Columbine from my back yard, above,
and nasturtiums, growing everywhere.

]]> http://www.toostupidtodie.net/2010/06/04/photos-early-june/feed/ 0 http://www.toostupidtodie.net/2010/04/05/missing-magic-mountain-no-not-the-theme-park/ http://www.toostupidtodie.net/2010/04/05/missing-magic-mountain-no-not-the-theme-park/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 23:31:31 +0000 EJB http://www.toostupidtodie.net/2010/03/30/missing-magic-mountain-no-not-the-theme-park/ Lots of 19th century “innovations” are gone for good reason: horse-drawn wagons, the Saturday bath, walking across continents, surgery without anesthesia… novelties like these are lamented by no one except history buffs and masochists.

But one 19th century institution missing from our world is a true loss: the health retreat. Back in the day they were called sanatoriums: resorts set up for the “improvement or maintenance of health, especially for convalescents.” Today the  idea of withdrawing from life to recover a bit health is so odd that most people, hearing the word “sanatorium” translate it as “nut house.”

My oh-so-slow recovery from my latest medical travail makes me long for this old tradition.

I ache to check out of my life for a time and into another, one where meals are prepared and laundry is done and my duties consist of napping, reading, and taking long walks through woods and meadows.

Thomas Mann wrote about life in a health sanatorium in the novel The Magic Mountain. A young man of no great intellect or ambition named Hans Castorp visits a friend recovering from tuberculosis in a mountain retreat. So taken is Hans with the sanitarium’s disconnect from the real world (the “flatlands” he calls it) he finds excuses to stay until, with a doctor’s eager encouragement, he imagines himself into tuberculosis and becomes a patient for seven years.

It might seem odd a book with such a subject was so influential on my young life. I found the lure of Hans’ introspective and purposeless life both horrifying and irresistible. Having spent a childhood in too much solitude caused by an introspective nature and aimless wandering around the country followed by a 1960s adolescence (no one should have been allowed to turn 16 in 1968) I wanted desperately to plant myself in some situation with defined and gentle borders. So I then thought anyway.

Mann’s deft novel talked me into the world, not out of it. The book laid bare the siren song of isolation and withdrawal; it showed me what is lost if you do not engage the world. The Magic Mountain was for me a necessary cautionary tale. For all the trials and tears I’ve had in this life, I don’t regret for a minute having engaged it.

Now though, after four years of medical ordeals that only an insane optimist or a fool would voluntarily endure, I long for a break. The miseries of the last year in particular leave me exhausted and in desperate need of renewal. I long for Mann’s mountain with its wooded paths and dining rooms, if only for a while.

In the 19th century there were health sanatoriums priced for nearly all but the poorest. Those with less means did not get the elegant treatment described in The Magic Mountain but they had places to go. Not any more.

Today a “health spa” is something you “do” for a weekend; a resort where you pay lots of money to have mud thrown onto your body and be served tiny little portions of gourmet greens with artisan bread and a Napa chardonnay. Activities are planned for the day, right down to the Swedish massage and the meditation hour. The spas of the 21st century are no place to go if you need to stitch your life back together after too much trauma.

I took break once before without succumbing Hans’ tubercular temptations. In 1996, after my first near-death experience (a “mere” bout of killer pneumonia) I went away to a little cottage – a studio really – on the beach. I slept and walked and slept more and rode my bike and wrote poems and was beholden to no one. When I arrived I could barely walk a block. By the time I left I was bicycling miles every day. So much changed – so much healed – in that one calendar month of March 1996. How I long to do it again.

How odd the idea is to us now: Go away and rest? For weeks? But what would you do? Restore? What’s “restore?” Dump everyone and everything you love for a month of solitude? Solitude? Do they have cellphone and WiFi there?

I for one don’t find it an odd idea at all. If I could only visit The Magic Mountain. Just for a month, I swear. One month.

Bull-crap-ola.

How many of you have told me when I’ve felt guilty about relying on you yet again for some necessary kindness that it’s not only not a bother to help but is even a distraction for you from your own day-to-day problems? Lots of you. Did you say that just to shut me up? Over concern for my health? Please. I’m not that fragile.

So why are you robbing me of the essential human tic of worrying about you like you do about me? Why do you deny me the right to fret over your hardships and troubles? Just because some jerk named Conventional Wisdom insists I can’t take on any more?

Did I ever tell you how much I admire Conventional Wisdom?

