I started taking a new drug called 4AP (fampridine) a couple of weeks ago. It is not yet approved (in its current form) by the FDA for treatment of MS so, while it's legal, there's only one compounding pharmacy that makes it. My first visit to my physical therapist after I'd started on it (having been on it for a week), his wig was flipped. I went from having balance equivalent to that of a typical 90-year-old to having the balance of someone about 50. Moreover, I went from being able to walk less than 4000 feet in half an hour (extrapolated from six minutes of walking) to being able to walk almost 6000 feet in that amount of time. All in one week! This bodes very well for the future--I'm not even up to the full dose yet. I will keep you all apprised.
_____
Last week I went to the birthday party for an old high school friend I haven't seen in at least 18 years. At the party were other high-school acquaintances I haven't seen in more than 20 years. What a life-affirming experience. We all look different (in most cases exactly as I would've pictured 20 years down the line would look like), but we're all so essentially the same inside as to be instantly recognizable. Some of us have fallen in a couple of decades, most of us have seen some shit, and all of us have fundamentally altered perceptions of what this breath is all about.
*EVs*
About the time that I moved to Bellingham WA to finish college, my father sold that beautiful piece of land in Maine, on which my girlfriend and I had built a cabin. I had just been realizing I had to give up on the homestead idea so the news came at a good time. I had also decided I no longer wanted to drive a gasoline-powered car, and had spent some time with the Seattle EV (electric vehicle) group. I knew of a nice Fiat that had been converted to electric by a father-son navy electrical-engineer duo. The owner had tried it for a few years and was ready to move on. I had money from the cabin and so was ready to take it off his hands. Sweet ride! It had LEDs on the dash which showed you the relative strength of each battery.
The one thing it didn't have was a heater--really not a good thing in northern-most Washington state. Whereas heat in an ICE (internal combustion engine) car comes from the engine itself, in an electric car heat must be produced by taxing the batteries, which cuts heavily down on the distance you can drive (the heater took more power than driving). Additionally, lead-acid batteries do not hold a charge very well in cold weather. This combined to make for a very tough year. I had resolved to retire my gas burner and use the EV exclusively. When I first started I knew next to nothing about motors, engines, or cars in general. After taking a course of study (five engineering classes) at the Vehicle Research Institute (one of the premier schools of its kind in the country)) I was a veritable wiz with cars.
I wish I'd foreseen the "year with" trend which is so hot right now (year with Julia Child, year with minimum-wage jobs, etc.) because my year driving an EV exclusively would have made a hell of a story. There was a very steep learning curve. First off, at the Seattle EV club, we had changed the car from eight 12-volt batteries to 10. No one had told me that this meant the car now had to be charged on a 220-volt circuit instead of a regular household 110; I guess they assumed I knew. At the beginning I didn't even know the difference between an engine (ICE) and a motor (electric). With the help of a friendly Seattle EV buff, I finally hooked a charge cable to my 220-volt stove socket (with a splitter), and ran it out the window to the car.
There were numerous other problems, some of which I was able to fix, some I never did. As winter came on I realized I needed a heater that would work with my new 120-volt battery stack (instead of the old 96 volts). That was small hurdle. Then I discovered that the motor mounts were coming loose; actually, a Seattle EV-club member who lived on Camano Island, the closest member to Bellingham, figured it out, and we devised a simple but sturdy brace that held the motor in place. Then one night as I was driving through town, the simple piece which connected the transmission with the drivetrain broke. Because the car was a Fiat, parts were not easy to come by. I finally got my hands on the replacement part, but the car never did work right again. I could never again get it in reverse; I always had to park on an incline or hill so that I'd be able to get out.
Major lesson learned: all cars are bad. Even electric cars need their electricity from somewhere, and invariably, in this day and age, most of that electricity comes from coal power plants. A net advantage of zero. The most important thing to consider as far as cars go is emissions. With all-electric, you've got the emissions from the power plant (it is not possible to generate enough electricity for motive power from a single solar-panel array). Nowadays you can get Ultra Low Emissions Vehicles (ULEVs) and even Partial Zero Emissions Vehicles; in all cases those are hybrids, and hybrids are without doubt the best bet for everyone between now and the 100% electric-vehicle world (with no coal plants!) all of us EV idealists are banking on. Maybe not in my lifetime, but some day.
