Be careful what you pray for darling. . . .

I was very smug about passing through security at the airport Thursday morning without a second glance by TSA. But in some way I missed the attention I usually get, the "random selection" for further screening, "can we look inside your suitcase", where are you going, and the full enchilada. I should explain that the full enchilada starts in the queue waiting to pass through security when you're pulled out of line for an extra interview. Then, even though you don't beep, you're pulled out of line to have your suitcase explored, your shoes are inspected, and sometimes you're frisked. Back, post 9/11, you could get pulled out at the gate for a "random" pat down. Once, just after 9/11, in Denver, I was given the full enchilada starting at the ticket counter. So by the time I was "randomly" pulled out of line at the gate--I lost my A status on Southwest--I was getting annoyed. I was standing with my arms outstretched while a TSA agent looked into my shoes. (Can you imagine a worse job? You spend the day digging through people's soiled underwear and smelling sweaty shoes)

"I'm sorry sir," he said looking up. "These inspections are random."
I started to laugh.He looked at me bewildered.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh out loud," I said. "But if I could hit the Colorado Lottery with this kind of randomness I'd pay you a million dollars a shoe to re-lace them!"
He had a sense of humor because he didn't haul me into the back room to be flogged. Instead he softly said:"I could've used the money."

On my return trip last night I got the full enchilada. Everything was back to normal. I stepped through the machine which shrieked. "New hips," I explained.
The young man was soft spoken but firm. "Stand here," he said. He pointed at two yellow footprints printed on a piece of carpet. He put on rubber gloves and patted me down. But he explained how he was doing it and where he was doing it on my body in case I couldn't feel his groping hands. "I'm doing your buttocks," Now I'm doing the inside of your legs," "now I'm running my hand around your waist band," etc. Thankfully I don't have to wear adult diapers yet!

Testing the security risk of my new hips

Early this morning I flew to Las Vegas to meet another consultant on the Topoc Remediation Project. I've been working on this project since December of 2010 and he's been on it for a bit longer. The issue is an Erin Brokovitch Jr. Same issue--dumping of toxins that get into the aquifer--same company; different location. Topoc has a toxic plume of Chromium 6 in an aquifer that is about 300 or 400 meters from the Colorado River. CR 6 is lethal!
This case is not far enough along to report on and besides, even though it's a very serious environmental issue on the Colorado River, I really wanted to write about my first post-new hips airplane ride.

I thought I should get to the airport well before an hour prior to lift-off in case I got pulled out of line for the "full enchilada" security check. My flight was at 7 am, I got there at 545 and into the queue that would take me through the full body x-ray scan that Representative Chaffetz says invades his privacy. [what does he know?  He's the half brother of John Dukakis (ex actor)  and was the Utah Democratic co-chair in 1988 when his stepfather Michael Dukakis ran for president. Jason has since became a Republican won't talk about his past, and has been, prior to being voted in as Representative, the spokesperson for one of many multi-level marketing schemes that thrive in Utah County.] As I held my arms up and spread my legs inside of the x-ray capsule I wondered two things: Why does Jason protest so much (hiding something or,  maybe, almost nothing?) and who is the person looking at my naked ass on the screen? I really don't care. If they get a thrill out of my x-ray they need serious therapy!

I thought I would trip every alarm in the building when I stepped in to the machine. Because I've been profiled so often when I fly I thought maybe I should have come to the airport even earlier once I saw the long line extending down the hallway. The guy in front of me, who was indignant when they asked him to take off his belt, got my full body pat down and was led off to what I hope was just an interview and not a full body cavity search. After my x-rayI stood outside of the machine waiting patiently for TSA to direct me to the "full enchilada" station. When the TSA person growled at me to move along and pick up my belongings I felt confused and felt a keen sense of loss. No invasive pat down? No being pulled out of line and asked repeatedly what country I was from? No being asked humiliating questions?

So the only thing I can complain about are the morons who wear their day pack strapped to their back and forget that every time they turn in the aisle someone gets smacked by the pack. The other breed of morons are those who bring on a bag clearly to large to fit in the overhead bins but insist on cramming it in.

I would like to see my x-ray. I'd like to see how my prosthesis are doing. Has the bone grown over them like its supposed to?  Did the doctor really install titanium parts?  My hips are feeling better each day. Recovery from spinning takes less time and fewer Ibuprofen. I think my goal of being on my bicycle by the end of March may be reachable. Yes!!!

