Category Archives: Men

Drone On

26 Thursday Feb 2015

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Grampa had an airplane. Bryce has a drone.

Grampa had an airplane. Bryce has a drone.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Model airplanes were all the rage when I was a boy. People would spend hours assembling replicas of World War II bombers or historic planes like The Spirit of St. Louis. The really ambitious kids (usually high school age) put motors on their models and flew them by radio control.

I was reminded of this because of two events in the news recently. First, one of the places where people used to buy radio-controlled planes — Radio Shack — filed for bankruptcy. That’s really sad. First we lost record stores, then book stores and now we are losing electronic supply stores. What’s next, newsstands?

The second recent event that brought the old radio-controlled model airplanes to mind is the flight of a drone onto the grounds of the White House. The President was in India at the time and no damage was done, but the incident further tarnished the reputation of the Secret Service.

Drones first came to the attention of the American public when the military began using them in Pakistan and Afghanistan to target terrorists. But they have been around for years. The civilian versions are usually equipped with GPS and camera and can be programmed to fly a specific course. Prices have dropped in recent years and you can buy a good one now for under $100.

The most popular type of drone is what’s know as a Quad Copter because it has four propellers. They can fly for miles from the controller. And that makes them perfect for search and rescue operations, farming applications and traffic reports. In fact, I would not be surprised if drones replace helicopters for traffic reports in the very near future. They can be sent airborne quickly and moved around with ease. The cameras today are high definition, and they cost a tiny fraction of what a helicopter with a pilot and camera crew cost.

Drones are the future of delivery as well. Amazon announced recently that they want to deliver packages by drone. The FAA is not cool with that yet, but the day will come. I certainly can see newspaper home delivery services using drones in the future.

Yes, it seems likely that the air will be full of drones in the next 20 years. It’s not flying cars, but there is something Jetsonian about drones. Oh sure, there may be problems with abuses like Peeping Tom Drones and Police Drones. There may even be drones falling out of the sky on to people. But every new technology has bugs to be worked out. Hell, we’re still working out the bugs in the Internet after more than 20 years. I have confidence that drones will become commonplace, along with self-driving cars.

Speaking of self-driving cars — that seems to have a lot of potential for providing a way for the elderly to get to the supermarket or the drugstore without endangering anyone. New technology does not allow these autonomous cars to get close enough to another object to hit it. Soon, the Little Old Lady From Pasadena may be hitting the road in something made by Google or Apple. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind that myself. Old age is going to be fun after all!

Two Men Walked In to a Gun Show

19 Thursday Feb 2015

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IMG_1614BY BOB SMITH

Maria and I recently visited Susan and Mark, old friends of ours who live in North Carolina, and we were at a loss for something to fill a Saturday afternoon. The women wanted to go to shopping for drapes to match the cushions, or vice versa, which to me seemed only marginally less painful than having a root canal. Mark agreed, and as he flipped through the local paper we found the answer: a gun and knife show.

Neither of us owns guns or non-kitchen knives, so we figured we’d get an education.

The show was held in a cavernous building that must have been two hundred yards on a side. The admission fee was ten bucks, and there were two lines to get in: one for unarmed customers, and one for those “carrying.” It was perfectly okay to bring a gun. They just wanted to be sure it wasn’t loaded when you walked through the door.

However, they didn’t frisk anyone to see if they had a pocketful of bullets. And there were a dozen vendors inside eagerly selling every variety of ammunition, clips, autoloaders, silencers, scopes, and other deadly accessories, so if someone had come to the gun show with mayhem in mind, there wasn’t much to stop them. Except, I suppose, the deterrent effect of the other 200 gun-loving patrons, surrounded by weaponry, who presumably would turn the shooter into a multi-ventilated shadow of his or her former self before too many shots had been fired.

The first table we visited was a knife display. These weren’t your grandma’s knives – there were razor-sharp mini-scimitars, Bowie knives longer than David Bowie’s list of hit songs, and tiny purse-friendly switchblades in designer neon colors. They even had a medieval-looking hand weapon that consisted of a leather-wrapped stick with one, two, or three spiked metal balls dangling from the end on an eight-inch chain.

