Another medical update

I caught some sort of digestive system plague, and the last week or so has been miserable.

It used to be that these illnesses would effect me more (because of my existing lung problems) than the general population, but this is ridiculous. I get a sniffle, a cough or a stomach ache and I am down for days, trying not to moan so loudly I disturb the kid.

I am in a fairly dark place, mood-wise. Eating is no longer pleasurable, nor is sleeping. In fact, since the heart attack, I have felt almost nothing but nerve-munching, upset-making, oh-god-I'm-gonna-die fear.

cheers.

medical update

So, a walk outside of less than 100 yards almost does me in.

I HATE appearing weak. I don't mind actually being weak, as long as it doesn't show. That's probably vanity or ego or whatever twisted thing I use to judge my own self-worth. I am used to appearing strong, even if it is a sham (which, if we are talking physical strength, it has been for quite some time). I don't even mind appearing fat or slovenly, as long as I still look like a moving train when I walk and a cross between a Vulcan computer and an axe murderer when I talk.

No longer. I walk with a cane and there is, at least to me, a noticeable weakening of my voice, frequent straining for breath, and occasional mental disorientation. Okay, so in times of need, I look like a moving train with a cane, but it actually takes an effort. Yesterday I walked over to a neighbors house only two doors away, and had an asthma attack, moderate chest pain (about 2 points above the constant background pain) and had to take a nap.

And just because it pissed me off, I woke up and found a very good excuse to do it again. Same result, altho while at the neighbors house, I held up my side of a detailed philosophical conversation.

This is going to be a long, nasty road to get even close to the sickly bastard I was before the heart attack. And the pain is getting really old really quick.

Here comes the depression. Hooray.

I'll get throough it, but shit, it is harder, by far, than I thought it would be.

Lizard

An Explanation of the 180 I.Q. thing.

I am not really THAT smart.

I have taken 35 IQ tests, only six of which were administered by professionals. On those six tests, I scored the following:

Unmeasurable (max 200)
185
130
130
126
112

On the other tests, the average is about 150.

IQ tests absolutely nothing but the ability to take IQ tests well. That's all. If it actually tested anything useful or functional, MENSA members would be running the world instead of being a collection of socially malfunctioning malcontented underachievers who think they SHOULD be running the world.

I use the number 180 because it is a nice, round figure, it is pleasantly high, and it is on the license plate of a total ubergeek in the movie "sneakers".

I am smarter than the average bear, no more. I suck at math, I have no memory for dates, names, times, schedules. Without my wife, I would never even know what day of the week it is. This was true even when I was a full-time computer repair person who HAD to know these things.

Nope, it is a joke. My intelligence comes mostly in the usage (preferably savage, vicious, unrelenting) logic in argument, conversation, and writing (not the kind of writing I put in my blog).

Diogenes is easily as smart as I am, and CrowBear is going to be an amalgam of my intelligence, which lies in communication, and his mother's intelligence, which lies in organization, keeping track of diverse detail, and dogged devotion to task. Step aside, world, here he comes.

If he decides to be a happy bum, I will be content. If he decides to accomplish something, I will watch with profound admiration. If he decides to pursue his potential to it's fullest, I will be jealous and mooch off him for the rest of my life.

Whatever shall I do? I am just wracked with indicision!

For the last fifteen years, my most serious medical problem has been my massive high blood pressure.

It's gone.

Apparently, whatever happened with my heart attack has completely eliminated my hypertension.

Which leads me to a question I have, at the moment, no answer for :-) . The Docs have been telling me that I need to become less angry, less tense, less vehement, less stentorian, less ME. THAT was what was causing my hypertension, my type-A temperament (even tho I live a very nearly stress-free lifestyle, worry very little, and am a complete slob) and I MUST change it, or it will kill me. Oh, and lose some weight.

None of them said "perhaps a heart attack might be a good idea, too" but that is what seems to have done the trick.

