Post Mortem: Pointless Practicing

Like all of the "Post-Mortem" essays, this one was intended to be auto-published after my death. I've intentionally let one of two slip past that target, but as long as I can reset the publication dates on these things I'll keep pushing them back until I can't.  Damn it, I'm still alive in 2025, so it goes back yet one more year.  

Well shit, I'm still putting up with this nonsense in 2026?  Screw it.  I'll let this one go. 

August 2, 2017 

Modern, at least American, medicine and doctors are a curious mix of uselessness and hope. The things that doctors and medicine are useless at are the important things and the things they cling to a claim of value for are hopeless. Crippling arthritis that inhibits your ability to use your hands for everyday necessities? Forget it, medicine is useless. Don’t even bother asking for help because none exists. Cancer of a vital organ or even several organs? Well, maybe, if you are willing to subject yourself to surgeries, radiation, and toxic chemicals and almost certain poverty and debt regardless of your insurance situation.

Forty years ago, I ripped out the fingernail of my left hand’s middle finger and that fingernail never grew back in any useful form. A couple of years ago, while helping my wife move a plant from a friend’s home to ours. Turns out, that plant (Snow on the Mountain) is a toxic relative of poison ivy. My wife experienced a nasty rash on her face that cortisone shot quickly stopped then cured. I am allergic to cortisone, so I tried to treat the growing, painful rash on my hands with a variety of ineffectual over-the-counter medicines, natural treatments, and a lot of whining. I went to the doctor, but was told that I was pretty much on my own since their only solution, cortisone, was not an option. The end result was that my already mostly frail and undependable fingernails began to develop a fungus that turned them into even larger handicaps. As you might suspect, there are no practical cures in modern medicine for nail fungus and I’ve been left to deal with that on my own.

And tinnitus. My constant companion for at least 20 years. Medical “science” has found absolutely nothing to combat tinnitus, but there are no shortage of non-functional tactics upon which you can pay big money for even bigger disappointments. For a long time, it was a slight background noise only in my left ear. It was enough of an irritant that when I spent time in an anechoic chamber in St. Paul several years ago I mostly thought about the first time I was in such a chamber and how, after accommodating myself to my own rushing blood and cardiac sounds, I became irritated at the asynch heart beats of the three other people in that chamber with me. No such problem 40 years later. Thanks to that constant tone, I probably couldn’t have heard someone else’s heart if it were in my hand, held next to my ear. Then, a few years ago, an inattentive evening spent in a Red Wing club and I was left with much louder and more irritating tinnitus, now in both ears. No thanks to what passes for “modern medicine,” there is nothing to be done about it.

Likewise, when my hands began to wither and twist into uselessness from arthritis a few years ago, other than pain medications, modern medicine takes an “oh well, that’s too bad” approach to my problem. I’ve had an orthopedic surgeon take x-rays and shake his head in sympathy and my regular doctor tell me “it’s just part of aging.” No comfort or relief from either of those “diagnosis,” but there is a reaffirmation that medicine is helpless to deal with problems that can be easily measured like rotting nails or disabled hands.

This week, my aging symptom is a return of my double-vision problems that first occurred last year about this time. At that time, my diagnosis was that the muscles that coordinate my eyes into a coherent single image were simply wearing out from age and over-use: my left eye has always been grossly near-sighted which exercises those muscles unusually. My diplopia was treated, at that time, by adding prisms to my glasses prescription. That worked pretty well until this last week. At least for the short term, I’m wearing an eye patch over the eye that is mostly useless for the task at hand: the right eye when I’m reading and the left eye when I’m driving. That was a “fix” that cost me $7 on Amazon.com. I’m sure Mayo Clinic’s solution will be more expensive and, possibly, less effective. I am learning how to close one eye without tensing up the muscles of that eye and causing ever more headaches than I usually experience. The end result is, so far, a diagnosis of "ocular myasthenia gravis." Still, no real solution for the double-vision but a very expensive prescription medicine.

So, as a result of my last year’s (2018) physical, my doctor noticed that my Prostate-specific antigen ( or PSA) level was around five. Supposedly, anything over four is a concern; a warning factor for cancer. I’m seventy-one now, so “concern” is a relative term. Pretty much everything about my body is turning into a warning factor of some sort. I hurt everywhere. My physical limitations abound. I am seventy-one, pretty close to, or slightly past, the terminal age for someone of my economic class and genetics.

