National Loneliness Day 2015

Of Monkeys, Of Towers and Naturally of Chocolate: National Loneliness Day

By Robin Ford Wallace

I am rushing this piece out before Valentine’s Day to make sure we have time for a straight up-down vote on abolishing the whole thing. 

But don’t panic, merchants!  What I had in mind was replacing the national romance-and-chocolate day with a universal self-pity-and-chocolate day.  You’d sell as many Godivas as ever, possibly more.  Not everybody has somebody to buy candy for, or somebody to buy it for them; but the rest of us are sorry enough for ourselves to empty your shelves so enough with the gift-wrapped hearts already!  Just cram the goods into plain brown wrappers and let’s cut out the middleman.

The idea for the new holiday – shall we call it National Loneliness Day? – came about last February, when thanks to the magic of Facebook I realized Valentine’s Day makes practically everybody suicidal. 

It started on the Monday of V-week, when a single male friend on Facebook posted:  “Since Valentine’s falls on Friday this year, I have the whole week to think about not having a girlfriend, or even a date.”

Then on V-day evening came a post from a female FOF who had been what FB calls “in a relationship” since before FB, in fact possibly before ZIP codes.  “I understand him not getting me candy,” she wrote.  “He’s waiting until tomorrow when it goes down to half-price.  But maybe a few flowers he could have brought...”

As for me, I was spending the big date night with the tall, dark and handsome man of my dreams – who was deeply submerged in his own.  Wrapped in the arms of Morpheus, not mine, his hot lips pressed into the sofa cushions, TD&H was sleeping off his carb-heavy dinner, which we’d eaten out not because it was Valentine’s Day but because it was Friday; and which had been accompanied not by red foil crinkling off heart-shaped boxes but by red condiments oozing off french fries; and which had been followed not by drinks and dancing but by couch and newspaper; and which had climaxed in snores.

So Valentine’s Day was making me feel frowsy and pathetic, just as it had ever since the blush wore off the rose, roughly around the Middle Pleistocene (I’ve been “in a relationship” since before dinosaurs).  But this year, thanks to FB, I realized I was not alone. 

Yes, maybe there were still lovers experiencing Great Romance, but if so they were holed up making out somewhere I couldn’t see them.  What I did see were singles not swinging but moping around wishing they had a love life, unaware that we LTR participants were eaten with envy for what we imagined they had that we didn’t, which is to say: a love life.  We were all a bunch of slobbering losers! 

Which made me feel much better. 

Why?  I don’t think it’s so much that misery loves company as that the worst part of being unhappy is the loneliness.  You imagine that everyone else is frolicking around having a wonderful time while you’re the only one too stupid to find the fulfillment button, or too unpopular for anyone to tell you where it is.

The great upside of the Cyber Age is disproving this.  Google anything you like – “jumping cursor”; “uncontrollable flatulence”; “Will anyone ever love me?” – and you’ll see that others have the same problem. 

Not that these truths weren’t out there long before the Internet; they were just less evident.  I heard an NPR report about a clever college orientation for incoming freshmen.  The presentation in no way suggested that the freshmen themselves felt lonely, or suggested remedies.  It merely noted that in the past other students had reported feeling especially miserable during this period because they remained alone and left out while they imagined others around them were “finding their tribe.”  After the orientation, participants seemed much happier, presumably simply because they now knew they weren’t the only pariahs.

I went through the pariah phase myself at that age and it was the pits, but about the unhappiest I’ve ever been was later in life when I felt betrayed by someone I’d loved and trusted.  Betrayal is another of the lonely pains – you think you must be the most genetically inferior pile of steaming excrement in the universe, because even the people you thought loved you most now hate your guts like everybody else.    

            While I was suffering through that, I happened to be talking to a lawyer about something unrelated when he grumbled about his clients:  “I don’t mind helping them procure a divorce, that’s my job; but I don’t understand why they have to complain to me every time the ex fails to get the kid home by six.”

            Well, I understood why!  It was because the person they’d always cried to when the world treated them unfairly was now the person making them cry, that’s why.  Where else were they to turn?  The arms they’d relied on for comfort were currently wrapped around some Waffle House waitress to whom the louse was ratting out their deepest secrets.

            But even as I had these bitter thoughts came a new sense of ease, as I realized the very fact that the divorce lawyer was doing a booming business meant I was not the only one who had been betrayed.  It seemed about as common as hangnails. 

Thinking about it later, I also realized how redundant it is to say “betrayed by someone I loved and trusted.”  You cannot be betrayed by anybody else.  Being wronged by a stranger falls among your garden-variety “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as opposed to your “most unkindest cuts.”  It takes someone you trust to watch your back to stab it. 

So really, the very existence of the word “betrayal” is a pretty good indicator how many people have reeled through history with that same whiny, amputated feeling I had.  Like I said, such a bunch of pathetic no-hopers we are!  But there is comfort in that word “we.” 

Deepak Chopra in one of his books referred to the mind in the body as a monkey in a tower, sometimes happy and fulfilled and sometimes tormented by the loneliness of its isolation.  So when I think of humanity, what I see is millions and millions of towers stretching into the clouds as far as the eye can see, each with a little monkey face peering anxiously out the window.  What I would like to see with my proposed new holiday is each of those monkeys contemplatively nibbling a chocolate truffle. 

The idea in replacing Valentine’s Day with National Loneliness Day is not to denigrate romantic love, which can in fact sometimes function as a metaphorical catwalk among the monkey towers.  But catwalks crumble and love as often as not leads to yet more misery and heartbreak, to say nothing of country music.     

No, the purpose of NLD is to assure each monkey in each tower that other monkeys are out there in similar towers suffering similar torments.  I would say in fact that the purpose is to celebrate the human condition, except by this point I am way too tangled up in these damn monkeys.

Anyway, fellow monkeys, here is the message of National Loneliness Day:  Take comfort, for we are all alone in the universe –

Together.

END

Asparagus: A How-To Guide

Asparagus:  The Mysteries Unveiled

by Robin Ford Wallace 

Reader, I have come to tell you the secrets of Nature.

No, Reader, not that secret of Nature, though since we are on the subject, I may as well tell you what my niece Katy said when her mother explained to her, at age 10, the monthly magic of womanhood:  “This is a joke, right?”

She had a point.  This whole business of existence as self-aware biomass is a serious thigh-slapper.  The yuks I have gotten from the digestive tract alone!  Throw in the reproductive system and it is a wonder anybody gets any work done at all. 

But were we not discussing asparagus?

 

Yes, Reader, asparagus is the mystery I came to reveal.  I had never considered it a particularly enigmatic vegetable until I decided to grow it.  It was then I realized I had never seen it growing and in fact had no idea what part of the plant it is that is eaten.  It is not a fruit like tomatoes, a root like turnips, nor leaves like lettuce.  Just what was asparagus, and what did it look like when it was growing?

Answer 1, as I soon learned, is that the edible part of asparagus is the young shoot that rockets up from the roots as the plant’s first growth; but it does so with such rapidity that there is no Answer 2.  One does not see asparagus growing, though one is sometimes tempted to stay up all night with a flashlight, and try.

