Latest Poll Results - It's Official: We're Miserable

What a lousy week. In July, I asked you how your “last seven days" went. Out of 127 responses, only four of you (3%) replied, “couldn’t have gone better.”

By contrast, seven times as many of you (28, 22%) told me your week “totally sucked.”

Okay, let’s check out the adjoining categories. One in five of you (23, 18%) said the last seven days went “pretty well.” Add that to the three percent of you who had a great week, and - guess what? - it still rounds off to a pathetic one in five who could look back on a positive week.

Contrast that to four times as many of you - nearly half - who had a negative week. We arrive at this by adding the “totally sucked” group to the one in four (31, 24%) who reported the week “posed a serious challenge.”

Filling in the middle, one in three of you (41, 32%) reported that the last seven days “had its ups and downs.”

How would I have answered this poll? At the beginning of July, I came back from a road trip with a moderate depression and what I thought was a bad leg cramp. Put me in the “posed quite a challenge” week.

Then the leg cramp intensified into excruciating pain that kept me flat on my back for eight days looking up at the ceiling fan. Sciata. Life “totally sucked.”

Could I squeeze a good week out of my entire month? No. “Serious challenge" was the best I could do.

Granted, July was an anomaly for me. I like to think in any given month, I can cobble together at least two weeks that “went pretty well.” As for “couldn’t have gone better,” you gotta be kidding. Never in my entire life, not for a seven-day stretch, anyway.

I have bipolar. You’d think I could count on at least one reliable hypomania to rocket me through a week I would never forget. But in case you haven’t noticed, hypomania isn’t all its cracked up to be. Mine come preloaded with high anxiety and road rage. So - whenever I hear some stupid doctor saying we go off our meds because we’re addicted to our manias, well, never mind.

Obviously, our population has extreme difficulties with the concept of happy. Meanwhile, we have miserable nailed. I suspect the general population is similarly - though not as excessively - predisposed.

Maybe we’re simply not meant to be happy, and the sooner we acknowledge this the happier we’ll be. Maybe our perception of happiness is totally wrong, and we become miserable chasing after the wrong things. Maybe life is all about successfully negotiating its special challenges, instead. Maybe the best we can hope for is quiet acceptance.

Who knows? What this admittedly unscientific poll clearly tells us is that an overwhelming majority of us are having considerable difficulties negotiating this rather ubiquitous presence called life. Obviously, we need to do a better job.

Thinking Outside the Box: Lessons in Military History, Part II

In Part I, we looked at how thinking outside the box enabled the Romans to defeat rival Carthage at its own game in the First Punic War. Instead of facing the vastly more experienced Carthaginian navy on their own terms, the newbie Romans figured out, in essence, how to stage a land battle at sea.

In Part II, we investigate a mirror opposite, how the American Revolution’s best general (on both sides) took on the British Royal Navy deep in the American wilderness.

The Battle of Valcour Island, 1776

Washington forced the British garrison out of Boston in the spring of 1776, but they returned with a vengeance several months later, with a huge fleet bearing a large army weighing anchor in New York and another armada sailing up the St Lawrence into Quebec.

The British had no problem routing Washington’s army just outside New York City and reducing it to a remnant as it occupied the city and asserted itself in New Jersey. In Canada, they easily swept aside the badly outnumbered Americans there. A British invasion from the north and into New York would bring a swift end to the ill-fated colonial rebellion.

One of the American commanders in Canada, Benedict Arnold, fought a brilliant delaying action, destroying British ships, fortifications, and sawmills as he retreated south.

The British Army followed to the northern shore of Lake Champlain, deep in what was then impenetrable wilderness, while the Americans regrouped on the southern end. This set the stage for one of the strangest campaigns in military history.

The key to transporting the British Army south to New York City was via the waterways, first Lake Champlain, then Lake George, then down the Hudson. But first the British needed to build a fleet, and so did the Americans, if they intended to stop the British.

The Americans had already commandeered a sloop or two, but were at a decided disadvantage, lacking the necessary shipwrights and sailors, as well as supplies and resources.

The British, in the meantime, came well prepared, with 10 prefabricated ships, plus a 180-ton warship that they took apart in Canada, carted overland, and reassembled on Lake Champlain, not to mention the necessary shipwrights to build more boats. By the end of the summer, the British had a fleet of 25 heavily-armed vessels, commanded by a captain of the Royal Navy, together with a full complement of officers and sailors.

