“A thought will color a world for us." –Theodore Dreiser


Norris
For nearly all of my adult life, I’ve read little fiction because I wanted to further my learning, and I equated learning with non-fiction. It has since become clear to me that there are different kinds of learning, and that both the objective and the subjective have their place. I started my foray into fiction with Westerns but, finding them to be canned and superficial, I returned to nonfiction. After breaking my back in November, I could do little but read, so I finished maybe ten books on houseplants, most of which I enjoyed very much. I then read a biography of John Paul Jones (a naval hero from the American Revolution) and several books on existentialism, but the latter left me so depressed (the moreso when I quit taking the narcotic Fentanyl) that I decided to try fiction again as an escape. I first read Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which I so enjoyed that I read it again despite its length. My next book was Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, which I followed with another Lewis book, Babbitt. Then came Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.

The Lewis and Dreiser books were of a genre called naturalism (to distinguish them from the romantic works of the preceding era) and were set in America between the 1880s and the 1920s. Upon deciding that I preferred this genre, era, and locale, over any other that I could think of, I decided to confine my future reading to it. With that in mind, I read Dreiser’s The Bulwark, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, W.E.B. Dubois’ The Silver Fleece, and Frank Norris’ The Octopus.
Dreiser

The Octopus was my favorite partly because I could scarcely believe that Norris possessed such depth of understanding while still in his twenties. Then I learned that Dreiser was in his twenties when he wrote Sister Carrie; Fitzgerald was in his when he wrote The Great Gatsby; and Sinclair Lewis was in his thirties when he wrote Main Street and Babbitt, but none of these books present such intimately detailed portrayals of so many people. That said, George Hurstwood in Sister Carrie was the most memorable character in any book I’ve ever read, and it was he who led me to conclude that fictional characters are superior to biographical characters in terms of psychological depth. For instance, the biographer of John Paul Jones attempted to psychoanalyze his subject, but because I didn’t know if he was right, I found his portrayal distracting, a problem that I couldn’t have with a fictional character.

Lewis
My main problem with The Octopus was that I found it so depressing that, just as I had turned to fiction as an escape from the bleakness of existentialism, I now needed an escape from my latest fictional work, so I’m reading another novel, Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, which is about a self-aggrandizing Baptist clergyman. Because I’ve read other works that started out light and ended up heavy, I fear what is to come, but so far it’s hilarious, although few people found it that way in 1927. Here’s a portion of what one website says*:

“During his research for his next novel, Elmer Gantry…Lewis would visit various churches in Kansas City each Sunday. At one service, the atheist Lewis challenged God from a fundamentalist pulpit to strike him down within ten minutes if He existed. The quote made the newspapers and Lewis remained safe from lightning but not the fury of the religious community. Elmer Gantry was published in 1927 and immediately banned in Boston. ‘There was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail.’ The novel was the bestseller of 1927….”

Du Bois
(Because every book I've listed was critical in one way or another of the American status quo, they all made one or more groups unhappy. For example, Dreiser's own publishing house tried to suppress Sister Carrie because it offended both capitalists and moralists by portraying a woman whose only escape from dire poverty was to use men for their money. This suppression caused Dreiser to become suicidal and to have a nervous breakdown.)

...I'm also enjoying Elmer Gantry because it describes my childhood:

“The church provided his only oratory, except for campaign speeches by politicians…it provided all his painting and sculpture… From the church came all his profounder philosophy. In Bible stories, in the words of the great hymns, in the anecdotes which the various preachers quoted, he had his only knowledge of literature… He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”

Fitzgerald

I greatly prefer old books because I don’t want to waste my time sifting through the latest bestsellers, none of which have shown themselves to have lasting merit. I also want to read books by authors who lived in the place and era about which I’m interested rather than those who wrote about them secondhand. The downside of reading dead people’s works is that I come to regard them as friends so I find myself grieving that they are dead. You probably won’t meet many people who cried over the death of Thoreau 125 years after his passing, but I was one of them. I still sorrow that he died so young, so you can imagine my grief for Frank Norris who died at age 32 of a gangrenous bowel brought on by a burst appendix. 


Peggy suggested that I entitle this "Beauty and the Beast"


I had a few astonishing thoughts after I wrote my last post. One is that it was all true, and the second was that Peggy’s openness to experimentation—and my reaction to it—makes us seem young and adventurous. The third is that it shows that Peggy and I still have a loving relationship. Even so...

