A Statistical Observation, in the Form of a Prediction

Neither you, nor almost anyone you know, will ever be rich.  I don't mean wealthy.  I don't mean comfortably well-off.  I mean fuck-you money rich.

On the plus side, studies show that money doesn't make you any happier.  So you got that going for you.  Which is nice.

An Ill-Informed but Somewhat Cathartic Rant about Dentistry

So, I got a root canal the other day (thanks), after which the dentist said that he recommends I get a crown on the tooth.  Now, I get that this is standard procedure in these cases, but there's a part of me that has to ask.

Really?

I mean, I don't think they're just trying to get extra money out of me or anything.  But after drilling out every last little particle of nerve tissue and the bacteria that was eating it, he filled my tooth in with permanent filling.  The same stuff they use to patch up the outsides of teeth when they need it.  Basically cement, I'm pretty sure.  But apparently my tooth is in danger of cracking if I chew something too hard.

That is, my tooth, which is newly filled with cement or something like it, is in danger of cracking.

Why don't they fill the tooth with something harder, if that's a danger?  Is the filling material not harder than the dead nerve tissue?  One assumes that it is.  I mean, I understand that they drilled out the core of the tooth, and that they had to do so from a hole they drilled in the top.  BUT THEY FILLED IT WITH F-CKING CEMENT.  How is that not stong enough?

I think the best part was after the root canal was done, and we were talking about it, and I was asking if I needed the crown right away or if it could wait (the expense of a root canal, even at the UW Dental School, is not inconsequential) and he said, casually, "Maybe a month or two."  So I figured okay, I can deal with that.  Then he said, "Just chew on the other side of your mouth."  And I said, "You mean, like, today, while the tooth is still sore."  And he said, "No, until you get the crown."

And of course I'm going to do it.  After all, I have not spent the last several years studying dentistry (he's a grad resident, so he's already got his degree), and I was warned that almost all root canals end up needing a crown.  But there's still that part of me that can't help but think WTF?

Okay.  End of rant.  Thank you for listening.

PS  Don't forget to enter this week's Dallas' writing-related contest.  It's easy, and there're fun and prizes to be had.  You'd be crazy not to.

Suicide is Painless

for the person who commits it.  For the people left behind, not so much.

That's all.

Quick Note

So, turns out I will not be blogging the Clarion experience.  Our first instructor, Delia Sherman, made a very good case last night as to why we should not (having mostly to do with focusing on our work), and I have decided to bow to her wisdom and the strength of her arguments.

As a result, I expect posting will be sparser than previously expected, though you never know:  I may just take it into my head here and there along the way to spit something out that I'm thinking about that doesn't fit into any of the things I'm doing here.  You'll just have to check periodically and see.

I will, however, continue with my plan to post micro- and flash-fiction, along with various fragments and cast-offs from what I'm working on, on my Facebook Writer page.  So if you just really need a fix, try that.

Warm Fuzzy Moments

Me to my friend (whose son was born a couple of months ago):  So how's fatherhood treating you?

My friend:  Like the first chapter of a book that you know you're gonna love.

True Dat

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but you always lose if you never try.
-John Cole

Sounds About Right

OK, put the kids to bed and lock the cat in the cupboard, because I'm going to reveal an Awful Truth about the Real World.

Ready?

The Real World is run by dolts, drones and particle-board humdrums.

There. I said it. And there ain't no takesies-backsies on Teh Internets.

Me and mine have traveled far and crossed many latitudes and longitudes across the great, wide Sea of Gainful Employment and -- with all of the usual exceptions excepted and stipulations stipulated -- I can tell you flat out that, whether you're taking the measure of the titans of industry, or education, or gummint, or not-for-profits, or faith-based organizations, like as not the people you will meet in the executive suites are some timid, risk-averse motherf**kers.

