Something Else That Sucks About Bend: Its Hospital

Kind of a shocking headline at the top of the front page of this morning's Bulletin: "Staff questions safety at St. Charles."

The story went on to tell how a survey of operating room staff at Bend's only hospital "raised widespread ... concerns" about patient safety. Only 40% of the staff who took the survey said they would feel safe having surgery at St. Charles themselves. The average score on the survey, which has been conducted annually for the past four years, has dropped from 49 in 2009 to 39 in January 2012.

Actually, the story isn't all that shocking to somebody who's lived in Bend for more than a quarter of a century and is familiar with the Bend way of doing things.

People in Bend like to say they work hard and play hard, but the reality is more like "play hard, and work as little as we can get away with." As a PR client of mine -- a prominent, longtime Bend businessman -- used to lament, "People come to Bend to play, not to work." And that's probably just as true of surgeons as sheetrockers.

Add to that the culture of mediocrity* that permeates the place -- the attitude that being "a nice person" is far more important than being excellent, or even competent -- and it's not hard to imagine that culture penetrating the operating room too.

Hard data on how the attitude toward safety affects patients' health is hard to come by, but the Bulletin story did note that in 2011, there were 14 cases of surgical site infections in patients who had bowel surgery -- twice the normal rate for hospitals of St. Charles's size.

And I personally have known too many cases of surgery patients who experienced unfavorable outcomes -- up to and including dying on the operating table.

Of course, such mishaps happen -- happen way too often -- at hospitals everywhere. Nonetheless, I've made up my mind about one thing, and given my loved ones a clear directive about it: If I need surgery and I have any choice in the matter, I want it done somewhere other than Bend.

ADDENDUM: Recently I encountered a Bend woman whose child had been suffering chronic pain. The Bend doctors -- even the so-called "pain specialists" -- had been able to do nothing to help the child. Finally the parents took the child to a top medical clinic in the Bay Area, which fortunately was able to diagnose and treat the problem. Bottom line: If you have a broken femur or a torn ACL, Bend is a great place to get it treated. If you have anything more exotic, fuhgeddaboudit.

*The culture of mediocrity does not apply to athletic endeavors, which is the only area in which Bendites strive for and prize excellence.

We're Number One!

See that number 54 smack-dab in the middle of Oregon? Yep, that's little old Bend -- coldest town in the Lower 49 states at this moment (10 a.m. on July 23, 2012).

But no worries; it probably will warm up to 60 by late afternoon.

Meanwhile, Albuquerque's looking good at 80.

My Pride and Joy

This is my new most-prized possession (and a neat early birthday gift) -- a custom-made BEND SUX mug handcrafted by Owen Gearing Dearing of Bend, aka "The Mugmaker." Owen is a fine craftsman and a helluva nice guy who creates beautiful mugs with your choice of custom lettering or design, and also very lovely shaving mugs (I bought one). Check it all out here.

P.S.: I'm sure Owen would be happy to make any of my fans a BEND SUX mug of his/her very own.

Anthropological Fact

"Chimpanzees never shelter from the rain; they just sit in the open and look miserable, occasionally shaking themselves to throw off the raindrops clinging to their coats." Source: http://chimpanzeesite.webs.com/everydaylife.htm

Q: What's the difference between chimpanzees and Oregonians?

A: Oregonians sit out in the rain grinning, and they don't bother to shake.

Shit My Mother Said, and Related Matters

I've always thought one of the most annoying sayings ever coined was one my mother used to lambaste me with all the time I if I complained about anything: "I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet."

This is an example of the so-called logic that says: "Because something worse is happening, has happened or could be happening to somebody else somewhere at some time, what's happening to you right now isn't bad."

I say this is 200-proof, double-distilled, bottled-in-bond bullshit.

Somebody else's misery may be worse in comparison to mine, but that doesn't lessen mine. If I had no shoes and met a man who had no feet I would feel sorry for that unfortunate man. I would do whatever I could to help him. But the ineluctable fact remains that his lack of feet would not remedy my lack of shoes. (Unless, of course, he happened to have an old pair of shoes that he didn't need any more and was willing to give them to me.)

