The Church Of Jesus and Mary: Week II NFL

"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too."
-- Samuel Butler 1835-1902: "Notebooks" (1912)

The neon green tag on the bars of the dog-cages reminded me of a chartreuse Rapala I’ve used at the mouth of the Salmon Trout. It was my turn to take them downstairs. You try to detach yourself. Sure the dog looked like Shadow, but I couldn’t let that interfere with my job. When times are hard toughness is required. Besides, as a technician it’s my duty to make sure my research team is desensitized to the killing. Enforcing the rules is my job, and I do it with extreme prejudice. I’m more than just an animal killer. It’s my job to see that strict documentation and ethical standards are followed. One slip. One dehydrated mouse, one unsanitary research area, and I’m in front of a disciplinary board. Janitor, cop, call me what you like, I’m committed to my work. Had to fire a guy last week. Said I was one rude dude.

The researchers get all the glory, but it’s us technicians that do the dirty work. We clean the labs, do the re-supply and prepare the chemicals. I’m proud of our facility. We’ve got hamsters, gerbils, dogs, pigs, sheep, pigs and monkeys. Over 4000 mice alone are housed here. Just one time I’d like to see those pampered student researchers handle the washroom and euthanization detail. Let them scrape up the petrified bird shit and load the cages on the conveyor-belt washer. Let them take the animals to the basement, lock them in the cage, and turn on the carbon dioxide machine. They wonder why I turn them in for clipping mouse tails for DNA samples. They don’t know what cruelty is.

Funny thing is, a dog’s what got me. A Goddamned German shepherd named Max did me in. It figures, cadaver dog, sniffing through the same mounds of garbage where I hid her. He picked up her scent in the basement of the lab where I hid the corpse.

Man’s best friend. Yea, right.

Welcome to the Medicine Patch!

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-82: "Fortune of The Republic" (1878)

























"O farmers excessively fortunate if only they recognized their blessings!
Virgil 70-19 BC: "Georgics"

The Folly of RiGhteOusNesS!

"What is most objectionable about extremistsis not that they are extreme but that they are intolerant.”

-- Robert Kennedy 1925-68: “The Pursuit of Justice” (1964)

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

-- George Santayana 1863-1952: “The Life of Reason” (1905)

“Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”

-- Lenin 187-1924 “Imperialism as the Last Stage of Capitalism” (1916)

Let’s talk politics.

I don’t know about you, but I’m advising Brigitte to keep her daughter home from school today. Knowing her class was scheduled to watch Obama’s education speech, I admonished her to protect her offspring from the threat of socialist indoctrination, lest she lose her child to our once proud country’s insidious and relentless march towards a cliff that overlooks a sodomite valley where Flintstone shaped-birth control pills are handed out like candy, condoms come in crackerjack boxes, and HPV vaccines that promote sexual promiscuity are administered by sexually predatory homosexuals bent on corrupting our children. Just say no to liberal brainwashers!

Brothers and sisters, I’ve seen the light! The stickers are coming off the car. It’s time to get out my “Kucinich in 2012” button. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Obama is a house, and not a field, slave. Make no mistake about it, the corporate status-quo, via the amoral institutional state apparatuses that rule the world, like America’s, love having a man of color do their bidding. How convenient, what better way to ensure their global hegemony than by donning the cloak of pseudo racial diversity and phony multiculturalism. No wonder then, that Obama pursues an age-old path of blood money that ensures the perpetuation of a widening gap between the bloated rich and destitute poor. And now it’s happening here. The war has sucked the life-blood from our economy. The fat cats get fatter on the sale of war, and it’s our tax dollars that pay for the guns. Look around, might our money be spent more wisely on looking after our own well- being?

In “The Nation” (9/10/09), Alexander Cockburn writes, “Obama flees responsibility, as do his die-hard liberal-progressive fans, including columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, so implacable against tyranny and war in the Bush years. Has either of them deigned to mention Obama’s continuation of Bush’s policies on enemy combatants, eavesdropping, or war?”

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Cockburn’s assessment of Obama’s first 8 months in office.

