Music of the Day: Enya, Watermark.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered a lump under my right arm; it was a little subcutaneous dime-sized lump with a corresponding discoloration that somewhat resembled a bruise and, at first, it was a little tender to the touch--not exactly painful, just a little tender, so no big deal, probably.

At least that's what I told myself before going to bed that night--no big deal. At 2:00am my brain woke me up with all sorts of negative and scary thoughts, which I don't think require much explication here--you probably know what they were. The Big C! Well, maybe. . . .

But honestly, after that initial half-sleepless night, followed by a couple of days of associated worry and trepidation, I had what I think is a pretty weird reaction--a strangely calming and liberating sensation and an associated sense that worrying about my "condition" would probably do me no good and in fact might make things worse.

I am not sure where this came from--maybe it just had to do with trying to be calm until I actually had something real to be concerned about.

All of which brings me to this: back in the mid-1970s, Mickey Rivers played baseball for the New York Yankees and I recall a quote of his on how he dealt with the vicissitudes of professional baseball--his quote was, to my recollection, something like this: "There ain't no sense worryin' about things you ain't got no control over, 'cause if you ain't got no control over 'em, there ain't no sense worryin' about 'em. And there ain't no sense worryin' about things you got control over, 'cause if you got control over 'em, there ain't no sense worryin' about 'em." I have seen other versions of this same quote, some more or less literate, but with the same essential message. Maybe it was recalling Mickey Rivers that had something to do with my change in outlook with respect to my right armpit--which in itself is a little scary.

As it turns out my sawbones examined me and said I had nothing to worry about and that most likely I had a partially occluded sweat gland; by the time she saw me, the lump was hardly noticeable and the tenderness was almost entirely gone (although when she poked and prodded around under my arm, I could feel something akin to tenderness). So, the preliminary results are good, I think.

I'm not sure I know how to combat those nearly automatic thoughts of doom and gloom associated with these signs of physical frailty and ageing and I'm not sure it's completely healthy to want to immediately dismiss or discount such thoughts. I am fairly sure that I'll have similar reactions in the future as I continue to age (I hope) and as various parts and systems deteriorate, so my goal is to attempt to be as calm and even-keeled as possible as I can about these things. I think I need to keep the aforementioned Mickey Rivers quote in mind; one of his other quotes was this: "What was the name of that dog on 'Rin Tin Tin'?" Clearly, I need to be a little selective when it comes to Mick the Quick. . . .

AJ

Music of the Day: Gregg Karukas, Looking Up

A few months ago I sent my old Mom a large book of oversized crossword puzzles, at her request; her sight had deteriorated to the point that working on smaller puzzles just wasn't possible anymore, so I hauled myself over to our nearby chain bookstore and found a fat book with challenging, but not too difficult, puzzles for her to work on, and I mailed it to her. As I was writing this on my laptop, she was working on puzzle number 15--but here's the part I didn't expect: Mom cheats! She looks at the answers in the back of the book. And I mean she LOOKS at the answers in the back of the book, she doesn't just GLANCE at the answers, she stares at the answer pages! She said after completing a puzzle the other day, "I got all of this one, quick." Yeah! No wonder! She cheats!

I guess this explains why I cheat every now and then on crossword puzzles, too--it's a learned behavior, as they say in the schools.

I learned some other things about Mom and myself on this most recent visit; actually, I think I knew these things before, just that I never truly confronted them as openly as I did on this trip. Here are just a few things I've learned about my Mom and myself.

I've often said that my Mom wouldn't ask for help if she was on fire, and it's true--Mom is pretty damned stoic about most of her ailments, aches, pains, and infirmities, and they are numerous and cumulatively somewhat debilitating. While I tend to grouse to myself about my occasional pains and such, mostly I'm the same way; what's scary is that Mom doesn't even tell her freakin' doctor about some of the stuff that's bothering here and while my behavior is not exactly the same, it's close--I usually don't go to see a doctor unless forced to by major discomfort or the obvious need for a splint or a cast or surgery.

Mom doesn't ask too many questions of others in conversations, particularly personal questions. Whereas my lovely wife gets as much information out of people that they are willing to share once asked, it seems that in my family, if someone hasn't shared information our rule is, "Don't ask." This makes my lovely wife crazy--she wonders how I can have a conversation with someone and not ask what she considers to be relevant questions and I wonder how she can ask questions that I think are way too private and personal. This too I get from Mom. . . .

