Allergic to What?

Finally, the other shoe drops on the nuttiness (pun allowed) of certain tony private schools and some public ones in tony locations where no parent can bring in cupcakes anymore, and peanut butter is outlawed. Well, of course peanut butter should be outlawed. It's a known carcinogen! Just not in airplanes.

These are the places where falling short of perfection requires medical investigation, and where it's presumed healthy to hover eternally over your kids for their sake. Anything short of some earthly approximation of paradise for kids in these places is to be eradicated like a disease bug. And heaven forfend that they be warehoused in daycare while parents work.

Play dates might spread a different kind of competitive germ, though. Transmitted among parents and with no immunity in sight.

Oh please may my daughter get in to Yale. But there are crazies out there who actually think that immunizations cause autism. The same ones who believe that GWB and company brought down the trade towers? And just what does divide those of us who rely on scientifically validated medical advice, from those who mistrust everything coming from some sanctioned, as opposed to sanctified, authority?

Could this be it, then? A litmus test, a quasi-scientific way to determine what it is that makes those who love Sarah Palin also hate gay marriage, public schooling, evolution, and immunization? That makes wealthy liberal types certain that their little princeling could do so much better if peanuts were avoided. Look for the allergic reaction and you will find it. Or could we all be overgeneralizing?

Fussy allergies makes you a hard-headed realist about food, while conspiracy theories make you an extremist wacko. Ah, but certainly it is true that information proliferates like a virus and will soon overwhelm our ability to assimilate. We need machines to sort it all out; to predigest the stuff our brains will feed on.  And these machines are, of course, the very paragon of hard-headed neutrality of opinion. Maybe it's information we are overdosed with, and we need hookworms in our thinking to even take our first mental step away from indigestion and inflammation.

Or do we have entirely the wrong notion of what it is that constitutes intelligence? Perhaps there is no equation between man and machine and bits of information. Other than the fact that we relinquish so much of our prerogative to our tools. Perhaps you can't increase the number of words in common usage any more than you can over-elaborate the mind beyond its physical substrate.

Wouldn't it be funny if it turns out that the mind can shape and bring to our attention only so much signal from among the noise, and that the proliferation of so-called "information" is in fact driving us back down the ladder of civilization toward some kind of beastly dumbness?

Well, not so funny really. The proper response to being expected to be a superstar is to shut down and refuse any further input. To show an allergic reaction of the mind. Or perhaps to become like Sarah Palin or Paris Hilton or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or any of the seeming hordes of well-placed attention-magnets who snap at certainties or claim the right of celebrity without any more foundation in their prominence than a lizard in the sun. Sitting on a rock. I'm just sayin'.

How Sick Am I?

Not sick enough to worry about it, but sick enough that the "medical underwriters" will likely consider me to have a pre-existing condition and not give me any health insurance after I move. I had an accident, right? I sat too long in my car and got a clot which traveled to my lungs. So the docs prescribed Warfarin - rat poison - but people on Warfarin are not considered good risks. Should I be worried? I thought the medicine was supposed to make me all better. Catch-22, right?

Plus I seem to have had another clot, on the completely other side of my circulatory system where it passed through my brain to produce symptoms of a TIA. And then there's my genetic condition which got uncovered. That super-secret private aspect of myself which only I should be allowed to know. Now it's hanging all out in public like my credit score. I tell you I can't for the life of me figure out what was so great about the health care reform I heard all about. But what I really can't tell is why anyone wants to turn it back to what was still worse before it. Weird.

So now what do I do? Should I negotiate the TIA down to a migraine? It might have been an ocular migraine, but you can't be too careful.  Maybe I should sue them for a needless diagnosis which now becomes a part of my permanent record. How dare you overdiagnose!!

At least someone's not holding out against life-saving procedures until I show proof of ability to pay. Not yet anyhow. I've had a lot of tests, and they all come up clean, but not clean enough to be insurable? Can I trade my genetic inclination for clotting for their genetic idiocy on the open market, or can we share? Don't they want payback on the tests? These things might be remediable, you know? I'll teach you how to reason, and you pay for my rat poison. I've been tested clean, I tell you!

It's kind of like if you make a claim on your homeowners' anymore, then your rates go up and so most of the time, according to what people I know say they do, you still have to decide if it's "worth" making that claim. If it's really catastrophic, you have no choice, and then you end up paying for it on into the future. Same with car insurance.

Maybe instead of a credit score, we should all get a morality and decency score, you know, the way they give buyers and sellers ratings on eBay. Then you could get insurance if everyone you deal with likes you, or if you're the head of eBay you can follow the body builder into office, who followed the Hollywood actor who followed the son of the former guy who lived in the house that Jack built. I'm telling you, there's no conspiracy! This is the way God meant for things to be.

They say there's a lot of insurance fraud. People wanting and getting more than they need or what about being careless driving or playing with matches or with the deadbolts? We could just have a sliding scale, or wait, isn't that exactly what we do have? Just try being poor and see how easy it is to get what you need, and nevermind healthcare. Ands it's always your own damn fault for not knowing how to behave yourself, you genetic deviant you!

In my case, there was never any choice on offer. There was no-one giving me some assessment of my odds, and so I got the same set of tests as if I were mortally ill and on death's door. Which I was, of course, but once they knew what it was that nearly killed me, the actual treatment could have been really cheap. But really cheap was never on offer. And now I apparently have to run around hoping nothing else happens since I can't get any insurance I can afford unless I stay put. Well, that horse already left the barn. But looking ahead with hindsight, I can see what more sensible people would do.

This is really really weird in a country which doesn't like to restrain trade. At least that's the story. Restraining the movement of workers is apparently not a restraint of trade? The "system" ought to prefer unafraid nimble workers who are willing to take risks. But to risk going commando - without health insurance - is to risk not death exactly but financial ruination because the healthcare system doesn't have any reasonable options. You're either all in or you're all out, and how many people forgo sensible healthcare for the same reasons and in the same fashion that they don't bother to make claims against homeowners' policies?

Everyone knows that the political system is controlled not by "the system" but rather by that subset of huge corporations or interest groups which can tilt the research and the flow of information and the fear mongering and even the electorate against our general interests. What's good for the health insurance industry is hardly ever what's good for you and me, but somehow they've got an entire Tea Party thinking that it actually is. Weird!

I'd like to be a tea partier myself, since it's obviously time for another revolution. But I'd like to be part of a positive revolution which looks forward instead of a scared revolution that thinks you can turn back time. Don't they get that you can't go backwards in time, Humpty Dumpty??? And I surely don't want to have the flames of my emotions fanned by interested parties who know exactly how to push my buttons.

I just don't think it's all that mysterious what's going on here. You might suppose that it is all some kind of grand conspiracy concocted by the MSM, or the Richie Riches or the fat cats at the top of some empire, and that would all be true. But in the end, each of these powerhouses is composed of people so glad to have a job that they all say Yes Sir! about the company program. Reporters just want to get their writing sold, and editors pick among stuff for what will be the most eye grabbing, and folksy folks like Glenn Beck just know how to get your attention and keep it, pushing buttons including their own.

And in the end all the different ways that have been invented to check on our health and to find serious conditions which might be latent and all the profits to be made on all those ways - all these things pretty much do compose a grand conspiracy. If you're scared, you want to know, right? I mean, who among us is willing to say aw shucks go ahead and take care of the next bloke and let me go. I'll take my chances against the odds and against the laws of nature.

And if you're in a car accident, you don't want them checking your wallet before they save your life. But on the other hand you don't necessarily want to be stuck with the bill either, considering that there aren't really any boy scout first aid options on the menu, even though that might be all you need.

So we're all in this grand conspiracy against each other, but the ones that have the resources keep getting more of them, and you and I keep getting stuck in a kind of state of perpetual terror, not exactly about the monsters and the dread diseases and the slings and arrows of outrageous ghosts since life has never in the history of mankind been more mild-mannered as it is in these United States; but it's like we can't ever get ahead and enjoy a minute of Mom and Apple Pie anymore.

We live in terror of being stuck without health insurance, or stuck with a house underwater or stuck without the ability to pay for the car insurance, and then we end up just plain stuck in jobs that we might hate, except we can't leave them because our pre-existing condition might prevent us from getting covered elsewhere. This is no way to live.

How is this good for the economy?? I know it's good for a few sociopathic aggrandizers of  epic portionsof wealth who can use and abuse and take full advantage of our slave labor, when they can't for whatever reason take the work offshore where there really is real terror. But how is it good for the whole?

I'm just asking . . . I'm a reasonably intelligent person, but damned if I can figure it out. And damned if I can figure out why people want to give back any gains we've gotten.

Poised Between Hope and Terror

The paradox of these modern times is that it's hard not to buy into the promise of technology. Something better just around the corner, except what if you don't make it around the corner? You feel cheated, almost, and it's hard not to fall into the dreamy expectation that if you just hang on long enough you might be able to live forever . . .

