Dan Treecraft

Dandelion B. Treecraft died August 4, 2011

He’ll be missed.

His burial will be this Saturday, in Spokane, Washington.

Kathy

As “planned”, it’s going to be a short week, for me. I’ve decided that I want to have my funeral-burial next Saturday. That means I have to be ready for burial; I have to get dead, between now and Saturday. It’s Monday morning. I intend to walk the plank sometime Wednesday. I have two days to get myself ready for Wednesday’s big transition. The sky is now quite noticeably brighter, north and east of me, now. It looks quietly gorgeous. It feels good to be alive, right at this moment.

The Unitarian Church minister is coming over tomorrow afternoon – Two O’clock. Todd is “brand new”. He just arrived about four weeks ago, to begin his new settlement. He looks like he’s going to be a good one. He allows as how he does drink beer, and that he can stay the whole afternoon, if I would like. Hell, I’d be happy to have him stay for a few years – if I could just stick around and BS with him. That don’t look like a good likelihood. In anticipation of a high social event, I spent about $50 at the two grocery stores in our neighborhood. I collected six kinds of beer, a small puck of smoked Gouda cheese, a half-pound of “Tapenade” from the fancier store’s deli, three kinds of crackers, and a few other sundry staples for life ongoing.  I think I must have spent about $12 on just six bottles of beer. Woo-hoo!  Somewhat more “sensibly”, I think I need to get some fresh vegetables to slice up for Todd’s visit, as well. I suspect he’s going to have some struggle with holding his weight down during his tenure here.  It’s a classic occupational hazard for a guy in his line of work.  Everyone wants a piece of the hem of the minister’s garment.  They also want to feed him.  At 47-years-old, he looks like he tends a bit toward fattening up.  He also appears, though, to be a guy who can handle that kind of struggle, if need be.

I shouldn’t be up now. I’m perpetually short of sleep. I don’t think I went to bed before midnight. But – this seemed important: sitting down to bang out what are likely to be my last posted thoughts, here at Kathy McMahon’s “Feisty Life”. Maybe I can do an hour, and then go back to bed. I could use a lot more sleep. Then again, a salty old girlfriend of my grandpa’s used to admonish, “We can sleep when we’re dead!”  That seems an apt point. Uh-oh – I see that my fingers are doing that thing, in cahoots with my drooping eyelids – they’re resting on the keypad – like this: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

It’s now 5:15; the sky is quite bright and clear in all directions. I think I’ll head for the sofa for another couple of hours sleep – before I do another row of meaningless lower case alphabet…. and I start drooling on the key-pad.      Stop.

Back.  No nap.  I spent the last two hours defying my own “inability to eat” – by eating.  ”Breakfast” was the small butt-end of a piece of mocha cheesecake, soaked in half&half, a dozen or so miniature shredded-wheat biscuits, with more half&half, and the last cupful of some tapioca pudding I made a few nights ago.  Probably 500 calories or so – it took me two hours to eat that much, one slow little bite at a time.  Eating is slow and difficult, usually very uncomfortable, even painful.  Often, part way through some trivial bit of solid food that requires a bit of chewing, and swallowing  (there’s the rub: swallowing!), I have to stop, because my throat has swollen up from the irritation of the process.  It just locks up, as if to say: “This shall not pass!”  [And, so, it doesn't.]   That, and the frustration about not being able to eat so many things I crave and was used to eating, formerly, and the frustration and resentment of watching everyone around me eating and enjoying so many of those same things.

Jan just arrived, home from work early.  It’s 9:00 AM.  She says she’s home for the week.  She’s feeling very “loaded up”.  She is very loaded up.  Whether I’ve left things finished or not, by the time I check out, once I check out, I’m “done”.  Jan’s load remains – whatever isn’t finished will still be there, to either do, or to write off.  She’s been on the phone, talking to newspaper representatives about an obituary notice (I wrote something a bit “different” several months ago).  Another phone call to her supervisor, re his notarizing a statement by me, that, “I, Dan Treecraft, on this date, do solemnly affirm that I believe myself to be of sound mind – though I’m intending to commit suicide in two days – do hereby swear that my resolve to commit suicide remains firm…”.  She’s also blowing around the house, picking up mislocated stuff (much of it mine?), and dusting,sweeping, washing, mopping – all that.  And, now, I tell her I feel “not-so-resolute” about shutting myself off two days from now, in light of Molly’s rapid decision to come here.  Kinda crazy-making.

Jan has just told me that her daughter, Molly, who lives on the other side of the continent, will be arriving here tomorrow night, having hastily obtained an airline ticket, and then spending the entire day – tomorrow – flying across the country to be here with her mother, and to say good bye to me.  Funny, the barrage of somewhat conflicting feelings that news kicks up.  Pleasant thrill to hear that Molly and I will get to see one another, and say good bye.  Unease about her dropping all that she’s doing – a lot on her plate – to come here, while I continue to march resolutely toward “my final sundown”.  My resolve to carry on as planned, “on schedule”, is rattled a bit by this little change in the environment around me.  I don’t feel quite so resolute to continue on schedule as I did earlier.  I don’t feel quite so resolved about leaving “on time”, now that Molly has “set her life aside” (even for a few days) to be here.  It’s all very dynamic and unpredictable.  Volatile.   Crazy-making.  Who could have imagined?   (Indeed)

My casket has been delivered, as of early-last-week.  It sits, now, on top of the twin bed in the spare bedroom, with its pyro-engraved “Dan Treecraft”  bracketing, above and below,  a ten-inch high depiction of a lovely ponderosa pine tree.  We both seem to take some pleasure out of showing it off to visitors.  It certainly seems to have some “conversation value”.  Not everyone is eager to see it.  Jan helped me pick out and prepare my “last outfit” – dominated by a green tee shirt, which proclaims, in a sort of Celtic-Arabesque design, the admonition: Transcend The Bullshit.  It’s an authorized rendition of a classic art poster done by Harold Balazs, one of Spokane’s most beloved resident artists.  Having changed my mind about being put away in a pair of vintage, wool plaid, bell-bottom disco pants (too cool to waste, thusly), I decided on a pair of clapped-out, somewhat-ragged, “boot-cut” jeans, that had defied retirement for the past decade.  A pair of pink cotton socks complete the ensemble.  They were borrowed from the county jail, where I spent an afternoon reflecting on my willful transgression of dancing in the street without a permit, when Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, visited Spokane, to offer help with quelling gang activity in Spokane County.  A week later, amid some fuss about gang activity inside the White House, and in the Department of Justice, Gonzales resigned to spend more time with his affection-deprived family.

I see, now, that (whether I can get to it or not) this blog cries out for at least one more entry, chronicling the thoughts in the mind of one peculiar Dead Man Talking.  Too many questions remain – like: “What is this guy thinking?”   Surely – there must be one deep thought in there, someplace.  I will try to get to it, tomorrow to see if something profound (or interesting) slips out.

Perhaps, some comments on the state of the world I’m escaping from would be appropriate?  I do have some thoughts about all that.  Maybe, also, more could be said about why – with some smattering of wits remaining – I might be so hell-bent on retiring from the race of rats.  We’ll see what, if anything, seeps out.

Any questions?

It really wasn’t all that bad a week, as I recall.  It sure wasn’t all that bad a day.  I was busy in the kitchen, getting ready to put the first batch of peanut butter cookies in the oven.  I had been on a peanut butter cookie kick for a couple of weeks, and was hopeful that this batch would, at last, hit the center of the target, having been less than completely satisfied with the previous two or three attempts to perfect a recipe that met my requirements for taste, texture, and “tolerability”.  I love really good peanut butter cookies, but I’m generally fussy about them, and was particularly picky about them, then, because of problems with tongue and throat irritation issues.  I had figured out that one of my favorite ingredients was irritating my mouth.  It was the generous dose of chopped walnuts I was putting in them, that was giving me trouble.  I had eliminated them from this batch, and had otherwise tweaked my recipe with regard to proportions of sugar, flour, and peanut butter.  This was going to be the winning combo, I was fairly certain.  This batch was going to be taken with us to a “Winter Solstice” pot luck dinner party at the home of some friends, later that evening.

As usual, with a cooking project where I was “messing” with the basic recipe, I was working at an amazingly slow pace.  After at least an hour of measuring, calculating, and mixing, I was finally measuring out and forming the dough balls, pressing them and arranging them to fit the cookie sheet.  Jan was in the living room, working at a project on the computer, having been home less than an hour, after being at a Saturday morning Restorative Circle practice-study group meeting.  It had snowed a good one the night before.  I stopped my cookie shaping for a moment and stepped over to the sink to cough up and spit out a gob of the ubiquitous mucous and crud that had become a fairly regular aspect of my condition.  To my dismay, I coughed up a rather good-sized gob of blood.  By the time I coughed and spat what seemed a satisfactory quantity, I realized that I was spitting up fresh, bright blood.  Dang!  I was having one of my hemorrhaging episodes – an annoying event, to say the least.  I grabbed a mug and filled it with cold tap water, and began drinking it, in order to cool the bleeding site and stop the flow.  After a minute or so, I realized that this one was stubborn.  I hollered at Jan to come help me.  I sent her outside to fill a large coffee mug with some fresh snow, which I then used to make an “icee”, by mixing in as much water as the snow would absorb, and then filling mouth with icy slush – guaranteed to shut down a bleeding episode.  After a few minutes of that, my mouth and throat were getting painfully chilled, but the blood just kept on pouring out.  It was One O’Clock in the afternoon.