One simply leaves the asparagus row an undisturbed expanse of dirt in the evening, then returns the next morning to find tall spears looming above the earth.  My city friend Joe, in fact, touring the garden one spring, accused me of buying the stalks at the grocery store and deploying them in the dirt, in order to mess with his head.

Asparagus row before harvest

After harvest, the asparagus row once again appears vacant – until, next night, the miracle recurs.  It is possible a fairy is involved.

After

Situating Your Asparagus Bed

If you would like to plant asparagus, the first point to consider is:  Where?  Asparagus grows in all climates except the wet coastal tropics – it requires at least a little winter – and it prefers light, well-drained soil. 

But for the home gardener, the most important consideration is that the asparagus bed must withstand the sands of time.  Once planted, it stays put, rewarding you spring after spring for decades to come with delicious green harvests.  So choose a location where your asparagus may thrive undisturbed as you lose your teeth, hair, faculties –     

And remember it prefers full sun.

Anyway, in choosing your location, you may use me as a cautionary tale:  I put my asparagus row about five feet inside the vegetable patch.  So now, each spring, if my neighbor offers to till the garden for me, he must do so in two sessions, one below the asparagus and one above, while I patrol the staked-out row grimly, defending it with my life.

How much room you give to asparagus should depend on how much you like it.  I love it and in theory could eat it every day.  In practice, I find that with my 20-foot row I can do so about twice a week during the season, sharing it grudgingly with guests and family members but never freezing it or, God forbid, giving any away. 

The rule of thumb for most vegetables is to take a piece of paper, add up how many plants you’ll need and multiply out how much room each will require; then you use the paper to wrap fish and plant one quarter that amount.  Asparagus is the exception to the rule.  If you like it, plant as much as you have room for.

Selecting a Variety

One can go cross-eyed choosing what asparagus variety to grow, what with plant catalogs hyping “new vigorous all-male hybrids,” as opposed to the time-honored but patently female-sounding heirloom, Mary Washington. 

All-male?  It is true that one might infer a certain masculinity from the manly skyward thrust of the firm, smooth shafts; but I looked up it up and went a little strabismal myself learning about dioecious and monoecious plants, which is to say those that have genders and those that do not.  In the end I elected to leave plant sexuality a moot point (at least until that nocturnal vigil with the flashlight), and stuck with Mary Washington.  

The disadvantage to female plants, apparently, is that they waste time and energy producing seed, and you may want to consider that.  I have, on the other hand, enjoyed the bright red berries my asparagus produces late in the season, and the pleasant surprise of finding wild asparagus growing along the driveway as Mary increases her family.

Planting

You may start asparagus from seed – it’s cheaper – but that lengthens the wait until first harvest, so most gardeners begin with first-year crowns.  These are hairy, tarantula-looking root balls from year-old plants, available in most garden centers.

Plant crowns or seeds any time after the soil has warmed – you will not be harvesting this year in any case.  Seeds should be planted sparsely, about ¼ inch deep, then the seedlings thinned to 15 inches apart.  As for crowns, place them 15 inches apart in a furrow five to six inches deep.  You can go mad deliberating which end is top; in fact, the root ball will send forth its tentacles no matter which way you put them.

Now:  Sit and Wait

Both seeds and crowns can take their sweet time to produce plants.  Depending upon weather conditions, soil temperature and how you are holding your mouth, it may take between two weeks and two months before you see any action.   

But wait long enough and your crowns will – finally! – send up the familiar solid green shafts that, left alone, leaf out into dainty, ferny-looking fronds.  If you have started with seeds, your seedlings will look fernlike from the beginning.  Interesting point:  The so-called “asparagus fern” is in fact a true variety of asparagus developed by florists for its pretty foliage. 

Even after you have plants, the fat lady has not sung:  you are still looking at a year or two before you can trot out the butter and the lemon and get down to business.  There is some argument in the gardening world about how long asparagus needs to establish its root system – here is where I remind you that most of what we know about horticulture, and possibly the universe, is lies and male answer syndrome – but most growers agree that with crowns you must wait at least one year, two if you can hold your horses that long, before you begin harvesting; and that growing from seed you should add another year to that.

But Reader, do not repine!  Remember that asparagus throughout the millennia has been rich-people food, and that throughout the millennia rich people have been the ones patient enough to realize the benefits of compound interest.

Harvesting Asparagus

            Unless you just like to thrash about in the dirt hand-pulling weeds, you should keep your asparagus mulched in with a thick layer of rotting hay.  According to the Ruth Stout deep-mulch method made famous by Rodale, in fact, the hay is never removed – it does, after all, keep the soil moist and nourished without chemical fertilizers – and the asparagus spears are simply allowed to push their way up through it in the spring.

            But our compound interest analogy notwithstanding, springtime is not a season designed to nurture patience in us winter-crazed gardeners, and I personally find it more expedient to pull the mulch back in March and allow the soil to warm up more quickly.  Then, miraculously, usually in April, though never as soon as one wishes, one goes out in the morning to find a lonely stalk, possibly two, thrusting upward through the dirt.

            Harvest the stalks by snapping or cutting them at or near the ground line.  Do it as soon as they are eating size, say five or so inches, which generally means the first morning you see them, or perhaps the second.  Do not make the common mistake of waiting until there are “enough to eat.”  Gardeners who do this are waiting still, no matter how long their asparagus rows!

            Cutting the stalks stimulates the roots to send up more.  And if you don’t cut them, they will grow tall and begin leafing out into summer mode.  

            Rather, what you must do is put the harvested stalks in a Zip-Loc bag and tuck them into the crisper drawer.  The next morning you will have several more stalks to keep them company, and as the season revs up you will find the bag filling up more and more quickly.

Saying Goodbye

            Though some experiments are now in progress for extending the harvest into summer, as a practical matter asparagus is a spring crop for most of us.  Many experts recommend limiting harvest to four weeks the first year, then eight weeks in ensuing years.  Many gardeners believe them, and cease harvesting by the calendar.

            What I have found in my own garden is that the asparagus itself seems to “know” when it is time for harvest to end.  The stalks start coming up looking ferny, and have an air of “wanting” to grow out into summer mode.  Though it is possible I am attributing more sentience to this particular biomass than it deserves, or drink too much beer.

One way or the other, ceasing the harvest just means leaving the asparagus to do what it’s going to do, and what it does is grow lush tall fronds that make an attractive backdrop to tomatoes and other summer crops.  Mulch the row back in and let the stalks stand there photosynthesizing and working on their root systems throughout the rest of the growing season.  In fact, it is best to leave them in situ even after they die for the winter, to mark the row in case anybody gets overzealous with the tiller come spring. 

Asparagus grows tall and leafs out in summer mode, providing a ferny backdrop to the veggie patch. 

In conclusion, growing asparagus at home requires a considerable investment in time up front but is very little trouble thereafter.  Further, it affords the gardener the satisfaction of looking at the price asked for the delicious green stalks at the store and saying smugly to the grocer:

“This is a joke, right?”   

