Summer, 2011

No, it’s not summer yet. That happens in a few days. But the kid’s been here with his freon substitute, his grim news about the 30-year-old unit we discuss every year about now and his good-natured kidding about finding a used replacement unit. And he’s due back today. He works on hot-tar roofs in the Dallas heat. He’s young.

Judy and I aren’t.

I used to be a rower. Back a dozen years or more, I tore the bejesus out of my right shoulder (don’t ask) and had surgery. The surgeon, apologetically, suggested my rowing days were over. As if it was his fault. He was wrong, of course, both for blaming himself and in his prediction. I rehabbed for two years and took a bronze in my age group in the single sculls at Master’s Nationals. I probably could have won it, but instead, late in the final, decided I’d made my point, so why add to the pain and incur additional risk by mounting the big sprint I’d trained for?

When the red floats, marking the final 250 meters, appeared beside me, I decided to finish quietly in third. Not much of a sprint, even though my competition was gassed and I could’ve caught them. Third was fine. I’d made my point.

Judy and I are well into the red floats marking the last little bit of what’s been an extraordinary ride. It’s time to decide how we’ll finish. Sprint? Paddle? Cruise? Or none of the above?

We woke up this morning thinking about being Worried. Nothing specific. Just Worried. Going to the office Worried. Returning home after work. Worried. A spokesman for General Motors was on the TV talking about Ford’s “good luck” in avoiding a federal bailout because they had enough dry powder to stay the course long enough to be rescued by Obama’s cavalry (his “cash for clunkers” program, along with other measures designed to stimulate demand).

I likened Ford’s “good luck” to our own. We’ve survived what others have termed the “great recession” caused, essentially, by the globalization of all the elements contributing to the collapse of Texas real estate, cattle and oil in the ’80s. No one was looking, so things happened. And one thing led to another.

Judy and I lived through the ’80s in Texas working in real estate. It wasn’t easy. I learned to be a welder/bicycle mechanic while Judy learned the art “bidness”. We struggled, but we survived.  The one huge lesson we carried away from those days was the need for liquidity when the worm turns. So, when the brokers brought around their derivatives, equity splits and other complicated investments, we thanked them politely for their interest and bought 0-coupon, tax-exempt municipal bonds. The rest we put in things like short-term,  interest-bearing bank accounts. Oh. And real estate. Paid-for real estate in areas we loved.

After September, 2008, we got smaller, taking up our belts notch by notch. The employees who remained suffered from the lack of demand characteristic of being in a building-related industry when the lenders, using gaping loopholes in their own, federal bailout package decided to make their living collecting fees rather than lending money. We Worried we hadn’t put enough aside. We Worried our employees would get tired and give up. We Worried that we would get tired and give up.  We Worried that we’d misjudged the severity of the problem and the pain inflicted by the cure. We Worried that like so much of our competition, we’d have to shut the doors.

But we’re thinking a little more positively these days. We’re feeling a little more like Ford than Chrysler and GM. We’re beginning to think we may have “gotten lucky” with enough dry powder to survive the firestorm that is the legacy of the past several years. But we’re not betting on it.

Now the red bouys are alongside. Do we sprint, paddle or cruise?

What on earth is a video window (besides a really odd name for something)? It’s an HD video played continuously as a background activity on a flatscreen TV (the bigger, the better). They’re designed to be “sights and sounds that soothe”. Trite? Sure. But they were designed to calm troubled waters — and they work. Hopefully, they’re headed to a hospital near you soon. The first bunch of these videos has been added to the site (http://video.artdallas.com) with more coming shortly. We’d appreciate your comments. However, for your entertainment, I’ll include the following joke I found this morning while looking for more effects of naturally-occuring cortisol on dendritic spread in the hippocampus (yup, that’s what i was looking for). It’s relevant to the most obvious commercial application of our videos.

Hospital Windows
Two men, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital room. One man was allowed to sit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to help drain the fluid from his lungs. His bed was next to the room’s only window. The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back. The men talked for hours on end. They spoke of their wives and families, their homes, their jobs, their involvement in the military service, where they had been on vacation.

And every afternoon when the man in the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time by describing to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window. The man in the other bed began to live for those one-hour periods where his world would be broadened and enlivened by all the activity and color of the world outside.

The window overlooked a park with a lovely lake. Ducks and swans played on the water while children sailed their model boats. Young lovers walked arm in arm amidst flowers of every color of the rainbow. Grand old trees graced the landscape, and a fine view of the city skyline could be seen in the distance.

As the man by the window described all this in exquisite detail, the man on the other side of the room would close his eyes and imagine the picturesque scene.

One warm afternoon the man by the window described a parade passing by. Although the other man couldn’t hear the band – he could see it in his mind’s eye as the gentleman by the window portrayed it with descriptive words. Days and weeks passed.

