Archive for January, 2012

When I was practicing medicine and saw everything going down the tubes, I got out. It all started when a poweful BUREAUCRAT told me I had to do things the way THEY wanted me to, not the way I had always done it, not the way I was TAUGHT to do it, not the way I KNEW would work…the way THEY wanted it…didn’t take a Ouija board for me to decide. Our house was paid for and we had enough to live on…so we got the hell out of Dodge. And…you know what? It hasn’t been nearly as tough as I feared. With my lady always there to support me…even when she was frightened, I KNOW we did the right thing, and I can only love her more for what she’s meant to me during such a disturbing and difficult time.
The sad thing is…afterward, I realized I had been practicing medicine at the pathetic end of medicine’s golden age in America…and on Earth, the end of good and promising things. Think about THAT, you overweight guys, or you people with stains in your genome or a bad family history. Today’s merciless actuaries consider you EXPENDABLE! Insurance companies, medicare toadies, government bureaucrats, and the tyranny of their paid, true-believer “nurse co-ordinators”, will see to it you haven’t a prayer. I hold those nurses in greatest contempt…traitors to a beautiful, promising, and incredibly useful profession. If you ask me, those women (and a few men) have a LOT to answer for.
Almost singlehandedly, they stepped in line, sat down, picked up their earpieces, and killed a magnificent and successful health care process.  I’ll leave it to history to tell them what they’ve done, but to tell the truth, most of them will probably be dead long before that. I bet they got a lot of perks and raises, and in the eyes of their overlords, I’m sure they earned them. Killing a system isn’t easy, but they figured out just how to do it…with a LOT of oversight, I imagine. I’m sure the most enthusiastic got ENORMOUS bonuses, but they better pray they don’t develop a debilitating disease. Even those huge rewards won’t be enough…and the system they and their masters left in place won’t cover it.
These days I’m also beginning to believe I’ve lived through the end of America as the shining beacon on a hill. When I think of how many people DIED to preserve that concept, it sickens me, particularly when I see how many now clamor to suck on the biggest government tit they can find, attach, and keep sucking voraciously no matter what happens, no matter the cost, no matter the debt incurred. Almost all of us live on a budget. We KNOW if we spend more than we take in, there’ll be a reckoning, but that’s only us at the bottom of the political food chain…not governments caught in the endless spiral of ever-increasing, unpaid-for largesse, mostly to cream their opponents in their next election, I suspect.  Just now, I think it’s time for a little Shelley…and Ozymandias…one of my FAVORITE poems.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Most scholars believe Ozymandias was another name for Rameses the Great, who ruled Egypt through at least five generations of his subjects. Absolutely powerful, rich, prolific, and successful, he was revered as a god, but he could NEVER have seen how he, too, was living at the pathetic end of a good thing. After Rameses II, there was a succession of increasingly weaker pharoahs, ultimately leaving the door open to invaders from the north culminating with the ROMANS, the rapacious Romans, who killed Cleopatra, the last pharoah (pharoahette?), locked the whole place down, and sort of kept Egypt as their own personal larder…which they sucked DRY. Old Ozzy didn’t see it coming, but it was out there nonetheless…waiting to destroy what he had built, planned, hoped for, and thought would last FOREVER.
Dazzled by endless reassurances of his primacy, Rameses never saw it, and you know, to me he sounds a lot like those idiots in Washington. Like him, they don’t know or see it, but it’s out there…and IT’S COMING! I’ve lived through the end of so many good things: the end of innocence, the end of trust, the end of social civility, the end of freedom to proclaim your beliefs without scorn, the end of common, proper English, the end of FAMILY as a central, stabilizing hub, the end of excellence as a goal for education, the end of promise, the end of fiscal responsibility…and the end of hope.  The ”lone and level sands” are swirling in; I just pray there’ll be another poet like Shelley somewhere out there in the future to document our fall so eloquently.

First of all…and you gotta understand this…I’m not a RESOLUTION kind of guy. I live in a fluid world, my life a river not a succession of speed bumps, but on January first everybody starts talking about them…and asking you what yours is…like it’s going to make a huge amount of difference to ANYBODY. I’m slowly beginning to realize they’re mostly just nosey people who haven’t made up their minds yet or don’t have the mental wherewithal to do a whole lot more than annoy others.
When they ask, I usually tell them I’m resolving to work more diligently for world peace…like that’s EVER going to happen…but it shuts ‘em up, which was what I had in mind in the first place. Still…late at night with Angel at my feet, my lady at my side, the ceiling fan going full blast, Baxter unconscious somewhere out of sight, and delicious quiet everywhere, I tend to catalog my unfulfilled goals, and you know what? I don’t really have a whole lot of ‘em! I’ve been blessed with an amazingly INTERESTING life so far…and I know it.
Oh, yes, I’d LOVE to clean Gordo’s clock on the disc golf course, and to tell you the truth, I ALMOST did it yesterday. We TIED. For a couple of weeks he’s been beating the crap out of me, so it was incredibly fulfilling for me to see him sweat a little. Of course, my brother, the BIG PRO, wiped the floor with both of us, but Gordo and I learned long ago to IGNORE what HE’S doing…just like we ignore his obscenely low scores. Actually, if it weren’t for us, he wouldn’t be playing recreationally at all. I think he should THANK us because nobody else I know wants to play him for fun.
