Kidney Bomb

 So I needed another chronic medical condition like I needed a new hole in my head, but here we are.  

In case you guys don't recall, I had knee surgery in June of 2024.  The surgery went fine, but my blood sodium and iron count tanked and scared the living hell out of my internist.  I spent four days in the hospital having my liquid intake monitored and watching dumb shark movies on Max.  I've been followed around by a kidney doc ever since.  The low sodium and iron are probably at least partly genetic, since other family members also have those issues.  But, they can also be signs of kidney problems.  And as of March, I have finally been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease.

What does that mean, you ask.  Well, I'll tell you.

The kidneys are two organs at the bottom of your back ribcage that filter toxins out of your blood and send them, along with extra water, to the bladder as pee.  Kidneys also regulate your blood pressure and help your bones by activating Vitamin D after you take it in.  As long as your kidneys are happily filtering your blood, all is well.  Many things can damage your kidneys, including diabetes (check), high blood pressure (check) and long term use of psychiatric medications (check, check, check).  And sometimes you just get lucky.

So I could trot out all the numbers from the various blood tests, but they're kind of confusing and I'd have to explain each one.  Let's just say, however, that from November 2023 going forward, the numbers were fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fell off a cliff in October.  At the time they fell off a cliff,  I was stung by a couple of wasps.  I doubt that was the actual cause, but it assuredly didn't help.

So what can be done about this, you may ask.  Well, honestly, not a lot.  Once there is kidney damage, it doesn't get better and will inevitably get worse.  I can change my diet to make life easier on my kidneys, in hopes of slowing things down.  I might change medications, though I'm really hesitant to do that because Everything Affects Everything Else.  And there are some drastic things that can be done if things get catastrophically worse, but honestly?  They are not appealing.

I saw my doc last Tuesday.  Everything is stable, except it might not be.  Nothing is getting worse, except it might be.  I'm going in for another round of tests in three weeks and then back to the doc for a recap.  This batch might be able to tell us what, exactly, is going on vs. Kidneys Not Working Good.  Ie, where creatinine ratios are compared to glomular filtration, which could have some bearing on the number of stars in the constellation Orion.  It's Complicated.  I have read all the test results and Googled the relevant terms and looked at a bunch of journal articles and I'm still not entirely certain I get it.

Meanwhile, my doc sent me to a registered dietician who is certified in both kidney failure and diabetes, and this is the best advice I've received so far.  (Note:  I have always had good results with registered dieticians.  Make sure they have that "RD" after their names, though, if you go looking for one.)  She wants me eating less protein overall, more plant protein and more fruit.  More plant protein means I get ALL THE HUMMUS AND BABA GANOUJ I WANT, within reason of course.  And luckily there's this great restaurant in Richardson called Afrah that makes the stuff by the gallon.  

No matter what happens, though, I am probably looking at a shortened life expectancy.  Shortened to what, is the big question, and we may not know for some time. (In fact, we may not know until it pounces on me, but most likely there will be signs.) After the batch of tests in March, I thought it might be only a year or more.  Which was somewhat jarring. I mean, we all know we're gonna die.  We Buddhist folks even do the Five Remembrances about we're of the nature to get sick, to get old, to die, etc. etc.  on a regular basis.  But most of us think it'll be some years from now, some unimaginable time when we are very old.  Having the end date possibly pushed up that far made me ponder what, exactly, I still want to do and accomplish in this life, and more important, what I'll feel cheated of if I get to the end and don't get it done.

The surprising answer:  Not a lot.  I don't know if I ever had a laundry list of goals in life, but if I did, I've done most of them.  I played in a symphony orchestra.  I traveled to weird places and had crazy adventures.  I saw Big Country live fourteen times. I saw the Who.  I saw the Stones.  I didn't see the Beatles, but they broke up when I was three, so I think we can let that one slide.  I went to college.  I changed careers four times.  I moved across country with no money and no plan.  Twice.   I wrote a book.  (Nobody cared, but I did write one.  In fact I wrote several.)  I swam in a mud lake in North Dakota at a balmy 65 degrees.  Many times. I illegally crossed the Canada border.  Many times.  I ate carne asada at the La Especial in Tijuana.  Many times.  I went surfing.  I went skiing.  I went skydiving, I went Rocky Mountain climbing -- Okay, I didn't do those last two things.  I don't care how terminally ill I am, I'm not jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, and camping makes me itch.  Most importantly, I fell in love with a good woman, and I have loved many friends and family members and cats. 

I mean, there are still things.  I still wanna see some Buddhist temples in Japan and maybe Thailand.  I would like to see Hawaii and maybe Africa.  I still wanna do the Flowers Sea Swim in the Cayman Islands (I'm thinking next summer) and go on a cruise.  I wanna finish another book, and maybe somebody will care about that one.  Or maybe I'll self publish the first batch.  Or maybe both.  I wanna Give Something Back professionally, whether it's speaking at a conference or maybe writing that book about law firm culture that I keep tossing around in my head.  But none of that's critical.  If I get to do it, great.  If not, the world will not end.  

There's this thing Thich Nhat Hanh says in his Five Mindfulness Trainings (the Five Precepts writ larger and adapted for modern times):  "I am aware that happiness depends on my mental attitude and not on external conditions, and that I can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy."  I have a good job, a house, a car, a marriage.  I do the daily chores and I watch space science shows on TV and I make dumb jokes with my wife.  I cuddle cats.  I have medical care.  Lots of people don't have those things.  I have been, and am, supremely lucky.  

So we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll get to be supremely lucky for years and years yet.  And on that note, I'm leaving for Afrah to get a fresh batch of baba ganouj. 