I watched my father degenerate from an active person who regularly played tennis and golf well into his late-60s into a couch potato who was so physically limited that his only “activity” was to sit a few inches from a big screen television and try to pick out the action from various sportscasts. He hated his last two decades of life and only his fear of death—an odd characteristic for someone so religious—kept him alive for at least a decade of suffering. My father went through several surgeries for cancer, a couple for what turned out to be a misdiagnosed thyroid problem, and at least two for various cardiac problems. Not one of those surgeries or procedures extended his quality of life and I doubt that any of them did much for his longevity.

The chances that I would submit myself to any sort of elective surgery, exploratory or remedial, are tiny-to-nonexistent. Broken bones and open wounds aside, I consider almost all surgery to be “elective.” I have zero faith in an industry that can’t fix small, obvious, important patient problems but claims to have miracle cures for the big stuff; cancer and cardiovascular diseases. This is, after all, a medical industry that regularly creates complicated drug addictions by prescribing medications to offset the effects of medications. It’s almost impossible to find an addictive compound that at one time the medical industry and the people who will only “practice medicine” for their entire careers didn’t claim was not addictive: from barbiturates to stimulants to synthetic heroin to depression and anxiety medications. If you can trust the opinions of a group that is so wary of its own expertise that life-long professionals only claim to “practice medicine,” good luck with that. I have been up-close and personal with some of the richest and most incompetent physicians the country has to offer and I wouldn’t trust most of them with a sharpened pencil.

"Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!"

Kurt Vonnegut's 1997 book, Timequake, used a quote that Vonnegut credits to jazz pianist Fats Waller, “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy.” That thought hit home hard with me.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece marveling at my recently deceased friend’s attitude toward preserving his life as long as possible, “I want to see what happens next.” I did, and still do, love that attitude, but I don’t share it. I suspect Keith had some kind of unfounded (in my opinion) faith that everything will somehow miraculously “work out for the best.” I love that attitude in anyone, but I suspect it is not much less insane than the intense desire for chaos that plagues much of the world, especially the so-called “conservative” populations all across this planet. My friend believed that human beings, under the right kinds of incentives (impending extinction, for example), could and would band together to stave off the death of the species; largely because he had a complex and convoluted intense love for nature and our planet, which included the species most likely to destroy it all in a fit of ego, arrogance, and stupidity. I am totally with him on the first part. I wholeheartedly love the planet we call “Earth” and everything living on it, except humans. And I am totally baffled by the logic or rationale that led to his faith in our species. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m saying I don’t understand or share that faith in humans. From my observation deck, it looks like more than enough humans worship chaos and imagine that, if you toss the world into instability, all the quarters will flip in their favor and they’ll end up rich and powerful. That experiment has been run repeatedly throughout history and it always produces the same sad outcome.

Vonnegut's Timequake also included a made-up biblical bit that should have been included in at least one of the 2,000 versions of the so-called "Christian Bible." Adam and Eve informed God, "that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime." Even better, would be knowing when. Everlasting life might be ok if it were just going to be Adam and Eve and the flora and fauna of the planet. But once those 930-year-old progenitors started puking out their 9 to 1,000 or so offspring, they had to become hoping for an end to the chaos and foolishness. Like me, I suspect those imaginary founding humans probably just hoped that they were having fun when the balloon popped. Suffering for what either is or feels like an extended period before dying sounds, to me, like the worst possible way to go. Those rich guys who are found dead with a half-suffocated prostitute pinned under the lard asses probably went out as happy as they ever were. How is that not ideal?

In Timequake, Kurt also wrote a succinct analysis of evolution, human beings, and the kind of crazy crap that random selection has produced on this planet, "I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly." Kurt desperately tried to generate a personal philosophy of optimism, but he was a realist and reality kept dragging his hopeful-self back to the dirt. When Kurt was well into old age (at 83), he told Rolling Stone Magazine he wanted to sue the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, “And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me." A few years earlier he told a Progressive Magazine interviewer the reason he chain-smoked Pall Malls was “I’m trying to die, but it’s not working.” He was clearly hoping someone would kill him while he was feeling good. It didn’t happen, though. Kurt died at 84 as a result of brain injuries from a fall at his home, and it took a few weeks for that injury to do him in. I would bet he wasn’t happy when he died.

