digitalzen's Open Salon Blog

That thing about "the unexamined life" could be true

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:08:15 -0400

I run across people, on the Web and elsewhere, who seem directionless. They don’t seem engaged with their lives. Some seem simply to exist passively, with little pleasure and no discernible joy. Others flail around at this and that, become intrigued or outraged by every small thing that crosses their path and may, briefly, stop off and register their interest in some way. However, when push comes to shove, if you ask them what moves them, what their passion might be, they are often unable to answer. If they do, it’s often with a caveat: too old, too young, not enough time, can’t afford it, and so forth.

There is a temptation to think of those folks as shallow and superficial, but that is an arrogant (not to mention judgmental) attitude. It is not up to me to weigh the importance of someone else’s life, their degree of satisfaction and joy, or their lack thereof. I do, however, see folks who I believe could be happier, and I suspect that’s because they haven’t looked deeply enough into themselves. They haven’t identified the one or two things that they feel strongly enough to act on, instead of reacting.

I think everyone needs such an avocation: not a job, not a hobby, but something that is so important to them personally that they would work at it — whether or not for pay — in preference to many of the things that we conventionally think of as “fun.” Self-fulfillment is a basic human need, and I believe that in order to be happy we must pursue it in some way. We may not be able to change the world, but we can change our little corner of it, a little bit. We may not be able to affect history, but we can affect the future of individuals.

We can drive a disabled vet to the store or to the VA hospital. We can read to someone who is unable. We can volunteer as a Big Brother or Sister. We can call up a church, a charitable organization, a library, and ask if they need people to help with anything at all. We can volunteer at a local nature center and turn our love of critters or plants into an enthusiastic presentation that will engage budding naturalists. There are hundreds of such things that we can do, if we but look for them — things that allow us to make a difference that we can see, that is tangible, that can bring us satisfaction and fruits that we probably can’t imagine yet. The people I see doing these sorts of thing nearly always seem fulfilled and happy.

I’ve got mine. It’s not posting links on blogs or Facebook, not even writing essays like this. Those are things I do when I’m distracted. It doesn’t matter what I do. What matters is what you do. I’ve found mine.

Have you? Will you look? Will you at least think about it?

Iconoclasm and Addiction

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:07:03 -0400

Ms. Lindsay Lohan has been much in the news today, and I’ve had several conversations about her, both in person and online. Two things that they all seem to have had in common was (a.) contempt for Ms. Lohan, and (b.) the general opinion that with all her money she should somehow be able to rise above her addiction. One person even wondered why she didn’t just hire a driver, instead of driving under the influence.

I find this disturbing, and not because I’m a particular fan of the starlet herself. (I am not, as a matter of fact.) What bothers me every time people start trashing celebrity alcoholics and addicts is that it indicates how, half a century and more after alcoholism (and later addiction) were recognized officially as diseases, we as a society still view them with a moralistic attitude. We also seem to enjoy seeing icons brought down, but that speaks more to our character than that of the icons.

My personal belief is that this is because nearly all of us have had our lives touched by addiction, and have experienced the chaos that addicts carry and leave behind them the way a tornado carries dust and debris. Addicts do things that “good” people would never do. We lie — to ourselves, our families, and the world. We steal — time, affection, money, jewelry, attention, and sometimes lives. We cheat others of the things that we like to believe that we are all entitled to: peace of mind, security, sometimes even shelter and food. We not only do these things, but we do them in ways that confound those around us. He wasn’t raised like that! Look what she did to her poor parents! What could such a person be, but evil? What could they possibly deserve beyond contempt?

I know those questions, because I asked them of myself in my active addiction, and for some years afterward. It wasn’t until I began to relate my behaviors during my addiction to those of the addicts that I was working with in my recovery that I really “got” it.

Addiction is chemically-induced insanity. We use drugs to make us feel different from what we really are. They do that by altering our brain chemistry in ways that make us feel better about ourselves. We like that. We may feel less shy, less “uptight,” less dumb, more romantic, more desirable — the list of things that drugs (including alcohol, which is just another drug) do for us in the beginning is limited only by the things that we might want to change. They change the way we feel, but they do not change reality, so when the good feelings wear off we’re “still the same old girl we used to be” as the song goes, and we want even more to experience that change — to be that other person. So we have some more drugs or booze, because the very first thing that they take away from us is the ability to make good decisions. In the case of alcohol, only two drinks affects our critical thinking, and our critical thinking is what keeps us out of trouble.

