Eight Feet Deep

Well, the good news is I’ve been cleared from the “No Fly” list.  I think.

I’m refer­ring to an Octo­ber inci­dent in which I was not allowed to print a board­ing pass prior to a flight to Mem­phis. The air­line folks said it was some­thing like the “No Fly” list in which a pas­sen­ger is screened for extra secu­rity by the Home­land Security’s Trans­porta­tion Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion (TSA).

Noth­ing hap­pened except I was incon­ve­nienced by hav­ing to check in at the Con­ti­nen­tal ticket counter. I didn’t go through any extra scrutiny by TSA in the actual screen­ing before the flight. No pat downs, no wands and thank­fully no cav­ity searches. Just take off your shoes. Pull your com­puter out. And, this was new, take out your CPAP machine, which I use for sleep apnea.

On my return flight to Texas, I had no prob­lem print­ing a board­ing pass.

Later, I found a link on the TSA Web site where one can receive infor­ma­tion on how to clear your name if you wind up on a watch list or have some­thing hap­pen which requires added secu­rity. It’s called TRIP, appro­pri­ately named, not because of the obvi­ous ref­er­ence to “trip” — as in tak­ing a trip by fly­ing. I think its name fits because the whole expe­ri­ence is a “trip.” Wow man. Far out. Groovy.

You can file your redress request online and you get a “Con­trol Num­ber.” This allows you to track your request, kind of like track­ing a pack­age on FedEx but much slower. The only time I tracked my case, it noted that my request had been decided and I would be replied to in writ­ing. That seemed like two months ago.

But lo and behold, I received a let­ter yes­ter­day from the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity. It stated:

“In response to your request, we con­ducted a review of any applic­a­ble records in con­sul­ta­tion with other Fed­eral agen­cies, as appro­pri­ate. Where it was deter­mined that a cor­rec­tion to records was war­ranted, these records were mod­i­fied to address any delay or denial of board­ing that you may have expe­ri­enced as a result of the watch list screen­ing process.”

So that sounds as if the DHS did some­thing con­cern­ing my expe­ri­ence, or maybe not. But the depart­ment did acknowl­edge what I “may have expe­ri­enced” was a result of the “watch list” process. Thus, one would think by that lan­guage that they had me on a “watch list.”  Why, I would be watched, I can”t imag­ine. I’m the dullest per­son this side of the Sabine River these days. I used to raise hell when I was younger, but I was never what one could call a rad­i­cal. Well, rel­a­tively speaking.

All”s well that ends well, though. Hope­fully. The National Secu­rity Agency or TSA itself will prob­a­bly read this and put me back on a watch list, for what­ever rea­son. Or even worse, I’ll be fly­ing some­where some day and all of a sud­den an air mar­shal will pluck me out of my seat, throw me down on the cabin floor and hand­cuff me. If that hap­pens, I might know the rea­son for it in such an instance, or at least part of the reason.

CBS News broke a story a cou­ple of nights ago about what appears to be ram­pant dis­crim­i­na­tion in the TSA’s air mar­shal pro­gram. There is a whole list of minori­ties and other groups the fly­ing cops like to tar­get for some type of has­sle or another. On that list are dis­abled veterans.

Now I’m not a dis­abled vet­eran. Well, I’m some­what dis­abled due to my med­ical prob­lems, from chronic pain at least. And I am a vet­eran. But I am not what is called a dis­abled vet­eran in the gov­ern­ment sense, also known as “service-connected.” That means the dis­abil­ity was a result of or hap­pened dur­ing mil­i­tary service.

I have been look­ing on the Web and have been unable to find why the air mar­shals are all up in the air, pun intended, when it comes to dis­abled vet­er­ans. The only pos­si­ble beef I could think of is that “qual­i­fied dis­abled vet­er­ans” receive a 10 per­cent advan­tage over peo­ple with no mil­i­tary ser­vice or service-connected dis­abil­ity when it comes to hir­ing for a fed­eral job such as air mar­shal. I don’t know if that is it or not.

How­ever, the CBS report indi­cated many of the air mar­shals who were said to be in a snit were for­mer Secret Ser­vice agents. That too is a fed­eral job. So I don’t know.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if DHS finds any­thing in their inves­ti­ga­tion and, if so, will do any­thing. In the mean­time, I am going to try and stay off the watch list, or bet­ter yet, stay off airliners.

Happy Ground­hog Day.

Seri­ously, some peo­ple actu­ally cel­e­brate the day the towns­folk of Punx­sutawney, Pa., drag the cud­dly lit­tle rodent Punx­sutawney Phil out of his hole to pre­dict the fate of win­ter. It is six more weeks if Phil sees its shadow or win­ter will come to an end in six weeks if no shadow falls from the lit­tle groundhog.

