Max and I take our dogs, Paco and Anka, to the Santa Fe Dog Park every morning. It’s acres of arroyos and mesas spotted with piñon/juniper that the city converted from a dump to an icon. For me, a lifelong rural dweller whose dogs are used to entering and exiting the house via a dog door to run free, it’s a godsend. We complained that it was too hot this summer—had to get there before 8 am—and now that it’s winter we complain it’s too cold at 7 because the dogs are still on Daylight Savings time.
Exactly two weeks ago we were walking back to the car from our morning walk when suddenly I found myself in the car with Max telling me he was taking me to Urgent Care. I asked why and he told me he just found me lying on the ground, mumbling incoherently. He’d been walking ahead of me but heard me moaning and saying that I’d tripped over Anka. I don’t remember falling. I don’t remember telling him I tripped over Anka. I don’t remember walking to the car.
The Urgent Care was closed so he took me to St. Vincent’s Hospital Emergency Room. I remember him telling me where we were going but I don’t remember walking in or being admitted. I do remember telling the nurse or doctor or whoever it was in the room with me that I needed to pee. I don't remember if I walked to the bathroom by myself or they wheeled me there.
Back in the room they took some blood, gave me an EKG to check my heart, and then took me somewhere for a CT scan, to check for an internal head bleed, which was negative. Back in the room again the doctor came in and said I probably had a minor concussion but he was giving me a prescription for a urinary track infection. I asked him, perplexed, if they could tell I had a UTI from blood work and he said no, you gave us a urine sample.
Now, of all the things I don't remember, this is definitely the weirdest. As any woman knows, peeing into a cup for a urine sample is not easy. You’ve got it get it right under the hole or you get it all over your hand or lose it all into the toilet. How in the world was I able to pee in the cup and give it to someone while non-compos mentis? And just as weird, as someone with a long history of UTI’s, I had no idea I had one because I had no symptoms.
So they sent me home with antibiotics and a very muddled mind. I never recovered those lost memories, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Apparently before I fell and hit my head I fell on my side and either bruised or broke a rib. It’s under my right breast and tender to the touch. It hurts like hell when I lean over, try to lift anything, cough, sneeze, or breathe deeply. And despite all this pain, I stupidly went to El Valle a week after the accident to visit my friend and housesitter Marlys and load a bunch of wood into my car to bring down for the rental fireplace.
Now I’m in such pain that when I go to bed I have to lie all night on my right side because if I lie on the left the rib sags and hurts even more. A doctor friend told me it usually takes six weeks to heal a damaged rib. Another friend told me to try the Kinesio taping that athletes use for injuries. So I abrogated my Amazon boycott and allowed Max to order it from Prime because I couldn’t find any in stock in Santa Fe. Pain often skews your moral compass. I probably wouldn’t last long under torture. And I REALLY hope it doesn't take six weeks to heal because I REALLY want to go skiing as soon as we're blessed with a little more snow.I have to assume it will come or I'll go crazy. It's been a tough year for all of us.
Sunday, November 27, 2022
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Mental Health or Therapy Crisis?
The October 16 Sunday NYT Opinion section dedicated its entire 18 pages to “America’s mental health crisis.” A selection of columnists took on a variety of issues from the personal to the political: “the overlap between bias attacks and mental illness” in a discussion of the Covid pandemic impact on the Asian community; can conservatives only get help from conservative therapists; the dismantling of the “recovered memory” movement; and “Does going to therapy make you a good person,” or the general push in society right now that we should all be in therapy. It’s these last two essays that I want to talk about.
Years ago, in the 1990s, when the “recovered memory” movement took hold, I had a first hand experience with it. According to the article in the Sunday Times, it was during the 1980s and early 1990s that therapists all over the country were helping clients “unearth” repressed memories of childhood sexual and emotional abuse. In 2005, Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally called the recovered movement “ the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”
Mark and I were in a truck headed up the mountains with a friend and fellow activist to check out a timber sale that was being protested by the local land grant. I don’t remember (again, a common complaint) how the conversation got started, but the friend informed us that her father, an esteemed medical doctor back east, had sexually abused her when she was a child and had also tortured her by sticking her with needles. We, of course, were flabbergasted and didn’t know what to say, but she blithely went on and on about it explaining that her siblings didn’t believe any of it and nobody ever knew about it until she unearthed it in recent therapy. I guess our silence was emblematic of that insidious behavior called political correctness. We’d already concluded that our friend was a little crazy to begin with, what with her sometimes bizarre behavior, medical complaints, and beguiling intelligence, so we decided to let “abused” be the unprofessional assessment of causality.
This got me thinking about another encounter with abuse that took place right up the alley from where I grew up in Colorado Springs. In elementary school a Catholic family moved into the neighborhood with a passel of kids—seven—who became our best playmates, especially Beanie and Bunker, whose real name he would inform us was Edward Rodgers with a “d.” Beanie’s real name was Susan, and there were three other sisters I didn’t play with as much, but the really interesting thing about the family was the fact that their father was an FBI agent. He would be gone for long periods of time and sometimes the mother would ask my mother if our live-in “nanny,” the young business college student who traded room and board for watching us while our mother was at work, could spend the night at her house when she felt spooked. All we knew was that the mother was the “nervous” type and the kids were a bit wild and made our play lives much more interesting than it had been.
Then, as adults, my sister and I discovered that a movie, “Ultimate Betrayal,” had been made about this family in 1990 when the sisters revealed their FBI father, Edward Rodgers Sr., had sexually abused them when they were our playmates. All the sisters were leading dysfunctional adult lives and persuaded their older sister, Sharon, who had apparently repressed the abuse, to file a lawsuit against their father (Sharon and Susan filed the lawsuit and the other two sisters testified). Marlo Thomas, who portrays Sharon in the movie, had this to say in a 1994 article in The Washington Post: "This isn't a case of false memory or repressed memory. The other sisters said, 'I've known this all my life,' but Sharon wouldn't allow herself to admit that."
Edward Rodgers, who retired as an FBI agent and became a child-abuse investigator for the 4th Judicial District Attorney's Office (El Paso County) in Colorado Springs (unf*#!ing believable!), denied any of this ever happened. His three sons, including Bunker, denied it as well. He never showed up in court and the jury awarded the sisters $2.3 million that was never paid. Colorado’s US Representative Pat Schroeder introduced a bill in November of 1993 that would allow them to tap into Rodgers's FBI pension, but I couldn’t find any more information about whether that ever happened.
The last essay I read in the mental health NYT issue was called “Does going to therapy make you a good person.” The author, Mychal Denzel Smith, questions whether he decides to go to therapy because he actually needs therapy or because he should be in therapy because everyone else he knows is. The therapists he interviews concur with his assessment: their clients tell them “I just feel like I’m supposed to be here.” While the article goes on to explore whether this therapy craze has become a binary—in therapy good, not in therapy, bad, I must say that the whole idea of therapy gives me pause for thought after these two stories of abuse. Smith states in the essay: “But the biggest issue, which therapists themselves told me, is that the fixation on therapy as the go-to cure-all leaves little room for people seeking other forms of healing.”
I wish I’d had the chutzpah to suggest to my friend with recovered memory that maybe she should have looked into some other healing for herself.
Years ago, in the 1990s, when the “recovered memory” movement took hold, I had a first hand experience with it. According to the article in the Sunday Times, it was during the 1980s and early 1990s that therapists all over the country were helping clients “unearth” repressed memories of childhood sexual and emotional abuse. In 2005, Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally called the recovered movement “ the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”
Mark and I were in a truck headed up the mountains with a friend and fellow activist to check out a timber sale that was being protested by the local land grant. I don’t remember (again, a common complaint) how the conversation got started, but the friend informed us that her father, an esteemed medical doctor back east, had sexually abused her when she was a child and had also tortured her by sticking her with needles. We, of course, were flabbergasted and didn’t know what to say, but she blithely went on and on about it explaining that her siblings didn’t believe any of it and nobody ever knew about it until she unearthed it in recent therapy. I guess our silence was emblematic of that insidious behavior called political correctness. We’d already concluded that our friend was a little crazy to begin with, what with her sometimes bizarre behavior, medical complaints, and beguiling intelligence, so we decided to let “abused” be the unprofessional assessment of causality.
This got me thinking about another encounter with abuse that took place right up the alley from where I grew up in Colorado Springs. In elementary school a Catholic family moved into the neighborhood with a passel of kids—seven—who became our best playmates, especially Beanie and Bunker, whose real name he would inform us was Edward Rodgers with a “d.” Beanie’s real name was Susan, and there were three other sisters I didn’t play with as much, but the really interesting thing about the family was the fact that their father was an FBI agent. He would be gone for long periods of time and sometimes the mother would ask my mother if our live-in “nanny,” the young business college student who traded room and board for watching us while our mother was at work, could spend the night at her house when she felt spooked. All we knew was that the mother was the “nervous” type and the kids were a bit wild and made our play lives much more interesting than it had been.
