Update

I am now living a life in which I am desperate for sleep. I don’t know why I’m in such pain, but since I felt similarly after my previous surgeries, only to eventually reach the point where I could sleep for up to four hours at a time, I can but hope that this time will be that way also. After all, I only had my third surgery nine weeks ago today.

Before my final awakening this morning, I dreamed that I flew bodily to the home of my friends—long since dead—Jim and Doris Bateman. I was so happy to have surrogate grandparents whom I could drop in on at any time that I cried, partly out of gratitude and partly because I couldn’t allow myself to believe that I was really welcome. When I awoke, I was desperate (it seems that I’m desperate about everything anymore) to have such people in my life again. I then realized that I do, really. I have Bella, and I also have a couple of elderly neighors who would love to have me visit. It’s not the same though now that I’m 62. Sadly, the time for grandparents is past.

I’m taking fewer narcotics because they don’t work well enough (outside of elevating my mood) to risk liver damage. Double doses of sleeping pills still deaden the pain enough for me to at least rest a little, although I worry far more about becoming dependent upon them than I ever worried about Demerol or Dilaudid. I’m still pursuing marijuana, and, because of my desperation, I have placed what is surely an inordinate amount of hope in it. Meanwhile, Obama just reversed his promise to not bust medical marijuana users, doctors, growers, and everyone else affiliated with the drug. Because Peggy is a nurse, I worry that she might lose her license simply by being married to me—sort of a collateral damage scenario. The waste, bigotry, and short-sightedness that is America leaves me aghast. I violate my conscience everytime I pay taxes. I mustn’t dwell on that though…. I see that the mailman just delivered my seventh medical bill of the week.

When I go to a doctor, I take along a summary of my problems so that I can express myself succinctly and not forget anything. The rest of this post consists of my summary from last week.

Treatments that have been of little or no benefit in relieving my bilateral shoulder pain:

Three shoulder surgeries in two years
Numerous steroid shots
Several courses of physical therapy
Dalmane, Restoril, Ambien, Lunesta, Hydrocodone, Oxycodone, Ultram, Demerol, Dilaudid, Naproxen, Piroxicam, Celebrex, Neurontin, Elavil, Tofranil, DMSO, Ginger, Turmeric, SAM-e, Habanero Peppers, Topical Anesthetics
Ice packs
Massage, Yoga, Acupuncture
Sleeping in a recliner

It is a good night when I am able to sleep two hours in a row before the pain awakens me, at which time I have to take more pills, get a fresh ice pack, or stay up for awhile. The pain makes it necessary for me to sleep entirely on my back, but my middle back hurts so much in that position that it combines with the shoulder pain to keep me awake.

Before the onset of shoulder pain, I enjoyed yardwork and handyman projects; but I have to be very cautious about such things lest the nighttime pain becomes so bad that I am challenged to sleep at all. I also enjoyed camping, but the pain now prevents me from doing that as well. Life as I had lived it for decades ended in 2006.

I’ve spent 4 ½ months out of the past two years in a sling, and 4 ½ additional months during which I couldn’t lift anything heavier than a cup of coffee. Now, I’m facing at least one more surgery. As with other treatments, I will submit to it simply because I am desperate for relief and don’t know what else to do.

Other complaints:

Burning pains in both shins was diagnosed by one doctor as complex regional pain syndrome and by another as syringomyelia. A third doctor disagreed with both diagnoses but didn’t have one of her own.

Raynaud’s Disease in both hands.

Advanced osteoarthritis in my left knee accompanied by a Baker’s Cyst and chondromalacia (a 2006 knee debridement failed to help).

An osteonecrotic C-5 vertebra that was initially thought to contribute to my shoulder pain, although a vertebral biopsy and a series of steroid shots to my neck failed to reduce the pain.

Sleep apnea for which I use a CPAP.

*Photo by O'Dea

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Nietzsche

For decades, I’ve written my way through depressive periods, but this last one was too deep. The more I despair of ever being free from crippling pain, the harder life becomes, so when something else upsets me—and something about the group I lead did upset me—I sink to a place that is cold and dark and from which words cannot escape.

Peggy and I took an overnight trip last week, and, as sometimes happens, I threw out all the stops in order to get enough pain relief to enjoy myself, but when I couldn’t feel 20 mgs of oxycodone (2-4 times the normal starting dose), I gave up. Same thing yesterday when we had an overnight guest. I took my strongest sleeping pill (Dalmane), but it only worked for ninety minutes before I had to consider what to take next. So it is that I can no longer quiet the pain without taking high doses of so many different kinds of pills that I fear for my safety. I’m going to look into getting some marijuana because it’s all that I know to do. At least pot won’t kill you.

I haven’t smoked marijuana in fifteen years. The last time was at a large party, which is the last place I should smoke dope, but, what the hell, it was good shit, and it was free. When the social terror kicked in, I went outside and sat in a car with a woman, and things were good until she got cold and went back in. I soon became cold too, but I couldn’t face all those people, so I drove home. It wasn’t a long way, but it seemed like a long way because my sense of time and speed were so warped that I had to stare at the speedometer the whole way. Things stayed bad for me once I got home, but at least I was alone.

Around midnight, I went back to the party, and that was good because the pounding music and deafening chatter were gone, and enough people had left that things were mellow. I couldn’t find Peggy, and no one remembered having seen her for hours. I figured she would turn up eventually, so I settled into the conversation until around 2:00 when someone finally found her asleep on a bed upon which people had thrown their coats. Never a woman to hold her liquour, she had gotten sleepy after two drinks, burrowed to the bottom of the coat pile, and missed most of the party.

In 1980, I had my worst—and my best—experience with marijuana at another party. What made it so bad was that I had no place to get away to because I was a hundred miles from home in the Louisiana Delta—near Tallulah. Another problem was that there were only twelve people at the party, so I would have needed to explain my departure, but I couldn’t very well have done that because I had lost the ability to make words come out when I opened my mouth. Imagine an animal that rolls itself into a ball when it’s afraid, and imagine that this animal doesn’t know when to stop, so the ball keeps getting tighter and tighter until the animal’s every thought and every function are drawn into a psychic black hole. That’s how marijuana makes me feel sometimes.

It was nightime, and we were on a screened-in porch sitting around an empty cable spool that had been turned into a table. My mother was there and she was drunk, but she never smoked marijuana. Joints and water pipes were being passed around so fast that I hardly had time to exhale from one before someone handed me another. I knew that things were about to get really bad for me, but I didn’t do drugs for fun but because I wanted to explore every corner of my being. When I was with a group of people or with people I didn’t trust, the result was very bad, but when I was alone—or with one other person whom I did trust—it was very good.

There were citronella candles on the spool, and I was staring at a raised area on the one nearest me when it morphed into the face of a monster. The monster stared at me—and me at it—until it suddenly leaped from the candle into my face. I jumped, and then I turned the candle around to make the monster go away, but another monster took its place. I turned the candle again and again, but a different monster appeared each time, and it never occurred to me to stop looking at them. Then I realized that everyone had stopped talking. When I looked up, eleven smug monsters with lying smiles on their evil faces were staring at me.

With a Marlboro held high in one hand and a Miller High Life in the other, my monster mother drawled in her best drunk Southerner accent, “Boy, I think that stuff has affected your brain.” Everyone laughed. Everyone, that is, but her and me. Another monster asked if I was okay, and I nodded because I wanted them to stop looking at me, to stop thinking about me, to stop knowing that I was even there, because what I was seeing and what I was feeling was too personal to share with people whom I didn’t trust, even if I had been able to talk. It’s always mistrust that shuts me down, that balls me up, that makes me leave parties. It’s knowing that my reality isn’t “normal.” Yet, what is “normal” but society’s demonic child, and society is bullshit. All societies all the time are bullshit, and, that night I could no longer carry on the illusion of being an oh-so-normal person at an oh-so-normal party in an oh-so-normal society. This meant that there was there was no reason for me to stay, yet I was too balled-up to get out of my chair and, besides, I had no place to go.

