The Wisdom of Bachman

I was recently reminded of the time I went to go hear Randy Bachman speak at the Wilkinson Center (i.e., student union building) at BYU during my freshman year in the spring of 1978. Bachman, of course, was (and is) an alumnus of two popular 70s-era rock groups, the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive; however, more fascinating to me was the fact that he was an LDS rock star, a thing almost inconceivable to Mormon youth at the time, since we were regularly assured that rock 'n' roll (which by definition excluded the Osmonds) was the Devil's music, etc. I don't remember much of what he said that day, but two things stick out in my mind. The first is the story he told about his grandmother's miraculous, spontaneous recovery from late-stage cancer following a priesthood blessing. The second is the short discourse he gave on the topic of friendships: he said it had been his experience that friendships seem to run in five-year cycles -- that every so often we as human beings naturally seem to acquire a new set of friends as we outgrow each other or move on to other interests. The astuteness of that observation has been borne out for me over the years, as periodically my friends and I seem to grow apart from each other. It seems now that the only real friend and confidante I have is my wife; I'd better hold onto her, I guess.

Picnic in S_______, Arizona (ca. 1935)

I love this photograph. It shows my mother, Wanda S________ (left foreground), at roughly the age of fourteen, on a picnic with relatives around 1935. She doesn't know exactly where the photo was taken -- she didn't even know it existed until one of her aunt's grandsons scanned and e-mailed it to her several years ago -- but it certainly was in or around her hometown of S_______ in eastern Arizona. Going clockwise from my mother, the other people in the photo are my mother's aunt Vivian, her cousin Alvin R_______ (the baby), her grandmother R______, her aunt Josephine, her cousins Norma F____, Nadine S______, and Frank S______, and finally her brother Alden S______ (the blond kid looking down).

All of the people in the photo are dead now except my mother, Nadine, and Alvin, although I can remember most of them. My great-grandmother lived to be 101 years old, dying in 1973. (Incidentally, she married my great-grandfather in 1888, when she was 16 and he was 40.) We visited Josephine and Vivian multiple times in S_______ when I was growing up. My uncle Alden was killed in a plane crash, in which he was the pilot, sometime around December 1972 (which is ironic given his having survived thirty bombing runs as an Army Air Force pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II); I still remember my mother staggering into my 13-year-old arms after she received the phone call advising her of his death. Nadine still lives in my mother's hometown, and Mom and I visited with her a couple of years ago. Norma and Frank both passed away relatively recently. (Nadine and Frank were my mother's cousins on both sides of the family, as my mother's aunt Lou married one of my mother's uncles on her father's side.)

My mother will turn 87 this Sunday, January 20, so this picture seems like it's from a long time ago -- and yet it doesn't. What strikes me most about it is how hauntingly beautiful my mother was as a young girl, yet it also betrays a certain characteristic self-consciousness on her part.

Video from Alabaster Cave

Here's some video from the last bit of Alabaster Cave, shot by Brent Peterson for a series called "Off the Clock," covering the recreational pursuits of employees of Sandia National Laboratories. (I wish I could upload the entire four-and-a-half-minute edited feature that Brent came up with, as it's very well-done, but the site has a size limit.) You can see that the traverse to get out the upper passage, after the Birth Canal, is a little highball, though not technically complex despite my obvious caution in making the moves. The water you see down below is the last part of the lower passage, which currently consists (as I mentioned in my post on caving, below) of 150' of neck-deep, ice-cold water, which, when you stir up the material rotting on the bottom, smells very bad. (The person climbing out at the beginning of the clip is Rod Williamson, my main caving partner.)

My Favorite "Train" Movies

I've noticed over time that trains are a recurring motif in a lot of the movies I like, and I don't think it's any great coincidence; I regard train travel as extremely romantic and something that hearkens back to a certain golden age of gentility. Two of my favorite movies are The Sting and North By Northwest, both of which, of course, have key scenes that take place on the Century Limited (in the former, the poker game in which Paul Newman first fleeces Robert Shaw, and, in the latter, Cary Grant's first love encounter with Eva Marie Saint). One of my favorite James Bond movies, From Russia with Love, has an important sequence on the Orient Express, which culminates in Sean Connery's killing Robert Shaw in a very well-staged fight scene. Another movie I like, Murder on the Orient Express, not only has many big-name stars, but it takes place almost entirely on the Orient Express. (I also like Albert Finney's portrayal of a conceited and slightly epicene Hercule Poirot.) Finally, I must mention the first Mission Impossible movie with Tom Cruise and Jon Voight, whose unforgettable climax ("Red light...green light!") takes place on the TGV as it enters the Chunnel southbound.

