9/30/07
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
-- George Orwell
-- The Sporting Spirit, 1945
Hello. I’m in my own voice today. I guess you could say it’s me, live. The self, historic, heroic, histrionic, hysteric tales I’ve been telling are 9 year old transcriptions of events from 36 years ago. The chemo is moving along. Tuesday I get #4. Because of liver complications, my doctor has decided to reduce the dosage. While the main dude, Kaminski, feels I can take it, my doc, Ahmed, wants to proceed on the side of caution. I trust her judgment here. Life is in a different mode. Since I’m not working, it’s like a weird vacation. Sure, reading, writing, and guitar playing is fun, but sometimes it just feels weird. Funny, but there are just some things I can’t say here. Remind me to write these thoughts later.
5 minutes from now the Lions and the Bears play. To say I like football is an understatement. I hope this doesn’t disappoint you who have mistaken me for an intellectual sophisticate, as I know so many of you have. I’m torn. Should I exit and watch T.V.? Wait a minute! I’ve got a radio in here. Yahoo. As it turns out, the radio constantly reviews scores around the league, while the telly is all Lions/Bears.
I just stepped in cat puke. Speaking of cat puke, how about the state of American politics these days. What a joke. I’ll tell you one thing beyond the ken of most Americans: the idea of holding our bowls upside down as a form of protest. This is what the monks in Myanmar are doing. We like our bowls heaping, and we don’t care whose is empty.
Halftime.
It’s autumn. I like the Fall save for what it portends. How about winter comes every 2 years and the climactic nature of spring and fall reverses itself every other year. Of course, of late there really hasn’t been much of a winter. My friend, Dave Clark, scholar and snowplow driver, has been hit hard by the lack of snow; as has the Upper Peninsula, which, in places like Big Bay, mightily depends on snowmobiling and other winter sports. We know it can’t be global warming. I mean, let’s not confuse a scientifically documented, physical phenomenon, with a liberal political mirage.
September 30, 2007
September 28, 2007
Marquette County Jail 1971
Say What! : The Limits of Memoir
(Atherapeuticism as Art)
What follows is an act of memory dredging that seeks to retrieve rather than recount my life; in other words, an artfully contrived imaginative recollection. My strategy will be to substitute irony for self-indulgence; although I suspect that this in itself will not ensure literary value. In arbitrarily organizing the chaos of past experience, my intent will be less to sermonize than to engage. My moral aim, if it can be called that, is to achieve a voice that better understands the self-created fictions that guide my behaviors, not in the sense of a rebirth or recovery, but of recognition. My motivation derives from a guiding suspicion that moving beyond a sensibility that understands writing to be a form of self-therapy has less to do with devoutly atoning for one’s sins than unflinchingly accepting the story that unfolds.
“It may be more productive in telling a story to choose a narrator or a narrative point of view of someone who does not know what his own story means.”
-- Charles Baxter
1971
In solitary confinement one becomes preoccupied with marking time, with making calendars out of bars and radiators. That our awareness of time is keenest when we need it least is one of life’s cruel ironies. One day, in a chain of nameless days, the sheriff arrived on the top floor of the jail, of which I was the sole occupant, and asked, “do you know why you’re on the 4th floor, Tessier?” I said, “yea, sheriff, cos there ain’t no 5th floor!”
On those rare occasions when the turnkeys would come upstairs, I’d talk shit. With a fixed, Rasputin-like, glare I would inform the jailer that there was really no difference between us. We were both condemned to a 19th century brownstone hell, As the deputy would turn to descend from his Sisyphian task, I would cruelly remind him that there was, of course, one sad aspect that made our situations quite different: I’d be leaving after serving my sentence, he wouldn’t. As he disappeared from sight, blowing him a kiss, I’d say I loved him and there was nothing he could do about it.
Then deputies and inmates alike thought I was crazy. The thing with solitary is that it matters less who you talk to, or hear, than that you talk to or hear someone. Or so I thought. There’s a difference between participating in a dialogue and being an unseen hearer. Much like Hamlet, who never planned on hearing Polonius’s prayer, I assumed that what I might hear would somehow conform to my expectations. But where Hamlet was undone by his relentless pursuit of revenge, I was the victim of lonely curiosity. When I was allowed to move into the bullpen area, I would sit in the corner closest to the stairwell. In the mid-afternoon, when the inmates below were playing Euchre, I would sometimes hear their conversation. On one occasion, this torturous eavesdropping resulted in my hearing a particular group of perennial jailbirds discuss my future: “He’s a drug addict, he’ll end up in Carp River College (Marquette State Prison) for sure. He’ll be a lifer, I can smell em. He thinks he’s getting out in 60 days, but when the time comes they’ll arraign him on new charges and hold him without bail until sentencing. I figure he’ll get ten to twenty. That’s what drugs’ll do to ya.” I quickly learned that it was better for me to read (after they gave me my books), write (with a hidden pencil stub on the flyleaves of religious pamphlets), and exercise, than to tune into the jailhouse lawyer channel.
I had been caught with a small amount of hashish. My lawyer—someone I retained an bad advice and limited funds—assured me that I would get no more than 30 days. But in light of my radical politics and the prevailing, conservative views of the time, I feared the worst. Steeling myself for what was to come—an impossibility, since there is no way to imagine being incarcerated—I assembled an array of books I thought might prove educational and ease the boredom. Sartre, Artaud, Kesey, and Kazentkais were just some of the authors I selected. When December 27th arrived (Happy New Year!) I took it as an article of despair that my lawyer was nowhere to be seen. I can’t remember Judge Hill’s lecture, but I do recall the sentence--60 days in the Marquette county jail. My friends looked on helplessly as the deputies hustled me away.
My hair was down to my waist at the time. And I, being young and somewhat innocent, naively thought that losing my hair would be one of the major injustices of being incarcerated. Consequently, during the visits I had with my probation officer leading up to my sentence, I donned a cheap, dark wig. My long blond hair, kept in place by old fashioned bobby pins, barely fit under this hellish toupee. I was processed in and lodged on the 3rd floor: two bullpens with five cells adjoining them that housed the general jail population. My cellmate was one Mike Savard (he’s dead now). Saver, then 17 years old, would spend his remaining years in state prison. At the time he was a troubled young man with a history of violent behavior that had followed him through grade school. In the short day and a half I was with Mike I came to like him. I began to understand how materially and spiritually deprived he was. When he asked for help in writing a letter, simple words like, “from”, “The”, or “when”, were a struggle for him. And so it was that Mike and I were cellmates.
I noticed that one of the deputies had eyed me hair suspiciously on arrival. I suspect he had an idea that all was not right with my coiffure. I wasn’t surprised then at the approaching sound of jackboots in the stairwell. It was common knowledge that two guards meant trouble. The notorious Joe Maino himself, the future sheriff, told me I needed a haircut. As this was happening, the inmate grapevine alerted the trustee barber, Billy Mallete, to the situation. As Billy valiantly pretended to clip my wig Maino picked up the clippings and carefully scrutinized them. Even I could see the wisps of fine blond hair amongst the course wig locks. The jig was up.
I was given two choices” either voluntarily submit to removing the wig, or, have it taken off by the guards. At that point I took off the wig and slowly removed the rusty bobby pins. My hippie dreds cascaded to my waist in a permy wave that would have made R. Crumb proud. Fighting back tears, I sat, depressed and broken, as my hir was crudely shorn with dull scissors. Something was lost; but what? I didn’t realize than that what I had mistaken for a sad little moment of tragic insight would pale in comparison to the soul searching my own foolish actions would burden me with in the days to come. How often it is that what we perceive the worst is simply a humorous prologue to real hardship.
Being young, immature, arrogant, impatient and morally at sea, I hatched a plan, via a note sent through the trustees, to have my confederates smuggle in a quantity of dope. On the night of the haircut, day 2, I passed a long string through a hole in my window screen. My pals on the ground attached a bundle of joints and Seconal, which I quickly reeled in. Poor me! I couldn’t sleep. Ha! Well I slept that night. But every night thereafter I would long to be back in the homey confines of the third floor. The next morning, groggy from my barbituate binge, I awoke to a posse of deputies menacingly looming over me. I was jerked to my feet, removed from the bullpen, and marched downstairs where my clothes were exchanged for denim coveralls. I was then moved to the Federal block on the 4th floor. Since Federal prisoners rarely visited Paquette’s jail, I had the place to myself. I was put in the most isolated corner cell in an already empty block. As if this wasn’t sufficient punishment, for he first week I was locked down without access to the empty bullpen. Given the fact that Mike Savard was now a trustee, and I was in solitary, it wasn’t hard to figure out how they learned of the stash in my mattress.
(Atherapeuticism as Art)
What follows is an act of memory dredging that seeks to retrieve rather than recount my life; in other words, an artfully contrived imaginative recollection. My strategy will be to substitute irony for self-indulgence; although I suspect that this in itself will not ensure literary value. In arbitrarily organizing the chaos of past experience, my intent will be less to sermonize than to engage. My moral aim, if it can be called that, is to achieve a voice that better understands the self-created fictions that guide my behaviors, not in the sense of a rebirth or recovery, but of recognition. My motivation derives from a guiding suspicion that moving beyond a sensibility that understands writing to be a form of self-therapy has less to do with devoutly atoning for one’s sins than unflinchingly accepting the story that unfolds.
“It may be more productive in telling a story to choose a narrator or a narrative point of view of someone who does not know what his own story means.”
-- Charles Baxter
1971
In solitary confinement one becomes preoccupied with marking time, with making calendars out of bars and radiators. That our awareness of time is keenest when we need it least is one of life’s cruel ironies. One day, in a chain of nameless days, the sheriff arrived on the top floor of the jail, of which I was the sole occupant, and asked, “do you know why you’re on the 4th floor, Tessier?” I said, “yea, sheriff, cos there ain’t no 5th floor!”
On those rare occasions when the turnkeys would come upstairs, I’d talk shit. With a fixed, Rasputin-like, glare I would inform the jailer that there was really no difference between us. We were both condemned to a 19th century brownstone hell, As the deputy would turn to descend from his Sisyphian task, I would cruelly remind him that there was, of course, one sad aspect that made our situations quite different: I’d be leaving after serving my sentence, he wouldn’t. As he disappeared from sight, blowing him a kiss, I’d say I loved him and there was nothing he could do about it.
Then deputies and inmates alike thought I was crazy. The thing with solitary is that it matters less who you talk to, or hear, than that you talk to or hear someone. Or so I thought. There’s a difference between participating in a dialogue and being an unseen hearer. Much like Hamlet, who never planned on hearing Polonius’s prayer, I assumed that what I might hear would somehow conform to my expectations. But where Hamlet was undone by his relentless pursuit of revenge, I was the victim of lonely curiosity. When I was allowed to move into the bullpen area, I would sit in the corner closest to the stairwell. In the mid-afternoon, when the inmates below were playing Euchre, I would sometimes hear their conversation. On one occasion, this torturous eavesdropping resulted in my hearing a particular group of perennial jailbirds discuss my future: “He’s a drug addict, he’ll end up in Carp River College (Marquette State Prison) for sure. He’ll be a lifer, I can smell em. He thinks he’s getting out in 60 days, but when the time comes they’ll arraign him on new charges and hold him without bail until sentencing. I figure he’ll get ten to twenty. That’s what drugs’ll do to ya.” I quickly learned that it was better for me to read (after they gave me my books), write (with a hidden pencil stub on the flyleaves of religious pamphlets), and exercise, than to tune into the jailhouse lawyer channel.
I had been caught with a small amount of hashish. My lawyer—someone I retained an bad advice and limited funds—assured me that I would get no more than 30 days. But in light of my radical politics and the prevailing, conservative views of the time, I feared the worst. Steeling myself for what was to come—an impossibility, since there is no way to imagine being incarcerated—I assembled an array of books I thought might prove educational and ease the boredom. Sartre, Artaud, Kesey, and Kazentkais were just some of the authors I selected. When December 27th arrived (Happy New Year!) I took it as an article of despair that my lawyer was nowhere to be seen. I can’t remember Judge Hill’s lecture, but I do recall the sentence--60 days in the Marquette county jail. My friends looked on helplessly as the deputies hustled me away.
My hair was down to my waist at the time. And I, being young and somewhat innocent, naively thought that losing my hair would be one of the major injustices of being incarcerated. Consequently, during the visits I had with my probation officer leading up to my sentence, I donned a cheap, dark wig. My long blond hair, kept in place by old fashioned bobby pins, barely fit under this hellish toupee. I was processed in and lodged on the 3rd floor: two bullpens with five cells adjoining them that housed the general jail population. My cellmate was one Mike Savard (he’s dead now). Saver, then 17 years old, would spend his remaining years in state prison. At the time he was a troubled young man with a history of violent behavior that had followed him through grade school. In the short day and a half I was with Mike I came to like him. I began to understand how materially and spiritually deprived he was. When he asked for help in writing a letter, simple words like, “from”, “The”, or “when”, were a struggle for him. And so it was that Mike and I were cellmates.
I noticed that one of the deputies had eyed me hair suspiciously on arrival. I suspect he had an idea that all was not right with my coiffure. I wasn’t surprised then at the approaching sound of jackboots in the stairwell. It was common knowledge that two guards meant trouble. The notorious Joe Maino himself, the future sheriff, told me I needed a haircut. As this was happening, the inmate grapevine alerted the trustee barber, Billy Mallete, to the situation. As Billy valiantly pretended to clip my wig Maino picked up the clippings and carefully scrutinized them. Even I could see the wisps of fine blond hair amongst the course wig locks. The jig was up.
I was given two choices” either voluntarily submit to removing the wig, or, have it taken off by the guards. At that point I took off the wig and slowly removed the rusty bobby pins. My hippie dreds cascaded to my waist in a permy wave that would have made R. Crumb proud. Fighting back tears, I sat, depressed and broken, as my hir was crudely shorn with dull scissors. Something was lost; but what? I didn’t realize than that what I had mistaken for a sad little moment of tragic insight would pale in comparison to the soul searching my own foolish actions would burden me with in the days to come. How often it is that what we perceive the worst is simply a humorous prologue to real hardship.
Being young, immature, arrogant, impatient and morally at sea, I hatched a plan, via a note sent through the trustees, to have my confederates smuggle in a quantity of dope. On the night of the haircut, day 2, I passed a long string through a hole in my window screen. My pals on the ground attached a bundle of joints and Seconal, which I quickly reeled in. Poor me! I couldn’t sleep. Ha! Well I slept that night. But every night thereafter I would long to be back in the homey confines of the third floor. The next morning, groggy from my barbituate binge, I awoke to a posse of deputies menacingly looming over me. I was jerked to my feet, removed from the bullpen, and marched downstairs where my clothes were exchanged for denim coveralls. I was then moved to the Federal block on the 4th floor. Since Federal prisoners rarely visited Paquette’s jail, I had the place to myself. I was put in the most isolated corner cell in an already empty block. As if this wasn’t sufficient punishment, for he first week I was locked down without access to the empty bullpen. Given the fact that Mike Savard was now a trustee, and I was in solitary, it wasn’t hard to figure out how they learned of the stash in my mattress.
September 25, 2007
The Hostage Crisis
1962
Plato may have been right in saying “the unexamined life is not worth living.” But, notwithstanding Plato’s sage advice, does the unexamined life always bear talking about. How does an author avoid the danger of producing either sophisticated drivel or boring unvarnished truths; especially in the memoir, or pseudo-memoir mode? One of my colleagues at the English Composition Board—a kind of grammar-centric clinic that, while denying all associations with remediation, teaches syntax in the guise of semantics--thought I should include one of my Nun stories. The time is the early 60s.
