It was a Hitler kind of week

I unintentionally lost seven pounds in six days last week, my only other symptom of illness being fatigue so severe that it kept me in bed for much of the time. Because I regularly take pills for nerve pain, pills for arthritic pain, and pills for sleep, along with marijuana and strong narcotics, my first thought was liver or kidney failure, so I stopped taking everything. I knew I would be in more pain, but I had no idea how bad it would get. My shoulders, my back, my hips, the hand that I broke last summer, and my upper legs and knees, were all screaming at me, and I could do nothing for them. When I couldn’t sleep in bed, I moved to the recliner that served as my bed for eight months out of the twenty-four that I was having surgeries, but I couldn’t sleep there either.

I didn’t want to go to the doctor because there are a lot of bad colds going around, but when four days passed, and I was little improved, I decided that I had to go because I wasn't holding up well under the pain, and because I thought I might be so ill that my life would be jeopardized if I waited. He took some blood tests, and I went home to await the results, practice having made me fairly stoic about such things. Peggy came down with a cold that night. The tests came back yesterday, and to my very great surprise, they were normal. The doctor speculated that, whatever the initial problem had been, my later fatigue and weight loss had been due to narcotic withdrawal, so I’m back to taking pills and eating marijuana cookies (but no narcotics). If not for the pain and fatigue, I would have enjoyed seeing the universe without a haze around it. I hadn’t realized how absent from the external world I had become, even though it had been a welcome absence for the most part. I mean, between hurting bad and being loaded, which would you choose? Duh. 

When people talk about the redemptive power of suffering, I think they’re full of shit. They’re invariably people who have no firsthand experience of what they’re talking about, at least when it comes to bad chronic physical pain. Imagine that you have the worst toothache you’ve ever felt, that it’s untreatable, and that the only thing that will even reduce the pain by half might cause you to sicken and die. Is there anyone on earth who imagines that he would gain from that? If there is, bring him over, so I can slap some sense into him. My life is a war of attrition, and every year I lose more hope, feel more pain, and become more disabled, and I’ve yet to meet anyone in my situation who is doing any victory dances. 

I can’t say that pain hasn’t given me insights, but they’ve been insights about how really bad life can hurt, how little can be done about that, how little support anyone can give, and how utterly tedious it all becomes, both to the sufferer and to everyone he looks to for support. I never dreamed that my life would turn out like this. Quite the opposite. I thought I would be strong and capable almost until I died, and now I’m wondering how much longer I will able to clean house. It took me three days last time, and it’s not even a big house. 

I think it likely that the only thing that keeps me alive is Peggy (I’m grateful for this), but she is also the person who suffers the most because of me, and that alone is enough to bear. I can only justify my life by bringing good into hers, and I rarely feel that I do particularly well. I have observed little difference in whether pain is physically or emotionally based because either way, the struggle to overcome (or to at least adjust) is likely to be longterm, intense, and a pain in the ass of ones partner. I guess I can give myself credit for doing the best I can, but how would I really know?

P.S. Yes, I understand. I could be worse off, much worse off. I probably know that better than those few who try to remind me of it because living with pain has improved my ability to sense pain in others. It’s like if you bought a red Toyota Camry, and all of a sudden you notice how many red Toyota Camrys are on the road. But, more than that, you have become deeply interested in red Toyota Camrys. Rather than bore me, people who tell me about their pain fascinate and encourage me.

You who read this blog regularly will remember that I had a period last summer when my pain level dropped by 90%. It lasted for about three months, and since then, the pain has kept getting worse. Those three months were the first time in a few years that I had seriously dared to hope, and when the pain came back, they just made it the harder to bear.

The Bed Wars

Everyday when I got ready to make the bed, Brewsky would be in it. I would pick him up, set him on the floor, and proceed with my work. He resented this and would jump back into bed before I could even pull the covers off. I would put him on the floor again, and he would jump back into bed again. I’m a fast bed-maker, but some days, he would jump back into bed as many as eight times. I didn’t know what to do. For six months, I was tortured. For six months, I lay awake worrying. Finally, I realized that I only had two choices: quit making the bed or kill the cat. These choices were so grim that I decided to devote six more months to thinking about the problem. 

One day as I watched him gobble down his supper (he eats like a dog), I thought that maybe I could use food to bribe him to get out of bed, so I tried it. It worked, splendidly. I would throw a few kibbles down the hallway, and off he would go. Sometimes, I would either be too hurried or simply not in the mood to do this, and so it was that I gradually went back to setting him on the floor. To my surprise, he no longer became angry. Most days, he’s even downright patient, and will observe me stoically until I pull the spread over the pillows, which is his cue that he can jump back in and not be taken out again. Ever now and I then, I will put him back into the bed myself, pet him a little, and wish him happy dreams. He seems to appreciate this. He’s hardly an unreasonable cat, and I’m happy that I was clever enough to think of an alternative to murder.

