Why Climate Change Could be the Best Thing that's Happened to America. Part 2

continued from part 1

The kids are in bed and my wife is sleeping on the couch. I should be writing about how it was such a magnificent Thanksgiving. I mean we really nailed it. Norman Rockwell would have been exhausted by the sheer amount of family goodness there was to capture. The boys played with their cousins, the adults alternated between food, drinks, football and playing with the kids, and sometimes that happened all at once. So it was good, very good. Add to that wholesome picture a wife that is due at any moment, and you've got a holiday feast of creative writing opportunities.

But...but...I'm going to be the douchey "more you know" green jeans telling you what's really on my mind. And it all goes back to kids and family and fun times, and how we're creating a place that isn't going to be so hospitable anymore. We're getting hot, and the world is becoming more dangerous. The Pentagon has even put climate change on their shit list of destabilizing global issues. And yet we don't seem to want to do anything about it. Well, we want to, but it's hard, which is why I'm going to be laying out some ideas for how to change the change for the better.

Yes, it's getting hotter, and because of that, the ice is melting faster. Because of that, water levels are rising and more water is entering the atmosphere. Those are the ingredients to a shitstorm of catastrophic proportions. And to add to the big stew of irony and death, despite all of the extra moisture, more drought is taking place. All I know is that helping to stem this disaster is just a home cooked meal away. It's a bicycle trip to the store. It's walking to the voting booth instead of driving. It's getting better light bulbs and wearing more sweaters. It's the stuff we should do anyway to keep from killing ourselves with inactivity and fast food. That's pretty cool. The biggest problem humanity has ever faced can be the solution to so many of our other issues. 

We're getting a break right now--a window to do something. Climate change is that trip to the doctor where she shakes her head and warns you about your lifestyle. It's the mild heart attack that has us improving our lives. Heart disease? Doctors suggest exercise. Cancer. We need to eat more veggies and less meat. Obesity. Well, that kind of explains itself. Oil dependency? Asthma? Hyperactivity? C'mon, this is getting kind of easy. Let's do this before it gets crazy difficult. 

I know, so walking instead of driving sounds like a little thing, and even in the most idealistic world the little things may not add up to be enough. But they can if we do two things: take politics out of it and be a country that leads again. That's next...

Let's Accelerate Over This Thing | Roughy D 4

from whence we came

So back to where we were, and by that I mean not only my mom and me, but you, because it'd be nice if you were there this time. Not that we didn't have it covered. It was just that some days you wanted to have a committee to make you feel better about your decisions. I think that's what corporations and committees may very well be: an ass-covering human blanket that hides the fact that we're all too timid to do something on our own. I include myself in that trembling mass, except on a few occasions. And it's funny, whenever I've stepped out and done what I truly feel needs to be done, things work out OK. I think we all know how that works. Unfortunately for me, I have to be pushed past all safe and readily available points of departure before I'm left to make a desperate leap off a cliff.

That's where I am in the story, the cliff. And I'm driving over it with my mom and her huge gauze dressing. She's about to do some cliff diving too. Later in the week she would take off her gauze cap and refuse to put it back on again. I would implore to her that the world wasn't ready for a human with no forehead bone and 52 industrial staples. She said she didn't care. She was who she was and that's who she was going to be. I was mortified, but probably not as much as the waitress at Buca di Beppos, who stopped cold. Looking past her order pad she focused on my mom's head--she couldn't help it, it was a massive head wound walking. And then, as if Sarah and I weren't even there...as if the entire world had dropped away and left just her to care for this poor woman with the bashed head...she leaned forward and asked, "Ma'am, are you OK?"

"Oh god," I said cradling my face in my hands. "Mom, I told you. the world isn't ready." Undeterred, my mom smiled and explained that she was fine, and that she'd have a half order of lasagna. The waitress walked away, backwards and staring, as if removing her gaze would cause great harm to both of them.

My mom's decision not to wear her beanie could be the brain patient's bra burning, but even more extreme, because people like boobs way better than head trauma. In retrospect it's one of those things that keep you afloat when too much silence has you thinking about the past. So many of those things that I was unsure about, well it turns out that simply being with her in embarrassed solidarity was enough. But back to another pride point: hauling ass on Interstate 25, escaping one hospital and trying to find another. The cliff.

I'm driving too fast and talking on my cell phone and my mother's cell phone. I'm speaking to Sarah on one, who's at work and searching for any medical professional who'll speak to me on the other. My mother would open one eye, because sometimes having both open gave her seizures, and she would remind me to be careful and to slow down, but I was in a zone, some place where years of futility had me pushing my Toyota Corolla to new mechanical heights. I pushed myself to somewhere beyond the doubt, a place where you can tell your nauseous mother that you've got everything in control.  

