From the heart

I went to church today. No, I am not a Christian—I don’t even have an unreservedly high opinion of Jesus—but I enjoy studying religion. I also enjoy being in groups in which people speak from their hearts. So, I go to church sometimes, or at least to Sunday School. If a church has two services and Sunday School during each of them, I go to Sunday School twice and skip church. In Sunday School, I learn; in Sunday School, I contribute; in Sunday School, I hear other people’s stories; in church I am just another member of an audience that is listening to a speech, and I am probably bored.

Joanne is 75 and goes to First Christian. I met her two weeks ago, and right away she loaned me three books. People who loan out books without even knowing where to go look for them are different cats than I, and I love them for that difference. I also love Joanne for other reasons. I love her because she is impish, sprightly, speaks her mind, punches the preacher on the shoulder when they disagree, has a sense of humor that goes right over most people’s heads, and most of all, because Joanne loves me.

Today’s lesson was from the Psalms. I’ve read that there are monks all over the world who get out of bed every morning at two a.m. and stand on marble floors in unheated chapels just to chant from the Psalms, but I don’t know why. Granted, it is a book of praise, but much of that praise was a thinly veiled attempt to persuade God to grant the speaker health, wealth, and happiness while annihilating his enemies; and the praise was interspersed with warnings that God would look awfully bad if he didn’t do these things. Today’s text was from Psalms 19:

“The heavens are telling the glory of God… Day and night, they keep on telling about God. Without a sound or a word, silent in the skies, their message reaches out to all the world. The sun…moves across the skies as radiant as a bridegroom going to his wedding, or as joyous as an athlete looking forward to a race. The sun crosses the heavens from end to end, and nothing can hide from his heat.”

Parts of the Bible, I abhor; other parts touch me down deep. Even when I don’t believe the Bible’s words, I cannot escape its power.

Peggy grew up much as I did. We both went to fundamentalist churches three times a week, only it was her parents who took her, while it was I who took me. The day she left home was the day she left church. I’ve never left. For years I tried, but I always went back, so I finally stopped fighting it. When I’m in the mood to go, I go; when I’m in the mood to stay home, I stay home. Mostly I stay home, but when I do go, I take my heart with me, sometimes to one kind of church, sometimes to another. My only requirement is that people feel free to speak openly. The participants in a recent class were asked to summarize what they thought about the Bible in one sentence, and one woman said, “The Bible is bullshit.” I thought it an odd statement, standing alone as it did, but I liked the fact that no one blanched.

During our study today, Joanne talked about how, years earlier, she came home from a wedding to find that her husband had packed up half of everything they owned and left. She didn’t know what else to do, so she started getting up early each day and reading from the Psalms. The ancient writer seemed to be expressing the misery that she felt in her own heart. Morning after morning, she would read and cry until, after many months, she was all cried out. I pictured Joanne, alone in the wee hours in her half empty house, crying, and I started to cry. Wanting to hide my tears, I searched the Bible in my lap for verses that might help me understand what Joanne had found that comforted her.

“In my distress, I screamed for the Lord…and he heard me…
The Lord is my fort where I can enter and be safe…
The Lord is my rugged mountain where I can hide…
The Lord is my rock where no one can reach me…
The Lord is my tower of safety…
The Lord is like the strong horn of a mighty fighting bull…
The Lord gives me the surefootedness of a mountain goat…
The Lord leads me along the tops of cliffs…
How I love Him!”

The second class today only had eleven people and started with a check-in. Martin, who had been in the Bataan Death March said that last week, for the first time, he had been able to bring himself to hug a Japanese. I thought of how that must have felt to him after 65 years of suffering, and I started crying again. The only other visitor was a woman who was seated beside me, and she too started crying, noticeably so. Someone asked her if there was anything we could do for her, and she said that her marriage had just ended, and that she felt as if her world was falling apart. Two more people now had tears in their eyes.

When the class ended, everyone held hands in a circle. Someone thanked God that I had come. Someone else asked God to heal my shoulders. I knew that both classes had been more meaningful because I was there, and that felt really good.


Part 2

I grew up in the fundamentalist Church of Christ. When I was twenty (I'm going to be rounding off a few numbers), I joined the Episcopal Church. A few years later, I joined American Atheists, wrote articles for their magazine, and was named non-resident editor. When I was forty, I became a Unitarian. When I was fifty, a Catholic. When I left the Catholic Church, I saw that my relationship to churches was as much of a joke as Elizabeth Taylor’s relationship to marriage, and I vowed to stop pretending that I had it in me to be faithful. I had imagined that the simple act of joining would open me to some insight or experience that I couldn’t otherwise obtain, but it never did.

The advantage of growing up in the Church of Christ is that I learned far more about the Bible than most churchgoers. In a recent class at First Christian, everyone was given five obscure stories and asked which ones were from the Bible. I was the only one of thirty people to get them all right. The Church of Christ didn’t use literature about the Bible: all we studied was the Bible. Kids were drilled on it. We would work our way from the front to the back, and then start over again, year in and year out. It didn’t hurt any that I also studied the Bible in college. I haven’t looked at it much in decades, yet I learned it so well that I could pass for a clergyman, which is what everyone expected me to become.

I can only attend very liberal churches. Fundamentalist Christians aren’t free to express doubts in church just as fundamentalist atheists aren’t free to express doubts in their organizations. People who belong to liberal churches are all over the board regarding belief so the concept of heresy is nonexistent.

I washed out of my first Catholic confirmation class because the priest didn’t welcome my questions. I went across town to a church that had a liberal priest, and I did okay there except for my relationship with the sponsor who was assigned to me. He quickly decided that I had no business being a Catholic, but he didn’t stand in my way. In fact, he did everything I could have expected except to put his heart into our time together.

I had wanted this most ancient of churches to show me a side of Christianity that I had overlooked, and I had wanted it to accept me, but I saw nothing new, and my acceptance depended upon how well I kept my mouth shut. After my confirmation, I left the Catholic Church.

Most churches are like political parties in that you only belong if you believe the same things that everyone else believes. I can see the sense in this, but it contradicts any promise of inclusivity. Because they agree among themselves, church people have no idea how exclusive they appear to someone like myself.

I am a pantheist. The reason a lot of people object to pantheism is that pantheists don’t believe that the universe contains any more or any less that what atheists believe it contains; pantheists just call the universe God whereas atheists simply call it the universe. The difference, for me, is a matter of reverence. I find within myself an implacable impulse to worship, and this impulse makes me constitutionally unable to be an atheist. Yet, most versions of theism leave me cold. Theists typically believe that God hears prayers, performs miracles, provides guidance, and cares about justice. These are comforting ways to look at the world, but I see no reason to think they are true. I am nonplussed as to how anyone can think they are true. Yet, most theists are no better able to doubt than I am to believe.

The books that Joanne loaned me were from the Cotton Patch Version of the Scriptures. It is a serious translation from the original languages, and was made by Vernon Jordan in the 1960s. The thing that Jordan did differently in his translation was to use Southern U.S. vernacular, and to substitute Southern locations and groups for Biblical ones. For example, in the Cotton Patch version, Jesus preferred the company of bootleggers and black prostitutes to that of the white elders at First Church; Pilate was the governor of Georgia; and Jesus was “lynched” in Atlanta.

I was a teenager in the South during the ‘60s. I watched crosses burn in the yards of “troublemakers,” and I saw groups of men standing guard in the doorway of my church “to keep the niggers out.” Had some white preacher called the church elders “white-washed tombs,” and said that he preferred the company of Yankees and whores to that of “Good Christian White People,” his life most certainly would have been in danger. Just as the Jews of Christ’s time believed that Gentiles were unclean, I grew up believing that sinners and black people (but especially black people) were inherently stupid, filthy, immoral, and germy. I sanitized the sinners of the Bible while standing in self-righteous condemnation over the ones in my own neighborhood. I was a Pharisee, and I didn’t even know it.

Something else struck me about Jordan’s translation. In fact, it figuratively knocked me to the floor. I am speaking of the difference between Jesus and Paul. If Jesus can be thought of as an itinerant hippie who wore tie-dye and spoke of love; Paul can be considered an IBM executive in a white shirt and black tie. Jesus was directly accessible to his followers; Paul erected a hierarchy that still stands between Jesus and his followers. The church might have died without his organizational skills, yet much was lost because of them. Thomas Jefferson made his own New Testament by throwing out everything that Jesus didn’t personally do or say, and I can see the merit in that.

Doctor Baxter and Nurse Bonnie

I was telling my neighbor, Ellie, and her fourteen-year-old son, Josh, about my upcoming surgery. Ellie said that Josh had to do a certain number of volunteer hours for a school assignment, and that he could help me out with anything I needed done. “Well…I won’t be able to wipe my butt for six weeks…” I said lyingly. Josh continued looking cool, unruffled, maybe a little bored (I see him practicing this look on his way to school each morning).