Now, losing the weight was annoying (throwing up for six hours at a time three or four days a week sucks, but THAT is gone, too) but maybe that was all I needed to do, that and my heart readjusting. My cholesterol is fine (my triglycerides suck, and I am not sure what that means, and neither are the doctors)

So I need to decide whether to change who I am, trusting that they were right all along and this is just a freak reaction, and if I stay my arrogant, sure-of-myself condescending, snippy, angry self, it'll just start killing me again, of do I say FUCK 'EM in a loud, angry, self-righteous, arrogant, I-know-more-than-them voice, and continue merrily on being the smartest guy in the room, a semiprofessional asshole, a 180 I.Q. annoying bastard?

Heh heh heh. I wonder which I will pick? Don't you?

Gonna keep losing weight, tho. Bring on the salad!

Lizard

rage Rage RAGE fucking RAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

God, I am tired of idiots.

"Drugs bad!" she said, then she stopped thinking.

Really? Drugs keep me alive. Albuterol, Salmeterol, Prednisone, Penicilin, Cipro. All of the above have saved my life, and will again, I have no doubt.

Also in the catagory of "saved my life", altho less directly, are Fentanyl, Morphine, Oxycodone. They also almost ruined it once. Most scalpels are also swords, in broad analogous terms.

Nicotine almost killed me.

So did (does?) caffeine.

Marijuana has improved bits of my life greatly, and made a few bits a bit worse.

Alcohol annoys me, and I don't use it more than about 2 beers a year.

Drugs bad? Without them, I would be long dead.

"That's not what I meant. Those are LEGAL drugs!"

With the exception of LSD, Cocaine and Heroin, ALL drugs are legal under some circumstances. Broaden your spectrum to the entire world, and only heroin is universally illegal, as far as I know.

So the illegality of a drug makes it bad? and the legality of it makes it good? Nicotine GOOD? God, I am tired of idiots.

What makes a drug valuable is it's usefulness.

"But a DOCTOR should decide that!"

Why? Because they have better judgment? Ever actually TALKED in real-life terms with multiple doctors? The ratio of morons-to-geniuses is the same as among normal folks. There are doctors who wont provide pain medication under any circumstances, even to dying people, because of the threat of addiction. DYING PEOPLE. Here is a clue, moron: If they are dead, withdrawl is no longer really a problem, neither is addiction.

What does a doctor know about your spirit?

"Spirit is not the proper realm for drugs. How can drugs help your SPIRIT?"

Aside from every society in history except the Eskimos (because their native land contained no spiritually active plants, and they were largely carnivores anyway) and every non-monotheist religion on the face of the earth, I guess nobody believes that drugs can help your spirit. Oh, wait, the catholics and most christians consider wine a sacrament. Okay, make that ALMOST every non-mono.... wait, jews do too, don't they? And the muslims? Well, depending on sect, they smoke marijuana and nicotine, and make an almost sacred ritual out of coffee. I guess we are left with just the Eskimos, the baptists (New Wine devotees) and YOU (and every other moron without the sense to think for themselves or the wit to do research)

But you , YOU, who first taught me about thinking about spirit, buy the white anglo-saxon protestant line uncritically, just because you knew a few people who were scarred by drugs, people who would have likely have found a way to fuck themselves up anyway. Shit, woman, you are married to one of those people, and he hasn't done drugs in years, and he is one of the most twisted, dishonest people it has been my sad experience to meet. Drugs didn't do shit to him, and you have already acknowledged it in conversations that hadn't pushed your goddamn buttons.. mommy, daddy and the church are responsible for that mess.

Prozac, Celexa, the list of drugs for depression, an essentially spiritual condition, is now massive. Go to a doctor, tell them you are depressed, and wham-bang, they will write you a spiritual prescription before you can finish the sentence.

Why should I let a doctor, from ANOTHER RELIGION or none, make judgments on what I use for a sacrament, what I USE FOR MY SPIRIT?

"Well, drug ABUSE is bad!"

Define abuse. Taking a drug for pleasure? Do ya drink tea or coffee, woman? Dont bother answering, I lived with you, remember?

"The DOCTOR should say how you take them, and anything else is abuse!" Yeah, just give your decision-making process to a complete stranger who may or may not have your best interests at heart.

