Coughing in the New Year

Happy New Year.

When 2016 opened, I was already a couple days into a powerful cold virus that had been making the rounds. Earlier in December, my wife had a round of sneezes and runny nose, and I seem to recall another small cold of my own before that, but neither was anything like this.

For at least five days, I’ve had a very wet cough, unlike any I can recall in my life, that makes me sound like a lifelong tobacco smoker (which I’ve never been). I’m constantly having to blow my nose, and the coughing regularly brings up “stuff” out of my lungs, or at least my throat.

This is hardly the sort of thing I would have preferred to write about for my first post of the year (anything from Bernie Sanders and gun control to new year’s resolutions and the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a couple of young Nevada Bundys and their crowd the day before yesterday would have done), but this is where I find myself.

When I was younger, I used to have a notion—I can’t really call it a fantasy or a daydream, since it was not an appealing thought—of a day in the future when the human cold would be permanent. It seemed possible: viruses fight to survive as much as any living thing, and the better they got at it, the longer they’d be likely to hang on.

I thought of attempting to write a science fiction novel (or a short story, at least) in which such a cold would feature—every human being on the planet had it, and it never went away—but it didn’t seem much of a hook for a thrilling tale. In fact, it’d be downright dreary. Where could you go with it?

For much of 2015, though, my fantasy seemed to have become reality for me. Not that I had a cough, sneezes, or runny nose, but I heard my lungs a lot more than I used to. Especially when I lay down to sleep, and everything was quiet, I picked up tiny clicks, whistles, and/or wheezes in my throat; sounds I wasn’t accustomed to hearing, as my breaths went in and out.

Unlike in the past, my sinuses weren’t plugged, let alone infected. Whatever was going on inside didn’t adversely affect my acting work: this year I shot several web ads for Intel, a couple of short indie films, and training videos for the Oregon Lottery and Friends of Trees; and I participated in staged readings and table reads of plays in progress. I also did voiceover narrations for a series of eight training videos on aging and elder health issues produced by the PSU Institute on Aging and Oregon Health Authority.

Although I sort of sounded as if I had asthma when I breathed deeply, I have no history of that condition, and I never felt as if I wasn’t getting enough air. It was very peculiar. When I went for a general health checkup late in the fall, my doctor listened and looked me over, but didn’t find anything specifically wrong. Yet the unusual sounds went on. And they’ve been especially prominent the past week.

What could it be? A semi-permanent allergy to growing air pollution, perhaps? Who knows. Perhaps it may never go away. But once I’m over this awful cold, I have nowhere to go in 2016 but up.

How It Played (When You Become the Lead Story, part 8)

After our Wednesday morning outing for the KXL interview, Carole was pretty wiped out. There was nothing else but to wait and see what the media would do, so I chose to put in a few hours with one of my part-time employers, the Portland Streetcar.

In a coincidence much like the one that had put me near the scene when Carole was hit a week and a half before, I was on duty and riding across the Tilikum Crossing bridge from the west to the east side shortly after 5:00 p.m., when I looked out at the collision site and noticed someone standing there in a yellow slicker with a video camera close by. I surmised that one of the TV stations might be doing a live feed about Carole’s story, so I called her immediately on my cell phone and told her to switch on the TV.

Why Our Tale Struck Gold (When You Become the Lead Story, part 7)

As we rode a Portland Streetcar train home from the radio interview and video shoot at the PSU Urban Center late on the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 21, I glanced idly over at the collision site and noticed several Trimet trucks gathered there. That was probably a signal that the story was about to break publicly, but I didn’t realize it at the time.

When Carole and I got home, there were messages on Facebook and in my emailer that my post to BikePortland.org four nights before had borne fruit. A commentary uploaded by Jonathan Maus on his blog that Wednesday morning was the first notice on public media that something had happened at the Tilikum Crossing bridge a week and a half before. Maus reprinted most of my nearly five-day-old email to him, as well as his comments, which opened with: “It has happened. And I hate to say that I’m not surprised.”

