Too stupid to die...

The fog is coming! The fog, the fog! Photo, late July 2010

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 02:49:13 +0000

While the rest of North America burns, here in other-minded San Francisco we shiver through unending days of fog. Here’s the fogbank – reportedly 2400 feet thick out over the ocean – pouring over Twin Peaks into Noe Valley. And this is just July; August is our coldest month. Everybody’s moaning about the weather here, though most of us are just grateful we’re not on the East Coast.

Highs predicted for July 31 in…

Nome, Alaska              70
Whitehorse, Yukon     73
San Francisco             61

If this site looks a bit wobbly…

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:18:33 +0000

…its because the relentless demon “Progress” forced me into updating the software. As with most things, the ”new and improved” just swaps out problems old for new and I’m dealing with the consequences now. When I’m done its back to the posts and pics.

Meanwhile here’s a picture from the best veterans memorial I’ve ever seen, the Living Memorial Sculpture Garden just north of Mount Shasta in Northern California. A series of sculptures depict the soldiers, the POWs, the nurses, and more. This one, part of the centerpiece, is simply called Why?

Why? indeed.

Photos, early June

EJB — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 04:02:47 +0000

Not dead here, or even hospitalized (for the last couple months anyway), just busy busy helping a group save San Francisco’s McLaren Park from the predators of disc golf. A new post is coming shortly. Meanwhile, here are a couple of flower pics, both enhanced slightly (ok, a lot) in Photoshop.

Columbine from my back yard, above,
and nasturtiums, growing everywhere.

Missing Magic Mountain (no, not the theme park)

EJB — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 23:31:31 +0000

Lots of 19th century “innovations” are gone for good reason: horse-drawn wagons, the Saturday bath, walking across continents, surgery without anesthesia… novelties like these are lamented by no one except history buffs and masochists.

But one 19th century institution missing from our world is a true loss: the health retreat. Back in the day they were called sanatoriums: resorts set up for the “improvement or maintenance of health, especially for convalescents.” Today the idea of withdrawing from life to recover a bit health is so odd that most people, hearing the word “sanatorium” translate it as “nut house.”

My oh-so-slow recovery from my latest medical travail makes me long for this old tradition.

I ache to check out of my life for a time and into another, one where meals are prepared and laundry is done and my duties consist of napping, reading, and taking long walks through woods and meadows.

Thomas Mann wrote about life in a health sanatorium in the novel The Magic Mountain. A young man of no great intellect or ambition named Hans Castorp visits a friend recovering from tuberculosis in a mountain retreat. So taken is Hans with the sanitarium’s disconnect from the real world (the “flatlands” he calls it) he finds excuses to stay until, with a doctor’s eager encouragement, he imagines himself into tuberculosis and becomes a patient for seven years.

It might seem odd a book with such a subject was so influential on my young life. I found the lure of Hans’ introspective and purposeless life both horrifying and irresistible. Having spent a childhood in too much solitude caused by an introspective nature and aimless wandering around the country followed by a 1960s adolescence (no one should have been allowed to turn 16 in 1968) I wanted desperately to plant myself in some situation with defined and gentle borders. So I then thought anyway.

Mann’s deft novel talked me into the world, not out of it. The book laid bare the siren song of isolation and withdrawal; it showed me what is lost if you do not engage the world. The Magic Mountain was for me a necessary cautionary tale. For all the trials and tears I’ve had in this life, I don’t regret for a minute having engaged it.

Now though, after four years of medical ordeals that only an insane optimist or a fool would voluntarily endure, I long for a break. The miseries of the last year in particular leave me exhausted and in desperate need of renewal. I long for Mann’s mountain with its wooded paths and dining rooms, if only for a while.

In the 19th century there were health sanatoriums priced for nearly all but the poorest. Those with less means did not get the elegant treatment described in The Magic Mountain but they had places to go. Not any more.

Today a “health spa” is something you “do” for a weekend; a resort where you pay lots of money to have mud thrown onto your body and be served tiny little portions of gourmet greens with artisan bread and a Napa chardonnay. Activities are planned for the day, right down to the Swedish massage and the meditation hour. The spas of the 21st century are no place to go if you need to stitch your life back together after too much trauma.

