Pax Nortona - A Blog by Joel Sax

I’ve been taking half a xanax to help me get to sleep at night. I combine this with melatonin, benadryl, doxepin, and a handful of other drugs at bedtime because I need a hammer to bring me to sleep. Last night, after reading a terrifying article about benzodiazepines at Furious Seasons, I decided to try an experiment: could I get to sleep without the Xanax?

The trick was to take the melatonin about an hour or two before bedtime, let it soak into the system, then go to sleep at my usual bedtime. It worked, but I woke up about five hours later. So I took more benadryl and slept an additional five hours.

I notice two things: first, I am slightly more irritable. Second, I am more alert. For the first time in weeks, I am able to set my hands at the keys and make sentences appear.

So here’s the plan: tonight, I am taking half a Xanax. The next night I perform a drug fast. I do this routine for a few weeks so my body gets used to the lower levels in my system and then make another jump.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Seven years and still blogging!

Here’s a collection of a few things that I have said while Twittering.

• If you cover your backside, the only way you can move is sideways.
• I have accepted no bets. If God doesn’t play dice with the universe…. neither do I.
• Judging from the person’s bio & other tweets, my call of New Age was dead on. I feel so excited I could just levitate.
• I feel like I am in a musicbox-driven wash machine on the slow cycle.
• The terrors for me are affectations: constellations of words that I use repetitively.
• Time for me to slip into the seas of slumber. Against the tide of blood pressure, I put out my little skiff of unconsciousness and sail off.
• Sometimes you have to resign to lost history.
• I realized that both my older brother & I had 6 years being the only child, but he got to be it at the fun age.
• Fading time — the wallpaper of self-presentation is being stripped and a new glue being laid down for the next day.
• I just made a note on my mood chart @ yesterday — “severely cheerful & loquacious”
• Time to melt like snow into water, from wakefulness into sleep where dreams do not lie still but run from the head onto the pillow.
• I’m feeling as happy as a warthog forbidden by its doctor to wallow bc of an ulcer on its underside.
• I’d like to get in a chase and not get caught. The fact that I don’t try shows my meds are working like they are supposed to.
• Damn. My asthma is acting up. Or is that miasma? My toes. Or mitosis?
• Bathe a cat? Makes sense if you’re squeamish about slitting your own wrists.
• We got to stick together. Otherwise we’d be ignored by our own navels. What is life if your navel never gazes back?
• I hate these nights when I do things so the time will go faster and an hour after I start doing them five minutes have passed.
• This cat is mewing like a coyote.
• You can never feel too much love unless the person loving you is ugly.
• When you count the number of times nongays get beat up by gays for not being gays, it is a pretty nonexistent number.
• Raining here. Can’t go out and throw cups of water at people: it pisses them off.
• The locomotive of the day’s history arrives at the final depot of night and promptly breaks down. Nearly 3 am.
• My cat is saying that it is time for me to update her food.
• A wise perseverance is never a flaw.
• I love when the kitties line up for their treats and take it directly from my fingers. “Corpus bastet.” “Meow.”
• My dog’s sniffing is quite leisurely! How he stops and intently draws the scent through his nose, dotting each smell receptor.

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roe. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
, James Joyce, Ulysses

Today is Bloomsday, celebrating the life and work of novelist James Joyce, especially that day in 1904 when the events of his novel Ulysses take place (and on which he met his wife in real life.).

I found the reaction of Americans to events in Iran interesting: they seemed sick and hurt that the election had not gone the way that their prognosticators had predicted. “Had to be rigged!” Laughably one of them told me that I didn’t appreciate nuances in the Iranian people — mostly just to say it, I guess. (I have had three Iranian students of differing backgrounds and views plus many friends over the years.) Americans read their own newspapers, watch their own television for information about the rest of the world. They want the world to like them. When it doesn’t, they assume that the results were fixed, that people just aren’t getting the information they need to be converted¹² . Both conservatives and liberals do this. It’s an American hallmark.

