A Too Ready Acceptance

Matthew Shepard

From boyhood through my forties, I was singularly non-judgmental, my one notable prejudice being against the under schooled, aside from whom I could be friends with pretty much anyone who treated me well.

When I was in my thirties, my seemingly macho father confessed that he was transsexual (it being the word of choice back then) and said that he liked to "go down on" both genders. I told him it didn't matter. When a nephew told me that he and some friends beat-up two gay guys in a McDonald's parking lot, I didn't even bother to remonstrate.
   
As Jesus said about the sun and the rain, my acceptance fell "on the evil and the good, on the just and on the unjust," and it made me the recipient of confidences. I asked no questions because I had none. I instead existed as an incurious witness to words, facial expressions, and body language. I observed life as through the wrong end of a telescope. I told myself that real men kept their peace, and that condemnation was for prigs and hypocrites.

I can only speculate as to why I began to take a less accepting view, but it corresponded with listening to ultra-conservative Fox radio (aka "hate radio") for hours a day, plus finding my neighborhood suddenly infested with graffiti, heroin needles, and homeless people. As Fox infected me with its purulence, and my anger over what was happening to my neighborhood increased, I came to hate a great many people, but for reasons to lengthy to delve into, homosexuality became the first issue over which I tortured myself, and to which I will devote the rest of this post. 

I began by telling myself that homosexuality was "unnatural" because it was an evolutionary dead-end. When a young gay man named Matthew Shepard was tortured to death on a freezing Colorado night, "Fair and Balanced" Fox presented his murderers as the victims in what came to be called the "gay panic defense." What this meant was that Shepard's murderers went temporarily insane upon realizing that he was gay, and were thereby forced to do what any red-bloodied, God-fearing American boys would have done, which was offer him a ride home but instead drive him onto the prairie where they tied him to a barb-wire fence, and robbed, beat, tortured, and burned him. He was still alive when they drove back into town and started a fight with two Hispanics (they also suffered from Hispanic-panic). Because of its obvious lies, endless exaggerations, and convoluted logic, I stopped listening to Fox. I also re-evaluated my tolerance of my gay-bashing nephew in view of the Shepard murder and Rev. Martin Niemöller's Nazi-era admonition:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me 


After a few years of internal debate, I lost interest in why people are gay because it seemed to me that justice and compassion demand full equality, and that anything short of full equality means tacit support for everything from job discrimination, to parking lot beatings, to blaming a young man for the fact that you tortured him to death. I never looked back from this position, and my interest in the life experiences of gay people became such that Peggy--who supports don't ask/don't tell and favors civil unions--flummoxed me by wondering aloud if I was a closeted gay.

I find it immensely rewarding to possess a clarity that I struggled to achieve, my previous years of ready acceptance having been as ethically neutral as the acceptance of a villainous man by his dog. I never called the cops when friends drove drunk; I refused to admit, even to myself, that I had two friends who were pedophiles; I looked on in silence as a friend tormented an insect with a cigarette; I said nothing to friends who bootlegged music and movies; and then there was the day that I didn't remonstrate when my cowardly nephew told me with pride that he and he and his gang of cowardly friends had beaten two gay boys.

I would not have you conclude that there was ever a point in my life that I would have tolerated anything (I would not have remained silent had my friend tormented a mammal with a cigarette), but I certainly tolerated too many things, and I did so, not because I was high-minded--as I told myself at the time--but because my values were so debased that I lacked a foundation for morality. I believed that virtue was for chumps, a chump being anyone who didn't go along with my willingness to use self-interest as a rationale for violating the rights of others--others beside myself that is.

A Week in Oregon

For the second time since April, Oregon's Republican lawmakers are boycotting the state senate rather than risk losing a vote. If they don't soon return, over 100 other bills won't be voted upon, and state employees won't be paid.

Republican senator Tim Knopp defended the action, saying, "This is democracy."

Democratic governor Kate Brown had a different view: "They are turning their backs on Oregonians and they are turning their backs on the democratic process." As is her right under Oregon law, Brown ordered state police to find the Republicans and bring them to the capitol. Armed militia members pledged to do "whatever it takes" to prevent this.

Republican senator Brian Boquist taunted the police, saying that when they come for him, they should "send bachelors and come heavily armed." Since then, he and other Republican lawmakers have fled the state to elude capture.

