Christian Schizophrenia

The state (and I don’t mean Georgia) killed Troy Davis last Wednesday, a manifestation of what I call Christian schizophrenia. I could easily be talking about Muslim schizophrenia or Jewish schizophrenia or any number of religious schizophrenias, but right now I’m talking about the good old U.S.A.’s affliction.

People like Jimmy Carter and Reverend Al Sharpton represent one side of the schizophrenic code. They temper the hail and brimstone fervor of an “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” with the “love thy neighbor as thyself.” They believe there is redemption in good conduct: society, as well as the individual, are responsible for creating an environment in which the human spirit can flourish and do good deeds. The death penalty allows no redemption. The commutation of Davis’ death sentence would have acknowledged his 20 years of self-improvement during his incarceration (or rather his 20 years of torture on death row).

The flip side of the schizophrenic code is represented by folks like Rick Perry, who as governor of Texas has presided over the execution of 235 people. As a fundamentalist Christian he’s definitely a “life for a life” kind of guy: no extenuating circumstances such as societal racism, poverty, or misogyny should ever interfere with the state’s license to kill. This license to kill is equated with God’s will.

Both forms of Christianity conflate justice and religion in their own perverse ways. While I admire many of the liberation theology priests and nuns who have devoted their lives to helping people around the world and who don’t want anybody killed in the name of God, they still believe there is a God to whose will we must submit. An NAACP leader outside the prison, right before Davis’s execution, said, when she heard of a rumored last minute stay, “We thank God, our prayers have been answered.” But then whoops, they decided to execute him after all: God’s will again. Within five minutes God had changed from the benevolent, merciful God of the Carters and Sharptons to the vengeful, unforgiving God of the Perrys. How schizophrenic is that?

I don’t know whether Davis was guilty or innocent, and the people (jury, lawyers, judge, guards, executioner) who participated in his death certainly didn’t know. Only Davis himself knew the truth. That he was put to death by state sanction (something different than the people) is tragic and inhumane. But the really unsettling part of this scenario is that the fundamentalist Christian schizophrenics (and complicity, the “love thy neighbor” schizophrenics) insist that this country was founded on Christian principles (they usually say Judeo-Christian, but that’s just a bone for AIPAC) and that these principles should guide every institution, not just the criminal [in]justice system. Its vengeful absolutism already determines the way many institutions are run: No Child Left Behind dictates that you teach kids to take a test and if they fail that test you punish the school by taking away its funding and firing its teachers. Now they want to punish all the old and sick people who don’t have IRAs, stock portfolios, or private health insurance because there is something sinful about these folks who haven’t achieved the American dream despite what Elizabeth Warren pointed out the other day, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.”

Fundamentalism has been around forever. But the increased fervor to make it the guiding “light” (darkness) of our combined lives when the Enlightenment is 300 years old, postmodernism permeates culture, and every prejudice the Bible holds dear is being smashed to smithereens is testimony to an even more insidious schizophrenia. It’s not endemic to the U.S., but when more than one of our presidential candidates is the face of this affliction it’s time to lock up the crazies instead of the criminals.

Guilty Pleasures

For anyone younger than 55 this posting is going to be in a musical foreign language. For those of us older than 55, it’s going to be a nostalgic tour of guilty pleasure (not the R&B of my Funky Soul blog).

Mark and I acknowledged our guilty pleasures to each other when certain songs came on the oldies station in Albuquerque that we’d listen to in the car when we couldn’t get anything decent on any other stations. I don’t know if other people our age also refer to these songs as guilty pleasures, but they know what I mean. (I have to acknowledge here that our son Max, who is 22, knows all these songs, too; from us or the oldies station, or both?)

Terri, my friend from Santa Fe, originally from Philadelphia, does, too. Although five years younger than me she never misses a beat (or title) when it come to pop music. She must have been listening at age eight. We were going to go camping last weekend up above Chama but it poured rain and I couldn’t find a housesitter who I could possibly ask to clean up my demented dog Sammy’s poop every morning (that’s another blog waiting to be written). So she came up to El Valle and we hung out yakking about this and that, watching the U.S. Open (Serena trash talking the umpire over her penalty), and eating. On Sunday we went for a hike up the canyon and then treated ourselves to brunch at the Sugar Nymphs, Peñasco’s own gourmet restaurant whose owners I sometimes sell produce to and drink a lot of mojitos with.

