old wife precisely because she is new; I know Peggy too well to build endless fantasies around her.

I could find half a dozen “soul mates” this afternoon alone based upon the wonders I saw (or imagined) when I gazed into their eyes. Lots of women look perfect, but it’s like the seasoned trail boss (Eric Fleming) used to say to his romantic young ramrod (Clint Eastwood) on the old TV show Rawhide!: “Rowdy, just because a woman looks like an angel; it don’t mean she is one.” I’ve found it difficult to wrap my mind around this concept, and the only reason I’m getting any closer is that my testosterone levels are on the decline.

Now for the yes. Inasmuch as the concept of a soul mate is valid, she—or he—is both born and made. I’ve been with Peggy for almost two thirds of my sixty years. Even if I should meet a woman with whom I felt such oneness that she seemed like myself in another body, she still wouldn’t know me the way Peggy knows me, and I still couldn’t give her my unreserved trust because I wouldn’t know her. It’s one thing to know what I’ve got, and quite another to know what I would hope to gain, and in this, as in all things, I live by the adage that, if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

You might say that I’m not being very romantic, but I’m not writing about romance; I’m writing about what I’ve found to work in life. If I lived by romance alone, I’d probably be on my fifth marriage by now. Romance is like dessert wine. It’s great to enjoy but bad to get drunk on.

By the way, the picture was made in 1971.

Some people scrounge; others just collect

Yesterday was a good day for a scrounger. First, I ate a piece of toast that someone had left in a restaurant (I dunked it in my coffee); then I found a pair of perfectly good socks under a park bench (socks were actually on my shopping list); and lastly I spotted some votive candle holders on a curb (I’ll use them for shot glasses).

“People who have class don’t scrounge,” Peggy objected.

“Ha!” I said. “In my family, they did. In my family, the ones without class went straight to the dump.” THAT’S low class. Finding stuff around town is serendipitous. (I don’t really think it’s low class to get stuff from the dump—I think it’s damn efficient—but I was trying to impress Peggy.)

“Hey, you didn’t tell me the light changed!” Peggy yelled as a car barreled past. She was prying a penny from the asphalt as we spoke, and I was standing on the curb where I was supposedly warning her of oncoming traffic.

“Shit, Peggy, don’t you go hollering at me. It’s not like you got run over or something!”

This reminds me of a funny story about Peggy—after 38 years together, I could tell you A LOT of funny stories about Peggy.

Peggy abruptly stopped her bike one day when she saw a penny in the bike lane. The biker who rear-ended her was pretty upset, so Peggy lied about why she stopped. Another time, Peggy was going somewhere with Shirley when she saw a penny at a gas station. She had Shirley drive round and round through the pumps until she saw it again. Naturally, the station’s bell kept going off, which, for some reason, seemed to piss off the man whose job it was to answer it.

Peggy isn’t a scrounger though; Peggy is a collector. A collector only picks up things that aren’t good for much, things like beads, pennies, matchbox trucks, and squished rings from Cracker Jacks’ boxes. A scrounger picks up things he can actually use. I especially like baseball caps because I wear one almost every waking moment. Peggy worries that I’ll get head lice—and give them to her—but the risk seems worth it.

I think that what is really low class is waste. I would even say that waste is worse than low class. I would say that waste is a sin. I went to a talk about mysticism at Unity Church last week, and the leader gave out ten-page single-sided handouts. I was horrified. Not only does double-sided printing save resources; it saves filing space in the event that anyone wants to keep the handouts. I was also horrified because Unity claims to teach a better way to live. Well, duh.

Another time, I was in a writing group when a woman read an essay in which she trashed loggers. She gave everyone single-sided copies of her essay. What was she thinking—besides how superior she felt to all those damn loggers?

My Dad was a scrounger, only it got out of hand when he was old. He would bring home things like broken baby cribs, things that took up a lot of room and didn’t even have parts that could be used in other things. When I moved him from Mississippi to Oregon in 1992, I spent weeks getting rid of it all. Everyday, I would take one truckload to the dump, one truckload to the junkyard, and set aside another truckload to sell. What upset me most were the scores of worthless (to him anyway) magazines that he had paid money for, magazines like Mademoiselle and Working Mother. He thought they would give him a better chance to win the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. When Ed Mahon—Johnny Carson’s sidekick who advertised for Publishers Clearinghouse—died last month, my only thought was that I hope there really is a hell, and that Ed Mahon is in it.