Going to the Media (When You Become the Lead Story, part 6)

On the evening of Saturday, Oct. 17, a little less than a week after the collision, I posted the following comment on Facebook: “So my wife has the dubious honor of being the first (so far as we know) to be struck and injured by a vehicle on the new Tilikum Crossing bridge, just under a month after it opened. Now that I’ve completed my personal, preliminary site investigation (since Portland Police did not respond to -- and probably were not notified of -- the 911 call last Sunday morning), I am surprised that it took that long. I predict there will be many more….”

Within ten minutes, a friend who works at a local radio station asked, “Want to talk to me about it for a news story?” I’d occasionally looked askance at the people who took their sob story about a dispute with a landlord, an obnoxious neighbor, or a government agency to the news media instead of “going through proper channels,” but in this case, the proper channels had utterly overlooked us.

The Search for Official Evidence (When You Become the Lead Story, part 5)

I began to think about the long-term implications of the incident. Carole told me she had pressed the button for the pedestrian crossing signal and waited until the light was with her. That suggested the cyclist might have run a red light, assuming the month-old traffic signals were working and properly synchronized.

But what if the cyclist’s insurer refused to reimburse any portion of our medical bills? What did we have if it came down to their word against Carole’s? One of the first questions an insurance company would surely ask was “What is the police report number?” There wasn’t one, of course. Did that mean we had nothing?

On Wednesday morning I started to make phone inquiries into what sort of official record this incident had generated, if any. Portland Fire & Rescue had responded to the scene, obviously; when I called them, a representative told me that AMR Ambulance would have taken the lead in filing an incident report. I looked up the ambulance company’s website and found a form I had to print out and mail to request a copy of whatever they had recorded.

Two-Plus Days in the Hospital (When You Become the Lead Story, part 4)

Carole spent most of Sunday afternoon in the Emergency department. She underwent a CT scan and at least two rounds of X-rays before being formally admitted to the hospital roughly six hours later and given a bed in the Emergency General Surgery department.

Late that afternoon we learned that she apparently had four cracked ribs on the left side (the side the cyclist hit as she was crossing his path from right to left), a separated left shoulder (the representative X-ray at right is not hers), and a chipped “wing” of the first or second thoracic vertebra. That last should be of no concern, the trauma physician told us, because it would either float in place or be reabsorbed by the body.

The thing to remember with the ribs, she was told several times, was to keep breathing deeply and filling the lower end of her lungs, even if it hurt a bit, to prevent infection. Health-care professionals no longer brace or bind cracked ribs for healing because people would breathe shallowly for fear of the pain and contracted pneumonia in their lower lungs.

When You Become the Lead Story, part 3

A little earlier that morning, Carole had started to cross Tilikum Crossing bridge with Pixie to the other side of the river as part of their daily hour-long walk. She had ridden across the bridge on the streetcar and MAX light-rail preview rides with me in August, but had not yet traveled the brand-new span on foot.

As the pair climbed the west slope of the bridge, however, Carole became concerned that the fairly lively pedestrian and bicycle traffic was making the dog nervous, and that a panicked Pixie might slip between the horizontal spars below the railing and fall into the river.

So Carole decided to turn back and continue their walk north along the west bank of the Willamette instead. To do this, she and Pixie would have to cross the road and rails that lead up to the center span of Tilikum from the west bank, and travel the breadth of the bridge instead of its length. The first pedestrian crossing Carole encountered came at the east end of the lengthy platform where Orange Line MAX trains and Trimet bus lines pick up and drop passengers, toward the western terminus of the bridge.

When You Become the Lead Story, part 2

Now that you know the catastrophe Carole suffered on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2015, and have a basic sense of how it came across on the local news, we can start to take a look behind the scenes.

Things to keep in mind:

•        Carole would spend more than two days in the hospital, getting her injuries assessed and receiving medications to get her through the coming weeks.

•        I took off roughly a week from my various jobs to stay with her in the hospital most of Sunday and Monday, and then bring her home and care for her after she was discharged the afternoon of Tuesday, Oct. 13 … helping her get out of bed and walking her to the bathroom, administering her ice pack and heating pad and medications, cooking the meals, walking the dog alone three or four times a day, answering the phone, and retrieving packages and mail.

•        Ten days (Oct. 11-Oct. 21) passed between the morning of the collision and the day it made the news.

Let’s go back to the morning of the incident.