Greetings reader! Your recently less-than-faithful correspondent has been laid low yet again by a mysterious "stroke" of what would seem incredibly bad luck. I've landed in some kind of ER 4 times now across maybe two and a half years, and each time seems medically unrelated to the others. But I have to tell you, it's messing with my poise and equanimity (who coined that phrase anyhow?).

First there was what ended up being called mania with psychosis. In layman's terms, I climbed into my own overheated narrative, and managed to replace the one everyone else inhabits (my memory of the event remains intact, if as strange even to me as some of my own writing when I revisit it).

Next, a pulmonary embolism last Christmas Eve which I experienced pretty much like I was a denizen of some Dune dystopia and someone pulled my plug. Then, following a fun evening with close friends involving too much strong drink too quickly, I was diagnosed with dehydration, even though the reason I redirected my morning walk to the ER was that it felt, internally, precisely like my PE on Christmas Eve.

Then, just now, they say I suffered a Trans Ischemic Attack or TIA/mini-stroke. Jeepers! It's as if I don't belong among the living.

As a kind of capper to these events, the only other time that I've visited the ER was another Christmas Eve, this one in 1990, when I had my appendix taken out. Now before the medical doctors among you (can there be "among" onesies??) attempt an armchair diagnosis, let me warn you that I swim against that tide.

We could try these for starters: Alcohol is an underlying constant, but not in my life and not in the same way to each episode. Alcohol might be related to stress or certainly to having fun (I lost my mind upon return from an extremely uncharacteristic bout of good times on someone else's nickel, since I never could have afforded it on my own), so it might be a good proxy for some other issue. Digging deeper, then . . . .

I have genetic factors, one which increases my propensity to clot - a fine discovery gracias nearly dying - and one which, very apparently, gives me a prodigious capacity for drink. I have a lifetime's scars from self-indulgence of various sorts, including smoking as a younger man, bartending and bar frequenting, and in general finding dissolution to be conducive to good interlocution, social bonding and general intellectual stimulation.

I've spent years cruising or day tripping on my sailboat, where beer was the hydration of choice. Talk about perverse. My theory is that you get a beer gut - of which I remain the proud owner, pathetically enough - to provide the function of a camel's hump, since the alcohol in the beer is basically fighting your body's need for water. Some alchemical re-adjustment gets accomplished to separate the water from the alcohol. (Don't fret, I'm not about to attempt to defend that theory) So, this anti-dehydration factory on my gut is now implicated as yet another "risk factor".

And hey, I'm getting old and there's lots of stuff I just shouldn't be doing any more.

Just now I spoke with my severely mentally ill cousin, who confided to me as I now do to you, that he will be glad when the Lord retrieves him from his hellish life. He doesn't consider himself unhappy or suffering unduly, but he does regard life as less than pleasant, and a good deal of that derives from his sense that mentally ill individuals remain judged for their illness. And that judgement comes most painfully from family.

So, before you judge me, consider that I am probably more moderate of habit than you are. I do very little to excess other than to challenge accepted wisdom. This does indeed sometimes lead me to take certain kinds of risks - social, mental, financial, emotional - which you might not be inclined to take. But by and large I lead a sober and low-key life. Well, apart from my perverse insistence that it's worth the risk to not capitulate.

I'm not drawn to sexual adventures, extreme sports, drugs, debauchery, challenging the law or the Man in any very direct way. You might say I'm plenty boring, although I'd give you a run for your money on that diagnosis. Even those bygone days when I would ride my motorcycle a bit too fast were tempered by a pretty darned reliable agility and judgment. I rode paranoid, which is, more literally, how my cousin lives. It kept me alive. Our Father . . . Hail Mary . . .  I believe in God . . .

But those darned slings and arrows have challenged me quite a few times - especially lately. There was the time Mom tells me that she slammed the door on the doctor making a house call (imagine!!!) when I had scarlet fever. There was a near drowning - amazing that there has been only one considering the time I've spent underwater. There have been the usual near misses on the highways. Sailing mishaps. And then, of course, these ER visits. I feel like I'm leaving out a bunch of stuff, but suffice to say I feel pretty darned lucky to be alive. Not that I deserve any favorable judgement upon any guidance I gave my fate. As if.

You know, when you're in the hospital you are surrounded by an army of devoted and diligent professionals who are struggling mightily to diagnose what happened to you. They desperately want to be able to repair it. But it is also sadly true that the system we rely on is broken.

Each person on the hospital team, when taken aside, will subtly try to earn your confidence by mild expressions of their cynicism toward the system they represent. "The doctors are all in cahoots with the drug companies, and that's why they prescribe the brand names instead of the generic I use myself." "This damned hospital does every test [billable service] in the book [are you a doctor?]/ it's the damned lawyers who force us to practice defensive medicine and do every test in the book." Overall, there is an assumption that the system must be working for someone, but not for me and you, wink wink, nod nod.

Medical diagnosis relies on research, most of which is at its base correlational. Research traces pre-conditions to outcomes. Drugs are developed by massive hi-tech shotguns to ferret out which compounds stick, and then to backfill, without theory, until you have a hit. Research can demonstrate which factors are correlated to which outcomes, and thus I find that I am more likely than most to suffer blood clots by my genetic predisposition. Four to eight times more likely. Yikes!!

But hang on now, I still might live among the vast majority of individuals who never have and never will suffer blood clots, since the vast majority of those with this clotting factor never get them (either!). This statistical fallacy is commonly exposed by those versed in Bayesian statistics. It relates to, but is not identical with, the more commonly understood misinterpretation of correlation with causation. Causation requires a theory. It's no stretch to say that a bullet to the brain killed the person, and similarly that a clot to the brain caused a stroke, but it's quite a stretch to find what caused the clot. All you can do is to mitigate risk and, perhaps, catch the outfall before it hits the mat.

"When I consider the miracle of being alive against the improbability of just me . . . [blah blah blah]" Indeed, the probability of just you being alive is precisely ONE since you are, demonstrably, alive. Where's the miracle in that? The probability of my suffering a life threatening blood clot is precisely one as well, since I've already been there, done that. The alarm goes off and I want to know the probability of number two. I know I'm at greater risk than you are.

Does education as an "input" increase economic productivity because some sort of intelligence is engendered, because individuals are socialized to the system in which they will produce, or because it provides an efficient sorting mechanism according to which wheat can be distinguished from which chaff or according to which roles can be assigned???

I studied these issues for a while, and it's deuced difficult to tease out causation. Fact is that educational expenses as "input" are themselves of dubious value unless you cook the statistics by making the "proper" assumptions going in. Education, like mass literacy, comes along as epiphenomena according to stage of economic development. It's as obvious an outcome as Jerry Seinfeld driving a Porsche, and it sure wasn't the Porsche that made him rich.

Most famously, recently, the commonly and sometimes militantly demanded mammogram was debunked as offering very little to the overall wellbeing of women in America. That's because the overwhelming majority of positives belong to the falsies (sorry) since there are so many more people without breast cancer than with.

I'm oversimplifying for sure, but in the case of blood clots, it should be pretty clear that while I may have to be more careful than you about, say, sitting for endless hours in a car or on a plane, that's not quite the same as to say that the sitting caused the clot. Or the drinking or the stress or the hormonal fluctuations due to over-excitement of the frontal lobes.

(OK, so the sitting probably "caused" the clot, but how many times have I sat for that long without one?)

Misunderstandings of statistics are incredibly useful to sellers of drugs or medical procedures. Why else would the whole world be taking anti-cholesterol drugs? The older we get the longer the list of drugs which are meant to lower our odds of ending up in the ER or cold on a gurney. But they don't exactly address the root cause, nor can they. You can't win if you don't buy a lottery ticket, but buying one is hardly prevention against being accurately deemed a damned fool for doing so.

In the final - sorry - analysis, assigning a cause is identical to assigning blame. Some of us blame people for being black or ugly or gay or credit them for being saintly or intelligent or beautiful, but "congratulations" for your good luck is not exactly how most of us want to be remembered. In the end.

This blame the victim thing is highly functional for our economy, if by that you might mean growth and overall wealth, regardless of its distribution. If something you did or didn't do is the cause of your "condition" then you will pretty much accept those slings and arrows and pay against them. If we can get everyone to both feel good and pay at the same time, then the economy grows and we can rationalize the good of the drug company getting filthy rich. Its principals, I mean.

But consider how the game is rigged. There are plenty of vicious feedback loops built into all our systems. Breast exams are highly lucrative, but I am certain that not a single soul on either side of the transaction is feeling gypped. It seems you feel gypped only if you can't get one. You get the exam, you feel cleared. You give it, you feel virtuous. But you're - da both of ya - just kidding yourself if you think it was a good idea.

It might be a good idea to get a mammogram if you're about to have a procedure which will kill you depending on if you have breast cancer or not. But then you'd be likely to go beyond the mammogram to approach something more like certainty.

