I’ve written before in this blog about watching sports, particularly basketball (“On Watching Basketball” in the first Unf*#!ing Believable) and baseball (“Just Trying to Watch the Game” in Unf*#!ing Believable Redux, yet to be published), but the only time I wrote about football was to dis Beyoncé and Madonna while discussing the Super Bowl halftime show (also in the first Unf*#!ing Believable).
Actually, in the “On Watching Basketball” blog post I also wrote about football but only to reference the Buffalo Bills, Mark’s hometown team—that managed to lose the Super Bowl four times in a row—while questioning his ability to disassociate sports from his criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: “class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed , media misinformation, etc.” I also recognized that he “just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run.”
This blog post is about the “gut wrenching physicality of football,” which I’ve found myself watching much more of lately. Maybe it’s because Jakob and Marcos, my grandson, remain Bills fans. Or maybe it’s because a couple of Super Bowls back I became aware of how hot the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes is. After Mark died my friends Kai and Ki and I started the tradition of watching the Super Bowl at their house so we could evaluate the quality of the millions-of-dollars commercials that paid for the spectacle. Kai and Ki are the owners and chefs of the Sugar Nymphs Bistro in Peñasco who also fed me delicious food while we were watching the commercials.
This year I’m going to be watching much more than the commercials, however, because Patrick Mahomes is there once again. I actually watched two Sundays of football when the Chiefs worked their way through the playoffs. I even watched two football games last Sunday—the first time in my life—because I had to wait until 4:30 to watch the Chiefs and what was I going to do with the rest of this day I’d set aside for TV.
But I have to admit, the “gut wrenching” display of players landing on top of each other and either slowly getting up or failing to get up often too much. Max and I were trying to watch the Bills/Cincinnati Bengals game— the streaming channel was on the blink—when the Bills player Damar Hamlin actually died on the field of cardiac arrest but was brought back to life. I saw many reruns of that wrenching moment and I’ve seen plenty of other violent, wrenching moments and ask myself, “Why is it that a game so physically brutal is the most popular sport in this country?” On the phone the other night John Nichols told me why he loves to watch football: “Yes, it’s violent, but it’s so interesting because you never know what’s going to happen.” I’m not sure that’s what millions of other fans would say if you asked them the same question, but we’ll leave it at that.
Then when we were skiing yesterday, Jakob and I chatted about the impending Super Bowl and he told me that at the last game they showed the owner’s wife dressed from head to toe in fur. I Googled the owner and saw that his grandfather, H.L. Hunt, was an oil tycoon and the inspiration for the character J.R. Ewing from the long-running TV series “Dallas.” OK, what NFL owner isn’t a capitalist pig (the Green Bay Packers are the only publicly owned team with a president, not an owner)? So, like Mark, I’ll put aside the notion of corporate greed and just enjoy the Super Bowl this year. Go Chiefs!
Monday, February 6, 2023
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
Death
Zadie Smith wrote a review in The New York Review of Books of Tár, the new movie starring Cate Blanchett as a world famous, narcissistic conductor. While Smith mentions that some movie reviewers asked, “Why do female ambition and desire have to be monstrous?,” the part of the review that interested me was Smith’s discussion of death. In this ambitious woman’s life, it’s her reputation that dies—“ego death”—not her corporeal being, but in Smith’s telling the two are inseparable. For someone like Lydia Tár, Blanchett’s character, the loss of prestige is death.
This makes me think about the many deaths I’ve already experienced and the ones that impend. I’m 73 (happy birthday to me), so there are going to be quite a few of the latter. Of the ones who are gone, there are those who leave behind something that makes it into the cultural zeitgeist: a book, a movie, a painting, a philosophy, or the fictitious Lydia Tár. Those who don’t make it in leave a memory of themselves to only a few others, and even then, that memory fades rapidly as the others’ lives proceed. When I think about those few whose memory I hold, it’s hard to reconcile who they were then, when they were with me daily or close by, with the fact that they aren’t anywhere any more.
