dan

Revelations

I’m ready to let 2021 go, with some sadness and some gratitude. It’s been a season of loss and a time of revelation.

I’m thinking first of all of January 6, 2021, a date which now signifies the attempted coup against democracy that started well before that date and is continuing.

The important revelation of January 6 is not about the former guy or his minions—the important revelation is that a majority of white Americans seek to end democracy and support an authoritarian dictatorship, as long as that dictatorship guarantees their white privilege.

I don’t buy it that these same white Americans are fooled or misinformed about the integrity of the 2020 election. I’ve spent a lifetime among white Americans, and I know that among them, Truth and belief are fungible. Group acceptance and belonging alone are sacred. Within the group, individuals use their mental energies to recast and retell their group narrative. They know the narrative is untrue. And they know the group dynamic rewards them for lying, because lying is a demonstration of loyalty to the group.

Lying is the basis of white identity, and the stronger the need for that identity, the more unhinged and extreme the lies become.

This lying has both inventiveness and continuity, so that it is entirely possible for white Americans to passionately advocate things that make no sense or are contradictory to each other—guns, abortion, social welfare, etc.—because the actual content of the purported beliefs don’t matter,. It is the group advocacy of the beliefs that matters. A thing can be argued today, and the opposite thing argued tomorrow, as long as the act of arguing serves the cohesiveness of white identity.

Again, this is my experience of living among white Americans. Those who support democracy, which is to say multiracial democracy, will do well to consider this dynamic of lying and belief. Our side should be focused on getting and maintaining democratic power. Once we crush the institutional and economic power of white supremacy, hearts and minds of white people will follow in time. But we shouldn’t waste time trying to make sense of their beliefs, or arguing with them.

I am grateful that 2021 kicked off with a powerful lesson regarding this dynamic, as professional agitators carefully organized the January 6 attempt based on an obvious lie, and the vast majority of Republican elected officials then endorsed the lie, and a substantial majority of white Americans, as we enter 2022, say they believe the lie and are ready to act violently to support the lie. Could we ask for a more clear revelation of what being white in America is all about?

On a personal level, I started 2021 in a different place from where I find myself now.

I was deeply in love, in a relationship then seven months old, and had few if any dissatisfactions in it. I thought the barriers to our intimacy and closeness—and they were clearly present—would be overcome as we slowly intertwined our lives.

Five months into the year that relationship ended suddenly, unexpectedly. I got thin and conflicting explanations as to why. I’m still working through it.

What I’m left with is an appreciation of how difficult it really is, in this time, to completely feel one’s feelings—in a word, to be authentic. Yet authenticity is what we need and crave. I started dating again, perhaps too soon, with this notion of authenticity in mind, both for myself and for my dating partners. I redoubled my introspection and my search for insight through meditation. After a while, I stopped looking at authenticity as a prerequisite and qualification in my search for a new partner, and began to look at authenticity instead as something precious, difficult to attain, and to be celebrated when it appears. And I have high hopes.

Beware of Darkness

It’s a long, cold, and rainy solstice night. It’s late, and I’ve got the blinds open in case some passerby might notice our Christmas tree in the window and be warmed by the sight.

I love darkness. It is sacred and beautiful; it’s the fount of mystery and creativity and newness.

And confusion.

I’m thinking of the difference between acceptance and ambivalence.

Accepting the darkness is a path to peacefulness, to appreciation of who we are and what we are in this moment. It’s been a long season of loss, with more loss likely to come, and loss is part of life.

But we mustn’t be ambivalent. Everything isn’t all the same, and we have to give a damn and choose sides.

I’m thinking about Joe Manchin, and the Joe Manchin in all of us.

Because what I see in Joe Manchin is ambivalence, an un-commitment. He’s a politician; he reflects some gestalt of what he feels by communicating with his constituents.

