THIS dog don't hunt.

Around sunrise this morning I opened the front door to let some cats out, and was surprised to find Nina the dog wanting IN. Except during thunderstorms or extreme cold, Nina, who is part chow and conscientious protector of the household and all of its occupants, never wants in. So in she came, even though just a few minutes later she and the other two dogs, Cecil and Xena, would be following me out to the front porch (front porches that face the sunrise are the world’s best places for morning cups of coffee).

Not long after we got out there, I heard distant gunfire. First day of deer season for rifles. Which, of course, explained why Nina wanted in. None of my current or former dogs are or have been fans of gunfire, or specifically, the sounds of it. And it was coming from all directions--east by the river and up on Pizz Ridge, from farther south along the river, from woods and fields to the north and west. It was intermittent, of course, not like a battle or even like riot police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at largely peaceful demonstrators, but every few minutes as we walked around the yard, we would hear a shot or two “ring out,” as they say.

All of it was far enough away that I didn’t worry about random stray bullets accidentally finding us out there, like in a CSI episode, and I know, having grown up in a family of them, that the majority of hunters adhere strictly to basic gun safety rules: For instance, never fire in the direction of a house; never, in fact, fire if you don’t have a pretty good idea of where the bullet is likely to land if you miss your target--hillsides are good backdrops, for instance, or a thick stand of trees. If your target stands between you and a highway or a house, you find a better angle on it.

I am not a hunter, in fact haven’t hunted in over 40 years, but, as I said, I grew up in a family of them, and a brother, at least two nieces and a great-nephew, are still avid hunters. The great-nephew, now age 12, got his first deer last season, I think, a clean shot at 300 yards (length of three football fields laid end-to-end). In my distant youth I might have been able to make that shot--heck, I was top marksman in my company in army basic training, back in the proverbial day, once earning myself a ride back to camp from the firing range after hitting 80 of 80 popup targets. I do know the skill and single-minded concentration and sheer focus involved.

Done right, hunting is an admirable sport, and, while I hate the fact that it involves killing animals, I recognize that so, also, do many of my own meals, although obviously I am not personally killing them. Throw in a couple of other pieces of “trivia,” for instance that hunting license fees pay for a lot of wildlife conservation efforts, and that hunting helps keep the deer population down, and it’s hard to be “anti” hunting. As I’ve told my brother, I would rather he kill a deer with his rifle, than I do it with my car. Despite spending so much time with my “head in the clouds,” at heart I am a pragmatist.

Actually it was a cat that made me give up the sport forever. Her name was Smoky, because she was a fluffy, gray tiger-striped ball of fur when we first acquired her, I no longer remember how. She wasn’t the first cat I had adopted as “mine” (despite it being the “family’s” cat): There had been a Siamese I named “Chang,” and at least two black tomcats I named, for no particular reason, “Christopher.” She would be the last cat I would adopt for close to 30 years, though.

I was in the neighborhood of 11 or 12, and Smoky was maybe six months old when she crawled up under the hood of a car, one late fall or early winter day. Our cats were all outdoor cats--I’m not sure “housecats” even existed outside of cities, back then, although I suppose they did. Generally they did just fine, bedding down in hay in the barn, cuddling up together. But there was no warmth like the warmth beneath the hood of a car. Unlike today’s cars, which, when you open the hood it’s like opening a can of sardines, everything packed edge-to-edge, cars back then had almost enough room under the hood to set up a cot.

Cats, of course, loved that.

We were headed to town for something or other that day. Mom turned the key in the ignition, and immediately Smoky came careening out from beneath the car and went cart-wheeling across the driveway before coming down in a tiny furry heap. We assumed she was dead, and of course I was heartbroken, but for some reason we didn’t check on her at that moment. She wasn’t the first of our cats to come to a similar end, after all.

When we did get back a while later, I found that she was still breathing, barely, and grievously wounded. She needed to be “put out of her misery.” (Spare me the judging, please. That was then, and there, a wholly different time and place; I’m not sure the local vets even knew HOW to take care of small animals, and even if they did, most farm families didn’t have money lying around to invest in expensive surgeries, etc., for “utility” animals, no matter how much we might love them.)

As Smoky’s “owner,” the duty fell to me.