            

Just a note to announce that The Dade County Planet, Dade's newest news source, is now online.  Here's a link:

http://dadeplanet.blogspot.com

Dear Bob's Little Acre Readers, If Any:

BE IT KNOWN THAT Robin Ford Wallace is alive and well and blogging her black little heart out -- though not necessarily about gardening!  I launched a satire blog, THE TURNIP, the week of Feb. 25, 2014.  Here's a link:

http://thedadecountyturnip.blogspot.com


And coming up this week, the week of March 3, 2014, I will launch a straight news blog (well, as straight as nooz gets in these parts) called THE DADE COUNTY PLANET.  I'll put a link to it here, though be warned -- the first edish is not yet up at the time of this writing.

http://dadeplanet.blogspot.com/

I will post in Bob's Little Acre when and if a girl ever gets time to roll in the dirt!

Be Kind To Thy Ass For It Bears Thee; And Be Kind To Thy Pants For They Cover Thy --

     Right now I’m working on a big project and should not be frittering away my time on humor pieces!  I’m on strike or leave from the Sentinel, or kaput, depending on how things turn out, and don’t want to print anything there.  But meanwhile I saw one of those weight-loss ads featuring a woman holding up Moby Pants and it struck me as funny and I couldn’t help myself.  So here for what it’s worth is my take on Before Pants, published NOWHERE ELSE BUT HERE!

Dear Skinny Britches Basher:  Kiss My Homonym!

By Robin Ford Wallace

January is the time of year for Before Pants pictures.

You know the ones.  Sometimes they’re on the cover of women’s magazines, inviting you to try some new diet, sometimes on advertisements for gyms or weight loss programs.

But the image is always the same:  a slender young woman holding up a monstrous pair of pants.  She was not always the smiling sylph we see now, explains the copy below.  There was a time she changed weather patterns by blotting out the sun wherever she traveled (shaking the earth as she went).  

Then she went on the featured diet, tackled the featured exercise program or underwent the featured surgery.  Whatever it was, it worked, and now she stands there in her itty size ones offering up these grotesque discarded elephant skins for our entertainment. 

What a vicious betrayal of pants!

Hi there.  I’m Robin, all-American Fat Girl, Weight Watchers recidivist, yo-yo dieter extraordinaire; a size 8 when I bought my wedding dress, roughly a 12 by the reception, when the front seam gave way during a belly laugh after a couple of prenuptial weeks of beer and pizza.  I haven’t seen the inside of an 8 – hell, a 14 – since, but I do keep trying, and this is the time of year I try the hardest. 

January around here is a time of fasting and purification, the Holy Month of Robindon we call it, when your narrator declares sacred fat-wah against the pounds accumulated the rest of the year, which are legion.  It’s not religious; it’s a matter of either receding into one’s natural boundaries or moving into orbit around the sun.

So this is the season my eyes gravitate helplessly to the current Before Pants picture and land there with a noise, and more often than not I bite the bait.  I have gone on the Atkins, Scarsdale and South Beach diets.  I have bought Skechers, green coffee bean extract and a treadmill.  I am, in fact, the Before Pants’s target audience. 

But as I looked at this year’s Ms. Skinny emerging from her baggy denim cocoon, I remembered the motto from a funky VW repair manual I bought in the 1970s:  “Be kind to thy Ass for it bears thee.”  And I thought, shouldn’t we also be kind to our pants, for they cover our –

Well, the motto refers to the beast of burden, not to its anatomical homonym; but when a person humiliates her pants what she is really insulting is the homonym zipped therein.  And that’s my real problem with Before Pants:  I’m all about a new beautiful me but I don’t want anybody flagellating my old fat –   

– blue jeans.  Before Pants are almost always jeans – jeans the size of subway tunnels, maybe, but still jeans – and after a lifetime of fat-wah I can tell you that in the eternal struggle against planethood a girl never had a truer friend than her jeans. 

Wear elastic waistbands if you want to eat your way into the solar system, but if you prefer to remain within your ZIP code choose jeans because they will alert you the minute you exceed your mashed potato quota.  My Levis may get a size larger every year as age and gravity gain ground, but as long as I have one pair I can zip up by hook or by crook I am by God still in the fight.

“If they zip they fit” is the Fat Girl Creed, and how many of my blue denim allies have died valiantly in battle to uphold it?  (To say nothing of the wedding dress.)  I remember losing one pair as I stretched up to dust a ceiling fan and came exploding from the seams like Lake Pontchartrain breaching its levees.  Bless those jeans’ heart, they had seen me through, but did not survive, quitting smoking.

And jeans are not just the means of waging fat-wah; they are also the prize.  The short-term goal is always to squeeze back into the next size down but the ultimate reward, the whole point, is to strut victorious from the battlefield wearing the Skinny Jeans that make a girl feel all hot and dangerous.  In the words of the great Conway Twitty, “Partner, there’s a tiger in these tight-fittin’ jeans.”

 Back to that Ass saying:  I thought it was from the Bible, but Googling it all I found was Aesop’s fables.  The Ass figures in a lot of those.  He does stupid things, everybody beats crap out of him, and the moral boils down to:  “Don’t be an Ass.”  He’s always, ahem, the butt of the joke, but I identified with the poor beast every time.

The worst is the fable where the Ass, jealous of the Lapdog, breaks into the house and cavorts there playfully, imitating the dog but at his size destroying the furniture, then tries to climb into the master’s lap.  I keep seeing my poor old homonym in the same situation, wiggling coquettishly in its tight Levis while everyone stares at it in horror and finally drives it away with sticks.

 This January, I’m wearing jeans with Before written all over them.  You look at them and think, “They make ‘em that size?”  They’d been in the drawer since some past Robindon pared me down to the next weight class, and I hadn’t swelled back to quite that magnitude until 2013.

I’m hoping Robindon 2014 will send these big boys back to pasture and I’ll never have to trot them out again.  But if I do need them next winter, and in between I have posed for a photo smugly holding their billowing yardage up for derision, I hope they will tell me to kiss their –      

END

Build Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul! And Tax The Crap Out Of Them.

              Out-of-towners, this is a Radio-Free Robin column I wrote about a highly local school-tax ish here in Dade County.  Dade Countians:  For reference, see my nooz piece on last Thursday’s county commission meeting in this week’s Sentinel.

   

 Build Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul!  And Tax The Crap Out Of Them.

By Robin Ford Wallace

My darlings!  If irony were acorns, and your narrator a chipmunk, after the November Dade County Commission meeting my little jaw sacs would be stuffed full enough to last the winter.  Even one of those long, blizzardy ones you read about in the Laura Ingalls Wilder novels, that happen after the old Indian hobbles into the trading post and warns, “Heap big snow coming” – heck, I’d still be spitting out hulls come March. 

The star of Thursday’s agenda was Dade’s duly and newly elected voice in Atlanta, whom we shall not name here except by the colorful descriptive phrase used more and more often about him locally:  Mr. He-Don’t-Come-‘Round-Here-No-More.

