Weaver's Web

<sigh>

 I spent more time this year working for political change than since I was in my 20s.   In January & February I canvassed door to door for Warren.   don’t wanna think how many miles I walked going door to door.   I just remember my ankles telling me, “this had better be worth it.”  After lockdown, there was phone banking.   I’ve always been a believer that politics is local and that my action needs to be local.   I no longer hold to that.   Not since my rights were stepped on during Prop 8, when forces from outside California funded the most vicious ads on our airwaves to deny not only the rights of my community to marry, but to undo my own already existent marriage.   How dare you tell lies about me.

In September & October, I journeyed virtually to Pennsylvania, spending day after day phone banking in the get out the vote effort there.   Vote Save America sponsored an adopt a state program and I opted for Pennsylvania. The adage tgat the state is Philadelphia in the East, Pittsburgh in the West, with Alabama in between isn’t all that far off.   Remember the Mason Dixon line is the boarder between Pennsylvania with Maryland & W, Virginia.   All this month, I moved my efforts to virtual, near daily travel to Georgia, in the get out the vote effort there for the Senate runoffs, jointing  NextGen, Fair Fight & the New Georgia Project.  

Personally, while I was unsurprised of the outcome in November in Pennsylvania given all the positive conversations I had in the 7 weeks prior to Election Day, I still feel the effort I put in, along with volunteers from all over the country, helped the cause significantly.   Similarly, the last month in Georgia, the determination I heard from the Metro areas of Altanta, Macon, Savannah, & Columbus, kept me calling.   I felt good about making sure folks knew, where and how to register, when to get their votes posted by mail or dropped off, and how to find their polling place.   I cannot tell you how any times I got told, “we have to get this done!”   At times I was unsure who was bolstering who I this effort. Yes, there were plenty of “please stop calling me”, but almost as many offered their thanks for what I was doing. 

Went to bed last night relieved, Warnock having been declared the winner by the AP, and Ossoff holding a 3,600 vote lead with the majority of the outstanding ballots predominantly from Democratic urban bastions.  Again I was unshocked, but deeply grateful.   In September, I had felt confident the Senate would flip; I thought a minimum of 4 seats would change.   I was dashed after the election, certain that although Biden wound take the White House, that McConnell would prevent and significant change in the new Senate and quash any attempt for progress in DC.   Early on, I had serious doubts Georgia would flip the Senate.   I went to sleep with incredible relief.  

Today started with great hope, thinking last night’s Georgia news would be the main news story of the day.   The staged drama in the House & Senate of objections to the acceptance of the ballots cast in the Electoral College might come in a close second.   Instead, the news story of the day was a riot incited by the President.  I’m incredulous.   Protesters breeched the Capital, while both the House & Senate were in session no less.   Someone died in the course of the protests, a woman shot inside the Capital.   They smashed windows and there are photos of them closing in on and chasing solitary capital policemen. I was struck that many of the police were people of color; I saw no protestors they were not white.   Not one.   I was also struck the difference in the police response to white conservative protesters, in comparison to say how the protesters were treated the day the President decided to hold up a Bible in front of a church near the White House. 

The insanity promoted by this charlatan in the White House cannot be over soon enough.  I pray the state of NY is ready to indict him January 21.

This is to be cross posted to my Dreamwidth, LiveJournal and FaceBook accounts.

I realize there are people who will see this title and read no further. So be it. I cannot speak to anyone who chooses not to listen. 

I preface this with notice I’m a retired physician, residency trained in the University of California system in Family and Community Medicine. I was board certified in Family Practice. I spent 35 years working predominantly with immigrants, at times serving families that spanned 4 and occasionally 5 generations. Some family units in my practice were as large as 70 family members. Why is that important? It gave me clarity just how interconnected family and community units are for disease clusters, both for contagious and non-contagious conditions.

Poverty affects not only access to health care, but access to healthier food and lifestyles. It is not an accident that hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, heart disease and obesity are rampant within poorer communities. It is a point easily argued that any economic, social or political system that keeps people from climbing into a higher socio-economic class, dooms them to remain in poverty and more often than not, dying at an earlier age of diseases that could have been delayed, if not prevented altogether. I believe this has been fostered by much of the Republican Party in power, but that is not the point of this essay either.

