How to convert an atheist

First the bad news. No one can convert an atheist unless that atheist is poorly schooled in atheism. Otherwise, converting him—to Christianity, for example—would require not just changing his mind about one belief (God=Christ, Jehovah, and the Holy Ghost) but about the scores of assumptions that underlie that one belief. Believers are generally unaware of these assumptions. I know a Christian blogger who claimed to have converted three atheists, yet she confessed that she had never known an atheist who wasn’t thoroughly arrogant and overwhelmingly obnoxious—me more than most. If you think all atheists are alike, please allow me to disabuse you of that notion.

I’ll tell you frankly that atheists tend to be smart, educated, liberal, and mistrustful of authority. After that, they are very different from one another. I don’t even like most of them, but then I don’t like most people. Some atheists don’t view atheism as important in their lives. These tend to be the ones who grew up in households that were either atheistic or nonreligious. For those like myself who took religion seriously or suffered from the oppression that comes with living among religious people, atheism tends to be extremely important. I think about it everyday, and it influences my thoughts in more ways than you can imagine. I would even say that atheism is as important to me as religion is to a devout Christian.

Far from being simply a negation of other people’s beliefs, it is the backbone of my worldview because it makes it necessary for me to create meaning in my life. By contrast, believers have meaning handed to them on a platter, although how most of them behave is so much at odds with what they claim to believe are the two great greatest commandments (Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor—including your enemy—as yourself) that their bad behavior would be facetious if it didn’t cause so much pain. For example, all of America’s recent presidents have been Christians but with the exception of Jimmy Carter, this has never stopped them from slaughtering people by the thousands.

I hold atheism to be a very personal and precious aspect of my life, and I embrace it without regard for anything or anyone other than my desire to know and speak the truth. If I am wrong, then I am wrong, and any God worth is his salt will give me credit for having done the best I could. On the other hand, if many of you are right in holding that everlasting hell awaits me at the hands of a vengeful deity ("…the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you…”), then I would ask you if you can in good conscience really and truly worship a being that would send an honest man to hell. If you say yes, then I would respond that any God who performs acts that are considered despicable when done by a human being* is better suited to play the demon in The Exorcist than to be worshipped as the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, and I am glad not to have made his acquaintance.

I am sometimes asked why I write about atheism and religion so much. It’s because they’re important to me, and because decades of study and reflection have made me qualified to express an opinion. Atheism lies beneath many of my thoughts in many areas, and religion represents to me a very great evil—possibly the greatest—and I want to warn you about it even if you hate me for it. My question to you would be, given that you think so highly of your God, why don’t you write about religion more? Could it be that, although you think God should be important in your life, he really isn’t?

Now for the good news about converting atheists.... Sad to say, but I lied and led you on just as you might have expected a dirty little atheist** to do. You see, there is no good news about converting atheists. All of your arguments are as old as Methuselah and have already been considered and rejected. The only thing you can do for an atheist is to help him fight the oppression of those who claim to worship the same God you do. Do this one thing for me if for no other reason than that, if religious fanatics come for me today, they will come for you tomorrow if they decide that you too are an enemy of their private deity. Atheists are simply at the head of the line of people who—for the good of society—must be re-educated, locked-up, or eliminated.

*http://www.nobeliefs.com/DarkBible/DarkBibleContents.htm

**Teddy Roosevelt, an American president, referred to Thomas Paine (who is pictured at the top of this post), a guiding philosopher of the American Revolution, as "that dirty little atheist." Roosevelt's view was that all of the good a nonbeliever does is meaningless. A recent president, George H. Bush denied that atheists are citizens, or that atheists who distinguish themselves for valor in combat are patriots. Consistent with such hatred, some American states have laws preventing atheists from holding office or even testifying in court. Believers often claim that religion is a private matter, but this is not the case if you're an atheist in America because you are hated and discriminated against everyday of your life.

How to Keep a Lid on Your Pussy in Twelve Easy Steps

When I got Brewsky 18 months ago, I resolved to rid him of those failings that are so regrettably common to both cats and women, things like vanity, aloofness, selfishness, disloyalty, obsessive grooming, and a perverse refusal to obey simple commands. In short, I resolved to do with him what I have failed to do with Peggy after 42 years of unrelenting effort—I resolved to make him into a good dog in the hope that he would serve as an inspiration to her.

He is only influenced by immediate punishment, and even then the effects only last two or three minutes, after which he returns to doing the same thing for which he was punished. This is where technology is useful. For example, I installed an alarm system to keep him off the kitchen countertop. When I leave the room, I flick a switch and if he jumps up on the counter while I’m away, three diesel-strength airhorns emit 185 decibels of sound simultaneously. Except for urine on the countertop, cabinet doors, and sometimes the ceiling, this works amazingly well because he knows he can’t wear down technology the way he wears down flesh and blood people who have more to do in life than control a recidivistic cat.

Breaking him from burying his shit has proven to be a greater challenge. As I observed him in his toilet one morning, I reflected upon how pointless it was for him to bury that which I would have to dig up anyway, so I resolved to cure him of the habit. To accomplish this, I began carrying his litter box to whatever part of the house I was in, and when he would start to bury his poop, I would run at him screaming while using my Deluge-a-Kitty Water Cannon™  to knock him right out of the box and into whatever wall, chair, or table was within his line of travel. Now, he only shits in his litter box when I’m asleep or away from home. The rest of the time, he shits on my pillow. On the one hand, I have been largely successful in preventing him from burying his poop, but on the other, things haven’t worked out quite like I planned.  