Sister Ruth Marie had come to our peninsular parish from the Indian Reservations of New Mexico and Arizona. It wasn’t long thereafter that she took to calling me “Chief Big Mouth.” While at the time, much as I do now, I felt this was an apt name for me, I wondered what names she had applied to her Native American charges back on the reservation. In her eyes there wasn’t much difference between a Finnlander and Navajo. Both were equal under God, and both were subject to her abiding belief that a mixture of corporal punishment and solitary confinement were prerequisites to Godliness. She was good with the ruler, pointer, and occasional rosary. Sister Ruthless had a place for those who dared to defy her. Our brownstone, 4 room Sing-Sing had a windowless, enclosed supply closet in each grade, as well as a shared cloakroom, both ominous places to contemplate one’s sins in the darkness. She had her pets. To preserve the ruse of objectivity, however, she posted a demerit chart that listed one’s crimes and sins in plain view. Of course the red squares that followed my name on the graph required that additional paper be added.
I thought I was done with her after 5th and 6th grade; but following the departure of Sister Domingo, Sister Ruth Marie took over the 7th and 8th grade. The fact that she once intercepted a note I passed in 5th grade left little doubt in my mind that my last two years of grade school would be turbulent. Perhaps thankfully, I can only remember the first line: “Hail Mary full of shit, The Lord is with thee.” Lord only knows what she thought when she read it. Her visage took on that fanatical half-sneer, half-smile look that signals someone in the throes of satanic possession. At that moment, I saw mirrored in her eyes an anti-Christ so vile that all of the Freddy Krugers and Michael Myers she could never dream of would pale in comparison. Strangely enough, however, I can’t remember the outcome of this incident.
It was also in the 5th grade that St. Johns adopted uniforms: navy blue corduroy pants and robins egg khaki tops. Report card day would see a room full of blues—at least some of us had the blues—awaiting a Dickensian Catholic priest who would later be committed. Father Garin had a penchant for wanting to know the minute details of every confession. No “Father, I had impure thoughts” escaped him. It was also rumored that he would sometimes ask the penitent’s name, as if this personal knowledge could somehow enhance the legitimacy of his absolutions.
On the days when we received report cards, Garin would dutifully show up to praise or vilify us, In theory, we, the vilified, were to internalize the wisdom he imparted and rectify the ignorance or inattention that had brought us to this sad state of affairs. In practice, this meeting was a twisted ritual dreaded by angels and devils alike. Thick, moist hair protruded from Father Garin’s nose and ears. As he would drone his admonitions, huge, irregular shaped flakes of dandruff would snow down on the torturous detainee. His yellowish, lime teeth and fetid breath were all but unbearable. The card itself was a single booklet that had academic pursuits on the left and character assessments on the right. Much attention was given to this right side, and I, of course, could never seem to do well enough in these areas. The good father would point to the D-‘s and F’s that corresponded to the headings: “Conduct”, “Effort”, “Courtesy”, and “Attendance”. Attendance wasn’t a problem, I was always there; in the other three categories, however, I failed miserably.
1982
THE HOSTAGE CRISIS
“The withdrawing addict is subject to the emotional excesses of a child or an adolescent, regardless of his actual age. And the sex drive returns in full force. Men of sixty experience wet dreams and spontaneous orgasms (an extremely unpleasant experience, agacant as the French say, putting the teeth on edge). Unless the reader keeps this in mind, the metamorphosis of…character will appear as inexplicable or psychotic….[e]xcessive drinking…exacerbates all the worst and most dangerous aspects of the withdrawal sickness: reckless, unseemly, outrageous, maudlin—in a word, appalling—behavior.
William Burroughs xiii
Shortly after flying in we decided to go out and eat. An academic couple from the east coast decided to accompany us to an upscale restaurant. I had read about it in Gourmet magazine. The Coco Locos I had been drinking only partially succeeded in quieting the ants crawling in my veins. It was a family owned restaurant, and we proceeded to eat and drink. After the meal we asked to see the desert menu. I inquired about the strawberry shortcake for my wife and son, asking the waiter to exclude the whipped cream since our son had a dairy allergy. The waiter politely informed me that this was impossible. Being intoxicated, in withdrawal and having seen too many Jack Nicholson movies, I told the waiter to” bring us the strawberries and to stick the whipped cream up his ass.” My wife and our dining companions looked at me in horror and disbelief. The waiter looked at me quizzically as if he hadn’t heard me right. I repeated my asinine request, and in doing so not only burdened myself with one of the many regrets in my lifetime but almost got myself killed. Shooting me a look of disgust and loathing that, at that moment, seemed to reflect the collective Mexican hatred of the Gringo mentality, the waiter said, “you are not in the United States anymore.” I suddenly felt very small, afraid, and embarrassed, but it was too late. While the waiter’s siblings restrained him from attacking me, the family patriarch told me to leave and never come back.
During the winter of 1982 I decided to do a little self-rehab, this was an ongoing project. I had been heavily dependent since 1980, and would finally quit in 1986. At any rate, it dawned on me that the money might be better spent on a trip to Puerto Vallarta than a stint in Hazelden. (This was never a choice I seriously considered; but it sounds good here) Oblivious to world weather patterns, my wife, our newborn son and I boarded a budget flight and flew off to Mexico. The nuns had always told me I had a one track mind, and my planning for this trip confirmed their opinion. Since I felt I needed a long vacation from my nemesis, I opted for the 17 day package. How was I to know that January 1982 would see an El Nino pound the North American Pacific seaboard with a fury unprecedented in that century.
To understand how this could turn a potential paradise into a living hell, one must consider the physical layout of the modern high-rise beach hotel. Typically, one enters the front of the hotel from an access road away from the beach. Proceeding to the rear one encounters an open-air patio bar situated next to the pool. Beyond this are stairs that descend to the beach. The water was so high and the waves so ferocious that the sea completely swamped the bar and pool area. The impenetrable murkiness of the muddy brine made it impossible to tell where the patio ended and the pool began. The previous week a vacationing spinster had drowned when her motorized wheelchair hit the drop-off. Her gurgling cries went unheeded as the obligatory Tourist Trap steel drum band emitted its high-pitched drone in the suffocating tropical heat. My wife, of course, having a sick infant son and a drunken husband; and being trapped in a sweltering room in the tropical heat; beset by a crowd that, deprived of the beach, now swelled the inside of the hotel to the point that leaving the room would be insane; and with the sewers backing up into the room, just loved the sound of the steel drums from hell. Did I mention that all of her jewelry—two small but sentimental rings—was stolen while we were there.
Plato may have been right in saying “the unexamined life is not worth living.” But, notwithstanding Plato’s sage advice, does the unexamined life always bear talking about. How does an author avoid the danger of producing either sophisticated drivel or boring unvarnished truths; especially in the memoir, or pseudo-memoir mode? One of my colleagues at the English Composition Board—a kind of grammar-centric clinic that, while denying all associations with remediation, teaches syntax in the guise of semantics--thought I should include one of my Nun stories. The time is the early 60s.
Sister Ruth Marie had come to our peninsular parish from the Indian Reservations of New Mexico and Arizona. It wasn’t long thereafter that she took to calling me “Chief Big Mouth.” While at the time, much as I do now, I felt this was an apt name for me, I wondered what names she had applied to her Native American charges back on the reservation. In her eyes there wasn’t much difference between a Finnlander and Navajo. Both were equal under God, and both were subject to her abiding belief that a mixture of corporal punishment and solitary confinement were prerequisites to Godliness. She was good with the ruler, pointer, and occasional rosary. Sister Ruthless had a place for those who dared to defy her. Our brownstone, 4 room Sing-Sing had a windowless, enclosed supply closet in each grade, as well as a shared cloakroom, both ominous places to contemplate one’s sins in the darkness. She had her pets. To preserve the ruse of objectivity, however, she posted a demerit chart that listed one’s crimes and sins in plain view. Of course the red squares that followed my name on the graph required that additional paper be added.
I thought I was done with her after 5th and 6th grade; but following the departure of Sister Domingo, Sister Ruth Marie took over the 7th and 8th grade. The fact that she once intercepted a note I passed in 5th grade left little doubt in my mind that my last two years of grade school would be turbulent. Perhaps thankfully, I can only remember the first line: “Hail Mary full of shit, The Lord is with thee.” Lord only knows what she thought when she read it. Her visage took on that fanatical half-sneer, half-smile look that signals someone in the throes of satanic possession. At that moment, I saw mirrored in her eyes an anti-Christ so vile that all of the Freddy Krugers and Michael Myers she could never dream of would pale in comparison. Strangely enough, however, I can’t remember the outcome of this incident.
It was also in the 5th grade that St. Johns adopted uniforms: navy blue corduroy pants and robins egg khaki tops. Report card day would see a room full of blues—at least some of us had the blues—awaiting a Dickensian Catholic priest who would later be committed. Father Garin had a penchant for wanting to know the minute details of every confession. No “Father, I had impure thoughts” escaped him. It was also rumored that he would sometimes ask the penitent’s name, as if this personal knowledge could somehow enhance the legitimacy of his absolutions.
On the days when we received report cards, Garin would dutifully show up to praise or vilify us, In theory, we, the vilified, were to internalize the wisdom he imparted and rectify the ignorance or inattention that had brought us to this sad state of affairs. In practice, this meeting was a twisted ritual dreaded by angels and devils alike. Thick, moist hair protruded from Father Garin’s nose and ears. As he would drone his admonitions, huge, irregular shaped flakes of dandruff would snow down on the torturous detainee. His yellowish, lime teeth and fetid breath were all but unbearable. The card itself was a single booklet that had academic pursuits on the left and character assessments on the right. Much attention was given to this right side, and I, of course, could never seem to do well enough in these areas. The good father would point to the D-‘s and F’s that corresponded to the headings: “Conduct”, “Effort”, “Courtesy”, and “Attendance”. Attendance wasn’t a problem, I was always there; in the other three categories, however, I failed miserably.
1982
THE HOSTAGE CRISIS
“The withdrawing addict is subject to the emotional excesses of a child or an adolescent, regardless of his actual age. And the sex drive returns in full force. Men of sixty experience wet dreams and spontaneous orgasms (an extremely unpleasant experience, agacant as the French say, putting the teeth on edge). Unless the reader keeps this in mind, the metamorphosis of…character will appear as inexplicable or psychotic….[e]xcessive drinking…exacerbates all the worst and most dangerous aspects of the withdrawal sickness: reckless, unseemly, outrageous, maudlin—in a word, appalling—behavior.
William Burroughs xiii
Shortly after flying in we decided to go out and eat. An academic couple from the east coast decided to accompany us to an upscale restaurant. I had read about it in Gourmet magazine. The Coco Locos I had been drinking only partially succeeded in quieting the ants crawling in my veins. It was a family owned restaurant, and we proceeded to eat and drink. After the meal we asked to see the desert menu. I inquired about the strawberry shortcake for my wife and son, asking the waiter to exclude the whipped cream since our son had a dairy allergy. The waiter politely informed me that this was impossible. Being intoxicated, in withdrawal and having seen too many Jack Nicholson movies, I told the waiter to” bring us the strawberries and to stick the whipped cream up his ass.” My wife and our dining companions looked at me in horror and disbelief. The waiter looked at me quizzically as if he hadn’t heard me right. I repeated my asinine request, and in doing so not only burdened myself with one of the many regrets in my lifetime but almost got myself killed. Shooting me a look of disgust and loathing that, at that moment, seemed to reflect the collective Mexican hatred of the Gringo mentality, the waiter said, “you are not in the United States anymore.” I suddenly felt very small, afraid, and embarrassed, but it was too late. While the waiter’s siblings restrained him from attacking me, the family patriarch told me to leave and never come back.
During the winter of 1982 I decided to do a little self-rehab, this was an ongoing project. I had been heavily dependent since 1980, and would finally quit in 1986. At any rate, it dawned on me that the money might be better spent on a trip to Puerto Vallarta than a stint in Hazelden. (This was never a choice I seriously considered; but it sounds good here) Oblivious to world weather patterns, my wife, our newborn son and I boarded a budget flight and flew off to Mexico. The nuns had always told me I had a one track mind, and my planning for this trip confirmed their opinion. Since I felt I needed a long vacation from my nemesis, I opted for the 17 day package. How was I to know that January 1982 would see an El Nino pound the North American Pacific seaboard with a fury unprecedented in that century.
To understand how this could turn a potential paradise into a living hell, one must consider the physical layout of the modern high-rise beach hotel. Typically, one enters the front of the hotel from an access road away from the beach. Proceeding to the rear one encounters an open-air patio bar situated next to the pool. Beyond this are stairs that descend to the beach. The water was so high and the waves so ferocious that the sea completely swamped the bar and pool area. The impenetrable murkiness of the muddy brine made it impossible to tell where the patio ended and the pool began. The previous week a vacationing spinster had drowned when her motorized wheelchair hit the drop-off. Her gurgling cries went unheeded as the obligatory Tourist Trap steel drum band emitted its high-pitched drone in the suffocating tropical heat. My wife, of course, having a sick infant son and a drunken husband; and being trapped in a sweltering room in the tropical heat; beset by a crowd that, deprived of the beach, now swelled the inside of the hotel to the point that leaving the room would be insane; and with the sewers backing up into the room, just loved the sound of the steel drums from hell. Did I mention that all of her jewelry—two small but sentimental rings—was stolen while we were there.
September 23, 2007
The Sympathy Deficit
The muse is silent.
What follows is an essay I wrote before the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings.
The Sympathy Deficit
Is there a correlation between reading and the capacity to sympathize? Perhaps, but only to certain degree. After all, if nothing else the Twentieth century has taught that the perpetrators of the worst genocides have been infinitely well read. But knowledge can never pass for wisdom. We may describe a killer as knowledgeable but never wise. Given this distinction, and recognizing that kindness does not require literacy, I submit that the value of the written tradition has to do with its capacity to represent and disseminate literary forms that require sympathetic imagination. The fact that our children read less may be related to their moral inability to recognize the dignity of Self and Other.
Consider the latest domestic atrocity: 3/25/98 New York Times "5 Are Killed at School; Boys, 11 and 13, are Held." The grim text beneath the ubiquitous images of body bags and chalk outlines reads: "Snipers Ambush Pupils at Arkansas School--10 Wounded." The shocking and horrifying nature of this event defies description. Yet discuss it we must. And so the media provides a horrifying litany of recent events that suggested a causal link: the West Paducah, Kentucky 14 year old who opened fire on a prayer group; The 16 year old Satanist from Pearl, Mississippi who stabbed his mother and girlfriend to death; the 14 year old sniper, Joseph Todd, from Stamps, Arkansas who sighted his victims from trees; and on and on.
Are these events symptomatic of a sympathy deficit? Perhaps there is a problem when the only available source moral consciousness can appeal to for counsel is the nascent electronic tradition of endless soundbyte. Tragically, the moral beliefs of many teenagers are solely influenced by the plotless violence of "action" movies and media docudrama of everyday atrocity--this is a volatile mix. When these factors, in concert with chronic emotional neglect, circumscribe a child's domestic background it is not surprising that we see what Dr. Sabine Hack describes as a copycat phenomenon: "More than adults, adolescents may be prone to copy publicized violent acts by their peers." Might this not result in what some mental health professionals have described as a "trickling down to younger ages of the sex patterns that lead many men to stalk and kill their ex-wives or girlfriends?"(NYT3/12/98)
Shortly after the Arkansas shootings, Walter Goodman, reporter for the New York Times, provided an accurate if disturbing description of how television numbs our affective responses: “Yet one stays tuned in, out of sympathy perhaps or out of curiosity or out of a need to participate. So although there is little to report after the first bulletins...television keeps at it, filling hours and hours of talk dished out from the prepared-food counter, on the menu under "Tragedy".
