Chronic pain: is it for you?

Here’s how I see chronic pain. Let’s say you take it into you head to help the poorest people on earth, and you are sent to a city dump in Cairo or Mexico City. An hour after you fold the seat-table on the 747, you are standing amid Third World filth, smelling the overpowering stench and looking at the emaciated children with maggot-filled sores, and you think, “My God, I can’t take this.” But you discover that you are stronger than you thought and, after a few months, you get used to it. You still hate it, but you get used to it.

Today, I went to see Shan, my number one physical therapist (I see three in all). If I don’t have less pain in the next two weeks, Mark will want to do a joint replacement on the same shoulder that he did the decompression and tendon repair on in March, so Shan suggested a drastic approach. His “drastic approach” was to stick needles deep into my muscles and tendons. This made them twitch so violently that I bent some of the needles. Every time I thought that he surely must be finished, he would have me change positions and stick me some more. Sweat poured off me, yet the pain still wasn’t as bad as much of what I experience everyday. I tried to carry on a normal conversation. “You handle this better than anyone I’ve ever seen,” he said, and I took it as a better than average compliment. Afterwards, I was sore but a lot more limber.

I realized some time ago that if I want medical people to take my pain seriously, I have to hang tough when they hurt me. As an ob-gyn nurse, Peggy often gets patients in early labor who claim that their pain level is a ten on a scale of one to ten. Peggy will say, “Ms Babymaker, you need to pick a lower number because you’re not leaving anything for later.” I always try to leave something for later. Not that I would act any differently otherwise; I’m too macho for that. Sometimes, macho is good. Of course, emoting is good too. It’s just a question of when. I cry easily (real easily) when I’m touched or grieving, but never when I’m hurt or angry. That’s just how I am, and I like it.

The last time I cried because I was hurt or angry, I was in the fifth grade, and got into a fight with a former friend, Jack White, after school. Jack brought three other friends to the fight, and when they saw that I was winning, they penned my arms so Jack could beat me up. Only he never threw the first punch because I began sobbing at the recognition of such treachery as I had never thought possible. Aghast, they let me up without a word spoken, and I walked home still sobbing. My best friend, Grady Green, was sitting on the porch, and he consoled me. I’ll never forget that, although I don’t even remember what he said. For all I know, he didn’t say anything. That afternoon contained one of life’s saddest moments followed by one of its sweetest. I wish I had a male friend like Grady today. But I digress.

I was dizzy when I left Shan, and that wasn’t good since I was on my bike and a half hour from home with a lengthy errand to do en route. I knew it would be better to skip the errand and go ice my shoulder, but macho kicked-in again. When I finally got home, I iced my shoulder for ten minutes and then ran another errand, followed by more ice, and finally a third errand. If not for ice, I don’t know how I could bear the pain. I try to limit narcotics to the nighttime, yet I still have to get up every two hours for a new ice pack. Demerol, Vicodin, Percocet, Norco, Dilaudid; none of them are sufficient without ice. It’s quite the experience to be passed out on narcotics and sleeping pills, only to be instantly awakened by a pain that comes screaming through the darkness like an arrow out of nowhere. Fortunately, I can usually get by on either the one or the other as long as I supplement it with ice.

A lot depends on how bad the pain is, and that varies, but I would say that what annoys me worse than hurting all the time is not being able to do so many things. Even small things like running the vacuum cleaner. I’m still hoping that I’ll be back to normal in about a year, but if I have to have my right shoulder operated on again (before I have the left one done), it will be closer to two years, and there’s even the possibility that the left shoulder will require two surgeries too since it and the right one look like mirror images on an MRI.

I wish I could have avoided all this, but it hasn’t been a total loss, although I can’t think of much good to say about it either. Really, the only thing that comes to mind is that it has shown me that I’m tougher than I thought—and more adept at suffering. I might hope that it has also made me more compassionate, and maybe it has.

Despite my toughness, I think about death, a lot. It all comes down to how much pain and disability a person is willing to tolerate. I’m not near my limit because I still have hope, and I also have Peggy to consider. Death does seem like an easy way out though. I think that, well, what if I lose hope that things will ever get any better? What if I come to believe that I will always need someone to mow my fucking yard and vacuum my fucking floor, and what if I conclude that I will never pass another day without significant pain? That would be a hard row to hoe, but I could do it. I just hope I won’t have to.

I roofed a dentist office in the early ‘80s alongside Jack Tindall, the sixty-year-old man who owned it. Out of the blue one day, Jack turned to me and said, “You’re a master, and I’m a past-master.” I thought it was a strange thing to say because he was a rich man, and he didn’t have to be on that roof if he didn’t want to. Now, it’s Jack’s turn to be dead, and my turn to be a past-master, and the fact that I have the money to pay someone to mow my yard and vacuum my floor isn’t enough to compensate. Money seemed more magical when I was young and strong. Now it’s mostly good for paying medical bills. That still makes it my best friend, because without it I would be left to suffer and die like so millions of others in “the greatest nation on earth.”

If all I had to look forward to was a continual downhill slide, health-wise, I wouldn’t want to live that way, and if I didn’t have Peggy, I don’t know that I would. Some days, it’s hard to see the point, and my fantasies turn toward how I might escape. I’m only sixty though, and I do have hope for a better tomorrow, if not next year, maybe the next.

So, tell me boy, what'd you wanna burn the woods down for? Did them squirrels do something to piss you off?

“Nothing lasts; therefore nothing means anything.”

I found this sentiment in the blog of a sixteen year old. I couldn’t have written it when I was her age because I still believed, despite serious doubts about the Bible, that life had an ordained meaning. I also lacked her insight into how quickly it is over. The years I had already lived seemed like a long, long time, and I anticipated living several times longer. I still felt as lost as she, but lost in a way that I didn’t know how to articulate—not that anyone ever asked. My best guess about how to deal with my lostness was to set the woods on fire. It seemed like such a crazy idea that I thought it would get me committed to a cozy mental institution where a fatherly psychiatrist could fix me.

Why this faith in shrinks? Did you know any?

No, I had never laid eyes on a first year psychology major much less a bona fide psychiatrist, but I had read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, in which a psychiatrist helped one of the condemned killers come to terms with his execution. I figured that, if a shrink could make a fellow feel okay about being hung before dawn in a Kansas prison, he could make him feel okay about anything.

I didn’t burn the woods down, partly because I didn’t want to burn the woods down, and partly because I worried that I would be sent to a reform school instead of a mental institution. For years, I continued to feel alone. Other people didn’t seem to share my angst, and my ever deeper and ever more raging questions about ultimate reality made me feel like a freak. I imagined that everyone else must have already found the answers I was seeking, and that their lack of apparent depth simply meant they were miles ahead of me, as if the rest of the world knew something that I didn’t. But, if this were true, I wondered, why wouldn’t they share the answers, and why did most of them seem so unintelligent?

I still feel alone, but it has moved beyond what I had thought was a remediable defect and into what I regard as the human condition. If you’re congenitally cheerful or believe in Jehovah, you might not feel it. Otherwise…

I wrote at length to the teenage blogger, pointing out that impermanence need not imply futility, although it does, in my mind, lead to sadness. All that I treasure, all that I protect, will be lost in a mere two or three decades. My photos, my writings, and the other artifacts of my life will, likely as not, end up in a landfill. Peggy will die, either a few years before or a few years after me, and in a few more years, all that we were and all that we did will be forgotten. These things will occur in roughly half the time we have already lived. If you can remain unerringly cheerful in the face of such a future, I envy you. I also suspect that you have embraced answers that are as groundless as they are comforting.

Abandoned and naked with only a schnauzer for solace

A letter by a follower from Slidell, Louisiana, reminded me of the following true story.

In 1983, I got a pilot’s license and bought an airplane because I felt hemmed-in by the provincialism of southern Mississippi, and thought that flying would broaden my social and intellectual horizons while expanding my spatial ones. This did not prove to be the case because of the slow cruising speed of my plane (85 mph) and the influence of Mississippi’s frequent thunderstorms. Even so, Peggy and I took trips to Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. We had two engine failures and one electrical fire along the way, but I’ll save those stories for another time.

Ever on the lookout for stimulating places to visit, I read about a nudist camp called Indian Hills (an odd name in an area in which the highest peaks are I-12 overpasses) near Slidell, I proposed to Peggy that we fly down. When she expressed somewhat less than zero interest in going, I went by myself. I had imagined that nudists would be of a liberal and educated bent, but this was not the case. I had hardly been there an hour before a large, drunk, and completely naked redneck challenged me to a fight. His wrath had erupted when I said something about him being gay based upon my observation that he was wearing a single earring.