I have also had excellent results in getting him to sleep during the night instead of keeping me awake by miaowing loudly while running full-tilt throughout the house (after which which he would sleep all day while I stumbled drowsily into walls). My method consists basically of locking him in a room with a vacuum cleaner everyday (he’s terrified of vacuums), and connecting the vacuum to a timer so that it will turn on for a few moments every fifteen minutes. Now, he’s the one who stumbles drowsily into walls, only he does so at night while I'm sleeping peacefully.

These are just a few examples of the kind of work I have done with him and the outstanding success I have achieved. If you would like further ideas, feel free to buy my $30 book How to Keep a Lid on Your Pussy in Twelve Easy Steps. You will find it anywhere good books are sold, which basically means that if you'll send me a check (certified only, please), I’ll send you a link to a Word document.

In closing, I feel it only fair to inform you that Brewsky appears to be losing his mind, as you might have guessed from his haunted expression. He cries piteously for hours, drools, refuses to eat or groom himself, and spends his every waking moment staring in transfixed horror at the same empty spot on Peggy’s bed. I suspect that the problem is hereditary, but since he was a shelter cat (I wanted a dog, but Brewksy was half-price so I got him instead), I have no idea who his parents were, so this is mostly conjecture based upon the absence of environmental stressors.

The point is to get woke-up, not fucked-up

I’ve written several times about the effects of marijuana, but for each piece that I posted, there were five that I didn’t because I know that many of you have little patience for the subject. This means that when I do write, I need to make it good, yet there’s nothing harder to convey than an experience that is completely alien to others, especially when they might judge it harshly, as is often the case with my posts about drugs and atheism. 

As you go through an ordinary day, how many new thoughts or insights do you have? I have few to none when I’m straight, but I’m awash in them when I’m high. I become so adrift within myself that I never know what new shore I’m going to land upon. I find myself visiting several per hour, and the rapid-fire intensity of my visions leaves me exhausted.

One person speculated—probably whimsically—that pot might lead me to God. I actually do have experiences that are akin to mysticism, and I enjoy them, but because I don’t believe in spirits, I don't interpret them spiritually. I’m open to seeing God, but so far I’ve only seen a succession of demons. That was 30 years ago, and I didn't believe they were real even as I was looking at them, although they still scared the hell out of me (ha). More recently, I all but see music, and I do sometimes see my surroundings pulse and shimmer. Often the drug starts by enveloping me within a heavy cloak of fear and anguish, which usually gives way to such an absorption in my thoughts that I completely lose contact with the external world. To better convey the profundity of the drug, I'm going to share what a friend wrote about her experience as she was nearing the end of a bad marriage.

“I was really losing it because I didn’t know what came next; I only knew I was, by necessity, going to be losing everything and walking away from it all. My son offered me some weed…. I smoked my first bowl in 30 years…and suddenly my life looked completely different. Suddenly, I could see inside. I understood. I am not talking about the delusions we consider that seem profound at the time, but that in reality are just that—delusions. These were very real revelations about myself, and along with those revelations came the emotions, the insights, the tears, the rants, the guilt, the anxiety, and finally and essentially…the very real ME I had been keeping hidden away for years….”

Unfortunately, marijuana increases right-brain depth and self-honesty at the expense of left-brain learning, memory, and problem solving, so I mostly use it when my left brain isn't too busy. I also need to be able to stop whatever else I'm doing to write because writing becomes my obsession when I'm high. Unfortunately, very little of what I put down is ever read by anyone, including myself, and this leaves me feeling more lonely and discouraged than I might otherwise feel, but it can't be helped. As Schopenhauer wrote:

“There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.”

In my fantasy, all of you are here with me, and we're high. Only what do we do next--go to our separate computers and blog? Well, why the hell not? I would argue that in most cases, writing is superior to speaking, if only because it gives a person time to reflect and, hopefully, to go deeper.

About the photo. The film canister contains unground flower buds (the most desirable part of the plant); the jar contains ground flower buds that are ready to smoke; and the silver thingy is a grinder. The open-top container holds matches. The pipe was made decades ago by a friend and is about as basic as it gets, but I don't smoke a lot. I mostly simmer marijuana in butter (the odor is so strong that it spills into the yard even with the windows closed) and then use the butter to make small sugar cookies that I cut into quarters, one quarter of a cookie being as much as I would ever want. Two quarters are pictured.

About blogging

I have 262 followers. Some are dead; some have deleted their blogs; some haven’t posted in years; many if not most never left a comment on my blog. Here’s the thing about blogging. You could post nothing but underexposed and out of focus pictures of driftwood, yet you could still have 800 followers and sixty laudatory comments per post if you did nothing all day but leave flattering comments on other people’s blogs. I used to receive 25-40 comments per post, but I became overwhelmed by guilt because I felt obligated to visit everyone who left a comment, and I couldn’t do it, at least not without spending my days on the Internet, so I all but stopped, and, no surprise, most people stopped visiting me.

