What Cancer has Wrought

Sometimes you just have to chuckle at all the interesting things that life can bring.

I’m speaking here of jobs, and there’s a story to tell, and it’s a bit involved. Growing up I was strongly encouraged to go to college, and I did so; a good idea these days as well as back then, because on this Earth you have to make living or you end up working at Walmart or the Rescue Mission. So, when I made my career choice – and with no experience doing much in this world in terms of work – I picked Magazine Journalism and ended up going to one of the best colleges for journalism in the country: Syracuse University. I wanted to be a great writer, and this was a road to that destination.

It turned out that I never became a great writer but ended up writing this little blog, so that is that, but I really like writing this blog, so all is well. And I had to give up being a great writer to follow Jesus, and to be a great writer I would have had to move to New York City, and who really wants to do that!

But then life happened and I got married and thought that maybe I should have a career where I could make some money; by that time I had worked with computers for a few years at General Electric and thought this would be a good career choice, so I went back to school upon marriage and got a second degree in Computer Science from SUNY Oswego. We only had one kid and we didn’t starve too much for the year and a half when I was in school, and I came out with my second bachelor’s degree.

This degree was a doorway to a good job, but even here I had to humble myself, as I took a job as a computer operator for $9/hour at a major hospital in Syracuse. A computer operator is the lowest of the low computer jobs but it was a job, and I was glad to be working again. Still, management saw that I could work, and being of German origin I could work my brains out and – oh – “You have a degree also” they learned, and up the ladder they moved me; up, up, up I went, and I became a programmer and a network engineer for several off-site departments of the hospital.

This was great but I realized that in Syracuse, NY, I could probably not replace this job if I lost it – the money was fairly good for Syracuse – and you have to understand that Syracuse is not he hotbed of hardly any economic activity, so I thought of getting into another field. I considered everything, from plumbing to becoming a X-Ray technician and was even accepted to Upstate’s medical program. That didn’t work out, and I somehow found a Health Systems Administration program at Rochester Institute of Technology and, yes, it was half price for some reason. God did that, I think.

We did this in 2005, and it took me about a year and a half; somewhere along the way, management saw that I was getting this neat degree and made me a manager of the support staff and IT department at the Dialysis program. I finished my degree in December, 2006, just in time to be diagnosed with cancer four months later. Some things don’t work out like you expect they would.

Then I began my cancer journey, as is chronicled abundantly in this little blog.  I was able to get a job four years later – and I spare you all the details of this – but I will say that it was a part time job working with the developmentally disabled: I would take them out into the community, go to stores with them, take them on walks so they could get exercise, and with one client, I would swing on the swings at Onondaga Lake Park. She liked to swing, so at 51 years of age I was swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I like swinging. Life was good.

I happened to run into my old boss from the hospital in the mall and we both had a laugh: me, the great nerd, was now working in a people person job. Who would have thought!? Life has many twists and turns, and we agreed that this was definitely either a twist or a turn, depending on how you looked at it.

Events happened and I left that job to try my hand in small business, installing networks and fixing common computer problems at businesses in the area. I did this, and liked it but it really wasn’t steady work and, besides all this, I’m really not a great businessman. (All Stahls are great businessmen and make tons of money, but I apparently didn’t get this gene.) I then applied to another agency for the disabled in the area and almost immediately got a job working again with the developmentally disabled. We were back to a people person job. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to get away from working with people, the nerd that I am; try as I might.

It turned out through a confluence of events that I ended up as a job coach for a very young, friendly fellow who happens to work at a Rescue Mission trailer, accepting donations and then sorting the items and placing them in the right bins. I am there to help him with the various tasks that make up this job and to teach him the skills to keep it.

So, there you have it: we have a guy with three degrees who had a Masters in a very hot field – healthcare – and not only that: healthcare is one of the few fields that is growing in these early 21^st century years, and I am essentially working at the Rescue Mission. How perfect! How apt! Only God could have thought of that! In all the twists and turns that we could go through in life, it has to be probably one of the best, one of greatest amusements for God, his biggest chuckle regarding me, and only something that He could have thought of! It shows that God has a sense of humor; from the beginning of the world, when the foundations of it were laid, he saw I would be working at the Rescue Mission and said: “This is too perfect for a nerd like this.”