Later, I found myself in bed, and out of the darkness came colors and patterns that flashed and revolved before my eyes. They comforted and delighted me all night long, and it was very good. When the darkness turned to gray, I went outside in the already muggy heat and sat atop a truck cab. There was a grove of water oaks nearby, and I watched them do a joy dance as the gray turned to blue and the sun moved down their branches. Then, other people got up, and called to me and looked for me, and when they found me, the trees no longer danced, and the kaleidoscope of night no longer comforted me, and I too had turned back into bullshit. People ruin things. That’s mostly what people are good for.

I have been blessed by hallucinogenics. I regret nothing. I would do them all again.

The art is called “Dizzy Thorns” and is by a fellow named Marcello from Potenza, Italy. Blow it up, and and stare at it for a few minutes. When the nausea, the fear, and the exhilaration become too much, you can turn away; but what if you couldn’t; what if it became your entire reality, and you didn’t know if it would ever go away?

About friendship

Until I was ten, my family lived in the country, and I substituted TV characters for playmates. My favorite program was The Huckleberry Hound Show, and I cried each afternoon when it went off.

I made friends readily when we moved into town, and I didn’t feel lonely again until I was in my mid-twenties. During the years when I had a satisfying number of friends, they and I visited one another frequently and without notice. I still miss that, but even at the time, I thought that some people carried it a bit far.

My high school friends and I came from low middle-class families and were under-achieving outsiders. I loathed wealthy, high-achieving insiders because they were snobs, yet I longed for them to like me. I have never gotten over my hatred.

After college, I discovered that people often lose friends to marriage. I can think of various reasons for this: (1) Your friend’s spouse will sometimes hate you—or you her; (2) Even if your friend’s spouse likes you, she will have first dibs on his time; (3) Jobs and children deprive people of leisure and spontaneity; (4) Our interests—and hence our friends—change as we age.

As I progressed through my twenties, I became increasingly lonely. I still had a few male friends, but I wanted more depth than I was getting, so I often felt bored and disappointed. I began having affairs, and these relationships were characterized by excitement, intimate conversations, and boosts to my ego. I therefore lost much of my interest in my male friends. As the years passed, I came to miss them, but not the women. Unfortunately, most of them are dead.

I tried to cure my friendship deficit in various ways. One thing I did was to get a pilot’s license because I didn’t want to move away from my house and land in Mississippi, and I thought that my social options would expand if I could fly. The problem was that my little Cessna was slow and easily grounded by bad weather.

I then decided that I wanted more than just friendship; I wanted people to share my life with, so I decided that I would like to live in a commune. I spent most of two years visiting such places all over the country. I wanted Peggy to go with me, but she wasn’t willing to give up the security of a job, so I went alone, and had her fly out whenever I found a place I thought she would like. Our desires were so different though that the place I liked most (an intensely personal international commune in NYC) was the place she hated most.

Then I found out about a new social movement called “polyfidelity,” which was defined as an egalitarian group marriage. Right away, I knew it was for me. Peggy wasn’t so keen on it, but she wasn’t closed to the idea either. The headquarters of the movement was in Eugene, so that’s the main reason we moved to Oregon. Within a week, I had more friends in Oregon than in Mississippi.

Peggy and I eventually became involved in a polyfidelitous relationship with a woman named Vicki who was a doctoral student in Minneapolis. We lived there for two years until that relationship failed. During my time in Minneapolis, I continued to have a satisfying number of friends. However, I was ecstatic to move back to Eugene where, again, both friendships and affairs flourished.

I soon founded a group called Family of Choice Network (FCN) that quickly grew to fifty members and sponsored two support groups and frequent social events. What I discovered about this group (and others since) was that I had no problem with finding enthusiastic supporters as long as they weren’t expected to do any of the actual work.

In the late ‘90s, things on the friendship front began to fall apart due to the demise of FCN and of the polyfidelity group that had brought us to Oregon. I also had a serious falling-out with my best friend, Walt, and, worst of all, I became involved in a peer counseling organization known as Re-Evaluation Co-Counseling (RC). I threw myself into the intensity of RC whole-heartedly, and became the darling of many people in the female dominated community.

Unfortunately I committed the cardinal RC sin of becoming romantically involved with two of my co-counselors, one of whom was an RC leader. When these relationships fell apart, I experienced severe anger, which I had imagined I could work through with the help of other co-counselors. Instead, I found myself shunned, and I became thoroughly disillusioned with RC and with people in general. During the seventeen years since RC, I’ve only had two affairs and one close friendship—all of but one of which ended badly. Nothing remains of my former idealism regarding the possibilities for human intimacy.

By contrast with my own friendships, Peggy’s friendships are characterized by an absence of drama and intensity, and whereas she never loses old friends, she sometimes gains new ones.

Aside from one male friend and three or four platonic friendships (I sometimes have trouble distinguishing a friend from a friendly acquaintance) with women, I have no face-to-face friends. I’ve substituted blogging friends to a large extent, but friendships with people whom I have never met and who live thousands of miles away have their limitations. Of course, face-to-face friendships have limitations too.

I would offer the following thoughts about friendship—sexual and otherwise—which are based upon my own mistakes and about which I’ll write in the first person:

It is important that I listen to what people say about their past friendships, because they will almost certainly behave the same way toward me—despite their insistence that they’ve changed.

I have always found that it’s a mistake to attempt to fix a friend even if she (so far, it has always been a she) asks me to.

I have had such bad experiences with people who are charming or charismatic that I’ve come to think of these traits as like fresh paint over rotten wood.

My worst mistake has been that I often mistook sex, drama, and intensity for intimacy. I have since come to realize that these things are usually destructive in the absence of commitment.

No matter how big and strong she makes me feel, I must never assume that I have the upper hand in a relationship with a woman because women have disillusioned me of that notion too many times.

I must never expect anyone to save me because they really and truly can’t, no matter how together they seem or how much they want to.

It is best to assume that other people are just as fucked-up as I, no matter how they appear.

Unless I am really intimate with someone, I must never ask him or her to give me more of themselves than they freely offer because they will almost certainly pull away.

The most trust that I can give to another person is to loan him or her money (I don’t mean just a few dollars for the sake of convenience), but doing so creates a lasting awkwardness in the relationship.

I can never know how someone is going to behave in a given situation until I’ve seen him or her in a similar situation—if then.

Most friendships are founded upon shared beliefs, interests, and geographical proximity, so I must be prepared to lose my friend when any of these change.

Even long-term friendships sometimes end, and I can’t always see it coming.

Having lost friends to death, I’ve concluded that it’s better to be more open, loving, and mature than I might sometimes feel than it is to be haunted by regret when it’s too late.

All friendships have limitations.

I know of no better gift than to take what my friend says seriously.

No matter how strong or prudent I am, intimacy is risky.

Bella

I called Mark’s office (Mark is my orthopedic surgeon) on Tuesday saying that my pain level was through the roof, and I needed to see him. His assistant called back and said that Mark didn’t think that would be necessary. I was seriously perturbed, but decided to give the pain another day or two before I insisted on coming in.

Peggy went out of town on Wednesday, which was just as well because I was awake nearly all night Wednesday night. I repeatedly lay down, but each time I did so, the pain drove me up again before I could get to sleep. Over a period of five hours, I took twice the prescribed dose of Dilaudid plus the maximum doses of oxycodone and Neurontin. I also drank some vodka, but I still couldn’t quiet the pain. It was a long night indeed, yet I wouldn’t say that it was an altogether bad night because, over the years, I have discovered within myself a fortress of serenity and optimism that the pain cannot penetrate. I don’t mean to brag, or to say that no amount of pain could reach it, yet I often stand amazed by my ability to remain upbeat against such a raw, unremitting, stabbing force.

I called Mark’s office Thursday morning, and was told that he could see me at 1:00. I worried about driving after taking so many drugs, so I asked Bella (at 87, she’s the oldest member of my atheist group) to chauffeur me. Mark checked me over pretty good, and then said that my excessive pain was probably caused by two things. One was overdoing my new exercises last week, and the other was the fact that narcotics simply don’t work for me anymore.

