NOTE: This is a copy-and-paste from a Facebook post I just made. The thing is, even though I know these two insufferable busybodies were being extremely rude, it left me feeling lousy, not about the unwanted public attention but because I didn't TELL them they had been inexcusably rude. It lingers like an ache somewhere that won't go away. The fact several others joined in the fun didn't help. I did not engage with them, which might have indicated I wasn't going to "go along with the joke" (if that's what it was), but they didn't twig, just kept on pointing and giggling.
So are Canadians still "polite"? Do they still apologize to the furniture if they bump into it? Today I had proof that not all of them do.
I was standing in line at the mall food fair, when I noticed two women in front of me (about my age), looking around at me and my bottom half. One of them came up to me and said, "I LOVE your pants!" I was wearing the kind of casual pull-ons you see everywhere now, but she kept at it, noticing the logo and saying (loudly) "Are those pajama bottoms?" (They weren't, but I was struck dumb by now). Both started giggling and literally pointing at the pants in question, like two junior high girls in the school washroom.
By then, others in the lineup began to "notice" my famous pants. They had become a sort of social focus in the food court. Then came the kicker - the other lady said, loudly, "SO, ARE YOU SLEEPWALKING?" I just said no, not engaging with them, then moved as far away from them as I could, wishing I could have said something about how rude they were. But I didn't.
Does that make ME a good Canadian, or just a chump who can't speak up for herself? Am I, as so many people claim, "too sensitive", and THAT'S the problem? As far as I am concerned, I am just sensitive enough.
It could be that the stereotype is eroding due to the stress of woeful world events. But added to feeling kind of humiliated in public, I also felt bad that I didn't say anything.
I should have. But I had it drilled into me all my life that I HAD to be polite to strangers. So I guess I turned out to be the "good Canadian", after all.
But if you're going to give a complete stranger a compliment, please mean it, and don't follow it up with public mockery. It just doesn't go down well, these days.
UPDATE! I received quite a lot of likes and comments on this post, including one from a nasty editor basically making fun of me for being made fun of (?). I deleted his comment and blocked him, but it gave me pause that I probably worked for or with this person in my publishing life. I guess nastiness comes in all sizes, shapes and ages. And occupations.
Wow some people never grow up! They still live in that teenage mindset of judging and assuming that others are constantly judging them. Must suck to be them.
Amber Hayward Well, it sucked to have my pants held up for scrutiny (so to speak). When I got dressed that morning, I never knew my apparel would become so famous.
These people were downright rude and awful. Sorry this happened. I think you were correct to get away from them. There are people who do distraction pickpocketing, for instance; there are people on drugs; there are people suffering from mental problems; there are mean people just looking for a tiff. Even from this distance I trust your gut that seems to have said, don't engage, gain distance from them.
I'm sorry you went through that. It really hurts to be made fun of in that way and it is nothing short of bullying. Thank you for speaking up. Take care.
When I was going home with steam coming out of my ears, I thought to myself: oh well, at least there's Facebook! I usually just post fun stuff, but this wasn't my idea of fun. At least I had somewhere to put my feelings.
Lucy Black I just deleted a comment that reflected the same kind of nastiness. To make it worse, it was someone I actually knew through publishing. Some people just don't have enough to keep them busy. BTW, I blocked him.
Sky MacKay Curtis It's not true that young people are more rude and thoughtless than those of my age group. These were women in their 60s. It was as if I was wearing a particularly garish clown suit and they felt perfectly OK to comment (loudly) on it.
No cat can come close to Bentley, but my favorite internet cat is Luna, cruncher of kibble. I've never heard a louder crackly crunch from a cat, with her little pink nose dimpling up from the effort. She also has glamorous eyes that look like she's wearing eyeliner, and a very soft, sweet meow. Her videos often receive more than a million views.
My absolute favorite version of our magnificent national anthem. I cannot get through it without tears (there's one rolling down my face right now). Now and forever, but especially now, my beloved country, we stand on guard for thee.
I like to listen to this in April. It's old-fashioned rock, with a classical passage written by Jon Lord. They don't make rock bands like this any more.