Joe Manchin is in a position to tip the balance among greater forces, forces arising on an historical scale. None of us asked to have to choose, in this moment, in these dark months, between two paths, both of which are abrupt and consequential. The first path is toward multiracial democracy. The other path is toward authoritarianism, perhaps outright fascism.

Joe Manchin can’t make up his mind, but a lot of white Americans can’t make up their mind either. It’s dark, and they are confused.

The confusion, the ambivalence, among white people generally, in this moment, comes from what feels like an abrupt shift, a shift from the presumption that advancing social equality would feel easy, that it would be along the lines of opening doors, that it would be akin to having more people allowed in to the party, but with the music and refreshments staying pretty much the same.

It’s not working out that way.

Part of it is demographics: we are marching inexorably toward an America in which whites are a minority among other minorities. But more than that, globalization and technological change have already undermined the economic basis of whiteness—undermined the whole purpose of the privilege, the protection, the not-so-secret favoritism that white people enjoy. The parochialism of America’s native white culture is simply outmoded; it has been superseded by a cosmopolitan culture that leaves us, perhaps all of us, less sure of our place in the world.

In consequence, the music has changed, the culture has changed. Every aspect of white privilege, and especially white male privilege, is suddenly subject to harsh reappraisal, not because of the rise of radicalism or division, but because it no longer fits in to a changed world.

What might it take to maintain and restore white supremacy even in the face of the overwhelming forces undermining it? Republicans—from party leaders down to registered members—have long known what it would take, and have dedicated themselves to the task. When it was adequate to use the built-in anti-democratic bias of the system (the Senate and Electoral College, just for starters), main line Republicans were satisfied with that. As democracy itself has come to threaten white supremacy, Republicans—all Republicans—have just as happy to dispense with democracy and resort to gerrymandering, voter suppression, packing the Supreme Court, and now, tacit support for physical threats and attacks against their political adversaries. For Republicans of all stripes, white supremacy is the end that justifies the means.

Given the stark choice, Joe Manchin is firmly in the middle, and shifting with the breeze. When he meets with President Biden—formerly Barack Obama’s Vice President—Manchin is committed to democratic social uplift, but when he’s on Fox News the next day, he’s blowing the age-old racist dog whistle about becoming an “entitlement society.”

Although Manchin is no doubt keeping his coal investments in mind as he speaks, he’s not really so different from most white people. When it comes to the battle for multiracial democracy vs. a harsh and racist authoritarianism, he’s bipartisan and a moderate. We see the same equivocation in pundits like George Packer, David Brooks, and James Carville, all of who tut-tut the slide toward fascism, but also feel impelled to trash “wokeness.” They may want their democracy, but they want their white privilege too.

Which brings me to the ambivalence I perceive within my own tribe.

The now-stymied Build Back Better bill represents, to a significant degree, the values and aims for which I’ve long advocated: Free universal preschool. Cut child poverty. Expand access to health care. Most of all, push technology and economic development forward as fast as we can—to alleviate suffering, achieve more equity, and save the planet.

The same goes for the Freedom to Vote Act, and even most aspects of Biden’s foreign policy, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Sure, there have been some missteps, and some compromises I didn’t see the need for, but the direction has been very much where I’ve long thought the country should go.

Yet I’m feeling a lack of energy, an ambivalence, among friends and allies. It concerns me. Not just because there is an urgent need to get behind the Democratic Party and try to keep the House and Senate next year. There is such a need.

It’s that I’m feeling that many of us aren’t deeply examining the changes before us and our gut reactions to those changes.

The changes of globalization, technological advancement, and social equity go hand-in-hand. What unfolds is all of a piece, and that whole is, in its very nature, disruptive and confusing. And when we experienced our own resistance to those changes, and look at that resistance, we often see that we fear a loss of our own privilege, including our security that we’ll keep on living in the old ways that are familiar to us. Sometimes, in our professional or political work, we experience challenges that are embarrassing and threatening to our egos.

