My soul is starting to revive. I'm not only writing again, I've started editing Wikipedia again. Things that I stopped doing because I was too exhausted as a truck driver to continue doing, and had given up because I was diverting all my money to pay for a third marriage, and because I had grown weary with life and decided didn't matter, I am once again doing for sheer love. 

Mind you, I've decided that life is much too short for me to spend any more time trying to woo and please a woman. This is not a statement against women. I suspect that, in a different culture, I could have a successful marriage. But my personality, physiology and history, plus this culture and these times, all combine to make an aromatic poop sauce out of my intersex relationships.

I probably say this more than I need to. But it comes into my mind more than it probably will as the years pass and I grow more content with my life. I'm reminded of it now because I've only had this point of view -- that bachelorhood can be a good thing -- for a comparatively short time, and because I'm gradually discovering more benefits. At this time I'm still in the process of convincing myself that the course I've found to be necessary, is also good.

So maybe I should stop feeling embarrassed that I talk about bachelorhood frequently. I notice myself mentioning it and consider the line, "the dude doth protest too much, methinks." Is it evidence that I don't believe what I say, that I say it so often? That I'm trying to persuade myself?

Not necessarily, and as I now think, no. This whole lifestyle, and the possibilities that go with it, cut against the grain of my religion and a lifetime of expectations and hopes. So yeah, I am trying to convince myself, in the sense that the trained areas of my brain still react against what I'm doing and planning. It's how things work when you adopt a transcendent idea and have to put off old ways.

I have my own reasons for deciding to be a bachelor which are actually perfectly consistent with my religion and philosophy; not the stuff I'd talk to just anyone about (it has nothing to do with wanting to caress men's bums). This makes it easier; I'm not rebelling against former beliefs, so much as adjusting my expectations. It's a huge change, and as I get used to it, I start thinking of ways my life can change. For instance, I don't HAVE to be a trucker any more if I don't want to. At least, I'm under less pressure to barf up money to maintain child support plus a marriage.

With the incredible kindness and encouragement of my younger sister, who invited me to live with her family while I finish my recovery from brain surgery and revive my writing, I am beginning to do just that. It's been heavenly to spend frequent sessions discussing books and ideas with her. I didn't know until just a few years ago that we shared literary interests. Now she's encouraging me to consider professional and artistic goals that I'd discarded long ago because they didn't seem practical.

Preston McConkie

5 hours ago near Washington, UT

• ‎3,100 words last night. Kinda scares me; it was comforting, to a degree, to think I was forever done with fiction, because that made me feel like a hard-nosed, practical man. Argh, now I have to contend with that cherished old ghost of creative compulsion.

  
  KLC: 

  I'm glad that you are not forever done with fiction. I think being a "hard-nosed, practical man" is highly overrated. I have no talent for writing, so I am truly appreciative of those persons who do have that talent. I spend a lot of tim...

  • • Preston McConkie Wow, that's profound, "characters who won't suffer if I make a mistake." That was the rub about journalism. When I screwed up, people sometimes got hurt.

      
      BG: On the other hand, my wife and I were talking about how we as readers suffered as teenagers when we thought Gandalf died in the Fellowship of the Rings, and how gratified we were when Tolkien brought him back in The Two Towers. Don't underestimate the impact that a well written character can have upon a reader.
    • Preston McConkie I've struggled for 15 years with the question of whether fiction was a worthy pursuit for a man of faith. More than 20 years ago I began wrestling with the question of whether science fiction was worthy for a man of faith. I determined then, that I wouldn't write atheist future fiction; if I could write in a multiworld universe, God would be its author. Very slowly I began to build a theistic but fascinating multiverse; I just thank my creator that I was raised LDS and have a theology that embraces an infinite universe filled with peopled worlds.
      
      But in 1996 I had what I then considered a permanent transcendent experience that turned me away from fiction and very quickly set me on the road that within weeks had me hosting a radio show and, in a little over a year, writing columns and news. I assumed for a long time that fiction was forever behind me.
      
