Tree Rant

Earth-shaker, air-, soil-, people-mover

attack the great pines of Vancouver...

No. This is not going to be a Nashery

because Nasheries are fun and funny.

This topic is neither. This is going to be a rant

about the reckless sense of entitlement 

of those who forget that you can't

replace some things. Not ever. And you will

be sorry when those things are gone.

A rant should sound like a rant. Blank verse, then.

Today on the way to the city I passed a hill

being eroded into a big flat gravel pit.

Tractors and bulldozers were crawling on it

like maggots in roadkill, and I wanted a super possum

to mop up those maggots. Sin of mental murder.

The Bible says we can say unto a mountain,

"Be thou removed," but I pity the fools who want to.

What I always want to say to mountains

is "Be thou where God has placed thee, 

blessed Protector and Grandmother. Be thou in peace

and impart that peace to our stupid mortal minds." 

Some say, "It takes all kinds..."

I say, "There is enough flat land on this Earth.

Let those who want more flat land go to Kansas."

There is enough treeless land on this Earth.

There are enough oil wells. I remember Sarah Palin.

She spoke for her people. I didn't like what they said.

I know I have no real right to like 

or dislike what they said. I still dislike

what they said. I did not dislike the woman

who told us what her people had to say.

So many years, so much talk, so many women

have made our own real choices in our lives 

and still they say "choice" when they mean abortion

and "She's impossible to work with!" when 

they mean "I can't keep up with her." Bah, humbug.

When people can run twenty circles around you

before breakfast, you learn from working for them.

I thought I could have worked for Sarah Palin

but it would have been a tough and tiring job. 

If those who hissed and spat about her choices

thought I heard anything but envy from them,

they were mistaken. Very much mistaken.

I don't like those who hated Sarah Palin

but said no word about the honest voices

of those who truly wanted to lay waste 

their biggest natural assets. Is that possible?

I used to doubt the town called Appalachia

really existed. Well, it does. I went there

with native guides, brave, tough older people.

The devastation brought tears to their eyes.

"A virgin wood, trees of fantastic size

are two miles up that path, if you can walk it."

My own elder didn't even try to talk it

but let me climb with an ex-cop, a fire fighter,

and a modern and enlightened logger.

Three men, one woman, failed to span one hemlock.

One said, "There was mad talk of logging here once.

Now that you've seen this place, you who'll outlive me,

if ever you hear such talk, you promise now

you'll join the human chain around these hemlocks."

I did. I don't understand how anyone didn't.

Thirty years before, I rode up to Vancouver.

My parents wanted us to See America 

By Bus, though all three of us had chickenpox

and nobody saw much of anything

but our own whines and itches. But I remember

the monstrous conifers, redwoods, sequoias,

and the great pines that stood beneath their feet

like foothills around mountains, windswept, ragged,

towering in their strength; not unlike those hemlocks.

The pines are nothing to compare with redwoods

but bigger, stronger than any pine Back East.

How people say anything to them but "Peace,

Tall Ones, and blessed be: long may you stand

where God has put you"? I don't want to know.

It's not as if there were a shortage of cheap wood.

They say Vancouver is stripping off their great pines

though sickly little pines are so abundant,

so easily reared to Christmas trees or pulp wood.

They say Brazil is burning their great rain forests.

They say Alaska wants to drill their parklands.

I believe it, because here in my own town

the maggots are gnawing into the side of our mountain.

The maggot-souls are poisoning human beings

because they're too lazy to pour boiling water

on native plants, and cultivating kudzu.

God, what is man, and how do You endure us?

And for how long now? I don't want to know.

"Do you Greens prefer trees to people?" 

Say: "Which people?"

I prefer almost anything, possums, poison ivy,

real honest maggots who dispose of garbage,

to people who pollute and destroy land;

yet it's for people that land's worth preserving,

real human people who on sight love mountains

and beaches, rocks and trees and butterflies,

who ought always to inherit all of the Earth

but we don't see that happening, somehow.

Status Update: The Inevitable Disgust Following Recovery

Well, I'm starting to think of my three weeks of continuous pain in the past tense, at last. This is good. I can lie down in different positions at night, stand up and move around during the day, just as I did before being sick. I have not recovered completely. I may not recover completely. The rather distinctive shape of my body has changed, and during the three weeks of pain my skin started to change from the "young" type to the "old" type. Getting my strength back will take work. And though I was born and raised a fiscal conservative, these days I'm feeling much more fiscally conservative about the whole idea of government "health" agencies than I've ever felt before.

Go figure. We've spent more than a year under a continuous bombardment of propaganda about how the dreaded coronavirus, which most people need a blood test to tell whether they've had or not, is actually a serious life-threatening disease for some people. Well, it is; most of those people did not have much in the way of a life before COVID-19, nor were they expected to have one ever again, but for them it is a terrible, painful disease. I have one neighbor who knew for sure when he had it. He's spent most of the past year living in terror of having it again. I knew for sure when I had a peculiar (but not prolonged or painful) cough and (very mild) pericarditis, too, at the same time that large numbers of my townsfolk started taking the blood tests and learning that that cough and pericarditis (or the lack thereof) were COVID-19...and like most people, I did not feel that COVID-19 was something to miss work for. I'm a writer, so doing quarantine was easy for me and seemed like the public-spirited thing to do. But while in quarantine I was doing house and yard chores to get my exercise in, and to relieve the guilt of staying home when I'd coughed in a peculiar way maybe ten or fifteen times. 

People in my town did die from COVID-19. At least they were ill enough to be tested and have it confirmed that they had COVID-19. The actual symptoms they had were in the general category of pneumonia, which removes the sickest from every human community every year and can be caused by lots of different virus or bacteria. But I lost two of my extended family's oldest living generation, a cousin who had a weird blood disorder for six years and a cousin's ex-husband who'd been fooling with drugs enough to be physically disabled for seven years. It was not as if anybody had seen them walking around, or even sitting up and talking to people, enough to miss them, actually, but they did die and the last thing a doctor confirmed that they had wrong with them was coronavirus.

But ohhh, woooe, we needed to break down and restructure our whole economy because of this silly little coronavirus. Well, we did need to change some things about the way we do business. We do have unprecedented numbers of active citizens over age seventy who are able to walk about and work and make their own decisions, and don't want to be shut up in hospitals, just because old age makes them vulnerable to things normal people don't notice as diseases. Coronavirus is one of those things. The common cold, the ordinary flu, the Norwalk Flu, streptococcus bacteria (so common and harmless that one strain is often added to food), and even staphylococcus bacteria (the ones that, if noticeable as infections in acne, can be considered an immune system dysfunction in teenagers) are some of the other things from which these older people need more protection, by way of common courtesies like maintaining a good healthy distance during conversation. People in nursing homes die of staphylococcal and streptococcal pneumonia every year. I love active senior citizens, hope to become one, and am glad to see society taking an interest in protecting them. But I go online and read the thoughts of multitudes of people, including active senior citizens, whose predominant reaction to the coronavirus panic is more like We shut down restaurants for THAT?! Say WHAAAAT!?!?!?--and they do undeniably have a point. 

The panic was probably unnecessary. The panic was certainly tacky. Dr. Anthony Fauci (you're telling me Trump couldn't find another doctor who was willing to be his administration's Surgeon General, better qualified than that old...??????) has backed and filled and self-contradicted enough that, if something weren't badly wrong with him, he would have gone home and tried to change his name before now. We needed more self-quarantines and social distancing. We did not need to shut down all the decent restaurants and threaten kids with fines if they were caught playing basketball. 