Another pain-in-the-ass thing my mother used to say to me when I griped because it was raining and I couldn't play baseball was: "Be thankful we don't have tornadoes."

I often wondered what mothers in Kansas said to their kids. "Be thankful we don't have earthquakes," probably.

Similar "logic" is often used to defend Bend's suckalicious weather, e.g., "Well, we could be having 100-degree heat like they're having on the East Coast."

Sure, we could. (Well, no, actually, in Bend we couldn't.) But no matter how badly the weather on the East Coast, or in Alaska, or in Siberia or wherever is at any given moment, it does not alter the sucky attributes of the weather in Bend at that moment. And, since I am in Bend and not on the East Coast or in Alaska or Siberia or wherever, the weather in Bend is what I'm interested in.

So here's a polite request for the next person who tries to pull my mother's old shit on me and tell me it doesn't really suck in Bend because it sucks harder somewhere else: Stuff it.

Wetness

Are We in Shangri-La Yet?

The Bend-is-Paradise myth takes many peculiar forms. One of them is that some Bendoids apparently believe living in Bend will make people live longer. The other day I heard an acquaintance remark, "Seventy is young in Bend."

Is it really? Is Bend a Shangri La-in-the-Cascades where 70-year-olds are mere adolescents and 200-year-olds are common? Well, let's look at the numbers.

Figures on life expectancy specifically for Bend are hard to come by. However, the extremely valuable source city-data.com has a table listing the 10 most common last names of deceased persons in Bend and their ages when they died. Averaging them out yields a life expectancy of 76.3 years.

The average life expectancy for the United States is 78.6 years; the average life expectancy for Oregon is 79 years. Measured against those numbers, Bend doesn't stack up very well -- despite its clean air and vaunted "healthy outdoor lifestyle."

What places do stack up well? The Top 10 11 states for life expectancy, in descending order, are Hawaii, Minnesota, California, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Utah, and Colorado, Arizona and South Dakota (tied at 79.9 years).

What do those states have in common? Most of them have relatively high levels of education and income. High levels of education and income correlate with access to good medical care, and good medical care indisputably extends life expectancy.

So Bend has no magic elixir for extending life. And if you hope to hit the century mark before you check out, here's my advice: Don't move to Bend -- move to a place where there are good doctors and you can earn enough money to pay them.

Understanding Bend's Sucktacular Climate: The Two-Month Rule

It's June 4, and in Bend the temperature is 54 degrees and it's drizzling. The visitors from California and other points south and east are wandering around in their shorts, T-shirts and sandals, looking dazed and confused.

Understanding Bend's suckalicious weather actually is pretty easy once you master a few basic facts:

• Bend is in the Pacific Northwest, which means that (even though it's in the "rain shadow" of the Cascades) it's likely to be cloudy.
• Bend is at 3,600 feet altitude and 44 degrees north latitude, which means it will be cold.
• Bend is next to a mountain range, which means the weather will be erratic -- sunny one minute, cloudy the next; 80 degrees one day, 40 the next.

As a rule of thumb, generally the weather in Bend during the (so-called) spring and summer months is pretty consistently two months behind the weather in places with a more normal climate. The following is a handy guide for those planning a trip or (god forbid!) a move to Bend. Feel free to print it out and save it:

January in Bend is like January in other places.

February is like February.

March is like February.

April is like March.

May is like March.

June is like April.

July is like May.

August is like June.

September is like September (if we're lucky).

October is like September (if we're lucky).

November is like November.

December is like December.

Well, This Is Rather Embarrassing

I have never claimed to be mathematically competent, so I won't offer any excuses for not realizing that with the end of April, the year's temperature record-keeping has been completed and the YTD totals that I posted are, in fact, the totals for the complete year of May 2011 through April 2012.

To recap:

Totals for Year:
Comfortable Days: 103
Tolerable Days: 73
Cold Days: 189

That's a pretty damn dismal performance, especially considering that practically all of the comfortable (above 70) days occurred in July, August and September.

If you live in Bend only during those three months, Bend isn't bad. The rest of the time ... well, I just have to say it ...

Bend Sux.