I agree. I like my little job, and with my cancer related fatigue, it’s perfect: not too little or too much, and I do it on the weekends so that helps with our cars situation. We have teenagers that need to be bused everywhere and new drivers, so the car thing is important. And it’s not so bad working with people, really; they’re not as cool as a new gadget or a new computer, but it rises to the level of at least interesting to me these days.

So this is what God has wrought, and he has used cancer to turn my life around 180 degrees. I could have made a lot of money in upper management at the hospital and really fed my family but perhaps I would have ended up miserable. Who knows; we always think the other direction our life could have gone would have been better but no: it could have been worse. Now I am relatively poor but have a lot of great kids and a great wife, and very, very good friends. And a few nickels here and there: what could be better?

Political Correctness And All That

Let us consider the following incidents that are quite minor but telling:

• My son is applying for a government job and receives a page giving him the name and address of whom to call in case he has been discriminated. Zech is 14.

• I get a new job working with the developmentally disabled and spend 45 minutes signing forms. Just to make sure I got the Employee Handbook, I sign a form saying it is true: I got it. I tell the HR director that this is like closing on a mortgage. It is.

• I am getting delivery of a new John Deere mower, and it is coming off the truck. “Does it have a little gas in it?” I ask, hoping it does so I can drive it into the garage. “No,” the driver says. “They don’t let us ship these with gas. It’s considered to be a hazardous material and we would have to get special training.”

• I’m reading about a retired Delta force general  who taught at a college for nine years and was recently discharged for joking, “The first man who goes into the restroom with my daughter will not have to worry about surgery.”  End of story – and his job.

  

We should be clear about one thing.  I’m really not for discrimination, and of course I wouldn’t want Lowes delivery men to get blown up from a few ounces of gas in the tractor, and far be it from me to think that the Employee Handbook should not be validated by me in some fashion, but still:  maybe we are going down the road of replacing common sense with dating and signing everything, initializing on the little line, endless notes about everything pertaining to our children, defensive medicine ad nauseum, victimization by all groups somehow and everyone has a constitutional right not to be offended by his neighbor’s behavior.

Welcome to Political Correctness!

What can we say?  We might conclude that trust is a thing of the past, and at one time business was done on a handshake.  Those days are long gone.  And we have exalted the individual’s rights far above the simple injunction of the Golden Rule:  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  The result?  There will be a bureaucrat in your life or even worse a lawyer, and perhaps someday there will be a knock on the door in the middle of the night because you said something remotely resembling the truth – which of course is very offensive and shall not be tolerated.

Doctors – Need I Say More?

One aspect of the cancer journey that is always interesting – if I may use that word – is having to deal with a subsection of the homo sapien species called doctors; that is, meeting with doctors, talking to doctors and making decisions with these doctors.

Doctors.

My Oncologist

Having cancer and having doctors – well, what would one be without the other? It just wouldn’t be right to do cancer without doctors; you would be cheating the AMA gods somewhere, who might turn wrathful and do something really bad do you (though cancer is bad enough, you would think. Still.) And I do know someone who attempted to treat and cure his own cancer on his own with herbs, weeds and other natural things he could find in his garden and by the roadside. Needless to say, he is not with us today, but he gets an A plus for effort and for having the guts (less the brains) to go against the American Medical-Industrial Complex.

And cancer just doesn’t come with one doctor, but many. Who could have cancer and be content just with their oncologist? The radiation doctor usually gets involved, and if you want to have the best chances of living, there’s a surgeon in your future (surgery is the gold standard for cancer treatment) and depending on the type of cancer, you can add yet another doctor in there. I, having esophageal cancer, have a GI doctor, for instance. Then if you happen to go off the reservation – or just don’t like what the first doctor serves up to you – you can always go and get a second opinion, which will deal another round of doctors into your life.

It could be that we have been a simpleton our entire life but now we get to talk to these ever so learned men about – not philosophy or abstract art or science – but about us, that is, our body. They are ever so learned and we are not. They can explain it to us with all their fancy words and we will do our best to understand half of what they are saying. With my last surgery, I spent hours beforehand learning about the issues at hand so that I could at least ask somewhat intelligent questions. We weren’t talking about actually understanding what the doctor said, but just about asking questions in such a way that I didn’t totally embarrass myself. Heck, for example, I had a spot on the lower lobe of my left lung, and the question is: why didn’t anyone ever tell me that I even had a lower left lobe? Who knew?