1. It never occurs to them that maybe the people over there are receiving information that we aren’t getting here? Oh, they’ll say, but it is always just propaganda. [↩]
2. I just got reminded of this story. A Friend (as in Quaker) I know was living down in Nicaragua at the time of the Sandinistas. An American peace delegation happened to be visiting on a day when they were holding a barrio meeting. After watching the back and forth for a few hours, an American turned to the Friend and asked her “Did they just do this because we are here?” When we go abroad or watch from our television chairs, it’s the same thing: the world is putting on the show for us. That is why we keep calling some situations wrong. [↩]

Rain wet the pavement overnight. Clear sky forced a broad opening in the sky so when Lynn took me to get my stitches pulled this morning, sunlight lit the ripe grasses yellow. As we drove through Irvine, I used my unique passenger-side view to scan new developments. The strawberry fields were disappearing: a new community called Stonegate boxed them in. Once through all that, however, everything was pretty much the same as it had been all the years I’d been going to Tustin for periodontal work. Green lawns and walls protected the subdivisions from the traffic of Irvine Boulevard. Strip malls let the big corporations peddle their wares to passing travelers. A series of traffic lights slowed the cars, but we managed to get through in time to make a 7 a.m. appointment.

They took me in faster than I could find an article to read in the latest National Geographic. The assistant clipped out the harp covering the hole where the doctor had pulled the tooth 16 days ago. The extraction had defied him: the root broke off and when he went after the broken piece, it broke again, necessitating that he dig long and deep. I felt the pain in cycles for days, oinking up twelve vicodin tablets as it surged and itched every third day. Today, I took two tylenol an hour before I went in. She pulled the stitches quickly and tossed them onto the tray. Dr. Dornan¹ examined the healing wound and declared it doing well.

I left with instructions to keep using Peridex, avoid crunchy foods, and return in ten days.

Lynn drove us along Santiago Canyon Road. I wish that I had pulled the Mino HD camera that I had in my pocket out and filmed the golden hills and dark clusters of live oaks as we passed them. You don’t appreciate the difference in the morning light until you have not seen it for awhile. I made a note to get up early some morning and hike out of the dawn with my camera in hand.

Remind me to keep that imperative.

1. No relation to the infamous Congressman [↩]

“They weren’t on the battlefield, but apparently the battlefield’s here.”

Daris Long, father of Private William A. Long

The winding down of the war has made me complacent. I haven’t written about it since October 2007¹ . Military operations still occur in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilians die. Soldiers die. Schemes go on behind the scenes to get the oil out while we can. And at home, an angry young man forgot what it means to oppose war.

The shootings committed by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad demand that we people of conscience who oppose war reflect on how we have communicated our message. This is essential: to be a pacifist means making no preparations to kill which hopefully will lead to no killing. Period. Mr. Muhammed obviously prepared to kill: according to the New York Times, police found “several boxes of ammunition and a red duffle bag containing two homemade silencers, binoculars, clothing and medicine.” This leaves me the chicken way out: he obviously wasn’t a pacifist.

But that’s not enough. The word did not get through to him: in a war, the lives of soldiers and civilians are equally important. Antiwar activists protest the deaths of both. To murder in opposition to a conflict makes no sense: the aim of stopping people from dying cannot be achieved by making people expire. Have I failed to do my job as a spokesperson for conscience? Is my silence of the last two years a dereliction of duty?

I think so. For this reason, I shall watch affairs a little more closely. Both the wars and the activities of peace activists shall be my focus when I can get news.

Now I set this challenge to anti-abortion activists: clean your own house. I daresay that you have sinned more than I have. Yet where my first response was to accept this as an act of terrorism and acknowledge the possibility of my influence or failure to express the message, yours was to deny. Shame on you.

To my fellow pacifists and anti-war activists: let’s keep our movement consistent to its principles. We are not soldiers set out on a battlefield: we’re human beings laboring to convince other human beings of justice.

1. I don’t count the articles I wrote about taking better care of our vets or the video in which I invited the soldiers to come home last November. [↩]

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but nobody thinks of changing himself.