He vociferously informed me that merchant seaman—of which he was one—also wore single earrings, but in the opposite ear to that favored by gay men, a group that he held in extremely low esteem. I apologized profusely, not because I felt badly about my error, but because I would have apologized profusely no matter what I had said. For example, if I had called him a human, and he had preferred to think of himself as a three-toed frog from Mars, I would have apologized just as profusely. Maybe I'm vain, but if I’m to be beaten to death, I want it to be over something that matters.

I stayed the night, and flew home the next day with no plans for another trip. Several months later, I was telling my friend Woozy Toosh (not his real name believe it or not) about the camp. I had known Woozy Toosh for much of my life, and was well aware that he was an excessively timid person, so I was surprised when he asked me to go there with him. I said I would be glad to, and we agreed to take his car. He made me vow secrecy about the trip because he worried that he would lose his job as a school guidance counselor and that his fundamentalist Christian wife would leave him. These were realistic fears.

Woozy Toosh, my little dog Wendy, and I drove down one August afternoon and stayed in a Slidell motel before going to the nudist camp the next morning. I was a little—but not a lot—surprised that night when he brought up the possibility of him and me having sex. I politely declined.

The next morning, Woozy Toosh, Wendy (you can tell from her haunted eyes that she had seen things a dog was never meant to see), and I drove to the camp. He was reluctant to take his clothes off (he had mostly wanted to see other men without their clothes), and he asked me if it was strictly necessary. I said I didn’t think so, but that he might feel even more awkward if he kept them on.

Woozy Toosh finally did undress, but he used a newspaper to cover his privates as he made a beeline for a chaise lounge. I thought he looked like Inspector Clouseau who found himself in similar circumstances in one of the Pink Panther movies, but I didn’t say anything. After we had sat down, he lost no time in covering himself from mid-thigh to mid-waist with the same newspaper. Only then did I notice that it was in reality a National Enquirer. I could tolerate homosexuality, but learning that I had a friend who read the Enquirer was a bit much.

After an awkward half hour, Woozy Toosh asked if I was ready to go home. I had anticipated such an outcome before we left, and had exacted his promise that we would stay at least six hours. By the time another half hour passed, he had asked me twice more. When I became testy, he developed the sudden urge to spend the day window-shopping at the Slidell Mall. We agreed that he would pick me up around 3:00, and he left with my clothes in his car.

Just before Woozy Toosh was to return, two men got into a fight near the entrance to the camp, and the police were called. I worried that when Woozy Toosh saw them, he would think it was a raid, and not slow down until he was across the state line. Just in case this should happen, I thought it behooved me to make alternate plans for my return home. Okay, I thought, it’s a two-hour drive, and I’m butt naked with no clothes, no friends, and no money. Of course, I did have a schnauzer, but she hardly seemed like an asset. All I could think to do with her was to hold her over my privates while I hitchhiked, but that didn’t seem like really workable solution, even after dark. Besides, Woozy Toosh had left his National Enquirer in the changing room, and if worse came to worse, I figured I could take some string and improvise a skirt.

3:00 was long gone before the cops looked like they might even be thinking about the possibility of starting to think about leaving. It was my firm belief that they were actually a great deal more interested in looking at the women they weren’t arresting than in the men they were. In fact, they didn’t appear to be making much headway in arresting anyone. Their tardiness gave me a great deal more time to come up with a workable plan, but none was forthcoming. I could have called Peggy, of course, but she would have regarded the trip as an imposition and have undertaken it primarily for the dog.

Woozy Toosh returned a half hour after the cops left. I have never at any time wished that the trip had ended otherwise even if it would have made a better story.

I’ll tell you what I want out of life

I attended a Zen service Sunday. The temple is nearby, and I had long been curious about it though discouraged by the requirement that new people arrive at 8:00 a.m. for orientation. This Sunday I was up anyway because Peggy had to work, and I’ve become motivated by more than curiosity about Buddhism because of the pain that is ever with me.

I sat in a chair (most people were on cushions) in the geezers’ row, and was completely lost despite the orientation. We would sit, then stand, then bow from the waist, then sit, then stand, then bow with our faces to the floor. Meanwhile, there was a gong banging outside, bells ringing up front, bells ringing in the back, various hollow objects being struck, chanting in English, and chanting in Japanese. I had a chant book, but everyone else knew the chants by heart, and I had no idea where to find them. I was finally able to locate one of the Japanese ones for all the good it did me. I couldn’t talk fast enough to say the strange words, and there wasn’t even a translation with which I might console myself.

After everything else was completed, we sat perfectly still for forty minutes with our chairs (me) or cushions (most of them) facing the wall. The other thirty people were barefoot, but it was 50º F (10º C) outside, the room was unheated, and a window was open. Everyone else knew enough to wear jackets, but I was in short sleeves and would have gone home before I would have gone sockless.

When the bell rang to end the sitting meditation, about a third of us filed out while the remainder did a walking meditation. We were supposed to reassemble afterwards for a dharma talk by the resident priest. During the whole time I had been there, I had been cold, lost, and ignored by everyone but the lady who showed me around. None of this inspired me to want to know more, and hanging around to see whether the whole shebang was as bad as what I had already experienced just didn’t seem like enough of a reason to stay. It was only 10:15, so I went over to First Christian for its second Sunday school. There, I found a warm room, friendly people, comfortable furniture, pastries, and coffee.

I’ve been asked why I go to church when I don’t believe in Jesus. I’ve addressed this at some length, but the bottom line is that I value a shared spiritual dimension to my life, and I enjoy studying the Bible. I had actually rather go someplace other than a church, someplace where I could fully belong, but there simply are no such places. For several months (this was ten years ago), I attended the Self-Realization Fellowship, and liked it very well, but the more people accepted me, the more they talked about different things that their leader (Paramahansa Yogananda) was doing for them. Since he was DEAD, this weirded me out a little. Sure, a lot of people at First Christian believe that Jesus is present in their lives, but they don’t usually claim that he takes care of such minutiae as arranging bus faire to California.

There is also a Bahá’í group here. I visited it years ago and might go again someday, but in all candor I don’t fit in there either. The main difference between Bahá’í and Christianity is that most Christians believe God has already said pretty much everything he wants us to know (despite the fact that we’re killing one another because he failed to make it clear), whereas Bahá’ís think he’s still saying it. I differ from both in that I don’t believe God can help us out with our little problems because God doesn’t even know we exist. There are no perks to worshipping the god of pantheism aside from the worship itself.

I’ve also been to Sufi and Hare Krishna groups. You might say I’ve gone to damn near everything I was ever close enough to go to. Even when I lived in Mississippi, I attended fifty Christian denominations and a synagogue (the synagogue and the rabbi's home had been firebombed by the Klan a few years previously). To my surprise and delight, the people at Beth Israel just thought I was another Jew.

My lily-white Buddhist orienteer said that the priest had renamed her Yoetsu (pronounced Yo-Et-Sue). I thought it sounded like a sexual reference in Spanglish, but concluded that it probably had something to do with cranes or lotus blossoms. I used to tell myself, “Snow, you’ve got to start honoring this diversity crap,” but I never did. I look at it this way. When people take on foreign names, use foreign words, eat foreign foods, and wear foreign clothes as part of their religion; they can talk all they want about openness and inclusiveness, but are you going to believe their words or their actions? If you believe their actions, their goal is the rejection of their own culture in favor of someone else’s culture that is presumably more spiritual. They are, as it were, pointing their middle finger at the rest of us poor schmucks who don’t even know enough to pretend we’re from the Orient.

Sunday’s Buddhist group wasn’t that extreme. They had their funny names, and they dressed in clothes the color of leaf mold (this distinguishes them from Tibetan Buddhists who wear bright colors—god forbid you should get the two mixed up). These things separated them from most of America somewhat, but they were also separated within their own group by the black bibs that hung around the necks of the more advanced. Bigot that I am, I interpret such advertisements as plain old run-of-the-mill pride. There were other things too. For example, one man seemed infatuated with a piece of white cloth that he solemnly laid atop his head for awhile, but I had no idea what it meant. Again, bigot that I am, I just thought he looked rather stupid standing in the middle of the floor worshipping a handkerchief.


