Cancer testing, the tale continues


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're not likely to see me buying any lattes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

1) Run in circles while screaming and flailing my chest with my fists.
2) Find God so I check item number one off the list.

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

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


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

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

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

Maybe cancer; maybe not


My prostate antigen level in April of 2011 was two. This April, it was 4.5. This week, it’s 4.9. I’ve had a few biopsies over the years—including one of my lower abdomen and another of a neck vertebrae for which the surgeon had to go through the front of my throat—but I never believed I had cancer. This time, I think I do.

I would hate like hell to leave Peggy alone. I would also hate to leave my "bloggy friends" as Nollyposh used to call them (she was one of four bloggy friends I lost to cancer). A lot of people will find out that they're dying just in the time it takes to write this post, and that won't be long because I'm still doing my experiment with minimal editing.

A few years ago my 56-year-old neighbor, John, drove three hours, climbed a 10,358-foot peak (3,157 meters), and drove home. I saw him that evening, and he complained of fatigue. I laughed, but he said that, no, this fatigue was different. He died a year later of prostate cancer. (I can hardly hold out to clean house anymore, which is one of the reasons I think I have cancer). John died next door, but I never went to see him because I didn’t really know him, and I wasn’t sure I would be welcome. He was also a lawyer, and I hate lawyers. I now wish I had gone because it would have been the right thing to do. I also like being around people who are dying.

Doc Martin is phobic of blood; Nurse Peggy is phobic of cancer. She's so scared that she’s been having to struggle to keep from hyperventilating. 

I've often wondered whether it would be easier to have a terminal illness than to live in pain. One advantage of living in pain is that I have a sense of time stretching before me, and that gives me reason to hope that I will either beat the pain eventually or at least learn to tolerate it better.

My odds of survival are probably good even if I have cancer, but there’s still that 3% chance that I’ll be dead within five years. After ten years, the chance is 30%, and it keeps going downhill from there. As cancer goes, only lung cancer kills more Americans than prostate cancer.

I won’t be getting any more teeth crowned until I have a prognosis. The damn dentist crowned one in January, and that alone drained my insurance for the rest of the year. He wanted to crown another one in April, but I said no, so he squirted some gook into the hole in the hope that it will last until January 2013.

Helter Skelter captures my mood today just as it captured the mood of America in the late ‘60s. To represent the early ‘60s, I chose Johnny Angel. How, in a single decade, do you go from songs about cars and teenage romance to songs about drugs, death, defeat, confusion, alienation, insanity, and injustice?

I like things that mess with my head, so I like Helter Skelter. The good thing about music is that I can turn it off if it gets too intense. With real life, I have to divide myself into two parts. One part thinks, feels, and acts; the other part dispassionately observes the part that thinks, feels, and acts. Pain can become so consuming that it draws my observer part into it, and that's when I go to pieces. I assume that this can also be true of cancer. I really must learn to do better, and I think I'm succeeding. I've felt stronger than ever since my meltdown on Sunday.


P.S. Shelley Fabares is a goddess.




Today's barely edited


I didn’t feel old until a year or two ago. I attribute this sudden oncoming of antiquity to the pain. Except for misdiagnosed sleep apnea (which cost me two needless surgeries) and the pain of the last six years, I’ve been healthy as an adult. In fact, I used to marvel at my good health because I would — sometimes for months—feel such sadness that I was just sure it would eventually eat its way from my heart and into my flesh, causing me to sicken and die. The fact that I stayed in such good shape was curious to me.

Then came the sleep apnea, and I grew increasingly desperate over a period of five years until it was diagnosed and treated. Three years later came the pain. For the longest, I thought I would beat it. I told myself that my species, despite its many faults, is very clever in various ways, and that medicine has been one of the major benefactors of the explosion of knowledge that has occurred during my lifetime alone (I would have died had the sleep apnea hit 15 years earlier). How hard, therefore, could it be to eliminate my little old pain? It might be impossible as it turns out.

For much of my life, I held doctors on such an intellectual pedestal that if a doctor couldn’t cure me of something, I would assume that he wasn't trying hard enough—maybe he hadn’t run the right test or asked the right question. I later met doctors whom I trusted as good men as well as good doctors, and when they told me there was nothing they could do, I believed them. Even with this recent pain and the urging of one reader to see a pain specialist, I have no thought of seeing a doctor. For what? Pills? I’ve got pills, and if there were other pills, I would know about them. Dosages? If I want to dicker with those, I have more confidence in the Internet than I do in any given doctor (I've discovered two serious errors in my prescriptions by looking them up on the Internet). Tests? Diagnoses? Surgeries? I could probably get several more of each if I wanted to start from scratch with new doctors, but I don't.

Maybe my "barely edited" experiment is connected with my need to transcend the pain because while I've lost all hope of escaping it completely, I haven't lost faith in my ability to someday live well despite it. I think at least one of you might have worried about me euthanizing myself after my last post, but I wouldn’t do that. I thought a lot about it for a long time, and I must have decided against it because I don’t dwell on it much. Not that I was ever really close to suicide; it’s just that I considered it a reasonable and reassuring option. If you hurt as I do, and you killed yourself, I could respect you for it if you only had yourself to think of (If you were married, I would consider it necessary for you to get your spouse's blessing to kill yourself it unless your spouse opposed suicide on principal). But even if you were alone or had your family’s blessing, I would suggest that you hang in there. You’ll be dead-meat in a few years anyway and you'll stay dead for all eternity, so why not stick around? You might do some good, you might have a few laughs, and you can always decide to off yourself later.  

