I expect to die “by my own hand”. I have a tumor or two in my tongue. This may be an indication that there really are gods out there somewhere, and that they have ways of dealing with wise-ass atheists. I was diagnosed with a biopsy in February, 2010. I figured out that I had some sort of cancer during Fall & Winter, 2008. I have been “ready to go” for a couple of years. Two months ago, the examining doctor informed me that by his authority, I’m presently hospice-ready. Now, for some background.
My wife, Jan, found a clot of blood in the toilet when she got home from work, one day last year. My negligence. That was her first clue. Several months later, under the press of some spousal torture (via placing my head in a vise and turning the screw), I blurted out that I thought I probably had cancer. Jan asked me to get an appointment to get it checked out. Some months after that, my own discomfort was finally sufficient to drive me to see a doctor. I’d put it off for so long, partly because I harbor a bone of contempt for the medical industrial complex and its sick care model. Also, I put it off because I couldn’t figure out how or why I should continue to be in the world, considering the toll I take on the environment. Maybe it was time to give back little share of space and resources. If you don’t ever think like this – believe me – some people do. You could say I was depressed a little. Mostly, though, I felt terminally discouraged. I couldn’t figure out any way that I might support myself that didn’t have planet-destroying ramifications. I was stuck. I felt terminally stuck. A hunting and gathering lifestyle would not yield much in my modest middle-class urban neighborhood, especially during the late fall, winter and spring, here in Spokane, Washington. A few sorties of rounding up stray cats & dogs for the stew pot, or digging up dandelion roots in neighbors’ yards, would soon likely get me in trouble with somebody, eventually the law. The potential for getting stuck eating jail food for months on end did not seem an acceptable option. So, I just resigned myself to suffering-along in my own feckless angst until something occurred to me.
I have worked for nearly twenty years as a self-employed arborist. It’s, arguably, enviable work. It can be grimy, physically-demanding, grimy, mentally-challenging, adrenaline-draining, grimy work. But, you’re outdoors, with opportunities to take in a bit of fresh air, sometimes in rather lovely, albeit contrived, landscapes. I’ve met, befriended, and worked with, and been mentored by some smart, talented, inspiring fellow arborists. The best of them are true, rare gems of humanity (some of the rest in the tree business are not folks you’d want to house-sit for you). Occasionally, I’ve had the chance to work for some unusually personable, interesting people. Some clients have been sufficiently well-heeled and generous enough to afford good, careful, thorough work, and thus willing to pay for goodly amounts of it. Back when I first started to work for myself, I asked a respected local arborist who’d been in the tree business for twenty years what kind of money he earned doing tree work. His answer was that he’d at least handled a fair amount of money during his years of working in the trees. I soon-enough found out what he meant. Purchasing trucks, chippers, chain-saws, rope, tackle, tools, permits, gas, diesel, vehicle and contractor’s insurance, telephone advertising, business cards, etc,… and paying business taxes, always seems to provide plenty of places to dump whatever money you might collect. Still, I’m glad I had the chance to work at it for nearly twenty years. Mostly.
Enough of all that.
I’m, preternaturally, a pessimist. Like most “pessimists”, I prefer to think of myself as a “realist”. I’m not sure how I got to be such a pessimist. I think it happened mainly by force of growing up with parents who were both cynical and intelligent. I was pretty skeptical and cynical, by the time I was into my teens. However, unlike most people I’ve known, I never grew out of it. Back in my early twenties, I had a straight-forward plan to make the world a better place. Simple: kill all the bad people. No one took me very seriously, though sometimes they took one step back away from me. My next great-but-simple idea was to just wait for the man-made mayhem of the world to play itself out. I said that all we needed to do was to wait a couple of thousand years, and verily, the world would have become a quieter, saner place. That idea at least seemed far enough out in time that most people who heard it didn’t feel threatened by it, though some still were inclined to to argue against my implication that we were going to exterminate ourselves
It was the Seventies, though, and most people at least had some idea where I was coming from. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, the four students at Kent State University, as well as the embarrassing horror of the war in Vietnam, took a little sparkle off of most people’s sense of how special America was. Add to that the ugly murders and police attacks on on blacks and activist-whites during the civil rights marches of the Sixties. By the Seventies, race riots, white backlash, “white flight” from northern cities, were adding to the stress of an attention-getting energy crunch. A lot of people began to catch on – America just might not be Fairyland Forever. For awhile, Lyndon Johnson’s bullish optimism and bravado had given a few people some cause to believe everything was going to be alright, but by the end of the Vietnam War, optimism was at a low ebb. Nixon and Watergate took their toll on national optimism, too. But, some people seem to thrive best on rose-tinted sunshine, and Motivational Rabble-Rousers like Tony Robbins were out making fortunes, small, and great, selling “positive thinking”. These were what were later referred to as The Go- Go Years. Optimism was a hot seller. I wonder how Old Tony is doing today. Does he still have his own personal helicopter? Sheesh.