“You’re saying what I hoped you would say,” I offered (I had been afraid he would have to redo the surgery), and then I told him about all the drugs I had taken the previous night. Before I could finish, Bella chimed in, “Tell the doctor about the vodka. He’s not supposed to wash his narcotics down with vodka, is he doctor?” “Oh, my god,” I thought, “I’ve found myself a Jewish mother, and I’m not even Jewish.” (I think Bella was disappointed that Mark didn’t give me a hard time about the vodka or about piling on the narcotics.)

As we were leaving the office, Bella twice observed, “He’s really good looking, isn’t he?” Well, the truth is that I almost didn’t go to Mark because in his picture, he looked like what he is, a jock. Yet, I get along with him about as well as any doctor I’ve ever had. Two hours after I got home, Bella emailed me a list containing everything Mark had suggested. My new Jewish mother is just too cute.

"The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe...to be bad." Thoreau

This post was precipitated by an atheist’s blog in which the owner said she had donated blood for the people of the U.S. Bible Belt after last week’s tornadoes. I immediately wondered why she would give blood to people who wouldn't want their sons to marry her; who wouldn’t vote for her for any office whatsoever; who would do their damnedest to shove their religion down her throat while silencing her own beliefs; and whose enthusiastic acceptance of this country’s torture of political prisoners would imply that it wouldn’t take much encouragement for them to subject people like her to a similar fate. George H. Bush surely spoke for most Americans when he said: “I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.”

Other things that make me feel that I’m not a true citizen of the U.S. of A:

I know almost nothing about modern American music, movies, celebrities, or commercial television—and I would be embarrassed if I did.

The death of bin Laden. Aside from the fact that it’s in questionable taste to take to the streets to celebrate the death of anyone, bin Laden’s attack inspired us to: curtail our own civil liberties, waste a trillion and a half dollars, cause the deaths of 1.75 million people, and become a nation of torturers; so rather than gloat because we have at long last killed him, we should hang our heads in shame over the far greater evil that we have done.

The fact that America cares not a whit for the opinions of the cultured or the learned, but let Oprah Winfrey or Donald Trump express any opinion on anything, and you will hear of it. Only the opinions of the rich and famous matter in America.

Going to the library for a book on Thomas Paine (one of America’s most important founding fathers) and only finding two books on him versus a dozen on his shelf-mate, Sarah Palin.

The news media because it is a tool for marginalizing dissidents, and it succeeds very well indeed. I’ll give two examples from last week.

1) England’s royal wedding, strangely enough. It occupied a full third or more of the national news all week despite that fact that 328 Americans were killed and major portions of many towns were destroyed by tornadoes. If the news is to be believed, the whole country was absolutely gaga over that wedding.

2) A local cop’s funeral last week during which a 1,000-vehicle procession proceeded up and down the streets of the city for two solid hours creating major traffic jams. Surely I’m not the only one who thought the hype, the in-your-face machismo, and the unwarranted favoritism (others who die while serving the public good are not so honored), was absurd, yet you would never have suspected it from watching the local news.

Almost everything my government does. It’s as if the people who are running this country are hell-bent on its speedy destruction, and the voters are behind them all the way. I stand aghast at the way this country is run, not just sometimes, but all the time.

The myths that Americans hold about this country. For example: that we’re uniquely favored by god to be the pre-eminent nation on earth; that the free world loves us for protecting it; that we are a moral example to other nations; that everything about America is the best in the world; and that other nations are either completely for us or completely against us, with the latter being on the side of evil.

America is so in love with size and convenience that we ignore the most basic means of protecting the environment even when they would save us money. For example, recycling, composting, reusable shopping bags, fuel-efficient vehicles, public transit, minimal product packaging, and smaller homes on smaller lots. We’re betting this country’s future on the hope that advancing technology will make it possible for us to be wasteful forever, yet we give very little funding to developing that technology.

Our entire economy is built on permanent growth (i.e. more goods for more people forever), yet permanent growth is unsustainable. This is not a fact that Americans can acknowledge simply because Americans are obsessed with owning things. (We call it “retail therapy,” and our national motto is “Shop ‘til you drop.”) I would even suggest that we have basically two religions in this country. The most popular by far is consumerism, and its distant second is Christianity, yet this is not the order we acknowledge. Because I embrace neither, it’s as if I’m in a constant state of pissing on the flag, which, come to think of it, I am—I speak of what the nation has become rather than the ideals upon which it was founded.

In fact, the two things that I hate most in this world are the United States of America and Christianity, because while there are worse things, these are the two that are in my face everyday. Yet, the world’s best hope isn’t that my greedy, arrogant, wasteful, bankrupt, and warmongering nation collapses but that it evolves. I fear that the first is all but certain, and the second all but fanciful. I say this because America shows no signs of changing its ways despite the fact that it is very nearly eyeball to eyeball with destruction. To hell with future generations and even the earth itself, Americans want what they want, and they want it now.

I’m glad I’m practiced in misery

The day after I last wrote, my pain level went through the roof and has stayed there, prompting me to take a phenomenal number of sleeping pills and narcotics. The worse case scenario would be that I tore the tendon that had to be temporarily detached during surgery in order to reach the joint. This fear of re-tearing tendons is a major stressor that goes on for months following shoulder surgery. I’ll give the pain two more days before I call the doctor.

Fortunately, pain doesn’t get me down as bad as it once did. I well remember the days when I would sit in my recliner (I had to sleep in a recliner in order to sleep at all) in the wee hours and worry that if the pain got any worse, I would become hysterical. As you might imagine, that fear was harder to survive than the pain itself. Now, that I have a long record of survival, I can reassure myself that it’s unlikely that anything like that will happen.

Another interesting aspect (interesting to me, anyway) of all that I’ve been through is that it has probably left me less depressed than I’ve been in years. I certainly experience anger, fear, and sadness, but not ongoing depression. During the London Blitz, psychologists found that the depression rate of Londoners actually went down as their city collapsed around them. Obviously, that was a very different situation than my own, yet one commonality might be that pain and fear trump depression. After all, depression requires reflection, and reflection requires that one’s basic needs be realized.

Even among WWII concentration camp survivors, there appeared to be little clinical depression, presumably because the people were too busy surviving fear, sickness, overwork, exposure, and starvation, to ponder their deeper feelings. So it was that the suicide rate appeared to go up after liberation when the former inmates had sufficient comfort and leisure to consider the meaning of what they had suffered, and to mourn for what they had lost in terms of family, friends, wealth, and opportunity.

The UPS and DOWNS of chronic pain

I just came from the doctor, and he and I agreed that things are going splendidly following my shoulder replacement twelve days ago. This could mean that I’m one surgery away from being relatively pain free. Why, then, do I feel sadder than I’ve felt in a long time. To try to understand, I wrote “The UPS and DOWNS of chronic pain.”

THE UP: People will give you a lot of sympathy. THE DOWN: Sympathy has the shelf-life of bananas.

THE UP: You find out who your friends are. THE DOWN: You discover that you don’t have many.

THE UP: You will find friends among other people who suffer. THE DOWN: You wonder if you will still be friends if one or both of you stops suffering.

THE UP: You’re excused from making a lot of the difficult decisions about life that normal people make. THE DOWN: You don’t get the rewards that come from those decisions.

THE UP: You get to take a lot of drugs that have the power to make you feel pretty good at times. THE DOWN: If you’re in a lot of pain, you can hardly tell you took them, and in no time at all, you will have to take enough drugs to kill a normal person in order to feel even a little high.

THE UP: You always have something to talk about. THE DOWN: People don’t want to hear it.

THE UP: Pain is a school that teaches you that you’re tougher than you ever imagined. THE DOWN: The tuition is outrageous.

THE UP: You don’t have the energy or the desire to create a social face. THE DOWN: Your newfound honesty will often look like irascibility to everyone else.

THE UP: You accumulate an impressive store of medical knowledge about obscure conditions and treatments. THE DOWN: No one gives a damn.

THE UP: Against all odds, you are buoyed along by hope for a brighter tomorrow. THE DOWN: Like a sandcastle on the beach, your hope has to be rebuilt twice a day.

THE UP: No one can tell by looking at you how much pain you’re in. THE DOWN: Even when you try your best to describe it, no words are adequate.

