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.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
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 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.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
My debut as a writing instructor
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.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Hip Replacement week two
The entire week was about feeling better and better. The first days (Friday through Tuesday) after I came home I slept on a "deluxe" self-inflating/deflating air bed. I couldn't climb steps to my bedroom. I had to modify one of the downstairs toilets to install an elevated seat. This felt humiliating and triggered memories of the outhouses on our ranch when I was a kid. I felt better when I had to duct-tape the elevated seat onto the regular seat.
On Tuesday I was able to climb the stairs to my own bed!! The in-home therapist showed me how to climb stairs with the folded walker in one hand and using the hand rail with the other. I've never climbed Mt. Everest but in a smaller scale this achievement felt as good.
By Thursday I was given the go-ahead to toss the walker and use walking sticks!
On Saturday the in-home therapist gave me a "wow you've done good" pat on the back and signed off any further need for in-home therapy. Out-patient P.T next week after I go for my two week follow-up chat with the surgeon on Tuesday.
By today I'm walking unassisted but I carry the walking sticks for security. The pain is mostly aching joints and not much different than how my hip joints felt before surgery. This should get better with time.
Thanks to all who have sent cards and well-wishes.
On Tuesday I was able to climb the stairs to my own bed!! The in-home therapist showed me how to climb stairs with the folded walker in one hand and using the hand rail with the other. I've never climbed Mt. Everest but in a smaller scale this achievement felt as good.
By Thursday I was given the go-ahead to toss the walker and use walking sticks!
On Saturday the in-home therapist gave me a "wow you've done good" pat on the back and signed off any further need for in-home therapy. Out-patient P.T next week after I go for my two week follow-up chat with the surgeon on Tuesday.
By today I'm walking unassisted but I carry the walking sticks for security. The pain is mostly aching joints and not much different than how my hip joints felt before surgery. This should get better with time.
Thanks to all who have sent cards and well-wishes.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Hip Replacement week one
Day one-Surgery- I’m told to be there at 6a.m.
Take off all of your clothes. Put on this gown. Sit down and try not to be nervous. Oh, by the way, what are we doing for you today?
A hip replacement.
Which one? Use this magic marker to mark the one that will be replaced.
Both.
You mean you’re having both replaced? Wow! Someone will be in to see you in a few minutes. Make sure you remember to mark them.
______
What’s your name?
SS Number and Date of Birth?
What are we doing for you today? Wow, a double hip replacement! Don’t see those too often.
______
Good morning, I’m George I’m here to shave you. [George is unshaven this morning]Yes, even most of that area around there also. Dang! Sorry about that, did that hurt?
______
Good morning, I’m your anesthesiologist. Any questions?
Yes, I get pre-anesthesia anxiety and could they play Beethoven’s Eroica at first?
He plugs in and I.V. starts saline solutions and gives me a shot of something via the I.V.
Oh ya!!! Wow!
______
I wake up in my room several hours later. I’m thirsty, I feel like crap! But they show me how to use the medicine pump hooked into my I.V. Oh ya!! Wow!
I have tubes coming in and tubes going out. The image of the man wrapped in bandages from head to foot in Yossarian’s ward, in Catch 22, comes to mind. In the book they wait until the bag going into the man’s arm empties and the one dripping from his body fills and then they simply switch them. I can feel the catheter. Part of my body feels like a gopher that has had a garden hose rammed down its throat.
Day Two—still punching the medicine pump as regularly as I can. Why can’t they shorten the interval? I’m thirsty, I feel like crap. My friend Peter comes to see me in the evening. He brings a goody basket with bagels, a thermos of hot water, a china cup and plate, and Rooibos tea. It’s real Rooibos from South Africa. His wife Gerda is all over being classy; who sneaks a china cup and saucer into a hospital room? Both of them and the Rooibos tea are the real thing from South Africa. I know I’m slurring my words and he’s blurry but the tea is great. My toes wiggle but my legs don’t seem to want to work.
Day Three—Did you get any rest?
How the hell can anyone sleep here when you have to check my vitals every hour or so? You night-shift guys get more sleep than I do.
Let’s try to walk the P.T says. I walk to the doorway pushing a walker. My upper legs ache. I’m off of the I.V Pump but on some sort of oral pain med. I try my breakfast again. Someone should shoot the kitchen staff I think. The jello is so hard it could be considered a lethal weapon. Maybe I’ll tuck it in a sock and whack the night nurse on the head and scoot my walker down the hall to the possibility of a better night’s sleep in the waiting room.
Day Four—Depending on how I do today will determine if I have to go to a rehab facility tomorrow. But I’m walking up and down the hall. Not eating much, not getting a heck of a lot of sleep; the bed sucks.