For some minutes, I just stood over the sink and let the blood pour out – occasionally coughing to dislodge and expel another red gob.  Jan hovered anxiously, nearby.  I asked her to fetch me the small steel sauce pot from its drawer under the stove.  With that in hand to catch my outpouring, I sauntered out to the living room, and slumped into the big reclining chair beside the ever-present orange Nitrogen bottle and apparatus.  Thanks to Jan’s scurrying to fill my requests, I soon had a roll of paper towels, several wash cloths, and a bowl of water arrayed beside me.  By now, bleeding too copiously to talk without spraying blood all over everything within two or three feet, Jan brought me a pen and a yellow legal pad so we could talk (so I could talk).  I began scribbling my thoughts and questions for Jan.  We “talked” like that, off and on, for an hour or more.  We talked “some serious turkey”.  I wanted to make sure she understood that there was no circumstance in which I could imagine myself tolerating either a visit by paramedics, or a trip to a hospital emergency room.  She understood.  I then had some “what if questions” for both of us to work through.  The main question was: “What if this damned bleeding just wouldn’t stop?”  I had to answer that one for myself.  There seemed to be only one answer, generally.  All possible variants of answers ended up with the same conclusion.  One way or another, I was going to be dead pretty soon.  It was a sober conversation.  But, it felt good to be having it clear between us.

About 4 PM, I had a sudden intuition that I needed to make my way to the “big pot” in the bathroom, a notion that seemed undeniable.  Shit!  This was not something I wanted to be distracted by, at this time.  Tough!  In I ran, down I sat, soup pot sitting on my lap, with a bit more than a pint of blood and mucous coagulating in it.  I sat there for some time, with nothing to show for my compliance or effort, except a slowly filling soup pot.  I sat for nearly an hour, finally having a calming thought: What if I simply sat there and quietly let the blood run out without worrying over it?  I was not in any significant pain – in fact I was actually quite comfortable, sitting there with my pants down around my knees, quietly catching my steadily-dribbling blood.  This didn’t seem like a bad way to go – setting aside any aesthetic considerations.  By golly!  Why not?  More calm settled on me.  So, I just gave into relaxing and letting nature take its course.  My only fear was that at some point I would topple off the toilet and fall on the floor, or into the bathtub.  I puzzled the problem while letting the blood do whatever it wanted to do.

By now, I had stopped coughing and spitting, trying to keep clots of blood from gumming me up.  Blood was beginning to clot inside my mouth, building up under my upper palate, and here and there.  Rather than cough, I tried prying the clots from their attachments with my index finger, and pulling them out by grabbing between finger and thumb.  Boy!  There’s a challenging occupation.  I cannot conceive of any slipperier combination than tug-of-war with a chunk of clotted blood, coated with a fresh flow of live blood.  Catching a live, wet trout, barehanded would surely be easier.  I managed, somehow, to detach the one clinging to the roof of my mouth, though – with much persistence.  Pulling it completely free of my mouth, eventually – that would have made a pretty competitive “funny home video”, methinks.  I got it!   And then – I realized that the blood had stopped, at last!

It was about Five in the afternoon, by the time I extricated myself from the bathroom, having failed to accomplish what I had originally gone there to do.  Fair enough.

Back in the living room, I sat down with Jan and considered my future.  This was not the first time I’d been assaulted by a bloody flood.  It was the worst, though.  Jan and I were both pretty wrung out, after 3 or 4 hours of non-stop bleeding.  The thought of going through another such episode, some future event being, perhaps, even worse – this was too much to reconcile, at this point.  I was “shot.”   I told Jan I thought it was time to concede defeat.  I thought, “Today is a good day to die!”  I felt completely determined, with no second thoughts.

“Time to call a meeting of the posse, Jan.  Would you please get on the phone and call the ‘loyal witnesses’ to come over, now?  Ask them if they can assemble here within an hour.”  It happened.  Within an hour, we had six of our closest friends sitting anxiously, in our living room, while I set up my deliverance apparatus.  With little fanfare, and no waste of time, I set up my kit, on the floor beside where I sat on the sofa.  Jan sat down beside me.  Our little coven of devotees arrayed themselves before us.  Aside from some alleged harp music, the room was very quiet, until I summarily said thank you and goodbye to the group, and then told Jan I loved her, and gave her a tearful hug.  By now, I was on a fast running “auto-pilot” setting.  No fooling around!  After looking over my “fool-proof as the space shuttle” equipment, I put on my respiratory therapy mask, cinched it up, and turned the valve to open the Nitrogen gas bottle, and began breathing very deliberately, deeply.  It didn’t seem to be knocking me out as quickly as it had when I tested the apparatus several months earlier.  After what was later reported to have been about four minutes, someone hollered to me, “Dan, your Nitrogen bottle is now empty!”  Groggily, I thought to myself, “Dead people surely don’t hear anything, no matter how pleasant, or otherwise.”  I opened my eyes, reluctantly surveying the scene.  I’m not enough of an optimist to have believed that my loyal coterie decided, all of them, to come with me.  ”Shit!  I’m still here!”

It was a Saturday night.  My failed stunt had derailed the solstice party.  My poor stressed friends all vowed they were willing to take another call, another day.  Jan and I went to the Unitarian Church the next morning – a lovely day.  For several days afterward, it felt somewhat odd to be alive.  For some reason, my resolve to go through that again… isn’t as sure of itself as it was before.

Sorry to have kept you all waiting for so long, to hear the next installment.

More, later.

dbt

I went to visit the doctor who diagnosed me last February.  He “insisted” – said he needed to see me because I’d been on narcotic pain-killers for so long, and needed to make sure I wasn’t becoming a raving addict.  I was on Oxycontin for several months, before I got to the point where the pills were too big for me to swallow, and I had to switch to liquid Oxycodone.  You know – I was on that Oxycontin stuff for over 3 months, and still, I never had the urge to suggest that “the White House has a new dog (?)….. Sasha!” (an updated version of a Rush Limbaugh “joke” made by the most overpaid right-wing-radio-thug of our time, the day after Bill Clinton was inaugurated).  I still hope there actually is a Hell, and that Mr. Limbaugh might rotisserate there for all eternity.  Slinging fecal stuff at presidents is fair game, I say, especially considering the past few decades worth of US presidents, but doing that sort of thing to anyone’s child…. I still haven’t come up with a satisfying retribution for that one, Russ, you bloated sausage casing.  Grrrr…   You know – if Bill Clinton really had been the sort who would have assassinated people… Rush Limbaugh would not still be around, spewing his endless offal.

But – back at the doctor’s exam room.  After peering into my mouth to look at my throat and tongue, the doc sat back on the exam room bench, eyed me thoughtfully, and announced: “You know, this cancer of yours is infinitely treatable.”  (OK, maybe he didn’t say “infinitely”… maybe he said “quite”.  ”Infinitely” makes a better story – since I have the idea that treating any of us “infinitely”, for most any ailment, is what the medicine industry lives for.  I think he said “infinitely”.)  He then proceeded to all-but-beg me to reconsider submitting to conventional cancer therapies.  I asked what sorts of things he had in mind.  He responded with the usual suspects – surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.  We talked briefly about what some of those might entail.  He said he thought I might still have a fair chunk of my tongue left after doing surgery on me.  From what he said, it didn’t sound like there might be enough tongue left to meet my standards, though.  I didn’t like the thought of waking up after surgery on my tongue, to find out that they decided they needed to remove 75% of it, after all.  I told him I’d give it some thought.  I did give it some thought.  Ughh!  I thought I’d already done crossed this Rubicon ten months earlier.  But, I did think about it.  Just before going to bed, that night, I made my decision.  I was going with Plan “A”.  No conventional allopathic treatment.  We all gotta die one day.  Something was going to get me.  In my case, it seemed predictable enough – cancer was going to take me down, one way or another, eventually.  I figured I had the choice: “We can do this the easy way… or we can do this the hard way.”  Where human suffering is concerned (especially my own), I’m for the easy way, every time.  The thought of committing to who-knows-how-many surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy treatments – over the course of who-knows-how-many months, at a cost of who-knows-how-many thousands of increasingly-worthless US dollars, in order to have a chance that a hoped-for semblance of normal life might be extended – for who-knows how-many years, months, weeks of additional time – would it be anywhere near enough time to pay for a significant part of the medical costs incurred?  It just didn’t add up to a good bargain, to me.  So, it’s Plan “A”.  We go with what Mother Nature has served up.  Phew!