To waste means to hold in contempt. The problem is that we all do it. I live in a 1,250 square foot house that has a double garage and sets on a fair-sized lot. All of the houses in my neighborhood are about the same size, and most were occupied by families of three to six people when they were built in the 1950s. Now, most of them contain widows or divorced people. I’ve asked several people who raised their families in my neighborhood if the houses seemed small back then. They all seemed surprised by my question, yet today, anything less than four bedrooms and two baths would seem small.

There really is no end to how much we want, because as soon as we get one thing, most of us start thinking about how nice it would be to have something else. I think 1,250 square feet is too big for a couple, but Peggy disagrees. Ten years ago, I talked her into at least looking for something smaller, but everything that was smaller was in a rundown neighborhood. People who couldn’t afford big houses apparently felt too discouraged to take care of the houses they could afford. Yet, when you think about it, the smaller the house, the easier the maintenance.

I think that, as a culture, we’re going to remain wasteful until something from outside stops us. Here’s why I think that way. Take the average overweight and under-exercised person. If that person develops serious health problems that can only be cured by weight loss and exercise, he or she is probably screwed. Now, extend the unwillingness of the individual to deal with problems that imminently threaten his existence to those problems that will threaten society as a whole a generation from now, and tell me what the odds are of voluntary change.

I have a friend who says that the problem isn’t waste per se, but the ever-growing number of people who are doing it. In his view, this excuses him from changing how he lives. I would consider waste to be an act of contempt if I was the only person on earth, but he’s probably right in a purely practical sense. Yet, I think we’re obliged to do what we can to better the situation we are in rather than to simply bemoan the fact that a better situation doesn’t exist.

There used to be a story that circulated the Internet about a little boy who was throwing stranded starfish back into the water (I don’t remember how they got out of the water—maybe a hurricane). A wizened old man came along and pointed out that, given the thousands of starfish that were stranded, the little boy wasn’t making a big difference.

“I guess I made a big difference to that one,” the kid said as he threw yet another one into the water.”

That’s the way I see it. I didn’t scrounge a pair of socks or a set of shot glasses. I respected them by rescuing them from the garbage. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and I treasure such finds far more than anything I could buy.

What do I care?

A woman was sobbing loudly and screaming at invisible people in front of the library today. I had been out all morning and was looking forward to getting home and eating peanut butter with homemade Parmesan crackers, so I walked on by. When I reached my bike, I looked back and saw that the only other person in the area was an adolescent boy who was beating a hasty retreat.

“Damn, I’m stuck,” I muttered. “Any other minute of any other day, and there would be a hundred drunks, druggies, pimps, whores, punks, Goths, hippies, skinheads, panhandlers, and homeless people standing around with their sleeping bags and pit-bulls admiring one another’s tattoos and nose-rings.”

“I’m having a panic attack,” she said when I asked how I might help. This didn’t fit with what I had witnessed, but I still felt relieved that she might not be out and out psychotic. She calmed down remarkably fast, so fast that I wondered if her hysteria hadn’t been a ploy to get my attention.

She sat on the edge of a concrete planter, and I sat beside her while she told me her sad story. To wit: her “boyfriend” neglected to tell her that he has AIDS, but she loves him anyway although he lost all interest in her after they had sex. Her “partner” doesn’t know about the affair, and she doesn’t plan to tell him because he would beat her up.

“Lady, you are just too stupid for words,” I thought. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to leave, at least not yet. I had decided to help, and, by god, I was going to do it—for five more minutes anyway.

She said she had walked for miles hoping to work the virus out of her system before it put down roots. She asked if drinking a lot of water might wash it out. I said I doubted it, and I then made an unforgivably practical suggestion about going to White Bird Clinic to be tested, and I tried to console her with the thought that she might not have AIDS anyway, but even if she does, people nowadays live for years with the virus.

When I finally got up to go, she thanked me sarcastically “for making fun of a serious situation.” I hadn’t done this, so I figured she was just trying to provoke me into staying, but I honestly didn’t care. The fact is that I never cared. I had done my duty as I saw it, but my heart was at home eating peanut butter on homemade Parmesan crackers.

