I opened up my email this morning hoping. It was driving me crazy waiting for the library to open.
There was nothing.
No word on my puppy. No word on help for me. Just nothing.
Except a message from Flickr. Mare has been going out of her way. She tried to take over the Flickr account? I guess she wanted to remove all the pictures of my puppy. I don't know.
She turned off my mobile phone yesterday. Mare suddenly has become a whiz at the internet.
Mare plans to remove any memory of me from the planet. I don't understand it. I'm used to not understanding things.
Our last "communication" was her refusing to return my computer or my clothes or anything really. I guess she thinks I need to be punished more. I'm genuinely terrified of her threat to put my puppy in the pound.
It worries me that I can't match her rage. I'm being victimized here and I keep feeling sorry for Mare. Stupid of me. I just know that all that hatred and trying to hurt people becomes habit. And that it is just no good.
I know rage hurts. Anger hurts the weilder more than the victim sometimes. I don't hate Mare. Not yet. Probably not ever.
I still wonder why she wanted my flickr account.
I'm not doing well.
They threw out these two guys from the homeless shelter. They werte loud but, aside from being alcoholics, they were harmless and they were funny. Not good funny but they told jokes and acted like fools. Never with malice. The spastic energy enlivened me.
With them gone the place feels emptier, more threatening. Sadder now than it should be even for what it is.
My heart attack pain isn't getting better. I've gone through most of my bottle of nitroglycerin spray. Where they drained the hemmoragh the lump has receded, become not a purple blare but just an ugly dark bruise. Unfortunately, for me anyway, its still bleeding. The purple lumps has moved to a new location, down the side. It looked at me angrily this morning.
I just want my puppy safe now. I want her not to be harmed by Mare's friends. I want my puppy to not ever be afraid.
I owe a huge debt to the breed and to the race. A debt I can never hope to repay. And I love my puppy. I find myself crying over her. Crying in the rain.
I can cry for my puppy. I can cry for my friends and I can cry for the children. I can't cry for myself. That's not right. Crying for others is crying for myself. I only wish I was better at it.
When I got to see my puppy for the last time she was so happy to see me she forgot to be angry at me. She just wanted me to be with her. She even went and let Mare pet her. Mare doesn't understand my puppy. She glared at me triumphantly. Mare said, "See, she loves me more than she does you."
What I saw was my puppy saying "don't go, I'll even be nice to the lady. Don't leave me alone."
I know my puppy.
Last night I thought about injecting all my insulin into me at once. I'm not normally a very suicidal type. I figured it probably wouldn't kill me. I'd wake up anyway and just be really thirsty or something.
I can't do anything until my puppy is safe.
I don't know who to ask for help. I don't know who I feel comfortable in bothering and who I feel would not be pained if they needed to reject me. Its important to me that people feel free and comfortable to say no. I object to control. I object to guilt.
With my health I might not need to be suicidal. Things could be planned out already.

Posted by David at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Pretty bad day yesterday.
It rained hard most of the day, which is not great when you have no dry place to watch it from. I've always felt that steel gray sky and driving rainstorms are the harbingers of the greatest miracles or the most tremendous tragedies. Yesterday didn't qualify for either but it was still a rough day for me.
Firstly there are an overwhelming amount of comments of the site here. 1671 right now. A lot, maybe most, are typical spam. Some are very nice. Lets face it, you know that even in the best of times I'll never be able to get through them.
Some appear to have been published. I don't know how or why, unless for some reason the system broke down, or the script just messed up. I'm not singleing any of them out or anything.
One theme that runs through my scan of them seems to be, "David, you're not the stupidest guy in the world how did you get yourself into the stupidest situation in the world?"
It was easy.
I've thought about some of the "signals" I got that I chose to ignore. The first one was pretty startling.
I was whining about my mobile phone a couple of years ago. Mare offered to get me a new phone. I demured and explained that mobiles in the US are hard wired to a network. You just can't go buy a phone and ask them to turn it on.
For some reason this hurt her feelings. It appeared she had already gotten a phone for me. She was so upset with me she smashed it and then took pictures of the smashed phone and sent them to me.
This concerned me for a lot of reasons. I liked Mare but . . . but really, I'm just a human being and human beings forget everything even the loudest danger signals.
Later Mare was upset with me. She had sent me flowers. A rather sweet gesture. I wrote to one of my kids that day and mentioned the gift.
I have the nasty bad habit of sticking pretty much to just one password. I forget that one often enough. I'm always handing my password out. Not intending it for email but for letting people see this or that.
Mare used the password to access all of my email accounts and to read them. She was hurt and angry about whatever I had written to my kid.
I was stunned that someone would go through my email!
For all I know people are going through my email accounts all the time and have just never bothered to call me on anything I've said.
I was pretty leery of this and told her so. Mare explained that we were so close that she felt we had no secrets. She was used to relationships where everything was out and open for each other to see.
She offered to give me the password to her email account. I don't think she ever understood that I had and still have no desire to read her or any friend's private correspondence.
I explained I was used to some privacy in all my relationships, not secrets but not being investigated either.
I was still thinking about this when Mare confided in me a secret of her past. Sexual child abuse. You know how I feel about that. One kid described it well, I get very "porky-piney" about kids getting hurt.
I liked Mare enough to want to support her. I believed her. All of my training and instincts are geared toward believing and protecting people who've been victimized in that terrible fashion.
I decided that going through my email accounts was but not fatal. My bigger mistake was in forgetting a rather cardinal rule. You can protect and love victims of child abuse but you can't be friends or more. That is probably the biggest error I made, forgetting that survivors have a lot of rampaging emotions, emotions they are entitled to but also that make it difficult for a relationship to thrive and succeed.
Those are 3 pretty big things to ignore. They're not flaws or faults but they are a pretty good indicator that things will be rockier and more difficult than things should be. As I now have pretty decent proof. For me its like a hardcore blood sport enthusiast getting involved with a board member of PETA. It doesn't mean anyone is wrong or more right. It just means that there are going to be . . . Issues.
My puppy's breeder wrote to give me her schedule of when she'd been willing to pick up my puppy. I'm grateful for that. I need to know my puppy is safe. I need that above all else.
Even though my puppy and I are seperated the reality of her being moved so far away hit me harder than I expected.
It felt like my life was a taut silver nylon thread that was stretching and threatening to explode in a haze of gray dust. Even though there is no doubt that this is the best way forward it hurt terribly to think of my puppy looking for me, waiting for me.
See my ex-friend was married before. She'd been embarrassed to tell me it was a second marriage. Her husband woukld hit the dogs. The little blind dog that I cherished so dearly, her husband would throw him out and let him wander the railroad tracks and the streets. She didn't like that he was mean to the dogs but she didn't divorce him or throw him out because of it. She divorced him over some religious concept that I had a hard time grasping. (When she was talking about me moving in with her she said sveral times that no matter how much she hated her husband she would never have thrown him out on the street, she would always give someone the time to set their life in order . . . unless they've had a heart attack or similar I guess. I'm allowed to be snarky. I'm old, sick and living on the street.)
That's why I was so worried. Not that Mare would hurt my puppy but that the next guy she moved in would.
Mare has still been texting me. I figured it was becauue we'd been in near constant contact every day for the past few years and that she was lonely and while she might not miss me she missed somebody.
I texted her about the breeder's (my puppy's gramma) schedule and the sadness I felt. Its tedious to reconstruct but it looks like someone else has moved in the house the day after Mare threw me out. Even though I knew she has the right and that its none of my business I was pretty well shocked. Things turned ugly. She made lots of threats, lots of accusations. You knew that would happen. People do that. I didn't do anything to turn it aside though. I'm probably more to blame than she is. I don't know if she meant the threats or not. Since I'm walking the streets 3 days after a heart attack there's pretty good reason to believe in her rage.
As soon as my puppy is safe I have to run as fast and as far as I can. My relationship with Mare is costing me relationships that I value as highly as I did her. It is stealing my health.
I'm scrabbling to come up with a plan. My first priority is protecting my puppy.
I don't think she is being visciously abused but she is being treated as an object and not as an animal with feelings, not as someone who might be confused and lost. I know she's looking for me.
This new library has an interesting feature. I don't get the internet for 1 hour but for 20 minutes. The difference is that I can have as many 20 minutes a day as I want (so long as I wait my turn and relinquish the computer after the 20 is up). The only problem with this is that you have to stand at the computer and I swear everything in this world has been designed for someone 3 to 4 inches shorter than me!

Posted by David at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I got badly sunburned yesterday. Then I took a bad fall. Whacked myself on the noggin.
I was wall washing, like an epileptic drunk when I saw my eyes in a window. One dialated, the other a pin hole. I was pretty sure I was concussed. No blood so I soldiered on for a while before I called for an ambulance.
At the hospital they confirmed the concussion. No big deal except I wasn't allowed to sleep. The doc came and yelled on me about my health. He drained about 1,200 milliliters from my thigh. It was mostly blood and not fluid. For some reason I thought that was a good thing. I don't have any idea why I thought that. I do know draining it took a lot of the burning pain away.
I got a lecture about how I was risking my health by not following procedures after my heart "procedure". I felt like saying its not my fault but I just listened. I did point out I was taking all my meds, pretty much in the right way. I told the doc I'd do my best to follow orders. I think we both decided the other was an idiot.
T#hey did more heart x-rays and stuff then they released me. I thought I was going to get some chance to sleep but officially I was in Emergency and not in the hospital. That's a technicality I can barely understand.
It was an unfortunate ending to what seemed like a decent enough day.
I told you about the shouting homeless bike mechanic. There was an event, some sort of political rally, with free food. I was standing around irritated that there was no food there I could even consider eating, when I saw the mechanic pulling up on his bike with a guitar!
I asked him if he was there busquing. He gave me a great crazy man answer. "I don't busque! Do the birds in the trees busque? I make music! If you want to hear it that's fine by me. If you should have a little money fall out of your pocket that's okay too!"
He started to play and he was horrible. His guitar was a flat top that he'd strung with nylon. The tone was odd but interesting. His box was totally out of tune and the way he played it was . . . we'll call it the Richie Valen's bashing around technique.
He only had two chords, both clearly two he made up. A sort of Am7 at the top of the neck and a freaky CMajor he pled arounf the 11th fret. There were a whole lot of strings he didn't fret and, even with nylon, a whole lot of buzzing. It was a nightmarish sound. People were walking past him and laughing at the crazy man.
That made me mad.
I asked if I could tune the guitar up for him. (No, I am still terrible tuning guitars totally by ear - I still don't have perfect pitch.) He at first refused explaining that he'd been a musician for 40 years and yadda yadda yadda. Then he just handed the guitar to me.
I sat down and tuned the box pretty slack, looking to just do a whole drop note and tune it from an open D.
To try it out I started to strum out the song that had been bouncing in my head all day, The Rolling Stones, Chris Farlowe "Out of Time". Since I don't know the words it had a lot of da da dee verses, but always a strong chorus.
We actually got a little bit of a crowd and the Mechanic yelled at me, "Well, don't stop now!"
So I played the first song I could think of, "O Lucky Man". Which is a nice rhythm based number with cool lyrics to detract from my cramped hands and missed chords. Then I went straight into the Kinks, "Till The End of the Day". Which everybody knows so you don't have to play it too well.
People were tossing money so I played a song, an old Elvis tune, that I learned recently for my ex-friend. I think I do it pretty well and figured out easy ways to do the chord changes so my hands didn't suffer; "Home is Where the Heart Is".
The drugs make my tongue swell and give me terrible dry mouth. On this tune that didn't seem to make much difference, in fact the choking sound on the high notes actually sounded emotional, at least to my ear.
I ended my big come back with Dion's "Dip Drop". Its semi-obscure but cool, more guitar percussion than playing and it has a killer chorus that always gets people's heads bobbing.
After that I couldn't play any longer. Didn't matter the mechanic was stoked. He'd gathered up $8.40
He wanted to only give me forty cents! Because it was his guitar and I did break his G - String. I settled for a dollar.
Not so much in my heart or mind but my body is dwindling. I see little old ladies passing me on the street. I'm constantly dizzy, lost. The pain is sometimes overwhelming. People must think I'm forgein and that erk, ouch, damn are a major part of my alien vocabulary.
I don't want to die. I know that my life has been full. There's too much tragedy in it but when I think of my life I think of the smiles and the laughs. I remember the tasty waves. The days when it was 10 foot and the Santa Ana's kept the face flat and smooth.
I've won an awful lot. I've had more miracles than a born again Christian at seminary school.
I was always amazed when someone said they loved me. Amazed at how many people did. And amazed at how many people said, "I love you," not to try and get me to fall for them but because they really did love me.
I'm conceited but I never understood why anyone should ever love me.
I've been so lucky in that I love so many more. I didn't tell enough people how much I loved them. There's my advice. Tell them that you love them. Just tell them.
There's no one out there for me to really hate either. I have enemies, had them but I think I always won when it was important and lost only when it was in not responding to petty and vindictive rage.
There are so many things I only got to see once, but I did get to see them.
If it gets to the point where I can't go on anymore I found a place to lie down and pass over. A baseball field because no place is closer to heaven than a playing field, and no playing field more blessed than a baseball diamond.
Its an oklay field. There's no little league team there, all adults so i wouldn't have to consider the horrow of a kid stumbling across the homeless guy's corpse. Its only 270 feet down the right field line! I'd have beebn a pure power hitter if I'd played my home games there.
I walked the base paths. I imagined getting a blooper hit to run out a single. (Even in my fantasies I can't hit the curve) then I stole second, moved to third on a bad pick off attempt and then went home when the center fielder was slow in retrieving the ball.
None of it is locked up. The seats are covered and lying on the bottom row I'm certain you can't be seen from the street or even close up.
To pass over looking at a baseball diamond and remembering and imaging life there would be as good as I could ever hope.
I only worry about my puppy. I would love to see her again but that would be too selfish even for me. By now she must be settling into the fact that I'm not there. To see her and then leave would be cruel.
I don't know how long I can hold on. I have to write to the two jobs that are still silent. A yes or a no is needed by me! It would probably make a difference. I'm just tired.

Posted by David at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It was funny. Yesterday I was standing against a wall when it suddenly felt like the wall was sliding away from my back, as if the building was falling. I spun around to see what was happening and it felt like I was, for the briefest moment, suspended in space. Skydivers will know what I mean, it was like that time when you forget the reality and your brain forgets to tell you what's really going on. You only know that you are flying.
The building wasn't falling down but I was. Its good I tried to turn around. I fell flat on my back instead of on my right shoulder. Even then the shoulder sents waves of incredible pain. I calmed it down by thinking how bad it could have been.
When I walk I feel my heart beating. My left leg burns from my hip to my knee and makes me walk in this sort of shuffle. My head hurt and my vision spins in and out of focus.
When I sit it feels like there's a dull wedge on my face, right between my eyes and a hundred pound hammer is trying to split my skull. My heart spins like a ratchet has sprung loose. It clatters like an old toy steam engine. My right leg throbs and my hands cramp into claws.
You'd think that would be enough revenge. I still don't know what the crime I committed was but gee.
Now my ex-friend is dragging my puppy to work with her. We tried this before. With me there and with an empty office my puppy was near panic. Some of it is her being silly. Some of it is her real fears and dislike of something new.
My ex-friend texted me her plans last night. I replied and asked her to please bring my puppy home if she started to panic. I asked. No reply. I begged. No reply.
I guess my puppy is being punished for my sake.
I spoke with my puppy's breeder. She's willing to drive and pick my puppy up and hold her until I can take her back. This is good and kind. I just miss my little dog. We always had adventures. Neither of us imagined this. My ex-friend can justify it by claiming she's training her up or something. I don't know. Maybe she wants to prove my puppy loves her more than my puppy loves me. I don't really know.
I feel guilty about this. You have no idea how guilty.
I found out that the rogue cop is just a jerk. Powerless to screw with me legally. It doesn't mean he won't screw with me illegally. I expect it.
He is trying to get me thrown out of the Shelter. Last night it was a given. The director came in early today and said that the cop didn't run the show and I could stay within their rules.
I have to think about it. Do I want to make trouble for them? Is it worth it for me to get hauled in for questioning? I spoke to my local lawyer and its sorted that I have nothing to fear, legally anyway.
My ex-friend said she's returning the football coaching gear the team gave me. I texted what she was going to tell them and she said it shouldn't matter to me. It does but, she's right, it only matters that I won't be there to help. Sad.
I don't talk much about the shelter. What's to say?
There's the ambulatory schizophrenics. They're pleasant enough. I find the sudden and then constant rocking back and forth a bit unnerving but not off putting. One fellow is pretty cool. He's a self taught bike mechanic and his work is excellent. He keeps bring home bike bits and ending up with a full working bike!
The way he works is fascinating. He shouts. "Mrs Obama has said that the greatest enemy of the American people is the front forks are bent but can be restaightened. AIG has split the derailer but I have another stop nut!" And on and on.
There's a few depressed people, a few party people and a few who you have to watch carefully. I have no idea what they think of me.
Last night was eeire quiet. After the wild weekend it was surprising. Last night was the night of hangovers and being out of cigarettes. There were a lot of fights, none that amounted to much though.
There were some shaky voiced plans and a few avowals of absitinence. I got asked several times if my med's were "text", "percadan", "oxycitain" etc. I told them they weren't and that some of them could kill them, which might be a rush but not one . . . only a couple of the woman seemed to be considering it.
This morning I was sitting on a bench when a young girl in her late 20's sat down next to me. She was attractive and more fashionably dressed than I'm used to seeing around here. I had half a bagle in my pocket and was feeding it to the birds.
She talked to me about birds and how they used to inspire her when she was "tiny". I tried to listen to her but my pain, grunts and mad thoughts and worry kept pulling my concentration away.
She stood up and said, "You're so nice to talk to. Thank you." She offered me her hand and told me her name. I don't remember it. All I remember is that I was glad I hadn't fallen so low as to be disappointed that she hadn't given the homeless guy a dollar.
I also think the only thing I said to her consisted of grunts and groans of pain. I have to remember that. It seems everyone I've talked to just wants me dead.
Three jobs are done and they are no. They can't get funding. The other two possible jobs remain silent.
15:05 - The dogs didn't go to work with my ex-friend. I feel better about thiss. Not much else. Took me 90 minutes to walk a mile today.

Posted by David at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm feeling worse.
I am also convinced that Mare's cop is going to keep searching for some reason to arrest me. You'd think he'd have given up already but it doesn't look like it. Staying at the shelter would just be suicidal, I think.
Dying in jail does nothing for me. There's no romance to it. Especially since its going to be for something inane and made up, like my description matches something from 20 years ago or some such.
I found out that my friend is going to give up the foster dogs. I feel responsible for that. She seems to be rolling her life back to where it was before we became acquainted.
I don't think I would want to do that but you can't live for other people.
I keep thinking about why she wants to kill me. I still don't know why.
I wouldn't, would I. I'm sure she feels its justified. I had inklings, not that she wanted to kill me but that she was unhappy. Having a heart attack just gave her the opportunity.
A few days before I had the heart attack she told me she needed to see a psychiatrist. She felt miserable, confused and angry. She claimed it was unrelated to me other than she worried because I was in so much pain.
A couple of years ago one of her ex-husbands tried to kill her - he cut the bolts on the drive wheel of her car. I was surprised at how unshaken she was by that. I mean she had an accident when the wheel fell off at high speed but no one was hurt, but still she seemed unconcerned. She didn't even think that was worth pursuing.
Maybe I remind her of him. Maybe I remind her of her brother. Maybe she's been calmly waiting all her life for a chance like this. I don't know.
I still don't hate her and don't really think anyone else should either.
That's not me being saintly. That's me thinking there's a reason we just don't know.
Before I came in to check email the cop's Sergeant called me. He told me that everything the cop was doing was perfectly fine. The Seargeant said three times, "If something happened to me he's the man I'd want investigating." It bothered me he kept saying that.
I thought, but am not so ill as to say, "Yeah. If something happened to me I'd want someone intense who ignored all the rules and the law to get the result I want."
What I said was, "I believe you Sir."
I didn't want to complain, and I didn't want to file a complaint. I just wanted to know why this cop is persecuting me. The answer I got was, because he can.
I miss my puppy. I don't think I'm going to ever get to see her again. My poor little girl.
I don't accept that I deserve to die for whatever happened between my ex-friend and I. But to deprive my little puppy of her happiness and to put her at risk like this is just too terrible and its all my fault. I wasn't even able to protect her. I wasn't even able to keep her safe and with me. Now. My poor little girl.

Posted by David at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It was a bad day yesterday. A day spent falling down a lot.
Only two of the spills were of a concern. I had to go to the pharmacy. A walk of about 3.5 miles. I made it in just over an hour. Not great speed but I felt pretty good about it. Felt good about making it at all.
Last time there I had to get the strips to measure my blood sugar. They gave me the wrong strips. Needed to be exchanged.
On leaving I fell down in front of Home Depot. I must have fallen on my face. The inside of my mouth is all cut up and the front teeth are loose. None knocked out though.
My face is a little puffy but not terrible bad. i don't look freakish or like some homeless guy who's been in a fight. That's important now and not just because of vanity.
Even with me weaving and stumbling I made the return trip in under 90 minutes.
With the strips I saw that my blood sugars were below 3. I'm not supposed to let them fall below 4. Not much I can do about that.
I fell again in the shelter. I was holding a coffee cup and it fell underneath me. No cuts or puncture wounds just serious embarassment. I also don't like looking weak. The worst part was yesterday I felt the spark of life starting to flicker. On Thursday the doc told my ex-friend and I that my heart could heal to 100%. There were things I had to do. These first two weeks were crucial. I was supposed to rest, exercise no more than 5 minutes a day. Keep my pulse down and then eat properly.
My blood pressure hasn't been under 170 since this odyessy started. My pulse rate has been floating around 100. Even though I've been able to take the drugs like I'm supposed to. As to eating properly . . .
For the past four years my goal has been to live just one more day than my puppy. I was, and am, horrified at the idea of her having to be in the world without me. She wouldn't be happy. She'd be miserable and I never want her to be anything other than completely happy. I owe her that much.
I'm changing my goal to surviving just one more minute than her. Sometimes reduced goals are the way to go.
I am not ready to die. I will fight to not die, at least not yet. For some reason I feel my body owes me at least that much. I hope I can cajole it into agreeing with me.
The pain has gotten worse. They gave me Tylenol 3. That's just Tylenol with codine added. It knocks out about 20% of the pain. That's enough to endure.
The hemmoraging continues. Its not pulsing and its not hurting. That's a good thing. Its not spreading as badly either so the seeping must be slowing down. The blood does appear to be spreading to my testicles. I don't think that signifies anything at all. Other than that its just getting darker shades of purple.
My job hunt is worrisome. I've gotten three so far, but all three are dependent on getting funding from the school board. With this economy that's far far from certain. The jobs are in North Carolina, Texas and New Mexico.
There another running a self storage facility in Colorado. That would be okay as I'd get accomodation and my puppy could live with me. I have to submit a resume, so I'll have to see what goes on there. I've started it and will work on it in the 33 minutes I have left on this computer. I can store the document on my iPod I think, using it as a flash drive.
Funny thing. I discovered that right now I can't walk and listen to music. I have the music on but I don't really here it. Its just noise that I seem to ignore.
Finally today started like I thought it would. The cops showed up. That's not completely true. Just the same cop I saw at my friends house showed up. He's run me for makes and warrants and couldn't find any reason to bust me so he's scrabbling around looking for some reasons to roust me. All he could do today was threaten to shoot me amongst other things. I'm sure he'd call it giving me a fair warning.
I can't be specific as to why he's carrying on what might well be a personal vendetta. It just confirms my opinion about cops. But that didn't need confirming anyway.
Yesterday my friend dropped off a care package at the shelter. It wasn't much but it will make life 10 to 15% easier. A small amount of money and some clean shirts and a pair of shoes. I'm grateful for that. I hope it means she's not dating the cop and siccing him on me.
I don't like posting without pictures. It takes away any sense of beauty.

Posted by David at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Keyhole" by Unknown Walking to the doctor's yesterday it was almost comforting to walk past the block of houses that are still full on with their Christmas decorations. Five months past Christmas; since the three homes are in a row I figure they have some secret reason for doing this, something personal that we'll never be privy to. Maybe something even wonderful.
Or maybe they're all just lazy. Maybe waiting for the other guy to go first.
The walk took more out of me than usual. I was really stressing the final half mile. I encouraged myself by thinking that, even though I'm not a huge grunge fan and not an idolizer of Kurt Cobain, I do think he had some genius. It was genius to book Shonen Knife to open for Nirvana on their ultimate tour.
At the doc's it was a complicated affair.
I try and slow my brain down and listen. I get to talking in a monotonous way because I'm trying to stay calm and listen to what they're saying. Trying to absorb it while keeping emotions out of the internal conflict. Try and keep the thoughts out of my head; thoughts like, "You mean I'm not immortal?"
I'm pretty sure most of us have at least a phase where we think we're going to live forever and that life will not leave an imprint on us, we will only affect life, not the other way around. God has blessed us. The proof is that we are still alive.
We go to see movies like "The Last Man on Earth" and "The Plague" and all those zombie flic's because they are tip sheets. When the apocalypse comes there's no doubt that we will be the final survivors.
If that wasn't some sort of primeval instinctive knowledge no one would be silly enough to believe in the Rapture, that the world will end and because we tie our shoes a certain way and don't use zippers or buttons angels will descend and take us away while the rest of you perish in holy white flames.

Click images for desktop size: "Le Bistro" by Edward Hopper Scientology (who I make no bones about believing are pure evil) makes billions of dollars from the fearful and the delusional by preaching that the world will end. Only they updated it to say that our mother planet will send silver space ships to save just us, just the we who payed for the courses and bought the books and the machines. The space ships will save just us while the rest of you perish in white holy flames. I guess the white flames here come from some enemy planet or something. They've never really explained that part or how the spaceships would be able to tell who were the right ones to save.
So I think its fair to say that we, as a race, think we're going to live forever even if we really don't think we deserve to and need to spend most of our lives preparing to be worth living forever.
I've never been conflicted in that. I just knew I was immortal and indestructible. I and all the people I loved were going to live forever and I has seen enough movies to be fully aware of the right way to survive any doomsday scenario: Triffids would melt in sea water, mutants are not to be trusted except the odd one who lives alone and has friendly eyes, if there's only one woman left you let the other guy have her, always shoot zombies in the head, never let anyone within your aikido based "circle of influence" or you'll deserve what you get and, most importantly, always keep a good dog by your side. I have them all memorized. I am prepared.
No matter what happened to prove that I and my little circle were no different than anyone else I still have the rock base belief that I'm going to be the one who survives.
But you can't let those thoughts fill up your brain pan while you're listening to the doc's, otherwise you reduce your chances proportionately.
I tried to listen.
The good news is that the Avpro is doing a good job on my kidneys, no ketones, the other "k" word has lowered and potassium levels have dropped. Why this is good I don't know. I'll take good news
Click images for desktop size: "Around the Water Cooler" by Lavakillu on face value.
Weird thing is that my blood pressure is up above my target. I was greatly worried about this. They use this machine that takes your blood pressure six times and then issues these weird electronic reports.
The test takes about 15 minutes and I get bored. At first I try and guess what the numbers will be by being aware of my pulse. After I nail it the first and second time the game loses interest so I start to poking around. Leaving me alone in a doc's office is rather silly actually, especially if all the cabinets aren't locked. I don't take anything, I just inspect it and read anything.
Since my blood pressure can shoot up ten points just from my sitting with my legs crossed the numbers aren't alarming.
The blood sugar numbers are a greater concern. Basically they don't make a lot of sense. The diabetic nurse insists that the Lantus (insulin) has to be working. Her studying of my "blood sugar diary" says that I have "dawn syndrome".
When she said this I wasn't sure if she said "don" syndrome, as in Don Corrleonni or "dom" syndrome as in Dom Dimaggio (Joe Dimaggio's talented but overshadowed brother) or dom as in dominant. I thought either would be cool and justify me walking around with an attitude or at least do some weird impressions.
So I asked. I was disappointed that she was saying "dawn" as in "always darkest before the dawn". This is proof that I should not be allowed to go to the things by myself, that's the question I had to interrupt her to ask, the thing I thought was important. "Don syndrome" meant I could do authentic Marlon Brando Godfather impersonations. "Dom syndrome" meaning I could use it as proof of my baseball skills or enter a life of S&M practices . . .
"Dawn syndrome" or slightly cooler, "dawn phenomena" mens that my body produces more sugars at night than it can handle. I prefer thinking that my liver and lymph are merely working at peak efficiency and my slaggard pancreas doesn't know how to keep up!
The other issue is that in 95% of diabetics exercise and activity reduce blood sugars. They get burned up. I apparently produce so much adrenaline that the blood sugar benefits of exercise are offset. Being an adrenaline junky I sort of understood that.
The end result of all this is that my blood sugars are too high and I have to go to a specialist group. I've been through similar before: dietitians, lots of quick tests. Its a drag. At the last clinic I frustrated the nurse and doctors so much they ended up prescribing an overdose of metformin. It worked but . . .
If I have to pay for this clinic I'll probably have to pass on it and rely on myself and my own sensitivity to my body. That's not as dangerous or stupid as it might appear.

