Going Solo at The End Of The Line

 

I thought this year would be different, and funny enough the damn time signature turned out to be quite different. Just not the way I envisioned. I must remember to be more specific when making those wishes near the New Year. The cosmic genie always lurks, and apparently still works from time to time.

I became hooked on George R. R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" books, and television series, this year.  "Winter is coming." Even for Bakersfield, CA where very mild temperatures fill the autumn days, the growing dark hours and chilly nights sap the tree limbs of their juice and force the annual plummet of leaves to the ground. What once pulsed and thrived in green just yesterday turns to wet brown mulch so quickly. The dampness of the soil lingers throughout much of the day, and the six or eight legged little creatures have crawled back down deep below, or left as a last will and testament to their lives a hopeful promise of progeny attached to some wood or stone. The circular events in the northern hemisphere on a small round rock circling a star hurtle through space with wills of their own. 

Last year at this time my wife and I were celebrating a new car purchase. It was a gift from her to me.  We had a 2003 BMW 525i that ran well but had begun to suffer those annoying little traits that conspire to all parts in the universe with hoses, linings, belts, lights, pads and you-name-it beginning to wear out and need constant replacement. We've lived modestly here for our 10 years in this town, and the repairs on the Beamer were beginning to look like monthly car payments. So Vicky convinced me a new car, just for me, would be the ticket. She had the still sporty Celica, which she loves, to do the commute to her job a few miles round trip each day.  Her dream job as the executive director at a local non-profit was secure, and so we took home a new Hyundai Sonata after trading in the BMW. 

A year later the car and its purchase puzzle me because I find I will be, in the immortal words of Ray Davies, "Going Solo." So low.

All the emotions people confront when their personal universe shifts into brain chaos hit me these past several months trying to work through the relationship woes with the one I love. Everyone knows the three Gs- gut-wrench, guilt and grief when breakup calls. There are plenty of other descriptors anyone can freely apply to note abrupt individual change when it happens to them, but sadness mixed with confusion fits me best today. I made it past anger, finally.

Anger made the scene untenable at the end of the line. After 20 plus years of togetherness being told  four months ago that she did not think the relationship could go on caused all my synapses to fire every round in the their tanks, and put me at a total loss. After feeling so comfortable in my skin being around the love of my life for so long the new order, these past 100 days or so, has meant I now felt childish and unsure at every moment in the day. What to do? How to repair the damage? What the fuck has happened? And how did it get to this?

Different perspectives over time on issues personal and professional, which never resolved themselves, apparently ate away what I considered an unshakeable foundation.

I grew up with arguments. My parents argued with themselves frequently, and loudly on many an occasion. Most of my relatives argued with one another, and often. My grandmother once told my mom when she called one time to complain about a fight with my dad,  "If you don't have a fight with your partner from time to time there is no point in having a partner." She then hung up on my mother. Some people might be made for arguments, others not so much it appears.

It's not as though there were no clues in front of my senses over the past several years that maybe things were not all hunky-dory in our little couple world. The various physical ailments that afflicted my loving partner over our time in Bakersfield, CA were in all probability symptoms of stress, and although many conversations brought up that possibility these talks always ended without a resolution of the dis-eases, or unease of the soul to be more precise. My lingering unhappiness over the failure to land any meaningful work in the Bakersfield job market had to be a constant irritant, and even though I was mum on the subject for the past several years, let's face it a few years of unhappy bitter is hard to live with. 

We had, I thought, compromised on a one earner one stay-at-home lifestyle. All her efforts could be on pursuit of success in the job world, which she has achieved, while all work on the property and household would fall to me. The ten-buck-an-hour gigs that I was able to land seemed pointless to keep pursuing when we had a bunch of aging pets to maintain on top of large properties in a town where poverty was so prevalent and opportunity for home burglary ever present on every street. We just had different perspectives on how that would play out, I guess.

Cue the Traveling Willburys "End Of The Line" on our lives together. This is not, however, a boo-hoo pity party on this page. Just an acknowledgement it is one more time to change tracks with the hope that lessons learned will stick, and that complacency and inattentiveness never reside with me in the years to come. Time for new horizons.

