War On Drugs

I, for one, become immediately suspicious of any doctor that I am asked to refer to by their first name. My dentist has been sticking his hands in my mouth for nearly twenty years, and I still refer to him by his last name. It's that little lift of respect that we give to people who make life and death decisions for us. Or at least filling or not decisions. It seems like they've earned it, after all.
Which brings me to Doctor Drew. That's Doctor Pinsky to me. The host of "Loveline" and "Celebrity Rehab" to most of the planet. He's a board-certified internist, addiction medicine specialist, and he's a celebrity himself. Each week, Doctor Pinsky brings his unique gifts to bear on the struggles of the lovelorn and the celebrity addicted. Addicts who happen to be addicted. You get the idea. He's deeply interested in others' pain. He would like to share that pain with a loyal listening and viewing audience.
Then there's this: Doctor Pinsky helped treat Mindy McCready for love addiction on season three of Celebrity Rehab and said he'd referred her to professionals who could continue to help her afterward. "A love addict basically is somebody that really didn't have a good model for intimacy in their childhood, often times traumatized in one way or another, thereby intimacy becomes a risk place, becomes an intolerable place," Pinsky said. Ms. McCready committed suicide last week. She joins a list of the patients who "slipped": Alice in Chains' Mike Starr and "Real World" alumni Joey Kovar died from unrelated drug overdoses in the past two years. "Taxi" actor Jeff Conaway and "Can't We All Get Along" star Rodney King have also passed on. Is anyone else wondering where Doctor Pinsky got his license?
There is no doubt that living life in public ramps up the difficulty for certain personalities to find their way. Does it make sense to run those difficulties through the fast-cut editing machine of MTV or phone in the advice between commercials for Pro Flowers and Amazon.com? Cries for help aren't best answered on basic cable or syndicated radio talk shows. It's certain that those who seek "Dr. Drew" out are looking for a brand name, and probably hoping for a few extra moments on their fame clock, but I'm pretty sure that a real doctor wouldn't prescribe reality TV as a cure. That's a symptom of a much larger problem. Just ask Doctor Dave.

Deep Impact

My wife attended the rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. I did not. She took public transportation. I did not. She gathered together with a like-minded group who are adamant about holding the president accountable for his words, these in particular from 2007: "We cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake. Global warming is not a someday problem, it is now. We are already breaking records with the intensity of our storms, the number of forest fires, the periods of drought. By 2050 famine could force more than 250 million from their homes. . . . The polar ice caps are now melting faster than science had ever predicted. . . . This is not the future I want for my daughters. It's not the future any of us want for our children. And if we act now and we act boldly, it doesn't have to be." I did not. I did take heart in the mention of global warming in this year's State of the Union address: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” And so did my wife.
It is science, after all, that put us where we are right now. The invention of the internal combustion engine and all those amazing factories we have been opening since the Industrial Revolution. As a race, we seem most content when we find something in the ground and then figure out a way to burn it. The problem is that all that creative fire makes creative smoke, and we never have found a way to re-purpose smoke.
I know the math. I understand the science. But I don't pretend to fathom the human mind. My son, who has been raised by a mother who speaks openly and candidly about three hundred and fifty parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere still gets all gishy when he hears a muscle car revving its engine. It is the planet that we are handing over to him that his mother wants to save. Where have we gone wrong? Why can't he feel the crisis? Why is his father sitting at home when thousands are taking to the streets to tell the world's leaders that we need to fix this now?
My answer? It's not a meteorite. If we could actually see the future, hurtling toward us, we might try and get out of the way, or attempt to deflect it. If Morgan Freeman were president, he'd know what to do. I suppose we could get Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg to get together to make some menacing public service announcements, and keep Bruce Willis on retainer. Just in case. Except that we don't want anybody to blow anything up. We want to try and keep things together. For future generations.

iHops

It's become a lot cooler to drink beer these days. The commercial I saw during the Super Bowl for Budweiser's new Sapphire special brew made me remember a time when I regularly consumed my weight in "Lite" Beer. But, to clarify, I know that it's not really Budweiser that is bringing this bit of amber perfection to us, but rather the brewmasters of Anhueser-Busch, under a Beck's label that makes it all the more chic. That cool bottle and name probably make it infinitely superior to the Black Crown that Bud is rolling out at the same time.
Enough about them. Let's talk about me. I didn't drink Budweiser back then, and I probably wouldn't now, probably because of a comment Robert Klein once made parodying the everyman's appeal of that beer: "This Bud's for anybody who ever went to school, had a job, or has a neck." There was no way for me to feel comfortable getting in that line, so I opted for the one that had all the funny commercials: Lite Beer from Miller. It was, by their reckoning, a third less filling than their regular beer, which, by my reckoning, allowed me to drink a third more of them. It was applied mathematics. They were also the ones who first delivered on the carrying-case: twenty-four cans, one handle, the Briefcase Full of Booze. Their selection of hops and barley mattered far less to me than the ability to lug my very own drunken brawl from place to place. This was the breakthrough I was so eagerly anticipating.
Meanwhile, up the road from me, Coors was tempting me with their own light beer, spelled correctly. It also had a cool nickname: The Silver Bullet. Growing up in Colorado, I never had much of a fascination with the "Banquet Beer," since it made me think of long tables, toasts, and fried chicken. It wasn't the appeal of Smokey and the Bandit that got me. It was the Silver Bullet Party Ball. My own personal keg? Now you're talking! Even if your speech is a little slurred.
And through the portal of years, I find myself back in the present, waking up to a reality that doesn't include nearly as much worrying about the kind of beer I drink as much as the renaissance in the brewing arts that I am sadly missing. Or maybe not. I had my own, thanks.

