Patriots
Posted on August 31, 2010 in Occupation of Iraq War
We are out of Iraq today. Those of you who were reading this blog back in 2003 know that I opposed this war and doubted that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I caught a lot of flack over this. I was called traitor even by other liberals for insisting that we had no firm reason for going, that this was a war for profit of Bush’s friends. Over time, American public opinion shifted to my point of view about Iraq. But it was hard in the beginning.
There were dark nights, but I never lost hope. Tomorrow, the last of the extremists will undoubtably complain, but today I heard magic words. I heard myself called a “patriot” by President Obama. He did not exclude those who presented opposing views: he called them “patriots”, too:
there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women.
There are those who will always try to be divisive over this, but I believe the President said the right words. I know it was out of love for my country and my concern for our service-people who were already in one war that I spoke out against the Iraq Adventure.
It is hard for me to forgive the worst excesses committed, but I shall try. I have already apologized for some things I said in anger and frustration on this blog. It’s a point of honor for me as my opposition to the war was and still is.
Back then I said those forgotten words “God guide America”. Let good sense lead us from this point to intelligent and honorable decisions that benefit all our people. Let us not be misled into war again.
Dreams
Posted on August 13, 2010 in Dreams
1. We own a tiny bear, a black bear that is no larger than a kitten. I lift it off the kitchen table and place it or the floor. I assure my mother that it will grow no bigger than a cat.
2. I’m in a barber shop getting my hair cut. A group of people surround another chair. From their conversation, I infer that they attend the Thursday night support group. As they leave, one of them recognizes me as the guy who runs the Monday night group. S/he invites me to join them for coffee. We go to a cafe and stand awhile waiting for a table. While we loiter, a Stratofortress flies over and opens its bomb-bay doors before crashing into the hills a couple of blocks away. I run over to see the damage. Several fields are on fire. I rush back to the shopping center where I parked my truck. A thief has broken in and cleaned out both front seats. He’s left the car stereo and my digital SLR.
Dream
Posted on August 9, 2010 in Dreams
I’m in a strange combination of a laboratory and a candy store. A scientist sits at a table experimenting. I praise his operation, then fall to the floor. In a trance, I push myself cheek-first around the brightly-splashed Rorschach bottom while various people follow me around, marking my movements and prognosticating on their significance. The movement gives me a sense of euphoria and I keep at it for what seems to be hours. My dance of face to floor takes me into a large garden with cypresses cut in square tops and layers. At a street corner I see a large fire-engine/steam tractor waiting to be charged up. I pirouette madly down the street, turning colorful corners along squares thronging with people until I come to an endless, colorless alley. I stand up and flee back toward the garden.
Passing of the Purple Plum
Posted on August 5, 2010 in Neighborhood
Long time readers of this blog remember my long antagonism with the tree in front of my condo, the dreadful purple plum. The tree savagely bore down on my head when I passed on the sidewalk and obstructed my view from the deck ever since we moved in 1999. No edible fruit grew on it. It splattered the concrete with its progeny. On the other hand, it brought me moments of profound intensity:
Tonight, beneath the white blossoms of a purple plum tree and an electric lamp which hummed away the silence, I stood. Not a very interesting story to tell, but the moment was thick with the immediate presence of the night and the white corners of the condos.
It never did well due to its place in the shadows. But this season the plum had been struggling. No flowers sprang from its branches. Only a few deeply colored leaves stuck to its whiplike branches. Where its confederates flourished, my nemesis exuded mere weak fingernails of life.
Yesterday when I went out to take Doggy to the park, I hurried along the sidewalk. Turning my eyes to the left to set my eyes for a second on the leaden grayness of the familiar trunk, I noticed an absence reaching down to a medallion of sawdust at my feet. The gardeners had taken down the purple plum. The object of my mocking interest had been cut down.