Not necessarily evil people, but not the tamers of frontiers, conquerors of mankiller mountains or tortured geniuses who have shed blood and sinew to hew the Great New Thing from the raw rock of an unforgiving Universe. Instead, you'll find Organization Men who roll off the assembly line hard-wired with a whole set of behaviors optimized to mute and mollify and reflect back on their superiors flattering images of themselves.
-Driftglass

Found on a Coaster in the Bar

I thank the fuck-ups in the world for showing me how to be a better person and live the life I want to live. Thanks fuck-ups.
-S.B.

Thank you, S.B. Thank you.

(hat tip to Buddy W.)

Clarion, Meet Dallas...

He sat at the computer, brow furrowed, just a little short on sleep, wondering what he was supposed to say. There was a questionnaire he could fill out, some guidelines at least. A skeleton to hang the flesh and the skin of his life on, if he cared to. It would be easier that way. Safer.

He thought for a moment. Stared at the empty box on the screen he was supposed to fill with introductory material. Who was he? Why was he doing this? What did he want? What would he be leaving behind? All good questions.

He stopped to make a cup of strong coffee. It was cheap stuff, a memento from his time in Florida, best when sweetened a bit and drunk without paying too much attention to the flavor. He tapped away, lackadaisically, while it percolated on the stove. On the headphones, Charlotte Gainsbourg gave way to Willie Hutch, postmodern dissonance dissolved in the butter-cream smoothness of blaxploitation funk.

Who was he? Just some guy who'd always wanted to be a writer. Who'd taken it up and put it back down more than a few times over the years, first because he had nothing much to say, later because life has a way of intruding on dreams. But it had always been there, this thing he knew he wanted to do.

Eventually he started writing a book. A book made of brambles and rhizomes, that wouldn't stop growing in every direction possible. He fought and he hacked at it, Hercules against the Hydra. He buried it in a closet, deprived it of the sun. But its tendrils refused to release their hold on him, and so he returned with a torch, an angry mob of one, and burned the whole god-damned thing down. He gathered the ashes, then, and sprinkled them on the ground in the space he'd created. Gently, carefully, he began to coax forth new shoots, husbanding them more deliberately this time.

Why did he want to be a writer? Because he was a reader, a text addict whose eye was drawn to words wherever they appeared, whose gaze caressed the curves and ligatures of letters and phrases the way a hand might caress the curve of a hip or a spine, whose love of language and the things that could be done with it blossomed in the secret garden of his inmost self in such profusion that it grew into and among all of the other botanicals, its roots spreading and pushing under the foundation stones of the walls, toppling them in places and opening up to the vast horizons beyond. Because such worlds had been opened up to him by the works of others that what was best in life seemed to him to be this: this strange magic between writer and reader, these mystic incantations and the filament-worlds they could weave in that magical space.

What he longed for most was to learn to work that magic himself, to write something he'd want to read, to give to others the wonders that had been given to him. To open those worlds and explore the logics and suchnesses that made them just so. To chart a path through them that others might follow.

What did he want? To focus. To learn. To be pushed. To have his best efforts torn to shreds that his skills might improve. To be taught his craft by those who had mastered it, whose work he knew and admired. To be sunk in a community of peers devoted for this small time to the cultivation of that craft and the life that went with it. To finally become the thing he'd always wanted to be.

What would he be leaving behind? A good life. An interlude of sunshine in an overcast land. The alternation of solitude, writerly and otherwise, with periods of intense entanglement in social networks and communities of friends and friendly faces. The bar where he'd worked for so many years, a community in itself, where he was loved and respected and not infrequently hated on (he does not suffer fools gracefully, for time is too short, and so can his patience be). An orbit of known faces and the places in his heart that they occupied.

Soccer on Mondays and ultimate frisbee on saturdays. Circles of friends and the unpredictable ways in which they intersected. A city vibrant with urbanity, with culture and music and gustation and art, yet cozy enough to feel like home. A community of creative souls and critical thinkers, of people who follow their dreams and can still hold down a job.

Love: the sweetest he'd ever known, the smiling girl who made it so much better. Who made him so much better. Who wanted him to be what he'd always aspired to.