Maybe you would have cared. Maybe you would have listened without passing judgment, but I can’t imagine how. I really can’t. The only way I can feel warm and fuzzy toward my fellow human beings is to not be around them very much. Still, if you would have cared, I hope it’s you who stops to help on the day that it’s me standing in front of the library screaming at invisible people. Not that I am given to such theatrics. No, not me. I realized when I was a little boy with a screaming sister that screamers get all the attention but none of the respect, and I came to hate them on both counts.

Chronic pain: is it for you?

Here’s how I see chronic pain. Let’s say you take it into you head to help the poorest people on earth, and you are sent to a city dump in Cairo or Mexico City. An hour after you fold the seat-table on the 747, you are standing amid Third World filth, smelling the overpowering stench and looking at the emaciated children with maggot-filled sores, and you think, “My God, I can’t take this.” But you discover that you are stronger than you thought and, after a few months, you get used to it. You still hate it, but you get used to it.

Today, I went to see Shan, my number one physical therapist (I see three in all). If I don’t have less pain in the next two weeks, Mark will want to do a joint replacement on the same shoulder that he did the decompression and tendon repair on in March, so Shan suggested a drastic approach. His “drastic approach” was to stick needles deep into my muscles and tendons. This made them twitch so violently that I bent some of the needles. Every time I thought that he surely must be finished, he would have me change positions and stick me some more. Sweat poured off me, yet the pain still wasn’t as bad as much of what I experience everyday. I tried to carry on a normal conversation. “You handle this better than anyone I’ve ever seen,” he said, and I took it as a better than average compliment. Afterwards, I was sore but a lot more limber.

I realized some time ago that if I want medical people to take my pain seriously, I have to hang tough when they hurt me. As an ob-gyn nurse, Peggy often gets patients in early labor who claim that their pain level is a ten on a scale of one to ten. Peggy will say, “Ms Babymaker, you need to pick a lower number because you’re not leaving anything for later.” I always try to leave something for later. Not that I would act any differently otherwise; I’m too macho for that. Sometimes, macho is good. Of course, emoting is good too. It’s just a question of when. I cry easily (real easily) when I’m touched or grieving, but never when I’m hurt or angry. That’s just how I am, and I like it.

The last time I cried because I was hurt or angry, I was in the fifth grade, and got into a fight with a former friend, Jack White, after school. Jack brought three other friends to the fight, and when they saw that I was winning, they penned my arms so Jack could beat me up. Only he never threw the first punch because I began sobbing at the recognition of such treachery as I had never thought possible. Aghast, they let me up without a word spoken, and I walked home still sobbing. My best friend, Grady Green, was sitting on the porch, and he consoled me. I’ll never forget that, although I don’t even remember what he said. For all I know, he didn’t say anything. That afternoon contained one of life’s saddest moments followed by one of its sweetest. I wish I had a male friend like Grady today. But I digress.

I was dizzy when I left Shan, and that wasn’t good since I was on my bike and a half hour from home with a lengthy errand to do en route. I knew it would be better to skip the errand and go ice my shoulder, but macho kicked-in again. When I finally got home, I iced my shoulder for ten minutes and then ran another errand, followed by more ice, and finally a third errand. If not for ice, I don’t know how I could bear the pain. I try to limit narcotics to the nighttime, yet I still have to get up every two hours for a new ice pack. Demerol, Vicodin, Percocet, Norco, Dilaudid; none of them are sufficient without ice. It’s quite the experience to be passed out on narcotics and sleeping pills, only to be instantly awakened by a pain that comes screaming through the darkness like an arrow out of nowhere. Fortunately, I can usually get by on either the one or the other as long as I supplement it with ice.

A lot depends on how bad the pain is, and that varies, but I would say that what annoys me worse than hurting all the time is not being able to do so many things. Even small things like running the vacuum cleaner. I’m still hoping that I’ll be back to normal in about a year, but if I have to have my right shoulder operated on again (before I have the left one done), it will be closer to two years, and there’s even the possibility that the left shoulder will require two surgeries too since it and the right one look like mirror images on an MRI.

I wish I could have avoided all this, but it hasn’t been a total loss, although I can’t think of much good to say about it either. Really, the only thing that comes to mind is that it has shown me that I’m tougher than I thought—and more adept at suffering. I might hope that it has also made me more compassionate, and maybe it has.