More boats were equipped to transport 9,000 British Army regulars.

The Americans, under the leadership of Benedict Arnold, proved extremely resourceful in knocking out their own boats - some little more than wooden platforms - to bring their roster to 15. These were built by mostly carpenter labor, manned in large part by ragged soldiers turned sailors. Arnold was a general who happened to have experience as captain of his own merchant ship.

In mid-October, as the nearby mountains turned white with snow, Arnold headed north with his strange flotilla of 500 “sailors” to meet the British. His intention was to lure the British into the narrow rocky strip of water between Valcour Island and the western shore of Lake Champlain. Here, the British would have difficulty bringing their superior firepower and sailing skills to bear.

The disadvantage was the Americans were backed into a corner, with nowhere to run.

The inferior American fleet held up under a withering British bombardment at extremely close range, managing to inflict serious damage in the process, but as the sun set it was clear the day belonged to the British. Virtually every American boat was ready for salvage. The British, meanwhile, were sitting pretty with ships that had not yet joined battle.

Facing the certainty of total annihilation, Arnold effected a brilliant escape in the dead of night, but with the British in hot pursuit. Under hellish weather conditions, one ship was captured while others had to be scuttled. The remnants of his fleet managed to make it to a refuge, where the boats were torched.

Arnold succeeded in leading the 200 remaining men under his command overland to an American fortification at Crown Point, thence (with the Crown Point garrison) to Ticonderoga, where a large contingent of American irregulars were dug in.

After that, the only thing standing between the British advance down the Hudson (and inevitable victory) was the oncoming winter. It turned out in losing the battle, Arnold had in fact set the scene for winning the war. By forcing the enemy to engage in an arms race way out in the middle of nowhere and then join battle, Arnold had run out the clock, delaying the British offensive by a good three months.

The Brits' only option was to retire to winter quarters in Quebec and try again next spring. This bought the American cause a precious year, time for Washington to rebuild his ragtag remnant of an army into a highly-trained fighting force. Time to assemble a strong regular army on the northern front.

When the British attempted a second invasion a year later, the Americans were ready, with an overwhelming force at Saratoga. The outstanding commander in the field was Benedict Arnold.

Arnold’s extraordinary military achievement is a shining example of thinking outside the box, of reframing issues and coming up with solutions where none seemingly exist. Unfortunately, by shifting his allegiance to the British later in the war and thus betraying his country, Arnold is much better known as a sober object lesson in thinking far too far outside the box.

Thinking Outside the Box: Lessons From Military History, Part I

Military history has a thing or two to teach us about life. Today’s and tomorrow’s two-part lesson involves thinking outside the box. Our case study focuses on two naval battles that took place two thousand years apart. The first was essentially a land battle fought on the water. The second a water battle fought deep inland.

The Battle of Mylae, 260 BC

The Western Mediterranean wasn’t big enough to accommodate two expanding superpowers. Rome was engaged in a land grab out from the Italian Peninsula while Carthage had a largely sea-based empire that extended up from North Africa into Spain and Sicily.

When the two finally butted heads in the First Punic War, it became evident that controlling the open seas was the key to victory. As inheritors of the Phoenician sailing tradition, Carthage had the decided advantage. Rome was faced with the prospect of building a fleet from scratch and then figuring out port from starboard.

They accomplished this in part by developing perhaps the first "simulators" in history, fabricating mock-up boats on land in which to train rowers and sailors.

Naval strategy of the day called for maneuvering one’s vessels into ramming and sinking the enemy ships. Rome’s survival depended on fighting naval battles on their own terms, which meant developing a strategy for fighting land battles at sea. Their solution was the corvus, a pivoting boarding device that hooked onto enemy ships.

The two fleets - about 130 ships on each side - met off of Mylae off the northern coast of Sicily. The Romans waited for the Carthaginians to initiate the action. When the enemy ships closed in, the Romans locked in their boarding devices and their soldiers swarmed aboard. The land battle at sea was joined.

The Carthaginians lost 50 ships and were forced to retreat. A succeeding battle resulted in further major losses.

In the end, the corvus proved a hazard in rough seas, forcing the Romans to adopt conventional naval tactics, but by this time they were real sailors.

By thinking outside the box - figuring out how to fight land battles at sea - the Romans accomplished the impossible, beating the highly favored Carthaginians at their own game, on their own “turf.”

To be continued ...

