"I wanna be ELECTED!"

I will admit that I pay less attention to the quadrennial presidential frenzy than I probably should. While I can name most (probably not all--how many of them ARE there?) of the GOP candidates and all one of the Democratic candidates, and while I’ve read countless news accounts and editorial discussions in the aftermath of the endless debates among the former, I still cannot pin down exactly why any of them chose to throw their hats into the proverbial ring. Why does Michele Bachmann want to be president, for instance, aside from “God told me to do it”? What does Rick Perry see himself as offering the country? Or baseball-glove out of Massachusetts, or the now nearly forgotten pizza guy, or salamander-serial-adulterer, or Ron “Methuselah was a KID” Paul. I admit I kind of like the Utah Mormon, Huntsman, but that may be as much because his daughters are a hoot as anything else.

I would love to ask every one of them, in a quiet, non-photo-op moment (if there were such a thing), WHY they, personally, not only want the job, but deem themselves qualified for it. Like that moment in the movie, “Blind Side,” when Michael turns the tables on the NCAA investigator, telling her that they want to know why everybody else wants him to go to Ole Miss, but not why HE wants to go there.

Why whatever percent of voters want Paul or Bachmann or Romney or Perry or Cain or Huntsman or whomever to become president (which mostly boils down to “anybody but the black guy” anyway) doesn’t interest me nearly as much as why that handful of people each individually want to become president.

Frankly, I sense that none of them really want the job.

Running for president has become less about becoming president, than merely the lucrative game of running itself. Heck, just tagging along as the vice-presidential candidate four years ago made Sarah Palin rich. She didn’t even have to bother going back to her original day job as Alaska governor. She has demonstrated that there are almost as many perks to being a presidential candidate, in however teasing a way, as to the job itself--plus none of the headaches.

Ron Paul apparently gave up his medical career to become a career politician and then a career presidential candidate. Near as I can tell, he “consistently” stakes out positions that will keep him “interesting” and “attractive” to just large enough a portion of the electorate to make him seem viable as a candidate, but not to large enough portion of same to make him actually likely to be elected.

It’s not the job, it’s the adventure, and the money and publicity that flow along with it.

As my own job seems threatened and my “career,” such as it is, in doubt, I’ve begun thinking about other lines of work. Running for president is starting to look like a pretty cool opportunity, and it’s not like I haven’t thought about it before. Back in the 1970s, here in Missouri, we had a guy run for governor, “Walkin Joe Teasdale,” who got the name because he actually perambulated on foot around the state, and eventually managed to beat the incumbent governor, Kit Bond, who came back to beat Walkin Joe four years later. I was in high school at the time, given to daydreams (always better than algebra or geometry), and one day I wondered what would happen if an 18-year-old Midwestern kid started walking across the country, announcing himself as a presidential candidate for the election 17 years hence. He could work odd jobs, talk to people, generally spend 17 years getting his name out. People would KNOW him, or think they did, and he would know people, his eventual constituency.

I never got much further with the story than that, but now I wonder.

Could there BE a better job than running for an office you know (and hope and pray) you’ll never win?

Guess you’ll have to ask Ron Paul or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or . . . Whomever. Don’t ask B. H. Obama, though--he tried to pull off this “running” thing and actually won, much to his apparent chagrin and dismay.

VOTE MEDIAN PERSPECTIVE IN 2020!

New Years Resolutions

About 147 years ago, give or take, I decided to start keeping a journal.

While it wasn’t a New Year’s Day or New Year’s Resolution sort of thing, I did set some ground rules for myself. Number One was that I would NOT waste journal space and writing time just bitching about stuff. The journal was going to be at best positive, at worst, blah, but never negative.

Somehow I managed to keep that journal for several years, before I got tangled up in e-mail (and convinced myself that that was a reasonable substitute) and chat and god knows what else, and somehow, I managed to stay true to the resolution to stay positive.

I wrote about tiny little kindnesses people had shown me, any given day--and there were a LOT of them, like the nurse telling me how proud she was of me for not smoking in my office on the day our hospital went smoke-free, or my doctor-boss walking to the lunchroom with me, just chatting casually about our everyday lives, people saying “thank you” or giving me a smile or just sharing part of themselves with me. There were unimaginable moments like one sparkling January day when the temperature magically climbed to 70 and people were stretched out on park benches just soaking up sun, and one March day when I went for my lunchtime walk and ran into hard-blowing snow and leaned against a tree for just a moment, and just for that moment felt so incredibly ALIVE, and there was the total solar eclipse and people all over “Hospital Hill” coming outside to watch--and the nurse poking a hole in a little piece of cardboard and projecting the eclipse on the floor for some patients who could NOT go outside.

I wrote down conversations that resonate with me even now, mostly little simple things, little simple moments, that somehow made me “connect” with other people in ways I had never imagined possible.

I wrote down LIFE. And it was cool.

Maybe it doesn’t qualify as a “New Year’s Resolution,” given that I started the journal in October. I could lie and tell you that I started it on January 1, but what would be the point of that? Writing the journal started with a resolution; it was my New Year, at that point in my life.

I’ll curse AOL for leading me away from it later. Or not.

Methane, the God particle, and the axis of evil.

Interesting news day . . . .

In one corner of our world, physicists playing with the giant atom smasher in Europe announce that they believe that they are getting tantalizingly close to finding the Higgs boson, aka “The God Particle.” I know nothing of physics, but gather that this subatomic particle would prove the scientific view of the universe and how it was born. Hence, “God” particle.

Meanwhile, a Russian scientific survey team studying methane emissions off the northern (Arctic) coast of Siberia were shocked and astonished, perhaps even awed by the scale, volume and force of methane being released into the atmosphere. Apparently enough ice has been melted and permafrost thawed that thitherto captured methane has begun to escape its earthly bounds much faster than anyone had even feared, with the potential to spur global warming to “runaway” state--with what one headline (couldn’t find the reference in the article) claiming possible “dramatic” climatic change in as little as a year.

Methane release. Basically, the earth farts, and we’re all suddenly history (or rather, pre-history to any civilization that springs up here thousands of years after we fade to dust). That would be an act of flatulence more impressive even than what we have spewing out of Washington, DC in this election cycle.

So on one hand we have scientists on the verge of unmasking God, and on the other, a discovery that could mean the end of life as we know it, much sooner than anyone had dreamed or nightmared.

Now, I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Still . . . Maybe God would rather not be unmasked.

Fast forward to today (yes, world events move quickly), and an opinion piece over on CNN tells us that the world should prepare for a “near nuclear” Iran. Of course, for those of us who came of age during the Cold War, that conjures up disturbing images of “Nuclear Winter” and all the misery accompanying that.

And suddenly it occurred to me that we do in fact hold the key to stopping global warming in its tracks.

Should Earth’s arctic farting indeed lead to runaway global warming, how about a tactical nuclear strike (or a few) to counter the life-threatening climatic catastrophe with its potential equal? Would nuclear winter trump global warming? Would they battle to a cosmic standoff, allowing at least some of humanity to survive?

Most of the problems of our world, obviously, are born in the northern hemisphere--obviously we would start here.

Smarter people than I, along with computer models and such, would have to plan specific targets, but I humbly suggest that we start with the “axis of evil”--no, not Iraq, Iran and North Korea. That is so Bush! I’m talking about the REAL axis of evil: Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood. That fits nicely with our cultural preference for “trinities,” as well. Nuke them, plunge the northern hemisphere into nuclear winter, and global warming is solved!

Of course, that will never happen--by human design, anyway. It’s one thing for the U.S. president to sacrifice New York City in exchange for having accidentally destroyed Moscow, a la “Fail Safe,” quite another for heads of state in the top half of the world to agree to sacrifice themselves and their citizenry for the greater good of humanity.

Intriguing thought, though. Maybe I should pitch it to Hollywood as a “reality show.”

Cabbage and the Antichrist

I’ve been giving the Antichrist, specifically the car accident variety, a lot of thought today.

On a report one of my coworkers edited today, our speech recognition program had translated a patient’s chief complaint of “I was in a car accident,” as “I was in a car antichrist.”

First question that springs to mind, of course, is “why would a medical program even KNOW the word ‘antichrist?’” I understand that thousands of words were programmed into these systems, and obviously that each individual word could be looked at critically to judge whether it deserved to take up space in the program’s vocabulary--how likely would it be for the word to appear in a medical report? So there will be a lot of superfluous words, words the system “knows” but will never likely use, in its vocabulary, as is true for most of us speakers of a language.

Still . . . . My computer desktop occasionally tells me that there are unused icons on my desktop, do I wish to dispose of them? I would think that, given what I understand to be the fact that speech recognition programs depend on complex mathematical probability models and so forth to make its decisions concerning “le mot juste” in any given context, after producing thousands of documents I would think the program would begin periodically purging itself of the clutter of thousands of words it never, ever uses, or so very rarely that it’s not worth holding onto, if only to avoid embarrassments like calling an accident an antichrist.

We are told that these speech rec systems “learn,” and it’s true, to some degree. But we are also supposedly able to “teach” them. One of my favorites from the medical world is CABG, the acronym for “coronary artery bypass graft.” That particular acronym appears in a significant percentage of reports I transcribe. Speech rec invariably (so far) reproduces it as “cabbage.” The way the system’s “learning” theoretically operates, if “cabbage” gets edited to “CABG” three consecutive times, the system will forget all about cabbage and stick strictly with the bypass. Unless there are a lot of medical transcriptionists out there who REALLY think the heart surgeon is talking about a coleslaw ingredient, the system just cannot grasp acronyms pronounced as words (CABG is pronounced cabbage. Nobody ever says C A B G--if they did, the system doubtlessly would get it).