It was a Sunday. Carole had established a routine of taking the dog -- our six-pound toy fox terrier named Pixie -- for an hour-long walk every morning. It was a great way to exercise herself and our girl, as well as explore the new neighborhood to which we had just moved a little more than four weeks before.

We had lived ten years in an apartment in the heart of downtown Portland. Our new locale, known as South Waterfront, is undergoing rapid change. It’s a former brownfield industrial strip on the west bank of the Willamette River just south of downtown. Seven apartment and condo towers, and a health-care structure, all between 20 and 32 stories, have been constructed here within just the last ten years. According to Wikipedia, South Waterfront “is one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in the United States.”

When You Become the Lead Story

We are closing in on the sixth anniversary of the debut of this blog. I posted my first “American Currents” commentary on Nov. 6, 2009.

At that point, it was the brainchild of Jeff Weiss -- though I coined the name -- and the shared production of an array of writers. Jeff wanted to establish a forum for voices across the political and social spectra to comment on breaking news and issues of the day.

For six months, half a dozen of us traded off posting on topics Jeff assigned to us: everything from charging children for adult crimes (here’s the news story to which I was responding), to a sexting tragedy (background), a tweeting Mom who posted online updates about her two-year-old son’s drowning, and my initial reaction to the blockbuster movie “Avatar.”

Over the ensuing months, some bloggers dropped away, and others came on to replace them. But aside from myself, nobody could keep up the steady pace, and the endeavor petered out in April 2010. I picked it up again in May, and have mostly had the space to myself ever since.

Though with regular months-long breaks, I’ve talked about everything from a purported near-bombing by a supposed Muslim terrorist here in Portland to my budding acting career. I’ve inveighed against the overuse of mobile devices (repeatedly), celebrated the legalization of same-sex marriage in Oregon, and offered my advice to high school students on how to choose a college.

Songs That Are Like Old Friends, pt. 3

To continue the task suggested by a friend:

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to post five cool songs in as many days. Each day, I'm tagging three friends, in the hopes they'll do the same. Expanding horizons, facilitating the tapping of toes, providing distractions from the looming void, etc."

I’ve chosen my five songs for their significance in my life, their illustration of larger musical currents of their era, and to some extent (I hope) their relative obscurity.

If I had stuck to my personal favorites, I might have chosen the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress,” Creedence’s “Fortunate Son,” the Moody Blues “Story In Your Eyes,” Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak,” the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” half a dozen Beatles tunes (from “Nowhere Man” and “Paperback Writer” to “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home”) or even some really great cover songs, such as Devo’s version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Santana’s killer cover of “She’s Not There,” and Dave Edmunds’s “I Hear You Knockin’ ” -- nearly all of which I would imagine most of my friends have heard.

Walking the Talk

Just like I suspect you have, I’ve fallen short on some of my resolutions this year. I stopped getting over to the gym every week (despite a running start -- literally -- toward the end of November), and I’m still inhaling sugary pastries and syrupy lattes at Starbucks.

As I’ve written here in the past, I try to avoid making classic, hard-and-fast new year’s resolutions. My strategy has been not to be too precise, because that’s mostly setting yourself up to fail. Instead, I think about general directions in which I’d like to move over the coming year.

In some ways, my 2015 plan is working. Tiramisu and Caramel Flan lattes and my absence from 24-Hour Fitness aside, on a grander scale I’m accomplishing at least some of what I’d hoped to this year.

Giving up pleasure reading, as I described on Feb. 13, turned out not to be that difficult. I simply don’t take stuff out of the library and have it lying around, if it isn’t a title chosen by one of my book discussion groups. And of course I don’t shop for books to own. Although I’ve felt the occasional jones to reach for a book whenever a quiet moment strikes, it hasn’t been too hard to fight.

Songs That Are Like Old Friends, pt. 2

Song No. 2: On Reflection

The step from song no. 1 to no. 2 is a giant one … in several senses!

My family lived for two years in Europe where, courtesy of the Armed Forces Radio Network, I became acquainted between the ages of 10 and 12 with old-time-radio shows (from Jack Benny, Henry Morgan, and Stan Freburg to “It Pays to Be Ignorant” and “The Magnificent Montague”), as well as some of the history of Sixties rock-and-roll. John Gillaland’s “The Pop Chronicles” and other compendia aired on AFN Frankfurt.