This is a diet we can't seem to shake. The fear that life might imitate art is perhaps less sinister than the idea of having no art to contemplate. To the mind of today’s man-child, how can a movie like The Treasure of Sierra Madre(1948) compete with continuous live coverage of the latest atrocity, let alone packaged reenactments of violent crimes? When it comes to youth, violence and tragedy we do well to heed Romeo and Juliet’s cautionary advice. The friar's wisdom that "They stumble that run fast" applies to today’ parents as much as teenagers. Technological instant gratification coupled with sensory overload have compelled us to expect speed in every process. But should this apply to growing up? Is it not easy to ignore the ineffective distinction between PG, PG-13, and R in wanting to blur the line between parenting and friendship? If there is truth to the notion that we baby boomers are comfortable with the illusion of eternal adolescence then we are also plagued by it; we role model a "gimme it all now" philosophy and wonder why our children have no respect for others.
Is it surprising that the celebration of self has produced a generation that invariably assumes the experience of others mirrors their own? In an age obsessed with recovery, self help and therapeutic experience, is it not ironic that--if we accept what we see around us--we are losing the ability to imagine what it means to respect that discrete entity we call Self? When the wisdom of reading is replaced by the folly of self absorption, force trumps negotiation as a means of conflict resolution.
What follows is an essay I wrote before the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings.
The Sympathy Deficit
Is there a correlation between reading and the capacity to sympathize? Perhaps, but only to certain degree. After all, if nothing else the Twentieth century has taught that the perpetrators of the worst genocides have been infinitely well read. But knowledge can never pass for wisdom. We may describe a killer as knowledgeable but never wise. Given this distinction, and recognizing that kindness does not require literacy, I submit that the value of the written tradition has to do with its capacity to represent and disseminate literary forms that require sympathetic imagination. The fact that our children read less may be related to their moral inability to recognize the dignity of Self and Other.
Consider the latest domestic atrocity: 3/25/98 New York Times "5 Are Killed at School; Boys, 11 and 13, are Held." The grim text beneath the ubiquitous images of body bags and chalk outlines reads: "Snipers Ambush Pupils at Arkansas School--10 Wounded." The shocking and horrifying nature of this event defies description. Yet discuss it we must. And so the media provides a horrifying litany of recent events that suggested a causal link: the West Paducah, Kentucky 14 year old who opened fire on a prayer group; The 16 year old Satanist from Pearl, Mississippi who stabbed his mother and girlfriend to death; the 14 year old sniper, Joseph Todd, from Stamps, Arkansas who sighted his victims from trees; and on and on.
Are these events symptomatic of a sympathy deficit? Perhaps there is a problem when the only available source moral consciousness can appeal to for counsel is the nascent electronic tradition of endless soundbyte. Tragically, the moral beliefs of many teenagers are solely influenced by the plotless violence of "action" movies and media docudrama of everyday atrocity--this is a volatile mix. When these factors, in concert with chronic emotional neglect, circumscribe a child's domestic background it is not surprising that we see what Dr. Sabine Hack describes as a copycat phenomenon: "More than adults, adolescents may be prone to copy publicized violent acts by their peers." Might this not result in what some mental health professionals have described as a "trickling down to younger ages of the sex patterns that lead many men to stalk and kill their ex-wives or girlfriends?"(NYT3/12/98)
Shortly after the Arkansas shootings, Walter Goodman, reporter for the New York Times, provided an accurate if disturbing description of how television numbs our affective responses: “Yet one stays tuned in, out of sympathy perhaps or out of curiosity or out of a need to participate. So although there is little to report after the first bulletins...television keeps at it, filling hours and hours of talk dished out from the prepared-food counter, on the menu under "Tragedy".
This is a diet we can't seem to shake. The fear that life might imitate art is perhaps less sinister than the idea of having no art to contemplate. To the mind of today’s man-child, how can a movie like The Treasure of Sierra Madre(1948) compete with continuous live coverage of the latest atrocity, let alone packaged reenactments of violent crimes? When it comes to youth, violence and tragedy we do well to heed Romeo and Juliet’s cautionary advice. The friar's wisdom that "They stumble that run fast" applies to today’ parents as much as teenagers. Technological instant gratification coupled with sensory overload have compelled us to expect speed in every process. But should this apply to growing up? Is it not easy to ignore the ineffective distinction between PG, PG-13, and R in wanting to blur the line between parenting and friendship? If there is truth to the notion that we baby boomers are comfortable with the illusion of eternal adolescence then we are also plagued by it; we role model a "gimme it all now" philosophy and wonder why our children have no respect for others.
Is it surprising that the celebration of self has produced a generation that invariably assumes the experience of others mirrors their own? In an age obsessed with recovery, self help and therapeutic experience, is it not ironic that--if we accept what we see around us--we are losing the ability to imagine what it means to respect that discrete entity we call Self? When the wisdom of reading is replaced by the folly of self absorption, force trumps negotiation as a means of conflict resolution.
September 17, 2007
Begin Nadir 3
9/17/07
“You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.”
-- Malcolm X, 1965
Agenda:
Fiction
Politics
Current Events
FICTION
Stories From Camp Kitsch (cont.)
…At daybreak, Pluto awakened to a primordial fear beyond words. He heard that terrifying sound of his prison days waxing and waning in the distance, the baying of bloodhounds. Weak and panic-stricken, he contemplated his chances. He could stay and face the inevitable, the Talion court of the avenging dead. That was suicide. Or he could flee. He headed toward the lake.
It was just after dawn when he crossed the Iron River. “What time was it? How long had it been light?” Stopping to catch his breath, he heard a soft, plaintive cry. “A sign! A sign!"
Then it came: dragging through the brush, trailing a bloody, useless leg and mewling softly, a yearling doe appeared. Her grotesquely twisted spine slowed her.
For Pluto, this sad, desperate beast, revealed an inviolable existential truth: the instinct to hope. In her eyes he saw mans' singular affliction: the capacity of the reasoning mind to deny, to annihilate, to strangle, and to suffocate hope. A pitiful confirmation of Pluto's belief that the potential for pre-meditated cruelty inherent to human reason--the ability to justify, to transcend the slither of instinct--could be redemptive.
The world closed around him. Frantically, he ran for his life. Picking up his scent, the hounds bay rose to a howl. Now cornered, he stumbled, collapsed, and gasped for breath. Suddenly they were silent. Pluto momentarily froze. Then, as the unholy choir renewed its relentless howl, he staggered toward the sound of the breakers. Suddenly a black chasm opened in the trees ahead. The dogs were everywhere. Pluto put his faith in the dark. He found the lake, the cliff, the knife-like sleet of salvation. Across the water he could see the Big Bay lighthouse. 60 feet below him the waves pounded the jagged boulders. He never hesitated.
POLITICS
“Camus said that the one serious question of philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide; the one serious question of political philosophy is whether or not to get out of bed. Silly as it may have seemed at the time, John and Yoko’s famous stunt was based on a profound observation. Instant Karma is not so instant—we ratify it day by day.”
-- Garret Keizer, 10/07 Harpers
One would think an administration that threatens the very Constitution of this country would merit stronger protest from its citizens. Sacrificing our sons and daughters on the altar of Neo-con ideology would also seem to qualify as a legitimate call to arms. In many ways, our neglect in not holding the current administration accountable amounts to what I would call a tacit approval of their policies. What does it take to get the public’s attention? Far too much, I’m afraid. Keizer frames the question this way: “As long as we’re willing to go on with our business, Bush and Cheney will feel free to go on with their coup. As long as we’re willing to continue fucking ourselves, why should they have any scruples about telling us to smile during the act?”
CURRENT EVENTS/MEDICAL
I injected myself with Neulasta today. You may recall me talking about--how could you forget—a shot that stimulates the white blood cell count. I think I did it right? Neulasta (pegfilgrastim) was the cause of the severe bone pain I experienced during my last cycle (#2) of chemotherapy. Aside from bone pain and the rare possibility of splenic rupture (sounds like a religious experience), the side effects are minimal. I suppose I should say more about my disease, my life, music, the world, football; I’m just not sure that what I have to say is that interesting. Next Monday I have my picture taken with K’Len Morris, a guard on the U-M basketball team. The players were asked to contact a favorite professor for a media guide shot. Thank you, K’Len. I’ll get one with DeShawn Sims, too. What a character. Putting my e-mail on the blog turned out to be a good idea, as was posting R. J.s web-sites. Speaking of the blog, you may have noticed a new look. The coolness is courtesy of Ms. Brigitte, my dear companion. Thank you, B..
One of the curious aspects of Cancer therapy has to do with the blurry distinction between treating the disease and treating the treatment. Notwithstanding the idea that the 6 treatment cycle should be followed in the same way as an antibiotic regimen, it is also possible--when the disease is diagnostically undetectable at the end of round 2, for instance—that any further chemo may result in more damage than good. My intent here is less to question the wisdom of the medical establishment than to provoke issues that might lead to better therapeutic alternatives. Today starts the second week of the 3rd cycle. Typically, this has been the physical and psychological low point, “nadir” if you will, in terms of recovering for the next bout. So how do I feel? Not bad.
Palliative care is an issue often discussed here. On or about September 10 there was a series of articles in The New York Times related to how the under treatment of pain constitutes a worldwide crisis. While inadequate palliative care is a public health problem in poor countries, it is also a serious issue in wealthier nations. As the executive director of Compassion & Choices, David C. Leven, points out, “A recent survey of 4,000 cancer patients in Europe revealed two of three are in pain and that one-third of these patients sometimes had so much pain that they wanted to die.” Regarding the U.S., one of the negative consequences of defining substance abuse as a criminal rather than medical problem is the draconian/puritanical attitude that informs opinions about health care. The cultural assumption that drug addiction equals criminality has made it such that physicians must police themselves, lest they face prosecution for what, in most cases, is a matter of professional judgment. As Garry S. Sklar, M. D., writes, “Physicians in the United States are phobic about prescribing adequate doses of narcotics for fear of government sanction or patient addiction.” Keeping in mind that it has long been established that patients in pain do not become addicted, there is no reason that any patient anywhere suffer needlessly. And yet, as Leven notes, “A survey of New York State doctors reported in 2005 that occasionally or frequently one-third of them prescribed lower doses of an opioid drug for outpatients with chronic pain because of concern about investigation by a regulatory agency.”
“You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.”
-- Malcolm X, 1965
Agenda:
Fiction
Politics
Current Events
FICTION
Stories From Camp Kitsch (cont.)
…At daybreak, Pluto awakened to a primordial fear beyond words. He heard that terrifying sound of his prison days waxing and waning in the distance, the baying of bloodhounds. Weak and panic-stricken, he contemplated his chances. He could stay and face the inevitable, the Talion court of the avenging dead. That was suicide. Or he could flee. He headed toward the lake.
It was just after dawn when he crossed the Iron River. “What time was it? How long had it been light?” Stopping to catch his breath, he heard a soft, plaintive cry. “A sign! A sign!"
Then it came: dragging through the brush, trailing a bloody, useless leg and mewling softly, a yearling doe appeared. Her grotesquely twisted spine slowed her.
For Pluto, this sad, desperate beast, revealed an inviolable existential truth: the instinct to hope. In her eyes he saw mans' singular affliction: the capacity of the reasoning mind to deny, to annihilate, to strangle, and to suffocate hope. A pitiful confirmation of Pluto's belief that the potential for pre-meditated cruelty inherent to human reason--the ability to justify, to transcend the slither of instinct--could be redemptive.
The world closed around him. Frantically, he ran for his life. Picking up his scent, the hounds bay rose to a howl. Now cornered, he stumbled, collapsed, and gasped for breath. Suddenly they were silent. Pluto momentarily froze. Then, as the unholy choir renewed its relentless howl, he staggered toward the sound of the breakers. Suddenly a black chasm opened in the trees ahead. The dogs were everywhere. Pluto put his faith in the dark. He found the lake, the cliff, the knife-like sleet of salvation. Across the water he could see the Big Bay lighthouse. 60 feet below him the waves pounded the jagged boulders. He never hesitated.
POLITICS
“Camus said that the one serious question of philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide; the one serious question of political philosophy is whether or not to get out of bed. Silly as it may have seemed at the time, John and Yoko’s famous stunt was based on a profound observation. Instant Karma is not so instant—we ratify it day by day.”
-- Garret Keizer, 10/07 Harpers
One would think an administration that threatens the very Constitution of this country would merit stronger protest from its citizens. Sacrificing our sons and daughters on the altar of Neo-con ideology would also seem to qualify as a legitimate call to arms. In many ways, our neglect in not holding the current administration accountable amounts to what I would call a tacit approval of their policies. What does it take to get the public’s attention? Far too much, I’m afraid. Keizer frames the question this way: “As long as we’re willing to go on with our business, Bush and Cheney will feel free to go on with their coup. As long as we’re willing to continue fucking ourselves, why should they have any scruples about telling us to smile during the act?”
CURRENT EVENTS/MEDICAL
I injected myself with Neulasta today. You may recall me talking about--how could you forget—a shot that stimulates the white blood cell count. I think I did it right? Neulasta (pegfilgrastim) was the cause of the severe bone pain I experienced during my last cycle (#2) of chemotherapy. Aside from bone pain and the rare possibility of splenic rupture (sounds like a religious experience), the side effects are minimal. I suppose I should say more about my disease, my life, music, the world, football; I’m just not sure that what I have to say is that interesting. Next Monday I have my picture taken with K’Len Morris, a guard on the U-M basketball team. The players were asked to contact a favorite professor for a media guide shot. Thank you, K’Len. I’ll get one with DeShawn Sims, too. What a character. Putting my e-mail on the blog turned out to be a good idea, as was posting R. J.s web-sites. Speaking of the blog, you may have noticed a new look. The coolness is courtesy of Ms. Brigitte, my dear companion. Thank you, B..
One of the curious aspects of Cancer therapy has to do with the blurry distinction between treating the disease and treating the treatment. Notwithstanding the idea that the 6 treatment cycle should be followed in the same way as an antibiotic regimen, it is also possible--when the disease is diagnostically undetectable at the end of round 2, for instance—that any further chemo may result in more damage than good. My intent here is less to question the wisdom of the medical establishment than to provoke issues that might lead to better therapeutic alternatives. Today starts the second week of the 3rd cycle. Typically, this has been the physical and psychological low point, “nadir” if you will, in terms of recovering for the next bout. So how do I feel? Not bad.
Palliative care is an issue often discussed here. On or about September 10 there was a series of articles in The New York Times related to how the under treatment of pain constitutes a worldwide crisis. While inadequate palliative care is a public health problem in poor countries, it is also a serious issue in wealthier nations. As the executive director of Compassion & Choices, David C. Leven, points out, “A recent survey of 4,000 cancer patients in Europe revealed two of three are in pain and that one-third of these patients sometimes had so much pain that they wanted to die.” Regarding the U.S., one of the negative consequences of defining substance abuse as a criminal rather than medical problem is the draconian/puritanical attitude that informs opinions about health care. The cultural assumption that drug addiction equals criminality has made it such that physicians must police themselves, lest they face prosecution for what, in most cases, is a matter of professional judgment. As Garry S. Sklar, M. D., writes, “Physicians in the United States are phobic about prescribing adequate doses of narcotics for fear of government sanction or patient addiction.” Keeping in mind that it has long been established that patients in pain do not become addicted, there is no reason that any patient anywhere suffer needlessly. And yet, as Leven notes, “A survey of New York State doctors reported in 2005 that occasionally or frequently one-third of them prescribed lower doses of an opioid drug for outpatients with chronic pain because of concern about investigation by a regulatory agency.”