I went upstairs, got my .22 and a single bullet, then carried Smoky as gently as I could over to a corner of the field, lay her down as gently as I could, then put that single bullet through her head. And then I buried her.

I have not intentionally killed a living thing, aside from one rattlesnake and countless flies, since that day.

Anyway, I’ll be glad when hunting season is over, and so will my dogs.
But while I will never hunt again, at least for “game” (I may spend a lot of time hunting for a new job, or meaning or purpose in life, etc.), I will also never “judge” the sport. The fact that I do not, or can not do it, does not mean that I should take up arms against it.

Sometimes seeing both sides of an issue can suck.

"We have met the enemy . . . "

This evening I spent an occasionally fascinating, often confusing, ultimately useless, and in some small ways infuriating 30 work-less minutes listening to our company’s quarterly report to its shareholders. The CEO and CFO gave informative speeches full of numbers and acronyms and bottom lines and goals for future growth, along with congratulating themselves subliminally for having met this past quarter’s goals, and almost all the numbers involved “millions” (well, the individual share price increase was more like $1.34 or something like that).

The number they seemed most proud of, the one that really made them beam (telephonically) like so many new dads and moms, was “46%.”

What is WITH us and our percentages, anyway? 1%, 99%, 53%, and now a “46%” tossed in there.

Okay, fine, we all know who the 1% and 99% and 53% refer to. What is 46%?

The percentage of my company’s work that is now happily off-shored. You know, moved to India or the Philippines, etc. That’s up from “just” 44% last quarter; the goal, I surmised, although nobody said it, was ultimately to move ALL work offshore.

The company’s “net revenue,” which I understand to be “profit” (I don’t remember enough of Econ 101 to be certain about this, and regardless, I took Econ 101 in about 1976--and I DO know that a lot of Econ terms’ definitions have been “redefined” over the past three decades), was somewhere north of 400 million, which probably makes us a pretty small-potatoes company in the grand scheme of things, but still, nothing to sneeze at.

Just a few months ago, the company lowered a lot of transcriptionist/editor pay scales, which means that we all contributed to that wonderful profit, which, of course, we won’t see because it took our sweat and dwindling bank accounts to create it.

From a purely Christian standpoint--and aren’t ALL of our happy Republican overlords “Christian?”--I suppose we should be happy to be able to contribute our tiny little portion to, well, SOME poor downtrodden corporate executive’s general welfare and well-being.

What gets me about all this is that most of the shareholders of the corporations, the people with retirement plans (or who are already retired, etc., and counting on the dividends for survival), probably are “99-percenters,” themselves. Many, if not most, of them probably are not even aware that they hold stock in the little company I work for. A lot of them are likely following Occupy Wall Street and cheering from the sidelines (in Florida or Arizona or wherever “normal” people retire, these days)--because the majority of them have been 99-percenters, and definitely 53-percenters, their whole lives. The vast majority of them cannot even begin to identify with somebody who gets a 100-million-dollar retirement bonus, or even with the “district manager” who gets a “handsome” one.

And most of them have absolutely no clue how purely lucky they were to have been there, from a chronological standpoint, to catch the economic train just as it was building up steam, to have lived and come of age in the “golden era“ of American workers. Or, if they do have a clue--and a lot of those folks have read or been taught history--they’ve chosen to ignore it.

In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Cecil's Home Improvement

A few months ago I acquired a puppy, a half-beagle, half-boxer, who so far in his young life has survived being raised partially by cats (my own, who have remote experience with another exuberant half-beagle who wandered blindly--literally; he was blind for the first couple of months of his life--into our lives) who recognize that a puppy genuinely needs the kind of guidance that only caring cats can provide, and who recognize also that the house biped--that would be me--is probably the world’s worst disciplinarian when it comes to puppies and most other critters.

At the moment, Cecil, the puppy, is working diligently on one of his house makeover projects, this one involving dismantling my old bed so we can get a new one in here. When he first came to live with us at age 7 weeks, he could reach only the fabric on the bottom of the box springs, but with much effort and perseverance, he managed to destroy that. He grew taller, of course, and so could reach the fabric around the sides of the springs and remove THAT. Now he has begun to work on the wooden frame itself, but these days he is large enough that he can go about it more comfortably, lying on his back, hind legs flailing happily about in the air while he grabs the frame with his front paws and gnaws mightily away at it.