I took break once before without succumbing Hans’ tubercular temptations. In 1996, after my first near-death experience (a “mere” bout of killer pneumonia) I went away to a little cottage – a studio really – on the beach. I slept and walked and slept more and rode my bike and wrote poems and was beholden to no one. When I arrived I could barely walk a block. By the time I left I was bicycling miles every day. So much changed – so much healed – in that one calendar month of March 1996. How I long to do it again.

How odd the idea is to us now: Go away and rest? For weeks? But what would you do? Restore? What’s “restore?” Dump everyone and everything you love for a month of solitude? Solitude? Do they have cellphone and WiFi there?

I for one don’t find it an odd idea at all. If I could only visit The Magic Mountain. Just for a month, I swear. One month.

Photos, 2 April 2010

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 05:16:46 +0000

The Golden Gate, north and south.

Above: Point Bonita, Marin Headlands.
This is the north side of the Golden Gate; the bridge is behind the camera.

Below: The south side of the Golden Gate,
aka: San Francisco.

Please, stop “sparing me!”

EJB — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 05:18:28 +0000

It is a universally accepted truism that we medically complicated folks “have enough on our hands” and mustn’t be troubled with your problems. No matter how much we ask, how much we insist, however close we are, you are always “fine”, your life is always uncomplicated and all is going exactly as you planned.

Bull-crap-ola.

How many of you have told me when I’ve felt guilty about relying on you yet again for some necessary kindness that it’s not only not a bother to help but is even a distraction for you from your own day-to-day problems? Lots of you. Did you say that just to shut me up? Over concern for my health? Please. I’m not that fragile.

So why are you robbing me of the essential human tic of worrying about you like you do about me? Why do you deny me the right to fret over your hardships and troubles? Just because some jerk named Conventional Wisdom insists I can’t take on any more?

Did I ever tell you how much I admire Conventional Wisdom?

Now I’m the first to admit that at times my life is so damned complicated or painful or just plain insane I can’t handle any input. But it’s pretty obvious when that’s the case: a) I’m usually in a hospital, and b) I’m even more heavily medicated than usual. It’s not like you aren’t getting strong signals when not to trouble.

So if you don’t see the flashing signs, please, dear friends, stop sparing me!

Despite my somewhat frankensteinish life I am human. And just like the rest of you hominids I can solve everybody else’s problems with ease. Just ask me! Its my problems that are crazy nuts impossible to fix… just like yours are to you. I believe that’s what is called the human condition.

So share already.

anemia [uh-nee-mee-uh]

EJB — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:49:09 +0000

–noun

1. Pathology. a quantitative deficiency of the hemoglobin, often accompanied by a reduced number of red blood cells and causing pallor, weakness, and breathlessness.

2. a lack of power, vigor, vitality, or colorfulness: His writing suffers from anemia…

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrroad trip!!!

The car is tuned. It’s got new tires and is loaded down with jackets and maps and food for doggie and me and of course my camera and the tripod I always take and hardly ever use. The back seat’s converted into Otto’s Command Center so da pooch can survey the world from the comfort of his traveling bed. And we are driving down Highway 101 through the ridiculously green hills of an El Nino winter California listening to Roseanne Cash and Michelle Shocked on our way south to visit family and friends…

That’s what was supposed to happen.

Instead, Thursday I wound up in Moffitt Hospital a few pints of blood short of a six-pack, getting a transfusion while the docs scoped me out from both ends (yes: exactly that) trying to find the leak while I, delirious from lack of oxygen, a triple-whammy sedative of demerol, percocet and benadryl, and most of all too too too many medical procedures for any one lifetime, howled at the injustice of it all like a fourteen-year old grounded for a month.

Twenty-four hours later, my fluids topped up like a nursed engine with a cracked block, I walked out of the hospital with the hangover from hell and returned to my day life.

Huh?

If you cut a leg artery or your jugular or remove the tip of your finger you are immediately aware you have a problem. If you spring a leak internally however, not so much. Especially when you are in denial about any new medical problems because you’re feeling a wee bit put-upon after four years’ state-of-art medical S&M.