What if the procedure you're about to do is the "nothing" procedure to assume that you don't have breast cancer??? Well, that is the least harmful in terms of causation. Cost/benefit analyses really do have to be done against the gaming of our knowledge of statistics by the healthcare industrial complex. Is there a procedure a doctor wouldn't do if there existed a possibility that he could be sued if he omitted it?

These things could be redressed. Pay the patient a portion of the omitted procedure, right? Create a marketplace in body parts, say. Don't make him sign away "rights." Just have him sign away the right to sue based on the omission of that particular procedure.

But how the hell do you educate the patient enough to be able to make the choice? I don't really think you can, you know, and so he's left - I'm left - with the need to trust my doctor. Except that I don't have any "my doctor" anymore in the hospital. I have a team. And the team is, each one, at odds with the whole. Neurologists don't need no stinkin' hematologist to second-guess their recommendations, but I might. Was yesterday's hospitalist the Man, or is it today's? Which one is proxy for my Man on the outside?

And how the hell do we reconcile the fact of our helplessness in the face of those slings and arrows against the implicit or explicit hope held out by our doctors that we might be able do dodge them? How much is the hope worth? And what about the terror during the process of receiving treatments?

* * *

OK, sorry. Too much. I go on and on. There was a nun next to me in the ER and she had come a lot closer to death than I was getting. She had been puking up blood which had been leaking into her stomach, and somehow the result of being brought back into balance was that she would fart like an old nag.

What a relief! For me, I mean, to have a cause for mirth and a proper context for our collective exposure. I almost wish I had her faith in God. But never her patriarchal God of subjugation. You know, just that last Word at the point where all meaning fails. Where finally outrageous fortune takes you home to meaningless sound and fury.

These fates then, how do they do? Wisdom from psychologists reminds us that we may not control the behaviors of those we encounter. We have influence only over our own response. Prepare prepare and respond with poise and equanimity, I guess. Your body will act before you do, although I'd challenge you to find the you in that one.

You can't pay attention to everything and so miraculous coincidence could be something prior to your consciousness sorting and sifting among the miracles you can stand to notice. The ones you see, by definition, have found their probability of ONE. What can you do but smile at them?

We are not so limited as we think by our skin, by other boundaries. Some are terrorized now by the evident fact that we have stripped the earth of all her easy pickings. That our future will be grim once the oil runs out and we have no way to get to the ellusive stuff to power our electromagnetic ways. That knowledge will not matter, that know-how will crest onto the shore of nothing to build with.

And yet we must remain abstracted, eating genetically modified farmed fish, for example, no different from the fatted calf who never could survive in the wild without us. Or can we remain embedded and enriched thereby? Our minds cannot be reverse engineered any more than they were engineered in the first place, you silly anti-creationists you. Context is innered and love is outered. That's all there is an ever shall be. Unless you know how to engender a decontextualized dot. Well, I do, but I've gone on for long enough . . . . .

Stupid Economic Theories

Yesterday, watching the evening news on PBS, I heard this really dim-witted fellow from some misleadingly named organization called something like "numbers-usa" debating the "immigration issue." He made the seemingly obvious claim that since we are short maybe 20 million jobs and that "illegals" now hold 7 million of the jobs that exist, we need to kick them out so that we citizens can reclaim those 7 million jobs. This guy clearly knows numbers only in the way that a flimflam artists does. It's a talent, but one we should watch out for.

Then my otherwise intelligent friend was marveling at the very evident fact that dual income families are now struggling to maintain the standard of living which used to be common when only the men were working. It feels as though there were some kind of conspiracy to dilute the wages of working people. Some kind of OK women, if you want to work, go for it. We'll adjust. Um, yeah, I thought this much was obvious. These two matters are not disconnected. Hello!

The idiocy of the anti-immigrant comment is that this economy is "designed" such that some percentage of the workforce is out of work. That doesn't mean that there is some designer, any more than do the results of natural evolution, no matter what the crazies say. It just means that there is no set number of jobs, such that kicking someone out of his might free it up for you. The issue is systemic. As with food and water and energy, it's usually not the quantity which causes shortages, it's the distribution. The appearance or especially the fear of shortage allows prices to spike. That serves somebody or some class of people that ain't you or me.

A pretty good clue for what's up with immigration is that when you dig, you are as likely to find that it was the right wing which wanted the cheap immigrant labor as it was the liberals who wanted to afford every soul a human chance. Pitting workers against desperate "illegals" does a pretty good job to push the price for labor down. Ditto women.

But these arguments play because we're angry and we seem to need some target for that anger. Someone who doesn't look too familiar in the mirror.

And so some grand artificial debate gets played out over our heads, without our ever having a chance to find where the game is fixed.

Like the healthcare debates; it helps the criminally kleptocratic insurance industry (executives, owners, not workers) when the left side calls for government to just take it over. That energizes the teapartiers, who - probably sensibly- recoil in horror at the notion of civil-service healthcare. So no one imagines what could be accomplished if we were to have some sensible regulation of insurance as we already know it.

Like what if there were severe penalties for not paying legitimate claims? What if there were a time limit to pay, and what if the price for uninsured were required to be identical to that charged the insurance companies? What if the providers were required to get pre-authorization for payment, the client were completely off that hook, and the subsequent negotiations and arguments were required to take place between and among the experts?  I think that's been tried around the world, and it works pretty well.

What if, furthermore, the patients weren't somehow taught that it is their right to feel entitled for treatment for whatever sort of "off" they feel. What if drugs were not deployed as a cure for the stresses of poverty or of warfare? What if we didn't all crave endless medical testing against terror at various what-ifs as encouraged by advertisements from the drug companies? What if those ads were made illegal again?

Well, apart form the absurdity of attempting to put the genie of information back into its bottle, there is reason to think that all the decisions shouldn't really be in the hands of the doctors. Sometimes they might be motivated to call for more tests than you yourself would if fully informed. They're fighting the insurance companies right now, and have to make up for their losses somehow. The system seems stacked against us even as the sides seem to be warring against each other. Coke and Pepsi. Microsoft and Google. Democrats and Republicans. They need each other. But even more, they need us to think they are opposed and in competition.

Drug companies seem to spend, naturally enough, the most money on issues which might require constant medical intervention. Viagra and Lipitor and things like Prozac are the perfect drugs, compared to useful things like antibiotics which might be used once in a while and that's it. Where overuse creates more problems than the drug can solve, but also where the excuse is somehow "out there" that it's we who use them too much. Forgetting that it might be our feedlot meat production system which creates many of the problems. That with bacteria, it should never be about eradication, but more about a kind of ecological balance among the organisms always present in our bodies and environments. By and large, "we" do what we're told within the limits of our education, intelligence and information. I know I'm not one to second guess my doctor, unless there's a really good reason to do so.

The distortions get created from and by the very same sort of motivated misinformation that the racist fellow used to cover his actual fear of difference. I'm sure he's even convinced himself that all he really wants are jobs for his fellow Americans. Drug companies don't want us to know everything about what they're selling - they speed up the voices magically when forced to fill us in. They refine and expand the unreadable print.

Government doesn't have to be populated by geniuses to provide the same sort of intervention to the public discourse - the balance to the body politic - that antibiotics might provide to the individual human body gone out of whack.

It serves someone's purpose to suppose that the problem is that the regulators now are not so clever as those they regulate. That the germs are smart; the terrorists are smart, that the bombs we need are smart bombs, that each of us only wants to get for ourselves what the least of us, the Bernie Madoffs, want to get for themselves. And morally, he is the least among us. Not a one of us would do what he did against his fellow Americans even if we had the chance.

I for one don't really imagine that the folks who work for the NSA are at the cutting edge of cybercriminal investigation (I have inside information). I doubt the government actually has the most computing power, and if it does, I doubt it's as cleverly deployed as the stuff arrayed in the private economy to measure my desire. I worry that dullards in government service will become overeager in their enforcement, just like the FBI did under J. Edgar, knowing which direction their promotion would come from.

So, too much power is no good answer. But there ought to be a way to release the creative energies of the private marketplace without allowing the predators, always, the upper hand. There ought to be a way to allow the financial markets to do their thing with the efficiency of money flows without always presenting those geniuses with that much temptation to dip into the flow for themselves. You don't have to be a genius yourself, you just have to get the sense that your work is valued, secure, amply rewarded against its difficulty and risks. Something we no longer really provide to our civil servants.

And another thing! Wouldn't you think the capitalist system would prefer a mobile work force? How about a nice regulation limiting the drag on mobility now guaranteed by regionally limited and company-connected health insurance. It's almost as though "they" want you to remain enchained. Or pitted against the great unwashed masses of "illegals." Vagrants. Homeless. Border crossers.

Come on, let's get a clue. This isn't as difficult as we're making it out to be.

