Solstice, 2017

Dear Ones,

    Can somebody find poor Donnie a friend?? Seriously…the poor guy won the beauty contest with a minority of the votes, thanks to a suspiciously high “9.9” from the Russian judge, and yet the expected applause and adulation just never happened.  The world fell silent. It’s his party, and he’ll cry if he wants to, but he can’t find a shoulder to cry on.  I feel badly for him.  Bigly.  More histrionics, more drama, and still no response from a disbelieving world.  He wonders aloud if he is our favorite president ever, and whether we should add him to Mt. Rushmore.  Even the Poet Laureate can’t find a word that rhymes with “Orange”. So he watches TV eight hours a day, burns through a 12-pack of Diet Coke, tweets random incoherent whining taunts, and cheats at golf on the weekends. Even the political comedy seems hollow.  This should be the most fertile ground ever, but it all rings so true, that we cannot bear to watch this slow-mo train wreck. 
    The real problem with this reality show is that someone equally isolated and scary now holds the launch codes to nukes, and has the capacity to hit LA or Seattle.  So we watch tantrum vs. counter tantrum, and hope that “Dotard!”—“Fatso!” exchanges don’t escalate to blows.  All those burgeoning 401Ks won’t be worth a pitcher of warm piss when the first mushroom cloud rises.  But those two rascals have so much in common!  Machismo, love for young girls, conspiracy theories…They should golf together, kick back in their bunker, call out to a Trump International Restaurant for some take-out,  knock back some cold ones, grab some pussy, swap lies and be BFFs.  Problem solved!
    What to make of this world, really…We have marveled at the sudden purge of sexual predators from the halls of Congress, the boardrooms and backrooms of media, industry, and universities.  Good riddance, but the sudden outing of so many formerly beloved and not so beloved figures is shocking and sometimes dismaying. And, maybe, instructive. We came oh-so-close to electing a child-molester and slavery nostalgist to the Senate, but discovered what actually getting up and voting can do. We have begun a national conversation about police brutality and the minority experience in America, and are perhaps a better country, just for having started the conversation. We are not done, by a long shot, but we are talking.
    So, we slog toward the longest night, make the turn toward the light, and hope that we all make it back to long days, and strawberries that actually taste like strawberries, and not Strontium 90.  Here in our upper left-most corner of the lower 48, we continue to make the best of every day, starting for Catherine, at least, with a half-hour of breathing exercises, followed by a 5-minute cold shower.  She saw this on YouTube, advocated by a wild man named Wim Hof, the “Ice Man,” and is now a devotee, and wants me to do this regimen also.  I know that cold showers are reserved for adolescent males denied the company of willing adolescent females, so I have resisted the trend.  She and Hannah allege that “Science Says,” that this is the path to prolonged youth and improved mental functioning.  So I remain the control rat, waiting for the double-blind controlled trials.  And a troglodyte, resisting “science”. Science says sex every other day makes you live longer, but that argument goes nowhere…
    Our summer highlight was our Eclipse-stalking trip to the Oregon Star Party, in the Ochoco National Forest.  We went in our Airstream van RV, acquired for this very purpose, and had multiple cameras running for the big event.  We got some pretty nice shots, and contributed to a group science project with our images.  It was a cool, amazing, humbling experience.  The temp dropped 15 degrees in 2 minutes, it got fairly dark, and all cardboard-goggled eyes were up, seeing cookie-bites to crescents to to black sun with pink-white corona, and then back to cookie bites.  I can’t wait for 4.8.2024.  The van, styled “Big Tony,”  or “Tony God Damn,” after my dear departed crusty RV-ing father in law, continues to serve us in SW and NW adventures.
    The autumn highlight and really the whole year’s peak experience, was the grand gathering of the whole family for my niece Rachael G-R’s wedding in Atlanta.  Present and accounted for were all 6 siblings, various significant others, kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, cousins and all.  We have not all been together in one place for more than a decade, and my parents made the trip from Buffalo, and we re-uned, a last hurrah of the whole fam damily.  Welcome to the gang, Logan and extended family.
    The older kids are well.  Michele, 41, continues to purvey peace, love and yoga for fun and profit. Husband Eric still works for NetJets, now promoted to his former boss’ job, and flying less.   Grandkids Jack, 11, and Lily, almost 9, continue to thrive.  Jack plays cello for the Columbus Youth Orchestra, and is taking up the Bass Fiddle.  Lily continues to exceed all expectations at being Lily, to which standard the rest of the world merely aspires.
    Nathanael (40!), is back in RI, working as a fitness trainer, and doing well.  He has a serious girlfriend and is settling into domestic life. The younger two, Hannah (31), and Everett(29), are also surviving and even thriving.  Hannah lives in West Seattle, works as a medical scribe in a walk-in clinic, and awaits acceptance from various medical schools.  This will be her year, I do believe.  Everett lost his job in the Trump Administration at Commerce,  and is waiting tables and a couple of swanky restaurants in DC and paying bills, while writing wickedly satiric novellas, and trying to break into that world.  He has been doing live readings to rave reviews, and for good reason, since the boy can WRITE.