Click images for desktop size: "Attack" by Lavakillu We ended up the diabetic end of the exam by reminding me that I'd be on the insulin needle and the metformin for the rest of my life. Not news I cherish.
We moved on to my shoulder and arms. I rather clinically described the pain, its location, pain, duration and intensity. I also described how it would wake me and prohibit sleep. I haven't slept for more than an hour at a stretch in over a month.
The nurse went on a bit about neuropathic pain and how the next way to address this would be with an anti spasm pill! A pill engineered for epileptics to moderate gran mal seizures!
The pain is so bad I didn't much care about what it was or its side effects I just needed the pain to stop. The pills name was something like Neuron or Neitron, which I thought sounded pretty cool as in I could overdose on it and wake up with the super powers of a Neutron Bomb!
She printed out the scripts for the doc to sign off on and then deposited me in another examination room to see the doc.
When he came in he bought the script for needles and test strips and a FREE blood glucose monitor! I love free stuff even if its stuff I don't like. I need the new monitor for the clinic. Its more sensitive or something and stores the test results for a full month instead of a week. I can get a data cord and download all the info and make cool colorful charts and stuff. I guess they can too.
The doc examined my shoulder. It irked me. He twisted it and made
Click images for desktop size: "Ali MacGraw" me do things that hurt and left it fiery and electric. He then asked me if I experienced any weakness in my hands in the recent past. I told him about how both my thumbs felt like they'd been sprained. They were mostly better now.
Then he asked if this was followed by pain in my elbows. I told him about my left elbow still being fiery and weak. He then left the room so I occupied myself by playing with my new glucose meter. Its really tiny! I figure I'll lose it at least once a week.
He came back into the room with the diabetic nurse and he manipulated my shoulder in front of her. It really hurt this time but not to the point of me seeing black or being forced to my knees in involuntary tears.
He then explained that this was no neuropathic pain. He then dropped the bombshell that there is no treatment for it.
I have a frozen shoulder. I think that's the medical term . . . The phrase "Encapsulated SHoulder" was bandied about for a bit but I guess that's the layman's term.
A frozen shoulder is unique to diabetics. It usually appears in diabetics over 40 and most of the time in women. (See, I do to so have a feminine side.) He asked if one of my chemos was the G word that I always confuse with the video game "Galaxian" or the international drug cartel "Galxo". I told
Click images for desktop size: "Hulk vs Fin Fang Foom" by Marvel Comics him it was my second chemo, one that just made me sick and offered not even a hint of remission.
It appears that virtually all people who'd been on one of the G-word trials experienced frozen shoulder.
Another reason to never remember the name of that chemical hell. It was also the trial chemo that blew out the veins in my left arm.
The bombshell is that there is no treatment for frozen shoulder. I can treat it with heat but that's mainly to sort out the atrophying muscles that surround it. I need to do the physical exercises that I already new to keep the shoulder alive and to keep it from taking over my body. Eventually in a year to 18 months it will cure itself . . . A year . . .
Not much for me there. Eighteen months. I have to figure out how to live with it somehow. Rah . . .
We left with the Clinic would contact me for an appointment, I'd see the diabetic nurse in a month and see the doc in 3 months. That's my schedule for the foreseeable future.
I walked home determined not to be depressed about this. So determined I was depressing myself when I saw a little shelty dog out in the middle of the busy street, I ran out and scooped the old guy up and put him on the side of the street he was heading towards. I set him down after I saw he had on a collar and no tags.
My manhandling him offended his aged dignity and he moved away from me. It was at a pretty glacial pace so I could follow him easily while I thought, "I can't deal with SIX DOGS!" But then I thought, he is really small. There's probably a corner someplace we can fit him.
He noticed I was following him and sped up. His top speed was such that I had to take a step instead of shuffling along behind him. He got exhausted and sat down in a sunny patch on the sidewalk. I checked my mobile and saw my friend had called me. I called her back and blurted out about the found pup! He was en route to home so she'd pick us both up.
The little guy accepted pets from me, even licked my hand. He seemed like he wasn't going anywhere. A bright hair girl walked by and I accosted her, demanding to know if she new the old dog. She didn't. I decided to knock on doors. The second house answered and they knew the guy, he lived next door to them. They were willing to take him in until their neighbors got home.
I started walking back home thinking about the little guy and how old he was. It bugged me that he was left in a yard he could escape from when no one was home. I wondered if I'd done right leaving him.
My friend found me in the midst of my reverie. As we headed home we saw someone throwing away a futon bed. My friend, with her practiced eye knew immediately that the bottom of the frame would make a perfect dog bench!

Click images for desktop size: "Immodest" by Leon Frollo We turned around to pick it up. While we were inspecting it the lady who'd thrown it out stuck her head out the door and told us that she'd put all the hardware in the bottom.
We loaded up the bottom half of the frame into the car. It jutted out about 3 feet so we decided I'd just walk home behind the door, not so much to keep it from falling out as to keep the rear door from swinging open and springing. Something that happened to a few cars of mine.
We got it home.
In the house all the dogs had behaved. The two fosters were crated with no stress. They were all overjoyed to see us and needed to tell us so. The new foster is a dolly puppy. He's getting better and better. I can see him being prone to separation anxiety. He wanted to be outside to play but he also wanted to be able to look at both me and my friend. A pretty serious conflict for a puppy mind.
Both dogs have two applications to make them part of their forever homes. I hope at least one apiece would be acceptable parents. I like both dogs quite a bit. Not as much as I love my dogs. I have to say that or else my life could be in serious jeopardy.
I slumped around in dead sleep deprived stupor while my friend tried to do her work and finish up her deadlines.
My friend woke up pretty ill. Not permanent illness, I think, just raggedy. She's sleeping now. Feeling better soon is my hope.
The fosters have to g to the vet this afternoon and then there's more trials for football this evening. A busy day.

Posted by David at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Irises" by Vincent Van Gogh Woke up in screaming pain from my shoulder. Very bad.
I see the doc's today at 3:30. I hope they have some sort of miracle pill to calm this thing down.
I'm far from impressed with the miracle of Lantus insulin. I thought it was starting to kick in. I got hypoglycemic trembles. Had to eat the glucose tablets to get them to stop, but it appears it was more from me not eating anything for 12 hours than the drugs.
Here's to today.

Football last night. It was good for me. It wasn't good in general but it was far from the worst session I've ever been involved in. The organizers' hearts are in the right place they just don't have the skills to pull it off.
The Equipment Manager and the Team Manager are stellar.
Saw 118 kids yesterday. No stud athletes. That's no big deal. They were kids. Some showed potential. Potential is all that they need right now. In general the kids seemed eager to learn, eager to play they just have no clue as to how.
I ran the agility section with the 6 inch agility hurdles. This is one of my and a lot of other coaches favorite sets of drills. We used to run these drills with "step over bags" which were about the same height as the hurdles and about six inches broad. One of the evolutions in sports science is how even this small thing has changed.
Originally the step over bags were about 12 inches high. The point then was getting the players to get their knees high, like stepping over arm tackles and flying bodies. Gradually it dawned on us that getting the knees high slowed the player down, it was not efficient use of kinetic energy. The step over bags got shorter and shorter. Virginia Tech was then using one inch plywood, eight inches wide and five feet long, as step over bags, getting the placement of the player's feet and legs while letting their knees and feet stay low and
Click images for desktop size: "Indomitable" by Unknown flowing to the motion instead of chopping against the motion. And now we accomplish the same thing with little plastic hurdles.
Part of me resists the change over. There are certain elements I think need the five foot long bags to properly implement. Since they don't have any step over bags and as raw as these kids are my normal concerns about finding a replacement drill aren't needed here.
I started with the "Bunny Hop". Six hurdles, 1 yard apart. The kids are supposed to keep their feet together and hop over each hurdle, one hop per hurdle. I had intended this as just a warm up and not part of the evaluation. Two thirds of the kids could not keep their feet together at all. One third could not clear each hurdle with one hop per hurdle. About 10% faded out and couldn't complete the drill.
They wanted to grade three drills. The single step, where the kids run through the hurdles taking one step to clear each one, come to the end, turn left, explode forward five yards turn left again and run through a second set of hurtles.
Then there was the side step, same drill basically.
The final drill were the in and outs. Just a weave going forward, side step, then backwards. What I look for are eyes, good football stance and good arm motion.
In West Texas and California high school ball 95% of the kids would have been given a 1. I gave most of them 3's. I only graded three kids as 1's and 4 kids as 4's. No 5's. I figured I should use a bell curve and not a rigid standard.

Click images for desktop size: "Gloria Swanson" Even the experienced kids kept their eyes on the ground trying to watch their feet, had no arm movement and no sense of precision. I tried to give them visualizations of what they were doing and why. They liked that. I gave the 4's more based on effort than skill. I like effort.
My friend ended up not working with me. She had to start and do the 10 yard time on the 40's. During a water break I glanced at her sheet. I was impressed I saw a few 5's and several 4's! Kids hitting 4 seconds in the 40's make my heart glow. Until I realized I was looking at the wrong column and the 4's and 5's were the 20 yard times!
Watching a few of them run it was apparent they all needed just some fundamental work. With times like that I can get some massive miraculous seeming improvement. I think the kids will work hard enough to accomplish that.
Since most of you know that my coaching technique involves trotting along the athlete and encouraging and exhorting I realized I trotted about two miles yesterday! I was pretty shattered
Click images for desktop size: "Hug Me Forever" by Jana Jelovac after practice. But it felt good.
We have to go again on Thursday. I'm going to push to take over my friends job and run the 40's. The kids clearly need some coaching there. That was my biggest surprise. I didn't hear any coaching, just instructions.
Oh, after practice we stopped and bought whistles! Just regular whistles. I still like loopy ones but that could terrify the parents.
That was the oddest part of the day for me, the 200 or so parents who just sat in lawn chairs on the side lines. I still don't quite know what to make of that.

New foster dog has decided he likes us. He spent much less time humping foster dog and more time hanging out with me and my friend. Yesterday he had no accidents in the house.
He was crated for about 4 hours while we were at practice. I hung out outside for 10 minutes before we left. There was no evidence of the bad behavior his previous fosters experienced.
New foster is a good little dog. He wants to be loved. Boy, does he not know anything! I think as he gets a bit calmer, he'll learn.
Foster dog has two more applications! No word on whether they are acceptable. Foster dog is pretty special. He's struggling to learn, struggling to find out how to fit in. He's a pretty great guy.
I took the Original Trio, gentle dog, my puppy and giant dog, on a walk with just the three of us. They needed the reassurance. My puppy not so much. She;s been through all these fostering things before. She stays steady. Gentle dog needed reassurance that he's still special the most, even more than giant dog who is is very insecure and jealous.
My friend bought me a new hard drive! A 500 gig Western Digital.
I'm not looking forward to installing it. The iMac case is NOT user friendly. There's so much tape and putty etc that it can get pretty overwhelming. Too many tight gentle windings to break, too many glues to distort.

Click images for desktop size: "Ella Fitzgerald" by Bernardine I did it before. I'm going to check around and see if I can get someone to instal the drive for 50 bucks or so. I figure 50 is about how much my fear is worth.
I feel oddly reluctant to let the computer out of my hands.
No issues from the "lost" files. I'm hoping it was just cache files or something.
I'm worried that I've loaded all these responsibilities on my friend, football practice, vets and doctors when she got hit with some ridiculous deadlines at work yesterday. I have to think of something reasonable so she can get her business and recreation done while I handle myself better.
I mowed half the yard yesterday. Not much of a contribution to her ease of mind.

Posted by David at 4:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Her Blue Eyes" by Unknown Pain in my shoulder woke me at 4, again. Last night I updated some of the Apple software. The QuickTime update required a reboot. I hate rebooting. Now I can hate it with even more purpose.
The restart began and then the computer turned itself off. Did that twice more.
I rebooted in single user mode (command line stuff) and ran a disk repair (fsck). The disk was unrepairable. The binary tree catalog had become corrupt. That's the entire file system . . .
I'd gotten lazy and hadn't done a full back up since Sunday. I was able to boot from my back up. 2 and 1/2 hours later DiskWarrior was able to repair the problem. At least for now.
I guess I'm going to have to start doing twice daily back-ups until I can find a replacement drive I can afford. DiskWarrior reported that I've lost 36 folders and 18 files . . . I don't know what they were. A quick visual scan doesn't show anything terrible. Maybe I got lucky and it was some cache files or something.
I replaced the drive in the iMac almost 3 years ago. A Seagate Barracuda. It was a terrible job. One I'm not looking forward to attempting again. What choice do I have? Last time I broke the DVD drive. Maybe I can fix that or replace it.
Working on the iMac is worse than working on a notebook.
If I suddenly cyber-vanish, well, you know why.
I remain grateful for IMAP. No fear of losing any emails, at least. Even when I don't answer them I like to have them.

Yesterday was strangely busy. Five dogs had a lot to do with that. Five dogs and thunderstorms.
My friend got to come home early, she got to work from home. Her MacBook running Parallels is doing studly duty, I think.

Click images for desktop size: "Modern Woman" by Unknown We had a good discussion about the football tryouts this evening. I was just pulling out of my zombie state, where I'm resisting passing out. I hate naps.
My friend sometimes resists discussions. I think she sees them as arguments and with my propensity for going ballistic I worry that I engendered that. She was at one of the meetings about the tryouts.
At the meeting I heard, "The coaches won't do anything but observe and evaluate the players."
She heard, "The coaches will be assigned drills to run so best come prepared to work."
Pretty contrary.
Somewhere in there she said, "You don't approve of any coaches except the ones you trained." I could immediately think of at least a half dozen coaches I worked for who I liked and also thought were pretty good, better than me in most ways.
The end result of the conversation was positive for me. It reminded me of a truism that I have always held but in the middle of the volunteer coaches I know it is easy to forget.
The main point of sport at this age and this level is to help the athletes to be better people not just on the field but in society, in their neighborhoods.
No person is really capable of teaching that sort of skill. But it can be taught. A coaches job is to train the athlete to be the best that he can be. The real beauty of football is that its teaches more than
Click images for desktop size: "Doris Day" I ever could.
My aphorism has always been, "I teach them how to play the game. The game teaches them about life."
All men are, by instinct, competitive. For me to be successful as a coach, and I think I have been successful, it is important I rise above my animal instincts and not get sucked into who's better, best.
Working with pros I never had an issue knowing that. Amateurs, volunteers who are giving freely and deserve love and respect for their efforts made me forget that, if only just a little bit.
Remembering that changes my attitude greatly. Remembering my place in the great scheme of my goals is important. Even though I made my friend uncomfortable the conversation was important to me for that and several other reasons.

The five dogs . . . oh boy. New foster and foster dog are tight buddies. Even if it involves a lot of humping. They are both doing better and better each day. New foster still gets too nervous but he's starting to laugh and smile. When my friend or I upset him he now goes to look for one of us to protect him from the other!
He's not housebroken and had another accident, urinating in the exact same spot! I need to buy a
Click images for desktop size: "Geisha Dream" by TitusBoy newspaper so I can cover that spot.
We had another small incident. Giant dog is incredibly jealous, He attacked, not viciously, the new foster. The little guy ran and hid under a chair but let my friend coax him out. Just too many dogs and giant dog doesn't like us talking so much to the new guys.
Foster dog has had some intrest from forever homes. One was rejected out right. They'd adopted and returned two animals previously. The other two are lets wait and see right now. The new foster has a woman willing to wait for him until we can see how he really is.
My friend points out that with 5 dogs we cannot do a proper assessment as to how he'd do on his own with just him and a person.

I watched a terrible movie yesterday. A BBC documentary. In this country we have a strange idea of the BBC. I've disliked them and continue you do so. The doc was "The Rock and Roll Singer."
It claimed to be an impressionistic view of a rock & roll tour from 1969. It was impressionistic becasue it had no point of view, no story to tell, and no skill in resolving it.
Still the 45 minute film was fantastic becasue the rock & roll singer was Gene Vincent. It was his tour with The Wild Angels" as his back up band.
Even inept filmmaking couldn't conceal the man's genius, his talent as a musicain as he rehearsed with the band. His insanity and his charm.
Although he was 34 at the time of the tour he looked well over fifty. He'd be dead in two years, dead from excess. There are five live numbers in the film, shot with a static single camera. That;s all he needed. When Vincent sang he collapsed the world in on itself.
The only effective filmmaking was a couple of pointless moments of Vincent walking around London, dragging his crippled leg around his corpulent body looking sadly at the world. Then there were the
Click images for desktop size: "Advocation" by Unknown moments after the show where he had to fret over getting paid. He was worried about himself but there was also the worry about getting the band paid that seemed pre-emminent.
Even when they attempted to provoke and in each spontaneous moment there was no scandal, nothing to uglify, all there was is a drunken, sad man who still held close to the idea of being a Southern Gentleman in all things.
Gene Vincent. Even talentless hacks can make art when you have a demi-god to point your camera at, a demi-god who was also so very mortal and so little different from you or me.

Posted by David at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Experiments Gone Wild" by Unknown Five dogs is too many dogs!
At least it seems that way today. Chances are that after a week or so it might very well change.
The new foster is a pathetic story. His story bears constant repeating. He's three years old; has no training whatsoever, not even housebroken. His front teeth have been knocked out. I've no concept of why or the method used. He has worms and it appears to be long term and never treated previously.
He lived with another dog. The owner of the pair went to court and was told to get rid of the dogs or face jail time. (We're not allowed to know what he was arrested and tried for. I understand that even scum must be protected even when it frustrates me.) He took the dogs to the pound and gave them instructions to kill them. They
Click images for desktop size: "Keith Richards" were on 24 hour death watch when they were rescued.
The new foster was with another experienced foster family and for some reason he was destructive there. They couldn't cope with him. So he ended up here.
At first he was pretty crazy.
He's been recently neutered but still tried to hump every dog in the place. Our three told him off pretty quickly, since he's about half the size of the smallest here the new foster had enough sense to back off. Except that foster dog, also recently neutered, doesn't seem at all concerned. New foster humps him constantly. Foster dog just goes about his business with this little dog humping whatever part of him he can latch on to.
Its a bit annoying but oddly seems to have calmed both fosters down immeasurably! Strangely my memories from adolescence don't consider dry humping as much of a relief . . . It works for them.
New foster has had two "accidents" in the house. I think they weren't accidents. I think he did it on purpose. He defecated within the first 20 minutes in the house. Last night he urinated by the book case.

Click images for desktop size: "Elements-Fire" by LawnElf He's been very good other than that. He's accepted being crated at night. My friend thinks he's a Pariah dog mixed with Basenji. There's no reason to dispute this, although I think the breed name is unfortunate. He certainly vocalizes like a Basenji, no barking but lots of odd little vocalizations.
He won't let his picture be taken. Dog myth about his soul being stolen? He eats more than the giant dog!
Today is going to be stormy. Beau coup thunder and lightening. We'll see how it goes.
He's a cute dog ad incredibly good natured. Stubborn about his dislikes but no real problems.
Today I have to schedule an appointment with the vet for both foster dogs. Foster dog for booster vaccines and heart worm meds. The new foster for worming (fecal sample!! yuk . . . )
They both need baths. I'm not sure if I have the strength for that.
My arms are killing me. I find it monotonous. On Saturday I was making the bed and flipped the duvet. It locked my arm up. I couldn't move it for twenty minutes.
A couple of years ago I accepted the new pains and took some pride in being able to survive and assimilate them. But now the hurt just makes me weary. My doctor appointment is on Weds. I'm hoping that there is some sort of reasonably quick treatment available.
I'm getting better at suddenly becoming left handed but if I lose my concentration and use my right hand for almost anything I pay too severe a price.
I have other fears about the doctor this trip. I don't think the Lantus (insulin) is working. I think that they're going to try me on a different type of insulin.
Two hours after eating a kiwi my blood sugars were 15.8! I had nothing else to eat after that and my blood sugars were down to 9.1. This is not good.
This morning they were at 8.3. They should be around 4. I was getting very similar results with just the pills. I'm up to 27 units of insulin. Starting to push the envelope. When they started me on metformin I had to get up to the maximum allowable dosage before I started to see results.
I've finally adjusted to the side effects of the Lantus. The trembling in the morning is gone, as is
Click images for desktop size: "Fallout 3" by Unknown most of the nausea and the extra hand cramping. Its a bit discouraging to have to imagine going to another type of insulin and additional side effects.
For some reason, maybe medical, I had it in my head that player tryouts were on Saturday. They're tomorrow and Thursday. Over 350 kids to look at and evaluate. At least I'm primarily an observer and won't have to run any of the drills or do much instructing. I have to get together the pad so my assistant (actually my friend) will know what I want and need recorded. I'll probably keep my little scraps of paper going to insure that I get all the data I can.
A lot of the drills will be worthless, I'm certain. For some reason my fellow coaches want to make sure that there are "fun" drills in the package. I think they underestimate the young athletes. The fun they'll have is in testing their limits, comparing themselves to their teammates, not doing "fun" drills that accomplish little for them or in terms of evaluation.
From what I've seen I expect that some of the drills will be run incorrectly which will also make them rubbish. I worry about being judgmental but then I remember that six of the coaches I trained went on to coach professionally. One in the Div III championship game. I think I've paid the price to believe I have a glimmer of what things should be done.
I don't want to be judgmental. These guys aren't professional coaches. I suspect I'm the only one with a degree in physical education. For some of their swagger its also obvious that I've had more experience and success than the rest of the coaches combined. I admire that they're willing to work with the kids, that they have the drive and willingness to do the job. I know the rewards that come from coaching. They're huge. But they are not the sort of rewards that appeal to just anyone.
They deserve respect and have earned the right to be proud of what they're doing. I'll remember that even if I think they're being dumb.
Most of you know that I am capable of a dumbness greater and more profound that it is reserved only for the well meaning and the oblivious.
I'm going to wrap my shoulder and arm, maybe even wear some sort of sling. I don't think me rolling on the ground cursing in unintelligible grunts and groans will do much for my image with the kids.

Posted by David at 7:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Division" by Robert Randtoul I was feeling somewhat better. Up at 4:00. Just over 3 hours of sleep but no where as bad as I've been feeling until . . .
I set my pills out. One of them started to roll off the table. Without thinking I caught it. Wish I hadn't. The quick move made me see black. Vision back in just a few seconds but the pain doubled me up for nearly 15 minutes. Still feel it 40 minutes later.
The deep nausea is much better this morning. Maybe I'm getting used to the insulin. Its not doing me much good as far as I can see. The injections still hurt. It makes me feel edgy right afterwards. I went to sleep with a good blood sugar count of 7.0 and woke up with a 12.4! Stupid body. Stupid pain.

Were getting a new foster dog today. An emergency placement. The dog was surrendered by the owner with another dog. It was one of those things, "Surrender the dogs or face jail time". So you can tell the guy has had a nice three years so far. He was going to be put down. Clearly fair. His abusive owner avoids jail time but the dog gets the death penalty. That's justice. Clearly being victimized was the dogs fault.
His front teeth have been knocked out. He's not housebroken. He's not crate trained. He has bad separation anxiety. I don't see much there that justifies the death penalty. Five dogs in a tiny house bothers me just a little. My flailing health and dealing with two fosters bothers me just a little bit more.
Looking ahead next weekend we'll be gone most of the day. My football teams "evaluation". I hope that a week with us will get the new foster enough time to know he's safe here and that we can be gone without him panicking.


Click images for desktop size: "Elegance" by Richard Mohler I am totally bugged by Obama. With all of the rhetoric he's going totally 19th century when it comes to consumer rights. And he's showing a deep hatred for the handicapped. I thought he was avoiding the sickening presence of lobbyists? It was one of his big promises, wasn't it?
There's the International Copyright Treaty convention going on. The Obama administration has presented an opposition to the treaty. He opposes books for the blind and for the handicapped. You know, people with no arms, people paralyzed from the neck down. Obama is sickened that these slackers have been getting a free ride at the expense of poor down trodden publishers. You know those poor publisher guys who need to park their Escalades in the Handicapped parking spaces at the grocery store.
The RIAA, MPAA and the publishing lobbyists are recorded as having open access to Obama. They decided that the Handicapped have had it their own way too long. No more free books in braille, no more handmade books on tape. The handicapped, according to Obama, have got to start pulling their own weight around here. I guess he figures they're handicapped, what right do the handicapped have to be informed or educated. They should just stay inside in the dark and out of sight.
This is the most repellant thing imaginable. The only reason for their opposition, at least the argument they presented to the conference was the verbatim page from the copyright lobbyists website, so you know Obama is watching out for us and not being unduly influenced.
Revolting.
More revolting is that come election day no one will remember this gross cruelty. No one cares much now. Its only the lost, the powerless, the disenfranchised. And that we will allow them to be exploited and forced into the shadows, deprived of basic human rights is revolting. It's not a country I can be proud of.

Posted by David at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Californian Farm Sunset" by 0videoman I don't think its a good sign that I'm waking up feeling worse than when I went to sleep. It all feels so contrarian. Like a nap should cure a head ache or an upset stomach. Shouldn't it.
I'm feeling rotten. Worse than I've felt in years. No where near as bad as the first chemo but remarkably bad all the same. Hands all cramped up, stomach twirling, eyes struggling to focus through the head ache and my skin feels hot and clammy at the same time.
What a mess I've become.
Most of this was predicted as side effects to starting insulin. They're supposed to go away. I'm up to 25 units a day now with no stabilization in the offing. It bothers me that I was getting similar blood sugar numbers with just the pills and vigorous exercise. To have the expense and the discomfort as well as the psychological numbness from having to do the injections and not see any radical bim bam improvement is disheartening. This wretched feeling only adds to the malaise.
I've been using hot moist heat on my shoulders and elbow. It doesn't do anything to relieve the neuropathic pain but it does loosen up the other muscles that were clenched tight. It provides minimal relieve but minimal seems like a lot right now.
I looked it up and 25 units of insulin is equal to about one third of a milligram. I'm clearly astonished that I carry around a big old gland like a pancreas and all it does for all the care I give it is to produce about one third of a milligram of insulin a day. Its even more distressing to accept that I'm so vulnerable that a drug about the size and weight of a snow flake or half the size of a mosquito should have this devastating effect on me.
My friend is home from her conference. I opened the gate for her to drive into the yard and she ran over this big rock we keep by the gate for propping the gate open. The rock is about 10 inches in diameter. It didn't hurt the car but it did bounce the rock into my foot. My big toe is all blackened. It
Click images for desktop size: "Silent Passage" by Unknown shows how bad off I am that I barely notice the pain from a traumatic injury.
I was glad to see my friend. I struggled hard not to pass out. By the time I'd sorted through that she'd fallen asleep! She slept for nearly 14 hours. Poor thing, she must have needed the rest.
She went into work today because she's the only management person who'll be accessible today. She took the giant dog and the gentle dog with her! That will be interesting for her and for her co-workers!
I'm going to miss them but I'm glad they're getting a break.
There was an upsetting incident with the foster dog yesterday. We took about an hour walk and been home about 15 minutes when I heard a bad bit of snarling and whining.
The foster dog had pressed the gentle dog into a corner and was snarling and biting at his neck. Gentle dog was not resisting but was clearly suffering. I pulled the foster dog off. He made no act or aggressive motion towards me.
The gentle dog was rattled but not physically harmed. He was upset but the one who was the most upset was the giant dog. He was trembling and stuck close to me for the next few hours. He was far more upset than the gentle dog.
The foster dog is subject to aggressive play. He initiates every play period and will not relent until the dogs play with him. After the attack they refused to deal with him for a couple of hours, all except my puppy who will only play with him if he plays her games.
Most of this is just a dog trying to figure out his place in the pack. Clearly he is not going to challenge me as the alpha dog and he's not interested in challenging my female puppy but he's using the
Click images for desktop size: "Count Basie" aggressive play to attempt to dominate the two males.
The only solution I have is to watch them carefully and when the foster begins to play and the playing is not reciprocated and continues to press he'll have to go to a time out.
The aggressive play indicates a lot of things. Breaking him of that bad habit may open him up to concentrating more clearly and being less stressed.
Its a saga.
One thing I might have known but didn't realize is that gentle dog was neutered late in life. This is odd to me because he is so gentle and happy, not in the way I associate with late neutered males. He was actually being used as a stud in the puppy mill he was rescued from which makes his gentleness and lack of aggression even more moving.
He still likes to bite me though . . .

For some reason I found myself thinking about Irvin Kershner. He's a film director there's no reason
Click images for desktop size: "The Call of the Wild" by Cole Phillips for anyone to know about except that for some incomprehensible reason he was picked to direct the "Star Wars" sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back". As I consider that to be the only watchable episode of "Star Wars" I find it interesting Lucas picked Kershner, a man whose career, up till then, had been defined by good but not remarkable gentle movies about people. There was never any hard edged cataclysms in Kershner;s movies. In "A Fine Madness" the hero, Sean Connery, is a poet who gets a lobotomy as a by product to trying to avoid jail for late alimony payments. in "The Flim Flam Man", George C Scott plays a con man who prowls the rural south. Scott is old, self aware, charming and sad without any bitterness.
Kershner's movies tended to be enjoyable, reasonably successful. How this translated out to working on a cash cow and making that cash cow the most interesting of the series is something worth contemplating.
Today figures to be much like tomorrow, with me trying to hold on. Friday is my friends "TV night". I've got the roomba running in the living room. I like to get everything nice so she can just veg out and enjoy the only show she watches. I'm still a believer in the Spartan aesthetic, and part of the asthetic is cleanliness. Even if she doesn't notice it makes me feel good getting it together for her.
I've learned how to move so as not to create any enormous pain for myself. I sort of had to. The sun has finally come out after 4 days! So it might be a better day.
There's no reason it shouldn't be. No reason it couldn't be.

Posted by David at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Business Lady" by Unknown One odd thing that bothers me; when I dance and prance around to the music playing either in my head or on the iPod I used to feel liquid and elegant, now I feel stiff, jerky and unbalanced. Of course, that's just the way I feel. Maybe someone watching me sees me as smooth and swirling as I used to be (and yeah, I practiced my dancing in front of mirrors). Maybe everyone else always saw me as stiff, jerky and unbalanced. Everyone has their right to an opinion on my dancing. Naturally if you feel that way I'll have to fight you and my puppy would help me.

I'm not doing well.
I'm even gladder that the diabetic nurse called me. For some reason its better feeling miserable knowing that this is just normal adjustment of my body to the insulin than a new stage of misery unfolding before my life. Pain is not an enjoyable view of the future.
Yesterday was a loss. After the blood letting at the lab I got home loaded with ambition. They day turned out to me passing out for 45 minutes at a stretch then recovering then struggling to stay awake for more than a few hours.
When I went to bed for certain I woke up every 45 minutes, awakened by the pain. I'd keep trying to go back to sleep but at 3:30 I just gave up.
Now, three hours later, after all my meds and two cups of coffee I've managed to get past the nausea, my hands still feel cramped and my concept of arthritic. I've managed to hold my arms so that they and my shoulder are quiescent. The pain is just an easy endurable 2 on the chart, no worse than a bad headache.
I know I'm feeling better. My puppy has stopped her vigil, watching over me, and gone to sleep on the bed. I'm glad that she nor any of the dogs, don't see me as a god like master, but as another member of the pack that they love. My puppy loves me dearly. Sometimes I'm astonished at just
Click images for desktop size: "Dark Tower" by Marvel Comics how much she loves me. The same way I'm astonished at how much the gentle dog and the giant dog love my friend.
The foster dog isn't sure who he loves he just knows he desperately wants to love someone.
As much as I miss my friend I'm glad she's not here to see me like this. Its easier to suffer and throw myself around when there's no witnesses. I wonder what it is inside me that makes me refuse to show this much weakness even to people I trust.
Last night they kept my friend at her conference until stupid late. She had to rush to get to the concert she's had tickets for for nearly two months. They got to hear six songs . . . I like numbers so I figure that between the two of them they spent 15 bucks a tune! She doesn't mention whether they were good songs.

