House of Dynamite

When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about nuclear war.  I'm sure I'm not the only person who did.  I was probably eight or nine when they started.  Missiles flying overhead, big mushroom clouds exploding.  I had a couple in which I felt my body dissolve as it was vaporized.  But nuclear war is so 1980s, isn't it?  We have much bigger things to be afraid of.  Like global pandemics.  Measles making a resurgence.  The world economy teetering on the edge of a crash.  So there really isn't time to deal with nuclear war.  We're just gonna have to hope that never happens.  

Except.  Have you guys seen “House of Dynamite” on Netflix yet? If not, go watch it and come right back, and we'll discuss. I'm finding it frustrating in the extreme that my friends and family members have not seen it yet.  Or won't see it, and I have no one to discuss it with. I've been going over the moral implications for days, and I've seen it three times.

Seriously, if you are going to see “House of Dynamite,” DO NOT READ ANY MORE OF THIS BLOG POST. I am going to spoil the hell out of it. I am even going to discuss the controversial ending which is kind of the whole point. So if you want to see the movie unspoiled, read no further.

(Sidebar here: Jared Harris does an amazing turn as Secretary of Defense Baker.  He was so good I looked up what else he's been in.  He was a nuclear scientist in the amazing miniseries "Chernobyl." He also Dr. Moriarity in the Sherlock Holmes movies with Robert Downey, Jr.  And he's been in two or three things I wouldn't see for all the tea in Afghanistan.) 

Still with me? Okay then. I'm gonna summarize the plot just briefly here. A missile is launched at the United States from an unknown actor somewhere in the Pacific. Maybe Russia, maybe China, but as things develop, most of the characters agree that it was probably North Korea. (But uncertainty remains.) Maybe it was an accident, but most of the characters think it was probably not. (But uncertainty remains.) Anyway, we attempt to shoot it down with one of our “Star Wars” missile defense warheads, but we miss. (“Star Wars” only has a sixty percent success rate on its best day. As Jake, the deputy secretary, explains to the President, “It's like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.”)

So the missile is still inbound and is going to hit somewhere in the Midwest, probably Chicago, in about fifteen minutes. There is no time to evacuate. Unless the missile is a dud or fails to detonate, Chicago and its ten million people and God alone knows how many downwind are gone. Now the question becomes, what do we do about it? Or rather what does the President, played admirably by Idris Elba, do about it?

There is literally a menu of options. There is a real life full time guy whose job is to follow the President around, all day, every day, with a black book of plans for nuclear war. (They call it “the football.”) The book has every imagined and conceived scenario by which we would launch nuclear missiles at other countries, and whom, and what targets. In the event of such an emergency, the president picks a page as to the response he or she thinks is best warranted, and reads the code to the Strategic Defense Command. The responses range from none at all to all-out nuclear holocaust.

Jake, the deputy secretary, is convinced that the best response is none at all. Even if the missile launch wasn't a mistake, hitting back would light the whole conflagration, antagonize our enemies, lead to further missile launches, and end life on Earth. The general of the Strategic Defense Command points out that if we fail to neutralize our enemies now, while they are still in port and not airborne, we will forever lose the opportunity to do so. The guy with the nuclear football thinks the President should pick from one of two of the most thorough retaliatory responses, eliminate all of our enemies at once, and hope that some of the Americans survive. So really, whether he chooses not to launch at all or launches everything we have, the outcome may be the same. 

And then we have the President. An ordinary guy at his core, as most of them are. A guy with no more moral foundation or understanding of ethical implications than probably any of us have, even if he has to wrestle with bigger questions from time to time. Ultimately he has to decide. What is he going to do? And here is why the ending is controversial. The movie does not tell you. We see the twenty minutes unfold from three different perspectives, the Strategic Defense Command asks the President for his decision, and then the screen fades to black.