Listen up, woman: I walk my own path, and I always have. Get in my way at your own peril.

And YES, you childless judgmental idiot, when my son asks, WHENEVER he asks, I will ANSWER honestly. I will not HIDE what I do to satisfy your narrow morality under ANY circumstances. If he wants to walk my path, I will not refuse, I will ENCOURAGE, provided he is OF AGE, provided he is mature enough, provided he is, to MY satisfaction, ready.

What buisness do you, who opted out of motherhood specifically because you thought you would be bad at it, (a decision I respect, by the way) have passing judgment on what goes on in my relationship with my son?

I know my son. Don't get in his way, either. The only weapon he knows is unconditional kindness, but he is 7, that will surely change. And he is smarter than I am, by a long way.

Come debate me here. You have the address, but you don't have either the backbone or the skill. And you happen to be wrong, and you KNOW it.

Come on, make your point, change my mind.

I am waiting, and I guarantee an answer to anything you post. Come on.

Lizard

The Damned Phone

I think it is because of the bizarre way I look at the world: I find the telephone among the worst of evils of the modern world when I must use it for voice communications, and among the most important, vital, and utterly beautiful creations (which, I am convinced, will be the tool that will finally give us universal literacy, suffrage, and even intellectual freedom) when I connect it to my computer.

There are exactly two people I am comfortable talking to by phone. My friend Diogenes, and a woman I have known my entire adult life in Florida whom I will pseudonym Sophia (wisdom).

Diogenes and I have a mutual agreement about language: Say it, mean it, explain it clearly or shut the fuck up. Neither of us is likely to misunderstand the other, we both speak in a very similar manner. He is a bit younger than I, and I was (I think) instrumental in teaching him the finer points of savage intellectual debate. The chances of us hurting one another's tender feelings on the phone is zero, mostly because emotional misunderstandings simply cannot occur when you have spent years arguing in the same style. (as an aside, one of my proudest moments was when he smoked me in an argument so completely that I was forced to admit that I was arguing based on an egotistical desire not to be wrong rather than an intellectual desire to be right. It was at that moment that I first realized the real value of losing an argument: Once you lose, and accept the correctness of the opponent's position, you are NO LONGER WRONG, and if there is one thing worse than being wrong, it is STAYING that way. Yes, Diogenes, photons are massless particles)

Sophia I have known nearly forever, and she is a bit older than I, and was instrumental in forming the way I communicate, much in the same way I was to Diogenes. In other words, all the miscommunications that are going to happen have already happened, we both realize the limitations of language, and we simply talk.

Everybody else (and I mean EVERYBODY else, my wife of 20 years included) causes me varying amounts of extreme discomfort to communicate with on the phone.

Serious discomfort. Sweating, trembling limbs, stammering, mental distraction and occasional terror. Phobia stuff, irrational reactions to normal events.

I feel like I am speaking to dead people. I feel like I have absolutely no grasp of the emotional content of any conversation, because I can't SEE it. Offense, confusion, misunderstanding, aggressiveness, anger, happiness, sudden understanding, distraction, even a need to cut the conversation short to go to the bathroom is all stuff I SEE on peoples faces and read from their body language, and I am really good at it. But NONE of that input is available on the phone, and I hate it. Talking to corpses that don't know they are dead.

So, to everybody out there I simply won't talk to on the phone for longer than about 30 seconds, you now know why. To those who are offended by that, I do apologize. This means YOU, wife of Diogenes, for whom, (because of the risk of offending) I will not choose a pseudonym.

With he two exceptions above, I worry about offending nearly everybody. Now, most people, even tho I worry about offending them, I simply don't care. The worry is ethereal and abstract. But for others, those people who have a VERY high emotional content in their conversation, the risk of offense is so great that the normal phone-terror turns to ... well.... outright fear. It amounts to this: the easier you are to offend in person, the harder a time I will have talking to you on the phone.

One (yet another) of the pieces of my personality that are whimpy beyond imagining. It's okay, I make up for it in other ways.