And, if you happen to know a bit about what they are talking about and have your questions all written down so nicely beforehand, then they can always throw you off totally by telling you the results of the most recent test and then, on a moment’s notice, you have to re-calibrate all your thoughts and land feet down like a cat, process the new information in all of 30 seconds and come back hopefully asking something that doesn’t make you look like a total fool. Like, “Oh, the spot is on my cerebellum! I didn’t know I had one!” Like that.

Then there is the issue of the time frame we are all working under. Doctors these days have 15 minutes tops, then the conversation shall not continue. The gods are angry after 15 minutes. You are trying to understand why a particular body part shall and must be removed, and they are wrapping it up, on to their next patient who is probably going to also lose a body part. Or, lets start this chemo which will wreck your life and there’s a few side effects but – hey – I (the doctor) have to go.

So all your questions didn’t get answered, and they never are, and they usually pop into your head at 3:35 am but by that time the doctor is long gone and you’re left after daybreak trying to piece together the information from a plethora of internet pages you just visited, and usually you end up with mush.

And regarding finding a doctor, the question is: how do you find a doctor? I think competence is quite up there as a virtue in a doctor, but at some level he has to have some command of the English language and enough social skills to carry on something of a conversation, and with some doctors we can use the word conversation loosely. I have a great oncologist who is very level headed, knows my history and has good social skills. He also one time said he planned on “curing” me – quite a quote from a doctor treating an esophageal cancer patient. My GI doctor is brilliant, and everyone says so. You know a doctor is good when the nurses say good things about him, as the nurses know the real scoop on doctors. But my poor GI doctor has all the social skills of a caterpillar, and maybe less. I think I’ve seen him smile once. He is a nerds nerd, and I bonded with him right from the start, being of the same fiber. But, hey, do you want a doctor you would want to invite to your Christmas party, or do you want a doctor who can save your life? I pick the latter.

There is a difference between a good doctor, a great doctor and a jerk. A jerk just about killed me nine years ago when doing a routine endoscope when, unfortunately, the lower part of my esophagus blew apart. Oops. Then there are good doctors, who are competent to diagnoses the obvious conditions and perform all the necessary routine procedures; they’re like a mechanic who can see the alternator is gone and can replace it. Great. But these doctors are procedure oriented, meaning they do it by the book, and the book is all they know. Throw them a weird condition or something way off the reservation, and they are lost. Then there are great doctors who can actually think. That is, take a complicated situation not found in the books and come up with some logical course of action, even if it might be exotic. This is the type of doctor you want, even if he doesn’t have full command of the English language and treats speaking as a chore.

One thing you will find out about doctors:  no one knows what the other one does.  They are so specialized that they are silos of information that know nothing about the other silos standing around them.  One example:  my surgeon performed an endoscope and told me afterward in no uncertain terms that he had seen cancer down there.  End of story. Turned out the biopsy showed otherwise, but that’s another issue.  When I told my oncologist about this, he said, “Cancer would never have come back in this short amount of time like he thought.”  This sort of thing has happened again and again.

And because they are so specialized, there is no one who is  putting all the pieces together except you, the patient.  You may be a truck driver or a computer programmer or a street sweeper but – guess what – you’re the only one on the team that has a 30,000 panoramic foot view of everything, from what doctor “X” says to what physicians assistant “Y” says to the surgeon to some other guy with lots of initials after his name.  When it comes to healthcare, you have to put all the pieces together.  Welcome, O patient, to the cancer world!

I’m thankful for these doctors. Where would I be without them? The Apocrypha says that God often uses doctors to perform a cure, and when God decides not to cure you with a POOF!, he hires a doctor to do it. But ultimately its all in the hands of God, who is the one who gives life and, when it is time, takes it – despite the best efforts of doctors.

Why I Hate the Internet

As you see, the title of this little blog is:  Why I Hate the Internet.

Actually, I love the internet.  I honestly think that of all the inventions of human history, the internet is one of the most amazing.  I’m sure the screw was amazing in its time, and so was indoor plumbing, as was the Model T or the airplane, but with the internet, you can connect to anything, get information on any subject, download a raft of articles, journals and books, as well as do all sorts of other stuff:  banking, gaming, job hunting, course taking, house hunting, movie watching, music listening – and the list goes on and on and on.  And I can do it at home, and I can do it at work, and I can do it in the car (as a passenger, of course, with my data on), and I can do it at DD downing a glazed you-know-what – all on their signal – or at the library on theirs, and we have internet at our Church and I just heard they port the internet in at the local high school, which I find surprising.  It’s ubiquitous, and awesome and right at my fingertips, and I carry it in my pocket on a device called a SmartPhone, weighing only 5 oz, and find it also on my desktop and tablet and Xbox gaming platform and soon they tell me this internet will be in my car and run my thermostat and refrigerator and coffee machine and maybe even my toaster!