Unfortunately, Josh knows me too well to believe anything I say. That wasn’t always true. When his family moved here, Josh was nine. One day, he was in the street with his remote controlled car. “Hey, Snow, look at this,” he said as he rolled the car several times. “Dude, I enthused, “that is like SO TOTALLY COOL that I’m going to try it with my van.” Here I got into the van while Josh looked at me in horror (this was before he discovered the importance of looking cool no matter what). “He’s just kidding you, Josh,” Peggy said. Damn kid hasn’t trusted me since. Go figure.

Peggy will be out of town for two weeks out of the five following my surgery. I wouldn’t mind this so much were it not for the dogs. Friends, neighbors, and lodge brothers are always willing to help out, except when it comes to the dogs which, ironically, is what I need help with the most.

My fantasy is that the dogs will help me. Specifically, Bonnie Blue Heeler would act as my nurse since she would look really cute in a starched white uniform and a nurse’s hat. There are only two things against it. One is that post-surgical odors scare the bejesus out of her, making it impossible for me to get anywhere close. The other is that she won’t wear clothes. At a Christmas party one year, Peggy tied a red ribbon around Bonnie’s neck before Bonnie knew what was happening. Bonnie was so humiliated by the ensuing laughter that she ran from the room and wouldn’t let Peggy come near her for hours. Though this happened ten years ago, it thoroughly discouraged us from ever again dressing Bonnie—that and the fact that she has extremely strong jaws and uses violence as a first response to interpersonal conflict.

My other fantasy is that Baxter Black Schnauzer—being a boy and all—would serve as my physician. He would look cute in a white lab coat with one of those round mirror thingy’s on his forehead, and his Nietzsche-like moustache would accentuate his scholarly appearance. Since he will wear clothes, the dress-up part is doable. The downside is that he’s an all-around idiot (Peggy vehemently disagrees with this assessment) and doesn’t exude an iota of the customary doctorly arrogance.

Such considerations make it clear that the dogs will be a liability rather than an asset. All I can think to do is to lock them in the garage for two weeks, and take them a little food if my head should clear sufficiently between doses of Percocet and vodka. Then again, maybe Peggy could tear open a fifty-pound bag of dog food and dump it on the garage floor on her way to the airport. They would immediately eat it all, throw it all up, eat the vomit, throw that up, and so on until her return. With luck, I wouldn’t have to buy another bag of dog food for at least a year, by which time I should be well enough to carry it home.

Two weeks from today

I am grateful for the kind words that my last post elicited. Your advice was valuable in that it told me of your caring, and because it confirmed that the advice I had given to myself was the best advice available. Sad to say, advice is not necessarily easier to accept because it is good.

Even so, my last entry—and your responses—calmed me remarkably, and allowed me room to think of things other than my fears, things like other people, for example. Self-absorption is like a whirlpool in that the lower I descend, the faster and tighter the maelstrom, and it is good to be out of the middle of that maelstrom, at least for now.

The thing that scares me most about this surgery is that, like all surgeries, it is a violent act. In this case, it is so violent that it will take months to recover from the wound. I recoil in fear. I think that, surely, there is a better way, a way that is gentle and encourages healing rather than treating my shoulders as if they were enemies to be conquered and enslaved. It was with this hope that I cancelled the surgery last September, but I have found no other way. I wasted a little money on herbs, a bit more on massage, a lot more on acupuncture, and a whole lot more on physical therapy. The bitter truth is that some problems don’t respond to gentle methods.

I take my shoulder to the surgeon with the same mind that I take my dog to the vet. I know that the vet might hurt my dog in the short term in order to help it in the long run, but my dog cannot understand this. All my dog knows is that it was afraid and hurting, and that the man I have taken it to is hurting it more. Nothing I can say will make that okay. Like my dog, when my shoulder hurts, it screams, and I cannot reason with it. I want it to know that I am sorry; I want it to know that I am doing my best to help and that I would never hurt it without reason, but words cannot reach it. There is my rational mind, and there is my animal body, and they sometimes seem very far apart.

"Gloom, despair, and agony on me; deep dark depression, excessive misery"

I mowed today for the first time this year. I’ll mow once more before having shoulder surgery in late March; then I won’t be able to mow for months. This surgery takes a year for a full recovery, and I will never regain normal strength and flexibility. What’s more, both shoulders need the surgery, but only one can be done at a time. I’ve cancelled it once, and I’m tempted every waking hour to cancel it again. I can’t say I’m terrified, and I can’t say I’m devastated; but I can say I’m close.

Three years ago, I had knee surgery. Before that surgery, I could hike twelve miles up and down mountains, but my knee would swell a little, so I thought, what the hell, knee debridement is a simple and commonplace operation and, after I have it, I can hike without pain. Since the surgery, I haven’t been able to hike at all, and there are even days when I hurt too much to take the dogs for a walk.

Before having knee surgery, I liked surgical options. My thought was: “If something’s bothering you, don’t beat around the bush, get a surgeon to cut it out—what could be simpler?” I’ve since observed that one kind of surgery can be life threatening yet cause little pain and offer a full and speedy recovery, while another can have a low mortality rate but a significant risk of disability and chronic pain. This realization is similar to one I had as a boy when I would get so sick each winter with colds that I would wonder how, if a minor ailment could make me feel that bad, I would ever be able to hold up against something that might actually kill me. I was relieved to learn that people die everyday of things less annoying than a cold.

Now, I don’t know how I am going to hold up to months of being unable to use one-arm followed by the same thing all over again when I have surgery on the other. A local woman survived having both arms ripped off by a gasoline auger last October, and I tell myself that I should be thanking my lucky stars I’m not her; but reminding myself that I could be worse off never seems to make me feel that much better about how bad off I am. If it were that easy, few of us would ever be put out by much of anything, there being few things so terrible that they couldn’t be worse.

By day and by night, fear rolls over me like a fast train. If it were any greater, I would be hysterical. I say to myself that I am not six but sixty, and sixty is plenty old enough to have become a barbican of strength. I say to myself that I should be limpid, ataractic, eudaemonious, and there is no excuse that I am not. So I say, but berating myself for being afraid only makes me less able to summon my strength.

I feel damned if I do and damned if I don’t have surgery. I’m in pain when I am awake, and pain often awakens me at night. Sometimes, it’s terrible in its intensity, and can stay that way for weeks making it almost impossible to think of anything other than how much I hurt. There have been times when I could scarcely bear to walk because even the gentlest steps were too jarring, and sleep would only come when I was exhausted and would only last for a few minutes before the pain awakened me. Yet, I’m fairly functional most of the time, and the pain is tolerable if I don’t use my arms much.

If the surgery works, I’ll eventually be without pain. If the surgery fails, I’ll be partially disabled, and there’s a 10-25% chance (estimates vary) that the surgery will fail. But if I don’t have surgery, my tendons, which are 80% severed, will eventually break, and the ends will pull apart, making repair impossible.

I had three surgeries last year. Two of them involved biopsies. In the second biopsy, the surgeon went through the front of my throat to get to my vertebra. My fear when I had to get out of bed at 4:30 in the morning to go have my throat cut is beyond my ability to describe. As it turned out, I didn’t have cancer, and I was almost as good as new the next day. Even though my worry then was that I might die, that was preferable to my present fear that I might be permanently disabled and in pain.

Last week, I met an athletic looking man twenty years my junior who had the same surgery in November. He said he was in so much pain for the first two weeks that even Percocet didn’t kill it, and he still can’t raise his arm high enough to shake hands. He looked utterly beaten and demoralized, the living image of my worst fears. Sure, my own surgery could turn out worse than that—I could die—but he represented my worst-case scenario of that which seems easily believable. He even had the same surgeon, not that I’m jumping ship now, this being my fourth orthopedist and the only one I like and trust.

The hysterical seriousness of life

We got the Camry.

“Why?”

Because I told Peggy I would go along with whatever she wanted, and she said she wanted the car enough to ignore the arbitration clause.

“Why were you willing to go along with what Peggy wanted?”

Peggy used to walk to work. Last August, the hospital at which she works moved nine miles away. She tried taking the bus—too long. She tried biking—too far and too dangerous (the streets are busy and she often commutes in the rain and the darkness). When busing and biking didn’t work, she started driving our 3/4-ton van (see photo) but was intimidated by its size. Getting a car was my idea because she works hard at a stressful job (L&D nurse), and I wanted her commute to be happy and relaxing. The bottom-line about getting the Camry is that I value Peggy more than I value standing on principal.

I received four calls from three people from the dealership the day after I walked out of the paper signing. One said that Kendall’s could force me to buy the car. They all said that no one else ever had a problem with the arbitration clause, so I shouldn’t either. They all said that my reluctance to sign implied that I didn’t trust them. They all said that the arbiter wasn’t one they chose but one that was assigned to them by the State of Oregon. I doubted that the State of Oregon assigns arbiters to car dealers, but I called the Department of Justice anyway and verified that I was right.

I will bike to the dealer’s on Monday with a bank check, put my bike in the trunk of our Camry, and drive home. Peggy will be out of town with a friend that day. Taking care of our business affairs is my job. Otherwise, I would have to go earn a paycheck. We’ve lived that way for many years—she makes the money, and I do everything else. The only time it gets awkward is when people ask what I do. Peggy has a title, but what could I possibly offer as my title? Now that I’m old enough to look like I’m retired, I just tell people I’m retired. It’s not true, but it’s easy. Not only do I value Peggy above principal; I value convenience above principal, at least sometimes.