Then, as adults, my sister and I discovered that a movie, “Ultimate Betrayal,” had been made about this family in 1990 when the sisters revealed their FBI father, Edward Rodgers Sr., had sexually abused them when they were our playmates. All the sisters were leading dysfunctional adult lives and persuaded their older sister, Sharon, who had apparently repressed the abuse, to file a lawsuit against their father (Sharon and Susan filed the lawsuit and the other two sisters testified). Marlo Thomas, who portrays Sharon in the movie, had this to say in a 1994 article in The Washington Post: "This isn't a case of false memory or repressed memory. The other sisters said, 'I've known this all my life,' but Sharon wouldn't allow herself to admit that."
Edward Rodgers, who retired as an FBI agent and became a child-abuse investigator for the 4th Judicial District Attorney's Office (El Paso County) in Colorado Springs (unf*#!ing believable!), denied any of this ever happened. His three sons, including Bunker, denied it as well. He never showed up in court and the jury awarded the sisters $2.3 million that was never paid. Colorado’s US Representative Pat Schroeder introduced a bill in November of 1993 that would allow them to tap into Rodgers's FBI pension, but I couldn’t find any more information about whether that ever happened.
The last essay I read in the mental health NYT issue was called “Does going to therapy make you a good person.” The author, Mychal Denzel Smith, questions whether he decides to go to therapy because he actually needs therapy or because he should be in therapy because everyone else he knows is. The therapists he interviews concur with his assessment: their clients tell them “I just feel like I’m supposed to be here.” While the article goes on to explore whether this therapy craze has become a binary—in therapy good, not in therapy, bad, I must say that the whole idea of therapy gives me pause for thought after these two stories of abuse. Smith states in the essay: “But the biggest issue, which therapists themselves told me, is that the fixation on therapy as the go-to cure-all leaves little room for people seeking other forms of healing.”
I wish I’d had the chutzpah to suggest to my friend with recovered memory that maybe she should have looked into some other healing for herself.
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
I’m a Cultural Illiterate
Anthropologist Franz Boas was the first social scientist to refer to “cultures” in the plural back in the 1880s. He meant “that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.” We’ve taken that idea and run with it. I wrote a book called “Culture Clash” that’s about the contested terrain between those who live in the forest and those who visit the forest (sort of). “Cancel Culture” seems to be about censoring whomever you don’t like intruding in your space. The “Arts & Leisure” section of the Sunday New York Times prints all the latest news about what is culturally significant in dance, art, classical music, pop music, and theater—at least to those who read the NYT. After reading last week’s issue, September 18, I discovered that I am culturally illiterate. Actually, I’ve known this for quite some time but now I know for sure.
Let’s take a look at what’s in it. The front page is a full color photo of the soon to open German production of “Hamilton” in Hamburg. The article talks about how difficult it was to translate the “rhythm, sound, and sensibility” of a rap musical about Alexander Hamilton, the father of American capitalism. I’ve never seen the New York production of Hamilton, of course (I’ve never been to any Broadway show), which is sacrosanct in the world of musical theater. But I’ve never understood why people of color wanted to see or be in a musical about a white colonial slave owner in the first place, much less German people struggling to reproduce language and music that is almost impossible to translate. Hamilton seems to have developed a life of its own, however, so watch out world, Iceland could be next.
Moving on to page 6 is The Queue, where someone from the NYT staff writes what they’ve been listening to or reading or seeing lately. This week it’s an editor on the Culture Desk and her choices include Bad Bunny, Bjork’s new podcast, Bunny the book, and Everything’s Trash, a TV show. I’ve never listened to Bad Bunny, I’ve never read Bunny or heard of its author, and I’d never watch Everything’s Trash in a million years. I’ve heard Bjork’s weird singing—once was enough—but she was pretty damn good in Dancer in the Dark, so I’m going to score that as one minor point towards literacy.
Next up is the Headliner page with Rivers Cuomo, the rock band Weezer front man. I’ve never heard of Weezer, so obviously I’ve never heard of Cuomo, either. In this section famous (?) people talk about their favorite 10 “cultural products.” Of Cuomo’s 10, the only one I know anything about is Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. TikTok—never gone there. Vipassana Meditation—haven’t done it. Coding—I don’t know how.
On the same page is a list of Podcasts and what’s new to listen to. I actually listen to many podcasts when I drive anywhere from El Valle, which is an hour away from anywhere: Slate, Slow Burn, Radio Lab, Chapo Trap House, Car Talk, This American Life, Useful Idiots, etc. But this week’s podcasts are hosts dissecting famous TV shows with names like “Buffering the Vampire Slayer” and “Gilmore Guys.” I’m not interested in dissecting Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I don’t think I’d listen to “Breaking Good,” either, even though I’m one of the millions who watched the series—twice. Watching it was fine, thank you.>>
We’re only on page 8 and there’s a lot left to go but I’ll hurry us along. I almost never read the Dance section although this time I saw the name Alan Cumming, whom I’ve always liked as an actor, so I had to read enough to find out he’s going to embody the Scottish poet Robert Burns through dance. OK, good luck. I skipped over Classical to Film, where a new movie about Gen Z supposedly acknowledges 1990s classic teen films like “Clueless” and “10 Thing I Hate About You,” which were actually rather clever and funny (so sad about Heath Ledger), but “Do Revenge” is about rich kids ingesting magic mushrooms at a school dinner and probably won’t be either clever or funny. Someone else will have to decide because I’ll never see it.
I skipped right over Television because it’s about the latest Star Wars show “Andor” that debuts on Disney + because the only Star Wars movie I’ve ever seen is the first one, which was also the last one. On to page 17, Pop. I wasn’t hopeful because somehow I’ve completely lost touch with pop music since the 1970s (see Play That Rock Guitar from 2014) except for when someone like Amy Winehouse or Chris Stapleton or Leon Bridges comes along to recharge my love (but then again, they really aren’t pop, are they?). No surprise that I have no idea who Alex G, aka Alex Giannascoli, is. Glancing through the article I see they label him as an indie, regional celebrity (Philly) so maybe many other readers also don’t know who he is, either (but I do know who Lake Street Dive is and they’re pretty indie and regional, too).
Finally, I come to the last page—Arts. And I read it because it’s about Just About Midtown Gallery—JAM—that showcased black avant-garde art starting in 1974 for 12 years, and is getting a major exhibition. It was wonderful to read about the founder, Goode Bryant, a 25-year old single mother who somehow pulled together the funding to open the gallery on 57th Street, blocks away from MOMA, which never acknowledged its existence. Do I get one more culture literacy point for this?
My final score is 2 out of 8. In the next week’s NYT Sunday Book Review I found out that maybe culture is “a mere byproduct of status” and perhaps we “make our aesthetic choices within the context of status.” So not only am I a cultural illiterate I’m also a plebian and an outsider. No surprise there, either.
Let’s take a look at what’s in it. The front page is a full color photo of the soon to open German production of “Hamilton” in Hamburg. The article talks about how difficult it was to translate the “rhythm, sound, and sensibility” of a rap musical about Alexander Hamilton, the father of American capitalism. I’ve never seen the New York production of Hamilton, of course (I’ve never been to any Broadway show), which is sacrosanct in the world of musical theater. But I’ve never understood why people of color wanted to see or be in a musical about a white colonial slave owner in the first place, much less German people struggling to reproduce language and music that is almost impossible to translate. Hamilton seems to have developed a life of its own, however, so watch out world, Iceland could be next.
Moving on to page 6 is The Queue, where someone from the NYT staff writes what they’ve been listening to or reading or seeing lately. This week it’s an editor on the Culture Desk and her choices include Bad Bunny, Bjork’s new podcast, Bunny the book, and Everything’s Trash, a TV show. I’ve never listened to Bad Bunny, I’ve never read Bunny or heard of its author, and I’d never watch Everything’s Trash in a million years. I’ve heard Bjork’s weird singing—once was enough—but she was pretty damn good in Dancer in the Dark, so I’m going to score that as one minor point towards literacy.
Next up is the Headliner page with Rivers Cuomo, the rock band Weezer front man. I’ve never heard of Weezer, so obviously I’ve never heard of Cuomo, either. In this section famous (?) people talk about their favorite 10 “cultural products.” Of Cuomo’s 10, the only one I know anything about is Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. TikTok—never gone there. Vipassana Meditation—haven’t done it. Coding—I don’t know how.