The photo is of me, from yesterday. It did me good to go to the woods.

A second experiment with posting in the moment




Given how much I bitch and whine, Peggy might not realize that I try to spare her from the worst of what I feel, but I can’t do it today. I had a horrendous night last night that followed a day spent trying to recover from another bad night. Dilaudid didn’t help, so I lay awake for hours and I am just about through the roof right now. I smoked some pot an hour ago hoping it would help, but unlike yesterday, I’m experiencing something similar to a bad acid trip. I feel like I’m caught in a nightmare, and I don’t have the strength to find peace in the storm. I work everyday to stay calm and hopeful, but when I’m really hurting, really exhausted, and really without any means to control the pain without knocking myself out, I just can’t find it in me. I’m unfit for anything but to shake and cry, yet, there’s something here for me. I know it, but I can't find it even after years of looking.... I've heard enough Mary Wells and going to listen to some Goulet. Before marijuana, I didn't care about music. Now, it's one of my main comforts, it and plants.

An experiment in not editing—much anyway


I’ve been thinking about posting more and editing less because it’s making me crazy that I can’t stop editing. Even after I post something, I continue editing for days. So, here goes.

It’s a good day to live in Eugene (the photo is one that I took of some area scenery). The six months of drizzle are at an end, and the drought hasn’t arrived. It’s our second 80-degree day (27 C), 80 being 15 degrees above my ideal, but still pleasant enough.

I did yard work yesterday and suffered a lot for it last night. In fact, I’m such a wreck today that I’m avoiding unnecessary chores. I had intended to at least march in a pro-marijuana parade, but my knees were hurting too bad. I did bike to the library and got some books about war (I just finished—and can recommend—American Sniper, The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History). I also bought some eucalyptus incense—which I’m now enjoying—and biked around the downtown area looking at the freaks. I like freaks—if they’re pleasant freaks. I also enjoy homeless men. Years ago, I considered them disgusting, so one day I passed a panhandler without speaking to him although he said something to me. He got up and followed me, demanding in a loud voice that I at least show him the respect of acknowledging his existence. I walked on in silence. I now shed tears when I remember that man. I could have done good, and I chose evil.

My right shoulder is hurting me a lot today, but I do my damnedest to avoid drugs in the daytime with the exception of marijuana, and I’m already so strung-out from the drugs that I took last night that I don’t dare use that. I literally feel like I’m losing my mind, and marijuana could make it worse. I’m also so tired that I'm sick, and marijuana could make that worse too. Then again, it could make me hyper. It's not a predictable drug, at least in my case.

Kurt and Jackie are coming for supper. Their cat was killed the day before yesterday, and although we rarely see them more than a few times a year, I thought it good to invite them to supper for the second week in a row. They accepted with an enthusiasm that made me sad for them.

I have two other recommendations for you. The first is an interview entitled A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. It's the heaviest thing I've ever seen on film, yet it's only 39 minutes long. He died a few days after I watched it, and I've seen it a few more times since then. My last recommendation is Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: a Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs. The author reminded me a friend from 30 years ago named Larry. One day Larry and were smoking pot with another man when the other man handed Larry a handful of pills and asked if Larry knew what any of them were. Larry had no idea, but he swallowed them down without even asking. After that, I thought of him as a starving dog.


So, I took a hit, and I'm happy to report that I feel a little better. The pain is still with me, but it doesn't hurt like it did.

Drugs and addiction


It’s a rare night that I can sleep without drugs. For pain, I take Cymbalta, Dilaudid, oxycodone, and Neurontin. For sleep, I have Ambien, Dalmane, Restoril, and marijuana. All of these drugs have overlapping benefits and they work best in combination, but with the exception of marijuana I seldom mix them because of the increased risk of side effects. Also, except for marijuana, I never take any of them during the daytime. The one exception was when I took oxycodone two weeks ago for that anxiety attack caused by the Cipro.

My most effective painkiller/sleep aide, is Neurontin. Oddly enough, considering how strong it is, Neurontin doesn’t make me high unless missing doorways and bouncing off walls counts as being high. To avoid tolerance problems, I save it for when I’m desperate. For example, I hardly slept three nights ago, and when that happens, I go for broke the next night, so I took three doses (900 mgs) of Neurontin at once and spent the next several hours flat on my back. One of the ways I minimize pain is by turning over a lot, so when the pain finally awakened me, I was hurting pretty bad, but the drug still had enough kick (about 16 hours worth altogether) that I was eventually able to get back to sleep. 

