Now We're Getting Somewhere...

Ah, here's a good central thesis on why I am the way that I am, and why I see things the way I do. See, I told you there was a method! I don't share my deeper thoughts, analyses, and feelings with strangers. Now, we're not strangers. You know enough about me, and you'll learn more.

Good evening, Reader, I hope your day has been as relaxing as mine. I spent quite a bit of time asleep today, and although I didn't do much, I did manage to accomplish some of the organizing to be done in my bedroom. It's a nice bedroom, it really is. It's the fact that it's located in my parents' house that frustrates me.

For the first twenty-six years of my life, I was bound by their expectations of me; I judged myself against them, and nearly always failed to measure up. When I was fifteen, my father asked me for a ten-year plan: where was I going to college, what would I study, where was I going to grad school, how many Master's Degrees I would pursue, etc. He insinuated - in fact, he may have flat-out instructed me - that without such a plan, though it may be adapted as circumstances dictated, and without strict adherence to it, I would not be the accomplished family man he assumed I wanted to be. That I would not accomplish anything of worth in my life. In truth, at the time, I think my life's ambition was to be a professional singer and actor, and to have just one girl so much as like me or think I was the least bit cute; "family" was not anywhere on my list of things I expected to be as a "man."

I couldn't provide him with that plan, nor could I come up with much for the five-year plan he asked me for when I was twenty-one. I'm okay with that now; I have no clue what the time-frame of my current plan is, I just know that I like it. It seems to represent my best interests and my desires, and pays respect to what I think it my part to play in the Great Story.

A friend of mine, who may actually get some face-time in my thoughts, recently complained that "saving the world is fucking hard" - and she's right. I just intend to focus in on contributing my small efforts to heal this one aspect of the world. But that was not what my parents had in mind.

It occurred to me, recently, that I've always taken for granted that my parents were always right. Not because they're my parents, and "parents are always right" - I was raised to question things, not blindly follow them (well, except for my parents' dictates, but they failed to realize that you can't teach a child to question everything and to follow your orders without question). No, it was really because as the central authority figures in my life, they quite often showed me how the World was shaped, in the process of disciplining me, teaching me, and even in praising me. They said, more than once, that my sister and I could not find better parents than they were, not for us; I believe it went something like, "Go ahead and run away! If you can find someone willing to take you in, they're more than welcome to you. I'm the best you're going to get in this world." And my mother's career as a clinical psychologist lent a terrible credibility to her views; she wasn't just speaking as a mother, in my mind, she was speaking as one with the education and experience to know the objective truth of her pronouncements.

My father is another story. He simply conducted a verbal reasoning seminar each time we reached loggerheads. He would either ask me what I was thinking when I did X, Y, Z - and really expect me to lay out for him in a bulleted list exactly what I was thinking - or he would simply control the conversation, leading me from point A through natural conclusion, obvious deduction, and simple-fact identification, to point W, and then leave it to me to understand how X, Y, and Z flowed naturally from there. He presented this logical procession to me in such a way that to contradict or gainsay it in any way was to deny reality itself. He didn't - and, in my mind, doesn't - understand the concept of perspective, of inherent subjectivity.

And as many who have argued with me in the past - that old friend I mentioned, not least - will attest, I have inherited this particular bastardization of the Socratic Method. It was a survival mechanism; the only way to have my perspective on life stand up against the intellectual assault of my parents was to present it and to defend it as one would a master's thesis.

It is a corollary of the combination of my parents' high expectations of me, and their assumption of the intrinsic objective correctness of their perspective on life, that I was never shown an ounce of affection that was not qualified. "Of course I love you; you should know that." "What do you mean, you want more physical affection? Last time I tried to hug you, you just pushed me away, I figured you didn't want me to touch you." "If you think I'm not proud of you for everything you've done, or that I don't respect all the hard work you're doing now, you're out of your mind."