The Blind Side

I'm still operating on West Coast time, I guess. I tried to muster the energy last night at least to watch a rented movie, since I certainly had no energy to write. And I have such a backlog of things I want to write about now, it's almost oppressive.

I started watching the Blind Side, the one with that lovely Sandra Bullock who was recently so blind sided herself.

I want to go on record, before I muster the energy to finish it, that I'd like to know how they salvage the dignity of that big black boy. Especially going up against Precious as the movie does. So far, it looks as though he'll owe it all to Sandra, which would not be what I would call dignified for the character of the big black kid.

Walking back from my welcome-home blood draw this morning, the woman walking in front of me was nearly blind sided by a Buffalo cop who'd sped out from his green light to make a left turn right into her sprightly step. She kept patting her chest in mock collapse and real shock.

I guess the cop was watching his on-board computer, having just come away from that massive conclave of police, fire, and rescue vehicles that I'd wanted to kibitz on along my return walk. No evidence by the time I got there, except for the remark of some other passers by that the  hot dog stand seems to be still open. I can only guess that it was the spot in danger.

We always need to worry around here about businesses disappearing for this or that good reason. On the other side of the spectrum, I was a little bit non-plussed to learn that one of my favorite breakfast haunts has now gone the way of all flesh - but in this case, I mean that they removed all the old kitschy comfortable Formica and Naugahyde to trend in the direction of the suburbanite cool-magnet my neighborhood aspires to. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the other trendy spot which suddenly looks closed. Or the seedy bar now looking like it's being transformed into a restaurant.



Then in the barber shop, right there on the front page of the local section of the News was the report of the grand opening of the new Confucius Institute, which I'd witnessed myself, right off the red-eye, curious to see what I was missing.

Down the page was a report of Wolf Blitzer, revisiting the high school from which he'd graduated where many of my friends and relatives attended. I either never knew that factoid, or I'd forgotten it. I think I knew that he was a UB grad.

Further back in the paper was a report of the death, apparently by pulmonary embolism, of a quite young man who was featured since he'd been the famous victim of a child kidnapping case way back when.

Blind sided then and again just now, by the very thing which might have killed yours truly. Which just goes to show you.

Tonight (in a few minutes actually) I'll attend the welcome back to Buffalo party of some really good friends of my parents' generation. I'm not the kind of guy who merits parties of any sort myself, the accomplishment of my Master's Degree being so much beneath expectation for instance, or my return from anywhere since I'm always gone.

I think you have to instigate these things somehow yourself, or have some significant other to do it for you, like I did for my Master's degreed ex wife. I'm not an instigator. I'm not feeling sorry for myself, I'm just saying. Maybe you have to be social to some significant degree, or moneyed. I should have a housewarming for this apartment before I leave it again.

Most of my time out West was spent messing around with cars, and to tell the truth, I'm kind of pleased with myself.  I pasted back together my daughter's old VW yet again. It wasn't much: fabricating a spring for the gas cap cover, finding a guy to weld the muffler, replacing the brakes for peanuts for my little peanut who'd worn them to naught on Seattle's artificially tamed hills. Just enough to keep the rustbucket moving, and by the time I left she (or is it Bob?) was driving really well. (I learned about Seattle's hills as if by magic when, on the way out of town, I discovered this really cool museum but a short walk from where I was staying!)

While out there I learned that the father of my other daughter's first semester roommate shot himself on Easter day. Talk about a blind side. Since the guy was retired from the NYC police force while still really young, you have to think that there was something in him that was really really hard to talk about. Something the rest of his family was blind to.

In the pile of mail I retrieved from the Post Office when I got back yesterday, along with the census notice and the census reminder notice, there was an entire new stack of notices from the various health insurance companies I'm involved with. Mostly new rejection notices, plus a mandatory notice that I might be eligible (NOT!) for a government subsidy in case I left my job involuntarily. I just don't qualify for much of anything these days. It makes me tired in advance to ponder the calls I'll have to make against all the new health insurance denials.

Some day soon, I promise, I'll write up my observations on this country's wonderful health care system, since I've apparently been on assignment to catch out its shortcomings. I feel like one of those test cases against the tax preparation or computer repair industry, where you purposefully hobble the computer, or pose a relatively complex tax question, just to see what the proportion is of  "correct" responses might be. In the case of tax preparation, you could add in the IRS just for comic relief, since they're not able actually to give you tax prep. advice. Just the facts and the information.

I discover that I have no writing style anymore. As if I ever did. Maybe this is a good thing. Nothing is better than something if the something is only in your imagination, right? It's all uphill from here. Or is it down? In any case, it can't get any worse!! I just hope I don't get blind sided by some new discovery of what it is I lack. Or have too much of. Can't wait to see this house right around the corner from me. It's in a really nice neighborhood. It's almost amazing what you can find right around the corner even though nobody ever told you about it.

Oh yeah, and I have this confession to make. I got myself a laptop out west. Like all laptops on the less expensive than Apple side of things, this one came pre-loaded with Windows as its OS. I'd thought that I was sworn off Windows in favor of Linux. But it seems I'm not. There's something nice about having things just work and not having to think about them, and about having all the details thought out and fully engineered. Even though copyright is only created for the Big Guys. I have to pick my battles anymore. And I got sick of the endless updates. I guess I told you that already. Welcome back!

Will the Authentic Seattle Please Stand Up?

Puzzling authenticity is really fun and challenging in Seattle. Everything is all about authenticity here, and it can  be really really hard to tell the posers from the real. Having walked all over Buffalo recently, the city I grew up around, I understand that walking is the only way really to get to know a place. It also happens to be the only real side benefit to pulmonary emboli since it seems that one must do something to get ones breath back, and walking fits the bill.

So, if I can discover a new Buffalo just by walking through the city I know best, it would seem that I could also discover a new Seattle, a city I know reasonably well, but not so well as I do Buffalo. Still, who are the authentic ones? Is it the fine guitartist with a nice and mellow deep voice at the Public Market whose face and clothes and distended belly prove that he sleeps on the street although he has CDs of his music for sale? Is it the pair of Native Americans sitting on the dock down at water level, sharing a simple meal of bread and polished apples? Is it me gawking at the Tesla Roadster which runs faster on laptop batteries than a Ferrari can on elaborate fuel injection, welcomed warmly to a city where no-one can tell who's got the money?

It can seem as though everyone in Seattle is striving mightily to become that "it" self; the one you get by driving the vintage Mini Cooper instead of the new one everyone else drives. The one you get by unfurling the sails on your wooden boat just at the solstice while everyone else is strolling in the unaccustomed sunshine. The one perhaps who throws the fish instead of merely buying it or snapping its picture. The one who understands that the best fish cannot be had from that particular tourist market in the first place.

Yesterday happened to be the day when admissions letters would go out from the Northwest School, one of several to which anxious parents submit their child's application with far more raw desire invested than you or I might have for shiny new toys of either child or adult variety. I had discovered two things the evening before; that a former student of mine is the Upper School director there, and that my niece had applied. Or rather my sister had applied my niece.

I knew neither of these things ahead of time and so could invest no guilt to my dear sister's all-in-good-jest complaint about missed connections. But as my daughter's boyfriend would be subbing at the school that day, it seemed a reasonable thing to do to walk there just in case I might be able to scare up my former student who I'd last seen when he was well beneath adulthood.

As I arrived still near the beginning of my perhaps 10 mile cicumnavigation of the city, the students had all poured out into the streets for a fire drill, and there was Ben looking very much in charge. We eventually had lunch together and I got the very insiders look at the school, and a take on its history with which I was already acquainted, because we had, the school and I, shared some history about the wars of transition from founding to continuing energy way way back in the day. This can be a problem for schools, as for most anything about life.

Does this count to make me a kind of "it" Seattlelite?? I hardly think so. But it surely does count as authentically random, unpredictable and somehow raw. Maybe? I really don't know.

I do think that there is something important to be discovered by hanging back from too much control. By staying open to what might come along in the course of simply being alert. I think that there may even be something to be said for hanging back from too much investment in authenticity. My own daughter never had as a choice a school so fine as the Northwest School, and yet I can find nothing deficient in her, or even in the potential she still might realize to change the world for the better. Or was it always and only about what she might accomplish for herself?

Among other things, I have been puzzling what to do about a chopstick my daughter's boyfriend and I managed to drop down into the oil pan of an engine whose blown head gasket we have been working to replace. I'd thought that the chopstick might do as a guide to place the cylinder head, but somehow it went down the wrong and bottomless hole. In the act of retrieval, I got to watch it disappear very much like the way in which cinematic drama might capture the feeling of losing your friend to the abyss when your grip on his hand fails.

This particular car - a VW of course - requires some significant disassembly before its oil pan can be removed. There are time constraints. There are tool and equipment constraints. Of course there are massive money constraints. The full drama has yet to unfold. I wonder - I really do - how it will end. I wonder if the chopstick also will force the proper cleaning out of the oilpan, the accomplishment of which will add that much new life to this old car. I wonder, honestly, how I can accomplish the blood draw which my doctor requires of me in a medical and insurance nightmare whose plot can only be the most absurdist comedy I have ever even imagined.