Happy Holidays to friends and families everywhere.

When people become brands who can be schocked by the lies?

Dan Hicks had a great line many years ago, "How can I miss you when you won't go away?" He made a quirky song out of it.



This line always pops into my head when the bombast of world class liars and frauds intrudes too much into my little world.  The song has ebbed and flowed in my brain throughout the forty plus years I can remember first hearing it and then immediately thinking of Richard Nixon, and why he would just never go away. Until, finally, he did one late summer in 1974 just go away with a spastic wave before boarding a taxpayer funded helicopter to fly off into obscurity and exile. The awkward wave was almost Napoleonic in its bizarre parting gesture to a nation. The nation had had enough of Dick.

This first month of January in 2013 we have two characters filling the news pages with their tawdry stories of deceit, Lance Armstrong and Manti T'eo.  Lance utterly fails all attempts to categorize him as a human being. If you read any of the multitude of articles over the years and the many detailed accounts of the lengths his corporate goons went about attacking and ruining any person who actually spoke the truth you just want this guy to die instantly and disappear from recorded history. Sadly, this will not be the case. Lance just reaches the upper echelon of fakes during this age of money fueled  disinformation. Manti T'eo's story, although stupefying and a giant pie in the face to all who cover college football for a living, comes off as a stupid teen prank gone big-time bad for Notre Dame, and Manti T'eo. Of course, this hallmark university of all things college football can mourn a fake girl who died, but not one who committed suicide after getting the brush off from Notre Dame after accusing one of its football players of rape.

Here is a Rick Reilly column owning his swallowing hook, line and sinker every Lance lie. This could be the general media template for all upcoming articles of gullibility and no accountability by members of our illustrious advertising sponsor-paid press corps. The Daily Coyote has more journalistic integrity than nearly all the high paid talent working for big media and their advertisers today. No one pays this lady to spin a yarn a certain way. The photos are honest, not an advertiser's demand.

No rational person in the world should be surprised at these latest liars, just at how many there are these days. Let's be honest, we are still paying off the eight year misadventure called the Iraq War, which was waged on outright lies by the Bush Administration, and whose total cost can never be accurately measured. We have had the nation's key financial advisers fail to tell the truth regarding their casino exploits with credit swaps and mortgage securities bundled together as billion dollar investments not worth a thousand dollars. Major banks and lending institutions lied to their their borrowers repeatedly on what the true cost of the loans they sold would be for a decade. We lived through the 1990s where every baseball game was a fraud, and applauded for every home run until the juice story leaked through the muscled biceps of the armies of players injecting PEDs into their bodies. We have seen the lies at Penn State, and the awful repercussions of those victims, but Penn State certainly seems well enough after a short hiccup in the public consciousness. None in the major media outlets during any of these gargantuan frauds and abuses of power raised a finger to point out the truth, until way after the fact. And wasn't it just yesterday when we saw a different Tiger Woods and John Edwards?

The apologies are not even apologies today, just news cycle spin  filled with crocodile tears for the conglomerate media. The charlatans of today are now brands, incorporated piles of legal teams and media consultants. Sad day when people morphed into a brand of advertising piffle. I can't feel sorry for a brand. I feel pity for all those who swallow up whatever soap, fragrance or charity work the brand sells to make itself more powerful. 

Lights Out College Football

This past week left no uncertainty regarding the season of the year. I sweat buckets while inhaling bottled water with triple digit temperatures making my old frame wither every time I go to douse a plant outside to keep it from simply igniting in the afternoon sun. For all the scorching going on in the Southern San Joaquin Valley, this part of the world looks very mild when you compare it to the climate bearing down on Happy Valley, Pennsylvania where the campus of Penn State cooks under the hostile glare of a stunned world.


I cannot imagine anyone in America not knowing something about this story. A former top assistant coach and key recruiter for the Penn State football program, Jerry Sandusky, gets convicted on 45 of 48 counts brought against him for  various crimes of sexual abuse against children.  Mr. Sandusky created a nonprofit charitable organization The Second Mile in 1977 to help at-risk children, some of the children became victims of the founder's sexual abuse. Sandusky also adopted six children, and one of them has also alleged he was sexually abused, although those charges were not part of the trial which concluded in June 2012. The convictions were for crimes committed from 1994 to 2009. Terrible crimes, and chillingly reminiscent of the many crimes against children some Catholic Priests have been convicted of this past decade. 