And so – I still weigh about 110 pounds.  I still look like Gandhi, with an Abe Lincoln beard.  I still have trouble (increasingly) with talking, tasting, chewing, swallowing, gagging, coughing, spitting, drooling, sleeping, breathing (occasionally), relaxing….   I’ve had a few episodes of acid reflux, often erupting while I’m sleeping, or trying to (No fun!).  So far, I’ve only had one real duesey of a panic attack (No fun!)  I still have to drink more water than I’ve ever drunk in my life, in order to have any chance of re2laxing enough to go to sleep at night, let alone be reasonably comfortable during waking hours.  If I don’t drink two-&-a-half to three quarts of water per 24 hours, I’m soon a stuffed-up, choking, gagging mess of a miserable specimen.  Unfortunately, it seems that about 75% of all that water is only willing to cycle back out during the hours most people sleep.  So, I manage to wake up about once every two or three hours, to pee.  That often turns into a 30-minute awake period – just happens that way, sitting on the edge of the sofa with my head in my hand for a spell.  I never was a very good sleeper.  I’m an even-worse sleeper, now.

I’m about worn out.  I did ride the scooter on a couple of errands, one day last week.  That was a kick I didn’t think I’d ever get to again, when I saw all the snow piling up three weeks ago.  Here I am, though, still kicking.  But, I’m telling you, my kicker is just about gave out.  I think, with some luck, and a good shot of what passes for grit on my part, I might be able to nurse this whiney, reeking gag-bag of pathetic human discontent on, a bit past Christmas, and then, maybe even up to New Years.  There’s another $1196 social security check in it, for me.  We’ll see.

Does “the dying one” have any new revelations to share… any epiphanies?  Yeah… one: Barack Obama is a close “second” to the awful “former occupant” (The Little Bush Child), for being the worst US president in my lifetime.  I read an interview with Max Keiser a few days ago.  (I also listened to Obama’s press conference, regarding the upcoming vote to end the infamous “Bush tax cuts” for the top “earners” on federal tax rolls.)  Keiser and I agree:  Obama is gutless beyond belief!  (If, by the way, you haven’t ever seen or heard Max Keiser, you might want to give him a google.  He’s smart & funny.)  Auditing Mr. Obama’s news conference, aside from his being incredibly whiney and repetitive, I couldn’t believe that he admitted that a majority of the American electorate supported ending the Bush tax cuts. And still – even with the bully pulpit, and with a majority of Americans supporting the end of the shameful tax cuts, and, even with all the other resources of the office of the most powerful elected official in the known universe, Mr. Obama claimed it just wasn’t possible to deliver the goods, not without selling out to a feckless “compromise” .   I was never any great fan of Lyndon Johnson – but, Gee Willickers!   Was I ever wishing LBJ could have been around to get this job done!  He’d have wrenched some legs off the Republican top brass in the House & Senate, and beat the rest of them weaseling Banana Republicans into a mewling bunch of urine-soaked fancy suits, who’d wish they’d never lifted a finger to protect those “poor, hard-working” billionaires – from a decent tax bite.  And, at the end of a rich lifetime of stealing and swindling from just about every noggin in sight, doesn’t it just make sense to shake some of that obscene gob of lucre back out of a pirate’s lousy corpse?  Really!  Granted – it wouldn’t significantly alter the trajectory of this washed-up, vainglorious, arrogant, bullying, has-been empire that was once the United States of America, but it sure would have given most of the 99.9% of Americans who aren’t billionaires a little something to cheer about – for at least a little while.  What I’m talking about here is the little matter of the federal estate tax.  Sheesh!  We all live on the same finite planet – every one of us dragged into it equally naked, vulnerable, and squalling.  Listen: Just because someone’s great-granddaddy made an emperor’s inheritance by clear-cutting (a 20th-Century-perfected form of environmental rape) the entire north-half of the State of Idaho… does not, by my book, entitle his eternal spawn to live like Chinese emperors from now through eternity.  Who falls for that?  (Unfortunately, a whole mess of our fellow pig-headed, dim-witted fellow Americans do.  We need an estate tax policy that goes some significant way toward leveling the playing field across the economic gene pools of all American families.  I don’t recall ever hearing any celebrity advocate giving the estate tax issue a good reaming – until Bernie Sanders took to the Senate Well, last week.)  What a sad lot of ignorant fools this country has become.  If I suggest the “average American” is a “dumb bunny” – does that unfairly impugn the intellect of the average rabbit?  Maybe so.

Maybe I’ll have the starch to do serious rant in another installment, if Mother Mary and Cousin Jesus will grant me just a few more free passes.  Like I always say: “We’ll see.”  Right now, I’m dead-tired.  Know what I mean?

Hail!… Bernie Sanders!

Ciao.

I have been tired, sometimes, if that gets me any slack.  I’ve been “to-die-for” tired, at times.  No fooling.  Some very bleak, dark days were staggered through at our house.  Over the past two months, I’ve been so low-down, crummy-feeling at times, that on more than one occasion, I’ve thought I’d not live through the week.  One day, back in early October, shortly after my last posting, I was so sure I’d reached the end of my rope, that I made several desperate phone calls to friends, looking to find someone to be ready to videotape my intended suicide, which I felt was an imminent probability.  Later that same evening, I was able to eat a piece of toast, and then perked up enough to amaze the chef and myself by eating two more!  I also had a bit of milk or water.  It was a “miraculous” revival.  The next day, after a fair night’s sleep, I felt better than I had at any time in the previous several weeks.

Throughout October, and much of this month [November], I’ve flown high for some hours, for some days, only to swoop and dive for the ground.  Sometimes, several days of “low down” would pass… feeling terrible, not hungry, not thirsty (not drinking), sure I was at the end.  Then, somehow, the grip of doom would lift and I’d perk up for another day or two, or three, or several.  All the while, the constipation/elimination boogyman skulked in the ground – fore and aft.  Jan and I, both, were puzzled by the highs and the lows I was experiencing.  What the heck was going on?

One day, about a month or so ago, I had a small epiphany, as I literally struggled through a session on the “pot”.  I thought I detected some evidence of dehydration – as I observed the process and the product of my efforts.  I decided that maybe my immediate troubles stemmed from a water shortage. I decided to make a concerted effort to increase my water intake.  Voila! Within an hour of beginning to “force” water down my craw, I began to perk up.  It was amazing.  It was astonishing!  It was like pouring water on a dehydrated, wilted house plant.  Wilting. That was the issue.  That was the concept.  Just like a dehydrated plant, I wilted when I didn’t have enough water in my tissues.  While I knew this was not exactly a major scientific breakthrough, the dramatic effect of adding water to my corpse was astonishing.

The trouble is – everything I put into my body has to go through my mouth.  That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if my poor god-forsaken tongue didn’t reside there – in my mouth.  Just my luck – to have cancer in a part of my body that I actually needed to have in good working order – in a part of my body that was used for practical purposes – a part of my body that is, now, at least as much a part of my problem as it is a part of my body.  How many times have I already mentioned this?… Swallowing sucks! Food, water, medicine… if it has to go in through my mouth, it amounts to something of an ordeal to get it down my gullet.  Occasionally, swallowing is very painful.  Mostly, though, it’s just very uncomfortable. Lately, it’s very common for me to take a drink of water, and realize ten or twenty minutes later, it’s still in my mouth, un-swallowed.  It is a very deliberate act.  I have to will myself to swallow most anything, most all of the time.  Bummer.  The result is that I can easily allow myself to go without drinking enough water to keep me sufficiently inflated with H2O.

Here’s the really cute part: I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to drink about twice as much water each day as I have previously, in my old life – before cancer.  Whereas I used to get by with a quart a day, more or less, (granted a lot more on hot, working days, for sure), I now seem to require at least two full quarts of water in order to get through a day without wilting miserably.  That’s without doing one blinking productive thing all day !   Just sitting around whining about my sorry life requires two full quarts of water ! (if I want to do it with any modicum of comfort)

Jan has tried to get me to monitor my water intake by putting out pitchers, or quart jars, of water in the morning.  The trouble is, I don’t manage to get all my water from the pitcher by the end of the day.  I habitually just go to the tap.  Or, I have a cup of coffee, or a can of pop (rare), or, I shoulder Skippy aside and slurp some water out of the toilet.  At the end of the day, no one has any idea how much water I’ve drunk.  So – I’ve tried something different.  I’ve set out two quart jars to pee in.  I seem to be able to stick to a routine that way.

I suspect I freaked out my friend, Tim, the other day.  Expecting him to arrive for a brief visit, I ditched the jars – which I’ve been keeping under the bench beside my living room bed (sofa) – putting the jars (one half-full of pee) in the kitchen sink.  I didn’t want Tim to freak out, seeing jars of pee sitting in the living room, so I thought it best to get them out of sight.  Tim hadn’t been here for more than a minute before he asked if he could have a glass of water.  Sure, I said, directing him to the cupboard beside the sink.  Too late, I realized my gaffe, and so I pointed out the obvious jar of pee in the sink.  From then on – I swear – Tim seemed barely able to contain his need to leave, right away.   C’est la vie chez Treecraft.