You might think that people would adjust to one another after 43-years, yet our life together is often difficult, although we’re as committed as any couple can be. After all, we’ve survived drugs, 20 years in an open relationship, two years in a group marriage, me getting busted for shoplifting, and periods when my mental state go pretty bizarre. Yet, I was never for a moment not committed to her, and I never really imagined that she would leave me.

As long as you have faith in your partner’s basic goodness and in her love for you, you can survive almost anything, and so we have. People can look at various problems we’ve had and say that, gee, such and such sure was stupid, or that must have been hard, or I can’t believe Peggy put up with you (people are rarely incredulous that I put up with her), yet here we are, together and in love after 43 years, and how many people can say that, people who are married to, presumably, normal people, and who are presumably normal themselves, with both being dedicated to some theoretically normal life in which they are: monogamous; sane; nominally theistic; in good health; and have adequate money, 2.3 children, a dog, a cat, a nice house in the suburbs, and no legal hassles? I would guess that many couples in long-term marriages have had it easier, but I think there are probably a lot more who settled for staying together without remaining close. Neither of us could stand that, and this has forced us to work things out, even when it meant beating our heads against the same wall for a decade or two.

The older we get, the more we know other couples who have also been together for a long time, but I think most of us remember an era when we knew a lot of couples who divorced. As sad as that was, and as stupid as their behavior sometimes seemed, I found it interesting, so I actually miss it in a way. The older I get, the more the drama in my life comes from within in the way of physical problems and limitations, so I wax nostalgic for those days when I got to witness a lot more of other people’s external dramas and a lot fewer of my internal ones.

What Peggy's doing now that she's retired



Peggy gets frequent migraines, and marijuana helps migraines, but Peggy has been unwilling to use marijuana because she's a nurse, and nurses get into big trouble if they’re caught doing illegal drugs. Twelve hours after Peggy retired, she got a migraine and asked me for some marijuana. I rarely use it anymore because its effect on me had gotten way too weird, but I still have some marijuana cookies on hand along with a few buds. I’m proud to say that I made these cookie, and although they’re small, one-quarter is enough to put me at risk for hallucinations, so I only gave Peggy a crumb about the size of 1/24th of one cookie, and that was enough to make her migraine go away completely. She didn’t get high, but she hadn’t asked to get high, and I would never presume to trick someone into taking a bigger dose of a drug than they asked for, and I especially wouldn’t do it to Peggy because she’s afraid of becoming insane like a few others in her family. I would even say that she’s really afraid. The following is from my journal for October 2, 2000:

“Peggy and I were staying at a motel on the coast a few years ago. It was dark, and she was looking out over the ocean while I was in the bathroom. Suddenly she yelled, “Come quickly and see the pretty lights on the water.” I went quickly, but the lights had disappeared. The same thing happened a second time, and then a third. At that point, Peggy looked at me with an expression of fear and resignation and said, ‘I am losing my mind.’ I laughed, but she said she wasn’t joking. I decided to postpone whatever it was that I was doing in the bathroom and stay with her until the lights could be explained. It turned out that the moon, which was out of sight behind the motel, was coming and going behind some clouds and creating a truly beautiful light display upon the breaking waves.”

While on drugs, I’ve had hallucinations of demons, heavy metal music coming from toilets, my body levitating, angels flying above my head, and so forth without ever once thinking that I was going insane. Even so, I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to give Peggy a whopping dose of marijuana simply because Peggy has often said, “I don’t believe pot would get me high,” as if she's a bad-ass and I'm some kind of a wimp. As it was, we did take a hit together about an hour after she ate her cookie crumb, and while the hit got me completely wasted, it did nothing for her beyond the usual first-timer coughing fit. This in no way diminished my complete confidence that enough marijuana would land anybody on her ass.

All this occurred two days before I was to to go to the hospital—the one from which Peggy just retired—for my colonoscopy, and she was to be my designated driver. Ninety minutes before we’re to leave, she gets another migraine, and I give her another cookie crumb. I think it might it might be a little bigger than the first crumb, but since she didn’t get high off the first crumb plus a hit, I’m not too worried, forgetting that it’s not unusual for a person to not get high the first time they use pot. So, Peggy eats her crumb; her migraine goes away; and we leave for the hospital with her driving. Six blocks from home on a street she’s driven thousands of times over the last quarter of a century, Peggy says fearfully, “I have no idea where I am.” “Okie doakie, Peggy, maybe you should pull over and let me drive,” and we trade places. For her next trick, Peggy announces that there’s a cat in the car, but the cat turns out to be her purse.