I can’t remember (my recurring theme) how we got started on guilty pleasures, a term she hadn’t before used but a concept she knew well. I started out admitting that I liked a couple of songs that were definitely pop, not rock, but had catchy enough beats that despite the inane lyrics got my toes tapping. Then she asked, “What else,” and I thought, I’m really going to be embarrassed to admit another guilty pleasure is “Brandi”, by a band called Looking Glass (I had no idea who recorded Brandi, I Googled it as I wrote this, but I bet Mark would have known) about this bar waitress named Brandi who’s in love with a sailor who’s love is the sea, not Brandi. I was just about to admit it when Terri blurted out, “Brandi.” I shot out of my chair and jumped up and down with delight.

When we got home we immediately went to YouTube and started playing all our guilty pleasures. We started querying each other about all those questionable pop/rock icons who actually had a good song or two: Rod Stewart with Maggie May, of course. Cat Stevens? (For those of you who don’t know who Cat Stevens is he started off as kind of a folk rock singer, then became more known for his writing, and finally became Yusuf Islam when he converted.) I knew there was a song of his I liked, and Terri actually had it on iTunes, but the song, The First Cut is the Deepest, was covered by someone else (Rod Stewart, among others, I just Googled that, too). Anyway, this went on and on and segued into other songs we had that the other one had never heard, like Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer singing Redemption Song.

After Terri left I remembered another guilty pleasure and e-mailed her about this particular embarrassment: Lying Eyes by the Eagles. Everybody has probably heard of the Eagles—they’re still out there touring with the same band members they started out with, I think. But Lying Eyes? This doesn’t jive with my criteria that a bad lyric song can only be saved by a good beat, or an edge. It goes: “Late at night the big old house gets lonely, I guess every form of refuge has its price. It breaks her heart to think her love is only given to a man with hands as cold as ice.” Or something like that. But the chorus picks you up and carries you along: “You can’t hide your lying eyes. And your smile is a thin disguise. I thought by now you’d realize, there ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes.”

Ahhhh. It’s just one of those anomalies I have to accept. When I’m in the car, singing “Brandi, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be” at the top of my lungs, you just have to let it go and enjoy your guilty pleasures.

Letter to Elizabeth

Instead of posting a comment to your blog, Elizabeth (elizabethtannen.com/blog), I decided to write you a letter via my blog. In the olden days I would have written you on paper and put it in the mailbox, but in those olden days I wouldn’t have read what you wrote because there were no blogs. So round and round it goes, but as long as we’re still talking, it’s OK with me.

I was 28 a long time ago but I remember it well. It was a time of angst and instability, largely precipitated by the pattern set at Antioch College, which I attended for a short but intense time. We went to school for half the year and spent the other half on co-op jobs around the country, in three or six month rotations: rural New Hampshire, Berkeley, and Santa Fe for me. Even after I left, the pattern continued: Colorado Springs (where I was raised and went back to briefly); Cloudcroft, New Mexico; Bend, Oregon; Albuquerque’s South Valley; and finally (but not lastly) Placitas. My friends from Antioch were all over the place, set in motion just like me. I had several relationships, both going nowhere from the get go, and many flings. These were the days when Okies (corner of University and Central), Rosa’s Cantina (Algodones), and The Golden Inn (on the east side of the Sandias) provided a community of sorts, if drinking, dancing, and having a good old time with a bunch of other students, hippies, and assorted misfits counted as a cohort (I never used that word until Jakob started referring to his PhD class as one).

None of it assuaged my anxiety, which we all seem to share at that age regardless of the time and place. But what I want to say in this letter to you and many others your age who feel disconnected, unsure of where they want to be and with whom, things will settle into place eventually. It may take longer than you’d like it to, particularly now, in the midst of a depression, which our politicians euphemistically call a recession. It’s going to be harder for your generation than it was for mine—fewer ways to slip through the cracks with cheap rents, cheap gas, and an appreciation of the second-hand (it’s all boutique now).

You may end up someplace you never thought you would, and with “someones” instead of someone. A lot of it will be determined by you—what work you end up doing, where you do that work, or where you to want to be instead of where you find work—but a lot of it will be serendipitous (which is a more elegant way of saying a crap shoot). When I think back on how I ended up where I am, in northern New Mexico, in El Valle, I’m amazed. At 28 I’d never heard of the place. And it happened just like I said: some of it willed, choosing time over money (living in rural New Mexico), bad luck (leaving my home in Placitas because of gentrification), and good luck (knowing someone who lived in El Valle). I ended up with the same partner for 34 years, but he had already been married to his high school sweetheart, divorced, and had somehow found his way from Buffalo to Placitas, a route full of serendipity and dumb luck (finding me). You never know where they’ll come from or who they’ll turn out to be, these people you’ll have relationships with. But it will be VERY interesting.

