Author Archives: Bill

My Brain

The Start

I have been out of commission for some time, unable to write.  Writing is just about my favorite thing to do, so not writing is a big deal.  Here I go with the long version of what happened.

At the end of January I had a major concussion stemming from a bad dream.  There are several small blood vessels running between the hemispheres of my brain.  Brains shrink some as we age, so the vessels are more vulnerable to impacts.  One of them ruptured San bled into the space between my skull and my brain, creating a subdural hematoma.  It was a sac containing the blood.  Osmosis did it’s thing even after the bleeding stopped and the sac-hematoma grew. 

I was not aware of this, but had a low grade headache for about a month.  I went to my primary care doctor who sent me to Porter Hospital for a CAT scan.   They took one look and had an ambulance haul me down to Littleton Hospital where the brain surgeons practice. 

The hematoma was large enough to start shoving things around, causing the headache.  Another CAT scan at and consulting with a neurosurgeon led us to wait and see if the hematoma would be reabsorbed on its own.  After two weeks I got weaker to the point I couldn’t stand up and step out of the bathtub.  I sort of slithered over the top and fell after I stood up. 

Back to Littleton Hospital, another night in the ICU, and surgery.  I told the neurosurgeon i could pick up a four inch hole saw at Home Depot, but he said he already had one.  I also asked him to drill a hole in the part of my skull he took out and install a threaded bushing so I could mount a reading lamp.  He said he didn’t have the parts or he would do it.

The surgeon took a piece of bone out exposing the hematoma on the right side of my skull, drained it,  rinsed things, and put in a drain through a hole below the big hole.

After the surgery my head was wrapped in a big bandage that ran under my chin.  After a day, a tech came in, took the bandage off and proceeded to staple the incision shut.  A nurse had given me a pain pill, but the tech didn’t do a local at all.  Maybe twenty staples went in with me howling in pain.  One the one to ten scale it was a nine.  He apologized but it didn’t help.

The drain was a piece of perforated plastic tubing to drain any additional fluid.  The fluid looked like the liquid you see in the bottom of the meat tray.  If you want to experience something strange, have a tube pulled out of the space above your brain.  Weird.

Through the entire process all the medical people were just great,  friendly, warm, caring, and helpful.  With two exceptions.  The jerk who put the staples in and a nurse practitioner who refused to believe he had done it in that fashion, not my favorite people..  However, the accident was bad, but the medical process was positive. Great people, good job.

After a couple of weeks I was feeling better, with good days and bad days.  On a bad day I decided to go to a meeting three blocks away.  I couldn’t maintain a steady gate, kept going faster until I fell.   I fell two times with neighbors helping me up.  The third time was right outside the meeting and I took a dive into the street pavement.  Scalp laceration, blood, help from friends at the meeting, ambulance, and another trip to hospital, this time Swedish because the Denver Health ambulances won’t go to Littleton.  I got four staples, done properly this time, and more good care. 

The recovery process addressed my severe balance and dizziness episodes along with the need to rest.  Throughout all the recovery, I wanted pie and ice cream.   More pie and ice cream.  And even more.  I had in home physical therapy and occupational therapy, 


My glasses were pretty bent up from the fall.  A maintenance man came into the room and I asked him if he had some pliers.  He did, and said he works on glasses.  He tried, but didn’t make much progress with the titanium frame.  He took the glasses, said “I’ll be right back”, and took them to a nearby optical shop where they straightened the frames and replaced a temple, no charge. 

My recovery continues, I can now drive short distances, they want me to walk a lot, and I feel like I have turned a corner.  My life is forever changed.  The outpouring of support from medical people, friends, and my Insight Meditation group is just wonderful.  The food is good as well.  I have given resentment up, the major issue remaining in my lifetime journey.  Gratitude is replacing resentment. 

I don’t recommend brain trauma and surgery as your path, but it is working for me. I tend to resist changing my life, and it has always required some sort of wake up call to induce me to move. in this case it was literally getting hit upside my head.

