So Philip Roth is done writing books. Finished. Outta here. While I have yet to have my first short story published.
It’s like getting out of the water and transitioning to the bike when suddenly you hear, over the loudspeaker, the names of the top finishers of the triathlon.
In a day after lament Lileks opines:
[…] I thought about a friend who’s pro-small business, pro-military, pro-religious freedom – of course! This is America! – and she will vote for Obama. She believes that the state should take more property from people who die with X amount of money in the bank and give it to other people, and while she’s not exactly sure about what X should be, this is necessary because of Fairness.
That does seem to be the dominant idea in the land these days, no? The State shall have the power to do X if the objective is Fairness. The details – and the actual result – are less important. If you believe the State should do these things, why, it stands to reason that it can, and and hence any limitation of the powers of the State is a mulish obstruction of a better world.
Good people do not vote against such things.
Later in the piece Mr. Lileks nicely captures the core of my lament:
But. I see the world through skewed eyes, I know. It strikes me from time to time that this is an exceptional nation, as flawed as any human endeavor, but unique in human history: a society whose foundational concepts are not rooted in blood or clan, or impossibly airy proclamations of transnational brotherhood and human rights granted by, and subject to revision by, a council of our betters who regard the governance of man as a blade that scrapes everyone level. Rather, we were devoted to something rare in human history: liberty. (I use the past tense because the word’s been replaced by Freedom, which has come to mean The Fun Things, and also means freedom from being judged for any reason.)
I disagree only insofar as I believe Fairness has replaced Liberty in this country. It has become the highest virtue according to those who would turn up their noses at the quixotic few who still cling to their silly notions of idealism, such as “Liberty.” We should, these nose-turners insist, cast our favor instead toward the directives of Fairness dictated by the State. You want to ask these people, “Now who’s being quixotic?”
It is tempting to think a Romney presidency might have championed the goals of the quixotic few, those of us like Mr. Lileks who see the world through “skewed” eyes, but I really don’t think it would have. Knowing there was never really a choice is truly something to lament about.
At a site devoted to the discussion of kidney stones (because you can find everything on the Internet), I came across the following remedy (for men) to hurry the passage of a kidney stone.
Drink at least one liter of water as rapidly as possible. Then drink a beer (strong diuretic). Resist peeing until you can’t anymore. Then go to the bathroom and lightly squeeze the tip of the penis to prevent going right away, allowing pressure to build in the urethra. Then release.
Worked like a charm! Pen point shown for scale. Kinda roundish and brown with a gnarly tooth-like projection in the center.
Whew.
Bigger (if you dare).
Last night I experienced something on the grand distribution of highly unlikely things. Like getting mauled by a polar bear and a regular bear in the same day.
Recall I left the doctor’s office yesterday morning reassured that the likely cause of my right quadrant pain was a torn oblique, or related musculature. I was relieved, even cheery. So later when I picked up the Happy Wife from work we stopped at one of our favorite watering holes to discuss the events of our day over a glass or three of wine. So far so good.
At home things changed. I’m standing by the kitchen sink after having playfully lifted the Happy Wife off the ground, then setting her down again, when all of a sudden I experience this wicked discomfort in my lower left quadrant. This time visceral, not muscular. Unrelated to lifting. Now what? Discomfort quickly transmogrifies into pain, maybe five on a scale of ten. Followed shortly by six, then seven, rapidly segueing to a buckled-over-on-all-fours eight.
Off to the ER, where there’s a line, but not a long one. Happy Wife champions my cause and suggests to the admitting nurse she perform triage — by now I’m expressing the kind of pain I’m told women experience during childbirth, ninety-nine on a scale of ten. On to a rolly bed I went, variably mumbling and screeching nonsense.
Have you guessed yet?
Then came the morphine. Ooooh the moorfeeen. At last I’ve found you! My nonsense increased measurably, I went logarithmic.
In the CT room I was asked again what my name and DOB was. “Surely you know by now,” I think I said, “this is the sixth time I’ve been asked that tonight!” Sir, your name and DOB please.
Drumbeat….
Yup, 3mm stone in my kidney. Right at the base of the ureter. Permission to enter bladder sir? Yes, pleaz. And more morphine please! Six milligrams in the IV and I’m back in the clouds, a most lovely place. A short nap, after midnight now, and when I awake I’m pain free. Out of the woods? So it seemed. Discharged and off to the all night Walgreens for take home drugs we went.
I figure the stone is still in my bladder today, as the pain comes and goes, but Percocet is a wonderful thing.
And now I pee into a strainer, like panning for gold.
Mom, do you see now why we asked for a chain saw for Christmas? The view (again) from the porch of what we hope will be our new getaway by week end. A little buzz buzz here, a zip zip there, and maybe we can transform the porch view into the beach view…
… if not for that pesky out building (the neighbor’s) we might. Oh well, as I always say, let not the perfect be the enemy of the pretty darn good.