Yesterday, I waa sure I had turned the corner. For the first time since that dreadful day in January when I lost half my guts, I managed to walk all the way around Blakeburn Lagoon, a man-made mini-lake right in the middle of Coquitlam, in which we've had some of our best wildlife sightings (including wild swans!). Yes, I got all the way around, I wasn't sore, I did not take a single dose of pain medicine, and I felt like I was back in the land of the living. . . and then today came.
I'm more achey and sore now than I've been in weeks. My right knee clanks and gives way on the stairs, and pain has extended both up and down: down my right leg, and up into my hip joint, which is screwed anyway with arthritis. We had to cancel all our plans for today, which were modest enough, but I just couldn't. So here I sit, feeling rotten in my body, but better in my soul.
On Saturday we had one of those incredibly enjoyable, fun family gatherings, which we get to do maybe three times a year. Ryan turned 19 years old, that chubby, dimpled little charmer - except he's now a tall, lean (and still dimpled) charmer, doing well at university, with his own bachelor pad (the entire downstairs of the house has been renovated, complete with private bathroom, so he can live as independently as possible while still living at home). This kid is so amazing, and has always had such an array of interests, from taikwondo to origami to gardening and (best of all!) cooking. To call it "cooking" is an understatement, as this kid is a gourmet chef and baker who turned out a professional-level Buche de Noel at Christmas. One of his birthday gifts was a sourdough starter kit, and I want to be there when he tries it out. I gave him a personalized chef's apron with his picture on it, making tacos in Mexico. (Unfortunately, I had to crop Shannon out of the picture!)
Saturday was one of those blissful days when everything seemed worthwhile, even possible, but today, not so much. I know I am guilty of overdoing it. I know I'm wrong to think I've "turned the corner" and can just go back to all my usual activites. I can't. Even stairs can defeat me and ruin my day. I refuse to be trapped upstairs, as I was for several weeks, or trapped downstairs, which was even worse. But if I want to get up or down, there's a price to pay.
I don't know what the rest of the week will be like, but at least I have blissful occasions like this (all too rare, unfortunately, as the grandkids reach adulthood). May they continue, because if they don't, I am not sure I can make this life journey any more. Time for me to quit?
Petrachus Incadio Rosenberg: Violin recorded in clay on a potter's wheel in approximately 1552, recovered using laser interference technology at the University of Hilversum, 2014, by Prof. Loekasia Von Strabo.
FOUND! First sound recording: FROM 1552! (so they say).
Here's why I think this is full of shit. If even that old Brahms cylinder thingie from the 1800s has great thumps, bangs, skips, clicks, sizzles and moments of dull silence, then you'd think a clay pot's surface would yield an even greater variety of racket. Instead, what we have is a sort of uniform static sound. From the very small amount of info I could get on this, it's supposed to be the sound of violins, inadvertently recorded in the 1500s while a revolving pot was being decorated with a stylus.
In principle, I guess it could happen. I wonder if anyone has tried it. But that stick would have to vibrate plenty hard to pick up violin sounds. These sound like feeble coyotes on a balmy night, recorded from 100 miles away. In some places, the sounds have a consciously mixed or engineered quality - OK, let's add a little more sound over here or over there to fill it out. Doesn't work for me.
Then again. . . there is that phonoautogram thing, which I swear I thought was a hoax when it first came out. This guy, and I'll be damned if I'll look up his blasted endless French name at this late hour, had this experimental contraption to try to make sound waves visible. It worked. but he never expected the products to be "played back". Such a concept was completely foreign back then. Basically his contraption was a revolving glass drum with a stylus etching lines on sooty paper, and if you yelled into it loud enough. . . The resulting sounds are depressing, and I still think it might be a hoax because people are getting rich off it. To call the small, thin, wobbling fragment of a line from Au Clair de la Lune "the first recorded music" is a joke.
Plenty of musical hoaxes have been perpetrated on a naive and unsupecting public. Years ago, and it's even harder to find any documentation of this, I heard a recording on CBC Radio of "Chopin Playing the Minute Waltz" in about 1875 or something. The host played it over and over again and went on and on about its documentation/authenticity, but after a while he began to waver. This "Chopin" was playing the "Minute" Waltz in one minute, a stupid Liberace stunt (remember the big clock ticking away the seconds?) that has nothing to do with the actual piece. Our announcer began to mutter about Piltdown Man and noticed the CD number was something like: 54321HAHAHA. It came to light that the CD had been included in a special edition of a European classical music magazine, dated . . . April 1. So we were all April fish, after all.
