A Healing Song.
At least, I find it so.
In response to Donna’s comment, you can listen to the song without visuals:
You Think My Life is Hard?
It’s a breeze! This is what it was like in 2005 (slightly bowdlerized just to be polite).
~~~~~~~~~
[We had just come back from Moscow, from a karate tournament, where J was an honored elder and we had lots of strong young help. But he was exhausted. It was our last such trip.]
9/21 J is better today, but it’s been an uphill struggle. Monday was the first day he was able to walk to the bathroom rather than ride in the wheelchair. [But nothing was happening since we got back], so I gave him a stimulant suppository which had no apparent effect. Then we got dressed to go to [the acupuncturist’s] for the first time. I’d doubted he had the strength quite yet, but he wanted to go . . . We got down two flights, him mostly bumping down on his butt, when he said, “I have to go to the bathroom.” So we turned around and started back up, him quickly so exhausted he could barely crawl up the stairs. It took a long time, and when we got into our doorway, him rubber-legged and buckling, he [had an accident]. That was the least of our troubles I got his pants off and provisionally cleared away, but then he really couldn’t stand up any more. I covered a stool with a towel and shoved it half under him, but he wasn’t on it all the way and was half falling off. He was also shoved up against the stove knobs and his body kept turning a burner on, and the black baking pan the coffeepot was standing on got hot and he burned his arm on it. All this time I’m struggling desperately to keep him off the floor, we’re both smeared with shit, and he’s yelling at me “You’re killing me!” . . . So finally I somehow managed to get the wheelchair through the door and shove it up the single step from the kitchen and under his butt without it falling backward down the step. Then I was able to wheel him to the bathroom and wash him (and the wheelchair) off. We were both exhausted and soaked with sweat. Good workout.
9/22 We got out to acupuncture yesterday, but when we got back J was too weak to get up the stairs. Close to the 4th floor landing he collapsed and just lay on the stairs, and we had to call 911 to get help. The strong young cops who came could barely help him.
9/26-7 We dared to go out to PT today. J got in the shower quite nimbly, then needed to lie down for 5 minutes. He got down the stairs OK, taking only the 2nd of 4 flights partly on his butt. When we got back, climbing the stairs was a grueling Sisyphean ordeal, but we made it without help. I dragged the wheelchair up each flight ahead of him so he could rest in it. On the stairs, I felt as if I was doing most of the work, pushing him up. On the 4th floor landing we got into an actual physical brawl. I was trying to get him to move his foot so he’d be positioned at least partly over the wheelchair before he started to sit down, instead of squatting on air at the top of the stairs with feet frozen to the spot and knees buckling. He perceived this only as maddening nagging. I don’t know how it started but he was pulling my hair and we were flailing away at each other, trying to slap, kick, pinch, claw and bite. It was ridiculously ineffectual, like a fight in a dream; we must not have wanted to really hurt each other. The upshot of it was that I sort of tackled him and threw him into the wheelchair, half-unintentionally.
9/27-8 We went out to acupuncture today. By the time we got there, J was already spent, dreamy with exhaustion. When we got back, I had him sit in the car with me waiting for a 6 PM parking place to become legal; I canted the seat back so he could nap. Even so, from the time we left the car on Sullivan and 4th [less than 2 blocks from home] to the time we got upstairs was 1 3/4 hours.
I’ve figured out a new, solid way to boost him up the stairs, with my right shoulder. I basically fit it under his butt, and lock my right hand onto the vertical metal bars of the banister. He is essentially sitting on my shoulder. This feels secure, though it puts a lot of pressure on my knees.
At the top of each flight, though, he’s exhausted and panicked and frustrated and humiliated and confused, and heads for the wheelchair like a cow to the barn. I’ve placed it off to the right, the only and closest place I can put it. But heading for it puts him with his front toward the chair, his butt hanging out in space over the staircase, and his quads failing. And he tries to sit down. On nothing. . . . When I try frantically to redirect him, he gets mean — says in a threatening voice, “Don’t drive me crazy, Annie or I’ll rap you!” . . . The best I can do is try to stay detached, soothing and calm, the way you would with a flailing, boneheaded horse.
He’s dreaming now — laughing in his sleep. The lucky bastard.
9/28 J had his neurologist appointment today. So we had to get up early. He woke up of his own accord before 7, bright and clear. . . . He remembered [people]. He recited Schiller. He got into the shower rather nimbly, without a lot of coaching. He went down the stairs with ease. When we got home, he went up the stairs with ease. That is, I just put my hands under his sitz bones and assisted, rather than putting my shoulder under his butt and doing most of the work. I had him rest in the wheelchair at the top of each flight, but he didn’t need to.