Over time, the continual presence of drugs in our brains causes actual physical changes that make us need the drug to feel normal. Because our critical thinking is affected, using again looks like the most reasonable choice. We tell ourselves that we’re OK. We lie about our use. We do what we need to do to protect the drugs that take us in the direction we believe we need to go. Eventually, we really do need the drugs to function. We are well and truly hooked, even though we had no intention of getting that way. The drugs become the center of our universe, and we are compelled to do whatever it takes to get them. We don’t plan to hurt others in the process, but it’s inevitable.

It’s also unsurprising that most of those folks don’t get it. They think “Just Say No” is reality, instead of a cruel joke, and to them our behavior is a complete puzzle, the obvious solution to which is that we are terrible people.

That’s really a shame, because I’m convinced, along with most other folks who know the facts about addiction, that if we put the time, effort and money into drug research and rehab that we put into prisons for incarcerating addicts, we could make a really big dent in addiction. That would be a good thing, because addiction — including alcoholism — costs us hundreds of billions of dollars a year in health care, lost wages, bankruptcies, disrupted families, and the myriad other kinds of fallout from lives run amok, not to mention heartache and misery for all involved.

But first, people have to understand that insanity — whatever the cause — is not evil. In the case of addiction, it is a disease that can be arrested, like diabetes, once the addict gets clean and begins to understand what’s needed to remain that way. That’s where detox and treatment come in. It doesn’t often work the first time, and for some it doesn’t work at all, but it’s the best we’ve got until our national will and attitudes change.

_____________________

This post was published previously in the Sunrise Detox blog.

May Sucks!

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:05:40 -0400

May sucks. It's going to suck for the rest of my life, and those of quite a few people I love. May 29th especially sucks. It's the day my new granddaughter Kathy decided to learn if she could fly.

My daughter Tammy waited until she was 38 to get married for the first time, to a guy she'd known since she was sixteen. My girls, about 2-1/2 years apart, ran with the same crowd in their teens -- most of whom at one time or another spent time living on our sofa. They were a troubled bunch, and we lost a few of them in later years to their attempts to become happier through chemistry. Most of them were basically good kids, though, and the girls are still friends with a lot of them today. Her sister Donna, members of the old gang and her new stepdaughter, comprised Tammy's wedding party. (Her sister, an accomplished baker, made the cake, and Dad took the pictures. She wanted it cheap and simple. That's my girl.)

My sons-in-law are great guys. They make me happy, because they love my girls unreservedly and treat them the way they deserve to be treated. Dave, Tammy's husband, actually came to me and asked my permission to marry my daughter. How many dads get to have that experience these days? Previously married, he came to us with a gorgeous 16-year-old daughter, and they both captured our hearts almost instantly.

Kathy had her problems, including depression and a tendency to try too hard to be perfect. Without going into the details of a childhood that included maternal abandonment and caring for a younger sister when she should have been experiencing kidhood, let's just say that she came by her difficulties unsurprisingly. Not too long after she came into our lives and hearts, she got involved in a relationship.

Sam is a nice kid, and I think he really loved her. But neither of them had any idea of what a healthy relationship looked like, and they fumbled around even more than most as a result. Kathy experimented with alcohol and, as a result of that and not handling her medications properly, ended up in acute care a couple of times for suicidal thoughts and one major threat. When she returned from treatment, on meds, things looked about as good as they could have. Depression is a tricky foe, however, and she was perhaps not as vigilant as she should have been. Who knows?

We're pretty sure she was off her meds for a few weeks. We do know that, one night, she had a fight with Sam after some drinking. Then she turned off her cell phone, got in her new Hyundai, drove to the top of the tallest bridge in Florida, placed her wallet and driver's license neatly on the seat, and climbed over the railing. We've spent a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that she felt as though she was free at last, and that she never knew when she got to the water, 200 feet below.