If the project maintains his interest, he’ll be working on the mattress next, and I suppose by Christmas or thereabouts I’ll have to go bed-shopping. Well, heck, it’s not like I don’t need one--this one looks like it has been gnawed apart by a dog!

Since Cecil began the project, I’ve gone from being slightly annoyed to more or less indifferent to fascinated, and now I’m wondering, not quite to the point of making bets with myself, when he will achieve his clear goal of rendering the bed “uninhabitable.” I have no doubt that he will get there--he has overcome worse obstacles, from cats to two older, much larger dogs who found him initially unbearable, to a recent bout with parvovirus that really should have killed him.

Another of Cecil’s home-improvement plans involves excavating the yard, presumably in preparation for reseeding so that he’ll have a more plush and green playground next summer. The yard is large and Cecil is not, but then again, the bed is quite a bit larger than he is, too, and what is it they say about one’s reach exceeding their grasp? Anyway, he’s making progress on the lawn, as well. He is not going about it quite so methodically as a farmer tackling a 500-acre field, one swath after another, the individual swaths of plowed or planted or harvested territory accumulating in a steady, inexorable march from one side of the field to the other. Cecil is more of a “spot-excavater:” He’ll dig a nice deep hole in one spot, then rush off to another, more interesting spot and dig a nice hole there, then maybe chase one of the older dogs for a while, then go back to his labors in still another corner of the lawn. Unless frozen ground stops him for a while, by Spring he may indeed have the lawn plowed up and ready for reseeding--and free of moles, as well.

There may or may not be a lesson somewhere in there as I go about this uncomfortable business of reinventing myself, whether it be in Cecil’s clear self-identification of a goal, his spending at least a little time every day working towards that goal, or simply the sheer joy with which he goes about his work.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep watching him and maybe go price some beds and look at grass seeds and seeders.

Mr. Roboto World: "Machines to save our lives/Machines de-humanize."

A doctor I used to work with once told me that “80% of diagnosis is history”--the individual stories the patients tell you about what has compelled them to come to your office. Sometimes patients will provide you very detailed, almost hourly chronological compilations of the preceding few hours or days in their lives; more often the history will be only slightly better than a vague, more of an “I-just-feel-yucky” overview that doesn’t tell the doctor much of anything, and the doctor then has to tease information out in bits and pieces and sometimes mumbles and grimaces and “my-balls-are-on-fire” (that’s an actual quote from a patient when I was working as a registration clerk in an ER in the 1980s) verbal ejaculations.

A doctor may not be able to glean much from your current vital signs, for instance: Your current temperature or blood pressure may be perfectly normal; what might matter is, say, that you’ve not been feeling well and so you’ve been checking your own temperature or blood pressure or blood glucose over the last three days and it has been wildly fluctuating, or running higher or lower than normal for no apparent reason.

Details count, even the vague or fuzzy ones--or maybe especially the vague or fuzzy ones.

Got to thinking about this tonight when my incoming work flow mysteriously dried up, I had time on my hands, and I started trying to research the potential/probable impact of the big push toward electronic health records on my own livelihood as a medical transcriptionist.

Frankly, it looks pretty grim from here.

Funny, or perhaps paradoxical, thing about the medical industry, from what I’ve seen over the past couple of decades is an understandable (on one level) desire to eliminate as much of the “human element” as possible--humans make mistakes, after all. Reducing as many aspects as possible to the least common denominator, that is, trying to “idiot proof” them, makes sense in some ways. The more that can be automated, the better and more efficient and less costly and less prone to error the whole system can be.

Right?

But it’s one thing to take the “human element” out of, say, the checkout process at your local Wal-Mart by installing “self-checkout” aisles. The human element removed from that process, of course, is the job of a human cashier (and in effect turns us all into unpaid employees of the retailer, not coincidentally); the corporation cuts its expenses, but the process is no more efficient and no less prone to error, and the corporation gets a lot of free labor.  The fact is, though, a customer can drag a box of cereal across a scanner just as well, if not as quickly, as a trained cashier can.

Health care is different, though: It is founded on human-to-human interaction between a patient and a provider.

