#13 Return of the Jack
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.
“Eighteen years. Can’t imagine doing anything else.” the heavily tattooed man said to me as we hit another bump and the entire gurney I was strapped to bounced. It was three in the morning in Jefferson County. We were the only vehicle on the road. It was raining. And we were going nearly eighty miles an hour.
“How long has the guy driving been doing this?”
“Six days.”
Hello again. You may have noticed a gap between this newsletter and the last. It was due to a combination of personal, professional, and technical issues that created a perfect storm of activity that prevented me from doing anything else and culminating in the above scene which I’ll get back to before the end of this newsletter.
Thankfully, things have settled down and I believe we can get back to regularly scheduled programming.
Who I’m Voting For
I’ve never been into professional sports. I don’t have a favorite team. I can’t tell you who won the last World Series and I can’t remember the last time I watched the Super Bowl. Most of my knowledge of the NBA comes from NBA Shootout. Instead of professional sports, I pay attention to politics. I’ve been this way since 1992 when I saw Bill Clinton speak in Seattle.
I’ve read books on politics. I’ve talked in person to many politicians. I read articles, studies, polls, and anything else I can get my hands on when it comes to politics. I can get positively obsessed during an election year. And this year promises to be one of the biggest election years of my lifetime.
It should come as no surprise that I’m neck deep in politics at this point as Super Tuesday is just days away. It goes without saying that in this election I believe the most important thing is removing Donald Trump from office. Currently we have five Democrats seriously vying for the Democratic nomination to go up against Trump. I will vote for the Democratic nominee regardless of who it is, but I definitely have favorites.
Initially, I was for Andrew Yang. He was one of the first to announce he was running for President and the concept of universal basic income is an important one. But then Jay Inslee entered the race with the much more important topic of climate change as his main focus. My allegiance changed to Inslee and I even donated to his campaign because climate change is an existential threat that is often ignored despite the cataclysmic results of ignoring it.
When Inslee dropped out, I wasn’t sure who to support. I really like Cory Booker but he didn’t seem to have any traction despite being smart, having extensive experience, and being someone who was willing to speak bluntly about issues, but his campaign was going nowhere.
I kept hearing from people that I should take a look at Mayor Pete Buttigieg, but initially I thought, ‘the guy only has elected experience as mayor of a small Indiana town and he’s gay which isn’t nearly as popular in some parts of the country as others’. But then I listened to him speak. It isn’t a stretch to say that objectively Pete Buttigieg is probably the smartest person to run for President of the United States since Barack Obama. The guy speaks seven languages, was educated at Oxford, plays four musical instruments, is a military veteran who was deployed to Afghanistan, and actually listens when people speak to him. When someone at The Root called him a ‘Lying Motherfucker’, Pete called the guy up and let the guy talk to him for two hours. Watching him in the seemingly weekly debates, he often comes off as the only person on stage who isn’t too upset to make sense.
It was easy to cast my vote for Pete Buttigieg in Washington’s primary given the other options. However, Elizabeth Warren with her progressive but sensible plans was a close second. And despite his dismal showing in the early states, last night’s South Carolina primary shows Joe Biden still has a real shot and I’d be okay with that.
The rest of the candidates either have little chance of getting the nomination or would be a disaster if they did get the nomination. Bloomberg is Trump-lite in many ways. And Bernie Sanders would be a disaster for a whole host of reasons. Don’t get me wrong. They’d all be better than Trump, but I don’t think Bernie can beat Trump. He’s not capable of swaying America into thinking socialism is a good thing. Yes, it’s Democratic Socialism which is different, but Bernie is oblivious to the toxicity of the term. Worse, he just killed his chances in the vital state of Florida by not soundly condemning Fidel Castro. Do the math however you like, you’re not likely to find a way that the Democrats win without Florida. Not to mention the fact that Bernie just had a heart attack in October and refuses to release information on whether or not that heart attack damaged his heart. The nightmare scenario is that Bernie becomes the nominee and then has another heart attack and dies a year after his last heart attack.
And, to be honest, I think Trump should be our last Boomer President. It’s time for a new generation and I believe Pete Buttigieg is exactly the man to begin that new era.
What I’ve Been Up To
Thirty-six hours before I was strapped onto a gurney at three in the morning, I had arrived at Fort Worden in Port Townsend for the first eight days of my second semester in my MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Unlike my first time here in July, I knew almost everyone and was excited to see them again.
I have been incredibly lucky in my college experiences. The Human Services department at Tacoma Community College felt like working with friends. Evergreen Tacoma felt like being part of a community. Goddard College at Port Townsend feels like a family.
There were many hugs. We updated each other on our lives. We joked that we should have a guidebook on how to survive between the two weeks a year we get to be here. I suggested we call it ‘The Other 50 Weeks’.
The way Goddard’s low-residency program works is like this: The first week of each semester is spent on campus attending and participating in readings, workshops, lectures, and meetings with our advisors where we work out our individual study plans for the rest of the semester. It is the most critical time of the year for us. It determines what our next six months are going to look like.
Upon arriving, I was given a key to my house. We stay onsite on what’s called Officers’ Row, a row of similar, though not identical duplex houses, each with four to six bedrooms, each with between two and four students in them. This semester I was in 7E.
Saturday morning begins with breakfast. All meals are provided through the cafeteria at Fort Worden and is included as part of our tuition. The food at Fort Worden is about what one expects from cafeteria food, but the fact that we need not do anything but show up and eat it makes things easy. The whole point is to have the time to write, learn, and talk about writing with few distractions.