But I still halfway expect to see, come March 17, a flurry of speech rec produced reports of ER visits all over the country concerning some poor wretch, maybe even the Antichrist, who choked on his “corned beef and CABG.”

Similarly, the same system that invariably spells “Advair Diskus” as “Advair Discus,” come track season or the Summer Olympics, start reproducing lines like, “The spectator unfortunately was hit by a flying Diskus.” “Discus” probably appears in medical reports with approximately the same frequency as “cabbage,” after all.

Getting back to the Antichrist, maybe it’s only that speech rec is developing an ego and wants to autograph its work once in a while.

Sunset maunderings at 1:30 a.m.

Mama always taught us that, if we didn’t have something nice to say, we should not say anything at all. (Is there anybody in the world, outside of politics and the internet, whose mama didn’t teach them the same?)

So for nearly 53 years I’ve mostly tried to avoid commenting on Winter.

Late this afternoon I was standing outside in the mild cold--it wasn’t the “take-your-breath-away” variety, just standard December right-around-freezing--admiring the sunset while Xena the old dog rolled in the grass (she has a thick coat and positively loves the cold) and Cecil, the half-yearling beagle/boxer mix chased Nina, the “middle-aged” part-chow, across the deeply furrowed fall-plowed field west of the house.

I work an odd split shift, most days--11:30 to 3, then 5:30 to 10--and so I grab sunsets whenever I have the chance. Most of the year, that means only on Fridays and Saturdays, my days off; rest of the week, I may steal a fleeting glimpse of the “reverse” sunset, the view to the east, through a crack in the curtains.

Sunset this afternoon wasn’t particularly spectacular. Clouds on the horizon and overhead bore promise that the sun’s fading slanting light could make it spectacular, and that wispy promise kept me out there with my feet turning numb and the (mild) cold starting to seep through the goose-down filling of my coat. Finally I did have to come back inside and thaw out--work beckoned, after all--but the little while I was able to spend out there, hoping for spectacular . . . Well, it’s all about hope, isn’t it?

When winter starts settling in, I dread the cold, of course, but most of all I dread the lack of light. Probably I am no more or less prone to SAD--seasonal affective disorder--than anyone else, but the decrease in hours of light definitely depresses my “inner photographer.”

It occurred to me today, though, and not for the first time, that the sun setting earlier means I get to enjoy sunsets on a regular basis for at least a few weeks. While I’m still more of a fan of sunrises, I have to call that a “win” for winter.

So, to my mother--I can finally say something “nice” about this godawful frigid miserable useless depressing and generally crappy time of year! You did your job well, Mom.

Here, have a sunset:

Too lazy and/or brain-dead to write, right now.

From the “if I ever say/write anything that cool, I’m going to shut my mouth forever because I’ll never be able to get there again“ file:

“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” Maxine Hong Kingston, “The Woman Warrior.”

Enough said, for now.

Wondering what the climate is like in Tibet . . .

A woman in a Facebook group for medical transcriptionists/editors on our particular team posted this today: “There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.--Dalai Lama.”

I love the quote, know virtually nothing about Dalai Lama, although of course I know the name, but it got me restarted wondering some things I’ve been wrestling with for a while.

Useless things, mostly: For instance, what if we all just bailed out of the “corporate world,” quit working for them, quit buying their products, etc. Obviously that is an impossible idea--we all have to work, we all have to eat, and our consumption is the driving force of two-thirds or thereabouts of our nation’s economy. It might make us FEEL all “fuck you” and so forth, but we would be shooting ourselves in the foot, or maybe in the heart.

Still . . . .

The notion of simplifying our lives, learning to live inside the temples of our brains and hearts, can be tantalizing. Who wouldn’t want to dispense with all the BS, all the daily rush (or the daily monotony, depending on what you do for a living), the daily nightmare or daily recalcitrant pain of just trying to make it from one day to another?

Life can be so fatiguing, sometimes, and it really shouldn’t be.  Exhausting, yes--exhausting can be a good thing. But fatiguing? Whole ‘nother thing. Life should be glorious. And in fact it is.

“Exhausting” is an exhilarating workout; “fatiguing” is a wear-you-down-to-nothing grind.

There is probably not a person in this country, maybe even in the world, who does not wish, at some point or other, that s/he could simplify his/her life, step off the treadmill, quit simply (or simply quit) worrying so damned day-to-day MUCH about whatever their hearts/minds are really “about.”

There is probably not a person in this country, maybe even in the world, who doesn’t wish that s/he had the luxury of simple time--even just a worry/stress-free hour to spend daydreaming, or watching cats or dogs or bugs or other people. A worry/stress-free hour just to relax.

We spend our lives in a continual state of tension, a continual state of competition, one way or another. Working at home alone, I’m spared some of that, though obviously not all. Most medical transcriptionists, even when employed by companies, are paid by what they produce, not by the time they put in. When you’re an employee, you are in fact limited to 40 hours a week. What this means is that, if you want to make a living at it, every day when you sit down at the keyboard, you have to make every minute count. It’s continual tension because you have to be aware of the “real” cost of every interruption or distraction--a 15-minute chat with a neighbor, for instance, costs you, say, a couple of loaves of bread or a pound of ground chuck. The clock ticks while you chat, and you can never get that time back. (May be a bad example: Sometimes a 15-minute chat with a neighbor is an invaluable break. To pass up the chance is another kind of missed opportunity).

I suppose in some ways tension and competition heighten our awareness, at least in terms of survival. Plus, a life free of tension and competition probably would be BORING.

Would the Garden of Eden really be all that great a place to hang out, every day of our lives, for the rest of our lives?

(I selflessly volunteer to be the first one there!) 

Paws

Everything has its advantages and disadvantages, I suppose. Advantage to say, digital photography over film is that it allows you to take virtually unlimited photos without much cost beyond startup for camera, computer, etc. Disadvantage is that it allows you to take, and store, virtually unlimited photos. The most memorable among them can get lost, needle-in-a-haystack style, amidst the ever-growing stack of others that may have been worth saving, but still, not quite so memorable.
As a former boss of mine used to say, “our strengths are also our weaknesses.”

Individual photographs, like individual or isolated memories, get lost--not irretrievably, they’re still stored in our minds or on our hard drive or Flickr or Photobucket accounts, and sometimes we can recapture them when somebody else happens across them, bringing them instantly back for us.

After work tonight I wandered over to my Flickr account, just to see what, if anything in my photo stream, other people had wandered across today, and I found this:

You may not be able to tell, but the photograph is of one cat’s paw, one dog’s paw, comfortably touching each other as their respective owners slept in the sun.

The dog and cat are both gone now--Sally the cat, an adventurous soul, hitched a ride somewhere in the undercarriage of a pickup truck; Bubba, the dog, loved to run, and particularly loved to run AFTER things, for instance, cars. He could run forever, swift as Secretariat--until he misjudged a car’s speed one day and tried to cross the highway ahead of it.

It is too long a story for OS, but Bubba started out life blind as a puppy, never began to see--or realize that he COULD see, I’m not sure--didn’t begin to be able to sort out images filtering into his brain until he was close to 4 months old. By that time he had been with us for nearly 2 months. All the cats more or less adopted him, but Sally also befriended him, and they spent a lot of time just wrestling and wandering around together and even simply dozing together on the lawn.

That somebody came across this particular photo, paws pausing together, brought the photo, the memory, back to me.

“These are the memories that make me a wealthy soul.” Bob Seger again (I’m sure I’ll quote and re-quote that line at least 1,438 times over the course of however long I keep posting here.)

Happy Monday to all, and to all, a good night.

Conspiracy Theory, Sheeple and Other Stuff

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, nor have I ever placed much stock in the occasionally even measured ranting of those who encourage us “sheeple” to “wake up” to the way we’re being “played,” by the liberal media or whomever (side note about “sheeple:” Those who direct the term disparagingly at others generally fit the definition--"those who follow blindly”--pretty neatly themselves; most of them follow blindly and continually reiterate the positions/opinions of their own leaders, whether they be Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or whomever).

Still, watching the “non-OWS believers” demonize the Occupiers as “unwashed, unemployed, lazy privileged college students,” etc., I wonder. Reading what the “53 percenters”--those who pay taxes--which admittedly hasn’t been much, lately, that I’ve seen, I wonder who convinced the 53% that, not only are they NOT part of the 99%, by virtue of their opposition to same, they somehow belong more in the 1%.

Then I listen to the welfare-bashers, who seem to believe that the “welfare” of today’s world is the same as it was prior to Reagan and his “Welfare Queen” or even further reforms during the Clinton years. Somehow they have the idea that we the taxpayers are subsidizing a bunch of drug-addicted freeloaders who should just go get jobs.

Again, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but even from where I sit out here in the proverbial boondocks, it looks like we’re being played, as if our strings are being pulled by a puppeteer or puppeteers that we cannot even see.

I look at the way the poor are being demonized, for instance, and see a “divide and conquer” thing going on--if we the working people can be made to focus on the poor as the real enemy to our national prosperity, maybe we won’t notice the “real” enemy, the politicians and the corporations who own them.

In a way it reminds me of what Hitler did to the Jews--he created a scapegoat against which all good Germans could unite against. Obviously we don’t have death camps, and I certainly do not intend to trivialize in any way the Holocaust. In a very general way, however, our demonizing of the poor is the same kind of identification of an essentially powerless group as a national enemy.

Maybe we are not truly being “played,” though. Even scarier is the thought that it may simply be human nature: When we’re under siege, militarily or economically, we look for an enemy; because we sense our own essential powerlessness, we look for someone even more powerless than ourselves--it is easier to victimize someone weaker than ourselves, obviously. Most of us lack the courage (or insanity) to go chest-to-chest with a tank.