I wanted a picture, and was positioning my smartphone over the table to snap a shot when a grizzled guy chomping an unlit cigar appeared on the other side of the table.

“No pictures of the flails,” he rumbled. Feeling foolish, I pocketed my phone and picked up the two-ball model, as if testing its heft.

“Pretty nice,” I said, clueless as to what to look for in a quality flail. “How much?”

“Single ball twenty bucks, two for thirty, three for forty. Stainless steel balls, genuine leather grip. Handle’s hardwood.”

He awaited my reply. In my khaki shorts, New Balance walking shoes, and gray cotton golf sweater, I didn’t fit his usual customer profile. We moved on.

A guy walked by with a rifle slung over his shoulder, and I realized why people brought weapons: sticking out of the barrel was a wooden dowel with a paper sign taped onto it reading: “FOR SALE OR TRADE.” It reminded me of the popgun rifle Wile E Coyote points at the Roadrunner that shoots out a flag reading “BANG” when he pulls the trigger.

The next table was arrayed with 50 rifles in a row, each chained to the next so you couldn’t raise them much above table height. Their burnished wooden stocks and oiled barrels gleamed in the harsh fluorescent lights. Similarly, the handgun tables had hundreds of sinister-looking weapons, from petite two-shot ladies’ pistols (the vendor’s description, not mine) to hulking hand cannons that would terrify Dirty Harry.

The sheer number and variety was staggering. We approached a rifle vendor and I picked up a small-bore shotgun. At a loss for words, and inspired perhaps by the walking FOR SALE gun signs, I asked, in my best Elmer Fudd voice:

“Excuse me – would this be good for hunting the wascally wabbit?”

The guy behind the table smiled thinly and turned away, clearly not interested in such nonsense.

I actually considered buying a self-defense baton. These are metal sticks that, when you flick your wrist, telescope in length from one foot to nearly three feet. Tapering to a dull point, it locks open and will only collapse again if you strike the tip solidly on a hard floor.

“Say you’re in a parking lot, and some guy’s comin’ at you with a broken beer bottle,” the seller proudly explained.”You can whip that open and give him a hot rap on the head or arm or leg or whatever, make him feel some real pain, from a couple feet away.”

He jabbed the end of the extended stick at my midsection and chuckled.

“And a poke with this here into some soft tissue can be very persuasive.”

I resented the insuinuation that my abs constituted “soft tissue,” or rather, that he could so readily discern that. But he was right: that hard metal stick created a well-defined, non-negotiable boundary between us.It seemed like a bargain for only 25 bucks. But then, I’ve been around for sixty years and haven’t yet found myself in need of a “soft tissue persuader” or head rapper.

So why would I need one now? I’ll just avoid honky tonk bars at closing time and save myself the money. I passed on the deceptively innocuous-sounding baton. But I couldn’t resist asking the vendor before I left:

“Could I use this to whack a wascally wabbit?”

On Pins and With Dr. ‘Needleman’

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Confessional, Men

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P1290924
BY BOB SMITH

I’ve got osteoarthritis in my right hip, and when I mentioned to my older brother Jim that surgery was an option if pain management didn’t work, he started raving about acupuncture. Apparently he’d woken up with a sore hip a year ago, and limped in to see an acupuncturist who fixed it in one visit. He walked out the same day, pain free.

This was high praise, particularly since I knew that, as a boy, Jim would break into cold sweats and/or faint dead away whenever he got an inoculation. I didn’t like getting shots, either, but if I looked away and didn’t dwell on the fact that a pointy piece of steel had been stabbed into my flesh, it was no more painful than a mild bee sting. So I decided to give it a try.