Now I’m the first to admit that at times my life is so damned complicated or painful or just plain insane I can’t handle any input. But it’s pretty obvious when that’s the case: a) I’m usually in a hospital, and b) I’m even more heavily medicated than usual. It’s not like you aren’t getting strong signals when not to trouble.

So if you don’t see the flashing signs, please, dear friends, stop sparing me!

Despite my somewhat frankensteinish life I am human. And just like the rest of you hominids I can solve everybody else’s problems with ease. Just ask me! Its my problems that are crazy nuts impossible to fix… just like yours are to you. I believe that’s what is called the human condition.

So share already.

–noun

1. Pathology. a quantitative deficiency of the hemoglobin, often accompanied by a reduced number of red blood cells and causing pallor, weakness, and breathlessness.

2. a lack of power, vigor, vitality, or colorfulness: His writing suffers from anemia…

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrroad trip!!!

The car is tuned. It’s got new tires and is loaded down with jackets and maps and food for doggie and me and of course my camera and the tripod I always take and hardly ever use. The back seat’s converted into Otto’s Command Center so da pooch can survey the world from the comfort of his traveling bed. And we are driving down Highway 101 through the ridiculously green hills of an El Nino winter California listening to Roseanne Cash and Michelle Shocked on our way south to visit family and friends…

That’s what was supposed to happen.

Instead, Thursday I wound up in Moffitt Hospital a few pints of blood short of a six-pack, getting a transfusion while the docs scoped me out from both ends (yes: exactly that) trying to find the leak while I, delirious from lack of oxygen, a triple-whammy sedative of demerol, percocet and benadryl, and most of all too too too many medical procedures for any one lifetime, howled at the injustice of it all like a fourteen-year old grounded for a month.

Twenty-four hours later, my fluids topped up like a nursed engine with a cracked block, I walked out of the hospital with the hangover from hell and returned to my day life.

Huh?

If you cut a leg artery or your jugular or remove the tip of your finger you are immediately aware you have a problem. If you spring a leak internally however, not so much. Especially when you are in denial about any new medical problems because you’re feeling a wee bit put-upon after four years’ state-of-art medical S&M.

If you want to know how you know you have an inner leak look up melena, I’m not going to blog the details. I should’ve done something sooner: this isn’t my first internal bleed – not even my second or third. But I’m rationalizing maybe it’s the cherries I ate or maybe it’s the iron I’m taking or maybe it’s anything other than some damn disaster that will send me back to the hospital.

It was only a day or two before departure that I realized the trip was no-go. When you have no blood you have a hard time concentrating on a C.S.I. episode and you drive like a stoned alcoholic texting your next order to the bar you just left. 500 miles behind a wheel down California’s coast with no oxygen in your brain is not a good idea.

So instead of Rrrrrroad trip! I now sit at home while Otto goes on adventures with the dog walker, waiting for my hemoglobin to creep up to a functional level. Good news is, the top-up they gave me at Moffitt kicked in quick enough so I can actually read a book and do some stuff, if not exactly what I planned. Other good news is, the leak’s stopped. And it’s sunny for a change here in the Bay Area.

So: lemons, lemonade. Whatever.

–––

There has got to be an upper limit to how many procedures, transplants, runnings-out-of-blood, medically called-for cavity invasions, viruses and auto-immune diseases one body can handle. You think?

My deal is, I get to stay alive for some unspecified number of moments after the liver cancer and transplant. I get to be conscious, occasionally functional, and once in a while I even get to thrive. I also get to experience each and every sensation of a body running down its weave.

I’ve started and not finished a dozen posts on my health trials of the past year. One did refer to my struggle last summer just to learn that I’ve comedown two impossible–for-a-transplantee autoimmune diseases, but that’s it. I feel guilt for not having posted more.

Somehow I’ve made peace with the situation. A diagnosis and some medication to manage it – the AI’s, as I call them, will not go away until I do – helped. But somewhere along the way I lost the ability to write about it all.

If you really want to know more read up on dermatomyositis and Reynaud’s Syndrome. The acute phase of this mess, which lasted more or less from June to September, was the worst experience I’ve ever had medically. No, really: the liver transplant was a mere cut finger in comparison.