Next time we get righteously indignant when we’re behind someone in a grocery store checkout line who is using a “free” EBT card, maybe it would be better if we wondered who truly caused that person’s situation. Is the person really useless and lazy--or was it that her job got shipped to India? Maybe it’s just that her minimum-wage retail job doesn’t pay enough to allow her to pay rent, much less for food for her 2.3 kids.

It might even help if we considered for just a moment that tomorrow, WE could be the ones depending on an EBT card.

Nice day for a picture.

Was working on my Christmas calendar, going through the year's photographs, and happened upon this one.  I have no idea why I like it, but I do.

Guantanamo, here I come!

Have been taking advantage of this generally dreary day to wash dishes, do laundry, make another trip to the grocery store, dread the oncoming winter, catch up on the news--and made the lottery-winning discovery that, indeed, I shall be able to afford a long retirement in a warm climate!

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . . Sun, warm ocean breezes, “three hots and a cot,” free medical care, for as long as I happen to live . . .

And all because I occasionally read non-(not necessarily anti-) American newspapers, once took a college class about Islam, used to give “special privileges” in terms of scheduling to one of our pediatricians (who was Muslim), and on top of all that NEVER go to church, has never, to his knowledge, been called by God to do ANYthing, much less run for president or something equally exalted.

Who would ever have thought those relatively trivial pieces of my life could come together to fund my dreamed-of retirement? Who would ever have thought that I would owe all this to freaking REPUBLICANS (and a couple of turncoat Democrats, including at least one from my own state)???

I should send personalized thank-you notes to every one of the blessed 61 senators who voted against the Udall amendment to the defense appropriations bill. That tiresome amendment would have excluded the provision of the bill giving the executive branch and military the “right” to detain even Americans, on American soil, forever without even naming a charge, much less going through the hassle of a trial and all that noise.

Unless that Hitlerite Muslim born-somewhere-else IMPOSTOR in the White House vetoes the bill, I figure it’s only a matter of time before somebody rats me out and the U.S. Govt flies me to Cuba to while away my remaining days.  

And JUST in time, too, because my current livelihood is being exported to a different warm climate halfway around the world.

Hmmm . . . Maybe if I rat on my dogs’ and cats’ disturbingly socialist tendencies (they share their food sometimes, sleep--just sleep, they’re all “fixed” except one--together, generally get along well), the government will fly them down there with me!

Probably it will be crowded in the 45 square miles of our base in Guantanamo, but I suppose I can sacrifice a little privacy in exchange for what the Grand Old Party plans for me.

I can practically smell those warm ocean breezes already!

Preambling.

A weird concatenation of Facebook and more real-life events today sent me meandering down odd paths until I wound up stumbling across this, which many may recognize as the preamble to the Constitution of the United States:

“We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Archaic language aside, and the fact that it is the only paragraph in the Constitution NOT considered law aside, it remains an impressive statement and vision of what our “founding fathers” meant for our nation to become.

Such OPTIMISTS they were!

Rereading it even from my now 21^st-century vantage point, I mentally summarize it as saying, “We’re all in this together, and we’re standing together not just for ourselves, but for our children.” Pretty simple stuff--and pretty heady stuff, as well.

Now, I know (or think I remember, anyway) that only about one-third of the country’s populace supported the American Revolution, another third stood steadfastly on the side of King George III (NOT “Dubya”), and the other third was more or less neutral, being more interested in keeping themselves and their children fed and housed. We’ve only become more fragmented, socially, as the centuries have progressed since the care-free 1780’s.

(Parenthetical revelation: Maybe the Preamble is where people get the notion that this nation was founded on “Christian principles,” whatever those might be. I’ll think about that tomorrow, or maybe the next day.)
“We’re all in this together.” “One for all, all for one.” “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” “I‘ve got your back.” “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

See a trend, here?

Sad thing is, we all give lip service to all of this stuff, but when it comes to actual “action?” Not so much.

Somehow we’ve become much more about “competition,” much less about “cooperation.”

There really shouldn’t be a battle between those two concepts--they CAN coexist, maybe even peacefully, if we don’t get too wrapped up in one or the other.

There used to be another “c” word--”compromise,” I think it was. Two “sides” each give a little, and by doing so, together they “promote the general welfare.” Everybody wins, maybe not as much as they would like to, but nobody “loses.” We’ve lost that “everybody wins” idea, and I’m not talking about every kid getting an “A” so as to protect their precious self-esteem.

Our forefathers had a fascinating vision. They weren’t always good at promoting it (anybody remember the “Alien and Sedition Act”?, or, um, the “peculiar institution,” slavery?), but their hearts and minds were in the right place. Somehow they managed to see beyond what we/they were, and imagine what “could” be.

Heady stuff.

So how have we, as a nation and a people, managed to drift so far from the ideals with which they prefaced, or preambled, the Constitution that holds us together?

How has “welfare”--as in, you know, “promote the general welfare”--become a swear word, or at least a pejorative?

When did we learn to start hating each other so much?

I think it was Dubya’s fault. Or maybe Obama’s, I get ‘em mixed up. Or maybe it was the Tea Party (I HATE tea) or the “Occupiers” or maybe even Sarah Palin’s (she does have a lot to answer for).

Remind me to burn my voter registration card.

Any twit can handle a crisis.

Spending eight hours a day, five days a week listening to and transcribing dictated medical reports can twist your brain in odd ways.

For instance, we’ve probably all heard horror stories about catastrophic events in other people’s lives--car crashes, cancer diagnoses, disappearing children, stock market downturns, election of a black guy to the presidency, etc.--and said to ourselves, “there, but for the grace of God,” and so on.

But in the immortal words of Flo Capp, “Any twit can handle a crisis, it’s the day-to-day living that whacks you.” (Or something like that--tried to Google it, came up with a lot of variations on the same theme.)

My own day-to-day living hasn’t particularly whacked me lately--I’ve been lucky in that regard--but still every day I hear stories of people surviving day-to-day stuff that WOULD whack me, if I had to endure it.

It’s not the crises that get my attention. Instead, it is the “little stuff.”

I transcribe mostly acute care reports, hospital stuff--admissions and operations, etc. Many, if not most people admitted to hospitals these days are in pretty bad straits, health-wise, already, or their care would have been handled on an outpatient basis, and damned near anything can be handled on an outpatient basis, these days. That means every day I hear the “worst,” not the “everyday.”

Sometimes it seems, though, that the "everyday" has become the "worst."

Even if the health problems, the diseases or acute events or whatever brought the people to the hospital didn’t get my attention, the details of their everyday lives would. Seems like every patient, every PERSON, is on a dozen or more medications and supplements. Imaginative guy that I am, I envision these poor people imprisoned in a daily routine of taking their heart medicines and cholesterol medicines and diabetes medicines and hypertension medicines and on and on and on, at a dizzying array of intervals, when looked at all together. I cannot imagine even what it would be like having that many medicine bottles in my medicine cabinet, much less remembering to take every one of them at the appropriate time, much less remembering to get them refilled, MUCH less managing to pay for them all.

For an awful lot of people, just keeping themselves medicated strikes me as equivalent to a full-time job (with mandatory overtime).

From my so-far unmedicated vantage point, I cannot help but wonder if a life that has been relegated mostly to a medical regimen is really all that worth living?

At some point, don’t a lot of these folks just want to say, “fuck it, I’ve had a good life, I’ve enjoyed flowers, kittens, exuberant beagles, sunrises and sunsets, grandparents and kids and people, and I cannot even really see any of them anymore, don‘t really even remember them anymore--time to catch the “last train for the coast, today life’s music died,” or something like that?

Sitting here transcribing endless lists of medications and idly envisioning a daily life devoted mostly to taking those medications, and realizing that, unless I step unaware in front of a bus or get tackled from an unfortunate angle by a wannabe-linebacker beagle on one of my morning perambulations, or some other calamity befalls me, such a daily life is inevitably in my future. The medical profession has pretty much ensured that.

I’ve had this conversation with my near-octogenarian dad a few times. “You know who wants most to live to be 100?” he asked me once. I shook my head. “The 99-year-old,” he said.

As I say, my perspective is skewed by what I do for a living. I never hear about happy, healthy people of any age--happy, healthy people don’t check into hospitals and generate “medical records,” after all, so how WOULD I hear about them?

Ashes and Dust.

One of the last reports I transcribed last night was a “death summary.” The patient (whyinhell are they called “patients,” anyway?) was elderly, though not particularly old at 81, had a fairly nondescript past medical history, wasn’t taking the customary 28 medications and supplements that most people her age (and much younger) seem to consume every day, had several family members in attendance for her grand, albeit unexpected, finale. She had just caught a pneumonia a couple of weeks ago, was apparently recovering from that, but then developed a pulmonary embolism from having been flat on her back in a hospital for a few days.

Nothing about her “story,” as I heard it, dictated in slow, measured tones by a doctor who seemed genuinely to care about the lady and her family, was particularly noteworthy, I suppose. As I do with all death summaries, though, I was as careful as I could be to get every dictated detail accurately--death, after all, is not the same thing as a sore throat or a fractured tibia. A death summary is the permanent “permanent record,” so you want to get it as right as you can. Yes, yes, I know--it’s just the final few hours or even moments of a real person’s life, does not begin to capture what the person was, who s/he was, how much s/he might have mattered to the grandkids or the coworkers or even in her role as “crazy cat lady” in some flyover Midwestern neighborhood. Still, it was her last moments, and deserved to be recorded accurately and, more importantly, with respect.