Last night, I was so tired that I did my best to sleep without drugs, but that only lasted for five hours before I took a 10 mg Ambien, which is my short-acting favorite. Taking so many drugs means that I'm pretty much permanently snookered. I'll give some examples of the annoyances this causes. One. When I got up this morning, I couldn’t find my sunglasses, so I finally left the house without them. When I got home, there they were, right where they were supposed to be, which was the one place I didn’t look. Two. I’ve already looked once today, and I still can't remember if this is 2011 or 2012.

I’m going to address addiction since some of you expressed concern about it following my last post. I was surprised that one person was especially worried about marijuana because I consider marijuana to be the least harmful drug I take in terms of tolerance, dependency, side-effects, or—in the case of narcotics—addictiveness. It strikes me as exceedingly odd that the least scary drug I use is the only one that's illegal. Marijuana can be habituating, of course, but then so can jogging or eating ice cream. Narcotics are a whole other animal because they bring about permanent changes in the brain and hellacious withdrawal symptoms. As I write, I haven’t used marijuana for five days (I sometimes get tired of being high) without the least problem. If I used narcotics as often as I normally use marijuana, I would be under medical care for withdrawal.

To further compare narcotics and marijuana; I prefer marijuana because it causes me to think about the world in deeper and more interesting ways, ways that are so profoundly true for me that they seem to be coming from the core of my being. The drug rarely leads me to euphoria while it not uncommonly makes me anxious, dysphoric, and sometimes downright miserable. I often go for months during which I start most days with marijuana and coffee and then continue to use marijuana until bedtime. I do this because I like the mental stimulation but also because pot works far better as a sleep aide if I use it all day. Sleep is my major challenge not just because of the pain but because I have four separate sleep disorders—insomnia, sleep apnea, nocturnal myoclonus, and nocturnal bruxism.

Narcotics differ from marijuana in that they do induce euphoria, although I find them boring in terms of thought stimulation (who needs to think when he’s euphoric?). I’ll use an analogy to describe how I envision narcotic addiction. Imagine that you’re rafting down a slow and muddy river. The hot air is stifling and the scenery boring. You too are stifled and bored, and you wish with all your heart that you could feel like you were getting somewhere, but your entire life has come to seem like a failure no matter what you do. Then you come to a whirlpool (narcotics), but you don’t realize it's a whirlpool because it's so wide. You’re just pleased to find that you’re moving, although you can’t really remember why you ever wanted to be someplace else. The breeze in your face is cooling, and the same scenery that bored you a few minutes ago is now fascinatingly beautiful. Happiness seems so simple and natural, and sadness so twisted and complex that it's hard to imagine that you were ever unhappy. By the time you see Death at your side, you might be too far gone to turn back. I’m not talking about me, but neither do I remain cocksure that addiction only happens to other people, people inferior to myself. When you're desperate for a way out, even a bad option can look better than no option.

My narcotic mainstay is oxycodone (when it comes combined with acetaminophen, it’s called Percocet) because I’ve been approved for a years’ worth without even having to go back to my internist. I limit myself to 30 mgs at a time (the starting dose is 5-10) three or four times a week. Unfortunately, I feel less euphoric and get less pain relief from thirty than I once got from ten, but I'm afraid that if I take a higher dosage even once, I’ll be tempted to do it again. Why did I set 30 as my limit when my prescription calls for 10-20? Because I was taking 30 when I got scared, and since I was handling that okay—except for the hellacious constipation—I stayed with it. Narcotics are so insidious that even though 30 no longer gets me high for more than a half hour, I crave it on my narcotic-free nights. On the nights I do take it, I have trouble waiting until bedtime to do so because the rush initially makes me too happy to fall asleep, so I want to be up doing fun things. There's nothing like high on narcotics and marijuana and then baking crackers while watching a movie. Yep, that's right, I can carry on real well even while real high, so well in fact that even Peggy can't even tell if I've had anything.

I sometimes imagine that narcotics are talking to me. They say they’re my friends, and that there’s really no reason for me to be in pain when all I have to do to feel better is to take a few milligrams extra. They assure me that, just as most people can safely relax in the evening with a few drinks, so can I relax with a few narcotics. Besides, don’t I deserve a little euphoria? Hell, I’m in pain; my brain—the one I once took pride in—is a turnip; I can’t do many of the things that I used to find meaning in; I look like shit, having gone from 180 pounds of muscle to 160 pounds of skin, bones, and a little round belly; and, worse yet, I have no hope of ever escaping the pain or ever regaining my strength and intelligence. As a matter of fact, the whole goddamn rest of my goddamn life looks pretty fucking bleak, and even after years of pain, I still don’t have a clue how to handle that. Narcotics tell me that they’ll handle it for me and make me deliriously happy.

The words that I say to myself are a bit different… "Why can’t I handle this better? I know people who are worse off but appear to be doing fine. Why can’t I be like them and cut through adversity like a knife through warm butter? And why, when I spent years trying to stay healthy and more years trying to regain my health, am I like this while people who are older than I and never gave a thought to diet and exercise are doing fine?"

