A Pilgrim’s Digression

The results of grandma’s CT scan were not heartening. The tumor has grown; her doctor suggested that she try another form of chemotherapy, and yesterday she had her first treatment.

I called her around 4:30, and knew when I heard her speak that the news wasn’t good. She sounded different, tired. After she told me the results, I said, “You sound more tired than usual. Is this new treatment worse than the other chemo?”

She said no, that the treatment is actually easier than before, taking only two hours instead of the usual four to five. She said she has some chest congestion she can’t get rid of which has made her tired. The doctor said it was just an ordinary cold, however.

I asked about the side effects of the new chemo. She said the only thing the doctor mentioned is that she can’t drink any cold beverage for about a week after treatment. She has to drink liquids at room temperature or warmer. Apparently cold liquids will results in a kind of long term brain freeze that, as you can imagine, would be pretty uncomfortable. Grandpa made the joke that she will no longer be able to drink cold chocolate; it will have to truly be hot chocolate.

Grandma said that what she was really going to miss is ice cream. She and grandpa have made a habit of going out for ice cream in the evening, and now she won’t be able to do that, at least not the first week after treatment. Since her chemo is every two weeks, that gives her a window of about a week to indulge, but the threat of a painful side effect might make it difficult to enjoy her treat even when she knows she should be safe.

We didn’t talk long. She seemed glad when I asked her about the weather, and she talked a little about grandpa’s vegetable garden and all the good beans they are getting. No tomatoes just yet. Maybe by the end of the month.

Finally, as we were saying goodbye, I said, “Well I am glad you are continuing treatment. You have to fight.”

She said, “Yes, but you know it’s just something we have to accept. I’m not going to get better.”

It. Accept it.

True enough, but it’s like consenting to live with the person who you know is going to murder you one day.

I slept reasonably well last night. I still woke up about every hour, but was able to go back to sleep easily. Then I woke up about a half hour before the alarm went off, and I didn’t go back to sleep. But I don’t feel too bad, today. Just normal. About average. I don’t remember my dreams.

At the bus stop last week, I found a little pink Croc, probably this one. It’s infant-size, and I thought, “Someone will miss that.” So I hung it from its strap on a screw on the back of the bus stop sign.

Today, it was lying in the grass. I picked it up and put it on the curb. Maybe the pink will catch someone’s eye as they drive by, but maybe not. It’s a very small shoe.

If not, I’ll get to see how long it remains on the curb. I am betting it will only last until winter, and then the first snow will cover it, and a snowplow will bury it even more with the sooty ice scraped from the street, and then it will either be swept away by the street cleaners or washed away in the dirty winter rain.

My bad dreams seems to be spilling over into my life at home on weekends. I slept poorly roughly half of the time I was home this weekend, not always because of bad dreams. I am easily awakened now, for reasons I don’t understand. Also, I seem unable to fall into a deep enough sleep. Deep enough to dream, but then I wake up frequently in the night, and sometimes I have difficulty going back to sleep.

This afternoon, I lay down and took a nap around a quarter of two. I woke up within fifteen minutes, having had another nightmare. In this dream, I received a phone call from someone who sounded like a great aunt. I assumed she was calling to ask me how my grandma was doing.

Grandma has been much on my mind this weekend, because she went for a CT scan last week and the results are supposed to be in today. Whether or not she continues treatment for her cancer is dependent on the result of these periodic tests.

I have been putting off calling her today, because I am not sure I want to know the news. It’s been a year since her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. How much longer can she reasonably live?

Anyway, in the dream, I talk to this person who I assume is a relative. I tell her I have not called grandma, and in my head I feel guilty because I haven’t called.

Finally, as the other person talks, I begin to detect oddities in the voice and in what she is saying. She seems to be repeating what I say, for the most part, not adding anything to the conversation.

I ask, “This is Aunt Mary Ann, right?”

There is silence on the other end. Then the voice says, menacingly, “Subtle. Very smooth.”

And she hangs up.

In the dream, I have this sickening feeling that this person knows something, or is going to hurt me in some way because I talked to her like a family member.

Probably, the dream is no more than an expression of guilt over not calling my grandma today. I need to do that and get it out of the way.

