I should like to register a complaint! This is not the body I was issued at birth. It’s not even the body I had been carefully maintaining until 2019. I’d like to send it back and have a new one issued, but unfortunately that’s not possible.

One healthy thing to which my recent vacation re-introduced me was yoga. Omaha and I used to do yoga for a few years while the kids were still at home, but when I discovered weightlifting I sorta dropped out of the yoga class and she didn’t want to go alone. There was a yoga class on the cruise ship, and I discovered that I enjoyed it enough to go home and pick it up again.

Being ADHD, I arranged all my triggers. For years, my habit is to hang tomorrow’s clothes on a hook inside the bathroom door. Now I hang my yoga clothes in front of those, and when I head out of the bedroom there’s a bottle of cold water already in the ’fridge and my mat, my iPad, and a fully charged set of workout headphones are waiting for me. (These come under the heading of “reduce environmental friction” and “force the next action” under the “managing ADHD” banner.)

And for three weeks, I’ve been at it every day, using a nice enough app on my iPad. It’s just a 15-minute beginner class, and I had to downgrade from “beginner 2” to “beginner 1” because I’m so far behind on my exercise it’s not even worth mentioning. I’m a wreck.

The one thing I discovered, and the reason I downgraded, was that I have absolutely no sense of balance anymore. The reason I downgraded from beginner 2 to 1 was that I kept falling over doing the one-legged poses! I used to be a flamingo, able to stand on one foot for an hour or more, often in what yogis call “tree pose,” without even noticing; now I can’t hold a tree pose for more than five seconds without falling over. Hell, I was having trouble holding a goddamn straight-line two-legged lunge, the kind where you put your feet exactly in line, so you have no left-right stabilizers other than your sense of balance.

Given that not being able to hold your balance is associated with early death, I’ve been pretty determined to get it back. The good news is that even after three weeks, I’m no longer falling over during a lunge.

I’ve also noticed that the force-of-will “relax” habit that I’ve been developing as part of my daily meditation practice is no longer necessary. Yoga is teaching my body how to relax, and when to tense up, refusing to carry the tension of the day inside my skin. I’m no longer trembling at the beginning of the exercise, with a sense of calm and readiness that wasn’t there three weeks ago.

I have noticed that the places where my muscles have tightened unacceptably is strange… I can do some stretches with ease, like pressing my feet together and putting my knees to the floor, but if I try to do a shoelace pose, stretching forward while my knees are stacked… I can’t. I just can’t move at all. That chain from my back to my knee is frozen, and it’ll be weeks before I get it stretched out properly.

But overall, this has been interesting. If I make it to the end of next week, I’ll have gone four weeks with this practice, and maybe that’ll make it a routine. Then I’ll have to up either the time or the difficulty, or both. But dammit, I need not to lose my balance, by strength, or my flexibility. Those get harder to hold on the older you get, but I was doing so well until Covid tried to kill me. I’m still not gonna let that damn germ win.

The story so far:

When last you left our hero, namely me, I had been discharged from Broward Regional Medical after being “observed” for three days following a diagnosis of Covid-induced spontaneous retroperiteneal hematoma. Omaha consulted with Alaska Airlines and I met their criteria (not mine) for flying, and I religiously kept my mask on the whole flight home because by all the unholy gods in the aligning stars’ sky I did not want to give this horror to anyone else.

I got home on September 25th and recovered fully from the ’Rona. I worked a full week. I had ordinary meals, performed The Ritual of Coffee consistently, cooked my own breakfasts, that sort of thing.


On October 5th, I thought I had a bout of food poisoning. I began to throw up, badly. It got worse, and on the 6th, I went to the ER at St. Anne’s, formely Highline Medical Center. Burien’s population has grown by 60.5% since Omaha and moved here in 2020 to start our family, but St. Anne’s still has the same sized ER it had in 2000. (We should know; Omaha’s epilepsy brought us there many times over the years.) I waited eight hours to be seen. The guy who saw me ordered a blood draw, saw I had a pancreatic lipase number over 100 (normal is less than 70, “bad is over 1000,” he said. “I’ve seen a few.”), diagnosed me with pancreatitis, and sent me home with an anti-nausea medication and told me to adopt a liquid diet– clear broth, black tea, apple juice, jello.

The pain and vomiting got worse. It established a very distinct pattern, two hours of cycling up to purge, followed by a few hours of relief. We went back the next day, and were told the wait was 9 hours. We bailed, and I made an emergency call to my GP. They immediately scheduled me for the next day.