On Saturday, the capitol building was closed by police based upon “a credible threat from militia groups.” On Monday, Democrats reported to work anyway.

The last time that Oregon militiamen took up arms against the state was in 2016 when 26 of them occupied and vandalized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The occupation ended 39 days later when a militiaman was shot to death by the FBI. 

The Malheur occupation was inspired by the conviction of area ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond for setting fire to federally protected wildlife habitat because they weren't allowed to graze cattle on the land. Soon after the Malheur occupation, Trump pardoned the Hammonds. That same year, he referred to those who parade under swastikas and Confederate flags as "good people."

Like the heavily armed groups of Republican thugs that call themselves militias, the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers will do "whatever it takes" to insure that all power is in their hands. Of late, they have been redrawing state voting districts in order to marginalize black people, and, just today, Trump vowed to postpone the 2020 census indefinitely because the Supreme Court won't allow him to include a question that would penalize Democratically controlled states. These are not guesses; these are facts that have been admitted to by the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers.

When I heard that Oregon state senator praise democracy only to explain that democracy means taking his toys and going home anytime he might lose a vote, I remembered Melania Trump saying, "We must do our best to ensure that every child can live in comfort and security with the best possible education," even while her husband was busy denying basic necessities to children, and a less fortunate woman was watching her husband and child drown in the Rio Grande because of Donald Trump's harsh border policies (see photo). America's "first lady" had previously said that she opposes cyberbullying, conveniently overlooking the fact her powerful husband is up before dawn each day bullying people on the internet. The words of Republicans might look like cake icing, but one must remember that the cake contains arsenic, and that the Republican Party represents the world's gravest threat to America democracy.

Frothing with Loathing

Rather than renouncing him when it became evident that Trump was unsuited for office, Republican support rose from 81% (the number who voted for him) to 90%. The hatred that Republicans and Democrats feel toward one another is such that 5% had rather see the country fail than for their opponents to succeed.

When Peggy and I recently heard the supposedly shocking news  that 44% of America's evangelicals feel physically threatened by Muslims, we weren't surprised because we feel threatened by evangelicals (nearly all of whom are Trump supporters), the extent of the threat being proportionate to the extent of their political power. Many such people are like Peggy's father who is polite, soft-spoken, dresses well, works hard, teaches Sunday school, holds political office, flies the flag on patriotic holidays, and never cheats anyone. Unfortunately, they also favor military solutions; support repression in the name of religious freedom; have so little actual faith in God that they elected a president devoid of integrity; and even agree with that president when he says that a free press "is the enemy of the people."

For most of my life, I voted for the candidate rather than the party, and I tried to respect the motives of those with whom I differed, but I will never again vote Republican, and I despise Trump supporters. Of America's recent presidents, Barack Obama reminded me of a gum chewing college freshman; Bush II was an inarticulate moron; and Bill Clinton a lying sexual predator; but perhaps the only president who ever attained to Trump's level of wickedness was, aside from himself, his favorite president, Andrew Jackson. Jackson was infamous for having a hair-trigger temper; committing bigamy; fighting duels; holding himself above the law; ignoring a Supreme Court ruling that forbade the state of Georgia from stealing lands from the Cherokee; and for forcing 50,000 poorly provisioned and broken-hearted Indians to undertake a mid-winter death march to Oklahoma even as the people who stole their homes were warming themselves before fires for which the Indians themselves had provided wood. 

Trump adores Jackson because, like Jackson, he believes that obedience to the law is for suckers. In fact, Trump so adores Jackson that he hung his portrait in a prominent place, and announced that a long awaited plan to replace Jackson's image on the $20 bill with that of a black female abolitionist will never happen during the eight years that he plans to be president. The Georgia white people who believed that God had given them Indian lands (just as he had given the ancient Jews lands that were owned by others), were the spiritual ancestors of those whom today are kept busy looking for ways to shaft anyone who doesn't share their looks and religion. For instance, they just enacted a federal "conscience rule" allowing health care workers to make on-the-spot refusals to provide services, including emergency services, to LGBTs, women with abortion complications, and any and all others of whom they disapprove. Likewise, they were the spiritual ancestors of Christian lawmakers who, despite presiding over the nation's most dysfunctional states (in terms of crime, mortality, illiteracy, poverty, and every other quality of life measure), nonetheless find plenty of time to pass "Religious Freedom Protection Acts" that legalize Christian bigotry, and, more recently, "Human Life Protection Laws" that prohibit abortion after six weeks, which is before most women know they're pregnant. When lawmakers in the various states with new anti-abortion laws were asked if they planned to expand their already woefully underfunded social services in order to help the many desperately poor women who will now be having unwanted babies, they said that raising other people's children isn't their problem, and if a woman can't afford a child, she shouldn't get pregnant, although the same lawmakers who oppose abortion tend to oppose birth control.