The FFRF, God's Big Ten, and a form of Christianity that I respect

“All of you must obey the government rulers…anyone who is against the government is against something God has commanded.” Romans 13: 1-2

The FFRF supports nonbelievers in various ways, most notably through lawsuits against those who violate existing laws regarding the separation of church and state. Among its current suits are two against Pennsylvania public schools that prominently display large granite monuments containing the Ten Commandments (henceforth, the Big Ten). Schools always lose these suits because what they are doing is illegal, and this means that they will not only have wasted tens of thousands of school dollars on their own attorneys, they will also have to pay the FFRF’s attorneys.

The Big Ten are a big deal to the many American Christians who claim that the commandments are beyond human wisdom, and as such, form the foundation of our laws today. Yet, with the exception of the first four, which concern the Jews’ relationship with their deity, the Big Ten are painfully obvious to anyone with an IQ above fifty. What’s more, of the first four, Christians themselves blatantly ignore the second half of #2 and all of #4. Why then, are they so obsessed with posting the Big Ten on public property? I think it’s their way of asserting their supremacy (like when a dog pisses on a fire hydrant) with the implication that anyone who objects can jolly well go fuck himself. Ironically, the FFRF gets lots of mail from Christians who don’t appear to know about the third commandment (don’t take the Lord’s name in vain), and these same Christians are inordinately fond of the word fuck, which is why I used it just now in conveying their feelings toward people like myself. I’m now going to write out the Big Ten and add my own brief commentary so that you can judge for yourself how useful they really are.

1) You must not have any other god before me. Here, Jehovah acknowledges the existence of lesser deities, this being just one example of how the Jews’ conception of their deity evolved over time, yet the storyline is that “God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” 

2) You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. I’ve heard that Moslems partially observe this, but Christians somehow decided that images are okay. I have no idea why. Maybe they just like to draw.

3) You must not misuse the name of the Lord your God. As in “Goddamn the goddamn mother-fucking goddamn son of a bitch to hell, goddamn it,” which was my father’s favorite chant and one that he repeated many times a day. Because he said it with such fervor, I pretended that he was a holy man offering a prayer, and this enabled me to smile.

4) Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. The early church gave up the Sabbath and started worshipping on Sunday. As with deciding that images were permissible, their reasoning is a mystery, at least to me. Maybe Billy Graham could tell you.

5) Honor your father and mother. This commandment applies to drunken molesters as well as to deserving parents. This is the only one of the remaining six that is given as something to do rather than something to avoid. Unlike Jesus, Jehovah was more concerned with avoiding evil than with doing good, which is why Jesus stayed so mad at the orthodox Jews of his day over their obsession with living in perfect purity at the cost of being sincere and loving. It is another example of how the Biblical God evolved.

6) You must not murder. Prior to this time, the Jews apparently thought that murder was okay. People in other lands were able to figure out that it was a crime without God telling them, so why the Jews needed to be told, I can’t imagine.

7) You must not commit adultery. I could do without this one, but that would bring the number to nine, and nine wouldn’t have the same authoritative ring, almost as if God had run out of ideas or got tired of writing.

8) You must not steal. Like with wanton killing, the early Jews had no clue that stealing was a bad idea. Before the Top Ten, they stole anything that wasn’t nailed down, and the people they stole from didn’t even know enough to complain.

9) You must not testify falsely against your neighbor. Yep, you guessed it. If the Big Ten contains divine wisdom rather than human wisdom, then lying must have been okay before Moses came down the mountain. Afterwards, a lot of people had trouble giving up lying, so judges made them swear that they were telling the truth when court was in session, a practice that continues to this very day.

10) You must not covet your neighbor’s house, wife, male or female servant, ox or donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor. Women came behind houses because items were listed according to monetary value. Peggy owns half of this house, so my share of it is reduced by the same amount, so I think she might be number one on my list. On the other hand, I got Peggy for free, whereas my cat cost $40, so maybe the cat should come first.

American Christians claim to love God’s laws, yet they can’t agree on what they are, and they do an awful lot of seemingly whimsical picking and choosing about which ones to observe. If I were a believer, I would take the approach of Progressive Christians, which is to reduce the number of laws to what Christ said were the main two (love God; love your neighbor), and disregard anything in conflict with them. If such were the dominant face of American Christianity, I wouldn’t spend time criticizing it, but I see its dominant face as hate-driven, materialistic, militaristic, hypocritical, and legalistic. What Christ taught, it is not; and what it teaches, Christ was not.