endless knot

Those happy-go-lucky Buddhists have a term, "Samsara." It means the endless cycle of rebirth and death. Or, in more casual usage, the general suffering of existence.

There's a fairly well-known Doctor's Opinion that states people like me tend to be "restless, irritable and discontent," until we find comfort and release after taking a few drinks. It works. For a while. Thereafter and for the rest of our lives, we chase after that sense of ease we once found, but it can never be recaptured. It's as elusive as the pot at the end of the rainbow.




This nifty little picture illustrates the cycle of craving, aggression and ignorance that make up the wheel of suffering that Buddhists would call, oh, you know, our typical daily life. Rooster, snake, pig. Repeat. That about sums it up.

This Christmas season, I'm thinking about samsara. I'm thinking about the ways I'm restless, irritable and discontent. And it all boils down to expectations. When I have expectations about how things are "supposed to" turn out or what people are supposed to do, I am locked into an either / or scenario. Either things will turn out the way I expect OR they won't. Either I will get what I want or I won't.

Looking back, more times than not, getting what I wanted didn't necessarily make me happy. Not getting what I wanted--or even worse, getting what I did NOT want--as it turned out, did not make me ultimately unhappy.

Things I thought were terrible at the time either turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, or at least set a train of events in motion that took me to a much better place.

Not only am I finding that I'm uniquely unqualified to issue self-appraisals (I think I'm walking on water when I'm really treading on thin ice and vice versa), I'm also not a very reliable judge of what is good for me, or what will really make me happy.

Still, I'm not content to just lurch through my pathetic existence like a zombie seeking warm brains to munch. I want more. I want to be liberated from the limitations of my own expectations.

I want to get back to the beginning. Beginner's mind. That place where things are new, and anything is possible because I haven't figured out yet that it is impossible. Potential. Possibility. Freedom.

I want to set myself and others free from my expectations. I want to give up the stupid certainty that I think I know what is best for you. A ridiculous idea, since often I don't even know what's best for me.

It turns out that the richest, most profound parts of my life have happened after and because my own little plans and designs fell apart. These days, I gravitate toward people whose life story could be told this way:

"The worst thing I could ever imagine happened. And then..."

My weird life

I am ordering take-out tofu noodles while texting a young woman I've never met. We are making an appointment to get together Friday night.

"Is 6:30 too early?"

I'm thinking I could meet her and still have time to make an 8 pm meeting of ex-problem drinkers like me.

"Yes," she texts back. "What's the latest you can do?"

"Oh. Ok. It doesn't matter."

"How about 9?" she suggests.

I'm thinking, won't you be too tired? Are you getting enough rest? But instead, I type,

"Can we make it a little later, 9:15?"

Because I'm also thinking I could still make it to that 8 pm meeting...

We make our plan to meet.

The young woman is the mother of my gestating grandchild. "Bump," I call him.

Bump's dad –Dad? Sperm donor? Or, as one of my friends called a young man in a similarly unplanned scenario, "the perpetrator" – is my son. And my son is in jail. And he got this young woman pregnant immediately before getting himself locked up.

"She's knocked up; he's locked up," my brain chirps at me.

My brain is not ready to address this situation dead-on. It tunes out. It makes pallid jokes. It fuzzes over.

He was sentenced to 3 years. After a routine traffic stop, he was found to be in violation of his probation. If he had met the terms of his probation for 5 years, his record would have been cleared of his felony conviction for burglary of a habitation. But he didn't. He will be a convicted felon forever.

He was on probation after 13 months of incarceration, the last 6 in a locked-down rehab.

When my son was himself a bump, I never dreamed he would grow up to be an addict and convicted felon. That he would run away and drop out and get arrested. That I would learn how to make bail to get him out of jail, then months later, change my locks to keep him out of my house.

He was a beautiful baby. Brimming over with life. Happy. Curious. Very intelligent. He got brown eyes from his daddy and the gene for alcoholism. From me, male-pattern baldness and the gene for alcoholism. A double dose of the demon gene.

I did everything worried parents do. I sent him to rehab. Went to the dreaded "Family Weekend" at the end of rehab. Hired shrinks and lawyers. Bought cars that he wrecked. After two, I vowed to buy no more cars. I paid tuition, hoping this time he would finish a semester. He didn't. As much as it breaks my heart, I will pay no more tuition.

Most of all, I hoped. Then I despaired. Then I hoped again. Then, I was slightly less crushed the next time. Then I hoped, maybe slightly less hopeful. Then, I was disappointed, but not crushed or despairing.

Finally, I grew numb.

I was advised not to expect "immediate, contented sobriety." In fact, stop expecting anything.

This advice came from people whose “kids” were now in their mid-40s, and who had been down this road for 29 years, not the 9 years I had.