Optimistic people baffle me. Mrs. Day keeps telling people she is having so much fun at this point in her life she wants it to go on like this forever. It won’t, of course. Our declining empire will continue to crumble, the crazed wingnuts will do everything they can to blow up anything that resembles decency and civilization, the media and the lucky quarter-flipper billionaires will finance it all hoping to get even further on top, and it will all continue to swirl around the toilet bowl of disaster and extinction. But for right now, this short unsustainable moment, For my money, this is as good a time as any for "somebody shoot me while I’m happy!" Actually, almost anytime between 2001-05 would have been perfect. 2008 was the last gasp of the old Musictech College as an educational facility and the beginning of the Age of McNally Smith College of Making Doug, Jack, and Harry rich. Before that downer moment, the school was a hotbed of creativity, academic direction, and cooperation. The downward slide to the school’s eventual despicable demise was rapid and predictable and no fun to be around. I retired in 2013, but the lights had long gone out of the building before then. During the summers, I was wallowing in the luxury of the brief moment when the Motorcycle Safety Center’s training philosophy was “adult learner centered” and offered a lot of room for creativity and individual instructor personality. But, if I had a moment to reflect and react, if a school shooter had appeared at any time during that amazing period of my life I’d have gladly stepped between everyone else in the Musictech building (except Jack or Doug) or any of my motorcycle students and taken one for the team. I would have absolutely died happy, assuming it was a quick death. Any other kind voids the inspiration for this saying.

Post Mortem: Winding Down the Watch

I’m writing this at 4AM, July 15 of 2015. I’m 67 and bored with my life and myself. Nothing new there, but it has all gone on way too long and last night was a typical night in a life full of typical sleepless nights. If I live long enough to see this blog entry published, I’ll be 70. 70 years and I’m tired as hell.

For years, I thought my step-grandfather died in his 60s but this morning I discovered my step-uncle, Barry, had logged Sarge’s life stats in a genealogy website and that Sarge died when he was 72. Not a short life, by any practical standard. Too long for me. Sarge didn’t “fight” his end particularly hard and I wonder if we had other things in common. He died from emphysema and complicating factors and smoked his whole life, right up to his last year on oxygen. To me, that feels like a serious attempt to intentionally wind down his life’s watch. Likewise, I decided to do the same thing a decade ago. So far, it’s not working all that well for me.

Two and a half years ago, I screwed up the end-of-life plan and I’ve regretted it ever since. I had a minor heart attack, correctly diagnosed it, and allowed myself to be poorly transported to a hospital emergency room. What followed were 3 of the most expensive, least productive, most miserable days of  my life. In the end, I fought off physician-attempts to do significant surgery, absolutely refused any consideration of medical devices, and ended up with a 3mm stent on my right coronary artery. Usually, implantation of any foreign device in your body requires lifetime anti-rejection, antibiotic, and anti-inflammatory medications. My doctors prescribed two incompatible blood pressure medications, while I had not shown any signs of high blood pressure, a clinically ineffective anti-inflammatory, and a cholesterol medication. All of which listed “possible severe depression” as a side effect.

Mostly what that experience proved was that doctors and hospitals could not care less about patient health or safety. Their one and only concern is emptying their “customers’” (not patients) pockets as efficiently as possible. At this point, I’m pretty much doing the Christian Science thing without the Christian bullshit. I no longer have a doctor. I don’t bother with a physical exam schedule and haven’t for three years. I’ve tossed my cardiac meds and use the internet to self-diagnose and treat any physical problems I have. The sooner this watch runs out, the better. I have no desire to see how the next decade plays out. The last seventy years have been, on average, more painful than interesting and there is almost no chance it will improve from here out. I did live long enough to experience an intelligent President, but even that was fouled by the most corrupt, lazy, insentient Congress in history. So fuck it. It's your ball now. 

POSTSCRIPT: (8/20/2020) I remember when I was a kid, I'd write down my dreams in the middle of the night, thinking "That's a great [song idea, story idea, thought" and the next morning, I'd wake up and read what I'd written and think "what a moron." I'm not willing to go that far with this essay, but it's interesting to read something written for a period that I was sure I would not live to see. 

 Be warned. I wrote a half-dozen of these things, back in that 2016-16 period I wrote a half-dozen "Post Mortem" essays. We'll see what they look like as they arrive. When I wrote them, I really intended them to be "post mortem" and be the only example of me living up to a writing ideal I've always failed, "Write as if everyone you know is dead." Instead of everyone else, I assumed I'd be the dead one, but it's a similar effect.

The Rat's Rules: #3 Never Become Expert at Something You Hate

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #3: I can’t believe I’m finally just now getting around to writing up this “rule”: “Never become expert at something you hate, they’ll make you do it for the rest of your life.” This is something I’ve said for at least 40 years. It’s also something I failed to observe for the overwhelming majority of my life. And it’s not an original idea.

The make-or-break moment, for me, came when I was working for one of the least ethical companies on the planet (outside of the military or military/industrial complex) in 2001 and I was depressed to the point that I could no longer read . . . anything. I had become “expert” at organizing and manipulating data (product failure data, in this case) so that product problems could be identified and fixed. Nothing about this “expertise” appealed to me, but it was specially unappealing in a company that had absolutely no interest in improving product reliability. While I have spent a lot of my life at a keyboard, including writing database code, I don’t have the right kind of obsessions to be good at it; or, more importantly, to like doing it.