So, here we are on our way to the hospital with me wondering how we’re going to get home, and whether Peggy is going to run amuck while I’m having my colonoscopy. I think it might be fun to scream, “Oh, my god, you’re losing your mind! You’re going to be just like your mother,” but then I realize how inconvenient for me it would be if she became hysterical, so I decide against it. I do suggest that, while I’m having my colonoscopy, she go visit her old buddies in labor and delivery and tell them how much she’s enjoying retirement.

By the time we reach the hospital, we're running a little late, so Peggy offers to park the car while I go in. “Are you sure?” I ask, and she says she is, so I let her, but not without trepidation, knowing as I do how fast a person’s perceptions and abilities can change while tripping. After an appropriate amount of time, Peggy joins me and purports herself normally (that is if you count cringing visibly when a brand new nurse fails twice to start my IV), although she says she’s high. I’m impressed because for much of my life, I found it impossible to act straight when I was high, and if I tried, I would tremble, violently, completely lose the ability to talk, and sometimes hallucinate. I have since learned to feign normalcy, but it took a lot of years and a lot of pot to reach Peggy's level. I just hope she can stay there because marijuana is a hell of a lot safer and cheaper than her Big Pharma medicine.

Pain check-in


Pain has two parts, the pain itself, and the strength, or the lack thereof, of the sufferer. In my case, I think that much of what I experience comes from weakness because I never imagine that I handle chronic pain as well as the average sufferer. On the other hand, I think I handle acute pain better based upon what doctors have told me and upon what I’ve observed of others. I’ll give an example. When I was in the eighth grade, I broke my lower left arm on the playground when I forearmed another boy while the two of us were running full speed in opposite directions. The break was such that my lower forearm was bent backwards as if I were trying to tough my upper arm with the back of my hand. As I walked to the principal’s office through a playground of open-mouthed kids, I smiled. Part of what makes acute pain easier to bear is that it’s often connected to something that people can see, so they shower you with sympathy and praise you for your bravery.

I never feel that I’m any good at handling chronic pain compared to some of you who are reading this, but then how would I know? Anyway, I don’t think I am, and I get down on myself for being a wimp. Another problem with chronic pain is that people run out of sympathy. An acute injury brings out the best in friends and even strangers, but chronic pain produces feelings of awkward helplessness accompanied by looks of disappointment when the same boring questions are met with the same unhappy answers. As time passes, the sufferer feels unsupported if not unwanted.

Chronic pain also makes it difficult for me to think well of myself because I’m constantly reminded of all the things I can no longer do. For instance, I would like to join a gym in winter when I can’t work outdoors, but there are so few exercises that I can tolerate, it’s not worth it. I look at my future, and I see pain, pain, and more pain until I die in sixteen years or so. It’s the kind of outlook that leads people to kill themselves, and if I weren’t married, I might consider it.

Just thinking about killing myself makes me lose more self-respect because I regard even a fleeting temptation in that direction as a sign of weakness when so many people who are worse-off than I are able to carry on. I was sinking so low in spring that I figured it was time to experiment with what I see as my last resort—an expensive drug called Cymbalta. Fortunately, it’s helping (along with Neurontin, oxycodone, and Ambien), although I have so little confidence in anything at this point that I don’t trust it to keep helping. But for now, anyway, the knife-like pains in both shoulders, the severely bruised feeling in my hips, the sharp pains in my hip joints, the dull ache in my lower back, and the horrible tightness in my upper back are improved. 

Cymbalta also seems to be slowly helping my mood, at least to the extent that I don’t lie awake most of the night thinking about death (I now lie awake most of the night reciting poetry—I know a lot of poems). Unfortunately, the pain in my knees is worse, and I’m both exhausted and sore beyond sore in much of my body from my fence work, but these are minor problems compared to the ones that the Cymbalta has helped.