Having not found any living people to discuss this with, I have been reduced to seeking opinions online. And honestly, I am not sure what those people were looking for. Everybody seemed to be universally disappointed. Did they want to see Chicago blow up in all its glory? Did they want to see our missiles racing across the planet to eliminate half of life on Earth, or maybe all of it? I don't know. However, I thought the ending was entirely appropriate. Because I think the point that the filmmakers were trying to make was, what would you do?

And this is the question I’ve been asking myself for days. If I were the President, what would I do? I would like to think there is a simple answer and that I would simply refuse to start a nuclear war. But. Hasn't someone else already started one? If I fail to retaliate at all, am I not communicating to our enemies that there simply aren't any consequences? Sure, you can launch your missile at the United States. Just claim it's a mistake and they won't hit you back. Or, as one of the other characters pointed out, this could be a feint. Send one missile, and if we don't retaliate, send fifty more.

(We don't have enough Star Wars missiles to handle fifty more. We only actually have around fifty to begin with, and at our rate of success, 40% of the missiles would get through. That's at least twenty more cities. And that's only if they send fifty more missiles. What if they send a hundred more? The Russians could probably send a hundred more.  China could probably send a hundred more.  North Korea could probably only send fifty, but we don't know that for sure, now do we?)

Okay.  Maybe a limited response just to North Korea would be appropriate.  But that would kill 26 million innocent people who just happen to live in North Korea, to say nothing of most of the population of South Korea and that whole part of the world.  And in the movie, at least, there was a lot of uncertainty as to whether North Korea was the actor.  What if it was Russia, blaming North Korea? What if we killed 26 million North Koreans for nothing? 

The President says that it's like we built a house of dynamite. We knew it was dangerous, but we kept living in it year after year. Somehow we convinced ourselves it would never explode. And the world has only become more complex and hostile since then, and the missiles haven't gone anywhere. The possibility that the bad guys, whoever they be, have their hands on nuclear weapons go up literally every day. So somebody, somewhere, someday, is going to have to make the decision that Idris Elba struggles with.

So again, what would you do? Would you fall back upon the ultimate moral principle and refuse to launch? Great. I like you. But. Somewhere out there is a guy or a gal who believes that our enemies are so evil that they must be eliminated even if that eliminates all life on Earth. (Because of course, then the rapture would happen, and all the good people would go to heaven.) Who is that person? Is he or she in office now? How would you know?

If this scenario were to happen today or tomorrow, we're screwed.  We have a President who wouldn't hesitate for a second to destroy life on Earth because he doesn't seem to believe that anything bad can happen to him personally.  And why should he? Nothing ever has.  He's convicted of rape, he avoids jail.  He is sued and loses, he ties the judgments up in courts for years.  Every weekend he flies to Florida on the taxpayer's dime to play golf while families don't get their SNAP benefits.  (He embezzled the money.  That's why he's fighting this so hard.  We're going to find out the money is gone and he won't be able to explain what happened to it.)  But we elected this guy.  (Yes, I know.  You personally did not vote for him.  But you live in a country with a lot of people who did.)  We elected him again, after all the shit he pulled the first time.  So what does that say about us?  Are we sure we aren't the sort of people who would nuke the whole world?

Anyway.  Still thinking about it.  I hope it never happens.

On Being Fat In America In Our Time

So I'm sorry and pleased at the same time to report that the Office Ghost did not follow us to the new building.  In fact, the new building is both bland and utterly void of psychic energy.  Which is good, in a way (we had a number of people over the last few years abruptly quit with no notice and I can't help but wonder if they Saw Something, or, like in my case, Heard Something).  Plus, with supernatural entities, you just never know what they're gonna do.  I mean, besides scare the bejabbers out of you, which it did to me, twice.  

But, it's also disappointing, in a way.  I for one was very curious, once I realized that I was in fact experiencing something and it wasn't just another case of "Well hey, I'm in a haunted place and I'm not seeing anything, guess I can't see them."  It was because of the Office Ghost that I discovered I can hear them, and what's more, I've been hearing them my whole life.  I just can't see them, for whatever reason.  Hey, I also can't see to read without glasses.  Every person is different.  

