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A New Mexico Men's Page!

 Umberto Eco said, "Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth and to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth."


       

   

Men's Health!
(Mine anyway)

      May 15th; I am  living a finite life now. My "official" prognosis, considering that the cancer has come back, is ".....a matter of months."
    How many, don't know. Two? Three? Eight? Donno. At 87 I'm not surprised to know my time is limited but "...a matter of months." puts the message on the chalk board right up there in front....where I'd rather not see it. I'll get a little extention because I got the "by-pass", and have aquired a "stoma". Adds another matter-of-months. Without this intervention it would be more like a matter of weeks. Also have picked up another hose. This one in an "in-dwelling catheter" to a bag I pee into.
    So here we go on another medical journey. I'll get into more detail later....or maybe not. I'm way too low on energy to get much done.




 I've decided to pull all the info on my TURP proceedure off the site but if anyone needs to talk to me about it contact me and I'll happy to answer questions.


   

    So! Attention all men reading this
(and the partners who support them). Men are big into one really bad habit; denial. I have men in my men’s group who are getting up three and four and five times a night and are not dealing with what this means. This is a “sign”, and not a magical one. This is a swollen prostate! And as you age, you will have to deal with it. Maybe not as intensively as I had to but odds are you may indeed be on the same track if you live long enough. Men over 65 have an 80% chance of wrestling with all of this. My advice, catch it early before you’re holding an 18” tube in your sweaty hand and fearing the worst.
    March 8th, 2022, Enough with the "medical report" I read this page yesterday and got depressed so I've dumped it all. Current status: I'm alive and have cancer. It will kill me.
    Other news, the madwoman of Snowy Owl Road is gone. (No, not dead, she just blew another gasket and moved out leaving the "trapper", who cannot trap around here, flat.) He may be happy with the isolation, we are VERY happy with her gone. Long Dancers know what I'm talking about, apologists for evil and wishful thinkers will not.
   
   

    March 31st, 2022. Yeah, the cancer's back, in spades (it's "everywhere") and there's nothing that can really be done....well, prayer and chemo. I'll be starting round of chemo nest week. It's once a week every three weeks for three months.
    Prognosis: 14% make it for 5 years. I think my final run will be for two.
    More on all this later. c
  
  

                                      
“You Americans and Your Guns….”

    ….sighed the Canadian border official as he was confiscating the two pistols I had forgotten I had behind the seat in my truck. I was traveling to Victoria, BC on a sightseeing venture after a Men’s Weekend on Whidbey Island, Washington. It was part of an extended road trip that originated in San Antonio and wound up through Chicago, Milwaukee, Casper, Wyoming and then Whidbey where I was the sweat lodge leader for the weekend. The guns belonged to my San Antonio daughter and I had totally spaced that I had stuck them in my truck and hadn’t really intended to be carrying them on this trip at all. And now they were gone, and they were sort of expensive and, as noted, didn’t even belong to me.
    Embarrassing, and a costly oversight. But what stuck with me, even all these years later, I’d guess that was in the early 90’s, was how we were seen by people outside of our culture. “You Americans and your guns.” Yeah. What th’ hell is that all about anyway?
    Well, we know damned well what it’s about. It’s about our being sold on the concept of fear beginning with the gun manufacturers, the gun lobby, the “Second Amendment” fanatics (and the gross distortion of that bit of our Constitution which serves their own ends) the fear-mongering media, the politicians who have their own vested interests to serve, and our romantic notions of what and who we are as a nation. i.e. we got where we are by virtue of having more and better guns (don’t forget “guts”) than the other guys. We outshot the Brits, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the South, the outlaws, the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians….then we got outsmarted by the North Vietnamese…..uh, but let’s not get into that.
    Fact is, GUNS, more and better GUNS will keep us and our families “safe”. (It says that right here in this gun ad and in our Wild West culture.)
    No matter what the statistics say, we are all safer when we are armed and ready. “…..if we’re trained!” says one gun advocate friend of mine. (Let’s not get into the fact that cops are “trained” and yet that hasn’t prevented a few of them from shooting unarmed people when they feel threatened.)
    “All those mass shooting wouldn’t have happened if there had been some good person present who was armed!” goes another claimant. The fact that Gabby Gifford was shot when three “good people” who were armed stood around her and made no difference in the outcome doesn’t seem to enter into this pattern of thinking.
    When that border inspector said what he said, I (sort of) remember thinking, “Hey, I’m not like those gun nuts Americans. I just happen to have a couple of guns in my truck. I don’t do this routinely.” That was true in that scenario. But it wasn’t true a few years later when I did routinely carry a gun. And it changed me for a time.
    If someone got aggressive in traffic there was, somewhere back in my thinking, a thought that went like this, “Hey! You’d better not get pushy, I’ve got a gun.”
    That’s a different response than I would have had if I hadn’t had a gun. Sans fire power I would, and do think, “What a clown. I’ll just stay away from that one.”
    As it turned out, I preferred the latter response because I realized that the only way the former thought was going to take me would be a road to greater and greater escalation.
    Seems our society is having the same experience.

