My Daughter Devery's Wedding

My daughter Devery was married to Easton H_____ of Tucson, Arizona, in late December in the Albuquerque LDS Temple. (This photo was taken outside the temple shortly after the wedding ceremony.) Devery and Easton are a great (and nice-looking) couple, and I'm sure they'll do well together. They met, as hundreds of LDS couples do every year, at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah (a/k/a Temple Tech), and now they face the difficult task of moving into a new apartment, starting a new semester of school, and getting used to being married all at one time. Devery is majoring in Information Systems (ISYS) in the BYU business school, and Easton will get his degree in Construction Management. Devery is our third daughter to be married.

At the wedding luncheon, Easton's father Steve H_____ called on those in attendance to come up with anecdotes or funny stories about the newlyweds. I honestly couldn't think of any about Devery, outside of the numerous times she wandered off as a little girl, but I did recall how she, as a baby, used to light up whenever I came home from school and walked in the door; it was always a highlight of my day. (My wife and I later remembered Devery's first experience behind the wheel of a car. She was about six years old, and we were getting our old Ford minivan ready for a trip; I stupidly left the car running and momentarily went in the house. Devery got in the driver's seat, somehow shifted into reverse or neutral, and rolled the car backwards into the neighbor opposite's bushes, knocking over his mailbox. She's become a much-better driver since then!)

Mid-1960s Pop and Rock Music

Having been born in 1959, I was a mere child during the mid-to-late 1960s; however, the pop and rock music of the era played a tremendous role in my development. Not only did I listen to the radio nearly every day as a kid, but my older brothers brought home loads of vinyl 45s, many of which remain among my favorite tunes today. (Anyone remember "Mrs. Bluebird" by Eternity's Children?) Thus it is that my favorite musical genre today is mid-1960s American pop/rock music, bookended by the rise of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1963-64 and the advent of "psychedelic" music (e.g., Hendrix, Cream, the Doors) in 1967-68. The music I like is characterized by simple chord progressions, Jagger-esque vocals, and less-than-virtuosic musicianship, but also a definite lack of self-important, wankful pretension. A number of songs exemplify the period of which I speak: "Dirty Water" by the Standells; "Little Girl" by the Syndicate of Sound; "Psychotic Reaction" by Count Five; "Liar Liar" by the Castaways; "Talk Talk" by the (Bonniwell) Music Machine; various tunes by Paul Revere & The Raiders; "Bad Little Woman" by the Shadows of Knight; and "Too Many People" by the Leaves. (Most or all of these songs are contained in a collection called "Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968," which I highly recommend.) Listening to any of these songs takes me back to a much-simpler time, when anyone with a guitar and a little chutzpah could dream of making a hit record, and when it seemed like there was a record company on every street corner.

Confessions of an Anti-Social Mormon

I have been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints all of my life (although, technically, I only became a "member" when my father baptized me shortly after my eighth birthday in 1967). I am a fifth-generation member on both sides of my family and thus have a rich pioneer heritage. On my father's side, my third-great grandfather Jefferson Hunt was a high-ranking officer in the Mormon Battalion, and his son, my great-great grandfather John Hunt, accompanied him, with the rest of his family, on the Battalion's famous overland trek from Iowa to California during the Mexican-American War. (John later served for 31 years as bishop of the S______, Arizona Ward -- and shortly after his death, my father was born and raised in S_______.) Another of my paternal great-great grandfathers, William Decatur Kartchner, left a vivid account of meeting Joseph Smith shortly after joining the church, just prior to the latter's assassination in 1844. It is reported that William developed the rheumatoid arthritis that plagued his entire adult life as a result of standing guard over the Nauvoo Temple during many a cold winter night. (He was later part of the advance party settling a number of Mormon colonies, ultimately ending up in S_______ along with John Hunt. When the church authorities called him to make this last move, he could barely rise from his sickbed, but do so he did, declaring that he might die on the journey, but that he would fall facing Arizona.) On my mother's side, my third-great grandfather Welcome Chapman Sr. and my great-great grandfather Welcome Chapman Jr. were stonecutters who, between them, were involved in the construction of the Nauvoo, Salt Lake, and Manti LDS temples. (Welcome Jr. later helped to settle S_______, Arizona, the town where my mother was born and raised.) Life on the frontier in budding Mormon settlements was hard, and all of my forbears suffered great privations for the church to which they had pledged their all, which in turn makes me feel very humbled.

Next, Mormon church doctrine has always had a certain intellectual and intuitive appeal for me, historical oddities notwithstanding (such as polygamy, "blood atonement," and the pre-1978 policy of barring blacks from the priesthood and temple blessings). In short, the Plan of Salvation, with its ultimate end of making gods of the children of God -- thus making them, literally, heirs of all that God has -- seems logical and desirable to me.