That job put me in 4 to 5 hour-long meetings a day and most of what went on in those meetings was political posturing and career positioning. I do not believe meetings of any sort are productive. . . politics in business is just bad management. But the job paid more than $100k/year and that was more money than I ever imagined I would see in any life. I hated the company, I hated the job, I hated myself for working at the company and doing the job. My grandson was the inspiration that tripped my quitting-trigger. I realized that my kids had grown up watching me be a lousy work role mode and, now, my grandson would too. With him for inspiration and several friends for support, I left the big money for the scary world of self-employment and temporary contract work. Worst case, I figured I would burn through my retirement savings in 5 years and have to look for “a real job.” Thirteen years later, I retired without having touched my savings and having added substantially to our retirement security. Best of all, I did not hate any part of the last 17 years of my working life. Sure there were bad days, but there were always great moments and good weeks and memories that I treasure to this day.

A lesson that only came to me in retrospect was that when I was doing work that i liked and, even, loved I didn’t need anyone to “make me do it.” Now, to clean up this Rat Rule, I want to be clear on the fact that nobody but me ever made me do the jobs I didn’t love. I chose to take that route for a variety of ill-conceived reasons. I always had a choice to take jobs that were less secure, didn’t pay as well, required more training and preparation, and/or would have taken more effort on my part to obtain. Always. Nobody every put a gun to my head and said, “Do this shitty job or else.” I always weighed my options and went for security, more money, and something that was familiar (something close to what I was already good at). Always, until 2001.

In 2001, several things ganged up on me to help me break that habit. One, my high paying job was so demoralizing and counter to everything I felt was precious to me that it broke me; literally. Not being able to read was simply one symptom of the major depression that job forced me into. Two, my kids were grown and on their own and no one really needed me to stuff my nose into the grindstone for their survival. We went through some rough economic times between 1968 and 2000 and I often felt that if I slipped off of that treadmill we’d be living under a bridge in a heartbeat. Three, I had the surprisingly good luck to have a friend in high places, Michael McKern the director of Musictech College, who offered me a temporary job helping to build the studios in the school’s new St. Paul location. That took a lot of the risk out of quitting my old job. It wasn’t anything near a replacement for the money I gave up, but it was enough money to keep me going for the interim and it gave me a new mission to focus on.

For me, maybe the mission was the thing that turned “work” into something less onerous. For a decade, I really felt like I was doing something that often contributed to making my student’s lives better and, as a result, the world a better place. The problem with most work is that most of us can’t connect the work to our life’s mission; whatever that may be. Having a mission is probably the most underrated quality of a modern life. Just going to work for the check is demeaning and boring and tends to make humans into machines; not very good machines, either. Machines are predictable, reliable, and unemotional. Humans are none of those things and when they are in a creative, inspiring, motivating environment humans kick machines butts every time.

Looking back at a 55 year work career, I am not one of those people for whom work is a means in itself. I need for my work, the thing that I will spend most of my life doing and most of my time attending to, to be something I believe is worthwhile and useful. Like the mistake I made so many years in pretending that I was made to do unsatisfying work because I was good at it, I have also made the mistake of believing that most people do not need a mission in life. I do believe that the overwhelming majority of people in my culture do not have a work mission and do not know that they need one. In this case, ignorance is fatal to your spirit, soul, consciousness or whatever you call that thing that decides if life is worth living or not. It is also true that the mission some people decide upon can be harmful to the world and their community: racial supremacy, wealth and power at the expense of anyone who gets in the way, experimental technology that risks the environment or life, and the rest of that list. Still, when you look at the people who have taken on harmful missions, you can’t help but be a little impressed with their effectiveness.

Missions are powerful and apathy isn’t. If you want to have a career and a life that you don’t hate, you will have to figure out what your mission is, then you will have to stay on it regardless of how easy doing something else seems. Greg McKeown, in his book Essentialism, said this more rationally than me, "If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. "

Post Mortem: I Just Wanted a “Family Day”

Monday 2/26/2018

My wife, Robbye, and I are having one of those classic “quiet days” after her day-long plan to drag me into the Cities for a day of being ignored by the kids, buying stuff, and waiting around for her visit to end stalled when she learned I had no interest in going. She tried the guilt trip, the anger trip, and the "I’m not talking to you” trip and we’re still in the last phase. She decided, yesterday, that she wanted to go into the Cities for a political meeting. Later, she decided she wanted to visit our daughter and her family before the meeting. Sometime after that, she started saying “we” when she described her plans and, this morning, I had to remind her that I had other plans for the day and had no interest in the 100 mile trip just so I could sit around being tolerated until she got back from the meeting. 