Next: The Battle of Valcour Island, 1776

The Asshole Effect

My most recent blog piece focused on the negativity people in my position attract. Call it the asshole effect. We’ve all had to deal with it. Knock on any door, these idiots are everywhere - people who hate Helen Keller, find fault in a sunset, and think cat food is fillet of cat, which they gleefully describe as tasting like chicken.

Their values are not our values. Hate thy neighbor, the Radioactive Plutonium Rule, It is better to receive than to give ... Whereas we struggle mightily trying to become better people, they cruise through life doing what comes naturally. Ironically - they are the miserable ones.

But it tends to be our friends and loved ones who hurt us most. From assholes, we know what to expect. From those close to us, the unexpected amounts to the unkindest cut of all.

Funny thing, a hundred individuals can heap praise on us - yet we vividly recall the one negative comment. Your dear friend throws himself in front of a car to save your life - you’re furious because three days ago he forgot your birthday.

What is it about us?

Today, by pure chance, I came across a blog piece on Psychology Today by self-described generalist, Jeremy Sherman PhD.

“We are all thin skinned,” he writes. “No one likes hearing anything that feels discouraging or critical. We don’t welcome news that feels like a setback, a loss of status, a loss of gained momentum. We find unpleasant anything that seems to say, ‘you missed a spot’ ..."

No surprise here. Here’s the eye-opener. Citing Jonah Lehrer, author of “How We Decide,” Dr Sherman documents how “loss aversion” contributes to irrational behavior: “Loss aversion explains why sustainable partnerships are ones in which positive encounters outweigh negative ones, five to one.”

Wait! Hold on! It takes FIVE positive encounters to offset ONE negative one? Apparently so. Not only that, any interaction only slightly ambiguous tends to get moved into the negative column. No wonder we’re so miserable.

I’m assuming Dr Sherman is talking about normal people. What about poor shmucks like us? We depressive types can’t seem to help it. We tend to give no weight to positive events and assign disproportionate value to the negative ones. Not only that, we tend to interpret neutral or only slightly encouraging events as negative.

So what does it take for us to balance the scales? A hundred positive events? No wonder we’re so miserable. Fortunately (I use the term loosely) I have bipolar. I have a tendency to over-react to good news. For instance, today I found out that a meteor did not fall on my head, and I’m ecstatic about that.

So what is going on here? Can we point to a system malfunction in the brain? Last month, at the Eighth International Conference on Bipolar Disorder in Pittsburgh, I came across a recent fMRI study that pinpointed a certain location in the brain that appears to be responsible for bipolars over-reacting to both reward and disappointment.

It’s as if we can’t turn our brains off.

The brain studies are coming in thick and fast. A lot of stuff is going on beneath the skull. Naturally, it’s easy - with our brains, especially - to interpret these findings as proof that we’re hard-wired for failure. Not necessarily. The brain is a work-in-progress and we can influence its development.

Granted, sometimes - often - it seems like we’re pushing a rock uphill. It helps if we have four muscular individuals in our scrum, shoulders to the boulder. But all it takes is one asshole, perched smugly above, with an extended pinky jabbing at our rock.

Screw you, asshole! This rock is running you over!

Comments You Don't Get to See

In my last blog piece, I recollected an unscheduled visit I had made to Walter Reed Army Hospital two years before. These are the type of spur-of-the-moment decisions journalists make all the time when they are on the road.

The purpose of my visit had been to see if I could get into the hospital’s psych unit to learn what was being done for returning soldiers with PTSD. Naturally - and appropriately - they did not let me in, Nevertheless, I made use of the visit in a blog I did for HealthCentral to draw awareness to PTSD.

“Time for quiet reflection on our heroes," I concluded in my piece. “Are they aware of what lies ahead for many of them? About the odium and contempt society will hold them in when it happens? These poor souls don’t have a clue.”

While there, I also encountered young men with missing limbs, which I also reported in my original piece.

At the moment, I am recovering from sciatica, which literally had me flat on my back for more than a week, I ventured out to the local diner last week, only to run into a telling reminder how fortunate I am: A woman at an adjacent table was relating to a neighbor about her husband, who had just had half his foot amputated.

That conversation prompted me to recall some of the suffering in my own family. Then those unforgettable images of those young men at Walter Reed seared through my conscious, with a pain far more intense than anything I had felt in my leg. Suddenly, my sciata didn't seem so bad.

