Alitalia doesn’t let you choose your seats.   It wasn’t a problem on the short flight from Trieste to Rome, but now, on the long flight from Rome to Los Angeles I find myself in the center aisle.  Perhaps because I worked my way up to business class with frequent flyer points and not hard cash I don’t quite merit my preferred window seat, but I am not complaining.  I am in the first row, and especially grateful for the 30 square feet of real estate, and especially the “lie-flat” seats that comes along with the business class fare.

In the center aisle I am almost robbed of the view out the window, but I can see enough to give me that jejune thrill a child has when riding his bicycle for the first time without thinking.

It is a beautiful, crisp morning at the Rome airport, situated well outside of Rome on the west coast of the Italian peninsula.   We are departing to the north, or so it appears, although I thought I caught a glimpse of the number 27 roll by as we were slowly taxiing to the runway.   That would mean we were actually departing to the west, which might be possible given the California-like, confusing northwesterly sloping coastline.

It has taken us a long time to taxi, probably indicating there were many flights queued up ahead of us, and given that we were awake at 3:30am in order to make our first departure from Trieste, I was just too tired to keep my eyes open to read during the taxi.   So I surreptitiously plugged in my iPod and it graciously provided the soundtrack:  Jimmy Buffett, Frank Sinatra, America, Jay and the Americans.  This is how taxi and takeoff should be experienced.

Leaving Trieste is sad in an ineffable sort of way.   Nothing sad here happened to me, with the exception of the mosquito bites, the few remaining signs of cancer, ridiculous quantities of carbohydrates and the impossibility of finding anything even resembling an American breakfast.

It was good to be away from the stage on which the last year unfolded.    Yet, I am so looking forward to going home.    Although it is going to be another stretch of PT/CT scans and doctor’s appointments, there really is no place like home, Dorothy.   Nowhere that grants the illusion of safety better than the place I only part-jokingly say my wife built.

We are lined up now with the center line, so we are number one for departure.   The gargantuan Pratt and Whitneys roar to life and I imagine the pilots, only about 15 feet in front of me, hand over each other’s hand, pushing the throttles all the way forward, their other hands gently cradling the yoke while they guide the Boeing down the runway with their feet.   Sure, I would rather be up there, but it is so much less stressful back here.  Go Alitalia, I think, and leave the driving to them.

I don’t know what kind of trees I am seeing out the window, but they are lined up too neatly to have been planted by nature.   Their canopy sits awkwardly on top of their straight trunks, with twisted branches like the Baobob tree gracing the cover of many a St.-Exupery “Little Prince” book.    The whole 777 is vibrating and whirring now as it picks up speed down the runway, and the rows of trees seem to unwind past the window.     In less than half a minute, the nose lifts off the ground haughtily, almost as if the big jet is smirking at the earth, saying “I don’t need you, buddy, any more than you need me.”  I don’t think all airplanes would talk that way if they could, but this one would.

We climb, steadily, gently, but severely, out over the deep blue Tyrrhenian Sea, then, after a minute or two, turn left to chase the sun.    We will chase it for 12 hours but never catch it, the earth spinning in the same direction in which we are flying.   For many on this magnificent technological behemoth, this is the start of an adventure in a new, strange, English-speaking part of the world.   For me, I am at once returning home and leaving Trieste behind.    I wonder if I will ever return, and if so, what fragments of memory will bring tears to my eyes.   And when I arrive home, what will spark the memories of Trieste’s sinuous streets, late-night strolls through piazzas, writing and drinking coffee in antique coffee shops, music, humidity, and an incomplete jigsaw puzzle?   Ultimately I suppose it doesn’t matter whether we are here or there, because it is all part of the journey.   And even if you are relegated to the center aisle, there’s still a lot to see.

Way down south, they call the wind Mariah, but in Trieste, they call it the bora.   It blows across the rugged mountains of the Karst, is pulled down the hillsides toward the Adriatic Sea, picks up speed and wreaks havoc over the land and sea below.