Stay tuned.

* * * 

So, OK, as if I'd willed it, March madness produces health care reform. I am as obscenely gleeful about this as are those basketball fans waving towels and shouting to break their vocal apparatus. If it wouldn't be unseemly, I would paint my face Obama warpaint colors, as someone along my walk did his garage door. I would shout it out on streets as so many were doing along the way to pick up our pizza at Fat Mama's up on Capital Hill. This is not an insignificant accomplishment.

This morning, I removed Bob's wheel - that's the other VW which belongs in the junk yard - and found that indeed his brake pads were down to the metal core, and tossing shiny flakes all over get-out. But the cost to replace these is still below the cost to rent a car for a day. Chris is rounding up the tools and parts to put the other VW back together. The sun is coming out.

No matter how much I feel akin to the folks out here, who are multicolored among their friends and even among the hypertalented children they adopt, I still find myself offended by the hyperachieving. It still feels an indictment on everyone else who isn't quite so great either in reality or aspiration. It still feels like a species of racism, although clearly it's not racism. But it is exclusivity, and even though these kids will likely be the ones to "save the world" which they actually are already doing by break-dancing for Haiti (you have to pause to parse that statement, consider what break dancing is, and where it got its start, and the fact that there are expensive schools here to teach it).

I still want somehow to howl, and scream and exclaim that we can do better than this. That it really isn't necessary to be that elaborate in the preparation of your mind or body. That there is something to be said for normalcy, for spaces filled with nothing more than absurd laughter.

Well, I'll keep you posted as and if I figure any of this stuff out. I'm sure your breath is 'bated. My daughter took me on the underground Seattle tour on Sunday. Her boss had given her a couple of tickets as a Christmas present, although the major domo of the tour still required that we sign our names, and give him our phone numbers, and those of my daughter's boss. He wouldn't say these gift cards had been forged. Something about being given away too freely. But I don't think her boss is that cheap.

The tour was great, in a touristy kind of way. There wasn't much to see, well, except for the genetic uderpinnings of Seattle. The building too fast in a sandy bottom, where incoming tide would cause the newly invented flush crappers to spout their contents which had been meant to go out to sea. Where a fire required rebuilding in stone what had gone up in wood, and where the merchants were too impatient to await the city fathers' plan to fill in the low ground. Where the architecture sits half submerged, and you must enter the spots where the whores used to await you, before the stone, before the fire, through an upstairs window, now at street level, now overcrowded by tourists. The Elliot Bay bookstore, anchor to the Pioneer Square district, will be moving up to Capital Hill. Perhaps Buffalo's fortunes and those of Seattle are more closely aligned than these folks could ever guess. The trajectory is trending down, just like my clotting factors.

Fallen ladies all, with fine aspirations for their offspring. Good day!

Spiritualist Commentary

I once visited Lily Dale, a spiritualist enclave nearby Buffalo, where I now live for the moment (I absolutely adore the English ambiguation machine; do I "live for the moment?" Am I in Buffalo temporarily? Or do I live at Lily Dale?). I had high hopes that something might be triggered there. I was looking for some even slightest sense that there were insights beyond the ones I find through reading and a bit of academic study. I even got myself a "reading."

In the event, it was clearly something to be gotten over with for each of us. The "reader" must have seen that I am opaque and impenetrable. I knew that he wasn't seeing anything. It would be pretty much like some poor doctor trying to diagnose a hypochondriac. Better to go through the motions and get him out of there as quickly as possible.

I was disappointed. Or more likely I mean "I wasn't disappointed." The experience was and remains hardly surprising; pretty much what I'd expected. I'm as proof as they come against spiritualist anything. Like I wear condoms on my gullibility.

Maybe I'd wanted to see if someone would see something in me; something to pull me away from my prideful deficiencies. Or maybe there's just not that much which would surprise me about me; there's not that much that I would be looking for them to tell me, and so it all felt like being a tourist in one's home town. I think I was actually open minded, though. I wasn't looking for negative affirmation.

Around here, in Buffalo where I live again now, temporarily, we often get the chance to take visitors to Niagara Falls, and each time, we also get to see the falls anew. Lately, trying to steer my body in a new direction, I take long walks and see the city in a way which I never could while driving a car. In general, I am the only walker.

Sometimes one is most blinded to the familiar.

I've lately started participating in a local spiritualist writers group, a bunch of people who sense that there are realities which have not been let in to our common discourse; for whom the evidence is too strong that there is more to reality than can be told. But who try to tell it nonetheless.

I have met a Native American medicine man there; I re-met an astrologer I already knew; there are poets, and ordinary folk for whom things have happened which don't fit in to the ordinary narratives of life. Hell, my whole life looks like a bizarre improbability to me, so - apart from the never seeing ghosts part - I should fit right in.

The narratives of these writers would all be extraordinary - hard to believe - except that lots and lots of people follow astrology, even in the highest places. Lots of people believe in and see ghosts. But not everyone wants to tame what they know with words. Almost everyone is secretly skeptical, unless they've seen something themselves. Which I haven't. But I'm not really skeptical, except in ways that I'm perfectly open about. Like, I'm skeptical about the skepticism which powers scientific inquiry, for example.

I never will either see ghosts nor guide my life by the stars, but lots and lots of people will. Still, I am a writer, if I am a writer at all, who writes at that very same edge of sense. Words from others have driven away the mysteries for me. Ghosts have been rationalized to my satisfaction as the reification of what's only "in the mind." But words also take me over the edge, to where only metaphorical is real. Except, well, metaphor is far too limiting a figure.

For me, what's "out there" (fun ambiguating machine again) really is starting to look more and more as though it came from inside my mind. Hard reality is collapsing beneath something else that much more powerful. And reality is pretty darned powerful if you ask me. How strange would it be if the stars did not have any influence on our lives. It only depends how large your frame is allowed to become.

I resist any and all certainties. I therefore risk insanity of the most basic sort, of course. My personal and written narrative often goes off the rails. But, in precisely the manner of this author I recently heard on NPR, the frame within which the various authorities would box me not only doesn't seem to fit, but would seem positively to keep me from myself, as if there could be a me divided from myself by prison bars.

I land in the hospital, but no cause can be found. Or rather, no cause for the cause. (Do accidents always require causes? Or is that just an escape clause the insurance policy writers use) The most important connections in my life are the ones which have been made far beyond my control. Random. Easy to miss.

I'm almost certain the same is true of you, unless you're filthy rich, in which case you're likely to credit your own intelligence and cleverness. It's only human. As if these also weren't matters of good fortune. So, you'll credit yourself with intelligent and clever deployment of your intelligence and cleverness. You see where this is going.

Among the authorities I simply must resist, I would have to include the astrologers, the ones who already know all about ghosts, as well as the usual suspects; the scientists, the doctors, the academics - all the ones who have worked so much harder than I ever will for answers.

These conventional frames are all fully fleshed out now, and so there's nothing left there for me. Which doesn't mean, in any of those and many other cases, that I'm feeling superior to the sense that folks inside them can make. I'm not. There's just no sense there for me. My body's healthy, my mind is strong, the only thing I have to fear is fear, and I'm working on that one too.

* * *

I have a headache today well beyond the power of doctors to diagnose. But it's origin is trivial. Nothing to be alarmed about. I had to get a new "smartphone" because the old one would no longer connect to the Internet. Verizon had sent me five, count 'em, five new ones in fulfillment of the warranty I pay for. I asked them, please, to look a little more deeply into the issue before sending me another one. Each time I set a new one up, costing my precious time and attention, I am a little less confident that my work will last. I told the guy I didn't want to feel like I was driving a Toyota. I think he took my point.
.
They obliged me, they brought in their big guns, but in the end offered no other resolution than to send me yet another refurbished identical phone. It seems merest coincidence that the timing of this series of escalating failure rates coincides with the termination of my contract, and the ability, therefore for me to claim a new phone free. Honest - I think it's random. Well, OK, as much as anything is random.

Naturally, I had wanted to hold out until the newer cooler ones come out. The Verizon folks helpfully advised me that there's never a good time to commit with these things. There's always a newer cooler one just around the corner. And it's no real surprise that among the diminishing number of people who ever bought this particular defunct phone in the first place, there should be some kind of crescendo of trouble. Verizon's cost in PR and technical expenditures for a remedy would be impossible to justify.

I caved. They offered me an extra fifty bucks off. (Just now I got a coupon in the mail for a hundred bucks off - I guess the guy was really stretching himself out for me!!) I miss my old phone, though. It was a kludge, a terrible compromise between touch and buttons and Windows' seemingly pathological design-by-massive-terrified-of-the-boss-committee-consensus approach about including the kitchen sink. The very antithesis of the iPhone. But I'd learned to make it work, and especially liked its slide-out keyboard.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering how and why I can afford an Internet-connected smartphone, being out of work, and dissing technology the way I do. Well, I pretend to.