But what about my other nightmares? I had a therapy session today, but forgot to mention my sleep problems. I did talk about grandma and my feelings over her situation extensively, however.

I mentioned how I felt when I went to my great-grandma’s funeral at the beginning of the month, how it seemed like an eerie preview of the funeral to come. In retrospect, it almost seems like a nightmare itself, right down to the way my grandpa and his brothers kind of made light of their mother’s death by only postponing their fishing trip long enough to put their mother in the ground.

I know that puts a harsh angle on their actions, but as I told my therapist, the whole thing seemed rather surreal, not like a funeral at all. And I was left wondering, how is grandpa going to act when my grandma dies? Will he go fishing then, too?

My therapist didn’t say anything, other than to repeat back to me what I’d said I felt. Sometimes I feel like I’m in echo chamber. I wish I had one male friend who lived close by, with whom I could just go out and drink and talk. But this isn’t exactly the kind of thing men talk about when drinking…”Oh, my grandma’s dying…I’m afraid I’ll cry at her funeral, and no one in my family ever cries.”

But I’ve got a therapist. I’m going to see him again in two weeks. I’m thinking about scheduling my next appointment for one week later, and seeing him every week for awhile, until I start to feel like I’m getting a better grip on things.

I’m going back to Washington tonight. Here’s hoping for a good night’s sleep.

Whenever I see a man wearing a pink shirt, the theme from Miami Vice always starts playing in my head. I think it was Don Johnson who first popularized pink in men’s fashion back in the eighties.

I went out to lunch today and saw not one but two young men in khakis and pink dress shirts, walking down the sidewalk together along with three other men. I don’t even know if the term yuppie applies anywhere in modern culture, anymore, but that’s what I thought of: yuppies named Brad and Chip, blond hair and pink dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up. All they needed was a sweater draped over their back, the arms tied around their neck.

I see a lot of pink shirts on men, and I wonder what it means. Or maybe the better question, as my therapist would say, is what does it mean to me?

(more…)

I slept badly again last night. I’m not sure what’s wrong lately. I sleep fine at home, but when I return to Washington I don’t sleep.

Last night, I even got to bed early, at 10:40. I turned over and over, one side to the next. I got up and got an extra pillow to make myself more comfortable. I lay there for what seemed an eternity.

I kept thinking I could hear thumping bass, as if someone were sitting outside the house in their car, playing hip hop on the stereo. After awhile, I decided the sound was coming from the air conditioner.

When I finally did get to sleep, I had nightmares that woke me up. I don’t dream much anymore, so it is worth recording what my nightmares were about.

In one, my son is kidnapped by a psychopath who keeps him in a dungeon in a dog kennel and forces him to watch as he murders other victims. The killer is intent on raising my son to his specifications and shows him pornography and talks to him for hours about the history of serial killers, and he grows furious when to comfort himself, B. starts singing a Carly Simon song he listens to at night when going to sleep: “Into White.” One day, he drugs B.’s food and, while he is unconscious, cuts his tongue out so he can’t sing anymore.

Meanwhile, the authorities seem indifferent. The police don’t organize a search. No one steps forward to offer a reward. Detectives have other cases they are working on, so they only get to our son’s case in the late afternoon when they are tired and ready to quit. The FBI isn’t interested in helping at all. Dateline turns down an offer to interview us.

“Will there be a Clarice Starling come to save you?” The killer asks my son. “No, I don’t think so.”

I woke up from this nightmare around two AM and then lay there reliving it for who knows how long. When I went back to sleep, I dreamed that my elderly landlady had died and I had to find a new residence. I moved in with a seemingly pleasant man and his wife, who actually have their tenants unwittingly sign a life insurance policy along with the lease. Then they butcher them. This nightmare ends with me locked in my room and the man and woman coming up the stairs for me.

In between all these bad dreams, I kept waking up periodically simply due to the lightness of my sleep. As the air conditioner cooled the room, the wooden doors in the room would crack or there would be a popping sound in the walls. Sometimes it actually sounded as if someone had opened the bedroom door, and I’d wake with a start. My groggy sleeplessness also brought on a headache which lingers even now, several hours later.

Hour after hour passed like this. I’d wake up and look at the clock, seemingly always in hour increments: 12:10, 1:00, 2:08, 3:12. Until finally I got up to get ready for work around 4:30.