I’m feeling that this discomfort with rapid change translates into a less-than-wholehearted support for the progressive initiatives Biden and the Democratic Party have on the table now, today. We should challenge ourselves to better understand the scope and impact of those initiatives. Moreover, we must understand that what is being put forward responds, in large part, to the needs and demands of a younger, ethnically diverse majority—a majority that disrupts everything we thought we knew since the time we’ve grown up.

We can embrace the loss of the old way of doing things and revel in the darkness, which gives birth to the new. We can drop our ambivalence, which arises from defensiveness, and commit to a practice of helping.

February 5, 2003

So Colin Powell died, and among the inhabitants of our planet, for just a moment, there was one fewer cynical liars. Good.

Powell’s famed UN speech led directly to the disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq–and the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

Later, he lied about his lying, blaming it on bad intelligence.

Crapola. For the occasion today I looked up what I wrote as I watched his speech that morning 18+ years ago.

. . .

February 5, 2003

I’m dubious about Truth. People talk about it the most when they’re giving you it the least.

Our grasp of what is depends, most of all, on the quality of the narrative we read to ourselves. Truth is a characteristic of language, of rhetoric.

I tried to apply this insight, this morning, as I watched Colin Powell on the TV. Where was Truth in the Secretary’s speech to the UN?

The murky photos marked with damning arrows. The mysterious fragments of wiretapped conversation. These seemed like dimestore props for the familiar rhetorical devices of a deceiver: escalating hyperbole, breathless speculation, and using the accused’s denial as further evidence of his guilt.

Add to this Powell’s science-fair speech about what can be done with just a teaspoon of anthrax.

And then there was the truck-mounted chemical weapons laboratory. Hans Blix says there’s no evidence that such a thing exists, but of course Channel 4’s reporters were soon breaking in to refer to Powell’s computer-generated images of the mocked-up model as “photos.” We’re led to conclude that the trucks could be out there, because, you know, they could be moving ’em around, the sneaky devils, and they haven’t shown us that they don’t have one.

I did sense, within all this foofahrah, bits of narrative that did ring True. Did the Iraqis clean up a little before the inspectors arrived? Who doesn’t? Of course, you want to show the inspector a clean site with nothing on it. Otherwise they just hang around and ask a bunch of questions, making you late to get home for dinner and potentially embarassing you in front of the boss. Anyone who’s operated an corporation yard or a commercial kitchen can relate to that story. I thought that part was True.

Or the tape of the two guys talking over on the phone. It’s got a bad connection, and they’re trying to make sure they got the instructions straight. It could have been an Abbott and Costello routine. So that seemed True as well.

Maybe these guys’ job is part of an evil plot to blow up the world. What I heard was, whatever they’re doing on the tapes or in the satellite photos, they’re doing it in the same confused chaos we all descend into every working day. That confusion and chaos and earnestness sounded real, and it contrasted, in my mind, with the ridiculous artifice of the U.S. Secretary of State.

October 18, 2021 by dan The Nature of Belief 0

Two Days of Hearings

The San Francisco Bay Water Board just wrapped up two days of hearings on the forthcoming reissuance of their Municipal Regional Stormwater Permit.

The mayors of Concord, Orinda, San Ramon, and Antioch, the Vice Mayor of San Pablo, Contra Costa County Supervisor Diane Burgess, and councilmembers from Danville and Hillsborough addressed the Board, along with many municipal staff from City Managers on down.

The difference in values–what comes from our people and communities vs. what comes from an insular bureaucracy–was most evident in the discussion of homelessness.

Water Board staff had written into the permit prescriptions for what to do to keep trash and feces from homeless encampments from getting into waterways. The elected officials and municipal staff were able to detail their experience (ah, actual experience!) of trying those very things. (News: placing porta-potties and hand-washing stations is not sustainable).

The elected officials and municipal staff plead to the Water Board: Don’t make us do these things that we already tried and found don’t work, and please don’t make use divert our efforts from what does work– getting people housed.

The conversation on other subjects was in a similar vein. Cubicle-originated prescriptions came up hard against experience (and heart). Insular bureaucracy collided with democratic reality.