Writing blog posts is probably something that I shouldnt be doing within days of a heart attack

I was quite gone, there, for a few days. I scared the crap out of a few of you who read this stuff, and for that, I apologise. Grindelwald, you can stop refreshing the blog every fifteen seconds, I am okay and getting some of my brain function back.

I am healing. The scars where I tried to rip my heart out are scabbed over (I am just lucky I had trimmed my nails to practice guitar the day before, or I might have actually been able to get down to the gristle before they whacked me with the morphine bye-bye juice) and have been keeping busy making homemade blowgun ammo. (no, it isn't craziness, it is simply a task that is physically undemanding and mentally challenging, which is exactly what I need to get my brain up and running again.)

To everybody who thinks my internal-conflict shamanic self-explanation for the heart attack is wrong, pointless or a kind of denial, I thank you for your concern, but I deal with things better in my own paradigm than in yours, and when i get stressed (and this really does qualify) I kind of forget that I have to translate Shaman-lizard into Human for some of you to understand.

I wrote a LOT of stuff in that first post-attack ramble that I did not intend to spill out onto the internet, and i am glad of my choice to make this a strictly pseudonymous place, but it is oddly comforting to know that there is a concrete record of my own twisted response to this mess that I can always refrence, and more importantly, can never again hide from.

Sunlight, even pseudonymous sunlight (Partly cloudy?) is the best disinfectant

Lizard

Requiem

"I want a dog. I've always had a dog".

So had I, as a kid, but I went to a petless private school, had two consecutive petless girlfriends, and I am allergic to anything that has skin.

When we lived in Portland, we had cats. Seven of them. They made life barely tolerable there, and I very conciously chose the allergens over the sterility of city life and stocked up on Benadryl. But we were on the third floor, so a dog was pretty much out of the question (TSG had Wilbur, the dumbest dog on the planet, when my wife and I were colllecting waifs to populate our early abodes. I will write later about how one black lab puppy managed to fit into an apartment containing 7 cats, 3 snakes, 4 permanent adults and up to 12 temporary waif-ish hackysacker couch potatoes. look for it later under the title "The Dreaded Butt Attack"

When our landlord sold our building, our menagerie (minus waifs, unfortunately. I liked the waifs) moved to seven acres in Bath, so, "I want a dog" Bastet said. Bastet wants a dog.

I dont want to contribute to the total suffering on the planet, so I will NOT get a purebreed. So we called the pound, and they asked Bastet what kind of dog she wanted, and she said "Big". And they said to her "we have JUST the dog for you!"

My friend, who I will refer to as Diogenes (yeah, motherfucker, you lucked out. I was tempted to pseudonym you Grasshopper, Gumshoe or Mr. Burton just to retaliate against you for not slavishly reading my every blog post, but my recent tryst with terminality has left me feeling generous)

/*begin freeflowing blogangst what the hell do I call people? I am demanding pseudonimity, but what if I piss off somebody by pseudonyming them myself, poorly? to quote a good movie, "Somtimes, ya just gotta say "what the fuck" end freeflowing blogangst*/

went to the pound to pick up the dog.

I have no idea why he went instead of me, it was too long ago, but anyway, Diogenes went to pick up our new dog,

Diogenes is a martial artist. A VERY good one, too. He moves with grace and determination, and he has excellent balance, better than mine when I was at my best. He is a pretty big guy, and very well trained. Black belt. Grappling instructor. Ninpo Taijutsu. The first thing that our new dog did was knock Diogenes on his ass. I wasn't there, but I got the idea that the dog REALLY wanted to be adopted, and was rather aggressive in agreeing to accompany Diogenes to our house.

Now, in his defense, it was winter, and slippery, and the dog was FUCKING ENORMOUS. 170 pounds enormous. Blocking Out The Sun enormous. he was big. Really really big.

His name was Ben, and he was a problem. His left hip had been crushed somehow, either through abuse or neglect or accident, and had never been correctly set. He was in constant pain in stormy weather, he was affectionate and deleriously happy to be alive at all other times.