Sleeping Injury

Carpet Burn

A few weeks ago I suffered a sleeping injury.  I was dreaming I was with a truck convoy heading south from Denver.  There were many identical white trucks.  I was one of the leaders.

South of Pueblo we passed some spectacular scenery looking like the red rock country in Utah.

We got into New Mexico and stopped for the night in a long tunnel.  I was asleep in the cab of my tractor-trailer rig when I woke up to see five entities coming toward me.  Four were translucent white, gliding along the tunnel.  The fifth was solid black.  They passed my truck than the black one turned and came directly toward me.  I screamed and bailed out of the truck.

The problem was I was not in a big truck, but in bed.  I must have been on my knees when I dove, because there was a loud crack when my head hit the floor and woke me up.  I sustained a carpet burn on my forehead and a concussion.  The carpet burn healed in a few days, no big deal.

The concussion was another matter.  I had some severe vertigo for a few days when I couldn’t stay upright.  I also had a steady headache and was sort of foggy.  The vertigo diminished, and the doctor gave me an exercise which eliminated it entirely.  The headache persisted for about three weeks.  The pain was about a four on a scale of one to ten.

The doctor told me to avoid bright light, including a computer screen, meaning I couldn’t write.  I don’t think I could have put something together anyway.  I rattled around the house and slept a lot.  I am mostly back to normal (whatever that is) now and back to my normal routine.

My scream woke my wife up and I dazedly crawled back into bed.  I have had intense dreams before, including some motion, but I never leaped out of bed.  In talking to other people, the events are relatively common.  One guy gets so violent in his dreams he has to sleep in a mummy sleeping bag to prevent damaging anything.

What does the dream mean?  I am told it probably means I have cleared some issues in my life up, but a big one remains.  I am slow to catch on to this stuff so it takes a whack on the head for me to get it.  I don’t like malevolent black ghosts scaring me out of bed.  Yes, I know what the issue is but I’m not telling.

Pride

Pride has served me badly.  I put on a brave face all my life out of pride.  I wouldn’t acknowledge to anyone, including myself, how much I was hurting.  I was mourning my mother’s death, my rocky progress in school, my lack of athletic ability, and not understanding why I did impulsive things I instantly regretted.

I stood tall, lied, and ignored my feelings.  Fakery and bullshit were my default modes.  I’m smart, so I often got away with it unless I had to prove it.  “Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.”  I was great at counter accusations because of my well-tuned bullshit detector.   I operated this way for probably 60 years.

In more recent years I developed enough self-awareness to detect my own bullshit.  Mostly.  I knew about my ADD/ADHD and had years of therapy and various group activities to build a reservoir of mostly honest behavior.  Except for the addictions.  Pride kept them in the closet.  I drank and drugged without admitting my helplessness.

I like to accuse oil companies of lying, cheating, and stealing.  I saw it because I was doing the same thing.  About three years ago my therapist / Jungian Analyst/ Addiction Counselor looked me in the eye and said “You are an Alcoholic.” did I begin getting it.  Despite all my prideful front, I was a mess.  I quit drinking and got serious about wrestling with my non-substance related addictions.  I go to meetings, pray, and meditate.

For the first time in my life I may be getting past all the pride and deception.  I do have to say the wrestling with non-substance addiction is a win some, lose some proposition.  Maybe I have to be more honest, less secretive, and humble with my shortcomings.

Drinking

I don’t drink.  I am coming up on three years alcohol free.  I don’t know how many other times I have quit, starting when I was seventeen.  I started drinking when I was fifteen, if you count Coors 3.2 beer as alcohol.  It isn’t very strong, so I just drank more.  I started and stopped several times after the first time.

My mother was an alcoholic, my father drank quite a bit.  Their entire social circle revolved around drinking.  One of my mother’s best friends choked to death on her own vomit on the kitchen floor.  One of her kids found her.  Alcohol was the culture I grew up with.

One of the issues I live with is ADD/ADHD.  Growing up, I knew something was wrong – always in trouble, unable do do schoolwork I wasn’t interested in, lots of other stuff.  I thought of it as the Fatal Flaw.  I have managed to lurch along with the ADD, but it affected all my life.  My college transcript is mostly A’s and F’s.  It helped ruin my first marriage.  The deal with it, I drank and did dope.