So far, I haven’t been tempted to take a higher dose of narcotics or to take them during the daytime (except for two weeks ago when Cipro took me to the doorstep of panic). I’m helped in this by reminding myself of what George Peppard (see photo) said about drinking: “You have problems, you think drink helps, then you have two problems.” I never knew him, and he has been in his grave for years, but I sometimes imagine him beside me, looking the way he looked toward the end of his life when his arrogance was gone. I don't only want to be strong for myself and for Peggy; I also want to be strong to honor his memory because every little bit of inspiration helps, and George Peppard's tortured existence and eventual triumph has certainly inspired me.

The bareass truth is that I need drugs to sleep, mostly because I’m in too much pain to sleep without them, but also because I’ve taken them for so many years that normal sleep is all but impossible. Yet, drugs are robbing me of myself almost as much as the pain is, not because I’m addicted but because when you take mind-altering drugs everyday, you start to lose sight of who you are. I’m desperate to give up drugs as a way of life, but I’m desperate for sleep too, and I can’t have it both ways. You might look at my situation and think you could do better, and I hope you could because you might have to someday, but where I am is where I am despite the years I’ve put into trying to either get well or get strong. 

I just came off a five-month break from even trying to help myself—well, except for diet, drugs, writing, physical therapy exercises, and buying potted plants. When I started getting scared about how much I was looking forward to narcotics, which wasn't too long ago, I signed up for a Qigong class. My classmates are mostly old ladies, and I'm having trouble keeping up with them. I would have already quit the class, but where do you go after Qigong? It would be like dropping out of kindergarten. 

As the saying goes, “You either get tough or die.” I’m not all that tough, but then I’m not dead or on a psych ward either... I grieve my life. Although, for years now, my experience of it has hardly been in the league of a walking death, it seriously sucks. My chief support has come from Peggy, my doctors, and you. Two bloggers who were dying (Renee and Nollyposh) gave me a generous portion of their time and compassion, and that still helps even though they're gone. I wouldn't be surprised but what many a life has been saved by a single act of kindness on the part of someone who had no idea of the significance of what they were doing.

Bamboo shadows on a rice paper floor


Today is the first warm sunny day since last fall, and every square yard of earth is covered with shoots, buds, tendrils, flowers, and new leaves. By afternoon, I was drowning in…what? Fecundity? No. Reality. I became confounded by the thought that being alive is so intense that I can't imagine how I've pulled it off all these years--or how I can possibly continue to pull it off. It's usually a bad idea to smoke pot when I'm anxious, so I contented myself with 30 mgs of oxycodone. Thirty is a wee small dose for me, but it's frightfully high by most standards, and I've vowed to never exceed it. Odds are that 50 would make me feel really good, but after a week on 50, I would need 60 to feel really good, and then the day would come that I would lie down to enjoy my opiate euphoria, and I wouldn't get up again.

At bedtime, I added 600 of Neurontin (another painkiller) to the oxycodone and, curiosity getting the better of me, smoked some pot. As soon as I turned out my light, the hallucinations started. A long procession of indistinct gray images appeared one after another after another until they exploded in a blinding barrage of light, color, and movement. Afterwards, the darkness pullulated with images that passed before me like so many room-size flash cards. Some were still lifes. Others were in motion. The one that touched me deepest was that of my dead neighbor, Belle, and her dead poodle, Lily. I liked Belle, but I loved Lily. (How I wish I could draw close to humans the way I draw close to dogs and, now that I have Brewsky, cats.) I fought to stay awake, but the Neurontin eventually won.

It’s now 2:50 in the afternoon on the following day. I feel hyper and am so near the edge of reality that I could easily start hallucinating again. 


Oh, NOOOOO!!ll! Leg cramps! WHOA! I had to to throw myself to the floor to massage them, only I would scarcely start on one before another one stabbed me. Paul Butterfield (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaV-S5ivX3E) is starting into "East West" again. I've listened to all 13 minutes and 14 seconds of it scores of times since yesterday because I want to go deeper into whatever trip this is, and psychedelic music sure helps. 

The room is now pulsing ever so slightly, and I am very close to being dizzy. Everything around me—my monitor, the pictures on the wall, the chair in which Brewsky lies sleeping—appears to be slowly moving further to my right. Objects are also expanding and contracting as if breathing, yet I'm less surprised by all this motion on the part of inanimate objects than I am that I never noticed it before. In other words, I don't feel like I'm hallucinating; I feel like I'm seeing reality more clearly than ever, yet my rational brain keeps suggesting that it's pretty damn unlikely. I'm also jerking and trembling, almost too much to write, and I don’t even know why I'm having this wild trip. My best guess is that I’m high on some medication that I’m not supposed to get high on, although the only new drug I'm taking is the antibiotic Cipro (to hopefully rule out prostate cancer), and the only problem I've ever had with antibiotics was the runs. I definitely like this better. But what if it's not a drug behind the weirdness? Would I be okay with that? Probably. This will surely sound strange in the kinds of experiences I'm having, but I feel secure enough in my sanity to allow myself to be insane.

...I did it. I looked up Cipro, and sure enough, running amuck in a blind panic while having outrageous hallucinations are two of the 150 or so side-effects, and they actually looked pretty good compared to some of the others--liver failure, tendon rupture, cartilage destruction in weight-bearing joints, death! The website advised that I contact my doctor immediately about the hallucinations. Yeah, right. The odds that I’m going ask a doctor to fuck-up a really good drug trip are WHAT exactly?! Years ago, some other drug had euphoria listed as a side-effect that I was supposed to call the doctor about. I thought it would be pretty funny to get my internist out of bed at 3:00 a.m. to complain that his pills were making me exceedingly happy.