I did find another video with archaeologists who supposedly retrieved the sound of voices conversing in Latin from Roman vases. The voices, displayed on those graph thingies that look so impressive, were frankly ludicrous, far too clear to be plausible. If you watched the video a couple of times, it began to seem less hoax and more satire, a sendup of the earnest pipe-smoking scholars who endlessly drone on about these things. (And by the way, one of the guys WAS holding a pipe that wasn't lit.)
Then there's the infamous Brahms-playing-the-piano recording, which is really shit and which has been discounted EVERYWHERE except on YouTube, where people oooh, ahhh, blubber, pee their drawers, and phone home for the first time in 6 years over the majesty of it. Everything about this recording screams inauthenticity, but musicologists have based entire careers on it, giving lectures where the applause is deafening.
The playing is lousy, every chord is crashing and sloppily misplayed, melody nonexistent. It sounds like a drunk in a honky-tonk. It may well be from the same era (unlike that rotten Chopin pasteup), but it's not Brahms, who announces the recording is "by Dr. Brahms" - ? He NEVER identified himself as "Dr.", nor would he say "by" because he didn't speak English! Besides, Brahms' voice was as high as Minnie Mouse's, and the guy on the recording sounds like a lumberjack. I'm not sure how he got that beard, since they didn't have injections back then.
Post-blog regrets. I wish now I'd never listened to this. I do my blogging late at night, for some reason, which I've always wondered about cuz I useda go to bed around 8:30 and get up at 6:00. Now some night-owl urge drives me on, awakened perhaps by the apocalypse I experienced back in 2005 (which I may some day write about, or not). Turned all my cells inside-out, or something. Anyway, I wish I'd never listened to this because even though I KNOW it's a hoax, it's creepy. It's creepy like those old, crappy, bizarre cartoons I posted a while ago, the ones you know almost nothing about - they're just THERE, and came out of nowhere. No one actually drew them. You don't expect them to be that way, so inexplicable. They come from another world. So somebody out there either has a major delusion, is out to make some money, or has made one of the biggest discoveries since the Pokemon trading card. Then why haven't I heard of him before? So now I have to go to sleep after hearing this? Thanks a bunch, von Strabo.
CODA
(So NOW, after spending an entire evening puzzling over it,, we find THIS, which is just some new version of Victor Borge/Hoffnung/P. D. Q. Bach. . Bahchh!)
Extraordinary new Laser Interference Technology reveals ancient sounds of the violin from 1552 on a surviving Petrachus clay pot. For more on this archaeological audiophonic sensation, read the book - rosenberg 3.0 – it's all in there! This is sound art at the core of historical artefact and intrigue. The Rosenberg Museum is in possession of data that could lead to even greater discoveries beyond the world of violin music and into the realm of religious ecstasy and meta-belief systems.
The leader of our scientific team, Professor Loekasia Von Strabo, suggests that pots stored in the Vatican from the time of Christ might reveal sonic traces of the saviour's own singing voice embedded in the skin of the clay…copies of these Aramaic recordings are known to be in circulation amongst the secretive Oeyy Vei sect. A quote from the start of the relevant text "The Rosenberg Code".https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzd4AVXBP9k&feature=youtu.be
For centuries, scholars have wondered about the cryptic reference in the Chichester Codex to Aethaneus Rosenberg’s ‘howlinge claye.’ Likewise, the (excised) paragraph on ‘singing pots’ in the surviving MS pages of Roger Bacon’s New Atlantis appear to adumbrate the same enigmatic notion. Vas quae auditus fieri posse. It’s true that the late Alfred Watkins, citing Vitruvius (Book V. Sounding Vessels in the Theatre) believed Rosenberg had simply misunderstood the Roman practice of using pots in their great amphitheatres as Helmholz resonators… the same principle as the phonograph – a potter, inscribing a decorative groove with a stylus into a pot spun on a wheel is – de facto – recording whatever sound is present in its vicinity.
(I'm not sure who wrote and researched this, but it wins the Hokey Award for least-convincing scientific theory. Then again, it's kind of fun to read.)