Day Five—Friday—Doc says I’ve improved so much I can go home today!! No rehab joint for me! Getting into the car is a challenge but I manage with some help to swing my legs in.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
I'm back!!
It has been a while, a few weeks, since I last posted. It has been a busy few weeks. For several years a friend has been talking about starting a publishing company on the Colorado Plateau. His idea turns on its head the traditional money losing publishing business. Instead it will combine the best of both the world of traditional publishing with an electronic web based platform. The company is called Torrey House Press L.L.C. The link is www.torreyhouse.com So if you write literary fiction or literary creative non-fiction go on our web site and check out what we want. We also just fired off a fiction writing contest.
Since returning from my bicycle trip I have been bicycling as much as I can in the SL Valley to keep my legs and lungs in shape for my upcoming double hip surgery. I'm scheduled for 6 a.m. on November 1, 2010, the day before election day. I'm really looking forward to the surgery and I'm not looking forward to the results, albeit predictable, from election day.
When I went in to vote the other day I decided that I would not vote for anyone who did negative campaigning even though I liked them, I liked their views. I refuse to support bullying! Who would want someone who has to tear down another person's life, who uses innuendo and misinformation as the truth as a friend or neighbor or to represent you in Congress or run your state? I think a poll I heard on Fox, by Fox, (It's on full steam at the gym I go to) says it best: 65% of the people polled said vote all of them out.
The Tea Party has some steam this election cycle but they should have read Don Quixote before they started spouting off about going back to DC, as a DC outsider (until they've been there a couple of months and learn how things actually happen) and reducing the size of government, reducing taxes, etc. Ok, I'm all for less taxation, but I also would rather not have to pay the true costs of water, electricity, roads, medicare, agriculture, fuel, etc. Does that mean I'm a socialist?
The "vote out the incumbent, lower taxes, reduce government crowd" don't understand that their idea, while good in theory, is simply not going to happen in the current atmosphere. The denial they and all of us suffer from about who is responsible for the horrible debt we're in as a country, shakes my belief in our ability to rationally think as a species. The last administration created a huge debt and this one hasn't done a damn thing except make it bigger. The recession started three or more years ago, not the day after the President took office. We can not solve the problems of this country if we refuse to look directly at them. We can not solve the problems of this country if both sides of the aisle promote divisiveness.
Change takes time. It will not happen until we start. It will not happen if we can't meet to talk about common ground. The debt will continue to rise. Why? Because if you want to lose weight you have to quit eating as much and get some discipline! We can't lower taxes and keep spending like a drunken sailor! If I ran my diet or my bank account like this I would be in serious trouble!
If you were going to donate to one of my charities for my bike ride I rode 1125 miles. Thanks for donating.
Since returning from my bicycle trip I have been bicycling as much as I can in the SL Valley to keep my legs and lungs in shape for my upcoming double hip surgery. I'm scheduled for 6 a.m. on November 1, 2010, the day before election day. I'm really looking forward to the surgery and I'm not looking forward to the results, albeit predictable, from election day.
When I went in to vote the other day I decided that I would not vote for anyone who did negative campaigning even though I liked them, I liked their views. I refuse to support bullying! Who would want someone who has to tear down another person's life, who uses innuendo and misinformation as the truth as a friend or neighbor or to represent you in Congress or run your state? I think a poll I heard on Fox, by Fox, (It's on full steam at the gym I go to) says it best: 65% of the people polled said vote all of them out.
The Tea Party has some steam this election cycle but they should have read Don Quixote before they started spouting off about going back to DC, as a DC outsider (until they've been there a couple of months and learn how things actually happen) and reducing the size of government, reducing taxes, etc. Ok, I'm all for less taxation, but I also would rather not have to pay the true costs of water, electricity, roads, medicare, agriculture, fuel, etc. Does that mean I'm a socialist?
The "vote out the incumbent, lower taxes, reduce government crowd" don't understand that their idea, while good in theory, is simply not going to happen in the current atmosphere. The denial they and all of us suffer from about who is responsible for the horrible debt we're in as a country, shakes my belief in our ability to rationally think as a species. The last administration created a huge debt and this one hasn't done a damn thing except make it bigger. The recession started three or more years ago, not the day after the President took office. We can not solve the problems of this country if we refuse to look directly at them. We can not solve the problems of this country if both sides of the aisle promote divisiveness.
Change takes time. It will not happen until we start. It will not happen if we can't meet to talk about common ground. The debt will continue to rise. Why? Because if you want to lose weight you have to quit eating as much and get some discipline! We can't lower taxes and keep spending like a drunken sailor! If I ran my diet or my bank account like this I would be in serious trouble!
If you were going to donate to one of my charities for my bike ride I rode 1125 miles. Thanks for donating.
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