And then we have Penn State University, and its total failure to do anything about these crimes 14 years after being alerted of serious sex abuse allegations being levied against one of their top assistant football coaches. The men at the top did nothing. Not the revered coach of Penn State, Joe Paterno. Not the Athletic Director of Penn State, Tim Curley. Not the Vice-President of Penn State, Gary Schultz. Not the President of Penn State, Graham Spanier. Not the Penn State Board of Trustees who oversee the University and all its policies and finances. As a matter of fact, after the first serious allegations at the university surfaced Jerry Sandusky was "allowed" to retire with full privileges and unlimited access to all campus facilities while getting a nice monetary parting gift of $168,000.  According to CNN, "Top university officials said they had never known Penn State "to provide this type of payment to a retiring employee." 


In its effort to get ahead of the crisis to blunt even more outrage, Penn State hired former FBI director, Louis Freeh, to investigate and report fully on the matter. The Freeh Report is 267 pages of condemnation of the University and the men who were entrusted to know and do better while running a state funded university. There are many who want to dig much deeper into this sordid saga of arrogance, abuse of power and greed, and think the current list of cut-out men ( a dead coach and three former executives of the university) is much too small. 


All I know is that justice works very slowly in this country, and many trials will be forthcoming in both the civil and criminal courts with lots of sordid details to digest for years. What penalty will Penn State, and more specifically its vaunted football program, pay for such big crimes against young people who needed protection not sexual abuse. What the headlines and most of the pundit talk around the country regarding this story fail to acknowledge, or do so quietly with the full understanding that nothing will ever really change, is that this story just encapsulates the nation's brutish football culture that campuses of high schools and colleges have created while pursuing the gold that media conglomerates dangle like rabbit decoys in front of administrative greyhounds running in circles around a track. 


A few weeks back I read a great Chuck Klosterman article on football and why Chuck finds it so fascinating today. Within this outstanding Grantland on-line column is a link to a debate on whether or not to ban football from college campuses. The debate comes courtesy of intelligence 2 (Squared) US on the New York University campus. The debate is lengthy, clocking in at nearly 2 hours. I've watched it three times, and have come away each time more convinced minor league football with big league revenues attached to it has no place on the campuses of our American universities.   


The arguments from the two panel advocates, Tim Green and Jason Whitlock,  who want to keep the game alive and well on college campuses focused on how the game builds character and team work. The two talked up the monetary gains for the colleges, and the benefits players  receive for their devotion to the game. The thrust of the two panelists, Malcolm Gladwell and Buzz Bissinger, for banning the game from colleges and universities dealt with head and body injury issues to the athletes and how the economics works against most players and the schools with football programs throughout America. 


Buzz Bissinger wrote the exceptional Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team And A 
Dream. Malcolm Gladwell wrote the New York Times best-seller, Tipping Point: How Little Things Make A Big Difference. Gladwell is a New Yorker Magazine contributor columnist and has written 3 other best selling books. Tim Green is an NFL analyst on the Fox Network, and has authored 21 books of fiction and 3 non-fiction book titles. He is a lawyer who practices law in the state of New York. Jason Whitlock is a sportswriter for Foxsports.com and is a contributor to ESPN. The fascinating element to the debate procedure finds all those in attendance asked to give an indication on their leanings before the debate happens. Are they in favor of the proposal, against the proposal or are indifferent regarding the proposal? At the close of the debate the audience weighs in again with how they view things after hearing the debaters. This topic has been the biggest intelligence 2 (Squared) debate thus far.  


The results of the debate surprised me, as did some of the statistics the panelists offered into evidence as support of their positions. This debate took place after the allegations surfaced at Penn State surrounding Jerry Sandusky, but before his trial started. 