Now for some late night miscellany.

Things—like this whole weird car-buying experience—go easier when I can think of life as a game because thinking of life as a game takes the edge off. When the stakes are lowered, the outcome doesn’t seem so deathly serious.

If I could go through life on a three drink high, that would be about right. The trouble is that a three drink high doesn’t last long. I’ve often wondered why, if after three drinks, I feel like I would like to feel all the time, I can’t hang onto that feeling when I’m not drinking. It’s like the old hippie belief that psychedelics can lift you to a higher level of consciousness. That might be true, but then they drop you back to where you were. I learned this when I came to the realization that people who did a lot of psychedelics (or a lot of liquor) were as messed up as everyone else, often more so.

I’ve always been flexible about principals. For example, if a store clerk gives me too much change, I might keep it or I might not. It depends upon how I feel about the store. If I respect the store, I’ll return it; if I don’t, I won’t. Whether I was given one dollar too much or a million dollars too much would make no difference (if the amount was a million dollars, I would really hope I was in a store that I didn't respect). Sometimes, I’ve gone to the wall over principals that other people didn’t think were important. Other times, I’ve been okay with doing things that other people thought were wrong.

Today is my birthday. I am sixty. March 1 is the best possible birthday. If you tell someone that you were born on September 23 or January 11, they just nod and look bored. If you tell them you were born on March 1, they say, “RAAAR! RAAAR!” They do this because the sounds in March 1 flow like martial music. Some people will even stomp their feet and drum their hands. One man got so excited that he couldn’t bear the agony of his ecstasy, so he jumped in front of a freight truck (the truck wasn’t actually moving, but he didn’t know that). After this happened, I started being careful about where people were when I told them it was my birthday.

Just as March 1 is the best possible birthday, 1949 is the best possible birth year. I’ve already gotten to live in three half centuries, and that’s the same as being 150 years old. When I was a kid, I felt sorry for people who weren’t born until 1950 because they always seemed so childish. Peggy wasn’t born until 1951, but that’s okay because it means that she will always be a nymphet and men are really into nymphets, in a manner of speaking. Sometimes, I lord it over Peggy because I was born in the half century that preceded hers. I’ll say, “Peggy, I was born in the same half century as two world wars. Your half century just had a lot of piddling little wars; how embarrassing that must be for you.” Peggy never seems much impressed by this line of thinking, which is why I have to keep presenting it to her. I figure that someday, she will get it and say, “Ooooooh, you’re my big, strong man. I don’t think I would have been tough enough to have survived two big wars the way you did.”

I care some that I am getting old, but I wouldn’t be keen on going back either. It’s like everybody says, “I wouldn’t mind being young again if I could take everything I’ve learned with me.”

Now, if old people think they’ve learned a great deal, why do young people hold their wisdom in such low esteem, sometimes even dismissing their opinions simply because they are old? Maybe it’s because old people have also lost a lot, things like the ability to play and to be spontaneous…also the ability to remember quickly…and to see and hear well…and to move fluidly; the list just goes on and on.

This means that young people are right in thinking that old people are an irredeemable mess, but then young people are too, come to think of it. That’s just how people are. You’ve got old and doddery, and you’ve got young and dumb, and you can’t even choose your poison. It would be enough to turn Joan of Arc into an atheist if she had lived long enough. The advantage of dying young is that you get to avoid a lot of aggravation.

Such bummer thoughts are why it’s important to think of life as a game, as something like checkers, say, so that you can enjoy playing it without getting overwrought about whether you’re winning or losing. Life is also like a conveyer belt. We all fall off sooner or later, so why clench your teeth about something that is about to end anyway?

I know why. The reason is that time seems drawn out when you’re suffering. All this stuff about life being a game sounds hollow when you’re lying awake in pain at three a.m., and you have no hope for feeling better the next night, or the night after, or any night in the future. In fact, you worry that you might feel even worse, and you don’t know how you can bear it if you do. Happiness is over in a heartbeat while misery just keeps on keeping on, and misery makes it damn hard to say that life is a game.

But what’s the option? Some might argue that God ordained it all, and so it all has a purpose. Okay, fine. If you can believe that, it might do you a lot of good, but it doesn’t mean squat to me. I don’t think life means anything more or anything less that what any of us thinks it means. Life is not serious unless we think it is, and life is not a game unless we think it is. There is life and then there are our thoughts about life, and we cannot know how closely the two coincide. Even so, we can't not think, and my thought is that the meaning of life, and therefore the worth of life, is entirely subjective. My worth comes from Peggy, nature, my dogs, my friends, my writing, and from those moments when I feel happy or when something touches me so that my heart melts. But all of these things are transitory; I don’t believe in anything that is lasting. Could I be wrong? Yes. Any of us could be wrong about pretty much anything. There’s always room for humility.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO9dbmJ_2zU

The day after tomorrow

Car salesmen assume they can get away with being outrageously rude in their efforts to sell you a car, any car, even if it’s nothing like the car you want. They assume this because most people automatically enter into a conspiracy of silence when they are treated badly. The terms of this conspiracy require that they make every effort to carry on as if everything is normal even though they’re being shamelessly pressured and manipulated.

Peggy and I bought our first car together in 1973 when she was 22 and I was 24. She wanted a Dodge Colt station wagon; I wanted a Datsun truck. The Dodge salesman (I’ll call him Vince) was twenty years our senior and a fatherly, soft-spoken gentleman who convinced us that he had our best interest at heart. Still, I demurred. We were “marvelous young people,” Vince said. He wanted to take us to dinner, Vince said. He wanted us to meet his friend, Vince said.

“So, what do we have to do to sell you this car?” his hard-eyed friend (I’ll call him Igor) demanded. Vince seemed dismayed by Igor’s abruptness. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I guess we need to go home and talk about it.” “You said you came here to buy a car; we’ve shown you the best car at the best price; and now you don’t want to buy it?! Why have you wasted our time? You owe it to us to buy this car before you leave here tonight.”

Vince wrung his hands and looked like he wanted to crawl under the carpet. Peggy stared at the wall like she hoped Igor would forget she was there. I made up my mind that I wouldn’t buy an air conditioner in hell from this asshole, yet my concept of politeness required that I stick around for another hour of abuse. Every few minutes, Vince and Igor swapped out. Igor berated us while Vince was out of the room, and Vince treated us like his beloved children while Igor was out of the room. I didn’t realize that it was all a big act until weeks later when the dealership was charged with multiple counts of abusive sales tactics including the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine that we got to witness.

I got so fed up with salesmen on our most recent car-buying search that I went to the lot where Hertz sells its rental cars. “Hertz will be different,” I thought. “The prices will be what the stickers say they are, and there won’t be any pushy salesmen.” I had no really good reason to believe this, other than Hertz’s advertising, of course.

“We have limited garage space, and it’s important to me that we buy something that will fit in the garage,” I told the salesman. The car the salesman led me to see clearly wouldn’t fit. “This car clearly won’t fit,” I objected. His jaw dropped, and his tone was accusatory. “You don’t REALLY need to keep your car in the garage, DO you?”

I can’t believe this young turd is trying to pull that shit on an old fart like me, I thought (why no, I would never overuse metaphors). “Bye,” I said.

He followed me to my van, but stopped short of breaking my legs to keep me from leaving. By the time I got home, he had called twice. Giving your phone number to a car salesman is like giving your phone number to a stalker.

I only got took once by a car salesman. Patty was her name, and she was a redhead who was ten years my senior. If not for her smile that gave birth to fantasies of happily throwing myself in front of a train to save her life, I wouldn’t have been able to take my eyes off her cleavage. The vinyl dash on the used Datsun 610 that I wanted to buy had come unglued. “Patty,” I asked, “If I buy the car, will you take care of having that fixed?”

“Well…I wouldn’t do it for just anyone, but you’ve been so nice that I’ll do it for you—if you buy the car today.”

When it came time to write the check, I reminded Patty about the dash, and asked her to put it in writing (I had read somewhere that that was a good idea). “Snow,” she said with a hurt look, “Do you really think I would lie to you? Please don’t become one of those people who have forgotten what it means to trust.”

I apologized to Patty for hurting her feelings. She said she forgave me, but the pain in her eyes told me only too well that my callous words had threatened to sever the delicate tendril of affection that united us. I apologized a second time, and a third. Finally, her smile returned like sunshine after the rain.

She said she had spoken to the shop foreman, and that I should bring the car back the next day for the repair. When I returned for my “appointment,” no one seemed to know why I was there, and they were incredulous when I told them. “That’s an expensive job,” the sales manager growled, “We would have to take the whole dash out. Who told you we would do it?”

“Patty.”

“Did you get it in writing?”

“Uh, no. I asked her to write it down, but she said I could trust her—she’ll tell you.”

The sales manager’s steely gaze softened. He obviously knew of Patty’s influence over young naïve men. “Yesterday was Patty’s last day to work here.”

