Jack

I and some friends for years have gone to a local diner every Wednesday morning.  Over breakfast we debate St. Louis, women, politics, and the merits of corned beef hash.

The guy who served us, faithfully, sometimes grouchily, always skillfully, was Jack.  A fiftyish, heavily tatooed biker who became, over the years, a friend and my principal reason for meals at that diner.

Jack and I developed a separate bond between us these last two years, as we discussed our battles, mine with cancer and his with heart disease.  We both became gladder with each week that we were both still there.

Now it's just me.  Jack died this week.

It's a big world and I guess Jack was just a little person in that world, but damn, not to me.  He had style, he took pride in his work, he suffered impatient dining patrons not at all.  His ability to remember what each of us wanted was simply uncanny.  For each it was the "usual" or, because one guy's usual became very popular, "the Ted."

His recall ability, in addition to being just plain cool, gave us each a sense of belonging.  But despite this, I drifted away from the usual for breakfast during the months that Jack and I faced our challenges.  To me, every Wednesday became a brand new Wednesday and I wanted to celebrate it.  He got it.

This is hard, this dying.  The world shrinks.  But the hope for a reunion grows, and if it's possible, Jack, I will sure see you on the other side.  And this time, my friend, I will pour your coffee.

Fortress America

I've always been a pro-defense, strong military, if-you-fight-a-war-you-fight-to-win kind of guy.  Which means support for most of what our military does, since it seems like the most honorable and effective governmental agency we've got.

But there's a disconnect.  Militaries do what the civilian authority decides they should do.  Our military happens to execute as well as one could expect; but that doesn't mean that what they are asked to do is the thing that makes us safest and most free.

Like garrisoning the world, for example.  If you can make a compelling case that that's how we are safest and most free, great.  But how about an alternative that brings home the garrisons:

A big tough navy that can project force and has subs that can blow up any enemy; a kick-ass Marine Corps, stationed here; missile and drone offense and defense that give us other ways to blow up any enemy and keep incomings to a minimum; and 50 tough, well-equipped state militias that would make any invader of our land very sorry indeed.  Some soldiers stationed in our embassies, but otherwise no troops overseas.

Are we less safe with this?  I'm not sure.  I don't think anyone would invade Philadelphia knowing there are lots of armed Phillies fans ready to fight back.  Not to mention Houston.  OK, it wouldn't be taking the battle to the bad guys in the Middle East.  But I just don't know that that's worked.

And wouldn't this be a lot cheaper?  I think so - tens of billions cheaper, in fact, once the transition is made.  Savings like that should make us safer and more free.

And no standing national army, but rather militias where the officers are guys from our neighborhoods?  I'm sure that's more free.  That's almost a definition of freedom.

So, hawkish I am, but for a reason.  Because the purpose of government is to make us safe.  Keeping our infantries here, under relatively local control, seems to me to keep us (including the lads and lassies in the infantries, who are also us) as safe as we can hope.

Risk and Choice

Back

From another hiatus, another great turn of the wheel.  The details probably don't matter.  We're all fine here at Strays, me, family, friends.  The latest turn does remind me, though, of a conversation I have packed and unpacked for years.

The conversation is with strangers and I have it all the time.  It goes:  What do you do?   And I answer:  I'm a lawyer.
What do you do really means, of course, what do you do for a living.

And the proper answer, in my case, should be that I practice law for a living.

But the question and the answer come out much closer to what to you do in life - almost who are you.

And the answer, literally, is that I am lawyer.  That's who I am. 

But it isn't.  I quit journalism and went to law school, which I regarded as a trade school, a place to go learn stuff and get credentialed so I could earn a good living, still do a lot of writing, be an advocate, in a world where hard work and merit play a greater role than luck.  But it didn't make me someone I wasn't before.  It was not a metamorphosis.  It was learning a trade.

And in this way I'm not a father or a husband or a musician either, even though I love and treasure fathering and husbanding and playing music.

I'm a guy trying to lead an interesting life.  Looking forward to an astounding 2011.  Happy New Year, and bring it on.

How to Raise the Dow by 5000 and Add 1,000,000 Jobs

"I think it's time to set the record straight.  There has been all this nonsense thrown around about how I'm a socialist, that I hate business, that my agenda is for government to take over the economy.

"It isn't true.  Yes, I flirted with a lot of left-wing thinking in my youth.  Who didn't?  But history's verdict over the past four decades is completely undeniable.  The free market, on a global scale, is the path to prosperity for the USA and the rest of the world.

"I am not an ideologue.  I'm a politician, and a pragmatic one.  The best politics for me and my party is to convince the US business community that the Democratic Party is a better vehicle for prosperity than the Republicans.  That isn't a strange idea.  Look at Jack Kennedy's tax cuts, and Bill Clinton's commitments to free trade and welfare reform.