He-Don’t-Come was to speak and be spoken to about the Board of Education’s proposed modification of the so-called 65/5 school tax exemption, because this would require legislation at the state level.  But Reader, can you guess how Rep. He-Don’t-Come started the evening?

Bingo.  Pleading a last-minute prior engagement, or something, He-Don’t-Come didn’t come.  But the other players were lined up in the wings, shuffling their notes and rarin’ to go, so the show went by God on and the speakers spoke their pieces whether or not there was anyone there to listen but the commission and members of the ravenin’ press.

(Who were not unappreciative.  They say we small-town journalists are under-rewarded, but not only did I recently receive from a friendly interviewee a free T-shirt with a fart joke on front, Thursday night afforded harmless entertainment enough to keep a girl through Christmas.)

First, speaker No. 1, whom we’ll call here Mr. T. Bagger:  T. Bagger was Dade’s chief executive for four rollicking years in which the foolishness of electing people to government who don’t believe in it was made flesh.  During his term, Mr. B. almost managed to restore Dade County to primordial chaos, though not so much as a matter of policy as from the irritation factor.  I’m probably exaggerating when I say Mr. B’s in-your-face leadership style would have inspired b-slaps from Mother Teresa, but not when I say he couldn’t pass around doughnuts without starting a fistfight.  I was there.  The man conducted budget hearings like Caligula! 

Mr. B had come tonight to defend 65/5.  It was, after all, the issue he had ridden into office.  Though then, of course, he had gone off home to the compound and left the damn thing there, noisily huffing up oats and pooping in the schoolyard, while the remaining politicos tore out their hair fretting how to get rid of it without seeming pro-tax.  (It’s why most of them have bald spots.)

Now, ladies and gentlemen, let us move to the other corner, to speaker No. 2:  Mr. Education.  Yes!  That camo-wearin’, “yo”-callin’, ex-Army schools superintendent who campaigned for ESPLOST, then forgot to put it on the ballot, was now at the meeting calling for a new referendum, this one to amend 65/5.  The guy who OK’d $400,000 for sooper-dooper security in a town where the worst school invasions come from swarming ladybugs, but couldn’t find $38K for the library, marched right up to the podium and quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes:

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."

You want irony, my dears, I give you Mr. Education riding into town to proclaim himself the savior of civilization, fresh from gunning down the Dade County Library.  It don’t get no better than this, Earl!

As for Mr. E. quoting literature, interviewed earlier (during his maiden-voyage book-banning pogrom, BTW), he wasn’t able to name one of the Canterbury Tales, not even the Miller’s Tale, which is mostly a fart joke. 

So I expect somebody Googled the tax quote for him.  But here’s a further irony:  Me, when I think “Oliver Wendell Holmes,” I think “Chambered Nautilus,” as in:

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!”

 And stately mansions are what 65/5 is all about.  It exempts people 65 and older from paying school taxes on five acres and their houses, no matter how stately. 

Mr. Education wants to reverse that.  He thinks people who come to Dade to build $500,000 mansions can afford to pay school tax.  But T. Bagger says making them pay would be against everything the Founding Fathers wanted for America. 

Mr. B. says he conducts Constitutional-law-slash-target-practice sessions at his shooting range (does that make anybody else go “EEE?”) and he and the boys have concluded between BLAMs that the whole purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to protect rich people’s right not to pay taxes.

What I take away from all this, besides the irony, is the utter uselessness of Big Ideas in government.  We need government for practical things we can’t achieve individually – for most of us, roads, law enforcement, schools; for some who need not be named here, clean water piped into their isolated armed compounds. 

With limited revenues, our sitting county commissioners supply us these things through a responsive, practical, push-pull democracy which you, too, would admire if you spent as much time staring deeply into their bald spots as I do.  Whereas when T. Bagger with his grand notions called the shots, county business pretty much shut down while everybody gritted teeth and tried not to slug him.

It’s the same with 65/5 and Mr. E.  Call me a commie but I’d rather hear Dade County described as having good schools than as a great place to dodge property taxes.  Saving civilization is a wonderful idea.

But maybe if the Board of Ed wants some help with that, it should redefine “civilization” to include books, learning and libraries.  Until then – well!

We’ll see how far through the heap-big snows we can all live on irony.

END

Reposted: All the 2009 Radio-Free Robins

          I never could stand scary movies.  I remember spending the last third of Alien in the lobby, pacing nervously and smoking cigarettes.  They don’t let you do that anymore, and anyway I quit smoking years ago.  But that’s how I feel about these last tense scenes of the Obamacare debate!  After all it’s been through, the bad guys are doing everything they can to kill it at the end.  I can’t look!  It makes me want to light up spasmodically amid the smell of buttered popcorn.

          Of course I’ll do no such thing – but what I have done instead is start writing “Radio-Free Robins” again.  Remember, I started in 2009 when the whole debate started, then tapered off as things calmed down a little. Maybe I should have kept going!   Well, I’m back now.  I’m busier now as a regular news writer, or maybe just stupider and slower, because I can’t do it as fast as I used to; but I’ll keep churning them out as long as the health care reform debate is still a debate.  (Might as well do something, since I’m stuck out here in the lobby nohow…)

          Meanwhile, I’m going to post all the RFRs from 2009 on this Bob’s Little Acre page.  I have another tab for them on this blog, but from the numbers I don’t think anybody much ever went there.         

Radio-Free Robin

     Bob’s Little Acre was meant to be apolitical.  Well, it tried.  Sometimes it found itself squatting in the dirt making snide little comments out of the side of its mouth, but in general it did try to live up to its endnotes and play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one – which, by the way, if anybody cares, is a redneck regurgitation of Voltaire’s cultivating one’s own garden.

            Then, in the summer of 2009, all that changed.  Desperately-needed health care reform was pole-axed by a concerted propaganda campaign, and the Sentinel’s letters section became dominated by weird manifestos claiming the president was fixin’ to send death squads to assassinate our grandmas.

            So, with a noisy sigh, Bob brushed the dirt off her butt and girded her loins for battle.  The following columns were published with a different picture of your narrator from the Bob’s Little Acres, a more contemporary one with shorter hair and more wrinkles, and under the title “Radio-Free Robin.” 

Also, the endnotes changed to something like:  “In the past, Robin Ford Wallace has played quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.  Things change.”        

Turn Off The Shock Jocks!  Radio-Free Robin Hits the Airwaves!    

By Robin Ford Wallace

So.  There I was, minding my own business, investigatin’ journalistically as usual.  You know the drill, disseminating information, exposing corruption, fighting injustice, just basically keepin’ America safe for democracy.

All right.  So mostly it’s listing new hours for the county dump.  It’s a living.  Sort of. 

Anyway I was sitting in on some hearings and my attention had wandered a bit.  In fact, it had loped off down the road and was fixin’ to have lunch except it couldn’t make up its mind between the gyro sandwich and the Greek salad. 

Sometimes it runs off like that by itself; other times it gets carried away by my imagination, which is a little hyperactive and frankly a bad influence.  I’ll be listening to attorneys in blue suits arguing in front of a judge and suddenly I’ll see all three of them wearing red silk kimonos and those little hats like you see on the Village People. 

