Stray Shot

It’s Super Bowl Monday on the South China Sea, off the coast of Thailand.  I woke up at seven and stumbled to the Magellan Lounge, the Seabourn Pride’s theater, where the game was projected onto a huge movie screen, delivered by satellite feed live and gorgeous.  There were even hot dogs and beer along with coffee.

I have an enjoyment of the off kilter moment, but I have to say there are damned few of them aboard this ship.  Everybody I’ve talked to here says that Seabourn is the best cruise line in the world, and that the Pride is the finest ship in their fleet.  It’s hard to imagine how it could be improved.  If you want something you just ask, if you have time, because more often than not you are anticipated.  And there is at least one crew for every passenger.  We asked for the Super Bowl, and we got it on a screen right out of an old Palace Theater.

The only funny moment came shortly into the game.  We had arranged ourselves so that everybody had a full view of the screen, when a couple came in and went down to the front seats.  “Down in front!” Tevis called out.  The woman waved at him and sat down, taking a little chunk out of the bottom of the screen where the crawl runs.  I was pleased that New Orleans won.  They need all the morale boost they can get.

I slipped out to Veranda Cafe for eggs benedict and coffee during half time.  The Pride was slowly cruising toward Ko Kook Island, where a pristine beach was being prepared for our exclusive use by the crew.  By the time the tenders took us ashore the beach was set with umbrellas and seats, a bar was set up, and masseuses were waiting in grass huts to work their magic.

The beach was pure white sand and the water was warm and perfectly clear, the sand sloping gently out into the sea so that you can walk a long ways before the water comes up to your waist.   And of course the service was perfect, with pina coladas on serving trays to get things rolling.  A Thai Elvis Presley was singing the King’s songs from a makeshift stage while most of use lolled in the water, interrupted only by a skiff serving champagne and caviar out in the surf.  That drew a crowd.

On the beach there were serving tables with all kinds of food:  hamburgers, hot dogs, crab, shrimp, vegetables, thin roast sliced beef, ribs, lamb, ham, fish, and more, plus a range of desserts and three kinds of ice cream.  Crew even came around with sun screen, as well as ice water and, after the pina colada and champagne courses, a course of margaritas.  It was hard to tell whether people were sunburned or just dilated.

We are resting in the cabin, now, and later will go down to the restaurant to a dinner hosted by Rachael.  I can’t explain Rachael.  She’s just gorgeous, and she sings rock and roll and dances as well as working on the crew.  Linda said, “I accepted the invitation because I know you think she’s the hottest female on board.”

Well … yea …

We came aboard the Seabourn Pride and were immediately surrounded by an attending staff, something I’m not used to but could probably learn to like.   What’s not to like about having anything you want any time you want it?   That’s life aboard the Pride.

The Captain’s name is Bjarne Larsen.  How Swede it is.  He said that should anyone go overboard we should throw into the water a life buoy or anything else  that floats.  It would be really embarrassing to make a mistake and throw something after a drowning person that proved not buoyant.  I amused myself with cartoons of my own making, which is a lifelong habit.  Had I learned to draw I’d connect the habit to something outside myself.  As it is, the habit just makes my sense of humor seem sometimes odd.

The cruise is expensive,   though in this economy the prices have been slashed to the point that it’s affordable to those not so rich.  Our first formal dinner at the cruise director’s table confirmed that  the favored subject of conversation among the passengers … at least the ones dining with us … is  travel.   And not just travel, but  expensive travel.

We struck a conversation with a couple of older people from Scotland, and our looking out at the Hong Kong high rises reminded the man of their having lived in a high rise once, though not very high, where the wind whipped around it because of convection currents.

Trying to be engaging I mentioned that when I moved to San Francisco in 1980 the winds used to blow freezing fog up the avenues off the ocean, but that in recent years it has been much milder.  “I have to tell you,” he said, “that we don’t buy this global warming thing.”   Even talking about the weather seems to have become socially perilous.