Anyway, so long, Office Ghost.  I hope you found what you were looking for, and if not, I hope you scare the bejabbers out of the next tenants, whoever they be. 

Speaking of bejabbers and scaredness, it is the Spooky Season, and it is time once again to think about Mortality.  I mean, if you want.  I don't think it ever hurts to ponder that none of us have unlimited time on Earth and what we still want to do, experience and feel.  If there's something you've been putting off, move that to the top of your list.  You could get hit by a bus and die tomorrow.  Some of us, in fact, have serious medical conditions and are not looking at a lot more years.  I personally was told by a doctor that I'd be dead by February of 2026, so I have to live until at least March so I can flip him off. 

 

That was only the most recent prediction of my demise.  There have been several.  The one before that told me I wouldn't live past 50.  (I was 53 at the time.)  The reason for this is not kidney disease, or diabetes, or hypertension, all of which I have.  The reason is that I'm fat.

Fat. Not a little on the heavy side, not plump, not zaftig, not curvy.  Fat.  I weigh more than 300 pounds.  People usually don't know that and put me in the mid-250s, but anyway, I am fat.  I have been fat since I was, oh, about nine, and I'm going to die fat.  

But wait! screams the panicked, fatphobic Voice of America. There are GLP-1s now!  You can be cured! Uh, back up.  Being fat is not a disease. It is a condition of the body.  There is a range of body types, and I happen to be at one end of it.  Some people are naturally very skinny.  (There's a woman in my office who I swear would disappear if she turned sideways.) Some are fat, and most are in the middle.  There have always been fat people.  We have paintings.  We have letters.  Being fat even used to be super fashionable, back when it meant you were rich and not of poor moral character.  

I have some bad news.  There are no long term studies on users of GLP-1s.  The longest study done tapped out at four years, after which most of the participants had started to regain weight and a whopping 89% of the test subjects had dropped out of the study because they had stopped taking the medication for various reasons.  

Also, GLP-1s are not for everybody.  In my case they blocked absorption of all my mental health meds, sent me flying through a figurative windshield at 95 mph and had me convinced that I was going to have to stop working and go on disability because I could not get a fucking thing done. That was a fun couple of weeks.  I will not be doing that again.  By the way, this can happen to anybody taking any other med for any reason.  Google "Ozempic pregnancies" to see how this works.  If you are taking any other medication for any health condition whatsoever, and your doctor wants you on a GLP-1, you MUST be monitored to make sure your meds are still working.  Do not skip this step.

GLP-1s are only the latest innovations that claim they are going to cure fat people.  The one before that was bariatric surgery, which is still practiced.  However, bariatric surgery patients regain the weight at the same rate as other people who lost weight by any other method.  Within six years, most have regained 50% or more of the weight lost and some regain all of it and more. 

Anyway, I am fat, and I am not going to try to lose weight.  I have already done that and the net result was that I gained it all back plus more.  This is the same net result that about 90% of the population experiences within five years of losing the weight, so people who try to lose weight end up fatter and with poorer muscle mass each and every time.  Plus, there is measurable heart and lung damage, which is almost certainly why fat people supposedly die young.  (I mean, to test that, they would need to find a bunch of fat people who have never tried to lose weight and follow them for twenty years. But there are no such people.) Combine that with the notoriously bad medical care that fat people get, and it's no wonder fat people have a shorter life expectancy.  

Do I wish I'd figured this out when I was in my 20s and only weighed about 180?  Sure.  But Everybody was still telling me I was too fat, so I must not be skinny enough, so I had to keep trying.  I have lost 30 pounds and regained 40-45 about twenty times, by my estimate. I figured out the results were never permanent about ten years ago, and my weight has been stable since then.  Which, considering I've been on antipsychotics for 20 years, is practically a miracle.  (Antipsychotics and antidepressants are notorious for causing weight gain, even when all other factors are controlled.) The only change in my weight that whole time was six months before my knee surgery, when I gained 25 pounds, largely because I couldn't walk.  Then I had the surgery and lost 25 pounds.  Which just goes to show something or other.  