I used to buy pot by the quarter pound.  I never bought booze in less than 1&1/2 liter bottles, beer by the case.  A friend and I would go to the beer joint and drink seven pitchers in an evening.  I smoked three packs of cigarettes every day, more when drinking.

All the drugs and alcohol were self medicating.  I was heavily medicated for a long time.  I started therapy more than 30 years ago.  It seemed to help in a lot of areas, but the addictions remained. One day in a therapy session the therapist stopped and asked me if I had ever been evaluated for ADD.  Well, no.  That evening I did a checklist.  I was 48 out of 50 questions.

That is when my life began to change.  It all took a while, I didn’t stop drinking for about fifteen years, but I was doing better in lots of other areas.  I can now do tasks I was previously incapable of even starting.  It took a lot of cognitive therapy and the stimulant medication to get my prefrontal cortex working without stirring up a bunch of drama.

You are aware alcoholics go to lots of meetings.  I go to two meetings every week.  They are a tremendous help as other alcoholics share their experience, strength, and hope.  We humans need to associate with others  and the meetings are healthier than bars.

I am fairly sure I will never drink again.  That’s good, because it would kill me.  My stomach doesn’t like alcohol and kicks up a real fuss when I drink.  I like not having my stomach hurt.

I don’t agree with all the concepts of the program, but I can live with it.  Spending time with a bunch of sober alcoholics is a constant reinforcement for my sobriety.  As we say at the end of meetings, “Keep coming back, it works if you work it.”

Fragmentation

Divided

Our current political situation illustrates the divisions in American society. The gaps between urban and rural, the coasts and the flyover region, north and south, races, wealthy and poor, and, these days, male and female show the fragmentation. It exists at all levels.  To a large extent, we have always been a diverse society but many of the bonds formerly holding us all together have dramatically weakened.

Fraternal organizations such as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Eagles, Moose, Eastern Star, and the Veterans organizations are rapidly dying.  Masonic temples are replaced by apartment complexes.  Labor unions continue to shrink, a trend which accelerated in the 1980’s.  Church membership continues to decline.

Yes, we come together for concerts, sporting events, and even political marches.  Youth soccer leagues and youth sports in general seem to be growing.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is a book about the phenomenon.  Published in 2000, it remains the premier study of increasing social isolation.  Bowling leagues used to be an activity bring millions together to compete, bond, and have fun.  Bowling has increased, bowling leagues have declined.  Bowling, lodge night, churchgoing, and club going are dying.

This is not a new trend.  Max Weber, in the early twentieth century outlined the trends as stemming from urbanization.  In small communities, everyone belonged.  I pretty much knew everyone in my small Western Colorado town where I grew up.   In the city, I don’t know my neighbor across the street.  Crowds but not much connection.

Mass communication is also responsible for the fragmentation.  When I was a kid, listening to the radio on Sunday evenings was a standard ritual.  Amos and Andy, Jack Benny, The Shadow, and the other programs were standard conversation.  To hear the radio programs in rural Colorado, we had to tune in to KRLD in Dallas.  On Monday, everyone talked about the programs.  In more recent times, Seinfeld and Game of Thrones seem to be the big ones.

Today, we are online or in front of the TV.  At home, we mostly watch reruns of the good programs from the 1990s through the 2000s.  I am embarrassed to tell you much time I spend with this iPad I am pecking on.

I follow Facebook, the New York Times, Words With Friends, and entirely too much You Tube.  I am not alone in this.

Music brings us together.  Several of us attend performances at the Newman Center on the DU campus every year.  We even talk to each other about what we saw.  Music has several genres, rock and roll, classical, country, pop, and oldies are examples.

Music had a tremendous influence on the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1070s.  Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Judy Collins (a Denver native), the Beatles, the Stones, Buffalo Springfield, and many others spread the message on FM radio.  The music brought huge numbers together in protest of most everything.  The mud and chaos of Woodstock and the violence of Altamont can stand as cornerstones of the movement.  “Hey Hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?”.