I'm going to try and accomplish something today. I need to for my own sanity and self respect. Its still a grim looking day. I'm going to take the dogs out for a walk. Maybe we'll meet some new people and new dogs. Then some household chores. I'll try and avoid the nap fever.
I keep thinking that at the doc's on Wednesday they'll give me some pill that will like instantly knock out the terrible pain. I was even looking for the terrible mood elevator pills that they don't ever give as a mood elevator because it stinks at the job it was designed for. They use it for neuropathic pain almost exclusively. I hate the pill because it makes me feel like I'm hung over for a few days after taking just one.
I'm already feeling badly hungover so . . . the pills were expired for
Click images for desktop size: "Janis Joplin" two years. I feel better about that. I still have a knee jerk reaction to depending on pills. To relying on something outside of myself.

I'm up to 23 units of insulin. I discovered that the SoloStar, the "pen" I use to inject the insulin, locks down at the amount of insulin it still contains. The last dose in it was 14 units, which meant that I had to inject myself twice. Not too surprisingly the second injection was much more painful and annoying. I resisted the temptation to re-use the same needle to boot. I used a fresh one but it still hurt.
It was annoying having to use a fresh needle. they're relatively precious. I'm relying on the free samples the diabetic nurse gave me. It seems that since the doctor didn't prescribe them I have to pay a serious price for them. He has to write a script for needles then they're a lot cheaper. I'm asking him for one when he gives me the script for the pain pill they decide on.
My blood sugars are still all over the place. Its annoying. My diet is good. Last night before the
Click images for desktop size: "Buffalo Hunt" by Charles Russell injections they were acceptable 8.1. Six hours of fasting later they are at 10.8! I still have to take all the pills I had to take before, the metformin and the glyburide (metformin makes my body more sensitive to insulin while glyburide squeezes what ever insulin there can still be left in my pancreas) the blood sugars are at 11.6! They should be in the 4 to 5 range.
I don't know what to make of it. I'll just keep doing the routine and see what comes off.

I was curious to see if anyone had been listening to the RIAA free music on the jukebox. I was a bit lost as it looks like no one has even taken a look at it. Maybe the feeling is that if the RIAA isn't willing to sue you for listening to it the music isn't very good. I disagree with that. There's some stuff there that I think is better than most of what's out there. I guess you have to like guitar music.

My puppy just came in to check on me. She's laid down beside me and is checking me intently. I'm going to feed her now and then we'll take off for our walk, she, I and the other three. I always feel lucky when I look at them all. I wonder what good things I ever did in life to deserve such affection, trust and friendship. I wonder that always. Funny, I never wonder what I'd done to deserve all the hell.
My puppy just got up and stopped the foster dog from coming in to jump on me (bad habit we're still working on). My puppy, my nurse and care giver.
To the day. To this day and to all the other days to come.

Posted by David at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Click images for desktop size: "All Mine" by Unknown The diabetic nurse called me yesterday. Just a check up. It made me feel much better. Not so alone.
There was no real out shoot to the call. I'm doing everything fine, other than not changing my eating habits as much as I should. Not the content of the meals; the frequency.
We discussed my type of diabetes. Its a common enough occurrence with chemo. She pointed out that it was surprising that my thyroid has no apparent damage. I was surprised that there was a side effect I'd managed to miss. I wasn't upset that there's an episode of the chemo experience that I avoided. Doesn't feel like I missed out on anything.

Click images for desktop size: "Sophia Loren" This morning I had my blood work done, to see what the effect is of the insulin and what damage its doing to me.
The woman who took my blood last time wasn't there. When she took my blood she told me she was waiting for her test results to see if she had Hodgkin's Disease. Turns out the results were positive. Poor girl.
The blood test cost less this time around, fewer tests to run.
My friend dropped me off in a driving rain. My friend was on her way to her big work conference. She was distracted. She's afraid that she's not going to be able to get away from the conference to see her concert tonight. She was looking forward to the show.
After the blood was taken I walked home. The rain had slacked back some. I noticed that the "Burger King" had gone out of business. I always take it as a bad sign when crappy franchise fast food joints go under. I saw that the Indian grocery had folded too. There were a few others.
Failed businesses are depressing, especially on a gray day in the rain. They are the face of crushed dreams. It also means the economy isn't doing as well as the overly optimistic announcements.
I thought about places I loved that went out of business. That didn't last long. It was easier to
Click images for desktop size: "Betty Page" by Jim Silke remember the people who succeeded. Ma Maison, when it was in the little blue and white clapboard house on Melrose, when Wolfgang Puch was in the kitchen. The food was remarkable and cheap enough. Now its that big glitz palace by the Beverly Center, as capable of storing pleasant memories as a McDonalds.
Gorkies downtown. A twenty four hour cafeteria serving Russian food and coffee. You could go in there and eat with the latest art stars, slumming celebrities and surfers and musicians. No matter how crowded it was no one ever hassled you, even if you'd been there for hours nursing just a cup of coffee.
It used to be that to play in clubs on the Strip (and adjoining areas) bands had to pay to play. It wasn't like you had to hand the club owner a wad of cash to get on stage. Well, actually that's exactly what it was, except the logic behind it was that you were buying tickets to make sure the place was full. You'd buy a block of 100 tickets and then you could resell them . . . The actuality was that you'd give them to your girlfriends and band fags and they'd just give them away. Its how you got to meet the guys in Motley Crue and Guns and Roses. I liked that they lived in their stage clothes. They'd be out there handing out tickets trying to get you to come to the show. Working their way up.
Its why clubs like Brendan's Masque and the Park View Hotel meant so much to us. A place to just set up and play while people danced and went crazy. I liked the Masque best when it was in this basement; toilets with no doors that constantly overflowed, as many bands as would show up thrashing it out and the crowd was always into it.
The Park View Hotel was this crusty falling apart home of faded excess overlooking Macarthur Park and the crack dealers. On the weekends it was filled with about a thousand crazy people and about 10 different bands playing until they had nothing left to give. We played there a half dozen times. A few hundred people in the mosh pit while a few hundred more strolled around the enormous ball room. It was a moment in time I'm glad to be a part of.
Then there were the chinese restaurants. Madame Wong's started it. A very elegant restaurant, plenty of thick black and red enamel. They weren't drawing the dinner crowd so they did the obvious thing and became a rock/punk venue.
We played one memorable show there. Gary Myrick and the Figures opened. I never got along with Gary. No reason for it. He's a nice guy. But back then we were young enough to not get along with people and not care about they why's or wherefores of it. Gary opened and then we followed him. It was a big deal show. It was the debut of the B 52's in LA. David Bryne and Bob Dylan were in one of the booths. The room was thick with A&R clones.

Click images for desktop size: "Little Annie Cyborg" by Unknown We did a brilliant set. I was wearing my After Six blue velvet tuxedo jacket. Back then bands would make pins to publicize themselves, so the lapels where tastefully decorated by the pins of bands we shared the stage with. I wore my boris Badenov T-Shirt and black leather jeans.
We gave way to Peter Case and The Plimsouls. Peter is one of those pop geniuses who should have gone down in history. He's already had the monster hit "A Million Miles Away" but here he was following us.
His stage show rocked. Then Peter was put in the weird place of having to introduce the B 52's. It was clear he didn't know a thing about them, even if they were the headliners.
They had the A&R buzz though. I had their single "Rock Lobster". I thought it was okay. I can listen to "Peter Gunn" riffs all day without getting bored.
I liked their set. The girls were dressed in 50's retro Judy Jetson style mini skirts, had mile high bee hive hair do's and made some freaky cool sounds. Fred was a hard working front man. There was nothing to not like.
After the show Gary Myrick had a hit single, "she Talks in Stereo". Peter saw serious money when "A Million Miles Away" got featured in a dozen different movies, the B 52's became legends - I mean when "The Love Shack", their rehearsal hall burned down it made international news. And I got served with a subpoena and a restraining order from my old band and the record company telling me I was violating my contract playing in front of people and using my real name . . .
It was a memorable night.

I got home to the dogs. They were, of course, overjoyed to see me.
Yesterday had some issues with the foster dog. He insists on pushing out the door and then thinks its a great game to get you to chase him. Moving after him hurt me terribly. It made me angry. I don't like being angry with dogs.
The gentle dog has taken to beating up foster dog! All three are tired of his perpetual aggressive
Click images for desktop size: "Light Symposium" by love1008 play mode and are letting him know about it. Their lessons will probably stay with the foster dog longer than my tedious lessons!
Since my friend is away for a couple of days I'll spend the time continuing foster dogs training. I also plan to answer emails. I have 71 in my in box.
I'm fine answering email if I can give a single line, a single word is better response. My usual method of handling the back log is to wait and see if someone writes me a second time, then I can delete the first one while I figure out how to answer in a sentence.
My blood sugars are still all over the place. I'm up to 22 units of insulin. I now have the problem of figuring out these little insulin pens. The hold 300 units of insulin and are re-usable. They have a cap with a pen clip! But they are too large to actually carry in your pocket. I'll need 23 units tonight but the pen only appears to have 20 left in it. I have no idea if I make do with just 20 or if I have to stick myself a second time . . .

Posted by David at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "The Abyss" by James Cameron The football meeting was tedious. It wasn't helped by the meeting room. No air circulation and 80 degrees. Men coming straight from work in that environment . . .
This wasn't the worst meeting of this sort I've ever been to but it was bad. At least there were no shocking displays of ignorance. I did have to explain that while I wanted 10, 20 and 40 yard times it didn't mean the kids had to run three races, you just needed 3 time keepers.
I wasn't too surprised that my fellow coaches weren't didn't know the basic football drills. Only mildly disappointed that they didn't know the names of the drills.
I wasn't even surprised when one coach made the typical bad coaching statement, "You can't tell how good a player is till you see him hitting on the field." Its probably true that he can't, anyway.
The biggest stunner was that one of their most impressive feats was that they provide us with agility ladders and hurdles. These are impressive and expensive pieces of gear. None of the coaches had a clue how to use them.
They knew you ran through them or something but they didn't seem to know any of the drills to train the kids nerves to respond and gain true speed and improve the player's reflexes.
There was one very gung ho coach. A line coach. HE said a lot of pretty intelligent things. I could even forgive that most of his training techniques are about twenty years out of date. He's not a pro and probably doesn't even have a clue where to find the info on better techniques to accomplish his goals. At least he had a plan and knew what needed to be accomplished.
I was lightly stunned to find out he worked with the 10 year olds. I'm not confident that his sort of attitude translates well to kids that age. Maybe his attitude is tempered when he's working with the kids.

Click images for desktop size: "After Degas" by Unknown All in all I had a lot of second thoughts about the whole endeavour, on my part not on the teams part. I know you have to work with what you have. You try and train your coaches. I'm sort of proud that 5 of the coaches I've trained have gone on to be professional coaches.
Luckily I was braced for all the second thoughts and negativity.
I think it will all work out. I need it to.

I'm up to 21 units of insulin. It still hurts when I inject it, but at least I'm sure I'm doing it correctly.
I'm confused. It seems to be working and then it suddenly isn't.
I'm feeling incredibly sick. A big part of it is from the pain in my shoulder. Its waking me several times a night. It seems that the killer stab of hurt comes about 3 hours after I've gone to bed, then I can't get back to sleep. The ache has spread across my whole upper body. I have to be very careful to stretch out slowly and try and avoid any sudden jolts of pain.
Invariably I'll pass out a couple of times during the day. Fall asleep for an hour at a time. This bugs me no end. Bothers me worse than the general feeling of nausea and feeling unwell that now seems to accompany the day.
I am so bored with my suffering.
Click images for desktop size: "The Wizard of Oz"We did get to go to the Chinese Buffet yesterday. This was enjoyable. My friend and I were both interested in how busy this place always seems to be now.
There was someone new there, a pudgy Chinese fellow, who seated us. He seemed to fumble around while he was attempting to act with flair and grace. I watched him after he left us. He went to a mirror and studied himself most carefully, licking his inky and smoothing his eyebrows with the wet digit.
I liked the food. My friend ate more than I did!
I took my pack and lined it with a plastic grocery bag. (Those bags are going to become rare. All the grocery stores are now selling the bags for a nickel each. No more free bags, you have to bring your own. I can't fault them for this. I might even approve until I need a plastic bag for dog related activities.) I filled my pack with bacon, sausages and steak for the pups. That always makes it a
Click images for desktop size: "The Reader" by Ada Shulz good day.
Today I have to start on all the chores I was ignoring during my friends vacation, starting with too much laundry and unleashing the roomba.
I already miss my friend. I like having her around. Tomorrow she has to go away for a couple of days to a work conference. It shouldn't be too bad for her. She's getting put up in a pretty plush hotel. She has tickets to a show by one of those singers who I don't much care for. Her co-worker and friend is going with her.
I'll watch movies and ache.

Posted by David at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Steve Argyle When I was five I used to trade baseball cards with the other kids in my area. I didn't have the cash to buy the packages of cards. Most of my cards came from the back of cereal boxes. For a while Jello was putting baseball cards in their puddings. Trading those kind of cards put me in a lower trading class of kid.
When I was seven I discovered comics and surfing. We were kids. We didn't have much money so we'd buy the comics we could and then go to the beach and swap them. I got to read the first "Spiderman" comic trading a "Jimmy Olsen" for it.

Click images for desktop size: "Stalactites" by Unknown We'd look askance at kids who bought "Archie Comics" or Harvey comics like "Richie Rich". We lived for super heroes punching out bad guys. We loved that Spiderman made jokes while he duked it out with the Rhino. Batman, even when stupid, was always cool. The Fantastic Four were a bit stuffy but the Thing was cool.
Sometimes, on the flat days, one of the real surfers would loan us his board so we could paddle around in the ocean and work on our moves, usually practice trying to stand on the board. He'd trade us the use of his board for a couple of comics so he could have something to read while he prayed for a set.
When I was nine we'd get together and trade records. 45's, albums were something you got for Christmas. We lived on 45's, on songs not concepts.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Tatiana Valkovskaya These record swapping parties were our first interactions with girls where the main point wasn't to torment the girls to see how much they could take before they started crying.
We'd listen to the music. Dance tentatively. Swap the records for things we thought were cooler. Sometimes a trade would depend on the quality of the song on the flip side.
When VHS tapes came out movies were like 70 bucks a piece! We'd swap them with friends. Grabbing an obscure movie or TV show some guy taped off of late night TV in his hometown. Looking for westerns and monsters. Searching for cool.
Who knew that those happy days, those days of learning to interact with society, to appreciate a groups similarities and to cherish our differences would be considered criminal activities today.
You can't buy anything anymore. You can only rent.
Some rich jerks afraid of the future passed some laws. Instead of socializing for real and learning you have to sit and do as you're told. Government by the minority, the tiny minority, the "ruling class".
You can't own a record or a comic. You are only renting it and you're not allowed to trade it or let more than three other people listen to it.
It makes sense if you're rich and want to get richer and if you hate people. Albert Gonzalez lies to congress and okays torture behind their back. Nothing is going to happen to him. He gets to write columns and gets paid too much for them laughing about how he screwed us all over in the illusion of keeping us safe. Meanwhile Roger Clemens, a baseball player gets persecuted because some groupie he befriended swears he gave Clemens some shots. The full weight of the FBI and the Justice Department is committed to destroying his life.
Dick Cheney brags about using torture to lie to us and to to deceive us and Obama says we have to move on from having thousands of our kids slaughtered and murdered due to the actions of this guy. We have to forget all about that. Obama thinks that lowering our self esteem and having the rest of the world think we're sleazy scum sucking cowards is trivial. What's important is that we imprison and criminalize that kid sitting in his room who wants to make friends, who wants others to hear a song and see the same image in their heads that the song conjured in his.
It used to be that you were in a band. You made a record. You could get 45's stamped out in lots of
Click images for desktop size: "Wading Through Despair" by Resident Angel 500. With a two color self-designed label they cost you 300 bucks. You'd haul a box of the 45's o your shows and get your girl friends to hawk them for a buck apiece. If you got lucky you'd sell twenty at a show.
Later you'd get CD's stamped out. With the jewel case and art they'd run about $2.50 a piece to make. You'd smile at your girl friends and get them to sell them at your shows for $5.
Now, it used to be that the RIAA sold records for you. But the recording artists didn't get paid. They got to perform shows and they got to keep the gate. The major labels loved this deal.
The record stores made about $2 a sale, the record jobber - the guy who put the records in the store got about $3.50 and the label got about $5.50. Sometimes the labels would pay the publishers, if the publishers were big enough to sue the labels.
The RIAA loved it. They fought hard to keep it that way.
Then came the internet and the world changed. For the better most of us would say.
I can see it being illegal if I downloaded a mess of songs and tried to sell them to you. I can even see file sharing services being questionable when somebody is making money. I mean the RIAA or some webmaster raking off cash, might be wrong.
These rich guys couldn't be bothered to se the change in the world. They only saw threats to their mansions. About ten years ago Courtney Love wrote a brilliant piece telling how the RIAA screwed her and every other recording musician over. Steve Van Zandt has also come out strong about the abuse of musicians by the labels and the RIAA.
Radio Head and Nine Inch Nails are two bands who took the words to heart and were smart enough to see the world has changed and is changing.
So are a lot of other bands. They remember tape and they remember taping songs off the radio. They want their music heard. They want to touch people and to have their music move people. They want you to dance.
Up in the bar there's a new link called jukebox. It'll take you to a glitzy, funny (to me anyway) page where there are 40 songs that aren't burdened with the little RIAA bug.

Click images for desktop size: "Who Wants to Dance" by J Heppert The tunes are all there because they need to be heard. There are some great tunes there. Mostly awesome, at least if you like the music I like . . . These aren't my favorites, not all of them at least. The criteria was what I played the most often.
These are the bands of the past and of the future.

The porch is finished enough to be used. It looks good. My friend loves it which is all that matters.
I've been stove up. The pain is pretty horrible.
I use a simple scale. See the leukemia made me take chemo. Chemo gave me diabetes. The diabetes gave me neuropathic pain. For the past couple of years the pain has been pretty unremitting.
Death would hurt more. I can live with this pain. I have to remember that when I feel like giving up.
I'm up to 20 units of insulin. I looked it up. 20 units is about the average. I still have to increase the dosage. My blood sugars are still not under control. They gave me sugar pills. Big suckers they are, in case my dosage increase put me into a hypoglycemic coma. No where near any danger of that, at least not yet.
This is my friends last day of vacation. Memorial Day. She says its the best vacation she's had in years. Usually she misses work but this time she's dreading going back.
We're going to the Chinese Buffet.
The foster dog is fitting in better. The only issue he really has, aside form his incredibly sloppy water drinking, is his constant play. Constant play is not a good thing. It sounds like it should be but he gets so cranked up he gets annoying, not just to people but even to the other dogs. Foster dog gets so wound up he's nearly a threat. He's a good dog though and is trying to understand.
Tonight is a coaching meeting. After the meeting we have to pick up my coaching kit. The tackling dummies, agility gear, first aid kit etc.
They don't have a lock up at the practice field so we have to haul all this stuff around. On paper it sounds like a great kit though. That the kit includes an agility ladder and agility hurdles gives me a lot of cause for hope.
I hope my friend enjoys hr first ever coaches meeting. She'll be there as an equal.

Posted by David at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Red Umbrella" by Marta DahligModestly bad news on the health front. (My health has plenty to be modest about.)
Last night my blood sugars were at 12.7. I injected 18 units of Lantus (insulin). I was awakened at 4:30 by barking dogs and our guys wanting to go out and bark fight with them. I took my blood pressure and it was 150 over 80! My blood sugars were at 16.4. The blood sugars haven't been that high in years (?).
Three hours later the blood reports 10.5.
I feel frustrated.
I have to wrap my arms in elastic bandages just to move. It makes me feel like a Frankenstein monster in swaddling clothes. The bandage compression doesn't help the diabetic inspired neuropathic pain, but it suppresses the severe pain and cramping in the other muscles.
I haven't been able to stretch for months. Not even the old fashioned yawn-ey stretch in the morning thing, so that the muscles around the affected areas have started to knot up from the tension. I mean really know up. At first I thought I'd developed a series of tumors! I try and work them out with out much success.
(To understand how pain just below the shoulder point of the right arm and the elbow of the left has trashed my shoulder, neck, and clavicle I always use the story of Dizzy Dean. Dean was a hot shot Hall of Famer for the St Louis Cardinals. He broke a toe on his left foot. It annoyed him but it was just a small hurt, The Cardinals needed him. He needed the money so he figured he could easily pitch through the little pain. He pitched two games before he injured his arm and was out of baseball for good. His left foot was his pivot foot and the little pain forced an unnoticeable change in his delivery. His body compensated to avoid the pain and this produced enough torque in his elbow to tear the ligaments. They didn't have the
Click image: "Kessel Energy Spider" by Dragon Winter surgical techniques to repair it back then so a stubbed toe ended the career of one of the best pitchers in baseball.)
I'm starting to get angry about it.
The foster dog had a mild blow too. The perspective parents abruptly backed out. They claimed a family emergency that will necessitate them being in India for several months. I suspect if we had approved them and let them take the foster dog home they'd have called us in a couple of weeks and asked us to take him back. This is a pretty evil thing to do to a dog or a person. The timing is at least good for him.
I like to kid myself that I'm perceptive enough to have realized that these would have been the sort of people who would not see a dog as family, Any family emergency would, in my little world, have included the puppy.
Poor guy, but it could have been worse. He's a good pup. He'll find a home.
My goal with foster dogs isn't to move them out and sell them. I'm not involved in high turn over. I'm kind of known for making people jump through hoops. I want the dog and the people to all be happy together and to face life together. Love should not die.
The porch painting is progressing nicely. My friend is still having fun. That's the important thing. I don't care how long its taking so long as she has fun.
As the worst painter in any group I always get the cruddy job. Ceiling painting. It was hard because I had to extend my arms over head. It went alright though. The bandages got me through it.
It is finally looking like something. The color was supposed to be
Click images for desktop size: "Judy Garland" sand and look like stone and gravel. Its sort of a yellowish brown in execution. Nothing wrong with the color, just not what my friend expected. (To me it still looks like the inside of a translucent mushroom.)
Painting the ceiling I managed to drip paint on everything. My hair, my iPod even the giant dog has a couple of interesting splotches on him. They add personality . . . the last thing giant dog needs is more personality. I kept throwing him off the porch but the sight of me cursing and shouting in pain while standing on a ladder is just too appealing. Even my puppy comes and peeks at me. She walks away shaking her head.
Today I start of the floor. Being a porch I get to use the hose on it. For some unknown reason I'm looking forward to that. Sweeping it down and then spraying it with the hose. I wish we had one of those high pressure "thousand pounds of pressure hoses". That would be cool and potentially destructive!

Click images for desktop size: "Ricardo Del Cuore" by Titus BoyI still love the idea of potential destruction.
I also realized that I have a coaches meeting on Monday. This meeting slightly baffles me. Its to discuss drills to be done in player evaluation.
I'm confused because this is silly stuff and doesn't fit the pretty slick image they've presented to me. There are a core of drills. Watching a kid run them, watching him step over bags, watching him run, watching him strive to compete tells me all I need to know. It shows his heart and his present ability level. It shows his attitude.
When kids get psyched and say stuff like "I need to get the pads on. When I'm out there hitting people then I can really show them what I've got!"
The kids are wrong on that. I can tell what you've got by the way you plant your foot on a post corner cut drill. I can see how well you'll mix it up by the way your eyes follow me as you do the step over drills. I can tell if you've got the heart to be unbeatable by the way you check others heights on the vertical jump. I can tell how hard you can hit by your distance on the broad jump. Most importantly, how you do on that tell me what I have to teach you and what we need to do together to shape your body into what you want it to be.
I always note coaches who want full contact drills. I was asked to coach an All Star team in Europe. I and the other American coaches were google eyed when we saw one of the European coaches running "nutcrackers". Nutcrackers were punishment drills, made to "toughen you up" is some jerk of a coach thought you were slacking.
You give the kid a ball and set him out to run into three defenders with no protection. The defenders are about five yards off from the kid. The kid is guaranteed to get hammered. Some jerk college coaches use nutcrackers to get kids to quit the team and give up their scholarships.
We asked the European coach what he was doing. He was seeing if the kids were tough enough and really wanted to play. Since this was an All Star trial I sort of figured that had been answered.
That coach never beat any of our teams.
I'm afraid how many of my fellow coaches in this meeting will want to run full contact drills to see the obvious stuff that they should be able to see on their own.
Their argument will be that the kids love the contact. Some of them, most of them hopefully, love the contact. I like to keep the kids hungry for it.

Click images for desktop size: "Picture Book" by Robert F Blum Maybe I'll be surprised and the meeting will be to discuss some new drills that some crazy scientist has devised that safely and intelligently give even more diagnostic proof. Maybe.
My friend is going to have to end her vacation by going to this meeting with me. She's going to become my statistician! I need her to follow me around and record all the trials. Most of you have seen me on my own with my little scraps of paper with dozens of numbers rapidly scrawled all over them. Some of you have even given me nice little notebooks which, in a matter of hours, I have reduced to little scraps of paper that fall out of my pockets all over the field.
I figure she might enjoy the meeting and might get an idea of the information she'll be recording. She'll enjoy that. even organizing it into spreadsheets!
Time to feed the dogs and start on todays porch project!

Posted by David at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "La Gutin" by Pavel Last night I went to sleep with my blood sugar at 5.4. That's pretty good. I injected 17 units of Lantus (insulin) and this morning my blood sugars were 6.4 which is on the bright side of  acceptable.
I'm eating lunch in a few minutes - cheap-o ramen. So in a couple of hours the verdict will be in on whether the insulin has finally kicked in and become a part of my body chemistry..

Click images for desktop size: "Bob Dylan"
People say I complain a lot, even about things I agree with and am happy about. I don't know about that. I think its a part of my constant consideration. Part of it is that I know there are too few golden chances in life. I don't want to miss one. Same part is that there are many traps, most of which we set for ourselves. I try and avoid those. Another part is that I think you have to consider all sides of a problem and an issue. I tend to do that in the front brain and sometimes it comes out aloud.
I'm also generally described as self deprecating. I had to look that one up. I don't think I ma at all. I just have a tendency to think about other things than myself first. I do have a huge ego. My only issue with self esteem is that I don't think others have enough of it.

Click images for desktop size: "Pin Up" by Earl Moran I also have a natural cynicism and stoicism that makes me seem crabby . . . okay, I am crabby.
This is all thinking about stuff when pain in my arms woke me up. Three times last night. Once so badly I woke everyone else.
I guess I don't know how to age gracefully. Aside from having a total jerk of a step-father my young life was gold. Southern California; I was a good, sometimes great surfer, stud athlete, played guitar in a band that made "rekkids". My teen memories are flooded with images of girls sidling up to me and whispering outrageous things into my ears.
Now I was heartened when the diabetic nurse looked at my records and said, "oh, I never would have thought you were that old!" My hamstrings are so tight I have to stoop to pick something off the ground. I can't put the dog food back in the fridge without grunting. I've got my arm wrapped in elastic bandage so I can nearly raise it over my head. I had 6 teeth pulled, which makes 9 I'm missing altogether. The psychological damage of the cosmetics hurt more than the novocaine needles.
I never imagined getting older would mean being less than what I always knew I was.
Somehow through all this I still know I can coach kids and teach them to be winners. I can still make enemies and I can still make friends. I can still not care what people think about me. I can still think highly enough of myself to stay true to myself. I can still be happy.
Happy thanks to my friend and my puppies.

It never rained at all last night. It is a golden day today. Might reach 80!! Too warm. I re-cleared the stuff from the porch so that the painting can continue today.
I needed the day off. A lot of the pain has recessed. I like the way the big project is looking. I like it better that my friend is still on vacation and finally starting to relax a bit. (She had to log into her work account yesterday. I don't really understand why. She just had to.
The puppies are doing well. Foster dog got a bit crazy yesterday. The kid next door is an ass. He was teasing the dog. I don't think he started out with malicious intent, but after I asked him to stop and he continued I got irked. With kids this came out as, "Please stop aggravating my dog. Thank you!" That stopped him as best as it could.
My friend thinks maybe the kid was abused or something. I've worked with enough abused kids to think the kid is just a bored ass.

Yesterday I mentioned my puppy's aunt. I mentioned her cat which is doing well in her struggle to survive. I wrote the cat was now 50. Okay. This was a typo. The cat is 15!
I think that counts as a retraction. Okay?

Posted by David at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Nature" by Celso Junior Good news. Last night my blood sugars were 8.0 which is just a bit bad. This morning my blood sugars were 5.4 which is pretty good.
I had a breakfast of eggs, frijoles, kiwi and potatoes. Two hours later my blood sugars were . . . (testing) 12.3 . . . That's not too good. Should have been between 7 and 10.
I'm up to 16 units of Lantus (insulin) so it will be 17 units tonight.
At least there's some sort of reaction.