One morning, the day nurse arrived to bring water for their baths only to find the lifeless body of the man by the window, who had died peacefully in his sleep. She was saddened and called the hospital attendants to take the body away. As soon as it seemed appropriate, the other man asked if he could be moved next to the window. The nurse was happy to make the switch, and after making sure he was comfortable, she left him alone. Slowly, painfully, he propped himself up on one elbow to take his first look at the world outside. Finally, he would have the joy of seeing it for himself. He strained to slowly turn to look out the window beside the bed.

It faced a blank wall. The man asked the nurse what could have compelled his deceased roommate who had described such wonderful things outside this window. The nurse responded that the man was blind and could not even see the wall. She said, “Perhaps he just wanted to encourage you.”

Author: Unknown

The 13th of this month was special. It was Judy’s and my 32nd anniversary. That, folks, is longer than I thought I’d ever have as a warranty period when I was a kid. Over 30? Old, over the hill and probably ignorant of anything relevant to me. That’s the way I looked at it, anyway. If I made 30, anything over that was gravy. I had no idea I’d be given the gift of spending 32 years with the girl with the best smile in the world. Lucky me! But I was a difficult child, lemmetellya.

A very famous French guy once said “if you aren’t a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 50, you have no mind”. I’ve always thought there was some truth to that. I’m now old and conservative. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen too many young people with heart lately, but I’ve seen a lot of old folks who’re about as conservative as Stalin. Since he, like Lenin, was an early Communist, right-wing “conservatism” wasn’t something either of them had much time for. The same can be said for Americans Against Everything.

I’m an old, comfortable, bald, busy white guy who was recently carted off to jail for not setting a parking brake. When I was a kid, I WASN’T carted off to jail when it was discovered I headed up a group of Students for a Democratic Society members who’s sole mission was to render inoperative the majority of Washington DC’s police cars (I’m blushing).

A lot’s changed since 1969. I’ve tried to keep pace, but occasionally, I can only sit back in horror and wonder how education, a free press, politicians and the basic American character could have become so polluted with hate, purposeful misinformation and self-interest. It’s a different country than it was before 1980. I don’t want to recognize it.

In case you don’t already know, my training is in sensory neurophysiology. I did what most college professors do. I performed and published my research in basic science and I taught. I taught grad students, medical students, undergraduates and I even taught residents. I had graduate students in my labs and they learned as they helped conduct the ongoing work of my laboratories.

I cut short my academic career for several reasons. Some had to do with me. Others had to do with the students I was finding in the early ’80s. They were generally white, rich and their expectations showed they’d never, for instance, had the learning experience of driving a cab in an urban setting because they needed the money to eat.  They were like most very wealthy, very protected middle-class kids. They lacked “seasoning”. They went where they were pointed, but had very little idea of what to do when they got there. I had very high expectations.

The old farts raising Hell at town meetings are quite different. First, they give every appearance of treating utter ignorance as a major positive character trait.  They aren’t interested in discussing much of anything, particularly health care. Their sole intent is to make sure that whatever programs President Obama campaigned on and was elected to accomplish fail. But (incredibly), my guess is that about half of the most disruptive I’ve seen are eligible for, and probably happily participating in Medicare; the Public Option.

There don’t seem to be many young people at these affairs. I’m sure they’re there. I just haven’t seen them. It just seems to be raggy, yelling, old people  like me. Unlike me, they seem to have a lot of free time on their hands, so I guess they’re either unemployed or retired. In either case, they’re the ones who’d benefit the most from a system that included a public option for all citizens.

It’s not that I couldn’t be wrong. I could be. But when you’re thinking about your health care, and I include those of you with so-called “gold-plated” insurance plans, think about this. When you get cancer, or any other life-threatening disease, you’ll find yourself spending more time figuring out the reality of your health insurance than figuring out how to not die. It’s in your insurance company’s best interest to settle your illness as quickly as possible. While you’re fighting to “not die”, will you have the extra strength to fight your insurance company — alone? Don’t kid yourself. At the precise moment you’re least able to deal with anything but not dying, you’ll have to take energy away from that life-or-death struggle to fight to get the care you think you paid for. If you’re in Medicare, it’s not an issue.

As I said at the outset, I’m as conservative as I can be. I’m old, out-of-date and thinking the world I’m living in has little or nothing to do with the world I was born into. But I do know that the present American health care system is broken. I’ve been a part of it in the past and I thought it was broken then. I watch as well-meaning people with little or no empathy for the plight of others rant about matters that are just mis-information placed there purposely by the capitalists, the  moneyed interests who, for some reason, feel threatened by competition.

Irony is not dead. People are dead. And the system’s to blame.

This is a fantastic speech that deserves more attention than it got over the airwaves.

See for yourself!

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/flash/cspanPlayer.swf?pid=286821-1&autoplay=0

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