 Well.  Like I was saying.  Suddenly I got sucked back to alertness by the tone of indignation that had snuck into the conversation while my attention was off wallowin’ in zazeeki sauce.  “They’re takin’ your name!” the people in the room were saying.  “If you disagree with the president, they’re puttin’ you on their list!”

Who was taking whose name?  That’s when I realized I was the only person in the room with a pen and an open notebook, and, coincidentally, possibly the only one whose politics were anywhere further left than two degrees right of Hitler.  What I was hearing was the usual generalized Obama-bashin’ – “Why don’t he just show his birth certificate?” – but this time with this sinned-against I’m-bein’-persecuted thing going on.  What was that about?    

Later I found out:  One conservative talk show host had said speak up!  Call the administration and tell them you’re against the president’s policies!  But then another had said:  No!  Then they’ll have your name and know where you live!  You’ll be on their list!

I didn’t know that at the time, I found it out later that day out in a series of emails with my smarter older sister, Laura.  All I knew then was that people were looking at me expectantly – there must be some subtle something about my left nostril that tells them how I vote – and I was beginning to feel the way you do sometimes walking alone in the woods and thinking how good you would taste to a bear. 

Or maybe I was feeling like Hungary in 1956, because I signed those emails to my sister “Radio-Free Robin.”  (She was signing hers “Loony Leftie Laura.”  We are both outrageously funny.)

Anyway, whether from innate good taste or simple cowardice – I was seriously outnumbered – I refused to argue.  That kind of thing is always futile.  Nobody ever changes anybody’s mind, everybody just gets mad.  So I went on my way rejoicin’, and after flipping a nickel decided on the gyro sandwich, hold the fries.

It wasn’t until that weekend, reading the national op-eds – and Jewell Smalley’s insane, ravin’ incendiary letter-to-the-editor in our rag – that I realized the I’m-bein’-persecuted thing was a cynical, calculated attack on health care reform.  “They’re takin’ your name” had morphed into “They’re killin’ all the old people!”  Some evil demagogue had seized on a blameless mention of end-of-life care and used it to rouse rabble – and, incidentally, to shout down desperately needed reform.

And good old Jewell was in the thick of it.  Usually I think Dade is lucky to have such a dedicated activist, but at times like this you can’t help noticing how she approaches issues fearlessly, girds her loins for battle, and leaps in passionately on the wrong side every time.  Well, bless her heart, she was anyway right about the Bradford pears.   

Mostly I stay out of politics.  I am perfectly happy playing quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one. 

  But I’ve got a personal stake in health care reform.  A few years ago, when I did a different sort of work and had more money, I investigated and found that my husband and I could get health coverage for a hundred dollars more per month than our mortgage payment.  So we could be insured as long as we didn’t mind living under a bridge – though with huge deductibles that could wipe us out should we really ever get sick. 

About that time I read the headline, “Georgia prisons find health insurance for the incarcerated costly.”  So if I knocked over a liquor store, I could get health insurance for free?  Or if I was disabled, or raising children on welfare?  But if I keep on plugging away at keepin’ America safe for democracy, I can lie on the sidewalk and bleed? 

It’s crazy.  It’s broken.  It needs to be fixed.  And instead of fixing it, people are yelling silly lies about Obama knocking off their grandma?

So I was thinking, does anyone really, like, believe this drivel?  I remember when Jewell was a newshound for the Sentinel.  I was a stammering young stringer for the Times with the interviewing style of a large, friendly dog, and I  watched with admiration as she tore into some public official who’d been caught fibbin’.  She didn’t seem all that credulous back then. 

And the people in the hearing that day probably didn’t really believe anybody was taking their names and sending them to the White House.  It was more like one person said something crazy and everybody else kind of chimed in, cheering for the team.

So I’m going to have a stab at imparting useful information about health care.  In this occasional column, Radio-Free Robin, I will discuss some problems and I will tell some stories, and I will never, ever say anything that I don’t know to be true.

But then again, I have never seen any reason why the truth should not be entertainin’.  See you next time? 

END

Why I Moved Into the Erlanger Parking Lot

By Robin Ford Wallace

            One argument that I read over and over in the health care debate goes something like this:  “How can people say health care in this country is inaccessible?  All anyone need do to get care is walk into any emergency room!”

            That one always leaves me slack-jawed.  Go into an emergency room when you don’t have insurance?  Conscious, when no one is carrying you?  Are they serving beer for breakfast at those conservative think tanks or what? 

In case I’m burying my point as usual among the coloratura and the collard greens, what I’m spelling out here is:

It costs too much. 

When I got the notion of writing these columns I thought I would devote one to emergency room stories.  Then, as if whoever’s pulling the strings up there has a seriously sick sense of humor, I managed to accrue a new one between column 1 and column 2.

            Monday is crunch time for this rag, and at 7 p.m. that night I was still hunched heroically over the keyboard, assassinating characters, reducing empires to dust and preserving western-style democracy with the free and unfettered flow of information, when the first wave of nausea struck.             

At 5:30 Tuesday morning, I crawled back to my computer, summoned my stories back to the screen and tacked quick, random endings on them before I emailed them to the newspaper.  That’s why, in last week’s paper, you might have read stories about the PTA that ended:  “And then he pulled her up onto the horse and they rode into the west.”

            In between, I’d been to hell and back, and Erlanger twice.

            I’d been tetchy and unable to sleep all that weekend – an indisposition, by the way, to which a grateful world owes the existence of Radio-Free Robin – probably because I had unilaterally decided to discontinue a medication.  I won’t tell you much about it because frankly I hate the whole business.

One of the things that’s ironic about the health care debate is that somebody like me has to get involved at all.  I have no interest in medicine or sickness or internal organs of any kind.  Really I’d rather not have any.  Give me smoothly moving metal parts every time.  But like everybody else I’m stuck with one of these standard-issue flesh-and-blood bodies that seem like so much fun when we get them and then proceed to get uglier and harder to maintain every year.

            Anyway, that evening, sickness struck.  I vomited like I was practicing for the Olympics, then for the next five hours I writhed around in the kind of pounding, unending agony that you would gladly betray your country or shoot your mother to stop.  Or even go to the emergency room.

            So to the emergency room my husband drove me in the small hours, me flopping around like a salted slug, incoherent with pain, begging him to stop the car so I could get down and roll on the ground. 

Then, when we got off the highway, this really stupid thing happened:  It stopped.

So there I am in the Erlanger parking lot, face smeared with stomach acids but feeling, you know, absolutely OK.  I was afraid that whatever had happened might happen again, but to walk into the emergency room, I knew from past experience, would cost $500. 

So I didn’t go in.  We got back in the car and started home.

I was dehydrated and just dying for a Coke, so we stopped at a convenience store and I got a huge one with ice and a straw.  At the first sip, wham!   Bombs dropped, tanks rolled.  Back to Erlanger.

             And in the Erlanger parking lot this really stupid thing happened:  It stopped again.