At our first dinner, we were seated with a couple from Los Angeles.  Roy made his money in air conditioning and his wife, I think her name was Lalla, but I’m not sure I heard it correctly,  spends at least some of it on jewelry.   I think jewelry is a throwback to a time when one wore one’s wealth, and it was contained in rare trinkets.  Manhattan Island was bought from the natives with beads, so I have heard.   My mental cartoonist furnished a caricature of a woman wearing earrings made out of American Express cards.

Our dinner with the cruise director and eight other people was pleasant but lacking excitement, as,  like I said, the conversation around me at least focused on sea cruises and expensive accommodations.   I recalled a conversation with Joseph Henderson in which I expressed some feelings of inadequacy around a situation I was in with a German intellectual I was dating.  I felt like a rube around her friends and wondered if I should break it off and find something more culturally comforable.

He said that what I was having trouble with was not being as knowledgeable about European culture as are Europeans, but that this is to be expected, and  they generally don’t know all that much about American culture, either.  “When I used to be at dinner with the Darwin family I felt the same way,” he said.  He married into the family; I think it was a granddaughter.  “They knew nothing about the Dakotas,” he said “so that gave me something to talk about.”

One of the people I especially liked was an American from Florida.  At first I felt pushed by him, as he was trying to get me interested in signing some kind of letter to the head of Seaborne, urging that we get the Super Bowl  beamed aboard the ship.  I didn’t really want to do that once I realized it would be about three in the morning here when it broadcasts.  I’m trying to shift my internal clock away from being awake in the middle of the night and I don’t intend to shift it back if I succeed, even for the Super Bowl.

The reason I liked him (his name was Tevis) was that his irreverence  was in perfect juxtaposition to the English conversation about hotels and high end travel.  After talking to Linda awhile he  turned toward me and asked, “You hear about the black boy who said, ‘I don’t want a rich woman; I just want one that works steady?”  It was so off kilter with the proper behavior of the English that I had to like him for providing the ballast.

“I know that guy,” I said.

Linda is certainly a different breed than the women of inherited leisure.  “She’s a woman who understands how to run a hot plant,” I said.  Later there was some conversation about San Francisco, and from those who aren’t in San Francisco it’s almost always something about gay people.  For those who live there it almost never is, and so it comes as a surprise.  The fish don’t pay much attention to the water.

“I think there’s something queer about gay people,” Tevis said.  I didn’t laugh because I wasn’t sure that it was a laugh line.  I almost said, “And something fairly odd about the rest of us when you scratch the surface,” but censored it.  I wasn’t sure my dinner guests found themselves odd at all, and the surface was for the most part expertly  lacquered to resist scratching.   But I was sorry I hadn’t laughed because the point isn’t to let people know what you think in such a situation, but to make them feel comfortable.

“That was a joke,” he said, “but it went over like a lead balloon.”

After dinner Linda told me that Tevis is eighty-five years old, and that he was speculating on whether the woman on my left, who was very attractive, was wearing a bra.   I would have guessed him at least ten years younger.   I hope when I’m his age, I’m that energetic.

When I wake up at three or four in the morning in a hotel room there’s not a hell of a lot to do except make coffee and read for awhile.  I’m realizing that the combination of Cormac McCarthy novels and Carl Jung’s diary of his descent into the netherworld combine, but uneasily.   Far below the window I see a ship being escorted by tugs toward the dock where,  later this afternoon, we will board it and move out to sea.

The path to Hong Kong (where I am writing this)  by air from San Francisco, passes over vast, frozen tundra, giving way to a pattern of brown and white as the earth is exposed.  Then through a mist of clouds a sea of high rises appears below, like steel and concrete giants marching out of China toward the sea.

I am used to thinking of Asia as I knew it forty years ago, when I was afflicted with the thinking common to all untraveled people, a certainty that those of my color and beliefs were the heros, and the rest of the world character actors in my play.  I wasn’t nearly as bad as a lot of others because I had read extensively, even if I had not traveled.  I knew there was something not right about it when I heard another man heckle the actors on a foreign stage for discomfiting his expectations.

