Spend Some Quality Time with Random Thoughts

Busy weekend unplugged. At the DZ yesterday and this morning--spent the night in the bunkhouse. I'm gettin' too old for that.

Jumped three times yesterday and made what was probably the only load this morning before the winds picked up. Last night's excitement was the ladder truck coming out to get a jumper out of a tree. The jump before that, she was with me. She landed in the middle of the student pit and I have the video to prove it. Her jump on the sunset load was her final checkout jump. I don't remember there being a "tree landing" block on the A-license card, but if there were, she could check it off now. :-D She was bruised but still smiling!

When the winds canxed us today, I left early to swing by and say hello to my mother on the way back to Charleston. Watched a little of the race and heard the best line of the day. Originally, it was going to be the sole content of this post as the Quote of the Day, but then I was afraid of what it might imply without some backstory. At any rate, here it is, as heard during a commercial break:

"Spend some quality time with Viagra dot com."

Right. I didn't know you could have that meaningful a relationship with a web site. I'll just leave that there and head to bed. I'm still jet lagged from springing forward. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Beer Pong Herpes

My mid-term exams contained objective portions that allowed me to grade with other media playing in the background, thus the earlier CBS news post. From there, I moved on to more serious news sources and stories like the one below. I frequently give people a hard time who forward things to me without first exercising some due diligence. This piece is about what happens when news "professionals" are guilty of the same thing. It's four minutes long, but worth it. Clear out some space because you're likely to be ROTFL.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Beer Pong Herpes Outbreak

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Political Humor

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Joke of the Day

Start With Your Heart

Some four years ago, I was the deputy head in a department west of here, when my boss complained one day of having a problem seeing. And a headache. And numbness in one arm. I promptly informed said boss, a full colonel, that she was going to the clinic with me, post haste. When she resisted, I offered to get the Dean of the Faculty, a brigadier general, to accompany us.

Stroke is not a thing to be taken lightly. I scares the bloody hell out of me.

North Carolina takes it seriously enough to create a Task Force dedicated to it. Complete with helpful videos. They're even entertaining. Sweetness and light.

But the best part? That guy hosting the "game show" in the awareness spots below? He's another of those few that Robert Penn Warren aptly termed "the friends of our youth." Governor's School of North Carolina alums, we were to be roommates at UNC-Chapel Hill, had I headed that way instead of west to the Colorado School for Wayward Boys and Girls.

Enjoy. (Left clicking on the icons will open the video in a separate window.)

Hat tip: Connelly

Snapshot: Marsh in Fog, Evening

Shem Creek. Short fishing pier, unfrequented. 6 p.m. The dark comes early now. Quiet but for the soft whrrr of heat pumps, the faraway sound of traffic, but all that muffled tonight by a light, warm fog. Someone's streetlamp visible half a mile away over pier or boathouse, but beyond that, the condos and hotel normally visible are shrouded. A tall crystal glass of some Aussie Cab/Merlot silhouetted against the grey. A conversation of canines across the creek. Mine rests silent at my feet. She likes the pier, I think--accustomed now to coming here, sometimes only to look out across the water and marsh grass and retreat, and sometimes, like tonight, to pause for a while. To listen to the occasional splash of something alive in the marsh. To allow the breeze, heavy with the weight of the fog to caress us. The crickets to stroke our ears.

I'm learning this place. Tides. So high this morning that I could almost reach down and touch the surface. So, to the chart: +6.9 feet, it says. Then +7.0 tomorrow, before a steady regression to more normal depths. Pull of the full moon.

Fog horn this morning on waking and again now. Took a while to believe it was what it sounded like. No idea where. Something else to learn. Less than three miles to the harbor from here.

Cigar tonight perhaps. Later. After dinner, some Addison, some Steele, a little Swift, and the ever pressing paperwork. Mentally recapping the day leading up to this quiet. Solitary office hours this morning. The afternoon at the Air Force base. Retiree ID card, finally. Register for TriCare Prime. Learn what it is to pay for my health care--a pittance really, compared to anyone else, but after so long at no cost, one more reality check. Ready to be done with that life, but not ready for this.

Walking back in, a conversation of fog horns in differing pitch, like a hearing test for the wide wet world. I press the button.

Touch Me, Please

An article in yesterday's USA Today, states:

A new study from researchers in Utah finds that a warm touch — the non-sexual, supportive kind — tempers stress and blood pressure, adding to a growing body of research on how emotions affect health.

To which, all I could think of to say was, "Well, duh."

I have seen people holding everything inside let it go like a dam bursting because someone finally took their hand and looked into their eyes and said, "It's okay. I understand. I'm here for you." And it wouldn't have been the same without the touch. Touching--gently, firmly, calmly, reassuringly--says to a person, "I am willing to connect with you. I am not afraid of you. You needn't be afraid of me. It will be okay."