            So it was this ridiculous problem.  A person who wasn’t worried about money might have gone inside, described the symptoms, and gotten a diagnosis or at least some advice.  A person with a higher threshold for pain might have gone home.  Me, I vacillated in the parking lot. 

Is this the “choice” the brownshirts are worried “Obamacare” will deprive us of?  The rock versus the hard place? 

On the way into town I’d had another of those important “choices”:  Erlanger or Memorial?  I’d taken my husband to the Erlanger emergency room a few years before when a blood vessel burst in his eye.  Turned out, scary as it looked, it was harmless and healed by itself.  The doctor diagnosed him from across the room, no drugs were prescribed, and he got to wear an eye patch, which, if anyone is interested, is to women what the black lace garter is to men.

 But we got a bill for $500.  When I wrote questioning that, Erlanger responded by sending the bill immediately to a collection agency. 

So the next time we had a crisis – my back – we went to Memorial. 

My Memorial experience was like one of those B movies where the people who are there to help you are really Nazis or space aliens.  A sadistic young orderly hurt me deliberately, then gave me a stern little lecture about taking the Lord’s name in vain when I, er, reacted.  You need Indiana Jones to rescue you from Memorial – but Memorial showed some mercy about the bill.

So that was another of my sacred American choices Monday night:  How much is it worth to me not to be roughed up by the help?

Let’s end there for now, with your narrator hovering fearfully in the hospital parking lot like a metaphor for a conflicted nation,  watching the third shift come out for their smoke breaks and wondering when the cops will arrive and make her move on.  If you need a happy ending, there aren’t any yet but you can use this one to tide you over until next time:

“And then he pulled her up onto the horse and they rode into the west.”

END

Hot Buttons, Red Flags and Let’s Leave My Mother Out of This!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            What you lookin’ at, mister?  You lookin’ at me?

            Yeah, that’s me, in tight jeans and a dirty white Tshirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in one sleeve, walking down the street tossing a tire iron from hand to hand with an air of barely repressed violence. 

            What you gonna do about it?

            Well, all right.  So that’s not me. 

So I’m more apt to wear Relaxed Fit than tight jeans these days.  So I quit smoking in April with spectacular if inverse effects on my physical and mental health and anyway Marlboros were never my thing, I was more the Virginia Slims type.. And so I’m not entirely sure what a tire iron is, I just thought it sounded threatening.

But it’s true about the chip on my shoulder.  It’s gotten to where if someone says, “I read your column,” I drop into a defensive crouch and hiss, “So.  You wanta piece a me?”

All this since I started writing about the health care debate!  When I wrote the silly gardening column, people would come up to me in the grocery store with goofy smiles.  “You Bob?” they’d say. 

Them was the days!

Because then I began writing the news and people started glaring at me and stopped returning my phone calls.  Which is fine, I guess.  They say you’re doing a good job if you make people mad.  Anyway, keeping the world safe for democracy is a lonely job, right?

Wrong.  You don’t know what lonely is until you start writing about health care!  Remember, once in Bob’s Little Acre I wrote that being burned at the stake would make me feel pretty and popular?

I was mistaken.     

Not that I’m getting death threats.  It’s more along the lines of, “I disagree with you categorically.”  Everywhere I go there’s someone disagreeing with me.  It gets unnerving.  I order lunch like:  “No pickles, no mayo, and if there’s any disagreement on it I’m sending it back this time.”   . 

My boss said he disagreed with me.  He said the government would make a mess of managing health care.    And while he was there in my column a-disagreein’ and a-thrashin’ around, he dislodged one of my apostrophes, which whacked me out of orbit and sent me spiraling into a snit the size of Saturn. 

I happen to be the apostrophe queen of America.  I make mistakes of fact and taste and judgment but never of apostrophes.  I would go on television naked before I’d leave out an apostrophe. 

It’s a curse being like that.  I can’t be in a room with a split infinitive, I get, like, hives, and when someone says “between you and I” I go into seizures.  I call it the princess and the participle syndrome and I’d lose it if I could.  But both my parents majored in English and they suckled me on semicolons.

            Anyway, the apostrophe was the proximate cause for my snit, but maybe it had something to do with all this disagreement, too.  I’m not really the hard-bitten journalist type, I’m a big old quiverin’ mass of pink feelings and exposed nerve endings, chronologically vulnerable to the AARP bounty hunters but emotionally still in roughly seventh grade.. 

So I stamped my foot and shook my fist and swore off column-writin’ forever.  It lasted about 12 hours.

What happened was, while I was going down to the garden to eat worms, I tripped over my lower lip, which was dragging the ground, and the ensuin’ impact must have caused blood to flow to my tiny brain because suddenly I had the thought:

What, precisely, have I said so far that utterly anybody could disagree with in any way, shape or fashion?   

In the (count ‘em) two columns I’ve written, I’ve made exactly two points:  (a) that health insurance is prohibitively expensive for working slobs like me to purchase, and (b) that emergency room care is prohibitively expensive for working slobs like me who can’t afford health insurance.

I don’t think either point is open to debate.  It must have been seven or eight years ago I priced health insurance for my husband and me, and it was a minimum of $700 a month then.  I expect it’s more now.  My sister and her husband had to pay their own premiums via a COBRA arrangement when he lost his job a few years ago, and it came to $1400 monthly for their family of four.

As for emergency room care, I think a base price of $500 to walk into a joint can reasonably be described as a mite pricey.  They don’t even provide beer.

I never said Uncle Sam should manage health care.  I never proposed a solution of any kind.  I merely pointed out there was a problem, and that was enough to set people disagreein’ with me six ways from Sunday.

Now, why is that?  Why is it if I say “health care” I might just as well have made some comment involving your sister, the bus station,  green eyeshadow and sailors?

I really don’t know why it’s so hot-button.  Is it because we disagree so violently about how to solve the problem we don’t want to admit one even exists?  Is all this raving about death squads and socialism a national attempt to stick our fingers in our ears and shout, “I – can’t – HEAR – you?”

I don’t know.  What I do know is that  the present system isn’t working, and I’ve got a dog in the fight because I’m one of the ones it isn’t working for.  But I’m not alone. Practically everybody I talk to has a horror story. 

So I’ve got to keep telling those stories as long as I can, and if you disagree all I can reasonably say is:

“C’mon.  Who wants a piece a me?”

END

The Adventures of Huckleberry Bob and Employee Jim

By Robin Ford Wallace

            We was floating down the river, me and Employee Jim, and it was pretty broad day so I made Jim lay down on the raft and cover up with the quilt, because if he set up people could tell he was a employee a good ways off.  But we hadn't no accidents and didn't see nobody, and when night come Jim come out too and we cooked our supper and after that lit up our pipes and had a smoke.  

"Jim, this is nice," I says. "I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but here.”

“Bless you, Huck,” says Jim.  “Where else we gwyne ter be since I run off from de factory, and you excaped from your pap?” 

But he allowed as how he was tolerable glad to be there too, and we set and smoked and had a general good time while the river run through the trees and the crickets sung just as lovely and peaceful as you could want it.