As Trump's hatred for the leaders of free nations; his adulation of Putin; his self-described love affair with Kim Jong-un; his strange affection for neo-Nazis; his high-regard for Jew-hater Viktor Orbán; his reference to black-run nations as "shit-hole countries;" his preference for Northern European immigrants; his contempt for human rights; and his belief that the law only applies to others, would suggest, Trump is a Hitler wannabe (albeit a decades more aged and with much less energy and charisma), his only hindrance being the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, neither of which would stop him if he had sufficient popular support.

Hitler had that support, his power growing out of the Great Depression, hyper-inflation, Germany's anger at the rest of the Western world following the Treaty of Versailles, and his promise to erase the bitter taste of military defeat by making Germany great again. His 1934 propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will, consists of two hours of impassioned speeches, mass rallies, torch-lit parades, happy Aryan soldiers, the glorification of militarism, and thousands of worshipful faces uplifted to his in rapt adoration. Eleven years later, this man who pledged, "I will make Germany great again," had reduced it to ruin, brought death to 80-million, and lasting misery and debility to hundreds of millions more.

Like Trump, Hitler was an amoral narcissist who couldn't admit to mistakes, so as Russian tanks rolled into Berlin, he blew his filthy brains out after blaming the German people for having failed him. Pre-Trump, I couldn't understand how the German masses trusted a man whom, like Trump, was initially dismissed as cartoon-fodder by the intellectually serious, but I eventually concluded that my previously low confidence in the intelligence and clear-headedness of the masses had nonetheless been overrated. Generally speaking, the masses: are one issue voters; regard blind faith as the only path to ultimate truth; are highly susceptible to fake news; think in terms of right versus wrong and us versus them; are impatient with complexity; hold logic and evidence in low esteem; are deeply suspicious of scientists and intellectuals; and are easily swayed by politicians who reinforce their religion and bigotry.

They also equate having a legal right to think a certain way with having a rational right to do the same. The Trump era is described as "post-truth" in that unfounded opinion is held in higher regard (by Trump and his supporters) than scientific fact. All that Trump, a man who boasts of never reading, need do is to pronounce global warming non-existent (or unrelated to human activity--he has done both), and government agencies can be underfunded, and climatologists threatened with job loss if they warn of climate changes more than twenty years down the road. Such is the mentality by which America is being governed. 

Another aspect of living in a Trumpian post-truth world is that morality has been reduced to a matter of convenience. This allows Trump to defame his opponents with vague innuendo, often starting sentences with: "A lot of people are saying..." This week, he even justified accepting election help from hostile governments by saying, "Everybody's doing it," which is the sort of logic that many teenagers use to justify bad behavior.  Likewise, his Christian followers can deny that they're trying to shut down abortion clinics while imposing regulations that shut down abortion clinics, and they can bypass the legal challenges of using tax money to erect Latin crosses and Ten Commandment monuments on public property by claiming that those monuments "have no religious significance." I grew up in an era in which preachers criticized Communism on the grounds that Communists believe the end justifies the means. This being true, evangelical Christianity and its bastard child, Republican politics, has come to look much like Communism, in that its moral impetus has been directed away from positive admonitions to do good and toward an endless refrain of "Thou shalt nots" that use the law to destroy the lives of anyone deemed "not nice."

I believe that the blind faith which the religious masses place in an egregious politician like Trump--and other morally-challenged leaders of his party--is facilitated by their equally blind faith in an ancient savior, my premise being that when a person regards logic and evidence as obstacles to the realization of ultimate truth, he or she is more likely to apply the same standard to other forms of inquiry. As unkind as it is for scoffers to say that, "When believers go to church, they check their brains at the door," religious faith does require a segregation of a person's mental faculties, a segregation that at the very least requires one to say, "While reason and evidence might be appropriate when it comes to determining the boiling point of water on Mt. Everest, unfounded faith is a virtue when it comes to discovering the existence and nature of God." 