THE UP: Your family will insist that you’re not a burden. THE DOWN: You know they’re lying.

THE UP: If nothing else stops the pain, there’s always death—if not now, then someday. THE DOWN: A life spent looking forward to death isn’t much of a life.

THE UP: Someday, you really might get past the pain, and then you will enter into a land “in which all things are made new.” THE DOWN: You will discover that this new land comes with a whole set of new problems.

In summary, even if I escape this pain, I know from within my own body how vulnerable I am, and how hard—if not impossible—it is to fix some things. How, then, can I ever live without fear, and how can I ever live without guilt that I don’t suffer when so many others do? My first real peer support was from Michelle at http://thesmallgodsshallbemyjudge.blogspot.com and Twinkle at http://elysianreveries.blogspot.com. Michelle will probably always hurt and has been near death a few times, and Twinkle is now in so much pain that she seldom writes anymore. For me to feel good when they cannot is to betray them.

Today, I heard on the news about the street fighting in Syria. Those who are wounded are afraid to go to the hospital because the police can pick them up there and murder them. They are therefore taken to private homes where they lie in agony in a city without water or electricity. Then there are the women in Africa who are shunned because of pregnancy-related incontinence; there are the abandoned pets that whimper in cages at the pound; there are the beasts of the forest that face starvation when they grow old; there are the women who are sold into sexual slavery; and there are the children who are forced to grow up in violent homes and on violent streets. So much suffering! So much suffering!

Please don’t think for a moment that I imagine myself to have risen to some exalted position from which I KNOW pain because ALL I can ever say is that I know what I have experienced, and whether by some imaginary measuring stick, it has been a little or a lot, it has been sufficient to change me, and, at this moment anyway, I just wish I could go back to the way my life used to be, because I don’t feel refined, and I don’t feel enlightened; I just feel broken, and I don’t think I will ever feel whole again.

On surviving yet again

Miscellaneous experiences and reflections

Three shoulder surgeries in 25 months. If you don’t think that sounds like fun, you really ought to try it sometime. This was my first joint replacement though, and recovery should be easier because less soft tissue was involved, and it’s soft tissue that takes forever to heal.

I remember getting a nerve block just before they rolled me into the O.R. at 7:30 Friday morning, but the O.R. anesthesiologist must have cold-cocked me the minute I arrived because I don’t remember anything after my gurney hit the swinging doors. I don’t even remember waking up in recovery or being rolled upstairs to my room.

Because I’ve lived on narcotics for so long, they no longer work well, so my first night in the hospital was hell. I had a PCA (Patient Controlled Anesthesia) pump that injected a xylocaine-like drug into my neck, but when the main block wore off in the middle of the night, the PCA didn’t touch my pain, so I was given intravenous morphine, Dilaudid, and oxycodone, all within ninety minutes and all without effect. Nurse Jen then called Mark (my surgeon) and he told her to double the Dilaudid, but even that didn’t help.

Jen then said “I don’t mind waking doctors up in the middle of the night, so if you think of something else that might help your pain, you tell me.” It soon hit me that I needed Neurontin along with the Dilaudid, so Nurse Jen woke Mark up a second time and got me a prescription for 900 mgs of Neurontin, and the two drugs together enabled me to sleep three hours for a two night total of seven hours. (Mark hates the drug, and he knows that I know this, so I laughed about him being awakened in the middle of the night to prescribe it.) As you might imagine, Saturday sucked, yet if I hadn’t suggested the Neurontin, no one else would have thought of it, and I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep.

Thirty-six hours after surgery, I could barely walk 200 feet, and I needed Peggy’s assistance to go that far. Twenty hours later, I came home and walked 2,000 feet all by myself. Today—three days post-op, I walked a mile.

I won’t take a medicine unless I know what it’s for, and this meant that I sometimes turned down medicines while I was in the hospital. If I asked a nurse what XXX was for, and she said, “I don’t know, but it’s on your schedule, so you need to take it,” I didn’t take it.

After I was put into a room, I was surrounded by seven machines of one kind or another, and I was hooked up to four of them around the clock. I literally couldn’t stand up to use my urinal without a lot of wires and tubes becoming entangled. Also, some of these machines had alarms that kept going off for no good reason. I finally insisted that the worst offender be disconnected, and after three hours of serious bitching on my part, it was.

My main physical therapist was an Aussie guy who didn't want to talk about anything but his diabetes and his desire to move back to Australia for the government run healthcare. I kept thinking: “I wish you were there now, dude; I wish you were there now.” If I had it to do over I would have asked for another therapist, but all it takes is a moment of weakness, and some selfish bastard will steamroll you every time. I’ll still complain about him, but doing so after the fact will be less satisfying.

I think that most nurses and doctors respect a patient more—and treat him better—when he’s not mindlessly compliant. As for the ones who are bothered by it, I assume they’re on a power trip, or else they’re so lazy that they resent being forced to actually think for a change.

I had my yearly physical just before my surgery, and, just for the hell of it, I called my internist “Doctor Kirk” (Kirk is his first name). I hadn’t called him by his title since I started going to him 21 years ago, and he looked flabbergasted. I interpret an insistence on being addressed by a title as indicative of a need to have people brown-nose you, so I guess it’s just as well that I’ll never meet the queen.

The anesthesiologist who performed my nerve block was so concerned because I’m “not narcotic naïve” (meaning that I take a lot of narcotics) that he came by twice on his days off to check on my pain level. I wanted to leap out of bed and kiss him. Doctors like that are to die for.

I’m pretty sure that a nurse stole some of my Dilaudid, but I believe you should be 99% sure before you formally complain about such a thing, and I was only at 98.5% (although I did mention my suspicions to her).

I’m sure that some of you wonder if I’m ever tempted to pray given that I’m in chronic pain and have had numerous surgeries. No, I’m not. When someone tells me that their oncologist had “given up” on their Aunt Matilda, but that god dropped by and healed her cancer, I think about how much more impressed I would be had god re-grown her missing leg, or eye—or even her missing toenail. Funny how religious people only pray for things that might happen anyway. Why is this, religious people? Why not ask god to raise the dead or at least re-grow teeth? I mean, jeez, how difficult could a bicuspid be?

Finally—and for the hundredth time—allow me to warn you against ever allowing yourself to be intimidated by a lot of diplomas and certificates, or by a bigger than life personality. I promise you, you will occasionally have an idea that is so brilliant yet so seemingly obvious that you will be appalled that the experts overlooked it. Yet, they did because even the most brilliant, caring, and educated people suffer from the all too human tendency of falling into a rut.

150 years ago today, the war started

Three months later, a soldier who was about to go into battle wrote the following letter to his wife.

July the 14th, 1861
Washington D.C.

My very dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days - perhaps tomorrow. And lest I should not be able to write you again I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing - perfectly willing - to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence can break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly with all those chains to the battlefield. The memory of all the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them for so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes and future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and see our boys grown up to honorable manhood around us.

If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name...

Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless, how foolish I have sometimes been!...

But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you, in the brightest day and in the darkest night... always, always. And when the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again...

Sullivan


A solid shot from a Confederate cannon tore off Sullivan Ballou’s right leg a few days after he wrote the above letter, and he died a week later. Soon afterwards, rebel soldiers exhumed and mutilated his body, which was never recovered. Sarah didn’t receive the letter until a year later when the governor of his state traveled to Virginia to bring home the remains of Rhode Islanders who died in battle.

Tell me, when you consider the history of warfare, which wars would you have been willing to die for? I wish I could look at what my nation has become and consider the 620,000 lives we lost in the Civil War alone to have been worthwhile, but I can’t. On one level, I envy the love that people like Ballou hold for this country, but on another, deeper level, I just consider them to have been suckers, well-meaning and heroic suckers to be sure, but suckers nonetheless. We don’t deserve what they gave. We never did.

America’s new IQ test

Test directions:

This is a pass-or-fail multiple-choice test that can be completed during a single TV commercial unless you’re a slow reader in which case it might take two.

So that you can get a higher score, most of the answers are correct, but where only one answer is correct, it’s so screamingly obvious that you’ll know it right away if you’re not a godless atheist, a bleeding-heart Democrat, or a smart-alecky foreigner.