That last one always struck me as a little amusing. Because the truth is, these sentiments are only verbalized in any way, shape or form, when I ask for them. During one of these discussions, my mother found cause to tell me that unconditional love was a fantasy. Her words, not mine. The words of a clinical psychologist, telling me that unconditional love was simply a human impossibility, against our very mental makeup.

My reasoning life has been far longer than it really had to be, if you ask me; I could have been left to the average internal life of a child without real psychological damage. But I wasn't just raised to question everything; I was raised to analyze everything. And for all the time since I demonstrated any ability to do that, I have been pitted against my parents' analyses of various dynamics or realities. And until recently, I "lost".

Recently, however, I finally came to understand that my parents were not always right. Of course, in one sense, I've known this since adolescence, when I came to understand certain things about myself that my parents simply could not. But this realization runs deeper than incorrect or inaccurate observations; I'm talking about ways in which their fundamental approach to parenting was not always right. They tried; they did their best, and unlike my father, I am fully capable of understanding that a human being's best effort is, in fact, the best they can do. (The number of times I've said "I did my best" or "I'll do my best" only to be told to "Do better" would be most easily written in scientific notation.) My AA sponsor is fond of telling me, "Forgive your parents; they were stupid, but they did the best they could for you." I'm certainly aware of that, and I really don't have much of a hard time forgiving them. It isn't resentment that spikes when I consider the depth of their wrongs. It's just pain.

Pain, in this sense, is just an emotion; it's sadness. Deep and abiding sadness, yes - for the time being. Sadness at wrongs visited upon me, yes. But not intentionally. My parents have yet to realize that they are bad at providing emotional support to me, and that this disability has descended into incapability over the last several years. (In inverse proportion, it hasn't escaped me, to the increase in the consistency of their disappointment with me.) I feel as though I've lived my entire life not knowing something was missing, only to have certain people point it out for me in my adulthood; now, being aware of the lack, I find it all but impossible not to look back, and retroactively experience the full dearth.

Until recently, I've apologized for my parents anytime someone pointed out the rather harsh way I was reared. They love me, I'd say, I know they do, because I've seen what parents who don't love their children can do to them. Or because they support me materially. Or because we still speak after all the times I've disappointed them in big ways (leaving college without graduating and being arrested leap to mind). I had a pretty cushy childhood, with all the things any growing boy could want.

I'm through apologizing. Yes, I had a cushy childhood, chock-full of things. It's even been suggested to me, by many people quite close to me, that I was so spoiled that a certain sense of entitlement may never leave me. Even if this is true (and I doubt it), then it's also true that a certain feeling that I don't deserve to be loved has also never left me; this feeling is also a direct result of the manner in which I was raised - if I was showered with nearly everything a growing boy could want, then the most important thing was one of the only things missing. Emotional support. Positive reinforcement. Someone recently defined true "love" as "unconditional positive regard." Yeah, I've never had that from anyone in my family. And I may never experience it from them. But I have, now, experienced it, even though it's hard for me to do so.

It's painful that this difficulty arises from a near-total lack of history with this experience. I'm entering adulthood with something of an emotional handicap: I'm far more capable of experiencing and receiving the negative regard of others than I am the positive, and because many don't know this about me, they see the manner in which I deflect or avoid their praise or affection as a rejection, or indifference on my part. There's nothing I can do about that. The best I can do is to love, and to be loved, with the whole of my heart, and to demonstrate that love in all the ways both small and large I know of.

I am quite physically affectionate: it's truly uncommon for me to pass nearby a friend without some sort of casual touch, even just in acknowledgment. I love hugs. I recommend everyone try to fit at least twelve good hugs into their day, as that frequency of emotionally positive physical contact can actually instigate a positive neurochemical response: it can actually give us a boost not just in our sense of well-being, but in our ability to experience that sense. Fantastic thing, dopamine, never been able to get enough of it. (Hence and per, y'know, being an addict.) I'm trying to smile more often, and more genuinely; that's a real uphill battle. I was taught to laugh not long ago. You'd think laughter is one of those things we pick up so early on in our development that it's almost an innate human behavior. The knowledge of and ability to engage in laughter may be learned that early on; but not too many people, in my experience, remain able in adulthood to laugh from the soul, unselfconsciously. To laugh a laugh full-bellied and loud. It's another small thing I do to stave off that negative-affect state I'm so susceptible to.