Anyway, although people in the Eastern States are so tired of hearing about coronavirus that we're not expressing appropriate empathy for people on the Plains for whom this disease has not peaked and is still a growing danger, in most of the more populous states and the coastal cities coronavirus is, basically, over. Thank Heaven. E-friends are talking about the micro-rebellions against mask mandates they're seeing. 

A meme that's going around claims that the Arabs found that covering people's faces helped break the will of defeated enemies. I suppose it depended on what they covered their defeated enemies' faces with. Anyone who's been in the Middle East when the wind picked up is likely to agree on historians' best guess why the Arabs started covering their own faces. Nobody likes having their skin sandblasted, that's why. There are face coverings that provide relief from wind-blown sand and face coverings that make breathing difficult. The Arabs probably did become the world's experts on both. 

Personally, I live in a state that presented mask mandates as the way people could legally get back to work, so I've been in favor of them. I note too that a lot of people look better with the right kind of face covering, for their individual face, than we look with ou teeth hanging out. Myself among them.

But can we now turn our attention back to actual health problems, things that normal people notice for themselves without having to take blood tests? 

As documented in earlier posts to this web site: I woke up feeling "under the weather" on a Monday morning. On the Monday afternoon I didn't see the effects of poison spray along the railroad, so I just tried to starve out a possible infection and exposed myself to herbicide vapors for three or four hours and felt very "sick and tired." I got lazy and bought food, including a generally safe brand of chicken products, at the Food Lion in Gate City. This store is best known for its disgustingly tacky pricing policies and its rude (and COVID-clueless) employees, but it also has a long history of selling tainted meat and dairy products. I just hadn't heard of anyone buying food there and being very sick in the last year or two. So I went home and cooked and ate rice with this chicken in it, on the Tuesday, and it tasted perfectly normal to me and had no noticeable effects on the cats. Then on the Wednesday morning I was awakened by an acute pain centered in the liver area. This pain was the announcement that I was about to be sicker than I've ever been in the past fifty-some years. 

If I'd been rich I could have ordered blood tests and suchlike to confirm what I could only hypothesize by self-observation. Glyphosate can cause paralysis. My usual reaction to glyphosate involves a few hours during which my digestive tract is paralyzed while it forms bleeding ulcers. During those hours odorless, tasteless salmonella bacteria hit my digestive tract and, rather than being mopped up and flushed out by my bacteria-resistant blood as it would normally have been, it was free to turn everything inside me to green slime. I couldn't even wash it out with charcoal in water, as would normally have been easy, because water was not getting down. I felt thirsty and sipped water for the first four days, and nearly all of that water came back up. 

By the time I felt concerned enough about starvation to try eating solid food (yes, it stayed down) two full weeks had passed during which the only thing I ate had been the rice with the tainted meat in it. My sight was dimmed. My strength was diminished. I'd lost a lot of writing time; if I'd had a more physically demanding job I'd still be unable to do that job today. I'd had pain continuously, without a noticeable break, for three weeks. This is a serious health problem, with which silly little COVID-19 is not to be compared. 

I've lost friends and relatives to glyphosate poisoning, by now, too. The difference is that they were smarter, healthier individuals who have been missed. Most noticeable at this web site has been Grandma Bonnie Peters, the well-known home nurse, celiac health counsellor, special diet food entrepreneur, not to mention dear friend of mine. GBP technically died of a stroke she was deliberately pursuing after learning that her out-of-control celiac reactions had developed into liver cancer. Why had she been having out-of-control celiac reactions? Begins with G. 

There was a cousin on Dad's mother's side that I had grown up respecting. He owned businesses and invented gadgets and was, in Dad's opinion, one of the most intelligent relatives we had. He really deserved to be remembered as the one who showed us how to fight a fire, rather than as the stubborn old fool who persisted in spraying his garden and denying that after spraying his garden he always spent hours in bed with narcolepsy as his most noticeable glyphosate reaction. He developed Alzheimer's-like symptoms in his eighties, started forgetting things like his children's names as well as things like the way he always reacted to the chemicals Dad never talked him out of using. One evening at dinner with some of his children, he nodded off as he'd done so many times before, and when his sons tried to help him get to bed, he was dead. 

There was a woman with whom I worked different markets at different times, a deeply lovable woman, barely seventy years old. First her husband was diagnosed with cancer and then she was. She was not a celiac but she started having celiac-like reactions, first to wheat, then to other things. The diagnosis was breast cancer, metastasized--it would have been--but I remember how it metastasized. Glyphosate may not have been the only thing that killed her but it was the thing that most noticeably caused her pain.

Regular readers may remember that I started boring youall about this topic after standing in the Friday Market one day and watching my townsfolk react to glyphosate poisoning. A lot of them would later say, "Oh, some sort of virus was going around that day." Some sort of virus may have been going around but they all came down with it during the hour after they were exposed to glyphosate vapors. No two reactions were exactly alike. Almost everyone in that crowd had a very visible reaction, though some of them weren't pleased to learn that their reactions were visible to other people, and can they be blamed for that. One lady whose actual age was about seventy sailed in looking about forty and was led out looking about ninety. People who were normally deft and competent were making stupid, clumsy mistakes. People coughed and sneezed and gagged and rushed off in search of restrooms. Many of those people have used glyphosate themselves and are still in denial about its being what made them ill on that day. But anyone standing in that crowd and looking at the crowd, not only at themselves, could see that they all went into their various reactions in one hour.

I know one church lady--I'm not sure she still considers herself a friend, but I feel profoundly sorry for her, anyway--who could be considered a total glyphosate denier. She's English, not Irish! She has painful chronic hemorrhoids, not pseudo-celiac sprue! Oh right! She continues poisoning her own garden, and she's sick, afterward. She owns her own business so she can afford to tell somebody else to take over her job on top of their own, cannot afford to pay them extra of course, while she goes home to spend the rest of the day in bed. In pain. And she blames her age, thinks she'll be ready to leave this vale of tears at seventy if she lasts that long. She's never even considered reducing the amounts of glyphosate-tainted wheat and other increasingly glyphosate-polluted foods in her diet, let alone trying to raise her own vegetables without poisoning them. She believes fields of native plants look "scary" and "snaky" and "weedy" and ought to be replaced by invasive nuisance Bermuda grass as a poor substitute for Astroturf. She didn't believe she had coronavirus or needed to observe quarantine when she had that, either, and it worked on her. She became grumpy and then started talking completely off her head, saying things that might have been actionable as slander if they hadn't been so far out of touch with reality, and on that day she announced she was not my friend any more. Well, whether she has any friends left at all is her problem. I have seen old celiacs turn against their spouses and children, whom they accused of poisoning them, as they grew sicker before they died. But God knows and I know that whatever she's said to whomever she's said it to has been a glyphosate reaction coming out at her mouth. She's a sick, stubborn fool, and "old" before she's even seventy, but she will be missed. 

Most of the people who talk to me at any length are between the ages of fifty and ninety, so a lot of us blame whatever age we are for everything that goes wrong, although I don't. I'm a celiac and I know it is not so. I was stronger, more energetic, and better looking at forty than I was at twenty-five; I've known celiacs who were stronger, more energetic, and better looking at sixty than they were at thirty. If you don't have any chronic diseases, ages beyond seventy usually look and feel different than ages below seventy, but no age is a source of pain. None of my elders has been very active after they were a hundred years old, but several were active into their nineties, and they agreed that at ninety you become tired more easily and stay tired longer than you probably did at thirty, but you do not automatically have pain just because you reach age ninety. When you have pain, at whatever age, there is a reason for that pain. Reasons for pain can include things like posture and food allergies, infectious diseases, chronic degenerative diseases. For most people who pay attention, whatever the nature of their pains may be, the reasons include glyphosate.