And add to this:
         
                        Background Checks, the Political Manipulation


    Let’s face FACTS and not fantasies. Background checks will NOT stop all the gun violence in our country, in fact it won’t stop any of it. Few of these insane killers, “insane” because they did what they did not because they were necessarily diagnosed as such before the fact, would have been stymied in their search for these weapons of mass destruction with a background check. The guy who killed half a hundred in Las Vegas was not a raving maniac, he was a cold-blooded killer for no-one-knows-why. He had no history of “mental illness”.
    Short of confiscating every single gun in America, which will never happen, the only way we can at least make it more cumbersome for someone to carry out these mass murders is to make the tools they use less proficient. In short, stop the sale NOW of all “assault-like” rifles. (By the way, those opposed like to say “They are not really ‘assault weapons’ because they are not fully automatic.” and we’re somehow supposed to feel better about that) The fact is that even if they are not “fully automatic” they can be fired as quickly as anyone can pull the trigger and with high capacity mags. That means that 30 rounds can be fired almost as fast as you can say “Gee! That’s’ awfully fast isn’t it?” Yes, yes I KNOW that someone can load up on standard clips and slap them into a rifle or pistol quickly….so even banning h.c. mags won’t help much, but it’s SOMETHING, and if we can add it to the idea of BG checks, well hooray!
    More to the point, ban the sale and manufacture of these weapons AND of high capacity magazines AND of parts for those weapons…..and require that any current owners of such weapons register them, at a high taxation rate, just as any owners of machine guns must. If they won’t pay, confiscate them.         Period.
    And let’s not get into the stupid argument that gun ownership (of ANY kind of gun) equals “FREEDOM”. If you Mr. Gun owner want or feel the need of having a gun around then you may have one (or two or a dozen for that matter) but the type of gun WILL BE REGULATED….and you are free to stand on any street corner and argue about it all day and night…and thus your right to Free Speech will be respected. But there is no right to be armed to the teeth with high firepower for all….that’s why we don’t want anyone to have a howitzer or a bazooka for that matter.
    This “background check” b.s. is nothing more than a political game being used to buy off those of us who want something done about these killing machines in our society. We are offered the sop of background checks in order to turn off the spotlight and call off the dogs as it were and make us believe we’re getting somewhere…….yet if and when we finally win that fight we will wind up with NOTHNG. And “they”, the gun lobby and NRA supporters, will breath a sigh of relief that those who would “take our guns and our freedoms” have gone away.
Meanwhile, the potential killers will still be able to roam free with high powered weapons and we and our children will still be at high risk to those who will remain, until after the killing spree, unidentified.
    And “Open carry”! What are we teaching our children, mainly young boys? that it’s really a good idea, even “manly”, to be walking around with guns on our hips (and shoulders) all over town? Even in Dodge City in the 1800’s it was against the law to do that. And that was called “the wild west”!
And this crazy idea that “Guns don’t kill, people do.” The FACT is, SOME PEOPLE WITH GUNS KILL LOTS OF PEOPLE and the only way to at least slow the massacre down is to give them less power and ammunition to do so.
    People driving cars kill people too…but at least we have them register their cars, carry insurance, get a drivers license and require that they be sober. All we do for the OC (Open Carry) people is ask them to get a license to carry a lethal weapon into our malls, parks, public meetings…etc. That’s it!
    In response to the marches against gun violence some folks in Montana staged a counter march called, “For our guns”. Montana, the highest death rate for homicide and suicide by guns in the country. This gun worship is one crazy religion.

What we need is; Mother's (Wives-Girlfriends) Against Fathers (Husbands, Boyfriends) Carrying Guns! Not a great acronym but a great idea!
  