Dr. Eugene O'Neill is a funny guy, maybe a bit crazy, but as twenty-somethings who didn't think much about health, Sarah and I simply plucked his name off the Internet so we could have a physician to put down for our work insurance. That random and thoughtless act would bring us to a major intersection in our lives, where not only had we become my mom's caretakers, but where we'd beg a stranger with a PhD a favor: We needed him to sign for my mom to get into Swedish hospital.

That's the part where the clock has never moved slower or ticked so damn loudly. It's when our family doctor stared across the table at me and my mom--a woman who's most vital organ was held in place with gauze and staples, and who's forehead skin rested directly on her brain's outer membrane.

He paused before proclaming, "I'm a family doctor." Dr. O'Neill continued. "If you were to have a sprained ankle, maybe a headache, then I could help," he said, looking up at my mom's elaborate headdress.

"Can I see what you've got going on up there anyway?"

My mom and I tangled hands as we worked together to get to her latest scar. Dr. O'Neill has intense blue eyes, the the kind that cut you open that leave you no choice but to believe he's a serious professional. On that day, they softened into the curiosity of a little boy. I could tell, he was going to join us over the edge.

Even Dignitaries Fart on Heads

Let me tell you a story about Pete Ewy. My sister and I were in Virginia after his heart surgery. One night we couldn't get back onto the base, so I asked the guard if we could call my brother. He asked who my brother was and his rank. I told him I was pretty sure he was a chief. "Chief?" he asked like it was a big deal. I told him, "Yah, I'm pretty sure, but he's just my brother so..." The guy got pretty motivated and took extra care to get Laura Ewy and me to our room. I told him my that brother used to sit on my head and fart so he wasn't a dignitary or anything. Still, this guy was undeterred in his service. That was weird, but it helped me appreciate the twenty or so years Pete had put into the military. I'd discovered just how big my brother was. Sure, he got out of that hospital and resumed his weight lifting and five-mile jogs, but he was larger than his physicality.

On a rainy night in Portsmouth my brother, laid out and hooked up to hospital machines, afforded me a the kind of accommodations most of us take for granted every day. It put into perspective the silent focus with which our parents watched those Tomahawks rocket off his first battleship. It made it clearer the respect that must be paid to those who don't know where they're going to end up for the next week, month or year. So, thank you, Pete. Now I have my own children who are comfortable and free to wreak havoc on one another, and it's in no small part due to you and countless others who dove headlong into a responsibility much greater than yourselves.

Why Climate Change Could be the Best Thing that's Happened to America. Part 1

I've been wanting to write this for a long time. Actually, I've written it about a dozen times, but I never felt it was right. Sometimes it was too preachy, others it was just way too cluttered with information. Like I've always said about progressives: they have a very hard time getting across their message. Republicans are good. They announce they're going to lower taxes and kill terrorists. Neither may happen, but dammit at least they say it. Democrats stifle their message in the slow death spiral of overwhelming data. You'll hear it all the time. As in the instance of Climate Change, someone who does not believe it is occurring will say, "There was snow in my backyard this morning. What do you say about that?" Meanwhile, the environmentalist is inducing comas with a dissertation on atmospheric calculations. So I'm going to do my best to keep these short and sweet and relevant. If I stray, then punch me in the comment section.

I firmly believe that Climate Change (and I'm going to capitalize that shit because it's a goddamned monster) is the most challenging battle the human race has ever faced. It's not going to be easy because we rely so much on the agents that are altering our planet's atmosphere. I can't imagine having to pull a rickshaw to get the kids to school, and I'm not sure I'd like a world where can't light up a fireplace. Luckily, what we have to do isn't that extreme. Frighteningly, what we have to do needs to happen now.

The good news is that everything we need to do to maintain our planet for our children are things that we should be doing anyway. Even better, they are the things that will make us better. From personal gain to national independence, fighting Climate Change is a win/win. AND we can still kill terrorists.

Sometimes I wonder if it were all reversed. If we'd been able to start with renewable energy and then later someone stumbled across some oil. He'd have to pitch some investors on the idea of using it instead of wind and solar. "We'll have to engage in nonstop military intervention in faraway places," he'd begin. "We'll have to prop up a lot of bad guys, too, before spending trillions deposing them. There will be a lot of health issues; kids with asthma, increased cancers, and some desperate poor people in the Niger Delta will literally melt when it explodes."