I am talking directly at this point of the president’s current behavior that puts anyone in his immediate vicinity at risk for contracting Covid-19. It appears to be the culmination of his denial of the scientific, medical & epidemiological information he has been given over the past 10 months, and his refusal to accept it, let alone abide by it.

I remain gob smacked that face masks have been made a political issue. I defy ANYONE on the far right, to tell me they would be comfortable undergoing surgery where the surgeon or anyone on the operating room team refused to wear a face mask. Those face masks are predominantly for the protection of the patient. Since the bulk of people who have spread Covid-19 are either asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic, mask wearing by people who feel perfectly well, is to prevent the ones who don’t yet know they are infected and contagious from spreading this disease. Yes, you have a modicum of personal protection afforded by your own mask, especially if it is a properly fitted N-95, but the main reason face masks limit the spread of Covid-19, is to stop infected people from infecting others. FULL STOP. I repeat, it’s to stop symptomless infected people from infecting others.

Instead of sharing the message that masks are crucial to prevent disease spread and modeling that behavior to the American public, the president has undermined that message from the get-go, along with any meaningful modeling of social distancing, which brings us to the present and my main point. Cramming people into tight spaces, even out of doors, and simultaneously discouraging use of face masks are exactly the circumstances that cause what epidemiologists label super-spreader events. This applies to Trump’s pre-debate preparation (likely why former Gov. Christie wound up hospitalized with Covid), to the Rose Garden presentation of Amy Coney Barrett to a throng of political dignitaries sitting shoulder to shoulder, and to Trump’s donor appearance at Bedminster after the presidential debate, and after his close aide and advisor Hope Hicks had been diagnosed with Covid infection and the entire White House staff should have been quarantining. Even the debate put people at unnecessary risk for infection. The Trump entourage after arriving too late for onsite viral testing, entered the venue, sat and then each removed their masks. The hubris flabbergasts me.

Trump was hospitalized after being short of breath, febrile and hypoxic at the White House. He was given early on a large number of Covid treatments, some experimental and many of them simply not available to most of the American public as soon after diagnosis as he was given them, if available at all at any point, given much of the public’s access to state of the art care. Note that Covid death rates have been significantly higher at public and rural hospitals, than at University institutions where the staff to patient ratio is significantly lower. We must recognize the President was been given the VIP treatment, something 95% of the population, if not more, will never be able to receive, and even for those that get it, not with the speed the President did.

What did the President do in the wake of his hospitalization? A photo op from a sealed limousine the day after his hospitalization, putting two Secret Service members in the vehicle with him at unnecessary risk. Even masked, I wouldn’t be willing to enter a closed vehicle, in close quarters with a patient newly diagnosed with Covid. I know of too many health care workers who have died from Covid contracted in the confines of the hospital. There is evidence that the size of the initial dose of virus when you first get infected may significantly affect your outcome. Secret Service members are alleged to be willing to take a bullet for the President; apparently for some it could mean they were willing to get infected for him as well, for a photo op.

However, even more disturbing behaviour came with his return to the White House. Hours after Trump tweeted, “…. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”, Trump climbed the stairs to the White House balcony by himself, and at the top of the stairs, somewhat breathless, and on camera for the entire country to see, he removed his mask and only then entered the White House. If he felt better than he had in 20 years, why did a single flight of stairs leave him visibly short of breath? Moreover, he was actively infected and supposed to isolate from others until he no longer infectious. Was there no one else inside the White House? Was there no one inside those walls not already infected?

“…Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life….” The cavalier recklessness of this offends me. According to a former director of the CDC, Covid-19, a disease that did not exist a year ago, is currently the 3rd leading cause of death in the US, after Heart Disease and Cancer. 220,000 Americans are known to have died of Covid in the past 9 months, and the death rate for the same period is up almost 300,000 from the year prior, which forces me to question how many people died secondary to undiagnosed Covid. On average, 1,000 Americans die of this daily. Further, these statistics say nothing about what long-term or permanent consequences survivors may have. Covid has touched my family. Both my siblings, also healthcare providers have had it. There are at least 8 in my extended family who have survived it. Someone I know personally, 20 years my junior, appears to have some heart problems secondary to the infection, now 5 months on.