“History is 80% of diagnosis.” The individual’s story is what drives the provider’s treatment plan more than any other single factor. It is the history that cues the provider to order certain tests, etc., that essentially sets the provider off on one particular course versus another.

It would be difficult, I think, to reduce history-taking to a series of drop-down menus on a computer screen or “palm pilot,” etc.

I haven’t worked in a hospital for a while, but the way things used to work was that a doctor (or nurse practitioner or other provider) would come in, take your history and examine you without so much as a notepad between them and the patient. They might or might not chart their findings right there; where I worked, they did most of their charting in a conference room or in their offices. They wanted to provide the patient at least the illusion of “undivided attention.” Eye contact mattered, and they couldn’t make eye contact if they were scribbling notes in a chart. Plus, and I really am only surmising this based on what I used to do when taking telephone “histories” from patients--that is, took voluminous notes--it forced them, the providers, to instantly separate wheat from chaff, pick out and remember the salient facts from a sometimes rambling or sometimes skeletal story told by a patient. I HAD to take voluminous notes, write down everything someone told me over the phone, because I wasn’t qualified to judge what was important and what wasn’t (although I did get better at it over time, and with a lot of practice).

From what I understand, which may not be much, with electronic health/medical records, providers will have to enter information in a computerized record even as they interview the patient.

So much for eye contact.

I don’t know how all this will evolve; nor, I think, does anyone else, really, although many take stabs at speculation. Probably it means the end of my job at some point, and then maybe rebirth of it when the powers-that-be (the financial PTB, that is), realize that health care is one of those things from which the human element truly cannot be removed, entirely, no matter how “cost-effective” that dream might be.

In the meantime, I’ll be exploring other career options. (Actually dark blue is a good color for me; I would probably look great in one of those vests with “May I Help You?” stenciled across the back.) And I’m really too old for this.

GO (away) PENN STATE!

Watching events unfold in State College, Pennsylvania, over the past couple of days--and I’m sure everyone has heard the story by now of the former Penn State University assistant football coach serially sexually abusing a series of kids over the past 15 years or more; how a graduate assistant witnessed one episode in a shower, reported it to “legendary” Coach Joe Paterno, who in turn reported it to his superiors, who in turn apparently swept it under the thickest, University reputation-preserving carpet they could find, then allegedly lied about it to a grand jury a few years later--I’ve wondered why none of at least four educated, respectable people could have their priorities so screwed up that they would put a university’s “reputation” above the welfare of a child.

In fairness to JoePa, who has not been indicted, he reportedly wasn’t given explicit details about the episode by the graduate assistant witness, only something about “horseplay” in the shower, blah blah blah, and given that the former assistant coach had retired and was not really his employee, he reported it to people who theoretically would be responsible for doing something about it.

Uh huh.

Coach Paterno, Dude! Everybody knows you have iron-fist control over what happens in your facility, and to all accounts you are a good and intelligent man, at least most of the time, and up until relatively recently (retire, already!). Somebody tells you about an adult man engaging in “horseplay” in the shower with a 10-year-old boy, and you decide to kick the problem upstairs? Give me a break.

Then again, you were in your seventies at the time. While I know many people who retain sharp faculties well into their seventies and even eighties, maybe you just aren’t one of them. Or maybe you were just too wrapped up in the football season at the time and the seriousness of the situation didn’t really register, somehow. I’ll let you make your own excuses, though.

All that said, I find myself wondering if things would have been different, if you and the administrators, or even the graduate assistant, might have responded differently if the situation had involved heterosexual pedophilic “sex,” rather than homosexual. Football is generally perceived as “masculine,” after all, despite all the butt-slapping and hanging out half-naked in locker rooms that go on. It was bad enough that the tough former coach at “Linebacker U” was allegedly a pedophile, but my God, a F*G pedophile???

Given your age, Coach, I understand that you might find the homosexual aspect of the situation something you don’t even want to deal with, on ANY level, and, given that the accused had been a long-time friend (albeit not your “heir apparent,” as he had evidently once thought he was), the situation must have been a real, um, pain in the a** for you (although probably not as much so as it was for the 10-year-old boy). So you wrapped yourself in denial and moved on.