Finally, the LDS church is the tie that binds my marriage and family together. My wife is as faithful a Mormon as there is, and the influence of the church, with its high standards of personal comportment, has ultimately made all of my children much-better people than they otherwise might have been. Moreover, all of my closest friends, such as they are, are members of the church, and it is the church that I have most in common with them.

So, given all of the foregoing, why do I continually dwell on the margins of church membership, and why do I view the church as the number-one oppressor in a life that is woefully short of fulfillment and self-actualization? These are questions that do not bear easy answers, but I'll start by making a comparison to my short-lived career as a lawyer in 1989-92. As an intellectual pursuit, the law fascinated me (even though, socially speaking, I fit in not at all at the University of New Mexico School of Law, a hotbed of radical -- and radically boneheaded -- legal philosophy). However, I found that there were profound differences between studying law and practicing it. Whereas I always felt like I had the necessary mental faculties to be a successful lawyer (I graduated in the top 20% of my class and scored at the 93rd percentile on the Multistate Bar Exam, despite inexplicably scoring low in Criminal Law, which had been the area in which I'd consistently scored the highest on all my practice exams), I simply did not have the requisite ego and combative temperament. Some people who know me (but not well) might not credit this notion, but I simply didn't have it in me to be a big-enough jerk to be a lawyer, and thus I got off the lawyering highway at the first exit I came to, which landed me on the administrative side of the house at Sandia National Laboratories. (In many ways, Sandia is now my second-biggest oppressor, but that's a topic for another day.)

Similarly, I've persistently found that being Mormon in theory is significantly different from being Mormon in practice -- and ironically enough, I think this phenomenon has its roots in basic Mormon doctrine. Unlike other Christian faiths (and don't get me going about Mormons not being Christians -- only the most blinkered of fools can believe that), the LDS church believes that men must, to a point, work out their own salvation with good works, and that the grace inherent in Christ's Atonement will, in effect, make up the difference only "after all we can do." (Cf. 2 Nephi 25:23.) I've had numerous conversations with church members about this point of doctrine, and they seem to agree uniformly (a) that it is not meant to be taken literally (or, at least, that continual repentance is itself an integral part of "all we can do"), and (b) that, sadly, we as a church tend strongly to under-emphasize the importance of grace in the scheme of things.

However, I gave a lesson in priesthood meeting a few years ago that left me a little disillusioned: Harold B. Lee, a president of the church in the 1970s, closely analogized our mortal probation here on Earth to the abortive Apollo 13 moon mission, in which the three American astronauts had to follow each instruction from Mission Control in Houston implicitly in order to find their way home. I remember thinking, "Man, if the margin between spiritual life and death is that thin, what chance do I have?" (Now, President Lee appears to have been a rather doctrinaire fellow -- I don't think it's any coincidence that he was the last president of the church to whom it didn't seem to occur that the church would become an absolute pariah in the coming years if it didn't change its policies regarding people of black African descent -- but his teachings, together with the fact that the church republished pertinent portions of that particular address in a recent priesthood lesson manual, do shed some light on what we're supposed to surmise from this "after all we can do" business.) This view not only makes the standard impossible to ascertain -- who has ever done all the righteous works he possibly could, and how would he know when he had done that? -- but naturally makes it a moving goal line.

Compounding my self-doubt is the fact that Mormons don't believe either in the Protestant notion of being "saved" (and being assured of going to heaven) simply by accepting Christ as one's personal savior, or in the Catholic doctrine of absolution via confession and penance, under which a sin, once absolved, is forever removed. Rather, Mormons believe that even if one repents of a sin (and is thereby granted forgiveness through the Atonement of Christ), if he commits that sin again, the full weight of all prior instances of it falls back on his head. In a very real sense, then, Mormons believe only in a sort of conditional repentance, which is dependent on permanent change. It almost goes without saying that I have minor personal flaws that make it seem pointless even to think about repenting of same: why waste all that effort if I'm simply going to fall back in the same rut with nothing to show for it?

One effect of all this emphasis on perfecting oneself is to cause members of the church constantly, if subconsciously, to gauge their own standing before God by drawing comparisons between themselves and other members. To the extent I've engaged in this odious exercise, not only have I viewed myself as lacking in the balance, as it were, but I've found myself not wanting to be like other church members; in fact, I've wished a thousand times that I didn't have to associate with many of them. (The odd thing is that whereas I have few problems with individual members of the church -- would that the reciprocal were true -- I've concluded that, taken as a group, Mormons are extremely judgmental, self-seeking, and uncharitable.) Consequently, I'm not the good, quick-to-be-of-service person in practice that I am at heart, and I have tremendous difficulty making more than a desultory effort to fulfill church assignments and callings (although I do take some small comfort, even living on the periphery, in the fact that I care more about most other church members than they care about me).

