Beauty Parlor Wisdom

In the city I get my hair cut in a hair salon. Up here, though, I go to a beauty parlor. I doubt they’d call it that, but there are important differences. In the beauty parlor, for example, no one wears black. Jeans are a favorite outfit, in fact. And the stations sport personal assemblages of family photos and other memorabilia. Not just one or two, either, but a great sprouting of them, almost a family tree of pictures, in fact. And finally, the prices are less than half. Not a small matter, these days.

The conversation in a hair salon tends to be one-on-one, your hair cutter and you. In the beauty parlor, conversation can involve everyone. This morning’s subject was cholesterol drugs.

Anyone who has looked up Lipitor or Crestor on the internet knows that horror stories abound. I always thought: well, you’re going to hear from the ones who are having trouble. You don’t hear from the millions who don’t have trouble.
In the salon, today, I had a somewhat different response.

There were approximately ten people in the room; three of them were having the active conversation. Each of the three, and one husband, had experienced very strange side effects from Lipitor as prescribed by their individual physicians. Severe joint and muscle pain for two; mental fogginess to the point of interfering with daily activities for the other two; all of this occurring rapidly after the medication was prescribed and not before.

The doctors in question seem to have difficulty believing that rapid physical deterioration in a patient after they have been prescribed a statin has anything much to do with the statin. They will, if asked, recommend a different statin, but that’s about it.

So, is the problem the patient's perception? A patient is prescribed a statin usually as a response to a high cholesterol count. This is a problem without symptoms, for the most part. Suddenly, following use of the drug for a time, problems arise, which the doctor often ascribes to “aging.” Blood tests are performed, and if there is no sign of a particular pernicious muscle wasting side effect, the doctor attributes the changes to “aging.”

But why would “aging” symptoms dramatically increase in a short amount of time after the drug is prescribed, when they weren’t present beforehand?

We are sure that statins lower cholesterol. They seem to decrease the incidence of stroke and heart attack. They seem to increase muscle weakness and joint and memory problems. Are we now placed in the position of naming our poison? And of doing so without candid or informed advice?

(The two charmers below, who were roaming around Treeland Garden Center this afternoon, don't have need of beauty parlors, do they?)

More odd things

I've been trying to get back into the routine of taking photographs, as an adjunct to daily life. Being in Houston for those weeks intervened, but yesterday I made a foray, first into the yard and then out onto the country roads.

The first image above is what they call, hereabouts, a "bottle tree." Self-explanatory, except for the obvious work putting it together.

The second image is what happened to the "Odd Round Thing" I blogged about months ago. It is not a black and white image. That's just the color of the ground here at present. We all decided it was a fungus.

The third image, if you look closely, involves a tiny frog among the leaves. He moved or I wouldn't have spotted him.

The last two are views from the roads I traveled: a nice barn and the tunnel formed by greenery along Mayer Cemetery Road. A little further along I saw Oso, our neighbor's white Lab disappearing companionably into the brush with his chocolate Lab lady friend from Trails West.

Framing Cards

I've found a neat frame for artists' cards, handpainted ones like PJ's, and I wanted to show a picture of it. They're in dark gray steel or shinier steel, and they're made in New York by Bedford Downing Glass. I got this one at Surroundings in Houston. I think they're great for the purpose, since you can see both sides.

You have to use a card of some kind to slip the card in and position it, but then, there you are.

Monday, Monday

While on Sunday I seem always to be thinking about politics, probably on account of the newspapers we read, Mondays are different. Fortunately. On Monday, we're propelled back into our weekly routine, hurtling forward to accomplish the items on our to-do list, lacking the time or inclination for mulling the fate of nations. It's a relief, frankly.

This Monday, here at Winedale, there is rain. Yep. That wet stuff falling on the tin roof. The air is misty with it. A woodpecker has just let out a long run of his medium-pitched clacking sound. On the road, a truck rolls slowly by, its tires slushing a little across the damp surface. Our road used to be a reddish gravel, but in the past few years the county has decided to top it with a caliche mixture, whitish, that splashes up on your car's backside in a very unpleasant way.

