Problems With Bearings

My beloved 1994 Miata has been sitting in the driveway for nearly five months. She broke a supercharger belt last fall on the way to class. The belt drives the power steering pump too. Suddenly I was wrestling the wheel. I got back home okay, but the car is definitely no fun to drive without power steering. Maybe even a little dangerous for a vehicle that depends on being nimble to stay out of trouble on the highway.

I added the supercharger kit within a year of buying the car. The 'charger doubles the torque of the engine. At the time, it was fun blowing away larger sports cars. But the design has a flaw and this is at least the tenth time the drive belt has shredded, burned, snapped or squealed. The serpentine belt goes over two small aftermarket idler pulleys to make its circuitous way from the crankshaft to the air conditioning pump to the power steering and up to the blower and back again. One of the 2 inch idlers bends the belt nearly 180 degrees. The kit originally came with nylon pulleys with pressed in bearings, but they melted when the bearings failed. Finally I got a set of aluminum idlers, each with two 30mm ball bearings. I think someone concluded that the aluminum would keep the bearings cooler. Or perhaps that enthusiasts would replace their own bearings and leave the kit maker in peace to dream up some other not-ready-for-production idea.

Now when the bearings disintegrate, sometimes slowly so the belt overheats and sometimes quickly (then it screams), I can replace them. I have a shop press to get them out and back in. McMaster-Carr sells bearings. Sweet.

The last time the bearings failed I bought eight new ones, four to use and four to use next time. While I was fixing the idlers I discovered another four new bearings. It seems that I ordered eight some time in the past as well. Good, I have two spare sets. Bad that I cannot remember doing so, but at least my mind retraces the same rut. Usually I fix the car within a

week. Funny how suddenly it's four months.

Yesterday was finally the day. I had partially disassembled things several weeks ago but broke off for another project that seemed more urgent. Now, before I loose all the parts, I figured I'd complete the job. One hitch, though. I cannot find the spare bearings. I looked for two hours. No joy. I gave up and grabbed a beer.

To say that I live in a somewhat disordered environment is both kind and truer than I care to admit. I depend on putting things in logical places and then remembering where they are. I'm also a keen observer. I can find stuff Julie loses in under a minute. So I probably put all eight bearings on a shelf where I could see them, a little lineup of eight identical boxes. Logically I might have put them with other Miata parts, like oil filters and gaskets. Perhaps in one of the many pigeonholes in my office. They could be in a drawer with other important stuff. Finally, they may have fallen victim to Eloisa.

Eloisa has kept us clean for 15 years. She likes an orderly looking place so she puts stuff that is lying around into boxes or drawers or closets. When something disappears we suspect it has been "Eloisa-ed." I have several sacred spaces Eloisa knows not to go. One is my office. Or the second desk in the loft or the small table by the front door. Stuff I put there -- on it's way to wherever -- stays there. So I've even gone through many strata of Eloisa's past attempts to make the house look orderly. Nothing.

The thought occurs that the problem is me. I'm going senile. My shrink says no, I'm just getting slightly and normally a little more forgetful, typical of people my age. I'm not sliding into dementia. How nice to have a professional opinion. I still haven't found the bearings. Worse yet, I'm sitting at the computer writing this when I could be out there looking. That would involve straightening up one of my sacred spaces. Because I do what Eloisa does too. When my desk is just too much to bear and something needs urgent doing, I slide the contents into a box, promising myself I will sort it all out when the urgency passes. Sometimes that actually happens. I sort through the box and put stuff into smaller boxes, one for stuff going to the shop, one for stuff going to the boat, one for stuff going to the truck and then, finally, some makes the wastebasket. Sometimes these sorted boxes get to their destination and sometimes they just pile up. I can usually remember where I've seen something last, so it has been less of a problem than one might think. Until now.

You don't have to develop much brain friction to start forgetting where you put things. At least I don't. I seem normally competent to myself and those around me. But an edge is a little duller somewhere. Perhaps it's time to clean out the loft again. After all, finding things presumes you can get to them, see them.

I pause. . . .

Perhaps after another cup of coffee.

Postscript: I found the possibly imaginary bearings in July in my top dresser drawer. Who would look there? Shortly after the original post I bought four new bearings and fixed the car. So I still have four spares. Maybe if I run the belt a little looser I will not need them very soon.

Let's Escape Torture if We Can

An extract from my "Living Will" signed last Summer follows.  It's boilerplate for a while and, by necessity covers ground we'd rather not think about.  But stick with it, I do not propose to waste your time. 