The term "social Mormon" is one that gets tossed around a lot; it refers to a person who has concluded that the church isn't true, but who remains an active member for the fellowship and social aspects of membership. In that light, I guess you could call me an "anti-social" Mormon: I'm far from having concluded that the church isn't true (although I'm constantly reminded of Christ's admonition that "by their fruits ye shall know them"), but I remain active in spite of the social aspects of membership, which, to put it mildly, I find less-than-rewarding. My contributions are so meager that I sometimes feel like the widow casting in her two mites (even if it isn't obvious to others that it's all I have to give); however, that which I do, I do for the sake of my wife, my children, and my mother.

In all my life, the church as an institution has rarely made me feel anything but bad about myself; most members would say that reflects more on me than on the church, but I'm far from being alone in that regard. What makes me somewhat unique is the fact that I attend church despite it all, still trying to find outside sources of personal fulfillment in order to compensate for the psychic harm that church membership does to me, and still with increasingly dismal results.

Anthropogenic Global Warming: Color Me Skeptical

I've given the topic of anthropogenic global warming a lot of thought in recent months, and while I've always been extremely dubious concerning the doomsday predictions of Al Gore and his ilk, it's been hard for me to put my finger on the precise reasons for my incredulity. I now think it's because the proponents of the "Gore" theory (i.e., that increasing concentrations of CO₂ caused by various human consumptive activities are effectively causing the planet to burn up at some geometric rate) were operating under a series of prior assumptions that placed them 95% of the way toward their ultimate conclusions before they had even looked at any of the actual data. Therefore, I feel they could have looked at virtually any data indicating a slight global warming trend and come to more or less the same conclusions. (Which also explains why these same people, or their predecessors, were so quick to assure us that the slight cooling trend between roughly 1940 and 1975 portended a human-caused New Ice Age.)

What are these prior assumptions? First (and foremost), that mankind is destroying the planet. Second, that any evidence of climate change can only be reasonably interpreted in light of the first assumption, above. Third, that environmental catastrophe is always imminent, meaning we must act now before the Earth reaches the proverbial "tipping point" past which no remedy exists. And finally, that capitalism and technology are always the cause of the problem, whereas government intervention/regulation -- that is, socialism -- is the only thing that can save us from ourselves.

I'm certain these people would deny (with characteristically vicious vituperation) that their philosophical leanings have had anything to do with their conclusions. However, I believe that if anthropogenic global warming were not primarily a matter of faith (the real science still being decidedly unsettled), its adherents wouldn't feel such a great need to squelch dissent and move precipitously to restrict individual liberty and choice. The truth will out, eventually; we can only hope that the powers-that-be haven't totally ruined the global economy (along with technologies that might actually improve the environment) by the time it becomes apparent that the recent warming trend has had less to do with human carbon output than with other factors that are beyond human control (e.g., solar anomalies, periodic tilt in Earth's rotation, volcanic activity, bovine flatulence, etc.). The beauty of being an environmental activist, however, is never having to say you're wrong; instead, you simply move on, without missing a beat, to the next ecological chimera du jour.

Cheech & Chong - Comic Geniuses

I was first introduced to the comedy of Cheech and Chong when I was a 13-year-old eighth-grader in early 1973. I found their first two albums (Cheech and Chong and Big Bambú) to be supremely irreverent, deliciously obscene, and absolutely hilarious, and I listened to my vinyl copies of them until the grooves wore out. (My cousin Randy Baca and I even attended a church Halloween party one time dressed as C&C, Randy wearing a bandolier -- a la Cheech -- filled with fake doobies in lieu of bullets.) I had great portions of their routines memorized and can still quote extensively from them today; I have a couple of friends at church who are roughly my age, and we all still get a kick out of some of the old lines. I couldn't get into a lot of the later material (e.g., Los Cochinos and Cheech & Chong's Wedding Album), as it seemed to cross the line into "gross" for me; however, I now have CDs of both of the first two albums (along with C&C's Greatest Hit compilation), and they seem even funnier now than when they first came out -- probably because they were and are utterly politically incorrect. (No one could get away with their brand of humor nowadays!)

In closing, I will quote the Pope (live at the Vatican): "In nomine patri, et fili et spiritus sanctus...sanctus...sanctus...sanctus.... All-a you wops-a get off-a da lawn!"

Oh, man, I can't go on.