Yes, the other music styles were there at the same time, but we tend not to remember them.  Today, the music has also fragmented.  At my age, I can’t begin to tell you how many sub-genres there are.  I sure don’t know the band names.  Music once was a unifying force.  Not today.Without personal connections, loneliness grows.  Loneliness breeds anger.  Anger spreads into politics, and here we are.  Watch out, there may be more mass movements lacking a bond of hope.  Fox news may be in the vanguard.

The Colorado Flag

 

I like the Colorado State flag.  I guess you could say I am proud of the flag.  Here in Colorado you see the flag all over the place.  Flagpoles, of course, bumpers, hats, t-shirts, marijuana stores, on the iPad I’m writing this on, window stickers, building foyer floors, notebooks, backpacks, patches on jackets, tattoos, hoodies, on state highway signs, and lots of other places.

One place it isn’t on are Colorado State Line signs.  There are the venerable wooden Welcome to Colorful Colorado signs.  They were there when I was a kid.  I always felt a bit of a thrill when we passed the one on US 6&50 coming from Utah.  They’re rustic and distinctive.  The one on I-70 coming from Wyoming has had a No Vacancy sticker from time to time.

Recently the state government made a mistake in adopting a new logo. It is a triangle which can be paired with a state agency.   The triangles so small as to be unreadable from any distance.  The logos are an example of committees going too far.  Why not the Colorado flag with the agency name on a separate sticker?  Denver does it with success.

The flag colors represent blue sky, red earth, and golden sunshine. I think the gold also represents the gold responsible for attracting settlers in large numbers back in 1859 and 1860.  The gold brought people, wealth, farms and ranches to feed the miners and a fascinating mountain railroad history.

Along with the gold rush came a big mess.  Gold mines, mills, smelters, huge waste dumps, polluted streams, and superfund sites scattered throughout the mountains and in Denver.  We will always have the sad legacy of exploitation with no regard to the future.  It’s ironic one of the most famous photographs is a mine building in the canyon below the Million Dollar Highway.

The development of extractive industries also

Old Mine on the Million Dollar Highway

created a boom-bust economy.  The silver panic of 1890 closed mines and left ghost towns.  More recently, the big oil and gas downturn of the 1980’s severely damaged the economy.  There was a bumper sticker saying “Please God, bring another oil boom, I won’t waste it this time”.  Weld county, just north of Denver is densely populated with oil and gas wells creating an environmental crisis.

Maybe the Colorado flag should incorporate a black stripe.

 

How We’re Wired

Nature vs Nurture

Nature versus nurture is one of the seemingly perpetual debates.  The reason for all the controversy is because both positions are true.  I think most of our behavior is from how we were raised and educated.  There are also fundamental characteristics of our species stemming from the way we evolved.  Primitive humans had two basic needs for survival.  They could not function and have children without a community providing mutual support.  They also needed fear and aggression to  protect the group from attacks from animals and rival tribes.

So here we are, wired to connect with others and nurture children and relationships. We are also programmed for flight or fight responses when under threat.  It isn’t Satan making all this trouble, it’s us.  A single person out there on the veldt won’t last long among the lions and mammoths.  If he joins up with others, they can build protection from predators and provide shelter.  All they then need are food sources and something to clothe themselves with.

If the people are out of their enclosure and encounter a Sabre-Toothed Tiger or a rival from a neighboring tribe they have two responses.  They can stand their ground and fight the enemy or flee.  Encountering the threat triggers several internal responses.  The body goes on high alert, releasing adrenaline, tensing muscles, increasing respiration, and so on.  We are then better equipped to fight off the threat or run.

We run home, where we can get support from family members and members of our tribe.  We are then better equipped to fight.  The community provides defense.  The members have gathered together to raise babies, find mates, play poker, dance, kick balls, and get sick and die together.  If we are in Michigan, we are trained to dislike Ohio State.

The need for coming together to meet threats is institutionalized into sport.   We also get together to run and jump training to flee if necessary.  The two mechanisms are working in concert for pleasure.  Michiganders don’t seek to kill Ohioans.  Ethiopians often try to kill Eritreans.