A Sports Illustrated column from March of 2011 written by Jeff Benedict and Armen Ketayian explored a twist on the Top 25 ranking of college football teams. These are the top poll  ranked football programs of 2010 and the number of players in their programs with criminal records  playing for those universities. Pittsburgh came away with the top ranking for utilizing the most players in their program (22 players) with a criminal background. Iowa and Arkansas tied for second with 18 apiece. Lo and behold, what team do you think tied with Boise State for third place in using players with criminal backgrounds? Penn State you say? Yes, indeed.


Let's not kid ourselves here in thinking just the top 25 teams utilize players with criminal backgrounds, or find their student athletes engaged in alleged criminal behavior. The people in Missoula, MT are living the Happy Valley, PA nightmare as the Justice Department investigates multiple rape allegations from 2010, and prior. The identity of this town of 86,000 in Western Montana has been all about their Grizzlies football team.  The university had more than 80 reported rapes over the past three years. Probably not the learning environment message you want to employ to recruit bright young people to your campus would be my guess. 


Here in the Southern San Joaquin in September of 2011 there were two dozen Fresno State Bulldog football players implicated in a welfare fraud case involving the Department of Social Services.  And the beat goes on.


It would be one thing if all colleges and universities with football programs made money to help underwrite tuition costs and other school fees, but 42% of all collegiate schools with football programs lost on average $2.9 million for 2010 according to a report by the NCAA. A USA report found students footed a $795 million bill for sports programs in 2009, which was up 18% from 2005. 


I find it absurd seeing football coaches salaries at the astronomic levels they are today. Knowing Jeff Tedford, the coach at Cal, is the highest paid UC system employee, and the highest paid state employee to boot, makes me want to take a serious life long sabbatical from college football.  Alabama pays Nick Saban  $5.62 million per year. Ask any Miami Dolphin fan about Nick Saban's character, and his willingness to tell the truth when up against it. Nick's daughter appears to be a chip off the old feisty and publicity seeking Saban block.  The list of overpaid football coaches is now legion in America, where the costs of getting a higher education get further and further out of reach, and student debt is now the great source of debt in this country surpassing credit card and mortgage debt this past year.  The total debt of student loans is now over a trillion dollars in this country. No shock to see a stagnating wage world in America  with soaring tuition coasts and the lowest state and local spending on higher education in 25 years create this debt disaster for families.


Over a million young guys strap-it up and play football in high schools throughout America. Of that total only  66,000 get to play college football, and of those only about a third get a scholarship. All this, and those players battling it out on the Saturdays putting the butts in the stands don't get a dime as the actual talent of the game. 


You'll never hear the analysts and play-byplay announcers call for ending their meal ticket. And the conglomerate media networks will never do the right thing and take a step back to see what despicable social reality they have created, since their only right thing has to do  with making their top executives, major investors and top talent oodles of money. 


So, in a day or two a verdict will come down on Penn State, and Penn State alone. But, Penn State was not created in a vacuum. Penn State is just the reflecting glass of our current university culture that allows abuses of power like Sandusky's to permeate our society, and gives passes to major indiscretions and infractions to those who fill a stadium and get a television contract.   


I will never follow college football again. I have been a football fan for most of my life, and have no issue with the game itself. If the business of football wants a minor league system of club teams not affiliated with universities by all means go for it. Have the USC, Ohio State, Nebraska, Alabama, Florida, Miami, Oklahoma, Boise State minor league teams play their hearts out any day of the week they choose. We just need to remove this caricature of a game from places where higher education should be the sole focus. No other nation on earth uses their hallowed halls of academics as the venue for head-banging entertainment.  





    

Julius Comes Again

Julius Caesar's month arrives.




With apologies to Glen Frey, "the heat is on" throughout the days and nights. This time of year the Beach Boys always came to mind when I was younger. I was never a huge fan of the brothers and cousin from Hawthorne, CA and their many additions/subtractions over the years, but always thought many of their seminal hits catchy, and now find several other tunes of  Brian Wilson's evoking a sadness nostalgia wrings from an old sentimental brain when tweaked by a riff.  Surprising staying power for a band trapped in a regional location tied firmly to one decade, the 1960s.