On the same page is a list of Podcasts and what’s new to listen to. I actually listen to many podcasts when I drive anywhere from El Valle, which is an hour away from anywhere: Slate, Slow Burn, Radio Lab, Chapo Trap House, Car Talk, This American Life, Useful Idiots, etc. But this week’s podcasts are hosts dissecting famous TV shows with names like “Buffering the Vampire Slayer” and “Gilmore Guys.” I’m not interested in dissecting Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I don’t think I’d listen to “Breaking Good,” either, even though I’m one of the millions who watched the series—twice. Watching it was fine, thank you.>>
We’re only on page 8 and there’s a lot left to go but I’ll hurry us along. I almost never read the Dance section although this time I saw the name Alan Cumming, whom I’ve always liked as an actor, so I had to read enough to find out he’s going to embody the Scottish poet Robert Burns through dance. OK, good luck. I skipped over Classical to Film, where a new movie about Gen Z supposedly acknowledges 1990s classic teen films like “Clueless” and “10 Thing I Hate About You,” which were actually rather clever and funny (so sad about Heath Ledger), but “Do Revenge” is about rich kids ingesting magic mushrooms at a school dinner and probably won’t be either clever or funny. Someone else will have to decide because I’ll never see it.
I skipped right over Television because it’s about the latest Star Wars show “Andor” that debuts on Disney + because the only Star Wars movie I’ve ever seen is the first one, which was also the last one. On to page 17, Pop. I wasn’t hopeful because somehow I’ve completely lost touch with pop music since the 1970s (see Play That Rock Guitar from 2014) except for when someone like Amy Winehouse or Chris Stapleton or Leon Bridges comes along to recharge my love (but then again, they really aren’t pop, are they?). No surprise that I have no idea who Alex G, aka Alex Giannascoli, is. Glancing through the article I see they label him as an indie, regional celebrity (Philly) so maybe many other readers also don’t know who he is, either (but I do know who Lake Street Dive is and they’re pretty indie and regional, too).
Finally, I come to the last page—Arts. And I read it because it’s about Just About Midtown Gallery—JAM—that showcased black avant-garde art starting in 1974 for 12 years, and is getting a major exhibition. It was wonderful to read about the founder, Goode Bryant, a 25-year old single mother who somehow pulled together the funding to open the gallery on 57th Street, blocks away from MOMA, which never acknowledged its existence. Do I get one more culture literacy point for this?
My final score is 2 out of 8. In the next week’s NYT Sunday Book Review I found out that maybe culture is “a mere byproduct of status” and perhaps we “make our aesthetic choices within the context of status.” So not only am I a cultural illiterate I’m also a plebian and an outsider. No surprise there, either.
Sunday, September 11, 2022
It's Covid Time!
I made it two and a half years without Covid. I’ve lasted seven days with it. You know how you sometimes think, being sick for a couple of days might not be so bad if you’re not too sick so you can stay home in bed and read a good book and binge watch some TV show like The White Lotus or Enlightenment (if you don’t know about Mike White go directly to any show he creates). And even with the dreaded Covid-19, you figure you’re not going to die if you get the Omicron variant, as everyone says it’s not so bad, just the symptoms of a cold: sore throat, cough, runny nose, headache, and fatigue.
Then you get sick with all these symptoms and you say to yourself, what the fuck was I thinking? I feel terrible. All I want to do is sleep but I can’t because my throat is so sore I can barely swallow, and my head is so full of snot I can’t breathe when I lie down and if I try to lie with my head elevated on three pillows I get a kink in my shoulder and my back starts killing me. If it weren’t for Xanax I’d have been awake for four nights now (sorry all you doctors out there who don’t like to prescribe Xanax or Valium, but it’s imperative we all have a stash of either one for situations just like this).
Then there’s the other person in the house who’s watching you warily and trying to wear a mask and stay ten feet away and eat in the same kitchen and use the bathroom while remembering to feel sorry for you. Then they have to take the dogs to the dog park and get your apple juice and your prescription for Paxlovid, the anti-viral they prescribe for old people like me who get Covid.
I’m sorry I have to malign my local health care clinic, which I’ve gone to for 30 years with pretty good results, but they really missed the boat on this one. First, my primary doc, a Physician’s Assistant whom I love, isn’t at the clinic when I call to say I have Covid so they transfer me to the other clinic down the road in a different village. The only provider there is a PA who’s filling in and he prescribes the Paxlovid and tells me to call him back if I have any problems.
I take it for two days. Shortly after ingestion, your mouth tastes like metal and remains so the rest of the day. After two days of metal I develop a rash across my back and by the third day my mouth is so sore I can’t eat anything that has any kind of seasoning such as salt. So I call the number on my phone that showed up when speaking to the prescribing PA, but it guides me to my home health clinic where no one answers the phone and tells me to call back. Which I do, any number of times, until hours later someone finally answers the phone and I ask why I’m not getting through to the PA who prescribed the Paxlovid, because that’s who I need to talk to. Apparently all the calls get routed to the clinic where there are no providers on duty and the person answering the phone says the PA who prescribed the Paxlovid isn’t at the other clinic today so I just hang up and that’s that. I quit taking the medication. The next day I test positive—again.
Would I not have tested positive if I’d kept taking the Paxlovid? Who knows? Covid-19, in Donald Rumsfeld’s parlance, is full of unknown knowns but apparently the only known known is that we’re all going to get it at some point, just like we all get colds (do you think there’s anyone out there who’s never gotten a cold?). I hope all your cases are mild, that you have Xanax or Valium around, and someone to watch over you who doesn’t get sick by doing so. I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed with the new issue of The New Yorker, which luckily has a bunch of articles I want to read (many times it doesn’t) and one I already read, Ben Lerner’s hilarious short story about choking. And if you’re not feeling all that bad and want a really good, funny distraction, read Richard Russo’s Straight Man, which is being made into a movie next year starring Saul Goodman himself, Bob Odenkirk. Now that’s something to look forward to.
Then you get sick with all these symptoms and you say to yourself, what the fuck was I thinking? I feel terrible. All I want to do is sleep but I can’t because my throat is so sore I can barely swallow, and my head is so full of snot I can’t breathe when I lie down and if I try to lie with my head elevated on three pillows I get a kink in my shoulder and my back starts killing me. If it weren’t for Xanax I’d have been awake for four nights now (sorry all you doctors out there who don’t like to prescribe Xanax or Valium, but it’s imperative we all have a stash of either one for situations just like this).
Then there’s the other person in the house who’s watching you warily and trying to wear a mask and stay ten feet away and eat in the same kitchen and use the bathroom while remembering to feel sorry for you. Then they have to take the dogs to the dog park and get your apple juice and your prescription for Paxlovid, the anti-viral they prescribe for old people like me who get Covid.
I’m sorry I have to malign my local health care clinic, which I’ve gone to for 30 years with pretty good results, but they really missed the boat on this one. First, my primary doc, a Physician’s Assistant whom I love, isn’t at the clinic when I call to say I have Covid so they transfer me to the other clinic down the road in a different village. The only provider there is a PA who’s filling in and he prescribes the Paxlovid and tells me to call him back if I have any problems.
I take it for two days. Shortly after ingestion, your mouth tastes like metal and remains so the rest of the day. After two days of metal I develop a rash across my back and by the third day my mouth is so sore I can’t eat anything that has any kind of seasoning such as salt. So I call the number on my phone that showed up when speaking to the prescribing PA, but it guides me to my home health clinic where no one answers the phone and tells me to call back. Which I do, any number of times, until hours later someone finally answers the phone and I ask why I’m not getting through to the PA who prescribed the Paxlovid, because that’s who I need to talk to. Apparently all the calls get routed to the clinic where there are no providers on duty and the person answering the phone says the PA who prescribed the Paxlovid isn’t at the other clinic today so I just hang up and that’s that. I quit taking the medication. The next day I test positive—again.
Would I not have tested positive if I’d kept taking the Paxlovid? Who knows? Covid-19, in Donald Rumsfeld’s parlance, is full of unknown knowns but apparently the only known known is that we’re all going to get it at some point, just like we all get colds (do you think there’s anyone out there who’s never gotten a cold?). I hope all your cases are mild, that you have Xanax or Valium around, and someone to watch over you who doesn’t get sick by doing so. I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed with the new issue of The New Yorker, which luckily has a bunch of articles I want to read (many times it doesn’t) and one I already read, Ben Lerner’s hilarious short story about choking. And if you’re not feeling all that bad and want a really good, funny distraction, read Richard Russo’s Straight Man, which is being made into a movie next year starring Saul Goodman himself, Bob Odenkirk. Now that’s something to look forward to.
Sunday, July 31, 2022
Thinking Fondly of Murray Bookchin
I heard mention of the social ecologist Murray Bookchin today for the first time in a long time. Journalist George Monbiot mentioned him briefly in another of his doomsday articles in the Guardian, and journalist Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs (FYI, the Guardian fired Robinson, along with some other progressive journalists, but that’s another story) interviewed Janet Biehl, Bookchin’s former colleague and partner. She has a new book out called Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS about how the Kurds in Turkey and later Iraq and Syria tried to establish their autonomy based on some of Bookchin’s principles of decentralized control of a community. She also wrote Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin.