I’m trying hard to set aside my cynicism that the two days spent will do any good.

October 13, 2021 by dan Stormwater Pollution Prevention 0

More on the Municipal Regional Stormwater Permit

Last week’s post argued that municipal stormwater NPDES permits are social policy, not water quality policy. Because there is no reliable way to demonstrate that control measures are effective or ineffective, permit writers can and do select measures based on convention, consensus, and individual belief.
Here are four examples where social values and beliefs play out in the Tentative Order (TO) for the San Francisco Bay Area Municipal Regional Stormwater Permit.
1. Disproportionate impacts. The most expensive and challenging new requirements disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities. Low-income areas struggle to accommodate the unsheltered homeless and to reduce trash. Their streets are older and require more reconstruction. Old industrial areas have higher amounts of PCBs in street grit. The 669-page TO seems targeted to burden the municipal governments serving these areas. Municipal representatives raised this concern throughout the 3-year process leading to the Tentative Order. The permit writers–five white men with limited work experience outside the insular bureaucracy in which they have spent their careers–never acknowledged it.
2. Climate Action and Smart Growth. The current permit allows high-density Transit Oriented Developments (TODs) to use compact and underground facilities to treat runoff. Promoting TODs is a key strategy in municipalities’ Climate Action Plans. During negotiations, permit writers said “the lowest impact development is no development at all” and rejected a key precept of Plan Bay Area–that redevelopment in core areas can effectively reduce sprawl at the periphery. The TO eliminates the TOD allowance.
3. Multi-Modal Transportation. In 2019, municipalities prepared Green Infrastructure Plans that leverage private redevelopment and federal funds to retrofit arterial streets with runoff-cleaning bioretention facilities. The idea was to incorporate runoff treatment as urban revitalization happens. Two years later, the permit writers would toss aside these Plans and mandate a minimum acreage of Green Infrastructure within five years. Municipalities will have to retrofit residential and low-use streets just to meet this bureaucratic requirement. The resulting funding crunch could compromise Complete Streets improvements in Priority Development Areas.
4. Trash and Public Participation. For years, municipal stormwater programs funded and assisted volunteer creek cleanups. The massive amounts of trash collected counted toward NPDES permit requirements. However, the permit privileges a strategy of leaving the trash on the street and using proprietary devices to catch it as it enters the pipes. Now the creek cleanup credit will end, eliminating the Public Works departments’ budget justification for assisting local volunteers in urban beautification efforts.
These are just four examples of the social values and beliefs reflected in the TO–values and beliefs at odds with the Bay Area’s progressive milieu.

October 5, 2021 by dan Stormwater Pollution Prevention 0

Municipal Stormwater Permit

Because we lack reliable indicators of the effectiveness of municipal stormwater programs, permit renewals are essentially social policy, not water quality policy.

In other words, permit writers can invent or select new requirements at will; the requirements may arise from convention, or consensus, or even individual beliefs, and can’t be challenged on the basis of ineffectiveness. “Maximum Extent Practicable” is typically justified by references to other permits, not by evidence that the mandated measures actually work.

By this mechanism, permit writers effectively create policies on which neighborhoods get trash abatement, what types of housing are built, and where, and how limited municipal budgets get spent.

The social policies in the NPDES permits inevitably reflect the biases inherent to the status and milieu in which the permit writers operate.

People trust in public policy because it is adopted through a participatory democratic process.

However, stormwater permit renewals make social policy under a veneer of science–which allows a bureaucratic elite to dictate social policy while claiming a scientific basis that doesn’t exist.

Which is how, in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021, key decisions about municipal policies and programs on homelessness, street paving, industrial development, housing, and a host of other economic and quality-of-life factors are being made by five white men who have limited work experience outside the insular bureaucracy in which they have spent their careers.

And the language of the MRP 3.0 Tentative Order reflects that.