I haven't taken care of myself as well as I should have over the course of my lifetime, something that may eventually cause me considerable pain and suffering in the future and will likely cause me to spend too much money on fixing things that should have received regular preventive maintenance in the past. This too I get from Mom, who is now suffering a bit because of similar self-neglect. She's not ill in any serious way; that is, she doesn't have heart disease or cancer or breathing difficulties (despite 40+ years of smoking before she finally quit--cold turkey) but she's not healthy, either--she has back problems and shoulder problems and as previously mentioned, she doesn't see well anymore and her hearing isn't especially good. She moves at a glacier-like pace when in the grocery store or Wal-Mart and she thinks all other drivers on the road are either murderous thugs or morons. This too I get from Mom, except that part about moving at a glacier-like pace in the grocery store.

So my Mom is a living primer on aging and I really should pay attention to what's going on so that I can be better prepared to handle these things a little later in life. Mom handles herself with some dignity and a not too small measure of spunk and feistiness, which is good, but she's frail and lonely and I don't think she derives much joy or pleasure from her daily life, which is a real shame. She has lots of friends and family that provide her with much support and laughter and short jaunts to various places, such as the pharmacy and the grocery store, and that's all well and good--but her sister passed away about three years ago and the two of them were, for better or worse and for many years, completely inseperable, and now Mom's alone. This makes me all the more thankful for my lovely and wonderful wife and I hope we can sustain each other for many years to come. And I should probably make sure my own children read this--they may be more like me than they wish to be and if so they will have acquired some of these family traits which may not be all that beneficial as they grow older.

I should also note that in no way do I blame Mom for my ill-considered or stupid behaviors or traits, even if I did "learn" them from her; I have been making my own choices, good and bad, for a very long time and so I am thoroughly responsible for all of the decisions I have made along the way.

It's time now to thumb through the answers at the back of my own book of crossword puzzles--I can't help myself, Mom is the one who taught me to cheat and 53-down ("Die Schweigsame Frau" soprano) is breakin' my tiny brain, so excuse me while I turn to the appropriate page in the back of the book.

AJ

Music of the Day, Part II: Pat Metheny Group, Still Life Talking

The other evening Dr. GDA, Jr., and I had a nice phone conversation; we live in different cities now, but before I moved away we spent a fair amount of time together, mostly in bars--actually, only one particular bar, whose owner sponsored our softball team, a half-sleazy dive near the university. We usually drank beer after games, but sometimes it seemed the only reason we had a softball team in the first place was because it gave us an excuse to drink in the evenings. Dr. GDA, Jr., was the official Manager of the team, although I think he fired himself after the first miserable season--when we won a game he took us all to the local VFW hall, after the mandatory drinking at our sponsor's bar, and plunked down a fifty dollar bill for more beer. Apparently the victory was a big deal. . . .

And as I think about it for a few minutes, I remember that Dr. GDA, Jr., was advised by his physician to cease and desist with the alcoholic beverages (a blood pressure thing), advice that Dr. GDA, Jr., took seriously--he is, so far as I know, a practicing, and practiced, teetotaler. While I received no such medical advice, having more than two beers now is so rare that I cannot remember the last time it happend. Well, not really--I had three beers one evening about a month ago. . . .

Back to the story: Dr. GDA, Jr., and I reminisced the other night about some of our old friends and acquaintances from those halcyon days of summertime softball games, cold post-game beers, and our days as graduate students together when our friendship grew in the shared desolation of a historiography class. One of our fellow sufferers was a gent from Philadelphia who had made his way to the hinterlands despite his mother's fear that he might be attacked and murdered (scalped, perhaps) by Indians while on his journey out of the City of Brotherly Love. Vincent, Dr. GDA, Jr., and I were all born within a few years of one another, so our connection was a little stronger--many of the other graduate students in our department were considerably younger and while they too had to endure the awful historiography class, Vincent, Dr. GDA, Jr., and I probably drank the most in response to the class and the unpleasant man who was teaching it.

The three of us also orchestrated more than one alcohol-fueled road trip to the nexus of sin, decadence, and depravity--Las Vegas. There was much laughter, more than enough drinking, and the only one of us who ever came home with more money than he started with was Dr. GDA, Jr.

Vincent returned to Philadelphia after three semesters and for a while we kept in touch with him--occasional letters, a phone call now and then, and as I recall, he even returned to our fine mountain town a few years later; I remember driving him back to the airport at two in the morning on the day that he left and then turning around and driving back home, sleeping in my car in the parking lot of a roadside restaurant that no longer exists (my favorite sign in the joint was on the front door, and it said "Check All Guns At Counter").

Unfortunately that's about the last time any of us heard from Vincent, although we all heard a rumor that he again left Philadelphia for some high-powered position in the mental-health bureaucracy in New York City. Since then, not a peep from or about Vincent. . . .