So, it sounds like you’ve had a love-hate relationship with the crazy twenties and are ready to leave them behind and make your life a little more stable, which will hopefully make it a lot less anxious. You’re right that we tend to think of ourselves “on some sort of ascending path” but that the “better future” may indeed be false, particularly now. But I think, relatively speaking, that it will be better, at least on the personal level. Dan Savage founded the It Gets Better web site to let gays know that the social ostracism they suffer in high school or their early twenties will subside, that they will find the homes and relationships and work that most twenty somethings segue into in their thirties.

There will always be something to worry about, regardless of where you live, what you do, and who your family and/or friends may be (and for many folks friends are family). But you are not going to “revert to an older, lesser version of yourself”, regardless of the circumstances (even if it’s where you started out). It’s what you will be doing, who you choose to do it with, both personally and professionally, and how you go about making a home that determine who you are—even if in the end, none of us quite have a handle on exactly who that is. I often think back on all the stuff I did, the people I did it with, what I built and grew and wrote and thought. Someday you will, too. And it will have been a great ride.

Diary of a Bad Year: Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which

I write down ideas, sometimes as titles, as they occur to me in preparation for this blog. What on earth was I thinking when I wrote “Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which?” Try as I might, I can’t remember. So I’m going to wing it and start writing free association about Philip and maybe my original thought will find its way to my frontal lobe and I’ll end up writing what I originally intended.

A few years ago Mark and I started a Philip Roth book club with Mark Rudd. He lives in Albuquerque and we live two hours away in El Valle so we conducted our conversation via e-mail. I can’t really remember (this is a recurring theme, obviously) what precipitated the formation of our club, but it didn’t last very long. We encouraged Mark R. to read the Zuckerman trilogy, Roth’s alter ego at his funniest, but before Mark got there he was turned off by the newer novels, like Exit Ghost, and then didn’t much like Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson either, so our club fizzled. Mark and I had trouble, too, with Exit Ghost, but I thought Roth’s struggle about telling the “truth” in one's fiction, which no longer has much meaning in the postmodern world of relativity, salvaged the book. He apologizes for railing about cell phones and about his audacity to still feel there is a right and wrong way to be in the world, which is certainly something I sympathize with. I guess his alter egos, who constantly struggle to get through all the bullshit to what is “real” (and the way he becomes the women who call him on his own bullshit), allow him to make the attempt while acknowledging that we all come to our analyses with our neuroses, prejudices, and unalterable histories. I went on and reread not only the Zuckerman books but Goodbye Columbus, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and Portnoy’s Complaint, but the Monkey bit was too much for me. Roth’s obsession with young women is his recurring theme; in the novels when he’s preadolescent or a young man himself, or even a middle-aged man who also appreciates middle-aged women, it’s OK. But when he’s an old man, as in the later novels, it becomes, as Mark R. put it, “embarrassing.”

But wait. I just made the obvious connection with death and Philip, whose mortality is staring him in the face (although I still don’t know why I said “I can’t decide which” in the title of my blog). He must be in his late seventies now (I just googled him; he’s 78). Olympia Dukakis goes around asking all the men she meets in Moonstuck for an explanation of why her husband, Vincent Gardenia, chases women. Finally she gets her answer from Danny Aiello: “Because he fears death?”

Mark died at 62, much too young, at least for those of us in the western world whose life expectancy is somewhere in the late 70s or 80s, to have to face one’s mortality. I now think a lot about my own. Even though I’m on life’s downhill side, the end of that slide wouldn’t be so much on my mind if it weren’t for Mark’s death and knowing so many others my age who also have cancer and other illnesses. As James Woods points out in his New Yorker article “Is That All There Is?”, even those who believe in immortality aren’t immune to fear and dread of death. He quotes Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher: “If your life is directed toward nurturing others who need your protection and guidance, and if, unluckily, you die before they are ready to cope without you, the fact that you will be restored—and maybe restored to them in some entirely different state—is immaterial. Your project, on which you have centered your existence, has still been compromised by premature death.” I don’t think I’m particularly fearful, but I dread leaving my kids behind.