September 15, 2007
Postmodernism Run Amok
9/15/07
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
AGENDA:
MUSIC
CURRENT EVENTS
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
POLITICS
MUSIC
DEAR READERS, REGARDING THE MUSICAL REFERENCES THAT ARISE IN THIS BLOG, IF ANY OF YOU WOULD LIKE TO RECEIVE FUBAR CDS, PLEASE E-MAIL ME AT RLT@UMICH.EDU SEND ME YOUR ADDRESS, WHICH I WILL KEEP ANONYMOUS, AND I WILL SEND YOU FREE MUSICAL STUFF. (This means you, Bonnie D. in S.D.)
CURRENT EVENTS
You don’t think the terrorists are making in-roads in terms of sapping us of our precious bodily fluids? Think again. They’re bringing it to our shores, just as the Wagenfuhrer predicted. Why are we oblivious to this in Ann Arbor (AKA Squirrel town), because we’re too interested in seeing Britney Spears shake her cottage cheese and looking at DOG ATTACK stories in the A2 News. Where’s Michael Vick when we need him? We’re slippin', America! Did you know that two prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp were wearing unauthorized Speedo bathing suits? What next? The appearance of this kind of contraband should have us worried about the potential for smuggling who knows what kind of weapons of mass destruction into our fair land. What’s the Koran say about Speedos? What’s indisputable is that either one of these bearded, Nirvana seekers would have looked far more sexy in Speedo flagrante than Spears did in her black bikini. Who dresses this girl? Barbara Bush?
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ABOUT R. LOUIS TESSIER:
No doubt his sophistication in hermeneutics may be attributed his paternal grandfather, the venerable Pavel Reich, a Czech philosopher renowned for his essays on ontological conundrums related to hopelessness and death. After his death in 1971, an elegiac essay in Critical Inquiry noted that Reich "contemplated suicide for decades, esteems extremists, fanatics and eccentrics of every stripe, and has instituted vertigo into his daily life." Pluto was fond of quoting a passage from Reich's opus, The Wisdom of Despair, published in 1934 and winner of the Salzberg Academy's Trompe-l'oeil Prize: "However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the devil; I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony arbitrariness and caprice." Pierre Oblique, from the deMan Institute, described him as an ingenious, revolutionary misanthrope without parallel, who worked tirelessly to valorize the value of nothingness. The core of his canon reflects his intellectual preoccupations: Meditations on Dread (1950), The Error of Being (1955), The Illusion of Dimension (1960), and, his last book, The Sentence of Birth (1962). According to interviews with Reich, the source of his grim worldview was a chronic insomnia that plagued him since his youth: "Being abandoned by sleep is the worst. Incarceration is less debilitating. Macbeth's meditation on sweet sleep and its absence says too little. I wandered deserted alleys and desolate byways. Psychotics, diseased prostitutes, hunger artists and creatures of the night were my comrades in isolation, my silent co-conspirators. Diurnal helplessness left me without vocation or direction. Blessed subjectivity, my ontological foundation, withered under the naked glare of stark, uninterrupted consciousness; rusted within the constancy of awareness; and diminished under the influence of superficial perceptions and memory--not dream--images void of chiaroscuro. No rhetoric could soothe me, no discourse convey my dejection with language, rejection of meaning and lack of faith in words. 10 years of cursed insomnia. The sleep of unconsciousness, eternal dreamlessness."
POLITICS
WHAT FOLLOWS IS A RE-EDITING OF AN ESSAY WRITTEN IN 2002
Rather than focus on "how" the tragedy on 9/11 could occur, this rant will consider "why" this happened. If we grant that the twin poster children of Evil over the past decade, at least in the American zeitgeist, are Sadaam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, it behooves us to ask who these men are and how they attained power. During the 1980's the world saw one of the most horrific conflicts in human history: the eight-year Iraqi-Irani war. This war saw suicidal human wave assaults where young Irani boys charged to their deaths and horrible gas attacks were unleashed from both sides. On the heels of the Shah's deposal and subsequent hostage crisis, America decided to back the ruthless Iraqi dictator, Sadaam Hussein. Sadaam’s ability to retain and maintain a gangster state was only made possible through a military power base largely funded by American tax dollars.
And what of Bin Laden? Consider this quote from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: "The Americans say: we [the Islamic world] have no good and bad terrorists, all terrorists are bad. But in practice they themselves divide terrorism into good and bad." Recall that when the Afghani insurgents rose up against the Russian occupation in the late 1980s, the Taliban, a group we now label as criminal terrorists, were described as "freedom fighters." The point. The very same Russians upon whom the Afghani's were inflicting heavy casualties, a toll extracted with weapons and monies provided by the American government, are now offering us airspace and airbases in adjoining Turkistan. A further Irony is that Bin Laden fought with weapons supplied to him by American funding. So make no mistake about it, when American blood is shed in the "war" on terrorism it is a good bet the killing will be done with American or Russian weapons.
But what is “terrorism?” If we are going to make war on a group, or groups, guilty of ”Terrorism” shouldn’t we define exactly what it is.
As evidence of American duplicity on what constitutes terrorism, the Iranian Ayotolla has cited the 1988 downing of an Iran Air civilian airliner by the American warship “Vincennes”, which resulted in the deaths of all 290 people on board: "In the skies of the Persian Gulf they shoot down an Iranian airliner with hundreds of passengers on board, without any reason or excuse. They blow up the airplane, tear the people into pieces and drown them in the sea--a clear case of terrorism...not only do they not apologize to Iran, but they give an award to the commander of the warship. That is good terrorism." While it was defined as a military accident, the commander was awarded an exceptional conduct medal. From the Palestinian point of view, "American officials...define terrorism incorrectly. They define terrorism in such a way that the massacre of the people of Sabra and Shatila--two Palestinian camps in which men, women and children were all massacred one night on the orders of a person who is at present at the head of the Israeli government [Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] -- is not terror." Weren’t George Washington and the early colonial revolutionaries also insurgents bent on ending an oppressive British occupation? Given our history of military expansionism, both foreign and domestic, since this country’s inception, is it so surprising that the Ayatollah offers this grim dialectic: "Have you ever respected the interests of others, that you now expect everyone to respect yours? In today’s world, is the possession of cannons, guns and missiles a permit for a government to say: It has to be what I say and nothing else...it is these things that have made America detestable."
The final irony is this: where we once feared a Cold War world in which two colossal superpowers posed the threat of global annihilation, we may end up with a single monolithic superpower pitted against an enemy as committed as it is ruthless. Al Qaeda once said we were afraid to attack them. It was our tragic error to take this as an affront rather than warning; as an omen that we should draw Santayanan wisdom from, rather than an invitation to defeat. Consider Russia's recent experience in Afghanistan and the American debacle in Viet Nam. Remember past events. We need only look at the resolve of the North Vietnamese General Ngugen Giap (also a military history teacher). Giap defeated the United States of America without ever winning a major tactical battle.
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
AGENDA:
MUSIC
CURRENT EVENTS
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
POLITICS
MUSIC
DEAR READERS, REGARDING THE MUSICAL REFERENCES THAT ARISE IN THIS BLOG, IF ANY OF YOU WOULD LIKE TO RECEIVE FUBAR CDS, PLEASE E-MAIL ME AT RLT@UMICH.EDU SEND ME YOUR ADDRESS, WHICH I WILL KEEP ANONYMOUS, AND I WILL SEND YOU FREE MUSICAL STUFF. (This means you, Bonnie D. in S.D.)
CURRENT EVENTS
You don’t think the terrorists are making in-roads in terms of sapping us of our precious bodily fluids? Think again. They’re bringing it to our shores, just as the Wagenfuhrer predicted. Why are we oblivious to this in Ann Arbor (AKA Squirrel town), because we’re too interested in seeing Britney Spears shake her cottage cheese and looking at DOG ATTACK stories in the A2 News. Where’s Michael Vick when we need him? We’re slippin', America! Did you know that two prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp were wearing unauthorized Speedo bathing suits? What next? The appearance of this kind of contraband should have us worried about the potential for smuggling who knows what kind of weapons of mass destruction into our fair land. What’s the Koran say about Speedos? What’s indisputable is that either one of these bearded, Nirvana seekers would have looked far more sexy in Speedo flagrante than Spears did in her black bikini. Who dresses this girl? Barbara Bush?
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ABOUT R. LOUIS TESSIER:
No doubt his sophistication in hermeneutics may be attributed his paternal grandfather, the venerable Pavel Reich, a Czech philosopher renowned for his essays on ontological conundrums related to hopelessness and death. After his death in 1971, an elegiac essay in Critical Inquiry noted that Reich "contemplated suicide for decades, esteems extremists, fanatics and eccentrics of every stripe, and has instituted vertigo into his daily life." Pluto was fond of quoting a passage from Reich's opus, The Wisdom of Despair, published in 1934 and winner of the Salzberg Academy's Trompe-l'oeil Prize: "However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the devil; I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony arbitrariness and caprice." Pierre Oblique, from the deMan Institute, described him as an ingenious, revolutionary misanthrope without parallel, who worked tirelessly to valorize the value of nothingness. The core of his canon reflects his intellectual preoccupations: Meditations on Dread (1950), The Error of Being (1955), The Illusion of Dimension (1960), and, his last book, The Sentence of Birth (1962). According to interviews with Reich, the source of his grim worldview was a chronic insomnia that plagued him since his youth: "Being abandoned by sleep is the worst. Incarceration is less debilitating. Macbeth's meditation on sweet sleep and its absence says too little. I wandered deserted alleys and desolate byways. Psychotics, diseased prostitutes, hunger artists and creatures of the night were my comrades in isolation, my silent co-conspirators. Diurnal helplessness left me without vocation or direction. Blessed subjectivity, my ontological foundation, withered under the naked glare of stark, uninterrupted consciousness; rusted within the constancy of awareness; and diminished under the influence of superficial perceptions and memory--not dream--images void of chiaroscuro. No rhetoric could soothe me, no discourse convey my dejection with language, rejection of meaning and lack of faith in words. 10 years of cursed insomnia. The sleep of unconsciousness, eternal dreamlessness."
POLITICS
WHAT FOLLOWS IS A RE-EDITING OF AN ESSAY WRITTEN IN 2002
Rather than focus on "how" the tragedy on 9/11 could occur, this rant will consider "why" this happened. If we grant that the twin poster children of Evil over the past decade, at least in the American zeitgeist, are Sadaam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, it behooves us to ask who these men are and how they attained power. During the 1980's the world saw one of the most horrific conflicts in human history: the eight-year Iraqi-Irani war. This war saw suicidal human wave assaults where young Irani boys charged to their deaths and horrible gas attacks were unleashed from both sides. On the heels of the Shah's deposal and subsequent hostage crisis, America decided to back the ruthless Iraqi dictator, Sadaam Hussein. Sadaam’s ability to retain and maintain a gangster state was only made possible through a military power base largely funded by American tax dollars.
And what of Bin Laden? Consider this quote from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: "The Americans say: we [the Islamic world] have no good and bad terrorists, all terrorists are bad. But in practice they themselves divide terrorism into good and bad." Recall that when the Afghani insurgents rose up against the Russian occupation in the late 1980s, the Taliban, a group we now label as criminal terrorists, were described as "freedom fighters." The point. The very same Russians upon whom the Afghani's were inflicting heavy casualties, a toll extracted with weapons and monies provided by the American government, are now offering us airspace and airbases in adjoining Turkistan. A further Irony is that Bin Laden fought with weapons supplied to him by American funding. So make no mistake about it, when American blood is shed in the "war" on terrorism it is a good bet the killing will be done with American or Russian weapons.
But what is “terrorism?” If we are going to make war on a group, or groups, guilty of ”Terrorism” shouldn’t we define exactly what it is.
As evidence of American duplicity on what constitutes terrorism, the Iranian Ayotolla has cited the 1988 downing of an Iran Air civilian airliner by the American warship “Vincennes”, which resulted in the deaths of all 290 people on board: "In the skies of the Persian Gulf they shoot down an Iranian airliner with hundreds of passengers on board, without any reason or excuse. They blow up the airplane, tear the people into pieces and drown them in the sea--a clear case of terrorism...not only do they not apologize to Iran, but they give an award to the commander of the warship. That is good terrorism." While it was defined as a military accident, the commander was awarded an exceptional conduct medal. From the Palestinian point of view, "American officials...define terrorism incorrectly. They define terrorism in such a way that the massacre of the people of Sabra and Shatila--two Palestinian camps in which men, women and children were all massacred one night on the orders of a person who is at present at the head of the Israeli government [Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] -- is not terror." Weren’t George Washington and the early colonial revolutionaries also insurgents bent on ending an oppressive British occupation? Given our history of military expansionism, both foreign and domestic, since this country’s inception, is it so surprising that the Ayatollah offers this grim dialectic: "Have you ever respected the interests of others, that you now expect everyone to respect yours? In today’s world, is the possession of cannons, guns and missiles a permit for a government to say: It has to be what I say and nothing else...it is these things that have made America detestable."
The final irony is this: where we once feared a Cold War world in which two colossal superpowers posed the threat of global annihilation, we may end up with a single monolithic superpower pitted against an enemy as committed as it is ruthless. Al Qaeda once said we were afraid to attack them. It was our tragic error to take this as an affront rather than warning; as an omen that we should draw Santayanan wisdom from, rather than an invitation to defeat. Consider Russia's recent experience in Afghanistan and the American debacle in Viet Nam. Remember past events. We need only look at the resolve of the North Vietnamese General Ngugen Giap (also a military history teacher). Giap defeated the United States of America without ever winning a major tactical battle.
September 13, 2007
Suicide Bombers
9/13/07
Agenda:
Music
Politics
The Pressure Never Drops
The gondoliers are passing
If it’s what you’re looking for
Rolling quiet on the carpet
Bearing coffee, nuts, and more
A man without an eyelid
Takes comfort in his wife
The bald bandanad Diva
Stands stately in her strife
The shackled prison inmate
Stands watch upon his guards
But they know he’s going nowhere
'Cause it just ain’t in the cards
The engineer from Tahoe
Got a port in every storm
Which now includes his belly
We consider it the norm
Broke his back and cracked three rib bones
From a roll in bed, he said
Coulda quit and gave up trying
He’s a transplant man instead
In the bed next door there’s puking
At the thought of what’s to come
And her grim anticipation
Brings a sad eyed tear to some
Where the pin striped girls bring chocolate
And the beeping never stops
Where a cheery nurse will make sure
That the pressure never drops
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
-- M. K. Ghandi
-- Non-Violence in Peace and War, 1948
The Politics of Immortality
ANN ARBOR:
Given the current state of the world I thought it might be wise to revisit Bertrand Russell's essay, "The Finality of Death" taken from Why I Am Not a Christian (1957). Russell writes, "It is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life. The most important of these emotions is fear of death...if we genuinely and wholeheartedly believed in the future life we should cease completely to fear death. The effects would be curious, and probably such as most of us would deplore." Why does Russell suggest that having no fear of death would produce a deplorable effect?
While Russell lived in a time before suicide bombing would become the defining strategy in global militarism, he would probably show little surprise at the macabre popularity of self-sacrifice as a method of terrorism. It is often, as Russell points out, "an advantage to the victors in the struggle for life to be able, on occasion, to overcome the natural fear of death." What religious fundamentalists require, Christian and Islamic alike, is that the potential martyr accept the reality of a supernatural realm. What the bomber who blows herself up for Allah and the soldier who puts his life at risk for a Christian-politico ideology share is an abiding belief in the achievement of a higher end through violent means.
