HinesSight

My urinary catheter-related depression and anxiety

Recently I finished a 2,500 word essay for the consideration of 180 Medical, the firm that supplies me with urinary catheters. After I got a message from 180 Medical saying that they welcome essays about how people experience using a catheter, I wrote back saying I'm interested in this, having written a bunch of blog posts about my life with a catheter.
Download 180 Medical essay PDF

(I've also copied in the essay below.)

A marketing specialist with 180 Medical read some of those posts and suggested I write about my catheter-related depression and anxiety. It took me quite a while to get around to this, since it required dredging up memories that I've tried to suppress as much as possible. But now I'm glad that I did this. Usually it's better to face our problems head-on.

My catheter-related depression and anxiety
by Brian Hines
[email protected]

I wish I didn’t have to use a catheter to urinate. I wish I hadn’t made mistakes that may have caused my bladder to become dysfunctional, leading me to need a catheter. I wish I hadn’t suffered from so much anxiety and depression during the four and a half years I’ve been a catheter user.

But wishes are one thing. Reality is another. I’m going to be real with you. 

If you’re looking for a feel-good story of how a 72 year-old man has been coping with his catheterizing, look somewhere else. Sure, now I’m doing pretty well with my catheterizing. This wasn’t always the case, though. So i’m not going to sugarcoat those hard times.

In a movie about the life of C.S. Lewis, Shadowlands, a student tells Lewis, “We read to know that we are not alone.” 

My hope is that some people who also have had problems with using a catheter will read this and realize that even though our struggles mostly are private, we share a determination to make the best of a difficult situation. 

Up until the age of 68, I had no significant health problems. My family doctor would tell me at my annual checkup, “You’re a poster child for growing old.” I’d earned a karate black belt at age 56. I’d take my boogie board on vacations to Maui and catch big waves with the locals. I took up senior citizen skateboarding when I was 64.

I figured, wrongly, that I had many more years of good health ahead of me.

Yes, I had a prostate problem. It didn’t seem like a big deal, though. I took several prostate medications. I needed to urinate more frequently, getting up several times a night. I always got an aisle seat on airplanes to ease a trip to the restroom. 

Looking back, I should have realized that I needed to see a urologist. It became more difficult for me to start peeing, a different problem than having to pee too often. Yet I didn’t mention this to my family doctor. I thought I was just having normal symptoms of an enlarged prostate. 

Then everything changed in May 2017. My wife and I went to visit an old friend who I hadn’t seen in over 40 years. We drove to the Bend area from a vacation cabin we owned with three other families in Camp Sherman, Oregon.

Before getting to his house, I thought about stopping to pee. But I didn’t need to go that bad, so I drove on. Once we got there, our conversation on a deck overlooking the beautiful Deschutes River was so pleasant, I didn’t want to interrupt it by going to the bathroom.

When I finally did, I couldn’t go. Since this had happened before, I figured I just needed to wait a while and try again. Except, I kept trying every half hour or so, until someone asked why I was visiting the bathroom so much. 

This went on until mid-afternoon. By then I really needed to pee, but still couldn’t. My friend and his girlfriend told me that this was serious and I needed to get medical help. Good advice, which I didn’t take.

Well, actually I did, sort of. We Googled the address of an urgent care center in Bend. Driving there, I peed in my pants involuntarily. Luckily, I’d brought along some extra clothes.

I changed in the urgent care restroom, then saw a male nurse who asked what my problem was. “I can’t urinate,” I said. “At least, not voluntarily.” For some reason he wanted a urine sample. “Um,” I told him, “I can’t pee, so that’s not going to happen.” 

He gave me a glass. “Drink three glasses of water,” he said. “Then try to urinate into this bottle.” I should have argued with him, but I didn’t. I sat in the room by myself and drank the water. Then went into a bathroom and couldn’t urinate.

By that time I was distraught. I wasn’t thinking straight. I couldn’t pee on my own but had wet my pants. I was frustrated, tired, fed up. Holding the empty collection bottle in my hand, I walked out and told a different nurse that I wanted to leave.

“Do you want a catheter,” she asked me. 

I didn’t know what a catheter was. I didn’t care what a catheter was. I just wanted to go back to our cabin, take our dog for a walk, and wait until I could pee on my own again. Yeah, none of that makes sense. But at the time it did, because I was so upset with how the day had gone.

“No,” I told her. “All right,” she said. “You’ll need to sign a release form absolving us of responsibility for letting you leave without treatment.” Big danger sign, in retrospect. Yet I scribbled my name on the form.

The memory of what happened in the urgent care center is as fresh today as it was four and a half years ago. I agonize over that single word that came out of my lips, “No.” What if I had said “Yes”? Why didn’t I say “Yes”? One word. One little word. Choosing one word over another may have changed my life for the worse, forever.

We drove back to the cabin. I involuntarily peed in my pants again. After all, I’d just drunk three glasses of water in the urgent care center, when I already had been unable to urinate for about ten hours.

That night I keep getting up to see if I could pee. I couldn’t. The pain was bad. As soon as the sun was up I told my wife, “I need to get medical help.” We packed up and drove two hours to Salem. I peed in my pants again. A Salem Health urgent care nurse sent me to the Emergency Room.

There I got an indwelling catheter. Several weeks later, still unable to urinate much on my own, I was told that I’d have to do intermittent catheterization. Which I still am.

Several months after my traumatic urinary retention episode, I asked my urologist if my atonic, nonfunctioning bladder would have gotten back to the way it was if I’d said “Yes” to the offer of a catheter in the Bend urgent care center.

