Month: June 2009
Notes on a Night without Xanax
Posted on June 30, 2009 in Medications
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.
Happy Bloomsday
Posted on June 16, 2009 in Milestones Reading
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, [amazonify]0679722769::text::::Ulysses[/amazonify]
Today is [[Bloomsday]], celebrating the life and work of novelist James Joyce, especially that day in 1904 when the events of his novel [amazonify]0679722769::text::::Ulysses[/amazonify] take place (and on which he met his wife in real life.).
An American Hallmark
Posted on June 14, 2009 in Foreign Relations
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 converted ((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.)) ((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.)) . Both conservatives and liberals do this. It’s an American hallmark.
Stitches Out and A Golden Morning
Posted on June 5, 2009 in Dentition Routine Weather
Once through all that, however, everything was pretty much the same as it had been all the years I’d been going to Tustin, California for periodontal work
No Soldiers on a Field
Posted on June 3, 2009 in Abortion Courage & Activism Terrorism Violence War
“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 2007 ((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.)) . 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.
What I said to an anti-abortion activist & other thoughts
Posted on June 2, 2009 in Abortion Courage & Activism Terrorism Violence
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 killing ((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.)) ?
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.