And I don't blame my parents for all of that susceptability; they're merely unwitting players of a role, a contributing catalyst within the unbelievably complex mechanism that is my emotional life. There are so many more factors to examine. This is just one that has weighed heavily on me in recent days.

Ever yours,
Dash

I'm On the Outside Looking In

And I wanna be back on the inside, with you...


This blog is from one of my harder days last year. There's a method to my introductory madness, promise.

I'm not good at "belonging". I'm good at making friends, I'm fairly good at keeping friends - I guess I'm not that good at being friends, being with friends. But this doesn't surprise me in the least.

It's no exaggeration to say I was the class scapegoat, growing up. Even when I would get along privately with many of my peers, publicly I was outcast. I had a few incredible friends, and that was it. That was all I needed, but I didn't get very well socialized.

That lack of socialization has manifested itself in various ways at various times in my life. As a child, I had a Charlie Brown complex - y'know, "why's everybody always pickin' on me?" As a teenager it was much the same, until I got burned out on caring at all. I really got okay with being "unpopular". I thought I didn't deserve friends, being as uncool as I was. Then I left my little Los Angeles private-school bubble for a few weeks a year, those last years of high school, and found that both in Indianapolis with my father's family, and in a little town on the outskirts of Monterey, CA with my best friend, I belonged - people liked me, for who I was. I discovered I was funny, I was talented, I was a unique human being with something to offer the world. I started to wonder if I just changed when I hit the city limits, when the plane touched down or the train began to brake.

I never found an answer I could believe in. I knew that I found myself unattractive physically, but that I really liked just about everything about me on the inside. I was a smart kid, I had real talent on stage, and amongst my small group of close friends, I was funny.

I got tired. I ran low on the energy I devoted to over-analyzing my social identity. Then my oldest, best friend handed me a Heineken and told me to lighten up. I got drunk for the first time, and while it didn't immediately turn me into everybody's buddy, it certainly made me think I was.

It wasn't until I started college that the "social lubricant" factor of alcohol (and pot, and even a little coke a few times toward the end) took over. I developed this identity - I don't know if it was really me, although I like to think it was. I don't think I was a phony - I just wasn't totally wracked with social anxiety anymore. I came out of my shell - I wasn't afraid of people and what do you know? I had friends, hundreds of them. Many of them are still friends, nearly ten years later. I was a social cipher - I was an athlete with the jocks, a music geek with the choir kids, a frat boy with my a cappella group, theater snob with the dramaramas, etc. I didn't worry about whether or not all of these people liked me. Of course, I had the occasional issue surrounding that with my roommates, but the fact that they chose to live with me for the first three years of school was a good indication that we had a good bond. And we still do - I'm going to see one of them and his longtime girlfriend sometime next week.

So alcohol really greased my social wheels. I was invincible; I was even a success with girls, to hear others tell the story. (Sex wasn't quite as important to me as drinking, eventually.)

But a little over two years ago, that stopped working - well, no it didn't, but my body was going to die. My spirit pretty much already had, and so would yours if you'd spent years effectively telling yourself you were only good for anything with poison in your body.

So out with the old, unsuccessful, lethal coping mechanism, and in with the 12-step social model of recovery. Taking the steps outlined in those programs, I've learned who I really am. I've learned not just to like what I see in the mirror, but to love every aspect of myself. I've even learned to love others,

Easy To Be Hard

Just cleaning up the old blog before I get a-started on the new one...