A classic! Bentley once thrashed a battery-powered cat that looked a little bit more like a real cat because it had synthetic fur on it, but he could still tell, and pushed it over with great scorn.
I was happy to re-stumble on this while stumbling around trying to find something else. It's a very good example of Early Cat (a genre which has blossomed in recent years). These cats are damn cute! Speaking of stumbling, I can barely walk now, which is not a heartening development, as a month ago I was walking fairly normally. Is my body finally falling apart for good? Meantime, there's this.
This came up today, out of nowhere, during a kind of dire day when I discovered I can't put weight on my right leg. The knee keeps caving in. What does this have to do with abdominal surgery? I don't know, but I'll take any distraction from being disabled. The chopping of the celery is a highlight for me.
Not the greatest day, as suddenly I am walking with a cane (having wiped out on the stairs and pulled a muscle in my leg). But there's this, and though I have listened to it a thousand times, I still marvel at the delicacy, even tenderness of the musical interpretation. And it's just a bunch of tiny holes punched in an awkward, warped slab of metal. The automatic disc changer sounds like an unoiled garage door - and then the music starts. Pure enchantment, and it ALMOST makes me forget I'm hobbling around on a cane like some little old lady (which, technically at least, I guess I am). I will never understand how these discs were created, and how the creator would have any idea how it sounded. I do not think something like this could be recreated today. As with so many things, the best has been forgotten in the mad race towards technological progress.
Every once in a while I have to remind myself that "things" were NOT "better" in the old days. Intrusive ads are hardly a new thing, and back then it was quite acceptable, even expected, to make a whole studio audience of captive kids sing along to the Silver Cup National Anthem. This was all to get the kiddies to harass their Moms into buying this soft, white, spongy bread. It wasn't even Wonder Bread,but some pretender.
I suppose I have to get back to this blog some time, especially since, to my surprise, I'm still getting comments on some of my past stuff. Lately it's been far too personal, but I assume nobody reads them anyway. I've always been against getting too personal online, but there's a temptation when you've been through an ordeal, and I've never faced anything even remotely like this before. One more of those, and I'm finished for sure.
It's slow. I'm used to 45 minutes of brisk walking a day, and am now lucky to get in 15 or 20 at a much slower pace. I lost 8 pounds from the ordeal, and am making a concerted effort to gain as much of it back as I can. My obsessive counting of calories for my entire life has been completely reversed. Now I have to eat all the things I couldn't have before, but ironically, I no longer want them. Food is like medicine now. I suddenly feel like an invalid. I'm getting my life back bit by bit, including my channel, but it has been and will be a long haul, with many backsteps. I know recovery isn't a straight line - God knows I've had to face it over and over again in my life - but this seems more like a vortex or a whirlpool determined to suck me down forever.
The video, well, I had to go into a long explanation about the women's dresses "blowing off" (yet another of many illusions in this brilliant scene), and how they wore bodysuits underneath. Why did I have to do this? YOUTUBE, that's why. I almost certainly would have gotten a "decency strike" (again) if I had allowed this flagrant display of "nudity". So who thought they were actually nude? You can plainly see one of the women pull up her strap, which I am sure was left in to appease the censors. The bit where the woman "falls" also had to be carefully explained. She didn't really fall, folks! It was all "pretend"!
Yet other channels post the most appalling stuff, with no penalties.
I finally had to go with YouTube Premium, which basically means no ads (or is supposed to - when will they break their own rules?). Nothing is free any more, but YouTube now is not even remotely like it used to be when I signed up. That was another lifetime ago, of course. I am actually purposely not looking at views, and trying to focus on the many comments I get every day on my much older stuff, including things I posted five years ago and forgot about. The mad chase for views and $$ and all that stuff was wearing me out, and when I returned to my channel after a four-month hiatus, I promised myself I wouldn't do that any more. It means I can't even look at them now for fear my eye wanders down to the view count. If I could find a way to disable it - and maybe there is, but I just don't see it.
This documentary went underground for a very long time. Then there were just pieces of it floating around on YouTube, with Part 3 and Part 7 missing, always holes in it, perhaps due to copyright and perhaps not. That's YouTube for you, with whom I have a love-hate relationship. I finally had to suck it up and BUY YouTube, because my old ad-blocker suddenly stopped working, and the new one didn't work worth a shit. I guess everything costs now, but it still made me wince to pony up nearly $150.00 for a year ad-free.