I see it in the young as well. Some of The Nephews share my celiac gene, so their reactions are similar though not identical to mine. Other very young people have very different reactions. I know one unfortunate young soul whose reactions involve pain in the eyes, as with measles. I know some whose reactions appear to be "chronic" mononucleosis, except that for at least one college student I noticed a precise correlation with glyphosate exposure. I know a primary school student, one of the "smartest" and cutest kids in grade two, who "lags and drags" and even seems to have learning disabilities on the day after they've sprayed along the roads or railroads. 

And I'm quite sure, without having had the energy to call the local hospitals and get numbers, that when poison spraying picked up this spring, a lot of local television watchers complained to their health care providers along the lines of "I think I've got 'long COVID' after all." Their reactions are similar to the ones they had last year and the year before, but they are likely to forget that because "long COVID" finally sounds like a name for what they're going through. 

It's not "long COVID." It may or may not have anything to do with COVID. It's our real major health concern on the Point of Virginia, which is glyphosate. 

While lying on my back for most of two weeks I was thinking like a writer--not able to sit up and write very much, but thinking in words, anyway. I thought about calling some local "health care providers." I didn't pester doctors, but I did pester the failed nurses redirected into social work at the county health department. 

Well, for one thing I learned that the very low level of their intelligence, consciousness, and manners is likely to be aggravating the health problems of local people. For one thing, studies have shown that geriatric patients tend to become sicker when they're exposed to cutesipating, demeaning speech, like bogus endearments and inaccurate titles of kinship coming out of unhelpful strangers, and every one of the characters who picked up the phone at our local health department addressed me in an obnoxious, cutesipating way. Before I started replying to the "sweetie" and similar garbage with "potty-mouth" and "trashbag," even. (Any time a stranger addresses you as something like "dear," it is healthy to address that stranger as something like "trashbag." Thereafter, and until they get down on their knees, lay their foreheads on the ground, and loudly say "I HUMBLY beg your most kind and gracious pardon, Ma'am/Sir." And if people who are being paid out of our taxes have had their heads filled with p.c. nonsense about not trying to recognize people's genders, an alternative to "Sir" and "Ma'am" that might be acceptable is "My Lord and Master the Taxpayer on Whom I Depend for My Living.") I suppose these people normally talk to welfare cheats all day, but considering that they too depend on our taxes for their living, and they too aren't doing anything useful for the taxpayer, I'm not sure why they imagine they have any right to look down even on welfare cheats. If the trashbags who spoke to me were to encounter our local willfully-homeless drug-addicted public nuisance, I think it would be appropriate for them to call him "Sir," also.

That's a serious public health problem in itself, but, more seriously, none of the four trashbags to whom I talked seemed to have any idea that glyphosate is a serious threat to public health. Welfare cheats who sit around watching television all day are generally aware that glyphosate manufacturers have been ordered to pay large amounts of money to people with cancer and other diseases, that "Roundup" has been pulled off the market as a probable carcinogen, and that the fruits and vegetables people have told them they should eat for their health have tended to make them sick since 2009. People whom your and my tax dollars are paying to deal with public health issues are, so far as I could determine, less informed about these things than your typical retired coal miner with black lung. I remember thinking at some length about the possible costs and benefits of flipping the amount of tax money that is paid to retired coal miners with black lung versus allegedly healthy social workers at our county health department, but since becoming strong enough to sit up and crunch numbers I've had a lot of other cyberchores to catch up with. But my guess would be that the coal miners have accomplished more good in this world than the social workers have. My cats have done more for the health of my town, in the past year, than the social workers have. Anyone who's not aware that that glyphosate is a serious hazard to the public health, by now, ought at least to be able to kill disease-carrying rodents.

I e-mailed the state health office to complain about the useless bloated drones in the county health department. Someone from the state health office e-mailed back that as long as the FDA and the EPA were allowing glyphosate to be used, blah blah blah. I e-mailed her back that she can find links to the key studies showing why the EPA's documents were misread even before they were outdated, organized by topic at MomsAcrossAmerica, or by the order in which I've read them right here at this site. 

But, seriously? This woman is a government employee. Government office jobs are, to put it charitably, sinecures for people who fit in and don't make senior employees uncomfortable--as it might be by bringing updated information, energy, or conscientiousness to an office that's settled into a comfortable pattern of not doing what it's paid to do for the public. Chances of a government employee risking her job merely to protect our health, or her own health, or the health of her own children, are very low. 

When I think about this, I think that the case might be made that government should not have anything to do with matters of public health. History records that in the past government health agencies did take action against some gross abuses of public health, but history also record that government agencies are not places where corrections of entrenched mistakes made by those agencies ever happen. Maybe the reform we need might be to shut down every government health agency every ten years and rebuild it with fresh employees who are up to date on current information, rather than falling back on the fact that they made a mistake forty years ago, as our government health agencies are currently doing with regard to glyphosate. We currently have an EPA that wants to keep on blithely misreading glyphosate documents that they misread in the 1980s. Maybe we need to throw them all out on the streets and reorganize an EPA that can begin with glyphosate documents released in the past ten years.

I don't know what the ideal solution would be, but I know that our federal government's next "fiscal cliff" is going to be longer and steeper than any that has gone before it. Deep cuts are going to have to be made for our country to survive. If we're serious about putting Americans back to work, and finding them fit to work, a good place to start the cuts would be with any "health" agency that's still blathering about coronavirus and ignoring glyphosate. 

Book Review: Milo Talon

Title: Milo Talon 

Author: Louis L'Amour

Date: 1981

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 0-553-24763-8

Length: 212 pages

Quote: "I want you to find a girl...my son's daughter. She has been missing for twelve years."

She's the heir to a treasure believed to be even bigger than it is, and the search leads Milo Talon, a classic western-movie hero, into encounters with mean, greedy people--some of them rival treasure hunters, and a couple who are just plain nasty. 

It's what the world expected of Louis L'Amour: Historical fiction, well researched, set in the nineteenth century in what would become the Western States. One tough-guy hero who never intends to hurt anybody but is forced by circumstances to kill a few baddies, usually by shooting, sometimes by creative torture. A young woman or two with roles that are simple enough to be played by no-talent pretty faces, but can be livened up enough to provide vehicles for real actresses. Stagecoaches, saloons, gold, steam-powered trains, horses and mules galore. 

Movies and TV shows inspired by Louis L'Amour's dozens of stories are admittedly some of the less off-putting fare on television--at least they feature interesting landscapes and horses--so people are still watching them for hours on end, and there is still a brisk market for L'Amour's novels. So I invested in a few boxes, and have some for sale. 

It's not my favorite genre. All the English teachers of years gone by, and also my mother and grandmother, used to preach against it. I personally agreed with them when they were preaching, and still do, so I'll mention their objection to these books here. In real life, The West Was Won by a lot of hard, boring, sweaty work, including a huge amount of wasted effort planting crops that dried up and blew away. Will James and Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about the West as it was. Louis L'Amour wrote about the West as boys back East fantasized that it might be. There. 

The reply to this sermon was that reading escape fiction, as distinct from reading porn or surfing the TV, is a cheap and harmless way some people choose to relax, and it's a free country. I agree with those claims too. So I'm reselling these novels. 

Book Review: Better Homes & Gardens Best Holiday Desserts

Title: Better Homes & Gardens Best Holiday Desserts 

Author: none specified

Date: 1984

Publisher: Meredith Corporation

ISBN: none

Length: 16 pages

Illustrations: full-color photos

Quote: "Sensational desserts are the highlight of eveyr holiday meal."