What a dreadful night. I can only hope I’ll be tired enough to sleep better tonight. And may it be a dreamless sleep.

It’s one of those mornings where the alarm clock must have been going off for ten minutes before the sound penetrated my sleeping brain. I was in a deep freeze of undreaming sleep. When I finally did come out of my coma, I rolled out of bed into the morning dark and staggered around my room trying to get my bearings.

What time? What place? What am I supposed to do?

I try to gather up the things I will need in the bathroom. Towel, contact solution and contacts, toothbrush. I end up standing, swaying in the dark, trying to get straight in my mind whether I have everything.

Ugh, my head.

Fifteen years ago, this might have been the morning after a night on the town. Instead, it is the result of playing World of Warcraft until ten past midnight, then not being able to fall asleep until one A.M. Then the alarm went off at what time?

I look at the clock for the third time. 4:50 A.M. But I know that’s not right. I always set the clock fifteen to twenty minutes fast, so that I feel like I am saving time. It sounds silly, especially when I have barely slept and I’m standing there looking at the clock thinking “It’s really 4:35 A.M. Can I go back to sleep?”

No, I can’t.

I hadn’t done this in awhile. I thought the addiction was over, after more than a month of being able to quit playing and go to bed at 10:30. But last night, I went on an impromptu Karazhan raid with some people I hadn’t played with for a long time, and we had so much fun. There was Frenchy and his wife, the two Quebecoise who everyone loves to hear speak over Vent. There was the middle-aged, retired guy from Vancouver…who plays a petite, pretty female Draenei mage. There was the newbie, our novice Paladin healer we took along just to gear him up out of greens and blues. There was our guild leader, female cancer survivor and tree Druid, never letting our health fall much below 5%.

It was a wonderful time. We almost could have made a Karathon of it, running the whole instance, but we started too late. So we went through Shade of Aran, then did the Chess event just for kicks (and to try to get our Paladin the shield that drops). Then we all quit, dead tired.

And this is the morning after. I feel like crap, but am happy as can be.

(more…)

Even after refilling my Wellbutrin prescription this weekend, I forgot to bring my pills back to Washington with me when I left on Monday night. My therapist gave me a suggestion a long time ago when I told him I was having trouble remembering to pack my pills: “Leave them in a place where you can’t help but see them before you leave. Don’t put them in the medicine cabinet.”

Well, that worked well…until I put them in the medicine cabinet for no particular reason, this weekend.

I’ve spent the better part of the past two days carefully evaluating my emotions and thoughts for signs of declining seratonin levels. There’s a line from a Bruce Cockburn song that keeps running through my head:

“Trying to keep the latent depression from crystalizing…”

It’s hard to know if what I am experiencing is a crystalizing depression or not, though. I often wonder–sometimes aloud to my therapist–whether the medicine even works at all, or if it merely acts as a placebo upon the brain. He reassures me it does work, and that I need to be diligent about taking my wonderful pill every day.

I will say that therapy itself has been great at helping me recognize the thought patterns of my depression, and helping me to dispel them before they do crystalize. I noticed this morning that my thoughts were starting to run in circles of ever increasing negativity. Previously, I would not have recognized what was happening, and then when too late, I would not have known what to do about it.

As I have described it to my therapist, it’s not just that I have negative thoughts–about my grandma dying of cancer, for example–but that the negative thoughts become obsessive and repetitive, and then I translate the depressing thought of someone I love dying into obsessive, repetitive thoughts about my own death. I start thinking, over and over, about the worthlessness of my life, the pointlessness of getting up every day, the hopeless years ahead of me…and round and round I go, all day, the clouds growing darker and darker until finally I go home to my rented room and to bed, where I find some small relief in a dreamless sleep.

I see the pattern now. I didn’t really see it before; or perhaps better put: I didn’t question the validity of the pattern.

The way I break it is simple: I tell myself, “That’s just the disease. Ignore it.” Then I try to think about something else. This morning, for example, I could feel myself beginning to chase the tail of my depression, the pessimism and self-disgust building steadily as if there were someone following me, loading a wheelbarrow of bricks onto my hunched back, one brick at a time. So instead I started thinking about bringing in the trash cans.