But as you can see, I practically live up here in the ether. It's how I present myself. I have no fixed geographic address, and so I require cellular technology just in order to be findable by friends and family. I swear I don't really want to be reachable at any moment. I extol the virtues of staying put, even of going back to the old ways. But just like Al Gore, I make some kind of exception of myself. I guess.

Well, not just like him. He's rich and growing and I'm poor and shrinking. Divesting myself of fat and other accumulated stuff. But I do find extravagant hope in certain of the new technologies. I watched that Afghani reporter embedded with the Taliban, and like lots of others, I awoke to the evident truth that they could not coordinate their activities, plant their bombs, nor even detonate them were it not for the cellular network. One wonders why "they" don't just turn it off. You know, the other "they."

Clearly, as with credit card companies who would rather we not know precisely how much money they lose to fraud and identity theft, there is far more to lose by shutting down the cellular networks, than there would be for "them" to gain. A few hundred or a few thousand soldiers a year is a perfectly acceptable price. It's commensurate with lots of other costs, like the cost of mayhem on our highways, for instance, or in our hospitals where "preventable" is the single biggest cause of death (OK, I think it's third, but I know it's up there).

The true cost for public admissions about what's really going on would be our lost confidence in the structures which sustain us.

I don't like these Taliban any better than you do. I might like them a lot less, since I also see them as very similar to our own teapartiers. Angry at everything and nothing in particular, so target the biggest thing around. The American government. The US government is acting very big so far.

But I find lots of hope in the terrorist cells' ability to use the technology of wealth to frustrate its power. Poverty stricken people around the globe can now have phones where once the cost to get on the grid was prohibitive for all but the privileged classes.

There is very nearly no limit to what a company as large as Citibank, say, will do to protect your confidence in them. How much of your fees pay for the invisibility of rampant fraud? Do you ever wonder? And still they want to put a tax on top of what they aren't telling you, against your fear, by selling you identity theft insurance. Fear and greed make a charming couple, don't you think?

"Mission Accomplished" was precisely what got done by the shock and awe campaign against Saddam Hussein. We shouldn't have made so much fun of Georgie Porgie in his jump suit. The whole point of our going in there was to cement the fear we all must have of ignorant people willing to fly planes into buildings. No cost is too high to validate the fear in a kind of super high stakes triumphalism. A massive cheer for the winners. It's like a heroin hit to the collective psyche.

There was and remains quite literally no limit to what must be spent to own and to control our enthusiasms. (And you thought the "war on drugs" was about your kids??? Well, in a way, of course, it is. They must be kept in training!) Even though the cost to the lives of "our own" (not "us" but, you know, the ones too poor or ignorant to understand how their enthusiasms are gamed) now far exceeds the harm "they" ever did or could do to us.

Never mind the collateral damage, or the meltdown to our economy, which was the only thing which could, even conceivably, trump the cost of war. The War. The perpetual war of one name or another.

Oh, but what might have could have probably would have - depending on who you listen to - happened had we done nothing? I guess about the same things that happen every day over in Iraq and Afghanistan, or those parts of town where your family would never let you live, but people still live there nonetheless. They do. Are they not afraid? Is terror only reserved for those whose daily life contrasts enough?

I caved against Verizon, and my new phone - which I chose because it had the largest brightest most apparently durable and readable screen, plus the promise of a better way to input text - is an even bigger kludge than the last one. I miss the buttons; no keyboard anymore, it's all swipe and gesture, in the direction of, and with a silent bow toward, Apple.

But Apple, I learn today, is suing Google now for ripping off certain of Apple's patented intellectual property. These people have got to be kidding! They're protecting their right to profit from ideas which quickly become something anybody could do a hundred different ways. Should something like a wheel really be patentable? Is there no commons left??!!!

I have, apparently, purchased the least popular of the smartphones; certainly the least cool. It's running Microsoft's latest Mobile OS, which not a single tech guru praises. And to top it off, the manufacturer, Samsung, has hobbled plenty of the design aspects built-in by Microsoft, all in the direction of a better "consumer experience" I'm sure.

And on top of that Verizon has famously pushed the whole thing way over into the direction of an entertainment device, all for a fee, and all also in the direction of keeping you from putting your own hands on the device's locked away "features."

In the end, I'm happy enough. The browser beats Apple's in most ways. Text can actually be entered more rapidly than by either Apple's or anyone else's methods, or especially by a tiny keyboard with my thumbs. After a headache-inducing learning curve, in the end I think I got what I wanted. I won't be able to type so fast as I'm doing now with keyboard, but that might not be such a bad thing. Hell, I could give a damn for cool, and even hobbled, this beats the alternatives for me. Bizarre how Microsoft now is in the middle, stodgy, between the battling titans of cool.

So, I will deploy my technology precisely as does the Taliban. But I hope I'm a bit more enlightened than they are. I don't feel any anger toward those who screw me in the name of my own good. I'm sure not about to blow up myself or anybody else. I feel no need to be trimmed for Allah. But I do think that there's important work to do.

I sure can see how we have earned the Taliban's anger against us. As certain as I can be of anything, I'm certain that the way to win has nothing to do with guns or money (when the money's not in the form of relief aid). Just as the way to good health has little to do with the powers of medical technology, except when one is truly ill. The technology we need for good health is good information, good sanitation, public safety and housing, and an absence of fear and food insecurity and guilt; as though we cause all of our problems ourselves.

The large corporations now are all doomed to go the way of Toyota. There's not a single one of them which doesn't have the same sort of secret they'll spend any amount to keep from transforming into a generalized loss of faith.

The healthcare industry, collectively, is terrified that we won't be terrified anymore of dying. They act as though they too find the escalating costs out of touch with reality. This is a ploy folks. The more money goes through their hands, the more profit they can make. (Along with my Verizon coupon, I just got another denial of coverage for a blood test. You'd almost think they are trying to alienate me)

And if we stop being terrified, the evident magic will be that, collectively, we'll be that much healthier and better off than we ever could be on their drugs and surgical and genetic interventions when these get deployed as if every deviation from some norm were a cause for emergency response.

There is no massive turning which is necessary. There is no massive evil being perpetrated in our  name. There's just a lot of fear, being rendered up into a fairly insane collective behavior pattern.

* * * 

Last night, because my life is just that bizarre, I had a chance to attend the hockey event of the century. I nearly witnessed the Buffalo Sabres' own top goalie at his homecoming from center stage in the final event of the Winter Olympics. Canada won, but Buffalo would welcome home the next in a long line of superstar just-misses. We let him know how much we love and value him.

In the event, the son of the friend who'd offered me the last minute seat which he'd gotten last minute - absolute primo seats - the son invited a friend and so I got bumped.

Now, I'm sure you understand completely that this was no tragedy for me. I'm not the world's biggest sports fan, although I do seem magically to be in attendance at some great Buffalo sports happenings. Or just miss them. But the consolation prize was pretty good - I got to use their pre-empted tickets to hear Margaret Atwood in person.

Last minute, I couldn't get anyone to accompany me, so I dropped off two free tickets at the box office, which were then snapped up by some grateful students. So, in addition to feeling lucky, I got to feel generous. Which is a better thing to do than to feel pre-empted.

Atwood, poor woman, devoted her "talk" to answering publicly some frequently asked questions that she, as prominent author, often gets. It was pretty transparent to me that she was warning off those questions in the Q&A session which the format of this "distinguished speaker series" has established for itself.

Despite her sharing some intimate history of Buffalo from a Torontonian's point of view, you could sense this bit of tension between her and this crowd. She's most recently written one in a literary barrage of end-of-the world novels.

The crowd wants to know if she's optimistic, what we should do to prevent a catastrophic future. The questions veer just a bit in the direction of questions she's tired of asking. Questions she rolls her eyeballs at. She kept her poise, but the gulf between herself and this audience had grown immense. We felt mildly cheated by her impromptu carelessly prepared and brief remarks. She felt at odds with ill informed and familiar questions.

As a writer, she said, she is and must be an optimist: That she will finish the book, find a publisher, find an audience. As an accomplished author, she has about as much in common with her audience as the health insurance industry does with the ill. Why would she want anything changed? It's working for her. Being darkly pessimistic makes her life perfectly sunny.

I know that sounds like sour grapes, but honestly, it's not. In a way, it was generous of Atwood to give us her time in person. In a way, with the now inevitable mega-sized image of her talking head right over her actual - but too far away to be distinct -  head, it was hard to get the sense of what "being there" really means anymore. A television would be a far more intimate way to hear her speak.