It's a booklet more than a cookbook, but it's packed with the classic junk dessert recipes, beginning with the Carnation Evaporated Milk fudge. Evaporated milk is an essential ingredient (the recipe works without the corn syrup though) and it's a classic, never-fail fudge recipe. You can safely try all kinds of variations: chocolate or carob (my family used to like El Molino carob powder and black walnuts), peanut, pecan, mint, any wacky flavoring you found on sale. The combination of evaporated milk, relatively little butter, and lots of marshmallow makes it a winner, whatever you do with it. 

The recipes go on from there: peanut brittle, toffee, Rocky Road, popcorn balls, pecan pie, fruitcake, pumpkin pie, trifle, banana cream pie, cut-out cookies, chocolate chip cookies, hot fudge sauce and many more. 

If your family and friends like holiday treats made with evaporated milk and/or corn syrup and/or flaked coconut, this collection, sponsored by manufacturers of those products, will become your go-to holiday treat cookbook. 

More likely, it'll join your vintage cookbook collection--but it is part of North American culture that children learn to make each of these recipes, once. Unless someone's allergies are severe, you'll want to dust off this little recipe list, or even make a few photocopies, so the kids can have these cooking experiences. You can still serve the sophisticated unsugared pears in wine syrup to your grown-up friends. 

According to Amazon this little collectible is currently valued at only $4. (In 1984, would anyone have dared to sell it for fifty cents? It came with your magazine and/or junkfood cooking ingredients.) Prices are rising. 

A Fair Trade Book: Modern Manners

Title: Modern Manners 

Author: P.J. O'Rourke

Date: 1989

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

ISBN: 0-87113-313-X

Length: 280 pages

Quote: "The modern world is a horrid place. It lacks anything enduring and true. It is devoid of every tenable value."

It's hard to choose a favorite among P.J. O'Rourke's satires. They're all fact-based and guaranteed to be dangerous to read while eating or drinking. And there's no reason to pick one; you can collect them all. If I had to choose, though, this early, pre-political book just might be my favorite.

So here, Nephews, is an official document of the kind of thing your elders...mostly were not doing in the 1980s, but we knew richer, trendier people who were doing most of it. It includes some Adult Content, especially about drugs, with which O'Rourke had done some research, and things that were probably laughed about more than done because, if done, they would probably have caused some untimely deaths and criminal investigations that did not occur. Nothing in this book should be taken as a guide to behavior, even at drunken celebrations of the fact that somebody else's excessively and probably dishonestly rich parents are not in their house when you and your friends are. 

O'Rourke described his younger self reading Emily Post's Etiquette as a fantasy--of growing up to live among people who were more polite than the people he knew. I shared that fantasy, in junior high school. Emily Post was witty enough about her fictional illustrations of good manners that her long-outdated guide to etiquette is still a good read. If, however, you grew up and went into a profession where you partied with people like the Belushis...well, this book was a satire on what O'Rourke found when he grew up and went to sophisticated parties with people who were richer and more sophisticated than the ones he had previously known. It was a disappointment. This disappointment naturally made the satire all the more hilarious.

"A reception is a modenr tea with a guest of honor who's not important enough tor ate a dinner or who can't be trusted to be sober after six P.M."

"Waring a hat implies that you are bald if you are a man and that your hair is dirty if you are a woman."

"But there are plenty of masculine things women have, so far, shown no desire to be: pipe smokers, first-rate spin-casters, wise old drunks, quiet."

"Soup Nagasaki: Put unopened cans of Campbell's soup into oven at five hundred degrees and get out of there, fast."

"[T]he rich love money too well to be spendthrifts. They delight in getting others to pick up the tab, which is why it's not only polite, but also very delightful to imitate them."

If you buy it here, O'Rourke or a charity of his choice gets 10% of the price as ruled by Amazon.

A Fair Trade Book: The Spirit-Controlled Woman

Title: The Spirit-Controlled Woman 

Author: Beverly LaHaye

Date: 1976

Publisher: Harvest House

ISBN: 0-89081-020-6

Length: 174 pages

Quote: "[W]omen have asked when something would be written from the woman's point of view regarding the four temperaments."

Beverly and our late correspondent Tim LaHaye were the first Christian teachers to promote the idea that Christians were not meant to be all-alike "super salesmen for Jesus," that individuals have natural healthy differences of personality. In the 1960s, 1970s, even 1980s, this was controversial. Some churches were openly teaching that real Christians wouldn't be introverts. The best way I can describe this early book is that it still reflects the ignorance of its period about why some of us are introverts, but it was a refreshing change from the hate campaign directed against us at the time.

Around the turn of the century, when neurological studies were able to identify physical bases for at least three of the classic four temperament patterns documented in this book, the accuracy of the LaHayes' observations--and those of the early writers who first identified the patterns--made their books remarkable. Though it's traditional in this field to cite writers earlier than Hippocrates, and the first observers of the temperament patterns were neither Christians nor scientists, the observation and documentation of these patterns is evergreen. Ancient and medieval philosophers wrote a lot of quaint poetic fantasy about the mystical or pseudo-scientific bases for the patterns; they wrote accurately about the human behavior they could see. As a pastor's wife, counsellor, and teacher Beverly LaHaye had opportunities to observe the behavior of twentieth century church ladies at close range. That is what she describes in this book--sometimes with the cutesy humor of her generation (each type is personified with a given name like "Clara Choleric") and sometimes with wit and insight of her own.

To introduce this book to younger readers...really I sat down and wrote a whole new book about how today's Melanie Melancholy, Felice Phlegmatic, Chloe Choleric, and Samantha Sanguine are like and different from their mothers, Martha, Polly, Clara, and Sarah. I could publish that one, if youall want to read it. Meanwhile, in this summary I'll try to link the descriptions in the book with what we currently understand about four documented physical traits that shape human personalities:

1. "Melancholy" did not originally mean depressive (each of the four classic names has pejorated into a word for the type's worst quality) but feeling what C.S. Lewis called Joy--longing for a world better than ours, the idealism of people who have higher blood levels of certain hormones and develop more nerve endings than the rest of humankind. This web site usually describes us as Highly Sensory Perceptive, or HSP, as described at hsperson.org. This is predominantly an introvert trait because most HSPs are creative types who work alone, but obviously many HSPs also work with and for the public--creativity has nothing to do with shyness. 

2. "Phlegmatic" did not originally mean bored (see above), but detached, philosophical, prone to think seriously about things instead of reacting emotionally. This is the most obvious introvert trait people can have; The Introvert Advantage addressed only phlegmatic-type introverts. This web site usually describes Phlegmatics in terms of the Long Brain Stem, or LBS, that shows up on their neurological scans. Phlegmatic personalities can be mistaken for personalities affected by disease conditions that slow their reaction times, like hypothyroidism, but the Phlegmatic temperament is a good healthy trait.

3. "Choleric" did not originally mean grouchy, but decisive, bold, aggressive--well, probably it always did connote someone who was prone to grumpiness, but it was seen as the ideal temperament for war chiefs. This is the strong-willed temperament. Cholerics incline toward Type A behavior; they can control this. They can control almost everything and, if respect for others' boundaries is pounded into them at a formative stage, they make good leaders, organizers, and entrepreneurs. Beverly LaHaye describes herself as a repressed ("feminized," trained to be shy and ineffective) Choleric who might have seemed like a Melancholy gone wrong, when young, but blossomed out into a powerful teacher, speaker, and leader. The Choleric temperament is basically extrovert, often though not always found isolated from the definitive introvert trait called a conscience or sense of shame. 