Monday afternoon, when I was still on my medicine, I went out to bring in the trash cans and the recycling bin, and it was a lovely afternoon and I had the dog with me on a leash, and I just had this overwhelming feeling of good will and rightness. It all stemmed from the simple thought, “I am bringing in the trash cans. I am bringing in the recycling bin.”

The only explanation I have for it, really, is that at that moment it felt good to be right there in that place doing something simple; something not particularly productive, but something necessary, in a small way. I had no other thoughts at the time, just a feeling of well-being that I couldn’t pin down.

Since then, I’ve thought to myself, “Well, it’s the pleasure of domesticity that I felt.” To be sure, there can great pleasure in domestic chores. Sometimes I think about my family, my wife, my son, our house, the dog, the cat, even the bills, and I am overwhelmed by this feeling of peace.

I don’t know if that was what I was feeling Monday, a feeling of peace brought about by doing something domestically necessary. But it felt good, and I accepted it for what it was: a small gift from my subconscious, or perhaps from God though I tend to be skeptical that God deigns to intervene even in my moods; but it was a gift, nonetheless, and something to think about on darker days.

I often think about a conversation I had with my landlady here in Washington, probably two or three years ago. She is 94 now, so she was in her early nineties at the time, and she asked me how old I was. I was depressed at the time, and I told her I was 30 or 31 or whatever, and added that I felt much older.

She looked at me as if I were a fool, which I was, really. She was lying there in bed, ancient-looking and ancient-feeling, having out-lived nearly every member of her immediate family except her three children, and I was telling her I felt old at age 30.

“I’d give anything to be 30 again,” she said. “My husband would be alive. My children would be home again. I could go out when I felt like it, work around the house, take the bus into town and go to a museum, and I’d come home and we’d have dinner as a family like we used to. Afterwards, maybe we’d have some friends over and my husband and I would play bridge with them.”

She looked teary-eyed, probably remembering exactly what it felt like to be that age again, and especially to have so many of the dead alive again–her husband, friends, family, all the people who had gone before over the past century.

“It’s awful to grow as old as me,” she said…as she often says.

“Don’t grow old!” she sometimes commands me.

A truism isn’t called a truism because its false. No matter how obvious it may be, it’s not a falsehood: we don’t appreciate what we’ve got until it’s gone.

So when I feel the latent depression begin to crystalize now, I try to think about what I’ve got. I think about my wife, my son, my dog, my home. I think about how good it feels to come home on Thursday night and kiss my wife, kiss my son, and go through the routine of unpacking my things, putting my dirty clothes in the washer, making sure the pets have food, maybe taking the dog out for a walk. I try not to think about how my son is growing or how he just turned seven, because that will turn my thoughts the other way–to how old I sometimes feel, and down that road lies the darkness.

And after Monday, I will try to grab hold of that feeling of peace and joy I felt bringing in the trash cans and recycling bin. Simple pleasures can sometimes be as good as a simple pill.

I always feel cheated when I begin reading a book, only to discover it is an abridgment.

If I am considering whether to buy a book at the bookstore, and then I read on the cover “Abridged Edition,” I put the book back on the rack feeling something like disgust.

A couple weeks ago, after finishing Camus’ The Fall, I checked out the most recent biography of the writer from the library. Albert Camus: A Life, by Olivier Todd, translated from French by Benjamin Ivry. I began reading the preface, and discovered that the author had decided to abridge his biography, leaving out certain parts that he believed would not be of interest to American readers.

I think anticipation of a stupid audience is perhaps the most frustrating reason I’ve come across for an abridgment. If I am sufficiently educated to know about Albert Camus, as well as read his work; and if I then demonstrate enough perspicacity to go even further and check out Camus’ biography from the library, why should the author of that biography presume I am an imbecile and not sufficiently cosmopolitan enough to take an interest in specifically French elements of Camus’ life?

I am reading the biography anyway. Perhaps there are other, complete biographies available in English, but this one will do for now. Still, I have never come across a scholarly biography in which the author presumes his readers really don’t want to read every sentence that he wrote.

Most often, however, I come across works that were abridged, not with the author’s permission, but by an over-scrupulous editor who presumes not only what a hypothetical audience wants to read, but what the deceased or incapacitated author would want this hypothetical audience to read.