A Visit with my Therapist and other Doctors

"Old age is, so to speak, the sanctuary of ills: they all take refuge in it." Antiphanes

I read in a tongue-in-cheek editorial that: "Aging is like weight gain, it creeps up on you." Getting older is not analogous to gaining weight, because you can always lose weight! Age adds complications like a tree adds rings. The distant past seems recent until you do the math.  But I find the aging process to be fascinating in spite of the aches, pains, and more invasive and humiliating doctor's visits. After having my hips replaced I've felt younger, walked more upright, I'm less bow-legged, and I'm about an inch taller. The surgery and my recovery process was interesting but not nearly as interesting as what seems to have followed, the strange side effects, presumably from the anesthesia.

A Visit to My Therapist
"Sometimes, it seems like I can smell a wet campfire," I said. "You know that smell just after you pour water on a camp fire?"
My therapist looked at me warily. I think he had been wondering about me since I had the bout of temporary amnesia, just after my hip surgery. I exacerbated his unease when I jokingly asked  if all DSM manuals had cameras in the book spine. Now he makes sure I'm not between him and the office door.
"Where are you when it happens?"
"In the car, at a restaurant, the gym, even comes on when I'm laying awake in the middle of the night," I said.
"Have you been taking your meds?"
"Sure," I said. "Do you think I'm hallucinating?"
"You mean an olfactory hallucination?"
"And I've had a raspy throat and last week I had an inflamed larynx," I said.

He rubbed his eyes. My therapist looked like had aged in the hour we shared.  He suggested that I might want to see an ear,throat, nose specialist. I didn't tell my therapist that I already had an appointment, that I had been on-line looking up the symptoms for throat cancer, that in the night when I have my nightly anxiety attack, I was worried. And I didn't, nor would I ever, ask him who do therapist go see? Is is like in Lord of the Rings where a common wizard reports to a mid-level wizard, who then reports, presumable, to a higher authority?

Doctors must take a class in how to engage the patient in innocuous conversation while they tap, squeeze, look into various body openings, and collect samples of stools, urine, blood, spit, and other fluids and secretions.  It's an art form. "How do you stay fit?" the E/N/T doctor said. He was holding my nose open with what looked like Captain Hook's hook and peering into my nostril like a spelunker mapping a cave route.

I told him I rode a bicycle every chance I got. And I told him that I've been spinning two and three times a week plus my regular work out at my gym. "That's interesting," he said while he was greasing a fiber optic device and testing its focus.
I'm curious, I like learning something new every day. But even though the device was only about two or three millimeters in diameter it was making me uneasy.
"What's that for?" I asked pointing at the small tube.
He held my nostril open with the hook and squirted something into my nose that smelled and tasted like lizard bile.
"I'm going to run it into your nose and take a look at the inside of your larynx. Oh, I forgot to tell you that the spray smells and tastes awful. But it should numb everything all the way into your throat. Tilt your head back."he said.
It didn't hurt and was only a bit uncomfortable but it felt weird twisting around looking at the inside of my larynx.
I have acid reflux he told me. I'd had it for some time and it had caused some irritation of the larynx.
"Especially at night," he said. "It leaks out of your stomach and works its way up the esophagus."
"So, I don't have cancer?"
He told me that "we" would look down my throat again in three months to make sure. Then we talked about bicycles. He asked about my road trip last summer, where I started, how far I had ridden, was I by myself, was I going to do it again.
I think I will continue my road trip probably starting in late June. I want to ride the part through Glacier National Park.
"It helps keep you young," the Doctor said.

The end of Hibernation

35 degrees in the middle of February seems warmer than a 35 degree day in January, especially if the sun is out. Early last week it snowed in Salt Lake and the wind blew it into a rare day of drifting snow. It felt like a typical winter day in Wyoming. Towards the end of the week the sun was out, the sky blue, not obscured by smog, and bicyclists were out in flocks. I felt the urge to be out with them, to tune up my road bike, sort out my Burley trailer and repack my supplies, to continue my cross-country ride.

I bicycle during the winter under a couple of caveats: the air temperature is in the high 30s and the roads are clear of ice. Even at my most fit I am a large man. I am, or I was before I started to age, just over 6'2". Regardless of my varied weight over time I am just about two feet wide at the shoulders. That's a lot of wind resistance. Of course the good side of this body shape is that it reduces my speed and therefore, the wind chill is less for me than for someone 50 pounds lighter and narrower at the shoulders. But winter riding is still chilly.