4. "Sanguine" did not originally mean naive so much as cheerful and chatty. (However, the Sanguine temperament was associated with fevers and "corrected" by bloodletting; up into the nineteenth century it was considered a very mixed blessing to be noticed as cheerful and chatty.) This is the true extrovert personality. I have yet to find any evidence that it's associated with a desirable physical trait so much as with the absence of other desirable traits. The closest match for the Sanguine personality modern science seems to have identified is attention deficiency disorder (ADD)--but most observers continue to feel that the Sanguine personality is different from ADD, if only in degree. 

Most people can identify with one predominant pattern and one or two secondary patterns. Not all people, however, identify at once with a pattern that correlates with a physical trait they actually have. This is where personal growth, recovery from disease conditions (where possible), and the "Spirit-controlled" or radically Christian life come in. This book might have been more interesting if it had had more to say about the Type A behavior of people who are not natural Cholerics, the hypothyroidism of people who are not natural Phlegmatics, and the depressive conditions of people who are anything but natural Melancholies. LaHaye observed relatively little of that and more of the behavior of church ladies who learned nicer social behavior patterns in the course of obeying the Bible's guidelines for the Christian life. 

Accepting God's forgiveness can release the false guilt of pseudo-Melancholies, practicing good will can relieve the shyness of pseudo-Phlegmatics...LaHaye unfortunately has less to say about how learning to relax can reduce the bossiness of pseudo-Cholerics (I could write that chapter from experience), and how learning that it may well be that nobody is really meant to be a Sanguine chattermonkey can make pseudo-Sanguines happier and easier to love. Some of the most obnoxious extroverts in those "saved by Christ plus extroversion" churches are introverts trying desperately to pass as what they're not.

In the 1980s the LaHayes officially handed down the "temperament workshops" ministry to Florence and Fred Littauer. Both couples wrote other temperament books that might be considered to have updated or replaced this one. Nevertheless, people remembered The Spirit-Controlled Woman, and it's become the classic on its topic. 

Beverly LaHaye has retired but her charity, the Concerned Women for America, is still active, so if you order this book from me online this web site will send 10% of the total cost to CWA.

Book Review: Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Title: Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Author: Allan Gurganus

Date: 1989

Publisher: Ballantine

ISBN: 0-8041-0643-6

Length: 875 pages

Quote: “But they tells me: we gone inherit Mother Earth, us meek. Well, semi-meek.”

There’s nothing even semi-meek about this super-sized satire. It’s a historical novel set in an alternate history. The last real Confederate Widow lived into the 1980s and this story, only in the vaguest way even a travesty of hers, can seem like a tasteless jab at a woman whose only distinction was longevity, while she was dying.

However: Lucy, Mrs. William Marsden, has all the stories people wanted to imagine a Confederate Widow who’d survived into the 1980s would tell. Thirty or forty years younger than her husband, of course. Probably a second wife, though Will Marsden’s true love seems to have been an older soldier who was killed. Will Marsden lives with post-traumatic stress until he’s old enough to develop Alzheimer’s Disease, which can produce violent insanity. He’s never much of a treat to live with, although Lucy was impressed by his size and strength before she knew better. Eventually he has to be euthanized and who’s to do it...

Well, actually there are several possibilities. He’s lived with two women, one his legal wife and one his inherited slave housekeeper. After marriage he dismisses the housekeeper, but it’s a small town, the woman’s domestic odd jobs never call her very far away, and the three grow old together. Old and weird.

Castalia, the housekeeper, is an African “princess.” “King” is the title she gives her father although what she meant by it is more like “elder,” in a “tribe” of forty people, all enslaved after the international slave trade in our world was banned. Her tribal religion is the ultimate example of the Power of Positive Thinking: it leads her people into slavery without resistance, brainwashing them to see their enslavement as an expression of inferior people’s need for their guidance. If there were such religions in Africa it would explain a lot of things, including why such religions have died out. Castalia’s passivist self-worship guides her through a horrific life with her self-esteem intact. She repays non-fatal slights in kind, promptly, and carries on being helpful, even generous, while despising everybody.

Lucy is that rarely documented creature, a Southern girl who never aspired to be beautiful, brilliant, popular, charming, or much of a “lady” in the sense of a moral example to humankind. The sexual pleasure to which she admits is lesbian, but she never goes all the way with a woman. She does her duty, gives birth to nine children, admits no special affection for any of them but does melt down when one of them is blinded in a hunting accident.

I got as far as the meltdown scene thinking that this book was a collection of short stories about The Way Things Might Have Been But Weren’t, and then I recognized that it’s not meant to be either historical or a novel. It’s a bitter, satirical re-visioning of the Southern States’ historical lore. When Lucy’s emotions blow up, they take the form of blaming the object involved in an accident. She doesn’t weep over poor blind Ned, nor does she have much to say about helping him, apart from a throwaway line about most of the Marsden money being used to send the children to college. About her children, generally, people of the readers’ grandparents’ generation, she has remarkably little to say. But she wants to burn up Will’s whole gun collection, except for the guns he and Ned were carrying and the one she wants to point at Will’s head when she says, “Manners.”

Yes, “hysterical” is the word that comes to mind, for Lucy and for the book...but it’s relevant hysteria. The things that didn’t happen, wouldn’t have happened, in the real nineteenth century are statements about things that were happening in the twentieth century. Lucy compares Civil War veterans to Vietnam veterans, a group that were receiving very wary and tentative kinds of respect in the 1980s. Her gun grab and Castalia’s slave story, or Positive Thinking story, express the author’s opinions on contemporary political and religious discourse, and also on women: Lucy and Castalia are strong all right, even magnificent, but they’re not intelligent. 

Not that men are more intelligent; the men in this novel all seem to be coping with insanity in their various ways. Will wasn’t even half grown during the war (it would have taken some intensive lying to get him legally recognized as a Confederate veteran in our world) and wasn’t sent into combat; his claim to fame is having walked all the way home from Appomattox (home is in eastern North Carolina) but he rejected lifts he was offered. In the psychological news of our 1980s, researchers tried to determine whether punishment works as a deterrent to crime at all; in the family legends of this fictional world’s 1850s, a runaway slave is beaten and left in the cellar, then dug up from a tunnel she dug, working northward from the cellar.

A case might easily be made that all historical fiction consists of projecting our own present-time thoughts onto the past, that Jean Plaidy’s meticulous reconstructions of historical documents in novel form were shaped by her immediate concerns almost as much as Gurganus’s having Edwardians talk about “a gene” (instead of “something in the blood”) or slaves brought from Africa in 1860. The counterargument would be that, if most historical fiction represents a patchwork of current and recreated thoughts, and if a seam always shows somewhere, still, in most historical fiction the seams aren’t as predominant a feature as they are here.

In any case, if read as a deliberate use of images from historical fiction to represent present concerns, the way anthropomorphic teddy bears represent present concerns in children’s stories, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All makes sense, in a mordant and cynical way, and is worth reading once. As history it is, of course, worse than useless. Now you’ve been warned and, whether or not you find it entertaining, this work of fiction can do you no harm.

If 875 pages of snarky satire with extensive adult content, longwinded build-ups, and intensive disrespect for Our Past appeals to you, you probably already have this book. If not, you want it now. Allan Gurganus is still alive so it's a Fair Trade Book: if you buy a copy here, we'll send 10% of the purchase price to him or a charity of his choice.

Beloved Companion Loretta

Here's another free-verse thingie in response to a prompt at Poets and Storytellers United, where other people are undoubtedly posting better animal stories...When my brother and I were growing up, we had a dog of our own for a few months, boarded a pony, and bonded with other animals, but our main pets were bantam chickens. 

I always write about cats. Today 

I want to be different and remember the hens,

who, like my social cats, were most interesting

in their relationships with one another. 

