The death of George

I went to the funeral of a 95-year-old friend and neighbor today. It started with a rosary, moved on to a mass, and ended with one of my friend’s distinguished children saying that he knew of no higher honor than to be compared to his father. I was wrecked throughout. First, I was alienated by a memorial service that excluded non-Catholics entirely and was conducted under the auspices of a church that I consider the institutional embodiment of evil. Secondly, I was touched to the core by his son’s recollections of George’s goodness, the moreso because I couldn’t say the same about my own father.

George and I would sit and watch mass on TV while eating ice cream or drinking brandy. I didn’t mind watching those masses because he would invariably pause them when we started to talk in any depth, or at least try to talk, a stroke having made it difficult for him to remember words. He never asked about my religious views, and I never offered them because of his communication problem. John said he survived WWII by going to mass everyday (he served on a ship), and I envied him that comfort, but few things are more certain to me than that religion isn’t a gift from God but the invention of men, and I do mean men. Today, the things that I had once tried to love about the Catholic Church—the rosary, the stations of the cross, the saints in the windows, the words of the mass, the font of holy water, and the red light signifying the presence of the host—all represented a lie that, under the pretense of love, has gone far toward filling the world with hatred, abuse, persecution, and bloodshed, as well as hungry children for the impoverished and mansions for the church’s hierarchy.

I seldom passed George’s house on foot, on my bike, or in my car, without him seeing me and waving wildly with a handkerchief while smiling like a dog who was too happy to contain himself. I’ve now lost two neighbors who waved to me that way, and, oh, but how empty those windows look, and how I wish I had visited those men more often to store up memories for the famine that their deaths represent. Ghosts are becoming more present than the living in my life.

After I wrote the above sentence, I surmised that his family would be home from the cemetery, so I went to John’s daughter’s house for the reception. God bless Catholics, for there was enough beer, wine, and hard liquor to get everyone there smashed.

I’ll be honest with you—this being a phrase that my father often used, stupidly, I thought, but for some reason, it came into my head just now—George was a wonderful man. He was unfailingly considerate, generous, and good-humored, and if I had any thought that his Catholic faith had contributed to his many virtues, I would find it difficult to criticize Catholicism. But as easy as it is for me to attribute evil to the Catholic Church, I hate it too much to allow for the possibility that it might also be responsible for good. This is the opposite of how I once thought.

Growing up as I did in a denomination that made Southern Baptists seem liberal, I learned that the world contained two outstanding evils—atheism and Catholicism. This, combined with the plainness of my own church and my awareness of the ornateness of Catholic churches, created in me a very great interest in Catholicism because that which most people hated always struck me as deserving of investigation. When I became an Episcopalian in my early twenties, it was only because I found Catholic dogma even harder to accept than Episcopal dogma—by then, I saw all dogma as a challenge to work around rather than a gift to cherish.

In 1997, I made one last serious attempt to believe that there’s something deserving of worship: I joined the Catholic Church. As I ask myself whatever possessed me to go through a six-month process of being admitted only to leave as soon as I was admitted, I can’t think of a satisfactory answer. I can but say that I was under enormous internal stress at the time for reasons that I won’t go into, and that I love things which are old, and the Catholic Church is awfully old. When I lived in Minnesota, I would often visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art and admire the beautiful saints statues and triptychs from the Middle Ages, and I wanted so very much to feel connected to all of that, instead of persistently feeling as though I’m floating through time and space, unattached to everything that is past, everything that is to come, and most things that are present. I wanted to feel as if the hands of those artists were my hands, their eyes my eyes, their hearts my heart. Against all truth, I mythologized the era as being simple, clean, and deeply colored, which is the way it’s portrayed in the art of the period. I, who couldn’t accept the existence of a literal deity, wanted to at least accept something, so I joined the oldest church on earth in the hope that the mere act of joining would give me a sense of connectedness.