My attention to popular music was pretty spotty, because I didn’t have access to a record player. Mostly I listened to AM hits (I remember hearing a lot of “Saturday Morning Confusion,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia,” and “Don’t Pull Your Love” by Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, which made me wonder whether that was three or four guys every time the DJ announced the band) and taped old radio shows onto an Uher reel-to-reel. We did have a cheap cassette player; on the recommendation of a record department clerk, Dad bought a cassette of Led Zeppelin II at the U.S. Army Post Exchange in Hanau, Germany, but he didn’t like it much. I got into it, though.

"Being Connected" Means Disconnecting from Your Self

The extent to which so many people shut down their senses against things that are going on around them is astonishing. I’ve observed repeated evidence of this in recent days.

I ride the Portland Streetcar pretty much every day: sometimes for short hops as a patron, and other times for several hours as an employee. Recorded announcements over the p.a. system let riders know on a regular basis what kind of car they’re on: whether it’s heading to northwest Portland, the South Waterfront, or across the river to the east side.

Yet people don’t hear them. They constantly ask me and one another which train they’re on. “This is the Northwest 22nd and Northrup stop,” the calm female announcer’s voice stated as I stood up to get off for a work shift at another job last week. Right away, directly behind me, I heard someone ask, “Is this 23rd?”

Last Wednesday, March 11, my wife Carole was aboard a streetcar that was already passing a parked vehicle when the woman inside opened her door into the train, which naturally bashed and bent it. She screamed. Carole said everyone on board who heard her thought the train had struck someone. Why hadn’t this idiot looked out the window or in her rearview mirror before reaching for her door handle? (And could her insurance company deny coverage on the basis of stupidity?)

Songs That Are Like Old Friends

I try to avoid participating in Facebook memes and games. I know they’re primarily promotional, and designed to drive up site traffic as well as to divine each user’s tastes and interests so that bots can market stuff to them more accurately. I’ve never played Farmville or Candy Crush or Bubble Witch or Jackpot Party Casino Slots. Fortunately, nobody hit me up for the ice bucket challenge last year so I’d have to publicly demur, not least because I don’t have a smartphone to be able to shoot a photo or video and post it. But last week a friend tagged me for a five-day song challenge:

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to post five cool songs in as many days. Each day, I'm tagging three friends, in the hopes they'll do the same. Expanding horizons, facilitating the tapping of toes, providing distractions from the looming void, etc."

I liked being tapped, especially alongside two other Facebook friends of mine named David. I don’t see them or my Facebook challenger in person very often, though I’ve worked with each in staged readings or on video jobs in the past. And I really liked reminiscing about the music that has enriched my life in the past -- thinking about which five songs might be most interesting to choose; not necessarily my absolute favorites, not necessarily the coolest, but a little off the beaten path as well as personally illuminating with regard to my musical journey through life.

The Obsessive Reader Goes Cold Turkey . . . Sort Of

As I have done for many years, I submitted my reading list for the past year and an essay to Oregonian columnist Steve Duin’s annual reading contest. Without any further preamble, here’s the essay I submitted in early January:

The last thing I ever expected to announce in a reading contest essay was that I’m giving up pleasure reading for the coming year. If you’re anything like the reader I’ve been, the prospect is terrifying.

Books have been my friends forever. My parents read aloud to me when I was small. My grandmother, folks, and family friends gave me many books as gifts over the years. I also lived three blocks from the public library in my hometown, so from age 7 onward, I walked there almost every day.

In high school I was notorious as the kid with the stack of books. In college, I usually did all the required reading for courses before lecture, and still took time to read dozens of other books for pleasure.

Get Your Butts Out of Our Public Parks, NOW!

This Wednesday, Feb. 11, at 3:15 p.m., Portland City Parks Commissioner Amanda Fritz will introduce an ordinance to impose a smoking ban and tobacco-free policy in all city parks, recreation areas, and any other places where the Portland Parks & Recreation Bureau has jurisdiction. I plan to be there to observe and, I hope, testify in support.

The ban has been brewing for a while. The proposal surfaced last May, and the Oregonian editorial page came out in opposition. I sent a lengthy letter to the editor in response, which the paper put on its website and in the print edition as a “guest commentary” with a rebuttal from the editor. This is a rare occurrence, so as I observed on this blog, I must have hit the guy where he lives.

