Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be

The pains that are withheld for me I realize and I can see . . .
That suicide is painless it brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please.

So says the theme song for the movie and TV series, M*A*S*H. It is no secret that I have attempted suicide on more than one occasion. From the point of view of a person so horribly desperate, depressed, or terrified to believe that suicide is the only way out, it is painless. It is the ultimate pain killer. An end to the horrible emotional pain is just a single act away.

Today, I am the survivor of a loved one's suicide attempt. I was the one who had to make the phone calls. Your daughter/sister/friend/mother/employee is seriously ill and in the ICU. So many questions are asked, but there are no answers for most of them. Did you see it coming? What happened to cause it? How did I fail to see it? How could I have prevented this? What responsibility do I hold in the near-demise of this woman whom I love? How did I fail that person that led her to this point?

I am at the emergency room at an obscene hour of the night, watching as her blood pressure doesn't come up. I see her chest barely rising as she draws a breath. I am answering the doctors and nurses when they ask about medications and medical conditions. I have to tell the police that an argument immediately preceded the event, and there was no violence. I have to watch a policeman sitting next to her bed waiting for a moment of lucidity so that he can validate that claim with her. I learn that she needs to be admitted to the ICU, and they send me home, as there is nothing more that I can do there.

It's amazing, really, when one is sent home from the hospital to "get some rest, as there's nothing more you can do." None of the fear or worry are left behind as you walk through the doors to the emergency room. Instead, it seems as though there is more fear waiting in the car. There is more worry when you get home. None of it was left at the hospital. It's all right there, waiting for you. The rest that you're supposed to get is nowhere to be found. Instead, you lie there, dozing in and out (if at all) and wondering what comes next.

When it's no longer an obscene hour, you get out of bed. There's no more sense in laying around. You get out of bed and forget to eat. You walk around as though you're in a dream. At the same time, you know the dream is not a dream. It is the now shattered remains of what used to be your normal life. Then, as you're the only one who knows the story, you have to make the phone calls. "Your daughter overdosed last night and is in the hospital. No, I don't know why. No, there's nothing you can do to help. Yes, I will keep you updated." You send e-mail to those you can't bear to call. Text messages to others. The secret is no more a secret.

All the questions come pouring in. Why? How? WTF? The phone rings and is answered so often that one begins to wonder if it would be feasible to simply have the phone attached surgically and powered by one's bio-electricity. They're all answered with the same three words... "I don't know."

Fearfully, you stand in the ICU, looking at monitors and not knowing what the readings all mean. Slowly, some level of understanding comes in, and you know which is the blood pressure, the heart rate, the oxygen saturation, the respiration rate. You start to see a pattern in the graphs, as the EKG blips along showing a heart rate and a low, shallow sine wave indicates the respiration. How can anyone make it through such a low blood pressure and shallow respiration? Again, panic sets in because of those three ugly words. "I don't know."

Eventually, the patient awakens. You want to smack her. You want to hold her. You want to finish the job for her. Then she gets what she wanted and you at least get a little satisfaction having choked your frustrations out of her. Clearly that's impractical, so you do the only thing you can. You hold her and cry. You ask her why, but she's not really awake enough to help much, so you still are in that boat. I don't know.

At least she's awake, though. You watch as she improves by the minute. You are happy that the prayers of friends (new and old) and family members (both sides) were answered. God answers all prayers, you remind yourself. Sometimes, the answer is "No." You thank Him, though, that this was not one of those times. You wonder how you would handle it if that were the answer. Again, the three ugly words are brought to the fore. I don't know.

I do know that she's physically well, and I am grateful. For friends, family, answered prayers, and the fact that she's awake and looks and sounds like herself again. I'm not happy that it'll be empty at my house, but I'm happy that she'll be at the hospital for a few days and getting her head straight. I'm hopeful that things can get better for her, as they have for me. There are still so many things that I don't know.

There is something I do know, however. I have a new perspective on suicide. It's not painless. Too many people are hurt by the act of a single person. Too many lives are shattered. Even the attempt brings horror and worry into so many hearts.

I also know that I cannot ever put family or friends through that again. I can not imagine anything that would put me in that place... The place where my mother has to get that phone call saying "Your son is in the hospital because he tried..." The place where my friends and family have to bear the burden of three small, but extraordinarily heavy words.

I don't know.

Maybe there are things I don't know. I just know that suicide isn't painless. The changes it brings are massive and painful. That is a part of my life I just can't return to.

For those who were hurt by my attempts through life, I offer two words that seem far too small. I'm sorry. Truly, deeply, and without reservation, I am sorry. It will never happen again.