The most recent person I know who gave up blogging was Jane Gaston. She hadn’t posted in nearly a year when she returned for two months. Last week, out of the blue, she deleted her blog. Back when awards were popular, Jane gave me several, and she often told me what a great writer I am. Now, she’s gone, and I have no way to contact her and no reason to think she wants to be contacted. I took our friendship personally, but it ended impersonally with a post that basically said: It’s been fun, but I’m outta here; bye. That was her right, of course, but it sure hurts when someone up and disappears. Just so you’ll know, I plan to be here, as the saying goes: " 'Til death does us part."

About the picture. Yep, that's where I write, and, nope, I didn't straighten things up before I took the picture (which is why the mouse is off-center on its pad, and the file cabinet isn't closed all the way). I bought the little rabbit for a friend, but liked it so much that I kept it. The paint-by-number painting was in my family when I was born; no one remembered who did it or when it was done. As a boy, I often lay in bed pretending that I lived in that painting. The small photo is of Peggy, and the gold-rimmed plague above it reads:


I love Snow 100 million, billion, trillion, times over. I love him sooooooooooooooooo much. He is the best man, and I love him. 


                                                                         Peggy


    Love 
                     Love 
                                       Love 
                                                         Love
                                                                          Love


Given that she hates to write, I think you'll agree that Peggy does pretty well when she has the urge.

Peggy: sixty years worth, ten years at a time

1952. That's Peggy's sister on the right. Dianne was (and is) timid, whereas Peggy was (and is) tomboyish. You might have guessed this from their body language.
















1962. As I was looking at this photo trying to think of what to say about it, I had the thought: "I could just eat this little girl," but I realized it might be interpreted sexually when what I meant was that that I want to use my body to build a fort that would protect her from all the sad things that have since happened in her life, many of them caused by me. Even that doesn't capture what I feel when I look at this picture, but it's the best I can do. The sweetness, alertness, kindness, shyness, playfulness, innocence, tomboyishness, and femininity in her face is, well, when we talk about the sacred, I feel like saying, "But I feel the sacred all the time. Looking at this picture is one of those times."





1972. By now, we had been married six months, but hadn't known one another a year. This photo was taken on a canoe trip on the Pearl River near Jackson, Mississippi. I'm sure I put Peggy up to the pose because she was too shy to do such things naturally, and our relationship was still new, after all, despite the fact that we were married.











1982. We were building a shed at our home in Mississippi, and Peggy appears to be having an amiable interlude with a nail--either that or she's asking it not to bend when she drives it into the oak lathing. She insisted on the un-carpenter-like apparel and wouldn't wear anything on her feet but sandals. One day, we were splitting wood, and she dropped a large piece of post oak on her foot and broke it--the foot, of course. Silly me, I thought this meant a speedy trip to the hospital, but Peggy said, "I'm not going with my hair dirty," so I held her erect while she showered.


1992. Peggy was on figure skating teams in Oregon and in Minnesota. She then got into downhill skiing, and it and mountain climbing became her passions. I tried skating. skiing, and mountain climbing, but didn't care for them.












2002. Even I have summited the mountain in the photo, but it's a little one that you can scramble up. You've got to be willing to work hard and risk death to get up the ones that are technically challenging and prone to bad weather. Peggy couldn't get enough of them, so I became her support person, going on training hikes with her and keeping camp at trailheads. Mostly, though, she and a half dozen men (few women climb) would go off and leave me home, and that was fine with me. The red thing in her hands is an ice axe. It's good for probing for crevasses, climbing steep snow or ice, and self-arresting when you fall (you will fall).

2002. Those are cross country skis. Peggy and I did this together a fair amount, and we also snowshoed a little, but she found them boring compared to the excitement of downhill skiing, so she was forever going off with another carload of men to Hoodoo Ski Area or Willamette Pass. I don't like snow, so I don't miss cross country skiing much, but I would still like to go occasionally. Mostly, when we were going, we would simply drive to where the road was closed by snow and take a day trip from there. We have snow camped, and we have also skied to fire towers and spent the night in them. This photo was taken on a day trip, You can tell because the pad is too short for lying down (it's for sitting on), and the pack is too small for carrying everything we would need to camp. Bonnie was five in the photo. She's now 14 1/2 and blind. She still likes to play fetch.

2002. If the slope below her was as steep as she's making out, I doubt that Peggy would be holding her cap in her hand, yet she did go on rope climbs that people have been dying on for decades. Like many of Oregon's Cascades, this particular mountain has a bad reputation for "rotten rock," meaning rock that either comes off when you pull or push on it, or else falls on your head for no reason other than that your luck was bad. People have climbed Everest only to die in Oregon because mountain climbers aren't interested in safe mountains. I didn't like for Peggy to climb dangerous mountains, but it was in her blood, and I've never imagined that I had the right to tell her what she could or couldn't do (I subscribed to Ms Magazine for her when it appeared in the early '70s, but I was the only one who read it). I would be at a loss how to handle a subservient woman. On the one hand, it sounds sexy, but I don't know if I could respect her. I want influence, not control.

2012. Sad to say, but Peggy no longer engages in any strenuous activity, probably because of arthritis more than anything. She just took up drinking coffee, so in the photo she is having her daily brew of 3 parts vanilla soy milk to one part strong coffee. We try to find campsites with a good view and that (except for the road we drove in on) are so closed in by terrain or vegetation that we can let Bonnie roam freely. The thought of losing a 14 year old blind dog in the wilderness is simply too horrible to contemplate. You can see that we camped directly on the road, confident in the improbability of anyone coming.