I made an appointment with a local acupuncturist of Chinese descent who’s certified by what appears to be a reputable national organization. His office, reassuringly, was in a standard brick professional building, and Doctor Needleman (my pseudonym), was about my height and dressed in a casual shirt and khaki pants. He looked at my tongue, felt around my lower back, and pronounced that my kidney qi (“chee”) was low.

I’d been there all of two minutes.

It reminded me of the joke about the guy who goes to the doctor to find out why he’s feeling poorly. He’s got carrots sticking out of his ears, and stringbeans and French fries jammed up his nose, and the doctor says “I can tell just by looking at you — you’re not eating right.” How could Needleman tell anything from such a cursory examination?

“Got low energy? Pee a lot?”

No to the first, and yes to the second, but the need to pee isn’t qi, it’s my 60-year-old prostate. He nodded knowingly.

“You get cold easily?”

“Only in New Jersey in January, which is why I’m in Florida, Doc,” I answered flippantly.

He told me to remove my shirt, socks, and shoes, and lie face down on the table with my hands relaxed on a chair positioned under the headrest. On the chair was one of those bells you see on a hotel front desk, which seemed random. Then the sticking began.

First Needleman palpated both sides of my spine, apparently identifying choice spots. Next I felt pressure and a hot jab of pain about midway down my back, punctuated by what felt like two gentle taps as he inserted the first needle. The pain subsided within two seconds.

He inserted at least twelve more needles going down both sides of my spine, and even a few into my left ankle and calf. Because I’d mentioned the arthritis in my left thumb, he put three there for good measure. I peeked and saw one hair-thin needle dangling from the meaty flesh at the base of my thumb, and closed my eyes again.

Except for the first needle, I felt no more than a mild pinch and slight pressure as he pushed them in. Then he spritzed my back with a cool liquid and swung a goosenecked heat lamp over the table.

“Okay, nap time,” he said cheerfully as he closed the door. “Thirty minutes. Just relax. Don’t move. Ring the bell if you need help.”

That wasn’t reassuring, although I couldn’t imagine what exactly might go wrong. He’d turned on a loud kitchen timer in harsh counterpoint to the piped-in flute and sitar meditation music that flowed into the room. As I began to feel the warmth of the heatlamp spreading across my back, I had the queasy sensation that something was going on in my body.

Needleman would say my qi was moving, but it’s just as likely I was overcome by the strangeness of lying there like a chubby white porcupine, waiting to see if panic would overtake me and make me ring the bell. But then, maybe 10 minutes later, I drifted into a deep calm. I no longer cared about the nest of needles sprouting from my skin, or my forced paralysis for a half hour, or even the timer’s relentless ticking — it all faded away. I was in a trance (or sleeping), dreaming about swimming with dolphins or how it would feel to be a loaf of freshly-baked bread.

Then Needleman was back, breezily plucking the metal pinpricks from my back. He asked how I felt, and I considered telling him I felt “perforated,” but that wasn’t true. My hip and thumb still hurt, but I felt better somehow. Was it all imaginary?

Have the Chinese been practicing acupuncture for millennia merely for its placebo effect? Could that many people be consistently fooled into believing they’re being helped when nothing is happening at all?

I’ve scheduled three more human pincushion sessions with Dr. Needleman to find out. I’ll keep you posted.

Give Me Some Sugar!

03 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Food, Men

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Bryce cake

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Kids love sugar.

Who am I kidding? Just about everyone loves sugar. But it’s not very good for us. That’s how I got to be 60 pounds overweight. Be it cake, candy or ice cream, I crave sweets. I often joke that I wasn’t born with just a sweet tooth — I have a mouth full of them. So when my blood sugar levels began to rise in recent years and my doctor began warning me of impending diabetes, I had to admit that I was addicted to sugar. I think this particular addiction is shared by most people.

Cutting back on sugar was key to my recent weight loss. I hope that it also helps me avoid diabetes. But sugar is the devil constantly tempting me. So when my grandson Bryce was born, his parents decided to have his first year of life be sugar-free. He has been eating fruits, and that is about as much sweet as he has been allowed.