Trump has told one demonstrable lie after another, repeatedly prefacing them with, "Believe me..." When the news media began calling him on his lies, Trump urged members of his cheering crowds to assault reporters; labeled reporters the enemies of the people; put and end to press conferences by his press secretary; and demanded that the press be legally muzzled. Threats against reporters and their families have become such that they never know when the cost of criticizing Trump might be death.

Yes, I am frothing with loathing. While I despise nearly all of America's presidents for using the military (funded by my tax money) to commit mass murder in the name of political expediency, I formerly tried to tell myself that they were at least acting in the best light that they had. I cannot so excuse Donald Trump because his depravity is too brazen and unremitting, nor can I excuse his followers because they have continued to support him long after all possibility of doing so in ignorance ended. These people, most of them followers of Christ, know exactly what kind of a man Trump is, and they wouldn't have him any other way.

Religious Differences Within My Marriage and Other Matters

Rev. Jonathan Daniels, Episcopal martyr

I might compare my relationship to the Episcopal Church to that of people who practice Yoga but deny Hinduism. I might also liken it to a Japanese tea ceremony that offers tranquility and belonging in the absence of dogma. Admittedly, Christians--including Episcopalians--are less accepting of my nonbelief than are communities that revolve around Yoga or tea, although non-belief is on the rise. According to a British government survey, 2% of priests in the Church of England (the Episcopal Church's British counterpart) are atheists, and in America, the percentage of people who claim church affiliation has dropped 1% a year for 20-years, making the number of people who are un-churched greater than the number of Protestants or Catholics.

Peggy and I grew up in fundamentalist households--Southern Baptist in her case, Church of Christ in mine. My parents attended church sporadically and never pressured me into going, but I so loved church that when my family moved into town when I was ten, and I could walk to church, I went four times a week. Peggy's parents took her (took being the operative word) to church thrice weekly, but she spent the time daydreaming. With age came disillusionment, so that when I left for college, I left my boyhood church for the Episcopal Church. When Peggy left for college, she left church so completely that she flunked her school's mandatory chapel by failing to show-up. I became an atheist before she only because she was too bored by religion to think about it. Even today, religion is never far from my thoughts.

Peggy's Southern Baptist upbringing combined with her lack of interest in comparative religion, causes her to view the Christian world through a Baptist lens, and this leads her to say surprising things. For instance, she was shocked when I came home from a church men's group and told her that beer was served; even more shocked to discover that my evening prayer service includes hymns of adoration to Jesus' mother; and speculated that my parish priest assumes that if I attend church long enough, I'll be saved. For those who share her ignorance, the fact that Episcopalians sometimes serve liquor at church social events has inspired the church's detractors to refer to them as Whiskeypalians; some Episcopalians are devoted to Mary; and Episcopalians don't think in terms of being saved, lost, or born again. But what does distinguish the Episcopal Church, which I love, from the usual beliefs and practices of Christianity, which I loathe? 

(1) The Episcopal Church doesn't seek to rationalize the barbarism of the Biblical deity; it embraces the parts of the Bible that are honorable and rejects the rest as primitive tribalism. America's religious masses call this "cafeteria Christianity," and insist that the Bible is theologically and historically perfect.

2) Although the Bible endorses the oppression of women, America's Episcopal Church elected a woman to its highest office and has installed other women as bishops. Some of the church's women leaders are openly lesbian. 

3) Although the Biblical God demands that gay people be executed, America's Episcopal Church views them as equals, although doing so has cost it tens of thousands of members. Its acceptance of LGBT people has even inspired the wrath of the Anglican Communion, with some member denominations demanding that the American church be expelled. When the American diocese of New Hampshire sent its gay bishop to represent it at the worldwide Anglican convention in London, he was blocked from participating and even excluded from social events.

3) Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Episcopal Church's first female presiding bishop (national leader), condemned the concept of personal salvation as heretical and idolatrous. Although the concept of heresy is meaningless to me, I have observed that people who emphasize personal salvation minimize the importance of virtue because they don't believe that virtue will get them into heaven--or wickedness into hell. What will get them into heaven in their view is begging God's forgiveness according to the infinite merit of Christ's redeeming blood, which means that had Hitler, in his final moments, professed faith in Jesus and asked forgiveness in His name, Hitler is even now basking in God's glory; but if fifteen-year-old Ann Frank died without begging forgiveness in the name of Christ, she is writhing in eternal agony alongside Buddhists, Hindus, humanists, and such Christians as had the misfortune to die before asking forgiveness for their latest sin. In the words of Acts 4:12: "Only Jesus has the power to save! His name is the only one in all the world that can save anyone."


