I was a student pilot when I first heard a controller tell another pilot who was approaching the airport that they were “cleared for the option.”   I had no idea what that meant, and was too embarrassed to ask my instructor.   I just assumed it meant that a pilot could choose to do either a “taxi-back” or a “touch and go” landing, because those were the only two landings I had been doing up to that point.  

But I had never looked it up until now, and it turns out that it means, in official FAA language, “do whatever the hell you want.”   That could be anything from flying low over the runway, stopping briefly on the runway and taking off again, touching down and then taking off again, flying the established “missed approach” procedure, or pulling up at the airport restaurant and ordering a meatball sandwich.

Such freedom of choice is a beautiful thing, but it strikes me that while I have since then heard many controllers tell pilots that they were cleared for the option, I have never heard a pilot ask for it.   Maybe I just don’t have enough hours in the air to have heard it, but I also imagine it’s a rather awkward request.   It’s kind of like going up to your dad when you’re a kid and saying “Dad, can I do anything I want today?”

Somehow, I guess, there’s something rather perplexing about having to ask for nothing in particular, although frankly, the idea is appealing.   Maybe that’s what makes me difficult to live with or be around for too long.   Do you mind if I either take out the garbage, do the dishes, fold the laundry, watch football, or drive a stake through my own heart?   I imagine you would go right to the stake.  Better, I suppose, to be binary.  

Binary is just another three-syllable word for decision.  You’re either this or that.  When I heard someone say the other day that falling in love was “a decision,” I was mortified.   Such a cold, unfeeling thing, just a light switch that gets turned on or off.    It’s just plain crazy.   It isn’t the way the world works.   It’s as though these words on the screen consist of nothing more than zeroes and ones!   

Stating that love is a decision can be comforting, I suppose, if one believes that it’s possible to simply decide whether to love someone.    Just switch on that pheromone pump and turn on the ignition.  Although the idea can be useful, the romantic in me just won’t stand for it.  Love is about spontaneity, passion and mystery.   It encapsulates, or in fact it is, a magical concoction of joy, terror, vulnerability and depth.  It is the paradoxical, ineffable reason for things, the space between the body of a candle’s flame and the leap as it separates and disappears.

I do realize that there can be no shades of gray without mixing the inevitable blacks and whites.   And it is just as certain that there can be no white without black.   For that matter, there can be no middle without a beginning and an end, but isn’t the concept of a middle an artifact of the myth that there really is such a thing as a beginning and an end?    Maybe all there is a very long and wide middle, maybe all that exists are shades of gray and that it is the blacks and whites we imagine.   Doesn’t pi go on forever?  Maybe Donald Trump never existed and it’s all been a really bad dream.

Sometimes being binary can be a helpful way of making up one’s mind when faced with life’s overwhelming choices.   There was a woman I knew in graduate school named Penny Paris who couldn’t make up her mind about anything, including whether to remain in graduate school.   Eventually we came to label her degree of ambivalence the “Penny Paris Syndrome.”  I don’t know what came of her, or even if she is still ticking, but just in case, please know we all loved you, and you should be proud that there is a syndrome named after you.   You may not think you accomplished much in graduate school, but there you are.

You can’t really use the word “binary” anymore without at least thinking about gender.   Let’s face it, who in their right mind would want to be either a male or a female?   Truly, it sucks to be both.   Such societal burdens, such stereotypes to violate.   Give me non-binary neurodiversity any day of the week.   You see, while I may ask for a full-stop landing, what I really want from that Great Controller in the Sky is to be cleared for the option.