I wouldn’t say the comparisons between LBJ and Obama are unfair. Johnson’s “Great Society” push was a noble thing, but Viet Nam is the albatross they buried him with. Can you say quagmire? Rumsfeld couldn’t and apparently Obama can’t either. According to Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University: “Despite the Obama administration’s assertions that it has a new approach, the truth is they want to try harder to do what we’ve been doing for the last eight years.” We’re killing civilians, backing a criminal thug who just rigged the election, and allowing young American soldiers to die for no good reason. How does senseless killing in a far off foreign land make us safer from terrorist attacks?

The devastating airstrike on two tanker trucks last Friday but one example of the U.S.’s wanton disregard for the Afghani people and their culture. Here’s more on this from the NYTimes story: “Reviews of the strike indicated that along with insurgents, civilians also were killed and injured in the strike. An independent Afghan watchdog group said Monday that between 60 and 70 villagers were killed in the strike. The swift burial of victims at the scene of the airstrike near the city of Kunduz has added to the confusion.

The deadly bombing came at a moment of rising fatigue and disenchantment with the mission in Afghanistan, as the number and intensity of Taliban attacks increased and more and more reports of voter fraud in the recent presidential election in Afghanistan have come to light.”

Never mind the hearts and minds of the Afghani people, it’s the wrath of the rest of the world we also risk. Reports like the one released today by the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan little to regain the kind of American moral credibility Obama once promised.

“KABUL, Afghanistan — A Swedish aid agency said Monday that American soldiers stormed through one of its hospitals in Afghanistan last week, searching men’s and women’s wards for wounded Taliban fighters, breaking down doors and tying up hospital staff members and visitors.” The U.S Army’s 10th Mountain Division spent two hours searching the hospital on Wednesday.”

According to Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, America’s geo-political goals for

Afghanistan’s future have a “slim likelihood of success.”

Best - Randy

Chemotherapy: "The Fog of Everyday Life"

“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.”

-- Helen Keller 1880-1968: “My Religion” (1927)

The topic of the day is chemo brain. What prompted my interest in this is the recent spate of news articles expounding on the subject of medically prescribed chemicals and the cognitive perils that follow. Yes, there have been many pieces on the deleterious effects of toxic healing, the forgetfulness, lack of focus, dyslexia, neuropathy and such, but the one that caught my attention most recently was Dan Barry’s paean to chemo, “My Brain on Chemo: Alive and Alert” (NYT 9/1/09).

By Barry’s lights, I am a member of the “chemotherapy alumni corps.” Without getting naked on the first page, let me just say I have not garnered the wisdom that comes with multiple chemotherapies: a knowledge of just how insidious good health, a condition marked by what Barry calls, “the haze of the everyday,” can be. Barry sees this state of mind as a pre-existing human condition.” Absent the influence of serious illness, the beauties of the world and our existence in it are blindly taken for granted:

”Cancer, as it is often said, tends to focus the mind. But my diagnosis hovered in the theoretical until the moment I began six rounds of chemotherapy….The nurse hung clear bags of clear, innocent-looking liquid from an IV pole, found a plump vein along my right arm – and the fog slowly lifted.”

Never mind that should the Vincristine miss its mark, the stuff will burn through your arm like alien blood through the decks of the Nostromo. Of course, Barry’s right, one gains a new lease on life via the recognition that it’s terminal. Old leases don’t recognize borrowed time and permanent sublets. Barry offers a description of chemo brain he poses as, “the common definition’s opposite.” He sees the experience of suffering as a kind of redemption from the sleep of existential inattention; a numbness towards the world that fades as the lack of feeling in feet and fingers bring on a fumbling and stumbling toward a thanatoptic epiphany less a death wish than the Dickinsonian recognition that although none of us can stop for death, he will kindly, and inevitably, stop for us.

Barry writes, “Gradually, from midsummer to late fall….the chemo wiped away the muddle, revealing the world in all its mundane glory.” His point, and one I agree with, is this: as one returns to health, that precious attitude of appreciation for the world and those in it, recedes into a “pre-existing condition” of negative-mindfulness, a kind of blasé disenchantment and apathy toward the gift of living. I share Barry’s sentiments. Twice he experienced chemo, and twice he fell from grace with himself.

I, too, know that feeling of drifting from one’s context; of forgetting that most beautiful perspective being physically compromised brings; of naturally refraining from a judgmental and careless attitude towards others that marks a lack of grace; of feeling a narrow-mindedness slowly creeping and seeping back; and of experiencing that “fog of the everyday returning to enshroud me.”