After reading that Camus was a great admirer of Kafka, of whom I am also enamored, I picked up my Schocken Classics edition of Kafka’s diaries. I have had this book for years, dipping into it occasionally. I like the heavy bond paper of the cover; it feels almost like brown paper. And I like the font used for the title and other elements of the cover and binding. A book is all of a piece, you know, and I often find myself most dedicated to books that look and feel a certain way, as much as books with words that have great meaning for me. The Kafka diaries were both: a good looking book with words inside that meant a lot to me Like most such works, however, the diaries do not lend themselves to reading straight through, so I never made a dedicated reading of it. Thus I never read the postscript.

In reading the book, I came across the following fragment of a sentence, “The seamstresses in the downpour of rain.” There was a superscript numeral 2 at the end of the sentence, indicating an End Note. So I went looking for it, and instead found a “Postscript.” Upon reading it, I was disappointed to discover that this book I have owned for years–indeed, this book I regarded as a treasure among my books–is in fact an abridged edition.

The editor, Max Brod (the friend and literary executor of Kafka), had taken it upon himself to decide what Kafka would have wanted published, and what he would have rather kept secret. And yet he writes, “The text of the Diaries is as complete as it was possible to make it.” Oh really?

“A few passages, apparently meaningless because of their fragmentary nature, are omitted. In most instances no more than a few words are involved. In several (rare) cases I omitted things that were too intimate, as well as scathing criticism of various people that Kafka certainly never intended for the public.”

In other words, he took the red pencil to all the good parts.

That is perhaps too harsh. Yet I find such editorial decisions more than a bit annoying. It is likely that Kafka intended that none of his diaries ever be published. Therefore, to single out certain bits as especially unfitting for publication due to some perceived authorial intention is a bit disingenuous. The editor makes his excisions for his own reasons, then blames the author for his own rather prudish judgment.

It is not merely that we live in an age where the “intimate” details of a person’s life are no longer expected to be kept private, but that when we pick up a biography or watch a profile of a person on the news, we expect to be given the whole package, nothing left out.

One of the reasons I picked up the most recent biography of Camus was because one expects that more recent versions will not spare us from the unsavory parts of the writer’s life, if there are unsavory parts. If I picked up a biography of a favorite poet of mine, Philip Larkin, only to read on the book jacket that the author had censored the bits about Larkin’s penchant for looking at pornography, I would toss the book down in annoyance.

Give me the story of the whole person, as best you can, or give me nothing at all.

To tell us that there are “intimate” parts you are leaving out only whets the appetite and results in an imagination gone wild. On one page of Kafka’s diaries, he writes the sentence, “I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.”

Was this all he wrote on the subject? It is certainly all that Brod chose to publish, thus we have to decide whether or not Brod censored something he deemed improper. I do not want to read a book perpetually in doubt about the honesty of the words before me.

Nor at this point do I wish to debate with these modern adherents of dry scholasticism in our Universities who write criticism on the subject of whether there is ever anything “honest” about the words a writer puts on paper, much as their ancestors asked how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. Yes, all words are but a simulacrum, not to be trusted. I’d just like to know whether Kafka frequented brothels, and if so what he thought and felt about it, insofar as he put those thoughts and feelings on paper. That is all.

Perhaps even if Kafka did indicate that he was a patron of brothels, that would be a lie. I don’t know. I don’t particularly care. That is not the kind of honesty I am interested in. I want the author’s words, unfiltered through the medium of a scrupulous editor like Brod, or a condescending biographer like Olivier Todd. Let me make up my own mind about such things.

I don’t mean to reduce the argument to a matter of Catholicism versus Protestantism, yet that is essentially what it comes down to: do we readers need someone to interpret the text for us, to the point of deciding what we will read and what we mustn’t read? Do we need someone to intercede on our behalf to the author? Or do we read for ourselves and make our own judgment?

Before they die, authors ought to make arrangements for the proper dispensation of their works, much as they make arrangements for the interment or cremation of their body. Authors who make no such arrangement are like the atheist who, leaving no will, ends up on display in a church, prior to burial in hallowed ground.

But then once dead, we all make what we will of the deceased and his remains, don’t we? So often we see the corpse in the coffin and think, or even say aloud, “That looks nothing like him.” The corpse has been made up to look more alive than in life; yet it usually seems even more waxen and dead. Thus, perhaps there is nothing to be done about editorial embalming after an author is dead. It’s just the way of the world.