I began writing this post some time ago, so I don’t recall where I originally saw the phrase that caught my attention enough to want to say something about it.   The phrase that kept shooting through this tortured head of mine was “when the world is lawless I become aweless.”   I didn’t know that aweless was even a word but when Word didn’t underline it in squiggly red, I may have stumbled on a new one for me.   It’s so transparent a word that I will refrain from looking it up, although my curiosity is really getting to me.   Knowing me as frighteningly well as I do, that will just take me down a rabbit hole I may not escape from until I am forced out by some animal who discovered there were rabbits in the hole with me.   Aweless I suppose means numb, or as they say in my trade, anhedonic (which Word is underlining in squiggly red, although it shouldn’t).  “The inability to feel justifiable pain” was how one of my professors defined neurosis, although in my decades as a psychologist I have extended the definition of neurosis to the inability to feel justifiable anything.

The world we live in today, especially most recently, has become so upside-down that it’s just too much to bear.   I know there is a big part of me that believes that what we are experiencing in the world is no different from the cyclical madness that has plagued the human condition from the moment humans figured out how to communicate with one another.   Things must have gotten significantly worse when “isms” were discovered, an invention that closely resembled the cost-benefit ratio of fire.   Religion undoubtedly complicated things, as did families, clans, and ultimately nations.   Surely culture can be wonderful, adorning life with sweet nuance, but can take a toxic turn should it transform into culturism.   (By the way, Word is telling me there is no such word as culturism.   Multiculturism is a word, but not culturism.  Monoculturism isn’t a word either.   Okay, so let’s coin them both here and now, although I can assure you, we wouldn’t be the first.)

The MAGA madness over the last decade, Hillary’s defeat, and the rise of fascism throughout the world has been hard enough to tolerate.   The conflict in the middle east has always been painful, but the rise of antisemitism, or at least the unwrapping of it, in light of the Israeli response to the Hamas massacre, has hit me on a level that even surprises me.   I was never one to dismiss the prevalence of antisemitism, seeing it repeatedly uncloaked firsthand throughout my life and travels, but watching it demonstrated so powerfully in younger generations is hard to bear.

Despite my lifelong curiosity, I had never had the courage to visit Auschwitz until just a few years ago.   I feared I wouldn’t be able to handle the emotion of it, but one rainy day in Krakow I decided to face that fear.   Afterwards, and throughout, I felt ashamed of myself because of how little I felt.   I was angry that the Polish guide was being watched and clearly censored, and that he was forced to preface statements of how many Jews were murdered with the vast number of Polish resistance fighters who were murdered before the Jews arrived.    But when it came to feeling anywhere near the depth of grief that would have been appropriate for someone who wasn’t so neurotic, I couldn’t go there.   I became inured.   It was just too damn much to handle.   An animal run over by a car by the side of the road can set me off for days, but millions of Jews being shot, gassed and incinerated?   The lifelong grief that resides inside oneself was enough I suppose.   The black and white films that Eisenhower insisted be taken “because the world will forget,” and the stories my mother told me at bedtime prepared me, but the reality on a wet and chilly day and likely any day, was too much.

I saw my response as a cat’s double eyelids.   The external one was open, but the internal one was closed.   That is how I have been feeling lately, about all of it.   The world has become aweless, as nothing makes sense at all.   I used to say in response to the middle east that “it’s complicated.”   It’s not complicated anymore; it’s just too much to bear.   It’s all upside down.   There is no law, no reason.   And so when the world becomes lawless, and nothing seems to make sense, and anhedonia works its way into the soul, the awe that more than any other emotion signals the value of life just fades into oblivion.

Don’t tell the FAA, but those of you who know me beyond the casual fancy of this blog will know that I worry about losing my mind, about losing the razor-sharp cognition that I never had to begin with.

You see I always loved the construct of “clear air turbulence,” the aviation term for rockin’ and rollin’ in your airplane on a crystal-clear day, typically with no warning.   “Out of the blue” would be an apt idiom here, because it happens when skies are blue and you can see forever.

Clear air turbulence is a sweet metaphor for life as we know it.   It’s aviation’s equivalent to the nautical “Just when you think it’s safe to go back into the water.”