Despite the fact that Peggy is the breadwinner in our family and has enjoyed a lot of traditionally male activities; she is all woman. And despite the fact that my bedroom is pink, I cry more easily than she, and my father was a transexual; I am all man. We have always given one another the freedom, and even the encouragement, to transcend traditional gender roles. Perhaps, this was made easier by the fact that we have always known who we are.

Brother Stewart and the unpardonable sin

I was delivering newspapers on my bike one afternoon while throwing a hissy fit at God. I was twelve years old, and my first doubt had occurred a year earlier. A hundred more had joined it, but my focus at the moment was God’s inexplicable failure—inexplicable if he existed—to keep his Biblical promises; for example, “whatsoever you shall ask in my name, that will I do.” It was the first time I used profanity during a prayer, and I was laying it on thick as I railed at God for his interminable silence in the face of my desperate entreaties for a reason to believe. I still remember the very spot upon which I felt the horrific fear that I had probably, not more than a minute past, committed the unpardonable sin—a sin that, oddly enough, the Bible mentions but doesn’t define. I was so burdened with fear for the next three years that I was sometimes on the verge of panic, which was why I finally drove out to talk with Brother Stewart. When he seemed sleepy and distracted and made no attempt to draw me out, I let pass my one shame-laden attempt to share my angst. I never blamed him for this because he was too good a man to blame for anything.

Why would a preacher become an atheist?

The usual scenario is that a Biblically naive young person goes away to seminary with an interest in religion and a devotion to God. For the first time, he (usually) studies the Bible from a critical perspective. Doubts are born, but he prays for faith and does his best to push them away. Two decades later, he has been a minister for 18 years, and his doubts have multiplied. At long last he is forced to admit, at least to himself, that he has become that vilest of filth, that most loathsome of vermin, that veritable dung of Satan: an atheist.

Unfortunately, his job requires him to worship a specific triune deity, and the same church that endorses his paycheck owns his house. His parents, his wife, and his children, are probably religious. He has no training in anything but religion, and his every friend is committed to religion. If you were that person, what would you do? I think I would leave, and/or shoot myself, and/or go crazy. I might even build a new and deeply rewarding life based on rationality. Some do.

The men in the 1967 photo are Church of Christ preachers who had come together for a county-wide revival in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Three of the six were from the area, and I knew them well. I was 18 at the time, and had been struggling to keep my faith since I was eleven, yet I still envisioned preachers as residing in that rarefied realm referred to as "Men of God." I was so enamored by the group shown that if someone at the revival had dropped dead, I was certain that the combined prayers of these six men could bring him back.

Buford Stewart is second from right. When his little country church offered him a raise, he turned it down because he wanted to embrace God's ideal of voluntary poverty. I slept with him--platonically--when he took me along on a revival to Kentucky. The man on the far right is Norman Miller who took me to Indiana on another revival. They loved me, but if they were still alive and ran into me today, their version of the "God of love" would command that they turn me over to him for the everlasting agony that, in their view, I would so richly deserve.*


*"And whoever shall not...hear your words, when you depart out of that house...shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment..." Matthew 10:14-15. 

Superbly designed functionality

The steel “sanitary tee” shown to your left carried the waste from my house's kitchen sink and clothes washer for 57 years. I am so struck by its beauty and its importance to the history of this house that I’m going to keep it somewhere, if only in the crawlspace. There is simply nothing more gorgeous than superbly designed functionality, especially in an object that has been on the job for generations. As I sit gazing at my tee, I think of the plumber who installed it, what a different world he inhabited in 1955, and what a different trade he practiced.

There were no plastic plumbing pipes back then, only steel and copper for water; steel, cast iron, and concrete for waste. Much of the steel pipe had to be cut and threaded at the jobsite. I sometimes helped my father do this. The cast iron fittings weren’t threaded, and had to be sealed with oakum that was first driven into the joint and then covered with molten lead poured from a dipper. I sometimes helped my father do this as well. I didn't realize that I was seeing the end of an era.

Today, I laboriously removed lead and oakum from where a steel pipe entered such a fitting. I then put a rubber seal onto the end of a new ABS plastic pipe, inserted the new pipe into the fitting, drove the seal snug with a hammer, and voilà, I was done.  The old ways and old materials are sometimes beautiful, but the new ones are usually better, and so it is that I cast my vote for the new even while remembering the old with respect and affection. After all, the fitting in the photo served the people who lived in this house for a lot of years.

“…superbly designed functionality...” One argument against the existence of a divine creator is that we ourselves are so poorly designed that we start falling apart as soon as we reach physical maturity. If the eye—as many claim—is so superbly engineered that only a super smart deity could have created it, why are we all wearing glasses?

Back to work

I’ve spent weeks preparing for two plumbing jobs under the house. In olden times, I would have taken measurements, bought my materials, and set to work, all on the same day. Now that I’m in pain and out of shape, I’ve been planning every detail with the goal of making the jobs as easy as possible, mostly through breaking them down into manageable portions, and trying to minimize how much I will have to crawl around under the house on any given occasion. 

I’m now through with my planning, purchasing, and pipe preparation, and I’m just waiting for good weather to crawl under there, lie on my back in dripping sewage, and remove three 1 ½ ” galvanized drain pipes with a circular saw that will be running inches from my face and burning my scalp with sparks. Oh, the joy! I love hard and dirty projects as much as I love going camping with Peggy. They make me feel like a man. They give me a chance to use my skill and my intelligence to accomplish something that I can stand back and look at with pride for as long as I live in this house, which might very well be until I die.

