Only Mostly Red

As he fell slowly into sleep, Pippin had a strange feeling: he and Gandalf were still as stone, seated upon the statue of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind.
-The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien




I am a lousy driver, but unlike most of my fellow Americans, who are pretty much all lousy drivers, I know I’m a lousy driver and that makes me an excellent driver. At least that’s the way I see it.

You see, we are taught defensive driving; to look out for the other guy. But that’s only half the job. I do look out for the other guy but I also look out for yet another guy who while driving has little use for lane management and an attention span shorter than Michael Jackson’s restraint at a Cub Scout swim party. (Too soon?) This other guy I look out for is me. So I’m doing twice the work out there and I think that makes me a better driver. It certainly makes me a snobbish driver. Yes, I’m a lousy driver but I good at it.

I’m writing about driving because I think about it a lot, especially when I’m driving. I wonder why there is traffic. Why do we group together like packs of wandering, colliding dogs who weave back and forth from one dumpster to the next, from one odor to the next, instead of like school of fish who move in perfect synchronicity without so much as touching, just inches from one another? Why is it that on the highway we change from a smooth-as-silk flock of starlings into a mosh pit as soon as someone puts out an orange cone? And of course I wonder why is it that the last guy to see the red light turn green is the guy at the front of the line?

My commute is 22 miles. About 13%, just under 3 miles, of it is urban. The rest is rural. The urban part, the part with traffic lights, is on one road in a straight line. There are 14 traffic lights along this 13%. I can’t remember ever hitting two green ones in a row. I’d bet good money that I hit at least 10 of them red every day. I can get to work in 25 minutes, but 10 of those minutes are spent on lucky 13.

Then one day something changed. One morning I was rolling along, fully expecting to be brought to a halt at the first of my 14 intersections where a blackjack dealer traffic light would be dishing out reds, yellow, greens, and LED arrows like cards from the bottom of the deck. I expected to be sitting at the limit line of the crosswalk seeing red and seeing red. But when I got to the light it was only mostly red. What I mean is it was flashing red.

Suddenly the place that up until that moment had every morning been a noisy, helter-skelter, mishmash of steel and exhaust, brake lights and turn signals, and angry, frustrated drivers, had turned into quite, self-organized, self-governed crossroads. You stop first, you go first. What could be more democratic, more just plain fair than that? I waited my turn and then went.

I made my way to the next intersection refreshed and with a renewed faith in my fellow man. Then surprise number two reared up. The next light was flashing red too, and the next, and the next, and so on for eight lights. Gone were the malevolent traffic dictators, hanging over each junction like Wells’ Martian tripods, judging who will stop and who will go. Banished to a dull memory was the technology that enslaved us to the rule of the painted line and the clicking workings of the steel box on the corner that held the antiquated computer system. Released into the wild were the wolf packs. Erased were the short attention span exploiting mash of static reds, greens, and yellows that held prisoner those unlucky enough to be caught third, forth, or worse in line.

Every intersection had magically become a four way stop but the magic didn’t stop there. Through this same magic I became the sleepy 7-year-old in the third seat of my father's Bel Air station wagon, rolling through flashing red lights, as all lights became after midnight back then, coming home from the drive-in after seeing Ice Station Zebra.

Like a teen-aged virgin with his new license, alone behind the wheel for the first time, the world was open for me through my windshield and all possibilities presented themselves with abandon. I had no past as a motorists, only a future. The road became a faint, smooth black river without rapids or rocks, flowing out behind me.

The Taco Bells, McDonald’s, IHOPs, bus stops, and motorcycle shops blurred into a Monet’s Lilies pastel slurry of colors and streaks across my side windows. My grip on the wheel became loose and comfortable, like a batter just before he hits a solid single just over third base, allowing my knuckles to regain some of their color. I had reached the Zen of the commute. A place I only dared conjure up in my most fog-addled dreams. A place that has no place in the California Vehicle Code.

But alas, my Shangri La was gone on the return commute. The immortality it brings only lasting for a short while. When I got back to what now was the final 13% of my drive, all the lights had been “repaired” and everything was too large, too loud, and too much. Had anyone else seen what I had seen? Were the people locked in their “shiny metal boxes” all around me feeling as violated as I from having that all too brief glimpse of paradise stolen from them while they toiled away the work day?

The row of flashing reds has not returned. Whatever work was being done that necessitated their existence has most likely been completed. Now it’s back to a stressful commute that kills me a little every day. Now I am detained at nearly every intersection like I’m a traveler in a totalitarian regime where at any moment there might be a knocking on my window and a dark and shady man saying, “Papers please.” Now the radio seems to only play lousy Aerosmith elevator songs and the CD player only plays the soft beep that alerts me that it isn’t working.

Please bring back the flashing reds. Please return me to the mystical land of stress free driving and a surprise Jeff Beck song on the radio. Tear out the skulking traffic lights and replace them with zero-energy stop signs, not just on my 13% but around town, up and down the State, and across the country. Let us rule ourselves, for we have seen the promise land and it is Shaw Avenue from Fruit to Golden State.

Opium Den 2010

"Which is it to-day," Watson asked, "morphine or cocaine?"
Holmes raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.
"It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?"
-The Sign of the Four, Authur Conan Doyle




I woke up when the blood pressure monitor, which carries the heavy-lifting scientific name sphygmomanometer, started beeping in my right ear. You see, unlike the olden days when a person with the sphygo-whatever would listen to your pulse with a stethoscope and look at a dial to take your blood pressure, today’s sphygo-thingies are attached to a monitor, complete with battery backup, blinking lights, and of course an unpleasant beep to alert whomever needs to know that something is amiss. What was amiss was my elbow pinching the cuff of the sphygo-man-eater against the arm of my chair, rendering it unable to take a proper reading. So the machine beeps, the nurse troubleshoots the problem, and blood pressure is again taken and recorded.