It's not that the Beach Boys didn't make good music after the Sixties, but no one knows or remembers those songs much, if at all. Everyone remembers all the lyrical names of the California Girls from Help Me Rhonda and Wendy to Barbara Ann and an old lady from Pasadena, but after the Seventies crossed the big dial in the space time universe the band had a tough time selling records. Cameron Crowe found a nugget from the under appreciated album, Surf's Up, which Carl Wilson wrote with Jack Rieley titled Feel Flows. He included it on his rock nostalgia masterpiece film, Almost Famous.  The song is so unlike the usual Beach Boy offering in theme and instrumentation, but when you hear the harmonies you have a real good idea of who you're listening to while it takes you on a transcendental groove that was already out of time by its original release but has remained timeless due to its great production values with an exquisite layered mix of vocals and instrumentation .

Certainly, over my listening years a lot of artists (huge, obscure and everywhere in between) have mined the hot season with some great songs. Lovin' Spoonful's Summer In The City,  Sly Stone's Hot Fun In The Summertime, Alice Cooper's School's Out, Don Henley's  The Boys of Summer, Diesel's Sausalito Summer Nights, Janis Joplin's or Miles Davis' versions of Cole Porter's Summertime, Jimi Hendrix's Long Hot Summer Night, Meatloaf's Paradise By The Dashboard Lights with inspired baseball commentary by Phil Rizutto,  and Green Day's Wake Me When September Ends all pop into my skull as good sun-season melody fodder. I'm sure you have  some other tunes that come to mind that wring out beach towels of of memory-dripping summer madness.

Maybe this month's heat fried some of my circuitry, but I can't think of one British rock act circa 1960s onward that owns a good tune that really means summer. I know there have been plenty of tunes about sunshine from many a Brit band, or artist, but the feeling is that a day of sunshine is one of those rare and sparkling events to be celebrated as a gift, certainly not the American styled season of sweat. The Beatles could pop out Good Day Sunshine and Here Comes the Sun, but those certainly in no way evoke a summer spirit.  The Rolling Stones have a great tune, Winter, but no song of summer. The Kinks coined  the title, Autumn, but never for the season preceding it.  I guess it makes sense when the nation's latitude falls where Southern Canada's rests that odes to warm months would be sparse, much like summer itself in those climates. But, that curious Canadian, Bryan Adams, had a modest hit with The Summer of '69 back in the early 1980s. Of course, Bryan had his eye on the American market back in those days and summer has been  a somewhat topical treatment here in the states.

I say somewhat topical, because only two major rock era acts post the Beach Boy's 1960s moment in the pop sun truly make summer, and what the season really stands for in this country, their stock and trade.  Just my little opinion here on the blogosphere, but only Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger have owned summer in the rock world.  

When you listen to these two great artists, and especially their defining work from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, the themes and energy surrounding so many of their songs just screams high temperatures and perspiration born of  passionate desperation for youth on the cusp.


Bob Seger's best material exudes a sexual heat, a longing and an elusiveness of the all-too-brief moments of long days and short nights that quickly were over. His usual persona for many of his memorable songs always looks back in Night Moves, Roll Me Away, Main Street, Brave Strangers and Against the Wind. Other songs like Fire Down Below, Come to Poppa, Sunspot Baby and Her Strut all have beat and thermometer set to sauna levels. "Like a wildfire out of control" ... "young and restless running against the wind." Lines define the time.


Bruce Springsteen means summer in a completely different way for me, although he and Bob share the motorcycle as a metaphor on more than one occasion. The three major album releases- Born to Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River all deal with summer's promise and agony for youth looking to escape the inexorable determination of their forged fates. Years ago the sameness of some arrangements and beat on several of the Darkness on the Edge of Town's songs bothered me, but as time passed and gave my ears some distance I began to greatly appreciate the force of those slow hammer blows that marked these songs and the everyday intense repetitive drudgery causing the drive to escape they evoked. For Bruce, summer is/was no vacation time, nor a sexual metaphor in the great body of his work. Summer is the grind, it begets work-sweat and meets desperate encounters trying to outrun the inevitable. The earlier songs more defiant, but by The River a resignation has emerged in the author's voice. Later albums channel many of these themes with differing colors. The mixes get better while the July driven eloquence of his youth dims, as it must with age and vantage point, but Bruce Springsteen will always define summer's sound for me. 