So last week I sat down to write a post about it.   As I neared the end of it, I had this vague sense of déjà vu, so I went online to my actual blog and searched for the term.   Sure enough, merely five years ago I wrote another post about the same topic, and there it was, the creeping shame of dementia working its way back to me, babe.   Add to that shame the fact that when I read the post, I was fully prepared to hate it, as I do most everything I read years after I write it.   But rather than hate it, I thought it was better than the one that I had just written.   Even my writing is diminishing, I thought.  

My father became quite demented, although the worst of it didn’t hit until his eighties.   He had a girlfriend named Cookie in his last few years in the “not entirely lost your mind” section of the facility where he lived until his death.   Once, when I visiting him, he apprehensively mentioned that “Other people are telling me Cookie has dementia, but I don’t see it.”   I was worried that he would be offended by the response that popped into my head, but I said it anyway.   “Dad, that’s because yours is worse than hers.”  He understood the answer, and fortunately, took my comment equanimously.  

If your dementia happens to be worse than mine, you won’t recall anything I wrote five years ago, and frankly, what I wrote about clear air turbulence last week was quite different from five years ago, so rather than consign these poor old pixels to the recycle bin where they will eventually be permanently deleted, here’s a sample:

The wind is calm, the sun not too harsh as it gently washes over the nooks and crannies of earth’s face, feeding the trees and plants that keep our hearts beating.  The air is clear, you can see forever, and the sky is blue.   Then, out of that blue comes a nerve-shattering jolt, as though some invisible Thor smacked your airplane with his giant hammer.   Or, for those of us residing in California, as though this was a few months ago and you were sitting at your desk when the ground around you suddenly shifts and nearly knocks you off your chair, and then shakes, rattles and rolls you while you rise, stand in the doorway, and watch the objects around you shatter as they fall off the shelves.

Clear air turbulence is officially abbreviated as CAT, so to let the CAT out of the bag, here’s a quick rundown of the why of it.   It’s fundamentally about wind shear, which is the thing that happens when sudden changes in the speed and direction of air masses collide with each other.  It often happens on clear days, I think, because some of those masses have chased the clouds away. 

In big airplanes that travel high, turbulence is often caused by the jet stream, which can dip low but usually hovers somewhere around 30,000 feet.   You can’t see it, but when you cross into or out of it things can get shaky.   In small airplanes flying at lower altitudes, wind shear and the resulting turbulence can happen when a strong wind blows along the top or side of mountains.   Those winds typically propagate upwards, so it’s not unusual to experience sudden, unexpected turbulence when flying around the mountains.   But mostly it happens due to convective currents, which create thermals that can cause the air to rise or descend rapidly.   Convection is really another word for moving heat around, and it’s the uneven heating of the earth that in fact causes most of the phenomena we call weather.

Clear air turbulence can be quite the hazard, although it doesn’t happen that often.   Severe turbulence in airliners has caused serious injuries in 163 people between 2009 and 2022, according to the FAA, but that’s only counting the ones on airliners that are reported.  This year, which my computer tells me is 2024, has been particularly bad, likely because weather has become increasingly bad throughout the earth.   It’s the ones in small airplanes that I worry about, of course, well, you know why.

By definition, CAT can come scratching anywhere at any time.   In my lifetime it’s happened often.   It happened when Hillary lost, and when I received my stage IV cancer diagnosis, to name just two out of the many.   For some, the fear of clear air turbulence can lead to avoiding flying altogether.   I prefer to meditate on Tennyson’s reminder that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, because even when hiding in the basement bad things can happen to good people.  I suppose it can be summed up in the classic words of the famous 20^th century philosopher Bumper Sticker, who reminds us: “Shit Happens.” 

So that’s the post, and if you think you have read it before, you may be more demented than I.   Please take a cue from my father, and don’t take it personally.   Shit happens.

Ever since the tender age of 14, when I was struck with an epic case of mononucleosis that left me nearly bed-bound for six months, my life has been an epic battle between lift and drag.   Power is sometimes referred to as energy, as in Einstein’s “e=mc²” formula, or, as I like to call it, the “it” in Burt Bacharach’s “What’s It All About, Alfie?” In car and airplane engines, power is often quite anachronistically referred to by the number of horses required to get you from here to there, as if horses could fly!

