Writing in the Dirt

There is a story in the gospel that describes what happened when Jesus came upon a crowd of people about to stone a woman caught in the act of adultery. This was a punishment not only prescribed by the law, but also yet another opportunity for the religious leaders to use the law as a trap for Jesus, for if he could be shown to be in defiance of the law, he might thereby be discredited.

Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?"

Now here's the interesting part, the part wherein Jesus applies his customary gift for the uncommon response, leaving the accusers, the manipulators, even the hapless woman in silence, perplexed.

Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear.

Well, the outcome of the meeting is well enough known. He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.

The accusers did not continue to argue their case then, nor do we (hopefully) argue it now. The woman went free, for there were suddenly no accusers remaining.

Yet the fascination that persists, for me anyway, is contained in the Lord's strange act of kneeling to write with his finger in the dirt.

What did he write?

It is of course an age old question, with just about as many theories attached as a porcupine has quills--and for all this, curiously, stubbornly impenetrable. What is clear, though, is that whatever was written, it was the accusers who ended up convicted and not their target the woman, nor their prey the Lord.

Some say that he wrote down the sins of the stone throwers, one by one. Some say that he was merely doodling while he thought up his answer. Some say that he wrote verses from the Torah. Some say that he was simply bored with such pig-headed questions and lost interest for a minute.

But whatever he wrote, what seems ultimately clear is that it was the simple truth.

Now I do a certain amount of doodling of my own. I do not have, as the Lord had, access to the truth--receiving, as he said, every word from above--and so what I write is my own sorts of truths instead, my own questions. I write of my own struggles to understand, applying experience and theory, book knowledge and human compassion as poor substitutes for the Word from above.

Jesus knew his answers before he posed his questions (to the woman, Where are those accusers of yours?). For my own part, I am unclear about the propriety of my questions, let alone what answers might be had. I endeavor, in any case, to be honest, firstly with myself, and so also with others. I endeavor to strike at the core and to avoid the impedance of politics or diplomacy, of the undue carefulness that can mollycoddle a monster and the timidity that bows so readily to the fear of recrimination.

I will say to he who reads this and does not like it that perhaps I have touched on the truth after all. Each person will need to examine himself.

Fried Myelin With Anemone

. . . a wise man's heart discerns both time and judgment,
Because for every matter there is a time and judgment,
Though the misery of man increases greatly.
For he does not know what will happen;
So who can tell him when it will occur?
No one has power over the spirit to retain the spirit,
And no one has power in the day of death.
--Eccl 8:5-7

Wake up calls.

I have already written of my recent hour-long brain fart fiasco with forgetting my user name and password. That happened the day before yesterday.

Remembering one thing, however, does not lead to remembering another. Remembering one thing does not restart nor restore the brain--it simply sits in your head waiting to forget the next thing.

Yesterday, having left the Winco store along with Albert with our bags of goodies for a barbecue, it happened that I could not make the car move out of its parking spot. Perplexed, I checked the brake, I adjusted the gear shift--drive, neutral, reverse--right. Everything seemed to be in order.

"Uh, Dude, you need to start the engine first," Albert observed.

I begin to see, slow as I am, that there is no respite now, there is no delay, there is no recovery as from a common illness. Broken bones will mend, and be stronger moreover in the broken places, but the brain just lies there in the head, curiously unaware, as defenseless as a sea anemone.

"Fried myelin, anyone?"

"Umm, what else is on the menu?"

"Sorry, that's all we have."

Honestly. Has a strip of bacon ever unfried itself? Has an egg ever returned to its shell?

And so this is it. My lot from here on out. This, and more of the same.

Redeem the time becomes therefore the phrase of the hour, and of every hour remaining. It is the only reasonable approach to the reality that is upon us.

Will my spirit eventually hide itself as well in the same sorts of dim corners and crannies to which my memory has already fled?

O banish the thought, for it is too harsh for the morning to bear.

Please Enter User Name and Password

Yesterday afternoon I had one of the most frightening MS moments (or rather, hours) in my illustrious MS career thus far.

At about 2:25 I sat down at my desk to start work, powered up the computer, waited for the login screen, took a couple sips of coffee while waiting. The user name and password came up, I lifted by hands, and then . . . nothing!

I could not remember my user name to save my life! I had no idea whatsoever. I have been doing this job for 17 years, I have been using this particular system, and user name, and password, for at least 4 years. And yet suddenly I had no idea in the world what to type into the field.