Despite my toughness, I think about death, a lot. It all comes down to how much pain and disability a person is willing to tolerate. I’m not near my limit because I still have hope, and I also have Peggy to consider. Death does seem like an easy way out though. I think that, well, what if I lose hope that things will ever get any better? What if I come to believe that I will always need someone to mow my fucking yard and vacuum my fucking floor, and what if I conclude that I will never pass another day without significant pain? That would be a hard row to hoe, but I could do it. I just hope I won’t have to.

I roofed a dentist office in the early ‘80s alongside Jack Tindall, the sixty-year-old man who owned it. Out of the blue one day, Jack turned to me and said, “You’re a master, and I’m a past-master.” I thought it was a strange thing to say because he was a rich man, and he didn’t have to be on that roof if he didn’t want to. Now, it’s Jack’s turn to be dead, and my turn to be a past-master, and the fact that I have the money to pay someone to mow my yard and vacuum my floor isn’t enough to compensate. Money seemed more magical when I was young and strong. Now it’s mostly good for paying medical bills. That still makes it my best friend, because without it I would be left to suffer and die like so millions of others in “the greatest nation on earth.”

If all I had to look forward to was a continual downhill slide, health-wise, I wouldn’t want to live that way, and if I didn’t have Peggy, I don’t know that I would. Some days, it’s hard to see the point, and my fantasies turn toward how I might escape. I’m only sixty though, and I do have hope for a better tomorrow, if not next year, maybe the next.

So, tell me boy, what'd you wanna burn the woods down for? Did them squirrels do something to piss you off?

“Nothing lasts; therefore nothing means anything.”

I found this sentiment in the blog of a sixteen year old. I couldn’t have written it when I was her age because I still believed, despite serious doubts about the Bible, that life had an ordained meaning. I also lacked her insight into how quickly it is over. The years I had already lived seemed like a long, long time, and I anticipated living several times longer. I still felt as lost as she, but lost in a way that I didn’t know how to articulate—not that anyone ever asked. My best guess about how to deal with my lostness was to set the woods on fire. It seemed like such a crazy idea that I thought it would get me committed to a cozy mental institution where a fatherly psychiatrist could fix me.

Why this faith in shrinks? Did you know any?

No, I had never laid eyes on a first year psychology major much less a bona fide psychiatrist, but I had read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, in which a psychiatrist helped one of the condemned killers come to terms with his execution. I figured that, if a shrink could make a fellow feel okay about being hung before dawn in a Kansas prison, he could make him feel okay about anything.

I didn’t burn the woods down, partly because I didn’t want to burn the woods down, and partly because I worried that I would be sent to a reform school instead of a mental institution. For years, I continued to feel alone. Other people didn’t seem to share my angst, and my ever deeper and ever more raging questions about ultimate reality made me feel like a freak. I imagined that everyone else must have already found the answers I was seeking, and that their lack of apparent depth simply meant they were miles ahead of me, as if the rest of the world knew something that I didn’t. But, if this were true, I wondered, why wouldn’t they share the answers, and why did most of them seem so unintelligent?

I still feel alone, but it has moved beyond what I had thought was a remediable defect and into what I regard as the human condition. If you’re congenitally cheerful or believe in Jehovah, you might not feel it. Otherwise…

I wrote at length to the teenage blogger, pointing out that impermanence need not imply futility, although it does, in my mind, lead to sadness. All that I treasure, all that I protect, will be lost in a mere two or three decades. My photos, my writings, and the other artifacts of my life will, likely as not, end up in a landfill. Peggy will die, either a few years before or a few years after me, and in a few more years, all that we were and all that we did will be forgotten. These things will occur in roughly half the time we have already lived. If you can remain unerringly cheerful in the face of such a future, I envy you. I also suspect that you have embraced answers that are as groundless as they are comforting.

Abandoned and naked with only a schnauzer for solace

A letter by a follower from Slidell, Louisiana, reminded me of the following true story.

In 1983, I got a pilot’s license and bought an airplane because I felt hemmed-in by the provincialism of southern Mississippi, and thought that flying would broaden my social and intellectual horizons while expanding my spatial ones. This did not prove to be the case because of the slow cruising speed of my plane (85 mph) and the influence of Mississippi’s frequent thunderstorms. Even so, Peggy and I took trips to Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. We had two engine failures and one electrical fire along the way, but I’ll save those stories for another time.