All sorts of things impact power, which is why it is so important and even occasionally interesting.   Chemicals, such as gasoline and caffeine, which to me serve very similar functions, have a big impact on power.   I know my airplane can’t get off the ground without gasoline in its tanks, and I can hardly make it to the kitchen without caffeine in mine.  But the world around us also has a lot to do with it.

If you happen to be in some sort of relationship with another human being, that relationship in so many ways can impact the amount of power you might have in the universe.  It could be a relationship with a partner who shares a bank account or has a desire to have power him or herself, a cantankerous boss who might be inclined to direct you to work for a living, or even an employee who manages to subvert the very direction in which you choose to aim your power.

Energy is a big part of flying, and some say its management is the most important thing to understand when learning to fly.   In a previous post I wrote about the phenomenon of being “behind the power curve,” which is the interesting thing that causes airplanes to do the opposite of what you tell it to do.  It is often how my life plays out every day, when I not only end up doing the opposite of what I tell my body it should be doing, but I also end up doing the opposite of what other people think my body should be doing.  That may have more to do with my mother than caffeine, but thinking those sorts of things leads to feeling like a victim which has the untoward effect of depleting one’s power.

Airplanes with propellors to my limited knowledge have engines that are designed to turn them.   The speed and strength with which they turn those propellors is the result of the power the engine generates, but airplane engines can’t work in a vacuum.   Just like their human companions, they require air to breathe, and just like their human companions, the density of the air they breathe effects how much power they generate.

You know that air gets thinner as altitude increases, until there is none left and you are in outer space.   Humans don’t breathe really well when there is no air, so if you want to live there you’re going to have to figure out a way to breathe.  As a result of air getting thinner, therefore having less molecules per box of space, most airplane engines lose about 3% of horsepower for every thousand feet they climb.  So if you’re flying at 10,000 feet, you are going to lose 30% of your power.

Now, I have tried it a few times and I know it’s true.   Furthermore, unless you have a pretty powerful engine, you’re not going to be able to make it too far upwards.   My Lycoming 360 normally-aspirated engine is rated to take me to about 16,000 feet, but I’ve never gotten it above 12,000 without it telling me in no uncertain terms that it didn’t have the energy to take me higher.   I felt as though it really wanted to, because I anthropomorphize things that need to be taken care of, but as much as it wanted to it just didn’t have it in her.  12,000 feet above sea level gets me over most of the mountains in these necks of the woods, so I don’t complain a lot, especially because I don’t have the budget to do much about it.  

But altitude is distance in only one of the dimensions in which we are aware we exist.  Getting above it all is really nice, I must tell you, and an extremely important trait to develop in this wild and crazy life.   But when your engine truly doesn’t have the power to get you there, there’s at least one more direction in which to travel, and as anyone who grew up in the Midwest will tell you, there’s a lot of that direction out there as well.  

Most pilots know this trick well, because even those pilots who cross oceans in big jets have spent time flying very low-powered aircraft.    It is, arguably, a lot more fun.  The trick is that it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of power to get wherever it is that you want to go.   A little Piper Cub J-3 airplane with a Continental engine delivers only 65 horsepower, but it could take you to Timbuktu if you wanted it to and knew where the hell it was.   For that matter, one healthy horse that can swim probably could as well. It doesn’t take an Einstein to re-write the mass equivalence formula, and simply say that energy equals fuel times Times Square plus money plus motivation which I guess is just another form of energy.   Something like that.

This is where my lift and drag problem comes in, which in aviation lingo really turns out to be an energy management formula.   When there’s a load of drag on an airplane, let’s say your airplane suffers from something like fibromyalgia or chronic metal fatigue syndrome, lift suffers and so you need to put your nose down and get more airflow over your tired wings.   You’re just not going to go any higher, but you will go further and perhaps with a couple of more fuel stops you will eventually get where you are going.   You will be flying slower but potentially farther, and you may end up flying so slowly you can feel the buffet of a stall approaching.   It happens in life, which is why in my last biennial flight review Don Becker had me practice slow flight.   Slow down until you are flying right on the edge of a stall.   Sometimes it’s the only way to fly.