I guess I gotta start working on trying to DISCIPLINE Baxter, but that’s not really a resolution, more like a necessity. Our problem is…he’s SO adorable we tend to forgive him…WHATEVER he does. This evening when I walked into the bedroom, I found a mountain of sticks, leaves, and other stuff he had found out in the yard, and standing next to it, eyes dancing, tail wagging, he seemed to be saying, “LOOK WHAT I BROUGHT YOU! Isn’t it COOL?” I mean…how can you fault a little guy for something like that?
Of course, when I took it out, he followed me, and when I tossed it into the trash bin, I swear I thought I could see tears in his eyes. He’s a LONG way from quiet walks with me in the evening, and to tell you the truth, they’ll probably NEVER HAPPEN; those are for me and Angel…forever. Maybe…if he EVER calms down, I’ll think about a tandem lead and bring him out with us, but I said THINK…not do! If you knew him, you’d understand.
I’m happy, my lady’s happy, Angel’s happy…and Baxter’s NUTS! Who the hell knows what he considers happy, smiling like that all the time…whatever’s going on? We have a small folding barrier at the garage door, through which we come in from the supermarket. It keeps Baxter from charging at us and getting out, and when we’re at home…if he gets TOO obstreparous…we yell, “Time out!” and put him in that little enclosure.
Lately, he’s been doing it all by himself when he gets too off the wall, but you know…if you can figure out a way IN, you can also figure out a way OUT…and he has. He seems to think fifteen minutes is appropriate punishment, so he stays in there about that long and then calmly strides out. He’s also a big kisser…been watching Angel, I guess. We have a set of “doggie stairs” we set up next to the bed. Our bed is REALLY high, way beyond jumping up on, but when the stairs are in place, it’s constant running up, kissing, cutting up a little, then running back down.
When I’m trying to watch TV in the bedroom and Baxter’s doing his thing, I yell for my lady to come get him down and take the stairs away, but when his route up is gone, he just kind of SITS there staring at me with the saddest look on his face. When Angel’s curled up at the foot of the bed, the ceiling fan’s going, and my electric blanket’s on 1 or 2, I try to ignore him and go to sleep, but if I EVER wake up during the night, he’s STILL down there like one of those Chinese dog statues…just looking up at Shangri La, the forbidden territory. I TOLD you he was cute!
Okay…back to resolutions…I’m a writer who LOVES writing but HATES all the bullshit imbedded in publishing, and editors are WAY UP at the top of my list. You gotta explain EVERYTHING to them, and sometimes…I swear to God…it seems like they haven’t even READ the book they’re editing. They ask, “Why did you say this?” and when I explain it, they say, “Okay…that’s nice.” NICE? But they didn’t understand until I told them? What the hell’s going on here?
I’ve since learned it’s not about QUALITY but MONEY…what will make a bundle and what won’t…and it seems to me I’m kind of on the PUNY end of that equation, at least to those people who publish things. A couple of years ago I told my lady how I felt about all of this, and she said, “You like to write…so write; forget about publishing. Do what you LIKE!” She’s a wise woman and wonderful; I would die for her if I had to…and there was no other way of saving her.
Happily, I wrote like hell…six novels, total…but when I wrote “The Assassin’s Wife,” things changed. I really liked what I had written about Rose, the assassin’s wife, but I made the HUGE mistake of showing it to her. I left the printouts with her in the den and returned to my computer man-space…only hoping for approval, but in a couple of minutes, she invaded my sanctuary. “This is GOOD,” she said. “You GOTTA get this published!” It was a classic OH, SHIT moment.
These days she’s unbelievably interested in what I’m writing. I keep feeding her snippets from time to time…but she LOVES them, too! And…she’s an incredibly smart woman, an ICU nurse with an impeccable scholatic history and a keen eye for good literature…and husbands, I hope. So…it’s come to this. I have to jump back into the meat grinder again, a world peopled by cynics, greed, and diffidence…a scary and predictably frustrating world.
So…what with the new year and all…I’m gonna do it, God help me; it’s my New Year’s resolution…to jump back into the razor-studded maze I hate, mostly to preserve PEACE in my own, personal haven. To tell you the truth, HER liking what I’ve written is enough, but she seems to want more…mostly for ME. She seems to think I’m worth it, and even though she’s slowly pushing me toward the horror I despise, I’m going to roll with it. They never really scared me you know, mostly only pissed me off.
I wrote something somebody I love liked a lot, and as I said years ago on a dreary, rainy January day in Orange, Texas…for better or worse. I’m gonna give it a shot and try to publish “Demon Moss,” set in Louisiana in the nineteen-fifties, and from what I’ve seen on this blog, you guys seem to LOVE stuff about Louisiana. Pray God the rest of the world agrees…and pray God those AWFUL people in the publishing industry agree, too.
I’d be perfectly happy to go on writing and never publishing again, but…you know…my lady, Angel, Baxter, and all that…gotta keep peace at home when you can. I’ll keep you posted.