Phil saw its shadow today or so say his han­dlers. We can go on the sup­po­si­tion that ground­hogs rec­og­nize shad­ows, in their own lit­tle ground­hog way. Whether or not they can pre­dict weather is a mat­ter of belief, such as Santa Claus. Of course, any­one with any sense knows damn well that Santa is real.

There are tons of Punx­sutawney Phil knock­offs these days: Gen. Beau­re­gard Lee of Atlanta, Buck­eye Chuck of Ohio, Jimmy the Ground­hog of Wis­con­sin and so forth. Whether these weather pre­dic­tion experts see their shadow and fore­tell win­ter mat­ters more on geog­ra­phy and mete­o­rol­ogy than true superstition.

We don’t have a ground­hog to fore­cast weather here in Beau­mont, on the upper Texas coast near Louisiana. Hell, I don’t even know if we have ground­hogs in Texas. I will check and get back with you on that, but don’t hold your breath, please. I sup­pose we would have to come up with a nutria with a Cajun name, such as Boudreaux Bill or some­thing of that ilk if we were to have a Phil imper­son­ator. Since we aver­age nearly 60 inches of pre­cip­i­ta­tion a year, it would be a good bet that Boudreaux wouldn’t see his shadow. It depends, of course, on the time of day and the time of year.

I think a lot of TV sta­tions miss out on a bet by not hav­ing their weath­er­man come out of a hole on Ground­hog Day. A hole is where some of them cer­tainly belong. I won’t men­tion any names.

Per­son­ally, when I see my shadow on ground­hog day it means the sun is shin­ing or the cops have hit me with a spot­light. My pre­dic­tion: six more weeks of win­ter. A late snow in Feb­ru­ary. Then, smooth sail­ing about mid-March. That’s just a guess. But it works for me.

Dogs and philoso­phers do the great­est good and get the fewest rewards.  Dio­genes

Pres­i­dent Obama threw in the domes­tic kitchen sink last evening dur­ing his first State of the Union address.

Politi­cians, espe­cially first term pres­i­dents, tend to do that. Of course, Obama had a lot to cover. The nation’s aver­age unem­ploy­ment rate being in dou­ble dig­its alone could have taken half of the ground Obama marched over dur­ing his  70-minute speech.

As a State of the Union speech goes, it was very good. Obama was not Barack the law pro­fes­sor. Instead, he was Barack the pop­ulist president.

Of course, the cable media had to stir up a con­tro­versy where there really had not been one. I’m speak­ing of the president’s rebuke of the Supreme Court rul­ing allow­ing cor­po­ra­tions and unions to spend unlim­ited dol­lars on polit­i­cal cam­paigns. Some mem­bers of the high court were sit­ting near the pres­i­dent and dur­ing what was a polite but force­ful dart, Jus­tice Samuel Alito silently mouthed some­thing like “not true.” It’s not like Alito told the pres­i­dent “f**k you.” Or he didn’t yell out: “You lie” as  Rep. Joe Wil­son, R-S.C., did dur­ing Obama’s address on health care reform last year dur­ing a joint ses­sion of Congress.

Obama cov­ered a lot of ground, includ­ing his belief that now is the time to scrap “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and allow gays to openly serve in the mil­i­tary. The cam­eras on the Joint Chiefs of Staff showed its mem­bers in a grim state. But the pres­i­dent was right on this one.

The argu­ment against gays “telling” in the ser­vice is about 9/10ths polit­i­cal and 1/10th reli­gious. Which, if you really take the macro look at it, it’s either 100 per­cent polit­i­cal or 100 per­cent reli­gious. This is because the polit­i­cal argu­ment is mostly fueled by the reli­gious right, who in turn, pres­sure the politicians.

One exam­ple against gays in the mil­i­tary used 30 years ago when I was in the ser­vice was that the enemy could pos­si­bly cap­ture a gay ser­vice mem­ber and black­mail him to reveal clas­si­fied mate­r­ial by using the ser­vice person’s homo­sex­u­al­ity against him. (I use “him” because the “hims” were mostly those in such sit­u­a­tions. Today, there are plenty of “hers” serv­ing in dan­ger­ous and sen­si­tive mil­i­tary posi­tions.) If the mil­i­tary per­son was openly gay, such black­mail attempts would mostly prove moot.

What many sol­diers, sailors, Marines, air­men and coasties — some women but I think mostly men — would be most con­cerned with if they are not for open “gay­ness” in the ser­vice might per­haps being hit on by some­one of their own gen­der. You might ask one of these brave souls and they’d tell you “no way.” But until these mostly young males and even some females make peace with them­selves about their own sex­u­al­ity, being a straight who is hit on by a gay can be dis­con­cert­ing, and for some might rarely spark vio­lence. But the same could prob­a­bly be said about some straight guy hit­ting on your girlfriend.