4) I first became aware of the Episcopal Church during the Civil Rights era when I watched Northerners in priestly attire participate in demonstrations. When one of those men was murdered* in front of numerous witnesses while saving the life another person in broad daylight, and the good Christians of Alabama refused to hold his murderer accountable, the killing became but one of hundreds of incidents that hardened me against the integrity of the Christian masses even as I had already become hardened against the depravity of the Biblical deity. Although in earlier centuries, the Episcopal Church had courted slave owners and robber barons, by my day, it was alone among white-dominated Southern Protestant churches in its concern for social justice. Never once did I hear a Church of Christ preacher speak-out for human rights, although they posted guards at church doors to keep black people from entering, and it was common knowledge that the same Klansmen who bombed churches and burned crosses on Saturday night, worshiped inside churches and before crosses on Sunday morning. 


By the time I left the Church of Christ, I was in search of a refuge of safety and healing away from Christianity, but there were none. However, there was the Episcopal Church, and because it was liberal, and because its liturgies and its sanctuaries were beautiful, the Episcopal Church came to represent an abandonment of all that religion had ever meant to me, and I embraced it. Church of Christ preachers devote a portion of every sermon to the torments of hell, and their sanctuary walls are bare. Episcopal priests seek to inspire, and their walls are richly decorated. Even today, the Episcopal Church doesn't seem like church to me, and I believe there were better men than Christ. Even so, he and the Bible do uplift at times, and I'm too old to go elsewhere. The world contains little that feels like home to me, and the Episcopal Church is among the things that do.

* https://www.lentmadness.org/2013/02/jonathan-daniels-vs-macrina-the-younger/
* https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/shooting-jonathan-daniels-richard-morrisroe-alabama-50th-anniversary/Content?oid=18915294 

Spring, the Season of Misery, Drugs, Infusions, and Pain Specialist Visits

With physical activity comes pain, and this being my most active time of year, I live with exhaustion, irritability, despondency, a shoddy memory, attention problems, and near hysteria. Because it's damnably hard to say no to the one thing that gives me appreciable relief, I ran out of narcotics early last month, and the withdrawal symptoms were like a rocket booster to my misery. (Actually, I go into withdrawal everyday of my life because I take my day's supply all at once.)

Today, I saw two pain specialists, the first (Tom) was the doctor I went to for a Ketamine infusion three weeks ago and then went back to for two Lidocaine infusions. Since these things didn't help, I don't anticipate seeing him again. The second one (Frank), I've been seeing for many years, but like nearly all doctors anymore, he works for a mammoth medical group, and one of the limitations he has to live with is that he isn't allowed to administer drugs by infusion, which is why I went to Tom. When I saw Frank today, we discussed Tom's proposal to switch me to another (even stronger) narcotic and the fact that I had turned him down because it would have overridden Frank's order.

Frank agreed that the drug proposed by Tom would help stabilize my moods (I go from heaven when I take my daily narcotic dose to hell when it wears off). He then offered to prescribe it for me, but he said I needed to know that, since the drug has historically been given to addicts to wean them off heroin, it carries an unfortunate association that might haunt me down the road. Because I'm adamantly opposed to anything that might make a future doctor hesitant to prescribe narcotics, I told Frank that I would stay with what I'm on.

I then asked Frank to put me back on Ativan, which I've taken in the past in conjunction with narcotics. The benefits of Ativan are that it evens out the narcotic-induced mood swings, and that it helps keeps me from going to pieces when the pain is especially bad. Frank said that, unfortunately, a "black box warning" was recently issued in regard to prescribing downers and narcotics for the same patient, and that he would lose his license if he ignored the warning, and I ran into difficulty. Moreso than most doctors, Frank chafes at being forced to play games with the government and insurance companies, and on this occasion, he made his distress known with mild profanity. Doctors so seldom curse in my presence (I can only think of two that have done it) that I'm flattered when they do, the implication being that they trust me to not make trouble for them.

