We’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII. Bill McKibben

Last weekend, Michele and I went to the West Coast Craft Fair at Fort Mason in San Francisco. A lot of our favorite people were there but the show did not have the sparkle that it used to have, say, twenty years ago. Part of it is that the majority of the exhibitors are the same people that were showing their work here in the 1970s and some even date back to the Renaissance Fair in the 60s. It feels like the scene needs more young blood but, looking around, there seem to be more young people than two years ago so maybe that is changing. Either way, the show was low key but still fun and that is not what I really want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the location,

As an aside, when we first got to Fort Mason, the upper grass area was packed with young adults standing around, drinking and talking. It reminded me of an Italian Piazza where, after dinner, the locals gather to talk. When I first started going to the Fair, the upper grass area was usually empty on a Saturday afternoon. End aside.

As another aside, maybe a month ago, Michele and I went down to Santa Cruz for the 50th anniversary of Woodies on the Wharf. Fifty years ago, I was 29 and most surfers had long given up their hard to maintain Woodies for used vans. But I know the allure of old cars, I was sort of drifting into old Italian cars which were pretty cheap in the 60s and these guys were drifting into Woodies that were even cheaper. But “here’s the thing”, as Joe says over and over again, the same people are still into Woodies. The Woodies shown on the Wharf are owned by the same people, the result is a strange, all white, male, environment wherein they all look like me. It is a phase interest hobby obsession that came into being in the 50s and 60s and never really changed, it just grew old, the world has moved on to standing around on the grass, drinking and talking rather than tinkering in the garage. If that sounds derogatory, I don’t mean it to be; the world is changing and 50s solutions will not fix today’s problems. End aside.

Walking around the fair, I kept thinking about how great it is to have these buildings for something like this, these huge spaces that the Federal Government gave to San Francisco. But they didn’t originally build these spaces for San Francisco, they built them to support a war. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, the United States changed, everything became about the war and these buildings are a microcosm of that. The Craft Fair is in a loading dock, one of three, which were built to load young Soldiers and Marines onto troopships to send them into battle against Japan. When the war started, both the troops and the troopships didn’t exist. The troops had to be trained and the infrastructure to get them to battle had to be built. Over three and a half years, using an already existing British design, the USA built 2,710 Liberty ships, many of them built at shipyards around the Bay Area. Thousands of workers, a proportion of them black, were enticed to move here from the Gulf Coast. New buildings had to be built to house the new workers, the Bay Area was changed forever.

In three and a half short years, over 23 million tons of equipment and material plus 1,647,174 men were shipped from here into the combat zone in what was known then as the Pacific Theater (and, it should be noted, the big push was in Europe against the Nazis). At an average of 40 tons each – and 40 tons is probably too high – that’s about 575,000 train cars of stuff to supply the war effort. Over twelve hundred men a day were brought into San Francisco – most of them on trains – and loaded on ships at Fort Mason along with an average of about 450 train carloads of equipment and material. Because the troops had to have a place to sleep and be fed, the ships had to be furnished with beds and blankets as well as with new plates and new flatware. As an aside, for years afterward, schools and camps all across the country used flatware that said “USN”. End aside. The government mobilized everything to fight the war, everyday life revolved around the war and the herculean effort it took to wage it.

I have no idea what Donald Trump, the man, thinks about the science of global heating but Donald Trump, the President seems hell-bent on getting as much climate-damaging carbon into the atmosphere as possible. He gets lots of money from the Fossil Fuel Industry and he has their back, I guess, no matter what it does to the environment. The Democrats are not much better, sure, at least all the candidates running for President admit to the reality of global heating but few are reacting to it as the existential problem that it is. Bernie and Elizabeth Warren have both signed on to the Green New Deal – and so have, to a lesser extent, Cory Booker, Kristen Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris – but the Democratic Leadership gets a lot of money from the same Lobbyists as Trump and the Republican members of Congress and those lobbyists are trying to minimize any discussion of Global Heating at the debates and, especially, keep the Democrats from hosting a special debate on Global Heating. It is depressing and scary. Still, one comment that I find comforting is by Bill McKibbens in which he said something along the line of “We will have to have a weather event comparable to Pearl Harbor before we do anything, then we will react as we did in World War II”. That sounds true to me; at some point – to paraphrase Isoroku Yamamoto – the sleeping giant of America is going to wake up and face the existential threat of Global Heating and, I hope, we will do it with a terrible resolve.