There would be pause. I can hear a Christian objection of pumping black bile from the hellish depths of Earth and setting it on fire. And if the petroleum pitchman added, "Oh, and there's also this thing about the earth's entire climate changing and creating the single largest challenge the human race has ever faced," they would drag him out of the room. Oil, it would be determined, was not a good alternative. Besides, we didn't even have the infrastructure to make it happen.

It's funny, because that's about the only complaint we have today about moving to renewable energy. If we look to the future, solar energy doesn't come with children being blown up in Iraq or Americans dying in distant places all over the planet. There's nothing cancer-causing about wind and it seems that the biggest side effect of capturing energy from ocean waves is that you might have to relocate your family to the beach. I mean things look really good, but we're stuck on this infrastructure thing.

That's like not taking an awesome promotion because you don't have the right shoes. People every day go out and make the changes necessary to adapt to their lives, yet we seem to refuse, offering up this ugly scenario where for the first time in human history we're ignoring the adaptation necessary for the survival of the species. That's kind of embarrassing. I know my dog expects more of me.

I think about my grandparents who rationed, carpooled and grew their own food because of the growing specter of WWII. They did what was right for the greater good. The greater good...which seems like a great idea and is befuddling as to why we wouldn't do it again. Why wouldn't we all pitch in and make a change, many of them very simple and healthy choices, to help save the environment that sustains us? Well, according to recent reports, America is less about the greater good and more inclined to satisfy the individual. (I'm not sure if God would bless a country like that...but...I digress.) We're of an independent spirit and doing our own thing. It's what built America some have argued.

So what was my grandma rationing sugar for the troops? It seems like there was a realization that if you were only to look out for yourself, than you were threatening the country. Today, like in 1940, it is again the Department of Defense that is warning us about the dire consequences of our newest enemy. But this time it isn't the Germans or the Japanese. It is us. But I believe that we all have a desire to not die in a ridiculous superstorm and that we already have the solutions to curb climate change. Even better, we can fight the good fight on our own terms, and we can even do it through a rugged individualism that will, ironically, create a stronger sense of community.

Stopped at a Traffic Life | roughy d 3

so this happened...

Before we get to the doctor there's this important scene that takes place at a stop light just north of Fort Collins. I'm looking at my mom and she's so very small. The big beanie of gauze on her head doesn't help, even though it adds about five inches. It sits on her, weighing her down. It's all of the surgeries and tumors and medicine wrapped around her head in one more attempt to close it all up for good.

I've always had great empathy for my mom. This guy once asked me tips for talking about money with kids. I guess he's a Buddhist and wanted to share some stories with his Buddhist circle. Normally, I'd get a little intimidated by such an audience, but I just dove in. He'd uncorked one of the biggest emotional triggers in my life. I told him about the time when I my mom dropped me off for school and I ran back to her car to ask for a dollar for bowling in PE. She didn't have it, and it killed me that I'd put her in that position; the position of feeling shitty. All of us were empathetic kids. We knew too much about our financial situation.

I still remember the day when Pete and I found all that money in the woods and told everybody about it. Our verbose enthusiasm gave the rightful owner notice that he needed to get it back, and it infuriated my father to the point of very seriously saying; "If you fucking ever fucking find a box of fucking money in the woods, don't say a fucking thing, just put it in the truck." And he was serious, and I'm so mad at myself that I didn't at least slip a twenty into my pocket. That's maybe what I should have told the Buddhist guy: if you ever find a box of fucking money in the woods....

And we did. We did find the money. And there were gold coins, too. But I'll get there. Probably on the heels of some other emotional issue that story will come out about the drug dealer, his cute daughters and a country kid who took a shower once a week.

But it's that kind of adventure that I'd forgotten as I sat at the stop light in Fort Collins. It's that kind of living—eschewing the nuances that add up to the important things we overlook--that would have me get clobbered by a little lady counting pills in the passenger seat.

I guess it was just the sheer number of brain surgeries that had me thinking that it was ok to lift her from the hospital. Surprisingly, though, she was doing pretty well for the short time she'd had to recover in the hospital. And there I was, under another Colorado blue sky, whining about needing to get more done. My mother, who'd spent a lot of her life around loud men (myself included) didn't always get a word in edgewise. She waited until I took pause to pass the slow cars ahead of us. It was going to be a hectic trip, as I needed to get her to another hospital, and quickly. She was not deterred by my erratic driving. She carefully closed the caps on her weeks worth of anti-seizure meds and spoke.

"Jared," she said calmly but with a huge hint of witty sarcasm, "I don't have a job. I don't have a husband or a love life, I'd like a job but can't work and I have to count on my son to take care of me."