Yet again, I raised the issue of CBD, as I have done a few times in the past year. CBD is made from hemp and/or marijuana, and some people swear by it for chronic pain, but it too comes with a problem. Specifically, the consumer has to trust the manufacturer to truthfully state the product's THC content, and manufacturers have proven unreliable. What this means is that if I'm called in for a drug screen (which rarely happens but is always possible), and I test positive for THC, my narcotic prescription could be in jeopardy. Frank gave me his word that, unless my THC level repeatedly came back outrageously elevated (which shouldn't occur with any brand of CBD), he wouldn't pull the plug on me, but here again, I worry that something might end up in my chart that could cause me a problem down the road.

As my visit drew to an end, I again raised the possibility of trigger point injections. This is where a doctor takes a big needle (with a drug in it) and jabs it repeatedly into various parts of a muscle to relieve the horrible tightness that I live with and that never goes away. I've been there/done that with Frank, and although it didn't help, I'm desperate enough to try it again. He then told me something else that I didn't know. Specifically, he said that every doctor has a different technique, so it could be that I would have better luck being poked by someone else. 

Because I am not eager to see yet another doctor, I asked Frank if he really thought it might make a difference. He said no, and gave me two reasons. One was that I'm sufficiently thin that it's easy to find the appropriate places to poke. The second was that he's more aggressive than most doctors, so unless his previous attempts have caused me so much pain that I simply want a gentler doctor who pokes fewer holes, I would do well to stay with him. I had no idea that doctors' needle-poking aggressiveness varied (having never had anyone but Frank do it), and I told him that I would prefer that he be even more aggressive because I really need relief, the flipside being that I don't want to be poked by some doctor who's trying to avoid hurting me. I had wanted him to stick me then and there, but because I could tell that he was slammed for time, I suggested that he do it later. Maybe he would have suggested as much himself, but when I like a doctor, I do everything I can to present myself as an easy patient.

What It Was Like

The Ketamine infusion left me tired, cold, and nauseous, with a metallic taste in my mouth. Hell, for me, would be an endless repetition of Ketamine. In fact, I think I would altogether lose my mind after several hours, which has surely been the fate of thousands of lab animals. Even after a mere two hours, the doctor himself wheeled me to the car so Peggy could drive me home.

The nurse who started my IV said, "You might feel like you're floating around the ceiling." It was a gross understatement, because every time I thought the drug had peaked, it laid further waste to my sense that I existed. I became like a compressed ball, a black hole of nothingness, yet I recognized the place Ketamine took me as though I had been there before. I looked in vain for something solid on which to anchor my identity but the more the Ketamine took hold, the harder this became. The room lights had been turned low, but I was seated, as I requested, away from the others in a corner near the door under a softly shining pole lamp. I had brought four books because I had no idea if I would be able to read or would be reduced to looking at photos. Of the four, one was the spiritual memoir of an agnostic, another discussed the spiritual life of dogs, and the final two were oversized books of cat photos. I settled on the cat books, reveling in the beauty of my favorite breed, the ancient and sensuously beautiful Turkish Angora, but when I switched from book to book, the one I was putting away seemed to float downwards while the one I was retrieving floated upwards, my hands following rather than moving. 

Time, space, and even existence came to be mere intellectual concepts, and I had no idea if the music and the whisperings I was hearing came from within or without. When I could no longer focus on cat photos, I tried sitting with my eyes closed, but the blackness pullulated like maggots on a carcass, so I returned to my books. Many things cause me to feel alienated from my species, none moreso than that it allowed the flat-faced deformities called Persians to so displace the ethereally beautiful Angora that the Angora barely escaped extinction. I smiled when I reflected that I have come to adore cats with the same intensity that I once adored women, and that it was the cat photos that were making the Ketamine bearable.

A bed (patients could choose whether to sit in a recliner or lie in a bed) separated me from the other five patients and I could only see the upper bodies of the two nurses, Linda and Vanessa. I would look at them, let what seemed like several minutes pass, and then look again, but they would be in the same place and in the same posture, leaving me to feel frozen in time. I sat opposite a sink, and the cabinet's drawer handles turned into melancholy faces. The nurses, the doctor, and the other patients moved in and out of the room in slow motion like shadowy, surrealist performance artists for whom movement was its own end. Reality became an Ingmar Bergman movie. I had been warned that the drug would make me diurese (which I assume is why the other patients kept leaving the room) so I stopped all liquids three hours prior to the infusion. I was glad for this because I could have neither said that I needed to go or have gotten to the bathroom unaided.