I haven’t thought about Bookchin in a while, but my politics were influenced by his thinking as a “post-Marxist leftist,” organized around issues of democracy and ecology. Back in the 1980s he said things like “capitalism is barbarism” and embraced technology only so far as it would eliminate toil. He’s particularly germane to how I’m dealing with politics today: focusing all my energy on what I can accomplish locally in projects where I have a voice while turning off the outside noise of chaotic late stage capitalism.
Back in the day, though, I read Bookchin as an antidote to the deep ecology warriors like Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! who were anti-immigrant, misogynist, and saw humans as a scourge upon the earth. Bookchin’s movement, social ecology, recognized that destruction of the earth was the result of social inequality and hierarchy of man over woman, white over black, rich over poor. He wrote we must think and act "not simply in terms of economic questions but in terms of every aspect of life … not merely of class domination but hierarchical domination." He and Foreman eventually wrote a book together, Defending the Earth: A Dialog Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, after the mud slinging from the warriors became intolerable.
The book didn’t do much to resolve the conflict between the two movements, however. This is what Mark and I wrote in an editorial in the September 1997 issue of La Jicarita News, about the escalating conflict between urban environmentalists and the land based communities of northern New Mexico: :
“The battle lines being drawn in northern New Mexico mirror the internecine struggle within the national environmental movement. Those activists who come to the environmental movement with a background in social justice—labor organizing, civil rights, the New Left—are often called social ecologists: They see human beings as an integral part of the natural world that is being manipulated and exploited by the industrial, capitalistic economic system. Other activists, often called deep ecologists, come to the movement to save our wildlands as a moral statement apart from any value these lands may have to human culture. In the introduction to a book entitled Defending the Earth, in which social ecologist Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, come together to try to find common ground between these two philosophies, editor Steve Chase says: "While social ecologists . . . trace the roots of the ecological crisis to the rise of hierarchial and exploitative human societies, many deep ecology activists talk of the human species itself as a blight upon the planet . . . . Indeed, the deep ecology movement as a whole lacks a consistent or clear social analysis of the ecology crisis or even a consistent commitment to humane social ethics."
I actually knew Dave Foreman back in the early 1970s in Albuquerque—that’s where he’s from—when we both worked at the environmental center there that Terry Lamm (brother of former governor of Colorado Dick Lamm) founded. I was going to UNM part time after dropping out of Antioch. Dave had just come back from D.C. working as a lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. He was a staunch Republican. He founded Earth First! in 1980 but quit in 1990 because he thought it had become too Marxist and anarchist (in the Dave Foreman Wikipedia post it says, “Many Earth First! members attribute Foreman's departure from the organization as having to do with his alleged sexism and racism.”) But don’t worry, Dave, wherever you are. I can attest that there are still plenty of deep ecology activists out there who are staunch misanthropes.
I haven’t thought about Bookchin in a while, but my politics were influenced by his thinking as a “post-Marxist leftist,” organized around issues of democracy and ecology. Back in the 1980s he said things like “capitalism is barbarism” and embraced technology only so far as it would eliminate toil. He’s particularly germane to how I’m dealing with politics today: focusing all my energy on what I can accomplish locally in projects where I have a voice while turning off the outside noise of chaotic late stage capitalism.
Back in the day, though, I read Bookchin as an antidote to the deep ecology warriors like Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! who were anti-immigrant, misogynist, and saw humans as a scourge upon the earth. Bookchin’s movement, social ecology, recognized that destruction of the earth was the result of social inequality and hierarchy of man over woman, white over black, rich over poor. He wrote we must think and act "not simply in terms of economic questions but in terms of every aspect of life … not merely of class domination but hierarchical domination." He and Foreman eventually wrote a book together, Defending the Earth: A Dialog Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, after the mud slinging from the warriors became intolerable.
The book didn’t do much to resolve the conflict between the two movements, however. This is what Mark and I wrote in an editorial in the September 1997 issue of La Jicarita News, about the escalating conflict between urban environmentalists and the land based communities of northern New Mexico: :
“The battle lines being drawn in northern New Mexico mirror the internecine struggle within the national environmental movement. Those activists who come to the environmental movement with a background in social justice—labor organizing, civil rights, the New Left—are often called social ecologists: They see human beings as an integral part of the natural world that is being manipulated and exploited by the industrial, capitalistic economic system. Other activists, often called deep ecologists, come to the movement to save our wildlands as a moral statement apart from any value these lands may have to human culture. In the introduction to a book entitled Defending the Earth, in which social ecologist Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, come together to try to find common ground between these two philosophies, editor Steve Chase says: "While social ecologists . . . trace the roots of the ecological crisis to the rise of hierarchial and exploitative human societies, many deep ecology activists talk of the human species itself as a blight upon the planet . . . . Indeed, the deep ecology movement as a whole lacks a consistent or clear social analysis of the ecology crisis or even a consistent commitment to humane social ethics."
I actually knew Dave Foreman back in the early 1970s in Albuquerque—that’s where he’s from—when we both worked at the environmental center there that Terry Lamm (brother of former governor of Colorado Dick Lamm) founded. I was going to UNM part time after dropping out of Antioch. Dave had just come back from D.C. working as a lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. He was a staunch Republican. He founded Earth First! in 1980 but quit in 1990 because he thought it had become too Marxist and anarchist (in the Dave Foreman Wikipedia post it says, “Many Earth First! members attribute Foreman's departure from the organization as having to do with his alleged sexism and racism.”) But don’t worry, Dave, wherever you are. I can attest that there are still plenty of deep ecology activists out there who are staunch misanthropes.
Friday, July 15, 2022
No Boletes for Me
I saw my first wild mushroom of the year the other day on my hike with the dogs on the Borrego/Bear Wallow loop. Until the rains came—in torrents—in mid June, two weeks early in our monsoon season, I figured there would be no mushrooms at all. At my house in El Valle, while the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fire roared on the other side of the mountains, the land was woefully barren except for where I’d irrigated: the orchard and hay field. I’d say it was the driest and brownest it’s ever been, even though we’ve lived through many previous drought years.
Now, after those first few drenching storms and a return to a somewhat normal monsoon—I know, I know, there is no normal anymore—everything is verdant green and growing way too fast for me to keep up with, considering that I’m living in Santa Fe. Yesterday, I went to El Valle from the dentist’s office in Taos hoping to mow the orchard. Five minutes after I got there the deluge arrived. At least I was in the hoop house, where I watered—it’s inside, remember—and pulled weeds until the rain stopped. No mowing the soggy orchard grass, of course.
But I digress. I expect there will be a bounty of mushrooms, just like last year, when the spring rains came in April and the monsoon season flourished. But I won’t be eating any. The only ones I feel confident to harvest are boletes (porcini), those round, fully capped little things that are easily identifiable. I remember eating them years ago when my friend David stopped by and fried some up on his way home from Las Trampas Canyon. I remember frying some up after a long trip up towards Chama with Peter.
Last year, everyone in El Valle was harvesting them all over the forest and sharing with those who weren’t harvesting. I cut them up and put them in the freezer. Then I went up the Santa Barbara Trail with Marty and we brought down a bagful. I froze them as well, waiting to cook them in a stew or in stirfry. One night, however, I decided to thaw and put them on a pizza, which I ate for dinner, around 6 or 7 in the evening. Around 10 that same evening, I became sick to my stomach, rushed down to the toilet, and threw everything up. Then I was fine and went back to bed.
I didn’t know whose mushrooms I’d eaten, Marty’s and my collection, or Alonso’s, or someone else’s. I figured I’d cooked a rotten one: bad enough to make me sick but not bad enough to kill me (you can’t really die from eating boletes). But on a cautionary note, I threw out the rest of the mushrooms in my freezer.
A little later that summer I went to a party in my neighbor Luke’s field (he lives in Albuquerque and intends to build a house in El Valle someday). They were cooking food outside and I decided to take just a little stew, because after Luke’s I was on my way to Taos to attend a memorial for my friend Bill Whaley, the one who died of a heart attack on the Taos Ski Valley slopes while skiing with his granddaughter (see April 25, 2021 blog post). As I dug in, Luke said, “Kay, you know there’s some boletes in there. I heard about what happened to you.” I thought about it for a minute, that everyone else had been eating this stew, and went ahead and finished my small bowl.