In the fall, as day length shrinks in increments that have measurable daily definition, I start to feel what is called Seasonal Adjusted Disorder or more appropriately shortened to SAD. It is one more disorder in a long list that my therapist tells me I have.
But I think that the onset of SAD, a reaction to shrinking day-length, is less about science and more about primordial responses. About 70% (give or take a few percentage points depending on the study) of our reactions/responses come out of the reptilian part of our brain where fight or flight lurk just waiting impatiently to ruin our day. The cognitive part of our brain just thinks it's in charge. I tried to explain my primordial theory to my therapist. I told him that in the fall I start feeling an out of control hunger and find myself doing things I didn't remember starting. I was seen wading in the creek behind my house. After, in a more cognitive moment I realized I was trying to find fish, just like a grizzly. I told my therapist that I am, like the bear,trying to build up my fat reserves to enter hibernation. He was silent for longer than usual and then told me, in a neutral voice, that there were medications for this. Because one of my other issues is allegedly Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), I declined to fill the prescription and furthermore I didn't pay him for the session.

Instead, I've found that basking in the sun of deep winter (inside the house of course) makes me feel better. I stand in front of a large window and slowly rotate so all sides of my body have equal opportunity. I've been told I resemble a large lizard basking in a southern Utah morning. But on those rare smog-free days of a typical Salt Lake winter,when the roads are ice free, I like to ride to a coffee shop or the grocery store, do chores, go to meetings on my bicycle.

All of the symptoms and coping mechanisms listed above occurred this winter except for the bicycle riding.  I didn't ride because I got two new hip joints last November. I'm now a cyborg. As a sidebar, it complicates my desire for cremation, but that is for a later posting. Yesterday, while I was walking my new dog, bicyclists were out in flocks. I felt envy and jealousy, which before I left religion behind, were two of my most common sins. My surgeon strongly suggested that I should wait at least six months before I started riding the streets again.But he recognized my ODD and shrugged.
"Your choice," he said. "But if you push it and fall over before the hip prostheses have merged with the bone, the next surgery will not go as well." 
I grudgingly gave in. But when I saw bicyclists out in numbers yesterday and today I had to bite my lip. I came home and put my bike on the rack and started to tune it. I think I'm almost ready to come out of hibernation. A hibernating bear comes out of its den famished. I'm hungry to ride.

Can old cowboys teach writing?

Can anyone really teach creative writing? Are writers born not made (nature or nurture)? I don't know. But I do know that everyone has a story and I believe that anyone who can communicate in some fashion, can tell that story. Will it be well written or well spoken?

I think anyone with desire, who is willing to work hard, edit unmercifully, and be patient as a stone Buddha can become a writer. A best selling writer? A great writer? There are many best selling writers who are not  great writers but they're successful because they know how to leverage luck and are great self-promoters. Conversely there many great writers who struggle to get their work published.
The great writing teachers I've worked with facilitate learning. They provide the necessary tools, encouragement, and support that would-be writers need. Anyone who took English in high school knows the tools. But how many remember them?

My high school English teacher, Mrs. Foster, died in the classroom two years after I graduated. She was an angry person, one whose internal cauldron of anger boiled into purple rage within a couple of heartbeats. Mrs. Foster, barely over five feet tall, weighed close to two hundred pounds. She hopped up and down, from one foot to the other, which accelerated as her anger increased. Mrs. Foster's body jiggled like it was recording the after shocks of an earthquake. She slammed an 18 inch ruler on the wooden desk of the person who was targeted for wrath in a staccato that shamed the best drummer. My family practiced violence with the diligence of praying monks so I knew how to disassociate when I was the target of Mrs. Foster's wrath.

" I don't care if English isn't your first language, you're in America now so learn it," she yelled. The target that day was a new student from Argentina who spoke Argentinian Spanish and German. She assigned him to me because I spoke Spanish and was taking German. 

When she yelled, regardless of the object of her wrath, I went to the safe place in my mind, where violence had been banished. My feral, angry family had taught me how to avoid rage or at least minimize the fall-out.
Whenever she vented her fury I imagined she might jump into the air and then punch through the floor of our old high school. We were on the third floor and I viualized her slamming through floors until she crashed into the basement. Then I felt guilty. I worried that she and all of the debris that she and gravity accumulated, along with other students, might land on Mr. Yazzie, our janitor, who slept during the day in the basement directly below our English classroom.

Two years after I graduated a vein exploded in her head. I asked the person who told me: "Was anyone else hurt? Did they report her death right away or did they wait until the bell to make sure she had really died?"
I realize now that I was spiteful, seeking revenge on a woman held hostage by her own rage, lonely in her inability to be the person I'm sure she would rather have been. But in spite of my fear of her I learned the basic components of sentences, good grammar.