Dr. Hsu saved my life. My gods, she was furious. “They did no imaging? They can’t just diagnose you with pancreatitis! You had a hematoma, what if this is pancreatic hematoma? That number makes no sense. Go back to the ER! Go now! Go to a different ER, a bigger ER.” I suggested UW Valley View. “Valley? Very good. I will call ahead to make sure they see you, but go! Go now! Go! GO!”

We took a Lyft. I was early enough in the cycle I didn’t think I would throw up in his car, and fortunately I was right. I was admitted and scanned immediately.

The stomach’s outlet is called the pyloric valve. Just below that is the start of the small intestine, including the bile ducts that transfer bile from the liver to the intestine to aid in digestion. Just below that is the start of the intestine proper, the duodenum. The blood mass of the hematoma had shifted and was pressing against the duodenum, blocking it and causing the bile to back up into my stomach. My vomiting was bile reflux disease. The liver produces as much as two liters of bile a day. Gross, huh?

I was immediately put on a stomach pump, which is one of the most traumatic and disgusting medical procedures that has to be done conscious. It’s unnatural to shove something up your nose and then past your gag reflex. It hurt, and the tube rubs against the gag reflex constantly, causing pain and irritation. I’m allowed menthol lozenges and “icewater swabs” to reduce the pain.


I was then wheeled into endoscopic surgery, where a second tube, a feeding tube, was inserted (thankfully while I was unconscious) through the constriction into the “still functional” part of my small intestine. And for the past six days, I have eaten or drunk nothing at all. It’s all been pap and water forced down that tube. Oh, and extra water put intravenously, because… I don’t know why. They won’t explain why they won’t give me enough water. But I feel dehydrated constantly, and I’m getting weaker by the day. On Tuesday I did a few knee push-ups and four laps around the building; on Wednesday I just did four laps; on Thursday I did half a lap before almost passing out from dehydration.

Nothing else is being done. I’m being “observed.”

Thursday morning, I had a minor emergency: the stomach pump tube had come loose in the early morning and I woke up soaked in my own bile. I was helped into the bathroom to take a shower, rigging up the “child’s height” showerhead so I could sit on the floor and wash my hair and body while the staff changed the linen and cleaned the bed. While I was there, another nurse came in and found me on the floor of the shower and was this close to triggering the “patient fallen” alarm when the first team returned with the clean linen and explained that I had sat down deliberately. “He wanted to sit that way instead of a chair. He says he can’t fall off the floor.” That incident used up all my spoons that day. When Omaha and Julian came to visit, I fell asleep, and they waited three hours for me to wake up.

Oddly, when I did wake up, we played a round of Boggle and my words are still all there; I scored the highest of all three, although both of them were close.

My friends and family have been visiting regularly. My daughter gave me her lip balm, “the dial has been chewed a bit by my pet rat,” but it’s wonderful, it’s the only thing that keeps my lips from falling off since I’m now a requisite mouth-breather. Both Julian (my son) and Omaha have brought me my gear– my laptop, books, headphones, and the charger for my phone, plus USB cables to recharge everything else. They’ve been so understanding and wonderful, and I have come to realize how much I’m loved, both by the real people in my life, and by my alters, so I guess that means in the final analysis I a like myself too, although as always, I could do more.

The nurses are awesome and patient, but they say I’m not a very difficult patient. I’m trying not to be. But I’m so tired of this. Today is the sixth day without eating or drinking, and last night all I could dream of is food and cool, clear water.

Joseph Gentle has an all-up rant (he calls it that) called “The War Over Being Nice,” in which he tries to isolate two cultures, “Culture A” which says that your feelings are your own responsibility and no one else’s and respect comes from contributing to the shared values of the group, and “Culture B,” which says that feelings are a communal responsibility and everyone is responsible for them, and respect flows from how you make people feel. He asks if these feel gendered to you, says that he believes they are, but that “A isn’t inherently sexist, it’s just a set of different cultural norms.”

My bullshit meter went off loudly.

Let’s start with the obvious: Cultural norms can be sexist. The cultural norm of the United States and, hell, the world, has been sexist for a long time. The distinction between the two is wholly artificial.

The other thing that Gentle avoids discussing, which is odd because he seems very aware of the consent conversation. He makes a huge, secondary bullshit argument– that “consent culture” requires a kind of verbal game. It has never required a verbal game; it has required sensitivity on the part of both participants, and let’s face it, if your partner isn’t sensitive to your needs you must stop playing immediately.

