Personal: February 2008 Archives

To paraphrase the immortal words of the late, and therefore clearly mortal, Hunter S. Thompson, “I was somewhere around Encino on the edge of an urban jungle of strip malls when the drugs began to take hold.” I was on my way to conduct a class with a learned rabbi on Religion and Spirituality as my spirit and body seemed to want to part ways. Was I just getting in the mood or was there something non-spiritual afoot?

I was struck by a small epiphany, (so it didn’t hurt too much) and I realized that I was stoned—but not in a pleasant way. This was no flash back to the 60s when I may or may not have “experimented” with drugs. I love that euphemism experimented as if it were a lab section for a science class. The truth is I tried grass a few times and didn’t much like it. As someone who has struggled with weight issues (as well as weighty issues) all my life, if there is one thing I don’t need it is anything that encourages the munchies, or as my people say, noshing.

I was zipping along at 55 mph and feeling spacey, light-headed and sensed a slight tremor in my right hand. I asked myself if I felt safe to continue to drive another 45 miles to my speaking engagement. As one time sailor, I remembered my old safety rule: If I showed up at the dock and asked if the wind was blowing too hard for a recreational sail, it was. The question implied the answer. I pulled off the freeway and headed home.

At the time I did not know that it was the drugs. I thought that the head cold I was fighting had just weakened me, and I hadn’t put together what should have been obvious, and would have been obvious were I not stoned. The over the counter meds that the pharmacist had recommended for my head cold and sore throat had rendered me incapable of operating heavy machinery—which my little Honda CRV qualified as.

I returned home and not realizing it was the cough syrup (non-alcohol) and the anti-histamine, immediately took more meds before crawling into bed. Unsurprisingly I didn’t feel any better that night and after re-medicating in the morning nearly aborted a lecture in the first thirty minutes. I soldiered on to the end, returned home and did a web search of my two benign over the counter meds. I found that they could each make me light-headed, dizzy, drowsy and incapable of operating heavy machinery—such as my mouth. In combination they had, what is today called, a synergistic effect and rendered me non-compus mentis.

This is serious stuff, and I was totally unprepared to be, well, so totally impaired by non-prescription medication. During a long lifetime of allergies and three back injuries that led to surgeries, I have had a fair number of prescription medications and have never been so knocked out. I am deeply grateful (I suppose to myself) for my uncommon common sense in turning around and coming home.

My internal dialogue about how it was really nothing and I could still do it and how I mustn’t disappoint my audience seemed quite compelling at the time. Somehow I talked myself out of talking myself into continuing. Okay, that last sentence may indicate that I’m still suffering from some diminished capacity…but you do know what I mean.

The lesson, in case it isn’t clear, is that prescription drugs are not the only drugs that we should consider when assessing our ability to function. The over the counter market offers some pretty powerful drugs and they can and do alter thinking, reflexes and judgment—and these are the big three when operating a computer, a mouth or most importantly a car.

My one-time boss, my mentor, and my dear friend William F. Buckley Jr. has passed away. According to the reports, Bill died in his study -- at work. For those who knew him, this will not come as a shock. Whether sick or on vacation, Bill was always diligent about keeping up with his writing. But then, he was always diligent about keeping up with his recreation -- and his friends -- too. His was an ordered life, to say the least, and a life lived to the fullest.

To say "he will be missed" is not only to resort to the sort of cliche which Buckley despised, it's also to be guilty of understatement. I can't think of anyone with more friends to leave behind. The world knew WFB as a great intellect and writer, which he certainly was, but he was also as decent, gentle, kind and loving a man as those of us blessed to make his acquaintance would ever know.

It will take some time for me to formulate my thoughts and write something more about this extraordinary life, but till then I offer this excerpt from a profile I wrote about Buckley for Salon nearly nine years ago:

One almost forgets, when WFB refers to lunch with Henry, a stroll with Ronald or a trip with Milton, that he is speaking of a former secretary of state, a former president or a Nobel Prize-winning economist. But if Bill Buckley walks with kings, he has not lost the common touch. At a recent celebration commemorating Ronald Reagan's 88th birthday, Buckley, the keynote speaker, was seated at the head table with Nancy Reagan, two former cabinet secretaries and the ex-governor of California. The moment the dinner ended, he ditched the dignitaries, dodged hundreds of autograph seekers and sneaked out to the parking lot to meet old friends for a nightcap.