The bora wind is katabatic.    Katabasis is Greek for “descending,” so katabatic winds are also rather poetically called “fall winds,” although they don’t necessarily occur in the fall.   (Really they should be called “falling winds,” redolent of something Frank Lloyd Wright might have designed.)  Katabatic winds occur when a cold air mass, which (by virtue of the fact that it is cold and its molecules are squeezed together tightly—I think) is heavier than the air beneath it, “falls” down the slope of a mountain replacing the warmer and lighter air below.   The result is a bitter cold, sometimes ferocious and always chaotic wind.

Intimate knowledge of the wind is essential for pilots.   If it weren’t for the breeze, I like to say, flying would be a breeze.  Flying in turbulence requires a special set of skills, and being able to land in stirring crosswinds is the difference, perhaps, between a pilot and an airplane driver.

The city of Trieste itself is designed to some degree to shelter its inhabitants from the wind, with thin winding streets and some buildings sporting railings built into their walls onto which people can grasp when the wind winds up.

Life in Trieste without the bora might be pleasant enough, but it would lack that reminder of what living in the real world is like.

Many years ago a very green intern I was supervising complained to me that she just wasn’t getting this therapy thing.   She was a chipper one, effervescent, with a quick and easy smile.   I liked being around her, but not for too long.   So I played a hunch and asked her what her own, personal goal in life was.    She said, predictably, that it was to be happy.   “Isn’t that everyone’s goal?”

Trying to be kind, I simply said, “I want you to do me a favor.   When you go home I want you to think about that goal of yours.   Think about it long and hard.   Then, when we meet again next week, let me know what you come up with.   If it’s the same thing, then that’s fine, but I want you to think about it.”

Sure enough my childish ploy worked, just like telling a kid not to eat his tofu might work the first time.   She came back and said “You were right!” even though I said nothing to be right about.  “I don’t want to be happy, not all the time.   That wouldn’t be real life.”

“No, it wouldn’t be real,” I said simply.   “You want to feel things deeply, and sometimes that means happiness and sometimes it means pain, guilt, shame, or anger.”    She then said she thinks she now better understood how this therapy thing worked, and from then on—when she stopped trying to guide her clients towards happiness, she became a more competent therapist.

Trieste has a raw beauty to it.   The deep blue Adriatic, the quaint, cobblestone streets that wind their way gently up the side of a hill, the singular kindness of the people you meet, the magic of the baristas concocting what they claim to be the best coffee in the world, and so much more.   There is beauty all around, yet even without the bora blowing much of it can be dreary as well.     No one quite knows for sure why, for example, it happens to have one of the highest suicide rates in Italy.

If we had the mindset of thinking that life is about being happy, we wouldn’t welcome the bora, in whatever form it manages to assault our lives.   We wouldn’t dare go outside and tussle with it.   We would avoid life’s challenges rather than face them.

A souvenir bookmark that accompanied a purchase I made at one of Trieste’s numerous bookstores has two pictures on it.   One is a picture of the grand palace and the other is of the bora as it tosses the sea over the pier.   The juxtaposition of the two photos is compelling.   Can we really appreciate the grandeur of our shelters without bowing to that which we seek our shelter from?

Morning:  Caffe San Marco

There is an older man, maybe my age, sitting at the table where the three girls sat yesterday.   He is fanning himself with a menu.   He must be Italian, because he is reading “Il Piccolo,” but he is a bit strange because his eyes are darting around the café, probably taking in all the tourists, and occasionally looking back to his newspaper and reading out loud although there is no one with him.   His left leg is bobbing, and now for no apparent reason he moves the plastic sugar and napkin holders over to the side.  Now both his legs are moving, his feet planted but his knees nervously moving back and forth as if he were fanning a flame with them.

He has no drink in front him, nothing but the newspaper which he occasionally lifts off the table, opens, reads from and then replaces on the table in not enough time for him to read more than a sentence or two.   He rests his right elbow on the table now, and cups his chin in his right hand.

I see him, and I think he sees me watching him.   But I don’t know what he sees, what he is thinking, who he thinks I am and what I am typing.  I see him, but I don’t know him, not at all.

I am not without judgment.   I think he is off, and maybe he thinks I am as well, especially if he noticed the funny hat I was wearing when I walked in to this place.