These things he was leaving, they were good things. They made him happy. He was blessed and he knew it.

But he'd always been a restless sort, poorly wired for contentment. And though he was happy with this life he had made, there was more that he desired, work yet to be done, steps along the path that were yet to be taken.

The things he was leaving would be there when he returned, to build the life he desired. After all, every quest is a circle, a return to the place from which it began, though the wanderer who returns is rarely the same as the one who has left.

Obscurity had been his friend. Solitude his ally. But he could only teach himself so much. The time had come to seek the company of others, devotees like himself and the masters who would teach them.

Eyes turning southward, he began to gather those things he would need...

Ideals without results of any kind are essentially worthless.
-Chez Pazienza

Bush did push us into a baseless war and rich bankers do rip everyone off, just not in the way that some conspiracy theorists think.
-DougJ at Balloon Juice

True Dat

Alarming personality changes and firearms are a very bad combination.
-Emily Yoffe

And whether you, like Good Professor Sartwell, object to the use of your money in funding the world's preeminent wardeath machine or you object to the use of your money to feed imaginary inner city crack faggot Kenyanites, a fundamental truth remains: our government is a huge, implacable, rapacious, imovable death god into whose insatiable maw we are damned to make perpetual sacrifice. It is not unusual that this is going to raise some hackles.
-IOZ

Posted Without Comment

"No, I'm not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain't shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist."
-Justin's Dad

Here's a Thought

So, one thing everybody's always on about when it comes to Muslim terrorism and terrorists is just how many of the guys that get radicalized are educated, middle-class people. The consensus seems to be, basically, wtf?

I think the underlying assumption is that educated folks should be harder to radicalize because they aren't dirt-poor and, as such, have so much more to lose. I mean, here are guys whose families have enough money to send them overseas to Europe or the United States to study useful professions (engineers seem to be especially well-represented among radicalized Muslims), who get to spend time in the West, in our generally freer, more tolerant atmosphere, while they're being educated, and who come out the other end with valuable job skills. All of which would seem to gravitate away from radicalization (after all, radicals are typically drawn from the ranks of those with little or nothing to lose).

But here's the kicker. These guys, many of them young, return home with their degrees to countries that just don't have any jobs for them. So here they are, young and ready to work, with an education they can't use because their economies are lacking in opportunity, and they get frustrated.

What's worse, and this is, I think, the crux of the matter, is that because they can't find work, they can't get married, since they can't support themselves, much less a family. Which means they can't have sex. And that's a problem.

As we all know, or should by now, Islam has some very strict rules about gender relations. I'm not going to go into a deconstruction of sharia law here, or even express my own feelings about that. I'm not a Muslim, and I do my best to respect the faiths of others, even when I do not share that faith, or necessarily understand it. But the fact remains that in conservative Islamic situations there is very little chance that a young man with no job is going to be able to woo a wife, which is pretty much the only acceptable path to the bedroom for him.

Sure, Muslims aren't the only religious conservatives that have a problem with premarital relations. I was once told by a Christian friend of mine, a woman, that she couldn't stand hanging out with the men in her church anymore because "all they want to do is get married, so they can have sex."

It was funny at the time, but it got me to thinking.

However you feel about it, whatever your Book says, the fact remains that the prime directive of being alive is to reproduce. Human beings are no exception. We're wired, especially when we're young, to desire sex, preferably right now. That our societies have evolved rules that countermand that primordial drive may or may not be a tremendous mistake, but the fact remains that there exists a powerful tension between what our bodies tell us and what our societies tell us we should and shouldn't do.

So here are these guys. They're raised in a strict Muslim culture that says the only way they're ever going to get some is by getting married. They've spent time in the West, where the rules are quite a bit more relaxed (after all, the most conservative parts of the US also have the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections, so we can safely say that there is sex being had, whatever the prevailing moral attitude toward it might be), where they might or might not have gotten a taste of that sweet, sweet fruit that is a woman's love. But whether or not they were successful at the dating game, the women are much freer and more open, and sexuality is much more prevalent, which when you're young and horny can be quite maddening.