Leo Tolstoy

From my Twitter account (EmperorNorton):

I used to be anti-abortion, but then the hatred that was spoken by the others in the movement became impossible. When I discovered that many anti-abortion people were hostile to my pacifism and my anti-death-penalty stance, plus when I saw the complexity of the issue when it comes to pregnancies and how the anti-abortion movement didn’t acknowledge that abortion might be necessary to save the life of the mother not to mention the cruelty of putting a woman who was raped through an unwanted pregnancy, I shrugged my shoulders and became pro-choice because the anti-abortion movement was clearly not for me. Too absolutist. If there is ever a superior alternative offered without the hateful rhetotic and better answers to the question of rape and life-threatening defects, I will certainly jump on board. But I value and respect the human beings around me. I know that life is a difficult struggle. The anti-abortion movement simply isn’t pro-life enough for my taste.

This article by Frank Schaeffer strikes me as a conscientious statement of the problem with the anti-abortion movement’s rhetoric.

The anti-abortion people who I encounter don’t get the full import of the term “conscience”. They seem to think it means that you have an opinion and you do everything you can — no matter how harmful the rhetoric or the methodology — to achieve that goal. Most draw the line at violence, but nearly every one of them uses language that is so stinging and inflammatory as to incite some of their number to arson, bombing, assault, and murder.

As a pacifist, I have come to appreciate that what I say can be an influence on others. The example of a young man who converted to Islam and then shot a military recruiter was thrown at me. Was I responsible for that? I replied that it was certainly reason for me to pause and examine how I spoke in opposition to the war. Was I demonizing the opposition? Did my words forget that pacifism means avoiding killing¹ ?

When we act from our conscience, we don’t just look at our behavior but the way we influence others. This is where the anti-abortion movement largely fails to be a movement of conscience. To tell the truth, I think it is nothing more for most people than a chit to count against liberals when issues such as the wars, torture, oppression, etc. are raised.

Movements of conscience do not see the opposition as an enemy to be defeated, but as potential converts. So Gandhi persuaded the British to leave India: he did not start a war.

1. The way I live my pacifism is this: I do not spend my life preparing for violence. I do not own guns and I do not take courses in martial arts. I seek alternatives to violence, avoid situations where violence might occur. [↩]

I’m trying to find my way through a cemetery by reading the tombstones as I drive. Lynn and I end up in a Unitarian-Universalist meeting led by a rabbi who was hired by the minister to lock the doors and turn out the lights. At many points during the service, he stops to check a torn-out piece of yellow notepaper affixed to the frame of a glass door. At the end of the lecture, he pulls out several piles of books which he says will be helpful in our spiritual journey. There’s a stampede of hands for them and the only thing I manage to grab is a thickish text on how to study.

The lone tree, originally uploaded by EmperorNorton47.

This is a photo¹ I took on my last walk with Drake in the hills. This golden mesa kept attracting my attention but I couldn’t frame it with a wide-angle lense, so I stretched out my zoom to telephoto length. Even then, haze made the picture unpretty, so when I downloaded at home, I put it through an infrared and then a platinum effect plug-in to get the result that you see.

I’ve been quiet mostly because I went into a frenzy of shooting photos before I got a tooth extracted on Wednesday. I’m none too comfortable today — traditionally the most painful because you puff up and stretch the stitches to the breaking point.

Last night I got up the courage to look at what the periodontist had wreaked² . There’s enough string stretching from tooth to gum to palate (ew!) in there to rig the Pilgrim or The Spirit of Dana Point. I imagine sailors tugging at the lines, changing the direction of the gums, with each pull producing a new, spasm.

This is usual for the third and fourth days, which I am in. Fortunately I was so nonplussed by the pain of the second day that I stopped taking vicodin at all, so I have a store ready to weather the next several hours of misery.

This ship is rounding the Horn. We’ll make the Golden Coast soon.

1. If you want to see more, visit my photostream. [↩]
2. My Twitter friend Felicity said “You only just looked at it tonight? I would have checked it as soon as I got home.” I confess I am a coward and need to get used to the string being there. [↩]

I’ve been running around taking photos and videos in preparation for my being down for several days following a tooth extraction. Once I get all that uploading done, I’ll resume writing.

In the meantime, you can enjoy my work on Flickr. If you happen to be a member yourself, please feel free to add me as a contact.

You know, I always hated the creep. Andy Warhol that is. Especially after the way he treated Edie Sedgwick.