I feel ripped off. So does my wife. We'd just started loving her. Her dad and everyone else who loved her were -- and still are -- devastated. Being a dad, though, I feel worst for Tammy, who so loved being a Mom at last, and having both a daughter and a friend. I cried on Mother's Day, and I'm crying now. We'll all be wrecks the last week of the month.

Mother's Day sucks. May sucks. Bridges suck. I'm still incredibly angry at Kathy, the circumstances of her life, the inability of professionals to just FIX her, my helplessness, the god I don't believe in, and the world in general.

But I save my most intense anger -- hate -- for the asshole who stalked her after her death. There is some sick bastard who keeps track of suicides, and writes nasty stuff on his website about the victims and their families. I loathe that sociopath with all the disgust at my disposal. I will not tell you his site, just as I have not used real names in this post. I don't want anyone to inadvertently lead him here, and I certainly don't want anyone to flatter him by visiting his shithole of a website. I've personally gone quite out of my way to avoid finding out who he is, although I could easily do so, because I've got a lot of anger to discharge here. It's probably not a good thing for me to know.

As a person who has studied such things, I can understand his pathology -- but I can't excuse it. Evil is evil, and... Well, enough of that. Enough of this.

Enough of fucking May.

The Cedar Key Caper

Wed, 12 May 2010 10:05:45 -0400

They say that there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots. They're right.

Back in the day, I used to teach flying and fly a lot of charters around Florida and the Caribbean. One of the trips that I made regularly was from West Palm Beach to Cedar Key airport, on the Gulf Coast near the mouth of the Suwanee River. It’s a big deal artist colony, vacation resort and haven for bikers and environmental types now, but back then half the buildings in town were abandoned and it had fallen upon seriously hard times.

I had this drunken customer, whom I shall not name, who was convinced that he was the man to get the island back on its feet. I made a number of trips to Cedar Key, hauling him and his associates. I was of the opinion that they were developing the one or two bars in town as much as anything else, but it didn’t matter. The bucks and tips were OK, and I was trying to support a new family.

The Cedar Key airport is challenging to pilots flying anything larger than a small single-engine airplane. The runway is relatively short at 2300 feet, and there is a sharp drop-off at each end. Both approach and departure are over water — essentially beginning at the end of the hardtop — and there were no lights on the runway or anywhere else around, back in those days. I used to prefer flying in with a Piper Aztec: plenty of power and excellent short-fieldperformance. I’m not much on twin engine aircraft regarding safety — the old pilot’s joke that they just double the chance of an engine failure is only funny up to a point — but I did like that 500 horsepower on that short runway. I love to swim, but salt water is so hard on the radios….

One evening in February of about 1971 I got a call from my boss that the gentleman in question wanted to fly to Cedar Key with three friends. I told the boss I’d take the trip if he would cover the first student for me in the morning, since I’d be getting back pretty late.

I arrived at the airport to find the gentlemen well-lubricated, but I judged it would be OK to fly with them. My usual plan in such situations was to climb to about 8500 feet, where the decreased air pressure would often put a drunk to sleep. The excellent heater in the Aztec would keep us all warm and toasty.

Passing through about 4000 feet I began to feel kind of chilly. I’d worn a light sport coat since it was cool, and it hadn’t been too bad on the ground. The temperature drops about 3.5° F. for every thousand feet of altitude, though, so it was beginning to verge on cold in the airplane, and there was no moving around to keep warm. I switched on the Piper’s heater — and nothing happened. Further attempts to start it were fruitless as well. We’d be chilly. I gave up on the idea of 8500 feet, leveled off at 4500, and forged on.

Even at 200 mph it takes a while to fly 300 miles, including a long climb, and there was a stiff headwind that night. By the time I had the airport at CDK in sight, I was hypothermic. By the time I started the final approach to the short, dangerous unlit runway, I knew the chances of making a safe landing were about 50-50, and dropping with every bout of shivering.

The wrong decision at times like that has killed many a pilot and passenger. On the one hand there was the issue of safety but, on the other, hubris comprised of youth, bulletproofness, macho pilot self-image and, in this case the presence of three older men who I perceived were judging me harshly. Then I thought of my wife and daughter, considered that regardless of what the passengers might think, I was the pilot and they were just — passengers — and we were off to the Gainesville airport 40 miles distant, as low as I could safely fly, and as fast.