This is sad, as he was a good guy who had a great sense of humor and he seemed to enjoy living in our pastoral alpine burg. Joseph Epstein writes in his most recent book, Friendship: An Expose, that we have over the course of our lives various kinds of friendships, including temporary friends. It seems as if Vincent was one of those temporary friends to both Dr. GDA, Jr., and me--but we both miss him, his laughter, and his gentle demeanor. Every now and then I get a hankerin' to just go out and have a few cold ones with some old friends and laugh and talk beer-fueled philosophy and politics and religion and hatch a plan to drive to Las Vegas in the middle of the night. Speaking for both myself and Dr. GDA, Jr., wherever you are VSB, we miss you and hope you are well and happy.

AJ

Music of the Day: Hector Berlioz, Harold in Italy.

Here's a story I read in the local newspaper that almost knocked me to the floor the other day--I laughed, I cried, I thought my head was going to explode. If I get crazy in this posting, it will soon become clear why I went stark raving bug-shit. . . .

There is an entity called the California Coastal Commission comprised, I'm guessing, of well-intentioned people of various backgrounds; no names were named that I recognized or remember--no matter, really, who they are, just wait until you read what they decided to do (if you haven't already seen this in your local rag). This group, the California Coastal Commission, has sued the United States Navy to prevent the Navy from conducting sonar training exercises off the California coast. The training is meant to give our sailors the opportunity to become more adept at locating, identifying, and dealing with various underwater threats such as mines, underwater obstacles to shipping, hidden devices, and of course enemy vessels that might launch an underwater attack against the United States. As you can see there are legitimate national security issues at play in the proper training of our armed forces to detect underwater threats to the country--but apparently the people on the California Coastal Commission cannot see the value in this training.

What they see, instead, is a threat to WHALES and other aquatic creatures; the sonar the Navy uses, it is believed, makes the whales lose their hearing, after which they sometimes become disoriented, sometimes stranding or beaching themselves, at which point they die. Admittedly this is not a good thing, a bunch of dead, beached whales--it probably lowers beach-front property values every time it happens. You wouldn't want a pile of dead whales on your front lawn and nor would i, especially if my front law was some pricey piece of beach-front property in, say, Santa Barbara. So, the CCC has sued the Navy to prevent the Navy from using its sonar devices to better train its personnel to detect and deal with underwater threats. Its BAD for the WHALES. While reading the story in the paper, this is the place where my head almost exploded. . . .

What judge or court allowed this to go forward? In my view, the lawsuit is madness, pure and simple. There is no other way to put this--it's absolutely freakin' madness, California-style. These people on the CCC seem to be more concerned about the possible death of WHALES than they are about the possible death of their fellow human beings (fellow Americans). Think about it this way: No coastal sonar training means potential increased threat levels, which means that some enterprising group of whacko bad guys might find a way to float a powerful explosive device to the California coast and--boom!--the issue then becomes not just a bunch of disoriented and/or dead WHALES, but now there might be a bunch of dead PEOPLE on the beach, lowering property values and generally making a mess of things. And I can almost hear the CCC spokes-person, after such an event, decrying the loss of human life and regretting the decision to sue the Navy to prevent the training from taking place, and talking in humble and perhaps even contrite terms about the "unintended consequence" of massive human casualties. At that point, of course, it's too damned late for the victims, but hey, the intentions were good.

Good intentions are just not enough. And I have some questions that pop into my brain when I read about stuff like this, such as: Have these people been living in caves, or underwater, for the last six years? Do they not know that mad-dog terrorist groups seek to attack us again in ANY conceivable way and with maximum possible casualties? Do they not know that saving the WHALES is a good thing, but that saving PEOPLE is a better thing? Do they not know that sometimes national security is a legitimate trump to lesser issues such as disoriented or dead WHALES? Do they really mean to impede efforts to keep Americans safe (themselves included, by the way), or are they just hopelessly dim? Do they not know that the Navy will have to spend taxpayer money to makes its case in court, money that might be otherwise spent on something important, like ensuring greater safety for the country? Have they thought about what impact their suit, if it succeeds, will have on the Navy's ability to protect our coasts?

I can only imagine the glee with which this kind of news is received by those who wish to do us harm. This profoundly frivolous lawsuit is a testament to the shallowness, weakness, and morally bankrupt "thinking" of the California Coastal Commission; let's just hope the Navy perseveres and presses this case with maximum energy and let's just hope the Navy is successful in defending its desire to defend the rest of us.

AJ

More to come, but please look at this first:

http://www.slate.com:80/id/2161171/fr/flyout

AJ