I’ll tell you what I want out of life. It’s simple. I want to be completely present. That’s it. How hard could that be? Well, I find it a little like trying to maintain good posture. Peggy sometimes tells me that I need to straighten up, so, I straighten up—for about two minutes. Then I forget about it, and I slouch again. Sometimes, I think that what I really need to do is to devote my every waking hour simply to staying straight until it becomes second nature.

Being present is like staying straight only a lot harder, because there’s nothing about good posture that precludes steely self-absorption, whereas being present means being truly open to what’s inside and what’s outside, and this requires that I relax my defensiveness. If I were less defensive, maybe I would feel compassion rather than contempt for the more outlandish religious groups I’ve visited.

After my surgery in March, I went through a period of feeling terribly hurt that people hadn’t been there for me in the way I thought they should be. Then, for some reason that I don’t remember, my heart opened. If you’ve ever taken the drug ecstasy, you know how I felt. It was like the lightness I used to feel as a boy when I set someone down after carrying them piggy-back for a few minutes—like I was walking on the moon. I didn’t think I had arrived exactly, but that I had made a quantum leap in that direction. I actually thought the feeling might last, or that I could at least remember my way back to it. Then, poof, it was gone. Again, it was like the drug ecstasy; you think you can hold onto your new enlightenment, but you can’t.

When I’m with people, I feel tense. It’s not that I anticipate them disliking me. It’s that I anticipate them (a) not really listening to anything I have to say, and (b) not really caring if I live or die. At best, I anticipate them seeing me as a rather uninteresting diversion. I also anticipate being annoyed by them, because I feel bored by most people. You might say that I feel about them the exact same way that I don’t want them to feel about me, but think they will.

I try to counter this by facing them full-on, looking into their eyes, and listening to what they’re saying instead of waiting for my turn to talk. None of this works very well though, and it’s not even that rewarding when it does. Like with good posture, I don’t really have it; I’m just faking it in the hope that someday I will really have it. But I lack the discipline to even be a good fake, and I’m not sure that discipline is the answer anyway. I suspect that what I need is a change in attitude rather than a change in resolve, but I’m at point A, and my new-and-improved attitude is at point B, and point B might as well be on the top of Mt. Everest.

Oh well, the good news is that I’ll die before too many more decades and won’t have to worry about all this anymore. And you thought I was a pessimist. Silly you.

I pet my blogging peeves and even think of a few nice things to say

Nice things first so as to throw you off guard…

1) Instead of a few words, people often respond to my posts with a few paragraphs. I ADORE knowing that I’ve inspired them to think and feel, and vice versa.

2) Blogging has brought me into personal contact with people from all parts of the English-speaking world. Britain, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and Australia, have become as one, and except for an occasional place name, no one could tell where any of us are from.

3) I like it when people challenge my opinions, but I also like it that no one has ever trashed me. The only off-the-wall comment I’ve gotten was posted anonymously on my blog in the mistaken belief that I would forward it to another blogger who didn’t accept anonymous comments!

4) I like having the opportunity to share my writing—and even my photographs—with a world-wide audience, and to have them preserved in cyberspace.

5) I like it that I never have to edit my words to please a publisher.

6) I enjoy finding great blogs that almost no one knows about.


Peeves and more peeves…

1) Bloggers who have more followers than I.

2) Bloggers who post graphics without labels (like the accompanying map of the Internet) because they don’t know how to make labels.

3) Bloggers who go by no name but the name of their blog, which is usually long. Ideally, people’s names (even when made up) and the names of their blogs would be the same, because it would help me to sort everyone out. It would also make it easier to respond to comments. For example, if your blog is entitled She Who Likes to Eat Cantaloupes in the Nude, and I don’t have anything else to call you, I have to come up with an abbreviation. Cantaloupy? Nudie Tahoodie?

4) Bloggers whose latest entry says they don’t have anything to say, so they won’t say anything. I spend three to twelve hours (sometimes more) on my every entry trying my damnedest to make it worthwhile, and I just hate being summoned to someone’s blog (by notice of a new entry) only to be told that they don’t feel like writing.

5) The fact that I spend so much time trying to perfect an entry only to see errors as soon as I publish it. Sometimes, I have to edit and republish repeatedly to get everything right, and I worry that people will think I just keep republishing to get their attention, as if I’m screaming, “Hey, look at me!” Believe me, I’m not.

6) Cryptic bloggers who say things like, “If I do it, it might not turn out well, but if I don’t do it, it might turn out worse.” Do what?! Why write something that no one understands?

7) Bloggers who say, “It’s my blog, and I’ll write anything I want to.” I interpret this as pugnacity or, at best, defensiveness. Our readers are our guests, and they deserve our respect and consideration even when they disagree with us. Yes, I know, some bloggers say this kind of thing because they feel attacked. Like I said, it’s at best defensiveness. I mean, they’re stating the obvious—assuming, of course, that they don’t live in some free speech hellhole like Iran or China.

8) Awards. I’ve received four awards from three followers. I remember who sent them (Jane at Gaston Studio, Joe at My Quality Time, and Lille Diane at This Time Tomorrow), and I remember the joy and gratitude I felt upon receiving them. Truly, these people have a special place in my heart. I don’t display my awards because (a) I’m a decorative minimalist, so I prefer my own blog to be sparsely furnished; (b) I don’t want to risk distracting my readers from whatever I’m trying to communicate; and (c) each award came with the requirement that I pass it along to five (or even more) people, a number that boggles my imagination. Let me explain. Here’s how many people would have received a new award after it had been presented to ten generations of recipients if everyone who received it gave it to five new recipients.

Gen one. I create the prestigious You Just Don’t Know When to Shut-up Award, and I present it to 5 people.
Gen two. My five grateful recipients pass it along to five other recipients: 5 (originals) + 25 (new people) = 30 total
Gen three: 30 (the total from generation two) + 125 (the number the 25 new recipients sent it to) = 155 total recipients
Gen four: 155 + (125 x 5) = 780
Gen five: 780 + (625 x 5) = 3,905 recipients
Gen six: 3,905 + (3,125 x 5) = 19,530 recipients
Gen seven: 19,530 + (15,625 x 5) = 97,655 recipients
Gen eight: 97,655 + (78,125 x 5) = 488,280 recipients
Gen nine: 488,280 + (390,625 x 5) = 2,441,405 recipients
Gen ten: 2,441,405 + (1,953,125 x 5) = 12,207,030 recipients

In ten generations (three months maybe?), there would be over twelve million recipients if everyone passed it along. I am very appreciative of my awards, but I can’t see how an award can continue to be meaningful if it covers the globe faster than Swine Flu. Besides, if I deserve a merit-based award, why should I be expected to pass it along? I won’t even mention how easy it would be to simply steal an award by copying and pasting, because only a truly evil person like myself would think to do such a thing.

9) Followers. Based solely upon my own experience, it is my sad conclusion that the number of followers a blog has is primarily a function of how much time its owner spends visiting other blogs. The first time I visited a blog that had over 500 followers, I asked the owner how the hell he did it. He explained that Google had for some reason listed his as a blog of note, after which people just came out of the woodwork. Most of them, he believed, weren’t even interested in his blog; they just wanted to have their blogs listed on his blog so that people would click on their link. Thus began my disenchantment with piling up oodles of followers.

Another problem with having a lot of followers is that I feel all but obligated to follow the blogs of people who follow my blog, and I can’t adequately do that with even the 70 followers I now have.

10) Musical blogs. I had rather drink Drano. I hate musical blogs so much that I pet this peeve more than I pet all of my other peeves together. I can only give you 100% of my attention, so if someone is singing while I’m reading your words, your words get less attention. Besides, your writing has its own tempo, and I often feel as if I’m reading William Shakespeare while listening to Jimi Hendrix. It’s worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.

If you want to share your music, please create a playlist, and give me the choice of playing it. Yes, I could mute my speakers. This takes eight seconds followed by another seven seconds when I turn them back on. Rather than take the time (often with multiple blogs) and feel bummed about it, I tend to read fast, write fast, and get out of there. Yes, this IS a pain, and if I didn’t value you above health, money, and sex I wouldn’t do it.

Sometimes, I will have read a couple of paragraphs before the music starts. Because I’m deep in concentration, it just scares the hell out of me (when you drink too much coffee, you scare easily), and this pretty well ruins the rest of my visit. One reason I don’t go to bars is that I hate straining to hear people talk above the music only to miss half of what they say anyway. Music on a blog is like music in a bar.