By the time we got to Gainesville I wasn’t even able to think clearly. Having just made one good decision, I was tapped out in the judgment department. On downwind for the Gainesville runway, I couldn’t get an indication that the front landing gear had extended. I flew past the tower, where they inspected me as best they could with a searchlight and binoculars, reporting that the wheel appeared to be down.

At that point I had to decide whether to blow the gear down with the CO2 system, which would have involved purging the hydraulic system before I could return home, or land with the nose held off the ground as long as possible and hope for the best. Obviously, the right answer was blow the gear down and deal with the ramifications later. I chose to just land, as quickly as possible — and got away with it. The bulb in the gear indicator had blown, we found out later.

I’ve come close to being killed in airplanes on at least three other occasions, but they all involved overt stupidity on my part or someone else’s. The Cedar Key Caper was just a combination of circumstances, none of which were dangerous by themselves, but that added up to a potentially lethal combination.

I spent the night at a motel near the airport, and flew back in the morning with the warm sun streaming into the cockpit. Even after six hours in the warm motel room, it felt really, really good.

Delta Nights

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:03:06 -0500

This is a work of fiction. The writer does not claim to have been there or done that, and even if he had it would have been nearly a half-century ago and details would be fading. So cut him some slack, OK?

*******

Around dusk, we’d start preparing to move out. We liked the darkness for its relative cool, the quiet, and the concealment. The bugs were bad, but then they’re pretty bad most of the time.

Preparedness was something we took for granted, in each other and in ourselves. This man might spend a couple of minutes putting a final edge on a Ka-Bar or Randall. That one might re-tape his magazines. Another might hurry to finish the last few lines of a letter home. Everyone, as a matter of course, checked and made any necessary repairs and additions to his harness, the pouches, the medical dressings that everyone carried, weapons and other equipment. Then he would check over a buddy, taping or tying anything that could make noise. The other man would do the same for him. Those who carried shotguns would long since have finished waterproofing the pasteboard shells, dipping them in paraffin heated over a K-ration heat tab, quickly wiping off the excess, and setting them nose down to harden. Tiger-striped faces seemed streaked with blood in the dim light from the shaded red bulbs.

Darkness falls suddenly in the tropics, and as soon as it was complete we’d head for the boats, feeling our way along familiar paths in the gloom, cursing casually about small things to relieve the tension. Most of us would cup last smokes carefully in our hands, trying to suck down enough nicotine to last for several hours. You don’t smoke out there. The movies show guys hit by snipers shooting at the glow of a cigarette, but that’s not why. A non-smoker can smell it from hundreds of meters away if the air is moving slowly–and in Southeast Asia, outside the monsoon season, it doesn’t move much after dark. Then too, smoking puts carbon monoxide in your blood and that reduces night vision. Finally, there’s no practical way to keep your butts–either kind–dry on a night stroll in the delta.

The boat crews would crank up the big diesels and away we’d roar, usually in a direction away from the area where we’d be operating. We’d ride the noisy inboards to a predetermined point, then shut them down and lower the 50 horsepower, specially-muffled outboards. Running at low rpms and–we hoped–unheard, we would move in the direction of the night’s objective.

That was usually an intersection of waterways in the maze of mangrove-covered islands comprising most of the “dry” land for a hundred or more klicks in all directions. Someone would have determined that the bad guys were using a particular route for moving supplies into the delta region, a mangrove and scrub wilderness criss-crossed with innumerable channels and canals, and dotted with small camps used by the insurgents for a couple of days before they moved on. Trying to find them at home was a fool’s errand, and besides, the name of the game was to disrupt the flow of supplies.

The truth of the matter was, those guys could survive for weeks in the delta without supplies, subsisting on a few handsful of rice supplemented with crabs, oysters off the mangrove roots, an occasional fish or snake, and drinking water from seeps hand-dug in the mucky soil of the higher islands. The idea of starving a native out of one of the most productive ecosystems in the world was obviously conceived in the land-locked brain of some general or admiral from Kansas. Any low-country boy could have told them differently, but they never asked.