      But the urge never fully departed and I remembered the joy I used to feel at creating life of my own. And I especially wanted to be someone who helped people feel joy like I felt reading spectacular books. While nothing has surpassed the exalted expansion of the mind and soul from reading God's word, still othing has ever surpassed for giddy pleasure and exhilaration the time I spent hiding in the BYU library during Education Week and devouring "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
      
      But Douglas Adams was the most charming of atheists who ever lived, and I could not decide if my pleasure was lawful. Since then, though, I've read other works and examined the exaltation they light in me, and decided that fiction, in its place, can be more powerful than truth. Undoubtedly this is so, since God himself uses it in his allegories, and Christ taught in parables.
      
      At last, re-reading The Good Earth, for some reason it comes clear to me that fiction can be as noble as anything people create, and simultaneously as diverting, restful and joyful. And then I put my hand to the keyboard last night and felt words flowing.
      
      That doesn't mean my latest composition is worth reading by anyone. I hope it will be, but at least I know it is good for my own soul.
      
      I'm writing in stilted manner right now; I hope I don't sound as pompous to others as it seems that I am. I deliberately aim for a blend of Shakespearean/King James English and the manner of the 19th Century. It's my favorite form of expression, and emulated by my favorite writers, including the inimitable Joss Whedon.
      
      Anyway, here I am, starting over with some of the emotions and hopes of myself at 23, hammering out that last ambitious novel on the eve of my LDS mission to England. That was the last story I finished. Now I have experience and perspective and hopefully can write something more worthy than that 280 pages that, when I came back from my mission, shocked me with its awfulness and has daunted me ever since, knowing that I could deceive myself so utterly about the worth of my own work.
      
      Here's praying I'm at least marginally less sucky at fiction than I was then.

The Cold Turkey Chronicles

Friday, March 2, 12:20 a.m.
Cold turkey since 8 a.m. yesterday. Hour 16.

I know what this feels like. For months on end, this is what it felt like virtually all day, every day, in 1994-95. It had been creeping up on me, becoming a more frequent visitor, ever since Iraq.

Back then it was a feeling of certain doom, and an agitation that made me clench every muscle, sometimes thrash in helplessness, sometimes bite into the back of my fingers as hard as I could, just to distract from the physical feeling of tension like the feeling of onrushing destruction.

This is what's called "dysphoria." It's a major effect of opiate withdrawals. It's the monkey on the back of the addict. I've felt it before but I've always retreated from it because it's awful.

This isn't quite as bad as the last time, when I was coming off 60mg of morphine each eight hours and 40mg of percocet each four. That was nasty. That was unbearable.

Well, this isn't what I'd have called bearable. It's just that I know what it is. I'm so well acquainted with it now, it no longer frightens me. That feeling of doom doesn't mean anything. It's just a feeling.

It hurts. There's no difference between emotional and physical pain; that's been proven. They affect the same nerves, they manifest in the same way. It's just that certain pain is associated with emotions. That's a good thing; a properly functioning body is supposed to manifest neural perceptions that way. It warns us. It cautions us. It chastens us.

Then there are things that take the nervous system and turn it upside down, disconnecting it from reality, artificially punishing or artificially rewarding. It's not a good thing. It's not the way it's supposed to be.

The first thing that did that for me was the nerve agent "blocking" pills I took in Saudi Arabia and Iraq for a month and a half. I trusted the leaders who told me to take it. It was experimental poison and even in theory it was a crazy treatment. The pills were nerve agent. In an average healthy body they were supposed to block a third of the neural synapses. Supposedly this would block the "real" nerve agent from working its way between the synapses. The pill poison was supposed to cause less damage, to work its way out of the system faster.

Whatta buncha crap.

The second thing was the actual nerve agent, cycloserin. On March 2, 1991, we were sitting in the sun in Iraq, resting up after an exhausting four days of dash and smash. The Republican Guards had fled, bloodied, abandoning miles of bunkers filled with chemical weapons. The brass in Riyadh sent down orders for the engineers of the 18th Airborne Corps to blow it all up.

I lay on a cot next to my still mostly loaded ammunition truck and watched the small, gray mushroom clouds billow up as engineers set off demo charges all around us. The explosions were sharp and loud, smacking the ears and shaking the ground, but not with a rumble. With a single, hard wham. And unbeknownst to every fighting man watching, enjoying the show of Saddam's war machinery going up in smoke, that smoke was laced with nerve agent, and pretty soon we were all breathing it.