The bot­tom line is if gays are openly admit­ted in the ser­vice and you are upset at hav­ing a pass made at you, you can file the same com­plaints with supe­ri­ors as when an unwel­come pass by some­one of the oppo­site sex  is made. And yes, some­times it is dif­fi­cult to see jus­tice done with that. Nonethe­less, fair is fair. Plus we don’t have a mil­i­tary draft and we need peo­ple, espe­cially intel­li­gent and tal­ented peo­ple — gay or straight — to pro­vide for our national security.

I liked, as well, how the pres­i­dent basi­cally told both par­ties they act like jack­asses, and that his own party needs to grow a (some) pair (s).

I did dis­like one of the president’s pro­pos­als. That was his pro­posed gov­ern­ment spend­ing freeze begin­ning in FY 2011. Pre­vi­ous lim­ited bud­get increases for gov­ern­ment agen­cies have con­tributed to poor equip­ment and half-ass train­ing. If the gov­ern­ment doesn’t have time or a lit­tle extra money to update out­moded equip­ment and fully train their employ­ees, it will lead to both a total break­down in ser­vices as well as cost­ing more in the end when peo­ple or things fail to work as they should.

Think about that one, Mr. Prez.

All in all, I think the Pres­i­dent did a fine job on, at least my opin­ion for now, what I hope to be many more SOTU addresses over the next three-to-seven years.

Do you remem­ber the song “Dem Bones?”

It is an old spir­i­tual allegedly used to teach chil­dren basic anatomy even though the song is anatom­i­cally incor­rect, all accord­ing to Wikipedia. Though there is no doubt of the con­nec­tion between the song and the verse from “Ezekiel 37:1–14″ where the profit pays a visit to the Val­ley of Dry Bones and through God’s com­mand causes the bones to come alive.

Anatom­i­cally cor­rect or not, the song in its sim­ple way speaks to the con­nec­tion and one­ness of the human body. The body is such an intri­cate mech­a­nism, like in many ways a fine auto­mo­bile or space ship or air­craft. Often when one part of the body has a prob­lem it can cause a glitch in another loca­tion that even some­times seems silly to the mind not trained in at least a bit of gross anatomy.

Physi­cians are trained in more than a bit of gross anatomy and they know, or should know, much more than the rest of the pop­u­la­tion of these intri­cate inter­re­la­tion­ships within the body which can cause some­thing some­where to go wrong and make a body mis­er­able elsewhere.

I known my physi­cians, who work for the Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs, know all that. How­ever, I don’t know if they are too hur­ried or har­ried or caught up in some kind of mind­set that so often find them­selves unable to see the for­est of the body for the tree trunks.

 As I men­tioned here last week after my MRI at the Hous­ton VA, three dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble causes emerged for the painful periph­eral neu­ropa­thy I have suf­fered in my feet and legs since the sum­mer. One rea­son is Type II dia­betes, which was promptly diag­nosed after a lot of talk about it. Another rea­son was a type of fatty tis­sue caus­ing steno­sis of my lum­bar spine and the other rea­son being an untreat­able and pos­si­bly debil­i­tat­ing inflam­ma­tion of one of the spine’s membranes.

So which con­di­tion does my spe­cial­ist pick on which to focus? Why dia­betes, of course. And I’ll be bru­tally frank, if the VA wants me to be treated for dia­betes, they sure are pick­ing a funny way to do it. Here is this glu­come­ter and an instruc­tion book. Good luck with your dia­betes. Oh, we will fit you with some spe­cial shoes, but we can’t mail them to you. You’ll have to come back to Hous­ton for them. No instruc­tion on the diet and lifestyle that is needed to lose weight and pills to help com­bat the high blood sugar lev­els. That is the VA’s other answer for all that ails you: meds.

I find myself in a vicious med­ical cir­cle in which none of my med­ical pro­fes­sion­als have seemed to fig­ure a way out for me. I bal­looned in weight. My blood sugar went up at a mar­ginal rate. I devel­oped periph­eral neu­ropa­thy — a con­di­tion very often caused by dia­betes but also caused by per­haps more than 100 other rea­sons as well — the pain cut down on my walk­ing for exer­cise to almost noth­ing. My weight bal­looned even more. My blood sugar got higher. In the mean­time, a MRI finds other prob­lems not related to dia­betes that are caus­ing sim­i­lar symp­toms which include neu­ropa­thy. I also suf­fer from often severe back pain as well as shoot­ing pain in my hip and leg. Oh, and let’s not for­get that I devel­oped a hand tremor two years ago. Just a coin­ci­dence I guess, huh?