So of course, in shock from being whiplashed from one of his worst days to one of his best, I fell asleep and got a $65 parking ticket.
Was it something [the Korean acupuncturist] did? She let blood from his scalp and fingers, gave him some herbs, and said, “He’ll be better tomorrow,” which was hard to believe. Was it his good deep sleep — “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care” — with laughing dreams? The cool dry weather? Or just the universal perversity that when you call the repairman, the problem vanishes?
NO FUCKING IDEA. . . .
The neurologists were impressed with his condition. They said he was better than they would have expected. If they had seen him yesterday, they might have thought he was far down the path to total invalidism.
Yet, I know enough not to get my hopes up and start making plans for more days like this. Just to enjoy this one, and use it to gain some traction myself.
9/29 J continues good. He came up the stairs without a rest tonight after PT. He did [have another major accident], but overall, that’s a net gain. If I have to choose, I’d rather swab that deck than tote that barge.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Incredible, huh? I know, I can’t believe it myself.
Life now is a breeze by comparison. I’m glad I recorded all that and more, so I can truthfully say, “The worst is over.”
Dawn Brancheau Died for Our Sins.
If a tiger or a lion in a zoo killed one human, that big cat would be dead before it hit the ground. (No “dead cat bounce” jokes, please.) Tillicum, the bull orca that drowned its trainer at SeaWorld on Wednesday, has now killed three. Yet he will live on at SeaWorld and will even continue to perform for the public. Why the double standard?
One reason is money. I heard them say on TV that a captive orca is worth 2 million dollars, and Tillicum breeds them, so he’s like a valued stud in horse racing. He’s reportedly insured for $5 million.
But I wonder if there isn’t another reason: dolphins, of which the killer whale is the largest, have a special status with us. With their uncanny, sociable intelligence, so alien and yet so kindred (they’re the only nonprimate that can recognize itself in a mirror), they’re the objects not only of curiosity and wonder, but of . . . there’s no avoiding the word . . . reverence. (Silly-ass reverence as it may be.)
I would propose that the Delphinidae are the gods, or embodiments of the gods, of the new nature worship. Gods aren’t gods unless they deal out power and danger along with spiritual benevolence. How convenient then that the smiling dolphin family also features the orca, a multiton ball of muscle with a fin like a church steeple and the coloring of a yin-yang symbol. Here’s a god even the less sentimental can relate to: a predator, like us. Just as Zeus took the form of a bull, Gaia’s avenging consort might feel comfortable in the skin of a bull killer whale. And when such a god claims a human sacrifice, do we turn on the god, or do we grovel and figure we’ve got it coming?
J Is 82. [UPDATED]
From his birthday yesterday:
Axel, the "Perfect Match" (Duke Hospice volunteer)
“Wanna make something of it?”
UPDATE: In the 38 years I’ve known him, even when J was depressed or frustrated overall, I have never, ever known him to be down on his birthday. In some periods I used to dread that another birthday would only remind him of the dreams that hadn’t come true, the fruitless time fleeting. It never happened. I learned to trust that I could look forward to his birthday as a sabbath from all that. No matter what, it’s always a serene, happy, positive day for him. Not excited or egotistical or demanding; just sunny and calm. (I don’t want to wonder about his two birthdays in Russia, especially the first one, less than a month after he arrived. He climbed out of a train engine coal bin on the free side of the Iron Curtain two days before the third one, February 19, 1947.) Yesterday was no exception; Axel remarked on how “with it” and communicative he was.
That led me to wonder whether the way you feel about, and on, your birthday doesn’t say something about you — how you fundamentally feel about yourself, and life, and time. (Maybe this is nonsense; to some people birthdays are simply no big deal. I suspect it all goes back to your early family and how they felt about birthdays, and you.)
How do I feel on my birthday? I always eagerly look forward to it, but then the day itself is a letdown, an emotional blank. I can’t grasp that special whatever-it-was I was anticipating. I do kind of feel that way about my life.
On Global “Weirding” [UPDATED]
Tom Friedman thinks he’s so clever, but in fact his coinage, “global weirding” — the weather isn’t getting uniformly warmer, it’s getting weirder — was anticipated and, to my mind, bested by an Inuit at Baker Lake, Nunavut, Canada named N. Attungala:
Inuit have a traditional juggling game. The weather is sort of like that now. The weather is being juggled; it is changing so quickly and drastically.
“The weather is being juggled.” That’s usually what I quote to people when they remark on the apparent altering and intensification of weather patterns and extremes.