My friends,

I work in drug and alcohol treatment. It's a given that I see some seriously funny shit, and I see some seriously fucked-up shit. And what gets to me every time is the razor-thin paradox of the sober alcoholic: on the one hand, we joke around about life-and-death matters; we joke a lot, and those jokes would sound offensive, to say nothing of unfunny, in their ribald or iconoclastic nature. On the other hand, recovery from this disease is deadly serious, and the smart addicts never lose sight of that. It's a tough line to walk, being able to joke about your DUI or your child support payments or whatever, take it fairly lightly, but be absolutely serious when it comes to recovery and remember the stakes at all times. I'll be the first to acknowledge that sometimes, those of us who've managed to keep the balance for a little while must make it look easier than it really is - there is, at times, a very real and very heated internal battle being waged over the decision to remain abstinent, and to continue working a solid program of recovery.

But there are times - and this, as you might glean from the fact that I'm posting this here and now, is one of those times - that I get fed up by all the fucking around people in treatment do, both literally and figuratively.

Recently, two people died of prescription medication overdose in the treatment facility I attended. Inpatient. Within two days of each other. It's rare, but it happens. This is a facility run by the country's leading addiction expert. Two people died, less than a month ago. One of them was a man I'd known fairly well, through his numerous attempts to achieve lasting sobriety. He was a gay marine - which I say in order to highlight both the strength and courage he must have had, and just one of the central characterological conflicts that kept him struggling for sobriety and led him to this (some say intentional) overdose. He was, to many of his "trudging buddies" (friends in recovery with around the same amount of sober time), a hero. He is dead. And today I watched a girl overdose on the same medication. She's alive, so far as I know, but as they loaded her gurney onto the ambulance, she blew us an irreverent kiss goodbye.

This girl, and a few of her friends, had been playing around for weeks, before and after these deaths. They looked like they were having a good time, and I only ever saw them outside of their groups, so I hung around, shot the shit, had a good time with them. But the longer I stuck around, the more I realized it was all play, no work for these kids. And this is where I go for my recovery - it's not my job (yet) to shepherd these kids through early sobriety; I have my own internship, on the other side of Pasadena, for that.

So all I did was gently hint, even jokingly, that they might want to spend some time thinking about the fact that they had landed themselves in an acute psychiatric care facility. Then this happens. Shortly before the ambulance arrived, a girl I spoke to had deemed her rehab experience "relaxing". My response - "If rehab is relaxing, you're doing it wrong."

Relaxation is, to be sure, an essential component of treatment for any biopsychosocial disorder, especially if you expect the patient to participate in their own cognitive-behavioral treatment. But relaxing isn't the first thing that should come to mind. We make you work for your relaxation. Rehab is frightening, intensely emotional, frustrating, scary, clarifying, edifying, rewarding and terrifying. And amidst all that, as we beg you to change everything in your life that led you to us in the first place, we ask you to relax. To look inside and find some of the peace - sober - that you were seeking, knowingly or unknowingly, through poisons. (However awesome the poison was.)

The things we did when we didn't know any better may be incredibly funny (like getting my ass kicked at night basketball by Kelly Dupuis and using the "race card" to get us all out of consequences for that night's mischief). Most of them are, with a little perspective. But once we take responsibility for our actions, past and present, we have to laugh with a conscience. We have to be aware that what's funny, in the end, is that we survived the shit we did, that we're free enough from consequences that we're in rehab, drawing breath, with our full wits about us. (Eventually - the wits, in general, come back later, and slowly.)

This girl could have died today, and I watched her fellow "inmates" joking, smirking, playing around even as the gurney was being wheeled away. That scares me. I have lost more than one friend to this disease, because the seriousness of their peril escaped them completely.