The overcoming of one's instinct toward self preservation thus serves an expansionist military agenda. Russell describes it this way, "belief in Paradise has considerable military value as reinforcing natural pugnacity. We should therefore admit that militarists are wise in encouraging the belief in immortality." Sagely, he foresaw a millennial geo-political climate marked by a simultaneous rise in violent militarism and religious fundamentalism, both of which see the self as expendable to a certain dogma. Osama bin Laden, like George W. Bush, is willing to sacrifice our children on the altar of ideology. Bush's Christian beliefs, which provide a tacit justification for his pursuit of material gains (oil and democracy), and zealots like Moktada al-Sadr's brand of Islamicism, a doctrine of moral intolerance which encourages the martyrdom of his brethren, are only differences in kind; ideological distinctions that obscure the tragedy of the American and Iraqi dead.
Russell's ideas apply to less understandable, albeit no less irrational, human behaviors as well. He follows his comments on militarism and immortality with the caveat that the quest for Nirvana "not become so profound as to produce indifference to the affairs of the world." The appearance of apocalyptic suicide cults like Jim Jones' People's Temple sect, and Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate following, display the kind of radical, worldly indifference he speaks of. Given that Russell found it morally intolerable that the taking of human life be condoned in any circumstance, he, no doubt, wondered how we could find a martyrdom divorced from the terrestrial more disturbing than sacrificing oneself to an ism. He thought it a sad irony that the idea of life after death can at once provide a rationale for slaughtering human beings and be claimed as evidence of intelligent purpose; the ultimate grand designer's most sublime expression; the creation of an immutable species sealed with the endowment of infinite life on a higher plane. But how does the doctrine of intelligent purpose account for catastrophes like Hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires?
The very amorality of nature supports Russell's conviction that "nature is indifferent to our values and can only be understood by ignoring our notions of good and bad." Since moral principles like right and wrong are culturally derived--one might choose a Nietzschean rather than Christian ethic--immortality is inexorably determined from a position of power. In Russell's words, "those who have the best poison gas will have the ethic of the future and will therefore be the immortal ones." His argument for existential contingency over "divine or supernatural" origin has an historical basis, considering that all natural facts, including our moral beliefs, have developed out of the struggle to survive. Russell surely read Mark Twain's essay, "The Lowest Animal," in coming to the conclusion that "it is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens."
This brings me to a conversation with John Sinclair in February 2003. It was shortly after the sinking of the Senegalese ferry, Joola, in which 1,863 people died en route to the capital, Dakar. After reflecting on this and the various woes of the world, Sinclair remarked that God must be one sick fuck to take responsibility for natural, much less human, events. Perhaps more eloquently, Russell writes, "The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis."
Agenda:
Music
Politics
The Pressure Never Drops
The gondoliers are passing
If it’s what you’re looking for
Rolling quiet on the carpet
Bearing coffee, nuts, and more
A man without an eyelid
Takes comfort in his wife
The bald bandanad Diva
Stands stately in her strife
The shackled prison inmate
Stands watch upon his guards
But they know he’s going nowhere
'Cause it just ain’t in the cards
The engineer from Tahoe
Got a port in every storm
Which now includes his belly
We consider it the norm
Broke his back and cracked three rib bones
From a roll in bed, he said
Coulda quit and gave up trying
He’s a transplant man instead
In the bed next door there’s puking
At the thought of what’s to come
And her grim anticipation
Brings a sad eyed tear to some
Where the pin striped girls bring chocolate
And the beeping never stops
Where a cheery nurse will make sure
That the pressure never drops
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
-- M. K. Ghandi
-- Non-Violence in Peace and War, 1948
The Politics of Immortality
ANN ARBOR:
Given the current state of the world I thought it might be wise to revisit Bertrand Russell's essay, "The Finality of Death" taken from Why I Am Not a Christian (1957). Russell writes, "It is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life. The most important of these emotions is fear of death...if we genuinely and wholeheartedly believed in the future life we should cease completely to fear death. The effects would be curious, and probably such as most of us would deplore." Why does Russell suggest that having no fear of death would produce a deplorable effect?
While Russell lived in a time before suicide bombing would become the defining strategy in global militarism, he would probably show little surprise at the macabre popularity of self-sacrifice as a method of terrorism. It is often, as Russell points out, "an advantage to the victors in the struggle for life to be able, on occasion, to overcome the natural fear of death." What religious fundamentalists require, Christian and Islamic alike, is that the potential martyr accept the reality of a supernatural realm. What the bomber who blows herself up for Allah and the soldier who puts his life at risk for a Christian-politico ideology share is an abiding belief in the achievement of a higher end through violent means.
The overcoming of one's instinct toward self preservation thus serves an expansionist military agenda. Russell describes it this way, "belief in Paradise has considerable military value as reinforcing natural pugnacity. We should therefore admit that militarists are wise in encouraging the belief in immortality." Sagely, he foresaw a millennial geo-political climate marked by a simultaneous rise in violent militarism and religious fundamentalism, both of which see the self as expendable to a certain dogma. Osama bin Laden, like George W. Bush, is willing to sacrifice our children on the altar of ideology. Bush's Christian beliefs, which provide a tacit justification for his pursuit of material gains (oil and democracy), and zealots like Moktada al-Sadr's brand of Islamicism, a doctrine of moral intolerance which encourages the martyrdom of his brethren, are only differences in kind; ideological distinctions that obscure the tragedy of the American and Iraqi dead.
Russell's ideas apply to less understandable, albeit no less irrational, human behaviors as well. He follows his comments on militarism and immortality with the caveat that the quest for Nirvana "not become so profound as to produce indifference to the affairs of the world." The appearance of apocalyptic suicide cults like Jim Jones' People's Temple sect, and Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate following, display the kind of radical, worldly indifference he speaks of. Given that Russell found it morally intolerable that the taking of human life be condoned in any circumstance, he, no doubt, wondered how we could find a martyrdom divorced from the terrestrial more disturbing than sacrificing oneself to an ism. He thought it a sad irony that the idea of life after death can at once provide a rationale for slaughtering human beings and be claimed as evidence of intelligent purpose; the ultimate grand designer's most sublime expression; the creation of an immutable species sealed with the endowment of infinite life on a higher plane. But how does the doctrine of intelligent purpose account for catastrophes like Hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires?
The very amorality of nature supports Russell's conviction that "nature is indifferent to our values and can only be understood by ignoring our notions of good and bad." Since moral principles like right and wrong are culturally derived--one might choose a Nietzschean rather than Christian ethic--immortality is inexorably determined from a position of power. In Russell's words, "those who have the best poison gas will have the ethic of the future and will therefore be the immortal ones." His argument for existential contingency over "divine or supernatural" origin has an historical basis, considering that all natural facts, including our moral beliefs, have developed out of the struggle to survive. Russell surely read Mark Twain's essay, "The Lowest Animal," in coming to the conclusion that "it is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens."
This brings me to a conversation with John Sinclair in February 2003. It was shortly after the sinking of the Senegalese ferry, Joola, in which 1,863 people died en route to the capital, Dakar. After reflecting on this and the various woes of the world, Sinclair remarked that God must be one sick fuck to take responsibility for natural, much less human, events. Perhaps more eloquently, Russell writes, "The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis."
September 12, 2007
Infusion #3
9/12/07
AGENDA:
Disease
Music
Politics
“This nation is ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be, when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!”
-- Mark Twain
Thank you, anonymous blog responder, for the “Sicko” props.
DISEASE
I’ve been here since 11AM, in the chemo area since 3PM. It’s now 6:42PM and the infusion is running. The joint is jumping. Two cubicles to my left, there’s an older man, alternately moaning, groaning and whimpering. The combination of a groan and a whimper produces a peculiarly, eerie sound. His name is Lafayette. He is with a caretaker of some sort, who’s dressed in institutional garb: a light blue hospital type smock and dark blue scrub pants. Being the nosy type, I’ll get the skinny on this later. If necessity is the mother of invention, boredom is the father of curiosity.
Earlier I spoke with a man, Bob from Grand Ledge, who has been battling multiple myeloma for 3 years. He is on his second stem-cell transplant. Because of donor match issues, a bone marrow transplant was not an option. This is a particularly insidious disease that attacks the bones, making them brittle to the point that they often develop holes, giving them a swiss cheesy sort of appearance. Multiple myeloma is a cancer of the plasma cells. Three things happen, all bad: 1) the bone marrow is interfered with, thus compromising the immune system; 2) anemia and infection pose an ongoing threat; 3) the susceptibility to kidney problems is greatly increased. Symptoms: bone pain, abnormal monoclonal protein counts, elevated blood calcium levels, constipation, nausea, loss of appetite, mental confusion, unexplained bone fractures, weight loss, weakness and numbness in legs. Regarding the bone degradation , I’ll simply relate what Bob told me. After telling me about his 3 month experience in the hospital, I asked him what happened. He said he had broken his back and 3 ribs. When I asked how this occurred, he calmly told me the fractures were the result of his turning over in bed. As horrible as his 3 year battle has been, Bob seemed very upbeat and resolute. I dig you, Bob.
Meanwhile back to the later, you know, the then then, I mean post-Bob, but no, not now now. Peck.Peck.Peck. Layfayette is calm for the moment. The lady between us is readying herself for a marrow transplant at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. She orders the new Wendy’s Bacon Wizard, or Delight, or something like that. As her partner leaves she shouts to her, “remember, no bun.” You know, I was beginning to feel old, as if life were passing me by, those old Cytoxan sniffles were getting me down. And then, suddenly I looked up and there he was: no, not Dorian Gray, Jerry Hodak, the perennial channel 7 weatherman, once again reassuring me that a celebrity other than Sonny Elliot could still make me feel young. But I’m digressing.
To my right, one cubicle away, a young woman is having, in medical parlance, breakthrough nausea. For about 45 minutes to an hour she puked uncontrollably before finally getting some relief. Knowing that severe nausea can occur during the infusion, I asked the new shift nurse if she was having a reaction. Without batting an eye, she says, “Oh no, she doesn’t get the treatment for an hour. She’s vomiting in anticipation of having the chemo.” Oh boy!
MUSIC
Given my passion for music, I would be remiss if I failed to talk about the “Air Guitar World Championships.” Held in Oulu, Finland, this event has held a certain fascination for me since its inception 12 years ago. No doubt a number of my friends wish I had stuck with this specialty. Which in many ways makes sense, since I undoubtedly have the intellectual qualities specific to this discipline. I would be hard pressed to top the contestant who, when asked why he likes air guitar, answered “To me, it’s like a guitar, only it’s made of air, so you can’t see it. Pretty much.” As reported in The New York Times, the United States champion “came to air guitar when, in the typical manner of hopeless American pubescent boys, he air jammed with his friends at high school dances instead of dancing with actual girls.” One of the hazards of this competition involves getting too caught up in your adopted persona. Witness the French competitor, Guillaume de Tonquedec, who dived into a mosh pit apparently filled with air catchers” “Instead of enveloping him in a warm embrace, the crowd drew back in fear, leaving Moche Pitt (stage name) to belly-flop directly onto the ground. Apparently recovered from his ill advised Iggy imitation, Moche had this to say, “I’d rather be stupid with an air guitar than a gun,” At which point the competitors serenaded the audience to a final rendition of Neil Young’s, “Rockin in the Free World.”
Did anyone cover an “Air Supply” song? Make air, not war!
THIS SATURDAY NIGHT CATCH FUBAR AT DYLAN FEST, BLIND PIG, ANN ARBOR, MICH (2 songs, “Positively Fourth Street & Pledging My Time)
POLITICS
One of the fundamental myths about the United States is that of a clear separation BETWEEN church and state, which allows us to roundly condemn Islamic theocracies that mix their orthodoxy with political policy. I suppose our medieval notions about abortion, same sex marriage and stem cell research bear no relation to that fundamental Christian morality which underpins our present administration’s policies. So obsessed are we with distancing ourselves from the charge of religious fundamentalism that it was recently decided to purge books on faith from prison libraries. It seems that prison chaplains across this wide land were told to remove all books, tapes, CDs and videos not approved by the Bureau of Prisons. Ridiculous. Take heart Senator Larry Craig, if you stall…er…wait long enough perhaps the government will give up on staking out airport urinals looking for deviant, homosexual behaviors. "Sir! the bad news is a terrorist just boarded the plane; the good news is we caught another queer. Fact is, this country was based on Christian values. In “The Americans in their Moral, Social, and Political Relations”(1837), the eminently philosophical observer, Francis Grund, writes, “The religious habits of the Americans form not only the basis of their private and public morals, but have become so thoroughly interwoven with their whole course of legislation that it would be impossible to change them without affecting the very essence of their government”(69). Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Jim Baker, had you only been familiar with Grund’s keen understanding of the American sensibility you might have avoided moral condemnation: “The moment a candidate is presented for office, not only his mental qualifications for the functions he is about to assume, but also his private character are made the subject of criticism. Whatever he may have done, said, or listened to, from the time he left school to the present moment is sure to be brought before the public. The most trifling incidents which are calculated to shed a light on his motives or habits or thinking are made the subject of the most uncompromising scrutiny; and facts and circumstances, already buried in oblivion, are once more brought before the judging eye of the people”(72).
Regarding the war:
“You, my imperialistic friends, have had your ideals and sentimentalities. One is that the flag shall never be hauled down where it has once floated. Another is that you will not talk or reason with people with arms in their hand. Another is that sovereignty over an unwilling people may be bought with gold. And another is that sovereignty may be got by force of arms….
What has been the practical statesmanship which comes from your ideals and sentimentalities? You have wasted hundreds of millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives, the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest, bringing their sheaves with them, in the shape of thousands of sick and wounded and insane."(82).
No, this isn’t related to what’s happening in Iraq, or even what happened in Viet Nam, this was written in 1902 by Mark Twain. He was responding to the sham war--remember the Maine--which took place in the Philippines in the early 1890s. What Iraq, Vietnam, and the Spanish American War all have in common is their implied religious justifications: our involvement in Iraq is a cultural crusade to install democracy and western values in a backward society (see William Bennett for more on this); Vietnam was the place where we would right the falling dominoes of godless communism, and the Philippines was where America’s manifest destiny would be played out on a world stage. Consider this speech given to the senate by Indiana Senator, Albert Beveridge: ”God has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America. The Philippines are ours forever. We will not repudiate our duty to the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world”(83). WOW! Not much has changed.
September 10, 2007
About Gout
9/10/07
“The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.”
-- Jean Cocteau
Les Enfants Terribles, 1929
Imagine falling to the floor in agony and having to crawl to the bathroom. The softest touch, the weight of a bed sheet or fit of the thinnest sock, produces paroxysms of excruciating pain. Shoes? Forget it.
About Gout: Quoting Isaac Asimov’s, The Human Body: structure and Operation (1963), “The amino acid cystine is a normal component of proteins and is the least soluble of the amino acids. Uric acid will also form stones, and here a new are of danger arises. Sometimes uric acid is deposited in the joints of the extremities, particularly of the big toe, to give rise to the extraordinarily painful disease gout. (This word arises from a latin word meaning “drop” because in the Middle Ages there arose the misconception that gout was caused by the gathering of some fluid in the joints, ‘drop by drop.’) Gout seems to have become more prevalent in previous centuries than now, partly because conditions which were once diagnosed as ‘gout’ are now diagnosed as some form of arthritis.”
First diagnosed 2,000 years ago, gout is the “disease of kings,” mostly as a result of its association with overindulgence in alcohol and dietary debauchery.
People with blood related cancers such as leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma are at risk for developing gout. The symptoms of gout are painful swelling of the joints such as the big toe, ankle or knee. When cells die, they are broken down in the body and make uric acid as a waste product. Normally we clear the uric acid out of our bodies in our urine. But, if you have one of the cancers listed above you probably have a higher level of uric acid in your blood. This is because your bone marrow is producing abnormal cells. As these cells die and are broken down uric acid is released. The already high level of uric acid can sometimes greatly increase when undergoing chemotherapy.