Friedman lets the climate-science establishment off the hook way, way too easily, implying that the end — fighting the oil-soaked Forces of Rogue Capitalist Evil — didn’t quite justify the means, but made the zeal touchingly forgivable. Sort of like Al Pacino’s cop character in Insomnia, who falsified evidence to convict the really bad guy he knew was guilty.
The climate-science community is not blameless. It knew it was up against formidable forces — from the oil and coal companies that finance the studies skeptical of climate change to conservatives who hate anything that will lead to more government regulations to the Chamber of Commerce that will resist any energy taxes. Therefore, climate experts can’t leave themselves vulnerable by citing non-peer-reviewed research or failing to respond to legitimate questions, some of which happened with both the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It was better put by Icepick, with whom I occasionally correspond about such matters, and who’s been appalled by the revelations of politicized, if not religionized, scientific misconduct:
We’d better hope global warming isn’t real, because they’re never going to get anything done about it now.
I’ll leave you with a couple more provocative thoughts.
First, here’s proof that self-described “skeptics” are anything but skeptical about the poorly understood extent and nature of anthropogenic global whatever (AGW). They’re skeptical only about the “supernatural,” but ironically they’ve invested in reverence for inviolate Nature the same credulity and sense of sin and exile that they ridicule in religious people.
Sometime I’ll try to write more about this, but this movement really does have the dimensions, functions, and emotional intensity of a replacement religion. In the van, where I listen to NPR, I heard the music at the opening ceremony for the Copenhagen climate summit, and it was unabashedly religious music. Avatar, from what I’ve heard (haven’t seen it yet), sounds like a pantheist passion play, a work of religious (popular) art. What really makes the climate movement religious, to my mind, is the belief that WE are Bad. We have fallen away, violated our Mother, and we must do penance. There’s even a sacred number that people solemnly invoke — 350 — sort of like JN8:12 on those rifle sights.
What makes it doubly ironic is that we are actually a part of nature, and our wild success as a species and resultant disruption of preexisting balances is entirely in keeping with what nature does at random intervals: change things suddenly and extremely, and the devil take the hindmost. Our real concern is that we ourselves may suffer, are already suffering, from the blowback of our heedless success; our real desire to preserve and restore nature (which I share) comes from our own need for it, which is what we have violated. More irony: whether or not it is explainably derived from nature, our sense of wonder, protectiveness, and loss towards other species and intricate systems, which drives us to protect nature, is what makes us odd “Man” out in nature. I suppose it can be viewed as nothing more ethereal than an extension of the survival instinct. Conservationism is to ecology what conservatism is to society: an awareness that rapid change is going to make us suffer.
Which brings me to a doubly contrarian take from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of my favorite living thinkers:
I have been asked frequently on how to deal with climate change in connection with the Black Swan idea and my work on decision-making under opacity. The position I suggest should be based on both ignorance and the delegation to the wisdom of Mother Nature since it is older than us, hence wiser than us, and proven much smarter than scientists. We do not understand enough about Mother Nature to mess with her –and I do not trust the models used to forecast climate change. Simply, we are facing nonlinearities and magnifications of errors coming from the so-called “butterfly effects” we saw in Chapter 11, actually discovered by Lorenz using weather forecasting models. Small changes in input, coming from measurement error, can lead to massively divergent projections –and that, very generously, assumes that we have the right equations.
We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks (they resemble those “risk experts” in the economic domain who fight the previous war) –these are the ones now trying to impose the solutions on us. But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the same conclusions as the ones endorsed by anti-environmentalists, pro-market fundamentalists, quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, super-Green, since we do not know what we are harming with now. That’s the sound policy under ignorance and epistemic opacity. To those who say “we have no proof that we are harming nature”, a sound response is “we have no proof that we are not harming nature either” –the burden of the proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not “try to correct” the harm done as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
UPDATE: Afterthoughts:
One way to look at it is that we’re just nature’s latest way of changing the climate.
The best representation in religion of the way nature works is the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Creation, maintenance, destruction. Without maintenance, resistance to destruction — the astonishing homeostasis achieved by a healthy body or a mature ecosystem, with its remarkable ability to absorb shocks and restore itself — there would be no point in creation, no cumulation, no elaboration. But homeostasis isn’t sacred (or no more so than the other two). A big enough shock, or a series of small degradations, will ultimately overwhelm it. Without destruction, also, there could be no creation.
State of Emergency
That’s what the State of North Carolina calls this:
Well, OK, I’m exaggerating. But not by much.
Meet “my” new tree, the OctoBaum:
facTotem lives!
The science blog I had the great fun of writing for a while on my employer Natural History magazine’s website is all archived here, thanks to my collaborator, the magazine’s longtime webmaster, Jim van Abbema. He’s now moved on and the magazine, along with so many print media, is trying to keep its head above water, but in the meantime, Jim has kept the archive of our work together alive by hosting it on one of the domains he manages.