"So, starting right now, here's the message to the US business community:  we are with you.  We get it.  We know perfectly well that government doesn't create jobs, and that we aren't going to prosper and compete in the world economy unless government is the wind under the wings of the free market.

"I'm announcing three steps today.  First, I am issuing an executive order that requires our agencies to implement the recommendations from leaders of the information technology industry that should save us $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years by going after waste, duplication, fraud, and abuse in federal programs.

"Second, I'm going to push for federal litigation reform.   I'm going to propose rules that say if  lawyers bring frivolous claims to court, they and their clients will have to cover the other side's legal fees.  Contingency fees will be capped, so that we aren't going to have lawyers getting multi-million dollar fee awards.

"Third, we are going to push to change our tax laws to ensure that if you take your company's profits and put them back into the business, they won't be taxed.  Period.

"And that's just a start.  From here on, so long as I'm President, I'm going to do what it takes to see that the federal government listens to business.  Here at the White House and in Congress, we are going to stop treating business people like criminals and start asking their advice."

Samizdat, sort of

I let myself down a little when these posts don't come out regularly but right now I'm writing mostly for the drawer.

This is different from something I've blogged about before, somewhat erroneously:  samizdat, the self-publication that Soviet authors were forced to engage in.  It was quiet publication, circulating manuscripts hand to hand.  Both for some level of protection, and because the authors probably couldn't get the materials published in the USSR even if they wanted to.   It isn't really writing for a drawer, where they stay.

Samizdat may be at the other end of the same scale as blogging, which is conspicuous self-publication at the click of a mouse.

Writing for the drawer, making a journal, whatever you call it, is writing for other reasons.

There is the ancient one: writers have to write like breathers have to breathe.

Also to make a record, published or not.

Also to exorcise demons.

As to the last, exorcism, it's double-edged.  If the point is therapy, then the more right down-to-the-bone personal, the better. But then the less likely you'd want anyone to see it.  If no one sees it, what has been revealed?  If nothing is revealed, does it just swirl around and go nowhere, and do nothing?  The Franz Kafka  - Emily Dickinson problems... ah, next post, or the next, or the next.

Darkness and Light

Two pieces that came out last weekend provide a cautionary tale and, to my mind, a bolt of light.

The cautionary tale is about Japan and how it has fallen in the last twenty years.  Martin Fackler at the NYT looks at not only the technical reasons for the fall - deflation being the biggest, evidently, although it's hard to tell if that's a symptom or a disease.  But more interestingly he writes about the failure of Japanese grit.

Japan’s loss of gumption is most visible among its young men, who are widely derided as “herbivores” for lacking their elders’ willingness to toil for endless hours at the office, or even to succeed in romance, which many here blame, only half jokingly, for their country’s shrinking birthrate. “The Japanese used to be called economic animals,” said Mitsuo Ohashi, former chief executive officer of the chemicals giant Showa Denko. “But somewhere along the way, Japan lost its animal spirits.”

The light, to me, is from a  piece in the weekend Journal by Jonathan Haidt that associates the Tea Party movement with karma.  It corresponds with everything I've seen about this middle class movement of people who are sick of our failure to accept consequences.  These are the folks who don't buy the idea that every kid on the team gets a medal and every team wins the league.  They are prepared to accept their own failures, but don't want to pay for everyone else's.  Losers should lose, gracefully, and winners should win, gracefully, so long as everyone plays fair.  

Putting the two together - optimist that I am - I am persuaded that we Americans can pull out of this slump because we have the stones.  We can suck it up, roll up the sleeves, and believe in the future.  But crappy handouts will not work, nor will get-out-of-jail-free cards, and unless our leadership stops offering them, it will be sayonara for the next decade.

Why I Read Paul Tillich

"...there is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it. If we were totally within time, we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. But as men we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time."

From "The Eternal Now" (1963)

Chop Chop Square

Eons ago, in 1982, I was doing a stint in Saudi Arabia for my law firm.  Riyadh was dreary.  When it rained, which was very seldom, it rained mud.  The law practice was like a war campaign; long periods of boredom interspersed with brief episodes of frantic activity.

One way to relieve the boredom was to go to the gold souk, but on an associate's salary the trip couldn't last long.  Or, near the souk, on Fridays after prayers, there was Chop Chop Square, where they beheaded people.

Curiosity took me there only once.  There was a big, shouty crowd, all men, mostly Arabs.  Agitated and looking for entertainment.  Lore had that I would be pushed to the front  - they'd show the Westerner how they do it in the Kingdom.  Not me, but they did part as I approached.  I thought it was simply because I was viewed as an alien, which I most certainly was.