There are eleven questions. That way you can throw one of them out if America's Most Eligible Bachelor comes back on before you’ve completed the test.

If you’ve ever voted for a president named Bush, you’ve already passed.

If you need to see the answers to know how you did, it means you failed.


Where are you most Sunday mornings at 10:00 a.m.?

1) Trying to find the door so I can leave the party.
2) Reading the Communist Manifesto.
3) Attending services at Calvary Baptist Church.
4) Having sex with my neighbor’s wife while he attends services at Calvary Baptist Church.
5) Listening to a preacher on the radio while driving to the Monster Truck Rally.

Which country do you hate most?

1) All of the ones that have a lot of ragheads.
2) France because the men talk like queers.
3) England. See France.
4) Canada because they think they’re better than us even though they waste their money on education and health care instead of investing it in nukes.
5) Australia because they have all those neat critters that can kill you, and all we have are a few candy-assed rattlesnakes and a half-dozen grizzly bears.

Which size should a patriotic American order no matter what the product?

1) Small
2) Medium
3) Large
4) Larger
5) As big as it gets

How many material possessions are enough?

1) No amount
2) An environmentally responsible amount
3) Twice as much as my stupid brother-in-law
4) One of every kind of gun, a two-ton Dodge Ram 4x4 with women on the mud flaps, and a lifetime supply of Coca Cola and Jack Daniels
5) Hugh Hefner’s house and broads

Which candidate would Jesus vote for?

1) Faggoty-ass Commie
2) America-hating Democrat.
3) God-fearing patriotic Republican
4) Green Puke Party slimeball
5) That Nader S.O.B.

Which of the following countries would Jesus nuke?

1) Monaco
2) Africa
3) France
4) Canada
5) All of the above because they don’t love him like America loves him

Which of the following might fit into a Glock?

1) M80
2) 9cm
3) 12 gauge 00 buck
4) .45 ACP
5) F-150

Who died for your sins to pacify a seriously pissed-off deity?

1) Oprah Winfrey
2) That heathen Arabb guy what the sand-niggers worship.
3) Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior and the Only Begotten Son of God
4) Nobody
5) All of the above

What do you love most about nature?

1) Having a place to dump old refrigerators for free
2) Shooting Bambi
3) Hugging trees
4) Driving my ATV over endangered wildflowers
5) Having a place to party where the neighbors won’t call the cops and where I don’t have to pick up the empty cans, bottles, and Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes

Where will you be when Jesus comes again?

1) Rising to meet him in the air
2) Sleeping in
3) Smoking dope while pouring beer over my Fruit Loops
4) Looking at Internet porn
5) Worshipping that heathen Arabb guy

What good is an education?

1) It helps you to find the word Republican on the voters’ ballot.
2) It’s a lot harder to read your Bible if you don’t know how to read.
3) Having an education means that you can make out the story that goes with the pictures.
4) Being educated is bad because atheists and evolutionists wouldn’t be that way if they hadn’t gone to college.
5) If you can’t read the menu, how are you going to get a job at Mc Donald’s?

Surgery day

I told the nurse that the patient whose room she had sent me to wasn’t Peggy. She said that it was Peggy, but I still had to look at the old, pale, and puffy woman in the bed for awhile to be sure (I had told Peggy just before her surgery that she looked sexy in her purple hospital gown--which she did). My advice to you is this: if you’re supposed to be in a beauty contest one night, don’t have surgery earlier that day.

While I sat by Peggy’s bed, I pictured us when we were in our twenties, holding hands while we ran for joy across the prairie in Saskatchewan (I remember that day because we were nearly struck by lightning). Now, we hold hands while we hobble into doctors’ offices. Well, we don’t exactly hobble, but we’re getting there.

The universe never promised us an easy life.

The universe never promised us a happy life.

The universe never promised us a peaceful end to life.

The universe doesn’t even know that we exist.

We live for no purpose, and then we die, and the fearsomeness of this thought is why people believe in god.

I’m scheduled for my first of four joint replacements, which means that Peggy and I will be one-armed together. The surgeon and I all but argued—over Peggy’s bed, no less—about which hospital to use for my surgery. I said I wanted to go to Sacred Heart because I could have a private room at no extra charge, and he said he could use his influence to get me a private room at McKenzie Willamette at no extra charge (I have good reason for wanting a private room). “Besides,” he said, “I can give you far better care at McKenzie Willamette.” “Then it sounds like a no-brainer to me,” I said.

Peggy is resting now. I held her hair out of her face while she threw up. How many times have I done that over the last four decades? I’ll tell you. Many.

I just took two stiff drinks. I hurt so much that it’s hard to care anymore what I take or how much I take as long as it stops the pain. I’m not supposed to take narcotics until after my surgery because if I do, they won’t work when, presumably, I need them most. Well, hell, they don’t work that well now. Nothing works that well now, but if I pile pill atop pill and use ice, I can at least sleep a little bit before I have to get up and do it all again.

You don’t think I complain too much, or that I complain without a good reason, do you? Pain is such a private phenomenon that I often wonder where I am on the scale of having a justifiable response. This might surprise you, but I think I handle pain better than most people, but it’s hard to know for sure.

I read from Camus’ The Stranger while I sat by Peggy’s bedside (the morphine made her doze, so I had a little time on my hands).

“He was wearing a soft felt hat with a round crown and a wide brim, a suit with trousers that corkscrewed down around his ankles, and a black tie with a knot that was too small for the big white collar of his shirt. His lips were trembling below a nose dotted with blackheads. Strange, floppy, thick-rimmed ears stuck out through his fine white hair, and I was struck by their blood-red color against the pallor of his face.”

When I was young, such passages were about someone with whom I had nothing in common. Now, they’re about how I will be in fifteen years. Sometimes, I wonder if I will even live another fifteen years. Come to think of it, that’s about the length of a dog’s life—if the dog lives to be fairly old.

Nurses can tell that I adore Peggy, and that touches them. I asked one of Peggy’s nurses today if she will be my nurse when I have surgery, and she gave me her home phone number so I can be sure she’s working that day. She said that if she’s not working that day, she’ll refer me to someone who is. Now, I have my surgeon, my anesthesiologist, and one of my nurses all picked out. My advice to you is this: if someone is good at what they do, stick with that person, and let them know that you respect them. You get better service that way. As you know, I was kidding about the beauty contest, but I’m being serious now. While I’m giving you advice, I’ll also suggest that you praise good workers to their supervisors. One reason for this is that they’ll feel beholden to you, and the other is that you owe it to them.

Do ever feel when you’re writing that, after every paragraph, you could go in a dozen different directions. How do you choose? I choose really fast because otherwise I get too bogged down.

Those two drinks—taken on an empty stomach—were too much. I thought they might be, but I found it hard to care. Now that I feel as if I too could barf, I do care, but it’s too late. Most wisdom comes after the fact, but since the rules about a lot of things are forever changing, after-the-fact wisdom isn’t necessarily better than no wisdom at all.

Upon cursing those who so richly deserve it

I rarely curse anyone, but have done so twice in one week. The first time was when I saw a man picking a bouquet of flowers in a public park. The second time was twenty minutes ago when I cursed Heidi, the medical office manager who lied to me last month about my insurance company and the federal government requiring her to collect mine and Peggy’s Social Security numbers (I refused to give them, so she had me pay upfront for an appointment I had waited two months for).

I can think of a few downsides to cursing people, but the one I find most influential is that, if they have the power to thwart me, they might be more likely to use it. This didn’t apply to the thief or to Heidi. As I told Heidi, I would be delighted if she didn’t refund my money because I would love to haul her lying ass into court. If there were a hell, it would almost be worth going there just to see some people I know getting what they so richly deserve. Of course, if Tertullian was right, one of the things that makes heaven heavenly is that "the saved" get to gaze into the fiery pit at souls writhing in agony.

The painting is Paul Gauguin's “Eve—Don't Listen to the Liar"

Omniscient docs have all my money, so I hope they'll be sweet as honey and make me frisky like a bunny

Story I

Dr A, an internist, confidently announced after a single office visit that my LEG PAIN was caused by Chronic Regional Pain Disorder, a degenerative disease that becomes so painful that sufferers have a pronounced tendency to go insane and/or kill themselves.