At Bill’s memorial, at a lovely restaurant in Taos, I sat with my friend John Nichols and ate some hors d’oeuvres and reminisced about Bill. But John, who is 80 years old, wasn’t feeling too well and asked me if I’d read what he’d written about Bill when it came time for our stories. He left and went home. John, by the way, is at his most brilliant when he’s eulogizing or remembering a friendship: full of sentiment mitigated by humor and lots of love. Once he’s read his piece there can be no follow up. So I’m sitting there, waiting for the remembrance to begin, when my stomach starts to rumble and I know exactly what’s happening: I’m going to throw up that bolete stew I ate. Which I did, in the restaurant bathroom, and then came out and stood up before all of Bill’s friends and read John’s remembrance, which was indeed brilliant.
So that’s it for me and boletes. I’ll be happy to go out with anyone who wants to look for them on a walk in the woods. I’ll harvest them and carry them and give them to anyone who wants them but I won’t eat them ever again. I have no idea why I suddenly developed some kind of allergy to this specific mushroom, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Now if it were potato chips or pickles, that would be a different story.
Now, after those first few drenching storms and a return to a somewhat normal monsoon—I know, I know, there is no normal anymore—everything is verdant green and growing way too fast for me to keep up with, considering that I’m living in Santa Fe. Yesterday, I went to El Valle from the dentist’s office in Taos hoping to mow the orchard. Five minutes after I got there the deluge arrived. At least I was in the hoop house, where I watered—it’s inside, remember—and pulled weeds until the rain stopped. No mowing the soggy orchard grass, of course.
But I digress. I expect there will be a bounty of mushrooms, just like last year, when the spring rains came in April and the monsoon season flourished. But I won’t be eating any. The only ones I feel confident to harvest are boletes (porcini), those round, fully capped little things that are easily identifiable. I remember eating them years ago when my friend David stopped by and fried some up on his way home from Las Trampas Canyon. I remember frying some up after a long trip up towards Chama with Peter.
Last year, everyone in El Valle was harvesting them all over the forest and sharing with those who weren’t harvesting. I cut them up and put them in the freezer. Then I went up the Santa Barbara Trail with Marty and we brought down a bagful. I froze them as well, waiting to cook them in a stew or in stirfry. One night, however, I decided to thaw and put them on a pizza, which I ate for dinner, around 6 or 7 in the evening. Around 10 that same evening, I became sick to my stomach, rushed down to the toilet, and threw everything up. Then I was fine and went back to bed.
I didn’t know whose mushrooms I’d eaten, Marty’s and my collection, or Alonso’s, or someone else’s. I figured I’d cooked a rotten one: bad enough to make me sick but not bad enough to kill me (you can’t really die from eating boletes). But on a cautionary note, I threw out the rest of the mushrooms in my freezer.
A little later that summer I went to a party in my neighbor Luke’s field (he lives in Albuquerque and intends to build a house in El Valle someday). They were cooking food outside and I decided to take just a little stew, because after Luke’s I was on my way to Taos to attend a memorial for my friend Bill Whaley, the one who died of a heart attack on the Taos Ski Valley slopes while skiing with his granddaughter (see April 25, 2021 blog post). As I dug in, Luke said, “Kay, you know there’s some boletes in there. I heard about what happened to you.” I thought about it for a minute, that everyone else had been eating this stew, and went ahead and finished my small bowl.
At Bill’s memorial, at a lovely restaurant in Taos, I sat with my friend John Nichols and ate some hors d’oeuvres and reminisced about Bill. But John, who is 80 years old, wasn’t feeling too well and asked me if I’d read what he’d written about Bill when it came time for our stories. He left and went home. John, by the way, is at his most brilliant when he’s eulogizing or remembering a friendship: full of sentiment mitigated by humor and lots of love. Once he’s read his piece there can be no follow up. So I’m sitting there, waiting for the remembrance to begin, when my stomach starts to rumble and I know exactly what’s happening: I’m going to throw up that bolete stew I ate. Which I did, in the restaurant bathroom, and then came out and stood up before all of Bill’s friends and read John’s remembrance, which was indeed brilliant.
So that’s it for me and boletes. I’ll be happy to go out with anyone who wants to look for them on a walk in the woods. I’ll harvest them and carry them and give them to anyone who wants them but I won’t eat them ever again. I have no idea why I suddenly developed some kind of allergy to this specific mushroom, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Now if it were potato chips or pickles, that would be a different story.
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Why I’m Living in Santa Fe
So why am I living in Santa Fe? Life is complicated in general and made even more so when you’re a parent. Now that I’m in the thick of it with my younger son Max I can think of many more parents who have also been in the thick of it with one or more of their children. Like the one who became involved in a cult and refused to see his parents (he recovered). Or the alcoholic/depressive who gave up booze but is still depressed. Or the one who had a child with someone she now hates but has to share custody. Or the one who’s a functioning alcoholic but still causes his mother tremendous anxiety.
Speaking of anxiety, that’s why I’m living with Max who suffers from it. He had a major break down about six years ago when he called me on the phone in his car saying he thought he was having a heart attack, which is often how anxiety manifests. I told him if he thought he could drive, go to the emergency room or if he couldn’t drive, call 911. He made it to the hospital where he found out he wasn’t having a heart attack but anxiety was causing him so much dysfunction he couldn’t be alone. I spent almost three months with him going back and forth between El Valle and Albuquerque, where he was living. He spent a couple of weeks in a local hospital’s mental health facility where you can only get in if you say you’re suicidal. He was put on anti-anxiety medication. We went to therapy where the therapist told me, as I sat there crying, that with time he would recover.
He did recover enough to be on his own, even have a short-term relationship, moving around the country playing poker at casinos—California, Arizona, Nevada, as well as New Mexico—and online, which is what he does for a living but doesn't do much to keep anxiety at bay. He was of the generation who learned how to play online as teenagers, aided by a brain wired by chess, which he also played in high school and won the state championship.
Then COVID hit. He was in Santa Fe then, with a cohort of friends with whom he lost touch. The casinos closed. The gyms closed (he’s a weight lifter but not the kind who develops bulgy muscles). The nightlife disappeared. The online dating scene vanished (he’s gay). He became angrier and angrier that his life was ruined by COVID mandates and the politicians who were responsible for implementing them. All of them, but especially the liberal elites (he’s basically a Marxist whose anger has fomented nihilistic cynicism, though he would challenge that assessment). He spent the winter in Texas to avoid having to wear a mask. He came back in bad shape, isolated, anxious, and depressed, and moved into my house in El Valle.
There’s not much for him in El Valle except walking his German Shepard dog, Anka, who I helped him get from my friend Ike, who raises them. So I had no choice, really. I offered to rent a house with him in Santa Fe for one year so he could be in a safe environment and slowly integrate back into some kind of social life. I haven’t lived in an urban environment for 50 years. I basically don’t want to be here. The only way I can afford it is because I sold my lower field to my friend who’s been pasturing his mules there for years and pestering me to buy it for years. I gave the down payment to my other son for a down payment on a house he wants to buy (in the coveted school district) and am using the monthly payments for my Santa Fe rent.
This is what parents do but it doesn’t mean I like it. I miss my house and gardens and fields in El Valle, although I don’t miss the gentrification that’s happening there. A Santa Fe friend who also abandoned his rural home for the city said to me the other day, we’re “adrift.” I’m pissed at what’s happening to El Valle but Santa Fe is a million times worse: more development, more mansions, more traffic, less water. And the dogs can’t just run out the dog door and play in the wild. We have to take them to the dog park every morning and some other park in the afternoon where there’s some shade and let them run around without some Karen yelling at us to “put your dog on a leash!”
I’m trying to take advantage of the things I can do in Santa Fe that I like or that Max likes to help him be here. We go swimming at the big community center where he also plays basketball and lifts at the gym. I haven’t really swum, other than helping my grandkids learn, since Mark and I occasionally went to the Pojoaque Pueblo gym more than a decade ago. I find that I can still do it, all of it (or almost all of it): freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, elementary backstroke, but I think I’ll skip the butterfly. My right arm hurts when it goes straight up. A couple of days ago we went ice skating. I could have broken a hip or fractured my skull when I ventured out around the rink before I got my skating legs (I fell straight back onto my butt and head), which hadn’t been used since my kids were little. I got them back—sort of. Enough to invite my grandkids to go skating with me sometime when they finally make it up to visit this new place in Santa Fe (if their father were reading this he’d say cut the Jewish guilt crap).
I’m supposed to be here for a year. I can’t think about that or I’ll go crazy. Marlys, my good friend and soon to be El Valle housesitter, already told me that anytime I want to come home for a visit or forever, it’s OK with her. She’ll just do something else. Nice to have a friend like that, no? We’ve known each other since our older kids were born. Various scenarios play in my head all the time: maybe Max will find the right combination of medications that help his chemistry sort itself out; maybe he’ll find a friend or a lover who would like to move in; maybe he’ll realize that living with his mother may not be the best way to heal once he feels safe. I want him to find his way in the world without me so I can go home.