Anyway, I am cool with this.  They make plus size coffins, and even if I weighed 100 pounds I'd still be looking at a shortened life span because of the kidney disease.  

The problem is everybody else.  It is still okay, in certain circles, to make fun of or gossip about fat people.  It is also somehow okay to walk up to a total stranger and give them diet advice. The weight loss industry took in $75 billion last year trying to convince people that if they just follow this plan they're about to sell you, you! too! can lose weight.  They'd stop making all that money if people just shrugged and said, "Well, okay, I'm fat."  So there's a vested interest in keeping the gravy train going.  Anybody who nags somebody to lose weight, puts a kid on a diet, denies somebody medical care because they "just need to lose some weight" (this happens a lot) or puts somebody down because they are not skinny is working for the diet industrial complex.  So are all the temporarily skinny people who get on social media and gush about how they lost ___ number of pounds and if I can do it anyone can!!" as if that's anything that can be predicted.

It's also wholly untrue.  If I told you "I learned to play the bagpipes, and if I can do it anyone can," you'd believe me and take up the bagpipes, right?  Right.  I mean, this may come as a news flash, but all of us can't do everything.  Nobody, for another example, has ever swum like Michael Phelps, and probably no one ever will again.  If Michael Phelps said, "If I won eight gold Olympic medals, anyone can," we'd all laugh at him.  Some people can sing. Some people can write.  Some people are really good with numbers, or logistics, or any number of other things.  But we all don't have to do everything.  I, for example, hire a mechanic to change my oil.  Because they can do it and I can't.

Never assume that other people can do what you can do.  Also, never assume that other people experienced what you experienced.  A black child of a single mom with 3 jobs growing up poor in the Bronx is not going to have the same experience as a rich white child who goes to private schools and has a nanny, and it's ridiculous to assume they do.  (The black child also has a much better chance of being both malnourished and fat.  Money is irrevocably tied to weight gain, or lack thereof.) In fact, just don't assume shit.  If you want to know why a person does something or acts a certain way, try asking them.   

Anyway. I'm fat.  I'm cool with it.  

I just wish the rest of the planet would fucking relax about it, too.  

The Tale of Ozzy Osbourne and the North Dakota State Fair

It’s too bad this blog software doesn’t let you change fonts, because doesn’t that blog title practically scream that it should be dripping blood red letters? And maybe with a scrolling gothic T and a pair of capital Os? It should also have a couple of bats flapping around at the corners. Blogger, you need to improve your graphic interface.

(And Jen, you need to be on another platform, like LiveJournal or Substack or something that can be monetized. Not that I update this thing often enough to be monetized.)

Anyway, we received the sad news today that rock idol Ozzy Osbourne, he of biting the head off a live bat and summoning “demons” (actually, dancers in costumes) onstage, has gone on to the Garden of Beautiful Souls. RIP, Your Ozzness. Mr. Osbourne had probably the craziest 76 years of anyone who has ever walked this planet, and if I die having done half the stuff he did, I hope somebody stopped me fairly early on and got me appropriate treatment. 

I cannot possibly pen a fitting tribute to Mr. Ozz in this space.  I am instead reduced to telling you the above-titled tale. Because really, it needs retelling.

Circa 1984, I was about fifteen years old and in North Dakota for part of the summer with my cousins. They lived in Minot, which is next to the Souris River. It has an air base, a Great Northern Railway hub and a couple of good hospitals, but really, not a whole lot else to recommend it. It does, however, have the North Dakota State Fairgrounds, and it just happened to be mid-July, which is fair time.