According to The National Center for Biotechnology Information: Sudden death likely or possibly related to catheter ablation occurred in 7 of 334 patients (2.1%). That is a big number – big enough that, if it were the death rate for flying to New York from San Francisco, everyone would take the train – but the success rate at Sequoia Hospital is better, much better and more importantly it is a stat I didn’t know until very recently. Still, going in, my thoughts kept returning to the possiblity of going into the hospital, going under anthesia, and never coming back. I was the second in the queue yeterday and I was a little concerned while I waited but my biggest concern, and the biggest risk, is that the proceedure will not take.

The ablation itself is a technological marvel. They put an IV into an artery – or, sometimes, a vain – at the patient’s groin and fish a catheter up from there into the heart – in this case, my heart – inwhich they burnoff the nodes that are producing out of rythum heartbeats. The the lab/operating room which is huge and chock full of equipment is like something out of a sifi movie by Ridley Scott with a huge array of 42″ flat screens, maybe six or eight of them and when I am wheeled in I am stunned. My first thought is how I would like to take a couple pictures and I think how much Michele would like to see this. I ask if she can come in just to see it but I’m told no because the room is disinfected. I say something like “But I haven’t been disinfected.” but figure out the answer to that one before he tells me I’m already infected with me. 

For me, being in a hospital is a spiritual expearance. Everybody we interact with is in deep service, starting with the doctor who meets with me several times to aswage my fears and answer my questions. It continues with the nurse who walks us from the waiting room to the prep area where she preps me for the operation by, among the other usual things, shaving my front and back while another nurse puts in an IV, marking pulse points on my feet with a felt pen to the nurse that wheels me into the lab/operating room. It continues with the nurses who take care of me that night and the next morning. Everybody is here to help and it is deeply comforting. 

Now I am home, the ablation seems to have worked, and I am very much alive. Life is sweet. 

Shit, my A-fib – Cardiac Atrial fibrillation – is back. The Cardioversion, that I was so hopeful about, didn’t take.

In a strange way, I feel both betrayed by my doctor and I want her to do exactly what she did. Betrayed because she gave me such hope that a Cardioversion would work when the chances of it working were so slim with a heart that has a replacement aortic valve, like mine. And happy because I have a doctor who is positive, hopeful, and very pro-active. Now I am looking forward to an Atrial Fibrillation Ablation on July 17th. (According to the dictionary, Ablation means the removal or melting away of an unwanted structure or tissue and I can’t help but think of that scene in India Jones where the Nazis’ faces melt off.)

I’ll end this with a long quote from Adam Gopnik in an article on aging – or the prolonging of aging to be more accurate. As part of the research on said aging, the researchers developed an aging suit and his description of the suit is a good description of the physical side of growing old.

Slowly pulling on the aging suit and then standing up—it looks a bit like one of the spacesuits that the Russian cosmonauts wore—you’re at first conscious merely of a little extra weight, a little loss of feeling, a small encumbrance or two at the extremities. Soon, though, it’s actively infuriating. The suit bends you. It slows you. You come to realize what makes it a powerful instrument of emotional empathy: every small task becomes effortful. “Reach up to the top shelf and pick up that mug,” Coughlin orders, and doing so requires more attention than you expected. You reach for the mug instead of just getting it. Your emotional cast, as focussed task piles on focussed task, becomes one of annoyance; you acquire the same set-mouthed, unhappy, watchful look you see on certain elderly people on the subway. The concentration that each act requires disrupts the flow of life, which you suddenly become aware is the happiness of life, the ceaseless flow of simple action and responses, choices all made simultaneously and mostly without effort.

The annoyance, after a half hour or so in the suit, tips over into anger: Damn, what’s wrong with the world? (Never: What’s wrong with me?) The suit makes us aware not so much of the physical difficulties of old age, which can be manageable, but of the mental state disconcertingly associated with it—the price of age being perpetual aggravation. The theme and action and motive of King Lear suddenly become perfectly clear. You become enraged at your youngest daughter’s reticence because you have had to struggle to unroll the map of your kingdom.