I would occasionally move an arm or leg because it seemed like the right thing to do, but I felt no connection with the seemingly distant flesh that was mysteriously obeying my commands. I kept going back to the same two Angora photos, and despite being enthralled by the textual description, I had trouble remembering the preceding sentence. I imagined that I was leaving visible fingerprints everywhere I touched a page, and this led me to fantasize that I was creating the book out of nothingness. I remembered that Ketamine causes brain damage, and I knew this was true because I was watching my mind disintegrate. If a bear had entered the room, I honestly don't know if I would have been able to flee. I was in awe of the fact that I had once walked, talked, and done the many things that normal people do, and I seriously wondered if I would ever do them again. 

Every time I thought I had reached a peak of disintegration, the Ketamine took me even higher. Like a stealthy shadow, Peggy entered the room, and I saw her with new eyes, a part of my high, a part of my movie, a knowing participant in the existential joke. She looked drawn and worried because her husband was wasted, and Peggy hates being around wasted people, and because, while I was receiving the Ketamine, she had taken Ollie to the vet for the same problem he had two months ago. Now as then, the vet didn't know what is causing the hair loss, but he charged another $175 to guess. He proposed a treatment that Peggy declined because it was toxic, and because she didn't trust him to know what he was talking about. He finally gave Ollie the same two shots that had temporarily helped before.

I think I might have succeeded in whispering a short sentence to Peggy, and I'm sure I nodded my head, but she soon drifted away, phantom-like, to sit in the car with Ollie. She returned when the treatment was nearly over, and this time I giggled and made gestures with my free hand, but I mostly tried to avoid disturbing my fellow patients. It worried me that I was among strangers and expected to maintain a decorum that had become impossible for me. Fortunately, when the Ketamine was withdrawn, I regained the ability to at least speak--however stupidly--and I was even able to stand, although I was too weak and dizzy to remain standing. 

But did it help? My pain level had been higher than usual lately, but it had dropped appreciably before the Ketamine, partly because I was done with the yardwork that had aggravated it, and partly because I was psyched to have a new direction for treatment. Doctors ask their patients to score their pain level on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst imaginable. I hate this because every number is a lie, but doctors demand it, so I gave mine a three going in and a one coming out. I think the anti-gravity recliner might have helped more than the Ketamine. My lowered pain score led the doctor to ask if I would like to come back in two weeks for a higher dose, and I said yes in order to keep my options open. Today, my pain level is higher than it was yesterday prior to the Ketamine, but what of Ketamine's promise of providing quick relief from depression? I don't know. Perhaps, I'm better, but I'm still so shaken by the Ketamine trip that I really can't tell.

Once home from two hours of constant Ketamine, I wanted to settle my mind by watching something happy, so I settled on a documentary about Roger Ebert. I knew he would die at some point in the film, but I assumed it would come at the end, so I was horrified when the film opened with him sitting in a hospital bed with his mouth hanging open and his bandaged neck visible through his mouth. I unsuccessfully tried to deny the reality of what I was seeing, but soon realized that his tongue and lower mouth had been removed, and that his chin contained no bone, which was why it was hanging open like a flap. I remembered Peggy's father's preacher's wife who so trusted in Christ's promise of healing that she refused to see a doctor for oral cancer, only going when it was too late to save her nose or her face from the roof of her mouth down. I don't know how any of us survive decades on this nightmarish planet, and Ketamine seemed like a new hell in a parallel universe.

I persevered with the documentary just as I had persevered with the Ketamine, stubbornness combined with my fear of looking afraid having, for good or ill, gotten me through a great many things. When I got into bed last night, Ollie ran, not walked, to join me. Every night he does this, and every night, he continues the ritual by rubbing his scent upon my book and bedside table. Then he stands upon my thighs and gazes into my eyes lovingly while kneading my abdomen. As our statue of Bastet looks down in divine approbation, I kiss Ollie tenderly, and tell him he's my handsome man. Last night, I asked him if he's worth all the money we spend on him, and he answered by slowly blinking both eyes in tenderness and trust. 

He's now on the chair beside me, taking his late-morning nap, and I am rapturous in the knowledge that it's money that enables me to provide him with what I lack, by which I mean a belief that the universe is safe and that our life together will go on forever.