Amazing.

Enjoying Each Others Company in the Internet Age

Besides that, there’s another reason I love the internet:  I’m a computer guy who loves computers and gadgets and absolutely finds programming exhilarating, so this computer stuff is embedded in my DNA.  My kids call me a nerd and I agree:  I am such.  If you look at my picture when I was eight years old on this previous post, you can see my nerdiness had already set into my character.  Just look at the glasses.  Nerd glasses.  It only got worse with age, and now I’m gadget enthralled and always have to take the device to the next step.  I rooted my phone because it could be done.  If you don’t know what it means to root your phone, you’re probably not a nerd.

Anyway,  the internet:  I love it but I hate it.  The very thing that makes it great is also its downfall, almost to the point of being dangerous.  Let me explain.

Sucked in

I have eight kids which means that I have to parent eight kids, eight young tender plants growing up in this amazing internet age, and it’s really not that easy.   The internet, like a black hole, has a habit of sucking everyone into it.  There is a point of singularity in a black hole which, if crossed, will suck you in, and with no escape – not even for light.  That is the internet.  It sucks everyone in, both children and parent, the poor and the rich, the great and the common – all end up swirling around a point, seemingly endlessly.

Turn your phone on, and the gravity of the black hole starts to pull on you.   Start texting, and you’re close to that magic line – the point of singularity.  Start your Facebook app, and you’ve crossed the line.  You are falling, falling, and then you play a game.  An hour has passed.  Let’s check email.  The clock ticks.  What’s our bank account balance?  More time passed on the machine.

It’s the nature of the beast.  It is so much and does so much that, like an invasive weed, suddenly crowds out all the productive plants in your garden and soon owns every square inch.  It takes up all the oxygen, and other life forms die.  Like a creature in a Japanese monster movie, it desires complete dominance.  It’s the internet.

Family life

And that’s the problem.

Children lounge on couches looking at their phones;  the mother manages to make supper but peaks into her phones as the rice cooks, the father relaxes and reads the newspaper (NAAA the buzzer goes) – no, he’s on his phone too, playing Chess.  Junior is on a PC video game, and the teen is gaming on the Xbox.  Teen number 2 is checking his stamp collection (NAAA the buzzer goes)  – he’s watching a YouTube video on his laptop.  The young adult is catching up on all his Facebook posts.

It’s a beautiful day out – not a cloud in the sky and 70 degrees – but we are all inside. We know there is a drought in Botswana but forget to put our clothes in the washing machine for tomorrow.  We can tell you the composition of moon dust (found someplace in the lore of internet trivia) but can’t tell you the steps necessary to wash the dishes.  It’s the internet age.

They have their friends over and end up sitting in the living room, each on his phone.  Or they play an X-Box game together.  To change it up a bit, they watch a movie. It’s the internet age.

Children become one dimensional and parents are not far behind.  Outside is a strange place with no electricity.  If there’s no electricity outside, then why do it?  Board games are considered part of the Medieval period.  To have dinner together is so 1950s.  Children are found in their rooms, clicking away at this or that or watching yet another video.  The worse horror is to run out of batteries for the Xbox One, and a phone charger is the umbilical cord to Mother Internet.  It’s the internet age.

What we did

We as a family started a grand experiment a week ago.  Last weekend I shut the internet off, with my wife’s support.  Completely off. Gone.  Some of my kids hand’s were shaking, and a few developed a facial twitch.  There was nothing to do.  How strange is that?  They did find a few things here or there to occupy their time.  One evening, we actually sat around and talked – talked!  Hey, that’s the stuff our grandparents or great grandparents did!  One of my kids even told me (in a private moment) that they liked having the internet off, but asked me not to tell any of the others, as it might be seen as encouraging me in my anti-internet ways.  A few kids went outside.  There is a sky outside, and the grass is green.  How cool is that!