And perhaps I am wrong to feel cheated, when I read that an author’s diaries have been edited a little too closely for my taste, or that some parts have been left out of his biography. Yet I can’t help but feel that way. Sometimes I think that my taste did not mature enough in the halls of academia to truly understand these matters. I still read with a child-like mentality.

I can even remember when I was a child, my maternal grandmother subscribed to the Reader’s Digest and would regularly receive boxes of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, as they were called. I read some of them, until I learned what “condensed” meant. Even at a young age, I felt abused that some abstract editor at the Digest made the decision to give me only so much as he or she felt I needed to know.

So even today, I often find myself looking first thing for some sign that a book has been edited or abridged or condensed. It is perhaps a pointless habit, but reassuring myself that I am not reading someone else’s version of the writer’s work, that these are the writer’s words and only the writer’s words, at least puts my mind at ease. Reading is for me a communion with an unseen, unknown authorial deity. I want to know what that author wrote, not what some priestly scribe in a University or publisher’s office thinks the author would want me to know.

Although I have been rather quiet on the political front lately, I am still attentive to Presidential politics and want to make some comments on how I see the political season shaking out at this stage.

First of all, Ariana Huffington stole my idea that John McCain looks more and more like Bob Dole every time I see him on TV.  Both men were distinguished veterans and POWs, of course, but more than that I see a similarity in how both men are campaigning.  As I remember it, Dole had an angry contempt for Bill Clinton that did not serve him well in the election.  Dole’s only memorable line from 1996 was the plea, “Where’s the outrage?” in regards to Clinton’s reputed misdoings.

I detect a similar contempt from McCain and his cohorts in regards to Obama.  John McCain probably believes he is correct to repeatedly reference the Democrat candidate as “naive”, mock his “change we can believe in” slogan, and generally express disbelief that anyone would take this one-term Senator seriously as a Presidential candidate.  However, those tactics did not serve Clinton well when she used it against him.  What I find unbelievable is that inasmuch as the Obama/Clinton primary season was a ferocious war, John McCain seems like he didn’t learn its lessons.

And if McCain really wanted a history lesson, he could go back even further than 1996 to 1992, when a young, relatively inexperienced Governor from Arkansas toppled a popular sitting President and distinguished war hero.  I remember a certain contempt for Bill Clinton emanating from the George H.W. Bush camp, as well, back in those days.  Specifically, I recall the elder Bush repeatedly looking at his watch during an apparently boring debate with Clinton over domestic policy.  It would be an understatement to say that the President’s chance of winning was hurt by his impatience and disregard for the candidate and issues.

Thus I believe there is a road Republicans are better off leaving untraveled this year.   Republicans need an issue, and not a co-opted Democrat issue such as “change,” but something that is bigger than either candidate and that Americans, too, will come to see as transcendent.  Rush Limbaugh suggested yesterday that domestic oil drilling might be that issue, with gas prices continuing to rise.  I don’t know what specifically the issue might be, but “the vision thing” (or lack of it) coupled with a sneering contempt for one’s opponent, will kill McCain’s chances in this election.

That said, there is also a road Democrats must not go down.  There is a post at the Huffington Post today titled  McCain’s Secret Questionable Record.  The record referred to is McCain’s military record, and the HuffPo article is (in my opinion) nothing more than an attempt to smear McCain the way so many Democrats have been smeared by Republicans, John Kerry most notable among them.  Down this road lies a forfeiture of the moral high ground and a cold-hearted return to Rovian politics at its worst.

Democrats do not want to go down that road.  For one thing, Democrats do not fit the role of judge and jury of someone’s character.  They look petty when attacking someone on moral or character, and it is character, not wrong-doing, that is at the heart of this hit piece on McCain.  The author accuses the New York Times of publishing a “flattering lie” about McCain refusing a promotion to rear Admiral, yet this story did not come from McCain but from a former Secretary of the Navy.  Whether true or not, it is Secretary Lehman’s lie.