But when his first birthday party came, the celebration included Bryce’s first cupcake with icing. To say that he enjoyed it is an understatement. He rubbed the icing all over his face and even into his hair as if to enjoy the sugar by osmosis. Bryce smiled from ear to ear as the sugar high registered in his brain. As his grownup relatives watched, Bryce became a sugar baby. Can candy be far behind? Oh, the humanity!

From Old Christmas Trees, New Dunes Grow

29 Thursday Jan 2015

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front end with tree

BY BOB SMITH

Twenty-five years ago when we first bought our house in Bradley Beach, a dingy wooden boardwalk ran the length of the town. It extended 20 feet out over the beach, suspended 12 feet above the sand on greasy, precarious-looking pilings. It was anchored on the inland side to a creosote-covered bulkhead built into the natural rise of the land, and, despite its tackiness, it seemed to be a permanent beachfront fixture.

During the dog days you could camp out under the shady boardwalk, provided you were willing to tolerate the tarry smell of the bulkhead and the spilled soda or cigarette butt that occasionally rained down from overhead. On hot nights they had music — a brass band, or a DJ spinning dance tunes — in the concrete bandshell just off the boardwalk at the foot of our street. Lost in a summer evening, we’d stand by the splintery railing and watch the waves foaming white at the waterline as the band marched through a Sousa medley.

Then in the ’90s a nasty nor’easter clawed up the whole thing, tossing its slats inland like tinder. It swept away a playground, swings and slides and all, and filled the town’s beachfront pool with sandy sludge and jagged shipwrecked sections of what once was the boardwalk. The bandshell had disintegrated overnight into a jumble of whitewashed rocks.

The town got smart after that. They permanently filled in the slimy hole that had been the pool and laid out a 25-foot wide brick promenade just west of the bulkhead. So apart from the broad wooden stairs that extended down from the bulkhead to the beach every couple of blocks, our boardwalk was entirely boardless.

And they made our first dunes.

First they built a 10-foot wide corridor of hurricane fencing on the sand about 50 feet east of the brick promenade. The wired-together wooden slats, a rickety shadow of the former boardwalk, ran the entire length of the town’s beach. Inside the hurricane fencing they laid all the discarded Christmas trees from that season, filling it to the top with fragrant evergreens going brown.

The trees formed a natural barrier that trapped blowing sand. Over the next decade, the trees disappeared under slowly-growing mounds that grew into dunes 15 feet high and wide, sprouting grass and small shrubs. The hurricane fencing was mostly gobbled up, and the scrabbly dune edges were now punctuated with metal signs warning everyone to “KEEP OFF.”

Then came Sandy, a storm whose remarkable ferocity made the nor’easter’s of the ’90s seem like mild squalls. In the space of 24 hours, Sandy completely dismantled the entire mile of dunes in Bradley Beach. Ten years’ worth of foliage, and the fencing, and the signs, were rudely stripped away. Then the storm literally pushed thousands of tons of sand 50 feet inland, flush against the bulkhead.

If you had stepped off the brick promenade toward the ocean the day before the storm, you would have fallen 12 feet to the beach below. But the day after Sandy, you could step eastward off the brick promenade onto smooth, solid sand. The tops of the dunes above that level had been neatly sliced off by the storm and deposited in drifts, like newly-fallen snow, across the width of Ocean Avenue another twenty yards inland.

Although the dunes were gone, much of the storm’s fury had been spent destroying them. As a result, Bradley Beach was spared the widespread damage to homes and businesses that befell neighboring towns without that protection.