At first it was a Wow, that's weird sort of moment, but as the moments passed and nothing clicked, as the moments passed and became minutes and then a quarter hour and then a half hour, as the moments passed and every stab in the dark I took at typing in a likely user name failed, weird became frustrating, then maddening, then terrifying.

I suppose this is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it. I suppose we have all had these moments where we just suddenly draw a blank--a name, a date, a memory--but of course such information temporarily misplaced soon pops back, and we chuckle and proceed.

Here there was no resumption, no revival, no retrieval, but only a quickening of the heart, a rising heat on the brow, a growing stuffiness in the brain, a dawning sense of panic.

The minutes marched on, ever away from revelation. The blank slate became if anything blanker. I began to search next for someone I could call, a coworker who might provide some sort of mnemonic, a phrase, a hint.

Now I had learned long ago that sharing ones troubles with MS among managers or supervisors in ones workplace is not the best idea. The sympathy that one somehow automatically anticipates does not in fact generally exist. There is, however, a friend and coworker who has been helpful in the past, who moreover will keep my terrible secret of incompetence, and so I sought now to locate her telephone number.

The idea that my current state of distraction could be further compounded had not occurred to me--until, that is, I found that I had not the slightest notion of where this person's phone number might be. Most certainly I had it. Somewhere. But where? I have, in fact, a printout of every phone number of every coworker in my department. Somewhere.

Knowledge, of course, is not presence. Two thorough searches of the desk drawers produced nothing--or rather, it produced everything conceivable other than that list of phone numbers.

By now a full hour had passed, and still I had not started work. My user name, my password, had fallen quite off the face of the earth, along with my brain.

Well, there is no amazing or edifying end to this. I wish there were. As it happens, the missing information simply popped back into my mind as abruptly as it had popped out. Sixty-five minutes later. I typed it in and began work. Later on I wrote the information on a strip of masking tape and stuck it on the side of the CPU.

What is left now is just a simmering sense of dread, a sense of just how bad things could become. And the knowledge that there's not a damn thing that I can do about it.

Not a Blob, But a Trout

Well this morning my laptop refuses to connect to the Internet, or perhaps the Internet is refusing to connect to my laptop. In either case, this may mean that I am not meant to write anything.

I, however, am seeking to frustrate destiny by typing in Word with the intent to later revisit the Internet, and thus my blog, when cyberspace is in a better mood, and post at that time.

I wonder if this is irreverent—or worse yet, a direct disobedience?

Oh well, never mind. Inventiveness is man's unavoidable curse.

I am thinking again about the mysterious blob near the beginning of time; or rather, I was thinking about it last night before I fell asleep. It is the last thing I remember, that blob. I did not, however, dream of the blob, but dreamed of catching an enormous fish and pulling it to the shore—a fish as large as my Labrador. I was showing the fish to some children and petting it as if it were a Labrador; and I was wondering whether to kill the fish and keep it, or release it back to the water.

The way one usually kills a fish—a trout, anyway—is by inserting ones thumb in its mouth and snapping the head back, thus breaking the neck. But in the case of this very large fish, it was clear that this method would be unfeasible.

Should I shoot the fish then? But of course I had no gun.

Even were I to somehow manage to kill the fish, how would I carry it back home to the frying pan? It was certainly not going to fit in my fishing bag, any more than my Labrador would. How then to get the fish home? And where to find a frying pan nearly as big as the kitchen itself?

Now what was the meaning of this dream—a very real dream, a very vivid dream, and yet distant and obscure, perplexing, not to mention ridiculous.

And so maybe I dreamed of the mysterious blob after all. What to make of the thing? How to contain it? How to comprehend it? How to digest it?

All I know is that I woke up with my arm around the dog, patting his stomach, wondering how he had gotten there, sleeping next to me like a spoon, and why it had occurred to him that I might appreciate it.

Strike Up the Band

"Arise, and do not be afraid."
--Matt 17:7

Today in Portland the world famous Rose Festival Parade takes place. Sant Louis has gone downtown with Roy. I myself am content to experience the thing secondhand.

It is raining, as usual. In 55 years, I think the day of the parade has never been sunny. It's some sort of jinx. All these Oregonians standing on the sidewalks in the rain, unwittingly starving for vitamin D, growing MS in our central nervous systems like dry rot in wet kitchen corners.

Gee, that was an unpleasant sort of thought, yes?

Yesterday I happened to be sitting quite a while in a hard sort of chair, a chair with a wooden seat, reading Jojimbo, a comic book in the Indonesian language, when I noticed that my legs had by and by gone all but dead, but for a sort of thrumming feeling, if you know what I mean.

