Burning Electrons

I was looking at the updated page for peripheral neuropathy. I don’t remember some of the things I saw there, but now the more recent symptoms that I have been experiencing make sense. Things like the loss of balance. I had been thinking that it was just because I can’t feel my feet, but I think it is more than that. I think that the neuropathy itself has affected my balance. According to the wikipedia page I can expect a lot more degeneration in my normal functioning. More loss of balance, more loss of muscle mass and strength. More loss of sexual function. More digestive problems, more bladder problems, more loss of feeling in both my hands and feet, well, there can’t be much more in my feet, they already have no feeling.

This is really a bummer because I have been thinking that I the loss of balance I have been noticing when I walk Comet is not really happening. I have been thinking that my ability to just get down the street is not real, its a figment of my imagination, and that I really can walk, but maybe it is real. Maybe I really do look like a spaz when I walk down the street.

I know that I am not walking as fast as I used to walk. I remember when I used to go camping and there was only one guy in our group who walked as fast as I did. Michael Denby Doran. He and I used to just go off on our own and let the rest of the people get them at their own speed. Now, I would be lucky if I could get there at all. Just trying to stay upright on the sidewalk is a problem. I sure hope that I don’t have to cross any streams or anything like that, because I would probably fall in.

Even walking down a set of stairs has been a big problem lately. I know that this morning, going down the stairs at the health club, I felt like I had to hang on to the banister or I wouldn’t  make it. I even have trouble going down the 4 steps on my front porch now. Holding on to Comet’s leash at the same time as walking down the steps seems more difficult now than it did a few weeks ago. I thought that that was a figment if my imagination, but maybe it isn’t.

I wonder how long this degeneration will take. I wonder how long I will take this degeneration.

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Or at least I have lost the text in the body of the posts. All I see are the titles and extracts. I would like to go back to the day before yesterday, which was the last time I saw the pages the way they are suppose to be seen.

I have no idea what my animals are going to do when I am on my trip.  They have gotten so used to a predawn walk that when I am not ready by 6:15, they enter the harassment phase and insist that I get out of bed, dressed, and on the road, The people who are house sitting for me (Lars and Mary) are on vacation.  They may not want to get up at 6 AM. I would not blame them if they objected to being harassed before day light. Maybe I am giving Comet and Buster (Dog and Cat respectively) too much say about when and where I an willing to walk them.

I think I am having separation anxiety about going off for a month without them.  No, I know that it is separation anxiety but I am sure that they will be well cared for.

I was driving through dowtown Ballard, collecting some things I need for my trip to India and South Africa when I drove past the shop I used to rent with Scott Hendrickson.  Suddenly, I remembered that when I first moved to Seattle with my last wife, Susan, we had hocked everything we owned so we could raise the down payment on a boat.  We were totally into being sailors, learning all the boat’s systems while working for 10 years so we could sail around the world.  That was my idea, anyway.  (Fade to black on white…)

While we were still in Providence, RI, both of us woefully underemployed, we lived in a little town called Tiverton, RI on the Sakonnet RIver We had access to a Valiant 40 that was moored across from our house.  That was the reason we got inspired to buy a boat and live on it until we were ready to retire and take off around the world.  Susan and I had both been married twice previously, and were tired of having big weddings, so we decided to get married at a close friend’s house in Seattle, before we took off on a whale research cruise up in Alaska. It was an awesome honeymoon.  Jerry Garcia died while we were looking for whales in Alaska, so that gives you the time frame we were dealing with.

I had lived in Seattle when I did my postdoc and Susan really liked Seattle based on several trips we made here. I had also lived aboard a boat in Santa Barbara, so I had a better idea of what we were getting in to than Susan did. Despite that, after the wedding, we decided to look for jobs in the Pacific NW, and I found the perfect job, being Lee Hood’s lab manager (I was supposed to not have to write grants anymore (yeah, right), so I applied for it, and Susan applied for a job as a tumor registrar in Tacoma.  Both places wanted to interview us and paid for us to fly out to Seattle for the Interviews.  I had mine on one day, and then, the next day, so while Susan was interviewing, I walked around Lake Union, looking at boats for sale.

At one brokerage, I saw a boat in the 40 foot range that looked solid and roomy enough to live aboard, but I also saw another boat that was a 47 foot ketch, that had beautiful workmanship (alas, it was wood), and was a good price, but I thought 47 feet was bigger than we could sail comfortably.  But it was a beautiful boat, so the next day, I made the mistake of showing it to Susan, and she decided that if we were going to live aboard a boat, it had to be that one, The Odyle.  We put in a bid that was way under the asking price, but not so far under that it was it insulting, and flew back home to Tiverton.  A few days later the owners accepted our bid, and that set everything in motion for us to divest ourselves of everything in order to buy the Odyle.  At least we thought we were getting rid of everything.  When we finally got here with our stuff and moved aboard, we found that we had enough stuff to fill the boat and then two additional storage lockers with junk we would never use.