You can see surprisingly well at night, even without a moon, once your eyes become adjusted. The trick is to look a bit to the side of what you want to see, and be satisfied with impressions rather than precise images. Night vision isn’t acute, but different levels of light are easily discerned. Early on, all warriors learn a technique of de-focusing and staring into infinity. This makes your eyes more sensitive to movement. Combine that with lots of practice keeping your eyes moving and not staring at things, and navigating in the near-dark is easier than you’d think. (The ingrained habit of gazing with unfocused eyes, used day and night by all experienced hunters, is the source of the famous “thousand yard stare” that civilians remark upon. To an operator, it looks perfectly normal.)

We’d try to get into position by 2200 or thereabouts, depending on the moon. If the tide was running in the direction we wanted to go, we might allow the boats to drift until we found a place where they could be concealed in the shadows of overhanging mangroves or brush. Otherwise they’d drop us into the water at a shallow spot, then make their way off a few hundred meters and stand ready to respond with additional firepower when needed. If we could, we’d stay in the water at the edges of the mangroves. We’d be mostly submerged, lowering our heads into the water from time to time to minimize the bugs, communicating by touch as needed, holding our weapons clear of the black water when possible. We’d tie condoms over the muzzles, and the chambered rounds sealed the barrels pretty well, but water in the works can cause malfunctions or worse, so it pays to be careful.

Each teammate knew his field of fire and other responsibilities–who would pop the flares, who would cover the flanks, who the rear, who would direct fire on target. The squad leader would have communicated, with a few hand signals and perhaps a whisper or two, the direction of withdrawal, where to meet the boats for pickup in the event we had to leave on foot or swim, and the direction to move if we got lost. We all knew that, regardless of the circumstances, our buddies would get us out. That knowledge alone–that the men around you would treat your life and wellbeing as their own–made the silent waiting, the wondering, and the flights of fancy a lot more tolerable.

Sometimes you’d see the shadow of a sampan as it moved toward the center of the waterway when rounding a bend. Sometimes the first warning would be a tiny sound, or the smell of the fermented fish sauce that is a staple of the Southeast Asian diet. A ripple catching starlight might give them away in the calm water.

If the boatmen were very good, they would just appear out of the night. Whatever the case, you knew no law-abiding citizen would be sneaking around the delta in an unlit boat in the middle of the night. After insuring that the entire team was aware of the target, the leader would poke the guy with the flare, who would fire it into the air, if possible in a direction that would leave the team in shadow and the boat illuminated. The pop of the flare was the signal to fire.

A second flare would follow the first as quickly as possible, bathing the waterway in a wavering blue-white light from the burning magnesium that dangled from the parachutes. The team would direct fire into the sampan and, while reloading, would check the surrounding area for more boats, and men in the water or the mangroves. Firefights seldom lasted more than a minute–in fact, were seldom really fights. Usually, by the time the boats got there, all the guerillas who were able would have hit the water and faded into the mangroves. They knew that the pintel-mounted .50 and 7.62 machine guns on the big watercraft rendered the trees no cover at all. The only escape was to disappear. When the diesels growled the battle was over, nine times out of ten.

We tried to take prisoners, but rarely found survivors. On occasion there would be weapons to gather up. If the sampan was already sinking, we’d back off and the .50 cal. would finish the job. If it could be boarded safely, we’d look for any materials that might provide useful intelligence. Checking carefully for booby-traps, we would pile up any ammo and supplies–rice, clothing and what have you–on top of a block of C-4. Someone would stick in a couple of 2-minute detonators, pull the igniters, and clamber into the boat.

Two minutes and a few hundred meters distant we’d here the flat bang of the C-4, then sometimes a secondary explosion. Either way, the sampan, supplies and ammo would take a lot of gathering up before they were of use to anyone. The coxswain would make the big diesels roar all the way back to the hootches that, after a night in the brackish water, even seemed something like home.

I don’t think anyone wondered, at the time, if what we were doing accomplished much. We operated, we survived, and we were one day closer to the end of that tour. The wondering–the anger–would come later for some; for others not at all. But back in those days, it was just another walk with our buddies in the delta night.

For all those who came home determined to change things,
and in memory of those who returned in aluminum boxes.
May it never happen again...