As I get older I hear the propensity in men to replay their stories, the kind ones improving on them and the others slathering them with tedious and undigestible  detail.  I have my stories of a year in Japan in my youth, of confrontations and assignations with foreign men and women.  In each story I am the viewpoint character, and never in their construction have I stepped outside the assumption that I was the leading actor, and the others supporting cast.

I suppose that is what, in essence,  Jung’s journey is all about:  the recognition that we begin as the actor in a play, and pass through a process of disintegration in order to encompass the play itself, to ultimately get a glimpse of the director and behind the director, the playwright.  The easy path is to simply do the lines and stay in character, collect your pay and hope for a long and successful run.

I am puzzled by the reaction to his work as religion, or by a profession of “believing him” or not.  I have no reasons to not accept that he faithfully recorded his experience, which is the best anyone can do.   He understood that it was the symbol which was the transformer of energy, and that before it passed through the symbol and gained emotional tone, it had no meaning.  So the symbols, or archetypes, are transformers.   Beyond them, outside the enclosure of them, energy is amorphous.  It doesn’t mean anything.  The only meaning is what we provide, or what is given to us by our culture.  And inside this meaning we are either protected or imprisoned, depending on our inclination to encompass or exclude what seems to be alien.

McCarthy is a western man.  He writes about the Mexican border, and about men who are self-sufficient and not particularly introspective.  If one of them asks the other if he believes in God his answer is most likely that he’s not thought on it all that much.  When one of his characters is shot in the leg he heats a pistol barrel in the fire until it’s glowing red and shoves it into the entrance and exit wounds to cauterize them.  He makes a lot of noise, but he doesn’t die of infection on the Mexican desert.  He does what he has to do to survive.

In, “The Crossing,” McCarthy writes:

“(The old man) said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence, but that the wolf knows better.  He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not:  that there is not great order in the world save that which death has put there … between (men’s) acts and ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see.  They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them … ‘You cannot touch the world.  You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.’”

I am certainly imposing my own order on what I am reading to say that Jung and McCarthy  would agree on anything.  But in some alchemy unknown to me at a conscious level they are working together to shape something bigger than either by himself.  Jung writes about his dream presaging the first Great War, and of the behavior of men  and women (the shine on their eyes) as presaging human sacrifice.  They do not realize that they are eager for the blood letting, thinking it will be other people’s blood.  They believe the image of themselves as heroes.  It is the death of the hero in the man which begins the journey to maturity.  I recall Joseph Henderson asking me who the hero was slaying all those dragons to impress, and I realized the truth of it:  that it was for his mother, and until he could move beyond that, he was as a child.

One of McCarthy’s ranchers observes that when wolves kill cattle they mutilate them more than when they kill wild game, as if there is something in their existence, in the way they are not bred to survive, that makes the wolf need to mutilate them.  The reason is understood, if difficult to articulate.   It is part of the order imposed on the world by beings of great order.

The McCarthy novels I will savor until they are finished, like other westerns that transcend the genre:  “Lonesome Dove” and Pete Dexter’s “Deadwood” come to mind.  Then I will let the shift in cultures strip away what I can bear to do without, and maybe see with new eyes for awhile.  And I will get back into the rhythm of night and day, and not be writing in the early mornings, when, like McCarthy’s characters, I move back and forth across the southern border without papers and with only a vague idea of any purpose for the crossing.

I got back to Prescott yesterday afternoon, after a couple of weeks away.  I left on Sunday about noon and drove to Mohave, where I stopped into my usual Mohave digs.  It’s a forty dollar a night dive with HBO I’ve stayed in for years.  I decided I needed a third point in my orbital pattern, and Mohave is an interesting character in any story.  It’s where the Space Shuttle comes cruising in over the airplane graveyard.

It’s also a highway town, built along the east side of the highway, with the railroad tracks running along the west side.  Sometimes the wind blows hard enough it feels like it’s going to take off the roof, and other times it’s still until the train comes through, making the room rumble and shudder.