Well, that’s about all I can think of, but before I close, I would just like to say a brief word to all those whom I have offended: FOR GOD’S SAKES DON’T LEAVE ME! I spent about a million hours piling up 70 followers, and I am too tired to look for replacements. Besides, I actually like you, even the ones with musical blogs. Surely, our friendship can include saying what we don’t appreciate as well as what we do.

Credo est

Part 1

Pretend that I am right; that our every thought and action is determined by the unalterable laws of cause and effect; that we are like so many rocks being tossed about as they roll down a hillside.

Peggy returned from settling her mother’s estate in Mississippi with a collection of family photos. Among those photos were school pictures from the 1940s of Peggy’s aunt for whom Peggy was named.

When she was in her forties, Aunt Peggy shot herself while lying in her bathtub. Her family came home to find her helpless with a collapsed lung. She recovered.

Aunt Peggy soon shot herself again. This time, she was left a quadriplegic. Several years later, she died.

Had I been a boy in her school, I would have tried to date Aunt Peggy. I know this because I like the way her eyes look in those old photos—mischievous, sensual, flirtatious—qualities irresistible to young males... Would you want to know how you will die?

I look at Aunt Peggy’s old photos, so filled with promise and life, and I wonder what she would have said had an angel offered her a vision of her final years? Among all possible lives, hers would have been among those that might be described as purest hell.

I knew her before she shot herself, but having moved to Oregon, I never visited her afterwards. It would have meant a long trip and, knowing something about her life, I had no thought that she would talk to me openly.

Her family blamed Peggy’s husband for her attempts at suicide. It’s easier to blame someone, anyone, other than your daughter or sister, I suppose. But if I am right, she had no choice. She never, from the foundation of the universe, had any choice. Would it have mattered? Unless we were able to know where our choices would lead, the freedom to make different choices would be of questionable benefit. I’ll give you an example.

A local man was a professional bodybuilder. He wasn’t among those who are pumped up on steroids, but a man who was sincerely devoted to healthy living. One day, a squirrel ran into the spokes of his bicycle. When he woke up in the hospital, he was informed that he was now a quadriplegic, and that he might never be able to live without a respirator. He insisted that the respirator be removed; it was, and he died.

Two people on opposite routes reach the same end; the one who never wanted to die chose death, while the one who longed for death continued to eat, and by eating, to live. I can make no sense of this, and if I am right, there is no sense to be made, because neither really got to choose. Their paths were determined from the foundation of the universe.


Part 2

I’ll tell you something that I have learned about suffering. Suffering admits no visitors. No matter how much you want to be understood, you cannot; or at least, I cannot; or at least, I feel that I cannot. This is mostly bad, but it is not altogether bad. Sometimes during the day, I will be thinking about the hours I lie awake hurting, and there will come to me a certain nostalgia, an almost glad anticipation of the coming night. Yet I would not for the space of a heartbeat choose to suffer. It is another irony to see some poorly defined good in that which I wish with my whole heart to avoid.

What is this good?

The recognition that I am thrown back upon myself to survive such nights. I subsist on hope for a better future, it is true, but I cannot help but think I would want to survive even if I knew I would suffer equally every night for the rest of my life. I cannot explain this except to say that suffering brings the possibility of redemption. But what is redemption? Redemption is freedom from appearances. Redemption is to know reality at its worst, yet to still love reality. Or so it comes to me. Maybe I am insufferably pollyannish; I suspect I am.

Why?

I knew a man who lived across the street from another man whose wife died. No one saw the bereaved for weeks after the funeral, so they finally broke into his house. He was there, in his chair, still dressed in the clothes that he wore to the funeral. He had sat, and he had urinated, and he had defecated, and he had eventually died.

If Peggy were to die, I would know suffering. I often think to myself that my situation is bad, but I know that it is merely a stubbed toe compared to her death. The sun can revive or burn. Suffering can strengthen or destroy. There are no guarantees. There is no rationale. There is no benefic plan. There is only death after life, but not, so far as I can see, life after death. When the boulder reaches the bottom, it stays at the bottom.

I judge my life - Part 5 - Best friends

Dogs. I’ve always had dogs. First, there was Mike who was old when I was born and wouldn’t allow anyone but family near me. I use to pee on Mike as he lay on the ground, his great tail thumping the earth. Mike went into the woods one day when he was seventeen and never came back. I was told that it was the way of dogs to die alone, and I believed it at the time. Now, I don’t know. I’ve had few dogs who got to choose.

The mailman missed Mike terribly, having run over him several times through the years. Dogs regard mailmen as persistent intruders who would steal everything and kill everyone if not chased away daily, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise since, by all appearances, they are 100% successful in protecting their homes and families. Everyday, the mailman comes, the dog barks, and the mailman leaves. It illustrates David Hume’s conviction that, just because one event follows another, we can’t assume that the one caused the other; but how many dogs have read David Hume?

I don’t know what dog came after Mike, there being so many, and them dying so young. Cars killed them for the most part, either outright or later. Some might have been saved, but country people didn’t take their dogs to the vet; they just got new dogs. Peggy and I treat Bonnie and Baxter like children, but when I was a child, dogs were more like to contract laborers. In return for barking at intruders, we fed them, wormed them, pulled their ticks, and dipped them in creosote when they got the mange. That was the deal, and dogs were too loyal to form unions.

Our dogs invariably came from places on the side of the road where people dumped their garbage. In a typical scenario, Dad would be scavenging in one of these dumps when he would find a litter of puppies. When he got home, he would tell Mama about them, and being softhearted, she would tell him to go back and get them, which was surely what he wanted to do anyway, or else why would he have said anything? They were usually too young to eat solid food, so she would feed them with a doll’s bottle. When they got bigger, she would give away all but one or two.

I got to name our dogs, and not being a terribly original kid, I always used the same three names—Wolf, Tippy, and Sassy. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was way more than the cats got; they were all called Tiger. I wrote the following true stories in 1960 when I was ten. I copy them as written.


Sassy

“Sassy was about the best dog I ever had. She was very playful. She wasn’t famous are anything like that. But she just gave you a warm feeling.

“We found her and 4 other puppies in a ditch on the roadside. She had a pretty color of white. Dad did that is when he was coming home from work during a rain one morning when it was to wet to work. He came home and told us about them, and mama told him to bring them home. Gay and I went with him. I don’t know the date. We fed them out of a doll bottle.

“Sassy only lived to be a little over a year old. I remember we used to get out and play with her and the other dogs. We gave all of the puppies away expect two.

“When Sassy died I was raking the grass, and dad was cutting it. And a car turned around in our driveway and Sassy started to chase it, and as soon as it got in the road Sassy got under one of the wheels. She turned and ran for the house and fell in the front yard. I ran and got mama and dad they said she was breeding inside. In about ten minutes later she died. She is berried in the back yard of our house. And we berried her on the same day. Gay and I prayed and singed for her.

“She left five puppies just like before. When she died I know she was trying to tell me something. I think she was trying to tell me she loved me and to take care of her puppies. She died in the evening of June the 19, 1959. I wrote this on the evening of January 13, 1960. I call the day that she died Dogs Day.”


Wolf

“I don’t remember much about Wolf, but I do remember he killed chickens. Well anyway, he was one of Sassys puppies. When Sassy died he was a orpan. That was the second time we had five orpan puppies.

“After Sassy died we to care of him and the other puppies. They became pretty big to. Even bigger than Aunt Annies puppies “Pal,”

“When got grown he started killing chickens. We whipped him but he wouldn’t stop.

“We used to play with him a and our other dogs in the yard. He fought the other dogs off so he could have all the food. He was very rough.

““Oh Yes,” I almost forgot we was talking about him killing chickens. So one Sunday we came home a found about 5 chickens dead.

“Ma Ma wanted Dad to shoot him with my new gun. But we decided to take him off. That is all I remember about Wolf.”

The End


My great-great uncle, King James Newby lived in Arkansas with his wife, Molly, and a pack of coonhounds. Molly complained bitterly about the dogs barking, digging, chasing chickens, and pulling laundry off the line. After years of being ignored, she gave King an ultimatum: “King, either the dogs go, or I do.” His answer was: “Me and the dogs are sure gonna miss you, Molly,” whereupon Molly kept her word and moved to Mississippi. When my father visited Uncle King years later, he found the old man living alone on a diet that consisted mostly of eggs, the shells of which he threw into a barrel beside his woodstove. After a few days, my father got up the nerve to ask, “Uncle King, do you ever think about taking another wife?” “Humph,” King snorted, “I’d rather sleep with a wet dog than with any woman that ever lived.” Thus is illustrated the loyalty of the men in my family.