It isn’t clear to me whether the long-time wife of an acquaintance was killed because she fell asleep at the wheel or lost her bearings as she wandered into the oncoming lane while driving up the Coast Highway in the early morning fog.   It was a horrific tragedy, leaving so many behind to grieve her loss, so many who loved her.

At times I blame machines, how they get bigger and faster, and harder to control.  More to the point, what we humans dream up and build for our convenience and amusement often destroys the natural world we live in, and in a horribly circular way destroys ourselves as well.  Sometimes I think I would fit in well with the Amish, whose distaste for the over-mechanization of modern life matches my own proclivities.   I even find the simple-shirted, suspender look appealing, let alone that forever stylish straw hat, and although I don’t think I would mind surrendering this wonder of machinery known as a MacBook Air, I am not sure if Amish codes of conduct would permit me to use my beautiful old Royal typewriter instead, and my handwriting has deteriorated almost beyond recognition.  

But the hardcore reality is that life is dangerous even for the Amish, who likely must watch out for their kids getting run over by a horse-drawn carriage or kicked in the face by the irritated horse who was forced into drawing it.

While it isn’t certain, it is likely that alertness had something to do with Joel’s wife’s demise.  It is that very thing, or should I say the lack of that very thing, that I imagine is the root of more tragic deaths than any other thing.   It is one reason that so many physicians these days are taught to inquire about sleep, and why we are inundated with articles about its importance for health.   It is why air traffic controllers and commercial pilot unions insist on regulating the length of shifts, and why we are advised not to get too close to heavy machinery or drive while under the soporific influence of even mild over-the-counter medications.

I would, however, like to stake a claim that there are a few things for which alertness is not a benefit.    Counter-intuitively, I certainly could not write these words were it not for my chronic insomnia and resulting somnolence.   In the truly rare moments I feel fully awake, alert and able to take on life’s slings and arrows, I am unable to sit at a keyboard and find the patience or even the ability to put a reasonable sentence together.     It may be a simple case of classical conditioning, but writing anything other than a brief, semi-formal, slightly nasty email while wide awake is as far-fetched as pole-vaulting my way over Cincinnati.   Even the thought of being hyperbolic while fully awake seems quixotic.

I won’t step foot in a cockpit, however, without being sufficiently caffeinated and at my highest level of alertness.   That is one reason I am deeply opposed to fearlessness, because it leads to a deadly lack of vigilance.    Fear is our friend for many reasons, and not the least of which is that it keeps us awake.    “Keep the dynamite dry,” I once heard spoken on a business call with a private equity guy.   I had to look that one up after the phone call and discovered that the phrase likely emanated from “keep the powder dry,” an injunction given to soldiers to ensure that their gunpowder was going to be effective when it came time to blow someone’s head off.

Boy Scouts have less pithily endorsed the motto “be prepared.”   Preparation is one thing, I suppose, but vigilance is quite another.   Keeping the dynamite dry to me means more than being prepared.   It means that perhaps each of us may add a few more years to our wretched lives by remaining vigilant.   In aviation lingo, the 3-word mantra is “see and avoid.”  

I am being pressured now to get out of bed and hit the road.    Need to take a shower, and down my fourth cup of coffee.    Damn it’s hard.  But before I do, and before you mockingly point out in the comments below that I choose to drive cars and fly airplanes, just hold off while I compose my next blog post on the value of hypocrisy.

I want to express my gratitude for those of you who have been contacting me “off-line” stating that you are missing my posts. It seems that something went wrong in the virtual universe and I lost the ability for my posts to be distributed to subscribers. I am working on this now, with able help from Pakistan. Thanks again for your patience while we struggle to fix whatever has gone amiss.