After that, we decided to turn the internet off from 3 pm to 7 pm on weekdays.  They get home from school at 3 pm and there is no internet, and so for four hours they are unteathered.  My younger ones went outside and ran around like kids used to do. [Disclaimer:  they would do this before we shut down the internet but more so now.]  Its nice to hear them yell and chase one another and pretend to be this or that super hero, or act out a zombie apocalypse scene they’ve seen on a movie or whatever.  They’ve also played legos and took my chess set and made this huge, creative, imaginative universe with the pieces as only children can do.

My teenagers adapted also.  One started a garden, and a fairly big one at that.  The other offered to mow the lawn and, as we have three acres to mow, went round and round, up and down in the cool May sunshine.

I should mention that it’s not easy turning off the internet.  Oh, on a practical level I just have to hit one button on the router and – Poof! – it’s gone.  But it’s not that easy.  When I say internet, I mean all electronics.  So though the internet is gone, they still have their PC games, which are local to the PC.  So I unplug the PCs.  Then there’s the two Xboxes we have, and they have their games on CD.  So I confiscate the controllers.  You would think that would do it, but the cell phones have a data plan, so they can always flip that on and – Wallah! – we have internet.  To date I haven’t confiscated the phones, but instead gave a strict warning, but you get the idea.

And we are linking internet usage to measurable goals.  A goal is something that we want accomplished so, if that goal is not accomplished, then something has to happen, and that something is:  no internet.  It is a cold, cruel world, but that’s how the world works.  The idea is that one has to work for these things, that these things are – at root – a form of entertainment;  they are a privilege that has to be earned rather than a right that they should expect.

And a few of my kids told me today that they liked not having the internet on all the time.  Wow.  I almost fell over.

That is why I hate the internet.  It seems to offer so much connectivity and communication, but delivers just the opposite:  seclusion and being ostracized from each other.  I don’t think it is a bad thing – understand that.  But like a dangerous medicine, it needs to be administered rightly if it is to have a good effect.   Then it is a blessing, and only then.

http://www.brunstad.org

The Joy of a Good Scan

I had a good scan the week before last – Friday May 6^th to be exact – and how good does that feel?

This is exactly what my CT Scan machine looks like

Scans are always a high risk affair. You can be feeling great and living life, with all that that entails, right up to a bad scan, then the world is upside down, and you’re upside down with it. Try laying across your couch and then pivot, so your feet are up over the back and your head is hanging down; then look at the world. That’s what life is like after a bad scan.

After finishing up my initial cancer treatment in 2007, I began on the scan journey. We started out with a scan every three months, then after two years I believe we scanned every six months, then after three years we were at the yearly mark, so truly we were getting someplace. I racked up one good scan after another until I just assumed they would be good, and it was a good assumption: they were. Well, it was a good assumption right up until I was to have my very last scan – the last one for ever at the five year mark – when the unexpected happen at the most unexpected time: a bad scan.

What followed was not pretty, all because of this bad scan. All we saw was a few white dots on a black background when my doctor showed me the results on the computer, and I just had to believe him that those white spots meant something. There they were. We had had a bad scan.

A bad scan is not like getting a poor grade on a test – something you can take over again to get a better grade; nor is it like a bad tax return, where your wallet is thinner and doesn’t bulge in your pocket anymore once you pay Uncle Sam. It’s not even like a bad traffic ticket that costs you more money than you have and also points – which are gone after three years. No, a bad scan is like the dungeon door opens and you descend into the abyss called chemo and there you are chained to the wall until the doctor decides we have gotten somewhere, or at least far enough. In my case, this happened after seven months in the depths, and they added a big operation on for good measure.

That is what a bad scan is like.

But a good scan – how good is that! That means that life will go on; you can live your life like every other human, most of whom don’t relish mowing the lawn or going to work, but if you’ve had a good scan, such simple endeavors are positively sweet. It means that the enterprise called life is continuing, that God has decided to keep you around for a bit longer, and what could possibly be better than that?

Remembering Michael Twilley

Life is short, as we all know, and the years they fly by. I know: I’ve been married 23 years and eight kids later plus two cats, we can ask: where have the years gone?

Michael Twilley, 1936-2016

Yesterday I went to a Memorial Feast for a very special person: Michael Twilley. I’ve know Michael for 30 years and it is largely because of him that I got married. And for years at conferences – which he led – I would hear him speak and encourage the youth and all of us with his big, special heart that only he seemed to have.

It is one thing to live a life, and another thing to live it well, and Brother Twilley lived it well. How can we weigh our very life but by the good we have done to our fellow man, and his life had weight. In particular, he had a special care for those who were struggling or perhaps even on the verge of giving up; to those he would bring new hope, and what is more valuable than that!