No, I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me.   We are bookends, of sorts, as all of us are to each other.   Between us there are other lives, each of them bookends as well.  Inside each of us resides the self-deceptions, the illusions that we define as the adventure of our lives.   The things we see, the complexions on the faces, the surprises, the mysterious aches and pains.   We are divided by our beliefs, our stories and our convictions.   But we are united in that together we share in the illusion that all of this somehow matters, that hearts can be healed and broken, dreams fulfilled and shattered.

Afternoon:  Café Specchi

Now, I am sitting in the Café Spechhi as have generations before me.  There is a cruise ship parked a half-mile from here.  The ship is Cunard’s Queen Victoria, a mountain of steel turned on its side.   Its passengers ramble through the piazzas, park themselves in restaurants, snap photos of each other with architecture in the background.   They are young and old, and speak in languages foreign to each other.

I am 62 years old now, and before this last year of cancer I thought of myself as a 45-year old, which is old given that just a couple of years before that I thought of myself as about 35.   I entered my sixties in absolute disbelief that the numbers were so high, that I managed to let so many of the years go by.   It isn’t that I wasn’t using or even abusing those years.   I was building, I was living as much of those years as I could, but it still felt as though I took a nap and woke up and looked at the clock and decades had passed.   I don’t know what to do with the brevity of this life, how to breathe and grieve my way through it.

After the diagnosis, after the surgeon’s gasp as she looked at the picture of the big black spot covering my throat that represented the primary tumor on the CT scan, I decided that the next year of my life, if I had one, would be devoted strictly to healing.   I had little choice, as the treatment knocked me out for the count and I couldn’t work or play if I wanted to.  It has been one hell of a parenthesis, and yet as the days go by I begin to forget.   I anticipated forgetting, even looked forward to it.   It is a platitude that one doesn’t remember pain, and that is certainly true.  You remember that the suffering was there, and occasionally you recall the images and your heart quickens with the memory, but the pain isn’t there.

Yet, fortunately, there was little physical pain to the treatment.  Plenty of psychic pain, more worry and fear than I would ever like to see again, but the physical pain was quite manageable.   It strikes me that if we are lucky or so inclined, we get to travel to different places during our life times.   Many of those places we tell ourselves we wish to return, as I did with Ireland and Northern California.   Whatever the place gives us, whatever adventure it hands us, we want more of the same.  And then there are those places we land that we wish to never see again.   This last year of chemo pumps, IV fluids and snap-down radiation masks is such a place.

Trieste is one of those places to which I would like to return, but my heart wouldn’t be broken if I don’t.   It is that sort of place.   It is somewhere that is nowhere.  But that is the point.   We are all, each of us, someone who is no one, someone whose life matters to those who believe in us, but their lives too are fleeting, and they too are only the collection of illusions that they hold.   We may ultimately be creatures of flesh and blood, but as far as I am concerned we are really only matter as long as we matter, for as long as we are remembered and felt.

There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own.  They are the lordly ones!  They come in all colours.  They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists.  They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.   They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists.   They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding.  When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.  They laugh easily.  They are easily grateful.  They are never mean.  They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness.  They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.   It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.

—Jan Morris, 2001

Usually when I read a paragraph more than once it is because I find that I am sleeping through it and don’t remember what I just read, but this one— from Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere—  I read repeatedly because to me it may as well be a prayer.

The first time I read it I imagined her Fourth World as the nation of travellers, and I thought Morris painted an exquisite picture of the people I have come to know through travel.   I recognized myself in the description, as well as so many others.   But then, reading it over, I thought her Fourth World described instead the nation of the expatriate, something I am not and unless Trump is elected president, something I am likely to never be.

The third time I read it I felt exposed– pleasantly lost and found at the same time.   It was as though I was wandering the meandering streets of an ancient city knowing I had no idea where I was in relation to anywhere else, but confident that soon I will spill out onto a known boulevard, exactly where I should be.

I have often wondered why I love to travel, what is the spark that motivates me.   I often just want to go someplace, and have as long as I could remember.   I imagine myself happy when I travel, but that is not exactly how it feels.   A couple of years ago my wife reminded me that the emails I send her while I am sitting alone in some skanky hotel room reveal deep loneliness and longing.   It is true, and my recollections of most of those cities whose ports of entry stamps bloat my passport—Tallinn, Helsinki, London, Paris, Hanoi, Manila, Yerevan, Budapest, Berlin, Tbilisi— would never warrant an adjective even close to happy.