Anatomy of a Chinese cluster fuck (or "How you can connect through your original departure airport")

Those who've been in and around the US armed forces for any length of time will be familiar with the term "clusterfuck." This is a situation which has degenerated to near-total chaos, with little prayer of any of it coming to a point where it makes any sense at all. A Chinese one is where it's degenerated to absolute chaos with no prayer of returning to any sense of normalcy. Luckily for me, I get to be in the middle of a Chinese cluster fuck today.

I'm on my way to Chicago. As I type this, I am sitting in the Denver International Airport awaiting a flight to Colorado Springs. "Wait," my regular readers will say. "Don't you live in Colorado Springs? Why are you flying there?"

Yes, I do live in Colorado Springs. The fact that I'm flying there is the icing on the cake of my current situation. Let's start a blow-by-blow of the day, and you'll see how this Chinese... well... you know... came into being.

At 04:45, my alarm went off. I must admit that 04:45 and I have not been on speaking terms in a very long time. If one needs, however, to be at the airport for a flight at 06:30, one needs to get one's ass out of bed at an obscenely early point in the morning. That's what I did. Ready to roll at 05:00, I get in Amy's car, and attempt to turn the key. Note the word "Attempt" in that previous statement. The key won't budge. We try to push it out of the way. No dice. We make an early morning rescue call to her ex husband to get me to the airport on time. Dude was very kind and did not tell us that this was NHFP (Not His F-ing Problem) and did pick us up. More on this later.

Fortunately, flying out of Colorado Springs is much easier than flying out of places like Denver or Chicago. This means that I zoomed through check-in and security and my seat was barely warm by the time the boarding call came. Hot dog, we're ready to roll... or are we?

Those of you who've read my travel commentary in the past will be aware that my colleagues have an unofficial "Never travel with Pappert" rule. It's just a bad scene, as I always have SOMETHING go wrong. Wife stuck without a ticket in Italy. Overnight stranding in London. If it can go wrong, something will. Don't travel with me. Ever.

Anyhow... We are on the plane when the captain got on the overhead and said that Denver was socked in with fog. Ugh. That's what I need... a delay with a tight connection. Being sharper than average, I get on the phone and call United to get rebooked for the morning's flight to Chicago. Friendly lady gets me a booking on the next flight out and wishes me well. Great. No problems.

Until I got to Denver, there were no problems, anyhow. When I got to the gate, dude says to me "I don't have you booked on this aircraft." Argh! I call United and try to get re-booked and the nice fellow in India tells me that my flight left on time, and the fact that I missed it means I'd have to pay a re-booking fee. At that point, my slow simmer turns into a rolling boil. I call American Express travel, the folks through whom my business travel is arranged. They call UAL and get the same story, BUT (light at end of tunnel) I may be able to get some help from the folks at the courtesy counter. Yeah, right.

I wander over to the courtesy counter, and the lady says to me, "I can get you on a flight at 19:40. It'll arrive in Chicago around 23:40." Uh, no. I took the early flight cuz I have work to do, hun. You can do better. She can't. I suggest Milwaukee, Midway, and Indy. No, no, and no. She then gets creative (something for which I'm certain for which the folks at United will sack her). "I found you a flight, but there's a connection."

Great. "You won't like it," says she.

I don't care. I just have to get to Chicago. What's the problem? "You have to return from whence you came." So now, I left Colorado Springs to catch a plane in Denver so that I can get a plane in Colorado Springs so that I can get to Chicago. Got that? Me, either. That's why they call this type of thing a "Chinese cluster fuck" and not a garden variety one.

On to the car... Amy looks online to see what kind of problems she can find with the ignition switch on a Ford Focus. She finds something, and I am not making this up, which says that this is a common occurrence in the Focus. The permanent resolution? A new ignition switch. The short term solution? A hammer.

Yes, a hammer. Apparently, there's a little thingy in the ignition switch which sometimes gets a bit discombobulated, and if you strike the key with a hammer, jamming it all the way in, it'll allow you to turn the switch. Unfortunately, this is a temporary solution, and you are left with three choices when you implement it.

1. Take the car immediately for service (but not to the dealer, as they will replace with the same possibly hinky ignition switch tumbler set)
   
2. Leave the key in the car until you can get it serviced (that's the "Please steal my car" answer, I think)
3. Keep the hammer handy.

Amy's not got the time to handle this immediately, and clearly doesn't wish to leave the key in the car. Instead, she's going to use the "keep a hammer handy" method. At least, that's what she'll do when I return from Chicago. For now, she's driving mine.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you build a Chinese cluster fuck at 05:00. This trip simply HAS to get better from here.

Road trip!!!

So, the trip to Vegas was interesting. I was surprised with how spectacular the mesa country through Utah is... I would've stopped for pictures, but we were on a mission heading out to Vegas and figured we didn't want to make an eleven hour drive into something longer. We made great time, occasionally slipping over to the wrong side of 100mph. Zoom, zoom!