Stupid old stupid old

Some fascinating—no, unbelievable—geographic facts:

The southern terminus of the Cascade Mountains is Hattiesburg, Mississippi. They exit the state east of Meridian and end somewhere in Alabama.

Portland is the largest city in Mississippi. It lies in a north south line between New Orleans and Memphis.

There is an area of small barren mountains just southeast of Brookhaven, Mississippi. I spent 37 years in the area without even knowing about them. Now, they are among my favorite places to visit.

The eternal snows of Mt. Hood loom large just east of Jackson, Mississippi.

Mississippi is known for its mild summers.

I often encounter such facts in my dreams, and am challenged to make sense of them. Since they are facts, I am able to do so. When I awaken, I realize that I had my facts somewhat, shall we say, confused, and I am forced to abandon them. I had rather have the dream facts because, in my dreams, Mississippi is an improved version of Oregon, and I am eager to move back.

Peggy never confuses the two states in her dreams, but then she wasn’t a Mississippian; she was an Air Force brat with Mississippi roots. She has already lived in Oregon far longer than she ever lived in Mississippi. When she was a kid, she hated the place so much that she made a vow to never fall in love with a man who lived there. Then she met me.

If I had my rathers, I had rather live someplace close enough to Mississippi that I could easily visit (it being 2,500 miles from the Willamette Valley). The problem is that I don’t know where that would be because I need wilderness, and wilderness is hard to find in the South. Here, people become lost in the woods while taking a Sunday afternoon hike, and they are NEVER found; their BODIES are never even found. You would have to work really hard to pull that off in the Deep South. You can hardly even escape the sound of people in the South. Here, there is wilderness. Here, there are mountains. I couldn’t give those up. But today, on my blog, I heard from a California woman who grew up 20 miles from where I did, and I felt that longing, that kinship that I never feel for someone who grew up twenty miles from Eugene.

Being from Mississippi is like getting a stain on your best shirt that won’t wash out, and that people from other places never seem to get on their shirts. You don’t even know why you can’t rid yourself of stupid old Mississippi because, after all, what is so special about the stupid old place? The stupid, humid, suffocating heat? The stupid fireants? The stupid mildewed everything? The stupid, provincial, impoverished, undereducated, pathetically obese, and grotesquely waddling fundamentalist Republicans who consistently outvote their Democratic counterparts who look like themselves only in a different color, and who don’t have much interest in voting despite all the rigmarole of the ‘60s? The stupid impossibility of finding whole grain foods or vegetarian options? Sure! Who wouldn’t want to live in Mississippi? Same humongous box stores and tacky fast food joints as in the rest of the country only in a Third World setting with no alternatives.

“Why, Snow, I haven’t seen ya’ll in a coon’s age. How are your folks?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh, my, that’s just too bad. I didn’t know they was that old. You know, everybody used to say that your mamma was just the best little cook they ever saw, and that your daddy was such a hard worker. The last time I saw them was out at Mt. Zion when Uncle Elbert died, and they was looking kinda poorly then come to think of it. Look now, I gotta run, but don’t make such strangers of yourselves. Ya’ll drive out and see us sometime when you’re back home.” Course, we might like you about as much as we like pus from a dog's anus, but Mississippi don’t call itself the Hospitality State for nothing, so we have to talk like this even when we don’t mean it.

Why, why can’t I be done with Mississippi? I have no family there (except for one sister who would NOT be glad to see me); I have no friends there; I own no property; there’s nothing in particular that I’m dying to get back to. Missing such a place is like having a mental illness; it is self-destructively irrational. Still…

Peggy’s mother died there last summer, and I told Peggy that if she wanted to move back to be near her father during his declining years that I would be willing. She looked at me as if I had offered to hang her upside down with no clothes on and dunk her in Crater Lake (way deep, way high, way cold). But what if she had said yes? I would have gulped, but I would have moved. God knows, I would have moved. I would have regretted it before I saw Eugene, Oregon, in the rearview mirror, but I would have moved.

I judge my life - Part 4- The unpainted house

I passed my first ten years in an unpainted house (photo 1) on a gravel road (photo 2). It stood a few hundred yards from where Peggy and I were building our new home.

I was often lonely because the only other children in the area were cousins who were a few years older than I and whose mother (my father’s sister) didn’t like my “city woman” mother, and who consequently didn’t like me. The fact that my Granny—with whom we lived—made no bones of the fact that she loved me more than she had ever loved anyone didn't help relations. Yet, I remember those years fondly because my father (photo 3) was saner than he would later become, and as far as I knew, my family was a happy family.

Until my sister was born in 1954, five years after myself, I was the center of the universe to my parents, my father’s parents, and an elderly dog named Mike (photo 4) whose fangs kept the rest of humanity at bay. I remember peeing on Mike as he lay in the dirt flopping his big tail against the ground. I considered this great fun.

Our other close neighbor was the Floyd King family on whose property was a gravel pit that was home to the water moccasin that killed their little boy. Like a lot of people, the Kings had a section of their yard that was swept. A swept yard is a child’s delight—cool, non-itchy, and smooth for toy cars and trucks.

Grandpa was opposed to indoor toilets for sanitary reasons, as he said, and even after we got electricity, it was prone to fail after every rain, so kerosene lamps lined the mantle. Our water came from a well that consisted of 8” concrete pipe that was sold in sections and descended a hundred feet or more into the earth. The long and slender well-bucket was raised and lowered by a hand crank, and had a float in the bottom that opened to allow water to enter, and closed when the bucket was full. I considered the well a mysterious and fascinating place that descended almost to the center of the earth and welcomed the toss of an occasional pebble followed sometime later by a muted splash.

We burned coal for heat—and perhaps for cooking for all I know. This now strikes me as odd since south Mississippi was hundreds of miles from the nearest coal mine. Yet, we had a little outbuilding that contained nothing but coal. Coal was an exceptional substance, unlike anything else I had seen or imagined, but I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t like the mess it made. We had other outbuildings as well, all of which were covered with unpainted planks that had grayed in the weather. One was for smoking meat, another for chickens, a third for hogs, a fourth for tools, and a fifth for a garage. The biggest one was for cattle, and it had a loft. Only horse nettles grew near it, probably because cattle wouldn’t eat them. I say this in retrospect; I don’t remember being curious about much of anything at the time.

A little way down the gravel road was a gristmill, and an occasional mule-driven wagon bearing a family of Negroes passed the house. Sometimes, they let me ride with them.

The Mississippi heat was pervasive for eight months out of the year, and even worse at night because my mother didn’t believe in fans or open windows after sunset. “Drafts” and “night air” carried disease, she said. She also worried about buzzards. The South surely leads the nation as the home of choice for vultures, and my mother was convinced that they dropped germs. She would look out from time to time when I was outside playing, and if she saw them circling high overhead in gentle glides on their great wings, she would call me in somewhat frantically.

Rattlers, cottonmouths, copperheads, red wasps, yellow jackets, and roosters were more realistic threats. The one I feared most was roosters because that was the one that plagued me most, but my worst encounter was with a speckled guinea hen. Unknown to me, it had its nest in a ditch, and it flew atop my head one day when I came too close to the eggs. I ran toward the house screaming as it clawed my scalp, but I nearly forgot my terror when the screen door flung open and my elderly Granny (photo 5) came charging across the yard with blood in her eye and a broom in her hands. It was surely the first time she had run in decades, and it was no doubt the last. One species’ maternal instincts had clashed with another’s, and I’m happy to say that mine won.

When I was almost five, Grandpa died. I have pictures of us together (photo 6), but I only have one memory of him, and that was because he did something unimagined; he scolded me. I was sitting among the chickens at the time (photo 7), and all of us were happily eating from the same trough. I didn’t even know he was around when he suddenly began yelling as if I had done something terrible. This man who had beaten his own sons had never even raised his voice to me, his favorite grandson.

Soon after his death, we got a bathroom, and it was also about this time that my father gave up his job in town and built a small grocery store in front of our house. He and my mother also farmed, but when the store burned one night, the money from farming wasn’t enough, so he eventually went back to maintaining the holdings of Gerald Kees, a rich man and the local Buick dealer. I still have the melted coins from the cash register. My father naturally suspected arson.

When I was eight, my father gave me my first real gun, a .22/.410 over-and-under (two barrels, one atop the other). I went hunting alone that first day, and killed a bird that was singing in a pecan tree. Its shattered body didn’t give me the feeling of triumph I expected, and I sought to atone for my sin by having my Granny cook it for me. I used my gun mostly for shooting opossums that got in the hen house. I left their bodies for my father to remove.