So I made sure the “i’s” got dotted and the “t’s” got crossed and all the commas got put in the right place. It was the least I could do.

Having been in this business for a while, I’ve transcribed a lot of death summaries. The one I remember forever is the first one I ever transcribed, concerning a 4-year-old boy who one day started walking funny--”my little crooked man,” his mother called him. His name was Drew (I even remember his last name, but won’t repeat it here--it’s a privacy thing, you know?). The doctor dictating the report was the general pediatric section chief I worked for, and who had hosted just hours earlier a retirement party for another doctor in our section.

It was late January, snowed a ton that day. I had fortunately just put new all-weather tires on the car, so had little trouble making it over to section chief’s house, where I shoveled snow off her sidewalk and front porch, helped greet people (including another of our pediatricians, who was about 8 months pregnant and took a fall, stumbling over the curb). Good night, at least to that point and even to the end of the party.

Monday morning I came in to find a micro-cassette on my desk, awaiting transcription. I plugged it in, then listened to my boss relate the story of Drew and his final moments, which came to pass about two hours after the retirement party ended. “His eyes rolled back in his head,” my boss dictated--and the 4-year-old was gone.

Two years after that, not long before said boss was getting ready to move to Minnesota, I was at my desk one morning and got a call from an inpatient floor, about one of our longstanding patients with a longstanding “idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis.” The patient, a girl named Pam who was born on Valentine’s Day 1972 and who doggedly worked towards a degree in allied health professions even while lugging around an oxygen tank, had been admitted a day or two earlier. “Pam’s gone,” the caller told me. And for the first time in four years of working with her, I tracked my boss down in a patient room and interrupted her examination of a patient. “It’s Pam,” she said, the instant I poked my head in the door.

On Monday, just a couple of days later, I was transcribing Pam’s death summary.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is all fine and everything, when the ashes and ashes or the dust and dust have at least a little something--you know, a “life”--separating them.

(And how I got off on this particular tangent, I will never know.)

If familiarity breeds contempt, why does absence make the heart grow fonder?

About halfway through an out-loud polysyllabic characterization of a dictator (physician dictating medical report, that is) a while ago, it occurred to me that the dictator may not in fact indulge in the activity to which that compound term specifically referred (think “suck-start a Harley,” you’ll get the drift), and that I was probably being unfair calling the guy a “blank-blanker,” despite the fact that he seemed to be talking with his mouth full and his teeth tightly clenched (ouch!).

One of the joys of working at home, in this particular profession, is that we never have to meet the people whose voices reverberate continuously in our heads, any given day. While generally I am neither surly nor dismissive enough to call some of these folks to their faces what I call them out loud, in the privacy of my own home office every day, after working at home for nearly 10 years, I’m not sure I could re-learn the necessary skill of keeping one’s mouth shut--discretion being the better part of valor--in a more public workplace again.

Flipside of that is, sometimes even antisocial “I” miss the social contact, the ability actually to ask a dictator what he thought he was saying, or even just say “good morning” to the guy without wanting to reach out and strangle the life out of him so that he can no longer fuck up my production (and paycheck) with his clenched-teeth, mouth-full, incoherent mumbles that I‘m sure he thinks make him sound cool and professional.

Sometimes I miss simple eye contact--and no, stare-downs with cats don’t count.

I was in my forties before I took a work-at-home job, and that was probably good. I’m not sure I could have handled it when I was younger, before I had amassed a solid quarter-century of working “out in the world,” with a variety of people, and had in fact worn my generally introverted self OUT working with said variety.

First thing I learned was that, even from a thousand miles away, our first instinct is to “connect” somehow with the people whose voices are relentlessly invading our heads. Even though we will never meet the owners of those voices, we want almost desperately to care about them and what they do, and by extension, the patients they care for every day of the world--when we care, we become better, more efficient, more productive. We become “value added,” we feel that, and it matters to us.

A long time ago one of the people I transcribed for in an RL environment--that is, we shared the same suite of offices at the same Kansas City address, actually breathed the same air, endured the same weather, took the same elevators, walked the same streets, etc.--was a wonderful pediatrician, about 5 feet 2, blonde, smart and warm and funny as hell but never sarcastic or even accidentally mean, who would retreat into her office with the mini-cassette recorder after seeing a kid referred in from somewhere, spend an hour slaving over a report, with much pausing and rewinding and fast-forwarding and so forth, and finally emerge, hand me the cassette and say, “work your magic!” That my “magic” amounted mostly to punctuating, getting the grammar right (not that she ever had any problem with that), spelling everything correctly, etc., didn’t matter--she truly thought, and made me feel, that I “added value” in the process. And so I probably did.

I cared about her, and wanted to help make her “look” as good as I possibly could.

Working “remotely,” I try to recapture that same kind of “bond,” but it’s tough.

Familiarity may breed contempt, but absence of familiarity can do the same, and either way, it sucks.

Tebow-Mania Part 2

Asked if, when he was praying during a San Diego field goal attempt in overtime of last night’s game, he had asked for a miss, Denver quarterback Tim Tebow, widely maligned for both his throwing motion and his open Christianity, laughed. "I might have said that. Or maybe a block. Maybe all of it."

The kick missed, Tebow and the Denver offense got another chance, and he marched them down the field, the Broncos scored a field goal and won the game.

Personally, I doubt there was any kind of “divine intervention” in San Diego’s missed field goal attempt, which was a longish one anyway--I suspect God has more on his mind than the outcome of a particular professional football game, at any given moment. I also doubt that Tim Tebow truly believes God cares which team wins in any given game. Times like that, I suspect that Tebow, and probably most Christians--and anyone else in the habit of praying to a “higher power”--in a similar situation, use prayer more as a way to focus and achieve some kind of inner calm than to try to influence God to influence the outcome.

That’s only a guess, though.

Come tomorrow, I predict that 98% of sportswriters, and closer to 100% of commenters on stories about the Denver-San Diego game, will be dismissing Tebow’s efforts (and, in fairness, he had a solid, but definitely not spectacular game), talking up the Denver defense (which deserves it), and probably dissecting the San Diego coach’s many failures (probably also deserved).

However Tebow’s career eventually plays out, I predict the same post-game outcome every week throughout every regular season and every postseason game in which he plays.

I’m also going to go out on a limb, here, and predict that he will have a longer and much more successful career than most “experts” are forecasting for him. Beyond the fact that he works at it, he apparently is a “born leader”--he makes the people around him better, and they believe in him. Never discount the “confidence factor,” both when it comes to self-confidence--not arrogance--and the confidence someone inspires in those around him/her.

As a lot of people who know more about Tebow than I do, which actually isn’t much, have said since his Florida college days, “he just wins.”

Wouldn’t it be SOOOO cool to get somebody with that quality in a position of national leadership? (One caveat: He/she had better NOT say “God told him/her to run;” count my vote immediately for the other guy/gal in that case.)

But “born leaders” no longer run for president or even congressperson or senator. Only “born followers,” people who will go where the “money” tells them to go, throw their hats in the ring (because that’s where the money is), in a tradeoff for the “power” they crave. They don’t even seem to recognize their essential powerlessness when they sell themselves to whomever lines their pockets most luxuriously.

In a time when we desperately need leaders with what sportswriters call “intangibles,” the kind of natural leadership ability that someone like Tim Tebow virtually exudes, instead we get people like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain and that nut from Texas and Baseball Glove from Massachusetts and on and on and on. Huntsman has potential, but he is a Mormon (Christians will never vote for him. There goes the GOP “base”). Salamander guy, Newt, would look a whole lot better if he didn’t want 9-year-olds cleaning school toilets, and if he did have any kind of “moral” leg to stand on, and if he hadn’t gone to grade school with God‘s grandmother. Have I forgotten anyone? Oh yeah, the older-than-dirt guy, Ron Paul. Pass. (This is not “age-ism;” even my staunchly conservative 79-year-old father thinks we need younger blood in the presidency, as long as it isn’t, um, you know, what we have now. It‘s a tough job that requires a lot of strength and energy that a septuagenarian, or whatever Paul is, may simply lack) Sarah Pales-in-Comparison-to-virtually-anyone is still hanging in the wings, waiting for the GOP to draft her--which it sounds like they might be thinking about.

On the other side we have Mr. Obama, whom I actually like in a lot of ways, but who also seems to lack “traditional” leadership qualities. He is not the “my-way-or-the-highway” kind of guy that, say, Shrub (thank you, Molly Ivins, and may you rest in peace) Bush was, which is not a bad thing--except when it comes to inspiring the majority of the electorate (middle-aged and older folks, more accustomed to and comfortable with the Shrub style, are neither accustomed to nor willing to be comfortable with a more conciliatory, more inclusive approach to governance).

But hell, Obama takes flak for continuing a tradition, started by a Republican, Bush-wayyy-senior I think, of pardoning a pair of turkeys on Thanksgiving--just a lighthearted, fun Republican tradition, and he gets hammered for it. He, his wife and daughters serve up food to homeless people on Thanksgiving day, and it is derided as a “mere photo op”--never mind that everything they DO is a photo op, it’s the nature of the beast, but they were STILL standing there on that serving line, helping other people when they could have been home watching football games or something.

And I’ve wandered far afield of wherever I meant to go, here.

Babel-ing.

It was quieter here, much more peaceful, when Cecil the puppy, if he can still be called a puppy, was asleep on the floor, his hind leg and nose occasionally twitching as he dreamed (and yes, dogs DO dream--I googled it, plus Stephen King described it in at least two of his 587 novels). Now that he’s awake, he first made sure that everybody else--Xena, Wendy, Muffins, Chewie, Evi and Sabrina, not to mention ME--was awake as well. At the moment he has one of my old shoes and is bashing it against my computer stand. No, this is not annoying. Well, not TOO annoying.