He looked like a cross between a German Shepard and a Great Dane. I am 5'8" tall and he could lick my chin with just a little hop up.

We had him about three years. Huge dogs, regardless of their worth and value as living beings, don't live long, and I did not know that at the time.

He was scared of children (there was possible abuse in his past, and he reacted badly to being startled), so whenever we went out, he was muzzled. But his big lips stuck out of the muzzle far enough to carry around a deflated football, which he carried everywhere.

He loved to go walking on the Kennebec river and bark at the water. I could always tell he wanted to jump in the water, but he was terrified to. Our other dog, Gamma, used to swim around frequently, and Ben would watch her jealously. We always tried to get him to swim, he was always too scared.

One day, he found it. The Swimming Stick. I threw it into the river, and he wanted that stick so badly, he jumped in after it, Gamma gleefully yipping at his tail. Ben got the stick, and swam back. His self-pride in his achievement was clear, obvious. He strutted. Ben had conquered the water.

He died a few months later. I miss him.

The Paintbrush

The Paintbrush

"Baby" I said,
"The blood ain't mine"
but the scarlet terror leaking from me
deafened her to my words
because it was already in her eyes
and she watched me die
helping the nurses
with their red-paint cleaning chores.

"Baby, it ain't blood anymore"
but I was already dead
and the pump that shot the crimson at them
was just useless plumbing

"Look!" I shouted,
my right hand gouging the flesh of my chest
"I don't need it!"
and the red food coloring that was decorating the innards
of the former me
dripped down

I couldnt get it out, that damn pump,
and I cried in desperation
as I peeled the skin off my chest
and they hit me with 20 mgs of morphine
and the sticky red stuff poured out, into my eyes
staining my tears red
and making my beard into
a grotesque
dripping
paintbrush
held by no visible hand
painting nothing

Sometimes, you just need to let crisis roll over you and on past

Sometimes, you just need to let crisis roll over you and on past, and watch it's wake rebound and ripple.

I am finding it nearly impossible to be the person I was about three weeks ago.

The Attack was a symptom of a rather nasty war inside me, being fought over primarily moral issues. Somebody won, somebody lost, and I am now a different person.

I feel far too pationately in two mutually contradictory ideas, both of which I believe, all the time.

There was something just beyond my understanding, but just barely, and, in terms of paradigm, I flipped. I had been wanting to flip for a long time. I had spent eons contemplating the fucking hanged man. I didn't really expect a heart attack, but I knew it was going to be a crisis.

It is, I hope, the price I paid for learning something I needed to learn, somatacising my goal and kicking it's ass (or not, twitch, twitch), classical animist or tribal or shamanic way to learn and heal. Symbolic sense, unnervingly valid.

It is very hard to explain to others why I believe what I believe, but it seems that one of the things I just smacked with is that I need to try.

I am finding it very hard to be the person I was three weeks ago. But, in that I wasn't really very fond of him anyway, it is getting on my nerves much less than I thought it would.

Self-therapy by blog. God, I am so screwed. My brain hasn't turned back on, at least not fully, but I do seem to be waxing a bit poetic.

Contemplate Benedict of Amber, and Faramir, and Arthur. Those are the metaphors my brain wants to think in at the moment, and that makes it a bit difficult on a hard-sci wannabee like me.

When most geeks in my generation had their religious formation moment, it was in either Star Wars for morality, or Star Trek for worship of science. Mine was Conan the Barbarian. Go figure.

I had a fucking heart attack. I just CANNOT get my mind around that.

In January and early February

Instead of actually blogging, I was engaging in several mystical rituals involving teacher-student relationships.

Also, I composed (but did not mail) a letter to my father (one of exactly three that I have sent him in 40 years) and attempted to compose a letter to my evil stepmother (who refuses to allow my wife and son into her home because of some imagined slight that happened more than 30 years ag0. I'd tell you what that slight was, but I have no fucking clue). I have been trying to figure out a way that can accomplish the goal of getting my father completely and totally out of my life in all respects, yet keeps him in the life of my son, who loves him dearly, and keeps my halfsister (I HATE that I have to refer to her as half anything) in my life, because I seem to dearly love her (which is odd, because we hardly know one-another). My father is not a bad man, but he made some simply awful decisions in his life, and seeks continually to judge, (in a snide, parental-concern sort of judgementality) mine.