To be continued. I feel like crap, and I gotta pop some Ambien and ride this out for a while.

I want drugs!


I started using percocet to stave off the head pains in late November last year. The neurosurgeons kept saying "this kind of tumor grows really, really slowly." I suspect they'd reached that point of knowledge saturation whereby new information gets ignored; whatever this "kind" of tumor normally does, THIS tumor wasn't growing nearly as slowly as they expected. My eye went from troubled to useless in a couple of months, and then the pain behind the eye got unbearable.


Thank heaven for Dr. Crow at the Nephi VA Clinic, who had mercy on me and gave me some oxycodone with acetaminophen. Thank heaven for that stash of morphine left over from my herniated lumbar discs, that got me through til the percs arrived.


Now it's been about seven weeks since the docs spent 16 hours combing trigeminal schwanoma out of the nerves on the lower right side of my brain, and the steady aches that gave way to stabbing pains have mostly gone away, so long as I keep my fingers off the unadhered bones that still wobble and squeak in my skull. But getting off oxycodone is no picnic. It took me two months to get off the massive morphine and percs I was taking with the back; fortunately the pain wasn't as severe with my head. But the dysphoria of withdrawals is awful.

Here is today's comment on the matter:

Preston McConkie

I want drugs. I WANT DRUGZ! But I want work. And they make me pee to work. Drugs are in pee. Drugs make bad pee. Bad pee means no workee. No workee, no piles of money. Me like money. Me like money lots! So no drugs. ME WANT GOOD PEE!

 ·  · 30 minutes ago near Saint George

• • 
    

    Brent Glines I think you need to invest in higher quality drugs. The ones you are using aren't hacking it.
    

    19 minutes ago · 
  • 
    

    Preston McConkie That's just because I'm not taking them. They're wonderful when taken. Opium rocks!
    

    18 minutes ago · 
  • 
    

    Preston McConkie The plan is to repeatedly overdose on Ambien and sleep through the withdrawals. Fortunately zolpidem tartrate is a hypnotic, not a narcotic/analgesic (though as they say, there's no gesic like an anal gesic). The only consequence should be occasional dehydration, running out of Ambien, and not being able to sleep for a month afterward.
    

    2 minutes ago · 

Reflections on the DMV: 1990s vs. 2012

These remarks were prompted by an inspiration that came to my about 11 p.m. last night, Feb. 28, 2012. I had just woken up after 20 very refreshing hours of Ambien-fueled sleep, and the day that followed saw me refreshed and energized for the first time since surgery on Jan. 13. 

I always give careful heed to my first waking thought; that's when divine inspiration strikes most easily. It's the time of mental clarity. And my first thought was, It's time to get back to North Dakota and get a job. 

I set work about 4 a.m., text-messaging three drivers I used to work with at Triple R Transport. Two responded, one with glowing praise for a new company he was working with. I contacted said company and got a positive response, as well as an emailed application. To fill it out I needed to get a DOT medical long form faxed to me from my Richfield doctor's office, as well as a current motor vehicle report. 

As soon as business hours arrived I got moving. Through the course of the day I was able to get the records clerk at my clinic to first fax me a form to sign and return, authorizing them to send me a copy of my own friggin' medical records (I don't know if she was being uniquely stupid, or if HIPAA really does require you to give signed permission to send your own records to your own self), sign it, return it, and get the long form.

I also took the trek to Hurricane to the driver's license office. There I obtained my MVR, and realized that this morning's inspiration was perfectly timed.

See, I've been wanting to rush back to work for weeks, but someone always advises me I shouldn't be in a hurry while I'm healing, and each time I've felt that was the right thing to do, and calmed myself. Today I felt certain that the waiting had to end, even though I still have a big hunk of bone wobbling around in my skull because it's only started healing along one edge, and when I touch it I get blinding, stabbing pains. Well, this ain't the first time I've gone to work before my body could handle it, relying on the mercies and power of God.

But when I saw my MVR I first cursed, then laughed. I was certain my MVR was already clean, but not quite. My last ticke conviction date was 03/01/10. 

In other words, exactly two years ago, if today hadn't been leap year. Without leap year, today the conviction would have disappeared from my record.