The worst part about living with chronic pain came some years ago when I was new to it, and found it so frightening that I would lie awake worrying that it would get so bad that I would be forced to kill myself. One day, while lying in the bowels of an MRI machine, it really did get that bad. Although I had taken Dilaudid, I lay there counting the seconds, feeling complete sympathy for soldiers who divulge information under torture, and wondering what atrocities I would commit if only I could escape the pain. I came close to that level on other occasions, and since one of my diagnoses was Complex Regional Pain Disease—a common outcome of which is insanity and/or suicide—and a second diagnosis, syringomyelia, wasn’t much better, it didn’t seem too big a stretch to imagine that the pain would become unbearable. Fortunately, both diagnoses turned out to be wrong.

I must confess that there were a few times when I became so desperate that I prayed, but instead of helping, my prayers only made me lose more self-respect because I felt weak for praying to a god in which I didn’t even believe—talk about pathetic. Yet, as pain increases and becomes a constant in one’s life, desperation also increases. That’s why, when I was in that MRI machine, I had those fantasies of committing atrocities. I thought, well, would I kill someone to escape this pain? Would I drown kittens? Would I transfer the pain to someone I love? And even if I wouldn’t do these things now, might I not do them ten minutes from now, but if not in ten minutes, then surely in an hour, that is if I wasn’t not a gibbering, drooling psychotic by then? When I hurt so much that I would be willing to abandon my moral values to stop the pain, it takes me even lower in self-respect.

There is no part of my life that pain hasn’t touched. Like rape or cancer, it has spread through my entire being as, one by one, it invaded every place within me that I had considered inviolable and in which I thought I could find safety. Like a war veteran, I’ve been set apart forever from normal people. Pain has even lowered my IQ, and since I had prided myself on the fact that, no matter what else I lost in life, I would still have my intelligence, to see even that slipping away has been a hard thing indeed. I forget what people tell me, and I forget what I tell them. When I’m doing one of my handyman projects, I make mistake after mistake. I don’t even want anyone to help me because I don’t want them to see how stupid I am. I can still make sense enough when I write, but I can’t measure a board with any confidence. Even if I check my measurement repeatedly, I can’t trust that I calculated correctly or even that I’m able to read the ruler correctly, and this too lowers my self-respect. Peggy witnesses my loss of intelligence more than anyone, and I find it humiliating for my wife to see how low I’ve sunk. I ask myself what am I still good for, and I can’t come up with as much as I think I should.

Perhaps, you can now understand how difficult it is for me to know what to say when someone asks how I’m doing or when they offer facile advice. Because they can’t see the source of my pain—as they could when I crushed my thumb last winter—they can’t begin to understand how bad it is, and there’s nothing I can say to make them understand even if my appearance didn’t belie my words. If you’re not writhing on the floor, or at least grimacing, people don’t take you seriously, so there’s really no point in talking about how you feel. Yet, the last thing that I want is to look like I’m in pain because the appearance of pain would suggest that I’m out of control, and being out of control would be the ultimate humiliation.

I’ve spent hours picturing myself washing down oxycodone with vodka while holding a .38-special in case I panicked when the drug paralyzed my breathing. Even though I never intended to do such a thing in the foreseeable future, I knew the day might come when I would have no reasonable option, and I wanted to harden myself against that day. Besides, I couldn’t stop the fantasies. Fortunately, Cymbalta has done just that. If only they will stay gone, but, as I said, I no longer trust anything to really help because I’ve seen so many things start out promising only to fizzle. Such experiences have taught me that it’s foolish to be optimistic. Likewise, it’s foolish to try to have a social life. It’s foolish to talk about how I feel (I regard writing about it as another matter). It’s foolish to ask people to help me. Most things involving other people have come to seem foolish because no one wants to be around someone from whom so much has been taken.

I have my work. I have my blog friends. I have my writing. I have good drugs, good books, a good cat, movies in the evening, a growing collection of old TV shows, good food and good coffee, such work as I can still do, trips to the mountains, houseplants, yard plants, an occasional dinner with people I’ve known for a long time, and, of course, I have Peggy. These things keep me going, and they’re enough. I would like more, but they’re enough.

I chose Bosch's painting of Christ to illustrate this post because it represents my sense that other people are around me but not with me, and, given my desperation, this makes them seem stupid, boorish, and oblivious, as disagreeable to me as I am to them. Of course, it's also true that I try to hide most of what I'm feeling because: there's really nothing anyone can do; I find it impossible to communicate my feelings verbally, and people wouldn't want to hear them if I could because I would be saying the same things over and over; and I don't want others to imagine that I'm a weakling and that they're my superiors because, unless they've survived pain better than I have, they're most certainly not.