I am happy, though, when I am with people who I meet, be they locals or expats, because happiness I suppose for me dwells in the texture of relationships with people and not place.   But there is something else, something other than happiness, that pulls me to place.   Given how often I have read over Morris’ paragraph above, I suspect it has something to do with her idea of a fourth world, that world she calls Nowhere.

Perhaps in my own version of Morris’ musings, I might prefer to call that fourth world Elsewhere, because for me, the magic that resides in travel is that I am not in the comfort of my own nest–  my warm, loving, familiar, and nurturing nest.  I am Somewhere Else, a place that isn’t so safe, a place that challenges my ability to communicate with others, to find a glass of water or a bathroom, or to figure out how to use a squat toilet.

Home is indeed as it should be—a place of safety and nurturance, but one cannot live on safety alone because that is a stagnation of its own sort.   I don’t know if you engage in this silly game, but I do more often than I would like to admit:  when I wake up in the middle of the night, or after I turn all the lights off and my wife has already gone to bed, and it is now pitch black, I am forced to navigate my way around the house blindly.    I bruise easily, and if I move too quickly I might even meet a wall or corner forcefully enough to nearly knock me out.   So while I am temporarily blind I imagine I have lost my eyesight altogether and am destined to navigate my way through touch and memory alone.  I take minor perverse delight in succeeding, although I do welcome my irises eventually adjusting and the gray visual world coming back on line.

Navigating blindly is uncomfortable, but it is easy to do in the familiarity and comfort of home, where you have a solid map of where the bed should be.   Home is the somewhere you know, the somewhere familiar.    And while the phrase “familiarity leads to contempt” is usually reserved for people interacting with other people, it may be equally as true for people interacting with the places they inhabit.

So it may well be that I do this traveling thing not to be happy, but to be uncomfortable, not to be familiar, but to be unfamiliar—not to be somewhere but instead to be elsewhere, or, in its ultimate form, to be nowhere at all.   And perhaps those of us who do the same find ourselves inhabiting a fourth nation, a nation with no singular passport to stamp, but a nation whose inhabitants have a deeper understanding of what it means to be confidently lost.  We laugh easily, we are easily grateful, we are never mean.

I am writing this particular post in a café in Trieste, Italy, not too far from where Rilke wrote the beginning of his “Duino Elegies.”   So it is fitting that I defer to Rilke’s poem from his “Love Poems to God.”   I am not sure this is the best translation, but here it is:

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things teach us:
to fall,
patiently trusting our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

I am convinced that the trick to becoming an expert at landing an airplane– or anything for that matter, is to approach each landing as if it were the first.   You bring everything your body knows to whatever first you are engaging in.

In Rilke’s poem, we learn to land better by first surrendering to “earth’s intelligence,” and then beginning again (and again), as a child.     We learn to land not by entangling ourselves in knots of our own making (over-thinking), but by instead maintaining what the Buddhists call a “beginner’s mind.”

I used to play tennis a bit in high school, and I find that whenever I am away from the game for a decade or so, my first time back I tend to play exceptionally well (for me).   The same is true for flying.   If I am away for a while and then return my first flight looks like I’m a pro.   It is the next 20 flights that look bad, because I am thinking rather than trusting what I already know.

There is an old story about how the philtrum—that little fold beneath your nose, comes about.   When we are conceived, the story goes, God gives us all the knowledge in the universe, but when we are born God touches us just below the nose and we forget everything.

In the course of mastering any skill, our task isn’t necessarily how to learn that which we don’t know, but instead, with the mind of a beginner, surrender to what is already known.

Here is Rilke again:

If the angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.

Trieste, Italy:  Tommy Roe is singing “Sheila” over the speakers at the Caffe degli Specchi in Trieste.    He is pretending to be Buddy Holly.   And now Bobby Vinton is crooning Blue Velvet.   Warmer than May her tender sighs.