I once saw a psychiatrist who told me he thought that I had “a little bit of autism.”    I confess that although by that time I had spent a big chunk of my life working with folks who had been formally diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, I just didn’t see it in myself.   Maybe the reason I couldn’t see it was because I had a little bit of autism.

Children who are diagnosed with autism have a notoriously difficult time switching from one activity to another.   Once the child gets into a groove, they get into it so deeply that it takes a Herculean effort to get out of it.  I too have difficulty with transitions, but it’s the opposite kind of difficulty.   That psychiatrist, perched in his leather throne in his basement office in a converted Victorian Pasadena house, bless his heart, didn’t really see the true me, the one whose attention deficit disorder superseded the 15 other diagnostic categories in which I seem to fit so cozily into.    It is that disorder that captures the distractibility, impulsivity and inattentiveness that might be most apt for my tombstone, but kids, please, if either of you ever read this, don’t put that onto my tombstone.  For me, transitions are way too easy.   It’s the thing I want to do all the time.   Give me a transition any moment of the day and I’ll gleefully take it.   There’s a road less traveled!  Let’s go there!

Psychologists who work with kids who have difficulty with transitions have developed a variety of techniques to help them with this important task in life.   One of them is called “priming,” which is simply a way of warning the child ahead of time that a new activity is going to begin.   It’s really the same thing pilots do when adding fuel to a carbureted engine before igniting it, or what drivers of cars with manual transmissions do when they pull out the primer and crank the engine, or what happens when you push that little bulb five times on your lawnmower.  Air traffic controllers also prime pilots with the word “Expect,” as in “expect further clearance at…”  

Transitions occur on every flight.   There are transitions between various stages of flight (such as takeoff, cruise, approach) and transitions between different kinds of airspace.   Knowing where you are, what you are doing, and what you are getting into is important in flying, as it is everywhere else in life.   As a couples therapist, I always used to say that knowing where you stand in a relationship is more important than where you stand.  

Airspace around the world is divided into 3-dimensional sectors, and by and large, each sector is assigned its own radio frequency.    When flying from one sector to another, ATC “hands you off” to the next controller by telling you to “contact [NorCal] approach” and then gives you the frequency to dial into your radio.    When you are flying around a towered airport, you need to change from the ground frequency to the tower frequency, and then from the tower frequency to the frequency of the sector you are flying into.    The tower controller will let you know when to do that by reciting the magical words “frequency change approved.”  It’s reassuring to hear those words, because it signals that you are now leaving somewhere and going somewhere else.   It is a transition warning, a priming for the adventure to come.    It’s also a signal of relief that you have safely left the earth and made it to the next phase of flight.  Some pilots will respond to the approval with a nicety, such as “Have a Nice Day.”  It’s rare, however, to hear anything clever, unless you’ve known the controller for a while.  I’ve never heard a pilot respond to the approval with anything like “Hope your kids get over the flu,” but I’m sure it’s happened.

On the ground, I have often been in the position of wanting to know when my desire to change frequency is approved.  Maybe it’s my “little bit of autism,” but I find it difficult to know when and how it’s okay to transition to my next activity.    It’s hard for me to negotiate that part of life, especially in conversation.   There are several people in my life who seem to think I have all the time in the world to talk on the phone, and even when I do, there’s only so much a fellow can take.   What do you do to indicate you’ve had enough without hurting the other person’s feelings?  

As a therapist, it’s easy, because you’ve already set the expectation that the session will last 50 minutes.    It’s not uncommon for me to prime the transition with clients who inconsiderately ignore the timeclock.  “We only have 10 minutes left today, so we should talk about….”  But in the rest of life, it would be nice if there was some sort of structure as there is in the air traffic control system, someone who can inject him or herself into the conversation at just the right moment, dictatorially demanding: “Frequency Change Approved.”  It is, after all, a rather polite way to say what is really meant: “I’m done with you.   Get out of my airspace.  Now get on with your life.”   Frequency change approved.