Chernobyl

 So Joan had her knee surgery, finally. Now she's home recovering and I'm, you know, handling everything. We had two people running a household and we're suddenly down to one. Me. I'm doing my level best to keep everyone fed, medicated and reasonably content, including the cats. Especially the cats. The first couple of days, when Joan could do basically nothing, were really hard, but it's getting better now. She'll be tooling around here just fine in a week or so, I'm sure. She's still a little loopy from the pain meds, tho. I'm keeping an eye.

Meanwhile, back in April 1986, when I was a junior in high school, there came a news report from Peter Jennings. "There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union."

And everything just stopped.

At least, for me, everything stopped. Probably most people saw Peter's broadcast, said something like "Those crazy Russians," and then looked at the price of eggs. But for me, at least, time stopped. There had been a nuclear accident. A reactor was damaged. Radiation was spewing into the atmosphere. We were all going to die a horrible death.

See, if you grew up on Reagan propaganda, and I did, the Russians were going to bomb us all to oblivion and humanity was going to end in a great big nuclear fire. We had "earthquake drills" in Salt Lake City but we all knew they were really "nuclear bomb drills." We also knew that if there was a nuclear bomb, nothing could save us. If you missed the initial blast, the radiation would get you; your body would dissolve, you'd bleed out and you'd die screaming. That movie "The Day After" came out when I was fourteen. Nikita Khrushchev famously said "We will bury you!" to Western ambassadors in 1956, and virtually every Reagan speech about the Russians mentioned that quote at least once. (And Reagan made speeches a lot.) We had to destroy them before they destroyed us. Mutually assured destruction and 12,000 warheads was the only thing keeping any of us alive.

That was my life up to 1986. And now there was a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union. Radiation was being detected in Sweden and Finland. Whole swathes of Germany and Poland were keeping kids inside and telling people not to drink standing water. Sting recorded "I hope the Russians love their children too." I had nightmares. I was distracted during the day. Google didn't exist yet but if it had, I'd have been busily Googling "radiation poisoning symptoms" and checking the skin of everyone I knew.

My death-by-nuclear-radiation angst eventually faded. Probably the basketball team won some championship and my boyfriend kissed me and I failed a math test. And I did not, apparently, die of radiation poisoning, though an estimated 93 to 300,000 eventually did (no official figures are available). And the news moved on to other imminent causes of the demise of the human race, including acid rain, global warming and, eventually, the Trump Administration.

There have been lots of other ends of the world. A meteor was going to hit us in the late 1980s and cause a dinosaur-like mass extinction. A supernova was going to blow up and sterilize the planet with gamma rays. (That's still going to happen, but we now think in maybe 500,000 years or so.) And in between, there were plenty of Biblical end of time dates, including but not limited to the Heaven's Gate cultists, who dramatically "left their bodies" in San Diego to join Comet Hale-Bopp on its way through the solar system. (It was still a nice comet. Better than Halley's.)

There was also the Long Emergency, if you remember that. The Saudis, who at the time pumped much of the oil that we use to power our cars and heat our houses and make plastics and pharmaceuticals and, well, pretty much everything, were past the halfway point, and it was all downhill in the desert from there. Cheap oil was at an end. This meant there would be the energy crisis to beat all energy crises, we'd be reduced to living in grass huts and subsistence farming, and there would be no more video games. Of course, we've since found lots of other sources of oil and invented fracking, and although we will indeed run out of oil someday, it's probably not going to happen before we've cooked the planet's weather past the point of any homo sapiens being able to live on it. Yay for us.

I dunno if you guys remember this, either, but in 2020 this thing happened called the Covid-19 virus. It's like we're dealing with a collective amnesia about it now, but at the time, there was no treatment and no cure. People were dying like flies in New York and Pennsylvania. Bodies were being kept in refrigerated trucks because there was no room in the morgue. People were wearing masks to go out in public, and people were yelling at the people wearing masks because "masks don't help you anyway so you might as well take it off and get sick, like us", which I don't quite understand. I personally didn't leave the house for approximately a year and a half. The high point of my day was listening to the kids next door come out and play about noon, when they apparently finished their schoolwork. Just to be reminded that there were other people in the world.

On Max, the streaming channel, is a mind-blowing docuseries simply called "Chernobyl." It's mostly factual and somewhat also dramatized, so you have characters standing in for the ordinary people caught up in the whole thing. It starts with an explosion in the middle of the night, and a shockwave that rattles the nearby town of Pripyat. But, like any good drama, you don't actually find out what happened until the last episode, where there's high courtroom drama. The series does an amazing job of capturing the Soviet Union of the 1980s, with its dour utilitarian apartment blocks, its taciturn officials clinging to ideology in the face of all logic and its men, women and kids just trying to have a life while all that's going on. There's a little old lady in Episode Four, whom soldiers are trying to evacuate, who sort of sums it all up. She's 82 years old. She's lived on her small farm her entire life. She lost her brothers to the Great War, her sisters to Stalin's famine, and the whole time, soldiers with rifles showed up periodically telling her to move. Do they succeed in evacuating her? I'm not gonna say. But it's worth sitting through ten hours of Chernobyl for the last episode to find out what all happened to everybody. Really, check it out. You may be horrified and saddened but you won't be disappointed.

(And Reagan flattered himself. He thought it was because of him that the Soviet Union finally collapsed. It wasn't. It was Chernobyl. The cleanup cost an estimated $700 billion in late 1980s dollars. That's a little over $2 trillion in today's money. Hard to imagine any government, even of a country with 278 million people, shouldering that kind of cost AND all of their day to day expenses maintaining a population and paving streets and, you know, producing newspapers, and remaining intact. They spent all of their resources and borrowed to their limits and it still was not enough.)