But the big elephant in the room, forever and today, is the power differential between two culturally different groups of people. Straight white guys dominate the culture, and expect the rest of the culture to put up with them. They feel like they can ask all the questions they want and never get pushback; they can regulate the lives and bodies of others, but get furious and exercise their power in violent ways whenever someone tries to regulate their lives.

This is how when a straight white guy makes a joke about homosexuals, the “Man, I was only kidding” or “Man, see it from my point of view” comes back. When I ask him to see it from my point of view. He wants me to have patience, again, with his shitty behavior. And I’ll tell you, after 53 years on this planet, thirty-plus of them out of the closet, I’m really, really fucking tired of extending that patience without getting any in return.

Bro-Culture, “Culture A,” wants the same safe space as “Culture B.” They just want it to be a much, much smaller space.

How to pair your Google Pixel 2 phone to your Subaru Outback.

The Google Pixel is a lovely phone, but it's notoriously bad at connecting with Subaru cars. It was the one feature I missed from my previous Samsung, which always connected reliably and automatically to the car every time I started the engine. Since I have "unlimited" 4G and a Spotify account, I found this breakdown highly annoying. It is possible to connect the phone to the car, but often it takes two or three minutes of sitting there with the car running, pressing the "connect" button on the phone's Bluetooth app over and over until, mysteriously, it would finally connect.

I have gotten it to work, and now when I sit down in my Outback, the music that was playing in my headphones in the office automatically starts right back up, reliably and automatically.

So here's why it fails:

Most people, when they want to create a Bluetooth Pairing between the phone and the car, go to the car radio, press the "Menu" button, and go through the Bluetooth pairing dialogs from the radio's LCD display. And that's where the problem lies— that dialog is for pairing with the radio and is therefore looking for an audio source, but the phone isn't programmed to prioritize being paired as an audio device, it prioritizes being paired as a phone. Every time thereafter, the protocol mismatch causes the automatic connection to fail. I'm not sure why manual connection sometimes works, but it should work reliably.

Here's the solution:

If you've already paired your phone and your car, go to the car's dialogue and delete the phone from the car's list of Bluetooth connections. Likewise, go to your phone and delete the car from the phone's list.

On the steering wheel, there's a button with a voice label. This is the HandsFree Talk Button. With the car parked and the parking brake on (this is important, as the car will not let you do this otherwise), but the key turned far enough to turn on the radio, press the Talk Button.

A female voice will say, "Welcome to the Subaru HandsFree Control. Press the Talk Button and choose from the following menu items: Setup. Go Back."

Press the button and say "Setup."

"Press the Talk Button and choose from the following menu items." One will be "Pair Phone". Do as the nice lady says and say "Pair Phone."

"Searching for phone. Searching. Searching. A device has been found. The passkey is 1234." Now go through the dialog on the phone and type in the stupid passkey.

"Phone paired. Press the talk button and say the name of the phone."

Press the button. "My Phone"

"Pairing Complete. Press the button and choose from one of the following menu items: Setup. Go Back."

"Go Back."

"[Beep]"

And now the car will use the connect to phone protocol whenever you start it, and your phone will respond accordingly. In short, the quicker and more obvious interface on the car's radio dial will activate the wrong protocol, and you'll get the bug. The only way to pair the phone to the car correctly is through a really stupid voice control menu tree.

I awoke this morning with a very odd sense of nostalgia; a dream of my grandfather's farm in upper New York state, which I think I visited exactly once, when I was seven. I wondered if it was still farm country, or if it had been long overrun by fevelopers and turned into a plot of condominiums.

I don't much like discussing dreams; I don't believe they're that useful. Dreams, to my mind, are the leftover impressions you get while your brain is sorting through its memories of the day before. They're literally detritus, the leftover connectome of your neurons as they transition from sleep to wakefulness. Still, I'm curious: What experiences from yesterday led my brain to tap into those memories?

I'm not even sure they are memories. I do know that I visited Amel's farm once, and it was when I was seven. I have vague impressions of a white house, a porch, some wrought iron, a rusting plow, a lot of dirt thrown around. It was late fall. But for all I know, those memories are jumbled together with farmhouses where I stayed once during a youth-oriented Outward Bound thing I did when I was twelve, or the later summer schools I went to in New Hampshire when I was fifteen and sixteen. Every time you remember something, that act of remembering is itself an experience, and your memory of the thing gets re-written slightly, modified.