He said, “Perhaps.” I held it together until I got into my car. Then I cried all the way home. 

Almost every day since, I’ve thought about how stupid it was of me to refuse the offer of a catheter. I should have asked what a catheter was. I should have asked what would happen if I didn’t get the massive amount of urine in my bladder out. But I didn’t. And I can’t stop blaming myself for that. 

My wife is a retired psychotherapist. She thinks I have PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s probably right. However, it didn’t take long before I had an even worse mental problem: depression. 

(If you’re mildly depressed yourself reading this sorrowful tale, hang in there. It’s going to end on a positive note, once I get through the anxiety and depression stuff.)

I already wasn’t happy, to put it mildly, about facing a lifelong need to insert a plastic tube up up my urethra five times a day. When I started getting nighttime leg cramps, forcing me to wake up and walk around my bedroom until they went away, then doing this again a few hours later all night long, the lack of sleep helped push me into a full-blown depression. 

Not fun. At first I just thought I was tired. And sad about my non-functional bladder. Then my wife said, “No, you’re depressed.” She was right. 

I had no interest in doing things I used to enjoy, like write posts for my three blogs. From being afraid of dying, I started to think that, hey, death wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d be free of feeling like I was in an emotional black hole with no exit sign.

My urologist’s office said there was no way the leg cramps could be related to my bladder problem. I pointed out that I’d never had leg cramps before, and now I did, shortly after starting to use a catheter. 

Fortunately, I was able to see a Sleep Clinic physician. After being prescribed gabapentin, the leg cramps went away. I also was fortunate that my primary care doctor’s office had a psychiatric nurse practitioner. She diagnosed me with Major Depression, Single Episode. 

So I now had a mental health diagnosis to add to my growing list of physical problems. I was prescribed an antidepressant, which over several months helped me climb out of the black hole I was in, along with counseling sessions with a social worker.

Depression was in my rear view mirror. Unfortunately, catheter-related anxiety was in the passenger seat right next to me, where it still sits. Worse, sometimes anxiety feels like it’s taken my place in the drivers’s seat — though gradually I’ve gotten better at keeping anxiety’s hands off of my mental steering wheel.

I don’t know whether the frequent trouble I have getting a catheter to pass into my bladder is typical for many men, or atypical. Regardless, this has been my biggest longstanding problem. 

In the early days I’d call my urology clinic and talk with the nurses who worked with my doctor. “I’m having trouble inserting the catheter,” I’d say. “Do you have any tips?” I’d be told to take a shower, go for a walk, or wait a while and then try again.

OK, but I wanted to get back to what I’d been doing before my bladder stopped working like it should. Eating out. Going to a movie. Visiting friends. If I went into a restroom at a restaurant to do my catheter thing, then found I couldn’t insert it, obviously taking a shower wasn’t an option.

And I didn’t want to interrupt a meal with friends by saying, “Sorry, I’ve got to go for a walk and then see if I can get a catheter into my bladder.” Not exactly a great dinner conversation topic.

Not being able to insert a catheter at bedtime was the worst. I was tired. I wanted to sleep. I needed to urinate. Yet sometimes I’d spend an hour or more lying on the bed, trying to relax with breathing exercises, so the damn catheter would pass into my bladder.

To make a long story short — and this story really is long — at times I got extremely frustrated and angry. My wife had to put up with quite a few outbursts where I’d either start crying or slam doors or both, because I was having such a difficult time inserting a catheter. 

I’d try catheters other than the Flex Coude Pro that I’d come to know and love. (Well, except when I couldn’t get it into my bladder.) But none of them were anywhere near as comfortable and easy to use as the Flex Coude Pro, so I stuck with it. 

Eventually I had the bright idea of trying a smaller size catheter, FR12 or FR10 rather than FR14. Often I could insert one of those when the FR14 wouldn’t go in.

Even so, I still am anxious about traveling or going anywhere where I might need to use a public restroom. I haven’t flown since I started using a catheter. I haven’t driven by car more than two hours from where I live. 

If I could be confident that popping in a catheter would go smoothly, I’d be hugely happier. That would allow me to view myself as simply differently-abled in how I pee. However, not knowing when I’ll have trouble inserting a catheter — I haven’t been able to predict when this happens — makes me anxious.

And when I have a particularly difficult time, my mind generates flashbacks to the traumatic day and a half back in May 2017 I’ve described. It must be similar to a war veteran hearing fireworks and feeling like it’s a roadside bomb. When I’m unable to insert a catheter, sometimes I feel panicked, like I did when I couldn’t pee at my friend’s house or in the urgent care center.

However, I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m a total catheter train wreck. I’ve learned a lot over the years. Most days now, things either go smoothly for me, or I’m able to handle occasional problems inserting a catheter with no freakout. 

I’ve accepted the fact that almost certainly I’ll have to use a catheter for the rest of my life. 

My bladder has recovered some function, but nowhere near enough, I strongly suspect, to ever justify prostate surgery. I got a second opinion from a medical school urologist who told me, bluntly, “You don’t have a prostate problem, you have a bladder problem.”

However, I always thought I had a prostate problem. It never occurred to me that my bladder might stop working one day, and my primary care doctor didn’t  bring up this possibility. 

I haven’t stopped regretting walking out of the urgent care center in Bend. However, I do my best to tone down that regret by focusing on a couple of things that allow me to fashion a story which doesn’t have me as the Bad Guy as regards my non-functional bladder.