Until the Reynaud’s was under control I literally couldn’t write – rotting nerve-fired fingertips do not encourage typing. Now I’m just weary of of it all: repeating symptoms over and over to too many doctors; explaining to friends and family why I was having test A then test B and then test C then explaining to them what the docs found when they finally found something; wrapping my own head around the diagnosis because once again I achieved the impossible as someone with a transplant and a deliberately suppressed immune system can’t get an autoimmune disease except I got two… and blah and blah and blah and BLAH.

I just couldn’t whine anymore so I stopped. Better to write essays about California’s crazy seasons and anti-vaccine idiots hanging outside the H1N1 clinic and how the good old U.S. of A. is once again following California (coming soon).

So. Under the terms of my imagined deal with the Fates I live the frayed ends of a life and find the beauty and happiness where I can while trying to ignore the miseries. Denial, as I’ve pointed out, is a Good Thing.

Truth is, the Fates don’t deal. I have no idea when Atropos will snip my thread. It is chilling to know that even the gods feared the Fates. Even Zeus was subject to their whims.

I’ve always been intrigued by ravens.

I’ve got pictures of them on my bedroom walls; behind one
is feather a raven tossed to the ground near me when grooming.
The Haida story of trickster raven creating the world and
dumping humankind into it just to amuse himself
has always seemed a more realistic description
of our condition than any offered by organized religions.

This one was hovering over Otto, her spread wings twice Otto’s size.
Fortunately she decided Otto wasn’t a threat (0r qualified as dinner)
and left him alone. I do wonder if any chihuahuas or yorkies
went missing that day at Fort Funston.

The blue eye isn’t a photoshop add-on, it’s a reflection of the sky.

What better way to start a new year than finding what’s true?

Unfortunately, this one truth just led to another, then another and another,
finally to the end of the building.

All true, but no answers.

Maybe next year.

I stuffed the thing in my pocket and went in.

After rolling up my sleeve and getting the poke, I dug out the crumpled paper, went up to one of the anti-vaccine guys and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around. I silently held out the crumpled paper and stood there. Staring at me quizzically, he finally extended his hand. I dropped the crumpled yellow sheet into his hand and walked away. He looked at me and at the paper, confused.

You can’t argue with these folks. But you don’t have to carry their garbage.

2012 is exactly like every movie catastrophe you’ve ever seen: an estranged family fights for survival and the meaning of “family”; do-gooders shriek justice and compassion while everybody else panics and stabs each other in the back; heroic rescues give the audience – and the characters stuck in the mess – something to cheer. Bad guys get called-for comeuppance and sacred institutions (religious and secular) are reduced to richly deserved rubble.

Oh, and of course L.A. is destroyed. Again. Poor L.A.; no other city comes close to suffering as much cinematically as the womb of the entertainment industry. Kinda makes you wonder about the folks who run it…

There’s a lie in 2012’s marketing though, and I’m not talking about the bogus science. The movie isn’t really about the end of the world. It’s about the earth – more to the point us, humans – getting a chance at a makeover.

Sure, a good three-fourths of us are knocked off. “Civilization As We Know It” ends. Continents realign, the poles shift (to Wisconsin?), tsunamis scour half the land mass, and on. But by film’s end Things Stabilize and A New Dawn arrives – literally.

In other words, the earth – remaining humans included – gets an upgrade: a chance at a reboot to version 2.0.

And isn’t that exactly what all of us really want?

Our planet’s a mess. We’ve overpopulated it like rats on a sinking ship. We’re running out of resources, we’re only still eating because of hideous meat factories and genetic tricks made to our crops. To keep folks from thinking about all this education’s been turned into pop-culture quizzes and we’ve made a religion out of shopping.

But way down in our limbic brains we all know we’ve fucked up and hell’s to pay. Doesn’t matter who we blame – ourselves, our neighbors, those people over there, the rich, our gods or saints or sinners or politicians or just the roll of the dice – we know we all contributed and we’re all screwed.

Probably the biggest laugh in all the buzz around 2012 is the guilt some critics mention of rooting for John Cuzak et al while 6 billion other earthlings are being offed. Get real, critics! No one laments those people. Too bad about them, we tell ourselves, but when the apocalypse comes we know we’re with the elect. We will survive. This certainty isn’t just in our religions; it’s in our DNA.

What are movies like 2012 really about? What do we really want?

Another chance. And that’s what we want.

What we want is to toss away everything we’ve screwed up – in this case the whole damn world and everybody (else) in it – toss it all out like last year’s iPod and upgrade to the next version. Something newer, something trendier. More intelligent. Something like Earth, 2.0.