The perspective foster dog parents didn't come yesterday. They'll come to meet him on Friday or Saturday. He could care less. He's found his place in the pack. Now he just has to face his place in the house hold.
The only thing wrong with him is that he is the world's sloppiest drinker. He drinks savagely and leaves at least half of what he takes out dripping from his mouth. I've watched him gulp up a pint of water, turn his head and let it all fall out on the floor. Fortunately I don't mind mopping a lot.
Yesterday, while cleaning up the painting for the day, the giant dog and the gentle dog found a real funny joke. I left the front door open because it was nice. The pair of them came up on the porch and whined and wiggled to get me to open the door for them so they could go into the house. They plowed in and two 20 seconds later they were back up on the porch begging to get into the house . . . I looked at them with one of my looks and let them in.
Twenty seconds later they RAN onto the porch, giant dog was wiggling and laughing so hard he could barely shine so gentle dog scratched at the door to get in.
I let them in. Five seconds later they were both stumbling onto the porch shaking with laughter and collapsing on each other going to the door. I laughed too. This was a signal to attack me and try and
Click images for desktop size: "Peacock Phoenix" by Unknown lick me. I hate being licked which, to them, made this all the funnier.
I have to remember I like dogs.
While I see painting as something that needs to be done I knew my friend enjoys it. I underestimated how much she would enjoy it. She said she was having fun. She looked forward to it.
This held even though she discovered that the paint wasn't exactly the color she had envisioned.
We got the paint at the Salvation Army! Recycled paint. It was cheaper but not a steal. Still it looks cleaner. The old paint looked like the product of a drunken hippy pipe dream. Not real hippies but like those old guys who have dreams of hooking up with a space cadet hard body chick. The chick had dreams of going to design school or being a fashionista.
She was with the old guy only because she had nothing else to do and no money to do it with. She probably needed a place to crash that night. After a couple of drinks and a joint she was probably wrinkling her nose at the state of the place and came up with this whacked design scheme. Since this was a way to get the chick to hang out the old guy readily agreed and the end result was . . . this?
She probably left as soon as it was finished, probably with the guy behind the counter at the liquor store.
Now the porch will look like the inside of a mushroom on a sunny day . . . Which is still better.
All week long there was an 80% chance of rain last night and today. So last night I spent about an hour hauling all the stuff I'd taken off the porch back onto the porch. There's a lot. The porch is more a summer room that a porch (two chaise lounges and three tables sort of things as well as an incalculable amount of lamps. My friend had fallen asleep so I had to do it myself. Hurt myself early and often.
Today its mid sixties and there's only a 30% chance of rain tonight . . . I couldn't have worked anyway. Even taped my shoulders are both killing me, add in all the dings and I'm close to worthless.
Still a vacation day is a vacation day.
I did watch two movies last evening. Back in the 80's Dolph Lundgren was the next big thing. There was this xeroxed magazine you couldn't afford to miss by the Hollywood Kids. It was six pages of
Click images for desktop size: "No Peeking" by Peter Dribben the nastiest cattiest fawning gossip in LA.
When Lundgren was cast in "He Man and the Masters of the Universe" opposite Frank Langella as Skeltor they went ballistic to the point of sneaking into the Lundgren's costume fitting. They reported he was more imposing and gorgeous in real life even if he did have pimples on his butt.
I figure that's the mark of real adoring fame. Either when someone takes the time to notice the pimples on your butt or loves you despite them.
Of course then then movie came out and Lundgren wasn't hot anymore. It was really bad. Langella survived because he got to wear a mask through the whole movie. Lundgren did a lot of junk movies after that. He became irrelevant.
He had that one interesting flash with "Big SHowdown in Little Tokyo" but everyone put that off to the burgeoning star power of Brandon Lee. Then he sort of faded to direct to video.
I somehow got a hold of a copy of a movie called "Missionary Man" when I saw it starred Lundgren I left it on but proceeded to do chores while it played. It wasn't great but it was good and Lundgren directed himself in a way I guess he really wanted to be. Chaste, huge, dangerous with an leaning towards finer feelings that he and his character knew he would never fully grasp.
I liked it. Made me see his next (or maybe previous) direct to DVD thing called "Diamond Dogs". It really sucked.
But yesterday I watched the 1989 Lundgren "The Punisher". While
Click images for desktop size: "Ray Charles" not a gruesome as the latest Punisher flic its surprisingly good. Lundgren is very effective as the deranged revenge fueled anti-hero. Marvel Comics wasn't the power house production company it is now so this is just a cheapie (even though Stan Lee still grabbed a production credit).
It actually made me feel warmly for Dolph Lundgren, and the cheap but stylish sets and his lumbering presence made for a cool enough 90 minutes.
After that I watched a strange movie, "Method Man". Nothing to do with the rapper/movie star. Its a seventies kung fu flic. This may be the worst movie ever made but and this is a shock the action choreography and the fighters are superb! It makes no sense. But when the fighters are mixing it up it reaches level similar to Liu Chia Lang's glorious choreography of Philip Kwok in the Chang Cheh flics that followed it. The fighters fly around and perform astonishing purely physical feats that dazzle and delight then we get back to the dreadful story which makes little sense even by cheapie 70's kung fu standards.

Click images for desktop size: "One Puff" by Monogamez Today is my puppy's aunt's birthday. To celebrate her 50 year old cat, (CAT!) is still hanging on. Perhaps just to spite me and my puppy. I can live with that. This is one of those cats with the sense to wish she were a dog.
My puppy's aunt other celebration was that their flat panel TV blew up! An over priced Sony. But even then there's a birthday miracle. They got the extended warranty so they get a brand new, current model FREE!
I've never heard of one of those extended warranties ever working out for anyone before. Sounds like a good, no make that an excellent happy birthday to me. Well, it should be.

Posted by David at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Hot Robot" by Lavakillu When I went to bed my blood sugars were 6.8. Acceptable. When I woke up this morning they were 11.6! It used to be the reverse of that. 11.6 is not good.
I'm up to 15 units of insulin. I have no idea how long before everything stabilizes.
Early Saturday morning I woke up with the worst headache of my life and I'm a guy who fractured his skull and had 3 concussions. It felt like a cheap description of a migraine. They warned me that headaches might be an early side effect to the insulin. I never imagined it would be like that.

We started the vacation project. Scrapped the entire porch and got the front porch 80% primered. It already looks better.
I tried wrapping my shoulder in an elastic bandage. It help considerably. I had a few twinges but only one drop me to my knees killer hurt. I worked through it. As everyone knows I'm stupid that way. It gentled up to an ache after a half hour.
I got whacked with overwhelming fatigue twice. There's no doubt that the fatigue from the insulin is a lot easier to push through than the leukemia fatigue. I'm pretty happy with how much work I got done. I expected to get more done than I did but, well, who wouldn't.
First coat today then will primer the back porch, there should be time to do that. Then have to bring everything back onto the porches. It is supposed to rain late tonight. I think the rain will come late enough to not mess up the paint.
If it rains all day tomorrow then we'll get to go to the Chinese Buffet!!
That will please the dogs no end. They deserve pleasing. They were very good through all the activity. Foster dog has settled in just in time to get adopted! There's been an application to adopt him and it has all checked out. They'll do the home visit this week. The potential adopters might
Click images for desktop size: "Korean Girl" by Unknown come today to meet the foster and to be harshly judged by my friend and me.
Harshly judged in that we want what's best for the dog and for them. The important thing is everyone be happy. I'm always predisposed to anyone who wants to have a good dog in their life. The foster is a pretty good dog. Not as great as my dogs but pretty great for all that.
One thing about all the painting is got to spend a lot of time with the iPod. Anything would have been better than the sound of paint scrappers on wood.
I like the new Green Day album "21st Century Breakdown". There's nothing as grabbing as "American Idiot", "Basket Case", or even "Geek Stink Breath" but its alright. I'm pretty disappointed with the new Queensryche, "American Soldier". I've been disappointed with Queensryche since "Empire", but one always has hope.
I'm surprised that my favorite album so far this year has been Offspring's "Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace". Weird. Since I only knew them from "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" it is shocking to discover that a novelty band could com out with a nice crunchy set of pop anthems. I particularly like "Stuff is Messed Up".
I've been trying to get my RIAA-Free jukebox up on the site. Its a complicated affair. One of those things I thought would be dead easy but is turning into a chore. It has mostly to do with permissions (unix file permissions) and folder structure than anything else. I'll keep on it. It will be a cool way to display music that needs hearing.
I wish I liked Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead more than I do. They're two bands who get it. They understand the world has changed and refuse to stick with the stupidity that is epitomized by the RIAA and the MPAA.
Got to be brief. Life is catching up to me and I don't want to miss any of the show.

Posted by David at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Gunslinger Girl" by VM Before my injection my blood sugar was 6.8, just inside the target. This morning the count was 5.9, which is okay.
It bugs me that a couple of months ago I was getting better numbers just from the pills. For all the stigma and grief from the injections I was expecting something more dramatic from the insulin.
I have gotten a bit better at doing it. My stomach is sore from it. The hardest part is, well the whole thing is hard and tricky; holding the needle dead steady while it hurts is hard then pushing in the little plunger is tricky and uncomfortable but the part I got wired is holding the needle inside of me for a count of 20. It makes me cringe now, even thinking about it.
The reason is that if you pull the needle out too soon the insulin seeps out . . . Crazy.
The insulin is not improving the pain in my shoulders yet. Its still excruciating and stops me from doing things like putting on my jacket. and combing my hair.
I mowed the rest of the yard yesterday. It rained in the morning but then the sun came out and there was enough of a wind to dry out the grass. My left handed falling pull start still worked. I was able to grimace through getting the mower over and around all the hills and stumps and things.
I was concerned because I felt more exhausted than I should. Its a side effect that should level out. Quickly I hope. Getting fatigued stirs negative memories.

Today is a big day. An important day. It is my puppy's fourth birthday.

Click images for desktop size: "Kurbatova" by Playboy Four years old and in all that time we've only been apart about 15 weeks. Twelve weeks while she was being weaned from her mother. Three weeks when we moved. The three weeks were hard on both of us for exactly the same reason and with pretty much the same intensity and longing.
She may not be the perfect dog to anyone else but she and I are perfect together.
She remembers things I tell her and will do things to please me. She gets defiant and demanding. She gets angry. She gets loving and protective. She plays jokes and tricks on me. We bicker and fight. We play games that are meaningless to everyone but her and me.
Together we are a boy and a dog.
I never much liked the show "Cheers", knowing a couple of the writers didn't help, but I heard a part of one episode where one of the characters said he was writing a novel about a man and his dog wandering the corn fields and drinking beer. I could read a novel like that and picture my puppy as the dog.
The entire world would be a scary bad place if by some cosmic mishap she and I had never met.
I feel pretty much the same way about my friend.

This is my friend's last day of work. Vacation time.
Only a week but it will be nice for and for me. Except someone stupid, probably me, decided that the vacation should be spent painting the porch . . . how dull. I mean why ruin a vacation just because the house needs the work?
So it will improve our lives, what reason is that to ignore frivolous self gratification.
I hate painting. It will be fine. We might even laugh while we're suffering through the arduous chore.

We managed to get tickets for the Jack White tour. The one he's doing with that other side band of his, Dead something or other. I like Jack White and still think he's the guitarist of the 21st Century.
Click images for desktop size: "Punk" by Unknownk His shows don't disappoint. He's an entertainer. Of course on this tour he's playing the drums . . .
I always viewed the White Stripes as pretty much a solo act. I can imagine White dragging along his ex-wife as support. You just don't do solo acts with just an electric guitar. White showed you could.
Meg was a pretty poor drummer. She'd lose the beat a lot but White keep a more driving steady beat in his head. His work on the guitar still astounds me.
Its interesting seeing him not be the soloist with the Raconteurs, to lose a part of himself within a real band. Some of the work is excellent, none of it less than good but it felt like White was losing some part of himself, like he was being too deferential to his band mates. I would have been more interested if it had been "Jack White & The Raconteurs" instead of a true band. It would have been awesome seeing White's manic intensity with a back up band. The Raconteurs are a collaboration.
I've only seen YouTube Videos of the Raconteurs live. The stage show looks like the same sort of democratic sharing thing until White does "Bang Bang" the crazy Nancy Sinatra number. Its worth seeking out. It shows what White could do as the frontman.
This will b interesting. Jack White as a drummer. Yow! He can keep a beat so we'll see if it catches fire.

I saw "Zatoichi 17: Zatoichi Challenged".
Peter Welling's defined an auteur as a director who was able to work within established genres and stay within the strict conventions demanded while still managing to express his own voice. Zatoichi movies are almost a genre unto themselves. Formally they are
Click image: "Growing Love" by Frida Lind Chambara (sword fighting) and jidai-geki (period piece).
Within this definition it still astonishes me that Kenjiro Misumi is not recognized as one of the greatest directors in the world.
Zatoichi's movie's follow a path, a path that Misumi defined. I wonder if most of his brilliant story telling innovations have been lost as they have comprised the bedrock of Japanese chambara films in the sixties and seventies.
This entry in the Zatoichi saga is fascinating on its own, touching and startling, moving with an economy and sparseness that recalls zen. It stands on its own as well as laying the groundwork for Misumi's later works and themes.
Worth renting for sure.

The foster dog is starting to fit in to the pack better with each moment. Now we're off to the closed down dog park to see what there might be to see on this birthday day.

Posted by David at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Fun Fair" by Unknown Last night my blood sugar count was 12.1, a little high. The insulin injection was no less painful and still left me with an annoying sort of tingling throughout my body. I slept pretty solid for 4 hours. I was tired from no sleep and a pretty busy day. On wakening my blood pressure was 128 over 78, within target and my blood sugars were 8.8, still too high.
This means that tonight I have to give my self 12 units. I'm
Click images for desktop size: "The Monkees" supposed to increase it by 1 unit a day until the readings are right. There was some confusion this morning as my friend thought it was 1 unit every other day. I called and checked and I was right! I'm not sure if that's a winning thing or not.
I also found out that I have to replace my blood meter pretty soon. That sucks. The meter is about 50 bucks, but the test strips run about a hundred. There's the little plastic strips that have to feed into the machine to collect the blood. Each strip is coded and they don't work on different machines . . . Seems that the machines start declining in accuracy after 1 year. Planned obsolescence?
I think there's something wrong with America in that you can only stay alive if you can afford it. I was lucky before. There was a town where the government thought all of its citizens were precious
Click images for desktop size: "Four Mounted Indians" by Charles Russell and there were doctors willing to donate their time. In Texas I could only afford my medication every other month or not at all.
When I was in grad school I drove a taxi cab at night. Held the job for 6 months or so. I had to give it up. Teaching and in school all day and working all night was kind of stupid. I'd fall asleep at odd times. When I was driving around LA about 4 am and suddenly it was 4:40 and I had no idea of where I was or how I'd gotten there. I'd been driving asleep for 40 minutes. Time to quit.
Driving a cab was unique. I made a lot of money. Meet a lot of people. Drag queen, drunks, hookers wanting to trade sex for the fare, gay guys telling me how they wanted a man like me, celebrities and sometimes people I knew. I thought they were all interesting except the wannabee pimps. I didn't like them much at all.
The cops used to flag me to pull over. While I was trying to figure what I'd done to attract the cop's attention they'd open the door and start piling in women, hookers. They'd throw a ten or a twenty dollar bill at me and tell me not to let the hookers out of the car and drive them west till I crossed the County Line. In LA the city cops run everything up to Crescent Heights and then its run by the Sheriff's Department.
The girls complained about how the cops had stolen all their money. The first time I figured it was just hooker talk. The fourth time I had to believe them. The girls always piled out of the cab at the first stop light. I had no intention of even trying to stop them. That would have felt to creepy, like kidnapping. I was a grad student driving a cab, not a cop.
Once a cop pulled me over and dumped a girl in the cab. She'd been stabbed. The cop told me to drive her to Queen of Angels. He didn't want to call an ambulance and fill in papers for street trash at the end of his shift.
She was bleeding but not terribly. We got to the hospital and there were a couple of orderlies and a
Click images for desktop size: "Panda" woman. They wouldn't let the woman out of the cab. She had no insurance, a credit card or $2,000 in cash. She was bleeding worse. I had to drive her to General Hospital (famous in bad TV series). Its the only charity hospital in LA.
Once I got flagged by a couple of guys in West Hollywood. One of the guys had been shot. Cedars Sinai was only two blocks away. I drove him there in less than a minute.
They went inside. I was in the back washing the blood off the seat when they came back. The one guy was still dragging his shot friend who was looking worse. Cedars wouldn't take his friend as a patient, not enough credit on his card and no insurance. The ambulance service wanted $125 in cash to take them to UCLA Med Center. The cab ride would be about 20 bucks.
(Even the Fire Department charges for ambulance service, but not in advance. They bill you. Same for Paramedic treatment. They used to not go crazy trying to collect, at least they didn't used to.)
So I know and I've seen that if you don't have enough money to live "they" are just as happy to see you die. And they can do it without mercy or fear. Killer world.

I mowed the lawn yesterday. It hurt. I got the mower started by grabbing that rope thing with my left hand, holding my arm stiff and then sort of falling backwards. Took three times but it ran.
I could only do about 40% of the yard. The vibrations and bucking the machine over the hills and valleys created too much pain.

Click images for desktop size: "Che" I was able to wear the iPod. The new cable is not as efficient as the old one, the silky wires one. It tangled a couple of times but not as badly as the Entymotics would tangle. I still don't have a solid feel for whether the sonic improvements and the probability that these cable won't need replacement are worth giving up the easy functionality of the silky ones. I still love the Ultimate Ears.
The foster dog is settling in. The gentle dog is very serious in hating him. The giant dog loves playing with him but hates him when he comes close to my friend. My puppy ignores him unless he plays one of the games he likes.
Situation normal.
My friend actually enjoyed her field trip. She got to hike through some untrammeled woods. She even got a cool walking stick from a dead tree. She bought it home for my puppy! Foster dog an my puppy played with it until the newcomer broke it in half. My puppy was indignant!

Posted by David at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Fabrique de statues sur isle de Bali" by ebajart Before I went to bed my blood sugars were 8.1. My target is between 4 and 7, so it was high, just not terribly high. The nurse/diabetes expert said that most diabetics who start insulin after being on pills are looking at numbers around 25! She thought it was cool I was aware enough to catch it so soon. It spoke well of me following my dietary restrictions.
I did the insulin injection. Forget the propaganda about the needle in the belly not hurting. It hurt like a son of a gun! It burned,
Click image: "Lena Horn and Dean Martin" was sore afterwards and left a mark like a bug bite. It could have been worse I suppose. I'll probably get used to it, like I've gotten used to pricking my fingers two or three times a day.
Even though I've got a high tolerance for pain I've never been big on self inflicted pain. Way back in high school there was a fad amongst some of the more vapid football players. Two guys would sit opposite each other and rest their forearms against each other's. Then they'd drop a burning cigarette between their forearms. The first guy to flinch was called chicken.
I thought it was cool to watch but I thought it was pretty stupid too. I noticed that it was only me and the other surfers who never got involved in it. Some guys forearms were a huge mass of burn scars, many of them running about the full length of a cigarette. I don't know if the surfers had more sense or just figured that our sports banged us up enough. Maybe we wanted to show self respect, maybe we didn't have to prove anything to anybody, maybe we were chicken. Who knows? I don't like inflicting pain on myself.
Click images for desktop size: "Full Moon" by Luis Royo Plenty of people to do that for you, if your so inclined.
I didn't sleep well. It was predicted. Tossed and turned, tremors and head achey.
I had to take my blood readings immediately on wakening. Surprised me that I went to bed at 8.1, injected myself and woke up with an 11.8! I guess this proves that my liver is working fine at making all them sugars all night. It also means I have to increase the dosage by 1 unit this evening.
I took the kidney medicine this morning. Its side effect, which is viewed as positive is that it also lowers the blood pressure. I do note that when the tooth pain was finally gone my blood pressure dropped to well within my safety parameters. It can still afford to be lower.
I notice that the prescription bottle forbids driving. I can expect to stand up and fall down a couple of times.
My friend had to get out of bed 2 hours earlier than usual. Her job is taking the entire region on a field trip . . . to let them see what all their efforts are accomplishing. The field trip is making them all take a bus. Reminds me of grammar school.
Not only did she have to get up two hours earlier than usual to catch the bus but the first person on the bus is her old boss whom she doesn't quite get along with. The old boss is still a VP. The VP is showing a hunting video . . . This is a conservation group. Somehow, I don't think its an anti-hunting video.
I dislike hunting. I've tried it. Shooting something alive doesn't seem like much of a sport. I've never been able to do it especially after watching guys who weren't as good a shot (on the range) as I was, maim and harm animals who didn't fall.
Also hunting is pretty boring. Hunting with a bow and arrow is just as boring to me and even lacks the thrill of worrying about your companion shooting you in the face or the back on accident.
I would find it especially distressing to watch a video of this "sport". All blood sports seem vapid to me anyway. But watching them? Watching 200 yard drives in a TV golf match would be more exciting.
The foster dog is coming along. His surgery has healed up enough to let him roam with the pack. He's still annoyingly stressed but willing o make some strides.

Click images for desktop size: "The Tradition" by Unknown My friend and I disagree a bit on what his history was that bought him to this state in his life and his personality. Nothing serious. More importantly we agree on what his future will be. He's a good dog.
The giant dog loves to run and play with him outside. Inside he wants to kill the foster especially when the foster comes anywhere near my friend or me. Jealous guy. Shows the silliness of being jealous at all.
My puppy thinks that playing is great but not with the foster. She'll make light dalliances but if he doesn't respond in her prescribed fashion she ignores him. He's smart enough to ignore her right back.
But he won't ignore the gentle dog who seems to really hate him. Gentle dog is always growling at him when the foster dog breaks gentle dog's "circle of influence". (An old aikido term I really like).
This is all pretty normal. They'll shift soon enough as the foster calms down and begins to accept his place in the pack.
I worked last night with his aggressive play nature. Its not a good thing when a dog initiates play constantly. I felt heartless about stopping a dog from playing but it worked. He started to calm down and then spent the final two hours of the evening wrapped around my legs as I sat in the office.
Today was going to be the first lawn mowing day of the year. I have no idea if it is but it seems to me that it should be a day worth celebrating. When I tried to start the lawnmower I nearly killed the bad arm. The right one not the bad left one . . . It dropped me to one knee.
Part of my pain chart goes like this: 2=headache, 6=slamming your hand in a car door, 8=tearing cartilage in your knee.
At rest my right arm is a constant 2, when I try to work it out with proper exercises it often reaches 6. When I forget and make a quick movement like stretching or reaching for a jar on a high shelf it goes to 8 for about 3 minutes then takes about 10 minutes to calm down and get back to 2.
The good news (?) is that its almost definitely neuropathic. There's a chance that getting the blood sugars correct will reduce the pain somewhat. Makes the pain of the injections (a 1 which equals a pin prick or a paper cut) seem worthwhile.
I'll probably need another pill for the pain when it settles.
I ant to mow the lawn today, at least a part of it. I want to listen to the iPod. I've been using the new cable for the Ultimate Ears long enough to have an opinion. I love the UE's, not least because they were a present from my friend. One of the things I loved about them was the silk like wire. They've stopped making that thin and super flexible
Click images for desktop size: "Factory" by Clarence Carter stuff. he new cables are heavier and stiffer, though not as heavy by far as the wiring on the Entymotics. The UE's are still capable of being light enough and non-obtrusive enough to sometimes make the music from the iPod seem like the music that often plays in my head on its own. I rather like that.
One advantage of the heavier gauge, other than it shouldn't need replacing like the silky ones is a noticeable increase in midrange performance. At about 2,000 hertz its more detailed, coming closer to but not exceeding or meeting the clarity of the Entymotics.
I'm on a fence whether the sonic improvement makes up for the lightness of the silky wire. I hoped the lawn mowing would make that clearer.

Posted by David at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Edmund DuLac It was a very nice day today. Very good for an ebike ride, except when I started up my ebike after it hibernation it ran fine for about 30 feet then did a weird short.
I can't track the short quite yet but I will.
So it was a nice day to walk to the doc's office.
It was a nice clear sunny day, around 60. But it felt like I was walking down the same street at 3:00 A.M. Felt empty. It might have been the several house that still have their Christmas decorations
Click images for desktop size: "Marilyn Monroe out, or it might have been that in 40 minutes I never saw another person, saw some cars but never the people driving them.
This got me to thinking about small town vs city life. Realizing there's not much different. I was interested at how busy New York streets were after midnight, but even then people at night, even groups of 2 or 3 would look uneasily at the group or the guy behind them. Probably justified.
Which tends to make you muse some about cops. I tell you this. Cops and robbers need each other. Its a game sometime laced with hatred and corruption but its the game they chose and the game they know. The innocent man is the one who has the most to fear from cops. Cops don't believe anyone is innocent. They can't believe it. Its invisible to them. The worst of them see the vile
Click images for desktop size: "Dominic" by Marco corruption of their own soul and have the arrogance to think that no one could be purer than they are, after all they carry a badge. Who could be purer than the princes of the city.
One of my kids once got arrested for murder. It was at Carnival. If you've never been there its like a sold out rock show in a too small venue. Oxford Circus at Christmas comes to mind. You can fight the crowd but you'll wear out before the mob does so you tend to just drift with it.
At this Carnival a kid was beaten to death. They got the whole thing on closed circuit TV.
My kid was about 30 feet from the tiny gap that opened up to allow the fight. Right there on tape. You would think that would end it. Case closed. He didn't do it. See, this kid was over 6'5" 270 fit pounds. No mistaking him.
The cops went on stand and swore that he was the lookout for the kid who did the killing . . . My kid  and the killer both came from the same estate, the manor or more exact the housing project of over 3,000 families. They were raised there since infancy. They knew each other but they weren't friends.
The killer had been arrested about 20 times, never in the company of my kid. My kid had never been arrested.
The cop story was that the killer had gone there with the explicit purpose of killing a stranger. Their proof was that was exactly what he had done. And that my kid was there as an accomplice. He was to use his height to be the look out. On the tape he's clearly talking to a friend and moving away from the fight. It doesn't look like he or any of the people around him even are aware of it. The cop story is that is how cagey my kid was.
I got called in as a character witness and as an expert witness. I told the court the truth about what I thought of my kid. I also pointed out that he was a "killer athlete" trained to knock down 300 pound athletes and that if he wanted to cut through the crowd he had the tools to do so, but he also had the tools to show self restraint and discipline. The proof of what I said was that after all this he still managed to go to University and then to play in the pros.
My evidence got a lot of play in the papers and on TV. I must have looked good. I had powerful enemies before. This testimony of mine hardened some and made me some new enemies. I still don't care.
My kid was found not guilty of murder but the all white jury and the ancient white judge still gave him six months because it was impossible for a black kid of that size who lived on that estate to really be innocent. The exact words were something like, "given the defendants physical prowess,
Click images for desktop size: "Sex, Fashion and Dog" by Unknown intelligence and his up bringing there is good reason to believe he is in someway complicit. This is further indicated by the police testimony as to his character and the character of the man he was arrested with."
Justice and cops.
So I was in that frame of mind when I got to the doc's office. I was tired from the walk. I was late, lost time trying to fix the bike.
I saw the nurse/pharmacist/diabetic expert, right away. On good thing is that she was young enough to still be interested in her work, young enough for the education to be fresh in her brain but experienced enough to know how to apply the knowledge and to see through the book work's fallacies.
We did a review of the medical history. I did find out that these people sort of expect people to go loco on them when they bring out the needles. No one's ever happy to be told that they've just become an insulin addict.
She was impressed that I knew all my target numbers straight off, glucose counts, blood pressures etc. At first my thoughts were, "of course I do. I don't want to die." But I remember a diabetic training I'd been to. There was an obese woman who had to have a foot amputated because of diabetes. She was adamant that she needed two liters of Coke a day and sugar in her coffee.
If I'd lost a foot I'd have been scared, she just wanted her rights and didn't draw any line between her rights and losing body parts. She's probably right. Its not fair.
We went over the dietary restrictions from the chemo's and how'd they'd mesh with the new dietary restrictions from having to inject insulin. The only real change is that I'm supposed to eat almost constantly. Small meals and snacks but almost all the time. She corrected me on one thing. I keep saying I can have 45 grams of fat when I mean 45 milligrams (less than in a McDonalds Big Mac). I know the difference but I keep saying the wrong word. 50 milligrams of fat makes me very ill so 45 grams would probably kill me.
I also have to carry around sugar tablets!! In case the insulin makes me hypoglycemic! I asked and
Click images for desktop size: "El" by T Hecker it is a myth that I could just grab a candy bar.
We talked about the side effects. The Avapro I'm having to take for my kidneys also lowers my blood pressure. I'll probably feel dizzy a lot.
This Lantus stuff only has to be injected once a day. In the stomach! My friend says I knew this. Maybe I did and blocked it out. I have to do it 10 minutes before I go to bed. I found it interesting that I have to do it at night because its when you're sleeping that the liver does most of the sugar production.
Sine I'm very good with my diet and at keeping my numbers at least close to where they should be even with the degenerative nature of the disease I will probably throw myself into hypoglycemic shock once or twice. I'll wake up with night sweats and bad tremors . . .
One thing she said that was heartening for others, if not myself, is that the newer types of chemo do not cause diabetes as often as the old "burn the bastards out" types did.
I got a lot of free samples and got to inject a napkin for practice. I liked the free samples. Only because I like free stuff.
I get to have one of those biological hazard waste baskets to throw away the needles. I kind of like that as well. It makes me unique I think.

Turns out I don't have to go to the parent's meeting tonight. Coaches aren't required until after the player evaluation. I don't know if I'll go or not. Maybe not. There's little to learn just by watching someone tell the parents what their rules are.
It feels odd not to be in total control but I like that I don't have to be dragged to every meaningless meeting. Or do I!?!

Posted by David at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "D'Amour" by Douleur I'm re-reading Raymond Chandler's and Robert Parker's "Poodle Springs". That's the book that was supposedly based on notes and pages Chandler was working on when he died. I've heard its anywhere from 5 pages of manuscript to 100.
Anyway, somebody hired Robert Parker to finish the book up.
When I first heard of this I rushed and got it right away. Got it in hard cover. I mean this is literature. Raymond Chandler. When you
Click images for desktop size: "Hope and Crosby"live in pop culture land as much as I do literature that you can actually enjoy, that isn't some arduous task that will some how make you into a mythic better person, you have to jump on it. Buying it in hard cover made it mean something, made it permanent and real.
I was pretty excited and really sort of sad that it more than a little bit sucked.
Robert Parker isn't anywhere near the writer Chandler was. Chandler was about the scene, the characters, and the poetry. Parker is about the plot, about the mystery and the crime.
Because of Chandler I've read a lot of mystery stuff. Don't care for most of it.
Part of the problem is that its hard to figure which is Chandler and what is Parker imitating Chandler. Like there's a scene where Marlowe helps out a gambling cheat who's also a bigamist. He helps him avoid getting arrested for murder because he saw the guy with his first wife and thought they looked sweet together. That's not totally inconsistent with Marlowe, but it's a bit too sentimental to be taken seriously. You wonder how much did Chandler intend to keep and how much was just taking a look at it.

Click images for desktop size: "Conquering the World" by Unknown At this stage of his life Chandler did all of his writing into a tape recorder then had it all transcribed. He would then ruthlessly edit the typewritten pages.
Its easy to imagine the meticulousness that he approached his editing. When he submitted his first short story he went through and typed it by himself. Because the cheap pulp magazines used justified margins Chandler went through and typed his manuscript with the same justified margins! This wasn't mousing over a button and clicking it, he counted letters and spaces and figured it all out.
So even though he typed things out there's no guarantee that he would have left it in the final story. We all know that Marlowe could get sappy, but he never acted sappy and he never saw killers as friends no matter how much he liked them before they became killers, no matter how sympathetic he might be.
In the book Marlowe is married to the multi-millionairess Linda Loring nee' Potter from "The Long Goodbye". Parker has them constantly squabbling about how Marlowe has to be his own man. Chandler never squabbled. You get the impression that Parker had so many great squabble lines that he decided he needed to use them all. Instead of condensing them all down to a bare element he scatters them throughout the story so they become tedious instead of whip smart. After the first squabble you know this marriage is doomed. Chandler would have let us see that love is always present but the people are just too wrong for each other. All the bickering just makes us dislike both of the people and feel relieved when they're apart.
I even wonder about the title. "Poodle Springs" as a nom de plume for Palm Springs is a little weird. Chandler didn't like dogs so perhaps he'd have kept it to show his contempt for the desert resort. But the same way he let Faun Lake stand in for Big Bear I don't think he'd have let his roman de clef predominate the story. It was the location, the air of the scene not the feelings for the place that overwhelmed.
Back in the life where I cared about such things I wrote an adaptation of Chandler's last original unproduced screenplay. I wrote it so I could make the movie with my friends, shoot it on 8mm stock with sound than transfer it to video for a sale to VHS. It was a good plan and I managed to strip the story down to free to use locations (borrowing from all my friends, their homes and their clubs, restaurants and offices). We even shot a few scenes before the contact I had at the video distributorship told me the cost the Chandler Estate agents wanted for my adaptation. The WGA said that my script contained about 35% of
Click images for desktop size: "Hannabai" by Kurkosawa Chandler's so I had to play ball. Forced me to abandon that little dream.
In rewriting his screenplay and bringing it into contemporary LA, a stripped down LA, I was inadvertently following Chandler's big advice for how to learn to write. He always preached that you had to read something you liked then sit down and rewrite it in your own words. Not copy it but try to recreate the impact of the scene or the characters.
The by product of this is that I learned more about how Chandler constructed his scenes, what appealed to me and also how different Chandler's and my view of the world actually is.
In understanding it I grew to appreciate the differences as much as the similarities. I was able to see more clearly his concepts of the world and of LA. It served me well in understanding people, and having compassion for those who are different and those who I think are just wrong.
I guess "Poodle Springs" as flawed and poor as it is still serves some purpose in that it forces me to remember the the LA that Chandler created so that I can recall more vividly the LA I lived in.

