To put things in perspective for my white friends: every single time I get in my car and go anywhere, because of police, there’s an underlying fear for my life. EVERY time I make it home safely, it’s like I’ve won the lottery. And I should never have to feel that way…Tweet by Henry Lake @lakeshow73

Last Saturday night Michele and I went to Napa for a small dinner party at The Pereira’s. The Ramirez/Kuhlmans came down from Boise and the six of us, all fully vaccinated plus two weeks, sat around the dinner table – inside – eating Vietnamese pork – yummm! – and drinking great wine. We told stories and laughed and it was all the sweeter because it seemed so normal. It’s as if the last year and a month hadn’t happened.

To get there, Michele and I drove across the San Mateo Bridge and then ran up the East Bay until we turned off for Napa, we came home through Marin County. Our route choice was based on time going up and scenery coming home. At one point, we passed a California Highway Patrol car pulled over to the side, and even though we were rolling with traffic, I glanced at the speedo to make sure I wasn’t speeding. It never occurred to me that we might be pulled over and shot. It didn’t even occur to me that I might even be pulled over for no reason.

Three or four years ago, late at night, I was pulled over by the local sheriff on a very dark and deserted Portola Road. It was a 40 zone and I was driving 45 (on purpose, on cruise control). I put my hands on the wheel and rolled the window down, when the cop came up asked for my license, and told me I was doing 45 in a 35 zone, I told him it was a 40 zone and could feel him tense up. My first thought was that I’d rather not get a ticket than be right, I’ll just drop that, let it go and I told him I didn’t realize I was going so fast. He looked at my license and my white face, commented that I lived nearby, gave my license back, told me to be careful, and drove away. It never occurred to me that the sheriff might pull out a gun and tell me – yell at me, fucking yell at me while pointing a gun at my head! actually – to get out of the car, to get down on the ground.

But getting beat-up- maybe even killed – did occur to U.S. Army Second Lieutenant Caron Nazario when he was pulled over in Windsor, Virginia on a dark road and, from what I read, it occurs to every black man under the age of, what? dead, I guess. Lieutenant Nazario was pulled over last December for not having plates, although the paper plates are clearly visible in the video from the on-board camera in the cop car. When the Lieutenant rolled his window down, the cops pointed their guns at him and told him to both put his hands out the window and get out of the car. When he could follow an obviously impossible command, he ended being pepper sprayed and pushed to the ground. At some point, realizing that they were in the wrong, the cops threatened Lieutenant Nazario and let him go. Now the Lieutenant is sueing the two cops involved in Federal Court. I hope he wins but, even if doesn’t win because of the cops qualified immunity, it is a great place to start. Somehow, cops are going to have to start paying for their constant violations of black people’s rights.

As an aside, under the guise of a letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coats wrote a book, Between The World And Me about the daily intimidation and humiliation black men live with. The book is short and very readable and, to quote Toni Morrison, visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. If you haven’t read it, I highly suggest giving it a try. End aside.

The reason why this has gone on so long without any recourse is that this kind of harassment and humiliation by the cops doesn’t happen to white people. If the harm being done by society doesn’t affect us white people, it is easy to overlook, even justify. That may be starting to change, but we have a long way to go before we reach a society that matches the bullshit we are fed in school.

I’m home from the hospital and still have no idea why I am so anemic. The endoscopy found nothing which ordinarily would be good news but now we are looking for something so it’s, more or less, bad news. I’ll start worrying about it again on Monday but, tonight Michele and I are going to dinner with some vaccinated friends.

Life is sweet.

An echocardiogram (echo) is a graphic outline of the heart’s movement. During an echo test, ultrasound (high-frequency sound waves) from a hand-held wand placed on your chest provides pictures of the heart’s valves and chambers and helps the sonographer evaluate the pumping action of the heart. Cleveland Clinic via Google.

Endoscopy is the insertion of a long, thin tube directly into the body to observe an internal organ or tissue in detail. MedicalNewsToday via Google.

Outside, it is Spring, a sort of cold and dry Spring, still, the flowers are blooming and the birds are looking for a good place to nest (which I can’t type without guilt because Michele and I – along with the Woodside Fire District – have been cutting back trees and removing brush, removing the local fauna’s habitat, really, to make our home, our habitat, safer for the upcoming fire season). But, I’m not outside even though, for the first time in, probably, a month I feel good enough to enjoy it. I am still in Sequoia Hospital, feeling better but not great and I still have very little idea what is wrong. Well, why what is wrong is wrong is more accurate. I had an echocardiogram yesterday and that seemed to indicate that my heart valve is not the problem. Today I get an endoscopy and, after that, I can go home. I have been on a liquid diet since Tuesday and they cut off all food at Thursday midnight but, with the alternative being the liquid diet, skipping breakfast is not much of a change. The upside – a huge upside – is that I have lost eighteen pounds – most of it excess water – since Tuesday.