First, my urologist said that not getting medical care sooner could have harmed my bladder’s ability to recover from the urinary retention episode. Could. This isn’t certain. So regardless of how I acted that day, I might well have still needed to use a catheter.

Second, during a cystoscopy (scoping of my bladder) by the second-opinion urologist, he said, “Look at that pocket in the bladder wall. That was caused by the bladder trying to push urine through your prostate for a long time.”

A long time. Those words imply that my bladder was gradually losing functionality for quite a few years, so slowly that I viewed this as a normal part of aging for a man with a prostate problem.

It’s difficult, but I’m learning to forgive myself. After all, there may not be much to forgive. 

I try to remember that life is difficult for everybody, and I’m more fortunate than many. As my wife frequently reminds me, I’m pretty damn healthy overall. I use a chainsaw on our ten rural acres. I put 40 pound bags of salt in our water softener. I can bicycle, lift weights, do Tai Chi.

Life isn’t over just because I have to use a catheter five times a day. As I’ve described, there were moments when I thought life wasn’t worth living. Now, though, I’m almost as happy as I was before. 

Almost. And that’s good enough for me, especially given the much darker days I went through with my catheter-related depression and anxiety. 

 

Nuance is what our country needs now

There's way too many Americans unduly confident right now.

They're sure they're right about Covid policies, the just-ended war in Afghanistan, racial justice, abortion, and a host of other issues that mostly get reduced to short sound bites, pithy Twitter tweets, brief Facebook posts, and other manifestations of our desire to appear absolutely certain about subjects that demand a word currently out of fashion. 

Nuance. 

Which means, a subtle distinction, an awareness of delicate shadings (as of meaning, feelings. or value). How did we get to such a dearth of nuance among a large proportion of our citizenry? 

It's tempting to blame it on Trump. He was a master of anti-nuance.

The crowds who adored his blunt, cocky, in-your-face style of speaking didn't want a political meal marked by difficult-to-describe subtle flavors. They wanted red meat cooked to a crisp over blazing hot coals, doused with BBQ sauce that hit the taste buds like a giant pickup truck rolling over liberal sacred cows.

But that's too simplistic.

The United States seems to bounce back and forth between presidents with greater or lesser nuance.  George H.W. Bush was less nuanced than Bill Clinton who was more nuanced than George W. Bush who was less nuanced than Barack Obama who was (way) more nuanced than Donald Trump who was (way) less nuanced than Joe Biden.

Those "way's" reflect the fact that Trump represented a recent peak of simplistic crudity, yet his becoming president was more a result of Americans relishing a brash overconfident macho style than a cause of the 2016-20 decline in national nuance.

There's always been an anti-intellectual bent among many Americans. Or perhaps better put, an anti-reasonableness bent. We tend to distrust politicians who are open to changing their minds. The sentiment, "I was for it before I was against it," followed John Kerry around in his 2004 presidential campaign like a flip-flop death knell.

Nuance, though, also can be a matter of style. 

Usually it is those on the far left or far right who cling most tenaciously to ideological positions. However, there's not much difference between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when it comes to policies. But I view Warren as more nuanced because she has a gentler, more thoughtful speaking style than Sanders. 

(Unfortunately, this could be one reason why we've never had a female president, since women tend to rate higher on the Nuance Scale. Our taste in national leaders tends to run toward those who express themselves with the most outspoken certainty, though Obama's deliberate speaking style certainly didn't hurt him.)

I readily confess that when Trump was president, I relished hard-hitting attacks on the Idiot in Chief. I felt like firing crudities at Trump was justified when he couldn't open his mouth without insulting someone. Or an entire country. 

Now, though, I'm realizing how much we all have lost -- liberals and conservatives alike -- by engaging in rhetoric that fails to reflect the complex nuances of most issues. Moderation isn't just a valuable political perspective. It also points to the fact that often, if not usually, the nuanced truth lies in-between simplistic extremes.

One of the reasons I'm hooked on the Gabriel Allon character in Daniel Silva's thriller/espionage series is that Allon is a deeply nuanced Israeli assassin. Who in addition to being a highly skilled killer is one of the world's top restorers of damaged paintings.

In every book, Silva has "good guys" and "bad guys." But they aren't caricatures.

Allon has doubts. He makes mistakes. He tries to understand the motivations of the Muslims who want to do Jews and Israel harm. Often Silva presents Palestinians in a totally sympathetic manner, even though his main character is fiercely devoted to his work in the Israeli intelligence agency.

I also read more typical books in this genre. They can be more entertaining, yet not as satisfying, because Daniel Silva presents the reader with hugely more nuance.

This is akin to how I'm able to enjoy reading both People magazine and The New Yorker.

One entertains. The other feeds my hunger for nuance. The September 13, 2021 issue of The New Yorker beautifully reflected this. Three lengthy stories, all in the same issue, each presenting a complex issue in a wonderfully intelligent fashion.

"The Sex Wars: Feminism and its fault lines" is a seven-page discussion of how the single word feminism contains many shades of meaning I wasn't previously aware of. For example, the story told me about the debate in feminist circles over transgender people, with some feminists arguing that transgender females aren't truly women, while others vehemently disagree. 

And I hadn't realized that "butch lesbians" are looked down upon by certain feminists because they embrace a masculinity that pays homage to the patriarchy. Naturally other feminists consider that however women want to look and behave is up to them.