It rained all weekend. My friend had to work all weekend. Not the best of times. Done now.
My friend meets her new boss today, on the telephone. Conference call thing. Seems odd to me but at least they didn't ask her to make the 2 hour drive to meet him.
My arms have become ridiculous. I'm bored with the agony. Tomorrow, if I get my bike running today, I get my Doctorate in self Injectology. I'm holding out the wispy hope that insulin might go some way to relieving this grief. So bad that muscles around the pain have turned into walnuts. If I was of the paranoid bent I'd decided the knots are masticized tumors.
The foster dog is amazing. He has to live in his crate with the stupid cone head collar on but he remains joyous. Sometimes a little bit more than required. I've only ever had one foster dog who arrived calm. Charles. an old cocker> He was very much about his business and even more so about his pace. Otherwise every foster has arrived full of life, a complete ignorance of most things human, and an inbred compulsion to play with everything.
I think that's right.

Posted by David at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "African Autumn" by Miss Yucki The foster dog is doing well. A bit of extra work and I still the body that resents extra work.
He has to stay in the crate. Which is hard on him and me. I was enjoying letting him sit quiet behind the gate to his room but he quickly discovered he could jump the gate with no trouble. He escaped out into the yard and ran around full speed play attacking everybody. After I had to catch him I checked his stitches. They were a bit fiery but not broken. The giant dog in particular was over joyed to have his play buddy back.
This morning foster dog started to worry the stitches with his mouth. I had to put the Elizabethan collar on him . . . he hates me. The other three are all impressed with the cone head looking dog. They all barked at him. I had him on lead while he did nothing but hop around excited and happy.
He's one of the least fearful happiest dogs I've ever seen. Regrettably
Click image: "Sigourney Weaver and Friend"this isn't the best attitude for recovering from surgery but I prefer it. Easier to calm him down than to cheer someone else up.
I'd be very surprised if we had this foster very long at all. I hope long enough to train him just a little. I think he'd like to learn stuff.

I noticed this morning that my thumbs have improved. Their pain is slight. It only took 3 months to get there.
My left elbow is responding to the exercises. This morning it hurt terribly but I was able to lift up the kettle for coffee without fear of dropping. As I work it the pain subsides.
My right shoulder is getting worse. It responds to working but not for any significant amount of time. Its peculiar too in that there seem to be too many ways to start the agony. I'm more familiar with this neuropathic pain only killing me if I do a couple of different moves or from moving too quickly and hard.
This shoulder has that but it also seems to go berserk from almost anything. The pain is so bad that
Click images for desktop size: "After Magritte's Lovers" by Unknown it hurts almost constantly, never really calming down. Just sitting and then shifting my position can set it off. Its waking me up several times a night.
It still responds to exercise. I use a therapy rubber band and move it under tension when I feel the first twinge of pain I hold it for a count of 20 then repeat until the twinges stop. Doing this has at least let me localize the pain to an area about 1 inch beneath the shoulder point on the arm.
I might have to see the doctor about it. I hate spending the money. I hate hurting all the time. Funny I never get used to it. I seem to be hurting all the time anyway.

This weekend will be spent getting ready for Tuesday. On Tuesday I have to get to the doc's office to get training on how to inject myself with insulin (and the doc won't look at the shoulder - requires a separate visit and a separate charge) , then I have to go about two miles further down the road to drop off the lantus and Avrio script. Get home and finalize my speech to the parents meeting that evening.
I'm going to spend the weekend getting the dreaded e-bike back in running order. All the walking would take about 3 hours. I figure I can e-bike it in a about an hour! Just have to spring maintenance it and be set to go terrorize.
Meeting the parents of the team members is not an odious task. I figure that all the other coaches will babel on and on. Amateur coaches seem to either talk to much or be taciturn. My experience is that 3 pointed minutes will get the points I want across and be memorable. (Its my same logic that forces me to find songs over 3 minutes tedious).
I'm going to need assistant coaches. Most of them will come from the parents. I can make a lot of my points by asking for coaches and lining out what I expect and demand from a coach: No berating the players; correct, instruct and encourage only. The Understanding that no coach ever won a game and no player ever lost one. The willingness to learn from me about turning the young people into athletes who play this sport. That's about it.
I've reached that age where my resume is impressive on its own.
Then today I'm playing burly housewife. The joint is dog heaven but a bit too messy and dirt for human habitation. And the foster dog needs to go out for a bit.

Posted by David at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Warriors" by Unknown The only fallout from putting my mobile phone through the washer and dryer seems to be the battery life. I have to recharge it every other day now. I'm impressed with Samsung.

The foster dog came home from the vet yesterday. When we picked him up he was groggy from the anesthesia. Had to lift him into the car sort of groggy.
When we got him home he urinated for about three minutes. Then defecated an astonishing amount, which pretty much confirmed my concerns about the vet's office not having a readily available exercise area.
All they did was neuter him. They didn't remove the double dew claws. It was relayed to us that the dew claws weren't particularly dangerous and removing them would cause him more grief than benefit.
I guess.
He got an odd reception from the other dogs. Giant dog who was adamant in his hostility before the vet was now seriously concerned for foster dog. Foster dog has to be segregated and kept still. Giant dog lay in an unusual position for him so he could look after foster dog through the grate.
Gentle dog, who previously had simply ignored the foster dog now expressed out right hostility. When my friend bought hi m in from a walk foster dog slipped his leash and made a bound for me, in a friendly way. Gentle dog stood up and unleashed a fierce snarl. I'd never heard gentle dog make a noise like that before.
I was pleased by his response. If he'd react that vocally to protect me, who he barely tolerates, I felt more secure about his ability to protect my friend, whom he adores, should the need ever arise.
Of course my puppy just continued to ignore him. She's consistent like that.
Foster dog is doing well.


Click images for desktop size: "Dog" by S4W Apparently I need to be clearer about the details of medical care in the USA. I lived a long time in the UK and had to use the National Health Service (NHS) which provides "free" medical care. Free via a payroll deduction similar but larger than the Medicare deduction taken in the US.
In Texas i was unemployed, broke, and starting a new job in 3 days when I got tonsillitis. I guessed that's what it was. I didn't know. There was no place to go to find out.
When my temperature neared 105 and the pain had kept me awake for two days I walked two miles plus to the nearest hospital emergency room. I waited in the waiting room for a couple hours then got sent to an examination room where I sat for a few more hours. A nurse came in looked at my throat and told me, "Wait here." That was all she said to me.
A bout an hour later some guy came in told me to drop my pants. He gave me shot and left.
I sat there for about another hour when a different nurse came in asked, "What are you doing here?" I croaked I didn't know. I was waiting to be told what to do. She closed the door and came back ten minutes later and told me I could go. I asked what was wrong with me. Finally she told me I had tonsillitis and the doctor had given me an antibiotic.
I left. Two days later I got a bill for about $1,800. Since I was already paying my Bells Palsy bill off from a different hospital at $25 bucks a week I was a little shook.
Now in England doctor's don't become wealthy only rich. You have to stop practicing medicine and become a consultant to get wealthy. In slow new seasons The Sun, England's biggest paper, will run an
Click images for desktop size: "Marilyn Monroe" expose of consultants making a million pounds a year by billing the NHS for 200 hours a week sixty one weeks a year. Everyone grumbles for a few minutes and then business continues as usual. In the UK you don't seriously mess with the wealthy.
Because of this there aren't quite enough doctors to go around. If you need one you have to register with a clinic. Your restricted to the clinics in your neighborhood and then restricted by whether the doctor has enough time to take you on as a patient. The doc's are limited by law as to how many they can take on to insure decent care.
I got stuck with a real croaker. An obscenely obese snob of a man who hated me for my accent. I hated him for hating me for my accent. It was a fine relationship.
I rarely saw him except for annual physicals. I never had to pay him anything. Then I started to feel a huge amount of fatigue and this creepy but not quite debilitating pain in my bones. It got to the point where it took a superhuman effort to get out of bed and dress. I just wanted to sit and stare. I
Click images for desktop size: "Tibal Girl" by Evgeney managed to never miss work. My friend (and boss) said I should see my doctor. I did. They ran some tests and the fat croaker told me I was just getting older. He gave me a script for some vitamins and told me to take paracetamol.
Filling the script cost me nothing too. I had to pay for the paracetamol because he didn't write me a script for it.
I didn't get better.
I had to take a business trip back to LA. I went and saw my old doctor. He wasn't in the same office anymore. He tagged up with one of those Medical Corporations. They ran the same tests. Word came back that I had leukemia,
We talked about treatments. They didn't tell me that it was close to a certainty that the chemo they wanted me to try would give me diabetes. He might have mentioned some damage to my kidneys. You'd have to be tougher than I am to pay real close attention to those sort of details.
When asked the only question I could think of was the same one that we all know about, "Will I lose my hair?"
He said, maybe not and that it almost always grows back. He never mentioned the fact that I'd have to look n the mirror everyday and see myself dying. It was during that time that for the first time in my life I wished I was only just getting older. I never imagined being old.
Its the stuff the doc's don't tell you that can kill you.
I guess they've stopped doing it. Chemo used to have support groups built into the treatment. Probably the insurance companies put a stop to them. Can't have people comparing notes about costs and they were expensive. I can see Blue Cross saying, We have to keep them alive. We don't have to make them happy," and canceling approval for the support groups. With the ay your going broke paying for your share of the chmo talking about it doesn't make sense to take on as an out of pocket expense.
I learned more from the other patients then I ever did from the shrink in charge of it anyway.
I've been through four chemo's. All the doctors made it a point that I had to do this NOW! The only
Click images for desktop size: "Unforgettable Autumn" by Unknown way to make a decision was from what they did or didn't tell you. Like I had six teeth pulled recently. It was most likely caused by the second trial (chemo word for an experimental cutting edge treatment that looks like it might work). Its a known side effect. They might not have even known that at the exact time. Even if they had they may or may not have told me about it. The doc's like to give you a 5,000 word pamphlet and let you discover this stuff for yourself but give your consent now.
The only doctor who treated me like a person and not a patient object was the volunteer doc, my last one. He could have been off getting rich but he felt the need to give back to his community. I still think of him as a friend first and a doc second. He explained a lot of my past and present situation to me. Th medical junk. He even took the time to try and get me to understand. And because he was free of charge he was a lot busier than the guys charging a hundred and fifty buck minimum for an office visit, but he still took the time.
I just think we all need a chance to understand what they're doing to us so we can see and make a better decision than we do when getting our car repaired.

Now I have to take care of my foster dog and the dynamic duo. Gentle dog got to go to work with my friend. He was ecstatic. Giant dog is so jealous. He's so put upon.

Posted by David at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Steve Argyle Yesterday was filled with nothing else but dogs. Giant dog has decided that the foster dog is okay so long as he is playing with him and not with giant dog's toys.
Foster dog would bring toys to me to throw and drop them in my lap. I would reach for them and discover that giant dog, who was sitting next to me, had deftly removed them. He was holding them angrily between his paws. Foster dog just went and got new ones. At one stage giant dog was holding three toys between his paws. He glared at me in case I had any funny ideas.
Even my puppy got slightly less disdainful. She initiated play. Of course the play was her game and could only be played by her rules.
When giant dog would play bound at foster dog gentle dog would join in by attacking giant dog! And then foster dog had to go to the vet.
If ever a dog needed a trip to the vet . . . doesn't make it easier. He was a pain. There was an unfixed female beagle at the vet's office. He was uncontrollable. I took him outside. This is the rescue service's vet so we had no choice, but I soon saw that there was no exercise area. No grass at all except the little patch we were standing on, and that little patch was next to the highway. Cars went by too fast for me to be comfortable.
I wouldn't have left my dog there.
Foster dog is going to be fixed, shot up and the have his dew claws removed. He has the ugliest dew claws I've ever seen on a dog. I'm amazed that he hasn't hurt himself before this. They have to be removed. The healing process is long. Three weeks minimum. He'll have to be crated and carried around some.
Poor guy. He's still one of the happiest dogs I've ever seen. His life has been pretty miserable but he keeps playing and laughing. He keeps the world shaped in his image. I admire that. I hope he keeps his attitude after all this surgery.

Click images for desktop size: "The Last Supper" by Da Vinci This surgery will make his life better but I always wonder if it will be worth it if he loses that gift of changing the world to his own joyous view.
Its one of the reason I go on so much about my health issues.
When the doctor's tell you some bad news, you got this or that brand of cancer for example, and then detail the available cures they always seem to do it in a rush. When you ask for details they get brusque, especially about the side effects.
Something like, "You've got lympho ballistic leukemia. No big deal its curable."
In my case it took over seven years to cure. I've been cured, or at least in remission for nearly two years. I've often felt like giving up, even recently. But I don't regret still being alive. No matter how low I've fallen or how despair filled things have often seemed. When it comes to doctor's and scuzzy insurance companies sucking up my money (This policy cover 100% of all costs of normal and average acceptable fees as decided by us you will be responsible for any additional charges as decided by your service provider.
Its been worth it to me. I have my puppy and I have my friend. I like the world well enough, I stubborn enough to enjoy things like music and songs and stories.
Its been worth it to me but it might not be worth it to someone else. When the doctor says, "I won't lie to you," or "I'm not going to sugar coat it," its safe to assume that he's going to enjoy being brutal, he won't discuss things so you can have a clear idea of what's in front of you, and that he's been pretty much misleading you in things up till then.
Most people will be empathetic at first but they don't know how to act. Most of us don't much like confronting mortality. I sure don't. I
Click images for desktop size: "The Bride of Frankenstein" always planned to be immortal, spitting into microphones, running down fields while opponents tripped over their own feet trying to catch me with all the dogs who've ever lived with me cheering me on from the stands or the mosh pit.
When they find out your ill people shut it out of their front brain and work hard to drive it out of their back brain too. The light we see blinds us to all but itself.
They get dismissive or they avoid you. Or worse, they suck it up so every meeting becomes more a confrontation than a casual conversation. Your mind's not working great either. You can't ignore the moments of self pity where you won't like yourself very much either.
I was kind of lucky and people really couldn't notice. I'm pretty dour anyway. In almost any relationship there would come a point would someone would look at me a bit amazed and say, "I never realized it before, your really a pretty funny guy, like you tell a lot of jokes. I never knew you were joking!"
The only difference for me is that they stopped saying that.
I think, no, I know that people need to know what's in front of them. They don't need to know the
Click images for desktop size: "Taoist Immortals" by Fûgai Honko future but they have to know enough to make a decision they can live with, not live happily maybe but they have to see some joy out there at the end of it all.
Steve McQueen went through it all, even ended up in Mexico swallowing extract of peach pit (Laetrile) while two people I know killed themselves. One by driving head on into a fire truck that was enroute to a fire.
I miss them all but there's no choice but to respect their decisions even if you regret their choices.
That's all.

I've listened to the new Bob Dylan, "Together for Life" and the New Neil Young, "Fork in the Road".
I like Neil Young. Everybody has had to sit through my Neil Young story. (Maybe that should be Neil Young Story - keep it capitalized so it enters myth). Me and my buddies hid on a hill at Point Dume and watched them build Bob Dylan's house and got a rush when we saw Roger McQuinn, even ran down the hill to talk to him.
I still listen to their stuff, their old stuff.
Because I loved their old stuff so much I probably took it harder and more personally that I think this new tuff absolutely sucks. Too old, too used to a life of riches and wealth. Young at least seems to try and understand what's going on in the world. He even has feeling for it but its not there in the music.
Dylan has lived in the legend cocoon so long that he's forgotten what it means to be human, to be angry and sad. He writes about heartburn like it was heartbreak.
It makes me sad.
What cheered me was re-watching "Hustle and Flow" as I did the usual household chores. An old movie but still the best film ever about creating music. It works from points of extremity and hyperbole. Music does. What I keep finding touching is the fact that the people here are all dreaming and reaching for that dream and in struggling for it they regain the humanity that the world has sought to pull out of them. All the other movies that tried to tell this story forgot about the human part, they wasted my time telling me about being an inhuman legend.
Time to take the dogs for their walk.
Next week I have to meet the parents of the players of my team. I have to prepare a three minute speech about what to expect from me and what I want from them so that we can build their children into something the children can be proud of. And I have to do this while I'm laughing at the latest dog jokes. Then I have to get ready for poor foster dog to come back to his home.

Posted by David at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Sky 1" by Ausencia This weekend was as busy as I figured. My body is still in rebellion. Lots of pain from the usual suspects.
Sometimes I wish I got a little sympathy for the hurting. I'd probably resent that too. You can't win with me, or, as I prefer, I can't lose.

Saturday started too early. My friend and I arrived at the football equipment locker. We weren't the very first ones there.
My friend got to sit at a table and do all the paperwork, registering the new kids. A rough enough job that I was glad to avoid.

Click images for desktop size: "Snow Fun" by NFL Films I got stuck doing shoulder pads and fitting game jerseys. That devolved as some guys showed up late or not at all. Normal stuff. They got a couple of players to fit shoulder pads. I fit jerseys and double checked the shoulder pad fittings. I only had to swap out a half dozen sets of pads so the kids did alright.
Fitting game jerseys is a real pain. Game jerseys are ultra tight. Lot of reasons for this; being tight the help compress the shoulder pads increasing protection slightly and also enabling the player to hit with more impact. Tight jerseys make it easier for referee's to see holding. The jerseys are so tight that if a ref sees a player's jersey being pulled its obvious that this is far from incidental contact. It also helps protect the player from actually being held and unfairly impeded.
And tight jerseys look great.
My method of getting on a jersey is to put them on the pads first and then put the jerseys and pads on as a unit.
That's too pokey for this sort of deal. There was only one jersey of each size. The new jerseys would be ordered based on my measurements. That means I had to put the jersey on each kid and then
Click images for desktop size: "Sinister" by Yasushi Nirasawa take it off.
The quickest way was to roll the jersey up from the bottom, have the kid slip his arms through, up to the elbow. I soon learned to tell ALL the kids to put their arms through the arm holes and not the neck hole. With the jersey on the arms the kid has to raise his head and arms to get his head through. Then I reach around behind them and pull the jersey over the pads and down.
I nearly choked out half a dozen kids . . . I'd then straighten the jersey and check it. The real grief was when I'd eye balled the wrong size and had to re-fit the kid twice (once it required 3 fittings, and one took four).
I also learned to tell the kids to stand strong when I was pulling the jersey, I still dragged about a dozen of them to their knees.
Getting the jersey off is worse. I have the kids pull one of their arms free then I pull the jersey loose from the pads then have them pull the jersey from the side over their noggins. The jersey then just falls off the other arm.
I didn't keep track but I probably fitted close to 200 kids.
I was on my feet for 8 solid hours doing this. If I was getting paid $7.50 an hour I'd have quit after the first hour and demanded my check. For twenty an hour I'd not have ever gone back and I'd have complained bitterly about no coffee breaks. For free I didn't mind it. My friend felt the same way.
I tore four of my weak nails. My hands didn't start cramping badly until 6 hours into it. I think its interesting that my hands cramp up after 15 or 20 minutes playing guitar. So logic says that guitar playing is 24 times harder than pulling kit around on kids.
I liked meeting the kids and having my brief chats with them and the parents. I felt there was a slightly higher percentage of parents who were in this for the right reasons, slightly higher than usual. Not at the cost of the parents into it for the wrong reason. There seemed to be fewer indifferent ones though. That's a nice positive.
Another nice positive was that they provided pizza for lunch. Eat on your feet thing. I asked them if they could order from this one pizza joint because they have a gluten free pizza that my friend could have. I was originally told no, they had reasons for that, acceptable reasons. Then they ordered from the same pizza joint I asked for because my request was more important to them than the reasons. EXCEPT they forgot the reason was to get a gluten
Click images for desktop size: "Evening Chant" by Unknown free pizza for my friend. Amusing unless you're my friend who got no pizza!
There were 5 coaches I noted who scarfed down free pizza but never seemed to work with any kids . . . made the note to not let them near any of the kids on my team.
As soon as I'd sent the last kid out the door my friend and I hoped in the car to go pick up the foster dog.
He was being held by this really sweet couple. New dog is a big happy goof, totally bewildered by everything that's happened to him he embraces his confusion by laughing and playing until the scary parts go away.
Its pretty obvious that he lived for a while where he was loved but badly cared for. He's not neutered, his dew claws are dangerously long. He sort of knows a few commands. I think the family abandoned him. He was found wandering in the woods. Kept in a dog pound for a couple of months. Put on death's row, then thrown into a car and driven away, then another car, then a home for a few hours and finally ends up here.
He's smart, scared, confused and happy. The food they gave us for him is too rich after dog pound grub - diarrhea and vomiting. Because he's not neutered giant dog hates him, my puppy has made it clear he's not to invade her personal space and gentle dog endures him because gentle dog is gentle dog.
All he wants is to play and be told its all okay.
His trip continues tonight when he has to go to the vet to get neutered, dew claws removed and all other vetting. It irks me no end that the pound couldn't do even these simple things to make his life easier. The idea of its wasted money on a dog they had slated to die doesn't cut it. Would you deprive a cancer victim of pain killers?
He's going to make someone a fine dog. He'll make them laugh. He's learning simple commands but still has a hard time concentrating. He'll be fine.
Sunday was the eagerly anticipated dog walk.
It was a bust. Highly disappointing. All the more so because there's no one to blame. I'd really have liked someone to blame.

Click images for desktop size: "Surf" by Unknown The dog walk is normally at this gorgeous hotel grounds. Some guest must have seen that there was to be a dog walk and thrown a fit about loose dogs ruining her holiday.
This was last second. To the hotels credit they did not forbid use of their grounds. They have something like 300 acres. They just set up a different trail for the walk but THEY INSISTED ALL DOGS BE LEASHED!
In today's economy I can understand them not telling the rich guest to go to hell. The trail they set up was horrid. Dirty, hot. We had to walk through about a half mile of loose dirt and wood chips stepping in the tractor tread marks and depressions.
It would have been okay if the dogs were running loose and making friends. This was just a walk that we could have done better at any of a dozen places.

The dogs still enjoyed it.
My friend's assistant from work bought her dog along. He was great. I was sad that the great adventure we had promised her had devolved into something bland.
She and her dog came home with us and new dog and assistant dog played incredibly hard and rough. It almost made the shambolic day worthwhile, for me at least.
My friend and I were both fatigued. I think she was as glad I was there as I was glad she was there.
Things seem to work out better that way.

Posted by David at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Old Friends" by Unknown When I was young (scary phrase that) I think I was in some sort of pain most days. Between football, baseball and surfing I was usually dinged up. (Football needs no explanation, I hope. Baseball, from always getting spiked, plowing into catchers and pulling the double play. From surfing it was mainly stepping on sea urchins, getting stung by jelly fish sort of thing.)
It never bothered me much then. It never slowed me down. Never really paid attention to it.
Maybe I was distracted or something. Now I'm growing weary of pain.
Tomorrow I have to do all the kitting of kids for the coming football season. It causes me great pain just to wash my own hair. The shoulder is killing me slowly. I'd feel near ecstatic to just have 15 minutes where I wasn't flinching and cringing from hurt.
Today I have to do a lot of exercises to loosen the shoulder. I figure the kid's will be anywhere from 4' 11" to 6' 2". I don't think it would make a good impression for me to be wincing every time I reach up to adjust a jaw pad or pump air into a helmet.
Today I have to bring up the kennel from the basement to get ready for the new foster puppy. Tat would normally be a pretty pleasurable task but now I have to worry about if I'll even be able to get it upstairs.
Yesterday wasn't a very great day. Lots of rain. Still it didn't start until after the dogs and I had our walk.
I haven't heard from the doc about my injecting myself with Lantus lessons. So I called and eft a lesson with the Pharmacist who's supposed to teach me. I got a call back a few hours later and the earliest appointment would be May 12th. I took the appointment but that didn't please me. For one thing the pain in my shoulder is neuropathic. That means it doesn't respond to acetomiaphin, ibuprofen or even aspirin. It only responds to this one pill. The pill was marketed as a mood
Click images for desktop size: "Obsession" by Michael Mobius elevator but didn't work too well but they discovered that it was great for relieving neuropathic pain.
When I looked up the pill and saw that it was a mood elevator I panicked in a small way. I thought maybe they thought I was suicidal, depressed or something and were trying to slip something past me. They doubly assured me that wasn't the case but I didn't really believe them until I managed to read the whole history of the drug.
It did a fair, not great job of reducing the pain but it also made me groggy and made my skin feel numb and tingly, so I stopped taking it. I went looking for it yesterday. I couldn't find it. Its probably expired anyway.
While I was looking for the pills I got another call from the doctor's office. They wanted to make sure I knew that teaching me how to inject myself would cost at least one hundred bucks . . . I have to wonder how hard they think will be.
I called the pharmacy I use, the cheapest one and found out that they won't fill the script for Lantus until I've been taught to inject myself. I almost asked if I had to bring a certificate. Like maybe I got a diploma; Doctor of Gluteus Maximus Stickiumus. They probably just take my word for it.
Right away I got a call from my friend asking me to make an emergency appointment with the doctor. She banged her knee a few days ago. It was causing her a lot of hurt. It bruised and was making
Click images for desktop size: "Music Lesson" by Leighton her whole body cold and clammy. I'm not a doc but I ascribe cold and clammy to broken bones. That morning I gave her a sports wrap like I'd give a kid with a sore knee. It apparently didn't help.
She got to the doctor. His word was that it wasn't sprained or broken just a deep bruise. She could expect pain for two more weeks . . .
That was a bit of a relief, I guess, but not the best news. Especially with the weekend we've got coming up. Selfishly, I now realize, it never occurred to me that maybe we should cancel some of the plans for her. I guess I'll have to rely on my friend sticking up for herself and ignoring any pressure I might unintentionally be putting on her.
I want to do the dog walk Sunday but its pretty unfair to ask someone with a bum knee to walk under cloudy skies.
The worst part of pain, for me, is that it distracts me too much. When you've got as little brain power as I do even small distractions create obstacles.

I did watch a couple of movies last night. I like horror movies. I watch a lot of bad ones in the faint
Click images for desktop size: "View of the Kiyomizudera" by Unknown hope of finding that golden moments: Karloff as Frankenstein trying to catch a sunbeam; Leatherface dancing in the dawn, dancing to the beat of his revving chainsaw while Marilyn Burns, sticky with red Karo syrup in the back of a pick up truck, provides a lilting melody of the hysterical laughter of freedom; the mad family feud in "The Hills Have Eyes", a feud crystalized in the heart of the dog "Beast" who sees it as a blood feud of revenge as he avoids thinking of his female companion dog eviscerated by the mutants.
I like horror movies a lot. Some incredibly talented guys get started in horror movies. So do some jerks. Horror always sells. Guys like me will sit in dank movie theaters, rent the DVDs hoping for the one moment of splatter that manages to encapsulate all our fears and shows them to the light. Tobe Hooper, who disappointed me like no other, made the incredibly brilliant "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" a film the critics all hated, at the time. So you can't trust anyone but your own eyes and ears when it comes to horror. Nothing else is reliable.
That said I watched "Laid to Rest". I was surprised that Bobbi Sue Luther, produced her first starring role. She's someone you'd describe as "big tits. little talent".
As a producer she did some great things. The gore and splatter were very good. The actors, except her and the killer, all worked really hard to make their cardboard characters seem to be made of flesh was well as obvious blood. Kevin Gage made a nothing character into someone likable. This got exploited pretty badly in a cruddy added on death scene at the end.
Cool special effects haven't moved me since I saw Tom Savini's glorious throat slitting scene that opened the carnage in "Friday the 13th". This stuff is cool but also really "so what".
The ending of the movie was stupid. It did one raise one interesting question. The star was whacked in the head which gave her amnesia. She discovers that she is/was a cheap prostitute so now she'd
Click images for desktop size: "Kim Novak" almost wishes she were dead. Her rage grows from her self loathing. I thought that strange.
I then watched Enki Bilal's "Immortal (Ad Vitam)". I like a lot of Bilal's artwork. The movie's gotten a lot of buzz because of its mixing of cgi and live characters. I guess the tech was interesting. The movie was not. The monsters were semi cool but the story was stupid and seemed to have no point, dramatic purpose or consistency. I can accept that ancient Egyptian gods are real, I'm willing to meet a story teller that far. I can even accept that the ancient gods sole reason for existing past creating the universe is to breed with a special type of person to create new gods.
I think if I'm willing to work that hard that the story teller has to do more than just string together some scenes of unrelated people and events. I'd have liked it if any of the characters was slightly interesting.
The story starts with Horous, the God, trying to inhabit a human body. Because of the new fad of eugenics and transposing human body parts Horous discovers that every human he enters blows up! This brings in the cops who are searching for this new serial killer. Then they sort of forget about all of that.
There's a weird love story about the guy Horous finds who never had a transplant and the chick who is the miracle who can breed a new god.
Bilal (which is the same name as the crazy mutant twin in the much better "Basket Case") throws out a whole lot of, I guess, very personal ideas about sex, love and loss. Not one of them did he explain, justify or explain. It was just a pretty boring mess that I felt was more an endurance contest than a movie.

At least the dog walk is this Sunday. I just got an email from my friend. She's as excited about it as I am, bum knee and all!

Posted by David at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Love Like This" by Lavakillu This weekend suddenly got busy. In a nice way.
Saturday I have eight hours of kit fitting for kids 13 and under. I volunteered my friend to do registration (paperwork) for the kids. The foster puppy will arrive in the area on Saturday morning.
Lots of logistics, kennels to set up, food dishes to shift about. Then the decision on whether the new comer will be up to doing the dog walk on Sunday.
Not a bad time at all unless they stick me on 8 hours of fitting kids for helmets . . . shoulder pads are a lot easier and quicker. Pants and girdles are the easiest. I've got a feeling I'll be doing a lot of helmets . . .