They then return to a land where a woman may not so much as step outside her home without a male relation to escort her. And because the economy is poor, thanks either to a kleptocracy or foreign intervention, or both, they can't find work, even with their advanced degrees. So they're not only frustrated by having all this training and education and it not doing them a damn bit of good, but they know that until they get that job and get that money that they're never going to get some love, which'll drive any man crazy.

No wonder they're so often willing to sacrifice themselves to kill Westerners. When you've got no healthy outlet for the perfectly natural desire to get your rocks off and you can't see a way forward to ever getting to, you become imbalanced and angry. Easy to radicalize. I'm sure it doesn't help that the Islamic heaven seems to involve a large supply of willing virgins, but even if it didn't there would still be this pool of young men who feel they have a reasonable expectation of finding work, getting married, and having, if not a good life, then at least sex, and who are frustrated beyond all reason when they discover that even though they have jumped through all the appropriate hoops that they still don't get to get some.

Hell, it's a wonder there aren't more of them.

Also, Too

"Fine, let’s take a vote. Who wants fish for dinner?...Yeah, democracy ain’t so fun when it fucks you, huh?”
-Justin's Dad

I have the best girlfriend ever, I'm pretty sure.

Last night a funny thing happened while I was at work. First of all, an old friend I used to work with came in, someone I hadn't seen in a long time. That was cool, and I was happy to see her, and also surprised that she'd brought me a bottle of wine for my birthday, which is on Sunday.

Then another friend showed up, and he had a bottle of wine, too. Then, while I was talking with them, another friend came, and she had a bottle of wine for me too.

"Did you read the cards?" the first friend asked. And then I noticed that each of the bottles, in addition to a colorful ribbon around the neck, had an identical little envelope on it. I started opening them, and each one had a little note in it, in Kendal's handwriting, telling me something about me she loved.

Then another friend walked by the outside of the bar, someone on my soccer team that I haven't seen in months (I tweaked my knee a bit before I had to go to Florida and haven't had a chance to play since, much to my dismay). I ran out to say hi, still not quite getting it, thinking how random it was that a friend who lives on the Eastside would walk by my bar in Fremont with her two kids on a Wednesday night. Until it was revealed that she too had a bottle of wine for me, and had made me a cd, too.

I went back inside and texted Kendal 'Did you do this?' She totally left me hanging.

By 6:30 more than a dozen of my friends had shown up, each bearing a bottle of wine with a note from Kendal on it. Many had added their own. By the end of the night I was up to around 29 or 30 bottles, maybe more, from people in all of my circles of friends, who'd all dropped by to wish me a surprise happy birthday. There were people from my soccer team, people I've worked with at a few different places, people I went to school with; the list goes on.

And Kendal did it all. Without my knowing. She tracked them all down, individually, and got a note to each of them for them to attach to their bottle. I'm amazed. Absolutely floored. Noone has ever done anything this awesome for me for my birthday before. Ever. I had one of the best nights I can remember, even having to work. All night people kept showing up. Some could only stay for a minute, some stayed an hour or more. Every one, and every moment, was almost unbearably precious to me, and will stay with me forever. I can't express how blessed I feel to have such people in my life.

Especially Kendal. The best girlfriend ever. Whatever I did to win or deserve her, I'm glad that I did it, and I hope I keep doing it.

Posted Without Comment

To live is to accept some modicum of risk. To live in an advaned, industrailized, technological, hegemonic, militaristic, imperial society in the twenty-first century is to accept with fair certainty that someone, somewhere, wants to blow you up, like, right now. This is, as they say, the cost of doing business, an inevitable outcome of the system in which we live, work, and pretend to thrive.
-IOZ

A Good Point from an Old Friend

As a physician....I appreciate the post on your blog. One huge issue that is missing; is the amount of waste that occurs with defensive medicine and end of life care. I know you have heard this before from physicians. I assure you that from the trenches......10 to 20 times is wasted with defensive medicine compared to ...medical errors etc. In fact many preventable events in health care could be avoided if defensive testing and unwarranted procedures were not performed. The system is broken! Unfortunately many feel that medicare is like a blank check and families request unneccesarry procedures and treatments that do not provide better health and only serve to prolong an inevitable death! When this type of coverage is expanded, without rationing, we are all screwed I assure you!
-George E.