I've been neglecting this blog for weeks, if not months now, having survived and scraped through very serious abdominal surgery. For the past four months, my energy, appetite, will to live, etc. have all been stretched as far as they could go, or farther. There were a few moments in hospital when I realized I could die from this. Weeks, months of recovery later, I see the surgeon for a checkup, and she informs me that if they had not removed that section of my colon, there was an 80% chance of it becoming cancerous. Almost certain, which is why I was fast-tracked from that first ER visit in November. Though I dodged the bullet this time, I suppose such a thing could return, and next time I might not be so lucky (IF that's what it was).
I'm not used to terrible health, or having to put my life on hold for four months. It's sobering and terrifying. Mortality was staring me in the face, and even now, when I go to bed at night a wave of fear breaks over me - the fear that this is the end, that I will never wake up again.
The scars are mostly mental, and though the surgeon was nice and helpful today, what I've had to go through seems to stand apart from any outside help. Something inside me, some powerful healing force, had to be activated even to get this far, with my digestive system completely reconfigured. Given how radical the rearrangement was, I'm doing remarkably well with things like eating and eliminating. But it doesn't mean attacking my meals with any great zeal. I lost a lot of weight after I got home from the hospital, and I've now joined the Eight Pounds Club - my husband has not yet regained what HE lost when he had abdominal surgery nearly a year ago, and my son Jeff was sick and unable to eat for weeks.
We all need to get fattened up.
I longed for the simplest things when I lay on my back in that dreadful place for 2 weeks (originally supposed to be closer to 2 days). I wanted to go outside. I wanted to walk beside Como Lake or the duck park or the lagoon, or even just sit beside the water. I wanted to play with my doll collections, just enjoy them. I wanted to spend some fun times with the grandkids. A recurrent image came into my head: standing on the dock at Burnaby Lake, my favorite place in the whole world, with red-winged blackbirds swooping down to eat out of my hand.
These things seemed light-years away, and very often I was convinced I would never experience them again. But somehow these simple pleasures have slowly crept back into my life, When Erica and Lauren and Jeff came over the evening of my birthday, bearing flowers, a cake, hugs and kisses, it brought me back to life and made me realize why I am here in the first place.
When I became a grandmother for the first time, I had just gotten out of a psych facility due to the most horrific manic episode I ever had, or ever hope to have. But something happened after that death of the soul. I did not merely realize that love is the most important thing - I became love, I moved forward into a way of love I had never know.
Those new lives, a grandchild born each year for four years, kept me here on earth, and though I am not as close to Caitlin and Ryan as I'd like to be, the others have been an absolute Godsend. I didn't need to strive for this, to do anything in particular, to "try". It was all like breathing, and for the first time in many years I was actually having fun.
"Fun is the one thing that money can't buy."
Something inside that was always denied, for so many years. . .
So here, today, I watch my Beatles show after 20+ years, and though I am physically tired and know I have weeks or months left in my recovery, I feel in one piece again. I dodged a bullet, I guess, or at least for now. But a cancer scare makes you wonder about another one, if it might just recur.
Right now I have to eat, even when I don't feel like eating, because the eight-pound loss isn't sitting well on me - my clothes are falling off, my arms and legs withered. I feel my age, or beyond it rather. I have spinal problems I haven't even thought about yet, and my eyesight is terrible, also needing surgery. How much time is left? Am I really wearing down this quickly, and what will come next?
This is the first video I've posted on my channel since HALLOWEEN. Some sort of a record. I just did it on impulse, and so it would NOT be controversial in any way. I even worried about how I slurred on "flock", thinking the algorithm would hear another word. It's mysterious, because I cannot believe I did not post anything in four months.
I decided not to edit it, just get it up there to see if I could still post. Strangely enough, that "warning" notice isn't there any more, and the format for the studio is different now. I have probably a few hundred of videos, most of which I probably won't post, but I sure won't run out either.
So, does this balance out the way I feel now? We'll see. So far it has seemed like 3 steps forward, four steps back. The progress I've made can be easily undone. It will be a while 'til I am able to actually get out and birdwatch, so this will have to do.
Bogey and Bette. Like faithful friends, they just keep coming around.