Warfare between groups is most often for territory, power, or simple greed.  Groups ally themselves with other groups to meet a threat or defuse threats.  All the strife and conflict occurs within and between groups.  It has been going on as long as we have been a species.

There is a remedy using our innate need for community.  We nurture and support those in our community then expand the support and nurturing to all.  I can’t directly support the one billion Chinese but I can pray for them.  The act of praying opens my heart, building empathy and lovingkindness for the billions out there.  The others praying together create a web of connection, acting across oceans and nations to bring us all together.

There are also forces attempting to tear us apart, stemming from the we-they response.  The twentieth century is an example of the we-they response going wildly out of control and killing millions of people.

I think the  natural world wide web of human interconnection, lovingkindness, and empathy is keeping the strife from destroying us all.  My goal is to build as much lovingkindness within my own community.  I also believe praying for all beings to be safe, happy, and free works to strengthen the web of connection.  Keep it up, folks, our civilization depends on us.

Eolian Deposition

Loess Caves in China

While studying a geography unit in grade school I was fascinated by the extensive deposits of loess in China.  Loess is fine wind-deposited soil.  In China, the loess covers a huge area in central China and is an important agricultural region.  The soil is fertile, easy to work, and when it erodes it can form steep cliffs.  People have carved homes into the cliffs for centuries, long enough to be included in geography books in western Colorado.  I lived in western Colorado cliff country, probably responsible for my interest in loess.

Loess is eolian soil, meaning it is wind deposited.  There is also wind deposited sand.  The Colorado National Monument, across the Colorado River from Fruita where I grew up has lots of eolian sandstone.  The cliff forming Wingate and the arch forming Entrada Sandstone are ancient sand dunes turned to stone.  My fascination for wind deposited cliffs comes naturally.

I now live east of the Rocky Mountains.  The mountains are tall and rugged, but are in the process of wearing away.  The Rockies have had several glacial periods.  Glaciers form, grind the mountains, then melt and leave their grinding as sand, silt, and gravel called glacial till. The more coarse debris often was carried in huge quantities onto the plains.  The  smaller particles, sand and silt, were blown onto the plains east of the eroding mountains.

The sand has created extensive sand hills on much of the plains in Colorado.  The sandy soil is thin and fragile, poor for farming, but fine for livestock grazing.  Interspersed among the sand hills are loess deposits now farmed extensively with water drawn from the Ogallala Aquifer in the Ogallala Sandstone, which was washed out of the mountains as the glaciers melted. The Ogallala extends from the mountains into Nebraska and south into the Texas Panhandle.

You may be aware the wind blows in Wyoming.  The entire atmosphere passes through Wyoming in any 24 hour period.  You have seen the Wyoming Wind Gauge?  It’s a logging chain hanging from a post.  I may exaggerate here, but not much.

While blowing, wind carries sand eastward out of the mountains. It also erodes the prairies in eastern Wyoming.  The sand ends up in the Western Nebraska Sand Hill country, covering over a quarter of the state.  The silt blew farther east, building loess deposits along the rivers.

In the dust bowl years in southeastern Colorado, northeastern New Mexico, southern Kansas, and the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, the dust storms sent silt as far as Washington D.C.  Wind blown stuff is a big deal everywhere.  In North Africa, the sandy deserts are getting sandier as the silt is picked up and blows across the Atlantic Ocean, fertilizing the Amazon Basin.

In Denver, a car sitting outside for several days acquires a significant coat of wind blown dirt.  A couple of years ago, the dirt was red, meaning it originated in eastern Utah.   I notice my sidewalk is lower than the lawn by a couple of inches.  How much of it is organic accumulation and how much is eolian silt and sand?

I went for a long time thinking water is responsible for most of erosion.  It may be true, but don’t discount the wind, especially in Wyoming.