And I did several things which I will not detail here that may have been of questionable value, considering what happened later. Suffice it to say that I was engaged in trying to radically reshape my life and attitude toward life, using shamanic means (incorrectly, as it turns out. I wanted it done quickly, and shamanism is both gradual and subtle, so I was fucked from the start, to misquote 'The Commitments"

I could not be the parent I wanted to be. It was not typical father-failure stuff. I was there, physically, still married contentedly to Bastet, his Mom. I am not emotionally distant, I can hug and tickle and engage in physical affection kids need. The problems were in other areas.I didn't really care why that was the case, I just wanted to fix it. If I wanted my son to be a motivated, smart, passionate, reliable, creative and rebellious young boy, I would have to be all those things in order to be an example, and I tried harder than I have ever tried anything in my life before to do just that. And I could not do it.


Parts of it were simple, I guess. smart, passionate, those things I find come quite easily to me. I frequently have to dumb myself down, and ratchet back the burning fire of my enthusiasm, in order to be taken seriously or understood. It isn't even a challenge to pass those on. Creativity was pretty simple, too, tho since I don't understand my own creative process, I just sit around and create with him, it seems to work fine.

But reliability and motivation I just could not do. God damn, didn't I try, tho. Schedules, both internal and external, dates, places I needed to be, events in which I would participate and contribute in some way, Karate, the importance of promises and simple words.

(as an aside, CrowBear couldnt have cared less. As long as I was there to tickle, rub his back, sing King Henry at least occasionally, and shut the fuck up while he played computer games, he was happy. None of this is about HIM, it is all (of course) about me.)

It started when he quit karate. And then I had to quit, for different reasons. Every single failure on my part, failure to do the dishes or to work with him on writing, or even things as simple as singing to him when he wanted, every scheduled item uncompleted, every event unattended stuck a knife in my gut.

Stuck a knife in my gut. I have a strange literalness in my metaphors. Starting in November 07, I started vomiting, for hours at a time, three or four days a week (Bastet says more). I lost a lot of weight, but things were getting progressively uglier here, as I got sicker and sicker and no idea why. (the metaphor not having occurred to me yet).

I started looking at all the things together. I have three students (four if you are broadminded, five if you are REALLY broadminded). On in particular, is a complete failure on my part, another is now a bitter enemy, and another who never should have even BEEN a student. Failure, failure, failure. One success, and one agreement to stuff the teacher/student thing and just hang out. If looked at realistically, this is my life's work: Out of five, that's three failures, one success and one agreement to desist.

And my kid.

And my Dad.

It was a cycle, a really bad one. My father treats my son in such a way that, as he is a child, he sees nothing but love and affection. When he is old enough to understand what is actually happening as my father showers him with affection (but never allows him over for the night or even to visit for lunch), he will understand both shame and hate. My father, on some level, knows this. He also knows he will be dead when the transition hits and will never have to do any of the explaining about why he was such a cowardly bastard. Leaving me with the entire pool of pigshit to drag my kid through when he is old enough to understand the stench.

I can't teach my kid the things I need to teach him, because I was never taught them. My students are mostly the same way as I, (except Valkyrie, who, I suspect, has enough reliability and motivation for several army units) and as such, their students are likely to be the same.

And I can't stop it. I can't fundamentally change these things about myself, altho they may be the most important things I can conceivably change. More failure.

The vomiting continued until early last week. It had been building in strength and intensity for three months.

I was constantly looking for a way to solve the dilemmas, and could not.

My brain stopped working, or, rather, it had stopped working well. I have an I.Q. of over 180, and I rely on it like most people rely on breathing. It failed. My mind came to the conclusion that there was no way to solve my existential dilemmas under any circumstance, including flight or suicide.

So, a few days ago, I had a heart attack.

I lived.

Now what?