I’m just not into all of the family hassle any more. I’ve been everyone’s daddy for 60-some years and it hasn’t been particularly rewarding. I was a pretty terrible parent and only slightly worse as a grandparent. I tried, but I don’t have the necessary skills. I disappoint people on a constant basis, mostly because I do not understand them . . . ever. I don’t know what people want from me and I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of most relationships. 

About the only line I’ve managed to draw in my life has been on funerals. Even that one gets crossed far too often. Once someone is dead, I’m convinced they no longer need anything from me and I would rather not attend funerals as a rule. I went to my step-mother and father’s funerals and those events were as baffling as being hit on the head from behind by a stranger. I don’t know why I was there or if anyone cared that I was. If my goal in life is to bring comfort to others, I’d just as soon they kill me and eat me for that purpose. 

Robbye and I are at the point in life where we are considering what we’d do if we were suddenly alone. She likes to think she’d do something independent, for the first time in her life. She imagines herself driving places towing a camper, a dog, a cat, and a house full of stuff. Or she might put all of the crap in a storage bin, where it will rot and be infested with mice, rats, and insects. The exploring part is the dream, though. I suspect she will muddle along in our Red Wing house for a year or so, get tangled up in some sort of home repair scam and lose a bucket of money, panic, and sell the house, camper, furniture, and the rest of our stuff for a huge loss and move into an assisted living facility. I like to think that I’d observe a reasonable period of mourning and hit the road. I’d probably sell the house to be sure I have nothing to come back to and simply disappear from my past life. 

The obvious directions are west or south: west coast or South America, that is. The past three years in Red Wing have made it pretty obvious that the “home” we thought we’d discovered and built is a myth. We’re about as established here as we were when we moved from Colorado to a rental house in Roseville in 1996. The “communities” that we imagined we were part of are all illusions. People say you aren’t a Minnesota resident until you are at least 3rd generation and, apparently, that is true. Likewise, once your kids no longer depend on you for support and sustainence, your relevance to their lives vanishes. That’s normal, if unexpected, and healthy for them. Sticking around to see if they might still need you is, however, insane. 

So, my wife’s dream of a “family day” is something she and we are going to have to get used to not having from here out. The kids don’t need us, probably don’t like us much, and get bored quickly when we are around. We always feel like we’re imposing when we visit them, their busy lives go on hold while they put up with us, and that’s about as satisfying as a pizza that has everything you don’t like sprinkled on top of the things you can just tolerate.

Men’s Lives Matter?

I’m on a mail list with a few local guys. Mostly, the point of the mail list is about motorcycles, but one of the guys is growing some kind of facial hair for the Movember organization. Supposedly, this organization is looking for the magic bullet to slow up the rate of deaths by male suicides (white men are 70% of the 35,000 suicides in the US) and prostate and testicular cancer. I can only say, “Good luck.”

Humorously, the organization claims to "know what works for men" and somehow they expect to reduce male suicides by 25% in 2030. I prowled the organization's website following all of the "how we're going to win the fight" links to the expected proclamations of doing something and I didn't see any evidence that Movember knows more about what they are doing than do the so-called healthcare and mental health "professionals." In fact, as WebMD reports "One doctor commits suicide in the U.S. every day -- the highest suicide rate of any profession. And the number of doctor suicides -- 28 to 40 per 100,000 -- is more than twice that of the general population . . ." And, as you’d expect, for every female doctor who commits suicide there are seven men offing themselves. "Male anesthesiologists are at highest risk," for some reason. If doctors don’t have access to solutions to depression mental healthcare, how will Movember manage to reach everyone else? They won’t. As for Movember, H.L. Menken once said something like “For every complex problem there is a simple solution . . . that won’t work.” I didn’t see anything on the Movember website that looked like they even had a simple solution to propose.

The problem is not just a US-thing, either. Men and doctors and male doctors kill themselves at a higher-than-average rate all over the world. If there isn’t a solution, at least there ought to be some attempt to find the reasons for suicides. One of the most interesting insights I heard recently, when a European psychologist was responding to an American right wing pundit crowing about how societies with the highest quality of life and general satisfaction are also among the countries with the highest suicide rate; again, particularly high among men. The response was that there seems to be some connection to the fact that, in a generally happy society, people who are depressed feel particularly miserable about not being part of all that joy. The distance between the average person living their lives and someone with mental illness may feel exaggerated in a country where the average person is more-than-typically happy.