As Prove it All Night goes into the seventh minute of a long ago live recording, and Wrecking Ball  awaits its third run the through all the tracks I can hear an M-80 explode nearby in the neighborhood. The dog now frets and pants, his anxiety at a very high level. The cats look about, in better shape than the dog, but they're old and probably don't hear as well. I turn up the music a bit, like I am forced to do every July 4th holiday to ease the critter nerves. Good speakers with summer melodies help.


Thanks for stopping by. 

What's Up? Doc.

I had a blog post almost set to go last week. I watched a number of terrific documentaries recently and thought I would pass my takes on each of them, in the spirit of providing knowledge about the crimes might undo the punishments being exacted on the innocents of the nation, which now swims daily in the conglomerate-owned vast seas of propaganda. No one gave me these films for free (those days are so gone) and no one chatted me up  looking for your eyes to capture as a click to some twisted algorithm tie that indicates if you like this plastic disc you must own this underwear. Fuck advertising.

But my blog post got derailed by events in real life, which somehow (even with my near invisible real life presence) takes precedence and routinely spoils my plans.  Ah, Robert Burns. This morning, as I pound the keyboard, finds me waiting on my Hot Coffee. Can't sip until the needle slips in to steal about four vials for some analysis. Have to get a shit sample off at some point today, too. Fun stuff.

Really, though, I can't complain much. My wonderful spouse did the heavy lifting by landing her current job this January, after 7 months on the unemployment dole. I won't get into her job- that is her business, but even though she was hired as "management" she and I had to wait four months for one benefit from the job to begin. All this just means we both got our health care coverage back after almost one year without it this June.

When I wrote that first sentence in the last paragraph maybe I should have typed, "We hit-it-out-of-the-park-fucking-lucky." Last Wednesday I thought I would give our circus dog, Darby, a well needed and deserved ride to one of his fun spots. The little dude likes the short drive, and short walk about the town to sprinkle his Darbiness on his favorite local flora. We hit the road and the trails at the local bluffs off Panorama Drive and had a great time. We got back and had a sandwich together, as we regularly do, and then I began to feel the effects of  having gotten up at 5AM along with the morning chores coupled with the outing followed by lunch, and all of a sudden it was nappy-poo time. And at about 1PM I went down.

Within an hour my chest felt like a pecan being squeezed in a nutcracker, with the back of my neck pouring out whatever liquid contents remained in my shell. Disorientation class arrived, and I was at my seat early. For over two hours I spent the time taking a couple of  baby aspirin tablets and doodling over the sink with some dishes to convince myself all was under control but the vise-grip around my chest up to my throat never let up. I tried sitting but no luck. I could not lay down the pain was too excruciating, and I worried that if I did get prone I might not be able to get back up.

Being the cheapskate I am a 911 call never entered my mind, nor did just calling the local ambulance service. I'd seen those rates from my many experiences with my dad several years ago. I knew the rates hadn't dropped with the housing prices. Shucks, the mayor of this berg who owns the local ambulance service and who basically has a monopoly here in the county, had just gone before the city council and county supervisors and they gave him everything he asked for in terms of service and rate increases for his ambulance business. I hung on until 4PM when I texted my wife if she could leave a little early, because I was not feeling too well.

I might have waited until she got home had I not experienced a very small event like this one about 3 weeks prior in the back yard after mowing the lawn. That episode was not nearly as intense, and one baby aspirin with a sit down alleviated the minor chest pain. I knew all this could just as easily be some GERD attack, but I had no acid reflex feeling in my throat nor any of the usual burping-the brains-out while syncopating farts in rhythm to the ultimate personal humiliation dance routine that accompanies gastritis and all its wonderful subsidiaries like H. pylori and the like. This was probably the heart attack I never worried about, and so I put in the text message with a follow up call which got her voice message prompt.