Time to count my blessings. Time to come to terms with the natural process of aging. That was the theme of my most recent blog post here.

It seems “Anonymous” entirely missed the point:

“Let me get this straight,” he wrote. “You made an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment visit to Walter Reed Hospital, where you used the suffering of strangers to make yourself feel better?”

Even though I did not explain the purpose of my visit to Walter Reed in my last piece, it’s pretty obvious the reason wasn’t to make me feel better. But having already made up his mind, Anonymous wasn’t going to let a good tirade go to waste: “I bet they loved being an inspiration to you,” he concluded. “Some compassion, and admiration, for your aunt and cousin might have been warranted, rather than your self-serving, sanctimonious blather.”

Irrational attackers like Anonymous are an occupational hazard for all bloggers. They just happen, and when they try to post a comment, I simply hit the “Reject” button. There is no sense reasoning with them, as they are beyond reason. Typically, they have an antipsychiatry agenda, but a good many are just plain freelancers with anger issues. Here’s a doozy from a few months ago:

Keep popping those wonder drugs SAL aka McPimp {Oh, that's right, you don't do meds Mr. McPimp}. Maybe McPimp can get himself into see his other heros as in Biederman, Goodwin, Jamison, Nemeroff and all the other greed mongering bipolar child Pharma huggers!

Though McPimp is a pretty lame con-man; did you write that post yourself Johnny Boy aka Sal? Did you steal this Page from Herb of many faces and IDs play book? {making up people to talk at is an old trick for sociopaths like yourself}. I guess being a fraud isn't enough; now you make people up to have comments on your "LOST" adventure. You do know that plastic blow up dolls are next in your precarious relationship pattern. {laughing}

Let’s see: This version of Anonymous is confusing me with someone named Sal, is nursing a resentment with someone else named Herb and yet another individual who goes by the screen name ID, is entertaining a delusion that I’m not on meds (I’m on a very light dose mood stabilizer and have emergency meds on standby), that I fabricate imaginary characters, and that I’m part of the Pharma conspiracy.

I’m grateful to Phillip Dawdy of Furious Seasons, who acts as Jupiter to my planet earth. Namely, his gravitational field seems to attract all manner of space debris nursing cosmic resentments, some of whom have ideated physical violence against me. It helps when he makes up things about my personal life such as:

“Maybe that's why a little over two years ago, when I was making the Zyprexa documents available to the public and going up against Eli Lilly, McManamy was going on book tours, divorcing his wife who'd supported him while he wrote said book and moving off to the desert of San Diego County to find himself.”

That little piece of fiction drew a whole meteor shower of nutjob comments. Better they scar his planet rather than mine. But, occasionally one or two migrate into my orbit.

That’s what the “Reject” button is for.

How Lucky I Am

At ten last night, I plopped into bed exhausted, expecting sleep to overtake me. My sciata had other ideas. What was particularly depressing was I had been up and about that day, with recovery in plain sight. Now I had a possible major setback to contend with. It wasn’t till about four in morning that I was able to drop off into an approximation of sleep.

I literally had to force myself to get out of the house and go have breakfast and put on a happy face. Bantering with waitresses is part of my recovery bag of tricks. I managed to make a lame joke about adding a Coors Light to the coffee and orange juice and water that JoAnn, my other favorite waitress of all time, was bringing me.

Please, God. No setbacks please. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

I was hoeing into my California omelette when I started paying attention to the conversation at the adjacent table:

A woman about my age was bringing a neighbor up to date on her husband. Half his foot had been amputated. It was touch and go. He had diabetes. He had been experiencing loss of feeling in his extremities for years. He’d had a major infection. He’d been on crutches for more than a year.

That wasn’t the end of the story. He’d had complications. A severe rash. Meds side effects. Plus stupid doctors. Emergency room visits. On and on, it went.

Diabetes runs in my family. My father mercifully died before doctors got a chance to amputate him piecemeal. He was a cripple the last six or seven years of his life. My younger cousin barely made it to age 40. The last time I saw her, my aunt was pushing her in a wheelchair. Her complexion was ashen gray and I didn’t recognize her.

Then I thought of a spur-of-the-moment visit I had made two years before when I was in Washington DC. “Walter Reed Hospital,” I said to the cab driver. I found my way to what appeared to be the main unit. A young man with no leg, with what appeared to be his family in tow, was being wheeled down a corridor.