Anyway, all that is one of the reasons that I'm not freaking out about everything going on with the current administration. Well, to be fair I don't watch the news, so I don't really know what's going on with the current administration. And my lack of knowledge does not seem to have done me any harm. I hear plenty. And any of you guys who ARE freaking out, please consider if part of it might be because you watch too damn much news. I mean, the guy doesn't get to live rent free in your head unless you decide to let him. I'm just saying.

But yeah. End of the world? I've seen it a few times. I'm still here.  

The Saga of Cricket the Cat

 So I think I forgot to tell you guys, what with Christmas and the ongoing catastrophe that is government, but we have a new cat (!). This makes a total of three. Her name is Cricket and she is, we think, about ten years old. Here she is.  That's the photographer in the background there, too.  

Cricket is, or was, my neighbor's cat. I have actually known her since she was a kitten. I was feeding several ferals, and she would come over to get snacks. Gradually, I began to notice that she was coming over all the time. At some point, I had become her sole source of food, apart from things she might catch (I saw her running like hell after a rat once, and that was one lucky rat because he was able to dodge into a hole at the last second. Unfortunately, the hole was in the side of my house. So had to get that fixed and rat removed.  So maybe unlucky rat).

Anyway, I kept feeding her. For years. She was always outside. A couple of times she came up to me during driving rainstorms and yowled. I would grab her and put her in the laundry room overnight, then let her out in the morning when the rain stopped. When the nights got very cold, I did the same thing. I could not figure out what was going on next door, but I can speculate.

A. They have young kids. I think their youngest at the time was about three. Young kids and cats rarely get along unless they are properly supervised. Young kids tend to want to grab cats, especially their tails, and cats are less than happy about being grabbed most of the time. Especially their tails. B. They got a dog. So what I'm speculating here is that the cat probably got grabbed once too often and swiped at one of the kids, or didn't get along with the dog, or both. So from then on she had to live outside, and at some point they even quit feeding her.

(I don't, by the way, want you to think that my neighbors are horrible people. They're not. They manage four kids in a house the same size as ours and their kids are not only clean and well-cared for but, that rare thing, happy. I always hear them laughing and playing. They are from a different culture and they have different views of pets. Which is unfortunate for Cricket, but her story ends happily. Read on.)

About six months or so ago, Cricket disappeared (!). She was like clockwork every morning at seven, but I didn't see her for three days. I went out looking for her, calling and checking under bushes and around the house. (Cats usually don't go far.) I also went over to the neighbors' and asked them if they'd seen their cat. (The kid who answered the door said, "What cat?")

I did not find her, but the next morning she finally turned up, so she must have heard me calling. She was obviously sick. I packed her up and took her to the vet. She had an infection, which they treated with antibiotics, and a fever. In doing the blood work, though, the vet discovered that she had feline leukemia.

Feline leukemia, in case you did not know this, is a disease that can kill you but usually doesn't. It makes you more prone to infections and other problems, can cause kidney failure, and you really don't want it, but once you have it, you can pretty much live a slightly shorter span of years than a regular cat, as long as you have good nutrition and good veterinary care. It is also, annoyingly, a totally preventable condition that a simple vaccine would have fixed. Now, I know Cricket is spayed. If she weren't I'd have Kitten City every summer and I don't. So she's clearly been to a vet at least once before me. Why she wasn't vaccinated at the time, I have no idea.

The vet said that, categorically, she should no longer be outside. Any other cats that encountered her, and more importantly got bitten by her in a fight, were in danger of also getting feline leukemia if they were not vaccinated. Here I had a problem, because my big male, Grayson, has an Issue with Cricket. It started some years ago when he saw her and managed to get out of the house. He chased her, they fought and she handed his ass to him. He ended up at the vet getting some stitches. So obviously he did not want her in the house with him. (Though, ironically, her feline leukemia was really not a problem because both my guys are vaccinated. This reduces the risk of transmission down to almost nothing, though Grayson and Artemis would need to get regular boosters forever.)

So I began putting her in the laundry room every night and started a campaign to get her into a shelter or a foster home. This was not easy because A. she is not young and B. she has feline leukemia. I wrote to shelters and cat rescues all over the state. I quickly narrowed down the number of rescue outfits to about seven, all outside of Dallas, because they were the only ones that took feline leukemia positive cats. All of them were full. I wrote to them again a few months later. All of them were full. I guess I could have kept doing this until the end of recorded time, but two things happened while that was going on.

The first thing was that, despite logic to the contrary and several Big Discussions with Joan, I got emotionally involved with Cricket. She is a sweet cat. She likes people, likes to be petted and held, and as long as you treat her gently and don't mess with her tail, she loves you. She was also, you gotta admit, in a very bad situation through really no fault of her own. And also potentially sick. I have a long and sordid track record of standing up for people and other beings that are being treated unfairly.

The second thing was that Cricket disappeared again. She didn't show up for her evening feed and to be put in the laundry room one night, and it happened to be the night we had a big storm.

I barely slept. If she disappeared again and never came back, I didn't know what I would do. I was frantic the first time. I could NOT handle it happening a second time. Fortunately, she was there in the morning. She was also soaking wet. And that was it. I grabbed her, put her back in the laundry room, and just didn't let her out again.

After which Joan and I had a big fight. Because, you know, Joan woke up in the morning and we had a third cat, after I'd specifically been trying to find another solution all this time. (I said "I'm sorry" a lot.) Joan was most concerned about maintaining harmony in the household, especially considering our big male. (Like a Muslim husband, it is my job to maintain harmony in the household. Says so in the Koran.) So it was up to me to find some way to integrate the cats.