In the afternoon we learned who our new advisors would be for the semester. During the first semester we were assigned advisors. All other semesters we have the option to suggest our top three choices. I managed to get my first choice, Richard Panek.
I had selected Richard after watching a few interviews with him on YouTube. He’s a non-fiction author who typically focuses on science. His most recent book, The Trouble With Gravity explores gravity and our relationship to it, but he does so in a manner that is more narrative than academic. He seemed like the perfect choice given that my manuscript is a narrative based on a true story. Below is a shot of Richard and I holding up a copy of the Goddard’s literary journal, The Pitkin Review.
In the evening they had a faculty reading. I was really looking forward to watching Richard read, but I noticed that my heart was racing. It was at over 120 beats per minute and all I was doing was sitting in the audience waiting for someone to read from a book. My fitness tracker also tracks my blood pressure. It said 182/108. (For those who do not know, anything over 140/90 is considered dangerously high.) I stepped out of the room and went downstairs.
In the lobby area I told a staff member what was going on and that I was going to take a Nitro and step outside. I told him to check on me in ten minutes to make sure I was okay. Then I called my girlfriend as she tends to be able to calm me down, but this time that didn’t work. I stepped back inside, took another Nitro, and promptly started feeling dizzy. It was at this point that I asked the staff member to call 9-1-1.
It is worth noting that the last thing I want to do is go to the hospital. I don’t like hospitals in the best of circumstances and in this case, I was literally going from an environment I had been looking forward to for months to one that I’ve consciously avoided for months.
They ran an EKG on me and determined I wasn’t having a heart attack. That was good, but my vitals were showing that something was definitely happening. They put me in the ambulance and took me to Jefferson County Hospital where they tried eight separate times to get an IV into me finally succeeding by using an ultrasound machine to find a good place to stick me.
Jefferson County doesn’t have a cardiac unit. So their ability to treat me if I was having a cardiac episode was limited. There was talk of transferring me to Bremerton, but after getting my records from Tacoma, the people in Tacoma suggested they simply transfer me there.
Less than two days after leaving Tacoma for Port Townsend I was headed back. It is eighty-two miles between the two hospitals. Many of the roads twist and turn. The combination of speed, rain, and road made the journey feel like an airplane with bad turbulence. I imagined the new guy skidding us off into one of the deep ditches I noticed on my drive up. I wondered if I could undo the straps on my gurney myself if I really had to.
Thankfully we arrived unscathed. At the Tacoma hospital, they ran more tests and found that whatever had happened there was no damage to my heart. There was talk of my doing a nuclear stress test, but they don’t do those on the weekend. I would be scheduled for Monday or Tuesday.
Two things became very clear for me. One was that I was probably okay. I had been through this sort of thing before, most recently back in August. If I was in any danger it had passed. The other was that if I stayed in the hospital until Monday or Tuesday my residency would be over as would my semester and the next six months of my life during which I was going to be doing a ton of schoolwork would be suddenly empty. I would not get to graduate with the people I started this program with.
When my cardiologist eventually showed up he promptly decided that conducting a nuclear stress test in which they inject me with radioactive material and get my heart up to over 150 beats a minute would likely be a waste of time as I passed my last test in August and there’s no good reason to expose me to more nuclear material if I don’t need it.
“Doc, if we’re not doing the test, can I get out of here? I have somewhere I really need to be.” I said.
A couple hours later I was free and on my way back to Port Townsend. No one expected me to return. It occurred to me that I have never attended a school or gone to a job that I could not wait to get back to after a hospital visit. But coming back to Port Townsend, to Goddard, to my cohort of fellow writers, it felt like coming home.
I thanked my Dad for giving me the ride back and got back to my residency.
I was exhausted. My arms were bruised from the botched IV attempts from nurses and doctors. I had been gone just over a day and missed graduation ceremonies for the graduating students. It took a couple of days for things to get back to normal. The staff got me a card and flowers. My fellow students were incredibly kind and caring. It was good to be back.
I cannot say that the rest of my residency was uneventful. On Tuesday my laptop died. I wrote everything by hand for the rest of the residency and learned that when I write by hand I have a different, more poetic writing style, though I still can’t write more than a page or so without my hand hurting.
The classes, conversations, and workshops over the next few days created the framework for this semester. I’ll be reading the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter Mosley, Delia Owens, and George Pelecanos. On another note, a classmate mentioned to me that she felt some of my strongest writing came from short memoir pieces that I hadn’t really given much thought to. This has me looking at writing I had not thought of in some time.
But as the week went on and literally every person I came into contact with asked me how I was feeling or expressed thankfulness that I had returned, I had a realization that had not occurred to me before. I felt stupid for not thinking of it earlier. It was only when I was surrounded by twenty or so people who all cared about me that it became so obvious. Like I said, Goddard is family to me. I knew how my medical emergency impacted me. I was all too well aware that my not taking care of myself hurt me. And while I had no control over what happened, I had quite a bit of control over my general overall health. What had never occurred to me before is that not taking care of myself doesn’t just hurt me. It hurts everyone who cares about me. When we harm ourselves through intention or neglect, we are harming our community.
Don’t get me wrong. I have friends and family outside of Goddard who care for me as deeply as I care for them. (Many of you are reading this now.) But, being in an environment where literally every person I talked to cared about me made my denial of this fact too obvious to ignore.
I’m walking more now. I’m drinking a lot of water. I’m paying attention to what I eat. I still don’t make all the right choices, but I’m making more of them. The bruises on my arms are healing. I took a few days off from schoolwork after getting home. And now it’s time to get back to work.
- Jack