God Save the Queen!

“You will find as the children grow up that as rule children are a bitter disappointment – their greatest object being to do precisely what their parents do not wish and have anxiously tried to prevent.”

-- Queen Victoria 1819-1901: Letter to the Crown Princess of Prussia, 5 January 1876

It’s a cold Friday, a hard rain is falling, and I ain’t even in the U.P.. I’m listening to Coltrane live at the Village Vanguard, getting ready for a gig at the Ann Arbor Holiday Inn, and wondering about Mcgee’s state of health. I’m sure he’s in the recovery room by now. Rest easy, dude. I suppose you could say my mood is code yellow, and that’s a Tom Ridge code yellow. Around these parts, it’s the inside threat you gotta watch out for. And it’s always something more than simply a material loss: the sentimental present, beloved musical instrument, or some labor of love endeavor. Steal, destroy, wreak havoc, and cause grief, that’s the modus operandi. It doesn’t matter who gets hurt as long as it ain’t you. Thankless serpent’s teeth, always the harvest of empty praise and absent consequences. Some years ago, in the eighties, I was sorely violated. They took everything I had at the time. I sought bear traps and punji sticks. It passed. I decided I needed to obtain something that couldn’t be taken. I decided to pursue a college degree. I though my drama would end. It didn’t. It never does, for any of us. Where’s those punji sticks?

- r

The Logic of the Unthinkable

“Without the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself a long time ago.”

-- E. M. Cioran 1911-95 in “Independent” 2 December 1989

“The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.”

-- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900: “Jenseits von Gut und Bose” (1866)

What happens when the unthinkable becomes logical? I suppose the typical examples of this pertain to men and women in dire straits: on the Donner Pass, atop the Andes, or in lost lifeboats at sea. Concentration camps and other genocides (Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda) also come to mind. In the first case, desperation dictates action, the second, hatred. And while horrific historical events would seem to shape my opening question, I had another topic in mind. More ordinary, but no less grim and tragic: suicide.

One of a number of trying occurrences that shortly followed on the heels of McGOOSTOCK was the sad and untimely death of a good friend, Jim Campbell. Jim’s decision to take his own life is my starting point here. My interest is not in Jim’s specific reasons, per se, but in the thinking that, in general, underpins this fatal choice. Was it carefully planned, or a random act? Why did he do it? Where did he get the nerve? How could he do such a selfish thing? Does the lack of answers belie the fact that perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions?

Is war an example of the logic of the unthinkable? If killing one another is irrational behavior, how can we apply logic in justifying the irrational? To speak of a war as a necessity implies the practicality of murder. What prevailing conditions would make killing practical? William Calley would know about this: “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” the former officer, William L. Calley, told members of a local Kiwanis Club, The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported Friday. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”

So we understand war, but not suicide. We can’t understand what made Jim Campbell’s choice seem practical to him. It defies our logic. I think most of us can understand wanting to commit suicide when faced with no-exit intractable pain and suffering, but what about being hale and hearty, and still adopting a state of mind that prefers death to life.

Another set of questions: what could be more selfish than burdening the world and those in it with anxiety and worry? Is the logic of suicide a kind of punctuated equilibrium of the psyche whereby the irrational is to the mind what negative space is to the artist? Does having the nerve to live entail a kind of existential hubris? Are we, the sick so desperate to live, not guilty of “Healthism,” a preoccupation with upsetting nature’s balance by seeking out extremist life-extension procedures that are ultimately anti-altruistic, and basely undermine the utilitarian maintenance of our species? Is it not fairer and nobler to cede one’s life as a choice rather than commend oneself to the winds of chance?

My friend says people who commit suicide lack something in the hard wiring of their brain. One more way, I suppose, of explaining how the unthinkable can seem logical.

Comb Over

Dear All:

Internet still down. I’m at my office. Maybe I’m blogged out. I know I care, but what’s left to say. Tomorrow I see my doc, Asra. This is my first visit sans a prior diagnostic (CT/PET Scan): Just blood labs and a consult. I’m on a 6 month watch now. I’m feeling pretty good, and I’m thankful.

Best - Randy