"The Other Afghan Women" is a marvelous twelve page look at how the American occupation of Afghanistan affected women in rural and urban areas much differently. While women in Kabul were enjoying modern liberal freedoms, women in the conservative countryside faced the chaos of war: drone strikes, bombardments, endless fighting.

Those rural women welcomed the return to order that came with the Taliban victory and the American withdrawal. It isn't that they don't want more rights; they just see that those rights need to come from within Islam, not from the barrel of an American gun.

"Force of Nature" asks in eleven pages, Can Kathryn Paige Harden convince the left that genes matter -- and the right that they're not everything? Harden is a brilliant psychology professor who earned tenure at age thirty-two. She specializes in behavior genetics, "which investigates the influence of genes on character traits (neuroticism, agreeableness) and life outcomes (educational attainment, income, criminality)."

Harden, a progressive, gets a lot of grief from academics who view any research into the effect of genes on one's success in life as racist, disgusting, even Gestapo-like. Yet she perseveres, because she knows that learning the truth is more important than clinging to an outmoded "nature vs. nurture" dichotomy. 

As with most things, studying behavioral reality requires a "both...and" mentality rather than a simplistic "either...or" outlook. In short, nuance.

Along with me, Oregon football team has #4 ranking

It was tough, but I did it!

Last Saturday I pulled out a win against Ohio State, defying the odds and 100,000 crazed red-clad fans who desperately wanted me to lose so their team could maintain or improve on it's #3 in the nation ranking.

Oh, guess I also need to give some credit to the University of Oregon football team. They were the ones who took the field against Ohio State. 

But the way I felt after the game, I was right there with them -- a 72 year old guy who didn't even play football in high school, yet shared in the Ducks' glory. 

Such is the magic of tribalism, a word I usually use in connection with political affiliations, as in "I'm a proud member of the progressive tribe."
After watching the Oregon-Ohio State game, going through the usual stages of football-viewing "death" when the team you want to win is engaged in a back-and-forth battle that came down to a few key plays -- worry, hope, excitement, despair, impending doom, relief, ecstasy -- I felt absolutely amazing. 

It was as if I'd won the game. I floated through the rest of my day on a cloud of exultation. I'd identified so strongly with the Oregon football team that their amazing victory was my amazing victory.

I replayed in my mind the plays that sealed the win. An interception. A quarterback sack. As I was going to sleep that night, those images appeared in my psyche as fond memories of what the Ducks and I had been able to accomplish.

Sure, the Oregon players were the ones in the Ohio State stadium, while I was the one sitting on my butt in a comfortable chair, watching the game with a remote in my hand. However, the power of football tribalism is so strong, I felt like part of the team.

Which means I'm now #4 in the country, according to a couple of polls. Pretty damn good, but now I'd like to be #1. Just need to get that pesky Alabama out of the way.

Naturally there's a downside to my identification with the Oregon Ducks. If the team goes into a tailspin, my current ecstasy will turn into agony.

I have a clue as to what that would feel like: the oh-so-sad faces of the Ohio State fans as the final seconds ticked off.

Oregon's changing demographics -- a Salem City Club talk

Today it was refreshing to hear Ethan Sharygin speak to the Salem City Club about Oregon's changing demographics. As befits the Director of the Population Research Center at Portland State University, Sharygin was 100% factual and 0% political. 

These days that ratio often is completely reversed, especially when the fact-challenged side of the political spectrum is doing the talking. So my mind relished the data-filled slides Sharygin shared. Because of Covid, we met via Zoom, which made it easy for me to grab screenshots of most of his slides.

In the course of introducing Sharygin, Russ Beaton made an interesting observation about how things have changed in Oregon during the past 133 years. In 1888 the Oregonian newspaper expressed a hope that the wealth of rural areas spills into the cities. 

Now the situation is pretty much the opposite. 

Oregon's population has been growing at 1% a year recently, while the United States as a whole has been growing at 0.7%. This enabled Oregon to snag an additional Congressional seat, leaving us with six rather than five.

I wasn't aware that generally the rate of population growth slows as the population increases. The figure above shows that Oregon's growth rate has been declining over the past 110 years. The 1900's and 1940's were marked by rapid growth in Oregon, while the 1980's saw slow growth. The gray circles are other states. In the 1900's some states had close to 8% annual growth. Recently, most states cluster around 0 to 2% annual growth.

While Oregon grew faster than the nation as a whole from 2010-20, Washington, Arizona, Idaho, and Utah grew even faster. But, hey, we whipped California's population growth ass.

Some demographic truisms are obvious. Population change is a function of births minus deaths, plus net migration. This chart shows that net migration is a volatile factor in how many people Oregon gains or loses each year. In the 1980's Oregon's population declined in three years, largely because of people leaving the state. In recent years net migration into Oregon has been going down.

This slide shows how Oregon's race/ethnicity breakdown changed from the 2010 census (left column) to the 2020 census (middle column), with the right column showing the difference between 2010 and 2020. The white population declined from 79% to 72%. Hispanic/Latino rose from 12% to 14%. Black/African American rose slightly from 1.7% to 1.9%. I don't understand the combinations of races data very well, so will let that part of the slide speak for itself.

Compared to rural areas in other parts of the country, the population in rural Oregon has been holding up fairly well. Only one county lost population, Grant, while Deschutes (where Bend is) grew the fastest. Marion County grew by 10%. Sadly, in the competition for Oregon's second largest city after Portland, Eugene (176,000)  beat Salem (175,000).