And we want more: we want something to force us to act, to do the right thing. Something like the realignment of the earth’s crust in 2012, say. Heaven knows we can’t do it on our own initiative: we can’t even agree whether Arctic ice is melting or if we should choose paper over plastic. Somebody – mommy? Are you there, mommy? – has to make us.

What a movie like 2012 offers is something to force us to act.

There’s another post-disaster movie out right now, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve read the book. Bleak, gray, filled with cannibals and hopelessness, strewn with wreckage, it offers no beginning to the catastrophe and no end. There are no shiny arks of salvation, no secret cooperation among nations. Just forage, disease and death.

The Road’s apocalypse is much more likely than 2012’s.

Which is why 2012 is packing the theatres and The Road will disappear in a week.

Who wants to fix problems when you can just upgrade and reboot?

I’ve been working on a few thoughts re: the healthcare “debate” we’re having in the U.S. from my perspective as a “professional consumer” of same. I didn’t plan to write this, though.

I have been seething at the treatment President Obama received addressing Congress about healthcare last Wednesday. The disrespect shown him – not just by Addison Graves Wilson of South Carolina, aka. “Joe the Heckler” but by the entire Republican caucus – was nauseating. Almost to a person, these “statesmen and women” of the opposition heckled the President waving sheafs of paper, petulantly pouted, booed and catcalled, and shot him endless hate-filled sneers worthy of a pissed-off 8 year old. One congressman even walked out for benefit of the cameras. It was disgusting.

Their venom has nothing to do with healthcare. It has everything to do with race.

Like the birth certificate flap that entertained us through the Summer, Spring’s anti-stimulus “tea parties” and pretty much every other pseudo-conflict stirred up since Obama’s election, the racial subtext of the health care “debate” is blatant.

Some people cannot abide having an intelligent, thoughtful black man in the Oval Office.

Finally someone with a pulpit has put the obvious out front and center. Maureen Dowd titled her column in yesterday’s New York Times Boy Oh, Boy, putting the missing word back into Wilson’s shout out, as in “You lie, boy!” Think about it for a nanosecond and you know she’s right. The old racist code word for black men was loud and clear.

Now, read carefully: no, not everyone who disagrees with Obama’s health care plans is a racist. Reasonable people have fiscal objections to government-run health care, philosophical objections, objections about his approach, and there are all sorts of worries about what change might do to our precarious status quo.

Are you hearing those people? No.

You’re hearing a U.S. senator boast how he’ll destroy Obama’s presidency by destroying his health care bill. You hear Master Wilson’s “liar liar” and how it’s netted him over 700 grand for re-election. You’re hearing Lindsey Graham – the so-called “reasonable” South Carolina senator – and a gaggle of other legislators calling the President a disaster.

And as always when politicians blow hard at the bottom of the barrel, they stir up muck.

Look at pictures from last week’s “tea parties”. Read the signs. You don’t need a psychic to see the real point of the protests. Obama is a “Fascist Muslim Communist!” (Will someone please tell me how anybody can be all those things at once?) Another shows Bin Laden passing the terrorist baton to Obama. Some of these fine patriots even put Obama’s picture in a pile of horse manure and took each other’s pictures standing in it. That’s a debate?

Death panels, granny-killers, black-on-white racism, a senator (Inhofe of Oklahoma this time) grandly proclaiming “I refuse to read the [healthcare] bill and I’m proud to vote against it!” Guns at town halls. Radio talk – serious – of killing the President. And anybody who has any kind of rational argument for, against, or middling on the actual issue of health care is a terrorist supporting a terrorist.

Don’t agree? Don’t think it’s racism, just strong opinions about a contentious issue? Take a look these photos from the first “tea parties” in April, set up to protest the stimulus package: “Obama’s plan: White slavery.” “The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s ovens.” You look at the rest. I don’t have the stomach. The racial subtext has been front and center for the opposition from the moment Obama was elected.

The Obama presidency has brought out the best and the worst in America. So many of us have a quiet pride in our nation taking such a significant step last November, including many who disagree with him and didn’t vote for him. But at the other bottom of that barrel are those so incensed by his election they welcome him as termites welcome an exterminator. They cannot abide – abide! This! New! World!

Racism is the venom in the veins of America. It’s time to get it out – to call it out – before it kills us.

This “debate” disgusts me. And it has nothing to do with health care.