                



 The fallout for me from a Men’s Weekend

    You’d think, well I’d think, that by the time I hit my 9th decade in life I’d have it all figured out……the “all” being Life & Me of course. But no! It took yet another Men’s Weekend to dredge up some hauntings from the past and exhumations of long buried feelings to make things “interesting” yet again post gathering.
    To wit; despite being told, even assured quite often of late, that I, yes ME, I have made quite a positive difference in a number of lives it was only after “owning” that affirmation in front of people that I was then plunged into some deep work on myself.
    The circumstances were that in the midst of our regular Give-Away Ceremony at the end of the weekend I stood up to have my say about how I saw and experienced the event and somehow got around to admitting that maybe, just maybe, some people came to these things, Long Dance, Vision Quest, Men’s Weekends, etc. not only because we, Elizabeth and I, do interesting stuff, but because of me and what I have to give or “teach”, though I still shrivel at the “teach” thing…offer maybe, but teach, that seems like a stretch too far. Seems like hubris.
    Anyway, there I was, standing up in front of a bunch of people saying, not from ego but from honesty, that maybe some would come to experience……me! This is a tough claim for me to stake.
    Of course I know what I want to do ALWAYS is to be clear and authentic. I know I’m not really the brightest bulb in the Spiritual chandelier, maybe I’m simply a clever guy, not in the manipulative sense, just that I’m able to tell a pretty good story and have got a memory storage unit full for just about any occasion. (None of them fictionalized or embellished to suit some hidden agenda.)
    I’ve got some wisdom about life too, and I really, really want to help. I take that Emerson line, “…to know one person has breathed easier because you lived.” to heart. In the end I want that to be said about me. I can’t imagine a higher honor.
    And, as with any of us I’ve got some crap in the closet, so my work is to keep trying to clear that out, sometimes by ‘fessing up, sometimes by just letting it go. I chose what works best for me and don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. (As a wise man said to me once, "You don't HAVE to reveal EVERYTHING to be considered "honest".) Thank you Sandy!
    But my standing up there and saying that I MIGHT have to accept the possibility that some people being attracted by how I do me and thus how the workshops I, and we, present have some power to support change, seemed incredibly risky. But I did it………and then Pandora’s box was opened. By me.
    And here came the flood of guilt and shame.
    First of all, whenever I end an email to someone I close with; “Love from our OZ! to yours.” I capitalize both letters in Oz to create a picture of those emerald towers, and I add an exclamation to communicate its singular importance, i.e., that the Emerald City represented Hope, and that’s what I “hope” our place and what we create here represents for all who experience it. After all, that’s what it has been for us. But…!
    Yes, there was a “But”, a fly in the ointment, a shadow in the spotlight that always bothered me about that allusion. In the end, the Wizard was unmasked as a fraud and I wondered if deep down inside I wasn’t one too.
    Why would I think that? Because one of the themes of the weekend, or for that matter, many a weekend I and we have created, has been “Who do you THINK you are?” because in that question there is both the power of self-delusion and the potential for change. And who did I think I was? Over the years; a kid who was dancing as fast as he could, working on an honest choreography of life. A kid with so-called shameful secrets, in short, the guy behind the curtain.
    By the way, in my experience that “shameful secrets” thing is usually very subjective. Though there might be some things any of us would concur ARE things to be ashamed of, many are, objectively, quite ordinary blunders that we, standing outside the experience might see as having little or no real shame potential at all. Often confessions of these things to others might be met with, “What’s the big deal?” responses which are not helpful. Because though the event itself may not objectively seem to be something we would consider to be worthy of condemnation, the power of how we have felt about it, over time, becomes more and more discomforting. What may have been a small weed, fed with enough guilt food, becomes a sequoia.
    So! The guy behind-the-curtain; his being exposed as a fraud, I came to realize, wasn’t the end of the story nor was it how it turned out. In fact he was an honest man, a bit of a bumbler to be sure, but an honest man who had taken on the task of creating a place of Hope, and the job he took on was the promotion of that idea. He didn’t work for personal gain, unless you consider his role as The Great and Wonderful Wizard of Oz! a kind of ego payment. He felt the need to create that façade because he had little confidence that his simple personage would be able to sell the concept. He wasn’t a “fraud”, he was a man with a great heart who wanted to help in the only way he knew how, with showmanship. We can fault the smoke and mirrors, but certainly not the intent. And after all, sometmes we NEED the smoke and mirrors too!
    Well, that’s not me, i.e., I don’t do smoke and mirrors, I just do me and I hope there’s enough communicated about the value of honesty and the power of personal risk in the service of highest purpose to be worthy of the title, “The Wiz”.
    As my Italian grandmother used to say to me over and over again, “Non cha be shamed!” At the time, I thought is was something that came out of her experience of being an immigrant in a time when Italians were were seen as “….lower than Negroes.” (an observation made by W.B. Duboise). But now I know that it’s a one-size-fits us all.
    I’m owning that one, and gifting it to you as well. No matter what, when it comes to our self imposed and inflated sense of  guilt about ANYTHING;
“Non cha be shamed!” and love from us here in OZ! and from the guy who stands in front of the curtain.
    Me.

Having just re-read this, I am happy to stand behind it all! (May 15th, 2022)
     

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