Right around this time, I finally got an intake application from one of the cat rescues.

I deleted it.

And I took Cricket back to the vet, got her other shots, got her microchipped, and she's our cat now. In essence, I stole my neighbors' cat. Though, if they were looking for her, they could have come over here and asked, since they know I was looking for her before. Or put up posters or something.

Integration has been challenging. At first we kept Cricket in the laundry room with the door closed and the cat door (conveniently located in the door between the laundry room and the kitchen) also closed. Then I began opening the door halfway, so that the cats could see each other but not touch. As of now I've pretty much removed the locking panel. Cricket can come and go as she pleases, but she still spends most of her time down there. She comes up into the kitchen when Grayson is not around, because he tends to growl and hiss at her, though he does it from ten feet away. Grayson is all hat and no cattle.

(Artemis, my diva kitty, oddly does not care. She's not getting all buddy-buddy with Cricket or anything, but for the most part she's like, "Eh. Another cat. Whatevs.")

One time, Grayson attacked the cat door after Cricket went back through it. After he'd swatted it with his paw a half-dozen times, he turned around to leave the kitchen. Cricket popped back through the cat door, SWATTED HIM ON THE BACKSIDE, and disappeared through the cat door again. Grayson spun around, didn't see her, and looked wildly around for several seconds, his fur puffed up like a punk rock Mohawk. I laughed for about ten minutes. Cricket is not putting up with his shit.

Another time, quite recently, I picked Cricket up to give her a little skritch to the head and she FELL ASLEEP on me. She was purring, and the purr got softer and softer, and then she went all boneless. She probably slept that way, with her head on my shoulder, for half an hour. I had no idea she trusted me that much. I mean, we barely know each other.

So, anyway, we have a third cat. It was not planned, it just happened. This has to be the max, though. We're outnumbered now. And if we have to evacuate in a hurry, one of us is gonna have to carry two cats.

Guess that'd be me. Says so in the Koran.

One Of Those Blog Posts We Don't Share With Family Members

So guys, my dad has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He is 86, so he's had a great run, and it seems to be mild right now, but it's not like it's going to get any better. I was just out there and I'm pleased to report that he doesn't seem to be unhappy. He just seems to kind of not-be-there sometimes. He was an engineer in his former life, so for him to space out once in a while and be totally unaware of what's happening is not new. It's just different now, and maybe happening more often? It's hard to tell.

 My sis thinks things have been off with him for a couple of years, but it takes ages and lots of scans to get diagnosed with this thing, and even then they apparently don't know it for sure unless they do an autopsy after you die. Scans can pick up likely signs of amyloid plaques but you can't confirm them without going in there and looking at them, and there's some controversy about whether or not amyloid plaques even cause Alzheimer's symptoms or if they just tend to co-occur, but I don't wanna get into all that right now. Anyway, he's been off for a couple of years and now we know why.

Obviously I need to be out there as much as possible while he still recognizes me. I was supposed to go over Christmas but both my parents got Covid, so I had to cancel. I finally got there in mid-January and I'm still reeling from this trip.

Strap on your seat belts. This is a long story and it gets kinda rocky.

The main problem with my dad having Alzheimer's, besides the fact that he sometimes forgets to put on clothes (!), is my mother. Mom has the same severe anxiety disorder that I do, and possibly also ADHD (which she thinks is made up), but she never got treatment like I did. What she does instead is try to control everything and everyone around her so she can have some sense of certainty, and this hasn't gotten better in the face of my dad's diagnosis. For the record, this drives everyone around her figuratively and literally crazy, and people, if you need mental health help and you don't want to get it for you, please oh please do it for the people who have to be around you. Crazy people make sane people crazy. Okay? Okay.

My mom won't entertain any kind of long term plan. There's no point in asking her about what she wants in possible assisted living for my dad, or memory care if that eventually warrants, because as far as she's concerned, he's fine and he's not going to get any worse and they can't afford that, anyway. (They totally can.) I've got her going to an Alzheimer's support group for spouses, which is a big step in the right direction. My sis is also trying to get her to accept more help around the house so they can stay in it, but that's been an uphill battle all the way.

Also, I don't trust her. Not that she'd deliberately neglect my dad or abuse him, but see above re: he's fine and he's not going to get any worse. Which means that she may not wanna do what needs doing, get him treatment he needs, or otherwise do anything that disturbs her view of the universe. She was also emotionally abusive to us when we were kids, and any illness that impacts the brain is gonna impact emotions and I don't want her brushing him aside if he gets sad or angry or any of the fallout that you would normally get when somebody slaps you with a life-changing and in this case, life-ending diagnosis (eventually).

Now, my sister's there, and she's boots on the ground, so I'm deferring to her and doing what she asks me to do. But she doesn't live with him every day and may not see what's going on with him. My dad was born just before WWII and Nothing Bothers Him so it's not like he'd say he's unhappy, he's scared or anything like that. You kind of have to intuit this from his behavior, like you would a cat. (Too bad people don't have tails. "Hey, Dad's tail is down, I'm gonna go find out what's going on.")

Which brings us to this trip. First thing, Mom totally overscheduled us. I didn't push back on this nearly as hard as I should have, and that's on me, but being as I wanted to be with my dad, I was kind of stuck with whatever the plans were. Now I know better; I need one afternoon where I can lie in my hotel room, watch junk TV and munch on Gummi Bears. I'm autistic, baby, and peopling wears me out. Except my dad. The Australian Open was on and so all he wanted to do was watch tennis. I sat there with him and watched tennis for three hours and that was the best part of the trip. I still know nothing about tennis but much witty banter happened (between moments of spacing out).