In preparation for this month’s formal proposal by Fritz, her office invited public comment in January. Here the letter I emailed to her assistant:

I am voicing my strong support for the proposed smoking ban in Portland parks.

For the Holidays, the End of The World as We Know It

December is the time for families, food, lights, and gift-giving, right?

Just as I’ve done for many years, I participated in dramatic readings of “A Christmas Carol” with actor friends at nursing homes and retirement centers, and helped serve hundreds of meals to low-income and homeless citizens at Temple Beth Israel synagogue on Christmas Day.

But my personal entertainment took an oddly apocalyptic turn in December. I don’t mean zombies and post-nuclear war battles, but actual, serious looks at Where We May Be Headed. This didn’t happen by conscious choice or design -- impulse decisions at the library and suggestions by friends in one of my book clubs set the stage -- but it’s odd how they all came together this month.

Carole and I had waited a while to get our hands on the first-season DVD set of True Detective from the library. Several weeks ago we raced through the episodes in barely a weekend. In the pilot, a monologue by Matthew McConnaughey’s character “Rust” Cohle includes the following passage:

I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist, by natural law. … I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction … one last midnight … brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

How to Choose a College

My niece is a junior in high school. Discussions with her parents over Thanksgiving about her education plans brought back a memory about the time the head guidance counselor at my old high school asked me to speak to college-bound juniors about preparing for higher ed. I was either still in college or fresh out.

One girl asked, “How do you decide which college to go to?” I think it was the first time I had formulated my opinions about college in an organized manner, and I haven’t forgotten my answer. Here’s what I said.

“Well, there’s an orthodox method that goes like this. You decide what you’re interested in -- what you want to pursue as a career -- and then you go to the guidance center and study the school catalogs [this was before the Internet existed, for the average person] and find out which schools have a strong program in that field. Then you apply to them.

“Now, there are several things that strike me as wrong with this approach. First, when you’re 18, you don’t typically have a very clear idea about what you want to do. Odds are you will change your mind, maybe many times.

It Ain't Over, Folks. . . .

Although the mid-term elections took place a month ago, and Oregonians had begun to mail and turn in their votes as much as two weeks prior to that, the election results on Measure 92 -- the GMO labeling proposal I wrote about here on October 28 -- are not yet final.

As of Nov. 6, the measure appeared to have been defeated by about 10,500 votes. That’s a slim margin: out of nearly 1.4 million votes cast, the difference amounted to 50.4 percent “no” to 49.6 percent “yes.” Nonetheless, the Oregonian pronounced defeat for the GMO labeling effort.

But the results turned out to be much closer.

A sizable chunk of votes had not been properly signed. For our U.S. neighbors who don’t enjoy the luxury of vote-by-mail (and that’s still most of you, at this point), once you’ve filled in your ballot, you can place it in an optional “privacy envelope” -- with big air holes so your check marks can breathe, I suppose -- and then in a slightly larger, preaddressed envelope that has a line on the back where you’re supposed to sign your name.

The votes inside are not counted as valid if there’s no signature on the outer envelope. Roughly 13,000 Oregon voters failed to sign their envelope in this election. In the past, those votes were simply not counted, period; but a new state law allows election officials and campaigns to obtain the names of the people whose votes were thus invalidated so they could be contacted to correct the error.

Election 2014: Oregon Ballot Measure 90

Ballot Measure 90 is intended to rectify a growing inequity in Oregon primary elections . . . but it exacts too great a price.

Oregon has a closed primary system, which means voters can only vote for candidates in the political party for which they are registered: Democrats vote for Democrats, Republicans for Republicans.

This is a relic of elections in centuries past, when parties chose their candidates in private meetings before they were presented to the voters. Due to pressure from the general electorate and the courts, that morphed into closed primary elections in which Democrats and Republicans select their respective candidates for the general election.

The idea is that constitutionally guaranteed “free associations” of Americans could affiliate, meet, agree on what they wanted, etc.

But over the past few decades, more and more voters have registered as Independent or non-party affiliated. I’ve seen various figures for the number, but it’s definitely more than half a million Oregonians now.