"OH god, I'm sorry," I said, thinking I needed to counter her with comfort.

"No, Jared, but I'm fine," she emphasized with the car pulling around an old truck in a no passing zone. And then she sighed and smiled and closed her eyes.

But I'M fine. I heard that. Even though she also added a very sarcastic "woo-hoo.”

And then, before nodding off in the cloud of blankets I'd packed around her, she told me she always loved following our adventures. "Our" being her kids. I didn't even realize how important that would be to hear, especially as I rolled onto the interstate, using two cell phones and my working wife to find out who and how to get mom into another hospital.

there's more

Blowholes and Blowhards | roughy d 2

Yesterday's post has me wanting to explain the use of the word "retarded" and why I felt comfortable using it. It's here where I should talk about my father, and how he's inadvertently made it OK. You see, both he and myself could be considered emotionally retarded, and I say that with great comfort, and without once wincing over offending anyone, because anyone considered developmentally disabled who's more honest with their emotions makes anyone of a fuller capacity seem just plain, well, truly limited.

My dad gets dragged into this because, well, he's my dad. He dealt with shards of shattered things working their way out in random emotional outbursts. Do I know this for sure, or do I even know him all that well since I was a kid at home twenty years ago? Maybe not, but dads do leave one hell of an impression. I'd go back to a tired guy coming home, dropping his lunchbox on the counter, and just wanting to get dinner and make some headway through some bills. But only a few feet into the house he'd realize he was tracking mud, and just that tiny infraction would set him off, and I could feel his frustration shock wave throughout the house. The dogs would find their places to hide. Being one of the most sensitive humans on the planet, I'd absorb every last ripple. 

It's 3am and I can't sleep. 

I'm not going to drag my father or anyone else through this. I'll go to another place, with my mom at a stoplight in Fort Collins (and she'll not be dragged, but carried lightly on fond memory.) 

I cringe thinking back to my final months with my mother, and instead of celebrating life with the gusto of a thousand Ricky Martins, I drained my poor mom with droning on about how I wasn't doing enough with my life. Now this is possibly the last thing a mother needs who's counting on her son to take care of her. In an incessant cycle of complaint and apology, I'd remind her that my spending time with her was the best possible thing I could be doing, and then drift to some place where this white middle class kid believed he was suffering. 

So let me get literary here, or at least visual, instead of journalistic (or whatever I'm doing.) But I'm at a stoplight with this amazing woman and I've just stolen her from Poudre Valley Hospital. Stolen, yes, I took her. They'd left a hole in mom's head. It's one thing to give someone a blowhole, but another to treat me like an asshole when I tell them about it. So it was kind of personal but oh so grand when I cut down the hour drive to thirty minutes to show them the blowhole. We'd all lose in the end because they'd have to do another surgery to make sure their wasn't another infection. Still, though, they gave me the gift of empowerment: I learned that in many cases I could do better for my mom than a PhD. So after everything was sealed up again, I rolled my mother away in a wheelchair. She woke up and complained I hadn't given her anytime to tie her gown. "It's okay," I told her. "We're going to give someone else a chance." 

Swedish Hospital is only a few minutes away from our house. It would be where we'd go until the end. The finale was just over a year away. In cancer time, that would be about thousand millennium. 

It gets better.

Pro Tip: We Put the "Men" in Developmentally Stunted | roughy d 1

I have to tell women something that I hope will be comforting: if a dude is struggling with his professional life, he won't mind making everybody miserable. There's a lack-of-accomplishment thing that sails ever onward ahead of the outstretched arms of every man. Every man that cheers on football--who cherishes a spectacular catch in slo-mo and then savors the same play shared in ten episodes of the same Sports Center--is seeing what he believes success must feel like. That moment, outstretched and actually physically grasping the goal. Only if he'd tried harder in high school.

This is supposed to be a good thing for you to hear, dear female friends, because it's not you. Guys should know better than to make it seem that way but, at least in my case, there's a total system shutdown that comes with disappointment in one's self. I can hear my wife now, "Well...should I throw the football for you?" And I'd laugh because it's true. Because in that quick-witted quip I'd hear my ever-the-internal wife express in humor a hot coal burning somewhere near her distaste for mustaches and unease with large groups of women. Now granted I've made some large, presumptuous leaps here, and there's a chance I'll land like Prince Fielder trying to get back to third, but at some point it will fit. At some point you'll feel the cold, yet be able to exhale and say, "Oh, right, you're emotionally retarded."

to be cont'd.