What we have seen from the president is a total disregard for anyone other than himself. He has by example put way too many Americans at risk, and in the past month, super-spreader events tied to this White House directly, have resulted in more cases of Covid than in New Zealand, Viet Nam and Singapore combined, for the same time period.

What harm is done by wearing a mask? What harm is done by protecting the vulnerable? Yes, a face mask is often not the most comfortable thing to wear, but watching a neighbor, a colleague, a friend, a loved one, ill, hungry for air & gasping for breath is much more uncomfortable. So is the guilt of finding out you were likely responsible for spreading that illness to them.

This simple request, that all of us mask up whenever we are out in public and maintain an adequate social distance is for each other’s safety. This current sense of American exceptionalism, that it’s “my body, my choice”, isn’t defending your right to choose whether you take risks with your own health or not. It’s defending your misguided right to be Typhoid Mary, your right to put the health of others in your immediate vicinity at risk. If all of us recognize that, the choice to mask up is clear, and each of us needs to treat others who choose not to wear a mask in public as the pariahs they are, just as in California the bulk of the populace recognizes that someone smoking in your immediate space is infringing on your right to clean and safe air.

The Kansas legislature has created a rather dramatic experiment.  Their governor, a Democrat, imposed a state-wide mandatory mask requirement for everyone when out in public and the legislature, controlled by Republicans, rolled back her authority to so.  It has resulted in some counties having the mandate and others not.  Roughly two months after this went into effect, the rate of Covid infections in the counties observing the mask mandate is half of what it is in the counties where the mandate is not in effect.  Half. 

It grieves me more than I can express, that a concern for public safety and for the public's health was made into a political issue.  Wearing a face mask should never have been a mark of one's political party.   Keeping one another safe, and keeping the resource of our already overburdened hospitals from becoming overwhelmed should have been a uniting message for every single American in this country. We were able to pull together in the face of warfare in both the First and Second World Wars.  We all stepped up here at home to protect our American society from a threat from abroad.  We rolled up our sleeves as one country.  Yet this time, instead of trying to address something that was an existential threat for so many in our midst, we have failed.  We have fallen into partisan bickering and politicized something that should have remained apolitical.

As a result, our current death toll from Covid-19 is more or less 300,000, and half of that could probably been prevented. 

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I’m sitting and doing a mental post Mortem on this headache.

If you’ve never had a migraine, nor anyone who does, they are not just a headache. Classic migraine, which is what I have, is a neurologic condition. Other than being male, my description could be found in a textbook. My headaches started during puberty, there was a family history (in my case on both sides of the family), there’s a warning aura, in my case visual (scotomata, a combination of flashing lights and jagged lines across my visual field), and there are known triggers. My very first migraine happened half an hour into a wine and cheese party my freshman year in college. Tyramine, a decarboxylated amino acid found in both aged cheese and red wine is a specific trigger for many.

I, like my mother, can also have visual triggers. I absolutely abhor op-art, and strobe lights. Mom often had trouble with fluorescent lights especially towards the time a bulb needs to be replaced. I learned the hard way never to drive across a north south bridge at sunset or sunrise. Similarly driving past regularly spaced trees at dawn or dusk. Visual field testing for glaucoma is no picnic & I have to premedicate with a couple of cups of coffee to be on the safe side.

I am fortunate that I generally appear to be responsive to caffeine. For years I relied on triptan medications, also highly effective for me when the occasional migraine aura began. As a young man, my residency was an absolutely miserable experience because constant fatigue and sleep disruption are common migraine provokers. Daily periods of meditation, some thing I rarely had time for during my residency, were successful preventatives when I could do them.

One of the early medications that I was given back in the early 70s was caffeinated ergotamine tablets which almost always was successful in aborting a headache. There were unfortunately limits in how often you could use it. When our godchildren were young, I was caught during a trip to the San Diego zoo by an aura, when I had no triptans on hand to treat it. In a moment of panic, I remembered that Cafergot had once been effective for me and decided to slam some caffeine to see if I could prevent the headache. Two pots of coffee later, the aura was successfully aborted, & the headache avoided. Since headaches at this point in my life are infrequent, & triptans expensive, whilst coffee Is readily available, caffeine is now my usual go to. Pissing like a racehorse is decidedly preferable to cowering in a dark closet.