September 30, 2021 by dan Stormwater Pollution Prevention 0

The Beauty of Anachronism

A month ago, I suffered a serious setback in my personal life, as a year-long relationship came to an abrupt and unexpected end.

Today, on a morning walk, my heart still heavy with grief, I passed this lovely anachronism, and it set me to thinking more broadly about defeat, and loss.

This was the 1984 election. After the 1980 debacle, many of us hadn’t accepted “there is no alternative” to Reaganism and Thatcherism. We held out hope that white working-class people, led by women, would return to the Democratic fold and re-establish the New Deal consensus that had been fractured by the Vietnam war and the social upheaval of the 60s.

The election results crushed those hopes, as the GOP’s tax cuts and deficit spending powered a well-timed economic boom, and whites of all classes responded enthusiastically to the President’s anti-intellectualism and race baiting.

Time goes in only one direction. As time does its awful work, we can be helped, at least a little, if we open to the present moment, and feel the humor that resides in what is. Relaxing the mind, we might come to awareness of how little we know about what comes next.

Amongst progressives, most of us were completely wrong, back in 1984, about how our country might move forward. We couldn’t foresee the halting progress under Clinton nor the deep cynicism and criminality under Bush II. But most of all, we couldn’t foresee the flowering of freedom as one barrier after another came down—nor the deliberate organization of the present fascist movement in response to that freedom.

The other night I got together with my friend and co-parent Melanie Mintz, and we watched Saturday Night Fever (1977). We thought we’d vet it before offering it as entertainment for our 12-year-old daughter. Watching scene after scene, we howled with laughter at how inappropriate that would be. After 34 years, we’d forgotten almost everything that’s in the movie, except the dancing. The stereotypes. The racism. The debasement of the female characters. The darkness and cruelty and hopelessness in every aspect of the characters’ lives.

All that didn’t seem so extraordinary or so awful when the movie first came out. Now it does, and I am so happy and amazed to look at the change.

We didn’t get what we wanted in the 1984 election, and we were at a loss about how to move our national politics forward. But the country did move forward—stunningly, in retrospect—toward a kinder and more decent society, and the politics have moved and continue to move with it.

I’m still plenty scared by the fascists trying to undermine democracy. And I’m still really sad about losing that relationship. But I’m buoyed by my renewed awareness of how waves of change carry us onward—despite grief, despite loss, and despite hope.

June 25, 2021 by dan Personal Status The Nature of Belief 1

People v. Hansen

I served on a jury 35 years ago, in New York City. The defendants were white cops, and a Black man had died in their custody.

The cops were charged with evidence tampering and official misconduct, and we voted unanimously to convict each of them for both felonies.

Many years later, I searched for the case, and found the appellate court record. I wasn’t surprised to see the conviction overturned–because I believed then, and believe now, that the whole criminal justice system is set up to protect cops who violate the law and abuse their public duty. Even so, I was upset by the appellate judges’ rationale.

The case was cut-and-dried. The patrolman, Hansen, had admitted the facts before a grand jury. There was some wrangling over whether we could receive the grand jury records, and once that was resolved, the case was closed, in my view. We spent some time deliberating over whether Hansen–who watched Compas, his supervisor, hide a shoelace that matched the ligature mark on Leonard Jones’ neck–had tampered with evidence simply by keeping his mouth shut about what he’d seen. Once that was resolved, we were ready to report our verdict.

The trial was plenty dramatic, though. The night Leonard Jones died, Compas and Hansen called their captain at home. Compas had just taken an internal exam and was freaked that this would screw up his chances for a promotion. So he was lying his ass off to the captain, and when the captain testified in court, he was still incensed about it. Maybe even more so because Compas accidentally left the phone of the hook after the call and inadvertently recorded himself and the other on-duty cops getting their phony story straight.

It turned out that the Assistant DA had flipped Hansen only after suggesting that the ligature mark on Leonard Jones’ neck matched the leather strap on Hansen’s nightstick. Then Hansen suddenly remembered about the shoelace.