If Mark had lived we would still be publishing La Jicarita News, working on books, traveling, gardening, cutting firewood, pretty much everything we’ve always done, but my life has changed irrevocably. While I don’t go around chasing young men, I’m less attached to my work and what my contribution to society has been. I feel that maybe I should be doing some things I haven’t been doing seeing as how I, too, could be gone tomorrow. I’m not sure what those things are, but I’m thinking about it.

Unplugged

Even in El Valle, at 8,000 feet, it’s been hot. So I planned to do some big-time weeding in my garden in the early morning when the hoop house throws some shade over my mess of bind weed, mallow, and grass. Instead, I spent that time trying to transfer information from my old laptop to my new used laptop (thank you, Jake Kosek) for all the editing jobs I’m doing, track down a UPS package that I thought was being shipped by the post office (see Marginalization blog), change the bank account on my electronic billing (my community bank got taken over by a multi-national), and answer a bunch of e-mails that needed answering. As I’m doing all this I’m keeping up a steady stream of complaint: I don’t want to be doing this, why am I doing this, computers are making my life more complicated (see The Scourge of Computers blog), not less, I can’t believe I’m talking to myself like this, I want to go back to my life before I had a computer.

I often think of my pre-computer life. I certainly was just as busy as I am today, but I was busy doing other things like building a house, raising children, fighting the Forest Service (a life’s work), gardening, knitting (I actually knit the kids and Mark sweaters and hats), writing stories (on the typewriter), fighting the developers (also a life’s work), and taking trips to Mexico and the mountains (see Productivity blog). I was younger, and had more energy, but it was also easier to generate that energy because my efforts produced something other than the busyness required to keep up with the bureaucratic bullshit that has taken over our lives.

Let’s take a closer look at the things I was doing that morning. Why in the world do I need two laptop computers? I have a hard drive back-up for all my important papers (two novels, a book of short stories, a memoir of my political activity in northern New Mexico, all unpublished) and other files, but you know how it goes: my old laptop is slow, it won’t run any of the constantly upgraded applications that Apple is constantly turning out so people have to spend more money to buy new computers, which means you have to buy one too or you can’t communicate and everyone tells you you’re a Luddite. After two sessions with my computer guru, Robin Collier, there is still stuff that hasn’t been transferred off the old to the new, and glitches that I’m still discovering on the new that make me run back to the old (or up to the old, as it’s upstairs and the new one is downstairs), cursing all the way.

Then I happen to look at my e-mail and realize that a package that I thought was mailed to me on July 27 and expected to arrive in three to five days was actually UPS’d to me and of course I’d provided the postal mailing address, not the UPS address. So I call the UPS center in Santa Fe (fortunately, the last time I managed to find the number, which is not listed in the phone book because they make you call a centralized number in anywhere U.S.A. that can only help you if you have a tracking number, I had the presence of mind to write it down) and give them the correct physical address (my mailing address is a physical address as well, but neither deliverer will recognize the other’s).

Moving on to the next distraction, I find myself once more on the computer trying to pay my credit card bill only to see that my old bank, the one I specifically chose because it was local, is still listed as the payer when it’s been taken over by some multi-national bank I’ve never even heard of because of the mortgage crisis. The new bank sends me about five letters a week explaining how this takeover is being handled and what I have to do and what I don’t have to do, which is change any electronic payment information because the new bank is going to take care of that. But of course it hasn’t and I’m worried that my payment won’t be correctly processed and the credit card company will charge me interest, which is usury, so I decide to make the change myself, which I can’t figure out how to do online, of course, so I have to call the credit card company and have someone walk me through it and then that’s done.

Lastly are the e-mails. Normally I don’t complain about e-mails. I know that some people get hundreds of them every day and end up throwing most of them in the trash. Of all the technological innovations associated with the computer I appreciate e-mail the most because it means I can impart information or ask a question or have a short chat without getting bogged down on the phone with certain friends who will remain nameless who think that anytime you call it’s an excuse to talk for an hour about much more than the purpose of the call. But you still have that nagging feeling that you need to read all those e-mails pertaining to your work or your political awareness and then like everyone else you throw them in the trash.