But, the point of all this was that between 1997 and 2001, all our effort, or mine, anyway, outside of being a scientist, was put into learning how to live aboard, and sail,  a 47 ft ketch. Not that we sailed a whole lot, but we worked on the boat a whole lot.  It was overwhelming and, in the end, we only did one trip up into the San Juans (a group of islands in the Puget Sound where people go on boats).  Even though we had put so much of our effort into being sailors, I barely remember that it even happened now.  The live aboard culture is very different than the dry land culture, but it was only when I drove past that shop that I even remembered that it happened.  Susan had felt that living aboard was romantic for about two weeks, and all the time after that was spent thinking that this was not the thing that she had signed up for.  I eventually found that the peripheral neuropathy got so bad that I have a very hard time balancing, and the last thing you want to be is off balance when you are on the pitching foredeck trying to shorten sailed in a gale.  It became clear that my days as a sailor were numbered.  Susan’s ended even before mine did.  But we have very few records that that time ever existed:  No momento’s of our time aboard or trips we took.  Not even any pictures.  It all just funneled down the tube and disappeared into some lost time when we thought we were going to be happy sailing around the world.

Completely gone.

I’m starting to get excited about this trip to India.  I leave in one month, 30 days. Do I have everything ready to go?  Well, I’ve got my tickets ready, I’ve got my passport and visa, I’ve paid for the tour (the Tricycle Journal’s In the Footsteps of the Buddha Pilgrimage),  booked an extra days lodging at a Tibetan Buddhist run Guest house in Delhi, and I’ve got my luggage ready, I’ve even done a dry run on packing to see if what I plan to take will fit into the bags I am taking.  I’ve got this real nifty camera bag and its even all packed, although I haven’t managed to find a decent tripod to take with me.  I figure I’ll take a small tripod and a monopod and hope that will make do.  I’ve never prepacked anything before, not sure why I did this time, probably just because I was ready to go about 3 weeks ago. I’m also looking forward to the end of my trip because I plan to spend a week in South Africa, near Knysna, visiting with a friends parents, sitting on a cliff above the souther Ocean, watching the waves and relaxing.

It turns out that this is the year that the Kumbe Mella (not sure how y0u spell that, but that’s how it sounds).  That is the biggest spiritual festival held anywhere, I think.  Apparently, as one of the Hindu gods was ascending into the heavens, four drops of water spilled from his cup and landed on earth in the 4 different places in India where this festival is held.  4 years ago there were reportedly 30 million attendees at the last celebration.  A movie was made of that festival called Fasttrack to Nirvana or something like that.  All the yogi’s and yogini’s and guru’s and every other sort of mystic shows up there.  Heavy on the Vedantic influences, but its something that I would like to go to once before I am done traveling.  I even thought about extending my trip 10 days to go this time, but then I figured that that might be overkill, and that I could better use the time to visit with Chris and Madeleine at Knysna.  They were so nice the last time I was there, when they were still at Francoise’s house in Oobos, when they let me sit on the porch and relax.  I was not in very good shape when I was traveling with Murray and Paul, two guys in their 20’s. They were into partying and I was into kicking back.  Luckily I could take the bus back to Oobos and hang out there and reschedule my flights out of George SA instead of having to go all the way to JoBurg.

So this is the first installment of my journal about this trip.  Hopefully I will get back into writing  a decent narrative on this trip to India and South Africa as it is at least unique in its two destinations.

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Its been so long since I’ve written anything in either this electronic notebook or in my handwritten note that I have fallen into the inertia of inaction.  Its been so long that its easy to find reasons for not starting again. Its easy to say to oneself that restarting a narrative after such a lengthy absence requires a topic of some import, and that what I have to say today just isn’t important enough. Not worthy enough. And so I don’t write anything.

Well, I don’t have anything important to say today, but I want to say something just to get my writing restarted.

It has been a long fall here in Washington.  I have been trying to balance my neuropathic pain with the dullness induced by opiates.  I’ve been losing the battle on both sides, either I am in too much pain to be comfortable, or I have taken to much fentanyl to be comfortable.  I picture this balance as a sine wave moving around a 0 line that represents being able to function and not be in terrible pain.  There is probably a sector of +- 20% around that 0 line where I am more or less normal.  On the -80% of the time I have a hard time sitting still or meditating because of the ants crawling under my skin.  On the other side, the other 80% of the time I am falling asleep or unable to focus my vision with both eyes open due to the effects of the opiates I have to take.  So up and down I go on this roller-coaster ride.