Well, Wednesday is a good day to get all this other stuff going if it's gonna be finished by Friday and if there's a chance to have an answer on my application by Monday. I'll be taking another trek to Hurricane, of course, so I can get an MVR that says NO CITATIONS ON RECORD   NO ARRESTS ON RECORD    NO DEPARTMENT ACTIONS ON RECORD

This is excellent timing.

And now, the Facebook posts:

Preston McConkie

I spent 15 minutes in line at the Hurricane DMV to get a number so I can sit for at least half an hour so they can take 60 seconds to print me a motor vehicle report.

 ·  ·  · 2 hours ago near Saint George

• • BG:  Isn't government grand?
  • 
    

    Preston McConkie Anywhere else I've been they don't make you take a seat and see someone else for an MVR. What the hell is the point? It saves no time for anyone behind me. They'll wait the same time behind one helper as another. The desk lady spent five minutes telling one old lady which IDs she needed and explaining the forms she had to fill out.
  • BG:  Welcome to the Taxpayer Harrassment Program.
  • TTB: Try LA. When we lived there..3 freakin' hours!!! Ugh:/
  • 
    

    Preston McConkie It turns out they have several types of "numbers." I used to think they just made it confusing on purpose so no one could compare their number to what was on the board and tell how many people were in front of them. I looked at the forty people sitting down and figured I had a long wait; but my number got called after maybe one minute.
    
    However, I missed it, because I immediately started making phone calls. Fortunately when I realized what had happened I just got behind the person at the booth I'd been called to and explained myself, and the lady helped me.
    
    But seriously. If they're gonna fast-track me ahead of everyone else anyway, what was the point of getting the number and taking a seat?
    
    There's a guy named Bob Gross that Mike Leavitt hired around 1998-99 to reform Utah's bureaucracy. I have to remind myself that Leavitt wasn't a pure evil bag of poo, because he built roads and he hired Bob Gross, who was, I believe, former CEO of Taco Bell. Gross took Job Service and all the welfare services and combined them in one office and put an information desk in front to direct people to the right line, instead of having separate offices where people stood in line for an hour only to find out they were in the wrong line.
    
    He also reformed the DMV so it wasn't an exercise in hatred against the citizens of Utah. Before him you had one serpentine line you had to stand in for a couple of hours before reaching a desk. He changed it so the foyer is filled with chairs and you have a fast-moving line to take a number, then have a seat. The person who gives you a number also tells you what forms you need, etc., so that by the time your number is called you've had a chance to get your forms filled out.
    
    All that stuff saved incalculable time, and even more pointless suffering. I bless Bob Gross for it! He tried to run for First District U.S. House of Representatives in 2000 when Jim Hansen retired, but surprisingly, he had the most ineptly produced campaign video of all the seven or eight candidates who had videos; it was so embarrassing that it sank his chances of getting any serious consideration.
    
    It would be unjust of me to gripe about the DMV without giving credit to Bob Gross and Mike Leavitt for making it so much better than it was, and so much better than it is in most other states. And I also had to correct the information about what I expected to happen, versus what actually happened.
  • 
    

     When I lived in Bountiful I had to go to a DMV in West Valley to have my DL renewed. Back then was the days of the serpentine lines, and I used to wonder if people with jobs and working showers had some way of getting their licenses renewed without coming down in person, because it seemed like every person in line was a freak. Tattoos, fat chicks wearing muscle shirts with their sports bras hanging out, enough facial piercings to melt down and build an aircraft carrier, and the general scent of feral aggression. Made me wish I had a license to carry a gun; it's actually the first image that comes into my mind when I remind myself why I DO carry a gun now.

Thoughts on torture

Bruising on my left arm from struggling against restraints during anesthesia.

At about 8 a.m. on Jan. 13, 2012, I went under general anesthesia so surgeons could cut a 12-inch incision along my scalp from near my old widow's peak, along the crown to above my ear, than down and swooping forward, then dropping close along the front of my ear, like a backward question mark or a hand-held sickle. Then they peeled me like an orange to expose my skull and used a rotary drill to bore out two large circles of bone, one about 2.5 inches wide starting at my right temple, the other overlapping it halfway, just above the ear.