...Now I'm lost in the spaces between things. What is this nothingness that exists between us? Neither matter nor energy distinguishes it, yet we all agree it's there, and that entities which do consist of matter and energy couldn't exist without it. What, then, IS it? Is it a void—whatever that means? Might it swallow me up? Has it already swallowed me (all of us) up? Is that the problem, and does it go all the way back to the Big Bang? I often feel desperate for answers to questions that don't even make sense to a lot of people. Unfortunately, the questions that plague me most don’t necessarily have answers. They’re the SCARY questions, the ones that make existence too ironic to be believable, and so it is that I tremble.

Trembling is actually a big part of my life when I’m alone (I try to avoid experiencing life deeply when I'm not alone because people commonly interpret my intensity as something to be fixed or pitied, and this makes them a complete drag to have around). Drugs like pot — and Cipro, it would appear—that have the power to cause hallucinations, crank up my intensity many times over, which is why I’m drinking coffee and smoking marijuana right now. Life would be easier if I gave them up while I was on the Cipro, but it would also be less rewarding.... I just restarted "East West" for about the 100the time.

It's now another day—I don't know which one—and I'm still lost in a world that looks surprisingly different than any world I've ever seen. I went early to my second ever Qi Gong class today so I could stand directly in front of the teacher, Matsuko. I was very much enjoying the music she was playing because I imagined myself on a rice paper floor that was being slowly encircled by bamboo shadows cast from plants that were swaying in a soft breeze. This pleasant fantasy soon turned into a compelling hallucination in which I lost all awareness that I do now or ever did exist as anything other than Matsuko’s hypnotically undulating arms. I had been mirroring her body--but especially her arms--for nearly an hour with complete concentration from no more than eight feet away, and that, combined with my Cipro-altered state, bewitched me so profoundly that I ceased to exist in my own mind. All too soon, an internal (and maybe infernal) spring snapped me back into myself, and, remembering where I had gone, my eyes moistened with affection for this person whose arms I had experienced as if from the inside. I was so moved that I was contemplating leaving the room so I wouldn't make a spectacle of myself, but then my eyes looked of their own accord into Matsuko’s eyes for almost the first time since the lesson started. She was back at me as if in accepting acknowledgement that whatever I had just experienced, it must have been a doozy. After class, I very much wanted to tell her all about it, but I'm seriously considering becoming her student for the long haul, so I didn't dare risk it. 

By Jove, I feel inspired to write a proverb. Here it goes: "You should neither assume that your experiences during a drug trip have anything at all to do with the people about whom you have them, nor should you imagine that those people would be pleased to hear about them!" 

It is now yet another tomorrow—at least I think it is; I’ve edited this so much that I’m about to fall over—and I just took my last Cipro. I've been in a significantly altered state of consciousness for five days and have even gone out of my way to intensify an effect that the drug's manufacturer considers a grave problem; I'm tired. Really though, if they want you to call your doctor, shouldn't they give you a better reason than that you just embarked upon a five-day, all expenses paid, psychedelic vacation to the mountaintop of the holy mystics?

I finally put aside "East West," and have since been listening to various artists (Yanni is currently doing a great job with "In the Bleak Mid-Winter”). I want to share one of those artists with you. Please do me the favor of listening to Suzanne Ciani's "Silver Ship" for ten seconds. If you're not hooked by then...well, I would be astounded. In the presence of such perfection, I'm ever struck by the thought that it only takes a few minutes of absolute beauty to erase an entire lifetime of mistakes. Unfortunately, this speaks to the rarity of absolute beauty.



A troubled man’s re-conversion and death

I’ve only known one person who had serious and prolonged doubts about religion who ever permanently returned to it, and that person was my father. He didn’t regain his religion because he finally found answers to the questions that had plagued him, but because his wife died and this left him alone, feeble, in failing health. His only help came from his daughter who found little time for him despite the fact that she lived in a house that he had built for her next to his own.

After his re-conversion, Dad and God conversed at length every night. God invariably monopolized the conversation, but Dad never complained. One of God’s messages was that Dad was about to win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, so he no longer needed his life savings. Dad told everyone at church that he had already won because in his mind, the fact that his number hadn’t actually been drawn was a technicality. His brothers and sisters in the Lord (Church of Christ people call one another brother and sister) were so delighted that they stopped treating him like a disheveled old eccentric who ranted during services, but like a beloved elder whom they were very glad to see. I called his preacher, and told him that my Dad had very little in the way of life savings, and that he hadn’t won a damn thing. The preacher suggested that I just wanted the money for myself.