 

I first applied for the membership class at St. Marys, but after talking to me for five minutes, the priest pronounced me unfit to join, so I presented my case to the priest at the more liberal St. Thomas. He said he had no problem with me, but that, like everyone, I would need a sponsor. Since I didn’t know a soul there, he appointed Bill, explaining that Bill’s extensive knowledge of church history and theology would enable him to address my concerns. Unfortunately, the more Bill and I came together, the further apart we grew due to his growing disapproval of me. It must have been hard for him to allow me to join (I needed his okay), but he pinched his nostrils, and publicly vouched for me on the Saturday night before Easter Sunday. Afterwards, he presented me with a copy of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain and warned that if I ever joined another church, God wouldn’t forgive me. It was the last time we spoke.

There I was, a brand-spanking new Roman Catholic whom, despite my best efforts, had gotten nothing of value from all the classes, nothing from my scholarly sponsor, and nothing but a fleeting wave of emotion from my confirmation. A few weeks later, the priest called to ask what had become of me, and I said it wasn’t working for me to be a Catholic. He wished me well without asking any questions. I now look upon the whole episode as one of the more embarrassing of my life, because I knew throughout the process that I didn’t have an intellectual leg to stand upon, yet I joined anyway.

There’s a character in Elmer Gantry with whom I identify more strongly than anyone I’ve ever known or read about. Frank Shallard went through seminary and preached for years despite his ever-growing nonbelief, yet, as unlikely as it sounds, he was a person of integrity. Gantry didn’t bother to ponder the question of God’s existence because his only interests were the prestige and wealth that went with being a famous evangelist. Neither did maintaining their belief pose a challenge to such preachers in the book as did believe, because they were “superbly trained to ignore contradictions.” Frank Shallard, by contrast, wanted to believe—in something—but he couldn’t avoid probing questions, and his questions had to admit of rational answers, so he kept on preaching for the good he could do, even as he sought an alternate belief. Gantry finally outed him in the following exchange:

Frank was so simple as to lose his temper when Elmer had bullied him, roared at him, bulked at him, long enough, with Frank’s own deacons accepting Elmer as an authority…he screamed back at Elmer that he did not accept Jesus Christ as divine; that he was not sure of a future life; that he wasn’t even sure of a personal God.

Mr. William Dollinger Styles snapped, “Then just why, Mr. Shallard, don’t you get out of the ministry before you’re kicked out?”

“Because I’m not yet sure — Though I do think our present churches are as absurd as a belief in witchcraft, yet I believe there could be a church free of superstition, helpful to the needy, and giving people that mystic something stronger than reason, that sense of being uplifted in common worship of an unknowable power for good. Myself, I’d be lonely with nothing but bleak debating-societies. I think — at least I still think — that for many souls there is this need of worship, even of beautiful ceremonial —.”

“‘Mystic need of worship!’ ‘Unknowable power for good!’ “Words, words, words! Milk and water! THAT, when you have the glorious and certain figure of Christ Jesus to worship and follow!” bellowed Elmer. “Pardon me, gentlemen, for intruding, but it makes me, not as a preacher but just as a humble and devout Christian, sick to my stomach to hear a fellow feel that he knows so blame much he’s able to throw out of the window the Christ that the whole civilized world has believed in for countless centuries! And try to replace him with a lot of gassy phrases! Excuse me, Mr. Styles, but after all, religion is a serious business, and if we’re going to call ourselves Christians at all, we have to bear testimony to the proven fact of God…”

The Gantrys of the world are welcomed by the church; the Shallards are not. So was it in Jesus’ time, and so is it today.

Fifty-four years after I started to lose my fundamentalist faith, I find it sad how cheerfully confident I was that I would soon find an alternative and even enjoy the search. This was because I assumed great diversity among religions, and there is, of course, enormous diversity, but it is diversity of what people believe rather than of how they think. I also assumed that, just as botany and history have their authorities, so does metaphysics. Now, I see no reason to think that anyone knows any more about ultimate reality than I do, death being the only path to certain knowledge. 

Art by Zdzislaw Beksinski. His images describe my feelings better than any words. It is a nightmare to be simultaneously attracted and repulsed.