This, of course, makes me think about my own death. Where do I fall into the scheme of things? A little fish in a little pond is probably about where I lie. In my 27-year old “Journal of Environmental Politics,” La Jicarita, I’ll be leaving behind a written record of an eventful time in in northern New Mexico but La Jicarita will die with me. It’s archive will live on in the Center for Southwest Research at UNM’s Zimmerman Library, but except for those who knew me personally there won’t be much memory of its editor. I always remember what Owen Lopez, former executive director of the McCune Foundation, which funded La Jicarita for many years, said to me at a party celebrating its fundees: “Well, you may not have accomplished much or won too many battles but at least you have a record of it.”
But I have some very important people with me in that little pond who I would classify as middle-to large sized fish and they’re not doing too well. One of them just called me on the phone to tell me he had a heart attack last week and spent three days in the hospital. “Why didn’t you call me from the hospital?” I asked, upset. “Verizon cut off my cell phone service for some unknown reason. I paid the fuckers.” He survived this time but the possibility of a next time is now much more likely. My other friend is in his 80s and barely hanging on. A beloved writer of novels and nonfiction, he’s hoping to make it through another winter, alone in his house crammed full of life’s detritus.
When they die there will be many people and family members who’ll attend their funerals and reminisce about their places in the world. When my partner of 34 years and co-editor of La Jicarita, Mark Schiller, died prematurely at age 62, we had a wake in El Valle that was crammed full of family, neighbors, co-conspirators, and friends from all walks of life. But the only ones who ever talk about him are the kids and me. That’s where I’m headed as well, and probably without a wake, as everyone who was at Mark’s will either be dead or been gone too long.
But that’s OK. My life is more circumscribed now and less fun, so thinking about death doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is how I’m going to die. Mark died of pancreatic cancer. He lived for 18 months with chemotherapy, some hospital visits, and in the end, he decided to quit eating. My mother died of an intentional overdose of drugs after she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that made her susceptible to infection. That’s the route I plan to take when I decide I’ve had enough. A serious illness or an inkling of dementia will probably be the tipping point, but you never know. I’ll just have to wait and see and make sure I have the right stuff at the right time. Until then, I’m afraid I’ll have quite a bit of mourning to do and that may be worse than death.
This makes me think about the many deaths I’ve already experienced and the ones that impend. I’m 73 (happy birthday to me), so there are going to be quite a few of the latter. Of the ones who are gone, there are those who leave behind something that makes it into the cultural zeitgeist: a book, a movie, a painting, a philosophy, or the fictitious Lydia Tár. Those who don’t make it in leave a memory of themselves to only a few others, and even then, that memory fades rapidly as the others’ lives proceed. When I think about those few whose memory I hold, it’s hard to reconcile who they were then, when they were with me daily or close by, with the fact that they aren’t anywhere any more.
This, of course, makes me think about my own death. Where do I fall into the scheme of things? A little fish in a little pond is probably about where I lie. In my 27-year old “Journal of Environmental Politics,” La Jicarita, I’ll be leaving behind a written record of an eventful time in in northern New Mexico but La Jicarita will die with me. It’s archive will live on in the Center for Southwest Research at UNM’s Zimmerman Library, but except for those who knew me personally there won’t be much memory of its editor. I always remember what Owen Lopez, former executive director of the McCune Foundation, which funded La Jicarita for many years, said to me at a party celebrating its fundees: “Well, you may not have accomplished much or won too many battles but at least you have a record of it.”
But I have some very important people with me in that little pond who I would classify as middle-to large sized fish and they’re not doing too well. One of them just called me on the phone to tell me he had a heart attack last week and spent three days in the hospital. “Why didn’t you call me from the hospital?” I asked, upset. “Verizon cut off my cell phone service for some unknown reason. I paid the fuckers.” He survived this time but the possibility of a next time is now much more likely. My other friend is in his 80s and barely hanging on. A beloved writer of novels and nonfiction, he’s hoping to make it through another winter, alone in his house crammed full of life’s detritus.
