Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Been a little while since I posted. I haven’t exactly had blogger’s block, but I also haven’t felt particularly like crafting any vignettes about my life either. One of those periods of time where I’m sort of glad that I don’t have my self-imposed daily posting requirements. Although it can run the risk of there being “missing time” from the proverbial posterity record. So to rectify…

In the last week, I have:
-Had 3 mini-migraines (less than 24 hours each), seeming to represent “aftershocks” of a sort after the 54-hour fiasco last week.
-Been even more focused than the recent normal on stocks, but with admittedly pretty good results.
-Gone to Fresno on the train, staying for 2.5 days, and returning in the van with the IV family. The trip was marked by remarkable evidence of recovery for Em’s mom, a critical mass of overall noise in the house denoted by an increasingly critical mass of children (6 and counting), tremendous failure at gameplay on my part (we played plenty of games, but I only won once and the game setup made it not really count), and spending a lot of quality time with the two eldest children in the Garin Clan, who have finally reached levels of maturity and verbosity at which I start to find people interesting.
-Been empaneled on a jury, with opening statements yesterday and a roughly week-long schedule ahead (more I am legally bound not to say, yet).

It’s been an interesting little run of small breaks from the routine, though it still pales in comparison to the level and rate of change I am anticipating for later in 2009. Other than the hefty spate of migraines, though, I’m not complaining.

Hopefully I’ll be able to return to a regular schedule of descriptiveness sometime soon. I would imagine that this March, in particular, will bring the typical seasonal deluge of activity and inspiration.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I already posted on why we get sick a few months ago. The challenge of this post is to not retread that water precisely.

At 3:30 this morning, I woke up and, for the first time in 54 hours, I didn’t have a migraine. It was all I could do to not race out of bed and do a victory lap around the pre-dawn block in my pajamas and socks. I settled for waffles and coffee and a lot of CNBC.

Time with a migraine – a really severe migraine, at least – is just dead time. One cannot read or write or really use a computer and one probably shouldn’t watch TV. Sometimes, when the extreme knife-edge of the worst points of the pain are dulled, one has to try doing some of these things (especially TV), because the insanity of the pure, distilled boredom of nothingness will itself start to become almost as painful as the migraine itself. One might think that this much time to think in sensory deprivation would be a welcome opportunity, but there’s usually something feverish and anguished about the actual thoughts one constructs under such duress. One is five times as likely to get an annoying song or phrase stuck in one’s head as to solve a long-standing dilemma or thread a problematic needle. This only compounds the ache itself.

It’s been an incredibly long time since I’ve had a headache that was both extremely severe in maximal intensity and lasted more than two days. There is a vague degree to which most of my migraines are either long or intense on a bit of a balanced scale. In high school, before I’d ever had coffee, week-long migraines were routine and many of them were off the charts in terms of severity. But the last decade has been a long history of getting gradually more control over my headaches, to the point where triggers and risk factors are pretty well boxed in, limiting me to a series of day-long mid-rangers for the most part.

Until I went and forgot to bring my sunglasses on a BART ride.

It’s interesting to note that, in controlling my triggers, I’ve actually made myself somewhat more sensitive to them. It’s a little like going vegan to improve one’s cholesterol, then having a small bite of cheese and having it immediately trigger a heart attack. I’ve worn sunglasses on BART for well over a year now, every trip, and forgetting once was a recipe for the worst migraine in years, almost immediately.

I guess the upside, beyond the normal timeout-from-life value and perspective that the “Why We Get Sick” post is all about, is reaffirmation that my trigger-controlling techniques really are working. It’s not that I had forgotten I could get headaches this bad (though I never remember losing all feeling in my left arm twice in one hour as an aura before, but apparently it’s fairly textbook), but one tends to relegate physical pain to a certain sidebar whenever one isn’t actually experiencing it. Which keeps us sane, but also complacent.

All I can really say is that I’m so happy to go back to work this morning that I can barely stand it. And that says more than you need to know about my last 54 hours.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s becoming a well-documented fact that the US stock market these days is rallying on bad news and crashing on good news. But nowhere is this more evident than on days when unemployment figures are announced.

Yesterday, the market rallied 217 points on the back of the worst employment report in a quarter-century. Though the more compelling fact is this: “The loss since November is the biggest 3-month drop since immediately after the end of World War II, when the defense industry was shutting down for conversion to civilian production.” (CNN)

We have never seen a faster unraveling of an employment market in United States history. And despite that everyone expects it to get worse in the months ahead, each month still manages to “beat expectations” in terms of how quickly jobs are disappearing. Not only that, but each past month’s figures are quietly getting revised upwards as well, meaning that things now are even worse than you’re being told – you’ll just find out later.