The Urban Oil Field

Oil and Gas Wells in Part of Weld County

Weld County, Colorado is one of the richest agricultural counties in the nation.  It is also rich in oil and gas, leading to hundreds of wells extracting petroleum.  With all that money around, Northern Colorado is booming, with people moving and subdivisions being built on what was farmland.  The houses and wells are often neighbors, close neighbors.  As oil companies put profit ahead of proper well management, disasters ensue.  Colorado has lots of fires in the urban-wild land interface.  In Weld County it is the urban-oil field interface.

Colorado is home to 48,000 active wells and 52,000 abandoned wells.  All of them are potential  fire and explosion hazards, and can release methane into the atmosphere.  Think about that when your furnace comes on in the morning before you head out to your car.  We need renewal energy.

The Denver Basin is a huge geologic feature extending along the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains.  As the Rockies were uplifted, the Denver Basin subsided while filling with debris washing out of the mountains.  There is a 22,000 feet difference between the bottom of the Basin and the summits of the mountains.  That is a lot of gravel.

When there is a lot of structure in geologic formations, there is opportunity for oil and gas to migrate into the rocks.  The Denver Basin is one of the largest gas fields in the United States.  Oil and gas extraction started in 1901 in Boulder County.   Trillions of cubic feet of gas and millions of gallons of oil have come out of the ground since then.  Most of the production has come from sandstone or fractured shale.  The development of horizontal drilling and fracking has accelerated the process.  In Weld County, sites with as many as five wellheads and the installations to process the gas are next to residential areas.

Oil Fire Near Homes

The result is spectacular explosions and fires near where people live.  Local fire departments, once used to fighting grass and barn fires, have sprayed thousands of gallons of firefighting foam on the fires and spent days on the fire scenes.  Attempts to increase regulation of the industry mostly fail due to the political clout of the oil and gas industry.  The politics may change with the election of Democrats to most of the state offices.

Keep in mind the oil bonanza is a major source of Colorado’s economy and growth.  The move to renewables is also a source of revenue to the region, but there will be inevitable disruption during the transition.  The oil and gas industry seems to be focused on keeping the wells flowing, regardless of the environmental consequences.  They do not seem to be shifting into renewals themselves, which may be a death knell.  Market forces will probably prove to accelerate the shift to renewables.  They are much cheaper than dragging fossil fuels out of the ground and pouring tremendous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.  The remains of dinosaurs and ancient swamps need to stay in the ground.

Notes on Climate Change

Everyone who thinks is aware of the impact climate change on our weather.  Drought in some places, more violent storms, and water coming out of manholes in South Florida.  Drought may be a cause of the instability in the Middle East.  People forced off the land move to the cities, always hotbeds of turmoil. The west coast of central America has also had a drought resulting in crop failures, with many coffee trees dying.  The people displaced move to the barrios in the cities.  California has had its cycle of wet years followed by drought, fires, and flooding when the rain returns.  The cycle is mostly intact, but extended drought followed by huge fires seems to intensify the cycle.  The rains, when they come, are stronger, with big debris flows devastating large areas.

We are in the anthropocene, a time of massive human impact on the earth.  Climate change is a result of dragging hydrocarbons out of the ground, burning them, and returning carbon dioxide once sequestered to the atmosphere.  Atmospheric CO2 traps heat, warming the oceans.  Warmer water holds less oxygen, meaning many sea creatures are killed.

Permian Temperatures

The Permian Extinction was about 252 million years ago.  A major cause was a huge increase in CO2 due to a number of factors, mainly extensive lava flows in Siberia releasing CO2.  Lots of sea life died, but the land got greener and wetter, again sequestering CO2 as coal and petroleum.  There are other factors to the extinction, but the result was 98% of sea life dying, with more than 70% of land life.  It took about 10 million years for life to recover.

We are not going to see a die-off of that magnitude anytime soon, but the climatological and geological records illustrate the risks.  The science is clear, and science offers the remedies, but taking action is a political matter.  Here is where an old adage comes in to play.  “Money Makes the World Go ‘Round.”  Lots of businesses are making money producing and burning hydrocarbons.  Those businesses strongly influence political decision making.  Our Current Leader is mainly motivated by money, so you do the math.

It is getting bad, folks.  It looks like it is going to get worse.  I Hope reason and sanity will prevail in time.

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