Looking at the Salem Metropolitan area, the population 18 and older increased from 74% to 76%, with a corresponding decline in those under age 18. Vacant or seasonally occupied housing units went from 6.6% to 4.7%, putting pressure on housing affordability/availability. However, Sharygin noted that the average household size has been quite steady, which apparently indicates that, say, there aren't large numbers of young people living with their parents because they can't find a place of their own.

In the Salem Metro area, the white population declined from 71% to 64%, while Hispanic/Latino increased from 22% to 25%.  The Black/African American population rose slightly from 0.8% to 1.0%.

The next slides are data from the American Community Survey of 2% of the United States population, which replaced the census long form.

Sharygin highlighted that Californians migrating to Oregon are most likely to settle in SW Oregon and Deschutes County. Overall, 46% of Oregonians were born in Oregon. I'm part of the 22% who were born somewhere other than Oregon, California, or a Pacific region state (in my case, Massachusetts). Sharygin noted that there has been a decline in migration from Mexico.

The BIPOC population (Black, Indigenous, other Person of Color) percentage is much higher among younger Oregonians. Sharygin didn't discuss the reason for this. Likely it has to do with birth rates and migration patterns. 

The life expectancy at birth for Oregonians is 82 years for women and 77 years for men. Fortunately for us 72 year old men, the life expectancy for those who make it to my age is higher. The Covid crisis should result in a further flattening of the life expectancy curve. 

The U.S. birth rate is 1.7 per woman, while Oregon's birth rate is 1.5. This puts pressure on programs like Social Security that assume population growth.

Redistricting relies on census data. This slide shows three House districts in the Salem area with their 2020 population, which needs to be equalized.

This is one proposal for redrawing the district boundaries to get an approximately equal population in each district. 

Sharygin ended with this slide, which shows where people can get more detailed census data and redistricting maps.

Life is only predictable looking backward

My wife and I have been married for 31 years. Looking back, it was meant to be.

But almost certainly that's an illusion, because life only seems predictable after things already have happened. And even that is an illusion. 

To understand why, let's look more closely at how Laurel and I met.

The way I usually describe this is true, yet incomplete: I responded to a personals ad Laurel placed in Willamette Week back when the Portland alternative paper only came in a print edition.

In a 2016 post on my Church of the Churchless blog, "Who's afraid of The Big Bad Contingent World? Sartre, but not me!", I provided a wider perspective on how Laurel and I got together.

Here's a true tale about my life that does a pretty good job of illustrating the philosophical notion of "contingency." I related it in a comment on my 2006 post, "Breaking free of family influences." 

I graduated with a useless BA in psychology and was contemplating applying for an appropriately menial job. Then I overheard a conversation in the San Jose State cafeteria.

"Man, I can't do anything with a psych degree. And it takes at least three years to get a Ph.D." His friend replied, "You should get a M.S.W. It's just two years, and there are good jobs available after you graduate."

I had no idea what a M.S.W. was. I went to the library and looked it up. Everyone was talking about beautiful green Oregon, so I applied to the only school of social work in the state. Was admitted. Thirty-six years later, I'm still here.

A brief overheard conversation. My life heads off in a new direction. Go figure. I sure can't.

Seemingly, if I hadn't been in a certain spot in the San Jose State cafeteria at a specific time, in just the right location to overhear this conversation, I never would have applied to the Portland State University School of Social Work, never graduated with a M.S.W. and gotten a job at the Oregon Health Sciences University as a research associate, never moved to Salem to work for the State Health Planning and Development Agency, never met my second wife through her personals ad in Willamette Week, and, in general, never had the life I've lived here in Oregon since 1971.

That's contingency. Which is opposed to necessity.

Now, I realize that many people believe in fate or destiny. Others believe that God is pulling the strings of their life, and they're just a puppet in His/Her hands. 

I'm sympathetic to those views, since I used to believe in the Eastern notion of karma, which can be close to destiny if one assumes that a "karmic account" has to be brought into balance over various lifetimes through reincarnation.

But now I'm an atheist. I believe in science, not the supernatural.

So even though I believe in determinism -- causes and effects in accord with the laws of nature -- I also accept that these causes and effects are so complex, so contingent, so dependent on small changes in conditions, such as me arriving at the San Jose State College cafeteria just a few seconds earlier or later, there is no way to predict how life will go in advance.

Which doesn't stop us from thinking this is possible. 

Most people, me included, certainly, visualize a certain life trajectory for themselves. While the details are uncertain, we enjoy feeling that the broad outline of our future will unfold in a fairly specific fashion. I'll live here, either alone or with this person, doing this sort of thing, with my health and happiness being pretty much like such-and-such.

What I find amazing is that even though I know that by and large I've been unable to predict the course of my life in advance, I still believe that I can do this looking forward from right now.

Thus when things don't turn out as well as I expected, often I feel a sense of unfairness -- as if life had made a promise to me that was broken. But actually I was the one who had predicted the future, not life.

(Life isn't a being capable of making promises, obviously.)

This irrationality -- expecting the future to be much more predictable than it actually is -- applies to every area of life. Politics, for example. 

Today I watched Meet the Press with Chuck Todd. A central theme was President Biden's approval rating dropping considerably in August due to peoples' concerns about Covid and Afghanistan. 

Someone on the show said that back on July 4 Biden had said that Covid restrictions weren't needed any more. Now they are, and Biden is being blamed for this.