I’ve been pestered by an upper right quadrant pain this past week. When I first mentioned this to the Happy Wife she went ashen in the face. Don’t misunderstand, as an advanced practitioner with years of experience delivering evidenced based health care to fortunate patients, she nevertheless tilts toward the zebra diagnosis where her husband is concerned. No honey, I tried to reassure her, I don’t think this is the symptom of late stage liver cancer. And yet, some nights she was haunted by nightmares, a chimera loping across an African Plain, a zebra with the head of a man. My head!
Sure enough, as the week passed the pain became more like a mild discomfort, and I became convinced it was caused by a minor tear in my oblique muscle, which happened, I’m quite certain, during a bout of playful wrestling with Happy Wife one carefree Sunday morning in bed. Still, it was a puzzling discomfort I’d not experienced before, so I kept the doctor’s appointment today. After her physical exam of my abdomen she agreed this was not a zebra. If new symptoms appear, the pain worsens, or eating fatty food causes acute pain (gall stone for sure), please call me right away she said.
I am off to a conference next week in San Francisco. Blogging will be light, if at all. Now now, don’t get all weepy, I’ll be back, promise.
My 6,128 Favorite Books — That’s a lot of reading, Mr. Queenan.
Personal effort thus far this year:
On Writing: A Memoir of Craft — Stephen King
Outliers — Malcolm Gladwell
Of Human Bondage — Somerset Maugham (current)
Generosity — Richard Powers
Freedom — Jonathan Franzen
Talk Talk — T.C. Boyle
All The Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy
State of Wonder — Ann Patchett
Countless short stories, essays, poems, and assorted letters from the Internet’s vast oeuvre.
The Happy Wife says, “Look what happened to my hair while I was cleaning the toilet. Do I look like The Donald?”
I turned to look. Coffee nearly exited through my nose.
“Yes, you look like The Donald. In your fluffage.”
Speculating on why Americans are resistant to doing something about climate change, Mr. Attenborough opined:
Attenborough said he thought the US’s attitude towards climate change and the environment was not just because of politics, but because of the country’s history. “[It’s] because they’re a pioneer country. There has been the wild west, the western frontier… that’s still there, you see it in the arms business, the right for everyone to bear arms. It’s part of the pioneer stuff that you’ve [Americans] grown up with.”
Righteo, chap. Perhaps our history would be different if not for the fact that your ancestors got a might pissy, shall we say, around my ancestor’s assertion of their independence?
The first time someone mentions something is “nearing completion”, you can bet it isn’t. Consider the claim by some neuro-scientists, “We’re closing in on how the human brain works.” Uh huh, sure.
* Via Slashdot.
Years ago (less so recently) I participated in discussions on an Internet newsgroup, now defunct. There I saw certain quixotic libertarians argue, supposedly on principle, that they would never a visit a national park. So far as I can recall, their reasoning was that the government ought not to own any land, all land ought to be privately owned, and since the government has violated this “ought” by asserting eminent domain over national park land, they will therefore not visit a national park. Fearing, I suppose, the cognitive dissonance that would arise in them if they enjoyed an experience they knew involved a violation of a fundamental ought of proper human action, namely, taking something, land in this case, by force. (Never mind that history records no examples to the contrary).
I was pretty quixotic myself at the time. Many who know me would say I still am. Nevertheless, the above reasoning bothered me then, and still does. Probably because I like national parks, not because they’re “national,” along with everything that entails, but because there’s cool stuff to see there; I enjoy nature. Nothing unprincipled about that. Would I prefer to hand over my entrance fee to a private property owner rather than a park ranger, sure, I suppose, but that’s not the way things Is. The way things is, is that the government has claimed ownership to these lands, and if I want to see the land I have to pay the government. (Even if you don’t want to see the land, if you pay income tax you pay anyway, but forget about that for now).
So what’s a Red Rocks lovin’ libertarian supposed to do? Forgo the pleasure of observing natural wonders? That’s inconsistent with my moral imperative to do things that make me happy. So no, even while I happen to live in a world that arguably isn’t as it ought to be, it is what it is, and there’s nothing practically I can do about that in the margins of an individual life.
Oddly, what set me to thinking about this was a short, well-reasoned article re: What libertarians really think about big corporations.
Already, the usual fallacies have resurfaced. If you don’t want the government to run education, you must be against education. If you don’t want the government to run healthcare, you must not want people to get healthcare.
This misunderstanding is often summed up with comments like, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with an ‘every man for himself’ society.” This springs from the absurd assumption that human beings never confer benefits upon one another except when forced to do so at gunpoint.