In any event, I am suspecting my moments on the deck this morning looking out onto the redwoods on the near side of the deck railing, shimmering in the early morning sunlight, probably was the equivalent of driving across the Golden Gate bridge at dusk. Note to self, next time face the house instead.

Watching what is happening in the streets across this country where the police and where people of privilege are lashing out at demonstrators, even peaceful demonstrators, the reason for those demonstrations is crystal clear in my mind. It is becoming clearer to many others as well, as evidenced by the number of people out marching who are not people of color.

I am troubled at the number of demonstrators that are being beaten by the police and moreover there seem to be no shortage of videos on line where the demonstrators being beaten are people of color while white demonstrators around them look on in horror, only getting struck when they try to intervene to stop the abuse.

This is not to say that white people are not being targeted at all for protesting. I am saying that the white 17 y/o that’s been charged in the Kenosha shootings walked right past police and went home to Illinois. Had a black 17 y/o been carrying a long gun, he wouldn’t have been apprehended at the scene either. He would have been shot. That’s the state of this country. A black child cannot play with a toy gun without it endangering his or her life.

We glorify weapons in this county and deny them to our underclass. That glorification must end. And we must do what we can to end the permanence of people being consigned to a lower class simply because of circumstances of race, ethnicity, gender, faith, orientation or sexual identity.

Black lives matter.
Brown lives matter.
Trans lives matter.
Lesbian & gay lives matter.
Muslim lives matter.
Jewish lives matter.
Sikh lives matter.
Asian lives matter.
Women’s lives matter.
Aboriginal lives matter.

Until we recognize the validity of each of these, we have absolutely no right to insist that all lives matter.

So bloody much has happened…

It’s hard to believe that it’s been three months since I’ve done any posting here. Life happens. You would think that with quarantining at home that I’d have plenty of time to post & yet it’s been horrifically busy.

I’m currently sitting in the kitchen of friends; we’ve been evacuated for the past week. Wild fires are still burning across much of Northern California. A little over a week ago we had a thunderstorm, something highly unusual for this time of year. Northern California simply does not get rain in July or August. There were multiple lightning strikes, multiple very loud claps of thunder. It was followed by short burst of rain & then, nothing.

Or so it seemed.

I should have known better. There were many many lightning strikes over the course of Sunday, the bulk of them not with an earshot. Evacuation of our area was ordered by Tuesday evening at around seven. I spent the next several hours packing up essentials to evacuate & arguing with LJ about evacuation. Sensing mid afternoon that we might have to flee, I had already packed a bag with clothing for a week, as well as all my meds & they were in the garage next to the door.

The county had sent out an emergency alert for all residents north of the Russian River & south of Stewart’s point Road to evacuate. We live right at the bend in the river so the river is actually both north and south of us, But our section is contiguous with the north side of the river, so it was absolutely clear to me that we were mandated to leave. My husband didn’t see it that way. Eventually I won out, when he realized I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. The roads in our area are narrow and tortuous. Exit from or area, especially if everyone is leaving all at once, is a cluster fuck, so the county authorities if they are concerned about the possibility of a disaster tend to issue warnings early (actually, a good thing in my book).

The second I was clear we were having to leave a checked in with friends of mine in Santa Rosa & they had room for us and all three of the dogs. Amen! Al & Dan are old friends, with two canids of their own. They’ve been personally affected by the fire storms that happened here. Their last home, recently sold, was one of two in their subdivision that survived the tubs fire three years ago. Even though their home survived, they were out of it for almost 2 months, Secondary to all the ash and debris from the fire all around them.

For reasons I find somewhat frustrating, the local authorities as well as the state have been referring to all the fires across Sonoma and Napa Counties, now extending up in to Lake county as a single blaze, because they all started simultaneously from the same lightening storm. All the published autistics have been from the one lumped together fire. The portion of it that was threatening our home was the Walbridge fire & finding out how much containment was on that was like pulling teeth. Last night we were informed we could go home, but as LJ’s car is at the mechanic’s till this afternoon we’re still in Santa Rosa. Our tenants called last night when they got home to say that all was well, that other than the plants needing water everything was fine.

My stress level is down. Now all I have to worry about is the pandemic.