There was a sign on the door.  ”Office closed.”  And it gave a number to call if it was an emergency.  Well, I supposed my wanting my room at six o’clock wasn’t an emergency, but I didn’t know what was going on.  Maybe the Chinese couple that run the place were out to dinner with friends.  The Chinese man who used to run it left and opened a whorehouse, from what the new owner inferred.   I don’t care what he’s doing, he’s my friend.  I once left a roll of hundreds on the dresser in my room and he gave it back to me.  Come to think of it, that might have set him thinking about opening a whorehouse, seeing how much cash some old white men carry.

Now I’m well off enough I don’t ever have much cash in my pocket, in case you were thinking about hiding behind the fence  around which runs a path through the darkness to the liquor store next door to the motel.  I left the money in the room while I went to get some beer because I didn’t want to carry it on me.   And lest I remember it was there, I slipped it under the ice bucket.  Brilliant.

My first thought was to keep driving as it was relatively early.  But it was dark, and I wasn’t going to drive all the way to Prescott, so there wasn’t much point in going on to Barstow or Needles.  Besides, I like driving into the Mohave early in the morning with a cup of McDonald’s coffee and an aerodynamic egg on a muffin.  It’s part of the Mohave ritual.  So I decided to look around for someplace else to stay.  My only requirement was that it be no more than forty bucks.

I picked out the one that seemed to have a few extras, like HBO, and didn’t look like a set for a B horror flick.  The Indian man at the desk was pleasant enough, and the room itself was fine.  I was especially pleased with the tasteless decor, with clashing forms and colors testifying to a frugal budget.  A nice place would be suspicious for forty bucks.  The television was bigger than in the other place and the remote actually worked.  I pulled out my iPhone to get my email and was surprised to see that I had wireless internet.  It just worked, with no hassle or password.

The only problem was that it was cold in Mohave on Sunday night, and the room heater fan rumbled like a truck on jake brake.  With it on I had to jack up the volume to hear the television.  HBO had something sucky on,  so I was watching a movie on one of the testosterone channels:  Con Air, with Nickolas Cage, about some murderous convicts led by John Malkovich.  He murdered a few people before getting the bright idea of  ordering passenger Steve Buscemi, “The Marietta Mangler,” be freed from his outfit, which was the same one Hannibal the Cannibal wore when he was transported from one facility to another.  If you don’t know Buscemi, think of the skinny little  kidnapper in Fargo.  He’s a familiar face but maybe not a familiar name.

As you might imagine,  that airplane was a bad neighborhood with no exit.  Nick Cage managed to get a message to the U.S. Marshals Office by writing it on the chest of this guy whose body was stuck in the wheel well — which is why they couldn’t get the landing gear to come up all the way and were off schedule — so he he had to push him out over a city, and as a humorous aside there was this couple at a stop light complaining about a bug hitting the clean windshield … okay, you see where this is going …

I had put a half bottle of red wine, some pocket bread and pears in the back of the truck when I left San Francisco,  and I got them out and had a little repast while I watched the movie.  Another thing this other place had was a coffee maker, so yesterday morning I made a pot of coffee and watched the news before heading out into the desert, instead of going to McDonald’s.  Instead I stopped at the Starbuck’s in Barstow for an egg salad sandwich and latte as provisions for the drive to Needles.  You can drive forty or fifty  miles without seeing signs of civilization on that stretch of I-17.

There was an accident on the highway between Barstow and Needles, and the traffic on the Interstate was eerily sparse.  The electronic sign at Barstow said all eastbound lanes were blocked.   I figured by the time I got there they would have it cleared but they didn’t.   The only way around it was on side roads, including a stretch of Route 66.    I put on the genius and got a country playlist seeded off of “Close Up the Honky Tonks” by Dwight Yokum off his Dwight sings Buck album. Then I relaxed into a back road adventure.  It’s more kicks on 66.