It was the magazine’s publisher, Charles Harris, who had the bright idea of giving me a place to stash the cool links and stories I was stumbling on in the process of fact checking (and overstuffing the footnotes with; they had to go somewhere!). Since we didn’t yet have blogging software on the website that I could use to post directly, I “had to” work through the webmaster: I’d supply text, hunt down images, and he would compose and post them. This apparent inconvenience turned out to be a godsend, as Jim had creative visual ideas (this is probably my favorite) and nifty scripts (click on the images here and see what happens) that I could never remotely have approached. The arrangement evolved into a true collaboration, of which this extravaganza on the Hubble Space Telescope was undoubtedly the pièce de résistance.
I’ve put a permanent link to the archive into the blogroll here in case you want to poke around in it.
John Avlon: The Scott Brown of the Center Left?
It’s obviously time for centrists to make their carefully crafted moves. These moments have to be seized; they don’t necessarily last. Political moods are fickle as March winds. Fed-up independents may be ready for some stirring rhetoric of their own — common sense need not be bland and wishy-washy — and just as Scott Brown played it perfectly (he almost had me!) and got himself elected to the Senate, John Avlon, author of Independent Nation, is coming out with his well-timed new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America.
Right out of the gate I question the title, because Avlon must know that “wingnuts” is generally used to traduce the fringe on the right; he means his brush to tar both “wings” equally, but it won’t be taken that way. That makes me think it’s a center-left book. If it just plays into liberals gleefully bashing “birthers” and the like, that’s nothing new. I hope the book overcomes that impression and at least gives the center left a strong, sane voice, as Brown has the center right. I’ve met Avlon once, he’s a smart guy, and I’m happy to see him making his well-timed bid for influence.
I’m going to post his press release and go back to work. That way, while we’re waiting for the book, we can review the press release. :)
Friends:
My new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, is now available from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. It is also available in e-book and audio-book format. It will be available in book stores next week.
What’s a Wingnut? It’s someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum – the professional partisans and the unhinged activists, the hardcore haters and the paranoid conspiracy theorists. They’re the people who always try to divide us instead of unite us.
The book looks at the outbreak of extremism in the opening of the Obama administration — from the unprecedented government spending that spurred the Tea-Party protests to the onset of Obama Derangement Syndrome. The book explains how hate-fueled rumors take hold (one section is called “How Obama Became Hitler, a Communist and the Antichrist”), examines the “hunt for heretics” that is taking place inside both parties, looks at the growth of the “Hatriot” movement and details the rise of increasingly hyper-partisan media. It compares current merchants of political paranoia with past
fear-mongers and finds that we’ve heard much of this hate-filled snake oil before. But the increased polarization of the two parties and the echo-chamber of the internet are helping the fringe blur with the base, making the Wingnuts more powerful than ever before. Not to fear, though — more Americans are declaring their Independence from extremes on both sides, and the book ends with “How to Take America Back from the Lunatic Fringe.”Buy a copy and please pass this email on to friends who would enjoy the book — we need to show that there is an untapped market for books [that] take on extremes from both sides. It’s also the debut book from BeastBooks. Below are the links to Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as Audible.com — and feel
free to write a review if you feel so inspired.Amazon:
Barnes & Noble:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Wingnuts/John-Avlon/e/9780984295111/?itm=1&USRI=wingnuts
Audible.com:
Sometimes Nothing Says It Like 140 Characters.
Nobody knows anymore what an unimproved 60+-year-old looks like. “Everybody” dyes their hair, does a little Botox, a snip–and no wonder!
Given a choice, who w/a smidgen of vanity would stay the course? Last week I got mistaken for my 86-yr-old mom’s sister & 53-yr-old bro’s ma
You can look salt&pepa distinguished in 50s, in 60s you just look old–if yr Caucasian & fried the bejesus out of yrself in the sun as a kid
It could be worse–it’s only genetic luck that nobody in my family’s dead of melanoma. In the 1950s & ’60s we fried ourselves yearly in FL
Remember Sea&Ski? Little coconut-oil droplets acted as lenses actually magnifying UV rays. My nose peeled so much I shouldn’t have a nose.
We were such savages–we fried ourselves ritually in the sun. & we killed anything that moved. Buckets of live shells, fat stringers of fish
There were like 1/3 as many people in the world. Nature still had the upper hand & nature seemed inexhaustible. If you shelled & fished (c)
(c) like that today, you’d be in jail. *sigh* It’s worth being old to have memories of those days.
Ambiance 