Lookin' Out My Back Door

My wife wrote to tell me about the chainsaws. Her first impression was that there was probably a crew down the street working on the Italian Cypress that had been set afire over the past week or so. Maybe they were going to take them all out to alleviate the arsonist's temptation. But the sound wasn't coming from down the street. It was coming from our back yard.
This is where my wife found the chainsaws. They were busy taking the limbs off the eucalyptus trees that towered above us on the hill behind our house. Upon further investigation, my wife discovered that the grove that had been the barrier between us and urban living was coming down. This was the considered reaction of our neighbor, who apparently came full circle from the moment when we first began to inquire about the acacia tree that had split and fallen into our yard. At first, he was certain that the tree was not his, nor was the odd-shaped lot that contained the pocket forest. Eventually, he came by after he heard us chopping and sawing at the half tree that had surrendered itself to us. We showed him a map. He wavered. Then he began to look at those tiny-rooted beasts as potential hazards.
Somewhere in the past few months, he figured his solution would be to take them all to the ground, and start fresh. Now we have a great big sky to look at, as well as the graffiti and rotted wood of the fence on the house directly behind us. That little whisper of wilderness that we had fallen in love with way back when we first bought the house was gone. Ironically, at that time, we had tried to connect with the man who owned the property before its current resident to discuss the care and maintenance of the vegetation that periodically encroached on our yard. That guy didn't want anyone or anything to fuss with his trees. He was expressly litigious about it, even taking the time to don a three-piece suit and dress his children in their Sunday best, coming all the way around the block to knock on our front door to present my wife with a letter stating the rights and limitations we had concerning all that wood. We were threatened with suits of a one-piece law kind if we attempted to prune or manage any of it.
And so, for years it grew. And now it's been cut down. My wife mourns the passing of those trees, as I do. We can look forward to a time when the redwoods and other sprouts assert themselves in that great wide open. My wife called it "Empty Sky." Later, after the sun went down and I looked out the kitchen window, I saw something I hadn't seen in all the years since we had lived there: stars. I showed them to my wife and told her that the sky wasn't so empty after all. It's just not so full of leaves anymore.

Cabin Down Below

The cabin in which I spent summers as a youth had little or no security, unless you count the fact that it was difficult to find even for our invited guests. There wasn't even a bolt on the front or back door. Upstairs there was a half inch latch keeping any desperate sorts from muscling their way in, as well as a nice tall blue spruce located right next to the deck that led into the loft where the three boys played, read comic books, and slept. In all the years that we owned that piece of property, it was only broken into once. They came in through that upstairs door, and looked around in what amounted to my parents' liquor cabinet, and left out the back door, closing it neatly behind them.
I mention this because I am pleased and happy to have had that experience rather than the one that San Bernradino County residents endured when "rogue cop" Christopher Dorner dropped by to finish off his week long flurry of terror. Guests at the Seven Oaks Mountain Cabins probably hadn't imagined that a gun battle and the immolation of one of the buildings would be part of their vacation plans. The web site encourages us all to "Leave behind the stress and smog of the big city." If only there had been some sort of assurance about the SWAT teams and crazed gunmen on the loose. 
In the end, it probably doesn't matter so much about the locks and alarms if the place ends up burned to the ground. It just makes me think more about my next stay-cation.

Stay Safe

A mother is accused of bursting into a high school classroom and helping her teen daughter beat up another student, even holding the other teen and instructing her child strike the girl in the face with a combination lock, police said. Shocking, right? The fact that it involves a mother and daughter. The fact that it took place in a classroom. The fact that it didn't happen down the hall from me.
The incident occurred last Thursday in Ohio. Not in an elementary school. Those factors kept me from simply walking out the door and taking a personal day. It reminded me of all the stories I have read about awful things happening inside classrooms. High school, college, elementary, preschool. It reminded me of the first thing I learned in teacher school: Give your kids a safe place to learn, and they will. The problem with that theory is that it doesn't take into account just how difficult it is to create a bubble, a safe haven inside a torrential world that exists just outside the doors decorated with construction paper hearts.
Whether or not this is part of some radical anti-bullying campaign in the Buckeye State, it made me tired and sad to think about all the time and effort that will now be required to generate a new bubble inside that high school. In that town. In the state. We have only recently begun to imagine solutions to the challenges of keeping our kids safe from crazed gunmen entering our schools. Now we have to turn out attention to how we keep our kids safe from crazed parents entering our schools.
I would love to say that way out here in California, in an elementary school, that I have never had to worry about such things. That wouldn't be true. That shouldn't be a surprise.

One Day At A Time

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference. 
My wife reminded me of this as I was walking out the door the other day. It's the Serenity Prayer, and it is very popular among the recovery set. It's actually the truncated version of Reinhold Niebuhr's original which goes on to be a little more specific in its religiosity, with a number of capital H "Hims." But it's that initial sentiment that sticks in my head, and has for most of my adult life. Know the difference between things you can change and things that you just have to leave alone.
The challenge I had this week was most blatantly defined by the couch in the middle of the street. To be more precise, the couch that was left to block traffic going up or down the street which I travel on to and from school each day. It sat squarely in the middle, perpundicular to the sidewalks. It could have been dropped there on some bizarre early morning furniture move, but the placement gave every indication of being some sort of prank. I could have ridden carefully around it and been on my way, accepting the garbage left in the streets of Oakland as something that I cannot change. But it didn't take much courage for me to get off my bike and drag the dirty beige mess out of the way of any motorists who hadn't already encountered the roadblock. 
Was that wise? Was it courageous? I don't know. I know that after I got back on my bike, I felt a twinge.  It might have been smugness.  It might have been serenity. I don't know if I have the wisdom to know the difference yet.