A few months later, Dad left Mississippi and moved to Oregon to live with Peggy and me. Each morning over breakfast, he would stare at us through Ancient Mariner eyes as he conveyed God’s latest message. We comforted ourselves with the knowledge that he at least hadn’t brought his yard sign to Oregon, the one announcing that he was a “Prophet of God.” He did bring his habit of standing up in church and rebuking the congregation because, as God told him, they sinned by not using the King James Bible. The people in the two churches he attended here were as obstinate in their sins as the ones in Mississippi (living prophets are usually considered insane), so he eventually stayed home on Sundays.

His next brainstorm was to order business-size cards containing his name followed by the word “prophet,” our address, and the sentence, “Come see me if you need help.” He planned to give these cards to homeless mean and anyone else who looked down and out. Peggy and I stopped laughing about the hellfire sermons he was inflicting upon churches now that he represented a threat to our own lair. It was tough knowing that we simply had to impose our will upon this man who had been mentally ill since childhood and who valued independence above life itself. Indeed, Dad’s drive for independence was such that he would permanently balk if he even suspected that someone might be trying to persuade him to do something.

Peggy and I were the only people I ever knew who had an intuitive understanding of how to present a proposal to him in such a way that he wouldn’t lower his head like a bull and start building toward an explosion. On his worse days, a person needed tact to ask my father if he wanted a cup of coffee (“I don’t have to beg!”). On his best days, we could come right out and ask him to do almost anything as long as we made it clear that it would be a tremendous favor for which we would be eternally grateful. So it was that we picked a good day to ask him to cancel his card distribution program, and he agreed. We weren’t always so lucky, and there were two occasions on which one or the other of us simply had to say, “I’m sorry, Tom [Peggy called him Tom; I called him Dad], but such-and-such just isn’t going to happen.”

Peggy’s turn to confront him came when we told him that we were going to build a room for him at the other end of the house because we were a married couple and needed our privacy, Dad said he would go live under the bridge across the street if we didn’t want him with us anymore. Peggy responded, “I’m awfully sorry to hear that, Tom. We’ll really miss you, and if you ever want to move into the room we’re going to build, you’ll be welcome. Then, she asked if he would like to go shopping for furnishings for the new room, and he said he would. My father’s love for Peggy was one of the thing that touched me most about him.

My father said that his time with Peggy and me was the happiest of his life, yet he realized that his deteriorating condition posed a threat to his independence, and for this and other reasons, he decided to die by not taking his Lasix (a diuretic that he used for congestive heart failure). Other reasons that he wanted to stop his medicine were: he felt it beneath his dignity to take pills for a chronic ailment (“I’d rather be dead than to know that my life’s in that bottle,”); he believed God wanted him to go off his medicine as a test of faith, and would save him at the last minute; and he said that drug companies were greedy, and he had rather die, “…than to let the sons-of-bitches cheat me.”

I experimented with sneaking his pills into his food and found that I could get away with it indefinitely. I couldn’t justify it though. I had to think about the matter long and hard because I wanted to be sure that I was deciding on the basis of fairness and compassion rather than my desire to be free of the stress of being his caregiver. I talked the situation over with Peggy and several friends, and they validated my decision. That was important to me because my own feelings were so ambivalent. The crux of the matter was whether Dad was sane enough to make such a choice, but since he had always been insane, the distinction seemed less important than it would with someone who was acting out of character.

Nine days before his death, Dad apparently lost hope that God would save him because he said to me, “I want you to promise that you won’t let me suffer, even if you have to ease me out.” I promised, although I felt annoyed that he was willing to put me in possible legal jeopardy when he had already endured so much suffering without ever once thinking to ease himself out. I had grown up listening to this man threaten suicide so often that it got boring, and now he wanted me to kill him! Still, I considered it my duty. Death is no stranger to me, and I know I could euthanize someone. If you’re horrified by this, let me inform you that I’m no less horrified to live in a country that thinks it’s God’s will to let people suffer to any extreme, no matter how hopeless their condition. 

Drowning over a period of days or weeks isn’t the worst possible death, but it’s plenty bad enough.  In fact, it’s so bad that my father needed many attempts before he was able to pull it off.  A day after he would stop his Lasix, he would look puffy, and his breathing would become labored. A few days after that, he would be too weak and uncoordinated to walk, and it would take him considerable effort just to lift a spoon to his mouth. His skin would turn the color of burgundy; and he would gasp for air like a fish out of water, his whole body swollen. He might stick it out for a week or more before he would go back to the Lasix. By the next day, he would be a new man.

The good part about dying of congestive heart failure is that when you’re pretty far gone, you fall into a coma. After that, you don’t appear to suffer, but the people who are sitting there listening to you drown on the green slime that bubbles continuously from your nose and mouth are doing plenty of suffering for you. Against his wishes, I saved my father the first time he came close enough to death to pass out, but after the cursing he gave the doctors, the nurses, and me when he awakened in the ER, I knew he was ready to die and that I was ready to let him. That was two years before the end, and as bad as those two years were, I’m proud that I didn’t ship him off to some waiting room for the grave like my sister wanted to do, and I’m proud that I married a woman who treated my father as lovingly as if he had been her own. Without Peggy, who knows what my father’s last years would have been like.