I can’t say now why my father exposed me to death when I was so young. Every Sunday morning, he would have me kill a chicken for dinner. I was too young to kill it outright, so he would hold it while I sawed its head off with a butcher knife. Then, he would toss it from us, and we would watch it “dance” as the blood splattered. I didn’t know what death meant or that a chicken could suffer, so I laughed. One day, I saw my father kill a stray dog with a piece of pipe, and since my best friends were dogs, I began to understand death, and my laugher stopped. Maybe he thought he was making me tough so I could better face life, but it didn’t work.

I judge my life - Part 3 - Breaking ground

I didn’t have to think long about what to do next because I had accepted Thoreau’s teachings about simplicity and the Mother Earth News avowal that happiness is best found in rural self-sufficiency. My parents owned eight acres of woodland that they gave to Peggy and me for a house site, and my semi-retired contractor father helped us build a home that had been designed as a ski lodge. At 68, he could still put in a full day’s work. The 1,000 square foot house was bigger than I wanted, my preference being a three-room shotgun (the rooms in a line from front to back) without a bathroom or electricity. Peggy and I settled on the “ski lodge” after she said I would be living alone if I built the house I wanted. The necessity of such compromise was what made a bachelor of Thoreau (that and being refused by the one woman he proposed to plus probable homosexual yearnings), but bachelorhood was not for me.

We broke ground at Route 4, Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, in the late summer of 1977. Our only “blueprint” was a drawing in Popular Mechanics. Dad was definitely the brains of the outfit. I wanted to be more involved in the planning, but his help was implicitly contingent upon him making the structural decisions. This would come back to haunt me. For example, Peggy and I decided on an aluminum roof, but didn’t realize until years afterward that his rafter choice was based upon the assumption that we would never want shingles.

My father was a hard man to work with because of his temper. He would literally curse a 2x4 (“God damn the goddamn mother-fucking goddamn worthless-ass son of a bitching nail-bending mother-fucking goddamn 2x4 to hell, goddamn it!”), exploding every half hour or so into a screaming litany of profanity that sounded like a Satanic Gregorian chant performed by monks on meth. He would throw tools, strangle on sputum, and curse his, “whore of a mother for giving birth to a worthless son of a bitch like me.” Such behavior took all of the pleasure out of house building, yet I bit my tongue because I didn’t think I could pull it off without him. Only once did I complain, “Dad, it’s hard for me to respect you when you talk like that.” “Fuck you. I have no respect for myself, and if you don’t want my help, you just say so, because I sure as hell don’t have to be here.”

On her days off, Peggy would join our little crew, and everything would go a great deal better because my father loved her like a daughter, and would pull back from the worst of his fits. He needed constant emotional management because he would otherwise conclude that people were against him, and Peggy and I were the only ones who were able to avoid pushing his many buttons—even my mother and sister were clueless. Peggy came to have more influence over him than anyone, and the one time she went head-to-head with him, he backed down. I don’t mean it in a prurient way when I say that the greatest love my father ever had was possibly my wife. He would have stood between her and a runaway tank.

Despite his temper, I never saw my father hit anyone. He had been an ardent barroom brawler in his younger years, but he never, to my knowledge, hit my mother or even spanked my sister and me. He always appeared so close to losing control that we lived in fear of him anyway, and my fear progressed into a fear of all men. I always had male friends, but I could never bring myself to lower my guard completely. For example, I wouldn’t lie down if they were standing for fear they would lose their minds and kill me before I could defend myself.

Peggy had insanity in her family too, and she and I have sometimes debated which was worse, with each of us defending our side as less insane. As I write about my father, I can see more clearly than ever how bad off he was. Growing up in his household, I realized he had problems, and I was ashamed of him from my earliest years. Yet, he was never locked away; he had above average intelligence; and he worked 55 hours a week to support his family…What I’m getting at is that it isn’t necessarily in a kid’s best interest to know how bad a situation is. If he can think of it as fairly normal, he can better survive it.

I could write much more about my father’s mental problems, but even though he has been dead since 1994, I don’t think it’s right to share just anything at just any time. I can only tell pieces of his story inasmuch as they’re important to my story.

Where were they?

I know what $100 will buy when I am in dire straits, but I have no idea of the worth of my friends, and to have them betray me makes those straits even more dire. I would therefore offer that, although both are desirable, money is preferable to friendship.
Ah, but money doesn’t care about you. It can’t put its arms around you or bring you gifts.

No, but my friends might not do these things either. It is also true that most of the things we need don’t care about us. The food we eat, the air we breathe, our winter clothes, our snug homes; these things don’t even know we exist. I’m not saying that friendship is worthless; I’m just saying that it’s a mistake to rely upon it.

Agreed, you might not be able to rely upon them to be there for you exactly when you need them and exactly in the way you need them; but why not be appreciative for what they do give?

Just because my friends don’t give me everything I need doesn’t necessarily make what they do give meaningless, but look at it this way. If you fall into a pit and someone brings you flowers instead of a ladder, what have they accomplished? I’ll tell you: they’ve given themselves the gift of feeling good about themselves, and I think this is the real motive behind a lot of charity. Otherwise, people would not ignore the expressed needs of the supposed objects of their generosity.

After surgery on my right shoulder, Shirley, a supposedly good friend who is also a neighbor and who had gone walking with me almost every week for two decades, wouldn’t walk with me at all despite my request that she help by taking charge of one of one of the dogs (the blind one that walks on my right). She didn’t give a reason, but she was training to walk a half marathon, so I assumed that maybe her feet hurt, or maybe she didn’t feel the need for the short non-aerobic walks to which I was limited. She did, however, bring me a potted plant that I was unable to set out. Am I not grateful? Well, not very. My friend of 23 years chose to ignore my request for help without offering an explanation, but for reasons that I had to guess and that appeared trivial.

I think you misuse your friends when you expect them to do things that you could afford to pay someone to do.

Yes, I could pay someone to walk the dogs, and I could get my own exercise by walking alongside my employee, and I could get my social needs met by talking with my employee as we walked, but I want friendship to mean more than having someone to go to a movie with at everyone’s convenience. I want friendship to offer a survival advantage. I want to care for and protect my friends, and I want my friends to care for and protect me, and this experience has taught me that I can’t even depend upon people who have been my friends for a quarter of a century to do the very thing that they have often done with me for fun and exercise.

My friends have literally spent less time with me than usual. Maybe I reminded them too much of their own mortality, but in any event, they acted like I was contagious. For example, Peggy happened to be home today, so she went walking with the dogs and me, and we ran into Kurt near the library. He said he had to run because he and Jackie were going walking in the South Hills. This meant that they had to drive past my house, yet despite my request that they go walking with me, they didn’t invite me. Why? People who I hardly knew have done more for me more than people I trusted.

I also want my friendships to have depth. If my “friends” don’t care enough to help me in even minor ways, how am I to respond when they ask how I’m doing? Am I to open my heart, or am I to assume that they are just making conversation? I worked hard before my surgery so that everything I could do for myself in advance, I did do for myself in advance. It is simply not in me to ask people to do for me that which I would not do for them.

Maybe you chose your friends unwisely, or maybe they didn’t consider your surgery to be that serious.

I think I did choose unwisely, but how could I have known? They said they loved me. They stayed in my life for years. I didn’t see them betraying other people. Well, come to think of it, I did sometimes see one of them betray other people, but since he was also capable of being unusually generous, I overlooked these betrayals, not completely but somewhat.

As for not considering my surgery serious, it wasn’t serious in terms of life and death, but it was serious in terms of disability and emotional trauma, and I tried to make that clear. There comes a point when I no longer see the point in talking to people. For example, when Shirley asks me now how I am (which she only does as part of a larger conversation), I see no point in telling her. My feelings are deep and personal, and not to be shared alongside news about the weather with someone who I don’t think really cares. I had three surgeries last year, and will have at least two this year, so maybe some people have come to take bad health as a given in my life, and therefore of little note. This means that they might not have taken my surgery seriously, but that’s one hell of a disconnect, and I don’t know what to do about it.

My challenge is to somehow avoid becoming that which I hate, namely a self-absorbed person who keeps his distance—who is incapable of being more than a friendly acquaintance. One of the most charming and seemingly loving people I ever knew was also a person who equated being needed with being trapped, and who often ended friendships overnight and without explanation. She was like an elaborate movie set that looked like a mansion on the outside but was empty inside, and I don’t want to be like that. Yet, how could I find it in my heart to respond lovingly if one of these people who failed me should now become ill or injured?