The second thing is the emotional abuse. Several things have just kind of come to a head as far as that goes. It's hard to capture all the nuances of this in a single sentence but my sister and I were treated like we were little robots, and if my mom inputted the right data, we would turn around and cough up the right result without question or argument.

In my case, I hit puberty at about 100 mph when I was nine years old and began growing breasts, hips, the whole nine yards. I also shot up about six inches and made my full adult height before I was thirteen. My mom and apparently also the pediatrician interpreted this as "shes' getting fat." My mom walked into my room and asked me (again, I was nine) if I wanted to go on Weight Watchers or Nutri-system. I'm sure lots of nine-year-olds everywhere are able to determine the pros and cons of each and arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. Anyway, from then until I moved out it was forced dieting, forced exercise, "You can't have that, you're too fat" said in front of other people. "We're not going to visit your cousins if you're going to eat all the junk food in the house so you have to promise me you won't before we go" said in front of other people. I could go on, but I won't. The result was that I had an out of control eating disorder from then until about ten years ago, when I looked at all the effort and wasted time that had gone into trying to lose weight and decided I Just Wasn't Going To Do It Anymore. 

Imagine my surprise when we watched some home videos and I saw myself at nine and I was -- not a fat kid. Fast forward to some more videos from when I was about 20 and -- I wasn't fat then either. If I'd stopped trying to lose weight when I was 180 lbs I'd probably still be there instead of way, way past it, but hey, this entire society tries to convince women they need to be so skinny that they disappear, and I know what I know now. (Part of what I know: Only between 5-15% of the population can lose more than 10% of body weight and keep it off for 5 years. Hundreds of studies from the last hundred years show that the rest of us gain it all back, usually with more, regardless of method used or the amount of time it takes to lose the weight -- yes, even bariatric surgery. Most of us then go on another diet or "lifestyle change" or "exercise plan" and do it over and over again, causing measurable heart damage each and every time, which probably accounts for the heart disease that people with "ob*sity" supposedly have because they are fat.) When you can't fix it, at least you can try not to do any more harm. And I can't fix it. Still trying to get my doc to accept this but I think we'll get there.

My sister, though. We had a Big Talk about this. My sister learned through watching my parents yell at me that she had to not do what I was doing, ie, having normal emotional reactions to things that a kid would have. There's a series of pictures of a photo shoot when I was maybe seven and my sis would have been four, maybe a youngish five. She remembers this photo shoot very cleary. I got upset about some of the poses they were trying to push me into and started to cry. Which of course made my makeup run and so my dad started yelling at me, which made me cry even harder. "So that's why you look red and blotchy in those pictures, because Mom insisted on going through with the photo shoot anyway," my sister told me. "And I learned I have to never ever cry."

Fast forward a few years to when my sister was seven. She was over at a friend's house and the dad came home from work and started a domestic abuse thing with the mom. She and her friend ran upstairs and hid in the closet until he stomped out again. While they were hiding in the closet, my sister decided not to tell my parents about this because she wasn't supposed to ever get scared.

That second story in particular hit me like a motherfucking Cat Five hurricane. I was furious for days, weeks; now I'm not furious anymore but I'm just totally, inexpressibly sad. And I feel like I didn't do my job. I was the big sis and I was supposed to protect her from things like that. I mean, logically, I was seven in the first incident and maybe nine in the second, and it's not like I didn't have my own shit going on. But logic often has nothing to do with the way people feel. Kind of like nine-year-olds who are told they have to lose weight because they are too fat and therefore they can't have birthday cake at the party like everyone else don't always smile cheerfully and say "Okay, Mom." That's just not how it works sometimes.

I mean, I knew this shit was happening to me, and if it was happening to me it had to be happening to my sister, but on some level I guess I thought she missed the worst of it. But she didn't. What happened to me is just easier to categorize and put a name to. My sister dealt with ceaseless, grinding attempts to turn her into a machine, which must have manifested in so many ways I'm not sure I can count them all. One of the big ones, though, is that she's sneaky. Not in a mean way, but she'll just not tell you stuff if she thinks you're not going to like it. She and her husband moved to South Korea, for example, to teach for a year, and she literally told my parents after all the contracts were signed, the airline tickets were purchased and there was no turning back without a huge lawsuit. My mom still freaked out six ways to Sunday. More so because she couldn't control it. (South Korea is, by the way, a First World country with literally the best health care system on the entire planet.)

So that's where I'm at. I'm sad, I'm worried and really, I'm not sure how to even begin to deal with all this. Yes, I have a therapist. I've had a therapist off and on most of my life and some have been bad and some have been good but all of them have helped me learn something. This one has helped me figure out that a big part of this monumental chip I have on my shoulder is about being pushed around and forced into things the way I was. I constantly expect that people are going to want me to be and act in ways that are convenient to them without any thought to what that means for me, and the only way not to do that is to explode in rage at them when they try it. Shockingly, this is not necessary. I am an adult and "No" is a complete sentence and I don't have to consent to certain cancer screenings or get into big political discussions or go out to bars on Friday nights. I have Options.

Except with my dad. The only option I have there is whether or not to show up.  

So There Are Dreams, And...

 ...there are messages. I think some dreams are messages.  From where?  Couldn't tell ya.  I just know I remember them for a long time, which I don't with ordinary dreams.  Even the sex dreams with the men/women/fantasy creatures are only significant because of that annoying part of my brain that's always in touch with reality.  Just as things are getting interesting, that part of my brain will pop up and say, "You can't be doing this.  You're married." And I'll be like, "Right, sorry, this has been fun but I have to get home to my wife." I make a terrible dream date.  