An experiment in shame

When people praise me for my bravery in sharing so much about myself, I think it means they would be embarrassed to do the same. Ironically, I’m more like them than they know because I too withhold things that would embarrass me. And what sorts of things embarrass me? The ones I haven’t forgiven myself for. I’m going to experiment with sharing some of these things in the area of religion. I’ve chosen religion because I’ve long been bothered by the fact that I write about it a great deal, yet I’ve purposefully withheld some things that are important for a proper understanding of my journey. Such withholding constitutes lying, and I’m here to correct my error.

I’ve belonged to four churches. I was baptized into Central Church of Christ when I was twelve, which is about the customary age. What you do when you want to join the Church of Christ is to walk to the front when the invitational is sung and tell the preacher what you want. He then asks you in front of everyone if you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior; you say yes; and he baptizes you right then and there for fear you might go to hell if the ceremony is delayed and you die in the interim. The country church at which my best friend, Grady, and I spontaneously walked to the front one night during a revival didn’t have a baptistery, so we were taken to one in town.

My second church was The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, which I started attending when I was eighteen. The Church of Christ was as plain as concrete, both in its looks and in the way the service was conducted. By contrast, the Episcopal Church was a veritable heaven of beauty and ritual. They still used the formal 1927 liturgy, and then there were all the decorative accouterments (the photo is of Redeemer Church the night Peggy and I were married in 1971).

I also adored the priest, Father Hale, although I didn’t realize how much I adored him until years later when I got a better handle on how rare good men are. He was so clumsy at conducting the ritual that I think he must have had a learning disability, but this failing seemed like nothing compared to his gentle, loving, unpretentious nature. He listened to me more intently than any man I had ever known.

When Father Hale moved away, the fact that I had no faith settled back upon me like an icy fog. It wasn’t long before I started attending American Atheist meetings 100 miles away in New Orleans, and I eventually became a non-resident editor for American Atheist Magazine. I knew several inspirational people in that organization, most notably Madalyn Murray O’Hair who was the most imposing person I’ve ever met. If she had possessed physical strength and ferocity to equal her mental strength and ferocity, she would have scared people off the sidewalk. She asked me to call her Grandma because she liked my writing. This was in the early or mid-eighties.

My next adventure in faith—or the lack thereof—started in 1988 at the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis (you would be corrected if you called it a church). Its minister, Khoren Arisian, and most its large membership were atheistic, and I took to it like a duck to water. This was during my group marriage phase, so Vicki and I joined together in 1989 simply by walking into the business office one day and signing the registry. Peggy never had any interest in religion, atheism, or anything in-between, so she stayed home. If she and I hadn’t moved to Oregon when things with Vicki fell apart in 1990, who knows but what I would still be a Unitarian.

St. Jude’s Roman Catholic. This is the one that I most hate to tell you about. First, some background. Peggy and I went through years of hard times in the ‘90s, much of it due to me being in a state of deep anguish for reasons that I won’t go into. In my desperation, I attended an Episcopal Church for a few months, but I thought it seemed more like a social club than a place of worship. I then took a class called A Course in Miracles at a Unity Church (not to be confused with Unitarian). This was way out in woo-woo land, but I grabbed onto it like a life preserver for about six weeks, after which I realized that there was no way I could ever really force monistic idealism down my throat.

Then, I started thinking about all those Medieval Catholic statues, crucifixes, triptychs, and so forth at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I had been blown away by their antiquity, their beauty, the talent that went into them, and the deep reverence I felt in their presence; I grieved that they were now 2,000 miles away. And so it was that I came to long for the art, tradition, architecture, and liturgy of Catholicism, this despite the fact that I despise almost everything else about the church. I soon signed up for confirmation classes at St. Mary’s, the oldest and largest Catholic Church in town. Doing this was an instance of magical thinking (more accurately, magical hoping) on my part, my hope being that the very act of becoming a Catholic would cause me to feel deeply connected to many things, for instance, the sense of oneness of which the mystics write, and to the ancient carvers and painters who created all that wonderful art. I believed that such a connection would heal me of my anguish.

Unfortunately, St. Mary’s was a conservative parish, and the priest who interviewed me quickly concluded that I was a poor candidate for Catholicism. No problem, I just drove across town to St. Jude’s, the most liberal Catholic church in the area, and the priest there was fine with me joining. I’ve since wondered if I might have been a tad less forthcoming with him than I was with the priest at St. Mary’s, but that was too long ago for me to even remember what we talked about. The class lasted for several months and climaxed in a confirmation ceremony. At the class’s outset, everyone was assigned a sponsor to meet with him or her once or twice a week until confirmation, and then to vouch for his or her worthiness to join at the start of the confirmation ceremony.

My sponsor was a man named Gary who had devoted years to the study of church history and theology. As did the priest at St. Mary’s, Gary quickly concluded that I wasn’t fit to be a Catholic, but he said he would continue as my sponsor if I was hell-bent on joining. Then, he looked me dead in the eye and warned that I would never be forgiven if I should join another church after converting to Catholicism. Because he didn’t respect me, Gary gave as little of himself to our relationship as he could without violating his conscience, and this discouraged me from volunteering information or even asking very many questions. As for the class itself, I enjoyed that very much.