So I’m happy to report that now, more than two years later, they’re at it again. On a frigid day on the beach two weeks ago, a guy in a front loader was picking up discarded Christmas trees from a pile and depositing them into a hurricane fence enclosure that’ll grow into our next sand dune. As long as Mother Nature gives us a few years’ head start before the inevitable next killer storm, the town should have a fighting chance.

trees in fence

I’m Serious as a Heart Attack: I Dread Winter

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

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cactus

Take me to the desert.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

This time of year as I venture outside I often think of the old song:

All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray
I’ve been for a walk on a winter’s day
I’d be safe and warm if I was in L.A.
California dreamin` on such a winter’s day

The older I get, the more I dread winter. Since my heart attack more than a decade ago I have been excused from any heavy-duty snow shoveling. I still operate the snow blower from time to time, but even that chore is now often handled for me by others. So snow removal is not the issue. Driving in snow is still bothersome, but it’s not such a big deal because I need only drive two miles to my bus every morning.

No, the real issue is the cold. I can’t take it as well as I used to. Maybe I can blame it on losing 40 pounds of fat since last winter. Or maybe my heart medications have irrevocably thinned my blood. But after a week of sub-freezing temperatures I’m ready to move south. But since I still need to work for a living and work is in the windy, concrete canyon that is Manhattan, the best I can do is make a hot cup of coffee and look at pictures of warm places.

In that vein, I was looking recently at some pictures I took of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona last year. I was reading that during the winter months, from November to April, the daytime temperatures in the Sonoran Desert range from 70°F to 90°F. That sounds extremely cozy for a January day. I wish I was there.

As I mentioned, I visited the Arizona portion of the Sonoran Desert last year. This year, I plan to visit the California portion, which includes Palm Springs. While desert living used to be only for the extremely hardy, air-conditioning has opened up these areas to a lifestyle that is Nirvana to a cold New Yorker. Of course snow is not an issue except on the top of mountains. The fact that it rains only a few days a year means almost constant sunshine. Having a dreary winter day in the Northeast? Just dial up a webcam in the desert and you can almost feel the dry heat.

The other thing I do to conjure up the desert is to look at my pictures of Saguaro cactus. These are the large, iconic cacti that grow only in the Sonoran Desert.They live to be as much as 150-200 years old I found them really beautiful and surprisingly hard to the touch. Before I went to Arizona, I had always thought that these cacti were soft, but the Saguaro Cactus has a hard wood-like feel similar to a tree. And in fact, I was told that dead Saguaro cacti are often used as wood for construction of roofs and fences in Arizona.

So as I endure yet another New York winter, my eye is on the calendar. Spring training begins in mid-February and the first pre-season Yankees game is March 4. After that, it’s a hop, skip and a jump until the first day of spring. Until then, I can huddle over a cup of hot something or other, look at pictures and think of the warm desert. California Dreamin’ on such a winter’s day.

This Ex-Hippie is Old: My Hip is Osteoarthritic

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Confessional, Men

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Is this my future anatomy?

Does my future include a prosthetic device?

BY BOB SMITH

I’ve had a persistent low-grade ache in my right thigh for over a year now. I wrote it off to too much running and not enough stretching, but lately the pain has gotten worse.  So I started getting regular massages, switched from the treadmill to the elliptical trainer, and did flexibility exercises hoping to erase the problem, but nothing changed.

Then, like Ebenezer Scrooge, I had a Christmas Eve miracle and revelation.

Every year we host an elaborate Christmas Eve feast featuring all sorts of seafood as well as fresh, crisp-crust bread and exquisite pastries from the local bakery.  But to get any of those goodies without waiting on line for an hour, you have to get to the bakery as soon as they open on Christmas Eve morning.  My over-50 body forces me to toddle out of bed every night in the wee hours to use the bathroom, so I’m the natural for that crack of dawn bakery run.

When I got there at 5:50 the lights in the main serving area weren’t on yet, but I saw activity inside. My right leg tends to stiffen up if I’m sitting still for a while, so rather than leaping out of the car and running across the street as I would have years ago, I carefully eased out of the driver’s seat and stood for a second to gauge the pain and let the stiffness dissipate. Not too bad – after a couple of seconds it felt fine, and I walked into the bakery with only a slight hitch in my step.

Incredibly, there were already three people on line, waiting in semi-darkness for the women bustling behind the counter to recognize the start of business. By the time I had my three dozen rolls and box of pastries ten minutes later, there were eight people behind me on a line, growing by the minute, that was snaking out the door. I’d dodged the bullet.