Editorial Comment
Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda!
Re “The New Social Contract,” by David Brooks (Sept. 7, 2007):
The health care system Brooks describes as “coming apart at the seams” is going to require a “distinctly America Social contract.” His argument is, of course, underpinned by a shopworn definition of American exceptionalism that went out the window on 9/11.
Here we go again, we’re somehow different. In saying why we could never adopt a health care system based on a Western European socialist model, Brooks contends that Americans “are more individualistic and pluralistic.” That rugged, individualistic frontier tradition just won’t allow us to “defer to the central government” on health matters. The fact is that pluralism--that social condition whereby numerous ethnic, religious or cultural groups coexist within one nation—is nothing new to Europe. What is odd is Brook’s historical naivete in thinking America is unique in this regard.
A term that pops up again and again in Brook’s essay is should. While Utopian writing has always functioned as a necessary form of social critique, I’m not sure this was his intention. Brooks assumes an economically strong society, where employment and wages should “stimulate private savings and self-insurance.” But that simply isn’t the case in this country at this time. With record mortgage foreclosures, new lows for the dollar, rising unemployment, and unprecedented health care costs, how can the average family’s dwindling savings make self-insurance possible? What do we do with his idea that the new social contract “should foster self--sufficiency”? Well and good to say, but does this sound like what the government is doing in terms of underwriting (a given he takes as an article of faith) this new social contract? In fact, as the 8/21/07 New York Times reported, “The Bush administration, in its 'continuing fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program,' has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.” This is just one example of where we’re headed. With the economy in freefall, largely because we’ve poured billions and billions into a senseless war while at the same time neglecting a crumbling infrastructure, the upkeep of which would provide countless American jobs; and with the growing public unease about the continuing loss of jobs at every level of the employment strata, it’s no wonder that the American people are concerned about healthcare.
Citing Stewart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, Brooks sees America as a “thick, decentralized” society, in which public sector, non-governmental groups (unions, churches, and community organizations) should participate in health care. What planet is he living on? Union strength is a thing of the past, the strongest religious denominations are more concerned with moral issues than human rights (one of which is the right to basic human health care), and participation in community groups is at an all time low.
Regarding Brooks’s contention that the social condition constitutes a “continuum between the dead, living and unborn,” he writes, “[W]e shouldn’t disrupt the lives of those who are happy with the insurance they have.” Wow! Given that 45 million America citizens have no health insurance Brooks is worried about those of us blessed with the means to pay for medical coverage. If nothing else, history shows that a morally enlightened society is one that provides for the welfare of its lowest class citizens.
A last point that Brooks seems to overlook is that individualism and civic engagement, as cultural values, are difficult to reconcile. The sheer volume of literature (high and low) on self-interest as a much sought after individual value, combined with the contemporary view that civic responsibility is passé, sadly confirms the fact that the “living” nowadays have no concern with either the dead or the unborn. In terms of deferring to the “central government when it comes to making fundamental health care choices” where does this leave us?
Randall L. Tessier
Ann Arbor, Michigan
“The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.”
-- Jean Cocteau
Les Enfants Terribles, 1929
Imagine falling to the floor in agony and having to crawl to the bathroom. The softest touch, the weight of a bed sheet or fit of the thinnest sock, produces paroxysms of excruciating pain. Shoes? Forget it.
About Gout: Quoting Isaac Asimov’s, The Human Body: structure and Operation (1963), “The amino acid cystine is a normal component of proteins and is the least soluble of the amino acids. Uric acid will also form stones, and here a new are of danger arises. Sometimes uric acid is deposited in the joints of the extremities, particularly of the big toe, to give rise to the extraordinarily painful disease gout. (This word arises from a latin word meaning “drop” because in the Middle Ages there arose the misconception that gout was caused by the gathering of some fluid in the joints, ‘drop by drop.’) Gout seems to have become more prevalent in previous centuries than now, partly because conditions which were once diagnosed as ‘gout’ are now diagnosed as some form of arthritis.”
First diagnosed 2,000 years ago, gout is the “disease of kings,” mostly as a result of its association with overindulgence in alcohol and dietary debauchery.
People with blood related cancers such as leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma are at risk for developing gout. The symptoms of gout are painful swelling of the joints such as the big toe, ankle or knee. When cells die, they are broken down in the body and make uric acid as a waste product. Normally we clear the uric acid out of our bodies in our urine. But, if you have one of the cancers listed above you probably have a higher level of uric acid in your blood. This is because your bone marrow is producing abnormal cells. As these cells die and are broken down uric acid is released. The already high level of uric acid can sometimes greatly increase when undergoing chemotherapy.
Editorial Comment
Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda!
Re “The New Social Contract,” by David Brooks (Sept. 7, 2007):
The health care system Brooks describes as “coming apart at the seams” is going to require a “distinctly America Social contract.” His argument is, of course, underpinned by a shopworn definition of American exceptionalism that went out the window on 9/11.
Here we go again, we’re somehow different. In saying why we could never adopt a health care system based on a Western European socialist model, Brooks contends that Americans “are more individualistic and pluralistic.” That rugged, individualistic frontier tradition just won’t allow us to “defer to the central government” on health matters. The fact is that pluralism--that social condition whereby numerous ethnic, religious or cultural groups coexist within one nation—is nothing new to Europe. What is odd is Brook’s historical naivete in thinking America is unique in this regard.
A term that pops up again and again in Brook’s essay is should. While Utopian writing has always functioned as a necessary form of social critique, I’m not sure this was his intention. Brooks assumes an economically strong society, where employment and wages should “stimulate private savings and self-insurance.” But that simply isn’t the case in this country at this time. With record mortgage foreclosures, new lows for the dollar, rising unemployment, and unprecedented health care costs, how can the average family’s dwindling savings make self-insurance possible? What do we do with his idea that the new social contract “should foster self--sufficiency”? Well and good to say, but does this sound like what the government is doing in terms of underwriting (a given he takes as an article of faith) this new social contract? In fact, as the 8/21/07 New York Times reported, “The Bush administration, in its 'continuing fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program,' has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.” This is just one example of where we’re headed. With the economy in freefall, largely because we’ve poured billions and billions into a senseless war while at the same time neglecting a crumbling infrastructure, the upkeep of which would provide countless American jobs; and with the growing public unease about the continuing loss of jobs at every level of the employment strata, it’s no wonder that the American people are concerned about healthcare.
Citing Stewart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, Brooks sees America as a “thick, decentralized” society, in which public sector, non-governmental groups (unions, churches, and community organizations) should participate in health care. What planet is he living on? Union strength is a thing of the past, the strongest religious denominations are more concerned with moral issues than human rights (one of which is the right to basic human health care), and participation in community groups is at an all time low.
Regarding Brooks’s contention that the social condition constitutes a “continuum between the dead, living and unborn,” he writes, “[W]e shouldn’t disrupt the lives of those who are happy with the insurance they have.” Wow! Given that 45 million America citizens have no health insurance Brooks is worried about those of us blessed with the means to pay for medical coverage. If nothing else, history shows that a morally enlightened society is one that provides for the welfare of its lowest class citizens.
A last point that Brooks seems to overlook is that individualism and civic engagement, as cultural values, are difficult to reconcile. The sheer volume of literature (high and low) on self-interest as a much sought after individual value, combined with the contemporary view that civic responsibility is passé, sadly confirms the fact that the “living” nowadays have no concern with either the dead or the unborn. In terms of deferring to the “central government when it comes to making fundamental health care choices” where does this leave us?
Randall L. Tessier
Ann Arbor, Michigan
September 8, 2007
X-RATED TRASH (Part 1)
9/8/07
READER BE FOREWARNED! If graphic sex and violence offend you, skip this blog. What can I say? It was a sad day when I found this manuscript. How was I to know what kind of smutty fiction I would find in Dewey’s rotting fishing creel. I’m still trying to cope with the fact that my much beloved and deceased uncle could imagine such filth. Disgusting! He was a marathon dancer, a Busby Berkeley regular, and a fine, closeted gay man. Or so I thought. So, you may ask, why am I putting this trash on my blog. Three reasons. One, Dewey would have wanted his…err…art to live on, two, I’ve got chemo brain, three, Pluto was my dad!
For R. J.
Stories From Camp Kitsch
“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”
- Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Pluto ran frantically through the poplar underbrush bearing the weight of a pursuing fury, in truth a burden where the fates of old executed their ultimate terrors, terrors born of the world's collective iniquities, transgressions--sins both mortal and venial that curse existence--terrors that no one but he could shoulder. His panting gave way to hyperventilation, which gave way to long pauses where he had no breath at all.
He clung to a massive dead birch, stripping the bark from the brickred rot disintegrating under his frozen maul. Prostrating himself before it he railed at its mute trunk, oblivious to the fatal anonymity nature ultimately guarantees.
Pushing on, he stumbled face first into a jagged stump, breaking off his two front teeth. His mind raced as the salty warm blood triggered jumbled memories of Zelda's horrifying immolation and his foster father's tongue stew. The knifing wind shearing the pinetops and smearing the thick overcast with dark streaks transformed the snow-covered swamp into a familiar place. A world beckoning to Zeke with a metallic tasting finality only he could interpret as typical. Suddenly, his troubles were irrelevant.
Stirring, he recognized the unfamiliar objects below him as his feet. They moved; he went on. An oak branch served as a crutch with which he dragged himself, sphinx-like toward the cliff. The earth moved as he did; as if they were going nowhere; and, in a moment of insight validated this parable of being. His exhaustion and desperation fed his exhilaration. He concentrated on images of his death; the shock of a stroke; the blitzkrieg heart attack; an aneuristic spasm.
When he hit the old lumber trail he found a better staff and headed for the Club road. Hearing an approaching snowmobile he dove into a thicket of tag elder. After a while, exhausted and delirious, he got to his knees and was startled by the realization of who he was; that he had an identity; that he was something more than brute animal consciousness.
Slowly, after an hour, perhaps two, he staggered on. Some three miles south, at the intersection of the Triple A road, he became disoriented and wandered in a panicky parabola toward the rising moon. One hour later he stumbled upon an isolated fishing camp on the Salmon Trout River.
He crawled between the broken down chassis of an ancient Willy's Jeep and a rusted out International Scout; passed by cords of snow covered hardwood, decrepit ice-shanties and outbuildings; and would have stopped had he known what he would see.
Pulling himself up on the Airstream's broken mirror he looked through the soot tinted oval, across the makeshift woodstove and beyond, at the sight of Bokasa raping Zelda. The translucence of the cracked glass that mediated this pathetic vision tormented his mental perception; mirroring his undeniable complicity in this unholy scene. For the first time he saw himself as another might observe him; an atavistic self-voyeur; a shunned harbinger of what was already; of a cruel life in all its terrifying clarity.
The trailer was littered with pornographic magazines and spent shell casings. Bokasa's massive back, scarred by a thousand wounds and surgeries, writhed in chiaroscuro silhouette against the setting sun and rising moon. Thrusting and pumping in the dying light, he had her pinned atop a cedar chest. Bokasa balanced himself against a stuffed deer head with his left hand while pistoning himself into her buttocks. Her doe-like legs splayed spasmodically as her beseeching arms flailed at her degradation.
Bokasa's larval girth obscured Pluto's view and muffled the hysteric cries of Zelda. The trailer cradled them in Cocteauesqe tableaux; its various mounted fish and antlered Ungulates lifelessly leering at Bokasa's loathsome act. Pluto could vaguely hear Bokasa's psychotic incantations as he plumbed Zelda's innocence.
Bokasa collapsed his spent tumescence onto a threadbare couch, his legs fleshy appendages suggesting an insect queen at the center of some depraved hive, his purple and red penis at the epicenter of a Bosch-like diorama of violent, bloody debauch. Beyond the couch where Bokasa lay gasping, Peacock's headless body lay on the yellowed linoleum. One of his hands was missing, and the pinkish bone of the upper arm protruded from the flesh.
Just beyond him a hounds tooth fedora floated in a pool of blood; like a tilted chocolate crown that might serve as a dessert garnish. Beneath it, lay the head. Two jagged brown teeth perforated the upper lip. An empty gray socket betrayed a missing eyeball. The matted hair was coated with icy mud. The gaping mouth clotted with yellow mucous.
Pluto began vomiting. Oatmeal gruel mixed with bits of bacon splattered the new snow.
The revulsion and shame he associated with his repressed incestuousness and homoerotic desire were made manifest in Zelda's violation and Peacock's brutal beheading. In this twisted projection, he saw a relationship between the rape and death before him and the lie of his desire, as if recognizing the external chaos before him might somehow relieve his sense of his inner turmoil.
Pluto had never loved anyone physically. His only succor being interminable frustration. The constraints on his longing were like iron shackles, prison bars, bulletproof glass, lessons learned with limbic certainty; the reptilian brain's reaction to months and decades of feeling the shock of the prod. His response was denial, and he gazed longingly from the cell of his self, attentive, optimistically despairing, patient for the lapse of the watcher, the dangled key, the impossible pardon...existing without hope and without capitulation.
He never condemned his latent deviance. He never saw his desires as depraved, as queer, as he associated perversion with ill will.
Gathering himself, Pluto crawled into the front seat of the jeep and went to sleep.
READER BE FOREWARNED! If graphic sex and violence offend you, skip this blog. What can I say? It was a sad day when I found this manuscript. How was I to know what kind of smutty fiction I would find in Dewey’s rotting fishing creel. I’m still trying to cope with the fact that my much beloved and deceased uncle could imagine such filth. Disgusting! He was a marathon dancer, a Busby Berkeley regular, and a fine, closeted gay man. Or so I thought. So, you may ask, why am I putting this trash on my blog. Three reasons. One, Dewey would have wanted his…err…art to live on, two, I’ve got chemo brain, three, Pluto was my dad!
For R. J.
Stories From Camp Kitsch
“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”
- Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Pluto ran frantically through the poplar underbrush bearing the weight of a pursuing fury, in truth a burden where the fates of old executed their ultimate terrors, terrors born of the world's collective iniquities, transgressions--sins both mortal and venial that curse existence--terrors that no one but he could shoulder. His panting gave way to hyperventilation, which gave way to long pauses where he had no breath at all.
He clung to a massive dead birch, stripping the bark from the brickred rot disintegrating under his frozen maul. Prostrating himself before it he railed at its mute trunk, oblivious to the fatal anonymity nature ultimately guarantees.
Pushing on, he stumbled face first into a jagged stump, breaking off his two front teeth. His mind raced as the salty warm blood triggered jumbled memories of Zelda's horrifying immolation and his foster father's tongue stew. The knifing wind shearing the pinetops and smearing the thick overcast with dark streaks transformed the snow-covered swamp into a familiar place. A world beckoning to Zeke with a metallic tasting finality only he could interpret as typical. Suddenly, his troubles were irrelevant.
Stirring, he recognized the unfamiliar objects below him as his feet. They moved; he went on. An oak branch served as a crutch with which he dragged himself, sphinx-like toward the cliff. The earth moved as he did; as if they were going nowhere; and, in a moment of insight validated this parable of being. His exhaustion and desperation fed his exhilaration. He concentrated on images of his death; the shock of a stroke; the blitzkrieg heart attack; an aneuristic spasm.
When he hit the old lumber trail he found a better staff and headed for the Club road. Hearing an approaching snowmobile he dove into a thicket of tag elder. After a while, exhausted and delirious, he got to his knees and was startled by the realization of who he was; that he had an identity; that he was something more than brute animal consciousness.
