Fletcher Friday Five

The Debate I Wish Was Happening: There has been a lot of noise the last few weeks around a sweeping veterans bill in Congress. Veterans groups were divided. Congress was polarized. The bill appears dead, but I kept thinking about the debate they were not having, and the one they should be having. When I first sought mental health care through the VA, I waited 14 months to see a therapist. That was not because anyone at the VA wanted me to wait. I have received great care from committed people there. The problem was that there were not enough therapists to meet the need. This Wall Street Journal investigation from last year documents an outcome of this problem. With therapy difficult to access and limitations on alternative treatments for PTSD, veterans can end up on what has become known as the “combat cocktail”. A combination of medications prescribed to mask nightmares, anxiety, depression, pain, sleeplessness and all the other ways trauma shows up. It is not my place to say medication is never part of the answer, but I can tell you that I went through my own cycle of being overnighted bottles of pills they numbed me, but they didn’t heal me. We need a healthy and thriving VA that is fully staffed, able to spend real time with veterans, open to promising new approaches and empowered to provide more than whatever can be prescribed during a short visual appointment. I wish our national debate spent time asking why a veteran can wait more than a year for a therapist, why pills are often easier to access than sustained treatment, and what it would take to build a system designed not just to compensate veterans for their injuries, but to truly help them heal.

Pecking Order: We officially have chickens now. This project was more Lorena than me, but I am here for it. They are a little crazy, fairly messy and apparently wasting no time deciding who is in charge. Watching them sort things out helped me understand the phrase “pecking order.” It is not just a figure of speech. The phrase came from observations of chickens establishing a social hierarchy. The dominant birds peck the chickens below them, who then peck the birds below them, until everyone understands their place. After only a few days, I can confirm that this holds up in reality. We are looking forward to fresh eggs before too long. The chaos arrived immediately.

Back to the Movies: Hollywood is having its best year at the box office since before the pandemic. People are going back to the movies. In high school, I worked at a movie theater as the janitor, cleaning it at four in the morning before school so I could still play sports in the afternoon. During the summers, I also worked as a projectionist, loading each movie into the projectors. I doubt anyone is loading big movie reels anymore, but I loved that job and grew to love the movies. We now have anything you might want to watch instantly on a smart TV, but there is still something magical about seeing one on a big screen with a room full of other people. You laugh together. You get quiet together. For a couple of hours, everyone gives the same story their attention. A few years ago, Lorena and I attended the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick. It was an incredible experience. I never got to see the original Top Gun (my favorite movie as a kid) in a theater, so seeing the sequel that way meant a lot to me. Get out and go watch a movie!

To See Takes Time: This week, I wrote an essay titled Learning to See about opera, a horse painting and the unexpected ways art entered my life. Writing it brought me back to something Georgia O’Keeffe once said: “To see takes time like to have a friend takes time.” We are quick to decide what we like, what we understand and what is meant for us. Sometimes that instinct is right. But sometimes we have simply not stayed with something long enough for it to reveal itself. That is true of friends, and it is true of art.

Happy Hour for Flipper: Last week I read a story that sounded like it might involve a couple getting high while getting engaged, only to discover it was actual elevation, not drugs. This week I heard a story about dolphins getting high and assumed there was no chance it could mean that literally. But apparently dolphins have been filmed gently passing around toxic pufferfish, then floating near the surface and seeming mesmerized by their own reflections. The theory is that they were taking in small amounts of the pufferfish toxin to produce a trance-like state. In other words, happy hour for Flipper. Scientists are not convinced the dolphins were intentionally getting high, which is exactly what their attorneys would say!

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Have a great weekend.
Nathan