This posting is full of a lot of “see other blogs,” which may indicate that it’s redundant, but I think it’s more a reaffirmation of the need to chafe and complain and yes, even rant, about the bullshit we, the few and the privileged (see Some Things Are Relative blog) put up with, and really, promote, in this short time we have on earth. I remember a backpack trip long ago, walking the crest trail in the Manzano Mountains, thinking, I wish I could walk this trail forever and never go back. Sometimes it’s just all too much.

The Million Dollar Bone Mill

In an issue of the Santa Fe New Mexican last week there was an insert published by the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, which is an affiliate of the larger AFSCME/AFL-CIO. The nurses and technicians at Christus St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe have been involved in protracted negotiations with hospital management over wages and conditions—safe staffing and experience—and as I write this union members are voting on the proposed contract.

The insert, as part of the union’s message to the public regarding the struggles of the nurses and technicians, includes a list of the salaries of “Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees” of Christus. The CEO, Alex Valdez, makes a whopping $457,064 (and $148,122 estimated fringe benefits). But lo and behold, the highest compensation by far on the list belongs to my old friend Dr. Samuel Chun, an orthopedic surgeon, whose makes $935,275. He’s not really my friend, but I did see him as often as I see many of my friends when I was referred to him for treatment of a bone spur on the lower part of my thumb. After shooting me up with cortisone a couple of times, which did nothing to alleviate the pain, he proceeded to remove the bone spur, which he did quite well, as he appears to be an excellent surgeon (although he forgot to take a look at a mass on my palm while he was doing the cutting). But then the trouble began, which should have been included in my Diary of a Bad Year, except that it would have made it the Diary of My Two and a Half Bad Years and I wouldn’t have been able to use J.M. Coetzee’s title.

I wasn’t blogging back then but I've always done my best venting by pen so I sent him a letter. He never answered, of course, but now that I’m blogging I’m going repeat some of what I said in the letter. You never know, maybe someone who is considering orthopedic surgery will read this posting and decide NOT to choose Chun and NOT to contribute to his $935,275 compensation package.

After my cast was removed Chun’s office sent me to a physical therapist who specializes in hands and arms. I didn’t get any better: my thumb hurt horribly and my shoulder froze. I was treated by the actual physical therapist only once; subsequently it was by her aides, and nothing helped. I figured it was time to go back to Chun with my troubles, but each time you go see him you have to wait at least at hour for a 10-minute visit, so I procrastinated. When I finally told him my tale of woe he asked me if I wanted him to cast my thumb again. I told him no, I wanted him to figure out why it was taking me so long to heal. He offered to shoot up my shoulder with more cortisone, and I told him no on that one, too.

He told me to come back in another month, which I did, still miserable. This time he said, I want to consult with my partner who specializes in shoulders. So I made an appointment with this other orthopod (I waited for an appointment and then I once again waited in the waiting room). This doc asked me some questions, checked out the lack of mobility in my arm and hand and said to me, I want to go consult with Chun. I’d been there for all of 10 minutes. He came back into the room and said, I just talked with Dr. Chun and I think you have RSD. I asked, what’s that, and he said, it’s a syndrome that can be treated at the pain clinic with a “sympathetic nerve block”, meaning a shot of anesthesia in the neck. I didn’t like the idea of a shot in my neck but I was pretty desperate for a diagnosis, so I took him at his word. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I had the presence of mind to ask the technician to spell out the name of this diagnosis, which was Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.

When I got home I did what anyone with a computer does these days: I went on the internet and looked up RSD. It was then I burst into tears. Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, is a chronic pain condition or “continuous, intense pain out of proportion to the severity of the injury.” It can start in your hand and spread to include the entire arm. There is no cure, and no definitive drug or treatment procedure, i.e., the sympathetic nerve block that Chun’s buddy was prepared to order. On one of the internet sites the words “some people can have unremitting pain and crippling and irreversible changes in spite of treatment” especially stood out.

That was the end of my relationship with Chun and his partner, who I suspect makes a six figure compensation as well. I found another orthopedic doc in Española who looked at my medical records and the RSD diagnosis and said to me, let’s not go there. So I didn’t, and with the help of a good physical therapist and many hours of evaluation by the new doc I eventually healed. In my letter to Chun I suggested that he spend some of the money he was making (at the time I had no idea how much that actually was) on a patient navigator who could follow the progress of everyone who makes his or her way through the maze of his assembly line practice. But that kind of practice works efficiently only when patients are in and out the door. Once it was obvious that I was a malingerer, he wasn’t interested.