When I got home, because of my achy leg and partly out of just plain laziness, I decided I’d carry everything (including my convenience store coffee and newspapers) in one trip.

That took some planning: first I put the coffee on the hood of the car, leaving the house keys hanging from my left pinky. Then I put my left arm around the bulging bag of warm rolls, and with my right hand folded the newspapers under my left arm.  I slid my right index finger under the red and white twine on the pastries so the box dangled below my hand, then carefully kicked the door shut using my pain-free left leg.

My left hand was still free (except for the keys on my pinky), so I used that to awkwardly reach down and grab the coffee cup from the hood while still hugging the bag of rolls and squeezing my armpit on the newspapers. I figured once I got up the steps, I could put the pastry box on the side table by the door, take the keys from my left pinky with my right hand, and unlock the door. Mission accomplished!

But my hip had other plans.

I began to climb the steps, but because of the pain I failed to raise my right foot above the riser, and tripped. Because I was walking so slowly, I fell in slow motion. The box of pastries rocked, my finger released the string, and the heavy box slid away across the step, unharmed, as my right hand came down to break my fall.

As my left side came down, I somehow placed the tall Styrofoam cup of coffee onto the porch without spilling a drop. Simultaneously, my arm splayed out and the bag of rolls plopped onto the step ahead of me – remaining upright and jostling, but not dislodging, any of the rolls sticking out of the top. Even the newspapers had fallen from under my arm onto the step in a neatly folded stack.

I stood there, feeling foolish, with the house keys waggling on my pinky.

The Christmas Eve miracle: I’d spilled nothing and was unhurt. The revelation: I’d fallen climbing my own front steps, and could have been badly injured. So I made an appointment with my doctor, got an x-ray, and a week ago was diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the right hip. So now I’m officially old, with an old person’s chronic ailment, an old person limp, and maybe a need for an old person remedy: a new hip.  We’ll see.

But it’s all good. Like Scrooge, I’m thrilled to be alive — even if it means hobbling around like Tiny Tim.

‘Relationship’ with Computer Fraught with the Artificial

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Concepts, Entertainment, Men, Opinion

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Me and my gal.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

The upside of Netflix being shut out by movie studios from streaming new Hollywood movies is that they have had to look high and low for content. The low has been some putrid indie films. The high has been some great British television. An example of the best is a British television series called “Black Mirror.” There are only six episodes available, but they are well worth your time.

Black Mirror has been described as an anthology series like The Twilight Zone, and it does have some similarities in that each episode is thought-provoking and often deals in moral or ethical issues. It’s set in the near future and technology plays an important role in each episode. For example, there is an episode called “The Entire History of You” that envisions a time where we all have video recorders attached to our eyes and implanted in our heads. This allows us to play back everything we experience at will on nearby television screens. While this instantly settles disputes about what people said, it also causes lots of problems. For example, the question “where were you last night?” is not simply answered by words any longer. Now we go to the videotape to actually see what you saw last night. It’s an intriguing concept and one bound to improve honesty. But a young couple with trust issues finds the pitfalls of having all this “evidence” to dwell on.

Another episode that really struck me was one called “Be Right Back” in which a man tells his wife he’s just going out and will be right back, but then gets killed in an auto accident. At the funeral, a friend tells the widow that there is a service available that takes all of a person’s online activity (pictures, emails, tweets, etc.) and creates a humanoid in that person’s form that has that person’s personality including memories, vocabulary and sense of humor. She urges the widow to simply re-create her husband from his online persona. After some initial misgivings, she agrees. The humanoid arrives and is indistinguishable from her husband and has all his online memories. But there are problems in any human-humanoid relationship and the episode shows them and how they are resolved. The episode seeks to explore the question whether a person is really just the sum of his online communications. By the way, the widow is played by Hayley Atwell, whom you may know as Agent Carter in the recent ABC television series.