Tazered for my own good
Posted on August 4, 2010 in Neurology
Did he like doing it? The [[nerve conduction study]] made me wonder. The nurse, who wasn’t the nicest or most sympathetic person, looked me over . “What are you here for?” she asked. I said I didn’t know. She smiled as she read my chart and said “The nerve exam.”
I had been warned about this. One friend told me that it had been like snapping rubber bands against her legs. My physical therapist didn’t like remembering it at all. She’d been suffering from carpal tunnel and when they applied the electrodes to her arm, IT HURT.
The result for me was somewhere in between. My neurologist led me into a room with a little electric box and a panel festooned with wires and electrodes. He attached a large dark gray, square patch attached to a wire to the back of my hand and two small, round, black ones to the fleshy parts of my thumb. Then he revealed a bi-pronged tazer. I told him that I had heard about this.
“And what did they say?” I told him.
“Like being snapped with rubber bands, eh?”
He positioned the device over my wrist. “Now I am going to count to three and you’re going to feel a shock. One, two, three.” He touched the prongs to the skin. My flesh seemed to catastrophically shrivel and run away from the point of contact.
“Whoa!” I cried. “Do me a favor. No count to three this time. Just one.” I didn’t much care for the drama.
“One” he said and zap! Same sensation, higher up on the arm where he prodded me.
“That wasn’t as bad,” I said. I laughed and kept laughing through the rest of the procedure. It didn’t tickle. My chortles were akin to those I emitted when hitting a bump on a [[roller coaster]] ((Bipolar sufferers often compare their mood swings to a roller coaster. I’ve always thought the ride was more like a panic attack.)) . I was terrified out of my mind, but the laughter helped me recover from the shock.
“The first time is usually the worst,” he said. “You don’t know what to expect. And one!”
He zapped me maybe eight, maybe a dozen times up and down my arm. My hand jumped and half-clenched whenever he hit me.
“You don’t have problems in the neck, do you?”
“Um, no.” I was thankful for the limits of the dysfunction.
He removed the electrodes and produced a pair of medieval clamps. “This next part looks worse, but it’s not. The charge is going to be less.”
He fastened them around my index finger, then touched my hand and my arm a couple of times. At the very end, my hand was shaking from excitement. He zapped me, checked the feed on a tiny oscilloscope window. “You’ve got to relax.” I took a deep breath and went to my other place, which wasn’t far away but had no real character. Zap! The procedure was over.
“I won’t be using the needle because I have enough data to make a diagnosis.” There was a needle involved? I shoved away the ugly fantasies that came out of this revelation quickly, then described the movement problems I’d been having with the left hand ((Interesting. I talk about the left hand as something removed, distant. I bet if the right hand was involved, I’d be talking about my right hand.)) , especially the distal joint of the ring finger. He made out a requisition for x-rays of the hand and the left elbow.
The ulnar nerve was definitely damaged. Surgery was not yet advisable so I was to continue at physical therapy. An elbow brace ((I don’t see what it is doing for me, but I very carefully put it on this morning and typed with it on. I had some adjustment problems at first — I put it on backwards so I was cutting off the circulation, but a spin and some loosening of the straps holding it in place cured me of this.)) was to become part of my daily attire.
I had done very well, my neurologist said as The nurse looked a little disappointed as I checked out ((The main aftermath consisted of tiredness in the arm and faint soreness that lingers as I write this.)) . I smiled and moved on to my next appointment.
In the Splash Zone
Posted on July 30, 2010 in Dogs Travels - So Cal Video
Drake ran away from me on Sunday. We were near the spot where we’d both been soaked by demon waves the previous Sunday. Twice, we passed the spot — once out to the southeast end of Dog Beach and back again so we could cover the full length of the strand. It was on the way back that he panicked, but not before he attempted to go around the spot by climbing on the landslide of cement fragments.
He climbed high, almost to the rim of the cliff. I lost sight of him and began to call. A passing woman laughed and pointed to where he was, but I couldn’t see him. So I was backtracking, calling loudly, when he shot off the rocks and began zipping like a bullet the way we had come.