Combine this with the fact that unemployment is around 18% using the methodology used during the Great Depression, and that at this temporal stage in the Depression (if we equate the 2008 crash with the 1929 crash), unemployment was around 10%, and we have an existential crisis the likes of which no one can really comprehend.

But the market likes it. Big-time.

Part of this, no doubt, is because devastating employment figures increase the likelihood of further bailouts. And Wall Street likes bailouts because free money is fun. Arguments have been circulating on financial message boards and even some articles about bailouts being the next great American economic bubble. Just tank your performance, qualify for a bailout, then watch the free money flow in. Sometimes this backfires, as with AIG, Fannie/Freddie, and others whose stock value went to near-zero as the price of a bailout. Yet Wall Street continues to have faith that future bailouts will be the old no-strings no-national control style, with free cash and blind eyes for all.

The larger concern, of course, is that it’s not in business’ best interest to have jobs. Since the advent of Reaganomics, we’ve bought into this myth that somehow business is “on our side”, that they’re interested in creating jobs and putting America to work. It’s not true. Business is all about profit, and during the last 20 years, profit has been driven more than any other factor by cutting American payroll. The real, fundamental reason that Wall Street loves skyrocketing unemployment is that it means the businesses still left are becoming more profitable, at the direct expense of the American worker.

But the market has found an insidious way to prevent the obvious reversal of their disinterest in the fate of workers. One would expect that workers would just throw the middle-finger back to the market and there would be an all-out struggle. But with the infiltration of IRA’s, 401k’s, and the propaganda that the stock market is just like a savings account, only better, the market has embedded itself in the psychology of the American worker. American workers have to care about the market, because their future is tied up in it. Thirty years ago, this wouldn’t have been the case and we could jettison the market like so much chaff. But now, the first bailout passed the House almost entirely on the back of the argument that saving Wall Street would be the most efficient way to save American workers because their savings were tied up in Wall Street.

Eventually, of course, this vicious cycle of Wall Street reveling in the destruction of jobs will hit a wall. But almost certainly not before it’s too late to reverse the predominant trends and save what we currently think of as being this country.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

One month ago tomorrow, Emily and I were driving up from Fresno and talking about life and her family. We’d just spent a restful New Year’s weekend with a partial incarnation of the Garin Clan and noticed that her Mom seemed to be finally accepting aspects of aging and the need to slow down a little. Both her Mom and my Dad have always been people who push themselves to the brink and it’s always unsettling to have a parent who doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on their limits as they get older.

The next day, we got a phone call which revealed that the routine colonoscopy she’d been scheduled for had justified the practice of getting periodic colonoscopies. She had colon cancer.

We reeled. For a long time, we had little or no information – not because anyone was concealing anything, but because the information would simply take time to discern. How long had she had cancer? What stage was it in? Had it metastasized? Would she need chemo? What was the general outlook?

We chose not to share most of these questions and dilemmas with others outside the family, mostly because we daily dealt with how miserable it was to wonder and not to know. By roughly half-weekly installments from additional doctor’s visits, we got a few tiles to throw into our mostly empty mosaic. About two years. Probably not metastasized, but inconclusive. Surgery was the immediate course of action and then we’ll see.

More waiting. An effort to keep life on an even keel, to not cower in the wake of this visceral confronting of mortality and larger questions and something that, in cliché but nevertheless essential fashion, eviscerated all the importance that had illusorily appeared in prior concerns.

Emily went down to Fresno last Monday night.

A week ago today, her mother went into surgery to remove the cancer. The surgery took about 90 minutes and a third of her large intestine. And apparently, as a two-day wait revealed thereafter, all of the cancer. The biopsy was clean. There will be routine monitoring and she had to spend a week in the hospital, but it looks like not even a little chemo will be necessary. Early detection saves lives.

The relief at such a diagnosis is indescribable. Guarded, surely, because nothing is ever 100%, but guarded euphoria is euphoria nonetheless. The surgery recovery has gone smoothly and all indications are that something like normal life will be back very soon.

One month later.

As someone who years ago started predicting that everyone in my generation who makes it to sixty will get several cancers, representing massive increases in both the incidence and survival rates of the disease, I guess this whole experience shouldn’t be as stunning as it feels. But even for someone living on a sine curve, this kind of roller coaster is overwhelming. There may be no more widely feared word in the language than “cancer” (perhaps “terrorist”) – the word seems to connote a death sentence no matter what the options wind up being. And to get cancer without needing any chemo at all is transcendently remarkable.

Of course the initial fear was tempered with a little hope, just as the current relief is tempered with a little concern. Such is how quickly things change these days and how much of every emotion and experience seems to be mixed. It’s hard to find a more unassailably positive thing to cling to than a wildly successful cancer surgery, though.

May this relief last. And may all your cancers go as well.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.