Of course, there can be too much touching, and there can be unwelcome touching, and I would never encourage anyone uncomfortable with touching to do so. There was more to Spock's Vulcan mind-meld than Roddenberry likely knew-- touch someone and they will know things about you, and you will know things about them. And for that reason, I'd never encourage anyone uncomfortable with human contact to go on a touching spree anytime soon. Anxiety is just as transmissible as calm through touch.

But calm is transmissible. Our souls can resonate with another like a guitar string next to a tuning fork. And to those whose natural pitch is calm, I would say, you are welcome to touch me anytime. The luckiest of us know someone like that and can't get enough of being near them. They touch us and the jangled dissonance of our stressed out psyches falls into sympathetic tune.

This is a case, I would say, of research merely quantifying what most of us already knew. Modernity and science "discovering" what many have known all along. Those many are called "touchy-feely" for a reason you know.

Or, as my favorite tuning fork remarked when I pointed out the study, "We're all really just mammals at heart."

So go ahead. Scratch my head and just see if I don't wag my tail.

Your memory or your life?

An interesting article appeared in the news last week. One which got my attention more than most.

Elderly black people who are chronic users of acid-inhibiting drugs in the family that includes Zantac, Pepcid and Tagamet have 2½ times the normal risk of developing dementia, Indiana researchers reported Friday.

The drugs block production of stomach acid by inhibiting histamine-2 receptors; the stomach releases hydrochloric acid when stimulated by histamines. But they also inhibit the brain’s cholinergic system, which is involved in memory and cognition. Low levels of cholinergic activity have been linked to dementia.

Now I am neither elderly nor black, but I hope to be one someday, and I'm pretty sure that the biochemistry we're talking about here isn't race-related. The study subjects were black, driving the wording above.

Why did this get my attention? Because, like many married men my age who, forced to take pleasure where they can find it, long ago installed a mirror over the kitchen table, I was also long ago diagnosed with a hiatal hernia and GERD. Of more concern, a recent EGD (The fog of anesthesia of which I emerged from alternating a recitation of the "Prologue" of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and my favorite line of "jive" from Airplane. That the portions of my brain governing memory and language awakened well before those responsible for discretion did not amuse my spouse . . . but that's another story.) brought with it the news that the bottom five centimeters of my esophagus is being assimilated by my Borg-like stomach. The technical name for this is Barrett's Esophagus. It is a precursor condition to cancer, which, doesn't so much run in my family as sprint. But, Picard escaped the Borg, so resistance is never wholly futile.

While opinions seem to differ on whether esophageal tissue that has become stomach tissue can ever really become esophagus again, there is at least agreement that treating the GERD (with both lifestyle changes and drugs) can at least stop the damage.

My drug is Aciphex. Which, I am happy to report, is not in the class listed above, but is instead, a proton pump inhibitor. That's good news:

The study did not look at Caucasians and there was not enough data to suggest a risk from a different family of drugs called “proton pump inhibitors,” which includes Prilosec, Nexium and Prevacid.

It would be a wicked irony indeed that asked a person to choose between risking an early end to life by leaving one condition unchecked and prolonging life, but not being able to remember why you wanted to in the first place. Which is why, in the end, lifestyle changes, when possible, are always a superior, if more difficult, option than drugs.

Don't complexify things

My prolific record of posts since my return from spring break should speak volumes regarding my failure to heed the title's advice. And yet, though I've written little here, my fingers have been no stranger to the keyboard.

I'm attempting to draw one long career to a close and set out on another. Just which other is yet to be determined. But the exploration of possible others has kept me rather busy lately.

The other thing that's kept me busy has been reconnecting with some old friends. Back in May, I stood beneath the center of the new Air Force Memorial, staring up at the stars, with only even an occasional passing car as a distraction. I recommend visiting that monument--in fact, I recommend visiting all of them--well after midnight in the middle of the week. I don't like crowds. But I do like individuals. And those I call friends, I tend to like intensely, and for a lifetime. One of those friends gave me that midnight tour of DC. The monuments were nice, the government buildings were nice, the empty streets were like something from The Twilight Zone, but the best thing of all was reconnecting with a friend I'd not seen in a quarter of a century.