Peggy has pleaded with me repeatedly to hire a plumber, but the job might suck either way. If I hire someone, I’ll feel that much worse about myself; I’ll miss out on work I enjoy; and we’ll be out hundreds of dollars. If I don’t hire someone, I risk causing myself weeks of pain. Peggy doesn’t understand how important such work is to me because to her it just looks like something hard and filthy that's best left to someone else, no matter what shape one is in. To me, it's what I need if I’m to find value in being alive.

I wrote the above a few days ago, and did one of the jobs yesterday. I spent five hours straight under the house because I had the clothes washer and kitchen sink disconnected (during my next project, the whole house will be disconnected), making it necessary to see the job through. I could have crawled out to take breaks, of course, but I wanted to spare my joints, and I could best do that by not by crawling anymore than necessary. I’m excited to report that I had a good night last night. I was awfully sore, but my joints were no worse for wear. I’ve been slowly getting better for a couple of months now, and the work I did yesterday far exceeds anything I’ve taken on for years, joint-wise. I am becoming guardedly hopeful.

Both photos are from yesterday. I'm not through hanging pipe in the top picture, but I am through replacing it. Peggy took the second picture when the job was done.

Why I am not an agnostic

The short answer is that I consider the possibility of the existence of a supernatural deity to be zilch. I could be wrong about this, but I could also be wrong about Bigfoot, although I very much doubt it. This leads me to ask what percentage of certainty a person needs to call himself a theist, an agnostic or an atheist. Would 51% do? 

I don't recall spending any time as an agnostic on my way to atheism. Until age 11, I was a believer, and I remained a believer even after I came to hold the God of the Bible in contempt. I proceeded to atheism in my mid-twenties because I found it harder to envision God as a weakling or an asshole (all supernatural versions of God paint him as one or the other) than to renounce his existence.

Emotionally, I would still like to believe that I am immortal, protected, guided, and that my life has an ordained purpose, but intellectually, I no longer try because I’ve examined all the supposed evidence and found it fanciful. Only a personal experience would touch my unbelief in the least, although I wouldn’t necessarily accept that as valid. After all, I’m capable of hallucinating, so if I were to hear or see an entity that my investigations had determined to be imaginary, my impulse would be to doubt the experience rather than to doubt my investigations.

In some countries, the hands of God-worshippers are dripping in blood. In the U.S., the Christian community generally stops at insults, threats, and social, economic, and legal discrimination, but vandalism and physical violence also occur (I was rapped on the head for not standing for prayer while on jury duty). Given Christianity’s bloody past and its widespread meanness even today, I believe that the only difference between the dominant face of Christianity in America and that of Islam in the Middle East is that America’s laws provide significant protection for a diversity of believers and nonbelievers. Unfortunately, this protection must be endlessly safeguarded by lawsuits against those who would make America a theocracy. As I see it, there are three kinds of Christians: those who are clueness regarding religious oppression, those who carry out the oppression, and those whose silence implies that they consent to the oppression. Because it would be a small step from making Christianity our state religion to enacting restrictive laws against unpopular forms of Christianity, I’m at a loss to understand the certainty on the part of believers that a Christianized America would only present a problem for non-Christians.

The sign in the photo (from the Freedom from Religion Foundation website) was one of four erected at taxpayer expense by the city officials of Sylvania, Alabama. Government-sponsored, Christian-specific displays and observances are commonplace in America despite the fact that they violate the law. If any Christians object to them, they do a good job of letting nonbelievers take the heat for speaking out.

A welcome outing

The pain has let up enough lately that Peggy and I took a two-night camping trip to the nearby Willamette National Forest, a tract of land the size of New Jersey. We had planned to stay in the vicinity of Elephant Rock, but one lane of the road had fallen off the mountainside a mile from our destination (the road is shown in the first photo—note the horsetails growing in the nearly vertical slide area), so we walked to it instead. That night, as always, we slept in the van on an abandoned logging road. The next day, we set out for Windy Pass, but snow turned us back at 4,100 feet (1,250 meters), so we decided to drive to the top of a small mountain for the night. Near the summit, a crosswise section of the road had sunk considerably (photo two—the gray area at the top of the photo is where the sinkhole reappears), and Peggy had to hit the brakes hard to keep from running into it.

We are accustomed to deteriorating roadways along with other backcountry travel hazards. For example, I frequently have to clear the road of rocks, and I carry a bucksaw and loppers for fallen trees and branches. Yet, our most common challenge is that the downhill side of a road will have slumped in preparation for collapsing altogether. Logging roads are often too narrow to avoid driving over slumps, so since Peggy prefers to drive (leaving me free to navigate and to remove obstacles), I will sometimes get out and guide her. If she’s worried that the road might collapse while she's on it, she’ll have the dog get out too. As she drove over one such slump on this trip, the van was so tilted that the rear wheels slid sideways. I would prefer that she be the one to get out when there's danger, but Peggy's unwilling to give up the driver’s seat unless there's much maneuvering to do. I tell her that I will never live down the embarrassment of headlines that say, "Local Man Saves Self, Allows Wife to Perish in Horrific Fall from Mountainside," but Peggy is nothing if not obstinate.