And the upcoming elections.

It’s been 96 hours since I last ventured off the property. The days run into one another; is it really only 4 days? It puts me a bit in awe yo think if the amount of time Anne Frank & her family hid in an Amsterdam attic

I awoke Monday to find my new phone dead and plugged in. I tried another lightning cord. Nothing. Changed the cube. Still nothing.

Crap. Not even 2 1/2 weeks since buying it and it had bricked. My alternatives appeared to do without my phone during this pandemic or venturing out to the place I’d gotten it, to get something done about it. I chose the latter. That decision took about 30 seconds. At the moment I’m questioning that wisdom, but more about that later.

I’ve gotten the phone at AT&T & I returned there, arriving 10 minutes before they opened. Immediately, I was struck by some of the social changes in just the five days since I’ve last been out. The line for Trader Joe’s stretched a full block, passing in front of the AT&T store; people were standing off for 6 feet apart, thanks to Blue masking tape lines on the sidewalk. The line parted 12 feet, allowing me to stand in line in front of the AT&T store, two people behind me extending out into the parking lot. Once in the store I found they had little to offer me. It seems any service on an iPhone after it’s been purchased has to be done by Apple & Apple has closed all of its brick and mortar stores, opting to go noncontact over the net. I looked at the clerk helping me & said how am I supposed to call them if I now have no phone to use? He sent me down at a back kiosk with a phone that he cleaned copiously in front of me and allowed me to dial through to Apple. After working my way through the phone tree, I waited for 45 minutes for a live person, only to be cut off after 34 seconds. Crap.

I decided not to sit there, but to run my other errands in town & try my luck via the computer once I got home. From there it was stop to get gas (gloves and facemask back on), go to the market to get fresh veggies and bread for my husband, & then head for home. Five minutes after I left the market, it dawned on me, my new iPhone has the ability to charge wirelessly, if I could get a wireless charger, so I doubled back to the same shopping center where AT&T was, in hopes that Best Buy was open.

Entering the shopping center I drove past Costco, with a line that snaked all the way around to the back end of the store, again people 6 feet apart thanks to blue masking tape on the sidewalk. There was no line at Best Buy, but the store was not allowing customers in. Strictly sidewalk pick up for phones in orders, or a queue to request at arms length, for a worker to get what you wanted from inside the store. It bothers me right now to realize that I was too close to that worker, who was not wearing a face mask, although I was. Roughly 10 minutes after I got there, I was on my way with a wireless charger as well as two new lightening charge cords just in case, both cords I’d tried that morning were the problem & not my phone.

In retrospect the two new chords were a very good idea, because both the cords I tried that morning had failed. There was nothing wrong with the phone itself. It works just fine. If only I had tried the brand new cord & cube that came with the phone, The whole trip might have been unnecessary.

It’s Good Friday as well as the second day of Passover. Smart religious people are taking their faith online rather than in person. I was just reading a piece in of all things, The wall street journal, about people with the coronavirus dying and ICUs alone, families when lucky getting to make their goodbyes by cell phones encased in plastic bags, or by Skype or Zoom.

I found myself in tears. I found myself mentally standing next to my father’s deathbed at Cornell hospital in the fall of 1995, there with my mother, my sisters & my aunt and uncle, weeping as pop left this world for the next. He had lost consciousness by that point, but being there with him, as awful as it was, was still the only place I felt I could be, and it was a valuable piece of my grieving process. After he was gone, I sat there alone with his body, waiting for the mortuary to come get him. Pop had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family; it is an obligation no Jewish body is left alone after death before burial, lest it be defiled. Would that have happened there at a major NYC hospital? Unlikely. Did I need to do that for my father? No choice. Absolutely. So there I sat. In silence. With my grief. There are 613 mitzvot to observant Jews. It’s said that the mitzvah of preparing the dead for burial is the greatest of the 613, as it’s the only one where the person on the receiving end of the act cannot thank you. Whether that’s true or not, it was something I needed to do for my father. It was as much my need as the kosher casket was for one of my sisters.

