My Wierd Eye Appointment

Since I am now well into my 40's and am starting to hold books a bit further away from my head to read, I went to have an eye appointment.

The Doc's assistant thought I looked unwell, and insisted on taking my blood pressure. It was 255 over 150. Then she LITERALLY left the room at a dead run. Less than six seconds later, the eye doctor came in and told me to go to the E/R, where I spent the rest of the morning getting stuck with 9 needles (6 to get the IV, 3 for shots before they could get the IV in. It took 2 hours. I went through three electronic blood pressure machines in the E/R. None of them were calibrated to read a BP that high. They went through two nurses to get one with the hand strength to pump up the manual cuff)

Oddly enough, one of the drugs they pumped me with ACTUALLY WORKED. When I left my BP was 110 / 63. It is the 43rd different blood pressure med I have tried.

I was told in the E/R about a year ago that if I could not control my blood pressure, I would have a stroke within 5 years. I looked up the stats and he was right, the chances are in the high 70% range of a stroke, with a 50 % chance of that stroke being fatal or debilitating.

I have not been comfortable for a single moment since getting this sentence. I have confronted major familial demons and stirred shit up that I thought long over, simply because I might not have time to do it later. I have given up Karate because I am not fit enough, even moderate exercise can cause a major blood pressure spike, and that may mean stroke. I made one exception to this, going to the first saturday class taught be one of my former students (former only in that he now outranks me, and I have been learning from him rather than the other way around for years now)

Since that day, literally everything I do is weighed against the possiblity of a stroke. "Is this worth my life?" has been a frequent thought.

Today was a bright glimmer of hope. The stuff they used WORKED. And it seemed to work very quickly. I have a script for it, and on thursday I pick up a home monitor and see if it will keep working.

I might be around for a bit longer than I have been thinking.

It feels pretty good.

with dreams like this, would YOU sleep?

I was watching Condi testify after not getting enough sleep, when I slipped into a dream.

In my dream, Sheldon Whitehouse (who, in my dream, was wearing some sort of weird dolphin costume) asked Condi Rice (who was, rather predictably, covered with blood. Naked. There are times when a good imagination is a curse) the following question:

"Madam Secretary, I am going to ask you to define torture for the record. I am going to ask you this for one reason: Within the next ten years, I expect there to be war crimes trials, and I expect to be called as a witness. At those trials, I expect to be asked what I knew about the torturing of prisoners, and when I knew it. And I am going to tell them the truth, that I tried everything I could think of to make sure that if we were torturing, we stopped, and the people who engatged in it were brought to justice. I am, in foresight, building the record that will be evidence in those trials. With that in mind, Madam Secretary, I would like you to tell me what the administration's definition of "torture" is."

Of course, the Whitehouse-Dolphin wasn't there, Condi wasn't naked and nobody asked that, but it was a nice dream.

YES I will write about ANYTHING to beat writer's block.

Block Blown!

Damn, that almost resembled a poem! I'm baaaaaaaaaack (maybe)

untitled

there is a moment when pain becomes something else.

Take my word for it,
you never want to go there,
and it certainly isn't worth the trip

But it is sweet.
Sweet pain.

it is after the anger,
after the bargaining has been rebuffed,
after the begging stops,
and the pleading goes unheard,

there is a moment, fleeting,
just a gesture away from the place
where pain and death become a united force

------------------------------------------------------

I approach the point of ice-white sharpness
where pain and ecstasy merge
into a convulsion of sensory overload

and I am in another place.

Pain is a door, and the Mystic Half of me pushes me through.

This isn't shamanspace, this is something else
like being too stoned to follow the lyrics
or too drowsy to catch the meaning in a phrase
or too drunk to walk the line
all at once

There's shitloads of noise
and almost no signal
but when the PainGod talks
I listen up.

I can't put the message in the poem
if words could say it,
there would be no need for all that damned pain.

But it is there, and it is dark,
cold and deep.

pain is pure.

oneline poem #7

If you wait long enough, the doomsayers will, eventually just by chance, be right.

The Alien Abduction Center

There is an area in the brain that knows about alien abductions.

That is just.... deeply bizarre. Not as bizarre as quantum mechanics, but freakin' close.

The reason I think there is an 'alien abduction' spot in the brain is because i don't believe in alien abductions.

If you read the vast amount of alien abduction literature, one thing becomes very clear, that a lot of people are hallucinating the same things. It is also fairly clear that many of these similar hallucinations happened without the knowledge of previous experiences. In other words, in a lot (but still a small minority) of cases, the people experiencing these hallucinations could'nt just be copying what others say.

Like the near death experiences, and conversion experiences, and the alcoholic's 'moment of clarity', the alien abduction experience is a shared experience, and I suspect that there is a spot in the brain which, when stimulated, gives us this experience.

DMT and Salvinorin A both tweak this area (or maybe a receptor system, I don't know) as they both generate the alien-being visions (Salvia's are a bit more horrifyingly strange while DMT's are more godlike and emotive, at least for me).

Why would there be an 'alien being' centre in the brain? Of what possible use is it, evolutionarily speaking? Or is it's presence a by-product of intelligence itself?

These are the things that keep me awake nights.

I probably have pnumonia again, sorry for the infrequent posts.

Maintenance Robot

I stayed awake for more than 150 hours straight.

My wife was having a hysterectomy, I was on prednisone and having severe asthma attacks every few hours. My wife's care at the hospital was atrocious, and I had to stay awake and monitor what was going on. I am not a doctor, but I know a lot about medicine from research. She was panicking, and she needed me there.

When she got back from the hospital, I must have decided at some unconscious level that she was going to be fine, and I collapsed, having almost 4 hours of the most vivid hallucinations of my life, in the complete absence of any exogenous psychedelics.

After that, I must have simply lost the conscious part of my mind, because I was out for three days. During those three days, I was apparently fully functional, if a bit cranky and whiney. I drove my family a hundred miles, I cleaned the entire apartment, had phone conversations, cooked, bathed, walked the dog, everything. Apparently if you take away the part of me that has the ego, the rest can still function pretty well.

I call him my Maintenance Robot.

Over the next year or so, both the asthma and the cluster headaches got worse, and the two drugs that I was taking as treatment (prednisone and fentanyl) caused Maintenance Robot to come out a lot. He displayed interesting behaviors (putting pizza in the silverware drawer, repotting plants). As soon as I could drop the prednisone, he went away.

I sleep better knowing he is inside me, and will keep me going if I am gone, for whatever reason.

The Block

it's like a fingernails on a chalkboard
or maybe constipation
Writer's Block
constantly reaching, grasping, clenching.....
nothing.

There it is! An idea!
and I reach out to it
and it recedes,
and I GRAB it, and it becomes the ghost of an idea
and slips away through my grasping fingers
as it races away back into the dark space that birthed it.

It is in my peripheral vision
an idea, a character, a plot
but when I turn to see it head-on
it turns sideways and disappears,
having no depth,
just a lovely misty outline
and again, I grasp nothing
and in a few seconds, even the memory is gone

AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHH!

Writer's Block Sucks.

Hopefully this is just a short burst of writer's block, but who knows.

On the theory that it is better to write pointless drivel than nothing, will now write about writer's block.

Hmm.

Writer's Block Sucks.