New Years Restitution

I've never really been a big fan of the New Year's resolution, I can actually only remember succeeding at one that I actually made. For NY 1999, I resolved to quit smoking. On December 31, 1998 at 11:55pm, I lit my last cigarette and put it out just before midnight, and that was it, I stuck it out and quit smoking.

I don't know the success rate for NYR, I'm guessing infinitesimally low. However, this year I decided I'm going to play along. All this alone time has really shone a light on a lot of me that I've never really paid attention to, and some of which is rather unsavory. I think the "big one", the attribute that I've both noticed about myself and find to be the most unsavory, is my ability to be a real dick.

I'm fairly intelligent (possibly debatable), have a very dry, acerbic wit, and also am prone to feelings and expressions of schadenfreude. For those of you who don't know what schadenfreude is, it's a German word which basically translates to experiencing pleasure from the misfortune of others. I'm far from the only one who has this trait, but as I really started to watch myself doing it, I really didn't like what I was seeing. I also have a tendency for catty behavior, and both of my hobbies (dog shows and drag) do me no favors in regard to trying squelch these tendencies; rather, they reinforce them. I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back for being so clever, or to wallow in sorrow and self-pity, these are merely observations noted from periods of intense personal scrutiny. I've tried to really step out of my body and see myself as if I'm floating above it and watching it do its thing, and it's been quite an eye-opener.

At this point, I really am tired of doing it; there is no reason to be a dick. Last week I decided to get an early start on practicing this. Over the last 10 days or so, I've been trying to get as many of the sweets out of the house as possible. This last week (week after Christmas), I boxed up care packages and took them to the dog show, giving them to people who are special to me. These were either good friends, trusted associates or the workers who make the shows run so smoothly. Then I had a brainstorm: if I was going to stick to this thing, there was no reason to wait until January 1, why not start right away? Then I remembered that there is another exhibitor who I often compete against who is at these shows. She is from Southern California, but often comes to shows up here. We usually remain civil, but there have been moments that are less than civil. I am at least 50% at fault, it takes two to battle, and as I thought about it, I really have been a dick to her over the years, to her face, but mostly behind her back (so typical of dog show cattiness).

I decided to pack her up a little care package as well, and when I got to the show and after we were done showing Basenjis, I grabbed the box that I had packed up for her, went up to her and handed it over, saying "Susan, I made you up a little care package for the rest of week and for the drive home". She was really touched, and thanked me genuinely and profusely. I then told her "my New Year's resolution is to stop being a dick, and I've been a real dick to you in the past, so no better place to start." She was very graceful, and gently laughed it off saying "oh Parry you haven't been a dick to me" and "well that will take all the fun away", but I wasn't going to laugh it off or minimize the times that I crossed the line.

"Yeah, I have Susan, and I wanted to just start things new" I said, and then I walked away. I felt so good, and not in a self-satisfied way, but just from knowing that I did the right thing. If it's that easy, then the rest of the year is a breeze, right? Ha! As if. But my intentions are to somehow not conveniently forget this promise after a few days and turn back into my old dick self. I really want this to be the new me. Not perfect, but a better member of the human race. Letting go of petty grievances and being a team player is, in the end, far more satisfying.

I think back at my catty moments, and I really can't ever remember them making me feel good or happy. I maybe felt self-satisfied and/or superior, but not good about myself as a person. Satisfaction felt at the expense of others is a passing and empty pleasure. Doing something truly good and virtuous, whether or not anybody ever knows that you did anything, leaves a satisfaction from doing the right thing that stays with you. I don't really remember any of the satisfaction that I've ever felt from kicking somebody else down. I've always known it was wrong. I may have been transiently smug and self-satisfied, but it's a bitter pill with an even more bitter after-taste.

As I've been doing this soul-searching over the last few years, and also because I've been integrating the lessons from the Course into my daily life, I've noticed that even though I've continued to do the same dick moves, my recognition of how wrong it is hits me nearly immediately. I can't tell you how many times I've started to get into some catty gossip session, or tried to knock someone else down to make myself feel better, only to start to immediately ask myself why I don't just shut the hell up, or even better, to ask myself if there is a better way to look at and/or deal with the situation. I might finish digging the knife in, but I know it's wrong and I can't believe that I don't just stop dead in my tracks. On better days, I'm actually able to stop in the middle of whatever I'm doing that is so dickish. This has gone on for a couple of years now. Especially in this last year, I've noticed that when I get going, I very often just tell myself to shut the hell up and I do. I'll listen to my friends continue to do the same things that I've done, and more often than not, I don't buy into it. I don't chide them or try to change them by making them feel bad. It's judgmental to do, and serves no positive purpose. I can't fix them, the best thing that I can do is to love them and help them learn to shine the light on their own behavior, and do it without judgment. It's leading by example, as opposed to giving lip service to these lofty ideas.