DEA/PDMP

I’m going to post this as an appendum to my last offering. Two states in the U.S. (Washington and Colorado) have legalized marijuana, and it’s on the ballot here in Oregon. Federal law prohibits the sale of marijuana, so even in states where it’s legal, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) could raid suppliers. I loathe, detest, and despise the DEA because, for one thing, based upon my experience—and the experiences of voters in Washington and Colorado—they spend millions and millions of dollars persecuting marijuana users for no reason other than that they receive millions and millions of dollars for persecuting marijuana users. Since they’re losing their grip on pot, they’ve now turned to narcotics as public enemy number one, and to this end, they’ve upgraded hydrocodone (the narcotic in Vicodin) to the same level as the stronger drug oxycodone (the narcotic in Percocet), and they’ve made it harder for people who use the drugs legally to obtain them.

Here’s what I—and everyone else who uses long-term narcotics legally—have to go through to get them. Every month, I have to go to my doctor’s office and put the date, time, my driver’s license number, and my signature, on a form in order get a new prescription for a thirty-day supply of oxycodone. Before I started using a mail order pharmacy, I would then have to take the prescription to a walk-in pharmacy, show the clerk my driver’s license and sign for the drug. Now that I’m on Medicare, I use a mail order pharmacy, so I have to mail the prescription (I, as in me, because my doctor can’t do it, and no one can fax it) to a special address in Pennsylvania. For some reason, it takes them two to three weeks longer to ship oxycodone than other prescriptions.

They send it by UPS (United Parcel Service), and I have to receive it at my house and sign for it. It can’t be left with a neighbor, and I can’t pick it up at a UPS facility. It has to come here, and it has to be signed for here, only I never know what time of day it’s coming, and I have literally stayed home all day trying not to make noise so I wouldn’t miss the delivery. One day, I waited ten hours, finally had to go somewhere, and, of course, that’s when the truck came, and I had to start the wait all over again the next day—three misses, and they ship it back. I have to do this every month, which means everything else has to be scheduled around the delivery, only I never know more than three days in advance when it’s coming, which makes it hard to plan my frequent doctor visits, not to mention little holidays with Peggy.

All of this bullshit is the work of the DEA, but they don’t stop there. They also require that I sign a yearly contract with my doctor promising that I won’t get narcotics from any other doctor—as I might do if I were if I were an addict, or having surgery. I also have to promise to always get my narcotics from the same pharmacy. A record of all this—along with every narcotic prescription I have filled—is put into a database so the DEA can be sure I’m being a good boy. Of course, they don’t say that this is the purpose of the database:

“The Oregon Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) is a tool to help healthcare providers and pharmacists provide patients better care in managing their prescriptions.”

Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! The sons of bitches! How dare they claim that they’re forcing every doctor and pharmacist in Oregon to spy on people for their own good! As might be expected, the news media is only too happy to handle PR for the narcs by running story after story about the evils of narcotics—how they are over-prescribed, how many people die of them (it’s an “epidemic!”), and how we need to use “other methods of pain control,” all this without a single, solitary mention of the fact that narcotics have a legitimate place in medicine, or that other “methods of pain control” might be inadequate, either in whole or in part. Heavens no! At the behest of the DEA, narcotics in and of themselves are coming to be regarded as the enemy, and let the patient tremble who, for whatever reason, gets them from two doctors or two pharmacies, even once, and woe be to the doctor who prescribes more of them than the DEA thinks appropriate because he or she will be raided (we might not have money for road repair and social services, but the military and the narcs need never go begging). Bear in mind that such raids never happen before patients arrive or after they have left, but always when the clinic is filled with patients, the goal of the DEA being the same as Bush’s goal when he bombed Baghdad—SHOCK AND AWE. It’s their way of saying to doctors, Put the image of being led away in handcuffs in front of a waiting room full of patients into your pipe and smoke it every time you write a prescription for Vicodin.

On the bright side, I only have one thing to report: the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is suing to put an end to the narcotic monitoring program because they are so radical as to think that what transpires between a doctor and his patient—or a pharmacist and his customer—should be private, but, of course, as every real American knows, the ACLU is nothing more than a left-wing nut group.

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

I take little pleasure in hearing about people’s vacations to exotic destinations because I can’t relate them to my experience, and because I feel vaguely disapproving that anyone would even want to go. The same applies when a drug user talks to a non-drug user about his latest high.