So my spe­cial­ist in Hous­ton says lose weight and lower your blood sugar. We’ll attack the dia­betes. Why? Well, my weight and blood sugar both needs to decrease. But also, dia­betes is the eas­ier, or per­haps, the only one of the three that can be treated. Good luck. See you in a month.

I don’t under­stand why the body can’t be seen as a whole, a sys­tem? That’s what it is. It’s true, all I can treat is the dia­betes as far as I know. But one of the con­di­tions I have been diag­nosed with has sim­i­lar symp­toms as dia­betes, includ­ing weight gain, and it can poten­tially par­a­lyze or kill you.

Once again, for how­ever many times, the VA has taken me out into the woods and left me to find my way home by myself. I have, at least for the unfore­see­able future or per­haps the rest of my life, chronic pain that can’t be treated. It can’t even be treated by the methadone I take for pain at the oppo­site end of the spine from this prob­lem. Yet, I have to some­how get up in the morn­ing, work, live, keep going. My body might break down along the way, it might not.

I am not plead­ing for sym­pa­thy. There is no need for it. Like they said in olden times: “It ain’t nothin’ but a thang.” I am, instead, just talk­ing out loud. Pretty loud at that. I am kind of going through what the late Dr. Elis­a­beth Kubler-Ross described as the “Five Stages of Grief” in her acclaimed book “On Death and Dying.” Those stages are denial, anger, bar­gain­ing, depres­sion, and accep­tance, although not all of those stages are reached and not nec­es­sar­ily in any order.

Right now I am in denial and anger over being diag­nosed as dia­betic. I am angry that, at least my spe­cial­ist thinks, noth­ing can done about my most recent chronic pain. I am also depressed. I haven’t reached the bar­gain­ing and accep­tance stage.

If noth­ing else, these stages present a way to look at the process of work­ing out a sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem. If my mem­ory from classes that I took while attain­ing a minor in soci­ol­ogy — includ­ing a course on death and dying — serves me right the whole grief thing works on roman­tic breakups and var­i­ous other trau­mas. It’s funny. The last “roman­tic” breakup I had a cou­ple of years ago revealed only, perh­pas, the accep­tance stage and none of the other five. I sup­pose that could be like the exchange method of diet­ing, I could exchange two of glee for one of depression.

Leave ‘em laugh­ing. Sorry, I am just talk­ing to myself.

 Who Dat?

 What more might I really say after the thrilling over­time win the Saints foist upon the Vikings. Well, per­haps Gar­rett Harley’s 40-yard field goal was a bit thrilling. The Zebras stop­ping what seemed like every play after the OT began was get­ting tedious.

 I must admit though, a TV shot of where Hart­ley was and where he would have to kick the ball made me believe that this thing wasn’t going to work. It seemed like he had to boot the thing for miles! I really didn’t want to watch. I didn’t want to but did and I couldn’t even tell it went through because for some rea­son my recep­tion on the local Fox chan­nel here in Beau­mont, Texas, sucks. It prob­a­bly is the fault of the cable provider, the always help­ful Time-Warner.

 But the Zebras lifted their hands upward toward the heav­ens. And the Ain’ts were no longer the Aint’s they had been for the bet­ter part of 40-something years. They were the NFC Champions!

 Poor Old Man Favre. I really don’t know what to make of that dude. I want to like him but he seems as if he teeters on the edge of macho drama queen. He sure got his a** waxed yes­ter­day. He should have been totally rested after the game con­sid­er­ing the num­ber of times that dude got knocked down. But there isn’t too many like him. Many are cold but few are frozen. That is except for Peyton.

 Man­ning just needed the time to fig­ure it all out. That was what that first half was about. And I needed to do my taxes any­way. After I fig­ured out how to get back into the tax pro­gram I’ve used for the last four years, it didn’t take long at all and got a decent refund — per­haps in as lit­tle as a week — to boot. I was fin­ished by the start of the sec­ond half of Colts vs. Jets.

 Oh and Sanchez. He had a nice ride as a rookie. Now he has to start play­ing some NFL-style foot­ball. Like I could carry his shoul­der pads. Or for any other pro foot­ball player for that mat­ter. But every­one can be a Monday-morning quar­ter­back, no mat­ter what time of day it might really be.

 Pey­ton Man­ning. There is no foot­ball player any­where like him as far as I know. He will be the decid­ing fac­tor come kick­off for the Super Bowl in a cou­ple of weeks. That is, fol­low­ing an after­noon filled with your stan­dards Super Bowl hype. Yes, I wish Pey­ton the best but wish Drew Brees the mo’ better.

 In the end, I will root for my next door neigh­bors in Nawl­ins. They have some­thing to cheer about a long time coming.