Many conservatives say that government is unimportant, but behave as though every legislative or electoral defeat is a personal disaster. Buckley is different. He loves politics, he's intrigued by its sport and he enjoys wrestling with big ideas. But he has other passions -- sailing, skiing, playing the harpsichord, studying the English language and, of course, being with his friends, who are legion and just as likely to include a former research assistant as a former president of the United States.

Before all of them, however, comes Pat, his wife of 49 years, a Vassar-educated one-time Miss Vancouver. Whenever she admonishes Bill to fix his tie, or sends a dinner party into a fit of laughter with a well-timed wisecrack, he gazes at her with relentless affection. They are unembarrassed to call each other by pet names, no matter who else is present. Their son, Christopher, is the father of two and a successful humorist -- facts that Pat and Bill proudly advertise.

But the work that helps to explain Buckley's character more than any other is his 1997 book "Nearer My God: An Autobiography of Faith." "It seems to me," he once said of his faith, that "a balanced life begins by acknowledging the insufficiency of purely materialistic considerations, and therefore one instinctively looks out for the other dimension that religion supplies you with." His is a quiet devotion, which he'd previously made little effort to discuss publicly. But his generosity, his patience, his compassion are all indicative of a grace that strives not only to believe the faith but to live it -- even if humility bars him from saying as much.

Requiescat in pace, Bill, and say hi to Pat for me.

What parent has not prayed to change places with a sick, or even a dying, child? What child has not wept at the pain of an aging parent? As my wife, the Fair Helenekela, rehabs from her knee replacement and I put her through her painful paces, I would change places in a heartbeat. It is far easier for me to hurt than to cause her tears.

In the military, a soldier will throw himself (and now herself) on a grenade without conscious thought and certainly adverse to personal interest. A mother bird or human mother will lure danger away from the nest and interpose her body between the threat and her off spring. Deep in the genetic code is the drive to protect the future and care for our offspring.

Since the beginning of recorded time we have danced, sung, painted, pleaded, fought, lied and died for love. It is fundamental to what makes us human beings.

I’m obviously not simply talking about sex and mating—all the other life forms higher than amoebas mate. Indeed, “birds do it; bees do it; even educated fleas do it.” But love is more, much more, than the male drive to inseminate and the female drive to select good genes for babies and a good provider for the family unit.

Human love is far more than lust, recreation or even re-creation. It is empathy, sympathy, sacrifice and generosity.

The Greeks had three words for love so that we wouldn’t confuse affection, lust and devotion: Eros, Phil and Agape. Eros is romantic love. Phil is attraction and devotion (Philosophy being love/devotion to wisdom). Agape is usually understood as the acceptance of the other—flaws, faults, warts and all. The classic example is God’s love for flawed humanity. These three words are connected by, well, connection. They all connect us to the world and to others. They connect our hearts to a special kind of generosity.

Parents, animal and human, will take enormous risks for love—sometimes from instinct and sometimes despite some seemingly strong instincts. Human beings have the possibility of choosing against instinct. We can, if we put our minds to it, come to believe our children are not the most precious and important things in the world. We can try to maximize our own pleasure and not understand the selfless generosity that is built in to our genetic code.

Love, as Agape and not simply Eros, is based on the instinct in animals and insight in humans that we are not the single most important entities in all the universe. This is a liberating epiphany.

As babies, we are only our needs and demands—feed me, hold me, change me, love me. As adolescents, we begin to have a compassionate sense of others and how two are so much more than one plus one. As mature adults and parents or grandparents, we begin to get—consciously or unconsciously—that the needs, desires, happiness and survival of others may be even more important than our own. While other animals may act on this by instinct alone, we are free to choose or ignore these better angels of our genetic inheritance.

Someone once defined civilization as the stifling of our basic animal drives for the sake of civil society. This is in my view 100% half true. The other half is that civilization sometimes stifles the genes of generosity by celebrating our individuality as if it were an unambiguous virtue.

Where romantic love meets devotional love is in the bonding that makes us sense our best selves. I think we often love the people who help us feel about ourselves the way we want to feel, the people who can show us, reveal to us, goodness and generosity that surprises and fulfills us, who can open up our hearts beyond the lonely skin-sack of self and connect us to each other, the world and the future beyond ourselves.