Dr B, a pain specialist, was absolutely convinced after a single office visit that the same problem was caused by a completely different horrible disease, syringomyelia.

Dr C, a neurosurgeon assured me that Drs A and B were both wrong, but since she had no idea what the problem was either, she gave me a referral to Dr D. Since the pain is showing some signs of getting better on its own, I haven't been to Dr D.

Story II

After ordering thousands of dollars worth of sophisticated tests, Dr E, an orthopedist, insisted that my BILATERAL SHOULDER PAIN was due to arthritis.

Dr F, another orthopedist, was just as insistent that it was due to torn rotator cuffs.

Dr G, my third orthopedist, unequivocally disagreed with them both, and confidently diagnosed another problem.

Dr H, my fourth orthopedist, completely agreed with Drs E and F but completely disagreed with Dr G.

Dr I, a neurosurgeon, suspected cervical cancer and cut through the front of my throat to get a piece of bone from the back of my neck. When no cancer was found, she said she was certain that a series of fluoroscopically guided steroid shots to my spinal cord—administered by her practice partner—would eliminate the pain. When they didn’t, I went back to Dr G who performed two shoulder surgeries, each of which required a yearlong recovery. I’m now in worse pain than ever.


I’ll share just one more story. Peggy had a cyst removed from her leg in the 1970s. The doctor put an airtight dressing over the incision and told us sternly to leave it in place until our follow-up visit the next week. We lived in Mississippi at the time, and it was August, so this sounded like a really bad idea to us, but we ignored our qualms because, as we told ourselves, he was a doctor and we were school teachers, so what did we know.

As we feared, the incision became infected. My point is simply that you shouldn’t put a great deal of faith in a doctor simply because he or she has a medical degree and sounds confident (if people treated you like God Almighty and threw money at you like it was confetti, you would sound confident too). As for “modern medicine,” well, the term has a nice ring to it, but you’ll recall that the modern medicine of one era is the primitive blundering of the next. You’ll also recall that “modern medicine” labored for millennia in ignorance of bacteria and viruses, and that the original appeal of homeopathy lay in the fact that it was SO innocuously worthless that it didn’t regularly kill people as did the modern medicine of the early 1800s (buy me entire carton of a “powerful homeopathic remedy,” and I’ll drink it in front of you). This meant that instead of having to survive both the disease and your doctor’s ministrations, you only had to survive the disease.

I’m far from suggesting that you should feel discouraged though. After all, no drug or procedure is a complete failure if you live to tell about it, and if you don’t live to tell about it, well, your doctor at least succeeded in ridding you of your problem, so you’re actually a winner either way.

A potpourri of generalizations about the irreligious

I went into atheism kicking and screaming, but many atheists found it easy to give up their religion because it never made a lick of sense to them, and because they didn’t think that living forever sounded so great anyway.

Even today, if someone could prove to me that god exists—and that he is good—that person would find me most appreciative, but then I would feel the same way if he convinced me that I had won a billion dollars. Neither prospect appears very likely.

I’m actually glad that no one ever tries to convert me, because it would bore me to rehash the same old tired arguments for god's existence. Yet, for someone to say that I’m going to burn in hell forever if I don’t believe in his particular version of god, and then to spend no time at all trying to show me the error of my ways does seem strange. Maybe such people recognize the paucity of their arguments, or maybe they just don’t like me well enough on earth to put up with me in heaven.

Believers sometimes ask what I’ll say to god after I’m dead if it turns out that I was wrong. Well, if I were standing at the edge of the proverbial fiery pit, I might brown-nose for all I was worth, but if I were honest, I would have to say, “I’m very surprised that you exist, but since you do exist, allow me to point out that you’re sure one sorry-ass excuse for a deity. The main difference between you and Satan is that Satan at least knows he’s evil.”

When I was a child in Mississippi, I often heard white people say that black demonstrators had no reason to criticize the way they were treated. When believers tell me that I have no reason to criticize religion, I remember those white people.

An atheist won’t think you’re more evolved because you claim to be spiritual rather than religious. He’ll just be grateful that you lack organizations through which to oppress him. Likewise, he won’t take it as a compliment if you tell him that he’s “too spiritual to be a real atheist.” Really, he won't.

Likewise, an atheist won’t think you’re “sensitive” because you believe in magic and mysticism; he’ll just think you’re so jaded that you can’t appreciate a real wonder unless you populate it with creatures of fantasy.

I sometimes wonder if most religious people aren’t just pretending to love god because they’re afraid of him. I would even suspect that most religious people secretly hate god because they have books that portray him in one way, yet the world around them—over which he presumably has complete control—is the other way.

Atheists think the same way about god that they think about Bigfoot. They don't categorically deny his existence; they just take the complete lack of evidence as a bad sign.

Most atheists spend zero amount of time fretting over your beliefs about god. What they fret about is that so many of you are determined to force your beliefs about god on society, only to scream that you’re being persecuted if anyone objects.

Most atheists do think that the world would be better off if no one believed in god because religion is a major—if not the major—cause of hatred, alienation, and war. Believers don’t seem to notice the harm caused by religion, or if they do notice it, they blame it on other people’s version of religion rather than the concept of religion.

Few atheists think religious people are more moral. In fact, most of them believe religion to be a hindrance to morality because religious people place their holy book or guru above fairness and compassion.

I think people are religious for psychological reasons. The world is often unjust and capricious, and the universe as a whole places no value upon our lives. Religion claims that the opposite is true, and this makes it attractive.

Scandinavia is known for its low crime rate, its high standard of living, its reluctance to wage war, its environmentally responsible lifestyle, and its irreligion. America is known for its high crime rate, its worsening standard of living, its warmongering, its pollution, and its religiosity. This same pattern is repeated in the parts of America that are the least religious compared to the parts that are the most religious, and it is repeated everywhere else in the world. Does this maybe suggest something to you?

Upon entertaining atheists

Saturday’s atheist group was the first that I unreservedly enjoyed, partly because we have finally gone from having one existing member to every four new members, to having four existing members to every one new member; and partly because I have stopped trying to be the perfect host. When you host up to three events a month, you just have to give up on having your dust bunnies symmetrically arranged. Here’s my report on last night’s meeting, and on the people who attended.

Steering Committee: We met an hour before the scheduled meeting, and discussed ways to handle our growing membership. We also decided to sponsor a support group for people who have been emotionally harmed by religion. This group was my idea, and I had done a lot of planning for it, so I assumed I would be in charge, but Mary volunteered, so I turned it over to her. This was hard for me, but since I’m forever ragging on everyone to take more responsibility, I felt that it was necessary. If we don’t attract enough support group members from our total membership of 73, we will reach out to the community at large.

The snacks. They were excellent except for some stale nuts. I tasted them in advance, and knew they were stale, but didn’t have the guts to say so to the man who brought them. I won’t do that again.

The drinks: Wine, juice, pop, and gin. I initially thought the gin was wine because it came in a corked bottle that was shaped like a wine bottle, so I poured myself a large glass, and ended up drinking it all. Since I’m well past the age when it seems cool to act loaded, I faced somewhat of a challenge.

The topics. Intuition—what is it; does it exist; how can it be explained; and are women more intuitive than men? Morality—if you’ve always been told that religion is the sole source of morality, what happens when you give up your religion? Dialogue with believers—how should atheists address issues of faith, prayer, purpose, and so forth, and does the abrasive approach of many of the so-called New Atheists alienate more religious people than it awakens?

The members:

Marian. She’s autistic and, at twenty, is our youngest member, yet soon after she joined, she had the guts to challenge a loud, large, and arrogant sixty-year-old man when he said something that didn’t make sense to her. I wish I had had such courage when I was her age.

Bella. At 88, she’s our oldest member and a treasure chest of experience if not of wisdom. If someone hasn’t spoken much, Bella will start trying to draw him or her out. We’re going to devote a major part of our next meeting to hearing Bella talk about anything she wants to talk about.