Ever on the lookout for stimulating places to visit, I read about a nudist camp called Indian Hills (an odd name in an area in which the highest peaks are I-12 overpasses) near Slidell, I proposed to Peggy that we fly down. When she expressed somewhat less than zero interest in going, I went by myself. I had imagined that nudists would be of a liberal and educated bent, but this was not the case. I had hardly been there an hour before a large, drunk, and completely naked redneck challenged me to a fight. His wrath had erupted when I said something about him being gay based upon my observation that he was wearing a single earring.

He vociferously informed me that merchant seaman—of which he was one—also wore single earrings, but in the opposite ear to that favored by gay men, a group that he held in extremely low esteem. I apologized profusely, not because I felt badly about my error, but because I would have apologized profusely no matter what I had said. For example, if I had called him a human, and he had preferred to think of himself as a three-toed frog from Mars, I would have apologized just as profusely. Maybe I'm vain, but if I’m to be beaten to death, I want it to be over something that matters.

I stayed the night, and flew home the next day with no plans for another trip. Several months later, I was telling my friend Woozy Toosh (not his real name believe it or not) about the camp. I had known Woozy Toosh for much of my life, and was well aware that he was an excessively timid person, so I was surprised when he asked me to go there with him. I said I would be glad to, and we agreed to take his car. He made me vow secrecy about the trip because he worried that he would lose his job as a school guidance counselor and that his fundamentalist Christian wife would leave him. These were realistic fears.

Woozy Toosh, my little dog Wendy, and I drove down one August afternoon and stayed in a Slidell motel before going to the nudist camp the next morning. I was a little—but not a lot—surprised that night when he brought up the possibility of him and me having sex. I politely declined.

The next morning, Woozy Toosh, Wendy (you can tell from her haunted eyes that she had seen things a dog was never meant to see), and I drove to the camp. He was reluctant to take his clothes off (he had mostly wanted to see other men without their clothes), and he asked me if it was strictly necessary. I said I didn’t think so, but that he might feel even more awkward if he kept them on.

Woozy Toosh finally did undress, but he used a newspaper to cover his privates as he made a beeline for a chaise lounge. I thought he looked like Inspector Clouseau who found himself in similar circumstances in one of the Pink Panther movies, but I didn’t say anything. After we had sat down, he lost no time in covering himself from mid-thigh to mid-waist with the same newspaper. Only then did I notice that it was in reality a National Enquirer. I could tolerate homosexuality, but learning that I had a friend who read the Enquirer was a bit much.

After an awkward half hour, Woozy Toosh asked if I was ready to go home. I had anticipated such an outcome before we left, and had exacted his promise that we would stay at least six hours. By the time another half hour passed, he had asked me twice more. When I became testy, he developed the sudden urge to spend the day window-shopping at the Slidell Mall. We agreed that he would pick me up around 3:00, and he left with my clothes in his car.

Just before Woozy Toosh was to return, two men got into a fight near the entrance to the camp, and the police were called. I worried that when Woozy Toosh saw them, he would think it was a raid, and not slow down until he was across the state line. Just in case this should happen, I thought it behooved me to make alternate plans for my return home. Okay, I thought, it’s a two-hour drive, and I’m butt naked with no clothes, no friends, and no money. Of course, I did have a schnauzer, but she hardly seemed like an asset. All I could think to do with her was to hold her over my privates while I hitchhiked, but that didn’t seem like really workable solution, even after dark. Besides, Woozy Toosh had left his National Enquirer in the changing room, and if worse came to worse, I figured I could take some string and improvise a skirt.

3:00 was long gone before the cops looked like they might even be thinking about the possibility of starting to think about leaving. It was my firm belief that they were actually a great deal more interested in looking at the women they weren’t arresting than in the men they were. In fact, they didn’t appear to be making much headway in arresting anyone. Their tardiness gave me a great deal more time to come up with a workable plan, but none was forthcoming. I could have called Peggy, of course, but she would have regarded the trip as an imposition and have undertaken it primarily for the dog.

Woozy Toosh returned a half hour after the cops left. I have never at any time wished that the trip had ended otherwise even if it would have made a better story.