After much indignant hell-raising on my part, he made good on Patty’s promise, but I vowed to never make the same mistake again. As for Patty, she went on to run her own dealership, and it didn’t take her long either. Even though she lied to me, I still feel all warm and fuzzy when I remember her. You’ve got to be damn good to make your victim like you even after he knows he’s been took.

On to the present. I’ve searched both Craig’s List and various dealers’ lots for months. I’ve analyzed every bit of information I could find about dozens of cars, and we’ve settled on a 1998 Camry. I saw it a week ago when it was $8,990. The dealer has since dropped it to $6,990, and has agreed to take another thousand off that.

Two important things that I try to remember when negotiating to buy a car are: (1) Unless I know it’s a terrific deal, I must be willing to drag my feet even though I run the risk of someone buying it out from under me; and (2) When I’m dealing in thousands of dollars it’s easy to forget that a few hundred dollars is a lot of money, yet a few hundred could a whole lot of groceries. If the wind blew even $20 from my hand and dropped it down a sewer, I would be seriously bummed, yet $20 seems of no more value than a penny when I’m car shopping. At least, it’s easy to think that.

Walt (a former mechanic) drove the Camry today and liked it. Tomorrow, I’ll take it to a garage and to a body shop for their okay and, if it passes, we’ll buy it.

It is now tomorrow.

The mechanic and the body shop foreman liked the car. Still, I took note of the few things they found wrong, and used them to negotiate another $110 off the price. All of the salesmen shook my hand and congratulated me, and I was sent off to sign the necessary papers. Necessary for what, I don’t know. I would estimate that I had to sign my name upward of thirty times. I even had to sign to refuse a lot of piddly things, things like tire damage protection, body sealant, and a sticker on the windshield stating that every window had been acid-etched with an ID number (the etching was done to protect the dealer from theft while the car was on his lot, but the tiny sticker that announced the etching would have cost me $256).

Among all these piddly things that I had to sign, I saw a tiny footnoted paragraph requiring that I agree to settle any and all disputes through a particular arbiter whose office is 115 miles from here. That’s right, in order to buy a car from the mammoth enterprise known as Kendall Auto Group, I would have to not only sign away my rights to the judicial system, I would have to agree to binding arbitration by an arbiter who just might value keeping Kendall’s business over making a fair judgment.

It is now the day after tomorrow.

When I refused to sign, I was told that I couldn’t buy the car. I took the papers home to talk the situation over with Peggy (who was off skiing). She felt as I did, so it looks like we won’t be getting the Camry. Fortunately, I had not given Kendall a check because they wanted my social security number to run a credit report before they would accept a personal check. I wouldn’t provide it unless they agreed to return it when the credit report was completed, but they said they couldn’t do that, so I said I would take them a bank check today.

“So what are the chances that you would need arbitration anyway?” you might ask. Almost none, I should think. If I did, it would be over the little 12-month powertrain warranty that they insisted on giving me in lieu of taking more money off the price. But there is a principal here. A few of them. For one thing, I believe that they stick that kind of thing into a footnote in a gray font on the back of one of dozens of pages so that the customer won’t see it; and that all those superfluous signatures are required so that the important ones will go by un-noticed (By way of analogy, I had a dog that jumped up every step in a football stadium until she reached the topmost step and jumped one time too many, badly injuring herself on the parking lot below). Kendall's is guilty of heavy-handedly stacking the deck in its favor. If I’m willing to forego my legal rights so that they will let me buy one of their cars, shouldn’t I have a say in choosing the arbiter? Couldn’t they at least provide a list of possible arbiters?

I put hours into checking out that car and negotiating a price. I have no doubt but what a lot of customers are so tired and emotionally drained by the time all those papers are set in front of them that they sign despite their misgivings, just so they can take their car and go home. I called Kendall’s business office a few minutes ago to tell the woman who gave me the papers that we weren’t going to sign the arbitration agreement. She was “in a meeting,” so I left a voice mail. I doubt it, but I suppose it’s possible that Kendall’s will let me have the car without signing, but I’m so disgusted with their lack of ethics that I wouldn’t really care.

I'll show you my dog in a string bikini if you'll show me yours.

There are days—this is one—when I feel terribly guilty for not doing something (i.e. work), yet the guilt isn't sufficient to inspire action. I have a physical therapy appointment at 1:00; the dogs have to be walked; some light housework has to be completed; and supper must be planned and prepared. Other than that, nothing HAS to be done, which is why I have spent the past two hours reading other people’s blogs. Cat Woman alone could become a halftime job, and she doesn’t even follow my blog.

I say to myself, “Snow, you spend enough time reading the blogs of your followers. For god’s sakes, stop reading the blogs of people who don’t follow yours.” I have cut back, but some blogs are just too good to drop. Besides, I’ve noticed that not everyone who follows my blog appears to actually read my blog. I’m not even sure that one of my followers speaks English. It’s creepy having him there, but I can’t think of any good reason to block him (he left as I was writing this).

As a follower of other people’s blogs, I torture myself over who to drop and who to keep. Yesterday, I dropped the blog of a woman who I didn’t think would miss me. She did. She came to my blog to ask if I had been offended by pictures of her dogs wearing clothes. I was astounded that she would think I went away mad because she dresses her dogs! Why would a man who puts string bikinis, tawdry “nurses’ uniforms,” and fishnet stockings on his blue heeler care if she dresses her poodle in firemen’s hats and ski bibs? Now, I feel guilty for hurting her feelings. It’s not that I didn’t like her blog; it’s just that she never came around to mine, so I started to feel like a one-way friend. I wanted to tell her, “If you follow my blog then I’ll follow yours.” That would have been the truth, but I figure that if people don’t decide to follow me on their own, I would be amiss to ask them. It’s like a lot of situations I run into. I feel bad if I say what’s on my mind, but I also feel bad if I don’t.

Besides, how many followers do I want? I’ve visited blogs that had fifty followers. This means that every post draws maybe twenty comments followed by fifteen responses from the blogger followed by ten more comments from the readers. Jeez, talk about having your life taken over by the Internet! But too few followers aren’t good either. Prior to this blog, I had one pretty much like it for two years during which time I had zero followers and only two visitors. I concluded that I was wasting my time, and deleted it.

Then I started this blog, and I thought that, well, it’s not fair to feel bad that no one reads my blog when I don’t read anyone else’s. So, I started checking out other blogs by hitting the “Next Blog” button. You can waste a lot of time doing that because of the immense number of blogs in foreign languages as well as blogs devoted to needlework, grandchildren, and vacations. The funny thing is that, gauged by their lack of response, some bloggers don’t welcome visitors. When I say, “Hi, I’m here,” and they just sort of look the other way, I say, “Well, okay, bye.” One person closed her blog to visitors right after I found it. She apparently had no clue that someone might stumble upon her.

But back to the point I was trying to make. I visited other people’s blogs mostly to attract them to my blog, but I discovered that I enjoyed a lot of the blogs that I visited so much that I was posting less to my own. I began following them, and some of their authors followed me, and then I saw that some of them were also posting to other blogs that I was following. This made me realize that the blogosphere consists of overlapping circles (I suppose you already knew this). I also realized that some people enjoy reading blogs although they themselves are not bloggers. They’re the ones who post comments, only when you click on their link, there’s nothing there.

I debated for a long time whether to share my blog address with people I actually know (since they’re the ones I write about). I finally did and, lo and behold, only one of them ever bothered to drop by, so far as I’m aware. Now, I’m sorry I told them, because I never know whether they’re there or not. Maybe I should make up all kinds of juicy things about their sex lives in order to flush them out. Yeah, that’s a plan. Stay tuned for stories about what happened when Susan and her iguana met Barry and his pomegranate at Meagan’s Tupperware Party….

Cossacks and me

I’m having my 5:00 p.m. vodka, and it feels SO good on my sore throat.

Along with from coming down with a cold yesterday, my right shoulder pain returned with a vengeance. That means that the steroid shots are wearing off, and that my third round of physical therapy didn’t work, and that I’m going to have to undergo two surgeries after all.

If you had a cold, the weather was miserable, and your shoulder felt like it had an ice pick sticking out of it; what would you do? Probably what I did. I worked under the house (on the plumbing) where it’s cold, drafty, and filthy, and I have to crawl everywhere. Makes sense, no? Well, no, not if you discount the fact that I am bummed about my health, that I needed to do something that would cheer me up, that physical labor cheers me up, and that working in crawlspaces really cheers me up. In fact, I’m never happier than when I’m working in crawlspaces. If the dust and insulation didn’t choke me, and the spider webs didn’t get in my mouth; I would sing happy songs when I’m working in crawlspaces.

God but this vodka is good!

Ah, but my shoulder will pay for the work I did, but then my shoulder pays for everything I do, and I’m sick of it. Three years of some pain; one year of a lot of pain; and god knows how many thousands of dollars gone for nothing. But I won’t whine and complain. No, not me. After all my fierce resistance, I am reconciled to surgery on my right shoulder followed several months later by surgery on my left shoulder. Things could be worse. I could have lived before there was “subacromial decompression,” or I could be unable to afford it…or I could be out of vodka.