For two of the past three days, I’ve felt “pretty good”.  Those were the two days when I filled more than two quart jars with urine (in 24 hours).  The day that I only managed to produce a little more than one quart of “product” turned out to be a day when I felt lousy.  With my weight now down to as little as 110 pounds, and assuming that two quarts of output ought to represent somewhat more input (given respiration and perspiration losses), it appears that I have a significantly elevated water requirement. [Do we all know "The New Water Rule" ?  Your s'posed to drink (in fluid ounces) half your weight in pounds.]  At 110 pounds, I should drink… uhh,… 55 ounces of water a day.  Hey ! … I’m just barely ahead of the new rule !  I’m peeing out about 75 ounces in a good day.]   I should add, here, that my own requirement seems to be quite constant – if I let half the day pass without getting “a good dose of water” in me, I’m sure to wilt and start falling apart.  Apparently, my cancerous state has upped my water needs quite significantly.  I’ve got no tolerance for dry spells.  Makes sense.  ”Garbage in” (cancer) begets “garbage out” – with water being the vehicle that rinses and floats out the crud that the “cancer battle” produces… around the clock.  A few hours, now, for me, without added water intake and my face is on the floor.  Just by noting the garbage that I manage to cough up, over the course of the day, is enough to give me the idea that there’s a lot of trash to haul out, around the clock.

Since I feel fairly chipper today, it’s a bit hard to get “into” how crappy I feel on down days.  On down days, I feel too crappy to sit down and write.  Lots of down days, recently.  Not much energy to spare, then.  Not good writing days, those.

All this talk about pee, reminds me of an erstwhile favorite topic – POOP!  Did you think I might let you down?  Really?  One might think this shabby excuse for a blog ought to be re-monikered: “The Shithouse Chronicles“.  Alas, Gentle Readers, we will not stoop to such lowbrow stunts as trying to grow readership by badging ourselves with such crude Anglo-Saxon handles as that.  If you want to go for serious lowbrow, you’re going to have to invest more effort than just looking for a shitty-titled blog.  You are going to have to actually do some reading.   Onward !

I will, now, admit – I had no idea just how absorbing a topic constipation could be.  I do believe I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but writing about constipation.  [Did it seem that way to you, too?  I don't really want to spend the entire remainder of my life mired in this topic, but, it just seems there is so much to be said.]  I find, as I grow older (consider the difference between age sixty-one, and age sixty-one & one-half), that topics too intimate or vulgar to mention at age thirty, are fair game by sixty-one & one-half.  This is where I find myself, now.  Mired – at the end of my life – in perennial constipation.  And trying to compensate by running my mouth about it…. non-stop.

And, so, I write about what I know about.

Before I launch into all that, though, I must tell you a (now-amusing) little story of a night back during some of the dark days of early October.  (I wish I’d put this to pixels sooner.  I think it may have lost some of its freshness.)  As of sometime late this summer, I had taken to sleeping in the living room, on the sofa, so as not to rumple Jan and Skippy with my seemingly-ceaseless up-and-down-gettings, throughout the night – mainly to pee, but also to re-hydrate, and to cough and expectorate, and so forth.  Soon, it seemed sensibly handy to fetch a jar – a peejar – into my sofa-lair sleeping area – to pee in during the night.  Soon, there followed a line-up of coffee-mugs of drinking water, plus one distinctively-shaped mug, dedicated to use as a spittoon (probably a good idea to have the spit mug identifiable, even with one’s eyes closed !)  The indoor-outdoor bench I made several years ago, served nicely, to array all my mugs, etc.  As befits my typical mode, all sorts of other paraphernalia quickly appeared, to complete my bedside secretary.  My cell phone resode there,overnight, as well as pens, paper, notes, magazines, mail, keys, spectacles, wallet, snacks, etc.   Seeing as how I’m only going to be here a little while longer, Jan has apparently re-calibrated her orderliness gage to allow for the proliferation of my assorted bedside kittage.  As long as the pile stays on, or neatly-arranged under the bench, she lets it pass.  So far.

After a visit to our friends Buell and Donna, I came home one evening, with a Mason jar full of assorted mixed nuts which they had gifted me.  The jar of nuts subsequently moved about, from time to time – sometimes on the adjacent bookshelf, sometimes on the floor, occasionally on the bench.  Jan occasionally raided the jar, but mainly confined her forays to liberating the Brazil nuts, some almonds, and a few Macadamias.  In the midst of one seemingly unrelenting bad spell, among my various other trials, my sensitivity to salt jumped off the chart, and the nuts – previously delightful – became all-but inedible.

Amid the worst patch of a bad spell, I made up “my dog’s bed” one night, relying on kinesthetic memory more than vision, to arrange everything.  Slowly, laboriously, foggily – I lined up my glasses, wallet, mugs, flashlight, and jars, in their various habitations, turned out the light, and crawled into my bed.  A few hours later, I woke up, needing to pee.  Thanks to generous street lighting and photon-pervious living room window shades, there’s no need to turn on lights to navigate our living room during the night.  Operating half-asleep, foggy – I reached under the bench for a pee jar, unscrewed the lid, and began filling it, savoring the reduction of bladder pressure, pleased with the simple pleasures still available to me.  Presently, the pleasant aroma of roasted nuts wafted warmly into my consciousness.  How sweet!  Ahhhhh…!   Then, in time… it hit me.  I squinted critically at the dimly lit, warm jar… of nuts!! Sheiss!! I woke up fast.  Quietly-but quickly cursing my way into the kitchen, I turned on the light, to reveal a quart jar half full of warm, salted almonds, Macadamia nuts, cashews and Brazil nuts.  But, it was also half full of fresh warm urine.  Sheiss!! Fortunately, I’m gifted with the ability to function in difficult circumstances.  I tipped the jar over the kitchen sink, strained the pee through my fingers, quickly re-filled the jar with tap water, gave the jar a few swirls, strained the rinse water through my fingers again, and ran to fetch the “D” section of bird-cage liner to lay out on the dining room table. I can’t remember if I turned on the dining room light or did all this by flashlight – but does it really matter?  I laid out the wet nuts on an open section of the paper, blotted them as dry as I could, pulled out the top two or three wet layers of paper, and arranged the nuts carefully, to dry overnight.  I think I even managed to laugh at my good fortune, having found a novel way to amuse myself at 3 AM, while significantly de-salinizing my otherwise inedible jar of nuts.  The next morning, Jan remarked at my apparent burst of entrepreneurial energy during the night, actually guessing that I had genius’d a way to make my jar of mixed nuts more palatable.  I noted her apparent approval, and let it go at that.  A couple of runs through the toaster oven, later in the morning, and my revived nuts were ready for a try-out.  Not bad… could use a little more salt, but even that deficiency was mitigated by an interestingly exotic aroma they’d picked up in the process.  I don’t think Jan bothered to raid the jar after that.  She has never seemed to trust my experiments with food.

Now then – I believe I’ve hinted at the recounting of some further poop tales.  Nothing too heavy.  My butt’s not so well suited to many hours of bearing my entire 110 pounds.

Constipation:  Oh, the tales I can tell you !  Now that I don’t have to worry about carrying a tainted reputation for two or three more decades forward.

Back about the time – just after my posting of essay 12, I began to have really awful sessions in the bathroom.  Events which, including self-administered enemas, and lasting for multiple hours, started to become “standard”.  Life in Hell must, surely, include such marathon orgies of procrastinated defecation.  Ugh… there’s a word I don’t like to speak (or hear).  It sounds unpleasant, even disgusting. but, hold on – I’m just getting started, here.  As long as I’m setting myself up as an Icon of iconoclasm, I might as well let you have the whole enchilada – which I intend to do.

It was while sitting on the pot one day, that the idea of dehydration, and its ramifications, really took possession of my speculative processes.  My turds (Is that too clinical? The spellcheck doesn’t like it. Tough.) were, notably, hard, as well as dense.  I suggested to my dentist, that they might be hard enough to be able to carve teeth out of them.  She didn’t bite.  I next suggested to some of my more law & ordered friends, that my well-aged masterpieces could make great billy-clubs. That didn’t stick, either.

Seriously, I’ve discovered things that would make a nubile young proctologist blush.  For example, I discovered that I have some apparently significant herniation of some furthest component(s) of my lower end.  Fortunately, I don’t expect to have to live with this problem for a very long period.  That’s one of the great – sometimes-overlooked – blessings of my situation… not having to worry about athlete’s foot, skin cancers, herniated rectae, bad teeth, and so forth.  Supposedly, the hard-core pain-killers I take are possessed of the magical ability to all-but shut down one’s lower-gut’s peristaltic rhythms.  I may have done some rectal damage prior to the onset of The Great Malady, but I do suspect that some of my recent athletic endeavors, aimed at working around my peristaltic partial paralysis, may have caused some further (unnecessary) mayhem down under.

Some additional good news - is that since the digital breakthroughs I’ve made, spelunking my own interior cavities, re my retarded excretory performance, I have actually trimmed hours off my previous recent “standard times”.  From two, three, and four-hour sessions, which have left me utterly exhausted for many hours afterward, I’m now down to “getting in” and “getting out” in an hour or less.  Believe me – that’s progress I can feel good about.  It had got to where I dreaded pooping, even more than I dreaded eating.  I was being torture tested, both coming and going.