When I was a kid, I had a dream about Ygdrasil, the Tree of Life.  I didn't know it was Ygdrasil at the time, but then I didn't learn anything about Norse mythology until I was ten or twelve.  Norse mythology, in case you did not know this, is pretty gory and involves lots of sex and the end of the world, so probably not really kid material.  Even though, back in the Viking days, kids learned this stuff around the fire. Anyway, it looked like a corkscrew willow but it was taller than a redwood.  I couldn't even see where it reached the sky.  And hanging from all its little branches, as well as leaves, were thin crystal spires that seem to have grown there.  When the wind blew, all the little crystal spires touched each other and made sweet music.  It was pretty amazing but the tree was in terrible danger and somebody had to protect it from the bad guys, whoever they were, and I was the only one there. so I was gonna do it.  And then I woke up. 

I shouldn't tell you guys about my dreams.  Other people's dreams are boring. But: I had this crazy dream last night and I think you guys will like this one.  Some lady calls me and says, "I work for this dermatologist and he botched a couple of procedures.   One of the clients is threatening to sue or report him to the state, and he's just in a tailspin, and I'm scared of what he might do.  Will you come down and talk to him?"  "Of course," I say, and then, "Just out of curiosity, why did you call me?" "Because you're a Buddhist." Oh, okay, that makes perfect sense.  "I'm on my way."

And I'm driving over there wondering if the guy is going to attempt suicide.  I don't think I'm qualified to talk him out of it.  But maybe there's no time to find somebody qualified.  When I get there, though, it's obvious that's not his plan.  His office is full of body armor and guns and camo gear.  He looks like he's planning a commando raid, or a mass shooting.  

Now, I'm very scared.  This guy doesn't know me and if he is going to kill lots of innocent people, he can certainly harm me.  But, Thich Nhat Hanh talked about giving people the gift of non-fear, or not being afraid so that other people will not be afraid.  So I decide to non-fear my way through this thing.  He's facing the other way.  I ask him if he'll listen to me.  He says he will.  I say I understand some patients are maybe going to sue him, and that must have really hurt his feelings.  I say if it were me I would be worried about my reputation and my standing in the community.  I don't want to be thought of as a bad doctor.  I would have to do something to protect my reputation.  

"And what would you do?" he asks.  I say, "Well, I'd find the guy, and approach him in public so he wouldn't be scared, and I'd say something like, 'I know that the procedure didn't go the way we both hoped.  I'm really sorry about that. I never want anyone to have a bad outcome.  Let me refund your money and refer you to someone who can fix this, and if there's anything else I can do to make this right, please tell me what it is so that I can do it.'" He turns around, looking very surprised. I can see that he's been crying.  "You'd actually do that?"  "Well, I wouldn't like it very much," I say.  "I hate saying I'm sorry and I hate being wrong.  But if I wanted to protect my reputation, yes, that's what I'd do.  I don't want him to be mad at me.  I want to make him whole. And if I can do that, he won't be mad at me and he won't tell people I'm a bad doctor.  He'll tell people I'm a good doctor because I admitted I was wrong and tried to do the right thing."

The guy starts to cry and falls onto my shoulder.  He spills out this whole story, which I don't remember now, of what's going on in his life.  Everything is all messed up.  He's having mental issues, one of his kids is having mental issues, there are problems with his practice and he's just overwhelmed.  I don't say anything, just let him go until he winds down. Then he says, "I know where the guy is but I'm not supposed to drive because of my meds."  I say, "No problem.  I'll drive.  Where are we going?"  He gives me directions and we head out to a golf course in Plano.  I know not why.  Anyway, as we pull into the parking lot, I wake up.

And when I woke up, I was thinking, there are all kinds of problems in this world and this country and even this neighborhood.  I can't solve a lot of them because I don't have that kind of money or power.  But there are small things I can do, and I'm going to do those things because they're important.  I don't have a crystal ball, but I think we're heading toward a very dark time these next several years, and people who are not white or not Christian or not citizens or not from countries that people in government like are going to have a really hard time.  And anything I can do to make their lives easier is absolutely worth doing.  

Okay, maybe it's the new med talking. 

But still.  

When The Smoke Cleared And The Dust Settled...

So we had an election.

We all know how that went.

I guess I am very disappointed in us more than anything.  I mean, sure, let's sell out all women of reproductive age and black and Hispanic people and gay and trans people to make more money.  I thought we were better than that.  Well, I think I thought we were better than that.  Because actually, I'm not surprised.  Disappointed.  But not surprised.

When Joe Biden stepped down, I thought it was a mistake.  People liked him.  Lots of people, me included, had already voted for him in the primaries.  I don't know if there are any statistics on this, but some of those people might have taken major exception to swapping him out for another candidate. And, Americans are racist sexist bastards.  Particularly sexist.  Argue with me if you want, but it's true.  I predict we'll have another black President, and probably a Hispanic President, before we ever have a woman, much less a black/Asian woman.  Hillary never had a chance.

If you don't believe me about the sexism part, how much do women make an hour compared to men?  What procedures that affect men's bodies are restricted by state law?  How often are men told they're selfish for wanting both a career and kids?  How are men's names changed at marriage to show how they're connected to a woman?  When was the last time a man complained to you that some woman was checking him out on the street or yelling something offensive about his body?

So again, disappointed.  But not surprised.

But:

This has all happened before.  No, not just in 2016, but then, too.