“Ah shit,” I said. The concept of “lost dog” flooded my brain. I ran after him, pausing after a few paces to call his name. He stopped abruptly and looked back. I jogged a little farther and called again. Just as fast as he had left me, he zoomed back. There was a mad tumble of legs and arms as I caught him.
“My poor boy,” I cooed and carried him past the spot of frightening memory before putting him back on the sand. A couple of small waves wet his ankles, but he stayed with me the whole way.
Samuel Adams would kick the Tea Party out of his organization
Posted on July 27, 2010 in Civic Responsibility Reading
“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” – Samuel Adams — organizer of the Boston Tea Party
Jammed Lens and its Aftermath
Posted on July 27, 2010 in Anxiety Mania Photography
Last week had its difficulties. I dropped my new camera on the Harding Trail and jammed the zoom lens. The ring allowing me to move between focal lengths wouldn’t turn below 35mm. The autofocus motor whined without acting. Upper Modjeska Canyon heard my yells of frustration. In my solitude, I shouted at uncomfortable memories, the kind of behavior you expected of the homeless. The rest of us, including me, kept to the confines of our homes, lonely trails, and the interior of our cars when driving places. I marked it an evil day.
The following day I marked some troubling signs on my dailybooth account:
I’m feeling on the edge of an episode, perhaps a manic rather than a depressive one.The signs are varied, but lately I have noticed these:
1.) Light-headedness or the feeling that my head is going to explode.
2.) Increasingly late and troubled sleep.
3.) A fascination with bright colors like the red of stoplights or brake lights. They just seem more vivid — a warning sign.
4.) An impatience with people whose faults I would ordinarily forgive or ignore.
5.) Being confused about what day it is.
The next few days may reveal more symptoms or these may subside. If the urges grow too strong and I can’t contain my impulsivity, it may be time to surrender the credit cards to my wife and stay close to home.
It’s more than take the meds or meditate or exercise or eat right — I do all these things. The main thing is to steel myself to ride it out: it could be over in a few days or a few weeks. I just have to hold fast to my rational state of mind, to let my logical, compassionate being take charge while my emotions seethe. ((Several people commented with encouragement. I posted a link to What helps, what hurts to assist them in talking to people going through the stress of an episode.))
I wondered if I should push people away, keep to a strict solitude. A particularly aggressive woman on dailybooth (or so she was magnified in my head) irritated me to the point that I sent her a private message asking her to leave me alone. “I’ll ignore you,” I said. “Please ignore me.” ((I don’t like aggressive women. But then I don’t like aggressive men either. One of my problems when I was younger was that I kept looking for a passive woman who would make the first move. I settled for one who was more assertive.)) She acquiesced.
Subsequent days brought me peace. I sent the lens out for an estimate and stopped taking photos with any kind of device until my rage settled. The mania rose and subsided. In my journal I noted “Anxiety is the root.”
Motoring with the Ulnar Nerve
Posted on July 26, 2010 in Neurology Video
The physical therapist has me doing the most absurd-looking exercises. The latest one involves the very last joint on my ring finger. Holding my knuckle rigid, I bend the last joint. We began doing this because I noticed a stiffness in the joint.
Many of my exercises are the result of discoveries such as this. When I first visited, we noted some loss of motor ability in the little finger on the left hand. When I held the hand flat, spread the fingers, and closed them again, the pinky was slow to join the others. A few days of exercise using a rubber band relieved this. I am not seeing the ring finger spring back so readily and I am wondering if there is damage to that finger which has nothing to do with the nerve. If I bend it, there’s stiffness between the distal joint and the knuckle.
An especial torture is the Purdue Peg Board. A set of long rods, washers, and short tubes must be arranged in a series of holes. It was a struggle to do five holes when I started: now I am up to thirty.
The hand continues to improve except for this small detail. Some days it tingles. Today, while the numbness is still there — especially in the ring finger — the numbness is less noticeable.