I would take him outside if it weren’t 30-something degrees with a wind gusting out of hell, or maybe Nebraska.

Just another (mostly) house-bound day. Winter, or oncoming winter, or almost winter, or warning-shots-over-the-bow of winter tend to make us hunker down inside until we get acclimated and go about our more-or-less normal business.

Those of us who are housebound AND without television tend to wander about online, flit more or less mindlessly from Sports Illustrated (and the Iron Bowl, the Alabama-Auburn football game) to Salon to somewhere that something on Salon sent us, to sometimes really bizarre places where we find “alternate universes,” in a way--whole worlds outside the world we normally inhabit. People, or whatever the inhabitants call themselves in those worlds, are looking at us from the outside, scrutinizing and theorizing and hypothesizing and mostly just guessing, based on their own alien experiences . . . Us. Much in the same way that we scrutinize and theorize and hypothesize and mostly just guess about “them,” those from other worlds.

I watch Cecil on the floor, his hindleg jerking and his nose twitching, and imagine that he is dreaming (he IS), then free-associate, try to imagine what he is dreaming about, envision him dreaming of chasing thrown sticks or wrestling with Nina, one of the other dogs, or terrorizing (in a playful way, of course) the cats, and then it hits me that I have NO way of seeing his dreams--Cecil is not me, he is not even human. He sees his everyday wakeful life in ways I cannot really even imagine, and thus his dreams likely are very different from any I could imagine.

Then I go back to web-wandering and learn that an American aircraft carrier group may or may not have been stationed offshore of Syria (many “news” reports say it is; the Navy web site says the carrier group is currently ported in the south of France, Marseille, and all the sailors are having a great time there).

One site or another or a few say that “Barry” Obama is about to pick a fight with Syria, for some reason or other.

Another site or two or three claims Turkey is fixing to invade Syria.

Still another one says that Ukraine is being set up by the “great powers” (U.S. and Britain, specifically) to become the new “Libya,” that we--the great powers--are laying the foundation to take over Ukraine and its oil on some humanitarian pretext or another.

What is unnerving is that I cannot muster enough documentation, online, to prove ANY of them wrong, even in my own mind.

From my perspective as a photographer, somebody who is accustomed to looking at subjects from different angles, different . . . perspectives, and from my perspective as a human being who grew up in a large family, I know that opinions--perspectives--have a tendency to vary from one person to another.

I’m beginning to understand where “the tower of Babel” came from, and even that God was made nervous by the fact that all the people of the world of the day shared a common language, could communicate meaningfully with each other, and so decided to jumble things up a bit by inflicting a multiplicity of languages upon “His people.”

So many different languages, so little communication. For some divine reason, God (well, God of the Christians and Jews; I don’t know about Allah or the assorted gods of the Hindu religion, or any of the myriad others currently ruling the myriad separate earths we all simultaneously inhabit) didn’t want us to be able to communicate with each other.  Somehow He perceived human communication with each other to be a threat to His own power, or so I gather. So He decided to splinter us by splintering our once-common language. “Divide and conquer.”

Mind you, I’m not a biblical scholar, and in fact have spent the last 52 years or so paying as little attention to the Bible as possible. (I tried once to read it cover-to-cover, but got bogged down in the “begats”). It’s interesting, though. As a biblical non-scholar, I’ve never tried to view today’s corporate world through a biblical lens--but as I read today about the Tower of Babel, etc., I kept remembering how many of my employers have had strict rules when it came to employees communicating with each other. We were always expressly forbidden to discuss salary with each other, for instance. I always wondered why, but didn’t worry about it overmuch. Now I see that our bosses were just trying to follow a page out of God’s “stick-it-to-’em” book.

But I digress. Of course.

In the course of all my web-wandering and maundering today, I came across a whole lot of what I can only characterize as “really interesting shit.”

But I found no reliable answers even to simple questions, for instance “Where is the USS George HW Bush” currently floating?” One source says Marseille, France; another few sources say “off Syria.”

Sad state of affairs, when you cannot trust your OWN press, much less that of any other nation, and when you cannot trust your elected representatives or virtually any one else to provide you real, “spin”-less information.

Maybe I should go back to watching dogs dream.

Gettin' My Scrooge On

After an unseasonably warm, although ferociously windy Thanksgiving day, for late November it is still relatively nice outside, somewhere in the mid-50s . . . Probably I should have camped out in a parking lot somewhere, eagerly awaiting “Black Friday.” The more I read about this holy day following a holiday, the more I suspect that I somehow lack “American” genes or something.

I do NOT like shopping, for ANYthing, EVER. Never have, really, unless you count those halcyon days of my distant youth when a trip to the local dime store (yeah, we had two of those here, in fact--Place’s Five and Dime, and the Woolworth’s next door to it) was an adventure for kids mostly isolated on a farm eight miles out of town. That had less to do with the “shopping” aspect, given that we rarely had all that many nickels and dimes to our names, than with the sheer novelty of it--to see all this incredible “stuff,” all in one place, that you could actually pick up and sorta play with while you “shopped,” stuff you had thitherto seen only on television or maybe in the Sears Christmas “Wish Book.”

On the relatively rare occasions we got to “town,” our lives truly were full of wonders.

Best time of year was the Christmas season, of course, which back then began only after Thanksgiving had passed. Most shopping in town still was situated around the courthouse square or within a block or two of it, and all the stores, which throughout the rest of the year closed at 5 on every weekday but Thursday, when they stayed open until 9, stayed open until 9 every shopping day for the 4 weeks of the Christmas season. Christmas music played from speakers above the sidewalk, and going from store to store in the brisk cold under brightly colored streetlights, with a backdrop of red taillights on the street, sometimes even snow hanging in the air more than simply falling, added still more magic to the whole experience.

This was in the late sixties and early seventies, of course, and in small-town mid-America. The nearest shopping mall was 45 miles away; 24-hour stores like Seven-Eleven didn’t even exist in our little neck of the woods.

The environment wasn’t yet conducive to competitive shopping like Black Friday, or really even to pastime shopping--even had we been so inspired, there simply weren’t enough stores to enable us to pass much time engaged in it.

While I’m not yet old enough to wax nostalgically over the “good old days,” nor Republican enough to want to return America to an even earlier time (the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century), from a 2011 vantage point, after 36 years in the workforce, having lived through and endured and mostly observed a variety of both personal experiences and social and cultural and political evolutions (heck, I remember watching JFK’s funeral on TV, and I was only a little more than 4-½ years old at the time; to this day I “remember” seeing red stripes--on our black-and-white TV--on the flag draped over the coffin; I remember Vietnam, I remember Nixon vs. Humphrey, and of course I remember Watergate and all that followed), I now wonder sometimes if those days, that little wedge of time in our nation’s history, will not eventually be seen through the historical prism as America’s having achieved its ultimate pinnacle--yes, there still were problems, deeply rooted ones like racism and sexism and so many other “isms,” and yes, we still had that “biggest kid on the block” mentality, though not to the extreme it would become, but what I remember, rightly or wrongly, was that we still had hope back then. Any man or woman had the power to “change his stars,” as Heath Ledger’s character’s father put it, in “A Knight’s Tale.”

We even often saw--and looked for--that “Made in America” stamped on whatever we purchased. We still made things in this country, didn’t just buy and sell them, and what we made generally was of much higher quality than virtually anything made anywhere else. The proverbial tide was beginning even then to turn, though.

In about 1975 I wrote a short story basically decrying the commercialism of the Christmas holiday season--not a particularly original thought, even back then; smarter people than I had been decrying the same thing for a while, although usually from a religious standpoint. I could never have envisioned--I’m not sure anyone could have envisioned--camping out in box store parking lots for days, just to secure a particular “bargain;” I am positive that no one could have envisioned a shopper going nuts with pepper spray to keep other shoppers away from a coveted item (as reportedly happened in Los Angeles this morning). But then, we would never have dreamed of stores open 24/7, either--maybe they had them in the “big city,” but they would never appear out in the sticks. Well, we’ve had our own 24/7 Wal-Mart for a lot of years now, and even a 24/7 grocery store.

Probably it’s just what Mario Puzo, who wrote books other than “The Godfather,” called “retrospective falsification,” but somehow “limits”--even as apparently essentially meaningless as a Christmas season limited to four weeks, or store hours limited to 9-5, Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Friday, 9-9 on Thursday, 9 to noon on Saturday, or purchases limited by the number of nickels and dimes in your pocket--seemed more to enhance the “shopping experience” than to detract from it.

Guess I’m just a Scrooge at heart.  My "fallback position" has always best been characterized by a lyric from a Billy Joel song:  "The good ol' days weren't always good/And tomorrow's not as bad as it seems."  (If I could remember the name of the song, I would look it up and make sure that quote is accurate.  Maybe I'm older than I think).  I'm finding that position ever less tenable, however.

Thanksgiving Snowy Owl

Yesterday morning I saw a snowy owl--at least, near as I could tell by matching up pictures I took of it with pictures of snowy owls I found online.

A snowy owl has no more business in this little corner of Missouri than Michele Bachmann has in a presidential race, so I was initially doubtful. Unlike this writer, snowy owls thrive in seriously cold places (think “inside the Arctic Circle); while it can be cold in the winter here, it never gets much below minus 20. Snowy owls like it a little cooler, from what I gather.