Sometime, I'd really like to travel somewhere on a train. My dream is to go back to Chile and ride the train south from Santiago all the way down to Puerto Montt, then hop on a ferry over to Chiloé island. (My wife's brother Don and his wife Margarita, who has an aunt living in the Santiago area, will be going there shortly; needless to say, I'm envious.)

Caving

I first really got into caving in 1997. I'd been bouldering for a year already with my friend Rod Williamson, and when he and several mutual friends started getting more seriously into caving, it seemed like a natural progression, in terms of outdoor adventures, to follow them. I'm not what you'd call a natural caver, as I don't particularly care for tight squeezes, tall heights, or places where my slightly impaired night vision and depth perception (see my original post about having had a botched radial keratotomy in 1994) make it difficult to make out the relief of the ground I'm walking on -- which pretty much encompasses the nature of caves. However, my love for nature, my limited-but-extant thirst for adventure, a need to bond with my buds, and Rod's reassuring presence all combined to spur me on, and for several years we had quite a few noteworthy adventures. This photo, taken in 2006, shows me in Ft. Stanton Cave (near Capitan, New Mexico), at the entrance to "Hell Hole," a 1,500'-long passage, mostly a crawl, that leads to the lower reaches of the cave. In the summer of 2003, I was involved in a cave rescue at Ft. Stanton; I won't go into the details here, but a scout who was part of another party had fallen off a ledge and busted himself up pretty badly, and a massive effort had to be mobilized to get him out. It took the rescue party (consisting mostly of serious-but-misfit caver types from local NSS grottos) all night to get him out; we spent five hours getting him through Hell Hole alone. My help wasn't needed once we got to the Lunch Room -- the proximal end of Hell Hole (again, see the picture above) -- and I was getting a little tired of being in the company of so many NSS people (think of Matt Damon being stuck in a van with Scott Caan and Casey Affleck in Ocean's Eleven), so I made a beeline for the cave exit. There I was pressed into being interviewed live on local morning television; I was so tired from having pulled an all-nighter that I have no idea now what I said.

This photo (which is actually a still-frame from a video) shows me doing a tight squeeze called the "Birth Canal" in Alabaster Cave, near San Ysidro, New Mexico. Skinny guys and little kids just pop right through, but guys my size not only have to remove their shirts, but they also must go through in the correct orientation (and then exhale deeply) to minimize their horizontal profile. Here I made the mistake of going through "right hand up," which caused my left arm to get pinned underneath me, wedging me in the hole. I couldn't go back, so I had to worm my way through in a series of quarter-inch movements, which in turn caused me to lose a fair bit of skin off my back. (The last time I did Alabaster Cave, I waded out the lower passage, through 150' of ice-cold, neck-deep, and extremely smelly water in order to avoid the Birth Canal, which was actually much worse than doing the squeeze!)

This photo shows me doing the technical traverse over "McCollum's Pit" in Sentinel Cave in 1997, which is located in the Guadalupe Mountains (Lincoln National Forest) of southern New Mexico. (That's Rod, who led the thing -- being a much-better climber than I -- on the left.) The pit is reportedly 70' deep, and there aren't a lot of positive holds on the traverse until you get around the corner; thus I was pretty gripped-up, despite being clipped into the fixed rope. I've been in Sentinel three times, although the last time I was so on-edge about all the exposure that I didn't even bother doing the long rappel to the bottom and climbing up into Shield City. These days, Sentinel is simply too much adventure for me -- I burn up so much nervous energy in the cave that I'm absolutely wasted by the end of the hike back to camp.

This picture illustrates how cavers get back up a rope after first rappelling down it: by using mechanical ascenders. We've never been sophisticated enough to get into fancy rope-walker set-ups; instead, we've always used the basic "frog" configuration, with one handled ascender and another, non-handled ascender mounted on the chest and attached to the harness. My set-up wasn't well-adjusted on this particular day in Chimney Cave (in Carlsbad Caverns National Park) -- leaving me ascending only about a foot per throw -- but since the ascent is only about 50', it hardly mattered.