And I thoroughly remember the Assistant DA’s summation. It was passionate, stirring, beautiful to see. However, it didn’t have any effect on our deliberations, which were entirely about “proper construction of the statute.” The appellate court concurred, essentially, with what we figured out in the jury room.

Here’s what pisses me off: The appellate court judges could see, as clearly as the jurors, that the facts of the case were cut-and-dried and the jury had no choice but to convict. No choice–unless, of course, we allowed ourselves to be swayed by the defense lawyer’s argument that the cops were really good guys just trying to do their jobs. In other words, we jurors should overturn the case the DA built based on the facts, because juries should support incompetent and dishonest cops just because they are cops. We didn’t do that, because–as we agreed unanimously after deliberating there in the jury room–it would be wrong to do so.

What I remember most clearly, all these years later, is the Assistant DA looking at us earnestly and saying, just as is recited in the appellate court’s decision:

“After all, who is Leonard Jones? He is just some skel, so nobody cares about him. So it is OK to cover up what happened to him. So his family has no right to know the circumstances of his death.” “[Defendants] don’t care what right the public has to know about a prisoner’s death in police custody, and [defendants] don’t care about Leonard Jones’ family’s right to know.” “It’s just Leonard Jones, it is just some skel, just some bum from the Port Authority. What difference does it make?”

The appellate judges Kupferman, Asch, Rosenberger, Ellerin, and Smith should have known, or maybe did know, that the Assistant DA wasn’t talking just about the cops, she was talking about the whole damned system, including them.

April 20, 2021 by dan The Nature of Belief 0

Painful, Part 3

On Thursday, 26 days after the surgery, I went to Kaiser Oakland to get the cast removed. I drove the F-150–it’s got an automatic transmission, so I can drive with just my right hand. And who uses turn signals anyway. I parked on a nearby residential street and walked under the freeway and past the tire shops.

I’d been looking forward to the feeling of the technician’s saw cutting the length of it, to the release of the pressure. The relief was good, but not quite what I’d hoped. The forearm looked like a newly shelled shrimp, and felt as raw and amorphously numb. Free, but useless for now.

And just as painful. I‘d thought the pressure from the arm swelling into the confines of the cast was the main cause of the pain, but the rough sores and the rawness of the skin were still hot and sharp. The surgical scars, six inches on the side aligned with the thumb, and another equally long aligned with the pinky finger, sang their sensation brightly with the novel cool air.

And I could feel the fascia, under the skin, stiff and turgid, painful to the touch, and unyielding whenever I tried, with little success, to rotate the forearm, or make a fist, or even droop my wrist.

Life is suffering.

“You can go ahead and use it, lift things,” said the P.A. I asked her to renew my scrip for Dialudid.

Which I haven’t used since, but still might. That morning, I’d awoken with an unexplained headache and nausea so intense I wasn’t sure I could make the appointment. Food poisoning? Sudden onset of severe sinusitis? A little later in the day, I thought about the Dialudid again, and a felt a physical revulsion.

Oh, so that’s it. I’ve been taking this stuff at bedtime, and sometimes again in the middle of the night, for a few weeks now, and my body and brain don’t want any more. I’d had the chronic constipation, and then the persistently runny nose, just like any other junkie. But now it was like I was going to finish with my works and then go vomit in the bushes, just like I’d seen guys do back on the streets of New York.

It didn’t stop there, either. My meditation practice was oddly thrown back, to the time before I felt my self inside myself. These last many sessions I was no longer turning toward that entity; no longer soothing it, or playing with it, or watching it dissolve. Instead, I was just kind of drifting on the cloud.

Life is suffering.

Four weeks ago, as I lay on the pavement, breathing into the pain, waiting for the ambulance, I promised myself I’d stay open to the lessons of this experience. Later, I shared this intention with my muse and sensei, and she kind of went off on how accidents can just be accidents, they are not there to teach lessons. I get that. Still, I honor my intention. Accepting impermanence is hard, and the difficult times in our lives can be gateways to a greater understanding.