How the bird managed to find her (I THINK it was a “her”) way down here to my neighbors’ rooftop will likely remain a mystery to me, given what I’ve managed to find online so far. No migratory maps I’ve come across show them venturing much farther south than southern Minnesota or maybe northern Iowa, quite a ways north of where I hang my hat (or would, if I ever wore a hat). She was clearly lost.

Have to give her credit, though, for making the best of her situation. She perched very patiently on that rooftop for at least an hour, probably a good deal longer, yet she obviously never lost sight of the need to hunt, the need to survive--this breed of owl apparently will pick some high ground and settle there, scanning the country around it, for as long as it takes until it spies a potential lunch and goes immediately, hungrily after it.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I am thankful for having the chance to see the bird, so far from where it “belongs;” I am thankful that I have neighbors thoughtful enough to call me and let me know the bird was there; I am thankful that there was still a little room left on the SD card in my camera to allow me to photograph it.

Come to think about it, I am thankful for so many moments.

When I was about 10, it was coming up to the lip of a ditch crossing our farm and seeing a red fox (rare then, rarer still now) lapping at the ice far below me. Around the same time, it was driving to a grocery store and being startled by a deer leaping across the street in front of us, right in the middle of town.

A year or two later, it was making my way around a pile of brush in some woods separating two ponds I used to fish, and coming face-to-face with a mama skunk and two or three or more of her babies--I froze, didn’t stop to count, just backed off and ran away, but I can still see the skunk and her brood in my mind’s eye, my memory.

Much later, it was the possum lumbering in its odd, almost hunchbacked way toward me on a dark walking path early one morning, and the hawk with whom I came face-to-face when going out on a smoke break in the middle of midtown Kansas City; the hawk was resting in a tree at the edge of the parking garage, I was on the second floor, just about at eye level.

There were the baby raccoons, four or five of them, huddled 15 or 20 feet up against a tree trunk in streetlight, around 4:30 a.m. when I was engaged in my morning walk.

The humongous river otter that appeared one morning in a pond near my house, a long way from the nearest river (the Mississippi, actually).
The enormous beaver that waddled into the headlights, down by “Goose Pond” (not its actual name) in Kansas City North one night when we drove down there just on a lark.

I won’t even mention the rattlesnake stretched out on a rock, a squirrel in its mouth (well, I guess I did just mention that).

The world can be full of unexpected wonders, if we are open to them.

To borrow a line from Bob Seger, “these are the memories that make me a wealthy soul.”

Why can't they all just get along?

A Modest Proposal

Newt Gingrich is a flippin’ genius.

Get rid of school janitors (well, at the poor schools), and let the poor 9- to 14-year-olds take over cleaning duties. It would teach them responsibility, get a little (presumably VERY little) money in their pockets, save the schools money . . . Everybody wins, right? If a few of the kids suffer life-ending or life-altering injuries, what the hey? We’ve got too many people in the country, anyway.

He may be onto something, but hasn’t quite gotten there yet. Let me help him along.

First of all, scrap this idea: Child labor laws were enacted for a lot of very good reasons. The “age limit” aspect, though, bears consideration.

After watching the so-called “Super Committee” in (in)action over the past few weeks, it occurs to me that we need to scrap the age minimums for our elected representatives. Instead of watching 12 “grown” men and women carp at each other, imagine putting a dozen 4-year-olds in the same room and letting them go at it. They would likely make just as much progress, and doubtlessly would be a lot more entertaining to watch.

Semi-seriously, I free-associated into wondering what would happen if you presented a “Budget Challenge” to high schools throughout the country? Schools would select 12 students, based solely on academic records, with maybe extracurricular activities as tie-breakers. Give them the same budget information that the Super Committee had to work with, then a semester or so to work out “deals.” At the end of the school year, each school’s proposed budget would be presented to a national panel of “adult” judges drawn NOT from Congress, but from a wider spectrum.

The budget with the most savings, with cuts and increases shared most equitably and with most clearly the best interests of America as a goal, would win.

The prize? Haven’t gotten that one figured out yet. Maybe the winning team would be given the option to select one lawmaker from each party to go at it, gladiator style, in, say, the Capitol building. Their weapons would be rubber swords, Nerf bats, and bubble-blow, and they would be wearing diapers (after a pre-bout meal liberally spiced with the laxative and the diuretic of their choice). The audience would be limited to congresspersons (mandatory attendance, plus mandatory sharing in the pre-bout meal), their staffers, lobbyists (may need to change the venue to a football stadium or Olympic arena to accommodate them all), Grover Norquist and Sarah Palin, as well as television crews, of course.

Plus Newt Gingrich.

Unfortunately, unless he gets elected to something (wasn’t he essentially driven out of Washington in disgrace, lo these many years ago?), he won’t be qualified for selection as a “gladiator.”

Salamander- or chameleon- or otherwise reptilian-boy Newt could handle the housekeeping duties after the fight, though. He would even share the same pre-bout meal and wear the same uniform as the combatants, with one minor change to differentiate him from them: A nice big letter “A” tattooed in scarlet ink on his back, just to remind us all of the moral high ground he occupies overlooking all of us.

But that would probably constitute "cruel and unusual" punishment (Nancy Pelosi in a diaper???  Jim Boehner???  Aaaarrrrgghh).  In the case of Congress and Newt, it is probably warranted.

If this gives you the impression that I've lost whatever respect I might ever have had (not much) for our legislators, you're very perceptive.

OWS, Hope, Change . . . yada yada yada.

From where I sit, out in northwest Missouri farm country, I can’t yet decide if OWS is going to have any immediate or long-term impact on the direction of our nation, or of the world. The movement seems largely to be tilting at windmills.

For instance, I’ve read--and many OWS’ers are well aware of this--college tuition has increased 900 percent over the past 30 years, yet salaries for entry-level jobs requiring a college degree have remained fairly stagnant. Is there any chance of the OWS movement significantly rolling back tuition costs? No. None. And in a sense, they wouldn’t want to--rolling back tuition costs would mean elimination of a lot of jobs on campuses all over the country. Is there any chance of the OWS movement significantly increasing salaries paid by the lovely corporations running this country? No. None.

Does OWS have any shot at all at decreasing corporate influence on our nation’s government? No. We have the best Congress money can buy, and congresspersons will NOT give that money up. Even if OWS managed to find, back, and get elected “pure” candidates, those candidates, once elected, being human and all, very likely would very quickly succumb to monetary apples offered them by the myriad corporate “Eves”--and they would find ways to justify that to themselves.

And the evil corporations are not comprised solely of their CEOs and other multimillion-dollar executives--they also employ a lot of real people, most of them among the 99% who aren’t the “movers and shakers” of our political and economic world.

I love OWS and everything it stands for--but I still cannot figure out how it can succeed, and trust me, I’ve been trying.

It is going to take someone with a lot more imagination than I’ve been blessed with to come up with a real, tangible, doable plan--with real, tangible, accomplishable goals. It is relatively easy to see and rail at problems. Solutions are more elusive. The people--or “persons,” as the Supreme Court refers to corporations--will never give up or even minimally share their power. Why would they? Politicians will never give up the bounty they receive from those in actual power.

Much as I would love to see 435 representatives and 100 senators, maybe even a president (and I actually like Mr. Obama) out on the unemployment line, along with a few hundred or thousand corporate CEOs, I do NOT want to see their secretaries and housekeepers and cooks and on and on and on in the same line.

The question is how to “hurt” the bosses enough to get their attention, without hurting the many people who depend on them.

I would make a LOUSY revolutionary.

What I’m afraid of is that we’ve already slid too far down the slippery slope towards the end of “America as we know it” ever to recover.

OWS gives me some faint sliver of hope, but it’s just that, a faint sliver. People seem to be waking up, to be catching on to the essential etiology of what ails us, but it may be too late. We have reached the point of wanting “change,” but are essentially powerless to effect that change, on anything more than a purely individual level, if even that.

Come to think about it, maybe that IS the key--we all must find ways to effect change on an individual level.

When I figure out what that means, I’ll let y’all know.

Pennsylvania 6-5000 and 867-5309 (Jenny!)

There’s a Massachusetts nurse practitioner I sometimes encounter in the course of my work who always closes her reports with, “If you have any questions about this dictation, dial . . .” and she gives a number. “Dial?” To judge from her voice, which is really all I have to go on, at most she is very early middle age, probably in her thirties--does she even REMEMBER rotary phones? I’m pretty slow to adopt new technology, but even I had a touch-tone phone back in the days when there was still an extra charge for it on the phone bill--1980s. Has she ever “dialed” a telephone number?

Then again, I’ll still have people ask that a “carbon copy” be sent somewhere. “Carbon copy?” I think I last used carbon paper in typing class in the mid-1970s. Photocopiers pretty much ended “carbon copies.” The “cc” at the bottom of a document or piece of correspondence now pretty much means “courtesy copy.” Granted, some of the doctors, etc., doing the dictating are long enough in the tooth to remember “carbon copies,” although I’m sure none of them have seen such a thing in more years than they can remember, aside from maybe some forms (but even those are mostly “NCR”--no carbon required--these days). That doesn’t really explain why, say, a medical resident born in the mid to late 1980s would ask for a “carbon copy.”

What I suspect is that at some point they learned that “cc” was an abbreviation for carbon copy; having no reference point, really, to them, “carbon copy” means simply, “copy.”

I get the same feeling sometimes about all the acronyms we use, or that medical professionals use--it is as if the acronym has become the de facto “name” of a given disease entity. COPD--chronic obstructive pulmonary disease--is perhaps my favorite example because I’ll often hear people talk about “chronic COPD,” apparently forgetting what the C in the acronym stands for. As transcriptionists, of course, in certain sections of reports--diagnosis, etc.--we have to expand all abbreviations, and we are also supposed to transcribe “verbatim.” Somehow I’ve never managed to convince myself that it would be okay, even preferable, to type “chronic chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”

I cannot remember ever hearing a psych professional refer to post-traumatic stress disorder as anything but PTSD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as anything but ADHD, although I’m sure it happens.