One theory for my condition is that I’ve leaned a lot on the elbow. Every night I take my place in the big red retro chair in the living room and put my weight on the left elbow. I do this less when I sit in the office chair. It’s a common effect that afflicts truck drivers who lean on the window until their ulnar nerve balks and gives up its motor abilities.
Dream
Posted on July 21, 2010 in Dreams
We’re driving on a very rough road in a national park. We turn left into an overlook with mountainous bumps. As we pull in, another tourist — from Texas — tells us to be sure to check out the cave. The cave lies at the end of a steep trail. A small triangular entrance opens next to a yawning pit. When we get closer, we see the pit is full of feral goats. A ramp turns down a corner and under an arch. I round the bend and find myself facing a grizzly bear-sized ape (the face is like an orangutan). I rush backup to the laughter of other tourists, one of whom tells me that the beast is none other than the only Sasquatch ever captured. The scene abruptly cuts out to one of Lynn and I ascending an escalator in a department store.
Goy on the Wall
Posted on July 20, 2010 in Morals & Ethics Travels - So Cal
Last week, I attended a film festival held in conjunction with a Jewish Genealogy conference at the L.A. Live Marriot. No, despite my eminently semitic name (Joel Sax), I am not Jewish. Lynn was there because she has long suspected that she has [[Sephardim]] ancestors from the vicinity of [[Constantinople]] or [[Thessaloniki]]. Wednesday was rich in workshops on the subject, so she paid for a one day conference pass and bought a film festival ticket for me.
I saw only four of the movies during the eight hours I was around. The only fictional piece was a short about a Hungarian Jewish mother in hiding who rescued the son of another Jew from a firing squad. The standard Holocaust theme done in black and white caught the heart. The contents of the next film were forgettable. After it, I ate lunch and took a walk down to the L.A. Public Library and back ((I was frustrated all the way because I did not have my Nikon to catch the street scenes. My d40 had died and I was waiting for a new d60 to replace it. What photos I did capture were taken with my Droid camera phone. Some interesting material resulted, but I was limited by my battery’s power.)) before the next two.
A film about [[Felix Mendelssohn]] and his descendants raised the question raised the question “Can there be anything especially Jewish about his music? I laughed aloud when I heard a Nazi claim that he lacked depth and soul. That his music could be considered “Jewish” caused one man to vocally argue against it. How can music be measured as Jewish or not, he cried. Music is music. The whole concept struck him as ludicrous.
There was also the question about the many German Jews who converted during the 19th Century. This had made no difference to the Nazis who rounded up Mendelssohn-Bathory family descendants wherever they could find them, but it also annoyed many Jews who saw this as treasonous and uncalled for.
The plight of South American [[Crypto-Jews]] also touched on this theme. To be a Jews in these times — especially in Catholic-dominated Latin America — invited discrimination, hatred, and even violence. The biggest hurdles for the handful of men and women who wanted to recover the religion of their ancestors, however, were not set in their path by Catholics but by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who had come to South America to escape the ultimate pogrom. Whose Judaism was more authentic? asked the [[Reform_Judaism|Reform]] rabbi who performed the conversions: the ones who had been given it by birth and only perfunctorily lived a Jewish life or these who had embraced it with passion? The worst discrimination the new converts — who were the descendants of men and women who had lost their faith in the aftermath of the Inquisition — came from other Jews who did not want to recognize their conversions.
I didn’t stay for very long afterwards, but I made these observations. First, I found myself moved by the story largely because as one who had been raised a Christian, I accepted the idea of being drawn to a religion and affirming a connection to it by an act of faith. Second, though it annoyed me at the time, I have since come to realize the source of the hurt that led some in the audience to lash out at the aspersions of Kansas City based Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn ((The film showed Rabbi Cukierkorn conducting a mikvah in an Ecuadorean river. The symbolism of this is so close to baptism that I can appreciate the audience’s nervousness.)) . “I’m only a Jew by birth”, one woman prefaced her attack during the question and answer period led by the filmmaker.