You guys probably don’t really remember the Satanic Panic of the early 80s, but I do, and let me tell you, it was quite a thing. It started with this professional hoaxter writing a book about a woman named Michelle, and kind of exploded into the public consciousness with the McMartin Preschool trial in Los Angeles. And to just illustrate how crazy all of this got, three people who (as it turned out) were perfectly innocent ended up getting life sentences because of what a bunch of freaked out adults coached out of two and three year old kids who were still learning English. Really quickly, the story was that all the kids were being sexually abused as part of a Satanic cult. I’m not sure why a Satanic cult; child abuse all by itself is horrible enough.

Lest you think this thing has finally petered out, I was in San Diego in the early 2000s and it was still going on then. There was, in fact, a huge high-profile trial of a mentally divergent man named Dale Akiki. You can Google him if you want. After a seven-week trial, Akiki was acquitted of forty-seven counts of child sexual abuse, torture, attempted murder and animal mutilation. The acquittal was a total shock to prosecutors and absolutely no surprise whatsoever to anybody who was actually following the case.

Among the allegations was that Akiki, who stood about 5’4”, slaughtered a giraffe and an elephant in front of the kids to terrify them into not talking. Mind you, nobody pulled up the carpet to look for blood or animal hair. Nobody even reported a giraffe or an elephant missing. But children don’t lie, apparently. The jury later said the only reason they debated more than a day was that they had to go through forty-seven fucking counts. “Count one. Slaughter of a giraffe. All who think this is utter bullshit.” (Counting.) “Okay. Count two. Slaughter of an elephant.”

(To be fair, they probably also stretched things out because they wanted dinner on the Court’s dime. That happens.)

Back to North Dakota, though. Ahead of the State Fair, rumors were abuzz in Minot. The Satanists were in town and they were looking for ten victims. No, the Satanists had always been in town; they founded the town, carried on in secret since 1886 and they were looking for a hundred victims. Young girls were disappearing on the way home from school. There were secret rituals out on the prairie at midnight. And Ozzy Osbourne was going to play the North Dakota State Fair. People, the level of hysteria was so high that you would have thought the very Devil Himself was coming to town.

I was aware of the rumors in a fuzzy, not-very-important kind of way. I was fifteen and on a long trip away from the one boyfriend, which was dramatic enough to take up most of my attention. Besides, it was North Dakota in the summer. There were water ski trails to be blazed, rafts to be swum to, barbecues to be had. And lots of alcohol to be consumed, too. Not by me, unfortunately. I was too square. Or more to the point, it never would have occurred to me to pour a wine cooler into a clear glass and tell my parents I was drinking a strawberry soda. 

So it happened we were going to be in Minot the day of the Ozzy Osbourne concert. And since it was the State Fair, it wasn’t sold out or anything. You just had to buy a gate ticket. So without our parents knowing what was up (I think my aunt knew, because she pretty much had her finger on the pulse of all things Minot, but she didn’t say anything), we older kids made arrangements to go to the State Fair that night and see Ozzy.

I mean, the atmosphere was electric. There was a fairly large police presence. You’d expect a lot of Goths dressed in black at a show like this but it was North Dakota. Everyone had on jeans and floppy t-shirts. I think I wore a pair of earrings because it was a special occasion. But the excitement was palpable. Would Ozzy do a human sacrifice of a virgin right there on the stage? Would he summon the Devil? Would all the Satanists show up and start killing people right when he finished “Crazy Train”?

Uh. No.

You guys, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Ozzy was so blitzed on his substance of choice that he could barely stand up, much less sing. I mean he was terrible. All the colored lights and flame effects from the stage were wasted because it was sunny as high noon. (The sun doesn’t really go down in North Dakota in the summertime; it gets twilighty dark around eleven and starts getting light again around four.) The summoned “demons” either didn’t show up or they missed their cue because they were smoking something back stage. At one point Ozzy tried to get the crowd clapping along to the beat. “Put your hands together like this, mates! That’s the way!” Nary a Devil or Hell got uttered. I don’t even think he raised his voice.