I don’t know about you all, but I thought talking about poop again might be fun.  But, now I’m not so sure the preceding revelations were all that spiritually uplifting.  Sorry if I brought undue sobriety to what should otherwise be a fun topic.  Perhaps I can keep it a little lighter next time.   Yeah – that’s more like it!   Step on it!

I see the Word Counter has counted a few dozen more than 2700 words, this outing.  I probably should give it a rest for the day.  Maybe I can get back, to write another fun-filled, action-packed, spiritually ambiguous, nail-biting episode of Dead Man Talking, before Christmas.  God forbid I should tarry down here for that long !   I don’t care much for Christmas, anyway.  It lasts too goddamned long, for one thing.  And, it wastes way too much electricity.  And….  Oh – never mind.  I think the word counter just popped a fuse.  Now, it reads: “2851″.  Ooops – 2855.  2856.  oops.  2857.  Dang!  (Oh, never mind!)  2863!   Sheiss!!

(Oh, I don’t know…)  dang it   2870.   ???   !%&##%&!      [ dbt ]

There are complicating factors.  For one thing, my talent for procrastination ought to be allowed for.  I should have taken that into consideration, myself.  Not only have I been procrastinating my own suicide, but have also been procrastinating with regard to completing my two-and-a-half-years-dead-mother’s estate probate.  Jan has been working on it in my absense.  I have also been procrastinating about selling my truck, chipper, saws and pruning and climbing tackle.  Procrastinating getting some very tardy bills delivered to clients (some for work done years ago).  Procrastinating over the ordeal of tax filing for the past two years.  Procrastinating the relinquishment of my social security disability check.  They think that if you have a terminal cancer you’re disabled.  Fair enough.  I find myself wanting to keep collecting my (presumptively-few) SS checks.  We keep winnowing down the expenses that bleed my monthly allotment, and I keep thinking that one of these months I’ll actually finish with a net gain in my checking account balance.  I don’t think I’ve done it yet, but I keep expecting that “this will be the month” that I break out of deficit spending and manage to book some savings from my check.  I do think this might be the month.  These are all things which have caused me to have to put off my rendezvous with destiny.  Darned good excuses, I think.

I suppose I owe you (who?) some telling of toilet-house tales.

My cancer, besides impeding my ability to talk and chew and swallow, has driven me into the arms of narcotic painkillers.  As we all know, one’s tongue tells one whether or not whatever has been put into his mouth should stay and be swallowed, or be spat out.  Much (nearly all) of what comes into my mouth, lately, tastes either: 1) not-so-good, 2) bad, or, 3) poisonous.  Increasingly, bad and poisonous are vying for dominance.  Among the bad and poisonous substances I keep trying to choke down, water is one of the more disagreeable tasting.  Often, our water tastes like poison, lately.  Not sure why, although there’s no doubt that my cancerous tongue has gone off the rails.  Letting water sit out in a mug or jar overnight seems like it ought to dissipate the most likely-nasty-tasting toxin – chlorine.  Unfortunately, the overnight “airing out” of a mug of water seems to render it even more vile tasting.  Really vile, sometimes.  Combine that with the unpleasant discomfort of the mere act of swallowing anything, and you have a nice set-up for becoming dehydrated.  I sometimes forget to take my pain pills on schedule – or at all.  This leads, usually, to even greater discomfort in swallowing.  That tends to lead to drinking less water, which leads to a general diminution of my basic vigor and sense of wellness.  I feel droopy… bad.  Which contributes to forgetfulness, re taking my pain pills.  You see…?

Both, the consumption of narcotic pain pills, and the reduction of fluid intake, contribute to the reduction of hydration everywhere in your body, including the contents of your gut, most pertinently, in the lower intestine.  Peristalsis does or may slow down or weaken, and the content of your colon suffers the shared fate of all now-dehydrated tissue of your body.  To put it quite succinctly, good-old garden-variety shit turns to brick.  Have we talked about this before (if so, you may be excused) ?

Don’t know if any/all reading this are familiar with the term “shit a brick”.  (sorry)  I’m here to tell you, this is not something that the intestinal tract (at least, mine) was designed to do.  My theory is that anything the consistency of a brick (hard, inflexible) does not flow around the corners of one’s lower 12 feet of pipework.  No matter how much grease, no matter how muscular one’s peristalsis, brick shit will just not make the turns.  I believe, to my own satisfaction, that this I have demonstrated, repeatedly, and well.  Everyone seems to have advice about how to get this stuff to come out more easily.  ”You need a lubricant.”  ”Just take some laxative!”  ”You need to take some “stool softeners’” (getting close)!  None of these will do any good if you’re fundamentally dehydrated.  My main problem, re constipation, is & has been the drastic lack of adequate hydration.  For most of us, that’s supposed to require something in the realm of two quarts of water a day.  I’ve been attempting to get by on less than one quart, many days during the past month.  The trick, from now on, will be getting enough water into myself every day.  The only acceptable route (besides a goddamned, blessed enema) is to get enough water past my tongue and down my craw.  I expect this will be where the last battle is fought, as far as my continuing existence in these parts is concerned.  Not enough water is my ultimate boogyman.

On to the etc.      Jan and I have been scouring the county for a cemetery that will accept my pine-boxed corpse, without the requirement of a vault or liner of some sort.  We have spoken with quite a few cemetery representatives over the past month or two.  Jan found one cemetery in the county who’s agent told her that they had no requirement for a vault.  It just happens that this one cemetery also informed us that we lived outside of their geographical boundary line, and were not eligible for admission  The coincidence of that one cemetery being the one-and-only one “requiring no vault”, leads me to believe that the person representing their burial grounds is misinformed – I’ll bet that they do require a vault, but, the person Jan spoke with was not aware of their requirement.  I think that because it just seems so unlikely that the one cemetery which would not allow us “entry” would also be the only one which permitted burials without a vault requirement.  Too extreme a coincidence, I think.

But, after two months of searching, it seems we have discovered the holy land, at last.  We had to go out of state to find a cemetery which would allow us entry, regardless of our geographical address, and which does not require us to purchase and bury a concrete (or other material) vault or liner.  These vaults and liners are “required” by the respective cemetery boards, for reasons apparently unknown to many of their agents and members.  Many sextons and agents told us that the vault/liner requirement was dictated by Washington State law.  Our research discovered otherwise.  We found no state statute that requires a cemetery to have all burials include a vault or liner.

I should stop, here, and explain these terms.  A vault is a box (usually concrete) that surrounds a casket on at least five planes (four side panels and one top panel).  Some vaults have 6 sides (including a bottom).  Some are rather elaborately sealed.  Some are not.  The basic concrete models seem to cost between $400 and $600, delivered and placed.  They can run upward of a couple thousand dollars.  Well upward.  There are some vaults now being marketed, made of polyethylene, and some, I believe, made of polypropylene.  I think they can be had for $200 to $3oo and up – wholesale.  Some are sealed, some are not.  My internet searches indicated that purchasing one of these boxes directly was, perhaps, prohibitively expensive due to shipping-rate economics.  Orders of multiple units may cost no more for shipping than ordering a single unit.  There seems to be some tradition of telling funeral customers that the more elaborately sealed vaults will protect their contents from corruption or infiltration.  I think most states now prohibit the purveyors of ‘burial goods” to make such claims.  In our area, an outfit by the name of “Wilbert Vault” appears to have the vault market pretty-well sewed up.  Wilbert manufactures concrete vaults, and delivers them to burial sites, on a custom-job basis.  They also seem to have many cemeteries contracted exclusively to use Wilbert-hired grave-excavating services – “opening and closing” as they call it.  In some cases, I believe Wilbert handles the placement of heavy and elaborate vaults into the open grave.  Some of these things must weigh a half-ton or more.  Again, they can be very expensive – sometimes exceeding the cost of the casket… a piece of furniture that can run up to many thousands of dollars!  There’s money, real money in this industry.  It’s a serious underground economy.

As I was saying earlier, the cemeteries’ representatives don’t always know why there is a vault requirement.  ”State law”, they say.  I talked with a local Washington State Cemetery Board member.  He said, emphatically, that there is no state requirement for vaults or liners.  He also said he knew of no local cemetery that didn’t require a vault or liner.  A few cemetery sextons or reps told me they required vaults because of subsidence issues.  You dig a hole, drop in a large wooden box containing a large-ish piece of meat, and wait for a few years.  Eventually, after sufficient time, the box and its contents decay and collapse.  Subsequent to that, the soil above the cavitated space begins to fall into the cavity and, eventually, the cavity “moves” upward as soil from above keeps falling into the space below, until at last, the soil in the top layer falls into the upward-moving cavity and leaves a depression at the surface about the same volume as the casket originally occupied at the floor of the grave some years before.  In the “old days” they simply piled the soil into a prominent mound above the grave, and then “waited” until the natural collapse and subsidence process played out, at which point, the ground would be approximately level again.  No problem.  Then, about a century ago, someone invented mowing equipment, followed by the invention of mowing equipment salesmen.  This, of course begat “lawns”.  Lawns need lawn-mowers.  Away we go.  Can’t run a lawn-mower across a two-foot-high mound of dirt.  It’s hard to even grow grass on one.  So, they hauled the “extra” dirt away and raked the grave-top level.  In a few years, more-or-less, the ground subsided as the coffin collapsed.  The cemetery’s visitors tripped and fell into the depressions, and this begat insurance salesmen.  The sextons and maintenance crews had to fill in the holes and/or deal with mowing divoted ground.  They griped to the board folks.  The poor board was desperate to find a way to keep visitors from suing, and lawn crews from striking.  This, thanks to American can-do-ingenuity, begat steel-wire reinforced concrete vaults, which of course, begat concrete vault salesmen, and thus Wilbert Vault.  ”The State makes us do it!”, say the local cemetery board’s representatives.  Their cluelessness is typical of the misinformation and fog that cloaks all things funereal, it seems.