My friend says I was pretty upset Monday about the doctor. She also thinks she understands the doc thinking I was going to slug him.
I didn't feel upset. A little bit down probably. I thought I was being as gentle with the doc as I could be.
Maybe I hide this kind of stuff from myself but not from her. Possible.
One thing that does upset me is Joe Biden appearing at the MPAA dinner. Biden went as the Vice President. He got a standing ovation for calling kids who download music and movies from the internet "thieves".
This is just another step towards Obama's campaign to criminalize kids sharing music.
Criminalizing downloading will save the RIAA and the MPAA serious money. They won't have to hire scum bag PI firms to hack innocent people's computers searching for "illegal" stuff. They'll have the FBI do it for them. I doubt that the FBI will even have to get a warrant to do this. In the UK they're already forcing the ISP's to keep all the logs of everything anyone does on the internet. So do we.
Click images for desktop size: "London Streets 1888" by TitusBoy Bush's lie was that it was to root out all those millions of terrorists. Nothing political about it they claim. Nobody would ever misuse all this data.
Obviously the FBI has done such a stellar job of removing crime that they have plenty of excess time to go trolling for 14 year olds scarfing down the top 40.
Then the rich jerks would save even more money. They wouldn't have to hire sleazy ambulance chaser lawyers, the US Attorney's office will prosecute the kids. Obama's hired the scummiest of them to train the rest in being even a purer distilled kind of scum. They'll get the kids jail time, probation time. Those services are all standing empty. The US Attorney has locked away all the rapists, child abusers etc and the prisons must be standing empty because everyone has been rehabilitated. Probation officers must be facing being laid off. (Of course America leads the world in having the largest percentage of its population in prison, we must be trying to beat our own record).
And then the RIAA and MPAA can then ask the judge to award them money for the serious damage these children have done to their business. At twenty bucks a track times a billion or some other wretched formula. Obama himself puts the damage at $350,000 a track. Rah!
When Obama gets his law passed criminalizing the kids I'll boycott every rich musician who doesn't sign off of the RIAA. Like rich guys like Tony Bennett who shockingly claims he isn't rich enough and wants to squeeze even more money out of people who just want to
Click images for desktop size: "La Liseuse" by Fragonard listen to music.
This really bugs me. If I buy a car and loan it to a friend for the weekend this logic would make me a criminal.
According to the RIAA and the MPAA when I lay down my twenty bucks I haven't bought anything. I don't own the CD or the DVD they do. I can't tape it or make a digital copy of it or let my friends hear it, play it at parties. Blockbuster can charge me to borrow it but I can't loan it for free. I don't know why. Neither do they. They just want all the money for the least amount of money.
They claim that me loaning my CD to a friend costs them thousands of dollars. They're losing money! Well, not losing money just making a bit less but they want it all: No Compromise. Sales aren't dropping becasue we're churning out cruddy product its becasue I think I own something I paid them for.
Silliness that they've spent billions during the last 60 years to turn into law. Unfairness. The rich bullying the poor.
I wish I'd voted for McCain. Not that he'd have been any better but I figure he'd been inept at getting
Click images for desktop size: "Los in a Bad World" by Unknown this stuff done. He wouldn't have the same deadly proficency that Obama has.
McCain would have hacked off our allies, like Canada, with the same stupidity and ignorance but he'd have been laughed at more than seen as real and threatening.
The comfort of incompetence.

There is something going on out there. I saw this video that I think everyone else in the world has already seen. Its just a little music thing. You can click here to see the YouTube version of this bunch of guys all over the world doing "Stand By Me".
Its exciting and unexpected. It reminds me of why I wanted to play music. Getting rich would have been nice but mainly I wanted to make a joyful noise. I wanted to make people dance. I wanted to be heard. It looks like these guys have the same idea. Its a great mammouth effort. I'm buying the CD becasue the RIAA has nothing to do with them and the music is sweet.

Posted by David at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Grand Central Station" by Ian Foster Yesterday was bright and sunny. It reached 80.
Today it is 57 and pouring ice cold rain.

I took the dogs out for a shortish walk. Every person who was walking a dog got an advert from me telling them about the wonderful dog walk on Sunday. I started the pitch with the off the wall info that this place is so beautiful that they charge a hundred grand to have a wedding there!
I wonder if anyone of them will show. Their dogs would love it.
I walked the 5 miles to the doctor's office in 43 minutes. It would not have been as fast if I had the dogs with me but it would have been more memorable.
Click images for desktop size: "The Jolie Family"
It was hot and I was sweaty. From the reaction and movement of the other waiting patients they must have figured I had swine flu. Anyway it got me into an examination room in record time.
While I waited for the doc I had time to read an entire book! It was "Diabetes for Dummies". Interesting franchise. They seem determined to provide instruction for everything.
The doc came in in a rush. He was nervous about something. The man has no chin. Where his chin would have been was quivering. He asked a couple of unimportant although mildly pertinent questions, clearly to calm himself down. He was so nervous I tried to be relaxing.
He sucked it up and then just plunged into it. He pulled up my blood tests. He explained them so fast I couldn't follow anything he said. When I asked for clarification he didn't get much calmer.
The hardest part for him was that my diabetes was out of control. The pills (metformin) that sensitizes my body to insulin was still working fine but the pill that forces my pancreas to produce more insulin was not. My pancreas was producing almost no insulin. Time for me to go on the needle.
He flinched when he said it. As if he was afraid I was going to slug him. I still had the dark glasses
Click images for desktop size: "In Like Flint" by JW McGinnis on and I was certain that I had my normal blank poker face on so he must have been reacting to something deep inside himself. "I'm afraid you're going to have to start doing injections. It's only one a night. The needles are so thin they don't really hurt. Honest." He said it all in a rush then rared back in his chair pulling as far away from me as he could.
While pulled back he continued, "And there's albumen in your urine. The chemo damage to your kidneys is degenerating. You'll have to take some pills for that. Apropo, no, Avisio for them. To protect them more than anything."
I pulled my chair closer so I could see his computer screen more clearly.
"Boy, my bad cholesterol is super low, isn't it. Sixty really good isn't it?"
"Yes, but your good cholesterol is far too low. The proportion is bad. You seem awfully calm about all this?"
"I kind of knew this was coming. One day. Not happy about it but . . . It will it be Lantus? Is that the insulin injection?"
"Yes. Lantus. I'm putting you on 100 units a day. Increasing it by 10 units a day until the blood sugars get under control. The Lantus could cause further damage to your kidneys."
"I got my dialysis in my future?"
He fumbled before he said, "Most people don't need dialysis even after years of Lantus. You can't promise anything though."
All I could do was nod. He took my blood pressure while he went on to explain all the new procedures and things I'd have to fit into my new daily routine. And all the arcane cabalic rituals I'd have to undertake before I could fill my new prescriptions. One of them is I have to meet with the staff pharmacist. Not to fill the scripts but to have the rules explained to me and to show me how to inject myself. A pharmacist?
My blood pressure was 120 over 60. I was expecting it to be through the roof but it was the best its been in six weeks. I have not the slightest idea what that signifies. The doc ignored my question about it.
So after I start taking the injections I have to check my blood sugars 3 to 5 times a day. That means bleeding 3 to 5 times a day. Two weeks after I start I have to do another blood panel. Two weeks after that I have to go back in and see the doc.
The money for all this worries me the most.
I don't know how I feel about all this. Not happy. Not too upset. Just the grim inevitability of it all. Not even paranoid.

Click images for desktop size: "2009 USC Football" More pills, plus injections plus more blood work is a pretty worst case scenario but at least I ain't dead. I figure bad news here means I'm owed some good luck over there.
I walked home. A lot slower. I passed some youngish girls walking dogs. I figured that a sweaty man wearing shades and ear buds might not come across right so I didn't tell them about the dog walk on Sunday. I wanted to.
On the way home I stopped at the bakery to get some of the cheaper but superior bread and some Halvarti with Jalapeno cheese. The bakery was uncomfortably warm. There was an irate guy there holding a screaming baby. He was shouting at the little old ladies who work there. It seems he ordered some rolls that he was supposed to pick up on Sunday. He didn't. They sold them to someone else. He had it in his head that once he ordered them they belonged to him and they should have held on to them. He hadn't called and told them this. He hadn't paid them anything.
He kept getting louder. The baby kept getting louder and the little old ladies looked warm, uncomfortable and frightened.
I was pretty calm and suggested he go outside for a minute and let the baby cool down. He spun on me. I had about five inches on him and I wasn't holding a baby. He took my well meaning advice.
The little old lady thanked me. I said, "For what?"
She said, "I wish Mr Giant Dog had been here! Hem must be so comforting to you."
I explained that the dogs were at home. I never thought of Giant Dog as being comforting, at least not in the way she meant.
At home my friend and I watched another Doris Day movie, "It Happened to Jane". It wasn't very good. The situation was too real to be silly. Jack Lemmon had a good monologue and Kippy's dad Ernie Kovacs, was pretty much wasted. First totally duff Doris Day movie we've watched together. Next up will be "A Touch of Mink" with Day and Cary Grant. Rah!
My friend was beat after her day but she still offered up a lot of sympathy and support. I don't think she appreciated that I'd rather think about the dog walk and kitting up the kids on Saturday.
No problem is so big it can't be ignored.

Posted by David at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Carp" by Unknown It was a pretty unexciting Sunday. But pleasant. I'd forgotten that time can sometimes just be a pleasant thing to just see pass. There aren't ever enough of these moments. I often forget to treasure them. Times where life is just content. It will be short lived and can't be sensibly ignored or taken for granted.
After the bad storms the clouds passed and the sun came out. We drove to the Indian Reservation, did some more light grocery shopping and went to Taco Bell. My friend loves their hard shell vegetarian tacos. I got a bean burrito and a "Beefy Cheesy Melt". Since everything else was vegetarian someone took it upon themselves to make my Melt Beefy-less. It was fine, They made up for the lack of meat by using extra rice. Rice was what I was craving anyway.
When we got back home it was nice enough to sit outside with the dogs. The dogs love me but my friend is "The Mom". Her being outside set them into joyous doggie paroxysms. Like me dogs seldom express joy by sitting still in quiet contentment.
My puppy played with her Kong and pressed it against my friends leg. My friend didn't understand that this meant you were supposed to try and steal it from my puppy. The giant dog bought out one of his squeaky toys and just drove us nuts with that. The gentle dog was the happiest and most active of the bunch. His way of expressing his joy is to bite me. Not painfully, he likes to grab hold of my wrist and just hang on. For whatever canine reason this puts him into a state approaching nirvana.
Clearly no side effects to Saturday's vet visit.
That evening we watched the Doris Day, Clark Gable movie "Teacher's Pet". I discovered that my
Click images for desktop size: "Midnight Worries" by Unknown friend is a budding Doris Day fan. She even knows facts about her! I'd never seen more than bits and pieces of the movie before and was surprised at just how good it was. Plenty of surprises and plenty of laughs with just a tinge of bathos, just enough to make you think you were seeing something more worthwhile than an entertainment.
Good movie.
We watched an episode of "Kung Fu". We'd fallen off the ritual. I hold that it was because the last few had been so dire. This one was good. For one thing it had the genius that is Keye Luke in it for even the briefest spell. Even a small amount of Keye Luke is enough to make anything taste better. The episode was "The Arrogant Dragon". Carradine was very effective even though his fighting skill still stinks, his acting ability was clicking at a high level. High enough to hide some bad plot holes and some uncomfortable sexual tension. And my old buddy Jimmy Hong got to play a rat!
What I liked most was the careful acknowledgment of Chinese history. It was surprising and welcome even if scant. Basically they acknowledged the birth of the Tongs as being a result of the Manchu's burning of the Shaolin Temple.
Today I've got my doctor's appointment. I called this morning and they've got my blood test results. I'm out of excuses. I have to get my home test results diary into a readable-by-others shape. This morning my blood pressure was 140 over 90. About ten points higher than is considered safe and about 20 points higher than sis safe for first thing in the morning.
I'm hoping that this can be addressed just through diet. I don't want
Click images for desktop size: "Stevie Wonder" to take any more pills. I want no more pills worse than I want to be able to stop restricting my diet any further. My fat intake is already restricted to 45 grams per day, no sugar, no pork etc. I guess coffee and salt are next on the list.
My blood sugars have been running on the high side of acceptable. Within the parameters. There's a chance I might have to deal with that. I get amazed that my diet has to be so restrictive. I know an older diabetic here, on insulin injections, and I had breakfast with him. He had bacon and eggs! BACON! Sometimes its hard to remember that my diet is restricted as much by the chemo's and their after effects as they are by the diabetes. As much as I don't want more pills I want injections even less. So it goes, Diet, More Pills, Injections in my order of preferences. And I really want none of them.
Next Saturday I have to spend 8 hours kitting out kids. I roped my friend in for 4 hours of registering the kids. Paperwork . . . I'm still pleased she'll be there for part of the day.

Click images for desktop size: "Hot Air Balloons" by Unknown Then on Sunday will be the spring dog walk!!
There is little on the appointment calendar that is as much fun as the dog walk, for me and the dogs. This will be the packs third one!

Even though the door is open to the pretty day my puppy has chosen to spend this time inside wrapped around my feet.
I love my puppy. Its nice that its reciprocated. Nicer to know she's not mad about the diet. I've cut all her food in half. She seems no hungrier than usual and she's always hungry.

Congrats to the Men of Troy. Eleven players taken in the NFL draft and 3 of them in the first round! Then Tony Dungy saying that a kid would be crazy not to attend USC becasue SOuthern California is the school that gives you the best chance to succeed!! YOW!

Posted by David at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Dolphin" by AdaptD Took the dogs to the vet yesterday. Everything was fine, except the charges.
I was proud of all three dogs. My puppy did her sterling best to endure what she sees as a horrible torture. They drew blood. No heart worm, no lyme disease etc.
The only negative was that she's still overweight. Not obscenely so but enough to be concerned. I don't want her to die early or to be in terrible pain when she's older because she's fat. I don't quite now what to do. She's on a perpetual diet, she gets tons of exercise, 1-2 hour walk every weekday, she runs herself ragged in the yard, but she's overweight and I have to do something. I'll figure it out.
My puppy has now been microchipped. She thinks this means she is now bionic.
The gentle dog was sort of amazing. When the vet was drawing blood he rested his head on my fiends lap and smiled up at her so bravely. When it was time for his stomach to be palpitated he put his feet up on the bench to make it easier for the vet.
And then the giant dog . . . at first he wouldn't get on the scale. Soon discovered why. He weighs nearly 100 pounds!! He's still thin. This is still too large to be a lap dog, which is what he thinks he
Click images for desktop size: "Girl's Day" by Vii Lid is. When I consider how many times I've had to lift him up to move him from where he wanted to be to where I wanted him to be the deadly pain in my shoulder makes sense.
When the vet drew his blood for his test he nearly fainted . . . He endured the rest of the needles and poking with fear but since I was prepared for him to come bursting through the wall leaving one of those Wile E. Coyote silhouettes behind him I'm even prouder of him trying to be so brave.
We discovered that giant dog actually has a designation within his breed. He's a Royal Standard . . . Since my puppy demands she is Queen of all she surveys the air now seems rife for regal conspiracies, coups and intrigues.
We got a preview of our life to come. To celebrate the good behaviour of the entire pack we took them to get ice cream! I also figured this would be my puppies last treat for a long time.
While waiting for my friend to bring out the ice cream we stood in front and ended up chatting with a few people who were fascinated by the three dogs.
My friend bought out the three cups of 2 buck ice cream. She gave my puppy her cup first because that's just the way its done. My puppy gave her ice cream a lick, to claim it obviously and then went over to steal the giant dogs cup! She was laughing and clearly thought this was just the first step to showing who the Royalty was in this house.
When we got home everyone was calm and easy. We went out and did some light grocery shopping. We've finally sworn off the mega
Click images for desktop size: "Gary Cooper" chain grocery store. Not only is the store one of the most oppressive atmospheres I've ever encountered, all mega clean sweat shop and greenish fluorescent lights hung from too high but they've stopped carrying the final product we could only get from them.
We got home in time for some incredible winds. I watched some of the trees bend 45 degrees beneath it. Then came the thunder, the lightening and the rain. Surprisingly the lights and electricity never died. I was anticipating it.
Gentle dog was unhappy about this. HE was on his love seat lying rigid with fear, his eyes wide open. He followed me trying to merely survive in a fear induced zombie trance.
My friend gave him some of that natural tension releaser med. I don't think it cut much through gentle dog's fear. He was locked into this scary rigor for a few hours. What snapped him out of it was the stupid cat.
I'd left the door open. It was warm. My friend said the terrible storm was because it had gotten so warm too quickly . . . This may be accurate and true but is still the dumbest thing I've ever heard. How can it possibly get warm TOO quickly!
For some reason the stupid cat decided to come into the house. She was dry! Gentle dog saw her and took off after her, chasing her right out of the house! He calmed down immediately after that
Click images for desktop size: "From the Age of Fables" by Giovanni Caselli which proves something I guess. At least it shows that for animals hatred is greater than fear.
My friend bought the stupid cat inside and gentle dog ignored her, he'd proven his point. He went back to his quiet gentle animosity and decided he could tackle the world and went back to normal!
I fell asleep on the sofa watching a John Liu movie (bad movie but Liu is still probably the greatest leg fighter ever). Woke up at midnight when my shoulder jolted me out of sleep. Found giant dog was sleeping on top of me. Went to bed about midnight. Combination of snuffling dogs and my shoulder woke me at 4 A.M. I let the dogs out. They stayed out for half an hour. Shoulder aching so decided to stay up.
Doctor tomorrow. I'm going to mention the shoulder even though I know all he'll do is either prescribe a neuropathic pain killer, that I won't take, or refer me to a specialist that I can't afford.

Posted by David at 6:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Engineer's Libido" by Unknown I'm really getting bugged by how much Obama is disappointing me. I viewed the guy as the lesser evil, I didn't really support him any other way and yet I am still severely disappointed.
I'm not willing to blame him for the economy yet. I don't know enough to tell if his plans are working or if they're just adding to the boondoggle.
What is bugging me is how much Obama has disregarded the people. I keep remembering that he's from Chicago, arguably the city with the most prolific record of organized corruption in American history. Illinois itself isn't very untainted either.
What prompted him to appoint FIVE RIAA lawyers to the Department of Justice. Maybe I am stupid but in my stupid view the DOJ was there to bust criminals. I knew two US Attorneys socially and through work interviewed four others. Opinions of them aside the fact is that their job is going after the bad guys.
The job I was working when I interviewed these guys was crazy but crazy cool too. I was interviewing the worst criminals in Federal Custody. Not Jeffery Dahmer, Charles Manson type criminals but the robbers, the thieves. The producer was looking for stories for a TV series. He
Click images for desktop size: "Hawkgirl" by DC Comics figured that since I was an adrenaline junkie I would get along with hardened career criminals. His theory that criminals were just a sociopathic group of adrenaline junkies. I don't agree with that.
Two guys come straight to mind. They prey on it at times. One guy was busted by the Secret Service for counterfeiting. When they had him he also confessed to 104 bank robberies in a 7 year period. Over 80 of them were single handed robberies.
I mean this guy walked into a bank, looked at all those people and walked out of their with the money. Pretty scary, pretty smart dude. I couldn't do it.
The other guy I remember as being chilled beyond comprehension. Like all of them he was interested mainly in how much money the producer would pay him for his stories. He told some funny stories. None about himself, always about someone else, always stories he had heard from someone else. About 2 months after I saw him he walked out of Federal Custody without permission . . . no explanation was ever offered up as to how. He stole a plane and fled to parts unknown. Before he fled its alleged he killed the US Attorney who was prosecuting him. To my knowledge they've never found him.
Now then, the RIAA attorneys practice the lowest kind of law. Its on the same level as those PI lawyers who advertise on late night TV between the Cal Worthington used car ads.
They're used to standing tough in civil court busting pre-teens,
Click images for desktop size: "The Beatles" single moms and grandmothers. Its hard to see a guy who loses cases to grand-moms standing tough against the types of guys I met. They're legal bullies, cowards pretty much. Cowards because they are afraid to view the people they're persecuting as people. Cowards because they refuse to persecute children because they're afraid of going broke. They think their need for cash is greater than society's need to feel secure.
Can you see that kind of low level guy standing tough in front of an organized crime enforcer?
Its evident that Obama is setting things up to give the RIAA what they've always wanted. They're going to criminalize kids swapping music. The RIAA has wanted this since about 1920, back when kids traded 45's at parties and when young kids made audio cassettes to give to the girl they had a
Click images for desktop size: "Cherry Blossoms at Arashiyama" by Kornai Ki crush on, hoping a pop star could convey to her how much love he felt. The RIAA viewed and views that love sick kid as a despicable criminal for sharing music he bought.
Right now Obama is out there saying he favors $150,000 CRIMINAL fines for kids sharing music files! So it would be smarter for a kid to go shoplift than it would be for him to email the latest Rhianna single to his buddy out of state?
Obama has made it clear that this is one of his primary agendas. He's ignored hundreds of thousands of petitions to stop hiring these RIAA guys. He ignored them and hired a fifth one.
A few days after hiring tis latest RIAA mouthpiece he stated quite firmly that torture was unimportant. He clearly stated that there was no value in his looking any further into Americans torturing people. He said extending resources into looking into one of the hugest blackest moments in American history would distract from his agenda. His agenda appears to be prosecuting instead of protecting children.
I disagree with this. I believe that the Nuremberg Trials where the crimes of the Nazi government where laid bare for the world to see started a process where the world could begin to heal. It showed the banality of evil and showed how clear and simple it would be for us to fall into that deplorable evil all over again. It gave us a sign post and a clear view of what to avoid.
With the little tiny bit we know it becomes clear we're no longer the cowboys in the white hats. We haven't been for my entire life but we like to believe we are. I do.
We tortured people to get them to say what we wanted them to say. We became the bad guys because of a memo. No one has to answer for it.
It won't end there. There's a phrase criminals use to indicate respect. "He's a stand up guy."
It doesn't mean anything about his beliefs really. It has to do with a police torture method that was, probably still is prevalent. They'd cops would handcuff a guy then loop a suspects hands over a door so he had to stand on his tip toes or dislocate his shoulders. Of course they'd pummel him until he "pissed blood". They'd leave him there for as long as they felt. In the cop shop there's no time, nothing but cop time which doesn't have a clock.
There's a cop boss in Long Beach. When he read about the insanely draconian anti-terrorist laws Bush enacted he sprang to use these against the gang bangers. Other cops did to. They, at least in their minds branded the gang bangers as "terrorists" and then used the same techniques that the FBI used against terrorists.

Click images for desktop size: "Study Table" by William Harnett So its far from unreasonable to see some cop reading Bush's torture memos and self righteously figuring that the same rules should apply to him.
I know a lot of cops. A lot of my kids became cops. I still feel that the persons who should most fear the cops are the innocent.
Obama has proven he's going to ignore the people who elected him when it comes to his agenda. I fear we may have re-elected George W Bush, only a smarter, more competent Bush.
Protecting law breakers because they work in Washington is wrong. Protecting people who destroyed our country is wrong. Obama needs to expand his agenda to make sure that this sickness does not ever occur again anywhere in the world so we can walk proud again and not be ashamed of what we are.

Tomorrow the dogs go to the vet. it will be . . . interesting. First time at this vet. Its all annual checkups, shots and needles. I keeping it quiet. The pups wouldn't kill us in our sleep but they would set all the clocks to the wrong time so we;d miss the appointment.
We're not getting the foster pup tomorrow. Very disappointed. Very frustrating. Just some sort of red tape that has nothing to do with us or the sanity and safety of the dog. It will work out. It has to.
I go to the doctor on Monday. I've got my little diary of blood pressure and blood sugars all kept. I still have to make it legible . . .
The good thing is I have the door open and the furnace off! The dogs are wandering in and out. My pupppy keeps coming in every ten minutes and looking at me then running back out.
I wish this was all there was to staying alive.
My friend was nearly as crabby as I am last night. Her meeting was long and tiresome and capped with a near two hour drive.
She's still my friend. I'm happy about that.
Its funny all the rest of its endurable so long as that one fact remains.
Busy weekend. Vets, dog food, Indian reservations and getting my act together for the doc on Monday. And plenty of movies to see.

Posted by David at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Click images for desktop size: "Colorful Variants" by Unknown The meeting last night was fine. Meeting the other coaches was interesting. For the most part it was pretty boring. Not boring to the point of me falling asleep or even to attempting to balance my pen on my nose. Those are things I've done at most meetings. I won't delineate the things I've done that I got away with. I've been in too many of these meetings. Even if they are essential - too many.
From what I saw all the coaches are in it for pretty much the right reasons, for the kids and not to be "the boss". I didn't pick up on any of them having the calling to coaching. They seemed to be in it for the fun, which is possibly the best reason of all.
There were a couple who seemed to have that militaristic thing going but I doubt if its too deeply ingrained. I also doubt that they're into it to the point of berating players for their own shortcomings.
The only scary part came because of of question I asked before the meeting. The question was taken as a suggestion that was seized upon. It had to do with terminology.
Football is loaded with jargon. Middle linebackers are called mike backs or just mike, outside linebackers have become sam bakers and willie backs. Sam after s which stands for strong side (the
Click image: "Castle and Diana" by DC and Marvel Comics side the tight end lines up on) and W for weak side linebacker. And those are the more sensible bits of jargon.
All I wanted to do was get on the same page as the the team on the next level. Use the same jargon, the same passing tree and teach the same base package.
The passing tree is just a stick drawing based on a single long line, which represents the fly route-go long- with little branches shooting off representing the different passing routes. They're usually pretty much the same but they can get different names and/or numbers.
The base package are your bread and butter plays. Almost always they start off with the belly plays, the fullback dive up the middle and grows from there. You teach the kids the base package so they learn the fundamentals of execution and then you build your offense around and from them. It possible to go through a season and never actually run any of your base plays. I use them for education primarily.
Taking these elements from the next level gives the kids an edge when they move along. If I called the linebackers bodacious backs when they graduated to the next level they'd stand on the field bewildered when their new coach asked them play willie back instead of just getting into position.
I forgot the level of coaches I was dealing with. Their was an argument about numbering the holes (right are numbered odd, left numbered even or vice versa) and the passing routes (even in routes odd for out routes). We never got to even discussing base
Click image: "Fashion, Sex and Politics" by S4W packages.
Even though there was an argument it wasn't as violent as a lot I've had to sit on. I had nothing to say. There was no place in that sort of discussion for me to even have an opinion.
It went on from there. The most salient point for me was that I'd have to come up with my own assistants. I need a Defensive Coordinator. All I know about defense is that they always seem to get in the way of my carefully crafted offense!
I've always had top ranked defenses mainly because I've had great DC's and I am glad to stay out of their way. I can coach Defense but I'm not the best at it. I'll still make the occasional suggestion, usually based on what a D will do that really annoys me i.e. it proves to be very effective.
The other great bit is that they told me what I'd get in my coaches kit bag. An agility ladder!! My most favorite tool. Agility hurdles! The rest is pretty bog standard stuff. I have to buy my own whistles. They don't understand that is dangerous. I like to present a front that the kids expect and feel confident in, after that I like to use goofy whistles, bird whistles loopy whistles, things that be heard but get a laugh. I copped the idea from Preston Sturges and his idea of always directing films while wearing a silly hat.

Click images for desktop size: "Landscape" by Del Sil I have to go help the kids kit on May 2nd. EIGHT HOURS! I've already specified I won't do eight hours of helmet fittings. I think they've plenty of guys who can do it as well if not better than I can. Its the most tedious job though and takes time so everybody tries to sidestep it as much as possible. They figure to kit out about 300 kids over the weekend!
Still, I'm looking forward to meeting the kids and looking forward to the day.

It looks like we will have our foster dog on Saturday! Saturday will be a manic day. Our dogs go to the vet at 10 and then we have to buy dog food, a major undertaking.
This will be a different dog then the one we were originally going to home. Its my only complaint, this constant shifting around. Going from one dog to another. Its a minor quibble. I've tried to put myself in the dog coordinators place and while I can't quite get there I'm sure there's a lot of pressure trying to figure out what dogs can be saved (all of them) and in which dog the dogs can flourish and have the best shot at finding a forever home.
Yeah, mines an incredibly minor quibble.
Last night, when I went to the coaches meeting, the dogs were pretty chilled about it. This morning my friend had to go out of town for one of her money earning meetings - her job - when I went out to open the gate for her the dogs started a horrible pathetic howling and crying. I guess we're only allowed to abandon them once in a 24 hour period. They were pretty happy when I walked back in.
Its rough to figure out how the pack is going to respond to a new number. As individual dogs I don't see any personal issues, but as a group its a hard read.
The breeds seem to include the same no problem status. Especially since there's little question that they perceive me as the leader. They'll accept a newcomer if I do.
Giant dog will be the most difficult. He already thinks the other two take more than there share of the love, love that should all belong to him!
He'll settle in well enough. He always does.
So the only real issue will be how the new guy relates to belonging here. We have to take him to the vet on Wednesday. The break will do a lot to sort out issues in his mind. He'll come back overjoyed.

Posted by David at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Church and God" by Unknown I discovered something rather surprising this morning. Reconstituted powdered milk can go sour!
I guess it makes sense but hardly.
I use powdered milk in my morning coffee in one of my byzantine money saving schemes. Everyone complains about the price of gasoline but no one is complaining about the price of milk. Here, and this is a rural area with dairy farms not to far away, milk is about five bucks a gallon.
Seems incredibly dear for a staple, a staple that impacts the health of our children. With osteoporosis on the rise and with America's domination of world sports seriously declining (we didn't even make the finals in the World Championship!) and with McDonald's posting a 4% increase in business this quarter I think we have a pretty clear view that we're still not focusing enough attention on nutrition and the needs of our kids.

Yesterday was a sort of lost day. Nothing of note accomplished at all. I realized that today is an anniversary of sorts. It was in 2003 that I entered my second remission. The doc's then said that if
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Clarence Holbrook Carter all things went well I'd live another six years. A few years later they said the exact same thing. Six years seems to be the time frame they work on.
I'm still going. Maybe a bit slower but still going. I've no idea if this is due to excellent medical care or the fact that I'm incredibly stubborn.