When they die there will be many people and family members who’ll attend their funerals and reminisce about their places in the world. When my partner of 34 years and co-editor of La Jicarita, Mark Schiller, died prematurely at age 62, we had a wake in El Valle that was crammed full of family, neighbors, co-conspirators, and friends from all walks of life. But the only ones who ever talk about him are the kids and me. That’s where I’m headed as well, and probably without a wake, as everyone who was at Mark’s will either be dead or been gone too long.
But that’s OK. My life is more circumscribed now and less fun, so thinking about death doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is how I’m going to die. Mark died of pancreatic cancer. He lived for 18 months with chemotherapy, some hospital visits, and in the end, he decided to quit eating. My mother died of an intentional overdose of drugs after she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that made her susceptible to infection. That’s the route I plan to take when I decide I’ve had enough. A serious illness or an inkling of dementia will probably be the tipping point, but you never know. I’ll just have to wait and see and make sure I have the right stuff at the right time. Until then, I’m afraid I’ll have quite a bit of mourning to do and that may be worse than death.
Thursday, January 19, 2023
El Valle Writer Wars
Thirty some years ago I landed in El Valle because I knew Bill deBuys, New Mexican writer of great esteem, whose second book, River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life, was a celebration of the village, its people, its culture, its beauty. It was the story of Jacobo and Eliza Romero, of Tomás Montoya, of the Hispano community that kept the acequias, hay fields, and traditional practices intact during a period of transition that would profoundly change the demographics of the village once this generation was gone.
I arrived at the apex of their rule. Tomás, my closest neighbor, was the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle: Jacobo, the main character in Bill’s elegy, had died, but Eliza was still there along with the extended Montoya, Lucero, Romero, and Aguilar clans. Bill had left for Santa Fe but kept a studio he’d built next to Alex Harris’s house, the photographer of River of Traps, who’d high tailed it to North Carolina to teach at Duke.
Only one other full-time Anglo family lived in the village, Nancy and Larry Buechley, who’d been there since the 1970s. My family became the second full-time Anglo family out of pure luck: I knew Bill because we were both writers and he knew about a house for sale. But that’s pretty much all we shared and 30 years later I’m pissed: he’s been criticizing my forest restoration project for not being ecologically sound and for making it easier for poachers to go in and cut the big trees we’re trying to save by cutting down the smaller trees. In a sense, he’s right, at least on the latter point: anyone can drive by the access road that leads to our thinning project near El Valle and say to themselves, hey, I think I’ll just come back tonight and drive down this road and cut down a few trees.
If you’ve already noticed, I interplay “my” and “our” because I feel very proprietary about this restoration project. Over the past 20 years Mark and I thinned five or more acres near El Valle and Chamisal as part of a contract stewardship program run by the Forest Service. Villagers were allotted an acre of forest where they cut all the trees except the “leave” trees, mostly larger ponderosa pines, to replicate a more savannah like environment with an understory of grasses—and keep all the wood. The poachers Bill complained about cut the trees on one of the acres Mark and I thinned that bordered our current restoration project. I’m pissed about that, too.
“Ours” is a board of directors comprised of local people from El Valle and Las Trampas, a Santa Fe non-profit that did the NEPA work (environmental assessment) and wrote the grant for the project, and the Forest Service, that wrote the prescription. But I use “I” quit a bit because of my history in the stewardship program and my presence at the table developing the new one. So when Bill wrote the Regional Forester, behind our backs, that our project was enticing the poachers, we wrote back “ . . . we do not believe that thinning to remove ladder fuels from around large old trees is causing poaching. That line of thinking places the blame on the victims, which are in this case, the forest, the trees, and the leñeros [wood cutters] who are working hard to do things the right way.” That was way back in February of 2022. Then the poachers came in early this winter and cut down some more trees, in the same general area but closer to the village. This time Bill wrote the Forest Service and the project board that we ought to terminate our relationship with the Forest Service until they stop the poaching. We wrote him back again asking him to refrain from the blame game and I wrote an article in La Jicarita asking the same.