The “Be Right Back” episode reminds me of another film that explored the romantic relationship between man and machine. It is the 2013 Spike Jonze film “Her” starring Joaquin Phoenix and the voice of Scarlett Johansson. There, Phoenix plays a man who literally falls in love with the Siri-like voice of his computer. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. As computer assistants become more and more sophisticated, we are encouraged to think of them as persons. That’s why they have names. But any relationship between artificial intelligence and real intelligence is bound to be fraught with problems and that is what “Her” shows. Can a person be in love with a dis-embodied voice or is a body necessary? If you think about it, this is not a new question. In the past, there have been dis-embodied, long-distance relationships by mail or later telephone. Most of these did not work out once the parties met face to face, because real life is different from the intellectual life.

About six months ago I wrote about the peril of mistaking a life online with a real life. I urged readers to “Friend someone who lives in your neighborhood, rather than on Facebook. Deliver a Tweet in person. Interact with flesh and blood people and not just their avatars.” Television programs such as  “Black Mirror” and films such as “Her” show why artificial friends are as unhealthy as imaginary ones. It’s easy to be seduced by technology. That voice on your phone sounds so real. It’s always polite and helpful. Real people can be bothersome, rude and even hostile. But ultimately an online relationship is a fantasy. And living in a fantasy world, you always run the risk of a rude awakening.

An ‘Exit’ Strategy for Terminally Ill

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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Exit

BY BOB SMITH

I read an article recently in The New York Times about a not-for-profit organization called Final Exit Network (FEN), whose slogan is “Supporting the Human Right to a Death With Dignity.” Humans have a “right” to death with dignity? Tell that to the freight train bearing down on your disabled vehicle stuck on the tracks, with you inside unable to unclick the seatbelt.

Of course, the FEN’s specific focus is narrower: “to work toward obtaining the basic human right of competent adults to choose to end their lives on their own terms when they suffer from irreversible physical illness, intractable pain, or a constellation of chronic, progressive physical disabilities.”

To fulfill that mission, the FEN will tell you how to end your life. They have what they call the Exit Guide program — kind of the opposite of a life coach — where qualified individuals receive “relevant information, home visits if possible and a compassionate presence for individual and family.” First you must join FEN and submit an application, along with a doctor’s evaluation of your condition and prognosis — like a note from Mom telling the teacher it’s okay to send you home early. If you’re sick enough, and if you can attest that neither your family nor your primary caregiver will interfere, the FEN folks will assign you an Exit Guide.

From the guide, you’ll get “detailed information about the method [FEN] recommend[s], and the inexpensive equipment you will need to obtain.” Because in many places it’s a crime to help someone die, FEN never supplies equipment, but the guide “will provide you with information on all alternatives for care at the end of life, including all legal methods of self-deliverance that will produce a peaceful, quick, certain and painless death.”

And what do they often recommend? Asphyxiation by inhalation of helium.
You get a tank of helium, the same stuff they use at the party store to make festive floating balloons. You attach vinyl tubing to the tank, and run the open end into a large plastic baking or turkey brining bag. Then you securely tape the bag around your neck, and turn on the gas.

I can’t decide whether or not this is right or wrong, necessary or not. Instinctively it seems abhorrent; unthinkable. But then, I’m not living in the constant hell of pain that the people who seek out FEN’s services apparently seem to be enduring.

But I’m uneasy with the associations the helium exit brings to mind. I’ve seen people at parties inhale a lungful of helium, which allows them to talk for a few seconds in high-pitched, squeaky cartoon voices. It’s pretty funny to see a burly guy transformed into Tweety Bird at a party. But is it dignified to die that way? I guess if you’re in the bag making your exit, you’re not talking much.

And the bag itself, used to bake a roast, or to brine a turkey, is usually such a happy thing. You put something really good into it and it comes out better. When you’re done using that bag for its intended purpose, you’re warm, well-fed, and very happy. Even the vinyl tubing is a party accessory — it’s just like the tubing that attaches the plastic spigot to the beer keg at our summer parties.