If you want to know how you know you have an inner leak look up melena, I’m not going to blog the details. I should’ve done something sooner: this isn’t my first internal bleed – not even my second or third. But I’m rationalizing maybe it’s the cherries I ate or maybe it’s the iron I’m taking or maybe it’s anything other than some damn disaster that will send me back to the hospital.

It was only a day or two before departure that I realized the trip was no-go. When you have no blood you have a hard time concentrating on a C.S.I. episode and you drive like a stoned alcoholic texting your next order to the bar you just left. 500 miles behind a wheel down California’s coast with no oxygen in your brain is not a good idea.

So instead of Rrrrrroad trip! I now sit at home while Otto goes on adventures with the dog walker, waiting for my hemoglobin to creep up to a functional level. Good news is, the top-up they gave me at Moffitt kicked in quick enough so I can actually read a book and do some stuff, if not exactly what I planned. Other good news is, the leak’s stopped. And it’s sunny for a change here in the Bay Area.

So: lemons, lemonade. Whatever.

–––

There has got to be an upper limit to how many procedures, transplants, runnings-out-of-blood, medically called-for cavity invasions, viruses and auto-immune diseases one body can handle. You think?

Photo of the week 27 Feb 2010

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:10:03 +0000

Who knew? I sure didn’t.

I read somewhere that the full moon meters (photographically speaking)
pretty much the same as daylight, so I gave it a try. This is a hand-held shot
with a zoom lens, just cropped and sharpened (not enlarged).

About all that health stuff…

EJB — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:36:37 +0000

I’ve got this deal going – in my head anyway – with the Three Fates. The Greeks called them Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, and they spin out, measure, and in the end cut the thread of our lives. We are literally in their hands.

My deal is, I get to stay alive for some unspecified number of moments after the liver cancer and transplant. I get to be conscious, occasionally functional, and once in a while I even get to thrive. I also get to experience each and every sensation of a body running down its weave.

I’ve started and not finished a dozen posts on my health trials of the past year. One did refer to my struggle last summer just to learn that I’ve comedown two impossible–for-a-transplantee autoimmune diseases, but that’s it. I feel guilt for not having posted more.

Somehow I’ve made peace with the situation. A diagnosis and some medication to manage it – the AI’s, as I call them, will not go away until I do – helped. But somewhere along the way I lost the ability to write about it all.

If you really want to know more read up on dermatomyositis and Reynaud’s Syndrome. The acute phase of this mess, which lasted more or less from June to September, was the worst experience I’ve ever had medically. No, really: the liver transplant was a mere cut finger in comparison.

Until the Reynaud’s was under control I literally couldn’t write – rotting nerve-fired fingertips do not encourage typing. Now I’m just weary of of it all: repeating symptoms over and over to too many doctors; explaining to friends and family why I was having test A then test B and then test C then explaining to them what the docs found when they finally found something; wrapping my own head around the diagnosis because once again I achieved the impossible as someone with a transplant and a deliberately suppressed immune system can’t get an autoimmune disease except I got two… and blah and blah and blah and BLAH.

I just couldn’t whine anymore so I stopped. Better to write essays about California’s crazy seasons and anti-vaccine idiots hanging outside the H1N1 clinic and how the good old U.S. of A. is once again following California (coming soon).

So. Under the terms of my imagined deal with the Fates I live the frayed ends of a life and find the beauty and happiness where I can while trying to ignore the miseries. Denial, as I’ve pointed out, is a Good Thing.

Truth is, the Fates don’t deal. I have no idea when Atropos will snip my thread. It is chilling to know that even the gods feared the Fates. Even Zeus was subject to their whims.

Picture of the week 11 Feb 2010

EJB — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:50:48 +0000

I’ve always been intrigued by ravens.

I’ve got pictures of them on my bedroom walls; behind one
is feather a raven tossed to the ground near me when grooming.
The Haida story of trickster raven creating the world and
dumping humankind into it just to amuse himself
has always seemed a more realistic description
of our condition than any offered by organized religions.

This one was hovering over Otto, her spread wings twice Otto’s size.
Fortunately she decided Otto wasn’t a threat (0r qualified as dinner)
and left him alone. I do wonder if any chihuahuas or yorkies
went missing that day at Fort Funston.

The blue eye isn’t a photoshop add-on, it’s a reflection of the sky.