Speaking of anxiety, that’s why I’m living with Max who suffers from it. He had a major break down about six years ago when he called me on the phone in his car saying he thought he was having a heart attack, which is often how anxiety manifests. I told him if he thought he could drive, go to the emergency room or if he couldn’t drive, call 911. He made it to the hospital where he found out he wasn’t having a heart attack but anxiety was causing him so much dysfunction he couldn’t be alone. I spent almost three months with him going back and forth between El Valle and Albuquerque, where he was living. He spent a couple of weeks in a local hospital’s mental health facility where you can only get in if you say you’re suicidal. He was put on anti-anxiety medication. We went to therapy where the therapist told me, as I sat there crying, that with time he would recover.
He did recover enough to be on his own, even have a short-term relationship, moving around the country playing poker at casinos—California, Arizona, Nevada, as well as New Mexico—and online, which is what he does for a living but doesn't do much to keep anxiety at bay. He was of the generation who learned how to play online as teenagers, aided by a brain wired by chess, which he also played in high school and won the state championship.
Then COVID hit. He was in Santa Fe then, with a cohort of friends with whom he lost touch. The casinos closed. The gyms closed (he’s a weight lifter but not the kind who develops bulgy muscles). The nightlife disappeared. The online dating scene vanished (he’s gay). He became angrier and angrier that his life was ruined by COVID mandates and the politicians who were responsible for implementing them. All of them, but especially the liberal elites (he’s basically a Marxist whose anger has fomented nihilistic cynicism, though he would challenge that assessment). He spent the winter in Texas to avoid having to wear a mask. He came back in bad shape, isolated, anxious, and depressed, and moved into my house in El Valle.
There’s not much for him in El Valle except walking his German Shepard dog, Anka, who I helped him get from my friend Ike, who raises them. So I had no choice, really. I offered to rent a house with him in Santa Fe for one year so he could be in a safe environment and slowly integrate back into some kind of social life. I haven’t lived in an urban environment for 50 years. I basically don’t want to be here. The only way I can afford it is because I sold my lower field to my friend who’s been pasturing his mules there for years and pestering me to buy it for years. I gave the down payment to my other son for a down payment on a house he wants to buy (in the coveted school district) and am using the monthly payments for my Santa Fe rent.
This is what parents do but it doesn’t mean I like it. I miss my house and gardens and fields in El Valle, although I don’t miss the gentrification that’s happening there. A Santa Fe friend who also abandoned his rural home for the city said to me the other day, we’re “adrift.” I’m pissed at what’s happening to El Valle but Santa Fe is a million times worse: more development, more mansions, more traffic, less water. And the dogs can’t just run out the dog door and play in the wild. We have to take them to the dog park every morning and some other park in the afternoon where there’s some shade and let them run around without some Karen yelling at us to “put your dog on a leash!”
I’m trying to take advantage of the things I can do in Santa Fe that I like or that Max likes to help him be here. We go swimming at the big community center where he also plays basketball and lifts at the gym. I haven’t really swum, other than helping my grandkids learn, since Mark and I occasionally went to the Pojoaque Pueblo gym more than a decade ago. I find that I can still do it, all of it (or almost all of it): freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, elementary backstroke, but I think I’ll skip the butterfly. My right arm hurts when it goes straight up. A couple of days ago we went ice skating. I could have broken a hip or fractured my skull when I ventured out around the rink before I got my skating legs (I fell straight back onto my butt and head), which hadn’t been used since my kids were little. I got them back—sort of. Enough to invite my grandkids to go skating with me sometime when they finally make it up to visit this new place in Santa Fe (if their father were reading this he’d say cut the Jewish guilt crap).
I’m supposed to be here for a year. I can’t think about that or I’ll go crazy. Marlys, my good friend and soon to be El Valle housesitter, already told me that anytime I want to come home for a visit or forever, it’s OK with her. She’ll just do something else. Nice to have a friend like that, no? We’ve known each other since our older kids were born. Various scenarios play in my head all the time: maybe Max will find the right combination of medications that help his chemistry sort itself out; maybe he’ll find a friend or a lover who would like to move in; maybe he’ll realize that living with his mother may not be the best way to heal once he feels safe. I want him to find his way in the world without me so I can go home.
Saturday, June 4, 2022
It Could Have Been Us
El Valle spent two days on the Ready list for the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. The evacuation protocol goes like this; Ready, think about what you want to get out of your house if you have to leave; Set, put your papers, electronics, photo albums, and animal kennels if you have them by the door or in the car and be ready to Go, which means, get the hell out of Dodge. Then a cold front moved in, it snowed on the mountain peaks, and a few drops of rain fell in the valleys. The Taos County Sheriff took us off the Ready list and put the neighboring villages closer to the fire on Set instead of Go (through the grapevine I heard that not many of them had heeded “Go” and left).
We dodged (small “d” this time) the bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.
I’m living in a tinderbox. New Mexicans have a habit of saying, “Well, we’re pretty lucky here in the Land of Enchantment. We don’t get hurricanes or tornados (maybe a couple of small ones), we don’t have volcanoes that erupt or heat waves that kill or sub-zero temperatures that freeze us to death (only occasionally). Now we have to admit that we live in a drought plagued-water bereft environment that could go up in smoke at any minute. It just did for thousands of people who lost their homes, vehicles, animals (lots of cows and horses on all those Mora Valley ranches), garages, sheds, and forests.
They’re my forests, too. The fire barely crossed the east/west divide and got close to Serpent Lake, one of the most beautiful places in the Pecos Wilderness. I’ve hiked and backpacked there many times, the quickest access to the divide between the Rio Pueblo and Pecos River watersheds and Jicarita Peak, that big bowl shaped mountain that sits above Peñasco. Mark and I hiked to the divide via the Serpent Lake Trail many times—the lake lies in a bowl just below the trail—when the kids were young with other families with young kids. We hiked there without kids when we were older and climbed the peak. We hiked there with Sammy, our deaf dog who couldn’t hear us call him to come back when the wind was blowing like a motherfucker and we wanted to turn back. I took my hiking class from UNM Continuing Education on a backpack trip to the lake where we camped and later bushwhacked our way straight up the ridge to the peak because there was too much snow on the trail. I backpacked there with Terri and Emma and a friend from Philly on their first backpack trip anywhere.From what’s been reported, the fire burned just to the east of Serpent Lake in the Angostura and Alamitos watersheds. I’ve hiked and skied there, too. Those forests are probably gone, although miraculously, the cabins tucked away alongside the Angostura Trail survived, from what I’ve heard. Every time we passed by on our way up the trail I’d think, “Well, I hope a fire never goes through here cuz these cabins will be toast.”
I’m waiting awhile to drive up to see for myself the tragic consequences. Fire fighters are still everywhere, although most of the roads into the Mora Valley are open once again. The south end of the fire also reached into the Pecos Wilderness, near Elk Mountain and remains active. So when most of the crews are released I’ll leave Santa Fe—my next post is why I’m suddenly living in Santa Fe after 30 years in El Valle—and follow I-25 north to Las Vegas where I’ll pick up SH 518, which leads to Mora. At Sapello, I’ll turn off onto 94 that travels through many of the little villages that were devastated by the fire. Maybe I’ll go all the way to Rociada and Pendaries, the villages closest to that east side of the Pecos Wilderness that I’m less familiar with. Then I’ll return to 518 through Mora and Holman and Cleveland to Chacon, a village tucked away at the base of the mountains that were completely burned (miraculously, much of Chacon was saved). Returning to 518 I’ll climb Holman Hill, which divides the Rio Pueblo from the Rio Mora and leads to Angostura and Alamitos. Maybe I’ll drive up Forest Road 161 to the Serpent Lake trailhead, if it’s open (the Carson and Santa Fe forests are in Stage 3 restrictions, meaning completely closed to the public).
Do I really want to do this? Maybe not, but I feel compelled to see what happened. I’m too old to climb Jicarita anymore but I’m not too old to bear witness, even if it’s from a car. As I said before, it could have been us.
We dodged (small “d” this time) the bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.
I’m living in a tinderbox. New Mexicans have a habit of saying, “Well, we’re pretty lucky here in the Land of Enchantment. We don’t get hurricanes or tornados (maybe a couple of small ones), we don’t have volcanoes that erupt or heat waves that kill or sub-zero temperatures that freeze us to death (only occasionally). Now we have to admit that we live in a drought plagued-water bereft environment that could go up in smoke at any minute. It just did for thousands of people who lost their homes, vehicles, animals (lots of cows and horses on all those Mora Valley ranches), garages, sheds, and forests.