In the meantime, I have been able to work on my meditation and move ahead with my buddhist studies.  I really would like to have the discipline to learn some tibetan, but I am having a hard enough time just getting my reading done.  My class on comparative meditation is over, and it was pretty good, but fairly advanced.  At the same time I have been taking an introduction to buddhism class that is very basic, but whose texts are illuminating all the same.  In fact, the description of impermanence and emptiness and calm abiding, analytical, and placement meditation finally make sense, and my practice instructor has pointed me in a direction that should help me develop better meditation skills.  So that is good and looking up.  In fact, as soon as I hit publish on this post, I will be doing an hours of shamata (calm abiding) meditation, and then showering and taking Comet for a run in the dog park near Judy’s house.

Oh, and one other big thing is that I found some people to house-sit.  Or, more correctly, Susan found some people to house-sit.  From what I have gathered, they are organic farmers from Oregon.  That could leave a lot to the imagination, so it will be nice to get some clarification on what and Oregon organic gardener grows.  I have started to write Lars and Mary emails so they will know Comet and Buster before they get here. I hope that they will take good care of my animals (and my house, of course) while they are here.

Finally, my back is coming along slowly.  I have a feeling that I will only get one more session in before I leave on this trip.  That should get most of the figure above my belt done, leaving only the lotus seat to finish.

enough

But we still must ask serious questions about the use of the death penalty.

Like this video from MobLogic.  Their logic is not flawed.

They make an especially interesting point about a white murderer, who admitted killing his victim, who was granted clemency for the murder he admitted that he had done.  Using the death penalty, in any case, prevents new evidence from exonerating a wrongly convicted sentient being.

It is time to end the death penalty and it will be time, every day until it is outlawed.

It boggles the mind to look at the stats on where the people on death row are located.  Would you believe Texas is number 1 with the most death row inmates?  You would be right.  I also found this video on Amnesty internationals sight the describes the plight of a death row inmate in Georgia.  Besides being a good song, most of the witnesses have recanted and told of police pressure to name a perp for the murder.  A new trial is in order for this one case, but its time the supreme court says that the Death Penalty is cruel and unusual punishment or whatever they need to do to stop this foolishness. The death penalty does not allow for mistakes.  It is a permanent decision that can’t be taken back by new evidence.

End the death penalty now.

I found this youtube video on Digital Dharma and felt like it deserved to be here on this site. Tenzin Gyatso talks to the argualby best known news journalist.

I got one of my helmets set up with bluetooth communications between nt Zumo GPS and my Iphone, and the built in fm radio, and my MP3 player with 30 gb of mp3s.  I figure I won’t have to just listen to my motor and the wind anymore.

First thing I had to do, though, was to pick which helmet I wanted to set up.  For a guy who never liked helmets I’ve got a bunch of them… I’ve got about 7 helmets.

You would think that someone with that many helmets would wear one of them.  Well, in Wyoming they don’t require a helmet, so of course I had my helmet on the back of my bike, not on my head, when I laid it down going into a corner too hot.  I landed on my face and then my bike landed on me.

I remember trying to get off behind my bike after I layed it down (really quickly), but then I got flipped over the bike and landed in front of it, on my face.  I remember my face hitting the pavement.  It didn’t really hurt, or, it didn’t hurt as much as the bike landing on me hurt.

After that  I didn’t feel a thing.  I don’t remember anything until I woke up with some guy holding my neck in a vice grip so I couldn’t move it.  Of course, I was bleeding into my eyes, so I couldn’t see anything until the EMTs showed up.  It didn’t seem to take too long, but I am not sure at what rate time was moving right then.  It didn’t seem too long.

I got out of the hospital the next day.  I guess my face looked pretty bad  based on the look people gave me when they saw me.  It did ring  my bell, though.  I now know how you can get stupid from having a bike crash.

But I was lucky… again.  It only took a couple of months to shake off the stupid state.  This crash convinced me that wearing a helmet is a good idea.  I still think that helmet laws suck, the choice ought to be the riders, but I am going to wear a helmet from now on, and I will actually wear a real dot approved helmet, not one of those fake things, and if anyone asks, I will tell them that helmets are a good thing.  Everybody ought to wear one.

Welcome back to Burning Electrons.  A database crash wiped out all the posts and other documents that were a part of the old BE. Now, we are up to date, with the newest Wordpress installed, and new galleries on the way.  I apologize for the inconvenience of having to register as users again, but the user lists went to the same place that the articles went, somewhere out in the ethers.  Thanks.  srlasky