Every eight weeks I go into the hospital for an infusion of a wonderful drug called Remicade. I say wonderful drug because I know it has eased the pain I was feeling from rheumatoid arthritis. I can tell that because I no longer wake up with my feet feeling like they were both broken, my hands feeling like I had splints on all my fingers, and my body generally feeling like I fell down a flight of cement stairs, carrying a box of broken and jagged bricks, and landed on Legos. (I tried to find a Lego opium den but couldn't. I'm thinking the carpet in this graphic looks a little Lego-ish).

During this treatment, which lasts about 4 hours, I usually read, watch a little daytime TV (gag), and snooze. This time the only chair available didn’t have a working TV so it was just snoozing and reading for me. I read a few chapters of my book and dozed; for two and a half hours. Had the Sphygo-lama-ding-dong not beeped I might have slept the entire four hours, or if the nurses didn’t need the chair even longer.

So I woke up, my book safely on the arm of the chair, and thankfully no drool on my collar. I looked around the room which consists of 10 chairs like mine arranged in a semicircle. Each chair was occupied and each occupant had an IV and a sphygo-you-know-what attached to them.

The book I’m reading is a novel about Isaac Newton and his assistant investigating a series of grisly murders in the late 1600’s. And aren’t the best murders grisly? They are basically filtered through a Holmes/Watson template where Newton figures out everything by noticing a red hair here or evidence of mercury poisoning there and I’m guessing solves the crime(s) somewhere near the end of the book.

I guess this comparison must have put Holmes’ London on my mind as I drifted off because looking around at my fellow Infusioneers when I woke up, it occured to me that there is a similarity between us lying down attached to medicine to make us feel better, and the patrons of opium dens that featured in Victorian England literature, if you take away the bright lights, the 21st century technology, and the general cleanliness of course. Those people went to those dens to feel better, maybe some of them even tried the drug to remove a little of the discomfort of the very condition which currently occupies my temple. Remember, opium was legal in the 19th century. I wonder what an opium den would look like if it were still legal. Probably a lot like an infusion center except the TVs would probably showing Fantasia on a loop.

As a side note, the infusion center is also the office for infectious disease. In the front office there is usually a person sitting behind the reception desk, ready to log you in. On days when there is no receptionists there is a phone provided with instructions to dial a specific extension to let them know you are there. I’ve used this phone probably four times before finally realizing that it is the same phone used by patients who are there for the infectious disease side of the office.

Ten Little...

Oh I wish I were...


When I roll into the parking lot at the hospital, and after I turn off my car, I don’t get out right away. What I do is place my hands on the wheel, not at ten and two like I’m supposed to do when I’m driving, but at eleven and one, closer together both geographically and chronologically I suppose. I put my palms against the wheel and point my fingers up like pickets made from pale little sausages. Then I lightly put my Oscar Myers together and see how they line up. I perform these little surprise inspections each time I visit my rheumatologist. Yes, I have a rheumatologist, as if it is the most natural thing there can be, like having an accountant or a barber. At some point after I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis I was given a pamphlet that explained some of the possible symptoms of living with this condition. The one that caught my attention was the deformity of the fingers, and I decided that it was the progress, or lack of progress, of this particular symptom that I would use as a watermark to determine how I was getting on and how well my treatments were working.

So I sit in my car outside his office and see which of my fingers have remained loyal and which finger’s loyalty has come into question.

Starting on my right hand with the pinky, I see that he is as straight and true as a wiener dog that spends his days patrolling under the kitchen table of a large, sloppy family. Next comes the ring finger, who looks fine until I get to the second knuckle, where he leans away from his neighbor finger as if it had knocked on his door and shoved a copy of The Watchtower at him; still not too bad. That neighbor finger, sometimes called the “driving finger”, seems pretty strait although it does look to be rolled slightly to toward the ring finger, maybe inquiring how the Watchtower pamphlet was working out. The index finger is rolled over even more toward the “driving finger” and it is bowed so it only touches it at the knuckle and the nail. There is some daylight between the two.

On my left hand the index finger is behaving pretty much like his twin on the right; rolled and bowed. The driving finger on the left hand looks wiener dog straight if that wiener dog were saddled-backed from being ridden too much, perhaps by a small monkey. And by the way, is there anything funnier than a monkey riding a dog? The ring finger is straighter than his doppelganger but underneath there is a bump over which my wedding ring use to slide. I had to take it off before it had to be cut off. The ring, not the bump. The pinky on the left has abandoned all dog-loyal pretense and juts away from his brothers as if I were getting ready to properly hold a cup of tea.

I’ve been inspecting the sausage brothers for a few years now and I think I can safely say that none have wandered too much further afield since I began. Although I don’t entirely trust the teacup pinky so I’m keeping an eye on him.

You may be wondering about my thumbs. Well my thumbs have been loyal little fireplugs since they were installed. They’re there every morning like little drill sergeants, providing an example to the rest of the regiment, and always ready to give movie reviews or catch me a free ride.

Just so you don’t think my finger inspections are all I use to chart the progress of my condition and its treatment my rheumatologist looks at blood tests and examines my fingers, hands, toes, feet, elbows, and knees, and he says I’m doing very well thank you.

But if the continued, albeit slow, drifting of my digits is inevitable I suppose I’ll figure a way to live with it. It reminds me of a story I heard while listening to baseball on the radio, probably during a rain delay. As the story goes there was this catcher who at the end of his career, and at the end of thousands of balls fouled off his hands and hundreds of base runners motoring around third, was never asked for directions, because by that time he couldn’t point just one way.