Today, I reconnected with another, after nearly a decade. Over an hour on the phone wasn't really long enough. Our kids were in grade school the last time we talked. This fall, we'll each drop one off at different colleges on the east coast. The last time we connected was his birthday, a decade ago, and he was about halfway through a year-long deployment to Korea. For his birthday, I sent him a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing and one of two Costa Rican cigars from a little shop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, picked up on a visit to a battlefield there as part of a graduate course on the literature of the Civil War (good luck untangling those modifiers). Then, through e-mail, we coordinated so that, at the same time, half a world apart, he smoked his cigar on a morning walk in Korea, and I smoked mine, on an evening walk, in gently falling snow, near Charlottesville, Virginia. The walk itself, a long-range version of something we did rarely, but with intense consciousness of each precious moment, sporting cigars on the starlit terrazzo of our shared alma mater, not quite two decades earlier still. A world apart, a shared, smoke-haloed perambulation--and then, the long drift. I hadn't the heart to tell him today that I'd driven by his house once, or, at least a house that was once his, some four years ago. On a road trip from North Carolina to a conference in Florida, I'd detoured through Alabama with an associate to look at a house he was arranging to live in with his family for a year of school there. At my request, we detoured by another as well. There wasn't time to stop for a real visit anyway, we had somewhere we had to be, "miles to go." But even more than that, there was, has been for years, for me, an unexplainable conflict between yearning and foreboding, more like than unlike that of Frost's most famous traveler. Still, I wanted to see the house, to have an idea in what surroundings to picture the closest friend I made in the four-year crucible we called a college, should one or the other of us bridge that drift again.

So, today, I did. Only I could really. I've moved three times since that December walk; he only once that I know of.

Funny thing about both those reconnections, the one spanning a quarter century and the other a decade: both are doctors. Well, technically, I suppose we all three are, but they're the kind who can cure you; whereas, I . . . well as I've told more than one jumper who's approached me for medical care, "I can describe that injury in colorful iambic pentameter and analyze the subtext within the plot turns of your life leading inevitably to it, but I'm not going to be much help to you, medically--not that sort of 'Doc' . . . sorry."

And both are artists, of one sort or another, so naturally, I'm coming to believe that all surgeons have this alter ego as a feature of their personalities. One gardens and cooks on a level well above my head, and the other draws and paints. Both have a gift for words as well, and it is to today's reconnection that I owe the lovely coinage that titles this post. As we both laughed at our growing collection of reading glasses (I find I'm not the only person with a pair in every room, pocket, vehicle, and end-table) and lamented the utter complexity of our lives, I mentioned a yearning "to simplify" my life. He responded, rightly I think, that we were probably past that point, the better strategy would have been "not to complexify them in the first place."

So, this post is a tribute to simpler times and to one of the simplest and most fundamental of life's pleasures: friendship. Quite honestly, I probably don't deserve the caliber of friends I have, and my gratitude that God has seen fit to bless me so abundantly nonetheless is probably all the explanation I ever need seek for my affinity for expressions of friendship in art. Some people saw Serendipity as a chick flick; I saw it as a buddy movie. I've never seen a better scripted or acted portrayal of that mysterious way in which male friendships materialize than the first few episodes of Deadwood, from Bullock's and Hickok's first meeting to the latter's murder. And you already know that I think Reign Over Me the finest movie to come out thus far this year, in any category. But I digress.

To my friends, thank you for putting up with me. You're really the only readers I have anyway. And to any of the latter who haven't been or aren't yet the former, I hope for you that you are or will be at least half so blessed as I in that arena, for were I only even half so blessed, I would still consider myself a very, very lucky man.

"Industrial Organic" vs Farmers' Market

A few days ago, I mentioned that Michael Pollan was going to be speaking at Colorado College on Thursday night. We went, and we took our 15-year-old daughter along. It was a great talk. I'll buy the book soon. In the meantime, we know more about the food we eat, and we know more about organic food than we did before.

A note about that. An article in today's Gazette opened with the claim that organic food may not be better for us. Right. And global warming is just a myth.

One important note from the Q&A. Asked which he recommended between industrial organic (the large chain variety) and buying local (farmers' markets, etc), Pollan recommended buying local. He explained that much of it is organic anyway, but warned not to ask in those terms. The government owns the "organic" label now, and many small farmers won't or can't pay for the certification. Rather than looking for a label, he says, talk to them. The beauty of a farmers' market is that the farmers' are right there. Ask how they raise that cabbage, what fertilizers they use, do they use pesticides. Face-to-face communication beats a govt label any day.

Prions Revisited

Remember that whole thing about prions as the cause of Mad Cow and the accompanying analogy to Vonnegut's ice nine (see Prions and Ice Nine)?

Well, according to an article in today's news, it turns out that Mad Cow may be caused by a virus after all, and the prions could just be the effect, not the cause.

I'm not convinced though, and neither are the doctors/scientists just yet. My first question would be whether or not there are known varieties of virus that nothing seems to kill, as is the case with prions and Mad Cow, CJD-V, etc. Nor autoclave, nor alcohol, nor chlorine, nor you name it shall keep the mal-formed protein from its appointed rounds. Can a virus do that? Serious question. If you know, leave a comment, please.