This isn’t the first time I’ve wrangled with Bill. During the bitter 1990s and early 2000s’ wars between the environmentalists and community loggers, e.g., Forest Guardians and La Companía Ocho, Bill was the statesman-like conservationist, unwilling to get down and dirty to advocate for his fellow norteños against the lawsuits that greatly contributed to the death of community based logging companies. La Jicarita got plenty muddy and didn’t shy away from critiquing his “above the fray” positions that often failed to hold the absolutist enviros to account. So there you have it. Neighbors who don’t much like each other and don’t see eye to eye. Nothing new there (see Unf*#!ing Believable “It Takes a Village . . . or it Should Take a Village”) just another tiresome El Valle story dispelling romantic notions.
I arrived at the apex of their rule. Tomás, my closest neighbor, was the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle: Jacobo, the main character in Bill’s elegy, had died, but Eliza was still there along with the extended Montoya, Lucero, Romero, and Aguilar clans. Bill had left for Santa Fe but kept a studio he’d built next to Alex Harris’s house, the photographer of River of Traps, who’d high tailed it to North Carolina to teach at Duke.
Only one other full-time Anglo family lived in the village, Nancy and Larry Buechley, who’d been there since the 1970s. My family became the second full-time Anglo family out of pure luck: I knew Bill because we were both writers and he knew about a house for sale. But that’s pretty much all we shared and 30 years later I’m pissed: he’s been criticizing my forest restoration project for not being ecologically sound and for making it easier for poachers to go in and cut the big trees we’re trying to save by cutting down the smaller trees. In a sense, he’s right, at least on the latter point: anyone can drive by the access road that leads to our thinning project near El Valle and say to themselves, hey, I think I’ll just come back tonight and drive down this road and cut down a few trees.
“Ours” is a board of directors comprised of local people from El Valle and Las Trampas, a Santa Fe non-profit that did the NEPA work (environmental assessment) and wrote the grant for the project, and the Forest Service, that wrote the prescription. But I use “I” quit a bit because of my history in the stewardship program and my presence at the table developing the new one. So when Bill wrote the Regional Forester, behind our backs, that our project was enticing the poachers, we wrote back “ . . . we do not believe that thinning to remove ladder fuels from around large old trees is causing poaching. That line of thinking places the blame on the victims, which are in this case, the forest, the trees, and the leñeros [wood cutters] who are working hard to do things the right way.” That was way back in February of 2022. Then the poachers came in early this winter and cut down some more trees, in the same general area but closer to the village. This time Bill wrote the Forest Service and the project board that we ought to terminate our relationship with the Forest Service until they stop the poaching. We wrote him back again asking him to refrain from the blame game and I wrote an article in La Jicarita asking the same.
This isn’t the first time I’ve wrangled with Bill. During the bitter 1990s and early 2000s’ wars between the environmentalists and community loggers, e.g., Forest Guardians and La Companía Ocho, Bill was the statesman-like conservationist, unwilling to get down and dirty to advocate for his fellow norteños against the lawsuits that greatly contributed to the death of community based logging companies. La Jicarita got plenty muddy and didn’t shy away from critiquing his “above the fray” positions that often failed to hold the absolutist enviros to account. So there you have it. Neighbors who don’t much like each other and don’t see eye to eye. Nothing new there (see Unf*#!ing Believable “It Takes a Village . . . or it Should Take a Village”) just another tiresome El Valle story dispelling romantic notions.
Sunday, November 27, 2022
In Search of Lost Memories Instead of Time
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.
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.
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.
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