April Temperature Report: The Chill Continues

This spring in Bend has been a hell of a lot sunnier and milder than last year's La Nina-afflicted spring, but we're still not likely to challenge Palm Springs.

According to the records of The Weather Channel, Bend logged six comfortable days (high above 70) in April, 10 tolerable days (above 60) and 14 cold days. All but one of those above-70 days occurred during one freakishly warm (for Bend) stretch from April 20 through 24, on two days of which the thermometer even climbed into the 80s.

So far in May Bend has recorded eight 70-plus days, but the weather has reverted to its gray and chilly "spring" norm. So unless things warm up in a hurry -- which, according to the forecast, is not likely -- we probably won't surpass 120 comfortable days on the year.

April Totals:
Comfortable Days: 5
Tolerable Days: 10
Cold Days: 15

YTD Totals:
Comfortable Days: 103
Tolerable Days: 73
Cold Days: 189

Bend Sudorphobia*

I returned Wednesday evening from a five-day trip to New Orleans, where I had a swell time wandering around, taking photos, visiting museums, eating in fine restaurants, drinking in fine (and not so fine) bars, listening to jazz and soaking up the local color, which was present in abundance.

This was my first visit to the Crescent City, and before I went my friends warned me about the horrible heat and humidity I would encounter. As it turned out, there was nothing at all horrible about the New Orleans weather in early May. In fact I considered it just about perfect -- sunny (except for a couple of thunderstorms that brought torrential, but brief, rain) with highs in the mid-80s. The humidity was noticeable, but not (to me) oppressive. I thought it actually made the air feel pleasantly soft -- unlike Bend's cold and bone-dry air, which rasps at your skin and sinuses like sandpaper.

Did I sweat? Yes, a little. But so what? Sweat is not fatal. It's not even all that uncomfortable, at least to me. You sweat, you take a shower, you're not sweaty anymore. It's no big deal.

But to many people in Bend, sweating is a really big deal. They dread it as much as catching the Ebola virus.

The first day of my stay in New Orleans I posted on Facebook that the weather there was 83 degrees and humid, but that I'd take those conditions any day over 40 degrees and snowing, which was the situation in Bend when we left.

"You'll get over that quickly," one of my Bend friends responded.

"Get over what?" I asked. "Not liking snow and 40 degrees in May? Nope, don't think so."

"Vs. heat, humidity and mosquitoes?" the friend said.

"Yes," I said.

To which I will now add: "Fuck yes."

*A word I made up based on sudor, the Latin noun for sweat.

Everything's Coming Up Rainbows and Unicorns

I'm thinking about asking the city council to pass a resolution making this the official national anthem of Bend. What could more fittingly express the child-like, smiley-face optimism of Bendites, or their penchant for preferring pretty fantasies -- whether they're about the climate or the city's economic prospects -- to unpleasant facts?

(There are many versions of this song on YouTube; I chose this one because of the singularly idiotic expression of the singer. I suspect he needed surgery on his jaw to enable him to open his mouth that way.)

WARNING! Watching the full two minutes of this video may induce suicidal thoughts and/or actions.

As If Bend Didn't Suck Hard Enough, Now We Have Hipsters

In a previous post I wrote about some of the poseurs who inhabit Bend, notably including the "elite athlete" poseurs. Unfortunately I neglected to mention one of the more obnoxious breeds of poseur that has started to infest this town in the past five or six years or so: the hipster.

Hipsters can be identified by, among other things, their tight black jeans, their Chuck Taylor sneakers, their abundant tattoos and their fondness for bicycles (single-speed, preferably) and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, or "PBR" or "Peeber," as they call it. The last item alone tells you how execrable their tastes are. When I was starting to drink beer many years ago in New Jersey, Pabst was what you drank when nothing else was available. And it hasn't gotten better.

Hipsters have no visible means of support; it's suspected that most of them are living off trust funds. They spend their days hanging out in coffee shops surfing the Web on their iPads or MacBooks (they would never dream of owning a non-Apple product) or texting other hipsters on their iPhones (or calling their parents to ask them to send more money).

How hipsters spend their nights is something I don't know and don't want to know.