We have elected some bad Presidents over the years.  Take Warren G. Harding, for example.  Please.  Primarily elected because he was better-looking than James Cox, he won in a landslide. He fired everybody in charge at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, only to realize a year later that he'd made a big mistake and that he had to quietly rehire everybody or, uh, the US would run out of printed money.  At his direction, the Department of the Interior leased the Teapot Dome oil reserves to Harry Sinclair, thus permanently poisoning a potential national park (and getting him all kinds of rich in the process).  He also kept us out of the League of Nations, which led almost directly to World War II by way of--well, a number of things. He was a notorious philanderer and may, in fact, have been poisoned by his wife. If so, thank you, Florence.  You did your country a great service.

Then we have James Buchanan, who lobbied the Supreme Court to issue the Dred Scott ruling.  He got Kansas admitted as a slave state, did plenty to increase the tension between halves of a sharply divided country (kind of like now), and failed to act in the face of economic chaos, more or less causing the Panic of 1857.  That the worst depression until, well, the Depression.  Like that Depression, the Panic only ended because of a war, the Civil War, when rampant government spending for armaments and paying soldiers cranked things up again.  (Which is how we usually get out of economic downturns.  But I digress.)

And let's not forget Herbert Hoover.  He  also won in a landslide, but had the bad luck to take office right as the Great Depression was really getting underway.  Once he was in charge, though, he signed a tariff act that caused a trade war and made the Depression even worse.  He sent the Army--yes, that Army--in to deal with World War I veterans who were protesting for their pensions, and many were injured and killed.  He was a terrible speaker and while he didn't quite rise to Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" (if she really said that), he managed to say a lot of other stupid things that made him sound like he gave a shit about nobody but himself, which should sound familiar to some of you.  Shantytowns made up of unemployed people were called "Hoovervilles" in his honor.

I'm not gonna mention Reagan.  Oops, I mentioned Reagan.  It takes a special kind of talent to totally destroy an entire nation's economic foundation, kill 300,000 people, lie to Congress while framing some colonel and run the country through astrology.

Also, the United States has had plenty of dark days.  On August 24, 1814, the British Army burned our fledgling capital at Washington, DC more or less to the ground.  After keeping the country from tearing itself apart by civil war, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Army attacked Pearl Harbor.  On October 22, 1961, there was reasonable fear that we were all about to be nuked into oblivion (and probably several times since then, though understandably, a lot of those are classified).

I wasn't around for any of those, that I know of.  I was, however, around when Ronald Reagan was elected and everybody cheered. I was here when AIDS was rampantly killing people and there was no cure or treatment, and people who had it were written off as unimportant because they were probably gay (or worse, Hatian).  I was here for the Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area (in fact, my father was physically there) that killed 65 people and injured thousands and did major economic damage. I was here when we attacked Afghanistan, stayed there for more than 20 years, and then left, letting the same people and the same problems that were running things before waltz right back in and take over again.  I was here when an organization we'd never heard up blew up the World Trade Centers, and I was also here when we promptly went to war with an innocent third party and "bombed them into the Stone Age." And of course I was here on January 6, 2021.

Don't get me wrong, November 6, 2024 was one of the worst days ever.

But:

All that happened, and I am still here.  And so are you.

The way I see it, there's really only three things we can do.  We can pack up and leave the country (really only an option for able-bodied people with money who can handle logistics and speak another language and don't have cats).  We can lie down and die, or maybe commit suicide.  Or, we can do what we need to do to get through the day and just keep on keeping on.

I am a big advocate of that last thing.  Because as long as we're doing that, we can also do what we can to help the lots and lots of people, like trans kids and women who need abortions, who are going to need help.  And we can do whatever we can, in whatever ways we have available, to fuck everything up for the people that would legislate us into the 1400s.

I'm not saying it's gonna be easy.  But what percentage of things that are worth doing are ever easy?  Giving my cat his ear medicine every day isn't easy either, but I do it.  I've got scars to prove it.  I also have a happy cat.  So it is worth doing.

Anyway, I hope you guys are okay and people you love are okay.  If you haven't checked on them, you should do that, because some people are not okay.  Which is why they need us to stick around and help.  Donate to abortion funds, if you can.  The NAACP, United We Dream, Planned Parenthood, this little organization that's close to my heart,  and the ACLU could all use your help, too.  

That last one more than ever.

The Five Really Excellent Suggestions

5 minute meditation: Take a few minutes to consider what something is made of. I don't mean just the ingredients. I mean, the work that goes into it, the people who designed it, the process of making it at and the people who transport it, sell it and fix it when it breaks.

I tried to do this with a cell phone recently and about had a meltdown, so let us instead consider a single piece of paper. (!) A piece of paper is made primarily of wood. Wood comes from trees, which grow in a forest, so there's a forest in the piece of paper. There's the earth and the sunlight and the rain. There are the lives of the men and women who harvest the tree, put it on a truck and drive it where it needs to go. There are the people who get the tree and cut it into pieces so that it can be made into paper. There are big pieces of equipment in the factory that break the wood down into pulp. There are giant rollers that roll out the paper, and there are also machines that cut it to size and wrap it up. Somebody had to invent that process and design all those machines. Somebody also has to pick up the wrapped packages of paper at the end of the process and put them on a truck. The truck has to go someplace that sells the paper. And so on and so on and so on.

The deeper you look into this, the more you realize that there's actually an entire universe in that piece of paper. And in everything else, including you. Try it for five minutes. It's pretty amazing.

So I haven't done anything really Buddhist-y in a while. I mean, I could talk about the Noble Eightfold Path or the Four Noble Truths or the Three Nifty Teacups or the Six Scary Things Not To Do With Electricity (Buddhists are big on numbered lists; in fact, Buddha may have invented the bullet point). However, I think I'll just take on the Five Precepts today. This is the short list of Buddha's suggestions for living a good and happy life, and increasing the happiness of those around you. They should be kind of familiar to those of you who know of these Ten Commandments. There's only five of them, so they're easier to remember, and you don't have to define "adultery" or "false witness".