However, the rise of the Delta variant wasn't nearly as clear two months ago, nor was the refusal of a large percentage of Americans to get vaccinated, or how strongly many Republican governors would resist public health measures like wearing a mask.

Sure, in retrospect signs of all that were evident. At the time, though, the future looked quite different. 

Likewise, Biden is being criticized for how the pullout from Afghanistan was handled. Yet the pundits doing the criticizing on cable news hadn't predicted that the Afghan military and government would collapse in just eleven days or so, causing the withdrawal of our citizens and allies to be much more chaotic.

There's nothing wrong with looking back and trying to learn from history, whether it be the history of our single life or the history of an entire nation.

However, it's important to remember that history, and life, only makes sense after events already have happened. And decidedly imperfectly even then, because we necessarily have to pick and choose among a myriad of causes and conditions which are most pertinent to explaining how things ended up.

Bottom line: life largely is a mystery, whether looking backward or forward (but especially forward). So we should temper our expectations about how our life will go, since that's uncertain.

For this reason, being as appreciative and mindful as possible in the present moment strikes me as wise, since the next moment may be worse. Or better. Likely not exactly the same, though.

The curious case of MFS Total Return Fund (MSFRX) distribution history

I'm a long-time owner of the MFS Total Return fund. This is a well-respected mutual fund with a usual 60-40 split between stocks and bonds/cash. So the fund generates a fairly generous income stream.

Many years ago a personal holding company founded by my grandfather and uncle merged with the Total Return fund. The fund got a bunch of quality stocks, and the personal holding company received Total Return Fund shares equal in value to what the stocks were worth.

(The fund absorbed all of the capital gains from the stocks, a big benefit to the personal holding company.)

After my mother died in 1985, I inherited one-half of her Total Return Fund shares. My sister inherited the other half.

So I have a lengthy experience with the fund, which is appealingly conservative and dependable. That's why my uncle, a New England businessman, chose the Total Return Fund to merge the personal holding company with, part of the Boston-based Massachusetts Financial Services.

Thus it was surprising when I noticed recently that the monthly Total Return Fund dividend had dropped significantly on July 29, 2021 from what it had been for many years before. 

Sure, the amount of money my wife and I would get bounced around some as the distribution amount changed, but the changes were very gradual. In this case, though, what we got dropped 53% in a single month. Highly unusual. 

When I checked the Total Return Fund page on the MFS web site on September 1, the funds distribution history showed a .019 per share rate (rounded off) for both July and August, while the rate in June was .035. 

Curious about this disturbing change, I spent 20 minutes on hold until I was able to talk with a MFS customer service representative. She simply told me to talk with my financial advisor (MFS doesn't sell shares in its mutual funds directly to individuals). So I did that.

I emailed Steven, my advisor, two questions.

One was why the Total Return Fund had such a sudden large drop in its monthly distribution, and whether this drop was temporary or long-term. The other question was why, when I multiplied the distribution amount shown on the Total Return Fund web page by the number of shares we owned, the amount that appeared in our brokerage account was considerably less -- something I'd never checked on before.

Being a financial advisor, Steven was able to talk with someone at MFS. However, he didn't learn much. In a email from Steven, I was told:

The fellow I spoke with at MFS was unable to provide me with a cogent explanation as to why the dividend payout per share dropped almost in half in July 2021 and said it probably was due to a board decision that reset payouts on a new frequency, divs can be decided on a quarterly or yearly basis and the payments can be uneven month to month, etc.  This is not unusual since numerous factors constantly affect market prices and dividend payouts, some knowable in advance and some not.

OK. I figured that I'd just have to wait and see if the monthly dividend changed over the next few months. That left the question of why the amounts that showed up in our brokerage account were different from what I calculated we should be getting based on the figures on the Total Return Fund web page.

Today I learned what the problem was. Here's how I explained it in an email to Steven. But I still have no idea why the Total Return Fund monthly distribution has dropped so much. If anyone knows the reason, I sure would like to learn it. 

Steven, wanted to mention a curious finding. When I went back to look again at the MFS Total Return web page today, I noticed that the monthly distribution figures had changed from what I reported to you. They now show .014 for August and .030 for June. When I multiply those figures times our number of shares I get the exact dollar amount that went into our brokerage account. 

At first I thought I’d made an error in copying the numbers from the MFS web site. Then I remembered that I’d printed out the Total Return Fund distribution history. It turns out that as of September 1, the distribution history had a different set of figures than it did today, September 3. Since you’d talked with the MFS guy yesterday, all I can think of is that when you brought up the issue of us getting a different dividend amount per share than what was shown on the MFS web site, he checked the Total Return web page and found the error.

 

I agree with you that mutual fund companies don’t make mistakes in their distributions. But this episode shows, not surprisingly, really, that mutual fund web sites can contain erroneous information. Kind of amazing that apparently no one noticed this until now. My suspicions were aroused when I Googled “MSFRX distribution history” and found other financial web sites that had a different set of distribution figures than the MFS web site — which you’d think would have the best chance of being accurate, but in this case wasn’t.

 

Anyway, I now know that we’ve been getting the correct distribution amounts.

My tip for starting a Stihl "easy start" chainsaw

I'm no chainsaw expert, but I've owned a small Stihl chainsaw for many years, needing it on our ten acre property in rural south Salem, Oregon. 

This year I got a larger Stihl chainsaw after a bad February ice storm decimated many trees. They were in short supply around here for a month or so, but I finally went into Ace Hardware and saw that chainsaws were available.