He had a gift to speak to people and many came to repentance and to the Church through him, yet he never went up in himself to become the great man. This is remarkable. How many have erred in this way, only to have it go badly with them later on. But it never went badly with Michael Twilley – quite the opposite.

At the Memorial Service

He had an interesting and full life, and one not without trials. He was married with nine children when his first wife, Valerie, passed away, and he later married a Sister from Norway and had six additional children with her. Nine plus six is 15. He traveled to India and was always in search of someone who had an ear to hear the Gospel, and he couldn’t be in a restaurant without talking to someone. You could say he struck out many times in these attempts, like Babe Ruth, but also hit a lot of home runs, and many of these home runs are now firmly established in the Church. He had 75 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren, all who loved him, and he was a very blessed man.

So thank you, Dear Brother Twilley, for your big, warm heart and your help over the years. I will not forget it!

On Mother’s Day

I am convinced that the species would not have survived even half a generation if it were not for mothers.

Us in August, 1997, a Great Mother with her three chicks – Josh, Phoebe and Caleb – and a husband!

The Dad’s usual style of child rearing is as follows: “The kids will make it through somehow,” as the kids are off poking at frogs in a way-too-deep pond while the Dad is relaxing, shooting the breeze with his friends. Such a laid back attitude does not sit well with the Moms, when their very children are in danger of drowning while Dad makes another point to his friends and sips on his adult beverage.

The mother is also the one who makes sure the child’s nutritional requirements are met, and especially the vegetables, and that the meals that are prepared have some level of nutritional integrity. The dads are more likely to throw a box of corn dogs at the kids – and have them do the microwaving themselves – and call it good.

The Moms will want to know where the dear children are at all times, as the little guy or gal could suffer in any one of many ways: being chased by a dog, bullied by a kid two times bigger, stung by a bee, and do we have the Epipen? The Dads figure that somehow they themselves survived childhood – how, they don’t know – and the kids can likewise figure it out and, if not, there’s always the school of hard knocks.

So we are thankful for Moms, who have an amazing knack to watch over and care for another human being, which is wholly amazing for a self-interested species such as ours. And it goes even beyond this: the love is unconditional, no matter what the child at hand does. It doesn’t wane, either, as the years pass; it is a constant, like a value in an equation that never changes. I saw something on Facebook today that mothers love right up until their last breath, and I believe it.

So here’s to Moms! I’ve had a great one, and married one who is a fantastic one. We owe everything to them, and they deserve this day! Treat them well.

A Passing

Wednesday one of our chicks passed, having not even reached his adolescent years, and my creative children memorialized this with the following epitaph:

In case you can’t read the picture, it says:

2016-2016

Alfonso

Smallest body, biggest heart

Survived by her 5 sisters.  Died by Drowning.

R.I.P.

Can we get a moment of silence for the poor chick?

“Those Chickens are Tearing this Family Apart!”

“Those Chickens are Tearing this Family Apart!”

So said my melodramatic thirteen year old daughter at the kitchen table, referring to the chicken dispute at hand.

At issue was property rights and trespassing.  My seventeen year old son had bought all six chickens with his own money and retrofitted an old sandbox into a chicken coup, complete with a special lamp so the animals wouldn’t get too cold in the night, water and food feeders (of course) and the right chips for them to walk on (pine, not cedar, which can cause respiratory problems in chickens, and who would want that?).   He was king of the coup, as it were, and my other eleven year old son wanted in the coup with his other brother, aged nine, but was told to leave.

This did not sit well with him – in fact, so badly that he just didn’t leave.  He stayed in the coup – regardless.

The Cause of the Great Chicken Dispute

Thus the problem, which came out during dinner with some excitement, some saying that he should have left the coup as it was the only right thing to do and others feeling sorry for the poor fellow, who just wanted a share in the joy of chicks with the others, and a few in the middle, trying to find a common ground:  perhaps he could have explained in a nice way why he needed to be in there, and then the 17 year old chicken master might have said “You may stay, my dear brother!”

No, that didn’t happen, but the 11 year old who just wanted to bond with the chicks even went as far as to say right there at the dinner table that he had a “right” to be with them, having apparently listened in Social Studies when they taught about the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

As you can imagine, it didn’t go down well with the chicken owners rights proponents, and the dispute was swirling when my 13 year old daughter charged – with her arm outstretched and finger pointing – that these chickens were ripping apart the fabric of this family from end to end – thus the title of this little Blog.