Then Jim he heaved a sigh and he says, “Tain’t no use, Huck.  No matter how fur we goes, I still ain’t gwyne ter be free.  I don’t reckon there is no help fer hit, hit’s this here health care system.  Suppose I got ter go ter de doctor?”

“Do like I do,” I says.  “Go to a clinic where they will treat you on a sliding scale.”

Jim he commented he wasn’t too sure about that, it did not sound stable to him and he’d ruther be treated on a plain old examining table that was not sliding nowhere. 

Then he heaved another sigh.  “Them clinics is fine fer you, Huck, because you is healthy and don’t want fer no one ter mess with you nohow, but looky here.” 

And Jim up and unbuttoned his shirt, so that I could see this big old snake just a-wrapped around his throat like it was set on choking Jim straight to death.  “That’s gashly, Jim,” I says.  “What is it?”

“That’s my COBRA, Huck,” he says.  “I pays $600 a month fer hit since I left de factory, and it’s like ter stranglin’ me.”

“Why don’t you pluck it off and flaing it in the river then?” I suggested.

But Jim he just shook his head.  “See, Huck, I got this little problem with my heart and I got to see a specialist now and then, maybe have a stress test or one of dem angioplasties.  You know how much that costs without medical insurance, chile?”

Jim did up his shirt again, very gentle and tender so as not to disturb the COBRA.  “If’n I don’t pay this ever’ month, honey,” he explained, “then they will preexist me and won’t nobody give me insurance then.  That means I’s gwyne to go bankrupt in just a year, Huck, if I don’t fine’ me no job with good insurance.”  He looked very melancholy.  “That or not go to no doctor, Huck, just lay down and die.”

So Jim he judged it was all up with him anyway it could be fixed; for if he didn't get a job before the COBRA was up he might as well get drownded here and now.  Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for a employee.

But that didn’t make it fair and I commenced to keen.  “It wasn’t meant to be so, Jim,” I  says.  “Nobody would have designed it no such fool way.  Health insurance got fastened to jobs in the 1940s as a draw for employees when labor was tight.  It was never meant to enslave nobody.”

 Jim allowed as I was right about that and no mistake, but then the for-profit insurers done took over the health market; and shortly after the hospitals all went for profit too and commenced to be run by CEOS with an eye to the bottom line; and costs spiraled out of control with everybody a-grabbing for his piece of it and if anybody said the least little thing about it the rest of them all hollered it was socialism.

So Jim he just hung his head and he says, “I’s gwyne back to de factory, Huck.  T’aint fair.  T’ain’t supposed to be no slavery in the United States, leastways of ever’ man and woman as has got to work for a living.  But what is folk like you and me gwyne ter do about it, chile?”

So we was standing there just as mournful and sad as if we was at a funeral when out of nowhere up rows my old friend Tom in a canoe and he says, “Well, you better do somethin’, because guess what?  Aunt Polly sent me to tell you the factory ain’t there no more.  They closed it down and outsourced the jobs to Mexico.  Looky yonder!”

   We looked and saw that the river had become just clogged with people, men and women and little children still in their night clothes, many with them COBRAs around their necks like Jim’s that they was attempting to pay with unemployment checks but most of them without nothing, nothing at all.

So you see, it ain’t just Jim, there’s millions and millions of us just a-drifting or a-flailing helplessly against the current, unemployed or outsourced or downsized, and if health care stays tied to jobs while jobs keep a-dying out and a-drying up, we are all going to be sold down the river.

That’s all and there ain't nothing more to say, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to write about health care I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more.

The End, yours truly, Huckleberry Bob.

END

The End, Yours Truly, Only I Forgot To Tell You About the Purple Sock

By Robin Ford Wallace

One of the pleasures of living in a place this size is that it is such an elegant little microcosm of the larger world, everything in it a small and perfect metaphor simply bursting with significance. 

I sit in a Dade County Commission meeting and I see:  The Democratic Process.  Ted Rumley at the head of the table is Governmental Authority, Patrick Cannon, Law and Order, and the people hanging around the back eating doughnuts – well, you’ve got me there.  I guess sometimes people eating doughnuts are just people eating doughnuts.

Me, of course, with my camera and my officious little notebook, I am:  The Press.  I sit stern and dispassionate watching the elected officials with my eagle eye, occasionally breaking my flinty silence to ask a hard question like:  This the only kind of doughnut you got?

Well, see, even when you’re a metaphor bursting with significance it’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you are constantly reportin’ on what’s happening at the county dump.  Anyway, if you read this space with any regularity you will know that this particular metaphor is congenitally incapable of taking herself, or anything, seriously enough to break a real sweat. 

Until this health care thing came along and turned me into a different kind of metaphor – the Voice Crying in the Wilderness?  What happened is, I woke up one day and realized there were metaphorical elephants in the room and metaphorically nekkid emperors thick on the ground that everybody was pretending not to see, while I meanwhile sat in the cabbage patch babblin’ on about beer, Shakespeare and my brother Frank.

So I brushed the dirt off my butt, came in and said my piece, then last week made a dramatic exit from this whole crusadin’ racket and floated off with Huck and Jim down the Metaphor River.

But I’m bad at dramatic exits.  I tend to storm out, kicking over garbage cans, then come back and say, “Er, did I leave my car keys on the table?”  This time, what I forgot to tell you is about the purple sock.  So:

I used to be a court reporter.  I never much liked it and one thing I liked least was hospital parking garages.  Court reporters are always going to hospitals because attorneys are always deposing doctors, which is bad enough but another story.  We’d better stick with the parking garages. 

            I’m one of those people who get hopelessly lost in them.  If you were in a parking garage during those years and you saw an inbred-looking woman wandering from floor to floor, carrying a huge case and wearing high heels, odds are that was me and I wish you had stopped and given me a ride because those shoes were killing me.

Once I had a series of jobs that took me from hospital to hospital for over a week.  I had rented a car because my husband had gone out of town driving mine, and this complicated the parking garage thing to the point of cruel and unusual punishment.  I could actually stagger right past my car obliviously because it was a generic little rental car and I didn’t recognize it.

            So what I finally started doing, on maybe the third day, was tie a bright purple sock around the antenna.  Then I managed to find the car because, though it still looked like all the others, I was the only one with sufficiently low car pride to disfigure my vehicle like that.    

            Now, the reason I was at all those hospitals:  A group of doctors proposed to open a surgery center.  The three major hospitals in town all sued to stop them.  They sued not in the regular courts but before a public health commission, but the process was otherwise the same.  Their reason for objecting was: the surgical center would cut into their profits.

            So attorneys were deposing the CEOs of these hospitals, who sat there talking about cancer and heart disease as, I swear, “books of business.”  One of the attorneys asked one of the CEOs something along the lines of, “So your main concern in running this hospital is a profitable bottom line?”

            The CEO was mildly surprised, and said:  “Of course.  As in any other business.”

            Before that, when I drove past a hospital I’d see in my mind’s eye something very much like a TV medical drama – doctors and nurses rushing to the aid of someone being brought in on a stretcher, shouting:  “Has he got a pulse?”  These days, I’m more apt to think of them going through his pockets, shouting, “Has he got insurance?”