This photo shows me rappelling down the entrance to Helen's Cave, located in Slaughter Canyon at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I'm using the set-up that most cavers seem to favor -- a rappel "rack" with several brake bars both to create friction and dissipate heat.

We don't do much caving these days, outside of taking scouts to Alabaster Cave and Ft. Stanton Cave. Rod wants to go back to Ft. Stanton soon; his son Jimmy is a police officer working on the demolition squad, and he and a couple of his co-workers want to go through "Satan's Shoefly" (a long, tight squeeze that I won't even try) as part of their "confined space" training. Rod has also made noises about going back to Sentinel Cave and Deep Cave (located in Carlsbad Caverns National Park but accessible only through the Guads from the northwest), which has a 300' drop close to the entrance, but I hope he never does; the thrill of doing long vertical caving has long since worn off for me, and all that's left is the sphincter-clenching terror.

The Abortion Conundrum

I've given the topic of abortion considerable thought, and although I agree in general with the LDS position that it is a sin "like unto" murder, I do see a few shades of gray around the margins. I start with the opposite extremes. On one hand, I think all reasonable people should be able to agree that there's nothing particularly magical about a fertilized egg that warrants granting it the same legal status as a human being; otherwise, using an intrauterine device (IUD) -- which, logically, doesn't prevent fertilization of the egg, but only its implantation in the womb* -- for contraception would have to be considered the same thing as having an abortion. (And I daresay there are tens of thousands of temple-recommend-holding Mormon women who use, or have used, IUDs.) On the other hand, I also think all reasonable people should be able to agree that late-term abortions are absolutely inexcusable, given (a) the brutality and inhumanity associated with the notion of destroying a viable or near-viable human fetus, and (b) the inherent difficulty of distinguishing, for practical purposes, between a late-term fetus and a newborn baby.

The real policy question, therefore, is where to draw the line in the middle. In general, I think it is morally wrong to terminate a pregnancy intentionally, although there are three major exceptions. The first and most obvious is a clear and present danger to a pregnant woman's life, although I think such situations are much more rare than the pro-choice crowd would acknowledge.. The second (and almost equally obvious) is rape, including statutory rape. Some people might say that a baby is a baby, no matter what the circumstances of its conception; however, I look at pregnancy in terms of personal responsibility, and the idea of compelling a woman to give birth to a child she was forced to conceive (or who had no legal capacity to consent to the act whereby it was conceived) smacks too much of slavery, however noble it might be for her to go ahead and carry it to term. Therefore, I believe that rape victims should have an unqualified right to have abortions, at least in the first trimester (although one hopes that they would have the presence of mind to visit the hospital after the trauma, which I understand would do a D&C as a matter of course to prevent pregnancy).

(By the way, I'm a little torn on the subject of pregnancy resulting from incest, at least insofar as it doesn't also involve statutory rape. I think, based on my [admittedly limited] science background, that the traditional fear of birth defects resulting from inbreeding is generally unwarranted, at least across one generation. However, given that incest naturally rips families apart, I can see how abortion might help to ameliorate the damage to relationships. Nonetheless, on balance, given my tendency to regard the issue in terms of individual responsibility, I believe that pregnancies resulting from consensual relationships, even incestuous ones, should not be terminated.)

The third exception would be cases where the fetus isn't developing normally and has been determined to have defects that will cause it to die outside the womb in any case. (Note that I don't include Downs Syndrome as a defect warranting abortion; not only do I believe that Downs babies are worth saving, but I'm not sure where one would otherwise draw the line in the quest for "designer babies.")

Having stated my position, however, I do think that an abortion performed in the first six weeks of pregnancy is slightly less objectionable, morally, than a late-term abortion. They may both be sins in the eyes of God, but somehow the first doesn't seem as, well, irresponsible as the second.