*Cities*
When I fled New York in 1992 or '93, I had the very foolish notion that living in a city was in some way less eco friendly than living in the country--it took me nearly 20 years to realize just how wrong I was! One of my idols, David Korten, reformed World-Bank economist and author of the scathing When Corporations Rule the World (among others), took note of this "red herring" in his aforementioned book. Just as with the idea that plastic is bad and paper is good, the idea that city living has more of an environmental footprint than country living is patent hogwash: Paper is what fills up more than 75% of landfills and does not biodegrade under normal circumstances; if you consider the gas you have to burn in your single-occupancy vehicle just to get anywhere in the country the eco cards are stacked against you. Cities have mass transit in which many people occupy a single vehicle.
Add to that the fact that in the country, people all live in separate single-family homes (whereas in cities people live together generally, all under one roof, with one boiler for a whole building), and you're quickly into "no doubt about it" territory. One of the salient features of contemporary city planning is that the goal in general is to work against sprawl by building _up_ instead of out. Here again cities are way ahead of the game from the get-go: big cities are all about building upwards not outwards, with New York City being the premier example; we _can't_ build outwards. Those places where strip-mall sprawl is the norm, and where there is poor mass transit, are not in fact true cities. Therefore, for example, Tampa Florida doesn't count, nor does Seattle Washington. In both places, and similar ones, a car is absolutely essential, and there alone you've got one big environmental boondoggle.
*Peace*
Please watch the following video:
Nonviolent peacekeeping is the way of the future.
*Quirky*
Also look at this kooky video by a guy named Hawksley Workman (crazy name, I assume it's a pseudonym). I'd say this is understated and sublime:
*Rights*
From The Writer's Almanac:
"Margaret Sanger was born into a working-class Irish family. Her mother died when she was 50, after 18 pregnancies. Margaret went to New York City, became a nurse, got married, and gave birth to three kids. As a nurse, she worked in the maternity ward on the Lower East Side, and many of her patients were poor, some of them living on the streets. They seemed old to her by the time they were 35, and many of them ended up in the hospital from self-induced abortions, which often killed them. Margaret nursed one mother back to health after she gave herself an abortion, and heard the woman beg the doctor for some protection against another pregnancy; the doctor told the woman to make her husband sleep outside. That woman died six months later, after a botched abortion, and Margaret Sanger gave up nursing, convinced that she needed to work for a more systematic change.
"At the time, contraceptives were illegal in the United States, and it was illegal even to send information about contraception through the U.S. Postal Service. The information and products were out there, but a privilege only of the wealthy, who knew how to work the system. Margaret Sanger wrote a series of articles called "What Every Girl Should Know," and published a radical newspaper, Woman Rebel, with information about contraception. In 1914, she was indicted for sending information about birth control through the mail. She fled to Europe, where she observed birth control clinics, and eventually came back to face charges. But after her five-year-old daughter died of pneumonia, the sympathetic public was on her side, and the charges were dropped.
"But Sanger kept going. In 1916, she and her sister, who was also a nurse, opened a birth control clinic in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, modeled after the clinics that Sanger had seen in Holland. Neighborhood residents, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, flocked to the clinic for information. Nine days later, the police closed it down and arrested Sanger, her sister, and the clinic's interpreter. Sanger went to prison and her sister went on a hunger strike. The publicity worked: Soon birth control became a matter of public discourse. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1946 became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. And she funded research to create a contraceptive pill. She died at age 87, a few months after the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut finally made birth control legal for married couples."
It's astonishing to think that in this nation, where there is _supposed_ to be no mixing of church and state, there was a time when even birth control--family planning!--was illegal. Horrifying. And incredibly short sighted.
*Quotations*
Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that.
--Norman Borlaug
If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not bring it forth, what you do not have within you will kill you.
--Jodi Picoult
What people forget is that Shakespeare was a restless entertainer. When he played the Elizabethan stage, he was basically dealing with an audience of 3,000 drunken punters who were selling pigs and geese in the stalls. He played to everyone from the street sweeper to the Queen of England. And his style was to have stand-up comedy one moment, a song, and then the highest tragedy right next to it. He was a rambunctious, sexy, violent, entertaining storyteller.
--Baz Luhrmann
I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.
--Picasso
The worst thing a writer can do is to think. The best thing to do is to react, which includes thinking but doesn't let it act as an impediment or a censor. When you read something, you think something--write that down. That's what I'm always trying to do.
--Alberto Álvaro Ríos
Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.
--PT Barnum
Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.
--Julia Child
Media, the plural of mediocrity.
--Jimmy Breslin
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint you can on it.
--Danny Kaye
If I can go from burglar for the government to talk show host, you can go from entertainer to congressman.
--G Gordon Liddy
Peace love and ATOM jazz
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