In contrast to my near paralysis and zombie-like state, the baby's mama has handled herself and this situation with dignity. She has handled me with caution and respect. She texted me to see if I wanted progress reports on the baby. Did I want to know what the doctor said when she had her visits?

"Of course." I texted back.

"I just didn't know how you felt about the baby." She texted to me.

What difference does it make how I feel about it? It's here. You're having it. We deal with it.

"It's my grandbaby." I text back to her.

Watch out for the brown acid!

It is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, and I just learned that the promoters of the music festival/happening/love-in were bummed the performer they really wanted to close out the event turned down their invite.

Do you know this one?

It was Roy Rogers.

What a different world this might have been if Roy Rogers had crooned "Happy Trails" at the end of Woodstock!

It might have healed the generational divide permanently. Or ushered in the "hat act" cross-over country western musical genre decades before Tim McGraw.

Watching documentary after documentary, listening to Amy Goodman hawk the commemorative Pacifica Radio Woodstock edition complete with Roger Daltry-inspired leather fringe cover, I have to wonder about the half-million folks who are now 40 years older.

They're all on Medicare now.

You know what we need is another Woodstock where those 500,000 60+-year-olds have a peaceful love-in for universal healthcare! The lack of affordable, decent healthcare for so many in a nation so wealthy is really harshing our mellow, man.

Just swap bran muffins for the pot brownies and you're all set.

The doctor is in

I was intrigued with an interview I saw on Bill Maher's program this evening--the President's personal physician is also a member of Physicians for a National Health Program http://www.pnhp.org/ There are 16,000 doctors in this country who WANT a single-payor system. It is Medicare for everybody. Now, I know there are still plenty of nitwits out there polluting the atmosphere with babblings like, "Tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare!" But there's still hope. We just need to keep encouraging our electeds to press on and not let the loud and ignorant derail this movement. We also need to shine a very bright light on abuses like the CEO of Cigna's compensation ">"falling" to a mere $11 million last year, 50% off his $22 million paycheck in 2007. And we should hold up to shame and ridicule anyone who buys into Sarah Palin's phantom of an Obama death panel determining to put her baby to death, because Trig has Down's syndrome (seriously. and Newt Gingrich defends this reprehensible load of crap) what is more likely in danger of death is the $22 million paycheck for an insurance company CEO.

Dear Mr. President, keep pushing

I support your efforts to reform health care. Please keep pushing. And please avoid watering down reforms to the point of making them irrelevant.

A country rich enough to kill Taliban with drone missiles in Afghanistan can deliver breast cancer treatment to an unemployed administrative assistant in Texas! It is time for America to set its skewed priorities straight.

I believe the discourse around health care reform should be a conversation about the right of every American to a basic level of care. Denying health care is a denial of civil rights. We accept the right of every child to attend school. And we pay for her education, even if her parents are in the country illegally, because all Americans have a stake in equipping the next generation to be productive members of society. It is the next logical step to apply that sense of shared responsibility to health care.

And please keep repeating the fact that health-care costs have skyrocketed at the same time that real wages have stagnated. Even if people will not support reform because it is right, they will do it out of self-interest, when they know the facts.

Our current system discriminates against people who make too much to qualify for government care, but don't make enough to pay for the basics of wellness, like preventive check-ups and routine tests. For them, serious illness compounds physical and emotional crisis with a financial setback they may never escape. Multiplied millions of times, their illnesses are creating a financial hole the U.S. may never climb out of. And may God help the growing numbers of the unemployed. There is a stark line segregating the health care haves from the have nots.

This is not the America we should be.

As the health reform debate festers into an increasingly acrimonious and unhelpful mess, "Astroturf" organizations are disrupting town hall meetings and spewing misinformation. This disturbing perversion of the town hall process should cause thoughtful Americans to recoil in distaste. And to take action. That is why I am finally writing today, after having these sentiments for months.

But I am hopeful intimidation tactics will backfire. Perhaps by embarrassing moderate opponents, fake Americans for Prosperity will tip the balance toward reform. Fistfights at a Tampa town hall, hand-lettered signs scrawled with swastikas, and a Congressman hung in effigy, recall scenes of angry, axe-wielding white men screaming at a little black girl trying to enter a desegregated school. That was not the America we wanted to be then. I am hopeful America can rise to the occasion again. We are better than this.


My qualifications to write this essay: None, really. But I have seen a dear friend lose health insurance half-way though breast cancer treatment and before reconstructive surgery. This upper middle-class professional's company declared bankruptcy and cancelled its policy, leaving her to come up with $11,000 per treatment to continue chemo. If she couldn't find a new job soon enough, her cancer would be considered a pre-existing condition and not be covered by a new employer's policy. All this was perfectly legal.