As far as Roe v. Wade goes, I admit I regard it as judicial over-reaching at its worst. It is true that its being overturned would have little practical effect, given the mobility of present-day American society and widespread public approval of expansive abortion rights; in other words, it wouldn't make much difference if some states outlawed abortion, since others would undoubtedly legalize it, and it's a simple, relatively inexpensive matter nowadays to travel to another state. (Also, one has to think that modern technology or pharmacology will come up with "cleaner," earlier ways to terminate pregnancies that won't involve clinics, or possibly even doctors.) However, I heartily disagree with people who believe that abortion isn't a moral issue or that it doesn't have societal implications; the debate goes on, and rightfully so.

* I understand that medical opinion generally holds that IUDs actually -- magically -- prevent the very occurrence of conception, despite the fact that they are undeniably an effective post-conception abortifacient. It all sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me.

Pinochet and the Saving of Chile

If you've read previous posts on this blog, you know I served as a Mormon missionary in Chile in 1979-80, which was during the halcyon days of the military dictatorship headed up by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. (His maternal surname always reminds me of Peter Lorre's character in Casablanca: "Reeck! You must help me! Re-e-eck!") I feel like I have a pretty balanced opinion of Pinochet (pronounced pee-no-CHET, not pee-no-SHAY), although most Americans, having been spoon-fed a most unsavory image of the man by the mainstream media, would regard me as a right-wing nutball for not completely condemning him as the devil incarnate.

Let me say this: to the extent Pinochet's government tortured and murdered people (especially in extra-territorial operations, such as the Prats and Letelier murders), I do condemn him. Furthermore, it was while living under his government's austere, laissez-faire economic system -- in which the middle class rapidly dissipated, effectively leaving three social classes: the rich, the poor, and the desperate -- that I first realized what untrammeled capitalism does to a society and the people in it. (I once had a conversation with an educated Chilean woman of German descent about Pinochet's economic advisors, the notorious "Chicago Boys"; she advised me that for most Chileans the first syllable was silent. [Inside joke.])

However, that having been said, today's Chile owes Pinochet a debt of gratitude for having almost single-handedly preserved the underpinnings of democratic government in Chile at a time when they were severely threatened. Though many now pooh-pooh the notion, Pinochet prevented the advent of a Cuba-like wasteland envisioned by Salvador Allende, the democratically elected but still diabolical Marxist president whom he ousted in the now-infamous 1973 coup de etat. (Even in 1980, when a constitution was ratified consolidating power in the military, there was no doubt that eventually Pinochet would allow free elections. Can anyone see that happening in Cuba anytime soon?)

What really bugs me, notwithstanding the reported crimes of the Pinochet regime, is the great number of dictators (generally left-wing, of course) whose crimes are much worse, but who don't have nearly as much opprobrium heaped on them. That suggests to me that crimes against humanity aren't, finally, the issue, whereas ideology is. Thus Pinochet's greatest crime in the world's eyes appears to be his having thwarted Allende's Marxist designs, and the rest is mere window dressing.

Polygamy

I've always had a sore spot in my heart for polygamy. Even today, more than 115 years after the LDS church officially abolished the practice of "plural marriage," it is the one thing that non-Mormons associate most closely with the religion. Personally, I have difficulty accepting the notion that it was ever an inspired doctrine; from my perspective it looks like an oppressive custom embraced by a benighted people in a horribly sexist age. (I've often contemplated the mass distaff revolt or defection that would occur were the church leadership to attempt to revive the practice today.)

The Book of Mormon contains an ambiguous (and virtually impenetrable) passage concerning the taking of multiple wives: "Wherefore, my brethren, hear me, and hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none; for I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women. And whoredoms are an abomination before me; thus saith the Lord of Hosts. Wherefore, this people shall keep my commandments, saith the Lord of Hosts, or cursed be the land for their sakes. For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things." (Jacob 2:27-30.) Of course, Joseph Smith later received the revelation that became Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, in which the Lord putatively did just what Jacob said he might: command his people -- at least, some of the men -- to take multiple spouses, presumably to raise up seed unto him.

The practice began secretively while the church was still based in Nauvoo, Illinois, and it didn't become a public matter until after Joseph was assassinated in 1844 and most of the remaining Saints had migrated west to Utah. Thereafter, the church engaged in it openly for several decades, until Congress passed various statutes outlawing it, which statutes were later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court (thus giving rise to the constitutional maxim that the First Amendment protects only religious belief, not necessarily religious practice). The church leadership eventually realized what was going to happen if they didn't jettison polygamy, although the idea that men, at least those who attain exaltation (i.e., godhood), will have many wives in the Celestial Kingdom appears to be a doctrine of the church to this day, albeit one that isn't discussed much.