So that’s the story. The solution is simple: Christus St. Vincent can pay Dr. Chun and his cohort a salary just like it pays the nurses and techs who work their butts off to take care of all of us before and after the surgeons stroll in with the scalpels. If they can do it at the Mayo Clinic, they can do it in Fanta Se.

Diary of a Bad Year: Invasion of the Bats

I thought maybe the noise from the air monitoring station that the New Mexico Environment Department put outside my house two days after the Las Conchas fire broke out would scare away the bats, but no such luck. El Valle is one of the LANL downwind communities where the ED has been monitoring the air, soil, and water—largely due to the efforts of Sheri Kotowski of the Embudo Valley Environmental Monitoring Group, which came into existence after the Cerro Grande fire, the first time smoke and ash polluted our agricultural communities.

I was hopeful that besides measuring the potential fallout of Isotopic plutonium, Isotopic uranium, Strontium, Americium, Beryllium, and heavy metals the monitoring station, which sits next to the southwest corner of my house where the bats come every evening to feed, would annoy them enough so they’d vacate the premises. But they’re obviously doing more than just feeding because not only didn’t they go away, they decided to do some exploring inside my house, just like they did last year around this time. I figure they’ve got nests in between the tin roof and wood ceiling where they’re taking care of the “pups”— what the mammologist at New Mexico Game and Fish, who I phoned in desperation, called them.

Apparently they’re getting in through all the little cracks—they only need a half inch—around the beams and stove pipe and ceiling boards up in the loft of my very tall house. When they made their way into the house for the first time last year they met their match in Jake Kosek, our Berkeley friend who’s spent a lot of time in el norte. He was here to help bring in the wood supply after Mark was diagnosed with cancer. We were just sitting around in the kids’ old bedroom, yakking—Jake, our son Jakob (also part of the wood cutting crew), Mark, and me, when the bats started zooming through the air above our heads. As I recall I ran screaming from the room, but good old Jake just laughed, turned down the lights so the bats would settle down (or settle up, as they hang on walls and beams, they don’t perch), whipped off his shirt, threw it over one of the suckers, and tossed it outside. The other bat started up, tried to fly out of the room, knocked itself silly, and landed on the stairs. To redeem myself I threw a T-shirt over the prostrate bat and tossed it outside as well. After Jake left I filled up every crack I could find with expandable foam and nailed lath over that, but there continued to be bats in the bedroom until the pups were fledged: every night I shut the bedroom door while they flew around the room. In the morning they were gone.
Right on schedule they were back again this year. Last night I saw only one flying around the upstairs bedroom but there have been more: two, three, a dozen maybe, after they pushed in the screen on one of the windows where they congregate outside. I quickly slammed the door and by morning they’d flown back out the window, which I closed for good. While I’m not particularly thrilled at having bats flying around my house, I haven’t vacated the premises, either. But it has limited who I can invite to spend the night. You can’t have the grandmother from Cleveland (the inside joke when referencing someone who has no idea what living la vida loca in northern New Mexico means).

I lucked out that their arrival this year coincided with Jakob and Casey’s weekend visit. Jakob is now on a mission to get rid of these “f*#!ing bats.” The first night he caught two of them in a shirt, but was a little too zealous and kind of crushed them in the process. They ended up outside, dead. The next day we went over every possible nook and cranny with more foam and lath. Then my neighbor Tony, who comes over most evenings to fill water containers from my well, as the water line to his trailer is busted and they’ve yet to determine where, told us that he could see where the bats were flying in under one of the beams. So Jakob and I put up the 30-foot ladder, he climbed up with foam and lath and plugged that hole with a vengeance. Then we went inside, crawled into the nethermost regions of the loft with our headlamps and masks, and plugged the same hole from the inside. I’m sure that if we’ve been successful in stopping the ingress and egress of the bats the animal liberationists who read this blog are going to charge me with animal cruelty, but I challenge any of them to share their house with bats, their gardens with gophers, and their chickens with pigeons before they put my handcuffs on.

I’m really ready for both the bats and the incessantly noisy air monitor to be gone. I’m also ready for the day-long buildup of rain clouds to unleash their blessings and salvage what’s left of my parched fields (the Temptations’ song “Oh how I wish that it would rain, rain, rain” plays over and over inside my head). In my 20 years in El Valle I’ve never seen it so bad. None of us in the southwest—or at least this generation— have ever seen it so bad. Perhaps the world has never seen it so bad. But that’s another story.