            Now, as for insurance:  The manager of the surgery center explained how she dickered with insurance companies to set a price for surgeries.  Because the companies could bargain collectively, she explained, they could get lower prices for a procedure than uninsured patients who had to pay their own way.  Which didn’t matter because nobody wanted uninsured patients anyway.

            Meanwhile, the doctors who were opening the center had no intention of offering their own employees health insurance.  They thought they could get enough nurses away from the hospitals by offering daytime hours to skip extras like that.

            After five or six days of this, I came to see health care the way these people did – a battle between hospitals, doctors and health insurance companies for the consumer dollar.  No one cared about patients.  And I didn’t care who won the suit because as far as I could see all parties involved laid their eggs in hot sand.

            But back to the purple sock.  I forgot to take it off the antenna and it flew off into 80-mph traffic on I-24.  It was probably some kind of metaphor, too, but I never figured out what for.  My innocence?  America?    

Still, it struck me as a terrible way for a sock to die.

END

It was somewhere during that summer and early fall of 2009 when I was writing these Radio-Free Robins about health care that I realized I had turned into my evil twin or somebody.  Well, not really evil but I wasn’t me anymore!  In the spring, I had quit a longtime and deeply-entrenched smoking habit with the help of a prescription drug called Chantix.  It worked!  I quit – but:

But the drug caused a variety of sinister personality changes and then when I tried to get off it, it damn near killed me.  Really, the drug is responsible for the Radio-Free Robins to begin with – I stopped being able to sleep when I discontinued it, so all one weekend I gave up trying and got out of bed to write instead.  Then the emergency room piece, no. 2 in the series, chronicles what happened when I gave up and took half a Chantix on an empty stomach. 

After I printed this piece I continued whaling away at Pfizer about the drug, and I wrote emails and like that to the AMA and pharmaceutical societies, but to this day I never got anyone to take me seriously. 

 It’s a shame because everybody I’ve known who’s taken the drug has ended up getting stranger than they already were.  In my case there are things I’m not going to put on the Internet, and that I will cheerfully deny under oath – but trust me, it’s a bad drug. 

Me, Sadie  and Pfizer:  Prescription Drugs and Pink Lipstick

By Robin Ford Wallace

I’d never have called my friend “Sadie” a girly-girl.  Yes, she loves to cook, she’s got a fine set of full frontals, and she can’t throw a Frisbee for her life.  But she’s also almost six feet tall and was a basketball star in high school.  She was just never the frilly type.

Note past tense.  These days, Sadie practically dots her i’s with little hearts.  When she stayed at my house this July, she came out of the shower wrapped in a bath sheet, squealing, “Ooh, I love this towel!  It’s soft and it’s purple and it goes over your whole body!”  Then she wiggled like Marilyn Monroe, and put curlers in her hair. 

Curlers. 

“Do you have any lip gloss?” she simpered.

I didn’t, but I handed over the one tube of lipstick I had in my purse.  “Your favorite color,” I said.  “Pink.” 

Lately, everything she owned was pink.  When we went camping, she used a pink flashlight.  Not that we camped much anymore; Sadie preferred to spend weekends shopping at outlet malls. 

Shopping.

What changed Sadie?  I blame a prescription drug called Chantix, manufactured by Pfizer, prescribed by her doctor last fall to help her stop smoking.  

Yes.  Today’s subject is:  the drug industry.  I know I keep promising to quit raving about health care and go back to the cabbage patch, but then something new riles me up and I come roaring out of the dirt like a plague of locusts. 

Anyway, Sadie:  Frankly, I never thought she could quit.  She was a career smoker who would light cheerfully up under No Smoking signs.  But quit she did, and without a speck of self-pity.  It was unbelievable.  It was as if she’d had the habit painlessly excised, as if by surgery.

Which is precisely what I’d always wanted. 

I was a different kind of smoker – you know, the tortured artist type, squinting bitterly through clouds of foul yellow smoke and saying things like, “Eet ees all so … pointless.”  Well, minus the French accent, but you can’t be a writer without occasionally saying something bitter through a cloud of smoke.

I wanted to quit and I knew it was going to be awful.  So since the Chantix had worked so well for my friend, I got my own prescription filled last March.  

It wasn’t as easy as Sadie had made it seem.  I was always just screaming with thwarted desire.  I wanted something and I wanted it like crazy – but somehow, the Chantix helped me realize it wasn’t a cigarette. How?  I formulated a theory:

Early on, I was at a party, outside under a full moon, and had made a new friend.  She and I drank glass after glass of red wine, exchanged life stories and complained about men – and as we talked, she lit cigarette after long white cigarette.  I think what had drawn me to her in the first place was that she smoked my brand.

Usually when temptation says come hither I go thither without much fuss.  I figure I’m going to screw up and there’s no point drawing it out.  But that night I never bummed the first puff!  I decided that Chantix must contain tiny transistors that had implanted themselves in my fillings and I was being remote-controlled from Washington, D.C., or possibly outer space.

            But that was just a joke, and it didn’t occur to me that Chantix really was controlling anybody until July, when Sadie was wiggling around in that bath sheet and borrowing my pink lipstick.  And then, of course, I was thinking in terms of Sadie.  It wasn’t until August that it finally struck me:

            What was I doing with pink lipstick?

            I remembered thinking, when I bought it:  “This pink will set off my tan.”  You’ll have to take my word for it but I’m not the kind of person who thinks things like that.  I’m the kind of person who thinks things like:  “If we get there early, we’ll have time for a beer.”

            It was chilling.  After I started noticing, though, I’d catch myself putting on full makeup to go places like the dump, or pausing in parking lots to check my face in other people’s car windows.  I’d paid to have the sun-bleached parts of my hair colored to match the other parts.  Eek! 

            I’ve never enjoyed being me.  My big joke was always:  If somebody steals my identity, can I get a new one?  But after I realized I was a pod person, all I wanted was to be me again, to reclaim my true, if you don’t mind, robinhood. 

So I quit taking the drug, and then everything really went to pieces. 

I started longing to smoke again.  Once I went into hysterics because I was out of breath mints.  I quit being able to sleep more than a few hours, then one hour, then at all.

Finally I was so hollow-eyed and twitchy I gave up and took half a Chantix.  But after so long without it, my body rejected it so spectacularly, I ended up at the hospital.

So you see, Chantix helped me quit smoking but messed with my head and ended up nearly killing me, and that’s what I told Pfizer.  I wrote a letter describing my symptoms and suggesting that the drug needed further R&D, particularly in relation to females of Sadie’s and my age. 

Pfizer cared so deeply about my side effects that it referred me to:

A call center in India.

So.  Turn me into Barbie, send me to the emergency room, then let me complain to someone who doesn’t understand a word I say?  And they call lawsuits against drug companies “frivolous?”  What do they call Uzis?

OK.  I’m really not going to sue.  I’m grateful to have quit smoking.

But I don’t know that I’m quite ready to quit writing about health care just yet.

END