What to make of all this? I've had several long talks with my brothers about polygamy, and they insist that it was necessary, for a time only, to ensure the survival of the church at a time when great persecution was causing the menfolk to die off and leaving many more single women and widows than there were corresponding adult males. That may be true, but it doesn't explain why Joseph was reportedly wedding some women whose husbands were very much alive at the time, and it also doesn't explain why church authorities at one time tried to justify polygamy on practical grounds as being superior in various ways to monogamy. (In other words, it was never presented as a necessary evil, however much we'd like to regard it as such now.)

I've read a few books by the famous Mormon scholar (or apologist, as you will) Hugh Nibley, and he often went on about the Law of Parsimony (a/k/a Occam's Razor), which, in short, postulates that the simplest explanation for any phenomenon is probably the closest to the truth. What, then, is the simplest explanation for the early Mormons' practice of polygamy? Well, from where I stand it is simply that Joseph needed a plausible means of justifying his roving eye -- and there could be no better way than to have a revelation ordering him to take more wives. Heck, how could any Mormon woman resist such a proposition made under the aegis of divine edict?

Of course, this could present a problem to anyone who believes Joseph was a prophet of God and his instrument for bringing to pass the restoration of the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I still have faith in that proposition, but it's apparent to me that Joseph wasn't the near-perfect individual portrayed in all the airbrushed accounts of his life that the church endorses (tacitly or otherwise). As for the practical, natural consequences of plural marriage, I think one needn't look further than the various apostate, polygamy-centered "Mormon" sects that survive to this day: they don't advocate outright chattel slavery, but they do effect a pretty close approximation of it.

Arizona's Kartchner Caverns State Park

Members of my family did the two public tours at Kartchner Caverns (KC), near Benson, Arizona, on the afternoon of January 3, 2008. Dorine, our daughter Kiley, and I did the "Big Room" tour, and our daughter Kristy and her kids Nicole, Zach, and Alexis did the "Rotunda Room" tour. It is a nice cave, with some very pretty and interesting formations, and the state has done an impressive job of developing the cave for public use while still preserving the underground environment. In terms of scale, KC appears to be about an order of magnitude smaller than Carlsbad Caverns, although it's hard to gauge how grand the former is from just one half-mile walking tour. I would place it roughly on par with Slaughter Canyon Cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, although Slaughter Canyon Cave still has much-larger and prettier formations than anything I saw in the "Big Room" in KC. Reportedly, KC has a more-varied mineralogy than all but a few caves in the world, but it must be said that if it had been discovered in New Mexico (which has many more cave resources than Arizona), it would not have been deemed of sufficient interest for public-use development, and thus it would almost certainly be in the domain of the BLM and visited still by only a few well-connected cavers. Truth be told, no cave in New Mexico will ever be developed again in the same way as KC or Carlsbad Caverns.

(By the way, I am certainly related to the Kartchners who originally owned the land, and for whom the cave and park are named, as we all are descended from William Decatur Kartchner, my great-great grandfather; however, I'm not sure of the exact relationship, as it isn't very close. They're probably my third cousins once-removed or something, and, since I don't really even know all of my first cousins....)

Darren's Mission

My son Darren is currently serving a two-year LDS church mission in Honduras; he started in September 2007 and we won't see him again until September 2009. This photo is from a three-zone activity (a "zone" consisting of several "districts," which in turn usually consist of two or more pairs of missionaries), and Darren is the second from the right in the middle row of white shirts. According to Darren, his mission (the Honduras Comayagüela Mission, one of three in the country) is composed about one-half of "native" (i.e., mostly from Central America) missionaries -- his "trainer" companion, Elder Letrán, is from Guatemala -- which is pretty good representation. I served a mission in Chile in 1979-80, so in some ways Darren is following in my footsteps; I've tried to share my experiences with him, which I hope he's found helpful (and not annoying). Note that there are several pairs of "sister" missionaries in the photo; LDS women may serve missions beginning at age 21, although they aren't as strongly encouraged to go as are young men. (The latter generally begin their missions at age 19, or even 18 if that's the only way to postpone military conscription in their particular home countries.)