They’re my forests, too. The fire barely crossed the east/west divide and got close to Serpent Lake, one of the most beautiful places in the Pecos Wilderness. I’ve hiked and backpacked there many times, the quickest access to the divide between the Rio Pueblo and Pecos River watersheds and Jicarita Peak, that big bowl shaped mountain that sits above Peñasco. Mark and I hiked to the divide via the Serpent Lake Trail many times—the lake lies in a bowl just below the trail—when the kids were young with other families with young kids. We hiked there without kids when we were older and climbed the peak. We hiked there with Sammy, our deaf dog who couldn’t hear us call him to come back when the wind was blowing like a motherfucker and we wanted to turn back. I took my hiking class from UNM Continuing Education on a backpack trip to the lake where we camped and later bushwhacked our way straight up the ridge to the peak because there was too much snow on the trail. I backpacked there with Terri and Emma and a friend from Philly on their first backpack trip anywhere.From what’s been reported, the fire burned just to the east of Serpent Lake in the Angostura and Alamitos watersheds. I’ve hiked and skied there, too. Those forests are probably gone, although miraculously, the cabins tucked away alongside the Angostura Trail survived, from what I’ve heard. Every time we passed by on our way up the trail I’d think, “Well, I hope a fire never goes through here cuz these cabins will be toast.”
Do I really want to do this? Maybe not, but I feel compelled to see what happened. I’m too old to climb Jicarita anymore but I’m not too old to bear witness, even if it’s from a car. As I said before, it could have been us.
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Our Messy Struggle Towards Freedom
Michel Foucault: “Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom.”
This is one of the main tenants in Maggie Nelson’s amazing book On Freedom, Four Songs of Care and Constraint.
“The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” [or of course televised]. That’s the title of a book review in the NYT of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman.
Both writers are talking about how historical “acts of freedom” or “radical ideas” have played out so differently depending upon the time and players but that collectively they engage in redefining power instead of “waiting for the ‘big night’ of liberation.” As Nelson quotes anthropologist David Graeber, “Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” Nelson’s book tells the stories of those who try to act this way in four arenas: art, sex, drugs, and climate. The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas focuses on the “quiet ones” whose rebellions under the establishment radar often ended in defeat but ultimately moved towards freedom.
Reading Nelson’s book and the review of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas made me think about a conversation I’ve had more than once with a fellow player in contemporary radicalism, Ike DeVargas, with whom I’ve worked to empower rural communities in their battles over access to resources, expose corrupt politicians and corporate incompetence, and stop mass incarceration. Whenever I begin to bemoan the losses we’ve witnessed in any number of these battles and threaten to quit, he stops me with, “But you never know what positive effects you’ve had on everyone who’s been working alongside you and what those effects might have that you’ll never even know about.”
Nelson puts it another way, addressing the many more realms she takes on: “Learning to follow one’s intuitions doggedly without killing them with prejudgment; to hold at bay catastrophizing projections about reception; to have the fortitude to continue on in the face of indifference, discouragement, or intense criticism; to access or sustain the ambition to try things considered unwise, impossible, taboo, or out of step with one’s times; to “stand up for your work! Open it up! Don’t shut it down, man!”
There’s so much wrong in the world that it’s pretty damn hard to “act as if one is already free.” I’m also reading The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of American’s Secret Government. While we understandably focus our outrage today on how the “war on terror” unleashed the secret deep state surveillance, this book reminds us how the “fear of Communism” created the king of surveillance, the CIA, that not only used that “intelligence” to initiate coups around the world—Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, etc.—but to stoke the nuclear arms race. And just as it remains today, it was all founded on the corporatization of America to expand our empire, making a mockery of democracy. We’re not going to establish new “power relationships” that lead to liberation by electing a Democrat instead of a Republican to the presidency—or appointing a CIA director who vows there will be no more assassinations. Power brokers like Allen Dulles and Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld’s stink have infected a system that no vaccination can cure.
It’s up to us to figure out, and good luck with that. As Nelson points out: “No doubt there is much to feel powerless about these days, and no doubt certain bodies bear the brunt of this fact to a much greater extent than others. But locating authentic radicalism in the purity of powerlessness does not necessarily lead to our empowerment, or to more just, responsible exercises of it. A deepening conviction of our powerlessness can at times make us insensitive to the power that we do have, even as we demand such an accounting from others.” I’m afraid it’s back to Foucault: a constant reassessment of the power that we do have in our struggles towards freedom.
This is one of the main tenants in Maggie Nelson’s amazing book On Freedom, Four Songs of Care and Constraint.
“The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” [or of course televised]. That’s the title of a book review in the NYT of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman.
Both writers are talking about how historical “acts of freedom” or “radical ideas” have played out so differently depending upon the time and players but that collectively they engage in redefining power instead of “waiting for the ‘big night’ of liberation.” As Nelson quotes anthropologist David Graeber, “Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” Nelson’s book tells the stories of those who try to act this way in four arenas: art, sex, drugs, and climate. The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas focuses on the “quiet ones” whose rebellions under the establishment radar often ended in defeat but ultimately moved towards freedom.
Reading Nelson’s book and the review of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas made me think about a conversation I’ve had more than once with a fellow player in contemporary radicalism, Ike DeVargas, with whom I’ve worked to empower rural communities in their battles over access to resources, expose corrupt politicians and corporate incompetence, and stop mass incarceration. Whenever I begin to bemoan the losses we’ve witnessed in any number of these battles and threaten to quit, he stops me with, “But you never know what positive effects you’ve had on everyone who’s been working alongside you and what those effects might have that you’ll never even know about.”
Nelson puts it another way, addressing the many more realms she takes on: “Learning to follow one’s intuitions doggedly without killing them with prejudgment; to hold at bay catastrophizing projections about reception; to have the fortitude to continue on in the face of indifference, discouragement, or intense criticism; to access or sustain the ambition to try things considered unwise, impossible, taboo, or out of step with one’s times; to “stand up for your work! Open it up! Don’t shut it down, man!”
There’s so much wrong in the world that it’s pretty damn hard to “act as if one is already free.” I’m also reading The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of American’s Secret Government. While we understandably focus our outrage today on how the “war on terror” unleashed the secret deep state surveillance, this book reminds us how the “fear of Communism” created the king of surveillance, the CIA, that not only used that “intelligence” to initiate coups around the world—Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, etc.—but to stoke the nuclear arms race. And just as it remains today, it was all founded on the corporatization of America to expand our empire, making a mockery of democracy. We’re not going to establish new “power relationships” that lead to liberation by electing a Democrat instead of a Republican to the presidency—or appointing a CIA director who vows there will be no more assassinations. Power brokers like Allen Dulles and Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld’s stink have infected a system that no vaccination can cure.
It’s up to us to figure out, and good luck with that. As Nelson points out: “No doubt there is much to feel powerless about these days, and no doubt certain bodies bear the brunt of this fact to a much greater extent than others. But locating authentic radicalism in the purity of powerlessness does not necessarily lead to our empowerment, or to more just, responsible exercises of it. A deepening conviction of our powerlessness can at times make us insensitive to the power that we do have, even as we demand such an accounting from others.” I’m afraid it’s back to Foucault: a constant reassessment of the power that we do have in our struggles towards freedom.
Friday, February 18, 2022
I've Known a Lot of People!
Lately I’ve been going through all my CDs playing ones I haven’t listened to in a long time or completely forgotten I have. Yesterday I stumbled on “Get Out” by Larry Freedman, a longtime Albuquerque based keyboard player who’s performed with various local bands over the years. He’s a phenomenal musician whose blues piano covers and originals on this CD are a delight. This led me to his other CD, “It Is What It Is” with Joanie Griffin and Combo Special. Joanie was the lead singer with Cadillac Bob, a great Albuquerque band and the Thunderbird Bar’s house band (in Placitas).
It got me thinking about all the interesting people I’ve met over the years who may or may not be well known but whose company has enriched my life. Unfortunately, so many of them have disappeared from my orbit, either because of geography—my relative isolation in El Valle—my age—I’m getting old—or just the natural ebb and flow of people over the course of a lifetime.
I think I met Larry at the REI in Albuquerque when I was doing a book signing for my Hiking Guide to the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. He’s a big hiker and skier and his then girlfriend was working at the store. He brought me his CDs one day on his way through El Valle to go hiking in the Pecos Wilderness. The last time I saw him he was playing keyboards with remnants of the Combo at a wedding in Placitas.
Ah, Placitas, so many old friends and kooks from there who I haven’t seen in 30 years, like Larry Goodell, whose parties showcased his poetry performances or his boogie woogie piano playing. John Kennedy, with whom Mark and I collaborated on a spoof called the Placitas Unreal Estate Newsletter to protest against the developers, wrote pornography for a living. Artist Roger Evans, who lived up in the hills below Tunnel Springs, constructed his house and swimming pool out of ferrocement.
Jackie Boaz was the curmudgeon who I worked with in the Forest Service while building a house in Placitas. She helped us cut the vigas for the house and we helped her tear down a cabin in the woods so we both could have the oak flooring. She lived down in the Manzano Mountains with her partner Sandra and let me stay there once a week with baby Jakob when I was on duty in the fire lookout. I don’t think anyone in the local Forest Service office ever discussed her sexuality because they were too afraid of her temper.