Loretta was my last pet hen, and closest,

the one who used to mimic the sound of speech

and briefly managed to say the word "freebie." 

Loretta knew her male kin, and ignored them.

Also ignored full-sized chickens, male or female,

as being a different species she disliked.

(Bantams are miniature chickens. Loretta's body

was a perfect fit in the palm of my hand.)

At intervals she met a bantam rooster

from outside her own family, and became

flirtatious, even eager. Handicapped

by black-rose instead of bright red on her face,

she called and coaxed and showed no shame.

In spring, outdoors, in a family, she might have laid

eight or ten eggs a year; never very many,

and she never tried to raise a brood of her own.

Every feather she ever had was black.

We joked that they'd mistake her for a crow

if she didn't insist, in every way, she was a hen.

In fact her whole breed was developed for a look

produced by low levels of estrogen, low fertility.

When bantam roosters were not in the neighborhood

she tried to take the social role of one

by crowing in the morning and flirting with hens.

But she knew friendship, loyalty, generosity

with Silver, Sandy, Blanca, and with me.

Animals bond by sharing food. Loretta

would eat off my plate any time she could

and show me yummy pebbles, leaves, or beetles.

As a fledgling she used to snuggle in my pocket;

when cold or scared she'd fly on to my shoulder

but, like most birds, preferred not to be held.

The family kept her while I was at school,

isolated, to prevent lesbianism, and because

they didn't want to keep another whole flock.

Nobody cared about trained chicken shows

after my brother died. So Loretta was

often without companions, but she never

complained in any noticeable way; only

trilled happily when we could be outside together.

Most hens live three or four years. She lived six.

She'd become a burden on my young womanhood

but still I missed her, after her long life.

A Fair Trade Book: Sailing

Title: Sailing 

Author: Henry Beard

Date: 1981

Publisher: Workman

ISBN: 0-89480-144-9

Length: 96 pages

Illustrations: cartoons by Roy McKie

Quote: "The knowledgeable sailor does not 'get on' a boat or 'climb in' a boat--he boards a boat. And the prudent individual...remains ashore."

This is a book for people who recognize the similarities between sailing and tearing money into small pieces while standing in a cold shower, yet they "have heard the call of the sea" and enjoy sailing anyway. The book defines "deviation" as this "unnatural love of the sea." 

William F. Buckley, Jr., was known as a wit, but he recognized Henry Beard as a funnier humorist. (It was one of those lefthanded compliments. Buckley thought more of his own work was serious than many of his readers did.) He rated Sailing "the funniest book I have ever read." Meh. Some prefer Beard's Cooking, a similar "dictionary" that skewers the joys and futilities of a popular hobby. Neither book, however, should be read in any place where you can't share the joke. Both may cause coffee to be inhaled in inappropriate ways.

Born in June 1945, Beard was either the last of the war babies or the first of the baby-boomers. He is still alive so, although the badly water-damaged copy of Sailing I currently have for sale is the one to throw in if you're buying books for ten dollars a dozen, new copies are Fair Trade Books, and ten percent of the current price according to Amazon will go to Beard or the charity of his choice.

Book Review: Mirro Matic Pressure Pan

Title: Mirro Matic Pressure Pan 

Author: none specified

Date: 1961

Publisher: Mirro Aluminum Co.

ISBN: none

Length: 58 pages

Illustrations: line drawings

Quote: "The very first time you try the recipes in this book, whether you have cooked previously or not, you are going to have some very gratifying results." 

Probably most of the homemakers who kept this book had cooked before, but not in a pressure cooker. The Mirro Matic Pressure Pan (Economy Model) was a basic model. Anything it could do, your pressure cooker can probably do better. So you can still use these recipes.

Probably the book will appeal most, though, to collectors of vintage cookbooks. The copy I have for sale has been thoroughly and lovingly used, and shows it, but it's complete and legible inside. 

Recipes begin with timetables for basic cooked vegetable dishes, starting with raw or frozen veg, and stewed meats. They progress quickly, however, to things like potato salad, hasenpfeffer, Swedish meatballs, Irish stew, baked beans, tamales, pheasant, steamed brown bread, curries, and other traditional dishes that adapt well to pressure cooking. If you have a pressure cooker and enjoy using it to get slow-cooked flavors and textures in relatively short amounts of time, this book is for you.

I thought I was posting another review of a curiosity nobody else has. Wrong! Amazon has a copy, with a color photo on the cover that my copy does not have. Though used, the copy sold on Amazon has gone into collector prices, so the price of this book online will start at $10. It's not even a Fair Trade Book. Go ahead and buy it directly from Amazon if you prefer.

Five Things Social Workers Say That Are Almost Always Wrong

Real, professional social workers say the wrong things because they are social workers. That is to say, they are trained and required to work as part of a system that doesn't help the people it's supposed to help. But anybody can learn to say the things social workers say--perhaps from watching a TV program where someone says these things and does help somebody, or hearing a teacher or church worker say these things and at least sound very "professional"--and be surprised and hurt by the reaction they get in real life. Let's consider a few specific things people often say, with the intention of helping others, and analyze some of the reasons why they don't work.

1. It's All About You

Here's one that popped up in the Twitter feed of someone I visited this morning. We know this Twit was feeling successful, because he retweeted:

"

God didn’t create you 2b a failure or to just get by in life, your decisions did that. He did bless you will free will, that free will allows you to make the changes necessary 2 become successful! So remember U have nobody to blame for your failures or successes except yourself.

"

Wow. Considering this thought from the perspective of someone who feels like a failure, can you see why this kind of tweet might be considered to violate Twitter's rule against encouraging suicide?

(Twitter wanted me to paste in the whole tweets and give credit to the people who posted this tweet and the one below. I prefer to spare them from blame.)

Why would anybody ever say this? Because in the context of a long-term counselling relationship with a "life coach," where there's time to work out what changes may be necessary for the person to feel that he has become successful, it might encourage the person to ask for more advice. This is possible since the person has already entered this relationship of his own free will, so presumably he has more faith in the counsellor than it would be prudent for anybody to place in human beings generally. 

Where does this one break down in reality? In real life, our actions have consequences. So do the actions of other people. One thing leads to another, but sometimes those other things intersect and interact. Everyone, whether they feel like successes or failures, acts in ways that succeed and in ways that fail every day. 

When the general balance of the immediate consequences of our actions seems to be successful, we tend to overlook our "little" failures. Most of us are good at focussing on the aspects of our lives where most evidence that "we are successful" can be found. 

When the general balance of the immediate consequences of our actions seems to be unsuccessful, we tend to feel discouraged and overlook our "little" successes. Most of us don't stay in this kind of deeply discouraged mood for very long. People who get stuck in discouragement are likely, these days, to be labelled "depressed" whether they have that physical condition (which is a symptom of a physical disease, often an easily cured one) or not. If they talk to someone who is being encouraged to hand out certain popular medications, they can add dependency on an expensive drug with nasty side effects to the list of things that make it less likely that they'll succeed. 

In hope of speeding up the progress of a long-term counselling relationship, many counsellors were taught what turned out to be a very antisocial attitude towards "blame," or recognizing the way the consequences of different people's actions interact. The general idea the counsellors absorbed was "Ignore the effect all external circumstances have on your patient's life and focus on whatever effect her voluntary actions have. After all, as her counsellor you can only recommend voluntary actions to her." The effect on those who listened to them was more like "Counsellors think we should all agree to pretend that everything everyone does is 'okay.' They think we should just blithely 'accept' our cars being stolen or our children being molested." This was part of a widespread backlash Against Therapy.