They brought out only one proposed victim, a terrified-looking young man.  The handlers struggled to keep him upright, as if he'd lost his ability to stand.  (He was probably drugged, I was told later.)  The crowd's noise swelled in anticipation.  After what looked like final rites, a flurry of consultation among the handlers.  Then they marched him back out of the Square and it was over.  The crowd was not happy; I figured it was a good time to move on.

Someone later told me it had been a kind of shock-punishment - take him to brink, then let him live.  Maybe it was.  Or maybe his crime (I have no idea what it was) had a victim, whose family may have settled for a last-minute cash payment.

A medieval atmosphere, and one which modern Saudi Arabia must have outgrown over the last 25 years, right?

Nope.  Chop Chop Square, at least as of 2009, is still in operation.

Sometimes the end looks like the beginning 

Labor Day

We all used to read old Karl Marx, back when his thinking seemed to control 50 percent of the world's population.  One thing that struck me was his exhaltation of the value of individual work  - its nobility, even, although I doubt he would have said it this way.
It seemed to belie one line of critique about socialism - that the system does not spur, did not reward, people's work.  Hard workers thrive under capitalism, so the thinking went, while in a socialist world they would just be suckers.

He also seemed, from the lofty vantage of an enthusiastic teenager in the '60's, to be celebrating something that sounded pretty much like a drag.  I figured he was touting the value of work only because it gave him cred.

It added up, so I thought, to a kind of a fraud.  He really didn't believe that work was a virtue, or that the system he proposed would reward it.  He just used the idea to get across his larger pitch, that he had an inside track on how the world's societies would evolve.

A lot later, I now think he was not at all fraudulent.  Completely wrong, as to how the world really works, but not fraudulent.  Or at least I agree with the idea - individual work is noble.  When you are really really rolling you go into the flow, and if you could build a society around that, you'd have something.

Bliss

Feeling pretty good, I Googled "bliss".  Tells you a lot.

Mostly cosmetics.  Some restaurants.  But as to sites that might really glorify it - address it - locate it - or debunk it, for chrissake - thin, really thin.

I lost interest after about page five.  Not much more than a 21st century version of thumbing through the Yellow Pages.

Earl the Swirl

Hurricane Earl.  (What comedian names these things, anyway?  The last one through here was Bob.)  Earl missed us by a lot last night, here on the Rhode Island coast, and so today we sheepishly drag our lawn furniture back out on the lawn and witness a sparkling, windy day, very blue sky, grey-green sea, big surf, scrubbed beaches with neat piles of stone.  A good end to a hurricane.

Before Summer Ends

Burying the Lede

I had always thought that the term "A-OK" was a NASA thing. I found a little support for this, in the following from NASA's history:

"The origin of the popular space term "A.OK" is a matter of widespread public interest. In reporting the Freedom 7 flight, the press attributed the term to Astronaut Shepard, and indeed NASA News Release 1-61-99, May 5, 1961, has Shepard report "A.OK" shortly after impact. A replay of the flight voice communications tape disclosed that Shepard himself did not use the term. It was Col. John A. "Shorty" Powers who reported Shepard's condition as "A.OK" in a description of the flight. Tecwyn Roberts of STG and Capt. Henry E. Clements of the Air Force had used "A.OK" frequently in reports written more than four months before the Shepard flight. Roberts attributed coinage of the term to Paul Lein, of the Western Electric Co., while the tracking network was being constructed. Lein, however, said that "A.OK" was a communal development among communications engineers while circuits were first being established downrange from Cape Canaveral. The voice circuits at first gave poor quality. The bands were narrow, and the systems operated on 1,500 cycles. There was much static and background noise. Words got lost in voice circuit systems checks. To make transmissions clearer, the communicators started using "A.OK" because the letter "A" has a brilliant sound. Other sources claim that oldtime railroad telegraphers used "A-OK" as one of several terms to report the status of their equipment. Be that as it may, Powers, "the voice of Mercury Control," by his public use of "A.OK," made those three letters a universal symbol meaning "in perfect working order." "

But Wikipedia makes no mention of this history, and for them (it?) it's just the verbal version of the well-known hand gesture. Among different cultures, the gesture has, uh, widely varying meaning. Suffice it that after reading the Wikipedia piece, outside the USA I wouldn't use it.

This is a long way round to the results of my latest PET scan, about 15 months after this Big C Odyssey began. From my radiation oncologist's nurse: "A-OK. No evidence of disease."

As I said once before, quoting from Die Hard, and this time with feeling: yippie ki-yay, motherfucker.

Strike Three

Below I identified two causes of my cancer, smoking in "Smokey Joe" and anti-psoriasis medication in "Risky Business." Today the third: human papillomavirus, or HPV.