Once in Nevada, we got a quick reminder of how miserable it was when I lived there as a child. Oppressive doesn't come close to describing the heat that permeates the Las Vegas valley. I simply cannot describe the misery. Even if left under cover in a garage, every time I returned to the car, I felt as though somebody could be making pizza in there. I'm sure the black interior has something to do with that, but... Wow. It was effing hot.

The reunion was great. I ran into somebody whose friendship I always enjoyed, but we'd lost track of each other many years ago. We've vowed to make a change there. I also ran into a lady whom I didn't believe even knew I existed in high school. When she saw who I was, she yelped with joy at seeing me again. That was quite the surprise. Lots of memories were rehashed, and the twenty four years between graduation in 1985 and today were put into tidy little synopses as we got caught up.

I spent little time in the casinos, as I hate throwing money away. I did, however, make a 110% return on my blackjack investment dollar (I only put $50 on the table, and came back with $55 in profits). I then promptly turned around and spent the $55 on presents for my children.

Sadly, the trip home was not nearly as fun as the time in Vegas or the trip out. While we made great time through the deserts of Nevada and Arizona (again at times winding up on the wrong side of 100mph... damn, I love my Mustang), and flew through the mesa country in Utah, things got ugly in Colorado. Shortly after passing Grand Junction, 70 was closed and we had to go off the highway to try and find our way past what turned out to be a truck fire. Thankfully, the GPS does wonderful things with that. Sadly, that was just the beginning.

Around mile marker 150, traffic came to a dead halt... and I mean DEAD halt. We sat in the same spot for 45 minutes, and I wound up reading in a magazine waiting for it to move. Over the next two hours, we moved about a quarter of a mile. Fortunately, that quarter of a mile was just enough to get us to one of those "No U turn except..." spots. Yeah, I made an exception for red Mustangs, too. I flipped around and got on US 6 in the hope that it would improve. Ha! I learned that there was an overturned truck on I-70, and that was shunting all traffic off a horrifyingly packed 70 and onto a now hopelessly overloaded US 6.

To add insult to injury, once we got past the mess, I got stopped by a Colorado State Trooper. I rolled down the window and asked "Is there a problem, Trooper?" He said that while I was driving a good speed, I was weaving some and asked would I like to offer an explanation. Politely, I said "Yes, I left Las Vegas at 7am, and just spent the last five hours trying to get from Gypsum to Vail, with little success." He decided that I was sober (good thing, as I'd not had a drop since Saturday night's beer whilst playing blackjack), but suggested that I drive carefully.

I'm home, now... with the woman I love. Unfortunately, it's a short stay, as I'm off to Chicago for work. Whee!

Low Flying Aircraft

For the past few days, there's been a bit of extra military air traffic over Colorado Springs. The US Air Force Academy's commencement going on as I write, and the Thunderbirds are giving their annual demonstration for same. I've seen the Thunderbirds many times over the years, having lived on or near a good number of the Air Force's installations as a kid. We also were stationed at Nellis, where the Thunderbirds are permanently stationed, and our home was under their performance pattern. Regardless of how often I've seen them fly, I'm in awe of the talent shown by the pilots of these amazing aircraft. When I was working on my own pilot's license, I wanted to be two miles away from other aircraft, being a bit of a coward. These guys are flying at hundreds of miles per hour, a few hundred feet off the ground, a couple of feet apart. That's amazing to me.

Anyhow... Today's the USAFA's commencement, and the other service academies have theirs scheduled not long ago (or not far in the future). If my math is right, the classes of 2009 would've made their commitment to their academies during wartime. They couldn't know this war would still be waged in when they graduated, but I'm sure they had to have considered the possibility. To all of those who answered that call when it was most difficult to do so... Thank you, and God bless.

Open space

Being new to Colorado, I'm still amazed at how much open space there is here. My memory from living hear in the 1970s tells me that there's a lot less of it than there used to be, and my family who've been here a while tell me that the lights of homes and development creep further and further up the hills as time goes by. It still does, however, amaze me how open the spaces are here.

Today, Amy and I took a ride out past Canon City into the canyon for which it is named. We drove along the Arkansas River, and were surrounded by amazing geological features and rushing waters. While there were cars and trucks racing by, and a ton of Union Pacific and BNSF rolling stock sitting on the other side of the river, it was amazingly secluded. One cannot hear the traffic racing by over the din of the rushing waters. The spring thaw has the river cold and swollen. Being lost alone out here would be nightmarish, as finding a cellular signal is nigh on impossible until you break out one end of the canyon or the other.

One really interesting thing was the bighorn sheep standing atop one of the rocks... Seemingly surveying his domain. It's amazing that such rugged and forbidding terrain can be home to anything. Amazing creatures, all that live out in that. I really am beginning to love my new home.