Now, there are a lot of different kinds of Buddhists and we don't all agree. One person's interpretation of "sexual misconduct" is gonna be different than another's. So this is my interpretation of What All This Means, shaped in no small way by Thich Nhat Hanh and my Buddhist group. If you want the official Thich Nhat Hanh version, it is here. (Probably worth a look, anyway.) You'll note our boy got a bit wordy. Some of these have been edited since he died but I don't think the essential meaning has changed.

Here they are:

• I will refrain from killing any living being.

This covers every living being everywhere, even blades of grass, but it's not meant to be unreasonable. I mean, we all gotta eat. We all gotta breathe air (every time you do, you massacre millions of germs). The idea is to do what you can not to do harm to things, and it's dependent largely on your awareness. You may or may not be aware, for example, that lower life forms, like insects, are afraid of getting hurt or killed. Of course they are. They even have dreams, and they are crafty. They think things through. If you are aware of this, you will probably try not to kill them, if you're a reasonably nice person. I mean, I try not to kill them. I make an exception for those Big Creepy Bugs, not because I particularly want to. It's just that they're fast and they're scary and my brain won't let me go near them and so I can't always catch them and throw them outside, which would be my preference. I feel bad about it when I do stomp on one, or kill one by proxy (that's my wife's job). I am getting better at catching them. I don't think something should have to die just because I'm afraid of it.

That doesn't stop me from having regular pest control service at my house. My hope, tho, is that it convinces the critters to Just Stay Away.

Some people also interpret this one to mean that you have to be a vegetarian. Thich Nhat Hanh suggested (gently) that people aspire to not eat meat to the extent possible. As a young monk, he and the other monks did daily alms rounds with begging bowls, where they took whatever food people gave out, and sometimes that was meat. They were supposed to refuse if the animal had been especially killed for them, but you're not always gonna know that. And some people (like me) need meat to keep their iron count up, or their blood sugar low, or both. Again, it's do what you can do. If you can get meat from farms where the animals had good lives, enough space to run and play, and fresh air, that's obviously better than factory farmed meat where the chickens never leave their 2 foot by 2 foot space. Better for the chickens and better for you.

• I will refrain from taking that which is not freely given.

The second one is basically about not stealing, but it goes beyond physical things. It encourages us not to steal people's time, either, or their goodwill. Also to practice generosity with other people and with yourself. I dunno about you, but I'll cut other people way more slack than myself. Maybe give yourself a break sometimes. Take a nap if you need one. Tell a friend you need help or a friendly ear. Tip well. Give money and things to people in need. Whoever they are and regardless of their political, religious or citizenship status. And, you know, if somebody says something that comes across to you as really ignorant, racist or otherwise, maybe assume they don't know any better before jumping down their throats.

• I will refrain from committing sexual misconduct.

This is a big one. Most Buddhists interpret this as "Don't fool around." Which means different things to different people of course, but to me it means, "Don't have sex with somebody with whom you're not in a committed, long-term relationship." So one night stands are off the table. Cheating on your partner is off the table. Sex with exes is off the table. Group sex orgies are definitely off the table. (Some people somewhere must really do that.) I'm not sure about people married to more than one person. That sounds really complicated, but some societies make it work, so I guess never say never. Are you in a committed, long term relationship? Does the person you want to have sex with, with whom you are in the committed, long term relationship, want to have sex with you? In that case, knock yourself out. (Use a condom, please.) But I think it also means to keep your sex life out of public view, and not to indulge in salacious gossip about who's sleeping with whom. (I'm looking at you, Grey's Anatomy.) 

• I will refrain from misusing my power of speech.

"Misusing power of speech" generally means "Don't lie," but like everything else, it also means other things. Don't spread gossip. Don't say things to people to hurt their feelings or put them down. Don't say things just to sound superior or smarter than everybody else. If it's not really contributing anything, it's fine to just keep your mouf shut. In short, be mindful about what you're saying and to whom you are saying it. The same thing that's appropriate to say to a good friend may be totally inappropriate to say to your boss. Dude.

• I will refrain from taking intoxicants that cloud the mind.

Which are, in no particular order, alcohol, drugs not prescribed by a doctor, weed, excessive sugar, video games, social media and cell phones generally. (Cell phones are the anti-Buddha.) And gambling. Buddha made a point of not gambling. In short, it's anything addictive, which you fall into, waste tons of time you don't have, and lose track of everything else, with negative consequences for your peace of mind. Such as, losing money, losing time, deleterious effects on your body, etc. Also stuff that's flat-out bad for you. I love horror movies, for example, but I can only watch a very narrow stripe of the spectrum. Anything with serial killers, zombies, torture porn or psycho stalkers is right out.  I can't tolerate that kind of stuff. I also can't watch anything about slavery, mental hospitals in the 1900s, the Spanish Inquisition or El Salvador circa 1984-1992. Social media is also bad for me. Does that keep me off it? No. I'm doing my best, though.

And that's kind of the point. They don't say, "Thou shalt not." Buddha didn't give commandments. He gave really excellent suggestions. Also, the way the precepts are phrased, it's more of a statement of aspiration, not so much "I will" (or will not) but "I will do my best." Because really, all we can do is our best. We're human. We're gonna screw up. It's endemic to the species. The neat thing about being human is, we know when we've screwed up and we can do better next time. Probably some dolphins and whales also know this, and octopuses, and certainly cats. (If you've ever seen your cat do something inadvertently funny and then make a great show of washing its paws, that's because it's embarrassed. Yes, cats know when they screwed up.)

So that's it.

Let's not screw up this election, everybody.