My cousin's friend leaned over and said, “This guy is boring.” I said, “Yeah. You guys wanna go on the Ferris Wheel again?” “Nah. Let's do bumper cars” And so we left. Ten minutes into the set.

Hey, I'm sorry it's anticlimactic. The rumors about the Satanists were pretty anticlimactic, too. As far as anybody knows, not a single person was killed, raped, kidnapped or otherwise inconvenienced that whole weekend. Though a couple of people were ticketed for public intoxication.

Anyway, farewell to the great Ozzy Osbourne. I did hear that he got better. 

American Pride

Apparently there was a big meltdown of software in Europe and all the flights were canceled and something bad happened on a runway in Italy and a flight in Chicago sat on the tarmac for three hours with no A/C and a child almost died.

Which, you know, is not good news. And it seems like the airlines get it wrong more often than they get it right. But I just wanted to say, sometimes American Airlines does get it absolutely right.

Ferexample: I was about 20, I was on this trip to Europe. Things had not gone well. Among other things, I had a head injury, and was still walking around, drinking and sleeping and not seeking medical treatment, like a fool. (I repeat, I was about 20.)

 My bipolar disorder was also just about ready to get out of the shed and haul ass at 95 mph over icy lakes and distant fields without a plan or a helmet. And I was on a trip with a friend of mine, and we were fighting, and Stuart Adamson kissed me, and I spent way too much time on trains.

(Yes, this is the same trip where I got arrested in Sweden. But that’s another story.)

I got off the plane from Sweden and I was in Atlanta and I had no idea what to do next. I went to the airline check-in desk and told them what was up. I wasn’t sure there was even any provision for somebody flying back several days early to the wrong airport. The clerk seemed a little perplexed, too. But after getting on her phone and talking to three or four people, she said, “Well, I can’t get you all the way to Phoenix, but if you don’t want to stay here tonight there’s a flight leaving to Tulsa in half an hour, and from there you should be able to get at least as far as Minneapolis.”

Minneapolis = closer to Phoenix than Atlanta, so I was in. I waited about five hours in Tulsa and got on the next plane to Minneapolis. I did not have very much money. I was trying to figure out if I could afford one of the cheap burgers at the airport restaurant (no McDonald’s in terminals back then) without breaking the $20 I was saving for a cab when the lady at the check-in desk asked me how long I’d been awake and had I had anything to eat recently. I didn’t know, and no. She gave me a couple of food coupons and a blanket for the flight.

I was in a middle seat on the flight out of Tulsa. I was in a middle seat just about the whole way, and it’s a good thing I was smaller then, but not that much smaller, and it’s a good thing the seats were bigger then, but not that much bigger. Anyway, the guy in the window seat said, “You look really tired. How long have you been flying?” (I think it was only about 48 hours at that point. And miles to go before I slept.) “Look, let’s switch seats so you can get some sleep.”

Reader, I kid you not. This guy, a fiftyish Hispanic banker looking type, swapped his window seat for my middle. I fell asleep before takeoff and didn’t wake up until we touched down in Minneapolis. Alas, I did not get his name. He deserved a bouquet of flowers. Not that I had money for flowers.

I got off the plane in Minneapolis and they steered me onto a flight to Denver. Denver = closer to Phoenix than Minneapolis. The clerk in Denver gave me more food coupons and got me on a flight to Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City = closer to Phoenix than Denver.

We got to Salt Lake City a little before 9 pm. There was only one more flight out just after eleven and it went to Las Vegas. The flight was completely full and all they could say was that they’d try to get me on it. Manic, headachey me who wasn’t acting rational in any case burst into tears. 

I’m sorry, but have you people ever SEEN the Salt Lake City airport? It could easily be the last straw for anybody, regardless of their mental condition. It’s the blue and orange paneling. No sane designer, even at the height of the 1970s, would erect blue and orange paneling and just leave it there for thirty years. There are laws against this sort of thing. It’s cruel and unusual decor.