In the US, mental “healthcare” is pretty much getting a drug prescription for anxiety, depression, or “tiredness” from your doctor. All of the available health insurance plans pay more for pills than for therapy; if they pay for therapy at all. For starters, there is a severe shortage of mental health professionals in the US. The reason is that insurance companies don’t cover that kind of “healthcare.” For example, in my home area, Goodhue County, Minnesota, there is one psychiatrist for every 15,000 residents. Since estimates of the country’s mental health assume about 7% of US citizens have suffered depression at some time and 3-4% suffer long term depression and another 18% suffer from some form of anxiety, that leaves a lot of people out in the cold; even if they were inclined to put themselves on a decades-long waiting list to see a mental health professional. So, the answer is “take a pill” and call me in a year or two if you aren’t feeling better about yourself; if you are still alive.”

Men and boys are in heavy denial, insisting that the problem with us isn't from the outside. Wrong. It's us and our cultural training. There is a video on YouTube from a trans-guy who commented on how he hadn't realized how inhumane male culture is until he became one. There wasn’t much information in his speech, but the comments were informative. There was a crowd of guys pretending “inhumane” means “inhuman” and lots of nitwits imagining that being a macho bully has a place in normal, rational society. My takeaway from the comments was that the people who comment on YouTube videos are not very insightful.  

40 years ago, a friend and I were swimming out to scuba dive on San Clemente reef on a stormy day with 8' waves and 2' visibility and he wondered what we'd be doing with our lives; since we'd clearly outlived our design parameters. His thought was that guys like us were evolved to die with an axe in our skulls or a sword in our guts at about 22. At that moment, we were both in our early 30’s. Since we’d failed in our evolutionary purpose, his question was “What the hell are we supposed to do with the 30-50 years evolution has unprepared us for?” Obviously suicide is the answer about 30,000 US men pick. It is pretty obvious that there is an oversupply of men on the planet and war just isn't doing the job it used to do with rectifying that imbalance. The overwhelming majority of terrrorists and suicide bombers are men and they are just following nature’s coding to try to take themselves out of the gene pool.

Society provides plenty of cues, too. There wouldn't be OSHA labor laws if those rules were only intended to protect men from work injury and death. The whole concept began when women ended up in factories during WWII. As part of researching noise-induced hearing damage for material in one of my Acoustics classes, I found more information about how quickly work noise rule enforcement vanished once women were back out of the munitions factories. The whining from companies about OSHA's rarely-enforced or obeyed hearing protection rules is pretty hilarious when you learn that those guidelines came from 1944 and they are so obsolete (useless when it comes to protecting your hearing for a lifetime) that the rest of the industrialized world (outside of China) has a whole different set of standards and objectives. Again, if the point is in protecting men, it’s pointless to worry about it.

Likewise, a big reason men die from prostate cancer is men don't see doctors nearly as often as women. When we do we just want to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I know I do. Many men (and women ) live those lives of "quiet desperation" and just want to get it over with as soon as possible.

As for men and mental health, forget about it. This country decided long ago that the wealth of a few is far more important than the health and quality of life of the many. It's one of the many awful things we adopted from the UK. I don't see that ever changing. It was something Alexis de Tocqueville commented on in "Democracy in America" in 1835. The rich will have all the healthcare they can choke down and everyone else will be victims of our "wealth extraction" healthcare practical joke. All of that adds up to the obvious fact that we don’t care about any of this, as a nation. The only time mental health gets into the national conversation is after some idiot has shot up a school, church, restaurant, or some other public place. Then, it's just to distract us from wondering why gun manufacturers are so well-insulated from product liability. And we are one really easily distracted public. The NRA and their gangster-owned politicians and pundits quickly go into a “don’t regulate guns, regulate crazy people” song-and-dance that is increasingly ineffective at distracting the majority of Americans. So far, it’s working well enough, though. It will always be true that “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”

Sweet Dreams

I recently connected to an old friend who I haven’t seen or talked to in at least 30 years. He spent his entire life, outside of vacation travel, in Nebraska and most of that in small town Nebraska. I could have easily led that life at one time, but economics, chance, opportunity, and restlessness ended up sending me to a lot of places I would have never expected to see and experience. In one of many conversations with my friend and his wife, we touched on the dreams we’ve had that carried emotion, meaning, and resonance to our lives. My friend and his wife are religious and the dreams they described had to do with that subject. My dream was very different and their perspective and ideals reminded me of that near-spiritual dream that I still occasionally have.