I also have friends that are further along in their recovery. One of them, if not further along in recovery than me, certainly has more time abstinent than I do. And I watch them play in their clique, talking shit about each other behind each other's backs, placing more importance on sex than true friendship and mutual support. It's silly, it's high-school bullshit melodrama, but as long as they're sober it's no big deal, right? Uh-uh. Some of these kids are going to get so wrapped up in each other, in themselves and their psychodrama, that a drink, a joint, or a pill is nowhere near as dangerous to them (in their minds) as being around "him", "her", "them", or "that place". Even after the brief span of sobriety I've managed, I've seen it happen so often that the new funny, for me, is kids (as old as 60-something, but kids nonetheless) coming in, thinking "I'm going to be different; I've got this thing licked already, and there's too much fun to be had to worry about piddly things"...like the consequences of your choices....

It's lethal, kids. That's what I want to say, but in order to maintain the credibility I need in order to convince them of more easily-grasped concepts (like, "drugs are bad for you"), I can't lay that on them. They won't trust me, and right now they do. Trust is the core prerequisite for a successful therapeutic alliance. I only wish I could spare them the pain they will almost certainly experience learning their lessons the way I learned many of mine - the hard way. (I still haven't met a metaphorical brick wall I didn't want my forehead to get up close and personal with...)

I'm going to lose more friends to this particular symptom of this disease. It's a statistical inevitability. As my mentor would say,

"Oh well."
Aren't you glad you're not an addict?
But what do you think?

Cruel To Be Kind

What's the price of surrendering to evil? When does the price become too dear? Is the sale of a child into sexual slavery, to supposedly pious overlords, a valid sacrifice if it saves the lives and the persons of nine more from being violated? Can our souls survive even such a noble compromise with evil, without being indelibly stained? Who would weigh heavier upon your conscience - the dozens of lives you sold away, or the safety of the children you protected, nine times greater in number?

At first I thought, "this is why I believe there is some evil to which there can be no valid and noble response except to resist its influence with all we have, even at the potential cost of our lives." But if I spent my life resisting that foul 'compromise' then who would stand for these children?

This is, to me, a moral double bind. There is no right answer, only a choice between a morally reprehensible action and a morally reprehensible inaction. In that circumstance, I'm probably as likely to take the action as the inaction.

Like nickelodeon used to ask,

"what would you do?"

Whadd'ya think?

What You Own

Another old post of mine from another blog. Rather personal, but hey - know who you're reading, my teachers always said.

My mother knows the language of recovery quite well - she learned it studying psychology. Today, she mentioned, in reference to something, that she felt she was enabling me. She told me that she and I were going to have a joint session with our therapist soon, because she had some issues she felt we needed to work out. I love it.

I've been refusing to enable my parents for almost a year now - in fact that is, in my opinion, the source of at least half of their frustration with me. I don't co-sign their psychological and emotional abuse; I don't tailor my objectives or perspectives in conversation in reaction to theirs ('triangulating' we call it). I don't consider it an imperative that I do a given thing just because they do. When making amends to them for wrongs I've done them, I don't allow them to dictate the terms of the amends - my father, for example, demanded a "deeper" apology for something; I just said, "I didn't apologize to get your forgiveness, I apologized because it was the right thing to do". (And make no mistake, there have been many wrongs I've done them.)

I don't do (or not do) these things standoffishly, I don't make a big deal of it. In fact, my only response to my mother was that if it was important to her, I'd go do this session. But alcoholism is a family disease - meaning, while we call it a biopsychosocial disease, because it does encompass all of those systems within the addict, the truth is that you're not going to come to a full understanding of an alcoholic unless you take a family systems approach. I cannot be the only sick one - it requires the sickness of several others to contribute to mine. Even if it didn't, even if everyone who said "I don't need to participate - you're the sick one" was correct, they'd still have to have developed some interpersonal dysfunctions, even if only in reaction to my disruptive influence. And nobody in my immediate family other than myself is seeking treatment for this disease.

So when my mother comes to me with stuff like this, I take it in stride, but I'm bemused at the irony. I'm always being told, in essence, to own my own responsibility, my part in things. Well, that's fine - the problem comes in where people try to assume the authority to tell me what my responsibilities are. I'm not saying I'm the only one who gets to dictate that, but I am the one with the final say. It's my choice - as it should be, since any consequences are mine to own as well.