The article then goes on to speculate about McCain’s unreleased military records and what secrets they might reveal.  Was McCain given preferential treatment by his commanding officers because of his father and grandfather’s positions in the Navy?  Did his Vietnamese captors give him preferential treatment?  The latter charge in particular seems hardly credible, given the story of how his torturers “broke” McCain and forced him to sign one of their propaganda statements.  McCain was so badly beaten (his captors even re-broke one of his arms) that following this period of torture, another POW had to feed him, dispose of his waste, and tend to his wounds for a period of time.  If that’s preferential treatment, I don’t want to know what the North Vietnamese did to men whose fathers were not Admirals.

Did McCain crash too many planes?  Was he a hell-raiser whose antics were overlooked because of his father?  Was he stubborn, foolish, arrogant, superior-acting around his fellow POWs?

Heck, one might as well throw in the following (these are my satirical questions, not the author’s): did he use drugs?  Was he a regular customer of Vietnamese whores?  Did he have a venereal disease (remember that golden oldie about Bill Clinton?)?  Did he ever go AWOL?  Assault an officer?  Use a racial epithet for a Vietnamese person?  Was he ever arrested by MPs for being drunk and disorderly?

As the author says, all of these questions and more could be answered if McCain would release all of his military records, undeleted and complete.

Don’t go this route, Democrats.  Don’t do it.  It wasn’t right when Republicans did it to John Kerry, and it’s not right when Democrats do it to John McCain.

I am going to raise a question that will hopefully spark a little debate. As most of you know, I rent a room in the home of an elderly lady where I live for the three days a week I work in Washington. This week, her son installed my air conditioner, a brand new window unit that cools the room down marvelously. Now for the question:

Is it more energy efficient to leave the AC on low while I am at work, or should I turn it off?

I ask because I have been leaving it on, but my landlady (or her daughter, who also lives in the home) comes into my room and turns it off while I am at work.

Now, I admit there is a selfish component to this question. I want to leave the AC on during the day so that when I come home from work, I have a pleasant, cool room in which to relax. Instead, when I come home the room is sweltering, and there is only one window I can open and it’s plugged by the turned off air conditioner.

The house does not have central air, and there are air conditioners only in the bedrooms. The windows are never opened. In fact most of the windows, including one in my room, cannot be opened at all, even if I wanted to.  So it’s not like I can relax somewhere else while my room cools down.

But I realize I don’t pay the energy bill. Therefore this AC thing is something I am going to have to live with. I suspect it is the old woman’s daughter who is turning off the AC, because I’ve never had this problem before, and the daughter only just moved in a few weeks ago. However, again I don’t pay the bill, my rent is very low ($250 per month), and I am resigned to living with it.

I just want to know, for my own satisfaction, who do you think is right? Does it cost more to leave the AC on but set to Low, or does it cost more to turn it off, then re-cool the room when I come home from work? Keep in mind it takes at least four hours of cooling before the room is comfortable, yet still not fully cooled. The furniture and walls in the room literally seems to absorb the heat, then radiate it back into the room for hours after I come home.

I’ve had this same debate with my family. My grandparents, who have central air, are notorious among the younger generation in my family for leaving the AC off during the day, then turning it on in the evening after the house has built up a substantial amount of heat. Then at some point in the early morning, they get up and turn it off again and open windows.

I’ve spent the night at their house and gone to bed with the AC on, but woke up in the morning sweating because one of them has turned the AC off during the night.

My Mom is even worse. She rarely even turns the AC on because in her opinion, “it makes the heat feel worse when you go outside.” Money isn’t really the issue, because she’s on a budget plan with her electric company. What’s more, she doesn’t even run the AC in her car! She just has a prejudice against running the AC.

My opinion is that some people from previous generations have this attitude towards AC that it is somehow sinful to be comfortable. I think they take pride in suffering in the heat. For others, perhaps they disdain AC because of the purported environmental impact; thus they suffer for the environment.

I don’t know the reason why. I just want to know whether I am right in wanting to leave my AC in my room during the workday. I turn it off on Thursday morning, as I did today, since I am not coming back until Monday night; therefore I don’t totally disregard energy conservation.

It would just be really sweet to come home to a cool bedroom after a tiring day of work.