Steve. He has a gift for taking unpopular positions and calmly using his encyclopedic knowledge to turn them into teaching opportunities. I think his IQ is probably off the chart, but I would say the same about a few others. I rather doubt that I’m the smartest person in the group, but I have some good excuses for it.

Lee and Robin. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses until a few years ago, and this puts them in an excellent position to teach the rest of us about cultish behavior. I also enjoy the fact that Lee plays the role of the intellectual male and Robin the emotional female, yet they give every appearance of using these differences to complement their marriage—I know they use them to complement our group.

Bob and Mary. They both strike me as intensely emotional, although they wear a patina of calm. They’ve been together for a long time, and seem to have a happy marriage. If I had to use one word to describe them, it would be steady. Bob hosts our movie night, and Mary is going to host our support group. If the group ever needs a bouncer, I’ll appoint Bob because he’s the kind of guy who don’t take no shit from nobody.

Ruth. She gives the word ebullient a whole new meaning because she’s so childlike in her excitement despite her nearly six decades. She hosts our group’s game night, but her political activism often competes with her participation in other group activities.

Larry. He nearly always comes to meetings, but he seldom speaks unless someone asks him something. When he does speak, he expresses himself well and makes good points.

Victoria. She reminds me of a bird that seems ever poised to fly away, yet when she’s present, she brings good energy and interesting perspectives. Last October, she loaned me five extra chairs for the group’s use, and she hasn’t asked to have them back, so we’re still using them.

Richard. Although tonight was his first meeting, he acted like an old timer whose opinions were valued. I wish I could feel that wanted when I’m among strangers.

Kurt. He’s a man of depth, but he seldom speaks unless someone asks him something.

Edwin. He’s relatively new; he said little; and he left early, so I have nothing to say about him.

Rachel (a child). Brewsky (a cat). Bonnie (a dog). Every meeting should contain these three because they emit a sweet, casual and homey ambiance.

Blank and Blank. They were no shows. I hate it when people stand the group up because I have limited space, and this means that they might knock someone else out of coming.

Four hours and twenty minutes passed between the arrival of the first person and the departure of the last, yet I was sorry that they didn’t stay longer. That was a first for me.

Better no title than an obscene title

I am going to share the following experience to make a point.

On February 8, I went for my appointment with a neurosurgeon whom I hadn’t seen before. The receptionist handed me a form that asked for, among other things, my SS#* and Peggy’s SS#. When I refused to give these due to concerns about identity theft, the receptionist said that she needed them in order to bill insurance. I knew that this wasn’t true, so I refused to give them a second time. She then said I would have to pay for the entire doctor’s visit before I left, and that she would then bill insurance and reimburse me when payment was received. This contradicted what she had just said, but I saw no point in arguing with someone who wasn’t in a position of power, so I agreed to make the payment, and sat back down.

When a half hour passed, and I still hadn’t been called by the nurse, I went back to the receptionist and asked to speak to the practice manager about the SS# requirement. As I was making this request, my name was called, so Peggy and I left the front desk and were shown into an examining room.

After several minutes, a woman who introduced herself as Heidi came in. Heidi was the kind of person who just naturally inspired trust, and this made her well qualified for the lies she was about to tell. She said that both my insurance administrator (HMA) and the federal government required that I provide mine and Peggy’s SS#s. I told Heidi that I had a number of doctors and none of them had these numbers. She said that her office’s contract with HMA stipulated that it obtain them for payment purposes.

Heidi also said that I could still see the doctor if I paid for the visit in full, and that she would bill HMA, and reimburse me when she received payment, although she doubted that HMA would make payment unless I provided our SS#s. When I said that I had already agreed to pay after I saw the doctor, Heidi said that the doctor wouldn’t see me unless I paid first, so Peggy went back to the front desk and did so. When the doctor came in, I took the matter up with her, and she said that patients who decline to provide all requested information always leave without paying.

When I got home, I checked with both the federal government and HMA to verify that neither of them required that I provide a SS#. The HMA representative said that the doctor’s office probably just wanted the information in order to track us more quickly if there was a billing dispute. In other words, the doctor wasn’t content with my photo, my birthdate, my phone number, my driver’s license number, a copy of my insurance card, and contact information for Peggy’s employer; they also wanted the very last piece of information that an identity thief would need.

Now for my point. The most common means by which identity thieves operate is through insiders in medical offices, yet every form I fill out when I see a new doctor asks for information that the doctor doesn’t need but which gives identity thieves every last piece of information that they do need. I never provide SS#s, and no other doctor has insisted upon them. The fact that I was the only complainer in that large waiting room suggests how foolishly compliant most people are. In my case, I live with pain; I had waited two months to see this doctor; and I had spent $650 on a test she had ordered, so this would have made me more vulnerable to her unreasonable requirement had I not hardened myself against such things.

Just over the past ten years, I have seen businesses of all sorts rush pell-mell into invading their customers’ privacy and stripping them of their legal rights. For example, more and more stores are requiring the customer to provide his or her name, address, and phone number in return for an I.D. card that allows him to buy products on sale. These cards allow the stores to track his every purchase so that they—and the companies they sell the information to—can better target their advertising.

Where I live, at least, you can no longer buy a car without first agreeing to binding arbitration if a problem develops, and the dealer even reserves the right to pick the arbitrator! When I protested this, I was told that it was a government requirement, and that I was the first customer who ever had a problem with it. I later verified that these were lies to get me to fall into line, yet dealers couldn’t get away with such outrages if most customers didn’t fall into line, and it is this very mentality that disturbs me far more than the requirements themselves. Everyday, we give up more pieces of our privacy and even our basic legal rights, and I see no end to it as long as most people don’t have the guts to say no to unreasonable demands.

I have filed complaints about Heidi’s lies with the SS Inspector General, the Oregon Dept of Justice, and the Better Business Bureau. I have also asked my credit card company to wipe the charge from my bill. When I think of something else to do, I’ll do that too.

*A Social Security number is an individualized nine-digit number that is used for various government related purposes. If someone has your name, your SS#, and your birthday, he can steal your identity.

March 30 update: After demanding that I pay the FULL COST of the visit upfront, Heidi turned around and billed insurance for twice that amount. I went ballistic, and today she refunded ALL of the money I paid in the apparent hope of getting me off her back. My insurance company will still pay through the nose, but that’s by their choice not mine.

Things I love—a sequel to “Things I hate”

I love Peggy. She is kind and wise, and the best thing that ever happened to me.

I love baking crackers, cornbreads, and biscuits. I also love making soups and pancakes.

I love to write. I also love to read but not nearly as much as I love to write.

I love my new cat, Brewsky—aka Fuckface when Peggy isn’t around (“Isn’t that just like a man?” she would say.)

I love it when Peggy massages my shoulders each day.

I love the fact that, although I am in pain, I can still see, hear, and get around.

I love it that pain has made me stronger.

I love it that modern medicine has kept me alive when I would otherwise be dead.

I love camping with Peggy in remote areas.

I love learning about rocks and native plants.

I love oatmeal and mayonnaise but never together.

I love it that age has enabled me to give up most of my idolization of women. I love it that Peggy stayed with me during all the years before this was true.

I love having Ellie for a neighbor.

I love to dig. If I had my health back, and if digging didn't make such a mess, I could do it everyday simply for the joy of it.

I love living in the city instead of in the country.

I love it that I bike more often than I drive.

I love Peggy’s room, especially her “rabbit shrine” and her glass crystals that catch the sunlight and throw hundreds of rainbows.

I love PBS (Public Broadcasting Service).

I love a lot of Western movies and TV shows from before 1960 and a few after 1960.

I love it that I’m mostly unconcerned about what people think of me.

I love being able to do almost anything to a house that needs doing.

I love how much Peggy enjoys her button collection. I also love how much she enjoys her music collection and her Christmas ornaments.

I love my blog buddies.

I love Busby Berkeley dance numbers.

I love the beach, the desert, the forest, and the mountains.

I love keeping my house clean, orderly, and in good repair.

I love dark chocolate.

I love the bliss of narcotics in the middle of the night when pain awakens me.

I love the taste and the warm glow of hard liquor.

I love Baroque music. I also love cowboy music, both old and new.