After my decade in medical devices, I was a mental train wreck. Being asked to help the richest people I’ve ever known cover-up device failures that had killed patients, tortured even more patients, and bankrupted many others caused me to lose the ability to read for almost half of a year. In retrospect, I realize that some part of my brain decided that if my consciousness wasn’t going to do the right thing the next best thing was to incapacitate my ability to do the wrong thing. Many people imagine that becoming a whistle-blower is either some form of treason or is as easy as going with the flow and doing what the higher-ups demand. It isn’t and if you have never had the skills or talent to be in a position to be pressed to consider having moral backbone to blow the whistle on corruption and evil in high places you have no basis with which to compare your situation to that miserable place. This essay isn’t about that dilemma, but if it were it would be longer, sadder, and more revealing that I am likely to ever be in this blog. This essay is about the dream that signaled my release from that situation.

About three months after I quit Guidant, a St. Paul medical devices company and my last corporate employer, I had the dream that turned out to be an important part of my release from the hell that had become my employment “contract.” I was mostly unemployed, living on savings and some meager self-employment and contract tech work, the economy was in free fall because of the 9/11 attacks, and my future as a 52-year-old mid-tech technical writer and engineer was totally in doubt. I still could not, yet, read and comprehend the captions below pictures in newspapers. My sole dependable income was teaching motorcycle safety classes on weekends and, occasionally, weekdays. That particular early morning, I would be teaching my first classroom in this new career. To that day, studying the materials I had to absorb to become an MSF instructor had required that I read a list of 132 questions and memorize the course-accepted answers. Because of my reading disability I had spent hundreds of hours staring at the study guides and instructors’ manuals to get to the point that I had the gist of those documents memorized. The chance that I might have a clear moment and would be able to read the test questions to my students was too much to risk, so I memorized the test. That evening I had spent six hours just going over the test questions and I could spout “What is important to know about a convex mirror?” and when #19’s time came or when I heard “#39” my kneejerk response was “List the three-step process to shift to a higher gear.”

The last thing that I remember from the fleeting moments of sleep the morning of the day I regained my ability to read again was an incredible feeling of well-being as I rode my motorcycle from my garage into the street and in every direction I saw “suits” hanging from every telephone pole down my Little Canada street, along Little Canada Road to the I35E freeway entrance and all along the freeway to the Century Avenue exit on I694. Then I woke up. I don’t remember what led to that image, if there was a story that precluded the sight of so many corporate executives getting their just deserts. The dream was more a release from the self-torture I’d subjected myself to as a consequence of working for one of the many entirely self-serving, psychopathic, and outright evil corporations this greed-loving country has spawned. There wasn’t much of a story behind that grand sight, as I remember it. It was just a beatific scene from a world gone wrong that had self-corrected.

I had that wonderful dream repeatedly for about a month and intermittently for the next year or so. Then it stopped. The part of the dream I remember always woke me up about the time I needed to be getting out of bed. The feeling it left me with was always a great sense of peace because “truth, justice, and the American way” had been restored in my world. Sometimes, I suspect that there is a lot of French in my English and German heritage because the revolution I most empathize with is the French Revolution. Being a savage US citizen, I see the 1% being hanged from telephone poles rather than guillotined, but the end result is the same.

Of course, none of that will ever happen here. We’re a nation of serfs who love to serve and obey our masters while they misdirect our anger and violence toward other members of the 99%. The chances that Americans will rise up and throw off the shackles of failed and corrupt capitalism and its bedfellow, fascism, are about as good as are the odds that we’ll figure out space travel before the next ecological catastrophe wipes us from the earth: zero-to-none. But . . . damn! That was one sweet dream and I go to bed every night hoping I’ll get to experience it again.

Sad Times for the GOP

The Gay Old Party is having a tough time with getting its act together. The crazies in the House of Representatives pledged to focus on the economy ("It's still the economy, stupid.") and immediately turned their toilet-tube focus on abortion, union busting, and jabbering about socialism (a form of government that their hero, Reagan, badmouthed and loved at the same time). The crazies at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) wrangled publicly about who was going to sponsor the event; crazy religious freaks or self-destructive pseudo-conservative gays.

 The CPAC event is wrapping up showcasing the micro-intellects the Republicans have to offer for the 2012 presidential campaign: the corporate criminals' best friend and the poster boy for everything-not-family-values, Newt Gingrich; Abramoff's buddy and medical tort reform hypocrite, Rick Santorum; the trust-fund baby with the dead squirrel comb-over; and the Minnesota state bird masquerading as a US Representative. Palin was probably there, too, but I can only digest so much crazy before I lose all faith in my country.

 Eventually, you'd think these loony memes would self-destruct and the species would begin to rebuild. Wouldn't you?