I did some investigating, and then some calculating.  A human body has about the same relative density as water (we’re mostly water).  If you’re fat, you’re fluffier.  If you’re lean, you’re denser.  Mas o menos.  A pound of human takes up about as much space (volume) as a pound of water.  Same for a hundred-pound person.  Same for a two-hundred-pound person. Finding dimensions for a concrete vault on the net, I multiplied out those dimensions, to find out how much volume it displaced. It came to about fifty (50) cubic feet.  Almost two cubic yards.  My pine box coffin which our friend Jeff has built for me, calculates out to about twenty-five (25) cubic feet.  Me –  I’m down to about 110 pounds (about 35 pounds off my fighting weight), and I’m seriously boney.  Using water’s weight-to-volume ratio, I calculated my own body’s displacement – 1.75 cubic feet.  That’s about the equivalent of two basketballs.  If you buried me wrapped in just a sheet, I’d displace a little more dirt than a kid’s play-toy wheelbarrow’s capacity.  If I was inside my custom pine coffin, we – together – would displace about five or six wheelbarrow loads of dirt.  Cover all that up with a vault, and the displacement of dirt comes to about ten or twelve wheelbarrows full of dirt.  Eventually, the man-made vault, whatever it’s material construction, is going to collapse.  They warrant these things for as little as fifty years.  I say the cemeteries ought to let folks be buried wrapped in a sheet, or simply charge a bit more for the privilege of being ensconced in a small, basic wood coffin, to support maintaining the cemetery’s appearance of operating on-the-level.  Nix the vaults!  Manufacturing a half-ton, steel-reinforced concrete box, and burying it along with some poor family’s deceased matriarch, etc, to the tune of $500 or more, makes no sense.  As we enter The Era of Rapidly Declining Resources, how much sense does it make to waste resources the way we have thus far?  A half ton of concrete box contributes to the ultimate pollution of the soil and groundwater below it.  It’s environmentally irresponsible, unnecessary – therefore unnecessarily expensive – and it’s a waste of finite resources which we are soon going to realize we can no longer afford.

How did I come to deciding on an old-fashioned “dirt burial” in the first place?  Well – I did some investigating and some calculating.  Most of us, over the past fifty years or so, have come to see cremation as the smart, sensible way to dispose of what we no longer want around, in the way of deceased relatives.  Neat, clean, quick, “modern”, inexpensive.  I don’t know the numbers, but I’m pretty sure the vast majority of friends and acquaintances I’ve talked with, about body disposal, over the past thirty years, have told me they intend to be cremated.  I actually don’t know what my mother’s preference was, but when she died two years ago, I just automatically ordered a cremation of her remains.  Neat, clean, quick, modern, inexpensive, automatic on my part.  Never gave anything else a thought.  It’s how I expected to be disposed of, one day.  But, some time after cremating my mother, I found some cause to think about just how “smart” cremation really was.  It occurred to me that it must take a pretty good dose of natural gas to convert a flesh and blood human body (mostly water) into a seven pound box of “ashes” (mostly burned bone-dust).  I looked it up.  A one hundred, fifty pound person (a pretty flimsy person in today’s America) requires about 356,000 BTUs worth of natural gas energy to fully cremate.  Regular (even occasional) National Public Radio listeners will perk up when I tell you that if you performed a cremation with the BTU-equivalent of diesel fuel, you could move a ton of rail freight nearly 3500 miles with that much energy.  And, same as moving a ton of rail freight 3500 miles, converting a (soggy) human body into a few pounds of bone ash… also converts a rather large amount of natural gas into a rather large amount of CO2 … released into the atmosphere.  That’s how I got into thinking about the “alternative” to cremation – an old fashioned “dirt burial”.  Doing the math persuaded me to seriously reconsider the old fashioned way.

The more I thought about an old fashioned burial, and began to look into it, the more attractive the idea became, for reasons that had little to do with environmental politics, and more to do with human politics.

First, I made a couple of sorties to local “funeral homes”.  After being momentarily under the spell of one of the less oily representatives of that industry, I realized I needed to get as far away from that pack of jackals as I possibly could.  I think the ancient Egyptians fed their less wealthy, less influential peasants to the jackals.  Their art depicted jackals in material that had to do with death, I believe.  In modern, efficient, jackal-loving American culture, we began turning funeral preparation and services over to “professionals” about a century ago.  Funerals, and their preparations – including the preparing of bodies for burial – were increasingly, handled by trained experts.  In the earlier half of the 19th Century, few people would have let non-family members (strangers) prepare kinfolk’s bodies for burial.  This was strictly a family affair.  The dead were routinely washed, dressed, and laid out in the home for relatives and friends to visit and pay their final respects.  Even out on the hard-scrabble prairie farms of that time, personal attention was paid to respectful attendance to details of preparation.  Out on the pioneer trails that led people from the East out to the “new land” in the West, people were often forced by drastic circumstances to give searingly-short-shrift to niceties, and dead bodies might not get more than a sheet wrapped quickly around them before being dropped into a shallow grave near the wagon track, before the caravan moved on again… but… I’m getting off my own track, now.

I gave up on the “pros” and decided that Jan and I could figure out some better, kinder, gentler, more humane, and more inclusive way to do a funeral for ourselves.  And so we have.  Trouble is – the industrialization of funerals and burials has made figuring out  how to do it yourself a damned difficult and murkey proposition.  There is plenty of disinformation – easily acquired – as well as a fair amount of useful information “out there”, if you’re persistent and resourceful enough to try it.  First thing, I asked my friend, Jeff, if he would build me a simple coffin – the “classic pine box”.  Without a whisper’s worth of hesitation, Jeff gave me an immediate “Yes!”  He spent a week or two researching the subject, and then another couple of weeks, after work, building my “last ride”.  I can’t remember how I found out whether you could build your own coffin (I guess one of the already-maligned “jackals” might have given me a straight answer, there).  Finding out about a “permit to transport” our own body to the cemetery was a little trickier.  You start with the local county health department.  I spent an hour or two down there.  I suspect Jan made more phone calls than I’ll ever know about.  The “funeral home” folks are not eager to tell you how much of this you can do yourself (here, in Washington, virtually all of it).  At first, I was under the impression – given to me by a “funeral director” – that they would have to come to our house, to write up a death certificate, and then, they would need to take me (my body) away from the house to keep it “on ice” at their facility, until we were ready to have me delivered to the cemetery for interment.   (I’m having a hard time getting myself and my pronouns and duties and tenses all coordinated, here.  I’m – seemingly – forgetting my place and condition in all this tableau.)   The tab for my two taxi rides by the jackal services people, along with the several days in their cooler, mid-stream, was to be just under $1200 – with my good citizen discount.  At first, I went along with the idea, because the good fellow pointed out that I was entitled to a free burial plot, with all the required basic swag, including the cursed vault, also free, because I was a US military veteran, honorably discharged.  That all added up to about $1200 worth of free goodies from the federal government.  Whoo-hoo!  There being a newly-christened military veterans’ cemetery about twenty miles from here, Jan and I decided that sounded like too good a deal to pass up.  Being grateful for the good jackal’s tip about my veteran’s entitlement, my mind was so sufficiently fogged, that the $1200 price tag for his own services seem irrelevant.  Thankfully, the G.I. cemetery struck Jan and me as dreadful when we saw it.  Brand new, sterile, over-paved, low-bid-industrial-looking, and having the whiff of military about it, we ran away, and began to consider whether we had any better options.  That’s when the do-it-ourselves notion really took off.  It was, come-to-think-of-it, only after our brush with the veterans’ cemetery that it occurred to me to ask Jeff to build my coffin.  I realized that $1200 was a lot to pay for two rides in the Jackal-mobile and a trip to their cooler.

As it stands, we expect Jeff to deliver my coffin at the appropriate time, and that Jan will have a couple of days to clean me up, give me a shave and a haircut, get me dressed up for visitors, and load me into the coffin, with neighborly help.  After two or three days lying in state, at home, Jeff, or someone else with a truck, will load up the coffin and me, to lead a caravan trip to Worley, where the city grave-digger should have a nice neat hole, 4.5 feet deep, prepared.   Assuming good enough weather for it, some of our hard-bitten friends will be there, to help unload the coffin and me, say some kind things about how I tried to be a good person some of the time, sing a sentimental song or two, then lower the coffin into the ground, and pass out shovels to the willing and able, who will back-fill as much of the hole as their patience will allow.  The Worley city clerk told me our crew could re-fill the entire hole if they wanted to – no extra charge by the City of Worley, Idaho.  I’ll only be one state away from home – for about 15 billion years, if my sense of the universe and its schedule is reliable.  In any case, I’ll be back home, where I originated, a reunited Earthling, at last.