But it’s easy to speculate and wonder and rant and judge and on and on and on. That’s what we do best, I sometimes think. (Go back to sleep, JoePa, I’m moving on, sort of).

I’ve got a relative--won’t specify any further--who a bunch of years ago married a guy with two very young kids. The relative had four kids of her own, all older than her new stepchildren. I was living a couple of hundred miles away at the time, and so wasn’t around them much, but when I was, the relative’s treatment of her stepchildren was appalling--not so much physical abuse, but near continuous emotional destruction of the kids, and I did actually hear tales from other family members who DID witness physical abuse, spankings that went beyond simple “corporal punishment,” etc. The relative wound up divorcing the guy, who, aside from letting his children be abused by a crazed harpy, was mostly alright. What to this day I do not understand is why nobody came to the defense of those two helpless kids. I could sort of excuse myself, in a JoePa kind of way, because I didn’t witness the worst of it. But some other relatives DID.

Fast forward a few years, and that relative’s daughter has a family of her own, three kids, and is taking on foster children. Guess how she and her husband are reportedly treating their 6-year-old foster son? From what I hear, same emotional abuse, maybe some physical abuse, although, again, I’m not there to see it so I don’t know. Can we say “cycle of abuse?”

Point is, it’s easy for me to point fingers at Joe Paterno and say what he and the graduate assistant and those worthless administrators “should” have done--and I would like to think that, in his/their position, I WOULD have done. But then I remember two helpless stepchildren and wonder.

This pot is going to refrain from calling any kettles black, right now. The mess in State College, Pennsylvania, right now, from a distance, is enough to disgust anybody. But how many similar messes are going on invisibly anywhere in the country, at any given time?

Mm, mm, these dreams . . .

Herman Wouk wrote a novel called "Youngblood Hawke", about a young writer/author named, oddly enough, Youngblood Hawke; I never knew enough about Wouk to be certain of this, but always strongly suspected that the novel was strongly autobiographical - or maybe was semi-biographical about another author, Thomas Wolfe maybe (whoever wrote "You Can't Go Home Again"), because there seemed to be a lot of parallels although again I was basing that "sense" or "feeling" on an almost complete lack of information other than what I sensed/felt in reading Wolfe's tome. Sometime around the same time, or maybe later, it also struck me that maybe the parallels were more incidental than intentional, that the parallels were there simply because they were . . . there.

To get back to Youngblood Hawke, he--the character--wrote a series of novels, all serious and literary, etc., but essentially designed to make enough money that ultimately he, Youngblood, would be free financially to write his REAL masterwork, a series of novels patterned after some French guy's "Comedy;" Hawke's would be "The American Comedy" and would paint a comprehensive tapestry of American life at that point in history, and maybe throughout its history, I forget now. Anyway, Hawke dies fairly young, having completed several novels including one that was a critical flop which was told from a woman's point of view (see "Marjorie Morningstar," by Herman Wouk). After his funeral, his former editor, a woman with whom he had or had not had an affair, I forget which, who had wound up married to a lawyer, lamented to her husband that Hawke had never gotten a chance to start his "American Comedy." The lawyer--actually a thoughtful, likable character--thought for a moment, apparently mentally reviewing the work Hawke HAD completed, and said something like, "You know, I think Youngblood may have written his comedy." Thing was, he HAD--he just didn't know he was doing it when he was doing it.

What got me started wandering down this particular meandering mental path was a conversation with a friend last night about "dreams deferred" (from a Langston Hughes poem), and what happens to them. The point I wanted to make to him, although I couldn't quite figure out at the time how to verbalize it, was simply that sometimes we are living our dream without even being aware of it--as in the case of Youngblood Hawke. Corollary to that is that sometimes we "mis-identify" our dream, focus on one aspect of it without realizing that our subconscious has entirely different ideas about which is the most important aspect of the dream. Which I'm sure makes no sense at all . . . . In the case of an artist - musician, writer, painter, whatever - the conscious mind may identify the dream by its presumed "accoutrements" of fame, fortune, the "good life," etc., whereas the subconscious mind sees it as simply doing the art, or performing it or practicing it or whatever the hell it is you do with an "art," in and of itself. In the case of a musician, it is not "about" the label, the acknowledgment of the world at large that you are a "musician;" instead, it is about the music itself. Same goes for writing--it doesn't matter if the world thinks of you, and labels you, a "writer;" it is important only that you write. Same goes for any other art form (and just by the way, I still have a difficult time thinking of writing as an "art form;" it's just a communications tool, or a recording device, something, but to call it "art" seems a little . . . the word escapes me right now. Of course).