When we squirrel away for the future care of the family, instead of the immediate gratification of that giant flat screen TV (which I still lust for, but don’t need), when we give to our children, the children of the world, a religious group, political party, or scholarship fund—we feel good. We remind ourselves that our short time here in the sunlight has meaning, power and effects beyond its visible manifestation.

We love in order to know that we are not alone and to be connected, physically and spiritually, with each other and the future. Love liberates us from selfishness and opens our hearts to frightening vulnerability as well as to exciting and courageous growth. It sets our hearts dancing.

I admit it: In my early driving days, I was a slave to Jiffy Lube. The little stickers the oil-changers gave me told me to change the oil every 3,000 miles, and obediently, I complied. I blame my parents. As a kid, I remember the time the engine of a family car ceased because no one had ever bothered to change the oil. I was never going to make that mistake, I vowed.

So I went to the other extreme, and continued for years. Especially here in SoCal, with a long commute, it felt like nary a month or two passed without another trip to EZ, Jiffy, or one of them Lubes.

But then one day I got a crazy idea: I read my car's owner's manual. Turns out my Honda Accord only needs an oil change every 10,000 miles. And my wife's Ford Explorer only every 5,000.

I had been an oil-changin' sucker.

I wasn't alone. The California Integrated Waste Management Board reports that 73 percent of Californians change their oil more frequently than necessary -- often every 3,000 miles, just like the lubers suggest. So the CIWMB is launching "The 3,000-Mile Myth" campaign to get motorists to stop changing oil so much -- for the good of their pocketbooks and the good of the environment.

So do yourself and the world a favor -- and don't change your oil. Well, at least not more than necessary, anyway. If you're unsure how often you should change it, go to 3000milemyth.org, punch in your make/model/year, and you'll get the info the folks at Jiffy Lube don't want you to know about.

If you want to burst the enthusiasm of soldiers in Iraq, few words can do it like these two: Commo Blackout.

It means two very significant things, and, in the death-as-commodity environment of Baghdad that I knew in 2005, it was hard to judge which was worse. On the one hand, it meant all instant communication with the outside world was cut off. No Internet, no phones. Mail was delivered, but it took days any way.

The other thing it meant was that somebody was dead, or pretty close to it. Commo Blackout is the Army's way of keeping parents and spouses from being informed of a soldier's death by a passing comment in a grocery store, or via a reporter arriving at a door step ahead of the Notification Team.

There's a lot just about any Joe can complain about with regard to the Green Machine, but the dedication to supporting families is not really one of them. They honestly do the best they can, and inconveniencing troops for a couple of days so the most solemn ceremonies can be conducted as best possible is not even a question.

Of course, as soldiers, when you've survived another day, it's hard not to curse at prety much all involved when you walk to the phone trailer and find a scribbled note on the door, one that effectively says: "you're wife's just gonna have to wonder if you're alive, 'cause somebody else's is about to find out that her husband ain't."

I bring this up because an interesting trend has recently developed on my personal blog, Reasons to Believe. I've been posting a lot there lately, because over in the other Valley, my little town of Monrovia has been having a gang war in recent days. Certainly nothing akin to Baghdad, but enough to give me strange tickles, and make sure the personal protective systems for my family are in full working order, just like I would before a patrol in combat.

Anyway, while the traffic for my blog has spiked significantly, I've been getting a lot of referrals from Google, many of which are searches for those same two words. They all lead to this post: Things That Go Boom, Things That Do Not.

Now, two years seperated from the war zone, my heart sinks at that thought. Somewhere, somebody is getting the worst news possible. Somewhere not far away, someone else thinks she might. At some Army post in the south, or maybe Texas, a new bride who goes to bed worried each night hasn't heard from the love of her life for a week. Her nervous query has been met with a polite, stilted re-assurance from the head of the Family Readiness Group, "ah, don't worry, they're probably on a Commo Blackout." Knowing she already asks enough silly questions about the strange system in which she finds herself, she decides to figure that one out on her own.

My post, I assure you, supplies no solace.

I wonder if her silent world will awaken with a ring of the phone. Or, a knock at her door.