Slowly, after an hour, perhaps two, he staggered on. Some three miles south, at the intersection of the Triple A road, he became disoriented and wandered in a panicky parabola toward the rising moon. One hour later he stumbled upon an isolated fishing camp on the Salmon Trout River.
He crawled between the broken down chassis of an ancient Willy's Jeep and a rusted out International Scout; passed by cords of snow covered hardwood, decrepit ice-shanties and outbuildings; and would have stopped had he known what he would see.
Pulling himself up on the Airstream's broken mirror he looked through the soot tinted oval, across the makeshift woodstove and beyond, at the sight of Bokasa raping Zelda. The translucence of the cracked glass that mediated this pathetic vision tormented his mental perception; mirroring his undeniable complicity in this unholy scene. For the first time he saw himself as another might observe him; an atavistic self-voyeur; a shunned harbinger of what was already; of a cruel life in all its terrifying clarity.
The trailer was littered with pornographic magazines and spent shell casings. Bokasa's massive back, scarred by a thousand wounds and surgeries, writhed in chiaroscuro silhouette against the setting sun and rising moon. Thrusting and pumping in the dying light, he had her pinned atop a cedar chest. Bokasa balanced himself against a stuffed deer head with his left hand while pistoning himself into her buttocks. Her doe-like legs splayed spasmodically as her beseeching arms flailed at her degradation.
Bokasa's larval girth obscured Pluto's view and muffled the hysteric cries of Zelda. The trailer cradled them in Cocteauesqe tableaux; its various mounted fish and antlered Ungulates lifelessly leering at Bokasa's loathsome act. Pluto could vaguely hear Bokasa's psychotic incantations as he plumbed Zelda's innocence.
Bokasa collapsed his spent tumescence onto a threadbare couch, his legs fleshy appendages suggesting an insect queen at the center of some depraved hive, his purple and red penis at the epicenter of a Bosch-like diorama of violent, bloody debauch. Beyond the couch where Bokasa lay gasping, Peacock's headless body lay on the yellowed linoleum. One of his hands was missing, and the pinkish bone of the upper arm protruded from the flesh.
Just beyond him a hounds tooth fedora floated in a pool of blood; like a tilted chocolate crown that might serve as a dessert garnish. Beneath it, lay the head. Two jagged brown teeth perforated the upper lip. An empty gray socket betrayed a missing eyeball. The matted hair was coated with icy mud. The gaping mouth clotted with yellow mucous.
Pluto began vomiting. Oatmeal gruel mixed with bits of bacon splattered the new snow.
The revulsion and shame he associated with his repressed incestuousness and homoerotic desire were made manifest in Zelda's violation and Peacock's brutal beheading. In this twisted projection, he saw a relationship between the rape and death before him and the lie of his desire, as if recognizing the external chaos before him might somehow relieve his sense of his inner turmoil.
Pluto had never loved anyone physically. His only succor being interminable frustration. The constraints on his longing were like iron shackles, prison bars, bulletproof glass, lessons learned with limbic certainty; the reptilian brain's reaction to months and decades of feeling the shock of the prod. His response was denial, and he gazed longingly from the cell of his self, attentive, optimistically despairing, patient for the lapse of the watcher, the dangled key, the impossible pardon...existing without hope and without capitulation.
He never condemned his latent deviance. He never saw his desires as depraved, as queer, as he associated perversion with ill will.
Gathering himself, Pluto crawled into the front seat of the jeep and went to sleep.
September 7, 2007
Stalled
9/7/07
“The American people, taking one with another. Constitute the most sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under the flag in Christiandom since the end of the Middle Ages.”
-- H. L. Mencken
Prejudices, 1922
I wrote this yesterday while waiting for my infusion that never happened.
I’ve never really kept a diary or journal before on a consistent basis. The waiting room is ¾ full. Types? Today’s group looks like a snapshot of middle America. Mostly white folks. A guy in a striped Polo shirt on a cell phone, an older gentleman with a hearing aid reading “Road and Track” magazine, 3 church-lady types talking about knitting, a young tattooed father wearing a Megadeth t-shirt playing with his ailing son, a swollen man, covered with sores in a Michigan Wolverines shirt (already there are little maize and blue Chuckys who remember 9/1 but not 9/11). Suddenly the nurse called my name, “TESSIER”! She took my vitals: WT. 198, BP. 113/75, Temp. 98.6 (some of you may recall the song by Keith). Back to waiting.
They bring in a prisoner in a wheelchair. Hand and feet bound, he is shackled across the chest. Two corrections officers (Think storm troopers from the Waffen SS) accompany him. He looks sad. I wonder: where does he live in prison? What is it like to be sick in prison? One of my chemo nurses reported having a patient express her disgust that our tax dollars were funding the treatment of prisoners.
The chemo I’m waiting for was rescheduled from Tuesday. The Neulasta shot I received during last week’s ER visit precipitated such a rise in my liver enzymes as to necessitate the postponement of my infusion. Expecting my levels to decrease, I was then re-scheduled for today. So here I sit, writing. Or, there I sat, because I’m really here, at home, transcribing what I wrote there. It says, “What if. What if the complications from having hepatitis C precluded any future chemo sessions? And what if, since the cancer is no longer detectable, the therapy was terminated? A sort of miracle. Two treatments wipe out the cancer and the debilitating effects of chemo are banished! We can all dream.
What follows is as I wrote it.
Trick question? Can you tell me your birthday, Randall?
“Ooooooo….it’s good for you, that good old fashioned medicated goo.”
Are you supposed to just sit and keep writing until something appears on the page?
Hunter Thompson would copy the great writers and, I guess, receive some kind of artistic inspiration by osmosis. As a writing teacher, I was encouraged to have the students freewrite. Now that I’m sitting here doing it, I’m wondering, what for?
Asparagus & Lilacs
Lilacs & Cicadas
Nice words, but how to use them. Hmm….
Cool of the morning, in Fall
the asparagus is
gone and frost ices
the lavender; when
the buzz and hum of
the Cicada is lost in
the crow’s echo; when
the scarecrow points
to the moon of coming
winter,
when the back
to school shoppers
wait on their laundry in
tired coffee shops; when
the automobile
exit ramp view offers
a tea leaf reading of
cigarette butts.
Whose lipstick was
This? Is it the Wall Mart
Moms? The Costco dads?
The Ikea auntie?
The bathroom stall
Politician? Who smoked
These, and why can’t
Someone rock my
Stall? Perhaps it’s
Time for an electronic shoe,
Or sandal. A series
Of lights on the sides
Would indicate my
Stall status: brown blinking
To yellow
Would signal my happiness
With the status quo.
Green to blue would flash my
Anxious, longing consent. Red
Would mean, of course,
That undercover blowjob
Busters are on the
Prowl. All beware.
Forget the infusion. The nurse just informed me that my liver enzymes are still too high.
Toodleedoo, gotta go! I’m off to an Ultrasound.
“The American people, taking one with another. Constitute the most sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under the flag in Christiandom since the end of the Middle Ages.”
-- H. L. Mencken
Prejudices, 1922
I wrote this yesterday while waiting for my infusion that never happened.
I’ve never really kept a diary or journal before on a consistent basis. The waiting room is ¾ full. Types? Today’s group looks like a snapshot of middle America. Mostly white folks. A guy in a striped Polo shirt on a cell phone, an older gentleman with a hearing aid reading “Road and Track” magazine, 3 church-lady types talking about knitting, a young tattooed father wearing a Megadeth t-shirt playing with his ailing son, a swollen man, covered with sores in a Michigan Wolverines shirt (already there are little maize and blue Chuckys who remember 9/1 but not 9/11). Suddenly the nurse called my name, “TESSIER”! She took my vitals: WT. 198, BP. 113/75, Temp. 98.6 (some of you may recall the song by Keith). Back to waiting.
They bring in a prisoner in a wheelchair. Hand and feet bound, he is shackled across the chest. Two corrections officers (Think storm troopers from the Waffen SS) accompany him. He looks sad. I wonder: where does he live in prison? What is it like to be sick in prison? One of my chemo nurses reported having a patient express her disgust that our tax dollars were funding the treatment of prisoners.
The chemo I’m waiting for was rescheduled from Tuesday. The Neulasta shot I received during last week’s ER visit precipitated such a rise in my liver enzymes as to necessitate the postponement of my infusion. Expecting my levels to decrease, I was then re-scheduled for today. So here I sit, writing. Or, there I sat, because I’m really here, at home, transcribing what I wrote there. It says, “What if. What if the complications from having hepatitis C precluded any future chemo sessions? And what if, since the cancer is no longer detectable, the therapy was terminated? A sort of miracle. Two treatments wipe out the cancer and the debilitating effects of chemo are banished! We can all dream.
What follows is as I wrote it.
Trick question? Can you tell me your birthday, Randall?
“Ooooooo….it’s good for you, that good old fashioned medicated goo.”
Are you supposed to just sit and keep writing until something appears on the page?
Hunter Thompson would copy the great writers and, I guess, receive some kind of artistic inspiration by osmosis. As a writing teacher, I was encouraged to have the students freewrite. Now that I’m sitting here doing it, I’m wondering, what for?
Asparagus & Lilacs
Lilacs & Cicadas
Nice words, but how to use them. Hmm….
Cool of the morning, in Fall
the asparagus is
gone and frost ices
the lavender; when
the buzz and hum of
the Cicada is lost in
the crow’s echo; when
the scarecrow points
to the moon of coming
winter,
when the back
to school shoppers
wait on their laundry in
tired coffee shops; when
the automobile
exit ramp view offers
a tea leaf reading of
cigarette butts.
Whose lipstick was
This? Is it the Wall Mart
Moms? The Costco dads?
The Ikea auntie?
The bathroom stall
Politician? Who smoked
These, and why can’t
Someone rock my
Stall? Perhaps it’s
Time for an electronic shoe,
Or sandal. A series
Of lights on the sides
Would indicate my
Stall status: brown blinking
To yellow
Would signal my happiness
With the status quo.
Green to blue would flash my
Anxious, longing consent. Red
Would mean, of course,
That undercover blowjob
Busters are on the
Prowl. All beware.
Forget the infusion. The nurse just informed me that my liver enzymes are still too high.
Toodleedoo, gotta go! I’m off to an Ultrasound.
September 5, 2007
Lazy Cicada Calm
8/5/07
Hello all. The good news is the cancer is undetectable, if not gone. While I’m ecstatic about this, I’m trying to keep an even keel. Given that I have 3 cycles of therapy after tomorrow, I need to focus my attention on the chemo and dealing with its side-effects. For whatever reasons, I feel less invalid, or, perhaps, less sense of urgency about things. Tomorrow is infusion #3. Friday FUBAR plays the Club Heidelberg, 6-8.
Peace & Health - Randy
Hello all. The good news is the cancer is undetectable, if not gone. While I’m ecstatic about this, I’m trying to keep an even keel. Given that I have 3 cycles of therapy after tomorrow, I need to focus my attention on the chemo and dealing with its side-effects. For whatever reasons, I feel less invalid, or, perhaps, less sense of urgency about things. Tomorrow is infusion #3. Friday FUBAR plays the Club Heidelberg, 6-8.
Peace & Health - Randy
September 4, 2007
Gratitude
04/08/07
“That man is happiest
Who lives from day to day and asks no more,
Garnering the simple goodness of a life.”
-- Euripides
Hecuba, 425 B.C.
Rad/Nuc Results xxxxxxx– TESSIER, RANDALL LOUIS User: xxxxxxx
Reg#: xxxxxxxx Name: TESSIER, RANDALL LOUIS DOB: 12/16/xxxx Sex: M Age: xx Years User Name: xxxxxxx
Radiology and Nuclear Medicine Results Text
Status: Finalized
Exam: NM T PET SCAN Exam Date: 8/31/2007 11:56:00
Study: FDG PET TUMOR CLINICAL dated 8/31/2007
INDICATION FOR STUDY: 56-year-old-man with a history of lymphoma. Evaluate interval change.
PRIOR FDG PET STUDIES: 7/19/2007
FINDINGS: There has been marked interval improvement of disease throughout the chest, abdomen and pelvis, consistent with complete metabolic response to therapy. There are an increased number of normal sized, non-FDG avid lymph nodes in the mediastinum and retrocrural regions. There is increased FDG uptake throughout the axial skeleton, most consistent with reactive change.
IMPRESSION: 1. Complete metabolic response to therapy
2. Minimal residual non-enlarged, non-FDG avid Mediastinal and retrocrural lymph nodes.
“That man is happiest
Who lives from day to day and asks no more,
Garnering the simple goodness of a life.”
-- Euripides
Hecuba, 425 B.C.
Rad/Nuc Results xxxxxxx– TESSIER, RANDALL LOUIS User: xxxxxxx
Reg#: xxxxxxxx Name: TESSIER, RANDALL LOUIS DOB: 12/16/xxxx Sex: M Age: xx Years User Name: xxxxxxx
Radiology and Nuclear Medicine Results Text
Status: Finalized
Exam: NM T PET SCAN Exam Date: 8/31/2007 11:56:00
Study: FDG PET TUMOR CLINICAL dated 8/31/2007
INDICATION FOR STUDY: 56-year-old-man with a history of lymphoma. Evaluate interval change.
PRIOR FDG PET STUDIES: 7/19/2007
FINDINGS: There has been marked interval improvement of disease throughout the chest, abdomen and pelvis, consistent with complete metabolic response to therapy. There are an increased number of normal sized, non-FDG avid lymph nodes in the mediastinum and retrocrural regions. There is increased FDG uptake throughout the axial skeleton, most consistent with reactive change.
IMPRESSION: 1. Complete metabolic response to therapy
2. Minimal residual non-enlarged, non-FDG avid Mediastinal and retrocrural lymph nodes.
September 3, 2007
Neutropenia
“From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.”
-- Charles Algernon Swinburne 1837-1909
This entry covers the period from Wednesday, August 29 through Saturday, September 1. (You know, the day Michigan lost to Appalachian State)
I had a bad night. Around 4 PM yesterday (Wednesday) I began to feel feverish. I had sweats, cold chills, and my temperature was 101. Having been told to call the clinic if my temp exceeded 100.5, I dutifully phoned Dr. Ahmed’s nurse, Denise. She asked if I lived close enough to come in for a blood draw. Assuring her that I did, I jumped in my truck and raced for the clinic. You’re probably asking why a temperature of 101 would merit this kind of caution? One of the side effects of chemotherapy is neutropenia. Neutropenia is a condition marked by an abnormally low level of neutrophils (the white blood cells responsible for fighting bacterial infections). What this means is that bacterial exposure the healthy person is unaffected by can become life threatening in a person undergoing chemotherapy. As I’m pulling into the parking structure I get a call from Denise saying, Dr. Ahmed wants you to go to the emergency room. I’m thinking, what? You want me to go to emergency, be evaluated, and possibly be admitted! No way, I say, am I going to subject myself to an atmosphere of disease--an environment crawling with who knows what virus’ and bacteria--that can only compromise my already inadequate immune system. After speaking with Dr. Ahmed, Denise calls me back. She instructs me to have my blood drawn, get a chest x-ray and report to the University of Michigan Cancer Center (UMCC) Urgent Care area. Hearing this, I race into the clinic, and get the blood draw and x-ray; what I forget to do, however, is register with Urgent Care. Boy was that a mistake. Before I say why, allow me to briefly explain what I mean by “bad night.” Finally, the fever, chills, and night sweats predicted by the literature on chemo and its side effects were upon me. Along with the drenched linens and fever dreams comes that futile attempt to use those same wet sheets for warmth. At around 5 A.M. the fever broke.