I know that I sometimes fail people. For example, I receive gifts slightly more than I give them, and I remember other people’s birthdays somewhat less than they remember mine. The truth is that I don’t much value gifts. I personally don’t want anything, and I don’t usually have a clue what someone else might want. But I do try to be there when people are in distress. To me, that’s the core of friendship, and things like remembering birthdays are an option. Maybe other people feel differently, and think I’m a piss poor friend for not remembering their birthdays. Instead of, “Do unto others as your would have them do unto you,” a better proverb might be, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”

I am trying to keep an open heart here, but the fact is that 43 days after surgery, I’m in more pain than ever, and I’m worried about my future. It’s not a good time for me to show love. Today, I can barely be civil.

"The many men so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on; and so did I."

When the pain started, I couldn’t sleep on my right side. After awhile, I couldn’t sleep on my left side either. Then, I couldn’t sleep on my back. Sleeping on my stomach was out because I use a sleep apnea mask, so I moved to a recliner. My shoulders hurt too much even there to sleep unless I put pillows under my elbows, and that didn’t help a lot. Three and half years have passed during which the pain has been better at times and worse at times, but mostly worse.

I saw the doctor Tuesday—39 days after surgery on my right shoulder—and he said the pain I’m having could be caused by a couple of things, either of which will require a second surgery on my right shoulder before I have surgery on my left shoulder. He ordered an MRI, which I had yesterday. People get MRIs and CT scans mixed up, but the difference is that the first kind of image is made with magnets and the second with radiation. For an MRI, you lie on a little trolley and are rolled into a long, narrow, and extremely noisy tube. I can best liken the noise to a whole lot of people rhythmically banging pieces of scrap iron together in a junkyard.

Yesterday, I knew that it would hurt a lot to lie on my back for a half hour with my shoulder in something resembling a vice, so I took two Norcos (the narcotic equivalent of three Vicodin). When the technician first positioned me, I couldn’t even begin the handle the pain, so he spent several minutes cushioning my shoulder. Peggy had helped me change clothes for the procedure, and the tech gave her a magazine and told her she could sit in the MRI room with me.

I knew that if I moved, I would have to stay in the machine even longer, and that if I moved too much, I would have to come back again, yet I despaired of holding out. I tried to count each four-minute series so I would have an idea how many more I had to endure, but I lost count. Then, I tried to relive memories of happy events in my life because I had heard that some prisoners of war survive torture that way, but I couldn’t come up with many memories or hold onto the few I did. I even tried counting the seconds, both as a way to distract myself from the pain and to know how much longer each series would last. One-one thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand and so on. But I had no idea how closely my counting coincided with the passage of time. I suspected that I was way slow.

The technician could talk to me over a microphone, and he started telling me that I needed to lie still. I thought I was lying still, but I tried even harder. My arm stopped obeying me any too well, and I was afraid I would lose control of it completely. Meanwhile, the roof of the tube hovered three inches above my face, and the metallic pounding of the machine blocked out the classical music in my headphones. I didn’t scream, cry, vomit, faint, or thrash about; so to Peggy, who was unable to see anything but my feet sticking out of the tube, I must have looked okay.

I thought of the months of torture that people were subjected to at Guantanamo Bay Prison, and I wondered what kind of lame-ass torturers needed months, rather than minutes, to break a man.

I remembered being told in church when I was a kid that hell was infinitely painful and lasted forever, but that the loved ones of people who were in hell were still able to experience unlimited happiness in heaven even though they knew what was going on down below.

I didn’t think I could bear it if the pain got worse, but I also knew that I could tell the technician to stop. This made me wonder about people who are in even worse pain, and for a much longer time, but can’t stop it. I’ve heard that they pass out, but what happens when they wake up and the pain is still there?

Years ago, I saw a documentary about Devil’s Island, the place where the French used to send criminals. In that documentary, a man was on his back, being manacled to a wooden bench for the night. He was in obvious pain, sobbing and pleading with the guard, for what I didn’t know; maybe to make the manacles looser. He was a little man, and he looked so pathetic that the image has stayed with me for years, although he was only on the screen for seconds. I think of him a lot when I’m hurting, because he had no drugs, and his guards had no mercy.

Another thing that went through my mind yesterday was that I couldn’t imagine anyone not killing themselves if such pain was all that lay ahead of them. I should think that even people who believe that God sends you to hell if you kill yourself would still kill themselves and take their chances. I should think they would even beg for a gun.

Later, I tried to tell Peggy how bad it had been, but words failed me, and I worried that she would think I was a wimp. Pain is a very private world. Sometimes, I feel like I’m no longer in this world (at least this world as I’ve known it), but have stepped into some other world.

For as long as I live, I will never forget the pain of my MRIs last year, and yesterday was even worse. I know it was worse because, last year, the technician complimented me on lying still. This year, the technician became annoyed. He didn’t say he was annoyed—he even acted like he was sympathetic—but I think he was annoyed.

Sometimes, I write about how bad things are for me, but what I don’t write about is how much I respect myself for how well I am handling it. Part of what keeps me going is that I have settled my mind on the idea that I am facing a year of pain and disability, but that, if I can hold out, I should be in good shape this time next year. If I’m not, I’ll deal with it then. For now, I need to believe that things will get better.

Some of the people who read my blog have cancers that will probably kill them. Another woman, Cali, has a disease that’s six words long, but which means that the nerves all over her body are screwed up, and that she is in permanent pain, and might get worse. Others are in pain from bad backs, rheumatoid arthritis, and so forth. These people hold me in their hearts with compassion. Maybe it’s true of people who suffer a lot that they are more loving toward those who are suffering less, than are people who haven’t known much suffering. Sometimes, such people tell me that I speak for them when I write about pain, not because I hurt as much, but because I describe it better. Still, I doubt that many of us feel understood by those who are closet to us. It’s like war in that you have to go there to have a clue.

I tend to think in terms of how bad things would have to be before I killed myself. I have already endured a lot, and this makes me think that I’m a lot stronger than I gave myself credit for. I have been depressed for much of my life, but for the most part now, I am not particularly depressed. I think this is because I regard my condition as so frightening that I don’t have the luxury of indulging myself in too much negativity. I get negative, of course, but I bounce back faster than I did when I was emotionally depressed but physically healthy.

I’m sure there are those who think what I might have once thought, that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, my main complaint is shoulder pain, and how bad could that be? Everyone has had sore shoulders, so when they try to imagine how I feel, they probably picture it as simply a bad case of sore shoulders. Peggy sometimes expresses the wish that she might feel my pain for a short time in order to know what it is like. I wish she could too, because even a few minutes of it would give her some idea.

Something else that comforts me is my knowledge that, throughout the millennia, most people who have suffered as I suffer had no hope for anything but more pain. And what of those who, despite the pain, had to work hard physically to survive? I have no idea how they could bear it, but knowing even a little of what their lives were like makes me better able to face my life, that and the fact that I have a doctor whom I like and trust.

Mark is big. Maybe in his upper thirties. A serious bodybuilder. Strong but gentle. He takes his time with me. He listens. I went through three other doctors to find him, and I would not be coping nearly so well without him—or his assistant, Laura, who is so prompt to call back when I need something.

What I would really like would be to compartmentalize my suffering so that I could still have a more or less normal life, but I’ve found this to be exceedingly difficult because I can’t do so most of the things I would normally do. It’s like my life is on hold, and getting beyond that is a struggle against which I’m not making much progress.

Rainbows everywhere

I just got caught up on answering responses from past entries, so if you wrote to me and didn't hear back, or didn't find a response when you checked back, you will probably find one now. A lot of you put a great deal of thought and love into writing to me, and it is very much in my heart to reciprocate.

Please know that I appreciate you. Especially now that things are so challenging for me physically, you are my guiding rainbow. I have always found purpose through the work that I could do with my body, and now I can't even dust furniture. You have no idea--well, a lot of you probably do--how hard that is, or how much your support means to me.

I judge my life - Part 2 - Go down Moses

My 17-day career in the Air Force being over (see April 20), Peggy and I returned to Mississippi where I got a job as a fifth grade teacher in Brookhaven, my hometown. The year was 1973, and Fannie Mullins had been a segregated black school until a few years earlier, so it was in Little Egypt a part of town that few white people had previously visited. The neighborhood was poor, and the streets were narrow and lacked curbs or sidewalks.