After the let-down of the Carter presidency (way too much bald honesty for most Americans) we got eight years of unadulterated wonderful, welcome encouragement from Ronald Reagan. Hollywood good-looks, slathered in “Grecian Formula” and Brylcream, with masterful doses of sunny packaging and rhetorical baloney brought enough of America back to its feet, that his sleazy VP, George H.W. Bush was shoed-into the White House for four years of more baloney, and worse. Among other things, he got us into the atrocious, but efficient-thus-popular First Iraq War, as well as the scandalous Savings & Loan Debacle, a precursor to the financial swindle/meltdown we’ve experienced lately. ”Poppy” Bush must have increased his fortune rather handsomely during those four years. He was born a New England blue blood, though he wasn’t exactly rich, by the standards of the day. He’s become plenty rich by now, somehow.
While Tony Robbins and Old George Bush were, each in his own way, angling to make their next several million bucks, some of us were trying to figure out how we might be able to simply earn a living. From there, I moved on to wondering how I might earn a living without significantly contributing to this planet’s demise. When I hit on the idea of being a “tree surgeon” (something I’d fantasized about since I was eight-years-old), I thought I had caught the great brass ring, at last. All the while, the Earth’s atmosphere was slowly, insidiously, heating up, as silent, invisible CO2 continued to seep, in relentlessly growing molecular moles, out of our cars, helicopters, jet airliners, 18-wheeler trucks, power plants, houses, chainsaws, ski-boats, and lawn mowers.
Off and on, during the late Eighties and early Nineties, I would slump into occasional states of depression. There was, at least, some pay-off, though. It was during this period that I began to figure out an explanation for why so many people in America were depressed, especially women. I concluded that our lives and much of what was going on around us was… depressing. There was actually a good reason why we felt so crappy, and it wasn’t because god hated us, in particular. It was our environment, including our social and political institutions. All sorts of things were unfair, skewed, destructive, and apparently out of control. The game, it became obvious, was rigged. Even if you took the trouble to exercise your fifteen minutes of “democracy” every four years, unless you voted for the well-packaged corporate Cheeze Whiz cracker-puppet, you voted for the loser. As we have seen with the latest presidential election, this time a black guy got to be the the well-packaged corporate Cheese Whiz cracker-puppet. Before the paint cans were even opened to redecorate the West Wing, new President-elect Obama brought some of Wall Street’s most culpable reptiles inside the building, helping to bring down the whole house of cards, while minting, for the Reptile Class, new magnitudes of lucre from the melt-down of the national economy. Cool part of it, for the lizards, was that the new president had brought more of their kind into the inner sanctae of his administration than any president in memory. The “Hope & Change We Can All Believe In!” bubble took a heavy hit right there and then.
Remember? Remember when you first wondered if it might be possible that anyone who scratched and greased his way into the White House might really be there working for the betterment of himself and his backers, rather than working to make America a better, fairer place to live and work? Boy, does that seem like a long time ago!
So, I’m now enjoying the somewhat vaunted status of a dying man. It’s really rather nice. People ask me how I’m doing, and I’m actually convinced that many of them are truly interested in knowing how I am, how I feel, what I’ve been thinking. Friends bring us dinners once in awhile. There are times when I wonder if we can keep up with the volume of incoming food. People treat me with deference. So far so good. I even have a Social Security Slurry check promised to my account every month – my wife says it adds up to more than I actually netted, after expenses, when I worked. The humiliation of that knowledge is nearly balanced out by the pleasure of knowing that I, perhaps rare among some of our friends and relatives, am assured of getting back some of my own contributions to one of the greatest Ponzi schemes of our era. Admittedly, I won’t come close to collecting anywhere near what I paid into the fund, considering that I started paying in over 40 years ago. Assuming, as I do, that I probably won’t be around, sucking up Social Slurry money a year from today, I calculate myself to be a cheap date. Forty years, times twelve — comes to, uhh… 480 months? I paid in about about fifty times more than I expect to recoup. Of course, I don’t mean to sound like a whiner. Mostly, I just want the rest of you to know that I’m not going to be getting away with all that much. This is really all just a piece of my hair shirt.
I am winding down, I believe. Comparing two week intervals over the past six or seven months, I think I feel, and operate, a little less well each interval. So far, though, I’m in pretty fair spirits. One of these days, one might suspect that I would get a bit depressed. Seems reasonable. I believe I can put up a bit of that. Eventually, when it gets too hard to put up with, I plan to have a small, quiet party. Probably sometime this Summer. I plan to get high, with my wife, a few close friends, and with a small bottle of Helium. I’m hoping our friend, Julie will be here, to play some lovely, soothing harp music. Julie is deep into a two year program, studying Music Thanatology, a curriculum that aims to prepare her to be a professional musician who specializes in playing music for people who are in the final stages of the dying process (Thanatos was the Greek god of death). I think this is a pretty-damned fine idea. Even if it’s not an absolutely sustainable occupation (probably not), I believe it’s a step in the right direction. She’ll do most of her work in hospitals, but if this idea has some serious legs like I think it does, people will be able, with any luck, to have someone like Julie come to their home when they’re about ready to check out. I’m looking forward to hearing Julie’s harp, while I go to sleep holding Jan’s hand. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. But… all things in their turn. I’m not quite ready to go just yet. Anyway, it’s rainy and grey… and cold, today. I propose to die on a nice warm, sunny day. There are still a few things to do, some of which can perhaps still be got to. For one thing, I’m planning to host my own wake – a “Going Away Party” – a little more than a week from now. I’m thinking it could be fun. I hope that’s what Jan is thinking. That’s the latest big idea. It’ll be Pot Luck, of course.