The country is relatively quiet in January, however. The restaurants are mostly empty. Tourists tend to stay home, which is a shame because the countryside offers some rewarding pleasures this time of year. The monochrome landscape is wonderfully subtle in its variations. With the understory knocked back, the skeleton of the land is more visible. Barns and houses appear where you've never noticed them before. And, no, they're not new construction, thank heaven.



And sometimes, driving along one of the roads, you will see surprising sights. These llamas are definitely not an indigenous animal, hereabouts.

Good or Bad

I've just finished reading John LeCarre's A Most Wanted Man, which I really enjoyed. At the same time, I've been re-reading Leon Hale's Bonney's Place. Two more different books would be hard to find. Yet...the subject matter is the same. Let me explain.

In the Le Carre thriller, the Muslim target is a public figure whose charitable contributions are said to be 95% "good" and only 5% "bad." The five percent relates to the money and goods siphoned off to fund terrorists. So the question becomes: is that five percent bad enough to cancel out the vast preponderance of good works? The Americans in this story think so. And so (spoiler alert) he's basically toast.

In Bonney's Place the question is whether a man who bilks an old man out of a considerable sum of money can possibly be anything other than "bad." This man also spotlights deer out of season, repeatedly cheats a pompous customer, slaughters the same customer's heifer and serves it to the poor people of his community, and performs other larcenies, here and there. At the same time, he takes in people who need help and performs many small acts of kindness in his community.

It seems to me that our society has entered a time where many of our citizens desperately want clarity between actions that may be called good, or bad. But instead we find ever larger situations where the actions encompass both polarities. I'm thinking of things like how to treat people suspected of terrorism when they are arrested; and how we respond to suspicions of terrorist activities. There is no clear and immediate answer, and we grope toward an understanding of the boundaries we cannot allow ourselves to cross.

Our new administration will be caught in the complexities of this process, but it may be able to handle them in a more satisfactory fashion than did its predecessor. Because of the value the president places on the pre-eminence of the rule of law, we have drawn a boundary for ourselves. That will help guide us, and possibly allow us to avoid the pitfalls of ideology.

Without law, there is no civilization. When we must deal with nations and tribes who reject common understandings of law, including their own religious law, and we respond by doing the same, we abandon all concepts of civilization. I suggest that this constitutes another boundary for us. If we must abandon our civilization in order to prevail against the enemy, what have we achieved in the victory?

Moving

Thanks to everyone for the nice comments on my previous entry. It's been pretty thick this week, so I've not had time to post. But we're on the road back to Winedale today which will definitely help.

Larry McMurtry gave a talk on Wednesday at Rice and my spies tell me he was very pessimistic on the future for reading. His focus, of course, is books. He defines himself first and foremost as a "bookman". His comments stimulated a spirited discussion in my writers group. He was talking about the publishing industry and the rare book area, where many rare book dealers have contacted him over the past several years asking him to take over their store of books.

What do you all think?

It should be noted, of course, that Larry has written about his own depression following open heart surgery. And his last talk at Rice in the early 80's was seriously pessimistic about writers over the age of 40. So we're not dealing with Pollyanna here.

It was more than a color

Many years ago I was working in Washington, DC, and one of my roommates fixed me up with a blind date. The young man had attended St. Paul’s School and graduated from Harvard. He was tall and handsome, with a serious face and hazel eyes. And he was bi-racial. In fact, his skin was scarcely darker than mine.

We climbed into his sports car, and pulled away into Georgetown traffic. We talked while he drove. I don’t remember what we talked about. Neither do I remember where we were going. All I recall of the evening was that at one point we drove past the White House. It was blazing with light and I blurted out: “It certainly is white, isn’t it?”

This admittedly stupid remark made him very angry.

I’ve thought of this young man often as I watched Barack Obama over the past two years. He would be in his sixties, now, and I hope—and expect—that he has been successful. But it gives me great satisfaction to know that no young man or woman will ever again have to look at our beautiful White House and think that the color of its paint says something important about them and their future in our society.