Slipping and sliding

Peggy and Walt slid off an icy highway Saturday and totaled his 4-Runner. It was their third ski-related accident, and Walt was driving each time (Peggy wouldn’t drive in mountainous wintry conditions even if we had a vehicle that was capable of it). No one has ever been seriously hurt, although I have lost all faith in Walt’s driving and would prefer that Peggy not ride with him. She feels differently, almost as if she regards the occasional wreck as part of the skiing experience. I could forbid her going with him, and leave it to her whether to accede to my order, but I am not disposed to giving orders even if I had the power to enforce them. I even thought about telling her to call someone else for help next time, but that was only because I was in a pissy mood.

Peggy’s passion for skiing brings only worry into my life, but I have rarely if ever forbade her to do something. I worried about her climbing mountains; I worried about her traveling around Europe; I worried about her ice-skating; but I worry most of all about her skiing. Even so, I realize that it’s no use trying to clip someone’s wings. Back when I was chasing women, Peggy put her foot down, but the compulsion was too strong. Likewise when I was experimenting with psychedelics. Now that I am over all that, I am glad she hung around.

Some indignant reader might well ask, "How the hell is her going skiing comparable to you going womanizing?" Well, dear reader, given the tone of your query, I doubt that any answer of mine will be considered adequate. Nonetheless, the comparison is that they are things that we each feel, or felt, that we truly needed to do. Yes, both are risky, and mine transgressed moral boundaries; but they still represented parts of ourselves that we felt we couldn’t say no to. Certainly, all paths are not good, and all paths are not equal, but sometimes a person has to travel a path in order to learn these things. This is why I cannot bring myself to say, 'I forbid you.'"

Fire in the hole

Habaneros don’t keep well, so stores are often out. When Market of Choice didn’t have any today, I asked the produce manager about something he did have that was labeled “red-hot cherry bombs.” He said they were hotter than habaneros and offered me a slice. It might as well have been a jalapeño. I then biked over to Plaza Latina but they too were out. The Hispanic produce lady assured me that she had something even hotter in the back. She brought a green, globe-shaped pepper for me to sample. I couldn’t understand what she called it, but I wasn’t about to let a dusky maiden from the land of fiery tamales think I was a wimpy gringo, so I ate it whole. Her eyes widened in anticipation of my screams, but again, I might as well have eaten a jalapeño. She disappeared into the back a second time and came out with what she called a Thai pepper. It was ominously small (like every hot pepper I’ve had), and I ate it whole too. Hotter than a habanero? Ounce for ounce, maybe. My stomach burned for two hours. Peppers eaten alone are in a different category than peppers eaten with other foods. I didn’t scream though.

I started eating habaneros a year ago because I read they were good for arthritis and for Raynaud’s (a circulatory problem affecting the extremities). The Oxford American defines them this way: “Habanero, a small chili pepper that is the hottest variety available.” At first, even a quarter inch section made my eyes water, my face turn red, and heat race across my scalp like flames through gasoline. But they grew on me. Now, I eat three with every meal and even take them to potlucks. I can’t say for sure that they helped the arthritis, but they’ve reduced the severity of the Raynaud’s by two-thirds.

I wash after I handle them but I still don’t dare put my hands near my face. I even hold myself gingerly when I pee, but I often end up with a fiery crotch anyway. Peggy burned herself just by drinking grape juice from my glass last night. The night before, she did it on a sweet potato that I peeled. A few days before that, a bite of my banana sent her running for the milk jug (milk neutralizes the capsaicin somewhat). Peggy is most decidedly not a fan of hot peppers.

Now, why would I enjoy something that hot? Well, like I said, habaneros don’t taste that hot to me anymore. Think of them as like coffee. If someone who never drinks caffeine has a cup of coffee, it will give him the jitters, but a heavy coffee drinker will scarcely notice the same amount. Peppers are also like coffee in that they have a psychoactive effect. I haven’t been able to find validation for this, but I can vouch for it from experience. Habaneros boosted my mood sufficiently that I even stopped taking Lexapro.

Hopeless Chasms and Impossible Bridges

I sometimes express a desire to take on Peggy’s health problems. Peggy never expresses a desire to take on my health problems. I don’t interpret this to mean that I love her more, just that I love her differently.

Likewise, she sometimes treats the dogs in ways that seem insensitive to me, and I sometimes treat the dogs in ways that seem insensitive to her. In other ways, I am nicer to them, just as she is nicer to them in yet other ways. It’s not that one of us cares more; it’s simply that we possess different personalities and are at different places in our understanding. It takes a great deal of closeness to understand this and to let it be okay, and I have not found that closeness with anyone else.

My oldest and dearest friend told me recently that, after 22 years of doing so, he no longer wants to read my writing. He first said that this was because he has too little time to check his mail, but he later indicated that he simply doesn't find it sufficiently interesting. I was hurt and dismayed because no one can be close to me and not read my writing. I didn’t tell him this (I rather assumed he knew it) because what good would it have done? Would I really want him to do that which he had said he was opposed to?

I used to assume that all human difficulties could be resolved with adequate communication. Hardly. Our individual needs are too different and too contradictory. At another time in my life, I was prone to write people off as worthless if they let me down. That too was an extreme position. It is better to simply accept what others offer without complaint and without asking for much else.

I’m not saying that this is easy. As with my friend, I have yet to work out an acceptable way to relate to him at all, but he, not suspecting the depth of my disappointment (and never being terribly sensitive despite his training as a counselor), doesn’t appear to have registered the change.

What I have found from past experiences in which I have withdrawn to some extent from another person is that they sometimes respond by trying to draw closer to me. But there was no possibility of reciprocation on my part, chasms being more easily opened than bridged. So it was that we each had a cross to bear. Their cross was my withdrawal. My cross was the continuation of a friendship that served as a constant reminder of what I had lost.

The secret of a good life lays not so much in working through disappointments with other people as in learning to live gracefully in the presence of those disappointments.

I-Day

Saving the country seems like an awfully big job to lay at the feet of one man, but maybe that’s just how things work. Take the civil rights movement. Folklore has it that Martin Luther King, Jr. made it happen, and that Rosa Parks helped. I hate to think that’s true, but it might be. Sure, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman made a brief appearance, but they didn’t contribute so much by what they did as by the fact that they got shot and buried under a dam. Nobody thinks they were vital. Even Rosa Parks wasn’t vital; she just made good P.R. I know this because she wasn’t the first person to get arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus; she was just the one selected to be the focus of the boycott. Why her? Because the first person was pregnant, single, and under eighteen. Oooh, bad P.R. Way bad P.R.

If, instead of individuals pulling together to accomplish a great work, history really is about charismatic visionaries and their expendable followers, that doesn’t leave a lot to be said for the rest of us. We can go along with someone else’s program or not, but we don’t ultimately matter. At best, we’re like individual privates in the military, mostly nameless, always expendable, and frequently dead. There were hundreds of thousands of WWII privates. Name five. There were a few hundred generals. Again, name five. See what I mean?

A part of me rebels against that. Maybe it’s a vain part that isn’t worth keeping, but I think of myself as more than somebody’s lackey. I also think that, well, if that’s the way the game is played, I don’t want to play it.

Maybe Obama truly is Kennedy and Roosevelt all rolled into one, and maybe we would be screwed without him. But that points to another of the problems with the charismatic leader theory of history. I mean, how can we trust that such leaders possess the goodness and wisdom to lead us someplace desirable? Look at Hitler. Germany adored him, and you know what happened to Germany. You might argue that Americans are smarter and more virtuous than Germans, but where’s your evidence?

I think those old Germans were simply people like us only in worse shape. They considered the future bleak, they felt desperate, and Hitler convinced them that he could restore them to greatness. No, I don’t mean to compare Obama to Hitler; I just mean to point out the danger of falling in line behind charismatic people. If you’re an optimist, you either have to trust charismatic leader types a lot more than I do, or you have to trust the thinking of the masses a lot more than I do. Maybe we really will prosper again someday, and maybe Obama really will be responsible for making that happen, but I hate it that we’re betting the farm on him because the next guy we bet the farm on might lead us to hell (which is pretty much what the last guy did). It makes my species look more than a little bad if this is the best way we can come up with to run things.

I plummet with Cliff

I don’t get on well with tolerant people. Don’t ask me why, but the more tolerant someone is, the less he is able to tolerate me. Likewise with loving people. As soon as someone starts talking about much they love the whole world, I lose any hope that they will find my company bearable.

I just took a walk with Cliff, the significant other (or shack-up honey, depending upon your level of tolerance) of a friend. First, he bemoaned the failure of society for letting a man freeze to death on the sidewalk, as recently happened here. I pointed out that the man hadn’t asked for shelter and had drunk himself unconscious on a night of record cold. Cliff could barely tolerate my callousness.

Then the subject of changing the name Centennial Boulevard to Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard came up. Cliff assumed that my objection was racist. I don’t know why he assumed this other than for the fact that I am from Mississippi, and tolerant people usually take this to mean that I just have to be racist. I don’t think I ever did convince him that my objection actually arose from my belief that no street name should be longer than four syllables. Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard has seven, not counting the three in boulevard. Cliff was right in arguing that everyone abbreviates it to MLK, but I thought that this proved my point. Take Eugene’s presidential streets. It’s not Ulysses Simpson Grant Street or James Knox Polk Street; it’s just plain old Grant Street and Polk Street, so why not King Boulevard?