I am often accused of being a pessimist. As soon as my constant downgrading of expectations begins to prove wrong, I promise to accept that label. As long as expecting the worst from my fellow human is a reliable predictor of future behavior, I'm sticking with what works.It's a sound investment strategy, too.

NPR drew some sort of idiotic conclusion from interviewing some "young Republicans" at CPAC. That bunch (NPR and the spoiled brats at CPAC) confirmed my expectations from that crowd. Supposedly, these were "college students," but when asked about their field of study the response was repeatedly "business," "communications," "theology," and other fluffy subjects barely suitable for an adult's afternoon recreational reading. Not a science, engineering, or pre-med student among them. This isn't higher education, its a continuation of the K-12 babysitting service. I know that reflects the "education" distribution in the general college public, but that is nothing to brag about. The dumbing down of the American public began with the watering down of "higher education."

The only upside to all this nuttiness is the entertainment value. Suddenly, Republicrats are as disorganized as Demolicans. The only thing that has allowed me to pretend that Demolicans slightly represent my positions is the lack of lock-step marching from members of that party. While both parties are corrupt, inept, and corporate sponsored, the Demolicans occasionally show signs of independence. Republicrats are wholly-owned subsidiaries of international corporations and, therefore, useless as the tits on my chest. Is it possible that actual citizens of the United States have crept into the GOP?

How to Fix Kansas

The subtitle for this rant ought to be "And Why Kansas will Never be Fixed."

Kansas, like most of the Midwest, is and has been in economic depression since Jerry Ford and the end of the Vietnam War. Outside of federal welfare, the state's economic base has been steadily shrinking since the end of the industrial period in the 70's. The population is aging, the replacements are unskilled, uneducated immigrant minimum wage labor (when they aren't illegal). The school system, which was never particularly good, is now reduced to the blind leading the blind. The quality of life is so pitiful that the state resorts to generating its own standards for QoL measurements to avoid the obvious conclusion that only someone who is desperate and out of options would life in the state.

So, what are the state and local community solutions for this catastrophic situation? The usual culprits: hillbilly recreation and gambling. In my hometown, Dodge City, the city has proudly built a "$33.7 million multi-purpose events center" that is supposed to attract pro hockey, rodeo, and music acts to the city. Supposedly, Dodge has a population of 33,000, but most of that population is barely surviving, with next-to-no income available for high-priced recreation. A substantial portion of the population is retired or approaching retirement.

Dodge City has a long history of being conned into idiot development by city mismanagers and crooked city council members, only to find that the mismanagers skip town leaving the city with the smell of rendering and packing plants and feedlots surrounding the city and a continuing decline in average incomes and quality of life. This new "events center" has the stench of déjà vu.

Another proposed "solution" to the city's economic woes is gambling. Supposedly, the reason Dodge's tourist business is in decline is because the city hasn't properly hyped it's quarter decade of historic importance into a commodity. The fact that the freeway bypasses the city b y almost 200 miles and the railroad is all but dead and the city has no meaningful air transportation is, apparently, unimportant. Some folks imagine that the incredibly opportunity for poor people to gamble will be a big draw to the city. "Just hold your nose and ignore the nasty taste of our air and water and yank on that one-armed bandit." Catchy, don't you think?

The obvious real solution is so far out of the grasp of this kind of community that it might as well be described as "impossible." The solution for Dodge is the solution for the rest of the country, too. The taxpaying, self-supporting states and cities of the nation all have one trait in common: they are tolerant and liberal. Innovation and creativity and tolerance are all part of the same package. The code name for this is the "‘technology, talent and tolerance formula" and it's not only well-documented, but it's obvious. The places where tolerance is at what Midwesterners would call "extreme" are the places where talent and technology thrive. Call me crazy, but it just seems obvious that a culture of tolerance would attract talented people and talented people tend to drive technology.

A place like Dodge City, Kansas would be near the far end of intolerant locations. Being gay, non-white, hip, non-conformist, or unusual in any way is a guaranteed path to discrimination and, possibly, violence in Dodge. This is the kind of community that actively hunts down "the green monkey" and exterminates him with prejudice. Dodge is exactly the kind of "real American" city that Sarah Palin extols and it is also a dead zone, creatively. The school system produces mediocrity; when it produces anything at all, since the drop-out rate is above average. (Kansas' overall dropout rate is 25%, but the Hispanic dropout rate is 45% and that is the fastest growing population in the state and overwhelmingly the fastest growing population in Dodge.)

To become an economic center, the city and state would have to reverse decades of Republican-directed discrimination and intolerance. I can not see any way that would happen. Without that reversal, however, the place is doomed to become a 3rd world, dysfunctional poverty zone and a drag on the economies of the productive parts of the country.