I suppose that it really doesn’t matter, in any real sense, whether something is called “CLL” or by the polysyllabic mouthful, “chronic lymphocytic leukemia” (although there are other expansions of that particular acronym, which could conceivably lead to confusion): The physician presumably knows what he’s talking about, and calling it one thing versus the other won’t alter his treatment plan.

Still, sometimes the increasing use--and, to my mind--overuse and over-reliance on acronyms threatens to reduce “medicalese” to a kind of pidgin English, in the same way that a similar process has reduced much “on-line” communication to the same.

I first went on-line in 1996, about a month before AOL (anybody remember AOL?) went “unlimited”--that is, started charging a monthly flat rate rather than a per-minute charge for on-line usage. All the acronyms so widely used now, all the “wtf” and “lol” and “roflmao” and “fml” and so on, were born in the days of per-minute charges. People held on to that language even after the advent of “unlimited use,” when you no longer had to worry about every character you typed into an “instant message” or a chat room costing you money. It evolved somehow from “necessity” to “cool.”

Medicalese seems to have followed a similar progression. What makes me think that is that I hear so many “lay” people--people who are not medical professionals--slinging the acronymic lingo, as if it makes them part of the medical crowd, or something. The “medical crowd” reinforces it by talking to lay people--you know, “patients”--in the same lingo, the same pidgin. Interestingly, nurses seem to be some of the worst offenders. While the nursing profession has gone to great lengths, or so nurses have told me, to develop a language “separate” from that of physicians--a “laceration” becomes an “disruption of skin integrity,” or something like that, a nurse practitioner once told me--once they become advanced practice nurses, they embrace the medical pidgin with gusto, and speak in nothing BUT acronyms unless it cannot be avoided.

This is sometimes problematic from a transcriptionist point of view, of course, especially when so many spoken sounds can be so difficult to distinguish from each other (“f” and “s,” for instance, “m” and “n” to a slightly lesser extent; c and e and d, falling in the middle of a hastily blurted acronym, can be virtually indistinguishable from each other--sometimes all you can really hear is a sort of an “eee” sound).

Acronyms, in online communication or in the medical field, were originally designed as “shortcuts” that would enable us to communicate more information, faster and more efficiently, and they’ve succeeded.

Still, I cannot help but wonder sometimes if, after passage of a generation or two, we are not shortcutting ourselves out of any ability to communicate meaningfully with each other at all.

Random side-note regarding rotary phones: It occurred to me while pondering this stuff today that songs like Glenn Miller’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309” could not be written now. Somehow, “613-814-5000” or “913-867-5309” just wouldn’t have the same, um, ring to them.

Gotta love progress!

Occupational Hazards

Motivating oneself to work on a cloudy, cold Sunday can be challenge enough without seven highly unmotivating factors within easy eyeshot: Two cats asleep on the bed, another asleep on the chair I’ll have to occupy in an hour or so, yet another one asleep on the recliner in the living room, and the last stretched out atop the television case, sleeping quite comfortably. Then there’s the large dog asleep at the foot of my chair, and another one, the puppy, curled up on the couch, happily and increasingly sleepily gnawing away at a rawhide “bone.” The third dog, Nina, is the self-designated protector of the household and all within it, so she prefers to stay outside--but I’m pretty sure that if I were to look out the kitchen window, I would see her curled up in the corner of the yard between the house and the garage, asleep. This is not an environment conducive to maintaining the degree of alertness one needs when tackling medical reports.

When you first start working at home, you will be offered all kinds of advice and warnings from people who have tried it and succeeded (or failed). Prominent, of course, is that you must keep potential distractions--kids, spouses, phone calls, or, in my case, sunshine streaming through a window--to a minimum. You’ll be advised to keep your work space separate from your living space (and my work computer is indeed separated by 4-5 feet from my bed, 6-8 feet from my “play” computer, the one I use to write and go online for news and photo-edit, etc.). One self-described “crazy cat lady” who had a couple dozen cats told me that she put up a screen door between her office and the living room so that the cats could see her, and she could see them, but they couldn’t take up residence on her chair or stretched across her monitor (these were the days before flat screens; cats LOVED stretching out on those old-timey monitors).

Nobody ever warned me about the dangers of the cozily sleeping cat(s) on the kind of day people call “made for sleeping.”

Xena, the large sleeping dog, has now awakened--she apparently senses that it is almost time for me to begin my shift, and wants to make a trip outside. Dogs DO learn your schedule when you work at home, by the way. I used to have a Pomeranian, Pixie, who would get antsy and try to lead me back to my office when it was just about time for me to go to work. Cats are aware, as well, although they handle the situation differently: One or another of my matriarch cats, Sabrina or Evi, will curl up on my work chair about 10 minutes before I need to settle into it, practically daring me to move her.

Guess I’ll follow Xena’s example and step outside for some fresh (frigid) air.

Constitutional Complaints

Having never been particularly Christian (despite my mother’s assertion, when asked directly to which religion we belonged, that we were “Methodist”) or even particularly deist or theist--descriptions of “God” were, in my mind, anyway, virtually indistinguishable from descriptions of “Santa Claus,” right down to the beard--plus being aware of that whole First Amendment thing about our government staying the hell away from religion, I’ve found it fascinating that at least two of the Republican candidates claim to have been “called” by God to run for president.

Which, while leisurely free-associating this lazy and generally purposeless Saturday (it WAS my day off), led me to some more reinventing-of-the-wheel kinds of things, for instance why “under God” was belatedly inserted into the “Pledge of Allegiance,” and why “In God We Trust” was adopted as the nation’s “motto” three years before I was born, and about 167 years after the Constitution of the United States was ratified. “Epluribus Unum” seemed a much better fit, after all.  "Out of many, one."  Parse "united" and "state"--the latin describes what we, as a nation, have aspired to be infinitely more accurately than the "under God" thing.

But smarter people than I have raised these questions before, and smarter folks than all of us, wearing Supreme Court robes, have essentially dismissed them (gotta love what Justice Brennan said, in a 1984 decision about something or other: “ ...I would suggest that such practices as the designation of 'In God We Trust' as our national motto, or the references to God contained in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag can best be understood, in Dean Rostow’s apt phrase, as a form a 'ceremonial deism,' protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly because they have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.” Basically, through sheer repetition, the phrases have become meaningless.

Certainly that was true for me in sixth grade, when Mrs. Henderson directed us every day in repetition not only of the Pledge of Allegiance, but also in something called “The American’s Creed,” which, by the way, was adopted by Congress as the “National Creed of the United States” back in 1918.  (Who'd a' thought we ever had a "national creed"?)

Mrs. Henderson also encouraged us to “rat out” our classmates for various indiscretions. For instance, somebody ratted me and my friend, Steve Swords, out for only mouthing the words to the Pledge and the Creed, not actually saying them aloud. Mind you, we were NOT protesting having to recite them; we just both happened to be painfully shy, and speaking aloud didn’t come easily to us. So Mrs. Henderson made us stand up together, in front of the class, and recite the stuff aloud. Only in retrospect do I see how counter that punishment runs to the spirit of both the Pledge and the Creed.

Of course, Mrs. Henderson was also the one who made us memorize and recite for the Christmas play that year a section of the Bible (Luke 2:1-20, to be precise), and so indeed it came to pass that we stood together on stage, somberly reciting that great news or whatever to our assembled family and friends, who in some cases were as mystified by it as many of us were. Good thing for Mrs. (and, by the way, that was in the early 1970's--"Mrs." hadn't yet fallen into disfavor) Henderson that the ACLU never heard about it.

My life was not particularly disrupted by having to recite the Pledge and Creed and Bible passages aloud; nor was I particularly traumatized by it. And, in fairness, Mrs. Henderson was an enthusiastic teacher who helped us learn to love learning about other cultures, and a grammar fanatic, so almost everything I know about writing (which may not be much) can be traced back to her, and the way she shaped us.

I’m only guessing, but imagine that Mrs. Henderson was probably born sometime in the 1920s, a few years before my dad, basically was coming of age in the 1950s (after the uncomfortable interruptions of the Great Depression and World War II)--along about the time Joe McCarthy was doing HIS thing about “godless communists,” etc.

McCarthy “shaped” Mrs. Henderson, I think. Had he never existed, my sixth-grade class likely would still have learned a lot about English grammar and South and Central American food and Panamian golden frogs, but probably we would not have been forced to mindlessly recite a whole bunch of words that essentially meant nothing to us, every day of our sixth-grade lives.

“In God We Trust” was adopted as our national motto in 1956, just two years after “under God” was inserted into the “Pledge of Allegiance" (to the FLAG OF the United States of America, not the republic itself, which is interesting, but probably the subject of a whole 'nother rant).

If you listen to Republicans, our republic has been on a downhill slide ever since about the “Happy Days” era--the 1950s.

Coincidence?

Tebowmania

As only a casual follower of the NFL--that is, I’ll read Peter King‘s “Monday Morning Quarterback” column in Sports Illustrated (online edition), skim through the scores, etc. every week--I’ve nevertheless somehow become fascinated by the whole “Tebowmania” thing out in Denver and, apparently, across the country. Tim Tebow, of course, is the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback out of Florida who helped win the university two national championships, and who against “conventional wisdom” was surprisingly selected in the first round of the NFL draft in 2010 by the Denver Broncos.