Besides, when you look at the kind of people who are referred to by all three names, it’s serial killers for heaven’s sakes (Lee Boyd Malvo, John Allen Muhammad, David Parker Ray, John Wayne Gacy, George Walker Bush—need I continue?). Okay, Mark David Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald weren’t serial killers, but at least they were killers. My point is that two names are adequate for everyone but murderers. Anybody know Christ’s middle name (his middle initial was H)? How about Mother Teresa’s (maybe it was Dear)?

Not content to let Cliff think I was but half an asshole when I could go for the full monty, I added that if someone's parents had the audacity to give them a name that was longer than three syllables, they should have the courtesy to abbreviate it. For example, how megalomaniacal do you have to be to expect everyone to call you Elizabeth when you could go by Liz, Beth, or Libbie? I mean, come on, how much of a person’s day do you expect them to spend saying your name?

If a person boasts of his tolerance but can only tolerate the opinions of people who agree with him, then how is he better than the rest of us? Or if he says he is loving but only loves those who love him, how is he more enlightened than you and I? Maybe I’ll ask Cliff about these things someday when we take a walk together, someday when hell freezes over and its drunks perish.

How it feels

I bore even myself with my health updates, yet of those who have read my preceding medical adventures, some might want the latest. My fellow sexagenarians will probably be the more interested because musculoskeletal problems befall us all even if we smoke Pall Mall, drink alcohol, snort aerosol, and bejewel one ball.

Peggy and I saw my new doc yesterday. I was tying a hangman’s noose when he walked in (the kind with the 13 windings). If I were a doctor, this would give me cause for alarm, and he did look alarmed and even clucked as he sat down. He needn’t have worried. I have loved knots for many a year, and I often turn to them when I am stressed. Its grisly connotation aside, the hangman’s knot is without peer, both for beauty and strength. It’s also fun to tie.

“Here’s the thing, doc, one of your fellow orthopedists says I have arthritis; one says impingement; and one says superior labrum anterior posterior. What do you say?”

“Yes.”

“Yes! What do you mean yes?”

“I mean they’re all right—they ARE doctors, you know. However, every problem isn’t contributing equally—if at all—to your pain.”

“So doc, if, being doctors, they’re all right and you’re right too, what do you plan to do about it?”

“Well, my handsome young patient, there’s choice A, and there’s choice B. Choice A is to stab you with an arthroscope and fix whatever is amiss. Choice B is to give you steroid shots in both shoulders, send you for some more physical therapy, and see how you feel in six weeks. I recommend Choice B, but you seem more than a trifle frustrated with non-surgical approaches, so it’s your call.”

I was frankly more worried about washing out with a fourth doctor (I have been to each of the three orthopedic groups in Eugene plus one loner doc) than of surgery (after 28 months of pain, I WANT surgery), so I was relieved that I liked Mark Fletcher. He listened well, took his time, seemed to care, gave me options, didn’t turn apoplectic when I called him Mark, and introduced himself to Peggy (doctors often ignore the patient’s spouse). Do I think shots and exercises will help? No, but I’ll give them a try rather than challenge his judgment. He is, after all, recommending a treatment that will cause him to miss out on a quick buck. Then too, the opinion of a surgeon who advises against surgery is not a thing to be sneezed at.

I’ve had three steroid shots to my neck, one to a knee, and one to a shoulder. None of them hurt much afterwards. These shots still hurt WAY MUCH. Without Percoet, I can scarcely move my arms, and I’m obliged to support one hand with the other when I do move them. I naturally wondered what went wrong that the other shots didn’t hurt and these do—is Mark yet another dud doc? An orthopedic website identified the problem as a cortisone flare, meaning that the drug crystallizes and stays that way for a day or two. It isn’t anyone’s fault. At least there’s that.

Ortho four

I wrote the following for my new orthopedist. He is the fourth I have seen. So, why is this worth putting in my blog? Because it illustrates what a circus a seemingly simple problem can become when put in the hands of the “experts.” These people have god knows how many years of training, yet the patient, who has no training at all, quickly sees their limitations and realizes that he must become the final authority over his own care.

You will note that I address the doctor by his first name instead of his title. This is because tokens of subordination stick in my throat. If I should be introduced to the queen someday, this could be a problem as I will refuse to so much as curtsy. Even if my resolve should weaken, and I should curtsy just to keep the old bag in good humor, my aged knees would probably become stuck, and I would have to spend the rest of my life curtsying to every man, woman, child, and dog that I met.

Osteonecrotic means dead bone.


Dear Mark,

I was overwhelmed by the prospect of verbally updating you on why I came here, so I decided to write it out.

In August of 2006, I began taking yoga for nine hours a week to strengthen an arthritic knee. A month later, I fell on my head while practicing a handstand. My neck felt compressed when I hit, but it didn’t bother me much afterwards. A week or two later, both shoulder joints started hurting almost overnight, and I was forced to give up yoga. My shoulder pain slowly got worse despite the fact that I drastically reduced my physical activity.

Nineteen months later (April 2008), I saw an orthopedist (Lisa Lamoreaux) who ordered x-rays and diagnosed the problem as arthritis. I questioned her diagnosis because the pain had started suddenly and at the same time in both shoulders.

In July 2008, I saw another orthopedist (Matthew Shapiro). He rejected Lamoreaux’s diagnosis, and said he suspected bilateral impingement. He ordered an MRI on both shoulders. He also gave me a cortisone shot in my left shoulder, and said that if I experienced relief, it would confirm his diagnosis. I experienced complete relief for about a month. He said that the MRI further confirmed his diagnosis.

I began taking an anti-inflammatory and going to a physical therapist (Lonnie Ward). I was given various band exercises to do, but they caused so much pain that I quit therapy altogether. A deep tissue massage that I got to relieve the pain made it much worse. I stopped doing anything involving my shoulders that I didn’t have to do, but the pain was so great that I was almost in tears for weeks. I was unable to even walk, bike, or drive for any distance, and sleep was nearly impossible. Shapiro prescribed Elavil, but it was woefully inadequate. By the time I obtained narcotics from another doctor, my pain level was going down, so I took very few of the pills.

Shapiro recommended subacromial decompression surgery, but said that a tingling problem in my right arm that had developed over the summer was caused by a nerve in my neck, so he wanted me to see a neurologist (Michael Balm) before he did surgery. Balm disagreed with Shapiro, saying that the tingling originated in my shoulder rather than my neck, and the tests he did in his office (EMG, NCS, etc.) seemed to confirm this. He said he would order a neck MRI anyway to reassure Shapiro. Based upon the results of the MRI, he ordered a CAT scan. Based upon the results of the CAT scan, he said that my C5 vertebra was probably malignant and speculated that the cancer had spread from my prostate.

A surgical neurologist (Andrea Halliday) biopsied the vertebra and determined that my C5 was not cancerous but osteonecrotic. Based upon the MRI that Balm ordered, she said that I had some nerves in the C6 area that were being squeezed where they left the vertebra, and she sent me to a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist (James Kassube) for a series of cortisone shots. Halliday was confident that these shots would not only eliminate the tingling in my right arm, but would completely take care of my shoulder problems. The shots did eliminate the tingling but did nothing for the shoulders.

I went to a second physical therapist (Chris Besonis), and he prescribed isometic exercises. These also proved too painful for me to do.

I went to a third orthopedist (Thomas Peterson) because he advertised non-surgical treatments. Based upon a brief office exam, he rejected both Lamoreaux’s and Shapiro’s diagnoses, and said the problem was superior labrum anterior posterior. He gave me a numbing shot that he said would confirm his diagnosis if I got temporary pain relief, which I did. He prescribed prilotherapy injections. I didn’t consent to them because I couldn’t find evidence that they worked, and I had no idea if his diagnosis was correct.

Last week, I started going to a third physical therapist (Rachel Roach). She said that my symptoms aren’t consistent with shoulder impingement and prescribed yet another form of exercises. I don’t yet know how well they will work. I am scheduled to start Rolfing treatments this week in conjunction with physical therapy. I even went to a Japanese-style acupuncturist for two months last fall but got no benefit from it.

I have been in so much pain for so long that I would gladly consent to surgery if I could but have confidence that it would address the issue. As things stand, I have yet to find even two doctors who can agree as to what the problem is.

The truth, the whole truth, and mostly the truth

If you want to know what a smart dog looks like, take a look at this (I mean the photo, not the word this). Now, I’m not one of those dog owners who thinks his dog is smarter than other people’s children because I know she’s not. I know this because I get audited every time she does my taxes. Of course, CPAs get audited too, so maybe Bonnie is smarter than other people’s children after all. Or maybe CPAs are just really dumb. Remember Arthur Andersen?