People travel for all sorts of reasons just as people use drugs for all sorts of reasons. I started my own drug use in the ‘60s partly out of curiosity, but moreso in the belief that they would lead me to enlightenment, it being the era of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. When I would meet a person who said, “I don’t need drugs to get me high, or, “I prefer reality to staring at the wall like an idiot,” or, “I don’t use drugs because I like who I am,” I would regard them as ignorant if not cowardly. It later occurred to me that similar arguments could be applied to travel. For instance, “I don’t need to go to the other side of the world to experience happiness,” or, “When you’re a person of depth, your own backyard is no less exotic than Rampur.”

Other than coffee and an occasional drink or two (never more than three), I hadn’t been high on anything for years until I started living with chronic pain. Then came narcotics, marijuana, sleeping pills, Neurontin, and Cymbalta. Now, never a day passes but what I don’t take three or more of these, marijuana being the only one that I don’t use regularly because I can no longer tolerate it. I’m not addicted to any given drug, but if it’s possible to be addicted to the desire to get high, then I’m addict because I love getting high. I always loved getting high but until I started living with pain, I just didn’t do it everyday.

When I was in my upper twenties, I only had regular access to two drugs—marijuana and alcohol—so I bought books about legal substances that could get a person high, things like lobelia, kava, jimson weed, and fly agaric. Some sounded so scary that I didn’t even dare try them, and of the rest, I had to order some, and none of them took me to where I wanted to go. Then LSD came into my life by way of one friend and psilocybin through another. My sister was by then a coke addict, so I snorted that a few times, and then someone gave me angel dust. I also took speed on a few occasions, but, except for marijuana—which gave me insights and hallucinations—I never got what I wanted from any of these drugs until I tried ecstasy, and it took me as high as I could even imagine going. When I shared some with a friend and she went into convulsions, I felt disillusioned that a drug which had been, for me, a source of overwhelming love and happiness could turn right around and make her seriously ill and panicky.

Like a lot of people, I didn’t care for narcotics at first, and they weren’t even that good at controlling shoulder pain, but they were what I had, and they were better than nothing, so I took them, and I’ve continued to take them for six years now, more recently for back pain and knee pain as well as shoulder pain. The enjoyment of a lot of drugs is like the enjoyment of riding a bicycle in that it’s no fun until you learn to do it well. Take Neurontin. I mentioned it a few posts back, and at least two people wrote about how unpleasant they found it, what with it making them dizzy and causing them to walk into walls. I initially liked the drug because it would enable to sleep through the pain when nothing else would, but then I learned that if I went from a low dose to 900 mgs all at once, I too would walk into walls, but the pain would disappear, and I would lie in bed for hours on end having amazingly vivid and happy dreams, one after another after another. Like touring Borneo, the effect of a drug is partly what it is and partly what you are able to make it.

Back in the ‘60s, young people were divided into two camps, those who were open to experimenting with drugs, and those who were not, and neither camp thought much of the other. I was never ashamed of my drug use, but was instead proud that I had the courage and the desire for growth that was necessary for me to take substances that scared the daylights out of me and had a reputation for putting people into mental institutions or worse. When I finally got an inkling of just how bad a bad trip could be, and determined that I was more prone to them than less sensitive people, I became more cautious. That was why, of the three times that I took acid, I only took a full hit once. It was also why I stopped taking hallucinogens at night, in unfamiliar places, when unwell, or among people I didn’t trust and couldn’t easily escape.

As the hippie era wound down, people came to regard drugs as less a vehicle for growth than a means for entertainment. Again, there’s a parallel with travel because a lot—probably most—people travel for stupid reasons. Maybe they’re simply bored at home, or maybe they want to travel for the bragging rights, or maybe they expect foreign countries to effortlessly enrich their minds. When you think about it, is there really that much difference between stories that start out, “I saw twenty countries in two weeks…” and those that begin, “I was so fucking wasted…”? Nothing, in itself, can make you a better person, and anything can be done for unworthy reasons, but the boundary isn’t always clear.