Thank God I’m not in a position to consider using FEN’s services. I just wish they’d come up with a “method of self-deliverance” that doesn’t make me think of so many silly, happy things. Death with dignity? Maybe. But please, not death with Daffy Duck.

Fear, Deconstructed

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Fear. Personified.

Fear. Personified.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

On March 4, 1933 Franklin Roosevelt took office in the midst of a national emergency. The closest thing in recent times was the economic meltdown in the fall of 2008. The fear on Wall Street was palpable. But then, thanks to the reforms that FDR made that were not repealed by Bill Clinton, there was no run on the banks. Our financial system was saved through an infusion of capital from the federal government.

Ironically, the very people who continually preached that the government should just leave them alone came running to the government when their fear led to panic. And Uncle Sam bailed them out.

Fear is a curious thing. It makes rational people abandon reason. FDR knew that. In fact, he began his inaugural address like this:

President Hoover, Mr. Chief Justice, my friends: 

This is a day of national consecration. And I am certain that on this day my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

FDR knew that if he could calm people’s fears, he could get them to act rationally. If he could take emotion out of the equation, people would use their brains and they would find solutions to the nation’s problems.

I bring all this up because just as 2008 was a distant echo of 1933, so too is the fear that ran rampant in the 1930s alive and infecting our nation in 2015 in myriad ways.

We fear terrorists, illegal immigrants, criminals. Democrats fear Republicans and Republicans fear Democrats. Our politics is rampant with fear. Let’s take just one simple example. According to the GunPolicy.org there are about 300 million guns in the United States. These guns killed 12,532 people in 2014. Estimates are that 1 in every 3 Americans owns a gun

Why do people have guns? Fear.

Talk to a Second Amendment enthusiast and you will find a very scared person. Gun ownership increases with fear. And fear defeats any rational attempt to legislate controls on guns. So is it any wonder why the more people are killed by guns, the more people want to own theirs?

Another more mundane example is SUVs. Despite high gas prices until very recently, SUV sales have remained high. Why? Because once you own an SUV you feel defenseless in a smaller car. What if you get hit by an SUV? Many people rationalize that you need to have a light truck in order to survive on the road today. And what’s that all about — fear. So people have flocked to buy these gas guzzlers and some even went so far as to buy Hummers, the assault rifle of SUVs.

Finally, there is the fear of “the other.” This is an ancient fear that rears its head at regular intervals. Currently, the “others” include Mexican immigrants, homosexuals and Muslims. Our political discourse, aided and abetted by the Supreme Court, adds to the problem by using fear as a political weapon. If you really were to pay attention to the political advertisements that are coming our way in the next two years you would be paralyzed with fear. What to do?

Americans have got to get a handle on their fears. Now I know that for many people that is a tall order. But surely the 74% of Americans who believe in life after death can bring themselves to suppress their fear of death enough to act rationally on issues like gun control.

One positive effect of having had cancer twice is that I no longer fear death as much as I used to. So for me the feeling that a gun in my house may hurt someone I love trumps the fear that might lead me to buy a gun for “protection.” The rationality of my decision is bolstered by the recent sad story from Idaho where a 2-year-old playing with a gun he found in his mother’s purse shot and killed his mother in a Walmart. Think it was a freak accident? Think again. The very same tragedy happened a month earlier in Oklahoma. There, the three-year-old child picked up the gun while his mother was changing a one-year-old’s diaper. Why does the mother of a small child who probably has safety plugs on the electrical sockets at home carry a gun?

That four-letter word, FEAR — fear that always results in bad judgment and often leads to tragedy. I could go on and on about the ways in which fear infests our nation. I haven’t even mentioned the overblown reaction to 9/11 that puts military in our bus and train terminals and make us take our shoes off at airports. But my wish for 2015 is that Americans get a grip on their fears and contemplate Franklin Roosevelt’s wise admonition — “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Only then can we begin to rationally solve our nation’s problems.