I'd been clear under twice before. Once in 1993 when several attempts at an epidural failed because they kept jamming it into my spine at exactly the place where the cord was pinched nearly to nothing by a lumbar stenosis I suffered from later. The second time was Jan. 11, 2012, two days before the brain operation, while a wire was threaded up my arteries (starting at my groin) and into my head and two or three veins were glued shut to starve the tumor growing on the right side of the stem. Oh, and to stuff my fat ass into an MRI for the pre-op scan.

In 1993 I went under peacefully, no worries. In 2012 as I lay under the mask and breathed the scentless knockout gas, I became afraid. I grappled the fear, wrestled it down, kept breathing and knew nothing until I started to revive.

What I didn't know was that, both times at the Veterans hospital in San Francisco last month, as soon as I went under I started to struggle. Coming into the anesthesia room for the second time, the anesthesiologist laughed and said his back had just about recovered from holding me down. For the operation they tied me down.

About three days after the operation when the doc removed the tape covering my incision

On that Friday, Jan. 13, the doctors opened me up around 8 a.m. and stapled my head shut about midnight. Then for ten hours I lay mostly unconscious while they kept me in Intensive Care, sedated and intubated, so that I wouldn't hurt myself during the most vulnerable hours after surgery.

I was sedated for 26 hours. That's pretty dangerous, as I understand it, so there must have been good reasons for keeping me as helpless as possible. And I'm sure they were right, because as soon as consciousness started leaking back in, I found myself in a panic.

I couldn't talk. I couldn't control my breathing. My body was in agony, mostly my left hip, and I needed to shit. Oh, I needed to shit, and I couldn't tell anyone. There were straps around my wrists, but I couldn't keep hold of that knowledge for more than a few seconds, and I kept falling back into a fog, reawakening and rediscovering that I had a tube down my throat, and when I reached for my face to tear it out my arm moved a few inches then stopped with a yank. So I would pull and yank and lurch, and out of a blind fog a voice would come saying, "We'll get that tube out soon, Mr. McConkie."

I remember the first thought that formed itself in words. The first memory of anything before the awful present. It was about what it would be like to have a towel thrown over your face, then have water poured on it so you couldn't breath and were certain you were drowning -- and whether that was OK to do to someone, because they had knowledge you needed.

Just weeks before, I'd finally decided, no. It's not right. No matter what's at stake.

One a bed in the ICU I was strapped for ten hours and I don't know how many of them were punctuated by me coming awake and thrashing in panic because I felt like I was drowning. That was probably when I was trying to breathe and the machine wasn't set to blow air down my throat. My heart would race and my blood oxygen level would plummet but the breather wasn't keeping pace and I was physically helpless; I couldn't freaking breathe! I couldn't scream. I couldn't protest. And my arms couldn't move to tear that awful thing out of me so I could suck in air and gasp bellow my existence.

A worded thought finally fell together in my mind:

"I wouldn't do this to my enemy."

No, not if he was a murderer and held the secret to save a city from annihilation. Because at some point we have to stop and not become what we fight.

I'd believed that for a long time, and nothing cemented it more firmly than my eight days in Iraq in February and March, 1991, when I never had to raise my personal weapon, not because no Iraqi soldier ever got the drop on me, but because Iraqis believed we were better than Iranians. Believed if they surrendered, we'd treat them humanely.

Would they do that now? No, probably not, because America has changed and it's known we're not above either torturing people ourselves, or turning them over to people who will.

It's a terrible line we crossed, and I personally will not go there, nor will I give my assent or turn a blind eye. In my heart I know there are things so wrong that we can't do them to our enemies. No, not even such a physically harmless torture as waterboarding.



I don't know how long it was between my first addled whiff of consciousness, and when they pulled cut off the anesthesia, pulled out the tube and slapped a full-face bipap mask on me. When I came awake that time someone said, "We got the tube out, Mr. McConkie."

I replied, and my voice croaked from my throat being raw -- literally, bleedingly raw. My first statement was a phrase I've never said except to quote someone else, because it's always seemed a bit brazen. But it was heartfelt:

"Thank God."

First spring kimchi

Just ate a few bites of unripened kimchi. Shara loves it; I'm a bit disappointed because it's bitter, possibly because I used green beans for the first time. But it's not bad, not too hot, and definitely healthy. I started soaking beans to eat it with.