George makes a good point, and one I haven't yet touched on in my ongoing bloviations here at the anticontrarian blog.

It's something of a truism that most of the money spent on any given individual's health care is spent at the end. Grief-stricken families with loved ones on their death beds will often, quite naturally, do just about anything to prolong their lives, even if what they're prolonging is the persistence of a vegetative state or simply unalloyed pain and suffering. The case of Terri Schiavo is a perfect example, where the body was kept alive long after the person inside had gone.

Now, this is some dangerous territory we're entering, as I'm quite well aware. After all, people are rarely rational in the face of death, whether theirs or that of a loved one, and George's point that having a blank check to extend that life, no matter what the quality of it is or will be, will inevitably lead to waste and abuse is a good one. The term 'rationing' is a loaded one, freighted with all manner of unhappy connotations, but it's also something that we, as grown-ups, quite frankly need to face up to.

There is, after all, only so much care to go around. Period. And only so much good that can be done for someone who is going to die. Period. That there will be rationing is inevitable, and even just. It sucks, but there really isn't any way around it, at least until there is more supply than demand when it comes to health care. I don't see that happening. Do you?

This is why end-of-life counseling and directives are so important. 'Death panels' nonsense aside (and it is nonsense, another example of willful misinterpretation in the service of scoring cheap political points, which I will not deign to rebut here), it really is important for everybody, and most especially those who're either sick or getting on in years, to sit down and figure out how they want things to go down when the end is nigh. Nobody wants to think about things like that, of course, but it's one of those things grown-ups have to and ought to do, if for no other reason than to see that their wishes are carried out. After all, when the time comes, you might not be conscious or capable enough to make your own decisions, and I can tell you from personal experience that it's a hell of a thing to put on someone else to decide it for you. The Schiavo family can tell you that, too.

Lucky for me, when my mother began her terminal decline, all of the decisions had been made, and the appropriate legal documents drawn up and notarized. She made her wishes crystal clear, which spared me from having to make that decision. She had long ago made her wishes clear to me verbally, and so I knew what she would've wanted, but it was a great comfort to have it in writing, to know that she'd thought it out and made her decision. Things were difficult enough at the time, and even having had the burden of decision taken off my shoulders it was hard enough to make the decision to move her to hospice and to sign the do-not-resuscitate order.

But it was what she would've wanted. What she always said she wanted. She would've been horrified to spend her last days in an ICU, shot through with tubes and surrounded by beeping machinery that could only stave off the inevitable for so long and at great cost, without changing the inescapable outcome.

Personal stories aside, what pisses me off most about the 'Death Panels' meme is the childishness of it. The unwillingness to face the fact that life ends, and that each of us should be able to decide how we want ours to end, if that choice is given us, and to have those choices respected. Why it should be problematic for any- and everyone to sit down with a medical professional and decide just how far they want things to go to draw just a few more breaths when the end is in sight and inescapable is beyond mysterious to me. That the government would be willing to compensate doctors for their time in doing so seems perfectly reasonable.

That there comes a time when it isn't worth it to do anything else but try and ameliorate the pain and ease a dying person's passage into whatever's on the other side is something we all have to face up to. Better to do it proactively, for ourselves and for the sake of our loved ones.

That it makes sense from a policy perspective, too, well, I suppose that just goes to show that life gets better for everybody when the grown-ups live up to their responsibilities. I, for one, would rather not waste finite medical resources to keep me alive in pain or a vegetative state for a few more hours or days when it's my time, not when they could be better used on someone whose life is still ahead of them. I suspect that most of the grown-ups out there would agree.