The tragedy of this pandemic has been compounded; families facing the loss of a loved one are unable to be there with that person as they pass, they cannot gather to mourn together to physically comfort one another. It is all from a distance. For that my heart aches. As a child who’s lost a parent I dearly loved, someone I still grieve for a quarter of a century after the fact, I found myself weeping today for so many people I do not personally know. A boy from a good Jewish family who hopes that the words from Matthew 5
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall find comfort,”

Both my sisters are infected with Covid-19.

One tested Tuesday, the other yesterday. Amen, for the moment both of them are only mildly ill. It also means mom, who is elderly, frail & recuperating from two surgeries to replace her hip, & has been coughing, is likely infected as well. I spoke with all of them in the last 12 hours and their outlook is surprisingly positive.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I was restless throughout the night. I last remember looking at the clock at a quarter past three. Joan’s call woke me at half past seven.

I’m relieved to hear how good she sounds. In retrospect, I’m sure Typhoid Mary sounded pretty good as well. She was only on briefly to reassure me she’s doing OK and to have me call mom. Joan needed to get going to get calls into her three children to inform, as well as reassure them.

Mom was very upbeat, much more so than I’d expected. She’d had a conference call with my other sister & with mom’s internist. Mom’s local doc is in the thick of this epidemic and was really effective in calming her down. Note, that there’s a large family in mom’s area that’s been on the national news, the matriarch & 3 of her adult children having succumbed to Covid-19, after a big family dinner a couple of weeks earlier. Another 3 of that family is in the hospital where her internist practices. The upshot of the call is her doc suspects mom is almost certainly infected & likely at least a week or more into this, with no real decompensation so far. Given her already compromised lungs, she’s got an oxygen saturation monitor at home and O2 wise, she’s doing fine. He stopped the anti-inflammatory med she was taking, since there has been some reports that it might decrease her ability to fight the virus. He made it clear to her, even in her age cohort, most people survive this virus. They’re not the people who make the news.

I’m much calmer this morning than last night. My dreams thru the night were rough, no surprise I guess given my personal history. I’m not just a gay man of a certain age, I lived in San Francisco at the dawn of the HIV crisis, a young physician doing my medical training at the time. I watched man after man, my age and older, sicken and die, some very quickly, some slowly, the walking dead among us. It was a wrenching time emotionally. I saw them in the hospital, I saw them in the clinic, I saw them in my social circle, I saw them as strangers walking down the street.

One man still haunts my memories; he’d come in with pneumonia, ending up on a respirator within a day or two. In a rare moment of consciousness while intubated, he motioned for a pad on his bed stand. With a shaky hand he wrote, “snow me, let me go & donate my eyes when it’s over.” I cried myself to sleep that night. He was still in his 20s.

I need to get on with my day. I’ve got plenty to get done here in the house, and I have to take my husband into town. The mechanic just called & my husband’s car is ready.

Was just on the phone with mom, who’s recently returned home after a very rocky course, post hip replacement. She was in the midst of her home PT bed exercises, and after a really difficult day, she was feeling significantly better. It drove home just how important a good night’s sleep is.

After she remarked how concerned she was about the amount her children & grandchildren fly/travel, given the current pandemic, she expressed some real vitriol for the Trump Administration’s sluggish response to the new illness. Before I could ask if she would watch his televised address that night, countered, “I cannot stand to listen to him. He’s truly the ‘moron-in-chief’.

I grew up doing The NY Times crossword puzzle. I loved both Scrabble & Boggle. A love of word games runs in the family. And we’re good at it. Mom still does the Sunday Times crossword every week, at nearly 90.

In college, the campus weekly newspaper awarded a gift card to the first person to hand in a completed solution. After my 6th win my freshman year, they stopped letting me enter. Now I thought I was good, until my sister brought home her then fiancé. Over a friendly game of boggle (the big version), I was impressed I found dentists, until my now brother-in-law countered with orthodontist.

A decade ago I discovered the Words with Friends app for my iPhone2, and it was love at first sight. Scrabble on the go. I wound up playing a fair number of folks I knew from LiveJournal, which meant many were other gay men. A disproportionate number were other redheaded, gay men, for some strange reason, but guys if you’re reading this, you know who you are.

What words do they drop on me?
Raw. Ram. Rump. Hard. Orgasm. Thrust. Lube. Tryst. Erect. Wad.

I guess this now feels like Words with Friends - with Benefits!