* * *

So anyhow, as you can see I have nothing at all spiritual to offer. Well, except that I have a really hard time finding almost anything at all which is not meaningful. The most random things just fit right in to what I'm thinking about. And I'd say that's just about as powerful as seeing ghosts. Just about as jarring. Not exactly terrifying, unless you lose your mind about it. I wouldn't want to go saying these things out loud, because everyone would just think I'm crazy.

But, in some new-agey spiritualist sense, all that needs to happen to change the world is for lots and lots of people to stop being so afraid. So terrorized. So subject to the narratives pandered by those already rich and famous and powerful. No, no, no, I'm not talking about Margaret Atwood (by strange co-incidence I found out where my long lost copy of The Handmaid's Tale went, but she couldn't use the tickets either). Atwood come to Buffalo, risking her reputation at the same time that our fair city was honoring a hockey player from somewhere else. Oh Canada!

She writes beautiful books full of implied cautionary tales. Stories and poetry which can reveal things about ourselves that we'd never know without the mirror of literature. But she too is asking us to be afraid. I'd say that's at odds with her audience in Buffalo. We have seen the future and it is us. We're only terrorized by what the better off might do. In Buffalo, silly sin-city of Atwood's past, we still sense a chance to turn it around. And if we can turn our city around, anything's possible, right?

Sorry. Way too long. I'm still working on the condensed version. That's a lot harder.

Framed!

Back when I was working on my boat a lot, I would sometimes find myself in a mess of more than I could handle. A handy way to picture this situation might be to imagine me with toxic epoxy up to my elbows, a head full of the understanding that I would have to use toxic acetone (nail polish remover) to get it off, and panic about various boat parts in various stages of hardening into the wrong position.

Of course, none of these problems could or would occur had I been less concerned to make permanent repairs or modifications. In the "old days" before the advent of such conveniences as epoxy, it was understood that timbers would rot, that they would need periodic replacement and that the entire labor was an ongoing and therefore never-ending process. Things were even built with an eye toward the possibility to repair them.

We have such enduring and durable methods now, and hardly anyone really bothers with wooden boats. Still, the plastic ones don't, in fact, last forever, and they can be pretty hard to dispose of. And somehow the cost in real dollars to own one keeps shooting up to the point where you almost might as well just build more disposable ones. Except that the cost for a wooden boat goes up even faster.

It is very hard to find peace and calm up against the rush of daily life as we live it.

These days, politically, we seem to be engaged in a new version of trench warfare; that ancient WWI disastrous technique which led to the advent of chemical agents and other monstrous techniques to smoke soldiers out of their trenches.

The longer term solution, on top of fairly lame new laws of warfare, seems to have been bigger and more powerful machines of war, combined with a sort of tactical guerrilla deployment of lightweight units.

In the political arena, we have opposing camps of certainty, which keep looking for ever more powerful tactics or techniques to outsmart foes which are certainly more stupid than your camp. Deserving to die outright. Sometimes the camps even try to sharpen up their arguments, but it seems difficult to downright impossible to entice anyone out of the other team's trenches even to pay attention.

Certainty is certainly not a function of being right. We know, historically, that each time we have thought ourselves certain, that certainty, over time, looks silly. Think about bloodletting, or early treatments for mental illness, or certain medical techniques and chauvenisms. The only embarrassing thing, looking back, is that we were once so certain of something which now looks silly.

Look back on your childhood, for instance. There's nothing that terribly embarrassing about being a child, or being wrong. Just about being certain when it turns out you are in no position to be so.

Certainty is a function of meshing your own position to a larger frame whose stability feels like the very definition of sanity. These frames may be religious, or scientific, and sometimes, especially in the case of science, fairly propositional. You aren't sure what the "right" answer will be, but you're pretty confident of the procedures which will find it.

So, the frame, in the case of science, becomes the Grand Narrative of progress. And still, if you are a medical doctor, called upon to diagnose individuals' dire and distressing complaints, you have to operate within some kind of ad-hoc certainty to be able to function at all. You operate within the frame of what is state of the art today.

And still you might have a hard time listening to those who understand at least the broad outlines of what you're saying, but from the inside, as it were, can't quite go along with the diagnosis. They have contrary evidence, but maybe not the words.

In the case of warfare, nuclear explosive devices have arguably kept conflict down to what classroom teachers like to call a dull roar. World War and the epic-level casualties from the two Great Wars have been kept pretty well in check.

Meanwhile, even though the age of Einstein also marked the age of Thomas Kuhn's skepticism about the certainties of "progress," as well as the overall Post Modern critique of any kind of certainty, we do and must await some sort of new approach to resolving entrenched differences before we can put away the bomb.

Here's a thought:

Yesterday, yet again, I landed in the ER. It felt like the same thing which happened Christmas Eve when I was found to have suffered multiple pulmonary emboli. The diagnosis yesterday was dehydration, likely related to having had a few too many drinks the night before.

The only trouble with that diagnosis for me is that I've had a few too many a few too many times for this brand new set of symptoms to make sense to me. Plus, I'd felt fine in the morning, no headache, no hangover, and had headed out for a walk, in the middle of which I felt the same kind of sudden and total loss of power that I'd felt on Christmas Eve. So, I kept walking, with whatever energy I had left, to the hospital which was no further than to turn around and go back home. Made sense to me.

Lots of tests later, the good news is that there is nothing apparently wrong with me. The clots are known to still be there, and the treatment protocol is ongoing. I guess I'm looking for some trigger this time which made my dehydration do something different than it had ever done before. I'm looking for some connection between this event, the event on Christmas Eve which also came on while walking in the cold, and an earlier event which bizarrely enough felt about the same from the inside, but which was diagnosed to be more of a manic episode with psychotic symptoms.

I know that in the earlier case my mind really did go off the rails. The narrative that I was inhabiting was fully detached from reality. There are reachy links among these events, relating to potassium levels, perhaps, but there have also been very definite and distinct diagnostic protocols which have been able to pin specific issues. And thankfully, some medicines to treat them.

Extraneous to all of these diagnoses is the fact that I have been making an awful lot of changes in pretty short order. I left my job, on the basis - I have to guess - that the cognitive dissonance between what I was doing and both expected of myself and was expected by those who paid me to be doing; and what I felt to be central to my being.

Then I moved premises, sold my house, re-established some important relationships, and established some important new ones. And without really thinking terribly hard about it, I find myself eating the kind of anti-cholesterol healthy diet which I never could get myself to do back when the doctors told me to.  Not to mention distressing events in the Big Picture, like the catastrophic anti-government, anti-regulatory, anti-common sense regime of GWB and his team of hucksters. Global warming, peak oil, teapartyism, Fox TV, and all sorts of things to make a thinking man feel as if the whole world is going off the rails.

So, there have been a lot of changes to my life, and it makes perfect sense to me that there might be a slew of symptoms as I seek, however inchoately, to re-establish some sort of homeostasis.

I by no means wish to be my own doctor, nor to second guess the treatments that I've been receiving, many of which may well have saved my life. I do, rather, wish to second guess the certainties in which these treatments are embedded. Because the one and only thing which ties the different things which have happened together is me. Not me as in the master of psychosomatic symptomatologies, but me as in the guy who has made all the decisions as a result of dissonances which I didn't really do a whole lot to cause.

Sure, I had choices about what job to take, but like all of us, not as many as you might think. I could have deployed strategies to stay where I was, but I saw an opportunity, like a speed skater at the Olympics, and bolted through the gap.  I could have tried more medicines, but, at least inwardly, my difference from the norm was worth taking into account, and none of the diagnoses fit well enough for me to inhabit them fully. Provisionally, for sure, but never quite fully. There has simply been too much changing at the same time, and it hardly surprises me that there might be physical or emotional manifestations.

It always surprises the medical establishment that I'm not on any meds. What's wrong with this picture?

What the doctors can offer me is a much more finely tuned sense than I could ever have of liklihood. They know how to weigh things in some context, where I might be latching onto potassium deficiencies, because among its list of symptoms are all the things which I have experienced. Where an experienced practitioner can put these into some sort of perspective, based on lots of obervations and research.

On my own, at best, I would make a kind of teaparty random mess of my desperate flailing after some explanation. And in the case of health issues, the explanation is precisely what you don't want because that would be a diagnosis, which would mean that there really is something basically wrong with you. So, I'd say ambiguity can be a good thing. Sometimes.

Well, unless a diagnosis is missed and then you end up dying when you needn't have. Which is pretty much why you keep your head down in the trenches too. It's scary to consider what might and can and sometimes likely will go wrong, and if smart people are warning you to look out for what might happen, it's pretty hard not to. Even though, sometimes, the aggregate net effect of looking too hard is pretty hard to distinguish from lots of people getting sick all at the same time, maybe mainly because they've stopped looking after themselves.


Which goes right back to that godawful mess you can get into working on an old fashioned wooden boat in the face of more modern technologies. Sometimes when you add up all the treatment regimens for any one human being, especially after they start interacting and even conflicting with one another, you do end up with a treatment looking a whole lot worse than whatever the disease was that started the whole thing way back in the first place. How many tales have you heard, especially from the elderly, about having to strip away the meds one by one to get back to some baseline from which some sense can start to be made.