End-of-Life Decisions

I do not want my life to be prolonged if:

• I have a terminal condition

• I am permanently unconscious, or

• the likely risks and burdens of treatment would outweigh the expected benefits.

In accordance with these wishes, I do not want artificially administered food and water.

Grant of Discretion to Agent

If I have expressed, in this document or in any other manner, a clear wish regarding a specific treatment or condition, I want that wish to be followed. In all other situations, I direct that my life not be prolonged and that life-prolonging treatment not be provided or continued, in accordance with what my agent determines to be in my best interest. In determining my best interest, my agent shall weigh the burdens of treatment against the expected benefits, considering my personal values to the extent known to my agent.

Relief From Pain

I direct that treatment for alleviation of pain or discomfort be provided at all times, even if it hastens my death, except as follows:

When the time remaining to me in this life is short by any reasonable definition, I will trade a few moments of lucidity for relief from agony. I have no more "last words" to communicate. Whatever secrets I take with me stay with me. I anticipate no deathbed changes in firmly held principles. There will be no last-minute religious conversions. I have not been reticent in expressing my love or in extending forgiveness. As death approaches, I direct that treatment for alleviation of pain or discomfort be provided at all times, even if it hastens my death or makes it impossible for me to communicate. Those I love know that already, and that is the only message worth expressing. Play my favorite music, if you can find it. If not, Bethoven will do.

Other Wishes

In addition to the instructions I have given above, I would also like my health care providers and others involved in my care to follow the instructions below.

Personal Values Regarding End-of-Life Decisions

I have read authors who profess horrible fears that death will mean the extingushing of their existence. I don't know what is on the other side of that door, but I certainly do not feel so self-important that I fear my end. Many people seem genuinely afraid to die. Do they fear eternal punishment? I do not. Is it an instinct, the last gasp of self-preservation? It is the job of our minds to calm our instincts.

I understand that many of the special skills I have developed in my life will not survive me. I wish that I had been granted a better opportunity to know my grandchildren and pass along what I could. But no one really has the opportunity to see his hard-won skills live on after him. Everyone takes anything that is meaningful in life with him to the grave. New generations start over and learn again, That is simply the way it is. Who am I to question the sequence?

My soul feels a deep calm. I have spent enough time among the living, the dying and the dead to appreciate the nature of the process. I have also witnessed birth and the development of children to adulthood. This is how life proceeds. I understand the importance of sex to the survival of a species. I also know that sex would be meaningless without death and birth. I appreciate the wonder of the universe and especially the wonders that are beyond my ability to understand. My mouth gapes like a child taking in his first Christmas tree. I have been given many opportunities and I have done what I have done, most for better, some for worse. I have taken my turn with my shoulder to the wheel, pushing civilization along the best I knew how. I took over the task from my father and he from his. My children are now taking my place and my grandchildren are learning that being a grownup is their lot as well.

How can you understand the pattern in this and fear death? Do you see yourself outside of history? You are deluded. So, to repeat myself, I do not fear death. The death of an individual marks the end of one cycle in the pattern, that is all. Those who will live the next cycle have been born and are getting ready to shuffle their genetic inheritance and reproduce, creating unique individuals who may be slightly better adapted to this environment than we were. But only slightly.

I am grateful that I have been given the opportunity to play a nearly insignificant part in the great show that is the rolling wave of humanity. I have enjoyed it, mostly. I have tasted success and defeat, advantage and it's lack, sorrow, joy, love and hate, true ecstacy, deep depression, happiness, contentment. I have been largely spared pain and infirmity although that may lie in wait around the corner. I understand that the cycle for one individual ends when it ends. There is little to gain from shifting the timer a little either way. I do not think I am writing the great literary work that I must stay alive to finish.

So let me end in peace, let me end in peace like a silent snowy meadow in the mountains with a full moon glinting off each snowflake. Let me end in beauty like the calm ocean with a full moon making the whole world like silvery metal with just enough disturbance to let you know it is not solid. Well, that's my hope, lets see what I get. If it's reasonably fast it doesn't much matter. If it is horribly drawn out part of me will be inside crying. But I understand some pain is unavoidable. I also understand that we do not completely chose the future, it unrolls in front of us.

I have enjoyed the ability to spell words in English correctly. I would have corrected each spelling mistake in this document if the software were not so balky and my patience short. Where I've made a mistake, I know it. Please forgive me.