I love the sound of an electric guitar.

I love my dog, Bonnie Blue, and I love my memories of dogs that have died.

I love cuddling in front of an old movie with a bowl of popcorn on a cold night.

I love having gained in prudence, knowledge, and wisdom over the years.

I love spring, summer, and fall.

I love coffee, strong and black.

I love making my yard look nice.

I love going to the nursery with Peggy to buy plants for our garden. I also love it when we go to Costco and say we’re having a “date.”

Herding cats

Part 1

When I took over leadership of my local atheist group, about six of us met irregularly. The first thing I did was to organize a regular monthly meeting. I also worried a lot. I worried that the group would fail, and I worried that its failure would be my fault. I thought I would feel better if I organized a steering committee to share the responsibility. Along with the regular meeting and the steering committee, we now have a monthly movie night, a monthly game night, and a bi-monthly book group. You might think I would feel better, but you would be wrong. I was so overwrought after our meeting on Saturday that I had to take even more pills than usual to get to sleep, and then I was awakened by nightmares.

In one, I was driving a car in which all 72 of us were riding. I had no idea where we were or even where we were going, but I didn’t want to admit it, so I kept trying to get my bearings by looking at road signs. Because I was going a little fast, I missed a curve. We ended up in a large flat area and came to a stop facing the way we had come. Still not wanting to admit my ignorance, I said I was just turning around.

In another dream, we were all in a house overlooking a river. I decided that maybe we were overlooking it from a bit too close, so I went outside and looked under the house. Sure enough the river was running under part of it, and although the house was built on posts, they didn’t look too substantial, and I worried that the house might fall into the river. When I turned to go back in, I saw that a mountain lion was stalking me, and I knew I would never make it to the door. I yelled for help, and when someone opened the door, I told her to bring me a gun. “Which one?” she asked. “Any of them!” I yelled, and woke up.

Part 2

The youngest person in our group is a teenager, and the oldest is eighty-seven. We’re equally divided according to gender, and nearly everyone has at least one college degree. Of the religious backgrounds represented, I only know of the following: Mormon, Mennonite, Unity, Jehovah’s Witness, Orthodox Jew, Baptist, Church of Christ (me), Roman Catholic, and one person whose parents were atheists. I’ve no doubt that many others are also represented, but I have no idea what they are.

The steering committee met before the regular meeting on Saturday, and one of the items on the agenda concerned how to handle group business between committee meetings. I had been doing it with the thought that the committee could overturn anything they didn’t like, and I rather suspected they would want me to continue, which they did. Later, I thought that I would be just as happy if two or three people shared the responsibility with me, but as soon as I thought that, I realized that for me to do it alone saves a lot of time.

The thing I’ve hated most has been facilitating our regular meetings, both because I’m shy in groups and because atheists tend to buck authority. It’s even hard for me to facilitate the steering committee. Two-thirds through the one on Saturday, someone asked me if we were covering everything I wanted covered. I laughingly said: “Oh, I gave up on that ten minutes ago because directing you people is like herding cats.” That must have pleased them because they stayed on track for the rest of the meeting.

If I were screwing up, the steering committee wouldn’t be so agreeable, yet, as I told them, I don’t want anyone to think of me as a leader in the sense that they either have to get along with me or leave the group. Rather, I want them to think of me as a leader whose goal isn’t to dominate but to serve. They said that is how I come across.

Part 3

Madalyn Murry O’Hair actually did lead American Atheists by force of personality. She could dominate hundreds of people just by walking into a room. I heard her speak at LSU (Louisiana State University) one night. She trashed Christianity in the most vulgar terms before a largely Christian audience that sat in speechless horror. When she finished, she didn’t exit through the wings as speakers usually do, but down the center aisle. I thought, oh, my god, they’re going to beat her to death, but they made a path for her that was wide enough for five people, and the only sound I heard was that of her heels striking the floor. I was reminded of Moses parting the Red Sea.

The trouble with Madalyn was that she needlessly alienated a whole lot of people, many of them atheists. She saw herself as the epitome of what a self-respecting atheist was supposed to be, and if you had a less confrontative vision, she considered you a coward. Because of her harshness, one of her followers founded The Freedom from Religion Foundation, which is now much larger than American Atheists. Another problem with Madalyn was that when she died, her organization nearly folded. That’s just how it is with personality-dominated groups.

Madalyn liked my writing and, as a result, she asked me to call her Grandma. That was definitely one of the high points of my life because, say what you will about her, she was one smart, quick thinking, and courageous cookie. She lived for the cause of advancing atheism to such an extent that it would make the pope and Billy Graham together look like pikers.

Part 4

Ah, but I can hear some of you saying: “See there, atheism is just another form of religion,” to which I would say, “Define religion.” If you mean a faith-based worldview, atheism is not a religion. I would even suspect that, to most atheists, atheism isn’t even a means to end (as is most religions), but simply one result of a worldview that values evidence and rationality. In saying this, I don’t mean that religious people value ignorance and irrationality, but that they hold faith as a superior means of knowledge, at least in matters of religion. My challenge to them is: “But how do you know that faith is superior?” If they say, “Because I have faith that faith is superior,” they’re into an infinite regress.

Any claim to the superiority of faith over evidence and reason can’t be disproven by evidence and reason. This is why—in the short term anyway—atheists can only reach believers who are susceptible to rational argument. True believers literally don’t care about evidence and reason (although they might use it in an attempt to persuade the ignorant). For example, if it were possible to prove conclusively that the entire Bible was written by some prankster, it wouldn’t matter in the least to them. They would just say, “That was how God chose to bring us his word,” or, “God allowed Satan to create false evidence in order to test the faithful.” Afterwards, they would believe even more strongly than before. Faith isn’t just belief in the absence of evidence; faith is belief despite the evidence.

Upon shooting politicians

If I was outraged when Congresswoman Giffords was shot, surely it behooves me to ask myself how I would have felt had G. W. Bush been shot when he was president. What Americans are supposed to believe is that if they dislike one elected official, they should work to elect another. But what if you think the official you dislike is single-handedly taking your country down the toilet? The fact is that I would have liked it A LOT had Bush been killed. The only thing I would have liked better had been if his entire cabinet died with him because it wasn’t Bush the man whom I cared about but the policies of the Bush administration.

But what of those today whom—benighted though they appear to me—see Obama as being as evil as I saw Bush? I could say that nearly all of the harm Obama is said to be doing will almost certainly be overturned after the next election, whereas George Bush left generations in debt, started two unnecessary wars, and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. If I explained this to the Obama haters, would they be likely to agree that the politicians I want to see dead are worse than the politicians they want to see dead? But of course, when hell freezes over.

It’s almost a moot argument anyway because the odds of killing a president—much less a president and his cabinet—have gotten harder over the years (JFK was riding right out in the open through the streets of a city that largely despised him). Senators and Congressmen are another matter though. Any of us could kill one just by checking our local newspaper to see when she’s scheduled to appear at a nearby event, and showing up to shoot her. Imagine how scary this must make it for elected officials who support abortion, gun control, healthcare reform, or any other issue that makes the right lather.

But do right-leaning politicians not have just as much to fear from the left? Probably not. That’s an politically unpopular opinion, of course, but political popularity isn’t related to truth but to the desire to win elections. As nasty as the left can be, I don’t recall them putting crosshairs on opponents’ districts, threatening to exercise their “second amendment option” (for non-Americans, that’s the amendment that has to do with gun ownership), or talking about taking their opponents “out.” Neither do they have rabid radio talk show hosts egging them on 24 hours a day.

Be that as it may, if one side of the governmental aisle feels itself in danger of being assassinated, then it’s reasonable for the other side to get uneasy too, so the most outrageous rhetoric will no doubt be toned down, at least by the politicians themselves and at least until the next election, because if there’s one thing we can trust our elected officials to do, it’s to take care of themselves first, and that’s true of the right and the left. After all, it’s not their lifelong government subsidized healthcare they argue over; it’s ours.

For those who care, the Glock in the photo is similar the one used in Tucson but with a laser scope. I chose this photo because it also shows an extended clip similar to the one used by Loughner. Four extra clips are also pictured.