I guess I have, or had, HPV. It may sound brave to reveal my connection to a sexually-transmitted disease; actually it's common. The statistics jump around, but it seems safe to say that a majority of American women, and lots of American men, have or had it. This "have or had" stuff comes from the fact that it seems to go away - your immune system can take care of it. My immune system is pretty funky - hence the psoriatic arthritis - and maybe that's why HPV caught up with me.

HPV has become well known as a cause of cervical cancer. Accordingly it's viewed as a women's issue, and a girls' issue, where the discussion has focused on the need to vaccinate girls before they become sexually active.

The same strain of HPV seems to be a principal cause of my type of cancer in men. The research is compelling. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine lays it all out in detail, and there appear to be plenty of others. Plus my doc identified it, without much qualification, in my case.

So, two things to say.

The first may be important. HPV may be killing as many men with head and neck cancer as it does women with cervical cancer. So the vaccine should be given to boys as well as girls. I haven't heard that said much; I am way past that stage of parenting, so maybe it's well known. It should be.

The second point is that if this cancer wins, I will have been felled by an STD. Or, more romantically, killed by a lady.

Like Sam Cooke. Not so bad, right?

The Big C

So now I'm a TV program. The name has been around for a while (see above, in my description of what Strays is about.) [True when posted - since changed - Ed.] I always associated it with John Wayne.

This show has Laura Linney, who is light years more terrific than JW or me, and I will be a watcher. But from the review I read this morning in the Times, although she's a cancer patient there are two big differences.

She isn't telling anyone. I, of course, have told everyone, puttin' it up on the Internet for chrissake.

And she, evidently, has a fairly near-term and terminal deadline. I haven't and don't.

The two are probably connected. I'm not sure how I would have reacted if the initial read was, you're cooked, but it may well not have been to go public. If it turns that way for me, how will I react? Don't know. I think the kimono, once open, stays open, but I don't really know. It's one of those things you have to experience first-hand, in real time, to genuinely understand.

Risky Business

Below, in "Smokey Joe", I identify the first of three reasons I had (have?) cancer. This is number two.*

The second culprit is medication for another disease in my life, one I've posted on before, psoriasis. Psoriasis sucks. I've had cancer, and I've been obese, and I've had, and have, psoriasis. It's the worst of the three.

Not just skin psoriasis, which is a total drag, but psoriatic arthritis, which is scary. Eviller twin to rheumatoid arthritis. As to both skin and arthritis, there is a class of medications, called biologics, which have been approved for psoriasis. They are miracle drugs. I moved through two, Remicade and Embrel, and landed with Humira. (These are their commercial trade names. They have even weirder chemical names.)

Humira requires a self-administered injection. Kind of cool, in a junkieish sort of way. Shots twice a week. Insanely expensive, like three grand a month.

It worked like magic. All the symptoms cleared up completely. Except for the injections, I forgot I had the disease.

Then things got a little strange. Under stress, one evening at the office I gave myself the shot and the next morning I was in early, under a deadline, got the work done, and then fetched up with what was diagnosed later as vertigo. I had always equated vertigo with fear of heights and the Hitchcock movie, but it's a real bad thing - I wound up in the emergency room. Pretty clearly it was a side effect of the Humira. And at about the same time, my dentist noticed the lump, I saw the ENT doc, and I was off to my date with old man Mr. C.

As I careened through the medical establishment I asked lot about Humira and whether it played a role with the head and neck cancer, and nobody knew nada. It just seemed so probable. I plowed around the literature, and at this point what I know is this:

I'm not the first.

Humira's seller, Abbott, updates the risk factors, and I think theirs has evolved since I first looked at it, but the current version puts cancer right up there at the top of the list. It doesn't nail me, but it comes pretty close (again, closer than I think it used to) with language about "lymphoma and other cancers" (mine wasn't lymphoma, but it collected in the lymph nodes) and "squamous cell cancer of the skin" (mine was somewhere in my neck, we think, never did find the bugger).

What this gets me to is risk.

We all talk about risk. There is risk in everything, we all know that, but by definition the risk of bad consequences is something less than 100 percent. Otherwise it's not risk, it's the future. Most things, it's way less than 100 percent. But it's there, and the bad stuff does happen to some people.

I think you have to be one of those people to begin to understand risk. It's a little along the lines of the completely-true "shit happens" - a recognition that you will not sail through life without a scratch. Is all this obvious? It wasn't to me, not at 20, or 30, or even 40.

But now I've been there, in this medical context and others, and now I guess I understand that this is all pretty risky business. The best we can do is try to identify the risks, make intelligent choices, and move ahead.



*Could all three be true? What is number three? Stay tuned.

Good Dog