It was hard not to have Darren home for Christmas (and unfortunately, he received our Christmas package several days late), but being gone for two years is a sort of rite of passage for LDS young men. Darren told us via e-mail that he and Elder Letrán and another pair of missionaries barbecued in their apartment building's stairwell on Christmas Day. Darren closed the door to their apartment to keep the smoke out, and in the process he unwittingly locked them out; the landlord was gone visiting relatives, so they ended up sleeping on the landing with only a few towels for warmth--something I'm sure he'll never forget!

Las Vegas

I was first introduced to Las Vegas in late 1994, and the first time I actually participated in "evil" gambling activities was in early January of 1995. I was in a turmoil about a situation that existed in my family at the time, and boy was it nice to be able to forget about things at the tables! It was a thrill I'd never known -- on that first trip, my friend and I were in Vegas for two days, and we spent over 30 hours of that time sitting at low-minimum (i.e., $1.00-$2.00) blackjack tables in Binion's Horseshoe, the Golden Nugget, and the Lady Luck (where we were staying). As often happens, I came out slightly ahead, and the hook was set.

For the next seven or eight years, I maintained a sort of love-hate relationship with Vegas, marked generally -- of course -- by steady losses at the tables interspersed with a few small wins. But the important thing to me was that Vegas was affordable entertainment, a place where I could go regularly to feel alive without blowing a ton of money. The rooms downtown were generally affordable; the blackjack was relatively inexpensive no matter what my luck was; good deals on food abounded; and there were myriad other things to do, like seeing shows (many of which were already expensive and required occasional splurging), riding roller-coasters, going bowling, climbing on indoor climbing walls, etc. The city obviously had its unsavory underbelly -- how could it not with all those undocumented aliens trying to shove cards into your hand advertising "exotic dancers" and what-not? -- but that was easily ignored.

Unfortunately, casino gambling then became increasingly more-popular in this country than it had been, which I attribute to both the proliferation of Indian gaming and a series of extremely effective advertising campaigns. The natural consequence of increased demand for Las Vegas (notwithstanding a great rise in supply, as more and bigger hotels went up) was that prices for everything -- lodging, food, entertainment, and gambling itself -- gradually rose and then, from my perspective, skyrocketed. Nowadays, you're lucky to find a room, at any time of the year or on any day of the week, for less than $75/night, even at hotels where I wouldn't have considered staying ten years ago. Buffets, once a ubiquitous bargain, can cost up to $30 at the better Strip hotels, and food quality is always suspect at the less-nice hotels. I haven't seen a production or headliner show in years, but I can only imagine what they cost now.

Worst of all -- or perhaps best of all -- the gambling has gotten much more expensive, often with significantly more-disadvantageous rules and various mechanisms designed to foil card-counting. Most "noobs" in Vegas these days have no clue how they're being ripped off when, say, the payout on a blackjack (i.e., Ace + facecard or 10 on the first two cards) is 6:5 instead of the traditional 3:2, or how strongly a continuous-shuffling machine reinforces the house advantage in blackjack -- or, for that matter, how much statistical advantage the house retains when it allows only 2x odds on pass-line and "come" bets in craps. No, the "noobs" will play just about any game offered -- and poorly at that -- so why shouldn't the house push the envelope in that regard?

Of course, in economic terms what this all means is that I've essentially been priced out of Las Vegas; at some point the idea of going there passed over the line for me from low-cost, low-risk excitement and entertainment to being an intolerably expensive, higher-risk grind. I keep thinking the corporate suits who took over the town in the late 1990s will eventually take things too far and run Vegas into the ground, but the "market" hasn't come close to topping out yet, particularly with the current poker boom ongoing. I still don't regard playing blackjack or craps as inherently, or at least monstrously, evil (something that puts me slightly at odds with my religion), but where Vegas has gone, I refuse to follow if only for economic reasons. It's left a hole in my life that I haven't been able to fill by other means, but I have no hope now that Vegas for low-rollers will ever come back.

Still, much as Rick and Ilsa (in Casablanca) would always have Paris, I will always have good memories of various trips to Vegas in the 1995-2001 timeframe.

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.