That’s the plan.  DeLuxe !

And – get this – our old fashioned, pine-coffined, genuine dirt burial, with, perhaps, a home-brewed graveside homily – will actually be less expensive than the recently-conventional, generic, gas-fired version of disposal that we’ve most-all been conditioned to settle for during the past several decades. Think on this, and spread the word… ?

I am (perhaps) ‘better’, today.  I’ve been sporadically pecking at a collection of essays by radical primitivist, John Zerzan.  I don’t know if Mr. Zerzan appreciates being called such names, but there it was on the back cover of his book (but wait – there’s no such epithet on the back cover, or the front… someone, somewhere, called him that, I swear.  I’m just repeating what I heard).  In an essay on the transition out of the bronze age, into the iron age, Zerzan mentions something about the WTC “Twin Towers” representing a sort of pinnacular monument to late 20th/early 21st Century civilization.  His brief mention of the WTC was enough to remind me of my second (spontaneous) verbal ejaculation, upon seeing the televised strike of the first tower (or was it the second?) by a jet airliner.  My first uttered outburst was, “Oh, my god!” (probably not the only person watching TV, on that Tuesday morning, who made such an exclamation).  My second outburst is the one I find more interesting and, perhaps, less likely to have been repeated by more than a few thousand other folks watching TV at that moment.  Right on the heels of “Oh, my god!”, I said, “Ahh… there!”  I immediately imagined that I was watching a first major attack on the Modern Western World Order – something whose time seemed due, or even overdue.  A big chunk of my soul’s supreme court approved of what I was seeing.  I was quietly pleased to see the World Trade Center buildings being taken down by somebody.  From my 3000-mile-distant safe perch, I saw their destruction, however horrific, as a good and ultimately necessary event.  I was, perhaps, not in complete sympathy with the jubilant Palestinians we saw on TV that day, but I sure thought I understood what they were feeling.  ”At last!” (we might have said in unison).

Over the next several years, while I never forgot the moment or the exclamation, my sense of it’s possible significance quickly faded as things appeared to return to a more-or-less “business-as-usual” pace and posture, e.g., the US immediately bombing and invading Afghanistan, then doing the same in Iraq a little more than a year later, followed, another year later, by the brazen, broad-daylight dive-to-the-mat by the Kerry/Edwards (“WE WILL COUNT EVERY VOTE!”) team.  Clearly, it seemed, the forces of onward-marching industrial civilization were still very much in control.  ”Ho-hum, business as usual, I wonder what inane nonsense they’ll be prattling about on the PBS Nightly News, this evening.”

Then, following two or three years of my own obsessive attention to the issue of “peak oil”, we had the oil-price spike in July 2008, preceding the stock market crash of 2008, followed closely by the housing and banking debacles.  After muttering a few additional, somewhat-more-muted “Ah, there!”s, I began to recall the ejaculation of September 11, 2001, once again.  Ah, yes… the WTC attack.  Once again, it looked like the Blockbuster Beginning of the End for Western Industrial Civilization.  Does it really matter whether the events of 9/11 were masterminded by Osama bin Laden or Dick Cheney?  For me – not so much, after all.  Sure, I do still think that there was a whole lot of behind-the-scenes skullduggery going on that day, but I’m now even more fascinated by the larger, more subtle events of the past two years, and by the events-not-yet-unfolded in the coming decade.  Cheney, Bush, Obama, Congress – they’re all just doing what they were bred to do: political thuggery.  They will stay at their careers as long as they can, grabbing every shred of whatever they can get their hands on – for as long as it lasts.  Meanwhile, we build up to the Mother of All poli-sci-fi dystopian Movie Plots.  Mad Max, The Road, The Book of Eli, The Day After, Silent Running, Soylent Green, The Children of Men, etc (all of ‘em), rolled into one heck-of-an “interesting” scenario over the next five, ten, twenty years.

The American national political stage seems so utterly irrelevant right now.  It is quite apparently not responsive to concerns of or or me (unless your name happens to be Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Scaife, Monsanto…).  The fools, crooks, poseurs, thugs, sycophants, parasites and humbugs, who have their tentacles and other appendages inserted into the zombied-corpse of this country’s government, will not alter their activities significantly – until the Peasants rise up in some truly-and-convincingly-wrathful posture, and burn them out – with what might be the last vestiges of gasoline on the planet.  How often have we heard the term “Political Theater”?  As in, “Oh, that’s just so much political theater!”  Guess what??  That’s all there is – on the national stage – POLITICAL THEATER.  No matter how much money or effort any of us manages to pour into the re-directing of the American National Train-wreck, all we’re going to see on the national stage is more political theater. I think it was Everett Dirksen who proclaimed “All politics is local!” ( I should go look it up ).

It’s time for All Good Peasants in America to begin paying attention to what’s going on at home.  It might – after all – be about time to starve the federal government down to something small enough to drown in the bathtub.  Let’s just be sure some little weasely-varmint like Grover Norquist isn’t one of those with his snorkel in the scuppers as the thing bleeds out its last.

A lot of us have lived the high life for most of the past century.  It’s about time for us to step off the boat (into the water), and let those of our children (who might possess some guts and savvy) begin to take over the mess we’ve made for them.  No – it won’t be pretty.  It’s time for the fat, feckless, spineless, clueless babies we’ve become, to go off and suck our thumbs – quietly – in the corner.  No – it won’t be pretty.

For now.

8/18/10 –  My hiatus is, hereby, suspended.

“Bare Buns Fun Run” (BBFR) :  For something like 18 years, the Kaniksu Ranch Nudist Camp has held an end-of-July fun run on their grounds.  I think the first one they promoted outside their own membership was in the summer of 1983.  I read about it on a poster at the local YWCA, and promptly signed up for it.  Thus was achieved the highlight of my own running career – at the age of 44 years, I was, on race day, The Last Male To Cross The Finish Line Before The First Female Crossed The Finish Line (emphasis, mine).  In the last hundred feet or so, I skirted past a red-haired girl I judged to be 19 or 20 years-old.  I can’t remember my time for the “5 K” event – maybe something like 25 minutes.  Woo-hoo!

The run and its attendant spectacle was enough of a kick that I came back again the next year, and in subsequent years I managed to persuade a few other daredevil friends to come along.  It never caught on with “my crowd” like I thought it might. It may have been around 1989 that I persuaded my young friend, T.R., to do the run.  He ended up with a medal that proclaimed him “First Nude Finisher” for the year.  He’s still quite proud of his accomplishment.  I think his mark was made among a field of at least a few hundred other competitors.  The run is billed as “Clothing Optional”, and has drawn varying percentages of clothed participants over the years, as the cachet of running with no shorts on waxes and wanes, per the zeitgeist du jour.  Lately at least, they let the slightly-more-modestly-inclined have been shamed into tossing their trunks (etc) just before they cross the finish line – in order to qualify for a “Nude Finisher” tee shirt.  I’ve never taken the trouble to figure out just how many of these folks let their impulse to hide their stuff fall away, and finish off their term in camp swaying, naturally, in the sun, like the rest of us more sensible sorts.

I’m not sure when they first hired the DJ folks to come up and do the music.  Over the past decade (more or less) the music selection, volume, and audio quality, have been first-rate.  The same hip, middle-aged couple also does DJ duty for the nude disco mixer the night before.  They’re great.  The dances always feature a black-light-illuminated mirrored-disco-ball.  People’s teeth are always very showy, under the the influence of the U.V. lights.

Since forever, the club has also had an informal volleyball tournament in the afternoon of the same day.  All in the buff.  Nude volleyball seems to have a long and proud history at nudist camps.  I think some of the players wear shoes.

Aside from the great thumping background music on race day, the best dependable feature is the swimming pool.  They have both a solar, and wood-fired, heating system to back up the ambient sunlight water heating.  One of the (perhaps) best ways the always-scheming, culture-bending founding parents of the fun run have figured out to get visitors out of their tutus, is by enforcing a no clothing rule for swimming pool users.  Actually, I don’t really know if this rule really accounts for significantly more daring baring, but I’ve always figured that clothen holdouts, should – if at all sensible – give up their modest pretenses, and drop their sports bras and such in favor of a chance to get cool by the pool.  They do seem to permit some rather interesting assortments of jewelry down by the pool – mainly along the lines of hip-hugging waist-laces (see “necklace”).   The pool is a fine place to sit and talk, and bake and swim, and study anatomy.  Some amazing variety of anatomical shapes and doo-dads are to be studied.