That morning (Thursday) my temp was normal and I felt better. First thing, I e-mailed Dr. Ahmed, asking her if she thought the chemo was related to the cancer, the chemo, or both. So, you may ask, why was it a mistake that I didn’t go to urgent care? Because they didn’t have a chance to evaluate me, and given that the Urgent Care Clinic was booked the next day, it was decided that I needed to go to the emergency room. So the first call I got that morning was from another of Dr. Ahmed’s nurses, Thecla, who, repeating Denise’s instructions from the day before, advised me to report immediately to the emergency room. When I adamantly refused, she coolly informed me that my ANC (absolute neutrophil count) was so low that a failure to comply might easily result in death. She went on to say that my neutropenic condition would guarantee special treatment, assuring me that I would be isolated and have priority in the suffering queue. I told her the only way I might consider it was if Dr. Ahmed herself called me. While I think the world of my doctor, and the U-MCC, methinks the idea that a neutropenic patient would be well served by going to the emergency room seems flawed. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Dr. Ahmed called. Her thought was this: the combination of a high fever and a low white blood cell count required that I receive infusions of antibiotics (as a prophylactic measure) as well as an injection to boost my ANC. She also advised that I resign myself to being admitted for the night. Reluctantly, I said that I would go in, but any IV treatment would have to be administered there. If it came to staying the night I would walk. At 1 PM I entered the emergency room. I left at 7PM. What follows is a description of that time.
After taking my vitals (normal temp and blood pressure) they took me back. Firstly, be advised, good doctors, neutropenics are not isolated, and are given no preferential treatment. If anything, I would say they are probably pushed down the list of those in need of urgent care, since someone in a serious car accident would probably demand more immediate attention. Which, of course, puts the neutropenic in a position of being exposed to a host of germs for an extended period of time. I was taken to a room with a privacy pull curtain. This cubicle, like the others surrounding the medical personal area afforded little privacy, and absolutely no escape from the sights and sounds of U-M Emergency. There is no escaping the cacophony of woe and misery served up by a part of the hospital that, because of our health care system, is little more than a way for the poor and socio-economically disadvantaged to obtain medical treatment. How could this place not be a veritable cauldron of contagion. If you recall my description of the latrine on the Northwest Jet to Marquette, this was worse. The nurse who escorted me noticed a sign keeping the door ajar, which said, “Wet Floor.” If one didn’t actually step inside, which my escort and I did, the assumption would be that the place had just been cleaned. We looked at each other much as if Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, had just stepped out of there. Whoa Nellie! By the by, I did receive two separate infusions of antibiotic, and an injection of Neupogen, a drug that induces the bone marrow to produce white blood cells.
At 9 the next morning (Friday) I reported for the CT/PET Scan I had consented to as a part of a research study. Positron emission tomography is a diagnostic tool that identifies areas in the body that are affected by non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It evaluates metabolic activity in different parts of the body using a radioactive isotope. Here’s what it’s like. I was taken to a room (with a private bathroom) that accommodated two subjects. A partition separated two comfortable reclining chairs (with separate TV access) where the patients are prepped for the procedure. The first step, part of the CT diagnostic, required that I drink an approximately 12 ounce bottle of a contrast agent, which enhances the image of the organs. How bad is it? Not that bad, though I suspect it becomes more dreadful with repeated tests and as one becomes sicker. It has a chalky consistency, which is badly masked by a pseudo-vanilla flavoring. After the body is given a half hour to assimilate this malty treat, the technologist administers an injection of a short-lived radioactive tracer isotope. This metabolically active agent, a sugar (fluorodeoxyglucose), then becomes concentrated in the tissues. One hour later, and after a required purging of the bladder, I was positioned on a flat examination table and moved into the center of a PET scanner—a doughnut like machine, which detects and records the energy given off by the tracer. With the aid of a computer, this energy is converted into 3-dimensional images. OK, enough science, let’s talk about the discomfort factors. Consider the positioning: after a pillow was placed under my legs, I was instructed to place both arms over my head, in a kind of extended Yoga position, after which my body was wrapped in a cocoon-like canvas sheet and velcroed in such a way as to aid in my not moving. While this may at first seem easily tolerable, know that the test takes 35 minutes. Regarding the claustrophobia factor, as one is moved, facing upward, through the tunnel-like machine, the roof is approximately 5-6 inches from the nose. While this was less uncomfortable than my first PET (my cancer symptoms, pain in the abdominal lymph nodes, was such that the position itself was painful) it was still a less than pleasant experience. I don’t know how typical it is, but on both occasions I fell into a nap-like sleep for a bit of the time. I can’t say how long I was asleep, but it wasn’t long enough. Upon waking and, in a moment of panic, (the disorientation was such that I was unsure of where I was) I struggled against the urge to cry out and break free. Given my age and condition,I can only wonder at, and admire, the stoic acceptance which those patients more infirmed than myself routinely exhibit. I felt better as the day progressed, and had a pleasant evening.
At about 3 in the morning (Late Friday Night) I was awakened by an excruciating pain of unknown origin. Much like the symptoms that led to my diagnosis, it seemed to be evenly distributed between my kidneys. In fact it was my hips. I would describe it as throbbing and constant, as in a pulse. It also flared across my sternum, causing me to think the cancer might be raging out of control. Being familiar with the myriad side-effects associated with chemotherapy, the psychological fear of not knowing where the pain was coming from, combined with the extreme nature of the pain itself, caused me to reluctantly agree with Brigitte that we should go to the emergency room. This ER experience, only two days after my Wednesday visist, was very different. Aside from the obvious fact, at least to me, that I was there for a tangible purpose (to relieve a horrible pain), rather than the intangible possibility that I might get sick, it also took less time and had a positive outcome. Once admitted (the room had a door), and upon seeing my agonized state, I was put on an IV and promptly given an injection of Dilaudid, a powerful narcotic. As a student of language, I have always thought that certain human experiences, like the sensation of pain, grief, or sexual ecstasy, are, in a way, ineffable. That is to say, they cannot be described in words. And so it was with the wave of relief that descended on me. Suddenly, I became chatty with the doctors, profoundly thanking them for delivering me from pain. While they evaluated my urine, bloodwork, and chest x-ray, Brigitte, tearful, and fearful of the “unknown origin” aspect of the pain, consoled me that everything would be all right, although I’m not so sure she believed this at the time. As it turns out, she was right. Filgrastim, trade name Neupogen, is classified as a colony stimulating factor (biologic response modifier) which stimulates the production of granulocytes (a type of white blood cell), in therapies that may cause low white blood cell counts. It is used to prevent infections and neutropenic fevers caused by chemotherapy. What the docs found was this: a side-effect of filgrastim (occurring in about 10-29% of patients receiving this medicine) is severe bone pain. More importantly, we were informed that not only is there no relationship between the presence or severity of side-effects and the effectiveness of the medication, but that my white blood cell count was now normal and that I would be summarily discharged. Finding out the cause and consequence of the pain dispatched my fear that the treatment might have to be halted, or readjusted; or worse, the awful dread that the pain was directly related to the cancer, having nothing to do with the chemotherapy or its associated medications.
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.”
-- Charles Algernon Swinburne 1837-1909
This entry covers the period from Wednesday, August 29 through Saturday, September 1. (You know, the day Michigan lost to Appalachian State)
I had a bad night. Around 4 PM yesterday (Wednesday) I began to feel feverish. I had sweats, cold chills, and my temperature was 101. Having been told to call the clinic if my temp exceeded 100.5, I dutifully phoned Dr. Ahmed’s nurse, Denise. She asked if I lived close enough to come in for a blood draw. Assuring her that I did, I jumped in my truck and raced for the clinic. You’re probably asking why a temperature of 101 would merit this kind of caution? One of the side effects of chemotherapy is neutropenia. Neutropenia is a condition marked by an abnormally low level of neutrophils (the white blood cells responsible for fighting bacterial infections). What this means is that bacterial exposure the healthy person is unaffected by can become life threatening in a person undergoing chemotherapy. As I’m pulling into the parking structure I get a call from Denise saying, Dr. Ahmed wants you to go to the emergency room. I’m thinking, what? You want me to go to emergency, be evaluated, and possibly be admitted! No way, I say, am I going to subject myself to an atmosphere of disease--an environment crawling with who knows what virus’ and bacteria--that can only compromise my already inadequate immune system. After speaking with Dr. Ahmed, Denise calls me back. She instructs me to have my blood drawn, get a chest x-ray and report to the University of Michigan Cancer Center (UMCC) Urgent Care area. Hearing this, I race into the clinic, and get the blood draw and x-ray; what I forget to do, however, is register with Urgent Care. Boy was that a mistake. Before I say why, allow me to briefly explain what I mean by “bad night.” Finally, the fever, chills, and night sweats predicted by the literature on chemo and its side effects were upon me. Along with the drenched linens and fever dreams comes that futile attempt to use those same wet sheets for warmth. At around 5 A.M. the fever broke.
That morning (Thursday) my temp was normal and I felt better. First thing, I e-mailed Dr. Ahmed, asking her if she thought the chemo was related to the cancer, the chemo, or both. So, you may ask, why was it a mistake that I didn’t go to urgent care? Because they didn’t have a chance to evaluate me, and given that the Urgent Care Clinic was booked the next day, it was decided that I needed to go to the emergency room. So the first call I got that morning was from another of Dr. Ahmed’s nurses, Thecla, who, repeating Denise’s instructions from the day before, advised me to report immediately to the emergency room. When I adamantly refused, she coolly informed me that my ANC (absolute neutrophil count) was so low that a failure to comply might easily result in death. She went on to say that my neutropenic condition would guarantee special treatment, assuring me that I would be isolated and have priority in the suffering queue. I told her the only way I might consider it was if Dr. Ahmed herself called me. While I think the world of my doctor, and the U-MCC, methinks the idea that a neutropenic patient would be well served by going to the emergency room seems flawed. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Dr. Ahmed called. Her thought was this: the combination of a high fever and a low white blood cell count required that I receive infusions of antibiotics (as a prophylactic measure) as well as an injection to boost my ANC. She also advised that I resign myself to being admitted for the night. Reluctantly, I said that I would go in, but any IV treatment would have to be administered there. If it came to staying the night I would walk. At 1 PM I entered the emergency room. I left at 7PM. What follows is a description of that time.
After taking my vitals (normal temp and blood pressure) they took me back. Firstly, be advised, good doctors, neutropenics are not isolated, and are given no preferential treatment. If anything, I would say they are probably pushed down the list of those in need of urgent care, since someone in a serious car accident would probably demand more immediate attention. Which, of course, puts the neutropenic in a position of being exposed to a host of germs for an extended period of time. I was taken to a room with a privacy pull curtain. This cubicle, like the others surrounding the medical personal area afforded little privacy, and absolutely no escape from the sights and sounds of U-M Emergency. There is no escaping the cacophony of woe and misery served up by a part of the hospital that, because of our health care system, is little more than a way for the poor and socio-economically disadvantaged to obtain medical treatment. How could this place not be a veritable cauldron of contagion. If you recall my description of the latrine on the Northwest Jet to Marquette, this was worse. The nurse who escorted me noticed a sign keeping the door ajar, which said, “Wet Floor.” If one didn’t actually step inside, which my escort and I did, the assumption would be that the place had just been cleaned. We looked at each other much as if Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, had just stepped out of there. Whoa Nellie! By the by, I did receive two separate infusions of antibiotic, and an injection of Neupogen, a drug that induces the bone marrow to produce white blood cells.
At 9 the next morning (Friday) I reported for the CT/PET Scan I had consented to as a part of a research study. Positron emission tomography is a diagnostic tool that identifies areas in the body that are affected by non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It evaluates metabolic activity in different parts of the body using a radioactive isotope. Here’s what it’s like. I was taken to a room (with a private bathroom) that accommodated two subjects. A partition separated two comfortable reclining chairs (with separate TV access) where the patients are prepped for the procedure. The first step, part of the CT diagnostic, required that I drink an approximately 12 ounce bottle of a contrast agent, which enhances the image of the organs. How bad is it? Not that bad, though I suspect it becomes more dreadful with repeated tests and as one becomes sicker. It has a chalky consistency, which is badly masked by a pseudo-vanilla flavoring. After the body is given a half hour to assimilate this malty treat, the technologist administers an injection of a short-lived radioactive tracer isotope. This metabolically active agent, a sugar (fluorodeoxyglucose), then becomes concentrated in the tissues. One hour later, and after a required purging of the bladder, I was positioned on a flat examination table and moved into the center of a PET scanner—a doughnut like machine, which detects and records the energy given off by the tracer. With the aid of a computer, this energy is converted into 3-dimensional images. OK, enough science, let’s talk about the discomfort factors. Consider the positioning: after a pillow was placed under my legs, I was instructed to place both arms over my head, in a kind of extended Yoga position, after which my body was wrapped in a cocoon-like canvas sheet and velcroed in such a way as to aid in my not moving. While this may at first seem easily tolerable, know that the test takes 35 minutes. Regarding the claustrophobia factor, as one is moved, facing upward, through the tunnel-like machine, the roof is approximately 5-6 inches from the nose. While this was less uncomfortable than my first PET (my cancer symptoms, pain in the abdominal lymph nodes, was such that the position itself was painful) it was still a less than pleasant experience. I don’t know how typical it is, but on both occasions I fell into a nap-like sleep for a bit of the time. I can’t say how long I was asleep, but it wasn’t long enough. Upon waking and, in a moment of panic, (the disorientation was such that I was unsure of where I was) I struggled against the urge to cry out and break free. Given my age and condition,I can only wonder at, and admire, the stoic acceptance which those patients more infirmed than myself routinely exhibit. I felt better as the day progressed, and had a pleasant evening.
At about 3 in the morning (Late Friday Night) I was awakened by an excruciating pain of unknown origin. Much like the symptoms that led to my diagnosis, it seemed to be evenly distributed between my kidneys. In fact it was my hips. I would describe it as throbbing and constant, as in a pulse. It also flared across my sternum, causing me to think the cancer might be raging out of control. Being familiar with the myriad side-effects associated with chemotherapy, the psychological fear of not knowing where the pain was coming from, combined with the extreme nature of the pain itself, caused me to reluctantly agree with Brigitte that we should go to the emergency room. This ER experience, only two days after my Wednesday visist, was very different. Aside from the obvious fact, at least to me, that I was there for a tangible purpose (to relieve a horrible pain), rather than the intangible possibility that I might get sick, it also took less time and had a positive outcome. Once admitted (the room had a door), and upon seeing my agonized state, I was put on an IV and promptly given an injection of Dilaudid, a powerful narcotic. As a student of language, I have always thought that certain human experiences, like the sensation of pain, grief, or sexual ecstasy, are, in a way, ineffable. That is to say, they cannot be described in words. And so it was with the wave of relief that descended on me. Suddenly, I became chatty with the doctors, profoundly thanking them for delivering me from pain. While they evaluated my urine, bloodwork, and chest x-ray, Brigitte, tearful, and fearful of the “unknown origin” aspect of the pain, consoled me that everything would be all right, although I’m not so sure she believed this at the time. As it turns out, she was right. Filgrastim, trade name Neupogen, is classified as a colony stimulating factor (biologic response modifier) which stimulates the production of granulocytes (a type of white blood cell), in therapies that may cause low white blood cell counts. It is used to prevent infections and neutropenic fevers caused by chemotherapy. What the docs found was this: a side-effect of filgrastim (occurring in about 10-29% of patients receiving this medicine) is severe bone pain. More importantly, we were informed that not only is there no relationship between the presence or severity of side-effects and the effectiveness of the medication, but that my white blood cell count was now normal and that I would be summarily discharged. Finding out the cause and consequence of the pain dispatched my fear that the treatment might have to be halted, or readjusted; or worse, the awful dread that the pain was directly related to the cancer, having nothing to do with the chemotherapy or its associated medications.
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