I started college only because it was a warm place to spend most of a day. I had run away from home just after high school graduation, so I was homeless, living in my car and on the couches of friends. I was the first one into the student union, at day break, where I helped in the kitchen enough during the day to earn coffee, breakfast and often a couple more meals per day. After classes I went to labs where I could stay until midnight and also where most TAs didn't mind my dog as long as she lay on the floor beneath my feet.
I made friends with a writing teacher named Red Bird. He gave me jobs around his home: shoveling snow, splitting and hauling firewood, mowing the lawn and he invited me to enroll in his class. He taught me how to write poetry and prose, how to  read like a writer. Red and his wife didn't know that he had, since the fifties, been slowly dying of leukemia triggered when the army made him stand up during atomic blasts in the Nevada desert. Red had flaming red hair (hence the nickname Red). He said he had never had freckles until after the atomic blasts.
Later, it was mentoring and encouragement by people like Carol Houck Smith of WW Norton, Brady Udahl, and Dawn Morano who sparked the English composition that Mrs Foster beat into my head and stoked the smoldering fire that Red Bird  ignited in me. And it was the patient help of Shen Christenson--an incredible writer and the best editor on the planet--and her love that really jump started my writing.
Now I'm "teaching" writing at the University of Utah in the Lifelong Learning system. Go figure. But I don't own an 18 inch ruler, I don't get angry in class, and even if I jumped up an down and punched through our classroom floor I could only fall a couple of feet.

The past is catching up to me

About three weeks after my surgery to just before Christmas I went into a highly functioning version of Rib Van Winkle. It was terrifying. I thought I was losing my mind or had all of a sudden gotten Alzheimer disease. It could be the result, I'm told, of a combination of anesthesia and the pin meds I was taking.  A rare but not unheard of side-effect. Each day was, in hindsight, like living inside of a child's jar of paint. Each day was a separate color. Only now am I able to recall what each of those days was like, who I talked to, who I might have insulted, what commitments I had made, etc. Each day I recall now is like looking into one of the individual paint jars. Even now I know what color it is (what I did that day) but I'm still having trouble using all of the colors to paint a coherent canvas of what those six weeks were like cumulatively.
My family did not notice other than to say that it seemed that the anesthesia had exacerbated my ADHD and I was more distracted and spacey than normal. But I wasn't keeping up with commitments, I wasn't opening emails or not responding to those that I did open. I would open an email from some store and not open very important emails from friends or family. So if I offended you or gave the appearance that I was shunning you I apologize. 
Other wise I'm recuperating quite well. I still have some weakness in the front of my hips but I've been able, with the help of some Ibuprofen, to start back into spinning. I started back the first Monday of the New Year. Before I had been working out at my gym. My surgeon went along with my recommendation that I go to P.T. and then use their exercises at my gym.  This saved both me and the insurance company a few bucks.

I wonder if Rip Van Winkle was really awake but not cognizant from a cumulative point of view of what he was , had been doing. Maybe he feigned sleep because it helped him hid his confusion.

My debut as a writing instructor

English became a fourth language for me when I started the first grade. My grasp of English was limited to yes, no, thank you, please (my grandmother insisted I know these last two phrases), and of course the first words anyone learns when trying a different language: swear words. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, taught me English by nurturing a love for books and patiently explaining that a gentleman didn't use profanity. She was successful in teaching me English, a language that has become my native tongue. The other three languages I spoke as a small child: Ladino or Judeau-Spanish, SW Spanish, and Navajo. Others I've picked up as an adult have all but disappeared for me. Mrs. Sullivan wasn't as successful at weaning me from using "colorful language," often at inappropriate times. I read on the restroom wall of a bar, that: "Profanity is the crutch of an inarticulate (insert your favorite 'colorful' noun here.)"

But reading has become as automatic for me as breathing. I will read almost anything.  I tell people in writing classes and writing groups that  "I have maybe twenty or thirty years left on this planet and I don't want to waste it reading crap, including my own." I like to write and even more importantly I love to read both my work and the work of great authors, especially out loud. I loved rolling wine over and under my tongue to awaken the subtle flavors. But as I've aged I love even more to roll the words of great writing around my tongue. I like the way the words cascade from my lips, echo in my mind, linger in my thoughts. 

The Lifelong Learning Program at the University of Utah has invited me to "teach" three courses this spring quarter. I think I worried Mandy Self, the director of Lifelong Learning, when I said, at an instructor orientation last night: "I expect to learn more than I teach, I expect to be a facilitator more than a teacher."
She and her staff have been both patient and helpful.