The clerk was, I think, kind of appalled. Crying in the airport is a faux pas, apparently. After she shooed me away, I think she went back into the employee break room and worked some airline voodoo. Clearly sacrifices were made and blood was spilled because I got the last middle seat on the last flight out of Salt Lake City. 

I landed in Las Vegas at three in the morning and said to myself, “Self,” I said, “I can handle this. Flashing lights and tinkly noises. No blue and orange paneling. This is okay. This will work.”

From there I got on the first flight to Phoenix from Las Vegas. Phoenix = closer to Phoenix than Las Vegas. We touched down at seven a.m. and I was home. I’d made it. I was still alive and I needed a shower and I really needed some mood stabilizers (though I didn’t know that yet) and I was in Phoenix. I was so tired I gave the cabby my last $20 and didn’t wait for my $12 change.

Anyway.

Horror stories about airlines happen. If they happen more often than they used to, it’s probably because we have more flying public, a greater profit motive, and more incentive for things to go wrong. But that particular three-day period in 1990, American Airlines and pretty much the whole rest of the universe took care of me. I landed safely with a full stomach and a major concussion. 

I mean, it was a fun summer, what with the memory loss and the bipolar disorder and the brain going 90 mph and the inability to focus and starting the process of breaking up with my one boyfriend (he clung to me like a barnacle to a ship, in one instance literally; I was going 30 mph before he finally let go of the car).

But. Before all that, the window seat and the blanket out of Tulsa.

If you guys have a story about how somebody did you a favor when you really needed one, gave you a break, hired you for a job, or went out of their way to make your life a little bit easier, I implore you to tell people. Any people. Lots of people. Because we need stories like this. Life and social media are full of horror stories and if we’re not careful, we’ll start believing that that’s all there is. And if you owe a thank you to a person or an airline or even some faceless corporate drone that did you a solid, it’s not too late. Send flowers. Or a small gift. Or even just a nice card.

Mini-Post: Caterpillars and Space Aliens

I found a caterpillar crawling around in the office hallway. No idea where he came from.  I expect he hitchhiked into the office on a package or something, because we're on the sixth floor and that's a lot of climbing.  Anyway, I got a piece of paper, scooped him up, took him downstairs in the elevator and shooed him into the garden. 

I realize that normal people don't do stuff like this.

But it got me to thinking: From the caterpillar's perspective, he was tooling around minding his own business when some alien force picked him up, stepped into an elevator (an advanced technology he would have no knowledge of) and took him out into a garden. Suddenly he was on the ground with dirt and plants, and there was plenty of food and all was well.

But what just happened? What was my purpose in picking him up? He had no idea. He only knew that it was happening and was probably very scared, even though it ended happily.  (I assume.  Discounting the possibility of a hungry robin or other garden predators.) 

So there are these stories about aliens abducting humans. People miss time, they have vague memories of being on a spaceship, and wake up somewhere safe. 

Stay with me here.  Maybe the alien noticed that Johnny Human had a brain tumor or some other medical problem that would kill him in short order, of which he was not aware. Not that the alien (or more likely, the alien AI; traveling from other planets is awfully hard on biological organisms) was out looking for good deeds to do, but then one presented itself.  Maybe the alien scooped him up, fixed the problem and then put him back down. Kind of like I did with the caterpillar.

I mean, the caterpillar probably didn't know yet that there was no food up there or that he was going to die if he stayed there, but I knew and I fixed it.

In short, maybe we should give these abducting aliens the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they have good intentions. If not, maybe they're at least checking us out as a species to see what makes us tick, in hopes that if we keep destroying our planet, they can relocate us somewhere safe. 

Probably not on a piece of paper. 

Kidney Bomb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chernobyl

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

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

And everything just stopped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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