Such are the disputes in a big family, and anything can potentially become a dispute as always someone is overstepping their bounds or sitting right in the chair that was vacated for 30 seconds so the occupier of the said chair cold get another helping of chips – and what is the legal measure to be applied in that case:  is it who owned it keeps it or they’ve had it too long and should share it?  These are not small matters, and I’m surprised that the Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the who-gets-the-chair dispute.  How could they not?

Well, instead my wife and I are often called upon to adjudicate such cases, and we can ask, for instance, regarding the chicken dispute:  where do the chicken rights lie?  And are there really any rights to see the chickens?  Can we come up with a chicken visitation precedent, to be followed for the ages?  Or shall we safeguard property rights and come down on the side of the chicken owner, who can do with his property (chicks) as he sees fit?

No, these are difficult questions;  hard waters to navigate but somehow the chicks have not split us as a family, like the North and South in the Civil war, with some falling to the North of the Mason Dixon Line and some to the South.  Somehow we find our way through it all.  We are not split.  And the lively discussion shows that there’s real life in the veins.

And the poor eleven year old was put down, we having eventually ruled that there exists no chicken visitation rights explicitly granted in the Stahl Constitutions that governs our household. Possession is 9/10s of the law, as they say.  So be it. But when the birds are finally let out of their coop in a month, maybe the poor fellow can at least chase them around the yard a bit, and find some solace that way.

 

If I Were President:

I would make it illegal to:

• Ever post a sign in the yard saying, “Free kittens,” or “Free bunnies” or anything free that has four feet and fur.

  

• Ever weigh a woman, even in a doctor’s office. Instead, the weight that would go into the chart would be the woman’s preferred weight.

• Ever send second graders home with Common Core homework that the parents can’t do. The punishment: the teacher will not be able to go home until they have mastered one of Einstein’s most difficult physics problems.

• Allow any employers to make prospective employees complete an on-line application when applying for a job. Time to complete an on-line application: 45 minutes. Time send a resume with the same information: 30 seconds. Information in each medium: the same

• Talk about your dog or cat in the same way as the person you are talking is talking about their kids.

Also:

• No dentist would ever be allowed to sing while the patient is in the chair.

• No dentist would ever be allowed to hum while the patient is in the chair.

• At the completion of all root canals, the dentist will open his wallet and give all the bills therein to the patient.

I would make it a law that:

• Anyone who owns an Apple product must list Apple as their religion on all forms.

• When any citizen calls a business and ends up talking to a computer, the human would have the right to request to talk to another human who has a pulse and a heartbeat; the computer must then answer as Hal did in 2001: A Space Odyssey: “Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?” [If you don’t get it, you have to watch the YouTube clip and here.]

• When any citizen starts cursing the computer that calls his house during dinner telling him he has won yet another Caribbean cruise, the computer would always say, per Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, “I can see you’re really upset about this.  I honestly think you have to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.”  See here.

• Have Deep Blue (Beat World Chess Champion, 1997) and DeepMind (Beat Go champion, 2016) attempt to to common core math, 4^th grade.

• All fathers who have hormonal teenage daughters would automatically receive combat pay.

• Whenever someone goes to a doctor, he will receive an armed bodyguard to accompany him into the room with the doctor. After 14 minutes and 55 seconds – when the doctor tries to leave while the patient is mid sentence – the armed bodyguard will block the door, brandish the weapon and sneer, “Get over there, Buddy! Listen to the patient! He’s not done!”

• Once a week, all owners of cats would have to remind them of Genesis 1:26, where God clearly states that humans are to have dominion over all animals, including cats.

In addition, I would:

• Similar to the war on cancer, I would marshal the greatest geneticists of the age to reconfigure the DNA of children, such that the innate impulse to throw all their all clothes on the floor (or under beds or stuff them between the bed and wall) would be forever gone.

• Similar to the Race to the Moon, I would assemble the leading scientists of the age to devise a TV\DVD remote controller with less than x buttons, where x is a number between 5 and 10.

• I would create a democratic colony on Mars, where only the two year olds could pull the lever in the voting booths for overall better governance; they couldn’t do any worse than the voters have done in the United States presidential election of  2016 and probably much better.

Vote for Me, November 8, 2016

(A write in candidate!)