Wishes Regarding Hospice and Palliative Care

I am not afraid to die. I am quite reasonably afraid of being tortured along the way. I value my lucid concious mind. This is the essence of life to me. I have witnessed others take general leave of their wits. I have seen people susutained in this condition for years and find it morbid and grotesque. Sustaining the body when the conscious mind no longer functions is a supreme exercise in false hope or indecision. Keeping the shell of the body technically alive is no virtue once it's owner no longer spends any appreciable time in residence. It constitutes an immoral allocation of social resources masquerading as waiting for God's will to be manufest in ending the person's life. We are God's agents and must be the conservators of his creation and the liberators of the unconscious suffering.

Although it is possible for the demented to occasionally stitch together a few moments of lucidity, it has never seemed to me that such flashes of consciousness outweigh the horror, for them, of realizing they will sink back into confusion and incommunicability. Existence, for the demented, must seem like a horrible dream. They still feel pain and frustration. Please do not sustain my body for one more brief flash of some remnant of what had been my mind. Let me go to my natural and inevitable end as has every predicessor from time immemorial.

The law may not recognize profound dementia as an immediately terminal condition. I consider it to be the death of the person while the body is still walking around. The demented are essentially warehoused, waiting for their bodies to achieve the same state their minds already have. If they were not supervised as closely as small children, the profoundly demented would die from an inability to eat and drink by themselves or they would wander into dangerous situations and be lost.

If my mind slowly fails before my body does, I would like to continue my normal activities as much as possible. You may take away the car keys and anything else that might endanger others, but please don't take away my ability to walk outside or sail my boat upon the ocean. Such activity will sustain what is left of my spirit. The small risk that I may come to harm along the way is one I chose to accept.

I was not allowed to see my Grandmother for several years before she died. She was kept in a locked ward for the demented. My Grandfather visited her every day his own health permitted. She could not recognize him. What was the point of this? Was it to upset my Grandfather? Was it to protect my grandmother so even God would have to bide his time until her body failed enough to let him take her home? It seems that it was an inability of our social institutions to deal compassionatly with the issue of dementia. Was it the medical mantra of "keep the body going at all costs?" I do not know, but I think it was horrible for her and for those of us who witnessed this and are forced to remember her that way.

If my agent determines that I am on a reasonably certain and inevitable path to death I direct that I receive palliative care to keep me comfortable and alleviate pain. I do not wish to undergo "last chance" or experimental medical treatments that do not have at least a 25% chance of significantly improving my condition. I have never bet long odds and do not want to start now. Let medical science advance by torturing someone else. I have seen the effect of pain medications prescribed insufficient in either type or quantity and the prospect of this happening to me is horrifying. Addiction has no meaning for the terminally ill. Please use whatever must be used to be effective, whether that includes powerful opiates which will temporarily addict me to them or not. I shall soon be free of the addiction and your consciences may rest easy for you will have done me a final service.  

 

Assuming the Recession Will End?

As I write this gasoline is selling for less than $3 per gallon.   I still drive my van 40 miles to work on a boat on a typical workday.  Business has been slow for a year, but is showing some signs of coming back.  How long will my personal economic model survive?  That's what I worry about.  I'm not young, so the problem is not quite as serious as it is for my grandchildren.

Half the boats I work on are powerboats.  The larger ones can consume over 750 gallons on a weekend outing.  The energy consumption rate is a matter of boat design and physics.  If you want to move a 37 foot boat across the water at more than 6 or 7 knots, you consume a serious amount of energy.  Petroleum is the only sufficiently concentrated form of energy to make a fast powerboat possible.  How many weekend trips will people be making when Diesel hits $15 / gallon or more.

At this point we seem to collectively assume the recession will end sometime within the next few years.  Things will come back to a point we have known as "normal" for three generations.  Well, maybe not.

Last night I watched "A Crude Awakening."  This 2005 documentary about oil was eerily prescient regarding the economic crash of 2008.  What is more real, the film asks at one point, finance or oil.  I guess we have now proved the case for the un-reality of finance.  

The case that we have hit and passed peak oil production is probably better supported than the case for global warming.  Cities built before 1900 will likely continue to be functional as increasing oil demand hits the wall of decreasing oil production within the next 10 years.  Suburbs will industrialize or rot.  Or we will all be bicycling to the train station to get to work.  My 80 mile commute will be economically unsustainable.  For better or worse, the US will have to rebuild itself.  All those freeways will probably get bike lanes.  Can you imagine a much warmer Canada having to choose between ripping up the ground to mine oil sand or leaving it in place to grow corn?  We can beat our junk cars into rails and bicycle frames.

