Dr. Mike

This is about the funniest thing I've ever seen on television

It's an old SuperBowl ad from the internet boom times.

http://www.lspagency.net/pd-folder/pd-reels/Fitzpatrick/Driveway%20Insidious.mp4

I enjoyed looking at this map of the neighborhoods of Manhattan, from the Strangemaps blog. Click to enlarge.

Protester in Boston

New things I learned today

1. Abbreviation on the Emergency Room whiteboard: "SPAW": "Status Post Ass Whipping," used when someone has just been beaten up.

2. A worker in a funeral home told me that after an autopsy, they can't fit all the organs back into the body. So at the funeral home they soak them in some preservative and stick them in the foot of the coffin in a plastic "goody bag."

A moment in the presence of a master will show you the way

This is a quote from the doctoral thesis of Bob Kull, who spent a year in voluntary solitude in a sort of spiritual and academic experiment. Bob and I had the same Zen teacher, Deneal Amos.

"When Patti arrived to the island in February, she brought the first news of the outside world I’d had in over a year. Deneal Amos had died in the previous spring. He’d been a strong presence in our lives as a spiritual mentor and as a source of strength and comfort. We’d both felt close to him for a long time, and we’d known that if things ever got really rough, we could always go to Deneal. Now he was gone and it seemed like there was a hole in the world where he’d been.

"It felt strange not having known about his death for so long, especially since I’d sent him loving kindness meditation each day. There was also a sense of the torch being passed on. As long as Deneal was alive we could lay the main responsibility for maintaining spiritual practice in the world on him and on others like him. Now it’s time for us to assume that responsibility ourselves. It’s time for all of us to do our part in keeping awareness of Spirit alive in our lives; to remember that beneath often intense surface conflict, we are not alone. We are all manifestations of the same deep flow of Life. If I’ve learned anything of importance in solitude, it’s how empty and futile life is without spiritual grounding - however Spirit manifests itself to each of us. The difficult task is bringing this knowledge into everyday life."

the edges of desire

I've had a conflicted relationship with desire (as a thing) for many years. There is a Western interpretation of the tenets of Buddhism which basically says that desire causes pain, that by avoiding desire you can escape suffering. However, desire is part of being human, and not to have desire is in a way to avoid life. And life, I think, is a good thing: it is felt to be the greatest gift in Christianity, and a human life is an opportunity for bettering oneself in other religions.

But on looking into the question, I think what is damaging is not desire itself, but something that occurs at the intersection of desire and our lives. Something happens at the edge of desire, or we do something with it. This has been called "clinging" but I think that word doesn't quite capture it.

We take a desire and turn it into dogma. We say that because we desire something, therefore the universe is bad if it doesn't afford us that thing. We cling to the things we want, or more specifically, we cling to the idea of the things we want. They become solidified, fossilized into our psyche, and we suffer therefrom.

And what I said is just a stab at it. If anyone else can figure it out better, let me know.

new diet

In Spain, I have discovered the makings of a new diet: The Oxtail Diet. You can have as much oxtail as you want, and nothing else. Probably you will lose weight quickly.

suicide flashback

"She did them a favor," the cop said.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of his patrol car. It was a cold night in the winter of 1988, maybe 1:00 a.m., Framingham, Massachusetts. He knew me from around town, the police reporter, and saw me standing outside in the cold and told me to get in so I didn't freeze.

"What do you mean?" I said. Across the street a man - civilian - in another cruiser was holding his head and rocking back and forth, obviously crying out. A child was sitting next to him. A few feet away was another car, a woman in the front seat, head slumped back, not moving.

"She didn't do it at home," the cop said.

Kiss

Over the head of the man in the intensive care unit, in a few cubic feet of space above and to the left of his head, in the same space where I stand to examine him, in the same space a nurse stands to give injections and adjust IV infusions, in the same place where we work to insert nasogastric tubes and adjust the ventilator, in a space where I worry in some patients about what I touch because I don't want to spread severe pathogens to other patients - in this space the man's daughter holds up her own four-year-old daughter, leans her across toward his face, and tells her to kiss him a few hours before he dies.

flashback

Bad flashback last night. I was sitting with a family coming to grips with the reality that the patriarch is going to die within a few hours. The wife: "I was going to ask our priest to see him today." And then I wash back through a series of thoughts and memories: well, can't someone give the sacrament of the sick under duress even if they're not a priest? No, that's baptism. Yes, baptism: like that 18-week gestation fetus/baby I watched die under warming lights after preterm labor couldn't be stopped, and the doctor came in later with some water in his hand and baptised the struggling little being, putting a cross of water on its forehead, saying, "I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit," then saying the mother wanted him baptized, and there's no priest or minister around, and he's about to die. And then he died. 

The memory hit me like a physical force. I had to get up and leave the room.