I spent a Jesusly long time, weeks, practically fastened to a chair, laid out like I was in a sarcophagus of heated blankets and squashy pillows. And I watched movies, and movies, and movies, until I was right sick of it. Even my favorites on Turner Classics wore thin after a while, or just weren't as great as I used to think.
It's only now I'm crawling out into the light, more or less, with plenty of backsteps. My newly-reorganized digestive works are still trying to make the adjustment, but I was glad to see I don't need to see the doc until March 6. I want to blow the whole thing off, as she is glib and superficial and self-interested enough to let me do just that. NEXT!!!
I have never been sick before, at least not like this, and it was an ordeal greater than anything I have endured (up to now). I believe, though no one ever spelled it out for me, that I nearly died twice. The hospitalization of 2 days went on, and on, and on, for nearly 2 weeks. It's one long surreal nightmare, but I am slowly putting distance between myself and the horrors. The mental recovery has been the worst. Slowly, bit by painful bit, I am getting my life back, but it is anything but a straight line.
And I will admit, or just state, that I've been using THC oil judiciously, and it IS actually stimulating my appetite. I lost a good 8 pounds after returning home, and though I'm not exactly a bag of bones, it's weird for me how I have had to reverse everything I've ever done (or thought of doing) with food
All my life, and I mean ALL my life, I have counted calories and felt stabs of guilt if I indulged too much in anything. Now I must flip this on its head and INCREASE my calories, or I will end up sicker, weaker, and more prone to further medical collapse. I can't afford this, but I cannot tell you how impossible it is to eat anything at all when you are either nauseated, or just have zero appetite. All the way through this, there has been a great deal of finger-wagging because "you're not eating!". From nurses, from doctors, even from my family. But the greyish-green plastic trays of steamed slop they call food often made me literally retch, and that's without even tasting it. Prison food would be better.
I wasn't going to go back there. But a scar is a scar. I suppose if I have another one of these, it will likely kill me, or leave me so disabled and dwindled that I won't want t live any more.
Had it not been for the visits from my delightful grandkids, I would have succumbed to despair. I know this, because I was suicidal for weeks. I just was, often leading to MUCH more and more brisk finger-wagging: "How can you do this to your family?" - meaning, MY loss wouldn't really matter too much anyway. Or it sure seems that way.
I don't think anyone reads this blog any more, but I do it for me, and so that I can look up things I posted years ago. And the comments, which I do get, are always on really old ones. I won't try to figure out how they found them, or why.
So I have to get on with my day, which is (very) gradually approaching my old life, the one I love so much, basically because it is MINE and no one dares to take it away.
Black rider, black rider, you've been living too hard Been up all night, have to stay on your guard The path that you're walking, too narrow to walk Every step of the way, another stumbling block The road that you're on, same road that you know Just not the same as it was a minute ago
Black rider, black rider, you've seen it all You've seen the great world and you've seen the small You fell into the fire and you're eating the flame Better seal up your lips if you wanna stay in the game Be reasonable, mister, be honest, be fair Let all of your earthly thoughts be a prayer
Black rider, black rider, all dressed in black I'm walking away, you try to make me look back My heart is at rest, I'd like to keep it that way I don't wanna fight, at least not today Go home to your wife, stop visiting mine One of these days, I'll forget to be kind
Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how If there ever was a time, then let it be now Let me go through, open the door My soul is distressed, my mind is at war Don't hug me, don't flatter me, don't turn on the charm I'll take a sword and hack off your arm
Black rider, black rider, hold it right there The size of your cock will get you nowhere I'll suffer in silence, I'll not make a sound Maybe I'll take the high moral ground Some enchanted evening, I'll sing you a song Black rider, black rider, you've been on the job too long
I promise (sort of) that I will get back to posting when I can. The surgery was utterly brutal and went so wrong, a 2-day hospital say stretched to nearly 2 weeks. It has been a long haul, and will probably be longer.
Well, so. I guess I'm OK, but in less than a week I have to have major surgery, and it has thrown me just a teeny tiny bit. Talk about having your world turned upside-down and shaken like an existential Etch-a-Sketch (oh, what a lovely phrase!) Or am I panning for gold? More like panning for deposits in the cat's litterbox.
