Farewell! If ne’er I see thee more,
Though distant calls my flight impel,
I shall not less thy grace adore,
So friend forever fare thee well.
Farewell, alas, the tragic sound,
Has many a tender bosom torn,
While desolation spread around,
Deserted friendship left to mourn.
Alas! and if we sure must part,
Far separated long to dwell,
I leave thee with a broken heart,
So friend forever fare thee well.
~ part of a poem i heard on Northern Exposure
“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”
~ Richard Feynman (one of the great physicists of the 20th century)
Summer, 2017: No telling what I was doing, but I just found my toothbrush with the silverware in the dishwasher.
Some time later: I realized that things like this were the result of uncontrolled mast cell activation disease (MCAS/MCAD).
For the last several days in dreamland I’ve been working in a large, beautiful log cabin. Along with a group of cohorts — I can’t call them coworkers — we’ve been giving a series of presentations to a group of visitors.
Before my presentation this morning I went out into the audience to talk to a couple of people I had recently met. They were talking about their plans for next weekend, and invited me to join them on Saturday.
Just after this I turned around and saw that one of my cohorts had scribbled a large collection of new notes on my blackboard. Yes, a blackboard with chalk, not a whiteboard with markers. I would later think about this, and wonder if it was influenced by a Columbo episode I watched recently — the one about the architect who likes classical music and kills the millionaire cowboy who likes country-western music. The architect also teaches at a local college, and he and Columbo spent several minutes wiping off chalkboards during one scene.
So I walk up to this cohort who has written notes all over my chalkboards like a mad scientist. I read what he has written, and he asks, “What do you think?”
When I first read the text in this image, it brought a few tears to my eyes. When I used to get up and make coffee, our dog Zeus used to come into the kitchen and make stretching moves like this. I came to think of this morning ritual as him saying, “Hey, how you doing? Did you sleep well? What’s on the agenda for today?”
~ image from this facebook page
Day after day,
Love turns grey,
Like the skin of a dying man.
And night after night,
We pretend its all right,
But I have grown older,
And you have grown colder,
And nothing is very much fun any more.
And I can feel
One of my turns coming on.
I feel cold as a razor blade,
Tight as a tourniquet,
Dry as a funeral drum.
(start destroying a hotel room)
Don’t look so frightened,
This is just a passing phase,
One of my bad days.
(Every year I have a day or two where I go to the dark side, and these lyrics from the Pink Floyd song “One of My Turns” describes the feelings of those days very well. February 5, 2020, turned into one of those days.)
A nurse that I see all the time suggested that I get Snapchat. I responded, “Oh, so you can text me my lab results more easily?” Which eventually reminded me of this image.
Yesterday one of my doctors was struggling to give me a little bit of bad news, fumbling a little over his words and giving me a very lengthy explanation. After a little while I told him, “Listen, I’ve been unconscious seven times, I’ve had three fake heart attacks (allergic angina), and I was once told that I had a 10% chance of dying during an operation. What you’re telling me right now, it’s okay, it’s not that big of a deal.” He calmed down a little after that. :)
A brief message from Cloud Atlas:
The story of the two wolves, from the movie, Tomorrowland. (You’ll have to see the movie to know the answer, if you don’t already.) (Or Google it. It’s actually an old American Indian story, not a Disney thing.)
“Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.”
~ Author unknown
[Questionnaire with a nurse recently]
NURSE: Do you drink?
ME: No.
NURSE: Smoke?
ME: No.
NURSE: (laughing) Don’t drink, don’t smoke; what do you do?
(Which leads us to this Adam Ant video.)
(And also, if it wasn’t for the mast cell disease, I might have my own personal margarita, daiquiri, and pina colada vending machine.)
“Our truest life is in our dreams awake.”
~ Thoreau
This song is called Dream Awake, and its by The Frames. I don’t particularly like the first two minutes of it, but after that it becomes more my tempo. And you’re really cool if you know how I know of this song:
“No dreams come without a bill. The reality of making something happen is just a ton of hard work.”
~ Peter Gabriel
From this LionsRoar.com article on how to have lucid dreams: “Studies have shown that meditators have more lucid dreams, and for a true meditation master, all their dreams are lucid. We’re non-lucid to the contents of our mind at night to the extent we’re non-lucid to the contents of our mind during the day. Become lucid to your thoughts during the day by practicing mindfulness meditation and you’ll naturally become lucid to your dreams at night.”
Probably the most important scene in the movie, I.Q. :)
“I think you’re the kindest, sweetest, prettiest person I’ve ever met in my life. I’ve never seen anyone that’s nicer to people than you are. The first time I saw you ... something happened to me. I never told you but ... I knew that I wanted to hold you as hard as I could. I don’t deserve someone like you. But if I ever could, I swear I would love you for the rest of my life.”
~ from the movie, Groundhog Day
Dateline May 22, 2016: Before I write this, just to be clear, on most days and times I’m not laying in bed waiting to die. But, there have been somewhere between 20-30 times where I have laid down in bed not knowing if I’d ever get up again. Five of those times I passed out. Recent lab tests also show that I may have something called a paraganglioma, which doctors refer to as a “pharmacologic time bomb.”
So while I’m not laying on my death bed 24x7, I can tell you what my thoughts have been when I laid there, now knowing if I was about to pass out or die.
October 11, 2011: After moving from Alaska to Colorado I spent about ten days trying to decide to live, and was staying in two hotels, one on the south side of Denver (in the Denver Tech Center area) and another on the north side. On this day I made the decision to live northwest of Denver and east of Boulder, and moved into my first apartment in Broomfield, and made this post on Facebook:
“Day one in the new apartment, slept on the floor, and there’s nothing to eat. Planning skills are questionable. But the fireplace is nice.”
From LoriDuffWrites.com:
“One thing (Lisa) Scottoline is very good at, is something that many authors are not, and it is a pet peeve of mine. There is a rule in writing – if you put a gun on the mantelpiece in a scene, sometime later that gun needs to be fired. Red herrings are ok, but you can’t have irrelevant details or facts. Scottoline fires every single one of her guns, and that makes me happy.”
I didn’t like parts of Lisa Scottoline’s earlier books because she actually violated this “rule” quite a bit, but in her book, Killer Smile, she keeps the action moving and eliminates at least 90% of the “irrelevant details or facts” that I didn’t like in her earlier books. (Killer Smile is really good.)