Portland is hipster heaven, as anybody who's watched the excellent comedy series "Portlandia" knows. The hipsters of Bend possibly are an overflow from Portland. It is to be hoped the climate here will prove too cold for them and they'll migrate elsewhere.

Meanwhile, for your entertainment and edification, here's a video to help you understand the Evolution of the Hipster from earlier species, including the beatnik and the hippy:

The Bullshit Goes On Forever

I couldn't resist re-posting verbatim the first item from The Bulletin's "Yesterday" column, a compilation of stories and other material from 100, 50 and 25 years ago that appears every Sunday.

Why should a Bend man smile?

Because: Substantial, permanent brick and stone buildings costing more than $70,000 have been built within the last month, are under construction or will be commenced within a month.

Because: There is more home-building, more attractive residences being erected here, than in any town of Bend’s size in Oregon.

Because: Two first class railroads are operating in Bend, and Bend has the best warehouse and terminal facilities of any town east of the Cascades.

Because: The distributing business of Bend is growing every day, making this the most important railroad point in the interior.

Because: Bend has a brick yard with modern machinery and an inexhaustible supply of splendid clay, which can supply cheaply the best of building materials for a large city.

Because: Bend has a creamery making a permanent market for all farmers of this territory for their milk and cream and giving the most valuable kind of impetus to agricultural development.

Because: Bend has the only ice plant in the interior, ensuring the town the best to be had in this line and meaning that money from other towns will come here for the Bend made product.

Also, there are many, many other reasons why Bend boosters should smile.

These are just a few — if your neighbor looks glum, remind him that the next year will see even more smile-makers than have the past twelve months.

Where now are those "two first-class railroads," that brick yard, that creamery? Gone with the cat-piss-scented high desert breeze, alas.

A century later Bendites brag about our plentiful microbreweries, our many miles of mountain bike trails and the four-year university that we're going to have any decade now instead of our ice plant and our "splendid clay," but the relentless rah-rah tone has never altered. And I'm sure it never will.

The timber may be gone, the ranching may be gone, the real estate boom may be gone, but the supply of bullshit is inexhaustible.

The Blog Is Prettier But the Weather Still Sux

As you can see, I have adopted a new design template for the blog. I figure it's the only way I'm going to get to see a blue sky before the middle of June or thereabouts.

Starting on March 10, Bend has experienced 39 days of almost continuous suck. Specifically, we have seen only 11 sunny or partly sunny days during that whole period, with clouds and/or rain and/or snow and/or wind on most of the other 28 and temperatures generally reaching only the 40s to mid-50s.

Temperature-wise, March yielded only three "tolerable" days (high of 60 or above) and all of those came in the first 10 days of the month -- lending credence to the old Bend proverb: "March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a Tyrannosaurus Rex."

March Totals:
Comfortable Days: 0
Tolerable Days: 3
Cold Days: 28

YTD Totals:
Comfortable Days: 98
Tolerable Days: 63
Cold Days: 174

They'll None of Them Be Missed

Since this appears to have turned into Mikado week, here's Ko-Ko the Lord High Executioner with an updated version of "I've Got a Little List." I'm H. Bruce Miller, and I approve this message.

Here's to You, Nanki-Poo

My comrade-in-bloggery, Jack Elliott, claims I enjoy nothing but "overcast, despair, and hard bop music." While the statement about bop music is, to some extent, true, it is a base canard that I enjoy "overcast and despair." To prove it, here is a charming little ditty from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Sing along, everybody!

March Musings

It is the last day of March, 10 days past the so-called "first day of spring." It is 45 degrees in Bend, and torrents of rain and sleet are blowing horizontally. According to the Weather Channel's records, the last mostly sunny and reasonably warm day Bend experienced was on March 9, 22 days ago.

Bend sucks.

Comments are not being accepted on this post; it is a meditation.

Bend Snobbery Totally Sucks

A Bend Eastsider relaxing at home, as envisioned by a Bend Weststider.

When we moved to Bend back in 1985, there wasn't much snobbery in this town. There were some rich people, and everybody knew who they were. But they didn't drive around in Bentleys or Maseratis or otherwise flaunt their wealth. They drove and wore pretty much the same things everybody else drove and wore.