    I continue my career as a sled dog in the ER, doing strictly nights, to preserve my circadian rhythm and sanity.  Excuse me.  I just said “sanity”.  My bad.  Work consumes me as it defines me. I am at the end of a stretch, having worked 34 of the last 41 nights. So I am a bit weary of the human race, and more certain we will kill ourselves off, and be replaced by more deserving cockroaches. After a week off, I will be a bit more optimistic, full again of the milk of human kindness.  I am a step slower, but still wily. I try to maintain a daily physical regimen, to stave off the depredations of age.  I do ten minutes of aerobic yoga daily before work—I put on my socks. I do a hundred kettle bell swings, ride my bike sometimes, and fast one day a week.  I am generally better off physically this year than last, definitely in less pain.  On the mental exercise side, I rely on the teaching of residents and medical students to keep me on my toes, and force me to stay up to date, just to keep a step ahead of the eager little rascals.  I am not sure the craft will be recognizable in 20 years, but people will still be the frail, illin’ apes they have always been, so I guess there will be work for us.  We are rapidly becoming  mere computer operators, loaders of input and interpreters of output. So our work is computrefying rapidly.  I do not envy these young-uns, just starting out.
    Things have been busy around our shop.  I come in at nine, find a waiting room full of supplicants, and dive in.  I feel like an Apache attack helicopter pilot with a full combat load, flying over a Taliban convention, cleared hot.  Night life revolves around homeless people quite a lot these days.  Unlike in the past, a rising economic tide does not float all the boats.  And so many don’t have boats, and don’t swim so well, either.  Folks just show up, just plain out of gas, with sore feet, wet clothes, and no medical issues, wanting a bed, warm blankets, TV remote, phone charger, a sammich, and a call light.  They remain dumbfounded that we cannot accommodate them night after night. The city/county/state seem to have very little interest in the problem. Sigh.  We ER practitioners have learned new and useful skills, however.  We now have a cool ultrasound machine, and have trained to use it for finding blood in bellies, taking baby pictures for pregnant nurses, and finding veins on heroin addicts.  We pore over used-up arms, enduring back seat encouragement from the addicts, “You’ll never get it in there!” and then place the needle under direct visualization into veins they didn’t know they had.  When I come back to discuss the lab results or whatever, I find a gown on the bed and the patient long gone.  “Thanks!  Couldn’t have gotten high the next three days without you!”  Glad I could be of service. I should just start a cash only side job on the street, placing IVs for $100 a pop.
    I pause, as always, to note the passing of notables from our midst.  My particular friend Jimmy Gleeson, who induced me to move to Anacortes, died of cancer this year, leaving a world better for his life, and poorer for his absence. Many stars of the Hollywood variety have fallen, including Mary Tyler Moore, Jerry Lewis, Adam West, the original Batman, Jim Nabors (Gomer Pyle), Martin Landau (Mission Impossible), Sam Shepard, and Johns Hurt and Heard.  Monty Hall chose door number three, Don Rickles is insulting everyone in heaven to big laffs, Roger Moore still can’t atone for “Moonraker”, and Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher just couldn’t be apart for long, apparently.  Musicians Fats Domino, Tom Petty, Chuck Berry, Greg Allman, Glen Campbell and Walter Becker of Steely Dan have played that last long chord.  Fred Beckey, mountaineer extraordinaire, has summited the highest peak. And thanks for the mammaries, Hugh Hefner.
    And so, friends, far and near, new and old…I lean heavily on my connections to all of you, and try to make sense of a world gone mad.  I take solace from the many sage and sane spirits out there I have encountered in my 62 laps around the sun.  All things of our earth move in cycles, days shorten then lengthen, tides rise and fall, but we do not come back to exactly the same point as before.  It is a looping, reiterative path, but there is change and evolution and direction nevertheless.  And chaos and cataclysm can alter our direction sharply.  I hope for you and us all, that we can push together past this mean and selfish nadir in our national experiment.  We were founded on high “Enlightenment” ideals, which were tarnished at the outset by slavery.  We survived the cataclysm of the Civil War, and continue to do battle with the demons of our past.   It is folly to judge the people of the past by modern standards, but worse folly not to learn from their shortcomings and struggles. If our experiment in higher human values and our republic should fall, it will be of a self-inflicted wound.  Be strong, falter not.  We can and will regroup, strengthen our defensive lines, and recapture the higher ground.
    It is the longest night, even as I write this, and I thank you all for your friendship, support from afar, constructive criticism, and sarcasm.  Be well, reach out to friends and strangers, and let the next tide deposit us all to a higher place than did the last.

                Peace, love, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.