I have no idea where the farm is, or was. Somewhere near Buffalo, but that's about it. Amel came to America as an immigrant and not a refugee; he left his small town on the German-Italian border when he could see the rising tide, and he was no fool, so when he arrived in America he had money and spoke English. His first wife passed away, and his second wife, Beverly, I'm told was a lovely woman but she didn't register much with my father, her stepson, so I don't recall her at all.

There is one phrase I'm banning from my life in 2018. It's one that I've heard time and again from loved ones, family members, and co-workers. It's one that drives me absolutely furious with disappointment time and time again.

"It doesn't have to be better."

And I'm here to tell you: Yes. It. Does. Whatever it is, if you pick it up, do it to the best of your ability. We have family dinners, and recipes we love, and recipes we cook by hand. One of our favorites is a savory, sharp macaroni & cheese dish, and every time I make it I pay attention to what I do and how I do it, and every time I make it I'll sit for a moment and consider the salt and the texture: did I brown the roux just right, did I use different breadcrumbs, should I have used another bay leaf? And every damn time one of my family members will reassuringly say, "It's fine. It doesn't have to be better."

I've hit that sublimely perfect Mac & Cheese once in a while, and I'd like to get better at doing so consistently. It's not possible to perfect, and certainly the mood of the person doing the eating is going to affect the determination, but I'd like to at least try.

The same thing is true of the stories I write and the progams I code. I'd like them to be better. I'd like to get better at them. My therapist once told me that I was "unusually relentless" in my program of constant self-analysis and improvement, but that seems to be a thing. (Elon Musk, I'm told, is similar, but he seems to be so in a really creepy way).

I'm not data-driven (although perhaps I should be) about this sort of thing, but I am anecdotally driven: I write down what I did and what I could have done differently, and the outcomes and expectations. I do this for cooking, for writing, for programming, for dating and even for my relationships. I want to be better at them. I want to be skilled at making things, and leading people to joy and happiness, if only for a little while.

So, just a warning: Never tell me, "It's fine, it doesn't have to be better."

I stopped by Whole Foods to grab a breakfast sandwich this morning, one of many grab-and-go choices available to me on those days when I drive into work rather than take the train. This is the first time I'd been in Whole Foods since it had been bought by Amazon.

I'm not going into Whole Foods ever again.

I have a lot of qualms about Amazon in general. Under communism, you buy everything from a single store owned by the State. Under late capitalism, you buy everything from a single store owned by Amazon shareholders. But that's not what got me about Whole Foods. Instead, it's how The Amazon Way has infected the store.

I understand that Whole Foods has always been a wallet-sucking, capitalist enterprise that views its customers as marks. But in pursuit of that cash-vacuum, Whole Foods was a lot like another capitalist enterprise: The Olive Garden restaurant chain. Olive Garden has a vibe: when you walk in, you're translated to an Americanized, unchallenging version of the Villa Vignamaggio, a place of hand-applied cream stucco walls supported by dark brown wooden beams and rafters, a place that somewhere deep in the back of your mind suggests warmth, coziness, safety, reassurance, and familiarity. Whole Foods went for a similar vibe, a sense of farm-to-table wholesomeness and wandering comfort.

No more. Amazon's version of Whole Foods is a lot like Wal-Mart: bright lights so everything is highly visible, precise labels so everything is recognizable, and regimented aisles so everything is efficient. The lighting is not just bright, but hot, blue-bright, the kind of frenetic, frantic bright that makes you want to leave as soon as it hits your eyeballs. The message of Amazon Whole Foods is "Get what you want and get out. Bother our staff and use our resources as little as possible. Fair trade is when you get what you came for and you leave."

Much like the Amazon website itself, come to think of it. Nobody likes that website. It doesn't win awards. But it works. The only reason to go there is because you need to buy something you can't get anywhere else. The fortunate thing here is that, so far, everything you can buy at Whole Foods can still be bought somewhere else.

Rowan Williams recently reviewed Dreher's The Benedict Option and sums up the book thusly:

The battle on the political field has largely been lost; there is no point in wasting energy on forming coalitions to challenge or change legislation. What is needed, instead, is to develop a more densely textured religious life, in which regular patterns of communal prayer and intellectual and spiritual development will keep alive the possibility of inhabiting a nourishing, morally rich tradition.

To which I respond, without cynicism or reserve, "Amen."

A while ago, I attended a series of lectures by several of the leading lights of the Pagan and Wiccan communities, and there were two questions I had for all of them that literally none of them could answer: "What is the basis of a pagan community?" and "What are the daily practices of paganism that keep people reminded of their place in the world and the substance of their reach?"