Another way that Bonnie is smart is that she always craps in the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor was pretty good about this for the first ten years or so, but then he started getting a little testy. One day he came over all red in the face and trembling. I thought he was just sick, but then he said, “If you don’t keep your goddamn dog out of my goddamn yard, I’m going to burn down your goddamn house.” I can’t describe how heartsick his words made me feel--I had really appreciated not having to buy my own lawnmower.

A few nights later, he woke me up about three in the morning. I heard screaming and cursing, and looked out to see him in my driveway buck-naked, jumping up and down, and holding a gun. I would have been hit by the first bullet if I hadn’t seen the fire leap from the barrel in time to duck. He must have stayed out there for upwards of two hours before he called it a night. Maybe he got cold, or sleepy. I never asked. Bonnie and I thought his behavior was so funny that neither of us could stop laughing for the longest, and we slept until noon. I didn’t send him a Christmas card that year because I wanted him to know that his behavior was a little off, but I did send him one the year after. He still doesn’t send me one, and he never did get me anything for my birthday. Not that I got him anything for his either, but then he wasn't forever reminding me of when his birthday was.

Bonnie is an equal opportunity biter—muscle men in their prime, little children with trikes, old ladies with walkers—she bites them all. She bites me too, sometimes. If I can see a good reason for having been bitten, I take my punishment and let it go at that. If I can’t see a good reason—or even a fair reason—I figure Bonnie is in the wrong, and I bop her on the snout. You might think it’s wrong of me to bop her on the snout. I don’t like to do it either, but when I bop her on the rump, she just bites me again. It is for this reason that I bop her on the snout instead of on the rump.

People say that dogs reflect the personalities of their owners, which means that if your dog bites people, then you probably want to bite them yourself but don’t have the guts. The trouble with this theory is that I have two dogs, and the other dog would never hurt anyone. So, I’m not such a twit after all—ha, ha, ha.

Peggy doesn’t like it that Bonnie bites. “Well, at least nobody will walk off with her,” I say, but this doesn’t seem to make Peggy feel better. One thing about her biting that does bother me is that Bonnie will bite people who not only don’t want to hurt her, but are too frail to hurt her if they did want to. That’s just how she is though—not mean like a pit-bull but wild like a dingo (which is partly what she is). She has a two-phase interpersonal problem solving system. Phase one is to snarl, and phase two is to bite. Since phase one is over in half a second, it isn’t very effective. Phase two is very effective. Whatever anyone is doing that Bonnie objects to stops immediately 100% of the time when she bites them. My own record for problem solving is nowhere near that successful. You might say, “Sure she eliminates one problem, but she creates a bigger problem when she bites someone,” but she doesn’t see it that way. Maybe if the dogcatcher threw her in the slammer she would, but that has never happened.

Bonnie is eleven, and her eyes are getting bad, so people are usually able to move their hands out of the way before they are bitten. A lot of people get really bummed about Bonnie trying to bite them, and they’ll say strange things such as, “I don’t think she likes me.” “Don’t take it personally,” I offer. “It’s just that she filled her friendship quota years ago, so you’ll need to wait for someone to die or move away.” I actually think this is true. Bonnie is very, very sweet to her friends (she only bites family members and strangers), but she doesn’t seem to want any new friends.

Bonnie snapped at one lady who then became determined to make Bonnie like her. What this lady did was to get some bologna and feed it to Bonnie by hand a little at a time. When the bologna was gone, she stuck out her hand with nothing in it because she thought that she and Bonnie were friends now (maybe she had heard the saying about the difference between a man and a dog is that a dog won’t bite the hand that feeds it). Anyway, Bonnie didn’t feel any friendlier than before, and she demonstrated her complete willingness to bite the hand that feeds her. It was at this point that the lady gave up on being friends with Bonnie. My impression was that Bonnie had snapped at the lady because she was mad that there was no more bologna, but I didn’t want to say anything that would make Bonnie look worse than she already did.

I didn’t want to buy Bonnie because she came from a pet shop, and pet shop dogs come from puppy mills. I had wanted some dog for years, but Peggy said it was so painful when our last one died that she was through with dogs. Anyway, when Peggy saw Bonnie in the window at the mall, she decided that she and Bonnie had a psychic bond, so I couldn’t very well nix getting her even if she was a pet shop dog. I did remind Peggy that neither of us knew anything about herd dogs in general or blue heelers in particular but, like I said, how could I put my foot down? A few weeks later, I came home one night, and Peggy was off the wall livid and yelling about how “that damn dog” had to go. What had happened was that Bonnie got mad at Peggy (without good reason, Peggy thought) and nailed her. I thought this was hilarious. “Hey, what happened to your psychic bond—haw, haw, haw?” I asked. This didn’t seemed to help Peggy’s mood the way I thought it would. Peggy is hard to comfort sometimes.

Something else that bothers me about Bonnie’s violent behavior is that if Peggy and I get into a fight, Bonnie always takes Peggy’s side even if Peggy is in the wrong. Peggy can literally walk up and start slapping me around (pretend slapping), and Bonnie will come running and threaten to bite me if I don’t stop. Stop what? All I’m doing is standing there getting slapped. Peggy thinks this is SO funny that she will almost bust a gut laughing, and this causes her to stop slapping me, and that causes Bonnie to go back to whatever she was doing (lying on the floor usually) before Peggy got her riled up. It’s as if Bonnie’s position is, “Okay, Peggy, anytime you want to kill your husband, just let me know, and I’ll help.” The rest of the time, Bonnie seems to like me better than she likes Peggy (I know this because she humps my leg all the time but never humps Peggy’s leg at all). She’s a very funny dog that way. Her sympathy is with whomever she considers to be the underdog, even if the underdog is beating the hell out of the overdog for no reason.

But I haven’t said nearly enough about how smart Bonnie is, so I’ll tell you one last thing. One day Peggy was throwing Bonnie her Frisbee and her tennis ball. She (Peggy) got to wondering what Bonnie would do if she threw them both at once. Would she bring back the one that she liked better (her ball), or would she bring back the one that landed first, or that hit closer to her, or that she was able to catch? Well, what Bonnie did was to catch the tennis ball and put it in the underside of the Frisbee so she could carry the tennis ball with the Frisbee. That’s pretty smart. I know I wouldn’t have thought of it. Would you? I don’t think so.

New Years

Peggy had an esophageal dilation and biopsy on New Years Eve. Afterwards, she was as helpless as a baby, and I was the lion at her gate. Every now and then, she would rouse a little and murmur, “Are you ready to go home yet?” I would say, “Today, sweetheart, it really is all about you, and I want you to rest for as long as you need to.”

We went to a party that night. There were Oregon wines, Oregon beers, and Glenlivet Scotch. I was always partial to Scotch—which I hadn’t tasted in decades—and I drank a bit more than my share. It wasn’t as tasty as I remembered, and I even had the thought that I would have preferred gin or vodka. I so seldom drink hard liquor that I didn’t know my taste had changed.

Everyone split off into groups to play cards. Hearts is something else that I hadn’t enjoyed in decades, and I was excited about playing it again. Unfortunately, no one else at my table had their hearts into it (ha). The woman beside me was about sixty and her hippie party clothes were appropriately complemented by long straight hair—long straight gray hair. She was nothing if not loquacious and, on that count alone, I imagined her as the belle of the ball. I suspected that I wasn’t among her favorites, and immediately felt as if I was fifteen again and had been rejected by the prettiest snob in class. I just as quickly remembered that I was nowhere near fifteen. Oh, what a happy thought: “Been there, done that, don’t ever have to do it again.”

My fellow partygoers mostly thought that it was time for Dick Clark to call it quits, and one man made an ass of himself by mocking his speech. Peggy said she admired Dick Clark’s spunk and looks forward to seeing him each year. I didn’t care one way or the other, but then I never was a fan of Dick Clark. At the magic moment, we all filed out of the house and stood in the drizzle banging pans and lighting sparklers. By 12:15, the belle of the ball and her partner were gone. At 12:30, Peggy and I left. I usually stay at parties until late because the best conversations happen in the wee hours, but Peggy was feeling bad.

When I got home, there was a message from the secretary of my IOOF lodge. He said that one member, Don, is dying and that another, Doyd, is in the hospital with pneumonia. I went to see Doyd today. He and his wife are ninety. She broke her hip and is recuperating in a nearby nursing home, so they can’t very well take care of one another, and the only family they have nearby is a son who doesn’t speak to them. I know someone who has the following on her blog: “Embrace all of life and not just the happy parts.” She is twenty-one and probably doesn’t know how bad some of the bad parts can get. Then again, maybe she does.

Three days after her biopsy, Peggy is still struggling to get up to speed. This is the third time in less than a year that one of us has been tested for cancer, and the waiting never gets any easier.

Twenty years to go

Some thoughts on (almost) turning sixty (on March 1).

If you say to your friend when you’re 29, “I’m screwed-up because my parents were screwed-up,” your friend will look at you and say, “Well, I hope you’re able to get yourself together.” But if you say the same thing to your friend when you’re 59, your friend will just say, “You’re fucking pathetic. I don’t know why I hang out with you.” You can only ride that horse so far.