That started to change in the early 1990s, when Bend began to promote itself not just as a place to visit for a few days for the hunting or fishing or skiing, but as an "outdoor recreation paradise" with an "upscale lifestyle" where affluent people should make their permanent residence.

I believe the watershed event was the opening of Broken Top, a snooty gated golf course community located on the northwest edge of Bend, in 1993. Contrary to widespread popular belief, Broken Top was not Bend's first gated community; Mountain High on the southwest southeast side holds that dubious distinction. But Broken Top was more expensive and had more "upscale"appeal from the get-go, and after it the floodgates of phoniness opened and the snobs poured in.

There are several kinds of snobbery operating in Bend. One, of course, is money snobbery, which is found in almost any community of any size. Another kind that's more peculiar to Bend is the snobbery of the jocks and -- mostly -- the jock poseurs.

The local media constantly tell everybody that Bend is packed wall-to-wall with "elite athletes." But bona fide "elite athletes" are pretty damn rare; there probably aren't more than about a hundred of them in Bend. But there must be at least 100 times that many Bendoids trying to pose as elite athletes.

These are the silly twits who are always wearing running shorts or bicycling tights or yoga pants (not that I have any real problem with yoga pants per se). They'e constantly posting on Facebook about how "awesome" their morning workout was, or telling you about their performance in their last triathlon and how they're going to totally kick ass in this year's Pole Pedal Paddle. They're ridiculous.

Equally ridiculous, if not more so, is the snobbery that residents of Bend's Westside display toward residents of the Eastside. As Westsiders see it, the Eastside is a forbidding, repugnant and probably dangerous place full of tumble-down shacks and rusting single-wides inhabited by drooling redneck semi-imbeciles who live on Twinkies, Dr. Pepper and methamphetamine, spend their evenings slouched in front of the TV watching NASCAR and ultimate cage fighting, and (very likely) marry their sisters.

It's a false image, but I don't mind encouraging it if it helps keep the Spandex-clad, jock-poseur, Westside hoi polloi away.

The Middle of Nowhere is Not Where the Action Is

In reading a book titled The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (it's about a cholera outbreak in mid-19th Century London and how its cause was discovered) I came across two passages that brilliantly explain why the fantasy of Bend becoming a vibrant, economically dynamic and diverse urban center is just that -- a fantasy.

First this:

"The power of telecommuting and instant connectivity was going to make the idea of densely packed urban cores as obsolete as the walled cities of the Middle Ages. Why would people crowd themselves into harsh, overpopulated environments when they could just as easily work from their homestead on the range? But as it turns out, many people actually like the density of urban environments, precisely because they offer ... diversity."

And later on, this:

"There's a reason why the world's wealthiest people -- people with near-infinite options vis-a-vis the choice of where to make their home -- consistently choose to live in the densest areas on the planet. Ultimately, they live in these places ... because cities are where the action is. Cities are centers of opportunity, tolerance, wealth creation, social networking, health ... and creativity."

Yes, Bend will continue to attract people who are devoted to the "outdoor lifestyle" to the point of obsession. But such people are a pretty small minority and they tend not to be the type of people who are driven to found mighty business enterprises. True, some of them will found small companies that employ themselves and maybe, at most, a dozen other people. But they won't create big job-generating businesses (think Intel, Apple or Dell) because in the first place they're not motivated that way, and in the second place doing that would prevent them from taking a day off every time there's fresh powder on the mountain or a week off every time they want to go catch some steelhead.

Also, Bend lacks the critical mass that makes places like New York, Los Angeles or Silicon Valley -- or, during the Renaissance, Florence -- centers of creative energy and intellectual ferment.  Energetic, ambitious and creative people tend to flock together. They seek out the opportunity to exchange ideas with others of their kind. They like the exciting vibe of a city. As Johnson says, they like to be where the action is.

Bend is a former timber town in an isolated rural area that managed to transform itself, more or less successfully, into a tourist town. That's all it's ever been since the mills closed, and all it's ever going to be. And the sooner Bendites face up to that the better off they'll be.