March 29, 2021 by dan Cycling Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0

Painful, Part 2

Kyle explained it to me.

As I lay face up, my back pressing against the pavement, waiting for the ambulance to come, my left arm began to curl into itself, bending at the place where the bones were snapped. In a few minutes, the bend came to 90 degrees, as if I had a second elbow.

I’d felt the curled, bleeding mass cradled against my ribs as I crawled on to the gurney.

Since then, pain has stayed about the same, sometimes more intense, sometimes dulled by drugs, but always feeling like a tightening, a pulling inward, a curling up.

Life is suffering. On the pavement, in the ambulance, and in the ER, I pondered my lesson. In the evening, after the surgery, I sat in my room—alone, in the dark, with a high-floor moonlit view of downtown Oakland.

The pain has been a constant companion, and I’ve accepted the pain, with help from some powerful opioids. After a day or two, the shock and the initial arsenal of drugs I’d received—Fentanyl, morphine, ketamine—wore off. I contacted the surgeon.

The fixing itself was, and is, a miracle. In the hospital, I was pleased by the surgeon’s bored demeanor. This is what you want in such situations, right? His team looked like they’d been bolting bones back together all damned day, and countless days before that. Somehow they sliced my arm open, moving aside arteries and nerves to dig down to the bones, then aligned the titanium plates on each, got enough screws in, and closed the arm up against invading bacteria.

Uncurled.

Which is, I think, part of the discomfiting feeling that goes along with the pain. I still have that wanting to curl up, to protect, but the arm is fixed straight, first by plates and now by a plaster cast, too. And it hangs off my shoulder like an alien. My fingers, emerging from the end of the cast, are painful and barely usable reminders of what was.

Life is suffering. I could accept the pain. I told the surgeon I couldn’t take the hydrocodone. I got him to upgrade so I could renew my expired stash of oxycodone, but after a few days, I was damned if I’d take that either. Both are really crappy drugs; both will, after a brief period of use, put me in state where I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing. I don’t know who else they affect that way.

The hydromorphone is much better, but 19 days now since the injury, I split my time between the pain—while working and caregiving—and drifting on the morphine cloud. I’m usually damned ready for a pill by 5 pm, if I haven’t already had one by then.

Life is suffering. I think the hundreds of hours I’ve spent meditating over the past few years has helped me cope with the pain and to function despite the pain and disability.

I don’t think I’ve learned my lesson, yet, though. I’ve spent some hours contemplating these new feelings of advancing age and frailty. I’ve let go some self-expectations. I’ve gently mocked myself for trying to do things I shouldn’t try to do. I’ve confronted myself for not taking time for needed self-care, and recognized that habit is part of holding on to past trauma. And I’ve also, just yesterday, dealt with my kid being defiant and melting down while simultaneously attending a Zoom meeting on one screen and writing a letter on deadline on the other. With my throbbing left arm elevated above my shoulder.

Today I finished some morning business and put on my rain gear before heading out the door on a walk, up through the City’s Hillside Natural Area, climbing above the cliff behind the old quarry, then through the residential neighborhood that straddles Arlington Avenue, where I admired the big mid-century houses, then down to Wildcat Creek, the rain beating down and turning the road into a slippery muddy morass, with my cast in a sling and my hand tucked into the pocket of the rain parka, emerging by Jewel Lake and the Little Farm, and talking with the client on my phone as I descended through Kensington and the Sunset View Cemetery.

I walked back in the door in time to strip off my wet gear and put on a blue button-down before joining a meeting with the managers of some of our local cities and towns.

An hour later, a bit chilled and shivering, I crawled into bed, watching the rain come down outside the window and feeling my forearm, up on pillows, shrink until it was no longer pressing tight against the cast. I felt at peace as drifted off to sleep in the waning afternoon light.

March 19, 2021 by dan Cycling Personal Status 0

dan