The only way that I can achieve both of these goals is by not trying to fix or change them, I just don't get into the game. Sometimes I'll remain silent and only appear to be engaged. Sometimes I'll pretend that I'm not hearing it and just change the subject, and sometimes, I'll just walk away. The other person might not know what is going on, but I think that they do, because more often than not, once it becomes apparent that I won't engage, they just stop. Just standing and listening with a peaceful smile and not joining in on the feeding frenzy takes away the joy of the act. There are things that one can also say that might help someone see life from the perspective of the person that they are cutting down. The one that I tend to use as of late is to let the person finish their litany of grievances, and then say something to the effect of "if anything, I feel sadness for (insert name), they must have a really difficult life." I see it as a non-judgmental way to encourage someone to walk in their brother's shoes.

Everyone has had or currently has serious difficulties in their life. Even the most despicable person you know probably has a story that brought them to their dark place. We are responsible for our behaviors, but we aren't responsible for things like trauma from being abused or the feelings of inferiority that may come from a life born into poverty. Some people rise above it, but many don't, and I still believe that they deserve love. Not everyone has the same resiliency, tools or opportunity to rise above their adversities. It doesn't make them bad; perhaps it makes them even more deserving of love.

I've never really considered what I would want my legacy to be, until after I lost Ken. I've talked at length about him, about how I couldn't even think of anybody, even after 16 years of knowing him, who could even say a bad word about him. If I could ever sum up his legacy, and I know that this is a really broad generalized answer, I would have to say that his legacy was just being a good man, and a man that touched every person he encountered in a positive way. That is pretty heady praise, some might interpret it as hyperbole, but it's the truth. I've been a very lucky man, in that both men that I was married to had this quality. To be honest, I was always a little jealous of both of them; I don't inspire that kind of affection in people. I'm not saying that everybody hates me, far from it, but even those who know and love me and are loyal to me to the end would admit to the following: I do not tend to inspire ambivalent feelings in the people who cross my path. If you love me, you love me deeply, and if you dislike me, it's usually expressed with equal intensity. I'm a strong personality, I'm opinionated, and I'm really not known for being able to sugar-coat my words. I pretty much call things as I see them.

I would have to say that I can be blunt, and to a fault. I'm not a finesse person. Ken was the epitome of finesse, and I'm not even close. At least I can't be called hypocritical, for I am able to take feedback as blunt and direct as the criticism that I can mete out. Still, that does not excuse it; there is a way to make one's point without crushing another's psyche. As I've gotten older, I think I've gotten slightly better at considering the feelings of the person that I'm critiquing, but as I now approach the fifth decade of my life, I've also become less tolerant of behaviors that as a younger man I could overlook.

To flip the coin on myself, I have to say that despite that character flaw, I've also got a soft heart. I'll help a friend or a loved one even if they have burned me in the past. I can't stand to watch suffering, and if it means that I help you at my own expense I'll usually do it. About the only thing that has changed in that regard as I've gotten older is my tolerance for repeating the same mistake over and over - 5, 10, 15 times. It's only in the last few years that I've given up on a couple of people who I've tried to save (usually from drug addiction and its consequences). Even then, and even if my reasoning is sound and I believe my actions are justified, every time that I've given up, I've suffered terrible guilt for it. In my mind, if I have known you and loved you, I can't have been such a bad judge of character that I would love somebody who couldn't be saved from themselves. That has always been my logic in not giving up, and to this day, I have at least one close friend who had given up on by everybody except me, and I stubbornly refused to join them. The proof is in the pudding for my logic in not giving up on her, and I apologize in advance for the verbose set-up to follow, but it will make a point.

My friend is somebody who started out as a good friend of Ken's. We met, we bonded and I've always loved her, and do to this day. Between the time that I met her (1991) and the last time that I lost track of her, this has been the story of her life (abridged):

She was a successful small business owner, got divorced and lost her minor child in the divorce, as well as the home she and her husband bought. She left her husband for an 18 year old kid, just out of high school and still living with Mom, and married him. She moved to San Francisco, set up house with her husband and older son and coasted through a few years, getting by, but going from a functional alcoholic to a barely functional drunk. Her son brought home crystal meth one day, telling her it's the greatest drug ever, like talking to God (ugh, that sounds so foul to hear and say). Within weeks she was addicted. She lost her job (probably due to embezzlement, though I could never get a straight story). Her now early 20's husband (no charmer himself) finally got tired of her emotional abuse (she had one of the sharpest tongues I have ever witnessed) and moved back home, out of state and filed for divorce. She partied on for a couple of years and finally lost her apartment and most of her dwindling belongings. She met a guy, moved in with him, and nearly immediately he starts to physically and emotionally abuse her. This was at the time of the O.J. Simpson trial, and this dirt bag would beat the crap out of her, then sit for hours in front of the TV, watching the trial, and loudly cheering O.J. on, ranting about how the bitch got what she deserved. My friend ended up in a women's shelter, again losing more of her belongings. I've only gotten to 1995 so far.