Speaking of the Forest Service reminds me of Pete Totemoff. I skied Santa Fe the other day with my grandkids and there was music and beer flowing at the Totemoff midway restaurant, named for the eponymous Aleut Indian. He helped Bob Nordhaus build the Sandia Peak Ski Area and Ernie Blake the Santa Fe and Taos ski areas, but I knew Pete when I worked the fire lookout. I think he was working with the fire crews but I’d see him when he’d visit the tower or at the ranger station, flirting with anyone and everyone—as long as they were female—including me. A notorious womanizer, he was also funny, kind, and a whizz on skis.
My Forest Service seasonal employment days were long over by the time we moved to El Valle from Placitas. So instead of working with some Forest Service kooks I went into battle with them over policy issues like clearcuts and ski area expansions. That meant forging a relationship with my local district ranger, Crockett Dumas. Crocket was a tall, lanky cowboy who wore blue jeans, snap shirts, knee-high laced boots, a handlebar mustache, and a ten-gallon hat. He raised and rode long distance, cross-country racehorses for fun but surprisingly enough, given his background, he was perhaps the best district ranger I ever met in my long history of district rangers. He actually initiated policies that reflected his commitment to the local communities he served rather than his DC bosses that ended up getting him transferred out of the district for being too chummy with us.
“Us” was a real mishmash of people, of course: Hispano land grant heirs, Picuris Pueblo Indians, hippies who came out with Wavy Gravy to establish the Hog Farm, alt generation back to the landers, professionals, traditional farmers, organic farmers, you name it. And then there was Tomás, my next-door neighbor. A big bulk of a man born and raised in El Valle who’d done just about everything to stay there—or have something to come back to when he couldn’t stay there: herding sheep in Wyoming, canning tomatoes in California, running a little store and gas station in the village, driving the school bus, driving the fire bus, serving as sheriff (I don’t think that lasted too long), and raising cattle. He took us, the gabachos, under his wing to teach us how to be buen vecinos and we did things for him that only privileged gabachos knew how to do, like navigate the Office of the State Engineer for money to rebuild our presa, or acequia dam, and go online to register him as a fire bus driver when that became mandatory.
Tomás died in 2009, a year before my partner Mark died of pancreatic cancer. Cancer also got Tomás, along with diabetes. In 2012 my friend Butchie Denver died, also of cancer. Butchie got the name “Denver” from Bob Denver, aka Maynard G. Krebs from the TV show The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis. How she ended up in New Mexico is a long story, but I met her as an artist/activist from Llama, north of Taos who had my back as we fought the powers that be over development, land use, and water rights. She was a power to be reckoned with, and like Jackie Boaz, often got things done because everyone was afraid of her.
Now, at 72, one of my closest friends is John Nichols of Milagro Beanfield War fame, although he’d much rather be known for any of his other books, of which there are 23, both fiction and non-fiction. He lives in a dilapidated adobe in Taos, having lost his former homestead to an ex-wife. But he’s never asked for much, just the energy to fly fish his beloved Rio Grande or hike and snowshoe to his favorite Lake Peak. At 81, however, and in ill health (he’s been plagued with heart disease since he was young) John can’t do those things anymore. But he can still write! His latest book will be published in a few months’ time. We sometimes walk in the park if the weather’s nice, during these frustrating days of COVID-19, and I call once a week to make sure he’s still alive. I suspect he’s going to be the next of my friends to go, but you never know, it could be me.
This list was not planned, I just wrote about someone and someone else came to mind. There are hundreds more. We all have lists like this, but sometimes we forget how incredibly interesting they are. It’s been fun remembering.
It got me thinking about all the interesting people I’ve met over the years who may or may not be well known but whose company has enriched my life. Unfortunately, so many of them have disappeared from my orbit, either because of geography—my relative isolation in El Valle—my age—I’m getting old—or just the natural ebb and flow of people over the course of a lifetime.
I think I met Larry at the REI in Albuquerque when I was doing a book signing for my Hiking Guide to the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. He’s a big hiker and skier and his then girlfriend was working at the store. He brought me his CDs one day on his way through El Valle to go hiking in the Pecos Wilderness. The last time I saw him he was playing keyboards with remnants of the Combo at a wedding in Placitas.
Ah, Placitas, so many old friends and kooks from there who I haven’t seen in 30 years, like Larry Goodell, whose parties showcased his poetry performances or his boogie woogie piano playing. John Kennedy, with whom Mark and I collaborated on a spoof called the Placitas Unreal Estate Newsletter to protest against the developers, wrote pornography for a living. Artist Roger Evans, who lived up in the hills below Tunnel Springs, constructed his house and swimming pool out of ferrocement.
Jackie Boaz was the curmudgeon who I worked with in the Forest Service while building a house in Placitas. She helped us cut the vigas for the house and we helped her tear down a cabin in the woods so we both could have the oak flooring. She lived down in the Manzano Mountains with her partner Sandra and let me stay there once a week with baby Jakob when I was on duty in the fire lookout. I don’t think anyone in the local Forest Service office ever discussed her sexuality because they were too afraid of her temper.
Speaking of the Forest Service reminds me of Pete Totemoff. I skied Santa Fe the other day with my grandkids and there was music and beer flowing at the Totemoff midway restaurant, named for the eponymous Aleut Indian. He helped Bob Nordhaus build the Sandia Peak Ski Area and Ernie Blake the Santa Fe and Taos ski areas, but I knew Pete when I worked the fire lookout. I think he was working with the fire crews but I’d see him when he’d visit the tower or at the ranger station, flirting with anyone and everyone—as long as they were female—including me. A notorious womanizer, he was also funny, kind, and a whizz on skis.
My Forest Service seasonal employment days were long over by the time we moved to El Valle from Placitas. So instead of working with some Forest Service kooks I went into battle with them over policy issues like clearcuts and ski area expansions. That meant forging a relationship with my local district ranger, Crockett Dumas. Crocket was a tall, lanky cowboy who wore blue jeans, snap shirts, knee-high laced boots, a handlebar mustache, and a ten-gallon hat. He raised and rode long distance, cross-country racehorses for fun but surprisingly enough, given his background, he was perhaps the best district ranger I ever met in my long history of district rangers. He actually initiated policies that reflected his commitment to the local communities he served rather than his DC bosses that ended up getting him transferred out of the district for being too chummy with us.
“Us” was a real mishmash of people, of course: Hispano land grant heirs, Picuris Pueblo Indians, hippies who came out with Wavy Gravy to establish the Hog Farm, alt generation back to the landers, professionals, traditional farmers, organic farmers, you name it. And then there was Tomás, my next-door neighbor. A big bulk of a man born and raised in El Valle who’d done just about everything to stay there—or have something to come back to when he couldn’t stay there: herding sheep in Wyoming, canning tomatoes in California, running a little store and gas station in the village, driving the school bus, driving the fire bus, serving as sheriff (I don’t think that lasted too long), and raising cattle. He took us, the gabachos, under his wing to teach us how to be buen vecinos and we did things for him that only privileged gabachos knew how to do, like navigate the Office of the State Engineer for money to rebuild our presa, or acequia dam, and go online to register him as a fire bus driver when that became mandatory.
Tomás died in 2009, a year before my partner Mark died of pancreatic cancer. Cancer also got Tomás, along with diabetes. In 2012 my friend Butchie Denver died, also of cancer. Butchie got the name “Denver” from Bob Denver, aka Maynard G. Krebs from the TV show The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis. How she ended up in New Mexico is a long story, but I met her as an artist/activist from Llama, north of Taos who had my back as we fought the powers that be over development, land use, and water rights. She was a power to be reckoned with, and like Jackie Boaz, often got things done because everyone was afraid of her.
Now, at 72, one of my closest friends is John Nichols of Milagro Beanfield War fame, although he’d much rather be known for any of his other books, of which there are 23, both fiction and non-fiction. He lives in a dilapidated adobe in Taos, having lost his former homestead to an ex-wife. But he’s never asked for much, just the energy to fly fish his beloved Rio Grande or hike and snowshoe to his favorite Lake Peak. At 81, however, and in ill health (he’s been plagued with heart disease since he was young) John can’t do those things anymore. But he can still write! His latest book will be published in a few months’ time. We sometimes walk in the park if the weather’s nice, during these frustrating days of COVID-19, and I call once a week to make sure he’s still alive. I suspect he’s going to be the next of my friends to go, but you never know, it could be me.
This list was not planned, I just wrote about someone and someone else came to mind. There are hundreds more. We all have lists like this, but sometimes we forget how incredibly interesting they are. It’s been fun remembering.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