My friend successfully completed her quarter end madness which leaves her open for the ponderous meetings for budgeting this week.
Budgeting is always a big deal especially in not for profits, and more especially for not for profits that's only focus is conserving nature. And most especially in the run up to an economic depression. People look at unspoiled land and think of the beauty of a strip mine, how nice a flock of condo's would look on that majestic bluff. I understand that impulse even as they don't understand my impulse to leave it as it is.
When I got dragged into rock climbing we used nuts, aluminum chocks developed by Yvonne Chounaird (The Great Coonyard). These chocks didn't harm the rock, once you removed them it was as if they'd never been there. Properly used they're as secure as a piton.
Pitons were never cool but they were all that you had.
Climbs are rated by difficulty. I forget what 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class climbs are, probably hikes. Fourth class climbs are scrambles
Click images for desktop size: "Dusty Springfield" where you need yo use your hands to go up but no technical climbing or equipment is needed. Fifth class is when you start to need gear. It gets crazy from then on going all decimal on you. From 5.0 all the way up to 5.10 (five ten not five one 5.1 Told you it got crazy.) When I was at the tail end of my climbing period there was a movement to add 5.11 (five eleven) or 6th class to the rankings. This was mainly to classify climbs that were probably considered impossible 5 years before.
The fellow who does the first ascent of a route gets to record it in the campground book and report it to Ascent Magazine. They also get to rate the route.
The ratings cause a lot of debate at night. I have to admit that in a sport that's primary enticements are pain and fear the bickering about how difficult a climb actually was safely on the ground was one of my favorite parts of the sport.
Thing is that there was a climb on Sentinel in Yosemite that was rated at 5.9, problem was that so many people had done the climb with pitons instead of nuts that the constant placing and removal of
Click images for desktop size: "Ensnared" by Shadowness the pitons had scarred the crack the route followed so severely that there was now a rock ladder leading to the summit. The piton scars were so deep it was possible to stick the toe of your boot into them and a 5.9 climb was degraded to a 5.2.
It was worse on desert climbs. Yosemite is granite, the desert is sandstone.
That's always my biggest fear. That a 5.11 planet is gradually being degraded to a 5.2
Surfers all have our stories. Sitting out at your favorite point break and suddenly realizing your sitting in the middle of a 200 yard wide pool of raw sewage. Or that time down south when the ocean was suddenly thick with empty used hypodermic needles, needles you saw stuck in the thick hides of the harbor seals. Harbor seals can be aggravating but never to the point where I wanted to stick needles in them.
Every surfer knows at least one guy who caught hepatitis from stuff that we've dumped in the ocean. And we've all had days where the beach was black balled not because of outrageously high surf but because some George Bush supporting company had dumped mega tons of toxic chemicals in the ocean that would kill, blind or skin you.
This was going on for a long time before Al Gore "invented" global warming. Anyone who's stood on top of a rock in Joshua Tree and looked out at the Salton Sea has watched the clouds of yellow pollution drift in from L.A. Clouds that ring and touch the stones and ground as nastily as a leaky pen in your shirt pocket.
Now the Arctic caps are melting, by miles now instead of feet and it keeps happening.
Today is Earth Day. I feel about that the same way about that as I do about "Be Kind To Animals Week". I mean, who would ever be mean to animals? Who would be stupid enough to throw litter out of cars and destroy the place where you have to live the rest of your life? Why do we need to remind ourselves to not be cruel heartless jerks? It does not speak well for us.
It does make me even prouder of my friend that she's sacrificing in her paycheck to help us not be so stupid.

Just got a call from the team manager making sure I'd be at the meeting tonight. Its nice to be wanted.
I've got my list of equipments and my questions all ready. I'm mildly excited. I still don't really want to be an HC but it will pay off for the team and for me, I'm certain.

Posted by David at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Crimson Dawn" by Spargett With constant disk repair and running a full series of diagnostic and repair tools I'm keeping the iMac running. Running acceptably.
That's good because I'm going to need this thing to get ready for the season. I want to start prepping a playbook and do those other "coacherly" things. I used to be impressed when I'd go to pre-season coaches meetings and I'd see a coach there with a 4 inch binder over filled with his playbook. I always figure that this was one heck of of coach, a lot better than I could ever be. Then our teams would meet in the season and we'd beat them 80-0.
I never figured it out. I have a good friend who coaches O-Line at a
Click images for desktop size: "Bob Dylan" high school. He has a 400 page playbook! But its not really a playbook. It has some O-Line plays in it but the book is mainly a preparation, a how to book on the theory of playing the Line, dietary and strength needs. The whole shebang.
Each season he says he has to throw out about 100 pages and maybe add in 50 or sixty. Now he's a coach who's a lot better than I'll ever be.
See, I don't know how to prepare a playbook until I see what kind of kids I have. This Saturday a couple of coaches were waxing rhapsodic about how much they love the pulling guard. The pulling guard is where, for example, you would get your right guard to run down to the left side of the line and turn forward and block so you have an extra surprise blocker for your running back. I agree that it is a pretty play. In all my years of coaching I've only had one guard who had the speed to reach his assignment.
The coaches talked some more about the difficulty in getting their tackles alert enough to know to pick up any backside pursuit. A defensive end could read the pull and follow it. Their solution to having slow guards was to give the Running Back some extra steps in the backfield so that he couldn't get to the proposed hole until the guard got there.
I won't ever coach against these guys which is good. I hope that this attitude is prevalent throughout
Click images for desktop size: "Angel Fish" by Unknown the league. When I see a slow guard pull the call is simple. You have the Defensive end hold his position which nullifies the tackle looking for back side pursuit, the middle line backer shadows the pulling guard and the Strong Safety pursues the pulling guard on a run blitz.
In college and high school ball that should either stop the play for no gain or limit it to 3 yards. At this level it should result in a three yard loss and 40% of the time a turn over.
If I get lucky and get a running back with that much speed I'll use cross blocking to open up seams and pound him up the A and B gaps for 4 yards a clip all day.
If I've got a guard who can turn and cover 4 yards in the time it takes my running back 7 yards I'll run a couple pulling plays to set up the decoy and go opposite and use the full back to pick off the Defensive End while the TE knocks off the Sam Backer.
And if I don't have players who can remember all that we just do straight ahead blocking and run a spread like running game.
Thing is I like a wide open game. I like 50 yard passes on the corner route. But if I've got a QB who can only throw the ball twenty yards I sort of have to adapt and do something different.
I never saw the job of coaching as being something to please myself. I think of it as a chance to give kids their best opportunity at success. I can't figure out what method that might be until I've seen what the kids can do and what they like to do.
Sure I try to get my QB to throw 50 yard lasers. I try to get my RB's to run 4.2 forties. But if they can't my job is to figure out what we can do with the talent they have.
The only thing I can use to justify my unconventional approach is to say that in the last 10 years of coaching my teams have led their league in scoring 9 times and in total yardage 8 times. I've always been incredibly lucky in the talent that's been entrusted to me to teach so maybe if I went in with a system already planned out and fit the kids to the system the kids would have been even
Click images for desktop size: "Brunette" by Archie Dickens more successful. I don't really know.
I've got my list of stuff I need for the first practice: 2 stop watches 3 whistles, a ladder, some cones and some step over blocks. And some bodies to fit in the whistles and stop watches. A Defensive Coordinator would be nice too.

My friend got home at 7:15 last night. That puts it at a 32 hour day. She survived it pretty well.
The month stays pretty rough with a new boss, budgets etc. She gets a couple weeks off in May. We're going to pain the porch. Probably being ably assisted by nosey dogs.
We actually watched a Zatoichi movie! I'm mildly surprised she's become a Shintaro Katsu fan. This was the eleventh Zatocihi film and there's no denying that Katsu has definitely worked incredibly hard on developing the character. He's made a sad, funny and never pathetic creature. His sword fighting in this one is very good. Its easy to believe that the carnage is being perpetuated by a blind man. I think bathos is more enjoyable than pathos and bathos always works best when its resolved with gallons of stage blood.

I've checked my puppy's email. I was amazed that she had nearly one thousand. All from kids in hospitals. They don't get to see much spring in the hospital.
I made up a maze game for her site. I thought it would be a quick and easy thing to do. It took me six weeks and five drafts. The final thing had 28 layers! Normally I'm amazed to get 4 or 5 layers in a picture. I'm glad the kids like it. Much gladder than I am sad that they are where they are.
The main crux of their emails is that we need to have more adventures!
I also notice that a lot of the kids thank my puppy but almost none even acknowledge I exist! The few that do think I should give my puppy more ice cream . . .

My health feels better. The old complaints are not improving. They'll bug me but not inhibit me, I think. No doubt they'll improve just enough so I can be uncomfortable but still able to do all the porch painting . . .

Posted by David at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "A Day in the Park" by George Serault It's been a pretty eventual set of days. Shape shifting days. All for the good, I think.
The biopsy came back. It was negative.
That's pretty good. Pretty good. That puts my remission at just shy of 21 months. That's the longest remission I've ever had. I guess that makes me a record holder.
After the trek to the oral surgeon and that bit of news my friend dropped me at the blood lab. I was feeling light headed from the fast and absolute lack of coffee. They took 6 little tubes and one big one. Then the creepy urine sample.
I was talking to the blood taker. She was slick and professional but
Click images for desktop size: "Buck Owens" seemed a touch preoccupied. She's being tested for Hodgkins Disease.
Not a pleasant future, Hodgkins Disease. I said a few consoling words but cut myself short when I flashed at how I felt about "comforting words".
She made a point of saying goodbye to me so I guess its alright.
After giving up the blood I broke the fast with a cup of coffee. Made me feel better, at least I felt that I could make the walk home.
On the walk I ran into a guy. About my first day in town I ran into him before. He was out walking his dog and slipped. Busted his head open pretty good. That day I would have walked past because he was already surrounded with sympathetic types at least one who appeared to know what he was doing, or at least he was doing pretty much what I would have done.
I only got involved because he had this little dog, a beagle mix, maybe a pure bred. My friend and I
Click images for desktop size: "Aquatic Beauty" by TitusBoy hashed out his address and took the scared little thing home.
The guy had no real memory of me but he remembered that day. We walked and chatted about dogs a bit before he turned to go home. The dog jumped on my leg for a pet then waddled away.
On Saturday I went to the "Equipment Fitting Seminar". It was as dull as I expected. The people attending were interesting. There were even a few players who were there to act as mannequins. I liked the people I met.
There was one thing I'd never seen before. A new helmet strapping configuration for little kids.
Its not more simple, its actually a pretty complicated system. I can't see how it would protect the kids any better but then I can't understand the different types of plastic they use in little kid helmets either.
After the equipment fitting we went to the animal shelter. We walked in fine but when I asked to see a dog they said that we were too early! It was after 10.
So we went to a restaurant for breakfast. The place was an old favorites of my friend, even though it had been years since she'd been there she glowed in hungry anticipation.
Her food was excellent. We watched it as they accidentally sent it on a tour of all three floors of the restaurant. Even then it was still warmer than mine.
Hers was excellent. I managed to pry a couple of mouthfuls from her. Mine was horrible. Cold yet somehow over cooked in some places and undercooked in others. Even her fruit salad was better! She got all sorts of different fruit while I got one piece of papaya and 3 hunks of flavorless melon!
I figure they remembered her ad disliked me for keeping her away for so long . . .
Finally we got to see a dog. We took a big Burmese cross out for a walk. The dog was fascinating. As overjoyed as she was to be outside of the kennel she was still constantly aware of us. It appeared that she was merely ignoring us but when my friend walked to a garbage can the dog froze and watched and did not move until my friend returned.

Click images for desktop size: "Surf" by Unknown I tried an experiment. I went and walked around a full pine tree so I'd be out of sight. Sure enough the dog froze. She sat right in front of my friend and stared at her as if to say, "Now's our chance! We can escape from him!" It was that sort of day for me.
Sunday was brighter, although not so warm and furry.
The coordinator from the Rescue Group came for our interview. Our dogs were incredibly well behaved. I was proud of them. She stayed for well over two hours. We'll have out first foster next Saturday or Sunday.
I couldn't be happier.
Or so I thought.
Just after the coordinator left I got the call from the football team. I'm the new Head Coach for the 12 year old squad.
I really didn't want to be an HC but it will make some things easier while adding a lot more work. On Wednesday is the coaches meeting where they'll lay out the schedule. I'll find out about equipment and if I can get a couple of bodies to run stop watches and to be eyes.
My friend has volunteered to be my clip board. Some of you know how I like to walk around and bark down observations. Its better to bark them out then to squiggle them on a pad. Mainly because 10 minutes after practice my notes are suddenly indecipherable.
I've already started mapping out the first practice so I can make a definitive list of equipment I can ask about.
I plan to tell them about "STAR" (Strength, Tenacity, Agility, Remembering) while they're running.
My goals for the team in the first season will be: 1) To have fun 2) To learn more about football 3) To learn what it means to be part of a team 4) Win the Championship and in that order. If we do the first three well the fourth will automatically happen.
My friend was awake all night working on her Qtr end stuff. I'm not happy about that but I guess better up all night at home than at the office.
She's been using the MacBook with Parallels to do the Citrix stuff. So far its been working pretty well, except this morning Windows XP crashed! It didn't even take down Parallels, just your basic stupid Windows crash.
The decent part was that it crashed in the middle of a save. The nights work was able to be recovered.
She went into the office. I'm worried about anyone being up all night and then being in an office on a rainy day.
My computer continues to limp along, now the console is throwing up wird kernel missed interrupt errors . . .

Posted by David at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Princess of the Day" by Unknown Yesterday it was warm enough to leave the house door open. The gentle dog went to work with my friend, that meant the giant dog and my puppy were here and able to come from outside to inside at their whim.
Odd side effect; I started to notice that ever ten to twelve minutes my puppy would come inside, look at me and then trot back outside.
It didn't matter what she was doing always she came back inside to see if I was still there. Maybe she just wanted to see if I was
Click images for desktop size: "Elizabeth Taylor" passing out pork chops or bacon. I don't know.She could have been bird watching, bark fighting or just running around tormenting the giant dog but she'd just stop and come rushing inside, look at me and then run back outside.
Considering the day started out with her following my friend and gentle dog to the car, jumping into the car (she hates cars) and then refusing to leave, determined to go for the ride, I don't know what to make of it at all.
There's a new wrinkle to the foster dog quest. The chow/shepherd mix we were going to take in is pregnant!
She's nine months old. I get a pretty grim image of her young life. There's no certification but it seems to me she'd have had to get pregnant during her first heat. General attitude is that its best for a female dog to be spayed before her first heat. This greatly reduces the possibility and probability of several fatal diseases including some cancers.
The people who had this dog, who shortly thereafter gave the dog away on a website classified site
Click images for desktop size: "Pin Up" by Suzanne Meunier either intentionally bred the too young dog or else they were so neglectful they left the girl in a position to be bred.
I feel the same way about this as I did when I saw a twelve year old girl pushing a pram on a London estate. I asked her if she was watching her brother and she informed me that the baby in the pram was her son. I was well known on that estate and the next day the little girl's mother came to see me about her child joining my sports club. The mother of the mother was closer to twenty-five than to thirty. She dressed to meet me. She'd seen me on TV or something so she dressed in her best. Even though it was ten in the morning she was kited out in her best all night rave gear. (The little girl mom became a gifted high jumper.)
I feel sad for the chow/shepherd mix. We're willing to take her in and keep her until she and her puppies are adopted. Not without serious reservations and heart skipping and a tiny bit of sly joy at being surrounded with puppies. The people who fostering her now are willing to keep her until the puppies are weaned. They also note that the people who surrendered the girl to the kill shelter reported a lot of bad behaviour. They've had the girl longer than they did and they see not an inkling of the reported behaviours.
Since they're willing to give the girl a home it seems better for her to not have her moving around. A poor young dog about to give birth, lost in confusion and not having any place to go to understand needs some stability, I think. It just seems better for her not to have to readjust to a new home.
I'm disappointed slightly, for me, but think its best for her.
In the meanwhile the foster dog coordinator will be here on Sunday. We'll get clear on the fact that we're willing to foster the most at risk dogs so long as they don't try to savage our guys forever and ever.

Click images for desktop size: "Unknown" by Unknown Tomorrow is my first coaches meeting. Looking forward to it. Hopefully they'll be a bit closer to my role. I don't mind being a head coach but I'd prefer working a position.
I've been running through first day practices both ways in my head. Most often in the shower. I'd like to get things firmed down so I can move beyond first day! Practice starts on April 22nd for the summer league.
I figure the first day will be in getting some measurables; forty times and such. If I've got linemen then we'll also get standing high jump numbers. Kids like prove of improvement. So do adults.
Then some group SAQ drills so I can assess the kids and see where they need improvement. That should about run them to death. Then some helmet only football drills mainly for assessments to lay out a plan and to see what sort of scheme the kids might be able to learn and implement.
I chatter at them during drills and its from the chatter that I start to form my psychological assessment. Not only to see who can be relied on in crunch time but how they're going to cope with life on and off the field.
Maybe not the best way but its the only way I know how.
Right now I don't even know if I'll let them call me by name or ask them to call me coach. It always depends.

My friend is home sick now. I have a hare brained theory that the pressures of her Qtr end and other work related things are what cause her to breakdown. She can handle a lot. (Hey, she can cope with me and that ain't easy).
I have to bumble on with prep for the weekend (coaching, visiting animal shelter, getting some hardware to repair some fences, foster coordinator and doggie playtime) and to do my best to be an inept nurse.

I do note with sadness that the guys from the Pirate Bay have been found guilty. This is not shocking. Freedom has to be fought for. They're fighting. But the RIAA and MPAA's wins are just bad for consumers and the world. Another step toward corporate take over of our lives.
I never cared much for the Pirate Bay. Never used it but I liked that it existed and will continue to exist.
The ridiculous sentence did not include ordering the site shut down.
I also note that for every loss their is a victory. Time Warner has abruptly backed off on the insane pricing plans. They haven't given up but have seemed to want to wait till October before going ahead. Probably figure they need to buy off a few more senators.

Posted by David at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Click images for desktop size: "Night and Day" by Michael Parkes On Tuesday for some reason I decided to wash my phone. In the washing machine with my jeans. I don't understand why I next decided to dry it in the dryer, with my jeans.
I heard something clunking around in the dryer but put it off to heavy jean zippers. It wasn't until I emptied the dryer that I started to find all the parts of the phone. Four of them to be exactly.
As my phone is the cheapest Samsung model made, free, sort of, with a pay as you go plan, I didn't have much hope but I
Click images for desktop size: "Robert Mitchum" reassembled it anyway and I was surprised that it worked just as well as it did before.
There's some peculiar stippling on the screen but everything is still legible. I figure the stippling adds character and will be prove positive, should it ever be stolen or lost, that its my phone.
Comforting. I now have a bit of respect for Samsung.
This goes along with me not getting my blood work done today. The doc told me it was necessary to fast for twelve hours before the test.
I have to take four pills a day with food. Every morning I convince my body that coffee is food and I take two of the pills with coffee. Works fine. The doc insists that coffee is NOT food.
Last night I started the fast. Not that big a deal. This morning I went to the lab and was told I had not been fasting as I had a cup of coffee.

Click images for desktop size: "August Night Fire" by Moving Insect This does not upset me as much as it pleases me. I now have proof that coffee is food and my pill regime is totally justified and with expert testimony!

I've been asked why I spend some much time worrying about chambara flic's like those of Kenji Misumi.
I think Misumi is a world class filmmaker. As much an artist as anyone can be who makes movies. I think that in understanding his movies we come closer to understanding parts of ourself and parts of others that were previously dark and maybe hidden. A part of humanity that no other filmmaker is dealing with or at least not dealing with so clearly and concisely and intentionally.
I think that we all relate to movies and art based on a lot of different factors. One of the most important ones, right after being entertained, is identification. Identifying with a situation, a fantasy or hope but most often with a character.
If you look at the top grossing movies, something like the "Titanic" the first movie to do a billion bucks in business, shows the identification factor pretty well. Men related to DiCaprio, king of the world, dying frozen, sacrificing himself for love, a selfish sacrifice that will forever lock his pale features into her brain and extol their love to mythic proportions at least to her. Women related to the lady being old and rich having that golden memory to cling to, a memory crystalized in a trinket.
I hated the "Titanic".
I feel the same way about Misumi's films. His lead character's provide me with something I can relate to; a character with no hope who refuses to die. What this says about my mental state compared to a guy who wants to die gloriously frozen in the dark Atlantic doesn't seem worth speculating about.
The fact that most of Misumi's resolutions seem to be that the lead simply kills everybody is the fantasy element and the entertainment part of the equation.
What is fascinating is how each character arrives at his moment of despair, the time when he discovers his dreams are gone, and with the dreams gone so is his life. And the fact that the lead has to think through and discover a solution to not dying is instructional.
A character like "The Mute Samurai" who merely goes mad and decides he has to make enough
Click images for desktop size: "Old Mill" by Maxfield Parrish money to go to Spain and kill holds almost no interest to him. The blind Zatoichi who fights to keep his humour and his vision of a world at peace and in proper order are his main interest.
His Ito Ogami who seeks reprieve by adhering closely to the tenets of bushido, rightness and politeness interest him, that the man stays sane in the face of lies and duplicity and condemnation is his meat. Staying this righteous, sane and pure enables Misumi's heroes to have the strength, mindset and ability to destroy small armies single handedly.
Misumi understands he needs to show us this blood letting power in a way that lures us into the tale and does not turn us away in horror, hence he constructs his bloody flowers of overwhelming peace extolling a loveliness of death and carnage.
So after seeing a minor Misumi film, such as his modern "Sword" where a kendo student seeks absolution in the glory of steel as opposed to wood, I leave the viewing with a different sense of the world around me and the people who inhabit it. I always thought, I was taught, that this is the main function and aspiration of all "art".

Yesterday was Tax Day. I'm chagrined about all these Tea Bag protests. Seems silly even as Roger Ailes tried to hype them as significant. Ailes is all about the dollar. His plan to try and get a grass roots thing going smacks of the loser tactic that has been in place since Caesar.
I forget that as stupid and transparent as these sorts of scams are every millennia or so they actually work. So I can't really be surprised that a rich white guy would try this silly stunt.
I wish people were protesting real things though. I'm sickened that Obama is fulfilling some of my worst nightmares. He's loading the DOJ with RIAA attorneys, the worst scum bag lawyers in existence are getting power.
Time Warner, the scuzziest of the mass media companies wants to restrict people's access to knowledge and information. With their plan you'd pay fifty bucks for enough internet access to make 10 minutes of VOIP calls, pay half your bills on-line and visit no other web pages while being allowed to receive about 3 unsecured emails a day. That is not fair or competitive. All of this based on an infrastructure that was built by us, the tax payers. An infra structure they have not updated or done decent upkeep on even though showing massive profits.
They justify this by claiming they have a responsibility to their share holders, conjuring up images of your granny not having to eat cat food because she got that sweet TWC dividend check. But the reality is that the guys demanding this outrageous increase in price are the major shareholders. So they're raking in massive unfair profits for themselves.
The latest figures show that CEO's still receive a wage 300 times larger than the workers.
Where the hell is Obama here? Why is he not threatening to force TWC and AT&T to repay the money they were given in the form of right of way and land use, municipality funded cable and monopolistic contracts by reducing the tariff? Resulting in free internet for a generation?
No protesters?

Posted by David at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Mourning Her Warrior Dead" by Charles Marion Russell Its seems I was mistaken about the dog shelters here. Blind man and the elephant thing.
The two shelters I've been to were non-kill shelters ergo I decided they're all non-kill. They're not.
The dogs we're fostering come from the kill shelter.
I begrudgingly concede that there might be a place in the world for kill shelters. Some dogs have been so cruelly tormented, usually by humans, that the end of life is the only way to end the poor creature's anguish.
I thoroughly believe that every animal and every person can become an important and necessary part of this world if they're
Click images for desktop size: "Winning Hand" by Unknown only given a chance.
I have to concede that not everyone is capable of giving people and animals that second chance. Some of us have to work so hard to protect ourselves that its near impossible to drop the armour long enough to let an alien thing into our hearts. Understanding takes a toll too, even though I know the rewards are great so is the risk.
One of my fosters, Jack, was at death's door. He'd been fostered and even they couldn't cope with him. So he ended up with me. I never knew what the problem was. It was a lot of little things. Nothing that meant anything. He was fine. The only thing we couldn't cope with that he was worse than my puppy. When we went on walks the two of them were of the school of getting there fastest and getting back home even faster, and if they had to drag me along to do it so be it. He got better but that's just the way he is. He calmed down a lot, got curious about stuff and learned it was okay to love people.
That this is a kill shelter makes the decision about what pups to foster a lot easier. My urge is to
Click images for desktop size: "Market Scene by Candle Ligh" by Schendel van Petrus say, "Just give us all of them scheduled to die tomorrow," which isn't fair to them or to the dogs living with me now.
It looks like the pup we'll take will be a 9 month old chow/shepherd mix. YOW! Big girl. She was a surrender. The people who gave her up got her for free via one of those CraigsList permutations that runs locally. So they put about fifty cents worth of gas into her and gave her nearly a week to fit in.
She's head shy, afraid of children, afraid of other dogs. If you'd had three homes and a shelter in your life you'd feel pretty shy and scared too. She's being judged for temperament now. The only thing that worries me about a new dog is that it not be cruel to the dogs that live with me now. No vicious attacks. Yelling at them, nipping at them I understand and deal with but snarling ripping attacks are out.
I have a commitment to my family. The dogs who are my family members will help a foster and be fine. They deserve most of my consideration at first. They deserve to feel safe in their home. If it seems hypocritical to place one animal's safety in front of another's I can live with being a hypocrite. The dogs and I have struggled to learn to live together and to be happy together. They are family and they deserve my protection as we welcome another family member into our lives.
We'll see how it plays out. I'm excited.

Yesterday was a pretty wasted mess. Too tired. Too cold.
I got the minimum done which is good enough most days.
I watched another episode of "The Mute Samurai". Mainly to see Misumi's direction. Misumi's episode was different in tone and effect than the rest of the series. Clearly personal. It was called, "The Girl with Blue Eyes" and was about a blonde gajin girl who washed ashore in the arms of her dead mother. The little girl is adopted by a kindly grandfather type. The rest of the village was prepared to let the infant to simply die. Even
Click images for desktop size: "Anime" by Unknown now with the girl only five years old they spit on her, revile her for being a foreigner.
The little girl is lonely. She spends her days wetting her hair and praying to the goddess of the stream that her fiery red hair will miraculously turn black.
A wanted outlaw comes into the area. He breaks into the grandpa's house and forces them to give him food. He does not harm them. He talks to the little girl, roughly and harshly but without prejudice. Then he leaves.
The next day the little girl is playing at the beach. There's commotion at the village bulletin board. They are all looking at the wanted poster for "Sabu", the outlaw who broke into her house. She goes to hear what they're saying and the adult women push her aside, calling her dirty and disgraceful.
The little girl goes home and begins making rice cakes and tea. She packs them into bamboo containers and heads off. She goes to the mountains and walks along a desolate path shouting the outlaw's name.
Sabu comes out and grabs her. She tells him she figured he must be hungry and offers him the rice cakes and tea. He eats them greedily.
They're by a stream. As the little girl tells him what is happening in town she goes about her odd ritual of wetting her hair from the stream. She tells Sabu of her prayers to have black hair.
Sabu tells her he will turn her hair black if she brings him food everyday. She eagerly agrees and they continue talking.
Sabu uses her to deliver messages and to bring him food. She takes him to a deep cave, a better place to hide that only she knows about.
Finally Kiichi Hogan comes into the story. Kiichi is here for the reward. This time we see the subtle differences between Misumi's Ito Ogami, Lone Wolf, and Hogan. Ogami walks the path of hell but he is a complete, ruthless but sane, man. Kiichi Hogan is obsessive, loaded with rage and hate that his silence forces him to hold all inside of him. He's insane but has the saving grace of being a good man at his core.
In Misumi's episodes Hogan is not even allowed the ecstasy of voice over. He is just a massive unhinged killer who's innate goodness prohibits him from taking the easy way out.
Surprisingly this episode has almost no sword play, very little action at all. Hogan finds Sabu but at the little girl's entreaties he does not fight him and capture him. He leaves.
Other bounty hunters don't have his morals. They figure out the little girl is Sabu's contact. They grab her, hold her and without her help find Sabu's hiding place.
They're afraid to go into the deep cave and ferret him out so they tie the little girl to a tree and start to beat her with sticks, yelling into the cave that they'll stop beating the girl if Sabu comes out
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown to be killed.
Sabu does. The little girl yells, "I never told them anything!"
Sabu replies, "I know that."
The bounty hunters and gang surround Sabu. They forget the beaten little girl. With no announcement Hogan comes up behind her. He cuts her ropes, freeing her. She looks at him and then runs to Sabu.
With little flash Hogan kills the bad guys. That's it for action.
The episode ends with Sabu about to go to prison. He turns to the little girl and promises to take care of her when he is released. He also apologizes to her for lying that he could turn her golden hair black. The cop then tells the little girl she should be proud of her differences. She made a black soul like Sabu's white due to her differences. She is a gift from the gods.