I could relax a little bit because the hospital and various doctors could not take everything we own, because Jumping-Jeebus in the Cosmic Rebus of Life I had fucking insurance once again. So relaxed as a fool can be we drove to the ER room at the local Kaiser where blood pressure was taken, an EKG produced and a thorough exam of my feeble state dictated a hospital stay with more tests would be in order. The doctor asked if he should call the ambulance service, and, of course, I told him no. We would drive once he confirmed that I had a room ready.

My stay lasted roughly 30 hours. The nursing staff did outstanding and professional work, as did all the various aids and workers who keep a hospital running. I even had the electronics maintenance guy pop in to make sure my television set was working properly. He didn't like walking by and seeing the tv off, so he checked to make sure all was well with his set. He probably thought I was from Mars when I said I didn't watch much television, and really all I wanted to do was sleep in between blood pressure exams and drawing blood for tests on various body parts. "Televisions are here to help you get well." Cool, but I kept the thing off for all but fifteen minutes until the end of my visit.

I saw two doctors. Each visit was brief, but to the points. The doctors were cordial, seemed to care about my well being, and gave me sound professional advice concerning what tests were going to be necessary during my time in the hospital. A CTscan and x-rays revealed no masses or tumors, and gave no indication for the pain. The EKG and blood pressure readings were negative, but a chemical stress test would be necessary to rule out a heart attack. I would get that during my final five hours in the building along with a ultrasound test. Every procedure required my signature, which basically said go ahead and do it,  I know I can't sue and me or my family can only go through an arbitration process should something go terribly wrong. The joys of "tort reform."

The entire stay felt like I was in a perpetual dream state of semi-consciousness. I would doze off in mid sentence talking to my wife, or to the nurse. I don't know if they were amused, resigned, pained or relieved. I was just "sick object" to be treated. Seemed like the perfect mindset from my vantage point, although female nurses and aides always seemed worried when the floppy gown was moving that some "surprise" might be forthcoming. I assured them on the several times this came up that I was no transgender, and had decent underwear all the same. It wasn't a great comeback, but even in my addled state you could feel the immediate relief. I got to wondering how many small ugly episodes of On The Way To Uranus, with all the obligatory slime induced special effects getting emitted,  these aids had to confront in the course of a working day. Then I fell back to sleep. It seemed to take forever to move from the bed to a wheel chair to a room for a scan or exam. I could not tell east from west, north from south and had no concept of time unless a nurse was doing a countdown on some injection.  And food was a no no, because you had to fast for your particular test.  

I could have stayed that Thursday night and checked out Friday morning. I know my wife was relieved to  have me get home that evening cleared of any real damage. I still felt woozy-weird, but, hey, I used to go work feeling that way plenty of times in my youth, and I was alert enough to know that the longer the hospital stay the higher the odds some micro bacterial pathogen gets into that little vein opening where the medicines go in, or the blood goes out, exacting a dread infection that could kill you.  I remembered the packed ER room at the hospital when I arrived, and thought maybe one of those souls downstairs might really need a room. As it turns out, I was the classic ER user- a newly insured churned individual who had been out of the health care market for awhile ( not the uninsured or the illegal immigrant who are both painted by the forces of evil to stir fear in the hearts of the ignorant).

Well, of course, all of the above thinking was just a few onion  rings on the meat of the matter. I did not want another hospital day put on the family tab. Week-long vacations to exotic places at 5-star hotels cost less than a two days in a typical US hospital. And all turned out for the best. I had some pains and a fitful Saturday night, but my Sunday evening was feeling almost back to normal, weak but getting stronger.

On Monday I met with my primary care physician who gave me the seal of Kaiser approval for decent health, but ordered the needle and vials and fecal smear the post started with. All could have been wonderful until on my way back home I get a call from one of my dearest friends that he, too, had been in the hospital over chest pains at the same time I had been. He allowed me to tell my tale, and then quickly described his few weeks of heart wrenching pain that resulted in the heart surgery, which placed several stents into the primary valves leading to his heart. The doctors have finished most of the work, but they still have one more stent to place next week.

Life will never be as it was. Life can be good, but the new reality finds the throttle now has a governor. Stupid cliches such as "A man has to know his limitations"  take on new darker tones as summer days shorten. I need another cup of hot coffee.

Thanks for stopping by and spending some time!