There are no routine pratices like that in Wicca. And there are no routine practices like that in Trumpism. As we are constantly reminded, the people who voted for Trump were very likely to identify as Christian, yet least likely to attend church regularly. As we've watched the growth of white supremacist movements on-line, we're reminded that the most common route for entrance into an extremist movement, be it white nationalism or religiously-tinted terrorism, is not through the practices of conscientious Christians or Muslims; it's through seduction by the extremists of some previously unloved or soul-injured part of the victim. Muslim terrorists aren't practicing Muslims; they're angry young men who've been told they've been denied a caliphate. White nationalists aren't Americans or Christians: they're angry young men who've been told their power is fading away into history.

Time and again I find myself feeling deeply sympathetic toward the impulses of people like Dreher. Some of my happiest memories were of the Palm Sunday week I spent at an Anglican monastery. I love Richard Beck's image that the world (especially now!) is one long, ongoing Nuremberg Rally, a constant assault of political news, social media, and advertising intended to whip us into a frenzy, when what we actually need is some peace and quiet, a daily setting aside, a time to think, to meditate, to contemplate our place in the world.

Over the years, I've adopted more and more of Epictetus' Stoic take on the world: that there is a conscious need every morning to contemplate your place in the world and the powers you have at hand to change it; that there are things out of your control and you must consciously know what they are and accept them; that you must be conscious of your limitations and act within them, evaluating the value of your actions within your resources to the best possible end; that you must consciously consider your friends and your enemies, and judge as if from afar how their actions impact you; that you must consciously recall your day, done, undone, or marred, and prepare again for tomorrow.

Note how much of that is sheer mindfulness, not the shallow Silicon Valley bullshit sort, but the real, daily praxis of trying to live a real life.

Every time I find myself drawn to one of these traditions, I get close enough to see the history, smell the bullshit of supernaturalism, feel the contigencies that result in the subjugation of women and the othering of those races who weren't present for a tradition's origin, and I run screaming for the hills.

Worse yet are the supposed rationalist movements that start with useful and beautiful tenents, yet inevitably get wedged in the worst sort of pernicious antihumanism. I can't begin to count the number of "rationalists" who take the "actual, historical causes of my beliefs" and twist it into a defense of white supremacy, ignoring completely the contingencies of time and space, or the moral dimensions of the notion of "supremacy."

I a man comfortable in my masculinity and my humanity; I don't need either of those ideologies to poison me further. Stocism is still the least poisonous tradition I've found, and I'll stick with it until something better comes along.

A (now deleted) Tweet from an alt-rightie demanded to know, "Please explain how millions of pink hats were manufactured and delivered with military precision all on the same day!"

Two years ago, I went to visit a friend who was stuck at home caring for her husband, who had recently had a heart attack and was bedridden but recovering. The walk from the bus stop to her home was about four blocks, and when she asked me how I was I said fine but that my ears were freezing.

She made us tea while we caught up, and then pulled out a bag of yarn and a crochet hook. It's something she does. About twenty minutes later she presented me with a lovely hat long enough to cover my ears.

I still have it, too. It's not pink. I bet the biggest problem in making so many hats for the march was securing the yarn in the first place.

Last night, after the light rail dropped me off at my stop, as I was walking to my car a woman who had been on the train started walking toward the street, then stopped and asked me, "Excuse me, how far is it from here to Tacoma?"

"Tacoma?" I said. "Are you walking?" She nodded. "It's 15 miles from here to Tacoma."

"I thought... I thought Federal Way was just down that way."

"Yeah, about four miles. Then, Fife I think, then Tacoma." She was a thin woman wearing only a thin hoody. It was 51°F out, night was coming soon, and it was drizzling.

"Really 15 miles?"

"Yeah. This is exit... 151, and the dome's at 136, so, yeah, 15 miles. And that's before you actually get into the city. It's at least a half-day's walk."

"A half day?"

"I can do twenty miles on a good day with good boots, yeah."

She looked downtrodden. "Okay, thanks. Gotta cigarette?"

"I don't smoke, sorry."

She nodded and started walking.

I later realized I was off by one mile; the freeway exit is 150, so it was only 14 miles. I suspected she hadn't even paid to be on the train, but had ghosted, which is risky but if you're lucky the transit fare people will miss your train and won't check your pass.

Encounters like this are the opposite of dealing with crazy people on transit. I wanted to help, but I didn't feel I could offer it, and she didn't feel she could ask for more. We aren't taught how to deal with stories like this, and I wish I understood better why we aren't, and what I could have done differently.