I ended up getting the MS 251C, an easy start Stihl model. I liked the idea of easy starting, along with being able to easily adjust the chain tension without a tool.

But when I took the chainsaw home, I had a tough time starting it. I did what the manual said, pressing the primer button a few times, gently pulling the cord a few times on full choke, then shifting the lever to a partial choke.

But when the chainsaw started and I'd blip the throttle to get the chainsaw into the "Run" mode, it would stop. Then it'd be even tougher to start, probably because the engine was flooded. I watched You Tube videos for tips, finding one that said to only press the primer button three times, a good suggestion.

(I was used to my Stihl backpack leaf blower, where a Stihl specialist at Ace Hardware told me I could press the primer button as many times as I wanted. But the leaf blower isn't an easy start model.)

Here's what finally worked for me: Once the chainsaw starts to run on the partial choke setting, I let it idle on that setting for about as long as it takes me to put on my leather gloves. Maybe a bit longer.

I realize that you're not supposed to let the chainsaw run at speed for very long with the chain brake on, but I don't blip the throttle. I just let the chainsaw run for fifteen seconds or so on the partial choke setting. Then when I release the chain brake and start using the chainsaw at full throttle, it doesn't stall on me like it used to.

Maybe this is just a quirk of my chainsaw. Or maybe I was doing something wrong with the starting procedure. It's just made a big difference to let the chainsaw idle for a while on the partial choke setting, a tip I felt was worth sharing.

"The Chair" is a great look at college free speech

I know some retired Willamette University professors who would love "The Chair" on Netflix. This is a short (three hour) series that covers a lot of ground: college politics, free speech/cancel culture, how minorities are treated in academia.

My wife and I liked it a lot.

Sandra Oh, who I came to know and love in "Killing Eve," has a very different role here as Ji-Yoon Kim, the new chair of the English Department at a smallish university. She's terrific, as are all the other actors, notably including Everly Carganilla, who plays Kim's adopted daughter. 

Though by far the youngest member of the cast, Carganilla steals every scene she is in, displaying an astonishing talent. 

Check out reviews of "The Chair" if you have any doubt about watching it. The Atlantic review is titled, "The Chair is Netflix's Best Drama in Years."

Perhaps, like me, you inwardly sigh with the breath of a thousand winds whenever you hear the words cancel culture, as mangled and distorted as the expression has become. If so, know that the people behind Netflix’s The Chair are likely sighing too. And yet here they are, presenting a unicorn: a near-perfect television show that clocks in at just three hours, and a comedy-drama that skewers the subject of free speech in academia without taking a side, demonizing a particular group, or descending into tweed-clutching.

That last observation is correct. It's refreshing to see a drama where there aren't clear-cut "good guys" and "bad guys." Since I'm a big proponent of free speech, having had some recent run-ins with excessively woke people on Facebook, I was sympathetic to Bill, a professor who gets skewered by students after making an unfortunate Nazi salute in class. The Atlantic says:

During one packed lecture, Bill satirically performs a Hitler salute while considering absurdism’s power against fascism, sparking a viral meme and a furious debate about free speech on campus.

The main gripe I had with "The Chair," a minor one, is that for some reason Bill never offers up a coherent explanation for why he did the Nazi salute, which was captured on video. That makes the angry students seem more justified in their demand that Bill be fired, whereas if he'd defended his action as satire, that should have reduced the cancel culture demands.

Hopefully there will be a Season 2.

The final episode of Season 1 ended with enough ambiguity to justify a second season, which I guess is one reason why it ended the way it did. Regardless, "The Chair" is well worth watching in its current incarnation. If it gets reborn, so much the better.

Maskless Oregonians, here's what I'm thinking when I see you

Public health experts say we shouldn't shame people who choose not to be vaccinated or ignore mandates to wear a mask in indoor public spaces. 

OK. I get that. Shaming isn't a good way to change behavior.

Anyway, I'm too polite and well-mannered to go around telling maskless Oregonians what I think when I see them scoffing at Governor Brown's order to wear a mask because of the highly contagious Delta variant that has filled up almost every general hospital and ICU bed in this state. 

This is causing non-Covid patients to die unnecessarily, because the mostly unvaccinated Covid patients are sucking up hospital beds that otherwise could be used by people who need one because of a traffic accident, heart attack, or whatever.

So, yeah, I have good reason to be irked at those who refuse to wear a mask -- the second best way to prevent Covid other than by getting vaccinated. 

Here's what I'd tell the maskless if I felt like walking up to them and sharing my honest feelings about their foolishness.

You're either ignorant, uncaring, or infected with the Fox News-Republican Party disinformation virus. Doesn't matter which of these explains your decision to walk around maskless in this store, gym, or other place we're sharing.

Probably you believe it's your decision whether to wear a mask. Actually, it isn't. You can make your own decision about whether to be treated for cancer. But you can't make that decision for anyone else. 

Likewise, with Covid, your freedom ends when you exhale. 

By not wearing a mask, you're markedly increasing the chance that I or someone else will get Covid should you be infected. Even if you don't have symptoms, you can still put someone in the hospital, or even die, because of your failure to wear a mask.

You maskless fools walk around in your own self-absorbed bubble. You must enjoy the feeling of ignoring public health advice. You must relish the idea that you're marching to the beat of your own uncaring drummer.

Problem is, your selfishness increases the risk that someone else isn't going to be able to march to any beat at all, because they're lacking a heartbeat after losing a battle against COVID-19.

And don't get me started about how stupid it is to "wear" a mask with your nose exposed, or dangling under your chin. 