Every one of the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — experiences among its own controversies as to who is a member and who is not. Many of the Jews who the rabbi criticized spent all of their lives struggling to be good people by learning to read Hebrew, reading tracts on theology, and living the life of charity that the religion calls for. Are they less authentic because they have not undergone a conversion experience? It has been part of their lives all along. Yet I continue to feel compassion for those whose families were cut off by political matters, who are only now finding it safe to learn about the faith of their fathers and return to it. I don’t think racism is the word I would use to characterize the attitudes of those reared as Jews, but it has a similar effect in bringing down the person. You are damned because of the choices your ancestors made is the way some Jews interpret rabbinical law. There is no going back no matter how deep the longing, how appropriate and authentic the faith. I kept my mouth shut in the room, but I am opening it here. Like the other religions, some of the concepts driving traditional Judaism are just plain wrong and are in need of reform. Ties broken by centuries of persecution should be reforgeable.
So speaks a goy.
White Out
Posted on July 19, 2010 in Dogs Travels - So Cal
The waterline at Dog Beach runs nearly in a straight line from southeast to northwest. Chunks of gravel-pocked conglomerate shore up the low dirt cliffs for most of the length until dunes meet the sea at the reach adjoining [[Bolsa Chica State Beach]]. As I just noted, the beach itself runs straight, but for about a quarter of a mile, the cliffs do a little advance and push the rocks into the sea. Aside from this, it’s an empty stretch so there are no interesting [[tide pools]] at water’s edge, just a sliver of sand.
We’ve been arriving during the late afternoon retreat of the tide. The waves have left gray penumbrae of themselves at the point where the beach abruptly changes its declivity to a twenty degree angle diving into the sea. At the southeast edge, people cluster with their canines, throwing orange and yellow balls into the foam while black-clad surfers float a few yards off waiting for the idea wave to scrape the bottom and carry them in a brief moment of magnificence to the shore.
None wait at the area I call the Point. The Point is merely the place where the rocks spill over into the sea. The beach remains straight, determined on its course to skewer Bolsa Chica. Winds blowing from the south churn up eight foot waves that crash into the beach in intervals that can’t be predicted. I have never been able to count the pattern of small waves leading to one large like surfers are said to — and I don’t think they can make the count either because they sit in the water until one suits their liking.
Yesterday, as we approached the Point from the southeast, no crests struck the shore. The water just slid in gracefully, throwing up little cockscombs of spray rather than the dramatic crashes we associate with winter storms. So I deemed it safe and let my diminutive, twenty pound [[Boston terrier]] up the strand.
Halfway through the rocky area without warning of wind, a succession of ten BIG rollers crashed into the shore. I saw them coming, so I lifted Drake onto the rockslide because he so hates getting wet. I pointed out the path he should follow. But my doggy kept coming off the rocks and onto the beach, scared I suppose and craving closeness.
I saw it coming: a huge scrapper with a slapping wall of turquoise water and a growing white crest bearing down on the shore. I turned my back to shoo Drake up the rocks seconds before it hit. My doggy was slow in understanding my intentions for him, so I was reaching down to pick him up and move him when the monster hit. For a second, white foam erased the rocks and the dog. There was only the heavy shush of the water, then a gurgle as it pulled back. Drake disappeared from my sight. The spring-back from the rock drenched from shoulders to knees. Then, as the green, silver and brown of the rockslide reappeared, he stood there, taking in the surprise of the splash. This time I grabbed him before the next one hit and placed him on a high place before scrambling up ahead of the next one which crashed even higher and still got my butt.
We were left to climb sideways down the rocks as one white-out after another wrecked itself on the shore. Lynn got wet, too, but only as far as the bottoms of her short-shorts. It was good to get back to the wider beach. I thanked no god for our survival, but I was glad that there had been no pull to the encroaching waters.