Inside the hospital it is also Spring, I guess, but it is a sort of a never-ending pseudo-Spring, not too warm or too cold. It all has a surreal feel to it. I sleep in my backless – well, not backless, just a perpetually open back – hospital gown which, I read, is a design that is over a hundred years old. My gown has a newish addition of a pocket for a transmitter that is connected to various electrodes stuck to my chest and sends a perpetual EKG to the nurse’s desk across the hall. It also weighs down the front of the gown, exposing my chest and my past heart-surgery scar, which increases both the awkwardness and my discomfort. I sleep in a pair of yellow socks that have no-slip rubberish pads all over them. The pads keep me from slipping on the floor but they also prevent the sheets from comfortably slipping over my feet and I end up sleeping in a mixed pile of polyester sheets and cotton blankets. For some reason, the whole thing has a vaguely camping feel. Maybe it is because I haven’t had a shower or shaved in almost four days.

My doctors – there are three different ones who visit me or call, every day – are all women. I didn’t plan it that way, but I am glad for it. The original model was for male doctors and female nurses in a proper patriarchal hierarchy with the doctors having a slightly godlike detachment but now there are male as well as female nurses and the atmosphere is slightly more congenial. An example for a better future, I hope.

The medical establishment is a little like the military-industrial complex in that there is lots of money to be made which drives innovation and complexity but, under the guise of necessity, there is not much regard for the environment. Almost everything is plastic and deposable except, to be accurate, my daily flatware – of two soup spoons with every liquid meal – is metal. But the bowls are plastic as is my bedside table and all the housings for the electrical gear that surrounds me. Almost everything seems to be disposable from the rubber gloves used only once to the countless disposable needles used on me. Everything comes wrapped in cellophane – well, what used to be cellophane but is probably some other plastic now – to keep it sterile. I am wearing a wrist band – plastic, of course – that has a row of QR codes so that the nurse just scans them to confirm that I am me and the pills I am about to take are for the right person. Interestingly enough, they still ask for my name and date of birth but the question seems to be more to test my cognitive abilities rather than getting information.

On a different subject, today is April 9th, the 156 anniversary of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General U. S. Grant of the United States.

Happy Friday, Happy Spring, Happy Union.

Anemia is a condition in which you lack enough healthy red blood cells to carry adequate oxygen to your body’s tissues. Having anemia can make you feel tired and weak. There are many forms of anemia, each with its own cause. Anemia can be temporary or long-term, and it can range from mild to severe. The Mayo Clinic via Google.

I am in Sequoia Hospital – I know, again -and I feel better than I have in months. It now seems that my problem is that I am seriously anemic. That is both the good news and the bad news. The good part of the news is that we – we being a bevy of doctors – now know what is causing my shortness of breath although the anemia is probably more of a fellow traveler, along with a replacement heart valve that is ending its useful life and lungs that are pretty trashed, the bad part is that nobody knows what is causing the anemia, although there are theories. As the various theories are being tested and explored, I got a blood transfusion, iron injections, and heavy-duty Lasix injections to lower my water level.

One theory was that I had an ulcer but that lost favor after testing, another is that my esophagus is chafing against some other, nearby, body part. My gastroenterologist will perform an endoscopy on Friday to explore that theory. Still another theory is that my deteriorating heart valve is the culprit (both Michele and I are in that camp). Meanwhile, I am sitting/lying all day long with a constant parade of doctors, bored enough to watch My Fair Lady on Netflix.

How strange America has become. Cousin Marion in an email from Gascony, France.

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. A statement made Senate Majority Leader McConnell in an interview in the National Journal on Oct. 23, 2010

I’ve had a problem breathing since last summer’s fires with their resultant smoke and the attempted cures have only made it worse. At first, I thought it was my heart because, with a heart valve from a cow – well, remanufactured parts of a cow’s heart sac, actually – everything, from a stubbed toe on up, is a heart problem. My heart is doing fine – considering – so the last couple of weeks have been taken up with fretting about my lungs but various Xrays and CT scans indicate that they are not the problem. I’ve now had both my shots – yeah that! – and had a much bigger reaction with the first shot so I keep trying to blame my shortness of breath and chills on them but that theory has not been as comforting as I had hoped. Meanwhile, the earth has continued to rotate and life goes on.