I have no idea why American music from the sixties is—apparently—so popular in Italy.   To me, it seems so out of context and awkward, as if it should be welcoming to me as an American, but it isn’t.   I certainly don’t expect to get a good hamburger here, or even a good New York pizza (where, by the way, it was invented.)   But awkward or not, it just so happens to be my favorite type of music, and as such, it reminds me somewhat of a good landing at an unfamiliar airport.

As a pilot, there is little in life that compares with the thrill of a nicely executed landing.   Perhaps I am just stating the obvious when I say that in order to get there, or anywhere, you must go on the journey first.   You must take off and fly a while before you can experience the thrill of landing.

It has been said that the greatest thrill for a gambler is winning, and the second greatest thrill is losing.   For a pilot, the first thrill—if not the greatest, is the take-off.  The moment the wheels leave the ground and pilot and passengers are airborne is a thrill unlike any other.   It is a moment of sweet incredulity; it is a moment that happens but somehow is not supposed to happen.   It is similar to the simple, guilty thrill of breaking a rule and getting away with it.   In fact, when humans fly we are breaking the most fundamental “rule” of all—the law of gravity.

For some pilots, the flying itself– cruising above the surface of the earth, is their chief thrill.   Certainly, it is a vantage point one can hardly get any other way.   Personally, I love flying above the traffic on busy freeways, noting how stressful it feels to be down there stuck in a row of cars, and taking a brief moment of appreciation that there is nothing restricting my own movement but the limits of the airplane.

Then there is the thrill of landing.   I am not sure how other pilots measure this against the other aspects of flight, but it is certainly the biggest thrill to me, partly because it is the biggest challenge.   While you have certainly heard the pilot adage that any landing one walks away from is a good landing, there is clearly something special about gracefully touching down, planting the wheels on the ground like a sweet, gentle kiss on the cheek.   It is more, though, than the accomplishment.   It is also the symbolism.   Flying is dangerous– being planted on earth is less so.   Flying represents movement and stretching the boundaries of the possible, while landing represents the passive stillness and rootedness of home.   Travel without the sweetness of returning home yields more of a feeling of being lost than a feeling of safety.

For, as long as one is flying in the cockpit of an airplane, there is no looking across the table at one’s spouse of many years over coffee and tea, reading to each other what we have written.

Hearing about Tommy Roe’s sweet little Sheila whispering in my ear at a café in Trieste is certainly disorienting; where am I?   But a glance above the MacBook Air’s screen reveals the comfort of having a good landing.   There, you see, is the comfort of home.   Warmer than May her tender sighs.

When my mother died, I wrote in a eulogy that one of the many things she taught me was to appreciate and understand paradox.  Paradox is more than merely holding two contradictory ideas at the same time.   What differentiates true paradox from contradiction is reflexivity.   A good example of paradox is the simple three-word statement “I am lying.”   If the statement is true then it is false, and if it is false it is true.   There is a “spinning” quality to a true paradox, like an echo in a canyon that reverberates repeatedly.

When Donald Trump declares that he is not a racist and then states that the judge in the Trump University fraud case must be biased because he (Trump) wants to “build a wall”– that is a mere contradiction.  It is not a true paradox because it lacks reflexivity- the self-invalidating component.    One can find truth in half a contradiction, but one cannot cut a true paradox in half because it is always both true and false simultaneously.

In flying airplanes, in business, and life in general, grasping paradox usually makes us smarter and better at what we do.   In flying, understanding how one can be “behind the power curve,” such that the more energy you add (power) the slower you fly, can save your life.  Or, the fact that when the airplane begins to fall out of the sky due to a wing stall, the solution to the fall is to point the nose down to the earth in order to gain lift.   It is the “Chinese handcuffs” of my youth, where in order to release oneself from their grip you had to push them together in order to pull them apart.

While paradoxes make for deeper understanding, we can also learn from contradictions.   My mother would tell me bedtime stories of how I should never forget that it was the “Christians” who built the concentration camps, and at the same time would instruct me that “if a priest or a nun were to get on a bus or train you should always give them your seat.”    There was no difference to her between “Christians” and Catholics, so her respect for those who she imagined built the camps was perplexing.  She would not, or could not, explain it to me, so I needed to draw my own conclusions.   Her life gave me what I supposed was the answer; when it came to loving her children and her husband, being dedicated in love meant an equal measure of forgiveness and compassion for one’s failings as admiration for one’s strengths.