None of this would be particularly interesting except that I’ve never seen a single player polarize so dramatically fans and experts and casual followers. Even people who never watch football games and don’t care one whit about the National Football League seem to have an opinion, seem passionately to want the guy to succeed--or fail--for reasons apparently having little to do with the game of football at all.

See, Tebow is an unabashed Christian. He doesn’t hide it, doesn’t downplay it, it’s just what he is, and he is comfortable enough, and sincere enough in his faith that he doesn’t apologize for it.

He is at once revered and reviled for that. The people who revere him call him “just a winner,” which, in fact, he seems to be (game last night bears, uh, witness to that); the people who revile him call him “Saint Timmy.”

I’ve never actually seen the guy play, and, in all honesty, am not enough of a football fan to be able to dissect and identify problems with his “throwing motion” or whatever. I sorta watched the Broncos-Jets game last night, or anyway the last six or so minutes of it--I say “sorta” because I don’t actually have TV; I was watching a Sports Illustrated graphic of it on my computer, which is a whole ‘nother story. When I tuned in after I got off work, the Jets had just punted, burying Denver back at their own 4- or 5-yard line. I looked at the stats real quick and saw that the Broncos had done virtually nothing on offense all evening, and at that point trailed 13-10.

Because of the Tebowmania thing, I found myself glued to the computer screen, watching the red line marking the line of scrimmage move inexorably from the right side of my monitor towards the left. It is admittedly weird watching a game that way, without seeing players or actual action or anything but a green cartoon football field with lines moving across it, yet it is fascinating at the same time, probably for the same reasons. When I was in high school and working every Sunday as a dishwasher at a local truck stop, I used to listen to Kansas City Chiefs games on the radio as I worked--watching the graphics last night was similar, but letting sight, rather than sound, trigger my imagination.

Anyway, that final drive of the Broncos just mesmerized me.

And, as I said earlier, I’m just a casual fan, but still read about the NFL. From what I’ve read about Tebow, his teammates believe in him. They will follow, however the season plays out for them as a team, because he is a leader.

His detractors, on the other hand, keep saying, “well, yeah, it has worked so far, but just wait--he’ll run into _____ or _____ or _____ and he’ll fall flat on his face.”

His fans, of course, want desperately for Tebow to succeed. His detractors want even more desperately for him to fail--so desperately, in fact, that even if he were to wind up winning a dozen Super Bowls, they would gloat that he had actually “failed” because he never managed to complete more than half of his passes, or whatever. He could become the winningest quarterback in NFL history, and STILL the detractors would be deriding him as “Saint Timmy.”

Which brings me to President Obama (believe it or not).

I’ve never seen so many people want so desperately for a president to “fail.”

And, as apparently is the case with Tim Tebow in an entirely different field, that desperation seems to stem less from Obama’s policies than it does from the fact that the president is black (“half,” the detractors remind us; “his mother is white, but he calls himself black, what’s up with that?” It would be the subject of a whole ‘nother post to respond to that one, although I have, in fact, responded to my dad on precisely that question).

Has any other president, or presidential candidate, been “forced” to produce his birth certificate?

Has any other president (aside from John Kennedy, who was Catholic) had to face inquisitions based on his religion?

Conservatives don’t like liberals, liberals don’t like conservatives, that is a given. But I have NEVER seen the level of utter hatred directed at a president as I have in the case of President Obama.

As with Tim Tebow, President Obama’s critics deride the equivalent of “arm motion” with the level of vitriol you might expect people to laser-direct at a confessed child-rapist. President Obama tries to work with the people “across the aisle,” and he is called “weak;” President Obama tries the other tack, “my way or the highway,” and he is called Nazi. Tim Tebow throws a pass and misses, he is called pathetic; Tebow runs it in from 20 yards out, people say he is “just not a pocket passer.”

What is heartening is that both Tebow and Obama seem to be riding their particular storms out with dignity, and even a bit of class.

I’m not a big football fan, I am not a Christian, and I am even less of a fan of politics--and particularly not of “partisan politics”--so maybe my perspective is skewed by the fact that, in my opinion, I don’t HAVE to have an opinion unless I so choose (and so research, etc.). From my more or less objective standpoint, though, many of the “haters” of Tebow and Obama nourish their hate ignorantly--that is, they won’t even admit the real reason they hate, even to themselves.

Interesting times, we live in.

Stuff, nonsense and charity.

The more I think about it--and I try to think about it as little as I can--the more I come to believe that when the final story of America someday is written, the final few chapters will be a lesson on the dangers of waste, redundancy, profligacy and arrogance, with a little greed, jealousy, suspicion and envy thrown in for spice.

We Americans like to think of ourselves as “generous,” and to a degree we are--individually we give to churches and charities and sometimes even panhandlers at intersections; as a country we scatter money all around the world. When we’re in the mood, of course.

On my grandparents’ old homestead there is a pear tree that has stood in the same corner of the yard for at least as long as I’ve been alive, if memory serves. My grandparents died in the late 1990s, in their mid-to-late 90s, and my sister wound up buying their house and the four or five acres immediately surrounding it (another “carve-out”). To get back to the pear tree, it still bears fruit, some years lots of it, but generally the pears just fall to the ground and rot there, given that nobody wants to go to the trouble of picking them up and preserving them, etc.

Well, almost nobody. A couple of years ago some Amish folk who live nearby stopped and asked my sister if they could pick up the pears. No, she said, she was going to use them. Of course she wasn’t--she just didn’t want to give the Amish folks “something for nothing.” Somehow it is “better,” in her eyes, that the pears just rot away on the ground, than to “give them away” to somebody who might actually get some use out of them.

I can’t take any moral high ground, here. In one corner of my yard stands an empty grain storage bin. For no particularly discernible reason, the former owner of the farm this house used to be a part of decided when determining the boundaries of the carve-out that the bin needed to go with the house, whether the buyer of the house and the 1.6 acres immediately surrounding it was going to be doing any farming or not. A couple of people have inquired about buying it, but when I name the price suggested by an “experienced” farmer my dad knows, they back off.

What I SHOULD do is just give the structure to the first person who is willing to haul it off--I have NO use for it, now or in the conceivable future, and it’s not like I would be “losing” something in terms of actual cost--it just came with the property. If I can’t use it, I should just give it to someone who can.

Of course, if I did that, “everybody” would be talking about how stupid or gullible or naïve I was, to give something away that I might (in some alternate universe; it’s a 5000-bushel bin, virtually obsolete when most people want bins three times that size) get a price for.

It all comes down to ego, I suppose, plus deep-seated fear of “being taken advantage of.”

So the bin stands empty.

In the corner of the yard opposite, or actually catercorner--”catty-corner“--from the bin I have two black walnut trees, one of them a truly magnificent specimen whose branches hang heavy with nuts every year (the other, not so much). I WISH some of my Amish neighbors, or anybody else, would happen by and offer to harvest them--certainly I never will, and I LOVE black walnuts, it’s just too difficult and time-consuming to get at the meat of them. More waste, although I suppose in this particular case it has less to do with ego or anything else I named, above, than it has to do with simple laziness on my part.

Wholly different, yet the same, situation: A bunch of years ago I helped my brother and his wife move a 24-foot truckload of “stuff” from two storage facilities and a basement to another storage facility nearer to where they were going to be moving. Among many other things, what we boxed up and packed into the truck were hundreds of toys their children had outgrown. The toys are probably still in those same boxes, but in another storage facility a thousand miles away since my brother and his family were uprooted yet again by work.

There are probably a lot of kids in this country who could have gotten a lot of joy out of those outgrown and likely now forever packed-away toys. (Yo! Bro!? Ever hear of “Toys for Tots?” It makes the news every Christmas.)

Now multiply me and my sister and brother by thousands, or millions, and you might get some idea of unnecessary waste.

Funny thing is, giving away stuff that you no longer need is not particularly painful, aside from maybe “missing” just having it around.

In the process of moving up here almost three years ago, I was forced by circumstances and finances to take a very cold look at my possessions and decide what to move, what to chuck aside. For instance, I had a veritable library of books still packed neatly in the same boxes I’d packed them in, last time I moved--I had never even unboxed them. Without renting a moving van, which I couldn’t afford, I had no way to move them. So I hauled them all down to the doorstep of a woman running a used-book store. I got nothing for them, of course (the store wasn’t even open when I dropped them off), but when I stopped by to say goodbye to the lady, whose name was Michelle, a week or two later, she told me that she had already sold several of them. “Maybe they’ll pay the store’s light bill for the next couple of months,” I said--and I really hoped they would. Michelle was managing the business on a serious shoe-string.

Yeah, I gave Michelle “something for nothing.” But those books had been stored for seven years by that point, doing nobody any good at all. How much did it really hurt me to give them away? And if it helped her keep her bookstore open a little longer . . . ?

Gave my admittedly worn bedroom set to a local women’s shelter. I haven’t gotten around to missing it, but know that other people are getting good use out of it.

Gave a whole huge tub-full (at least 200) of DVD movies to a friend who was then unemployed and without cable or satellite TV, and know that he filled a lot of otherwise empty hours with them before he, in turn, gave them to the women’s shelter.

A year or so ago I sent a barely-out-of-the-box super-zoom digital camera that I never could “bond” with to a camera-less friend, a new mother, a thousand miles away. I wasn’t using it, never would use it--I was happy to get it out of here, in fact. She has taken thousands of pictures of her now 1-year-old with it.

None of this was about “charity.” It was all about utility, really. If you own something but have no use for it, give it the hell away to somebody who CAN put it to use, who CAN use it to somehow improve their own lives, if only in a very small way. How hard is that?