Except that, in way more cases than should be, life didn’t go on, it ended early. In Washington, some deranged guy drove into a couple of Capitol Police Officers, killing one. In Orange County, California, another deranged guy killed four people, another one killed ten people – this time by a guy of Arab descent – in Boulder Colorado – and still another by a white Christian guy lamenting that he liked sex which he somehow used to justify the killing of six Asian women in Georgia (the head cop said “He had a bad day.”). As the plague winds down – because of Trump’s early push to get a vaccine and Biden’s heavy lifting in actually getting the vaccine delivered – our national love of violence winds back up.

While I am worried about my health, in 42 different states, 42 different republican legislatures are hard at work trying to make voting harder for Black People. I’m sure that this – these? – will end up in court and make a lot of lawyers richer, but, so far, all that has happened is that Major League Baseball has canceled its All-Star game in Georgia. As the Earth continued to rotate, a huge container ship got stuck and unstuck in the Suez Canel and a Republican Congressmember gets caught in an underage sex scandal.

I’ve been emailed the quote at the top of the page, by Minority Leader McConnell, more times than I want to count, usually to try to scare me into sending somebody, or some organization, money or more money. Because, almost every time, the email sender claims – or infers – it was made a week after President Obama had been elected when the economy was in freefall, and it wasn’t, getting the message has annoyed me more than the message itself. My tendency has been to just delete the email, there is enough misinformation floating around so that I don’t need any more clogging up my email queue. Still, I keep thinking about it. I do want to be clear that that Speaker McConnell made this statement in 2010, almost two years after Obama took office, and while McConnell was in full campaign mode. I also want to acknowledge that Majority Speaker McConnell added that, if President Obama does a Clintonian backflip, if he’s willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues, it’s not inappropriate for us to do business with him. Now, after another email, I want to acknowledge that, in my haste to hit delete, I kinda missed the point.

A couple of nights ago, when I saw the quote again, for the first time, McConnell’s audacity took my breath away. For the first time, I saw it in a completely different light. By McConnell saying that the most important thing is to make President Obama a one-term president, McConnell was implying, at the very least, that Obama failing was his main goal. Clearly, having the president fail is not a good thing for the country, but, for McConnell, according to McConnell himself, President Obama failing was a goal higher than the country succeeding.

I knew this, or I thought I knew this but it never hit me like this before. I always thought – believed may be a better word – that the Republicans voted fiscally conservatively because they thought it was better for their wealthy donors. But that’s not true, the opposite is true. The Republicans spent like drunken sailors when both Bush the Younger and Donald Trump were President. Republicans vote against things like a minimum wage because it is a Democratic idea and they know it is good for the country, if they really thought it was bad for the country, paradoxily, they would have voted for it to hurt the Democrats.

Even though that was way back in 2010, when Barrak Obama was President, and this is 2021 with Joe Biden as President, nothing has changed on the Republican side. Despite the country’s financial health being even more precarious because of Covid-19, the Republicans still don’t want the country to succeed under a Democratic Administration. If President Biden, and the Democrats not succeeding hurts the country, the Republicans seem to be willing to have the country pay that price. It’s not that the Republicans are against helping the country per see – I think – they are just against helping the country if it helps Joe Biden. When the pandemic hit the country, in March of 2020 Donald Trump was President, and Republicans voted, en masse, for the March 2020 Trump Stimulus Bill of Two trillion dollars. At that time, there were 1,382 deaths, nationwide, it was obvious that the economy was close to tanking, and the Republicans – along with all the Democrats – passed a huge relief bill by voice vote because they knew it was a political plus for President Trump who said, at the time, “I signed the single biggest economic relief package in American history. This will deliver urgently needed relief to our nation’s families, workers and businesses, and that’s what this is all about.”

 It turns out that “urgently needed relief to our nation’s families, workers and businesses” is not what “this is all about,” this time around. This time around, not one Republican voted for a slightly smaller bill even though the need is still there. Not one. Not one Republican said – or even thought, I guess – “I voted for a relief bill in the Spring because it was needed to counteract the economy tanking and the need is still there so I’ll vote for another one.” Every Republican said, in effect, “I won’t vote for this bill because it will help ‘families, workers and businesses’ and that will help the Democrats.”

That was an attitude that I didn’t want to acknowledge and just thinking about it makes me sad.