I found my way to a smaller out of the way building. Young men - kids - in wheelchairs were enjoying the spring sun outside. Everyone of them had a missing limb. I approached the first one. “Hello, sir,” I said. “I’d like to shake your hand.”

I did this a number of times. Then I found my way to the lobby of a rec center and did it again.

I paused in a grove of trees. There I lost it. My body shook uncontrollably. Tears streamed down my face.

JoAnn came over to my table. “You know,” I said. “I can’t help but think how lucky I am.”

The sciatica? Nothing.

I returned home, still feeling pain, but in a rare state of transcendent contentment. I settled into a comfortable sitting position on the couch with my laptop, performing small chores, savoring my temporary splendid relationship with my universe.

For the heck of it, I pulled up an educational video I had done earlier this year. In one scene, I am running full tilt as I leap onto a small rock, which becomes the platform for a spectacular sub-orbital mission. The film freezes at the apogee of my ascent. The closing segment of the video opens on the same freeze frame, then shows me gracefully descending in slow motion. It is a beautiful sight.

I was 59 when I filmed that piece. I’ll be 60 in a few months. I joked to my daughter in an email two days ago that age is the biggest risk factor for everything that can go wrong with you. So don’t be stupid like me, I advised her - stay young.

I may or may not be able to attempt that kind of leap again, but it doesn’t matter. Age has its compensations. I will be a grandfather in a few months. Yesterday, my daughter emailed me a recent photo. She is a natural beauty, but now she radiated a special aura.

The sciata is a bitch, a taste of things to come. I’m entering the decade where things fall apart. But, right now, I’m okay with that. That could very well change tomorrow. But at this very moment, trust me, I have so much to feel lucky about.

Raccoons!

As you know by now, three weeks ago I came back from a conference and a family visit with a bad leg cramp which turned out to be sciatica. Here’s what I left out:

My housemate Paul informed me we’d had two raccoon visitors. We live way out in the country, 3,500 feet up in the mountains. We get our fair share of four-legged visitors around here. Sometimes visitors with no legs.

It seems the raccoons had squeezed through the cat flap and had helped themselves to Bullwinkle’s cat food. Bullwinkle’s feeding station can best be described as a gravity-operated kibble silo. It seems that the raccoons had gotten in the habit of tipping over the plastic silo and helping themselves to several weeks of cat food.

I recalled just before my trip seeing evidence of their handiwork. I had attributed the effort to Bullwinkle, whose motive would have been my own negligence in failing to fill up the container.

But I was wrong! It was raccoons!

Can man outwit nature? We could close off the cat flap, but that would effectively make Bullwinkle a prisoner in her own home. Moreover, we would be conceding dominion to the interlopers.

Leave it to me, I assured Paul. I may only be a city boy, but I was up to the challenge.

I placed a metal coffee can which happened to have batteries in it on top of the feeder. Then I set an aluminum baseball bat atop the coffee can, with the top end leaning against the wall.

We know Bullwinkle won’t tip over the feeder, I explained to Paul. As for the raccoons ... I dropped the bat onto the entranceway concrete floor for effect.

The perfect booby trap. The noise would frighten away the raccoons.

In scientific terms, the amygdala, which mediates fear and arousal in the limbic system of the brain, would kick off the raccoons’ fight or flight response. The raccoons know they are encroaching on our territory, I explained to Paul, so their amygdalae will be on hair-trigger alert, Then we would just keep resetting the trap till the no-good bastards wised up.

A few days later, I drove forty miles out to the desert for my weekend water volleyball. My leg was still acting up, but I figured the pool exercise would be good for it, along with some good long soaks in the hot tub. Later that evening, I stopped in at my favorite eating spot, just a mile from the Mexican border. It was Sunday. The July Fourth weekend was wrapping up, business was dead, and it was just me and one other customer in the place.

Plenty of time to chat with Michelle, my favorite waitress of all time. Michelle is a genuine mountain girl, who grew up 10 or 12 miles from where I now live. Maybe she had some insights into raccoons.

In the place where she used to live, she related, she heard an unworldly banging noise in the middle of the night. The racket was far too loud to come from a mere animal, she figured. It had to be a human intruder.

“So I grabbed my shotgun,” she said in the same casual voice a city girl would use to describe choosing a Versace handbag. “And I was holding the barrel in the same hand as my flashlight.”

She entered the garage-basement ...