 

Our 3/4-ton van only has two-wheel drive, but it’s high off the ground and will take us down some hellacious roads if there’s not much mud or snow. We learned early on that it’s worthless in slippery conditions due the fact that there’s not enough weight on its backend to give it adequate traction. On one occasion, we made it most of the way up a long icy hill only to slide nearly to the bottom. As we slid, the van started to leave the roadway in the direction of a precipice making it necessary for me to jump out and push it sideways to keep it from going over. I don't know how much good I actually accomplished, but it was all I could do. Peggy kidded me about abandoning her and the dogs, but if the van had fallen, it would have taken me with it.

You might wonder why we drive such bad roads. It’s because we value solitude. On our recent trip, we didn’t see or hear anyone from the time we left the paved road on Wednesday until we regained it on Friday, yet we were never more than 35 miles (56 km), as the crow flies, from town. In fact, we could sometimes look back and see town with its metro area of 352,000. I spent most of my life in the country before I realized that I’m a city boy at heart. Even so, I need wilderness, and Oregon gives me that. Of course, in real wilderness, there are no roads, but my days of faring hard and liking it are over. In fact, we came back from this trip so sore and tired that I’m wondering how much longer we can continue to camp. It’ll be a sad day when we have to give that up.

All photos are from this trip, and were taken in the Old Cascades, a 40-million year old chain of igneous mountains that parallels the younger High Cascades, several volcanos of which are expected to erupt again (Mt. Saint Helens being a recent example). The columnar basalt rock formation and the waterfall in the bottom two photos are unnamed because such beauty is so commonplace in Oregon that it's considered unworthy of note. Waterfalls in particular often number several per mile, although most of them are seasonal. The flowers in front of the one pictured are coltsfoot. 

Cancer testing, the tale continues

Peggy had a migraine and was exhausted when we left the urologist's office (see photo), so when we got home, I rubbed her back until she went to sleep, but as I was tiptoeing from the room, I broke a piece of pottery and had to rub her back a second time. She couldn’t return to sleep, so we talked about her fears of me having cancer—if I have cancer—and possibly dying. I like it when Peggy shares her fears, but she worries that they will scare me, although I don’t remember a time when this was so—I can anticipate problems as well as she can. I tend to focus on percentages, so the better they are, the less scared I am. Peggy is so afraid of cancer that this doesn’t work for her. Some other disease might be easier.

I’ve had two previous cancer scares, but Peggy is more afraid this time, maybe because it’s the first time that I too thought I might have cancer. In fact, I wouldn’t have had my last two biopsies if she hadn’t insisted. They were both big deal biopsies that just scared the shit out of me—especially the one where the neurologist cut through the front of my throat to get a piece of bone from the back of my neck. Those two times, I just knew I didn’t have cancer. Feelings don’t constitute proof, so I recognized that I still might have it, but my natural confidence was such that I couldn’t get beyond seeing cancer as a remote possibility not worth the risk of a biopsy.

The more I learn about doctors and hospitals and the bad things they can do to a person, the more I try to make sure their proposals are necessary. Of course, when a book, the Internet, or a government panel’s report (like the one this week), tells you that a PSA-based biopsy (a PSA is a blood test) puts you at greater risk of harm than of good, and your doctor (along with two different urological organizations) tells you the opposite, whom do you believe? I should think the government panel would at least be objective in interpreting the data, whereas the urologists have a financial incentive to be biased--note that I said "biased," not dishonest. It’s also true that a person just naturally tends to believe in what he does all day. For example, Peggy is a nurse, and if the government had also announced that some standard nursing procedure did more harm than good, I’ve no doubt but what the nurses would be as enraged as the urologists. It’s hard to admit to yourself that you’ve been hurting people for years while trying to help them. Yet, none of this necessarily means that the government is right and the urologists wrong, nor does it take away my own doctor's power to influence my decision making. If I trust a doctor, I will generally do what he says—I just might not do it right away.

I’ve grown accustomed to orthopedists and neurologists, but this was my first urologist. Peggy went with me to the doctor as she always does (I do the same for her). She usually sits in the corner and says little, but today she sat between the doctor and me and read from a list of questions she had prepared and had me type. My first observation was that the waiting room was filled with old men, some with their wives, and I felt like I had walked into my next new club—Old Fuckers Who Dribble. I had known for some time that age would bring increased pain (even children know that it brings increased disability), but I hadn’t considered the indignities of aging. Old people have the kind of problems that gross out young people who are themselves certain that they will never have them. I reflect upon the fact that these indignities come to everyone if they live long enough, and this enables me to better accept them. Then too, death seems so near at times that nothing much matters to me anymore other than the fact that I have to fight to stay alive because I don’t want to leave Peggy alone.

I was prepared to mistrust Doug because statistics go against me trusting any new doctor (which is why I cling to the ones I do trust). He also works in a clinic with lots of other urologists, and I expect large clinics to be impersonal, rigid, and take a one-size-fits-all approach. As it turned out, I’ve never had a better first impression of a doctor. Changing doctors is a pain in the butt, so this meant a lot to me. He said that my odds of having cancer are 25-35% and suggested that I either go ahead and have a biopsy or, if I’m on the fence about the biopsy (prostate biopsies are another big deal kind of biopsy), that I have a blood test called a “free PSA” and base my decision upon the results. I jumped at the PSA. I don’t need government reports to tell me that I live in a test-happy/surgery-happy society in which I don’t dare subject myself to risk without doing what I can to avoid it or at least mitigate it.