Mom and Dad have a little problem when my perception of my responsibilities to them don't line up with their perceptions of same. Tough shit. I seek outside guidance, to make sure that my choices are valid and respectable, and the right choices for continued recovery, but the final choice, the ultimate accountability, and all of the consequences, lie with me. (Even if others are negatively affected, it's still my responsibility, and therefore my consequence.)

My parents are probably never going to own their stuff, their baggage, the ways in which they've wronged me - I've learned to accept that. But just because they want to put it on me, doesn't mean I'm going to take it. There's a definite recovery-oriented gap between me and them, and I'm through trying to manage it and myself at the same time.

The Way I Am

I get now that many people in my life (even my parents) don't have quite the understanding of me that they think they do. They see what they see, and that's a part of me, but they assume it to be the whole, not taking whatever inner life I might possess into account, and they judge me - not unkindly, not harshly, and almost always with love - incorrectly. Hell, there are people with virtually unlimited access to my inner life who don't have anywhere near the whole picture.

I imagine this is the case with you too, reader.

I dunno about you, but I'm constantly thinking, constantly reevaluating, constantly in flux. I am no more or less David at any given moment of my day, but wholly different world-views may be operating within me from one portion of my day to the next. My central thesis, if I must state one, would be that given all possibilities, all the "what ifs" and "if only's," all the more favorable or less favorable outcomes we could wish for; given the magnitude of the quantum possibilities for change in a given life at any given moment, and how they're compounded exponentially from one choice to the next, one action to the next; the best manner to dispense with all of these considerations, the most useful and spiritually sound approach to the question of "where am I right now in relationship to others, to the world, to the god-consciousness," is to assume that I'm where I'm supposed to be, and that I'm supposed to be in the best place there is for me to be. This is close enough to Candide that I'm moderately shocked with myself for being there, but it's not a statement of unflagging optimism; rather, it's a functional assumption that carries me through the shit-times. Because I'm more than capable of imagining, as I often do, a significant percentage of the myriad ways in which my life could be "better" than it is now. But my life is, now. And that's both an inescapable, immutable fact (inasmuch as inescapable, immutable facts are ever really inescapable or immutable - or facts), and something for which to be profoundly grateful. I've managed to free myself of the debilitating tendency I had to live in the past, to pick over each of my past decisions and wonder which ones were the most destructive, and which led me to whichever foul end.

And I've learned that, no matter the present circumstance, my present position in life has some meaning later on; each action I take, if it's the right thing to do, bears later fruit; and, if I abide, this will always be the case. So worrying about others' perceptions of where I am is just about as useful as worrying about my own; which is to say, not useful in the least. All I can do is walk through the day, confident that with each right choice I make (or, most-right, in a choice between equally unappealing alternatives), I'm progressing. I'm headed somewhere, and that's all that matters. We call it staying out of the results.

There's more to the equation, I don't believe in predestination; I believe there's plenty of room for my free will in the Design. And I've shown myself capable, time and again, of fucking up the pattern. But when I'm going with the flow, all I need my will for is putting one foot in front of the other and keeping my eyes, ears, mind and heart open to new information. I can leave the rest up to Somebody Bigger.

Princes of the Universe

This is an earlier post to an earlier blog, that maybe one person knew about.

I have a friend, Greg, who is traveling down to Florida next week. He's been doing this off and on for the almost exactly two years I've known him, gone weeks at a time, caring for his ailing mother. His siblings are on it year-round, and he goes down there whenever he can manage it to spell them for a bit. Because, as another friend was remarking in this same conversation, it positively sucks having to be responsible 24/7 for the care and well-being of another (parent or child, although it is perhaps more taxing in the former case for a plenitude of reasons) without relief or assistance.