Appreciating paradox and contradiction also tells us that life is not binary; there are always at least three sides to every story.   If we think we have a choice between the options given to us, we are likely missing something.   In a debate between the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers and the Jewish philosopher-psychologist Martin Buber, the moderator asked them both if “man” was basically good or evil.   Predictably, Rogers said he thought man was basically good.   Buber, on the other hand, said he thought man was “basically good and evil, or not good and evil.”

In other words, it was the wrong question.   Being alive, being “engaged in life,” meant that one would do both good and bad things.   To not do good and evil meant that one was less engaged in life, less fully alive.

Life is full of paradoxes.   Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s massive tome “Principia Mathematica,” which subsequently served as the model for the (now discredited) double bind theory of schizophrenia, was an attempt to solve the “simple” problem of whether or not the catalog of books in a library should itself be included in the catalog.   They concluded, after well over a thousand pages of mathematical computations, that it should not, because it was indeed a different “logical type.”  At that time, I suppose, paradox had no place in mathematics.  I am not sure that these days, in the era of chaos theory, they would have come to the same conclusion.

It is the appreciation of paradox, I believe, that leads one to understand how, in the words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”  It reveals how Nazi officers could engage in mass murder at 10 o’clock in the morning and come home to pet their beloved dogs and play with their children on their living room floors in the evening.   It is the awareness of the self-invalidating circularity within ourselves that allows each of us to understand how we can be the enemy.

If there was anyone who could hear the sound of one hand clapping, it would have been my mother.   There is a Zen koan in which two monks set out on pilgrimages from different places.   They each take vows to not retrace their steps, or to look too far ahead as they walk.   Unbeknownst to each other, they each set out to cross a deep chasm from opposite sides of a thin, reed bridge, and they meet in the middle.   If they were to go forward and cross each other, they would fall to their deaths, and if they were to back up, they would break their vows.    If my mother was one of the monks, I imagine she would have simply sat down on the bridge and spent the rest of her life getting to know the other monk.   She would have found a way to solve the unsolvable.

Along with that song you can’t get out of your head, I’m sure you’ve been wondering just how it is that jet airplanes flying in the clouds know where they are.  This turns out to be really important, because knowing where you are in space is a key ingredient in avoiding another bulky winged object.

The sky, as it so happens, has “roads” on which airplanes travel, which are called “airways.”   Airways, just like their counterparts on the ground, have intersections, which are called “fixes.”  Airplanes typically navigate on airways, flying like a junkie from one fix to another.  Okay, not like a junkie, but I couldn’t resist.

Unlike intersections on the ground, fixes typically have names, and by convention their names all have five letters.  The five-letter convention helps to differentiate them from other abbreviations, such as airports, which have four letter designations, or beacons, which have three.   A good navigator, like a good heroin addict, knows just where and how to get a fix.  (How’s that?)

Given the restriction to five letters, naming intersections can be fun.  I live near a town called Ojai, and there is a fix a few miles from me called OHIGH.   Make of that what you will.

A few years back the ILS approach to Runway 14R at O’Hare had a fix 15 miles out called SEXXY and a final approach fix called KINKY.   I am not sure how or why those have been discontinued, but I imagine that saying to a controller that “I’m between SEXXY and KINKY” could be a bit awkward.

There is a fix called LEBRN near Cleveland over the Cavaliers arena.   They left the name in place even though Lebron James left Cleveland, which was rather oracular of the FAA given his return and his subsequent canonization.

There is, in fact, no dearth of sports-related fixes.  Airplanes arriving at O’Hare sometimes fly through the following fixes: WELCM TEEOO CHCGO BHAWK STNLE CUUPP CHMPN.

Some fixes refer to the stuff that the locality is known for.  Any guess where these fixes are located?  DRLLR, GUSHR, IMPORT, PPUMP, REFYN, DIESL, and OILLL?   If you guessed Houston, Texas, you would have gotten it correct.   Kansas City is known for its barbecue, so along the instrument approach to the airport you will find the following fixes: SPICY, BARBQ, TERKY, SMOKE and RIBBS.