What can we say instead? Even for the Twit who finds it encouraging to think that he is solely responsible for his current success, it may be useful to balance his self-encouragement with a few humbling reflections. No doubt he did make good decisions that contributed to his current success. He is right to encourage himself to make good decisions but he should be aware that events outside of his control not only may, but will, eventually outweigh the effect his good decisions have on his life: No matter how good he is at his business, old age and ill health will eventually remove him from the business world. 

If he wants to help someone who might want his advice because she is failing to emulate his success, he should avoid generalizing. She may be doing something wrong. A change from one valid business decision to another might be the cause of her current lack of success or her future success. (I used to know a restaurant that served a chicken dish that became famous all over the city, but they employed one preachy vegan and several vegetarians who insisted on switching to vegetarian meals only. I wonder why their traffic slowed down?) 

Or her difficulties might come from real competition or opposition from other people. Nothing useful can be generalized about that; we have to know the situation. Someone else may in fact be supplying the demand for a certain kind of product or service, and her best move might be to try a different line of business or a different city. Someone else may in fact be sabotaging her business, or may just be draining her energy ("relationship problems" are the biggest drain on women's productivity). In real life it is probably more useful to acknowledge the difference between blameworthy and merely inconvenient things other people do to us, rather than try to sweep them all under the rug. Someone who actually stalks and threatens your customers (I had an enemy who did that) deserves blame; someone who merely drains your energy, as it might be by being your parent and having Alzheimer's Disease, does not. Either one can interfere with your ability to succeed. It's saner to admit that obstacles in the road to success may exist, while working around them, than to pretend that we're building our own road through a solipsistic world in which others exist only to reflect our energy back to us. We're not. They don't. 

2. Go, go, go! 

Another "motivational" tweet popped up in the same stream, right beside the one above: 

"

NEVER STOP LEARNING. Determine the skill you need to acquire to get to the next step in your journey. Successful people have figured out how to reach their goals through trial & error. Never let up, go go go!

"

Why do people say this? In its original context of athletic training, this kind of thing was said by and to people who were physically fit to push themselves to the limits of their strength. When everyone present routinely runs a mile in four and a half minutes, there seems to be no harm in pushing themselves toward a time below four minutes. 

A little "go, go, go" won't hurt us as long as our "going" feels good, overall. A habit of pushing ourselves, "go, go, hurry, push it, now, faster, never stop," becomes fast-moving cardiovascular disease. Go, go, go! Have that heart attack before age forty!

Why is this one false to reality? Life is not the Roman Arena. While I personally see more people who look undertrained than people who look overtrained, in terms of physical athletics, I still see the stereotype that may be most dangerous of all playing itself out in real life. That's the pattern where people abandon all physical training and just apply all those pre-game pep talks to business, personal time, even family life. "Win that conversation! Make that person buy one thing more than he came in to buy! The best never rest--shop till you drop! Bag those bargains! Get the best cabin at the lake! Push that kid through that math course!" They lose the ability to feel their blood pressure rise. Before long it just stays high all the time. 

What can we say instead? In real life, good coaches and trainers tell athletes when to stop pushing themselves and relax. A well exercised heart actually achieves a slower, steadier resting rhythm sooner than an underexercised one. In real life, unfortunately, few adults could find a competent coach to tell us when to push the working, studying, or whatever, and when to rest. We have to learn to do that for ourselves. 

One tool that works for some people is a home blood pressure kit. You can learn to use a traditional cuff and stethoscope, which never wear out, or buy a cute little electronic gadget that will do all the work for you until it wears out. When your resting or morning blood pressure reading is high, it's time to back off and pinpoint the source of stress. For that purpose, eliminating all "go, go, go!" thinking can help.

3. Focus on the Feelings 

Last night I felt sick. I was sick. I still am sicker and more tired than my younger self, or most young people, could imagine its being possible to be. I don't like to endorse any general slogan for everyone, because mine is probably as susceptible to misuse as anyone else's, but the thought that's worked for me in all of my hard times has consistently been, "FIX FACTS FIRST: FEELINGS FOLLOW." 

After long hard thought I decided to post exactly what I was feeling, what was going through my mind, because I think people need that information. When you disappoint someone who is ill and/or disabled, you physically aggravate their disease. You trigger emotional moods that make it more likely that they'll become sicker than they already were. Not all elders or people with disabilities want company all the time, but whenever one of them wants and expects your company, there is no alternative. Go ahead and tell the White House social secretary that you're not available because you promised to spend that day with your grandmother. I don't know about some Presidents, but the good ones have publicly commended people who did that. Rock stars and supermodels have been known to fall in love with people who made them wait, too, for good reasons.

But as I typed the post before this one I was mentally bracing for somebody to spew out the TV movie approach to anyone who says anything like "I feel too tired to get up and eat if someone brought me my favorite food." That is a physical symptom--a fact. TV movies and social workers have unfortunately conditioned some of us to treat it as an emotional feeling.

Which leads to messes like, "Ohhh, dear, but you have so much to live for (I don't know what that might be, exactly, and I don't care, but it's what I'm supposed to say)! Let's get you some help to FEEL better! Try some nice pills...they cause intense pain in about one of three patients and violent insanity in one of twenty patients, but ANYthing's better than FEELing that you don't CARE about staying alive!" 

In real life I got up this morning, nibbled at a little healthy food, and felt better. That's NOT because I am saner than someone who might have felt the same way, been older and sicker with less ground to lose, and actually let perself die of dehydration (with water in the house, which the person was too weak to get up and drink). It's because I started out stronger than that person was, physically. You never know how strong people are, so you never know whether their feeling too weak to eat and drink is just a passing symptom or a permanent condition. Their sanity and intelligence has nothing to do with it. Grandma Bonnie Peters was renowned for her sanity and intelligence, and part of that was that, toward the end of her life, she knew that the day would soon come when her body would not be able to digest food or water if she was able to swallow it. You never know when that day is going to come for any individual, but before it arrives, you need to know that it is a physical condition, not a psychological one.

Why people say this: They are scared. They have no real reason to suspect that other people have suicidal depression as a disease, but they may have it, or have had it, themselves, or known someone who did. Sometimes they've learned the lines they repeat from someone at the hospital where one of their parents was treated for a drug overdose. Sometimes they're very, very young--not only too young to have anything useful to say, but too young to have the discipline to shut up and listen to what someone else is saying.

Why it's false in reality: TV movies may have succeeded in teaching the young different speech patterns, but for baby-boomers and the older generation, nine times out of ten, "I feel tired of living" does not mean anything like "I have suicidal depression." It has meanings like "I feel overwhelming fatigue and/or weakness and/or pain and/or nausea." Not only do serotonin boosters not treat this symptom--they often aggravate it. Efforts to help someone "feel better" while living through the original disease process can compound the disease process and increase the odds that the person will commit suicide. A pattern associated with one kind of medication used for neurological pain creates an obsession with suicide. A pattern associated with serotonin boosters, specifically, can also create delusions that the pain actually caused by the drugs has been caused by other people's evil acts (y'know that teacher has beaten and tortured students in front of whole classes before!) and an obsession with killing other people before committing suicide. 

It was bad enough when chronically ill patients my age vented "I wish I could just end all of this," on the way into or out of another painful medical procedure, and were rolled into the psychologist's office for useless talk about their emotions and their early childhood. That discouraged them, but it didn't kill third parties. But the overprescription of antidepressants has killed hundreds of third parties, including children.

What to say instead: If you personally can offer the person more in the way of "something to live for," go ahead and make that commitment now; it may or may not be medically necessary, or even medically relevant, but you probably will outlive the person and you will feel better whenever that happens. If you can't, zip your lip. Even people who have suicidal depression do not need more lies and liars in their lives.