Sleep Disordered

I've been suffering from chronic insomnia for some time now--at least five years and probably longer--and lately it's seemed to have an increasingly negative effect on my health. I've tried just about every treatment option imaginable, but it's a complex problem with multiple causes, and an effective resolution has proved elusive. My sleep disorder has three primary components: (1) environmental (typically virulent New Mexico allergens, one or another of which seems to affect me throughout the year; my wife's snoring; and a bad bed); (2) psychological (which I first realized five years ago, when my wife started teaching an early-morning religion class at our church and had to get up at 4:45 am on school days, which in turn immediately caused my sleep habits to become much worse), and (3) physiological (at least some of my problem has to do with obstructive sleep apnea, resulting from an airway that becomes occluded in certain sleep positions.)

I've tried surgery: I had a septoplasty (with turbinate reduction) done in 2003, and I had UPPP surgery (with no tonsillectomy--that happened when I was five) in February of this year. The septoplasty was a success and had some salutary effect, but that effect is often offset by nasal congestion due to allergies. The UPPP surgery does not appear to have been a success, as its only noticeable effect has been the permanent "foreign object" sensation that I have in my throat due to having a stump where I once had a uvula. I've also tried CPAP/BiPAP, but it actually seemed to cause many more apnea episodes of the "central" variety than it ever cured of the "obstructive" kind. Literally, every time I'd start to drift off to sleep, I'd simply stop breathing out against the inbound air pressure, and I'd have to wake myself back up, gasping for air. Four or five nights of that, and I can assure you I was ready to go psycho! I've also tried prosthetic mouthpieces and even acupuncture and Chinese herbal remedies. Right now, I have to take a combination of 3mg Lunesta and OTC benadryl to get a few tortured hours of sleep every night; not only is it a miserable routine, but I'm certain it's contributing heavily to the overall feeling of worsening health that I've had for several months. (I've lived for years with physical exhaustion due to poor sleep patterns; this is something else.)

I do have one more hope, however: on January 24, 2008, I'm having another sleep study done using something called a "VPAP Adapt SV" (http://resmed.com/), which is designed to treat complex-apnea problems like mine. My brothers run a home medical supply company in Utah that does oximeter studies and CPAP placements, and they tell me their sleep tech has placed over 100 "VPAP Adapt SV" machines, with almost uniformly excellent results. This new machine, I'm told, acts like a ventilator in that it senses when an apnea episode is occurring and will not allow the user to stop breathing. I'm trying not to be overly optimistic about it, since my hopes with regard to other remedies have always been dashed in the end; however, I'm happy there's something else I can try now that seems to be specifically designed to address my particular ailment.

I hope and pray that the "VPAP Adapt SV" gives me some relief and allows me to get things back together, as I sense that I'm not long for this world otherwise.

This Is Me

I don't have much time right now, but I wanted to give this blog a start. I've long wanted to have a personal website, but I've never been able to get it off the ground; thus I'm happy sites like Blogspot are available for personal blogs, at least. A little about me: I'm 48 years old, live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been married to my wife Dorine for 23 years, work as a financial analyst at Sandia National Laboratories, and have five kids (four girls and one boy, ranging in age from 29 to 15) and four grandchildren. We are LDS (Mormon), something about which I'm sure I'll write much in the future. I love the outdoors and enjoy activities like hiking, family camping, backpacking, climbing (bouldering these days), and caving (less so now than a decade ago). I play guitar and enjoy inventing various riffs and chord progressions, although only rarely do I find sufficient inspiration to write a complete song with lyrics. I very much enjoy playing my electric guitars (all Squiers -- Fender's foreign-made budget line) through my Line 6 Spider 112, an extremely versatile amplifier that produces a variety of interesting sounds. I'm sort of a movie and music buff, although only within certain temporal and genre-based parameters. My favorite music is rock and pop from the 1960s, although I find myself revisiting the rock music of my youth (1970s) more and more these days. I used to enjoy playing sports -- especially slow-pitch softball, volleyball, and basketball -- but the combination of age and a botched radial keratotomy in 1994 (which left me with slightly impaired night vision and depth perception) eventually killed off my interest. These days, I play no sports (although I do run a lot at the gym to maintain at least some level of conditioning), and I can really only bear to watch soccer on TV. (My interest in soccer is a product of both the time I spent in Chile as a Mormon missionary in 1979-80 and the fact that several of my kids played youth soccer here in Albuquerque.) I am an inveterate diarist, something that ensures I will upload regular updates to this blog. Politically, I'm pretty conservative with regard to social, economic, and foreign-policy issues; however, I don't regard myself a right-wing ideologue by any means, and my future posts will probably reveal that I have significantly more "nuanced" ideas regarding various topics than do many Mormons (your mileage may vary).

Well, that's enough for now.