Peggy and I have long agreed that it would be better for me to have cancer than for her to have it because she's so terribly afraid of it. She also fears death more than I. Yet as I see it, the one who dies has things relatively easy because the survivor will have suffered with him or her until the end at which time the survivor will embark upon an an even worse period of suffering while alone. I’ve always had doubts that I would survive without Peggy, but I always thought she would pull it together without me. To my surprise, things right now are so hard for her that I’m unable to console her. Yet, I’ve seen her handle loss before, and she always pulled herself together, so I think it likely that she will get her sea legs under her this time too.

It’s interesting how unpredictable Peggy is to me even after 41 years. Of course, none of us really know how strong we will be until we’ve been tested, and that’s mostly hindsight. Each new bad situation is never quite what I expected. There’s always fear, pain, anger, despair, and so forth, but it’s never the same fear, pain, anger, and despair because no two situations are ever the same. I’m not the same either, but at least I’m tougher than I used to be. Now, I just try to sit quietly and watch it all go by. 33,000 Americans die of prostate cancer each year, and another one is diagnosed every two minutes. I think of each of those men as being all alone in his own movie theater, just as I am all alone in mine. It’s the human condition. We can never feel another person’s life from the inside, so we are forever separate.

I’ve already gone through so much that a little more isn’t likely to hurt me unless there’s some unfortunate medical outcome. With every new ailment, there are new and interesting things to learn, and the tests and surgeries are often quite interesting too once you get past the fact that you might bleed a lot, will probably be in pain, will be exposed to noxious substances, and might very well die. I have grown increasingly able to make the best decision I can and to let it go at that, although I’ve lost faith that everything will go right because it's usually the case that so many things can go wrong, that there’s a pretty good chance that one or more of them will go wrong.

I panicked when I realized what a crapshoot modern medicine is even when everyone performs at their peak, but I’ve gradually grown fatalistic. The worst part is when I’m having trouble deciding what to do. For now, I know. If the free PSA test comes back bad, I’ll have the biopsy. That’s as far as it makes sense to plan right now. Yet, it’s emotionally hard to stop studying, and the subject is interesting if wearisome. 

You're not likely to see me buying any lattes

I was born frugal. I was also born clean and orderly. My dedication to the last two items has sometimes left people speechless because, as I suppose, they consider me neurotic and don’t want to risk setting off a crazy man. But have people ever given me hell about my frugality! Some of my happiest childhood memories are of taking my 25-cent allowance down to the polished marble of State Bank where hot-looking tellers treated me like a man. What do my detractors remember? Throwing away money on crap they didn’t need and didn’t even want a week after they got it, and that's assuming they didn’t break it on the way home?

My father-in-law, Earl, overlooked my drinking, my atheism, and my hippie fro. Likewise, he said nary a word about my screwing around; was silent regarding my inability to hold a job; didn’t flinch when I put my marijuana pipe in the sink for his wife to wash (although he flinched a little when I played Back in the USSR just for him); and never complained about me being kicked out of the Air Force after he had pulled strings to get me the assignment I wanted; but he has harangued me for 42 years because I save money. He had another son-in-law who declared bankruptcy, and I sometimes wonder if Earl ever bitched at him. The last time he was on my case was the last time I saw him, naturally, when he looked at me quite somberly in the presence of four other people and suggested that a lead coffin wouldn’t protect my money from the fires of hell. Okaaay! He’s a Baptist deacon, and I’m pretty convinced that heaven isn’t where most of them are going, so I’ll just have to bow to his expertise.

Given her father’s attitude, you’re probably wondering how Peggy feels about my frugality. Well, she’s frugal too, which makes it a little odd that Earl never criticizes her. She makes noises every now and then about splurging on something, but she doesn’t have it in her to truly go overboard—knock on wood. Like me, if there’s something she really wants, she gets it. Also, like me, she buys better than average quality (it’s seldom sensible to buy the very best), but we’re people with simple tastes. We’re also people who tend to anticipate bad things happening and to prepare for them. Money is a great protector from much that can go wrong in life—it’s literally a lifesaver in America where the government and insurance companies have no problem with allowing people to die by the thousands in what politicians call, “the most generous nation on earth.” If Peggy and I weren’t frugal, she couldn’t have cut back to working part-time several years ago, and she sure couldn’t be planning to retire in two years.

The biggest difference between us regarding money is that Peggy is more likely to buy something on the spur of the moment (“I’m going to treat myself,” as she puts it), whereas I usually think about a purchase for anywhere from a few days to a few months. The usual result is that I lose interest in buying it. When I do buy something on the spur of the moment, I regret it more often than not. For example, I bought a scented oil diffuser last month. If I had thought the purchase over for a few days, I would have remembered that Peggy and I often have opposing scent preferences, but as I stood there in that shop, I made a decision to allow myself to ride a wave of emotion. I justified this by telling myself that I was being childlike when what I was really being was childish. Now, I’m sorry I abandoned my usual prudence, and I regret owning something I don’t want but don’t have a great way to get rid of. My country is facing bankruptcy and my species is burning through the earth’s resources like there’s no tomorrow (which might be true given how we behave) because most people are improvident, and my purchase, small though it was, exemplified that.