A giant raccoon was splayed on the top of a garbage can, trying to undo the clasps holding down the lid. With each effort, the raccoon would literally lift the container off the ground and crash it to the hard concrete.

Never rule out the resourcefulness of a mountain girl. Michelle found a high vantage point over the raccoon, loaded, and ...

Emptied a container of her own freshly-minted piss on the critter.

“Never saw the raccoon again,” she told me with a smile.

Michelle also advised me that she employs the piss option to keep the coyotes away. Literally, she flings the stuff into the bushes and the trees. That way, her cats stay safe.

It’s all about the cats.

I returned home and set my canvas bag on the table, and decided to call it a night.

CRASH!

One in the morning. I opened the door to investigate. The cat feeder was down. No raccoons in sight.

Man vs nature. Score Round One to man. With great satisfaction, I reset my booby trap and went back to bed. Bring it on, heh-heh-heh ...

At four in the morning, I heard a scratching sound from outside the bedroom door. Bullwinkle was asleep with me. It had to be the raccoons making a return visit. I braced myself, awaiting the inevitable crash ...

No crash.

Scatch-scratch-scratch ... Something was wrong. The raccoons were mocking me, holding a raccoon party, here, in my own territory. The nerve! Calmly, cooly, I reached in the dark for my nearest Gutenberg Bible and threw it against the bedroom door. Instantly, from outside, came the sound of a flapping cat door and the skittering of mother nature’s furry psychopaths in full retreat.

I reassured Bullwinkle, and psychically instructed her to stay put. Then I went out to investigate. The cat feeder was untouched. But my canvas bag was off the table and on the floor, half-way to the cat flap. Inside was the prize, one microsecond from being unprized - half a leftover tuna sandwich.

The raccoons had wised up alright. Score Round Two to nature.

Speaking of nature, nature called. Now it was my turn to wise up. I found a plastic cup and aimed. Then I went outside and scattered the contents outside the door and immediate environs. Then I reloaded and marked my territory further afield.

That was more than two weeks ago. The raccoons haven’t been back since. This, despite the fact that my worsening sciatica rendered me virtually defenseless to future furry onslaughts. As I triumphantly explained to Michelle, mountain girl extraordinaire, it’s a good thing I’m an alpha male - otherwise the raccoons would have laughed at my piss.

Let that appear on my gravestone: “Raccoons respected his piss.”

Bad Pain, Good News

As you know, I spent the last week lying flat on my back on the couch, breathing through sciatic pain, looking up at the spinning ceiling fan. My one bright spot during the week was an email from a site called Online College informing me that “Knowledge is Necessity” was included in their 100 Powerful Blogs for Self-Improvement.

According to Online College, the blogs “can help you achieve your goals, learn new skills, become a better parent, and expand your knowledge of the world around you.”

The list include blogs from a wide array of categories, from Personal Development to Art and Culture to the Environment to Travel, plus more. “Knowledge is Necessity” is one of 10 health and wellness blogs on the list, and the only mental health blog.

Had I started this blog at the end of 2007 rather than 2008, I probably would have called it something like “McMan’s Depression and Bipolar Blog” as a companion to my “McMan’s Depression and Bipolar Report” and “McMan’s Depression and Bipolar Web,” which I had been doing since 1999 and 2002, respectively.

But over time, my quest for understanding my illness (bipolar) has morphed into a quest of rigorous self-enquiry that embraces all of mental health and the wider world around it. “Knowledge is Necessity,” is the name I came up with to best demonstrate this new outlook, oddly the tag line I had been using since I first got started in 1999.

Thus, I find it gratifying to receive a pat on the back for charting a new course, just seven months into the effort.

Nevertheless, my guiding principles are the same ones I started out with back in 1999, namely that everything I write is aimed at either providing insight into how we tick (and tock) or helping us manage the challenges that life happens to throw our way. In short, it’s all about YOU, the individual, and those who love you.

This applies even when I am recounting my own experiences.

Back to couches and ceiling fans. I was squinting at my laptop, which I was holding with two hands above my head. Ah! Good news. Glad tidings have the power to lift us above our pain. But - the pain always comes back, reminding us how truly mortal we are.

Wisdom transforms us, transcends us. But it is pain that makes us wiser. I’m flat on my back, yet moving forward. That’s the way it is, always was.

Shoot For the Moon

Fortieth anniversary: July 20, 1969.

Walter Cronkite - And That's the Way It Was, 1916-2009

I don't have too many heroes. He was one of them.