A life is like a history book in that, all else being equal, the more time it covers, the more stories it has to tell, and the better it can pull seemingly disparate themes into a congruent whole.

I in no way envy the young their youth (being so ignorant in so many ways wasn’t that great the first time around). I do envy them their health, their energy, their options, and the many years that they have left to live.

I have been a fundamentalist, and an atheist, and a lot of things in-between. I have also been a conservative, a liberal, and a moderate. As for a career, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. Because I have been all over the map in so many areas of life, a part of me envies people who set out upon a road early on and never depart from it; but a bigger part suspects that they are more rigid than resolute.

The embarrassing part about getting old is that so many people my age are so foolish. I want respect for my experience, yet I don’t respect them for theirs. They might have learned a good bit in regard to practical matters (don’t touch a hot stove or drive fast on an icy road), but they remain appallingly deficient in depth and wisdom. Come to think of it, so do I. It’s just that they’re worse.

One might reasonably have hope for improvement in the young, but it’s harder to hope for the aged. Yet, I haven’t given up on myself. In fact, I’ve concluded that the day I turn sixty will be the day I am finally mature. I will still have odds and ends to work out, but the main themes of my life will be in order in just nine weeks. I can hardly wait.

I haven’t been carded in decades. No one has even looked like they were thinking about carding me in decades. In a way, I miss that, yet when I think back to when I was carded, I didn’t like it then, so maybe I wouldn’t like it now either. Maybe I would just think that there were entirely too many near-sighted store clerks.

I used to think that I was a very interesting person who had had a very interesting life. I still think this, but not too many people seem to agree. Maybe this is because they don’t know of anything I have excelled at.

I’m vague about what it means to excel. If you win an Olympic Gold Medal or a Nobel prize, I guess it means that you have excelled. But it would also mean that most people either haven’t excelled or else they have excelled somewhat obscurely. Does anyone regard himself as having hit that most excellent pinnacle above which nothing else lies? I wouldn’t know, but I have observed that, as a social species, it’s pretty hard for us to feel that we’ve done really well unless other people are out there applauding our efforts. Did Vincent Van Gogh or Emily Dickinson know that they had excelled?

Sitting here writing, I feel as though I should be doing something more important. Time is running out, so I must make the most of it. But what would be more important than this? I don’t know, but this doesn’t feel like enough. Maybe if I felt that I was expressing myself better. Maybe if I felt that more people cared about what I think. I so rarely feel that what I am doing is exactly the thing that I should be doing or that I am doing it in exactly the way it should be done.

I am always reaching for a feeling of rightness that I only rarely touch and never fully grasp, and even when I do grasp it, I might not recognize the fact until a lot later. Right now, I am thinking about a day Peggy and I spent in the Coast Range two years ago. Now, I see that that day was perfect, and I would be happy to relive it forever, but when that day was actually happening, I didn’t imagine that I would be sitting here now loving it completely. To love anything that much, I must have already lost it because, when it’s actually happening, I can always think of one or more teensy-tiny ways that it could be better. Later on, I don’t remember what those ways were.

No matter what your position, I can probably offer a reasonable argument in its favor even if I don’t believe it, simply because I used to believe it.

I used to expect some kind of unspecified quantum leap with every birthday, but it never came. This is what I got instead: I’m ten (double digits now!); I’m thirteen (a teenager!); I’m eighteen (old enough for the army to think I’m a man, but am I?); I’m twenty-one (old enough to vote, but why don’t I feel like a man yet?); I’m thirty (I guess I’m a man—if not now then when?); I’m forty (halfway to being dead—DEAD); I’m fifty (if I were a toaster, I would be halfway to being a genuine antique); I’m sixty (I’ll probably be dead in twenty years).

When I was young, I felt that my life had an ordained purpose that would be revealed to me someday. I wondered and wondered about this as the years went by without anything being revealed. I finally concluded that I was almost certainly wrong. After all, I had been wrong about a lot of other things that I used to think I knew for certain. For example, when I was six, I thought that nothing existed unless I was there to witness it—that people and places came into existence when I was present, and faded into nothingness when I went away. I also thought that I would be a boy forever because time was clearly passing far too slowly for me to ever grow up much less grow old.

If I don’t have a given purpose, then no one else is likely to either. This means that we do whatever we do while we’re alive, and then we’re dead, and that’s the end of the universe as far as we’re concerned. Kaput. Finé. Like a puff of smoke. Like a circle in the water where a child has thrown a rock. Later on, the universe too will die. Kaput. Finé. Like a puff of smoke…

Sometimes, something will happen that seems so timely, so apropos, that I think that, well, maybe there is some higher purpose going on here after all. But then I will say to myself that I’m grasping at straws, and I’ll be mad at myself for being unable to simply get on with living with what appears to be the case rather than forever longing for that which doesn’t appear to be the case.

I think of life as like a book or a movie that isn’t terribly good, but you stay with it because you expect it to come to a climax (otherwise, why would anyone have gone to the trouble of creating it?), and you want to see what that climax looks like. You wait, and you wait, and then the book (or the movie) ends with no climax ever being reached, and you feel cheated and even angry. You wish you had gone out and done something constructive instead of wasting your time. Only with life, there isn’t anything else you can go out and do.

Again, life is like boarding an airplane that moves away from the terminal but isn’t allowed to take off. Hours pass, and everyone says, “Screw this. We want out of here.” Only they won’t let you off. You don’t like it where you are, but you can’t go anyplace else, so you make the best of the situation. Some of us have the ability to do this better than others.

We are not equal. Some of us might try really hard to do well yet not accomplish much, while others of us might not try that hard yet accomplish a great deal. This makes it impossible to judge people because how can you judge them accurately if you can’t accurately identify and quantify what they had to struggle against? You can judge what they do, but you can’t judge who they are. They can’t even judge who they are. No one owns a calculator that can tally the inherent worth of anyone. Worth is always situational. We have all both failed and succeeded.

When he was really old, my father got religion. He was forever telling me about his latest conversations with God. Oftentimes, God would tell him that he had won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. I thought that, okay, when he doesn’t get the money, he’ll give up all this nonsense about God. Wrong. Dad interpreted the fact that Ed Mahon hadn’t called him to appear on The Tonight Show as a test of his faith, and believed he would get the money later. Other times, God would tell him that the people at whatever church Dad was going to at the time were “hypocrites who didn’t know God,” and that Dad was to give them hell about it. So, Dad would stand up during the service and give them hell about it. Whenever Dad stopped going to a particular church, it was a sure thing that no one was going to call and ask what had become of him.

Dad’s weirdness about religion didn’t come as much of a surprise, because I had never known him when he was sane. But, sometimes, I worry that I too might become crazy when I am really old. I try to console myself with the thought that, since I never was as crazy as he was, I probably won’t become as crazy as he became. The problem with this is that I don’t regard myself as an exemplar of sanity either. In some ways, my father was tougher than I, and in other ways he was weaker; so where does this leave me? And who will take care of me the way I took care of him?

The time will come when either I die and leave Peggy alone, or she dies and leaves me alone. Odds are that I will leave her. Either way, it’s a piss-poor way to go.

Life goes on

8:30 a.m. I could tell that Peggy hated to go to work much worse than usual this morning, because she complained about it much less. Christmas is special to her, and she so recently lost her mother.

I cleaned house yesterday so little needs doing today. Peggy asked for a light supper, and I have no social plans. I worried that someone would invite me to dinner, but few people know I’m alone.

Christmas would ordinarily be an easy day in Labor and Delivery because of the lack of elective C-sections. Yet, there were nine births during Peggy’s shift yesterday, and she took it as a bad omen.

Peggy’s distaste for her job might be easier for me if I didn’t have it so good myself. Of course, good is a relative term. What I mean is that I have no big remodeling projects left, so my chores consist entirely of housework, yardwork, shopping, and other repetitious activities. Since there are only two of us, I worry that I’m not doing my share. Peggy works thirty hours a week and spends another two hours commuting; how many do I work? I really don’t know. It’s hard to count work that is done a little here and a little there.

I would guess that, however tired of her job Peggy is, I’m equally tired of mine. The best part of housework is that I don’t have to travel to do it, and I don’t have to get along with other people. The bad part is that it’s mind numbing. I would even say spirit killing. We own so much more than we need. This is not an opinion shared by Peggy.

The bad part of Peggy’s work is the unremitting stress, and the fact that everything has to be charted umpteen times on computerized forms that are never designed by the people who actually use them. She thrives to an extent on the adrenalin, but the forms (and what they represent) have turned her against nursing, which has become an ounce of patient care and a pound of covering everyone’s legal ass.

Peggy’s father didn’t decorate for Christmas. I would guess that a lot of widowers don’t, but that most widows do. Peggy said that most men probably wouldn’t decorate while their wives were alive if it was up to them. Probably, but that doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy it.

On December 19h, we celebrated our 37th anniversary. The Episcopal priest who performed the ceremony warned us that every wedding he ever performed during Advent ended in divorce. That doesn’t seem likely in our case, but nothing should be taken for granted. After all, there was the woman who divorced her husband after sixty years. When a reporter asked why she did it, she replied, “Enough is enough.”