When it comes to food, you can’t get much more direct than along the approach to Lebanon, N.H. airport, which is close to Dartmouth College.  There you will find the fixes HAMMM, BURGER,  and FRYYS.  And one of my all-time favorite fixes is EIEIO, a waypoint near Iowa State University, home of a prestigious veterinary school.

Either the FAA was pulling a Greenland, or they simply got it backward when they named an important intersection just off the coast of the Florida panhandle HEVVN, and another a few miles north of Portsmouth, New Hampshire SATAN.   Clearly, they got those two backward.

Then there are the welcoming fixes, such as those on the final approach to Runway 4 at Newark’s Liberty Airport.   As you fly in, New Jersey-style, you will be passing through HOWYA and then DOOIN.

Now, I have told myself that I would steer clear of politics in this blog, so I will merely report the following and let you come to your own conclusions.   If you find yourself flying to Houston, you are likely to find yourself on either the WHACK TWO GPS arrival course or the TWSTD THREE approach.   Here are the names of some of the waypoints you will find along the way:  CRNKY, FRAGL, MENTL, NUTZZ, PSYCO, TWSTD, and WHACK.   This is no joke; these are waypoints leading you to George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

When I first moved to Ojai there was a man here who taught at a local boarding school.   He claimed he had terminal cancer, but didn’t have enough money for treatment.   He was a lovely young man.   People were nice to him, and they even held a fundraiser on his behalf.   What they didn’t know was that his only illness was sociopathy, so he ended up absconding with the money and disappearing from sight.   No one, to my knowledge, ever saw or heard from him again.  I imagine him living under an assumed name, perhaps in Costa Rica, and having a hell of a time.

I admit that back then I had a tinge of admiration that someone could pull off such a feat, although mostly I was incredulous—utterly bewildered by how anyone could be so boldly immoral.  I typically feel overwhelmed with guilt if I inadvertently bump into someone, and hold the weird distinction of being the only grown person I know who never stole anything as a child.   Once, I even got in trouble because I naively caught my parents lying when they returned a lamp I had broken.   They claimed it was defective, but I spoke up and told the salesman that I actually broke it.   When I got home I was yelled at for not going along with the lie.

As that kid inside me who never stole anything, I have little sympathy for lying and stealing, but I find that I have a certain sympathy for the Ojai sociopath.   After the extraordinary kindness shown to me in the last year, I realize just how touching and heart-warming it is to be appreciated, and to hear people tell you things that otherwise they might have thought, or perhaps more accurately, neglected to think when not faced directly with life’s impermanence.

When things feel really good, it is not difficult to see how wanting or needing them can turn pathological.   I have never felt as loved or as taken care of in my life as I have felt in the last year of struggling with cancer.   In fact, It felt so good to be so well nurtured that there were a few times that I found myself wanting to ask for help when I didn’t need it.

Psychologists call this “secondary gain.”  There is the gain one has from being taken care of, and then there is the emotional, secondary gain of being paid attention to and feeling loved.   Sometimes the secondary gain can even lead to creating symptoms that aren’t there, or even lying about them, in order to receive the benefits of feeling loved.

I once asked a rabbi if it was a sin to lie.   I knew that the commandment about false witness wasn’t exactly the same as lying, and I thought I might be able to pull one over on him.   He immediately shot back:  “What’s the purpose of the lie?”   I had no answer, because, of course, I hadn’t thought that deeply about it.   I said, “I don’t know.  It’s a hypothetical.”  The rabbi responded, “Well then, it depends on why you are lying.   If you are lying to protect someone else’s dignity, then it is not a sin.  But if you are lying to protect yourself, then you are stealing the other person’s dignity, and stealing is a sin.”  I learned two things from that conversation: lying is all about intention, and never to try to pull something over on a rabbi.   You will lose.

Fortunately, I am aware enough of my own intentions to know when I am asking for help for secondary gain; and I have been blessed, or cursed, with enough guilt to choose not to do it (well, at least most of the time).     I also recognize that there is a difference between the sociopath who guiltlessly lies for personal gain and a person who lies and struggles with it. Thanks to Obamacare, I won’t need to be holding any fundraisers.