The roof-mounted cooler wailed with an ear splitting intensity that would shame a banshee. (Or so I imagined, not having ever heard an actual banshee. I did date a girl once who was clearly at least half banshee, but that doesn't count.)

        Rather than call the management company and ask them to do something about it, I decided to see if I could fix it myself. Why should a little thing like not owning a ladder stop me? My first scheme involved stacking some of the outside furniture, getting my hands roof level, and hoisting myself up. The stacked furniture teetered a little too much for even me so I started rutting around for another idea.

        That's when I noticed the tree pressed against the car port. Okay, new plan. Climb the tree, maneuver across the edge of the carport (don't know if the middle could hold my weight after all, better to stick where there are some beams) and onto the roof. Cool.

        Damn, I swore I used to be able to climb a tree! Am I really so weak that I can't even hold my own weight and hang from a branch?! That's frustrating. Even Michael Jackson can climb a tree for goodness sake! And he has a few years on me. Does "hanging out" with all those kids have some sort of vivifying effect?

        At this point I'm obsessed. I will get up that tree and onto that roof! Where's that furniture I had balanced against the back wall? Okay, after a slight boost from a small end table, I'm up the tree, across the carport, over the roof and... Hmmm, how do you pry this cooler thing open?

        Rather than cause more damage to the cooler than it already clearly had and destroy my only source of coolness in 110+ degree heat, I backtracked back down the tree with my tail between my legs.

        Clearly in my current state of dishealth I have no business tottering on stacked furniture, climbing trees, or balancing across rooftops. In the process I ripped my pants, damaged my shoe, and cut my arm. I especially don't have any business doing it when no-one is around to help me if I injure myself or get stranded. And the cooler still screamed. It was fun, though.

        Sometimes news programs and TV-magazine shows like to do "exposés" of supposedly healthy people who are ripping off disability. Grainy surveillance photos are shown of people climbing ladders, or working on their vehicles, or doing heavy lawn work, even though they have filed disability claims for things such as excruciating back pain. It looks bad. It looks like the people are horrible frauds. You get worked up into an outrage, the shows get their ratings, and after the next commercial break life goes on for everyone except the "frauds" vilified in front of friends and family,

        I wonder, though. I wonder if all those people are really ipso facto frauds just because a private investigator or investigative reporter can come up with an incriminating shot or two. We only see the material that accuses, we never see anything before or after. We don't get to see these people in their houses. We don't know what kind of meds they may have loaded up on before attempting the things they got photographically nailed doing. We don't know what the repercussions for them were after trying to do those things. For all we know that guy with the injured back claim out doing yard work may have spent the next week in bed in such agony he seriously considered shoving the business end of a shotgun down his throat.

        When my mother was on disability years ago while suing her former employer she would wait till none of us were looking, gather up all the trash she could find, then head out the door. She had to walk down a flight of stairs, across the entire complex, manage to open up the dumpster and heave the trash into it, then reverse the process. She'd come back heaving and coughing, barely able to breath, and have to use a ton of inhalers and medication.

        "What are you doing?" I would demand.
        "The... trash... had... to be... taken... out," she'd manage to get out between wheezes.
        "Well why didn't you tell someone? You shouldn't be doing that!"

        This happened more than once. Every time it did I would think back to those news exposés and imagine some private investigator hired by her former company hiding in a trash can with a lot of patience and a telephoto lens. If photos or video of these trash trips emerged it would surely hurt her case, yet I knew that her case was very real. That made me wonder about those people I had seen exposed in the news media. How many of them were also really sick or injured, but in some vain attempt to still feel relevant did stupid things that further injured themselves?

        When you are very sick for a long time it is extremely easy to have a good day or two and imagine you can still do what you used to do. When you are just in the house at relative peace all day it's easy to delude yourself you are actually normal. In both cases, it is only in the attempt that you realize how very wrong you are. Sometimes you begin to feel so useless you force yourself to do things "to help" that only cause you more problems. Sometimes when you are all by yourself or have spotty help the frustration that important things aren't getting done grows so great that you throw yourself into the fray, pain be damned, and take the consequences later. Just because you can do something once or twice that can be used against you later doesn't mean you can do it again or with any consistency.

        Which isn't to say there aren't very real frauds and cheats abusing the system and costing us all money, just that we shouldn't be so quick to judge on fairly flimsy evidence.