Now I don't know if this was related to MS, or to sitting in a hard chair, or to sitting in an awkward position, or to sitting too long, but whatever it was from, it afforded an opportunity to experience in a purely physical sense what it would be like to lose ones ability to walk.

Feeling (or rather not feeling) is much more complete than imagination when it comes to things like this. This loss of proper sensation and function is not paralysis, but it is the next closest thing, and I suddenly understood what it is about MS that puts people into wheelchairs.

It is not that you cannot walk at all, it is just that doing so, even from one end of the house to the other, would take hours and eventually result in multiple injuries.

Well, eventually my legs returned to normal--normal for me, that is--more of a low level, manageable sort of thrumming, and I was glad to be stumbling about at my baseline. It was almost like being perfectly healthy. It is all relative, you see.

And I had learned something, experientially, such that my appreciation in real time had deepened.

MS, after all, is all about learning, right?

Yeah right. Sure it is.

Loading In Progress . . .

Mornings are sometimes like this for me--where tying ones own shoes is a challenging enough task in and of itself. Functioning on a level any more demanding than this is initially out of the question. It takes time--time for the system to restart itself, for all the tripping, rattling programs to reboot and load. In this sense, my old Compaq and I are perfect partners in a common ineptitude.

There are things to do. I am to take my son to school, I am to go to one bank and deposit money and to another to withdrawal money, I am to pick up something at the store (I know not what anymore), and then later I will need to work.

So far I have managed only the application of my shoes and a stop at Starbucks, where I sit at this moment wondering why it is taking so damn long for anything to show up on the blank screen, otherwise known as my brain. It's like staring at that little revolving wheel--program loading--and ending up mesmerized by the same, turning, turning, turning, without reason or result.

Now my wife has called with another errand, and the dial-up part of my brain that is now working, more or less, has become fixated on these errands, so that I can think of nothing else, knowing that I will soon forget what I am supposed to be remembering.

The other day I got an I-Phone. You can write messages to yourself, set reminder alarms, and even send yourself e-mails. I could even send myself an e-mail here at Starbucks and pick it up on my laptop before I finish my coffee.

The only trouble is, I can't figure out how to work the damn thing.

And Then My Heart Stood Still

Having gotten character assassination out of my system, I will now return to a more pleasant disposition, begging the reader's pardon in the meantime for what may appear to have been a less than kind attitude toward my father-in-law.

For there is this to be considered: Without Nico there would have been no Sant Louis, and without Sant Louis there would have been no life left to me for the duration of this ever contracting time in the world that remains.

To this I was resigned, back in the old year, 2005. Two marriages had turned hard, like bread left too long in the air, and finally crumbled. The hungry abundance of unearned comfort had swallowed itself, knowing not what else to do with pain, for the effort of love seemed unlikely to provide an equal satiety.

My life simply disappeared.

And I found myself in a two room apartment overlooking the transit center, leaning hard toward the tracks. I and my dog.

There was nothing in me, for it had all slipped away in the vacuum that had taken everything else, and I found myself profoundly displaced, in body, in heart, in soul, in time. Grasping for some kind of mnemonic, I returned to drinking vodka. It was at least familiar. Maybe that was me, for I remembered it. After ten years of exotic travel, and then shipwreck, here was something which at least had remembered me.

Sometimes I would walk to the Fred Meyer store. Sometimes I would take the train downtown. For dinner I ate Asian food that came dry in small packages, a meal in one box. I would rent movies. I remembered being scared after watching The Grudge, and holding the dog close all night long.

What is frightening in and of itself grows huge, unspeakably terrifying, on a diet of ghosts and silence, alienation, regret.

I drank instead--for alcohol is the only substance that is consumable by the soul.

And then all of a sudden she was there. Just there. I know now, of course, that she came from somewhere--it seems that everyone does--and yet that one night, that first night, she was simply there, just as if she had peeked out from my own inner emptiness, a single surviving smile, and winked at me.

I took one look at you,
that's all I meant to do,
and then my heart stood still!

So goes the old Rogers and Hart song. And so it was. I might have thought that my heart had already been standing still, and yet it had not been still at all. It was my life that had been still, or maybe my hope or my faith.

One enchanted evening.

Another song.

Why did she look at me in the first place? Why did she smile. What was it that activated the effort in her to cross the room in order to talk to me?

In any case, I was from that moment lost, and therefore found.

My feet could step and walk,
my lips could move and talk,
and yet my heart stood still!

And I love you, Louis. More than anything in the world.