Focus on the facts. The facts won't be the same for one person as they are for another. The facts may include this fact: there's nothing you can do. Or they may include this fact: there's something you can do, and it involves your back and/or your pocket, but it does not involve your mouth. Face the facts, and act on the facts you have.

In this kind of situation the facts can be incredibly hard to face. Be honest with yourself about the emotional feelings that may be complicating your response--your feelings. If you need someone to talk to about the fact that your disabled parent needs for you to remodel your ground floor and help him or her to roll around your home in a wheelchair all day, do not feel ashamed of asking for the help you need.

People's ability to discuss and work with all of their disabilities varies depending on the kind of disability they have. I've been using a bedpan. I can talk about that because (1) I don't expect to use it much longer, and also (2) I'm still strong enough and well enough coordinated to be able to use it efficiently. Reasonable people who don't even feel discouraged about being able to use a bedpan efficiently during a few weeks of acute illness might reasonably feel that having to be lifted out of a filthy bed, regularly, was more than they wanted their children to have to live through with them. Or their wives. 

Between waking up in their Heavenly Home and waking up in a filthy bed, any reasonable person would choose the former. If the person of concern to you is unable to keep perself clean, the only useful thing you can say is that you, personally, don't mind cleaning the person's bed. Which may or may not even help.

4. Counting Someone Else's Blessings 

I found an instructive example of this yesterday. A fellow Blogspot blogger posted this:

https://grahamlesterpoetry.blogspot.com/2021/03/blessed-lives.html

Reading the first few lines, I had the thought, "Yes, he's reminding all of us in the English-speaking countries" (the poem's been linked to blogs in at least the big six, and India!) "of a blessing we tend to forget--most of us have never been on a real battlefield." For me those lines are enough to evoke the awareness that this is indeed a blessing.

Right below the poem, a typical well-off yuppie writer, from Australia I believe, complained that "So many [people] do not lead blessed lives." Well, she might have been thinking of the ones whose homes have become battlefields. It is also, however, totally typical of well-off writers in the big six English-speaking countries (US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, NZ), all of whom are still filthily rich by global standards, to forget about the fact that we're not living in war zones and feel that, because our writing hasn't put us on the Forbes 500 list yet, because many of us have minor disabilities (or acute temporary ones like my current one), because those of us who married for money and/or extrovert charm have had miserable marriages and divorces, and so on, we do not lead blessed lives. Well, in some ways we don't. But we have had the blessing of not living in a war zone.

So some of us blather: "Oh, count your blessings! You're alive!" (This, at the moment, may not feel like a blessing. See above.) "The weather is nice! Flowers are blooming--well, somewhere. The world has puppies in it!" (And if the person was hoping to adopt a puppy and has just realized she's too ill, that thought might make her cry all day and long into the night.)

Why people say this: They sincerely believe that they are expressing their faith and gratitude for their Higher Power. Often they're whistling in the dark--trying to earn more blessings when, in fact, their own ratio of blessings to non-blessings is running low. It's easy, and if you have sadistic tendencies it's fun, to deflate their little emotional balloons. It's also cruel; in real life, as discussed in Bright-Sided, some of these people are cancer survivors desperately hoping that Positive Thinking will extend their remissions.

Why it's false to reality: If God wanted you to feel blessed, you would feel blessed. Many of the basic facts of most of our lives--our homes are not in war zones, the weather in North America happens to be the kind most humans like best today, the world has puppies in it--probably are pleasant if we think about it. But a basic fact is not a special blessing. When people receive blessings, they'll tell the rest of the world. We cannot tell, before the fact, what anyone's blessings, even our own, may be.

What we can say instead: See "fix facts first," above. Most of the things people complain about are physical facts that exist in the physical world. They may or may not be subject to change. That change may or may not involve our backs or our pockets. It does not involve our mouths. If the only thing we believe we can do is to run our mouths, good things to say might include "Tell me more" or "I'm really grateful that you took the time to talk to me. I don't want to waste too much of your energy, so if you're feeling tired I'll go away." 

If you live with someone who read Winnie the Pooh as a child and took Eeyore as a role model in life, you might try just talking about the pleasant facts of life--the flowers, the scientific discoveries, the social breakthroughs, even (if the person has not just realized he is too ill to adopt a pet) the puppies. I'm all in favor of that. I'm actually launching a weekly e-newsletter full of pleasant things. (My original name for it was GAN: The Fluff, but for those who came in late, I'm calling it The Tuesday Revue.) Sometimes cheerful thoughts can boost the flow of serotonin for some people who have problems with that.

People should understand, however, that at a deep level some people believe that talking about the good things in our lives attracts evil, so when they want to receive more blessings they'll talk as if even their grandchildren were big disappointments. There may still be traditional Chinese elders whose idea of showing gratitude for being healthy and successful and having beautiful grandchildren is to growl, "Bah, useless girls and an empty-headed boy who'll never get anywhere in life." What they really mean is "Long may these blessings continue," but they'd never dare to say that.

5. Someone Else Is Worse Off 

While typing yesterday's post I dismissed a few thoughts that came to my mind. Thoughts like, "Have you forgotten how many people find time to read blogs because they are going through chemotherapy for cancer? While writing about the misery of food poisoning have you given any thought to how idiotic you sound to chemo survivors?" I chose to write what I did because chemo survivors are not strong enough to write about what they are feeling while they're feeling it, and nobody would have the fortitude to read it if they did. So, reading about food poisoning, which is something young people can imagine happening to them, may give them as much of a clue as they can possibly understand.

A lot of baby-boomers first heard the "Someone Else Is Worse Off" line of unhelpful talk when they didn't like something served at dinner. "Look at these pictures of hungry orphans in Europe or India who would be glad to have those carrots! Now eat your carrots and try to be grateful!" 

I even heard it when I was new to widowhood. "Otto Frank lost his wife and his children and his friends in the concentration camps! How can you feel discouraged when you've only lost your husband?" 

To that, the only reasonable reply is, "Worse than losing my husband, I find myself living in a world that has you in it." And if I were on the jury trying someone who had followed that reply by doing what antidepressants suggested to her mind, that person would...have to spend at least two actual fifty-minute hours talking to a therapist. About easing off the pills, mainly.

For most of us, it should be enough to note the logical fallacy of this line of babble. Anyone still spouting it should have to copy the entire Bible by hand before being allowed to talk to another human being.

Why people say this: They're badly scared, they're desperate for something to say (probably because they know it's time to shut up and activate the back or the pocket or both), and they're also stupid. They are not people in whom we should ever confide or to whom we should ever listen. 

It should be noted that in a few cases, like the carrot situation, this line was a badly distorted, useless, and counterproductive version of a valid appeal to some legitimate cause. To adults who can understand the situation it may still make sense to say "We've raised funds for a gala dinner with expensive food, and we're eating a local farmer's supermarket-reject carrots, in order to send more money to those hungry orphans. Let's eat our carrots and give thanks."

In the typical carrot situation, the carrots actually cost more than some of the junkfood the children would have preferred would have cost, and there may be baby-boomers who don't understand why anyone ever told a child "Eat those carrots because of those hungry orphans," to this day.

Why it's false in reality: If you care about someone who is worse off than you are, adding that person's pain to yours makes you feel worse. 

If your goal is to cheer and encourage someone, never be the first to mention those who are even worse off. Sometimes sick patients will do this. Sometimes they actually mean, not just "Go away and don't talk to me, idiot," but "The patient across the hall might really benefit from more company." But don't you be the one to mention it. Wait for them to bring up the subject of anyone being sicker than they are.

What to say instead: Anything. Nothing. Just don't ever say anything like this.