A couple of days ago I received this letter, and with the permission of the person who sent it to me am posting it so that when someone else who has this reaction to statins searches they will find that while it may be unusual for statins to precipitate a seizure, it does happen.

Dan -

I was Googling statins and seizures and came across your blog.  Thank you for writing this!
I have been on and off statins for the past year.  Like you, I hate medication.  I won’t even take a tylenol (besides the fact that they make me dizzy!)
I don’t like putting anything in my body that’s not necessary.

I am a 56 year old healthy woman.  My cholesterol was 220 and my doctor gave me a statin to bring it down.  She first prescribed 40 mg a day!  Thank god I was home because after 2 days my living  room was spinning and I thought I would fall down. I had to lay down for 5 minutes.  I then cut the pills in half to 20 mg.  Still, minor headaches, muscle cramps and just an icky all over feeling that you can’t describe.   I then decided to quit all together.

After about 4 months I started up again, this time with 10mg every OTHER day.  Everything seemed to be okay with treatment.  My numbers dropped to 180.  Good !    On August 23 I had a dizzy spell.  Thank god my boyfriend was there to catch me as I fainted and blacked out for 30 seconds.   Five minutes later I had another fainting spell after feeling dizzy.  This time he wasn’t there and I hit my head on the bathroom tile floor resulting in a concussion.  The MRI  and all the tests at the ER were normal.   I am still experiencing lingering symptoms from that hard fall.

My doctor ordered an EEG.  The tests showed that a minor seizure had possibly occurred.  I have an appointment with a neurologist on Nov 3.  I know the side effects of the statins after much research and the effect they have on the brain.  I have thrown away the pills and am convinced they caused the fainting.  I am curious to see what the neurologist thinks about it.  Of course, they don’t have a lot of documented proof about things like this that patients can offer insight into, but he will get MY insight!

I have now decided to go on the Apple Cider Vinegar treatment.  It treats a multitude of ailments, including cholesterol.  At least it won’t affect my brain!

Thanks for listening and for your post!

Patty

Like Patty, I began to doubt that there was a connection between the statins and the seizure, and tried to take them again, this time choosing Lipitor.  I logged my experience so that I could try to be more specific when I talk to my doctor.  However, Patty is correct that this is very hard to put into words.  It really is a feeling of dread connected with what I can only describe as a loss of the feeling of well being connected with a hemispheric balance.  Here is what I wrote during the second try at taking statins:

reaction to Lipitor

The first time I tried a statin drug it was on the fourth day, in the evening, when I had a seizure.  This was the culmination of a progressively difficult four days, during which I had a “bad feeling.”  My doctor insisted there was no connection between the statins and the seizure.  It was following the seizure that I began to notice a difficulty in remembering facts and names which I normally would have at hand.  When I asked my doctor if she was reporting the seizure as connected to the statins she said there was no evidence of it.  I agreed to get extensive testing on my brain, which showed nothing unusual for my age.  There was still no reporting the connection between the statins and the seizure because there is no reporting of it in the literature.  And it obviously isn’t being reported because it isn’t in the literature.

Of course there is a Catch 22 there.

I tried taking statins again and this time was paying closer attention when I began having a bad reaction.  Before I was trying to recall what it felt like.  This time I tried to more specifically describe it as on the first evening I took Lipitor, there was nothing particularly bad except that I couldn’t sleep.  It seemed that my conscious mind was unable to relax sufficiently to allow sleep to come.  The second night I took another Lipitor, and it was less than half an hour later when the symptoms began, this time very strong.  I was at the dinner table and felt that I was extremely tired, and needed to lie down  I went downstairs to sit in a recliner, but the feeling of distress was so strong that I needed to go to bed, which I did, working with the symptoms by doing a progressive relaxation.  While I was able to relax somewhat, I realized I was so devoid of any physical energy I could only get out of the bed with great effort.  Again I could not sleep.  The next evening I did not take another statin, and was able to fall asleep.  I dreamed of a situation in which I was presenting an article idea to an editor and suddenly my mind was blank.  I had no ability to move information from where it was stored to conscious presentation.