You do realize that breath comes out of your nose and mouth, right? And goes in that way, also. Even if you're anti-science, you must have grasped by now that air goes in and out of your nose and mouth, not your neck. 

I don't respect people who fail to wear a mask when one is mandated. 

However, if you're going to act like a maskless jerk, own your jerkiness! Walk around proudly uncaring, ignorant, and clueless. Wordlessly scream out to your fellow shoppers or gym-goers "Look at me! I'm a selfish dude/dudette. My maskless face proclaims how little I care about other people."

Maybe wearing a mask under your nose or chin allows you to feel that you're able to have your Covid cake and eat it too. Hey, I'm wearing a mask! Take that, store owner whose sign on the front door says "masks required."

But actually this just brands you as a wishy-washy fool. When I see someone with a mask that doesn't cover their nose and mouth, I'm more irritated than I would be if they weren't wearing a mask at all.

Not wearing a mask could mean that the person forgot to put it on. Or they have a rare medical condition that prevents them from wearing a mask. Letting a mask dangle under your chin, or slightly better, under your nose, explicitly tells the world that you're a jerk who has a mask, but doesn't want to protect yourself or others from Covid.

Whew. That was a lengthy message.

Now I guess I could print up some cards with this blog post URL and a statement, "Read this to see what I think about you," then hand them out to to the maskless or wrongly-masked who irritate me.

Afghanistan is horrible, but Biden is doing right thing

For the past few days I've been agonizing over how I feel about the situation in Afghanistan.

It pains me that the horrific scenes of panicked people at the Kabul airport trying to flee their country are happening on Biden's watch, since I view him as hugely more competent than Trump, and so far he's mostly done the right things as president.

Last night my daughter, Celeste, and I talked by phone. Even though we're both progressives, much of our conversation centered on what was happening in Afghanistan. 

Almost certainly the Taliban takeover will doom Afghan women and girls to subjugation under harsh interpretations of Islamic law. Which is beyond sad. And we worried about how the chaotic evacuation of Americans after an unexpectedly swift collapse of the Afghan military will impact the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election.

Celeste and I agreed that Biden had screwed-up. It felt weird for us to be so down on the action of a Democratic president we both strongly support, but that's how I felt yesterday.

Today, though, I'm more inclined to look favorably on what the Biden administration has done with the Afghanistan pullout. Here's why.

This afternoon I watched Biden's address to the nation, along with a Defense Department press briefing. Biden did a great job explaining why it made sense to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan. There's no doubt in my mind that both Trump and Biden are correct in ordering this to happen.

(That's one of the few times I've used "Trump" and "correct" in the same sentence.)

Over the past twenty years the United States gave Afghanistan every opportunity to become a better country. We invested huge amounts of money in building roads, schools, other infrastructure. Over $80 billion went to the Afghan military. They got high tech weapons, an air force, training of an army far larger than Taliban forces.

Yet the Afghan military crumpled like a sheet of tissue paper in the past few weeks. The weapons our country gave them now are in the hands of the Taliban. Biden is absolutely correct when he said that it wouldn't matter if the United States stayed for another few months or another few years.

The collapse of the Afghan military proved that withdrawing all American forces was the right thing to do. Corruption and incompetence among Afghan leaders showed that Afghanistan squandered the support the United States poured into that country since 2001.

Our own military deserves a lot of blame also. Just as in Vietnam, our generals painted overly rosy pictures of how well the fight against the Taliban was going, and how strong the Afghan forces were. Sure, the soldiers who fought in Afghanistan were brave.

But in the end we have to face a harsh truth: their efforts were largely wasted. Soon after our invasion of Afghanistan, the mission shifted from hunting the 9/11 attackers to nation-building -- something the United States is really crappy at.

Just as in Iraq, we wrongly assume that Islamic countries want to be just like us: diverse, democratic, materialistic. We  thought Afghanistan could be remade in our own image. Instead, Afghanistan pretty much remained the same, a nation beset with corruption whose people either tolerate the Taliban or actively support fundamentalist Islamic rule.

So there's no doubt Biden was correct to withdraw all American forces. The only question is whether he botched that withdrawal. I found Biden's speech and the Defense Department press conference persuasive in that regard also.

Biden said that Afghan leaders didn't want him to move rapidly on giving Afghan interpreters and others who helped the United States visas to leave the country, because this would have demoralized the Afghan military. Sure, it turned out that likely nothing could have made the Afghan military a worse fighting force than it already was, but this wasn't known at the time.

It does seem like our intelligence services should have been more aware of how rapidly the Afghan army would surrender to the Taliban. However, as a general said at the press conference, it's a truism that battle plans last as long as the first shot, then have to be revised.

I'm bothered by how difficult it will be now to get Afghans who worked with the United States out of the country.

However, it's hard to fault the Biden administration for not doing this sooner. Hindsight always is 20-20. Unfortunately, I doubt that the optimism of those who want us to get tens of thousands of Afghans out of the country in the next weeks and months is justified.

It's hard to believe that the Taliban will allow interpreters and their families to line up outside the Kabul airport and file onto waiting planes. Thus it's a undeniable tragedy that those who risked their lives to aid the United States will suffer mightily under Taliban rule.

Even so, I suspect that in the long run, Biden will have the support of the American people for how he handled the Afghanistan pullout. It wasn't pretty, to put it mildly. But it was necessary. And I have no doubt that if Trump was still president, he would have screwed things up way worse than Biden did.