A Good Day, et al

1  It makes all the difference when you're not in severe pain, or feeling like you've been hit by a couple of semi-trucks. I remember when I felt this good every morning of my life. I'd wake up rearing to go and I'd spend my day composing, gardening, sitting in the park with friends, walking... I remember when I built a loggia single-handedly in 1991. I had a life before Thyroidzilla hit me up-side the head. But once every five or six months I wake up feeling good, and it gives me hope. The problem is, when I do wake up feeling good, I immediately want to get busy doing the things I've missed over the past few months, but I know that I can't. I have to lay low as if I still feel like crap, or else I'll over-do it and feel like crap tomorrow. What a pile.

Thanks for Nothing, OKC

On Friday evening Stillwater was hit hard by a major storm and flash flood. In the space of 90 minutes, 6 inches of rain were dumped on our city. I seriously considered making my way to Lowe's for some sandbags to guard our front door.

I'd made plans to go to Ville's at 7:00 and kept checking our local network telly channels to find out the status. As usual, Oklahoma City's channels were covering only the areas that might affect them, despite the fact that it wasn't even sprinkling there. They didn't even have the little Dopler map of the state in the upper right corner. I've gotten used to their, "If it ain't happening here, it ain't happening!" attitude (Tulsa's no better, they only cover the weather once it has passed over us and is on its way to their city), but this time they really dropped the ball. And I'm not even going to talk about the funnel cloud we saw less than a mile from our house. I then went to the weather channel and the current report said, "Light rain".

As it happened, we had major flash flooding and two people were washed into Boomer Creek that runs through the center of the city and had suddenly turned into a river. The rain stopped and, not knowing there was a flood, I decided it was okay to drive across town to Ville's.

Of course, I got detoured onto one of the most flooded streets in the city and I eased out of the tire-high water only very carefully. There were no road blocks on the streets that needed them and I got turned around at every street that would take me across the creek. Boomer lake too had flooded its banks and the road and peninsulas were under water. When I finally got to my destination (an hour later than I'd planned) there were helicopters and fire trucks everywhere.

And what were the OKC and Tulsa channels broadcasting? The usual sitcoms and the weather in Connecticut.

Thanks for nothing.

Of Lobsters & Plants

Thanks to a friend’s journal entry that I read back in the mid-1980s, I pretty much gave up lobster. He wrote about the “screams” emitting from the boiling pots and I have been traumatized ever since. These days, I can order lobster from a menu, but I could never prepare it myself, and every time I walk by the lobster tank at the supermarket I feel so badly for them. It doesn’t help that their claws are rubber banded shut, either. Well, all that has changed as of Thursday morning when I read that lobsters don’t feel pain.

“According to the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), when considering the concept of pain, it's the "subjective, emotional response that's considered important" and not the "activation of pain sensors in the body."
"Only animals that can experience emotions such as fear, anxiety, distress, and terror can feel what we think of as pain."

This article from ABC News seems to back up these findings. When asked whether lobsters feel pain after being placed in boiling water, Tony Yaksh, a professor of anesthesiology, responded that because they lack the emotional component, lobsters feel something different than pain as we know it. Additionally, an independent study funded by the Norwegian government found that the nervous systems of lobsters are too simple to process pain.”

All right, fine, but it’s that “something different” that now has me worrying. Maybe it's as bad as, or worse than what we feel. Probably not. Still, I feel a little silly for this relative sense of relief and lack of guilt that I’m experiencing. This study also confirms a theory of mine. Like most tree-huggers of the 1960s and 70s, I read The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and The Findhorn Garden by the Findhorn Community, and for years I felt guilty every time I had to prune back one of my houseplants.

Later, I reasoned that pain is an alarm intended to alert a life form that something is wrong and that it needs to get as far away from the source of the pain as possible, whether that be an act of violence, an illness, or something self-inflicted. If plants felt pain, then I think that long ago when they were being chomped on by dinosaurs they would have evolved some mode of mobility. That would have been more difficult than simply losing the ability to feel the pain, however. But I’m reiterating if they ever felt pain to begin with. I don’t think they ever did.

Wow. The crap I’ve carried around for the past 20 years…