Once a long time ago I was talking with my former boss, Jean, about I forget what, and she commented, "We're all pretty much where we're supposed to be, when we're supposed to be there." She was big on "sayings." That one stuck with me, obviously (given that it has been 19 years since I worked with her, and probably 14-15 years since I last saw her), and I've thought about it off and on over the years. Whether she meant it in as "cosmic" a sense as that in which I've generally contemplated it (and I think she did; she was bent that way, oddly enough), I've concluded that she was right. I also know that that is an easy thing to prove, looking at any life in retrospect--see Youngblood Hawke, for instance. Even decidedly wrong turns can look, in retrospect, if you wind up somewhere you want to be, even if it wasn't where you started out to go, as so serendipitous or fortunate or whatever as to be "other directed"--fate or predestination, call it what you want. In retrospect, nothing looks like a "fatal mistake"--IF you're still surviving and able/willing/predisposed to contemplate such things. This of course presupposes that at the time you engage in such contemplation, you're more happy with what you ARE than unhappy about what you "might have been, if only _____ (fill in the blank)."

The other thing about dreams, that just occurred to me, is that by definition they have to be "elusive" - that is, always just barely outside your grasp, or somehow just half a step ahead of you, almost within reach but not . . . quite . . . there. Because once you "catch" your dream, what then is there to keep you going on? The dude in the movie, "Flashdance," didn't mean it like this when he told the Jennifer Beals character, "You give up your dream, you die," but it could be taken as, "When you catch your dream, you die."

One thing leads to another . . . .

New term (to me) from work: "Pain ball catheter." That was from an op report regarding a hysterectomy (something OB/Gyn, anyway; it was that or a C-section, but I'm pretty sure it was the hysterectomy). The dictator said it clearly, but there was no mention of a "pain ball catheter" in my equipment terminology book, and not even anything on Google when I put the full phrase in there. Eventually--and this was after trying "paint ball," among other things--I did find "pain ball." I'm still not specifically sure what it is, at least with regard to mechanism, what it looks like, etc., although I gather that it has something to do with pain medications self-administered by the patient. Of course I was thinking of possible variations, especially the "paint ball" - with so many medications, etc., administered via patches on the skin, etc., it seems to me like you could rig a paintball gun to shoot paintballs full of the same drugs, and have a little fun while you administer the medications. Or rather, your significant other could have fun shooting you with the stuff. For that matter, the people who do the paintball combat games are missing a bet, here--think how much more fun they could have if they could load their paintballs with something like Demerol or some kind of tranquilizer instead of simple paint, just enough to knock the target out for a couple of hours. Of course that could lead to all sorts of problems, like the paintball enthusiasts being arrested for practicing medicine without a license, something like that. Guess I'll table that idea for the time being.

Another new term I saw in the paper (online version, naturally): "New Science." I'm still not altogether sure what THAT is, although it does seem to be an actual "entity," like "new math" or something. Apparently its fundamental principle is that "all things are connected." Probably that is an oversimplification, but it's close enough. Now, I don't know how long New Science has been around; in a way it sounds at least a little like chaos theory, with its hyperactive South Pacific butterfly flapping up a literal storm in Florida, or however that goes. But how freaking "new" can it really be? Even Isaac Newton was on a similar track with that "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" notion of his. What is interesting to me, though, is that I've been toying with that particular idea--"all things are connected"--for a lot of years, now, although not in "Newtonian" terms. Basically it is simple: Nothing/nobody exists in a vacuum.

That realization came to me much later than it probably should have. It’s not like I haven’t been paying attention over the past half-century or so, after all.

If you ever truly study history, for instance, you see how one thing leads to a predictable other.

You begin to see and understand what Maxine Hong Kingston meant when she wrote that, unless she sees her ancestors’ lives branching into her own, they offer her no “ancestral help.”

I suppose a translation of that would be, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Now, go look up “Gilded Age.”