This time, it's different. Greg couldn't specify a return date; he'd gotten the call that his mother was close to passing on, and it was his stated intent to go and to stay until the end.

My mentor was frank, even blunt to the point of harshness, about the real tragedy here: "We were never meant to live this long," he said. And he's right. Our bodies have not had generations to adapt, on a Darwinian level, to the ridiculously long leaps forward we've made in health care over just the last few generations. It really wasn't all that long ago, in the eyes of evolution, that we were leeching each other, that doctors were more often than not alchemists or mystics, each a faith-healer in his own right. (Hell, we didn't license doctors until sometime in the early-mid 20th.) We married at what is now middle-school-age; these days, most parents are afraid of allowing their 8th-grade children to recognize their own sexuality, much less anyone else's. "Birth Control" would have been a thing unheard of; nine times out of ten, the harshness of life took care of that - miscarriages aside, the chances of a child living to the age of five were dwarfed by the chances of a child dying long before.

And now, in some of the most ridiculous nonsense I see in this country, we're not allowed to end the suffering that comes attached to this longevity. Our bodies give out before we die. Our brains, lightning-quick to adapt and regulate to keep the organism alive, go into crisis-management mode, triage-ing conditions left and right; and, though our bodies are well past useful in any real sense of the word (y'know, like, walking is useful), like the song says, our hearts will go on.

But heaven forfend we simply terminate that triage process. No, we'll keep Aunt Shirley supplied with ever-increasing doses of morphine, until that becomes a crisis for the body to manage; we'll intubate, have her breathing through and pissing into a tube, shitting into a bag, and breathing with a machine before we allow her to expire. And I'm not just guessing here: it was my Aunt Shirley. Just as my mentor commented that the last time he was at the bedside of an elderly dying relative, she told him "Bobby, I pray every night for the Lord to take me home," my aunt said (and I'm paraphrasing, because she had a tendency to go on) "I've seen all I wanted to, done all I was meant to, and I got to see my niece and nephew grow into amazing adults. I'm ready to go."

And how can we get doctors to assist in this painless passage? Well...has the patient by any chance committed a capital crime? Because while we absolutely will not ease the suffering of the terminally infirm, we can't wait to end the lives of those with fully functional and healthy bodies and minds who have violated our society's most sacrosanct laws. I say, we should start dummying up rape and murder charges for the elderly. Then we can request changes of venue to death-penalty states. Hey, we could even cheapen this process, since you're almost guaranteed a no-contest plea. Then you request summary execution, and bada-bing, bada-boom, mortal coil successfully shuffled off.

When it's my time, if this is my path, there's only so long I'm going to want to fight the end. If there's no substantial hope of me getting back on my feet and continuing to offer whatever gifts I possess to society and my loved ones, then it's time to pack it in. My mother has the complete opposite view (for now; I suspect that if she was actually laid up in bed with no hope of getting up, she'd frustrate herself to death): "Keep my ass alive, I don't care how much it costs," my sister and I have been exhorted often. Of course, she's also given us all manner of other instruction on her geriatric care, that I'm sure we'll ignore or she'll rethink; but I'm hoping that we won't have to be responsible for that for very long. Shirley was in her mid-sixties when she fell infirm, but my mother has been - if not a model of physical health - than much healthier, now, in her mid-fifties, than Shirley was a decade ago.

But I digress - my point here is that Bob put the hammer to the point. We currently aren't built to live as long as we do, and our society treats our elderly and infirm like millstones about its collective neck. My ethnic studies teacher is fond of noting that anyone below the age of thirty is essentially paying into his Social Security, since we'll never see a penny of it - it'll have gone bankrupt long before our retirement, at this pace. (Especially if Congress votes to use it to pay off some of our massive debt...but that's another blog for another time.) My point: since evolution is pretty much never going to catch up to advances in modern health care - by the time the human body will be pretty much universally able to function with reasonable utility at the age of ninety, we'll be keeping people alive until their mid-hundreds - society must find a better way of filling the gap.