The principal (Dow) and three of the other teachers (Tillman, Brown, and Goodwin) were black men, making me the only white male. They greeted me coolly, but without hostility. Goodwin even invited me to go fishing one afternoon. I didn’t fish, but then I didn’t figure that the invitation was really about fishing anyway. I figured it was really about seeing whether I was openly bigoted. When I passed the test, no other invitations were offered. The truth was that the other men at Fannie Mullins didn’t want to socialize with me anymore than I wanted to socialize with them. We simply didn’t have much in common.

People from outside the South tend to see everything that happens there in terms of race, but things aren’t that simple because, in the modern South, cultural differences are probably more important than racial ones. Let me give you an example that might sound familiar. Compare an ordinary black church to an ordinary white church of the same denomination. The dress, the music, and the preaching style are quite different, but are these racial differences, cultural differences or a combination? How would you even know?

I’ve been to scores of teachers’ meetings during which the white teachers sat together on one side of the auditorium, and the black teachers on the other. Sometimes, a teacher might cross over, and I was never aware that anyone had a problem with it; but the fact is that the white teachers weren’t excluding the black teachers (or vice versa), but that everyone was exercising his freedom to sit where he pleased. Maybe this is hard for white people from other places to accept because they know very few black people, and the black people they do know fit into the dominant white culture. But Mississippi is roughly half black (more in places), and this enables two distinct cultures to exist side by side.

The other men at Fannie Mullins wore ties and sometimes sports coats if not full suits; I didn’t. One day, Mr. Dow ordered me to at least wear a tie, so I starting wearing a clip-on to work, only to take it off as soon as I got to my room, and not put it on again until I took my class to lunch. He gave me grief about this from time to time, but I hated ties; I didn’t see the sense in them; and I sure as hell wasn’t go to wear one in a Mississippi school that didn’t have air conditioning.

The third year I taught, a new roof was put on the flat school building, and the tar for the project was melted right outside my window over a period of weeks. This created such a smoky stench that I had to keep the windows shut, and between the smoke and the 100 degree plus temperatures, conditions were almost unbearable. No one learned in my classroom; they simply survived. When I complained, Mr. Dow said that he had ordered the cooker to be placed outside my room because I was a man, implying, I suppose, that this made me better qualified to suffer. I didn’t think it prudent to mention that there were other men he could have chosen, but we got into a bit of a row anyway. One thing led to another, and he ended up giving me hell about the tie issue. “Why can’t you just follow my orders like the other men?” he asked. I said it was because I wasn’t afraid of him like the other men (Dow was big and gruff). The other men had hardly confided in me, so I couldn’t be sure that this was true, but I was pleased to see that it very nearly made him apoplectic.

I finished my third year as a teacher in 1976. I had wanted to grow a beard for months, but put it off until summer. I was actually naïve enough to think my beard wouldn’t be a problem when school started back in late August. My reasoning was that three of the four remaining men (Goodwin had died) had moustaches, and so I wasn’t introducing facial hair, I was simply extending its range. I went to the school a few days before classes started to get my room set-up, and in less than five minutes Mr. Dow was on the intercom ordering me to his office. I knew from experience that this boded no good.

“Snow,” he said (of course he really used my other name), “I see that you grew a beard over the summer, and I want you to know that it looks mighty fine, but I’m assuming you’ll be shaving it off before school starts.”

“No, sir, I hadn’t planned to.”

“Well, I just don’t know if Mr. Trammel [the area superintendent] will let you teach looking like that.”

“Well, sir, I don’t intend to shave.”

I went back to my room and waited to see what would happen next. A few minutes later, he summoned me back to his office, and said that Mr. Brumfield wanted me to call his secretary and make an appointment to see him. Mr. Brumfield was the assistant superintendent. Both he and Mr. Trammel had been working their way up the career ladder when I was a kid, and this meant that they both had occasion to spank me from time to time for fighting.

Mr. Brumfield had no better luck getting me to shave than had Mr. Dow, so he passed me along to Mr. Trammel who found me equally recalcitrant. As my superiors saw it, their main weapon was to threaten my advancement into an administrative position. Little did they know—and scarcely could they believe—that I didn’t want to advance. They then threatened to take away my students and leave me in an empty classroom all year. The image of being paid to sit around and read sounded as appealing as it did unlikely, so I offered no protest about that either. Finally, they said that I was a disappointment to them, an embarrassment to the Brookhaven Municipal Separate School District, and intimated that I might be fired. This option was also appealing because I had by now talked to someone from the ACLU, and was pretty sure I would win if we went to court.

Why did they object to your beard?

Most white Southerners in 1976 associated beards with dope-smoking hippies (which wasn’t far off the mark in my case). I assumed that black people felt the same way, so I was surprised to learn that they associated beards, not with peaceful hippies, but with violent militants. Even so, no one in the administration ever admitted that he personally had an issue with my beard; they were simply concerned about what the community at large would think.

School started without anything more being done. I waited. Weeks passed. I finally realized that nothing was going to be done. My superiors would probably hate me and maybe even look for an excuse to get rid of me, but they had no doubt seen their lawyer and decided that it wouldn’t be cost effective to go to war over a beard.

Meanwhile, I struggled within myself over whether to shave in order to placate them. The consensus among people who I talked to was that the job was more important than the beard. Yet, I knew that if I shaved, I would become so resentful that I would probably quit the job anyway. I turned to nature, marijuana and Thoreau—all at the same time. Everyday after work, I would retreat to the woods with a joint and my compendium of Thoreau.

I saw a lot of Mr. Dow that year because he was forever on the intercom, summoning me to his office to give me hell about one thing or another. He even said that parents complained more about me than they did about all his other teachers combined. I doubted this because I had never been told of a single complaint in previous years and only one specific complaint after I grew my beard (someone objected to the relaxation exercises that I gave the kids on the grounds that they were un-Christian). Indeed, I had always been popular with students and parents so far as I was aware.

The year passed and contract renewal time came around again. I didn’t sign on for another year for various reasons. The hostility of my superiors was one of them, but just as important was a reason that makes no sense to most people. Contracts make me claustrophobic. Even though I had every intention of seeing the job through, the knowledge that I had to sign a paper promising to be in a certain place at a certain time on a certain day months and months in advance gave me the willies. Now that things were especially tense at work, the prospect of signing a contract weighed on me even more heavily.

Were you a good teacher?

Not especially. I liked the kids, and the kids liked me because I was creative in my teaching and my assignments, and because I made them laugh. The problem was that I didn’t take my responsibility seriously. I taught 150 kids a day, 30 at a time for 50 minutes at a time, and although I wanted to help the underachievers realize their potential—no one had helped me, and I failed three grades—I felt powerless to make a difference. And, as with every other job I ever had, I hated taking orders; I felt underpaid; and I thought I deserved a job better suited to my genius. Unfortunately, I never figured out exactly what job was better suited to my genius or even where my genius lay. I just knew that I had a sense of destiny, a feeling that I was meant for greatness, but I lacked any sense that I had to work for it. I believed that if I waited long enough, the universe would drop success into my lap.

Another major problem that I had was shyness. I simply couldn’t pull off speaking to groups of adults, and I was even afraid to speak to my students’ parents at open house nights or during conferences. I cannot overstate the severity of this problem. I can but report that I overcame it around my fiftieth year. If I had been able to overcome it decades sooner, it would have opened doors that were completely closed to me. For example, I might have gotten an advanced degree and become a professor.

If you were so shy, how were you able to stand up to people who opposed you?

I was also principled and stubborn. If I thought someone—or some group—was trying to run over me, I could find the strength to resist simply because I feared being unable to live with myself if I knuckled under. I remember but one occasion when I let someone intimidate me, and I tortured myself over it for many years.

I saw this same resistance in my father who was even shyer than I. His voice would break simply from trying to order food in a restaurant, but if he was mad enough, he could fill a football stadium with profanity. His problem was that his anger was consistently misplaced and misused. I have made a valiant effort to correct that in my own life, and as a result, I seldom lose my temper.

I was too immature to be a good teacher. Yet, if I were teaching today and the beard issue came up, I would struggle with it now just as I struggled with it then. Would I give in to the silly rules of silly men who valued conformity and public relations over freedom and education, or would I deprive my students of a good teacher—and I think I have it in me to be a good teacher? My choice is not immediately obvious. Here is what Thoreau wrote about his experience. At the time I taught, it mirrored my own.

“I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.”