I was horribly sick with a cold the night of Holy Saturday, 1999, when the class was to be confirmed, but the priest strongly encouraged me to attend, so I did, only to discover that a Catholic with a cold feels just as crummy as a non-Catholic with a cold. Aside from feeling a little disappointed (though not surprised) about that, I was so touched by the ceremony that I shed tears. This embarrassment occurred when the time came to baptize those who had never been baptized (my Church of Christ baptism was considered sufficient). One of the baptismal candidates was a fourteen-year-old girl whom I had known through the class. As she stood there in her new shoes and lovely white dress, I felt that I was looking upon the very essence of sweetness and innocence, and I wanted more than anything to protect it and was sick to the heart that I could not. I determinedly held myself together until the priest poured the Holy Water over her head, and then my tears flowed. After my confirmation, I attended mass no more than five times before I took my little crucifix off the wall and packed it away with my rosary. The first priest and Gary had been right.

Since then

I’ve gone to Sunday school from time to time at liberal churches, not because I had any thought of joining, but because I lack a permanent community in my life and because I enjoy studying at least parts of the Bible. Church is also the only place where anyone ever seems to discuss morality, and, aside from fraternities, it’s the only place a person can participate in a communal ritual. I might still attend an occasional Sunday School session if living with pain didn’t tire me so.

I remember desperately trying to sleep—in a recliner—on a particular night after the second of my three shoulder surgeries. I had been in significant pain for several years by then, and I had ice packs on both shoulders, a heating pad on my chest (to keep the ice packs from freezing me), and was loopy on narcotics. As I sat there, hour after weary hour, despondent and hurting too much to sleep (at least without taking so many drugs that I would have feared for my life), I began to wonder if it just might possibly make me feel even a little bit better to pray. I got to wondering this because I was becoming focused on suicide, and on that particular night, I had the urge to get out of my recliner and run head-long into the stone fireplace mantle. In my desperation, I finally started to pray, but I didn’t get far because I immediately felt completely asinine for betraying my intellectual and moral integrity yet again in a desperate attempt to attract the notice of a deity that I didn’t believe in and would have hated if I did.

Perhaps you’re wondering why, instead of joining churches, didn’t I join some other kind of religious group. Well, there was that Unitarian Society, but it’s true that I’ve put a lot of energy into Christianity. This was largely because it was almost certainly my forbearers’ faith (my white forbearers anyway—I’m ¼ Native American) for well over a thousand years, and some of them were even clergymen. I wanted to tap into feeling that I was a part of that history and community because I often feel crushed by the thought that I am but a dot in time and space, a dot that is completely cut off from every other dot, all of which are themselves cut off from one another. Sure, I checked out Baha’ism, Buddhism, Wiccanism, New Age Sufism, and lots more isms, but all I felt a familial connection to was Christianity and Native American spirituality, and I never could find much about the latter that interested me.

During those hard times of the ‘90s, I think I mostly wanted to believe that there exist these wonderful places where everyone really is loved and really is welcome. I knew that was hopelessly naïve, and I doubted that such an institution would welcome atheists if it did exist. But then what about John Spong, the atheist who became an Episcopal bishop? From the time I joined the Episcopal Church in the ‘70s, I had been astounded by its diversity of belief, and this was why, in the ‘90s, I considered returning. I thought it would be fairly easy to find a spot where I could sit comfortably under the Episcopal umbrella much as Jonah did under his vine.

However, there is one way in which I differ dramatically from every Christian in the world—even the atheistic ones—and it is that Christians respect the person and message of Jesus (not that they agree about who he was or what he meant to communicate), whereas I view Jesus as delusional, bigoted, hypocritical, conceited, contradictory, judgmental, bad-tempered, nasty to his family, a purveyor of bad ideas, quite possibly fictional, and so on. This means that I wouldn’t be fully accepted—or fully accepting, for that matter—in a church presided over by the most non-dogmatic atheistic Christian in the world. The Bible is simply too divisive even among those who don’t take it literally. In my relationship with religion, I spent a lot of time determinedly trying to ride a horse that was clearly dead. My attempts to be a Christian after any fashion were doomed by my twelfth year to be disheartening and self-destructive. I sought comfort at the cost of integrity and didn’t get it anyway.

You trash him now, but what would you do if God suddenly started talking to you from your monitor?

If he didn’t resort to the cheap trick he played on Job (scaring him half out of his wits) I would say, “Hello, God.” Then, I would ask which God he was unless, of course, he had his name on his shirt above the little alligator. If he said, “I am Jehovah, the God of the Bible,” I would say: [After much thought, I’m going to delete what I wrote here because leaving it would offend people for no good reason that I can see.] Afterwards, I would stop smoking pot and consult a psychiatrist.


So, how did my experiment with sharing something shameful go? Writing helped me to better understand why I behaved as I did, and, although I still consider it regrettable, I’m less ashamed of it. I doubt that there are many who, if under sufficient stress, wouldn’t violate their integrity, but it’s not useful to hold onto mortification, and it’s probably not even justified. In my case, a scary religion got me early and held me tight, so given the kind of person I am, it’s unreasonable to expect that my escape would be a straight path. I think it might even represent the biggest battle of my life.