Talk about an upset electorate?  Rush Limbaugh for President, anyone?  Maybe not him, but it could be someone who would actually make Bush II look good.  Not a happy prospect, but perhaps I should trust the American electorate a little more.  Maybe the Internet will actually stabilize us as a people.

New President Obama is currently fueling hope that most of us will get through the next 8 years relatively unscathed.   Many of us would like to think that Obama represents a return to reason in the country's leadership, a reversion to the mean.  We would like to think Bush II was the aberration.  If gasoline hits $20/gallon which way do you think things will go?  Today's people will readily accept alternative fuels, even much smaller, lighter vehicles.  But getting back on bicycles?  Perhaps we should have more faith in youth.  My generation would never do such a thing, although I still have my mountain bike in the garage.  Perhaps I should replace the tires and start riding again?

As this must-see documentary points out, the current population of the world can only be supported by the energy from oil.  Global warming will also affect the ability of the world to support current population levels.  As the available energy from oil inevitably declines, do you suppose all the extra oil-supported people are going to go away quietly?  I think it more probably that we will see resource depletion driven genocide as the rule rather than the exception.  Sort of a new hundred-year's war that ends when enough people have been eliminated and the rest are too exhausted and isolated to continue.  Remember the 100 year's war?  Look it up.

In my youth we worried about nuclear winter.  We thought the hydrogen bomb would make the world unlivable.  We thought  the USSR and USA would mutually eradicate each other.  Denial is a powerful thing and we are all still here, mostly not thinking about it.  It could still happen.  However, now I'd put my bet on  a few new Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's, isolated horrors perpetrated by disaffected minorities on us and on each other.  

Do you know of any weapon that was invented, perfected and never used?  All that is needed is the weapon plus sufficient hatred, desperation and no regard for the consequences.  Sound like any suicide bomber you've met lately?  Do you know that Japan's use of suicide pilots late in WWII was considered a real aberration, almost beyond understanding?  It was something that just did not happen.  How times change.  One can defend against almost anything except an opponent who will sacrifice his own life.  The disaffected, unemployed multitudes provide lots of foot soldiers willing to die if they can take you with them.

We believe in helping poor countries.  We believe in cutting infant mortality by the spread of better drugs.  We know this promotes exploding populations but we believe solutions for this problem will be found in the future.  Yes, as it turns out, solutions like war, starvation and genocide.

Perhaps help is really beyond our capabilities.  Perhaps Darfur is the new norm.  Our charity all rests on a foundation of cheap energy.  This energy foundation is so pervasive and has developed so smoothly that we notice it no more than we notice the air.  At a time when we use 25% of the world's oil and have two percent of the world's population (to use 2005 figures from the film), perhaps we should begin to doubt our charity is sustainable.  This is to say nothing of our way of life.

The human race has not hit a wall, has not passed through a population bottleneck for some 50,000 years.  We don't think it could happen again.  No physical law says it cannot happen again.  I think the possibility that human life will be extinguished on the earth to be almost vanishingly remote.  I also think population could collapse to 1% of what it is now over a reasonably short time, say a century.  That takes us back to the world population as of 1800.  Maybe today's world is all just another cheap energy fueled bubble waiting to burst.  200 years to grow by two orders of magnitude, another hundred to collapse back.  Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.  And the population in 1800 was hardly a bottleneck.  That's more like 5000 people, a level at which significant genetic variation is wiped out.  

That's more or less the number of modern humans who walked out of Africa 50,000 years ago from whom most if not all of us are descended.  The folks who's descendants eventually migrated into Europe and "displaced" the Neandertals.  If the populations interbred, no genetic trace of the Neandertal can be found in today's humans.  Racism is apparently instinctive in humans.

In 2009, "Globalization" is still accepted as the way the immediate future will proceed by the leaders of rich countries.  I suspect we have seen it's greatest extent and will not be sorry to see it pass.  We may not regret the disappearance of mass air travel.  When the disaffected must cross oceans to strike at us - well, that may not be so bad.

Oh yes, you will say "the old man is depressed again and raving away at the keyboard."  Perhaps, but that does not change the facts about energy.  Oil is about to get more expensive again, soon, and we are hooked on it.  Our entire way of life is supported by cheap energy.  That is about to change.  We'll find out who's lucky and who's not.  For me, I'm not planning to buy another work van, even with 125,000 miles on this one.  I think it will last as long as I can afford to drive a van.  And for the record, I've enjoyed the cuisine, the house, the family, the whole ride.  I'd give back the lawn.