Posted by David at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "The Long and the Tall" by Unknown The giant dog woke me. Simple method; barked in my face till I got up.
He was only the emissary. The other two dogs were agitated and waiting for me to get up and open the door. There was something in the yard.
I let them out. Typical non-event. And little barking.
They're all asleep now. My friends asleep. The whole house is silent except for me.
Headphones on. Staring at LCD screens and thinking. Always thinking even when the thoughts are just about white noise and guitar strings.
My puppy stayed in the office with me for a while. I was boring. She left.
She did her job. She reminded me that no matter how dark the night I'm not alone, never alone. Free? As free as I can be I guess. Freedom in exchange for never being alone seems a fair deal. Never alone against no responsibility, no love, just me and my pills and my pain.
Maybe the deal is too much in my favour.
Some good news yesterday. Very good news.
It started when the Animal Rescue service called. We're going to get to be foster dog parents.
Very cool.
All that's left is the house visit. Which just means some house cleaning. There's little question this is a home built for dogs.
My friend wants me to find out about us getting a shelter license. Where we could have as many dogs as we saw fit (and could afford). I still have a strong distaste for dealing with governments but the pay off would be kind of astonishingly great.
Both my friend and I are experienced fosters. I love having the dogs come in. Its a positive for everyone. Our dogs get to meet and adapt to another personality, the foster gets out of the shelter.
Click images for desktop size: "Marvel Comics Presents" Even the nice shelters are pretty hellish, at least to me.
My last foster was in an area that still believed in kill shelters. There the fostering had a more poignant edge. The poor dogs had either me or death. This never stopped any of them from making my life pleasantly miserable. One foster ate a wall, I've lost countless frozen pizzas off of kitchen counters. One foster I loved had this incredible ability to dig a three foot hole in under 5 seconds!
My puppy would argue with them, play with them. My puppy used to like to lay out her stuffed toys in the sun light. She would spend an amazing amount of time laying them out and arranging them, then she would just lie down and stare at them. I guess she was feeling wealthy.
All of the fosters respected her little arrangements, until her back was turned. then they'd steal her toys and actually play with them like a dog is intended to.
Here they don't have any kill shelters. It sort of puts the lie to the myth that kill shelters provide any sort of service. Even though the pups aren't facing unjust execution their lives are still sadly miserable.
The shelters here are nice. The shelters in LA are a disgrace. Visiting any of them is tantamount to seeing the undiscussed circle of hell. Here they're clean. Each dog has a room, not a cage, but its still prison. No dog is happy until someone stops to talk at them, and when the person leaves they sink back into their lonely misery.
One thing this agency does that is different from any past
Click images for desktop size: "Marty Robbins" experience; they let you pick which dog to foster.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. My experience is that the coordinator calls me and says that if I don't take this or that puppy they'll die tomorrow.
Its an unfair pressure I don't mind.
Here we had to go through the web site and pick one.
Considering that both my friend and I are prone to the "oh, hell, just give me all of them" syndrome and "we'll figure out how to deal with it as things come up" affliction, this is dangerous.
We picked two dogs for more info on. Both are Belgian mix breeds. In the pictures both dogs look terrified and terribly sad.
The female is a terv mix, about 18 months old. She was picked up on the street. No one ever claimed her. This makes me figure she was abandoned. Driven someplace and kicked out of the car to "wander lost and lonely like a cloud".
The male has a face too much like my puppy's. He's about 6 months. A surrender. That means that some one decided that his black fur didn't coordinate well with the new carpet, or his toes clicking on the linoleum grated on their nerves.
That's harsh. There are probably several good reasons for taking someone into your life and then cruelly dumping them. I can't think of any. At least its better than abandoning them to their own
Click images for desktop size: "I Feel You" by Jose Manchado devices. I don't really think so but it sounds like it should be better.
We'll know this weekend when we get the home inspection. I'll take the cowardly way out and let my friend make the final pick. I figure let both of them stay here, even though I know I could never cope with two new scared dogs, but I guess I'd figure it out.
I also love the idea of meeting the perspective adopting people. Its nothing but a warm experience.
The other nice news is that the football club apparently wants me to coach. They haven't figured out the assignments yet but they want me attend the "fitting" clinic this Saturday.
This is the clinic where they show coaches the right way to wear shoulder pads and the proper sizing and strapping for helmets.
Its been a lot of years since I had to attend something like this. I expect to be pleasantly bored.
I used to keep up with this stuff by listening to the salesman. Eastman, Riddle, Air etc were always making alterations to their equipment, innovations maybe. Th salesman would demonstrate and point out any differences in how the gear should be worn.
I'll be most interested in meeting my fellow coaches. I hope there aren't any militaristic win-at-all-costs types. Most of the time you can't recognize the type until game day. They've learned to disguise it.
If that weren't enough my computer worked all day. Its still going.
My friend is learning to love her MacBook. She using Parallels along with gr to do her job and keep it all on her Mac.
The only slight negative is that yesterday was the last day of her four days off. This is the start of her Quarter End which means I probably not really see her until this weekend.
Its a bearable absence.

Posted by David at 5:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Interleaved" by Lawn Elf My mother always had a lot of friends. They were usually young women.
I didn't understand it at the time but often one of these women would end up staying with us. They were unwed expectant mothers. They had no place to go. Even though we lived in near poverty my mother always opened our home to them.
At first I didn't understand what pregnant even meant. I just knew it was some lady that worked at the concession stand at the drive-in with my mother. They stayed with us, got fat and then they weren't around anymore.

Click image: "Day Dream" by Paul Fischer It always felt a little bit empty when they'd leave.
My mother continued doing this even after she got married. My stepfather didn't mind having another attractive woman in the house. From my step-father I heard a lot f disparaging phrases: Round heels, shacked up and stupid, knocked up and broke, and one I still don't really get, tripped the guy and beat him to the ground.
I liked the young women. They'd stare at me sometimes in a funny way I couldn't grasp but I liked them well enough. One in particular fascinated me. She was a morose girl, from the east coast she was as close to a beatnik as I'd ever seen. She said "cool" a lot and wore black turtle necks and a beret. That's as close to a beatnik as you could get in Southern California. The climate is not conducive to introspection. She might have been my first love.
She would borrow my red card board record player and play this one album, Gregory Corso's "Happy Birthday to Death".
To me this was a weird record. It wasn't songs. It was this guy, Corso, reading his poetry while this bongo player just wailed away. I liked the bongo's at least. I'd sit with her while she played this. Partially to protect my precious record player and partly because she'd talk to me. I had little idea of what she was talking to me about but she spoke so seriously and intently it made me feel like I was being treated as an adult.

Click images for desktop size: "Book Cover" by JW McGinnis After one of her soliloquies I felt like I should fill the silence so I'd ask a stupid question that seemed important to me. Like, on the record, it bugged me that after each cut the people didn't clap and applaud but they'd snap their fingers and shuffle their feet. It seemed weird then and now.
Now I realize it gives me the impression of some guy who got rich for the day at the race track and was at some lurid live sex show and this sweaty guy keeps shouting out, "Oh yeah baby!" while the rest of the raincoat crowd pretends to ignore him.
Anyway after I'd ask my stupid question the beatnik girl (who's name I can't remember) would tussle my hair gently, look at me sadly and give me a hug, sometimes even a kiss on the cheek.
I'd just started drum lessons then. I didn't have a set. I just had the rubber practice pad and anything else that fell under my drumsticks.
I liked the bongos. Liked them a lot. And then actually found a set at a yard sale. Cost a quarter. I think they were used more for decoration than for playing. Something to throw on the lanai for the tiki torch parties that were popular in the neighborhood.
I'd also only heard bongos on the record. I didn't know they were played by hand. It only took a couple of days for me to put the drumsticks through the skins. A whole quarter wasted. The price of a comic book down the tubes.
The beatnik girl who seldom noticed me except she was going through some sort of maternal angst, tried to show me how to use them, playing along with her Corso record. I wasn't interested in her bad music lessons so I listened to the words, Corso's words:
I stand in the dark light in the dark street and look up at my window,
I was born there.
The lights are on; other people are moving about.
I am with raincoat; cigarette in mouth,
hat over eye, hand on gat.
I cross the street and enter the building.
The garbage cans haven't stopped smelling.

Click images for desktop size: "Frank Sinatra" by Unknown I liked that.
I guess beatnik girl felt some maternal streak and decided to tell me about Corso, stuff she'd read on the record sleeve. Corso got sent to prison 3 times. For stealing a toaster, a suit and breaking into his school to have a warm place to sleep. All before he was 17. He was imprisoned as an adult with Mafia hoods and murders.
Prison scared me. I didn't think of poets as tough guys who could survive prison. I thought prisons were where you went to die.
I found out it was easier to read poetry than to listen to it. Even with bongos it's easier to read.
Corso's stuff was funny and mean. There was a picture on the back of one f beatnik girls books. He looked like a handsome prize fighter.
Poetry had its own music to it. It wasn't song lyrics. The best song lyrics, to me, are slogans, something to counterpoint the beat.
Poetry carried its own beat. For Corso it was tough and percussive. Words barking out at the night before heading into the long howl of the end of us all.
I can't remember beatnik girl's name, or her face. But I remember Corso.

I'm getting used to my new mouth. Brushing my teeth is still a hassle. Eating is a chore but not an impossible one.
Blood pressure is still all over the place but always slightly too high.
The pain in my right shoulder is aggravating. I remember that when I had similar in the left it took me three months or more of daily exercise to finally sort it out. Since my left elbow and thumbs are still gimpy I feel a bit lost most of the time. Making coffee is more of a chore. It feels like one of the labours of Hercules getting the kettle plugged in. Reaching for stuff, even light stuff takes grit.
The best thing about this weekend was that my friend has got four days off. Today's the last of them. I like her being around. I think she likes being around. I like to think that part of her pleasure at being home is that I'm here. Crabby people like to think that they are somehow an asset.
We watched the "hot" new Japanese film, "Ichi". That's the rethinking of Zatoichi. It replaces the cool blind masseur with a femme yetar player.
It was terrible. They cast some forgettable J-pop star as Ichi, I figure to try and catch the same lightening that fired the similar in intent "Azumi".
"Ichi" sucked. It was boring, meandering and a waste of the totally cool actors they did have in it.

Click images for desktop size: "Rapunzel" by Olivia No humanity. No soul. Bad fighting.

The iMac is giving me big fits. This morning it was all locked up. The UIServer crashed so couldn't do anything but reboot. Oddly it killed the network connection for some unknown reason. Then had to reboot it again after less than an hour. Everything just locked up and refused to quiesce. Still making daily back-ups, even though I forgot yesterdays.

Posted by David at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Rossetti and Dunton" by Dunn Not feeling well today. Whatever I think is wrong I've decided is wrong inside of me.
I'm to see the doctor on April 20th. Have to bring along all my numbers, my health diary.
Its obvious somethings wrong. After doing the lite exercise of working out the pain in my shoulder, Stretch it to the point where the pain just is about to start, then hold it for a count of 10 - repeat; trotting around the yard my blood pressure was 195 over 108. At the oral surgeons on Tuesday it was 180 over 90. Waking up its around 155 over 90.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown A year or so ago it never got above 130 over 70.
A year seems rapid to me. A rapid change.
I'm trying to resist self treatment. Diet is easy and obvious. Cut out sodium etc. I get twitched because I keep remembering the oncology team saying that it was important that I keep my blood pressure low, like my opthamologist was always telling me my eyes would do better if I kept my sugars at near hyperglycemic levels. Truths we hold to be self evident stuff.
My blood sugars are okay but not near the low levels I was keeping them at. Sometimes I think I'd do better if I would just get overwhelmed. Let panic take me someplace.
At least I can still laugh and think.
The giant dog has gone to work with my friend. The crazy thing jumped about four feet up in the air on his way to the car, he was so excited.
Inside my puppy let loose the saddest coyote/wolf howl I've ever heard from her. Its what prompted
Click images for desktop size: "Emotion Machine" by Unknown my trotting around the yard with her and gentle dog. My puppy gets the Kong. I chase her. Gentle dog latches on to my wrist and tries to keep me from catching her.
It must be a great game to them. They want to play it all the time.
It will be funny walking the two sane dogs. Easier on me but the giant dog's intent insanity sure makes every one of our expeditions a memorable adventure!
My mind may be wrapped up in morbidity but I can still think.
I've been watching a TV series. A Japanese TV series: The Mute Samurai. The first episode was entitled "The Man Who Lost The Ability to Sing" which is pretty RAH when you think about it.
What attracted me to it was the star, Tomisaburo Wakayama, of "Lone Wolf and Cub". Wakayama's brother Shintaro Katsu, Zatoichi, makes appearances. Hideo Gosha wrote the story! When I saw that a few episodes were directed by Misumi Kenji, it became must see stuff.
I'm watching them in order. They're pretty standard TV fair. I'm not keen on the pacing. The plot is that Kiichi's father was an honest judge in Nagasaki. He refused to turn a blind eye to the foreigners illegal drug smuggling so the foreigners killed him, his wife and slashed Kiichi's throat and left him to die so he could watch the foreigner's rape his fiancee.
Lots of reason for hopeless rage there.
Kiichi spends the show as a bounty hunter. He lives off the money but mainly is searching for criminals who can lead him to the foreigners. When the show picks up he's been on the quest for 18 years!!
He's become a deadly swordsman who's only fear is that the foreigners might have left Japan before he can kill them!
The humour of the stories comes from Kiichi's discovery that he only gets half as much money for bringing in the criminals dead. That and people making fun of the strong samurai that cannot speak. This is a tough show. In the first five minutes there's a graphic decapitation.
Misumi directs the third episode. It fit in to the series canon but because it's Misumi it takes an odder slant.
There are ideas that flow through all of Misumi's films. That's one of the requirements to be considered an "auteur". One of the most telling is his depiction of society and its relationship to his swordsmen. Society becomes a dense but single character in his films.
In this short film (which is what most of these TV episodes come across as) his concept of society gets clearer than ever before.

Click images for desktop size: "John Kennedy" Society and the people in it are vile, frightened contemptible things. Why shouldn't they be. Any hint of heroism from one of its part leads it to being rejected and destroyed by the society that protects itself above all else. Self preservation rules the vast majority. It is all they have.
And due to the low cruel lives they are forced into it is the superior man's instinctual need to love these people. To protect them and enable them to perhaps grow into something more than the miserable thing they are condemned to be.
And the superior man does this while not living amongst them, not ever letting them touch him lest they contaminate the purity of his love with their sodden reality.
Society's only touch of humanity comes from the women who maybe just as rough as their men but they have samurai's strength in their hearts. They are not afraid to show gratitude and realize their is pride in humility.
It would seem that this grim view of the world is essential to the power of Misumi's imagery. It forces him to construct his "fleur de mal" images of gore and beauty.
A world where the only thing worth loving is contemptible and represents dirt that you would never allow to taint your own soul is a tough place to live. That Misumi's heroes thrive in this world without regret and that they never let their love for their common man become infused with pity presents an image unlike any I've encountered in classical or existentialist literature. I guess it only works if you've got a heavy sword and the emotional where with all to calmly slay dozens at a pitch.
I'm going to take my pair of dogs out to explore a world that's not tinged with madness. I like walking all three of them. I always figure people see us and point while thinking to themselves, "There goes the luckiest man in the world."

Posted by David at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Death Rattle Comics 4" by Unknown I feel like an aged tiger today. A leery tiger waiting for the hunter he hears in the grass.
You know how in bad slasher movies there's that moment when there will be that shocking noise and it turns out to be a cat and you know its coming but you jump anyway? Even when you know that just as the victim realizes the slasher will appear behind them and get them anyway and you still laugh as the victim dies.

Click images for desktop size: "The Book Lover" by Kupka Its just a feeling that's hanging around me. Its funny though, of all the terrible things that have happened to me none of them were ever presaged. They always leveled me hard and unexpected.
Like an the anti-universe Roman Generals I used to mark the entire month with a black stone. I'd throw away the clothes I was wearing that day under the theory that they were cursed.
It doesn't take to long, with that method, to find every month marked with a black stone.
I don't know what I'm worried about, but I am. Maybe its the old if I imagine everything terrible then none of that terrible stuff will ever happen. Maybe.
Or maybe its been so long that I don't know how to handle happiness.

I'm not doing well with this antibiotic. Its making me queasy and gassy. I notice a slight reduction of the swelling today. Only slight but I did notice.

Click images for desktop size: "Desert Girl" by Dennis My blood pressure has been getting slightly lower since I'm not fighting the pain. 140 over 90 today, which is still too high but not as worrisome. My blood sugars are doing better as well.
I still have the brain shuddering pain in my left elbow and in my right shoulder. Lots of grunting and going "OW!" when I move. After the tooth extractions I got out of the habit of doing the exercises. I can get back into doing them for the right shoulder but I have no idea what to do for the elbow.

For some reason I found myself thinking a lot about North Korea. The people are starving. The people are escaping to China just to find food. People are dying from third world diseases that are associated with malnutrition but the government is testing billion dollar missile systems.
Children are dying and Kim Jong-Il is making weapons of war. Generals don't know how to feed a child let alone how to feed a people. Generals know how to make war. War is always their first solution.
I was jaw dropped by Sarah Palin making the statement that she was going to ensure that Alaska would use all of her power to protect America from the impending North Korean threat. Which sounds a lot like if Schwarzeneger decided that California was going to declare war on North Korea.
I thought it was illegal for local politicians to dictate a separate foreign policy. I mean what would a state do against a country?
Palin let her own people, she let Alaskan's starve and freeze to death but she's some how going to gather the resources to build a state wide security net? And she seemed to ignore that everything and everyone says the missile launch was pretty much a disaster, from the North Korean standpoint anyway.
She seems more like Kim Jong-Il than a viable Presidential candidate.

I've been following the USC spring camp pretty closely. Partially to ignore baseball's opening day. I'd really like to see Mitch Mustain take the starting job at QB. There's something I like about the kid. Aaron Corp seems to be the leader right now but I think Mustain will be the guy to lead the team back to the National Championship.
I don't have too many worries about the defense. It won't be as stifling as last years but It will still be top 10. Guys are improving, the secondary will be a monster. The linebackers are all experienced and deadly. I can't wait until August.


Click images for desktop size: "Dog" by S4W I've finally gotten some new stuff to listen to. Nashville Pussy, a band with a femme lead guitarist and a femme bass player. The new album is "From Hell to Texas". They're pretty good. They fall just south of great. There's something missing to propel them. I can't figure out exactly what.
I'm considering adding to this site. Just a little jukebox to share music. Its a little app called KavaTunes. It prepares a pretty spiffy looking set of php pages that mimic the look and feel of the iTunes music store OR an iPod. It then allows you to stream the music from my server or download it.
I was thinking I'd start out with my Top Ten Most Played songs and then add and adjust the next 10 monthly, so it would become like a Top 10, then a top 30 etc.
It might be fun for me, provide some cool non RIAA controlled music and prove beyond doubt that my listening habits are totally bizarre.
I forgot to mention that I updated the movie and genre listings. They're up to 3,400 movies. I keep having to explain on both lists you just have to click on the little buttons or titles to get more information and bigger artwork.
My friend got me a new chair for the computer! She had a gift certificate that was about to expire. I was touched that she'd use it for something for me.
Its a cool black leather thing. It's only fault is that the casters roll too freely. Since I normally have at least one dog wrapped around me it means I have to be a bit more cautious about scooting it around.
Its time to take our long walk. The sun is shining. There was MORE snow last night but its all supposed to melt today and then freeze up tonight. Makes all that snow shoveling yesterday seem like a bit of a waste but it provided some fun for three members of the household.

Posted by David at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Clothes Make the Man" by Unknown There are four inches of snow on the ground. The temperature is 27. Easter weekend is this weekend.
Yesterday my friend left for work. The giant puppy has strange issues. Whenever we or she leave he starts a pathetic crying. My puppy will often join in with a mournful howl.
Normally this all ends as soon as I step back in the house. I have to go out with my friend to open and close the gate behind her. Yesterday when I came back inside the giant dog's tears didn't stop.
Before I could start to comfort him the phone rang. My friend was
Click image: "Charmed to Meet You" by Unknown coming home. The snow was too bad for her to go into work.
I think the giant dog is taking credit for bringing her back to him.
As we settled in, her to work and me to annoy her and the dogs, I felt something odd. My gums had been swollen since the tooth extractions but they started to throb in a way that worried me.
I called the oral surgeon and got an emergency appointment.
The guy who pulled my teeth is on vacation. I liked his stand in far better. He said I had the start of an infection and I was healing much slower than usual.
Leukemia and chemo-patients are extremely susceptible to infection. Diabetics are slow healers.
It bugged me that this was in all my medical history. Before the extraction I even called and asked if I could pick up the script for the antibiotics before hand. I was told of course not.
I wonder if my call rankled them enough to not prescribe any antibiotics out of some sort of professional spite or in a vain attempt to not pay that much attention to my own health - let the
Click images for desktop size: "Esther" by Benouville MD's handle it all, Just be compliant and shut up.
I figure the latter.
So the stand in doc gave me a script for Amoxicillin, a pretty non-specific anti-biotic.
I was so amazed and relieved that there was no charge for the visit that it wasn't till some time later that I started to wonder why I wasn't charged.
I spent the idle moments waiting around asking anyone who was foolish enough to listen what they thought about the weather. No one seemed as upset about the snow and cold as I did. Much to my chagrin they all seemed to accept it pretty much as the way things work "around these parts".
Other than that relatively complicated ploy of mine to annoy my friend and the dogs we settled in.
It was pleasantly dull. I didn't even have much time for my usual pondering of what is going to snatch my simple comfort away from me.
We watched a Japanese movie: "Suspect X". It was surprisingly good and entertaining. It started with a crazy cool "Mister Wizard" style explanation and demonstration on how to make a super particle accelerator from things you can find around the house, if you happen to live in a medical tech supply factory anyway.
The film is based on a successful Japanese TV series so I wasn't all prepared for what was to come. A murder mystery that became a struggle between a genius physicist and a super genius mathematician.
And somehow it became a tale of enduring and effective heartbreak, loneliness and profound sadness. Its smart enough in its story telling to lay out some red herrings as to the character and motives of the characters, allowing you to gleefully jump to some conclusions that will intertwine your own guilt with the guilt of the leads and the distaste for the mere cops who slave away to solve the crime.
At one point the "villain", the mathematician, asks the physicist to not solve the crime; "It will bring no one happiness."
The ending is searing, simple with an elegance that speak to the truth of the lost.
A warmly recommended movie. Not great but terribly cool entertainment.
I've already had the dogs out in the bad weather. They love it. They knocked me down once. Unintentional this time. My puppy and the gentle dog saw something and went after it while giant
Click images for desktop size: "DC Comics" dog saw the same thing and decided to back away from it, probably to consider joining in on the attack. I was doing pretty well until giant dog decided that whatever was out there was small enough to make it safe for him to join in on the attack. He moved too fast for me so I went over. To the pups disgust I kept a hold on all three leashes.
One of my kids (former players) likes to send me the UK top 40 three or four times a year. I think I once muttered something about being afraid of loosing touch. For some reason he sends me the POP top 40. And once again I'm amazed that there are as many of those tracks that I sort of like and there are tracks I down right hate (keyboards and drum machines are often but not always the progeny of hate).

Posted by David at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Autumn Maple" by Kamisaka Sekka Yesterday was pretty nice. Temperature's up around 50, felt warmer in the sun. The dogs were happy.
It was nice, like a pleasant autumn day.
This morning there was about an inch of snow on the ground and the threat of about 8 inches to come. Aggravatingly no one but me thinks this is peculiar and slightly disheartening.
The dogs are still happy.
It was a mildly interesting weekend. On Saturday we met my friend's parents at the Chinese buffet for their birthday lunch. We were surprised at how
Click images for desktop size: "Bath Time" by Unknown busy it was.
This impacted my doggie bag purloining. While I doubt if they care about me snatching tidbits to take home for the dogs it makes the experience much more fulfilling if its a clandestine operation I barely get away with. Not certain how much I'd be able to eat I went loaded for bear, both the inner and out pockets of my sweater/fleece were lined with plastic.
The crowd was so heavy and there was so much wait personnel that I only got 2 pockets filled. Fortunately their Saturday lunch is more of a brunch thing. There was bacon and pork sausage.
There was also an omelet chef. This was new and novel. My friend had a cheese and mushroom
Click images for desktop size: "Beethoven" by Unknown omelet that she thought was pretty good. Except it was too large for her. This probably saved them a fortune in sprig rolls and veggies.
I had no big problems eating. I got sick afterwards but I put that off to living on nothing but over cooked rice, pudding and other non-chewables.
Real food felt weird in my mouth. The only problem I really had was with the calamari. Too chewy to disintegrate it properly for swallowing. I sampled a little bit of everything. Everything felt odd in my near toothless mouth but there was no problem and no bleeding.
The table conversation perplexed me. My friends family is larger than I ever imagined. Every time she talks with her parents I seem to find out about another sibling. I'm an only child so its perplexing to me. I guess my ideas about extended families don't have much basis in reality. I always figured that they were closer, chatting daily. I thought they were more apart of life.
I don't like how everyone looks at me like I was retarded when I ask, "who is that?"
(I suddenly remembered I'm not actually an only child. My step-father had three kids from a previous marriage. I guess I met them once when I was about 7. Never had any contact or heard about them until my step-fathers funeral. They sent some flowers. I was bored and I asked my mother who some of the flower senders were. She gave me that same "how retarded are you" look and explained, slowly, that those people were my brother and sisters.

Click images for desktop size: "Nude" by Unknown I thought it was pretty chintzy to only get one bunch of flowers from 3 people but then realized that since they'd never seen the guy in at least 20 years probably one of them thought to send something and just signed all three names. Fair enough and probably more than my step-father warranted. I lived with him and wasn't too thrilled to be there I can't imagine how his three other kids must have felt hearing he was gone. Heck of a legacy. They got mentioned in his obituary. I didn't. Suited me fine.
After lunch my friend and I headed to the Animal Shelter. There are plenty of reasons we should stick with having only three dogs, mainly economic and the lack of canine sleeping space. But there were two dogs there that seemed to need us more than we might need them.
I was surprised when her parents met us at the shelter. They'd never been there before. I liked them showing up like that. Its the only pleasant surprise I recall from them. My friend seemed pleased which made it all the better.
Inside was not so great. The one dog, Rufus, was gone. He'd found a new home. The other little dog Jackson had an application for him pending.
Jackson is one of those dogs that really irk me. Not the dog but the people who were entrusted to him. He is at least 9 years old and they just abandoned him. The notes on him indicated severe neglect. He was intact. (Polite dog words for not fixed, which is slightly less polite for uncastrated).
This is a non-kill shelter and they're fairly fussy about who takes their dogs so we decided to give him a break and pull him out of the kennel. He was a little frantic and really wanted out. Understandable. Except the shelter was closing! We weren't allowed to spring him. I was looking forward to it.
It cast a pall over what had been a nice day. My friend's mother was surprised there were so few dogs there. I thought that was good news.
Our spirits were elevated a little bit when on Sunday we got an email explaining that we are still being considered as foster parents. Dog foster parents.
I like the idea of being fosters. Meet a slew of nice dogs and a bigger slew of some excellent people (for the most part).
My friend bought up another subject on Sunday. She's been corresponding with an old high school chum. It appears that woman is going through some strive. Her husband's girl friend was calling him constantly while their son was getting an operation. I also gathered that the boob husband was taking the calls. Yow!

Click images for desktop size: "Mermen" by Maxfield Parrish My friend has invited her to stay with us if things get too crazy for her. (Crazier than that?) Now my friend is worried that her high school mate isn't very much like us.
We also had to deal with the stupid cat. When we came back from a little errand the stupid cat was standing in the neighbor's yard yowling its head off. My friend had to go into the yard but then couldn't find the thing. It had left the yard it was acting like it was imprisoned in. My friend caught the cat up and bought her into the yard where upon the cat demanded to be set down. Since the fence is separated from our neighbors by a quarter inch wire link fence we spent 10 minutes moving it a quarter inch.
There's someone who might like to take the stupid cat into their home. As much as I dislike the stupid cat, I mean I like skanky cat, the feral free loader, more than I do her, I still have a strong knee jerk reaction about moving an 8 year old animal out of the environment its used to.
My feelings aren't very important here so we'll see what happens.
Finally my iMac is holding on. Barely. I think the Hard Drive is only part of the problem. I think the HD Controller and possibly even the CPU might be in trouble s well. I'm still doing daily back-ups, which are a pain.
I looked at the Pystar Hackintosh. Pystar is being sued by Apple for making and selling machines that run OSX. There's even talk, probably true, that the next version of OSX will have DRM in it to prohibit it from running on anything but Apple taxed machines. Still . . .
Even though its about 25% the cost of a MacPro and about six hundred less than the sexier non boxed iMac its still too expensive for us.
I think I could replace all the parts. Its scary working with such tiny screws on something so fragile but how else do you learn?

Posted by David at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Water Sprite" by Unknown Passed out at ten p.m., which is early for me.
Woke up at 3:00 a.m. in the midst of a dream.
Like most of my dreams this one had a plot. I was back in LA as old as I am but looking like when I was 22. I was on the Hollywood Freeway, driving like a maniac through rush hour traffic, gunning up to a hundred in the fire lane and scuttering through traffic, not running away from anything but rushing to downtown.
I was driving my old junker red and white Ford Falcon station wagon, my sleeper. Some of you might remember it. Ran on airplane fuel. Looked like hell but tipped out at 145 in the quarter mile. The only real problem was that the carb kept catching on fire if it had to idle too long.
I hit downtown. The LAVA art exhibition was still going on. I tried to park by the Contemporary Art Museum but no luck. I ended up having to park deep in the nickel. I figured as much. Even in a dream you don't drive a decent car down to the Nickel.
I made a careful note of where I was parked. Put the keys in my pocket and started to run to my appointment. I was meeting my friend. We'd been separated for too long. She had managed to reconnect with her first love and they were living a very happy life together. It was her first time in LA and she'd been thoughtful enough to call me.
We were going to one of the grind houses. The last surviving one. Every town needs a movie theater where the bums can crash for a dollar. They were showing the double bill of Jean Luc Godard's "Masculin Feminine" and "Hong Kong Cat" which is actually not that weird a double bill for the old
Click images for desktop size: "State of Being" by Blatte grind houses. We scheduled our meeting to see those two and intended to leave before the other two flics, some gore schlock I'd normally have been interested in.
As we went to our seats I commented on how I was not a big fan of Godard's but "Hong Kong Cat" was a crazy cool mess of a movie.
We watched the flics, not even holding hands. Her lover, Rodney, had left us alone. He wanted to go see the Dodgers play the Angels at Chavez Ravine.
When the movies ended we left the theater. It had become inky and dangerous dark. My friend and I walked and talked. We talked like old lovers who never should have parted, with pain and lightness. We passed an SRO where a boom box with a blown speaker blared a salsa version of the Ramones' "Sitting in my Room". We were on Figueroa. There were lights and people. It was where she was supposed to meet Rodney. I left her in front of the old boarded up penny arcade where a bunch of cps loitered, drinking coffee and eyeing the gang bangers. It felt safe enough. She wanted to walk me to my car but I knew the area I'd parked in. It wasn't safe. I told her it was too far away and we might not get back in time for her to meet Rodney.

Click images for desktop size: "Reading Desk" by Leighton We parted with an aerial hug. I tossed her up in the air and enjoyed looking at her flushed near laughing face against the blue black sky and the crossing wires.
She called after me but I pretended not to hear. My heart was tearing.
Then I realized I couldn't remember exactly how to get to my car. I wandered downtown LA lost in thought, the kind of fervid thought that comes when your heart takes over from your brain and you get lost in the way things might have been and forget the reasons why things are as they are.
I watched the drunks, the bums, the hopeless and the fearful. Around the corner from Sneaky Pete's Liquors there was a building being renovated. A group were stealing the scaffolding. Two guys ran off with a pair of acetylene tanks.
I watched them run off and watched a patrol car, its bubble gum machine strobing blue drive by slowly. The cops watched the stealing but never stopped.
I woke up.
I have no idea what it means or why this dream affected me to the point of memory.

Click images for desktop size: "A Dirty Job" by NFl Films
I'm doing better. The worst pain left is where they cut out the section for the biopsy. Yesterday I was practicing smiling in the mirror. Trying to smile so that I don't look like a hillbilly caricature. I noticed that the wound where they cut is keloiding. I hope it flatt