Like with narcotics. They can be used to relieve pain, but they’re also good for the emotional distress caused by pain. The common belief is that you’re only justified in taking them for the former, which means that you’re better off seeing a shrink or taking anti-depressants for the latter. My guess is that most people who use them for very long use them partly for psychological relief even if they take other measures, because when you’re sinking like the Titanic, there’s nothing like the profound relief of a drug that can give you instant peace and happiness.

I was stricken when I learned that, within blocks of where I live, people rob pharmacies at gunpoint for the very drug that I take almost everyday. I know that these people will be locked away in prison, and that strikes me as throwing tragedy after tragedy. Peggy has another view because she’s seen how manipulative druggies are when they come into the hospital, not because they’re sick but because they want to make people think they’re sick in order to get drugs. In Peggy’s view—and the view of a lot of healthcare provides—addicts are lying, thieving sacks of shit who deserve prison. Because I know that the only thing separating me from them is lucky genes, I feel a mixture of outrage that some addicts let themselves sink so low and compassion because I don’t think they can help it.

I don’t know what the answer is, although I doubt that legalizing narcotics could be any worse than locking people up, because if they were legalized, fewer people would progress to heroin (most people turn to heroin because it’s cheaper and more available than legal narcotics), and no one would rob pharmacies at gunpoint or go to a doctor pretending they were in pain. Narcotics, bought legally, are far cheaper than liquor, and, having taken them for years, the downsides are not terribly obvious to me. I know they’re bad for my health, but I also know that I can function so normally when taking them that my mental state isn’t apparent to others, and this makes me wonder if addicts couldn’t hold at least some jobs if their drug supply was assured. If any drug that I’m taking has caused an obvious change in my behavior, it’s not narcotics but Cymbalta because Cymbalta has caused my extremities to twitch, but it has also alleviated my depression. The last time I was on an anti-depressant, Peggy begged me not to go off it, and I’m sure she would beg me now if I said I was going to quit taking Cymbalta. That’s how pronounced a difference such drugs can make.

I simply don’t believe that addiction in itself is the worst thing in the world as long as a person can afford whatever substance he or she is addicted to, and as long as the drug in itself doesn’t cause disruptive or criminal behavior, as with meth. My thought is that we would be better off legislating against bad behavior while on drugs rather than legislating against the drugs themselves. Alongside the futility of attempts to put an end to drug use, I think people have the right to use mind-altering drugs. I’m probably more intolerant than most of antisocial behavior while on drugs (for example, if you kill someone by driving while blind drunk, I think you too should be killed), but drugs don’t make a person drive while loaded or otherwise act like an ass.

I have a friend who smokes pot, another who drinks to excess on occasion, and a third who doesn’t use any drug, even caffeine. Of these three, the least interesting is the one who smokes pot, so I’m far from claiming that drugs are every case desirable, yet I’m incredulous in the presence of people who won’t at least try marijuana, especially when it’s free and offered by a friend. Hell, I might not be keen on travel, but if I won a trip to Uzbekestan, I would surely go because, well, why not? I would learn as much as I could in advance, put as much energy as I could into being enriched by the experience, and see how I liked it. Why not approach marijuana the same way? The usual answer is, “I like myself as I am,” which misses the point when said about drugs just as it misses the point when said about travel. To be anti-drug is to risk missing a trip down the rabbit-hole with Alice, and that’s a terrible thing to miss. There’s so much in our heads that we’re unaware of, and drugs can open the door to them. That’s a precious gift in my estimation.

Now, I’m going to tell you as good a drug story as I know. Three months ago, overwhelmed by pain and consumed by depression and thoughts of death, I started taking Cymbalta. Now, I rarely think of death, my pain is still appreciable, but greatly reduced, and I only feel depressed for moments at a time. All of this I attribute to Cymbalta. If a person can have a stroke and immediately assume a radically different personality, or, as in my case, take a drug, and undergo a dramatic change both in mood and in the content of his thoughts, how can we regard anything about ourselves as constant? But if we are not a constant, then what are we but sacks of chemicals that are waiting to be acted upon by other chemicals? So much for innate human dignity.