The past two or three weeks, I’ve been reading The Fall by Albert Camus. The book is quite short, not even 150 pages, so it makes ideal reading for the half hour or so I spend commuting on the train, weekday mornings. It has also served to remind me what I once appreciated about this author, whose novel The Stranger I read, probably while I was still in high school: brevity, wit, and a pungent ability to speak painful truth.

I do not mean this post to be a critical appraisal of The Fall, however. Such a thing is beyond me, at this stage in life. I merely mean to give an overview of the book and express what I appreciate about it.

The book is, on the surface, about two men who meet in a bar in Amsterdam. The story, such as there is one, is told in first person monologue by one of the men, Clamence.

Whether or not Camus intended it, the name Clamence suggests to me the French American word, “commence,” and indeed I do think we are supposed to view Clamence as a sort of prototypical human. In that regard, Camus portrays us all as pretty vile creatures. But that should come as no surprise, given Camus’ other works.

Clamence is a judge, or “judge penitent” as he calls himself, presumably meaning that he feels some regret about his status as a judge of men. “Judge” does not seem to indicate the same thing it means to Americans, however; the book suggests that in France, it must mean something closer to what we would call a “defense lawyer.”

Yet though his social position is quite high, and he is viewed by other people as the moral arbiter his profession would suggest, in reality his life is despicable. The central event in the novel gives just a taste of the man’s selfishness: while walking along the quais of Paris one evening, he passes a young woman standing on a bridge and looking down at the water. He passes by, and as he does so, he hears a splash and a scream behind him. He turns, considers diving in after her, but decides the water would be too cold. And so he walks on.

The scene reverberates as if the water of the Seine were still rippling outward from the young woman’s suicide, until the very end of the novel. In the final sentences, Clamence remarks that sometimes he wishes for another chance to save her:

A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose…that we should be taken literally? We’d have to go through with it. Brr…! The water’s so cold! But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!

Inasmuch as the title both represents the girl falling into the river, and the Fall (of Man), we are all Clamence, choosing selfishness over selflessness, even when selflessness would cost us little (a cold, wet dip in the river), but save another’s life. The odd “fortunately!” with which the novel ends suggests to me, perhaps incorrectly (but certainly ironically), an old idea that sticks in my head from my reading of John Milton long ago: the concept of “the fortunate fall.” The fall of Man was “fortunate” because it brought about the greater good of his salvation.

In the case of Clamence, the concept is turned on its head. What possible greater good could come from Clamence NOT saving the girl’s life? The only possible answer is that he stands as an “exemplar” as he says, a negative portrait of humankind for us to avoid. However, I don’t think Camus is quite so patronizing as to suggest that his character is to be viewed as a counter-instructional model.

But as I said, this is not a critical appraisal of the novel. Suffice it to say that Clamence lives in a state of debauchery, vice, and crime, as do many of his clients, yet he gives the impression of uprightness. He comments that he “never accepted a sou” for the defense of a poor person. It was that sense of being better than, what he calls “being above” people that most defines his character. He was charitable not for charity’s sake, but for the way it increased his virtue in his own eyes and in the opinion of onlookers.

Although he might disclaim it, he clearly feels overwhelming guilt, but not being a believer he has no way to absolve himself of his sins. That lack of hope for salvation is the quintessential existentialist predicament.

The novel is ripe with witty aphorisms and anecdotes. Indeed sometimes it reads almost as a collection of such bright baubles, rather than as a novel with a tightly woven plot. Allow me to share just a few of my favorites.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. [6]

To bring that up to date for modern readers, I’d change it to “he fornicated and read the blogs.” Another quote:

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent, cher monsieur. [41]

And another, one that I do not believe we are supposed to take as “truth,” but does illustrate the character of Clamence:

Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air. Commanding is breathing–you agree with me?…The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back.

And an example of an anecdote which does have the painful ring of truth about it.

“You’ll pay for this!” a daughter said to her father who had prevented her from marrying a too well groomed suitor. And she killed herself. But the father paid for nothing. He loved fly-casting. Three Sundays later he went back to the river—to forget, as he said. He was right; he forgot.

This compact, pithy little book is filled with examples such as I quoted above. It’s well worth a read, and I daresay someone with the ability to read faster than myself should make short work of it in an hour or two. It begs re-reading, though, which is sort of what I have been doing here, in this blog post. Now, I need to fornicate and read my blogs.