I suppose Earl must think I'm denying myself too much, but I actually have no desire to spend money on anything I don’t already own except for a few items that cost so much they’re no brainers. For instance, I wouldn’t mind having a new van to camp in and a new car for Peggy to go to work in simply because I would anticipate them being more dependable than our old ones, but our ’93 Chevy and’98 Camry look good, run fine, and have less than a hundred thousand miles on them. I would also like to build an addition onto the house so I could maintain a resident masseuse to massage me in the middle of the night when the pain wakes me up. Travel? No, it’s too much work; there's no place I want to go that I haven't already been to; and I would miss my house, my cat, and my dog. I wouldn’t mind an occasional train trip maybe, but there’s no place in the world I had rather be than the Oregon coast, mountains, and deserts, and each of those is within a two hour drive....

I just thought of someplace I would like to go. I would like to have a private pilot fly me to cities with world-class gardens, museums, and plant conservatories. A chauffeur would pick me up, take me to an elegant hotel, and then drive me back and forth until I had seen everything. Too bad I can’t afford a live-in a masseuse or luxurious trips to art museums. As for new cars, I wouldn’t pay what they cost. Other people do, and if they think a new car is worth a year’s labor not counting interest, that’s fine with me, but to put it out there in all its bluntness, I would feel like an idiot.

Something else that strikes me as so outrageous that I can’t imagine doing it is gambling. I drove through Vegas once and stopped long enough to take a look at the inside of a casino. While there, I thought, what the hell, I might as well gamble, so I put a quarter into a slot machine, cranked the handle, and lost my quarter. I grieved for that quarter all the way to Fresno because I violated my integrity by gambling with it. Of course, I’ve known quite a few responsible people (hi, KJ) who liked casinos, but they seriously weird me out. Gambling is sort of like paying someone to hit you over the head and then feeling like a winner whenever they happen to miss. That’s what happens in casinos; you lose, lose, lose; then you win a little; and then you brag about your winnings to all your friends as if to suggest that you outsmarted the bastards. Yeah, sure you did.

When I started taking money out of banks and putting it into mutual funds, Peggy, remembering how bummed I was over that quarter, worried that I would freak-out completely if we should lose thousands. Well, we’ve lost entire years of income a few times by now, but it wasn’t me who freaked out. I handled it better than Peggy simply because I’m less of a pessimist than she, which is really saying something. Anytime we lose money, I try to hold onto the thought that it’s a temporary glitch, whereas Peggy concludes that it’s the first day of The Great Depression II. Now that she’s planning to retire in 25 months—right when the nation, if not the world, seems poised to go down the drain financially—I must admit that losing money hurts more than it used to.

There’s no getting away from the fact that you can do the very best you know how and still get screwed simply because life isn’t fair. Like turtles crossing a road, some of us come to a much worse end than others, and it’s not always because we behaved worse. The advantage of frugality is simply that you better your odds (sort of like a turtle who crosses the road quickly versus one who takes his time). I’ve often been told that I can’t take it with me when I die, as if a person’s goal should be to spend his last dollar on the day he stops breathing. No thanks; I had rather leave a little to charity. I donate some money already to civil liberties, animal welfare, public broadcasting, and environmental groups, but hardly enough to hurt. Since it looks like charities will still be needing money when I’m gone, that’s when they’ll get the bulk of mine. Until then, I might need it myself.

I guess I've made it clear that Earl isn’t the only one who’s judgmental regarding money. It’s just too bad that the only thing he and I agree on is that it’s better not to gamble, although he would argue that the stock market IS gambling. Now that I've become convinced that this country is racing out of control atop a highway paved with greed and stupidity, it is starting to feel that way.

The photo is of me with my fourth most expensive possession (after the house and vehicles). It cost $1,900 several years ago, and that was money well spent.

“Cowardly little atheist finds God 20 minutes after being told he’s dying”

I know. You saw it coming, but you haven't heard the details, so here goes. I made the following to-do list when my second PSA came back:

1) Run in circles while screaming and flailing my chest with my fists.

2) Find God so I check item number one off the list.

While I was still on number one, Peggy said, “You’ve done this same stupid running amuck display for years now, but am I imagining it, or is this the enhanced version? Also, did it ever occur to you that the reason your shoulders hurt all the time is that you’re forever swinging your arms?”

So it was that with my dear wife's gentle encouragement, I moved on to item two—I found God. I found two gods in fact, one male and one female (the Wiccans taught me that deities come in the same genders as people). Their names are Aphelandra (top) and Aglaonema (bottom), and I can’t tell for sure, but I think Aphelandra is the goddess because she’s shorter and because Aglaonema's stem is big and erect.

My first houseplant was a Spathiphyllum (peace lily) that my father left when he died in 1994. I didn’t want a houseplant, but it was a living celebration of him, and it was also evidence of a love for beauty that he seldom displayed. I saw caring for it as an extension of caring for him. Besides, I asked myself, how long could a houseplant live anyway. It’s now 19, and I wouldn't be surprised but what it survives me--after which Peggy will probably kill it with love, aka too much water. 

My Aglaonema is simply too beautiful for words, and despite its look of fragility, we get along famously (I don't do high-maintenance plants). I’ve even been looking for another Aglaonema (one called Silver Queen) for a year now and am starting to think I might have to drive to Portland for it… 

If I were rich, I would live in a conservatory. The beauty of plants inspires in me the desire to make my own life beautiful, and their presence fills me with joy.