The mess is the simple and perfectly predictable result of working within little subsets of certainty without, ever, being able to step back and consider the whole. Imagine if we let the Palin Republicans handle the economy, while the Obama Democrats handled health care. Is there anyone in the world who would consider that a very good idea?? But does anybody consider the compromises we end up with a very good idea? Really?

We will have to find a way to crawl up out of our trenches. We will have to accept that some of us may die of missed diagnoses, reticence, stupidity. It may well be fewer than die now from mistakes in the hospital, which is far more than die from mistakes on the highways.

In my life, retrospectively, there was no need for the big guns deployed against various possibilities which never did materialize. I think I would have died of an appendectomy if there had not been surgeons, but I don't really think that was a terribly complicated surgery. And who knows, I may not have needed to drink so much, which might have been what brought it on, if things hadn't become so crazy in the world by then. If I hadn't been in the middle of not just cognitive dissonance, but crazy amounts of stress trying to keep a school open to which all sorts of lovely people had somehow attached their identities.

The trouble is that you can't really know in advance which are the ones who really do need the intervention of the big guns. Which are the ones who will need the anti-psychotic meds for life. Whose hearts are ticking time bombs. Who is prone to clotting, who will die of cholesteremia. Which cancer must be cut out and how drastically?

But who wants to live life afraid of his own body? On the screen, we all love to watch and cheer and cry about those who live a life as though in contempt of death. These are our heros, athletic, firefighting, fishers in the north seas. And we are afraid, sometimes, even to step outdoors because the neighbors might be toting guns.

The fact of the matter, if you were to do the math, is that the only reason health insurance is affordable to any of us is that most of us don't really care for or need the drastic interventions. God help us if we all become thoroughly modern, and consider it our right to rule out each and every illness which might explain our current symptoms.

There is no wooden boat which lasts forever. There is no body either. It is no longer clear that the way medicine works is in the direction of progress overall. That's not because there aren't wonderful new techniques to help the truly ill. But likely too many folks are dragged into the system hoping for something that just cannot be forthcoming.

We look to the medical system, or at least I do, for simple statements such as "this is what we are willing to do" without the question back "are you willing to pay for it, then?" Instead we get the absurd statement "this is what could be done if you can get someone to pay for it." And no-one is in any position ahead of time to tell you it will be paid for. This creates a state of perpetual panic, pretty much like living on a fault line. Imagine if the police asked you each time they intervened for your safety.

We have displaced our grief in the same way that we have displaced our heros. When it comes home, it is almost always unbearable because we had thought that there could be none so close to home. We had fallen into the lulled sleep of those whose life is too smooth. Until the very earth starts quaking.

Let's dial it back, how about? Stop the advertising which makes us all feel unwell *unless.* Taking trains most of the time will hardly affect our lifestyles. Electric cars for the local trips, rented hopefully, should be sufficient. Walking out of doors makes a huge difference to your healthcare profile. And how about shaking hands across the divides of race and class and education. That would do a lot to calm our fears.

There is so much that is wonderful about life as we have discovered it in these United States. Let's not blow it because a tiny class of hucksters in our midst would have us believe that we must take snake oil to feel whole. I don't think that there's a single person, embedded in whatever trench of certainty, who wants the hucksters to prevail.

And surely no-one believes in a centrally controlled economy anymore. So, what's the fuss? We're only talking about the boundaries. Should healthcare be on the side of police and fire, or the side of coke and pepsi? It's not about goverment making decisions. It's about you and me making decisions, taking responsibility, and calling in the trained experts when that becomes necessary.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for spring when I can figure out if that old wooden sailboat is still salvageable. For maybe the fifth time in its life. About the same number of times that I've failed to die myself. Let's see, there was the scarlet fever, the drowning, the near-miss on a motorcycle, the appendicitis, the embolism, not to mention the food poisoning, the storm at sea. Oh, I guess it's a lot more times than for the old sailboat. Bottom line, I feel pretty lucky to be alive. Which has not quite but almost nothing to do with elaborate interventions on my behalf.

I sometimes don't think it's my narrative which has gone off the rails. Sometimes I think it's the frame itself which isn't tethered any longer to reality.

Hillary, Get a Clue

I love you. Really, I do. You and John Edwards would make a cute couple. But you really can't go on about the free flow of information in a country losing its newspapers faster than a Kung Fu boxer can stop a speeding bullet. You can't get on some high horse about freedom of information, when our Supreme Court just declared corporations the equivalent of people. Yes, sure I'll put my sacred trust in Walmart. They would never hurt the little guy. They even put us in their ads.

Anyone know where the closest FaLun Gong congregation is? I'd like to sign up. Sheesh.

China should get a clue too. It's not we the people who are the Imperialists. It's our corporations. They've taken over. Can I please have my government back? Please?

Troubleshooting Illness

It seems that the mind becomes reluctant when the body loses its vigor. Thoughts seem as petered out as does the body after a short walk up and down the hallway. I've signed away my privacy as regards DNA testing for propensity for clotting, and vaguely wonder how this can and will be used against me. I wonder vaguely if concern for me as a class of human being will ever have any hope to overcome the lucid arguments made on my behalf by highly lucrative insurance, drug and medical technology interests which have my representatives' ears.

The troubleshooting seems solid, and on the side of being sick, I'm glad they know just what to do to maximize my odds for getting better. The signature also commits only to probabilities, that nothing's perfect, and that they might think I should when I shouldn't take various medications to thin my blood forever. I wonder which side the money's on. Yeah, well.

But I'm not all that cynical or even skeptical about the process. I've spent a long career troubleshooting computer problems, and the process strikes me as more similar than I might wish. You have a pretty good theory formed, of which a good chunk is always the aptitude and patience quotient of the person behind the keyboard. They look you in the eye for earnest answers to what might be wrong, and you try to mask your certainty that among the things wrong is that they think the computer is some strange and mysterious collection of complex systems beyond their understanding.

And you retain a kind of reluctance to let them know they're mostly right; that complexity when it multiplies goes right out of control very quickly. And least beyond the troubleshooting steps which isolating variables can uncover. The only choice is to control the variables on the way in, which makes you a kind of adversary of the "user."

I always want to form a picture in my head of how this sudden collapse of lung capacity might relate to the gradual but decisive reduction which occurred across the years of growing old and getting fat from too much work and driving; and from breaking a leg and tearing a calf muscle.

Where does the balance fall, I want to know, between the heart and the other parts, or is it all just a big continuum. I have this vague mental image of clots - just generalized clotting, a kind of restriction of the flow, maybe combined with loss of flexibility, so that after a while, if I'm doing something stressful, I get out of breath, but if I give my body time to catch up with aerobic ambitions, then I breath just fine.

I pictured my lungs contracting in the severe cold the other day, and that was just fine for an explanation of my more severe loss of breath; that and the fact that I was keeping up with my much better conditioned brother-in-law. Then the next day, after climbing a flight of stairs, I'm on the floor, and in the ambulance, but it feels like the same old same old, and it's just a little hard for me to credit a little clot. Punctuation to a process which had been going on for years and years.

But I guess with complex systems, any little thing can set the whole out of whack and into some sort of downward spiral. I just want to know what I should do now that isn't more slow waiting for some kind of ticking time bomb.

And I wonder where it all must end. So long as everyone's in on the game, house prices rising, insurance through the job, then the only ones who really get hurt are the ones who aren't in on it. I just don't have a whole lot of faith that things will keep getting better and better. That feels to me like a lot of justification to advertise new products and new hopes sold against your fears.

The problem I had is pretty high profile among the life threatening issues which land people in the hospital, and I hate to say it but it really doesn't seem like the high tech is a big part of my solution. I feel like I'm dealing with a basic ring job which doesn't have a whole lot to do with electronic sensors or feedback loops. I feel like I need to do more walking and less sitting, and maybe tweak my diet a little bit more.

Last time this happened on Christmas Eve, I could justify some vague sense that it was all my fault. That I had indulged too much stress trying to save an already bankrupt school, had internalized far too much rage and that quenching it with alcohol was really not a great idea. They yanked my appendix, and I was left with the poetic diagnosis; the one which still had the most credibility.

This time, who knows? It seems like the whole system is out of whack and I don't have any implication in it at all. It could have happened to anyone, despite what they might tell me about my genetic deficiencies.

It's the way I feel about everything, but I'll be the first to admit I'm in a compromised state of mind. We shouldn't be focused so much on the specific cause. We should be a little bit more focused on the systemic issues. The escalating state of getting more and mine. The evident fact which my roommate and I and every roommate I've ever had in the entire history of time, that the things which really count can't be counted.

I made several circuits of the hallway just now, and I feel only as though I've run half a marathon, so I must be getting better.