I am a packrat

When I was a kid, we moved a lot. It's the life of a family with a career military man at the head of the household. How much did we move? I ran through the list of primary and secondary schools which I attended before I went into the Air Force, and we counted thirteen. Now, I'll grant that some of that is the fact that you change schools into junior high and high school, but still... That's a lot of mobility.

What's that got to do with me being a packrat? I'm getting there.

When we were making all of these moves, we were limited to the amount of stuff we could drag with us. They take a look at the rank of the military member in the family and put a weight allowance on it. Clearly, the bulk of that weight allowance went to important stuff like furniture, appliances, and the like. We kids were given the "before we move, take a look through your stuff and see what can be pitched/donated/whatever." Decisions were made, and some stuff went off to the great PCS (no, not Sprint's cell service... Permanent Change of Station. It's an Air Force term) pile o' detrius.

Since then, I've still moved quite frequently. Since 1988, I've lived in ten different apartments or houses. I think we brats wind up with some sort of nomad gene turned on that doesn't necessarily live in civilian kids. Clearly since I've had ten homes in twenty-one years, I've had to move "stuff." I had friends and family help me move some of it, but let's be honest here... Since I wasn't paying for a mover, nor was DoD, I don't really look too hard at what the hell I've got before moving it. I've actually had boxes move, unopened, more than once.

Every once in a while, though, I find something that I honestly had no clue I had. Earlier this week, I found the senior class tee shirt from high school. What with me weighing in at a less than hefty 145 pounds when I graduated high school and currently weighing about eighty pounds more than that, I did not bother to even make an attempt at wearing it. It was cool to look at the list of names on the back. All 53 of them. Hey, it was a small school.

Sometimes, being a packrat has its advantages. It's instant nostalgia.

Becoming a business owner

I never really thought of it as "I'm owning a business" when I started this. I just figured I was a dude with a camera, a selection of lenses and lighting, a functioning computer which runs Photoshop, and the desire to take pictures of people and things. Of course, I also wanted to get to the part where I could convince other people to pay me for my pictures. That started a couple of years ago when a brewer in India saw a picture I'd taken and asked for a high-def image.

Since then, I've had friends ask me for large pictures for their homes. I've given a few away as gifts, as I thought the people I gave the pictures to would like them. I even have one of my recent pictures as a 16x20 in my bedroom because, well, dammit I just like it a lot.

I am self-taught, and I somehow figured that meant that I'm not a real photographer. I'm just some dude with a camera. Thinking on it, however, I figured that if people like what I'm making enough to ask me for prints (and better, I have recently had folks even want to pay me for some of those images) that does make me an artist of sorts. At the very least, I figure that the fact that people want to see my pictures makes them "photographs" and not "snapshots." I think that's pretty cool, now that I think about it.

Of course, if I'm going to have people pay for these images (especially since I will do some events), I figure it's probably best to set it up as a limited liability corporation so that when people sue the company, they don't necessarily bankrupt the next four generations of my family. I also have to get some insurance and all that. A web presence is easy, and that's ready to go when I've got the rest of it done.

Bill Pappert. Professional Photographer.

That has a neat ring to it, especially as I am (as noted earlier) self-taught. I will never be able to retire on the income from it, but it should be fun. The only thing I like better than getting out and making photographs is cooking. While my mother's example seems to indicate that hard work and chutzpa are enough to make one a chef, I don't see myself following in those footsteps.

Anyone who is looking for photo work in Colorado Springs, please look me up. I'll be hanging a shingle soon... as a business owner. Go figure.

Things I need to do...

A couple of things have come to mind that I need to do. First, I need to work a bit harder at getting past my procrastination habit. My parents will attest to the fact that I've been this way since my early years, with it being most prominent during my high school years. Back then, I would have six weeks' warning to get a project done only to get it started two days before it's due. I managed to overcome the proclivity for academic procrastination by going to college and writing checks for the classes. Paying for poor grades just didn't seem like something I wanted to do.

Another thing I need to do is get out and take some more photographs. I think I'm reasonably talented with a camera, and have sold photos in the past, but I think without practice, practice, practice, I will find myself with diminished skills in that area. So with that, I'm going to start training my eye a bit more and taking at least a half dozen frames a day. Some may suck, some may be good, but I need to get out and shoot.

The last thing I need to get on my "to do" list on a daily basis, or at least a more frequent basis than I have been, is to write in my blog. Again, I like to think that I have some level of talent with writing. Unfortunately, that's a talent that is mostly directed to writing e-mail or presentations for work of late, and that's not nearly as fun as doing this blog. With that, I'll start writing a bit more here, too.

I'll get on all of that stuff tomorrow.