Today I put up a 2025 calendar and realized it was one of those free ones from a charity, the Canadian Cancer Society. It gave me pause - is this lucky, unlucky, tempting the gods, etc.? Then I decided, hell, it was free and I hate buying calendars, and besides, this is an outfit geared towards ever-more-effective treatments. I hope. So it went up.
Yesterday was a misadventure, but it turned out OK after all. I have had to scribble down a ton of information due to surprise phone calls, extremely important dates, times and locations for the huge number of tests and preps I need to keep track of before I get mutilated forever. They only go over it once, fast, and you'd better be ready for it with a pen and paper, right now, because you have one shot at it, and as usual there is no way to confirm it afterwards. Not that it's stressful or anything.
One of the most bizarre ones came on Christmas Day, during one of those ultra-rare times when I have my whole family together. Christmas Day. Right! So I scribbled the info down on a sticky note (which is how I organize my world, forget about phones, I hardly ever use one) and stuck it on my calendar. They told me I had to have a CT scan on New Years Eve, which is about as festive as my holiday season got this year.
Yesterday was the day we were supposed to go to (I thought) Eagle Ridge hospital (a 15-minute drive) for the CT scan, and when we got there we were told we had the wrong hospital, it was at Royal Columbian in New Westminster (a horrible old hospital attached to the worst memories of my life, which I can't even go into here because it made facing possibly terminal cancer look like a bloody day at the beach). The receptionist kindly rebooked me for 45 minutes later, and we got there just in time. It being New Years Eve, there was no waiting at all, and the procedure was incredibly fast, so it all worked out after all, but I did NOT need the stress it caused. As it turned out, I did have the information from Christmas Day written down correctly, but was so confused by all the other stuff crowding in on me that I just got it wrong.
Tomorrow is a horrendous day, with all sorts of stuff I have to do, end-to-end for the entire day, cardio, blood tests, other things too bizarre and intimidating to even mention, with no appointments or requisitions or anything, and it's damn hard to get straight information out of anyone. They always start screaming at me to "calm down, calm down!!" It's OK for THEM to be agitated, of course (because they hold all the power and I am just a peon), but never me, oh no, never me. What have I got to be upset about? Aren't I grateful for all this excellent care? What is wrong with me?
I loathe dealing with the medical system at the best of times, and this is NOT the best of times, in fact, it might turn out to be the worst outcome I can think of. I hope not, and I do try to focus on things I want to do after my recovery (particularly, just going out and doing my birdwatching again - it really doesn't take much to make me happy, but to have these few simple things withdrawn from my life is truly miserable, and it's worse to think I may never be able to enjoy those simple pleasures again).
In truth, I have no idea what will happen. Part of me is convinced there's nothing wrong in there after all, and this has all been a big mistake. They'll gut me for no good reason, and I will be immobilized and in unrelenting pain for the rest of my life (with no relief whatsoever, of course! And asking for pain meds automatically makes you an addict trying to cadge drugs for your own partying purposes, or just a thief, and, in any case, obviously weak. Pull your socks up, dear, and stop complaining, NOW.)
My reaction to all this has shocked me somewhat due to all the anger I feel, about so many things. And of course it's bad mojo to say all this, or even think it or consider it, at the start of a fresh new year, unspoiled by catastrophe (so far - it's only 11:30 a.m.). But I do remember being all pleased at the start of 2020, such a symmetrical, lovely-looking date for someone who used to pay some attention to things like numerology (which, thank God, I outgrew years ago, along with palmistry, astrology and Christianity, the worst con of all). And look how THAT turned out.
And of course, all those Nostradamus types are now insisting they KNEW 2020 would be a hellish year, in spite of initially painting it as God's gift to mankind and the luckiest year in human history.
I can't say, but I have to say, and this is my blog so I WILL say, but really, no one is reading it anyway or has any interest whatsoever. I write this because I need to write it. I keep seeing those last few grains of sand trickling through the hourglass. Can I turn it upside-down again? Well, isn't my life upside-down to begin with?
I remember stumbling across this oddity years ago, and have just rediscovered it. It's an animated version of an interview he did at age 20, around the time portrayed in the much-hyped biopic. It's actually very well done, except that Bob doesn't quite look like that. But he looks a whole lot of different ways. I want to do something with this, but I'm not sure what.
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