Anthropologically, as well as stylistically, the fun run crowd is interestingly complex.  Many are extremely well tanned.  Many – to be fair – are not.  Apparently, there are always some pale forest dwellers willing to forgo the protection of sylvan shade, for at least this one day per year.  Aside from the top of my head and my forearms, I could be thus categorized.  Regarding adornment, “piercing” seems to be very popular among the well-tanned folk.  Surprising (for some of us) to see some of the places – to which it occurs to some people – to attach shiny bits of metal – rings, hoops, pins, and pendae – to attract attention, or perhaps hold things together (or apart), etc.  Then, of course there’s the matter of tattoos.  One of the more imaginatively bizarre bits of skin art, this year, was sported by a well-built tanned fellow in his thirties.  He was adorned with a very well executed African bull-elephant – mid-ships, frontal – depicted head-on, with its ears forward in an assertive pose.  The only part of the facial depiction of said elephant – not clearly outlined in ink – was its trunk.  The tattoo’s owner supplied that aspect of the art-work, in glorious, majestic, awesome 3-D.  One wonders how some other potential admirers of his trophy might have been preluded (or not) before being exposed to his arresting piece.  But, I digress somewhat, from standard, orthodox anthropology.

Taking a more culturally judgmental approach to the cultural-anthropological aspect of the people drawn to the Bare Buns Fun Run, and/or to Kaniksu Ranch, in general, I find the whole thing even more fascinating, if disturbing.  Mind you, I’m someone given to rather harsh appraisal, even in better days.  Lately, my inclinations toward harsh judgement seem much more keen and uninhibited than ever.

I was especially struck, this year, by how fat so many people have become.  But, then, I’m perpetually struck by how fat so many of us have become.  (This is not a situation I, personally, have been faced with.  Already, and always, tending toward the lean side, my weight has dropped from about 140 pounds, down to less than 120, over the past several months.  It looks like much of what I’ve lost… has been fat.  My hide drapes very loosely over my carcass.  I look at myself, and see… Gandhi!)  Many men at the “ranch” look like they must be mere days away from giving birth.  Women,of course, tend to look more like the Pillsbury Doughgirl, or the Michelin Woman. It’s not like any of  us were completely in the dark about what sorts of shapes were keeping those tunics, trousers, and blouses so well filled out.  Flat-out-nudity just removes any vestigial doubt.  Americans have become enormous, buy (supersize), and large.

Girth aside, I think many events, even remotely resembling the BBFR, somehow tend to emphasize the La-La-Land bent of latter-day American culture.   Most of us, these days, walk about completely incognizant of how utterly detached from any sense of  ”law of the jungle” reality that most of God’s creatures have lived in during most of the past billion years.  For many (not all) Americans, it’s Circus World 24/7.  As my favorite snarky Internet blogger/author, Jim Kunstler, has observed – many Americans have even taken to driving what he refers to as “clown cars” (one of the cuter, more benign examples of such design is, I believe, the now-several-year-old Volkswagen “bug”).  I’d suggest that many late model pickups and SUVs have clown car styling motifs – such as exaggerated fenders, headlights, tail-lights, grills, and so forth – as if the six-year-old children who once played with their toy cars twenty years ago, were now able to own and drive vehicles, apparently designed by the very same toy designers.  (Note: even nudists transport themselves to their destinations in fashionable motor vehicles.)  The BBFR also manages to attract its share of motorcyclists – often corporately-ample, tanned, tattooed folks, riding Harley Davidson motorcycles, most of which, in their gaudy, amplified amplitude, exude no shortage of “clown-motorcycle-ness”.  At an event whose very nature is “a bit” exhibitionistic, I shouldn’t be surprised.

All this speaks of a milieu of abundance.  We are living at the end of a clown culture era – an era bloated with abundance.

All that mean judgement aside, virtually everyone at Kaniksu Ranch on the weekend of the Bare Buns Fun Run, seems to be good-natured, there for a good time, and quite sufficiently talented at finding one.  I most always enjoy myself.  Largely.

Today, God (apparently) cured my constipation.  If ever I needed a sign… of God’s love for Me, I have surely seen it now.  The miracle occurred at 6:30 this morning, as Jan and I were hurrying to get on the road, to meet a friend who had offered to ferry us up to the far end of Deer Lake, for the 28th running of “The Bare Buns Fun Run”, at Kaniksu Ranch Nudist Camp.  Though Jan already has a scrap-melt-worthy pile of medals from past naked-running campaigns, she never seems to get enough of showing her backside to the competition every last-Sunday-of July.  Every year, she struggles with the decision, like a kind of monkey on her back, but she usually gives in – at the 11th hour.  I actually do enjoy the chance to sit naked around the camp’s swimming pool, just to see what the rest of God’s other boys and girls are working with.  But, I digress.

There I was, this morning – I was sitting in the “throne room”, ten minutes into Session One, Day Number Three, of the “Just Can’t Seem to Shake These Bloody Constipation Blues”, when what must have been the Holy Spirit entered my body (from whence I don’t know) and promptly took leave, – along with a much-cursed plug of confoundingly-well-stuck (poo).  I had been working for days, multiple shifts, to get the danged thing dislodged – to no avail (for the sake of brevity, I’ll spare my gentle readers the arcane details of my efforts).  With no time to spare, we hurried to make our 7:00 AM date with our friend, Ray.  Then, true to script, “nature called”.   In spite of every devious way I had attempted to help my self, just when I had given up any hope of getting shed of my overly-well-aged digestive obstacle, God came into my life, and gave me blessed relief from my distress!  How could I have ever doubted God’s concern for me?  Here, right in my own humble bathroom, was proof, everlasting, of God’s power.  Alone, I sat there praying (in my own fashion).  While I sat there, as innocent as a lamb, God’s name (“God!”) sprang out of my mouth.  I’d sprinkled in a few other expletive adjectives, too, though I actually had no expectation of God’s mercy falling upon me at that moment, or any other.  And then… it came.  Sweet Baby Jesus & Glory Halleluja!  Satan loosed his grip on the cursed plug of malevolent scat.  I was saved! Jan and I were a little late getting out the door and on our way, but, The Holy Spirit was in my heart, and I could once again walk, standing straight, without having to crab-walk on account of my peristaltic handicap.  And I could, at last, ride the motor scooter – comfortably – without feeling like I was sitting on an up-ended, out-of-date “Tootsie Roll”.  How many times do we need to be shown?…. Good things come to those who wait… and curse.

I was beginning to figure that if the cursed cancer didn’t kill me, then the GD constipation would.  Owing to increasing head-ache and mouth-tongue-throat pain, in order to make it through the week without killing someone nearby, I’ve found it helpful to indulge in swallowing a handful of painkillers, scattered throughout the day.  Swallowing!  Any “Christians” reading this can take comfort in knowing that – with a disease whose chief symptom happens to be difficulty, and often pain, associated with swallowing – swallowing is often, if not usually, fraught.. with… pain.  There seems to be some (signficant?) share of people (Christians) who object to the idea of me cutting my life short – by killing myself.  One of the main things I’ve hoped to cut down on, there by, is suffering.  My own personal suffering.  My own personal suffering.  Mine.  I’m not opposed to anyone – who really wants to suffer – being allowed to suffer all they want.  Me being a sissy, and a pragmatist, I’ve decided against doing a whole lot of suffering.  If I can help it.

Apparently, if you’re a “Christian” (of some local flavors), suffering is to be coveted.  I’ve never understood this, but it’s what they seem to like – at least, they seem to vastly prefer it to cutting to the final scene, like I plan to do.  The really funny thing is that some bunches of them love to imagine how great it’s going to be when they get to meet Jesus, and spend however many days and nights of Eternity, singing all sorts of martial hymns with Him, up in the Big Sweet Yonder.  As far as my own limited arithmetic takes me, this arrangement seems to follow after a Christian’s death.  That seems to be the big happy deal for these folks after they die.  But, as much as they love Jesus, you wouldn’t think they’d be so damned foot-draggy about the chance to spend all those happy days with Him.  Singing.  Would you?   But – I digress, again.

Apparently, it’s the blessed painkillers that mess with a person’s intestinal fortitude and good sense.  The pain pills stop the normal flow of what you’ve done ate.  It only gets so far.  Then, it stops.  Beyond a certain point, it just won’t budge.  Two, three, six or more times a day, I’d get the call: “Head for the pot!  This time it’s for real!”  Away I’d run.  I’d run like Hell was after me!  (I’ve recently learned, when you get the call, it’s no time to start making a scratch sun-dried-tomato pizza.)  Into the potty-house I’d run.  Down I’d sit….  Whoosh!!!  ……. ?…………..  ”THAT’S IT?”  All sound and fury – signifying nothing? …….  Yup.  That’s it. (nothing)  (___)!   No amount of “Special Olympics” or Yoga poses, or Tantric chanting seemed to help.  It was God, after all, who saved a poor wretch – like me – from the infernal stinking brimstone within me.

Doubling up on my laxatives might have helped, too.  But, if it really was the laxatives, why didn’t they work when I first called on them?  Why did they have to test me so?

Dang!  I’d intended to say something about my day at the nudist camp races.  I forgot.  Who knows – merciful God might suffer me to live through the night, again.  (Go figure)  Maybe I can work on “Nude Race Day!”, tomorrow.  Now I lay me down to sleep.  (If you want to read anything I’ve previously sputtered out, you need to go up to the top of the page… click on “Home“.  You’ll get it all, in reverse order.)

DBT