She came to our door one day, and I saw the shape she was in. I was devastated, and told Ken that we were moving her in immediately. I didn't know up until this point (we had fallen out of close contact, only seeing her occasionally after her divorce) that she had a non-alcohol drug problem. She moved in and turned the place into utter chaos. Ken lost patience and a couple of times I just had to dig in and tell him to give her another chance. Finally, we had to ask her to leave; she was completely out of control, and made our home chaotic and stressful. She left 90% of her remaining belongings in our basement and moved into a drug den South of Market in San Francisco. What she took with her got stolen, and so she then moved in with another drug dealer in The Mission. Then one evening after dinner, she appeared at our door again, still looking like hell; actually worse than the last time we had seen her.

I told Ken that we were taking her in again, and she moved in, continued her emotional decline and we finally had to ask her to leave again after a couple of months. All of her belongings were still with us from the first time. Then she disappeared until sometime around 2003. All the while I had tried to find her, but couldn't. Then one night she showed up at our door, needing money and giving a lame reason. I knew what she was going to do with it, but I gave it to her anyway. She told us she was living in a transient hotel in the Tenderloin, a hotel pretty much mostly otherwise inhabited by hookers (mostly trannys) and drug addicts (mostly crack and heroin). She and what she had managed to pull together of her belongings, plus her 2 cats (who she had left with a flaky friend for a few years, but she found them and they were fine) were in 1 small room, no bigger than 10 X 10 feet. She had enough in there to fill a small house. There was not one inch of unused space from floor to ceiling. The floor was a few paths; one to her bed (a bunk that she had built so she had storage underneath), one to her fish tank and on to a little kitchen that she had even set up, with a hot plate and toaster oven, off of her windowsill on a little bench that she built. In spite of the utter choas, the place was immaculately clean and well-organized though. Even at her worst, that seemed to be among of the few positive traits that made it through intact.

I saw her a couple of times again that year. I had given her a pre-paid pager so that I could at least get in contact with her in an emergency. Eventually she stopped answering pages and fell completely off the radar. Supposedly she was still living in the hotel, but I could never find her there. Sometime in late 2007 I had pulled my life back together enough to realize that she most likely had no idea what had happened to Ken. I went to the hotel to find out that she had been gone for more than 6 months, and of course, nobody there even knew who she was, other than the manager. At one time, I had her sister's number (she still lived back in the Midwest where they grew up), but had lost it my move out of San Francisco. Then I remembered her ex-husband, the one she left for the jail-bait guy. He was the father of her 2nd son, and I presumed still lived where he and my friend had lived together. I couldn't get a phone listing for him (and he always had a listed number), so I Googled his name and started an internet search. I found out that he was now in the Midwest, and when I called I got his wife on the phone (a really sweet woman, by the way). They had not heard from her in years (no surprise), but the wife did have her sister's number. I got her sister on the phone that night, and found out that she had moved back to the Midwest to take care of her ailing father. We're now in frequent contact (mostly emails), but at least I know she is finally living a fairly normal life. She tells me that she is still drinking (she never lied about that, just about the crystal meth), but she is off other drugs and living quietly with her father, caring for him as his health has continued to decline, becoming basically his nurse.

Now there is a point to all of this. How many among you could say that you would have continued to give someone like this chance after chance, and still try to do whatever you could to help her? Very few, I would doubt, but I never fully gave up on her. In the back of my mind, I always thought that she could pull at least a semblance of her life back together, and at this point it appears that I was right. If I love you, I can't give up on you, ever. This is not to say that I am a saint, but to show that as in-your-face as I can be on one end of the spectrum, I can be equally as kind and forgiving on the other end. I do not know anyone else in my life who I can think of who would have stuck it out through the amount of crap I tolerated from this friend of mine, and what I've shared here is the very abridged version of the last 15+ years of her life. But I love her, and my love of my friends isn't conditional, it's eternal.

The kind, tender and forgiving person who I have described here is pretty accurately the one side of my personality. Now, as I've started to think about the legacy that I would want to leave, I know that what I want it to be is a legacy of kindness. I want to take that part of me that did what I did for this person and flip it over to the dick side of me, who will either hurt someone's feeling purposefully or inadvertently because I didn't consider their feelings. Hopefully 2010 will be the year that I turn the corner and go full speed in that kinder and gentler direction.

In the past, when I have done something that I was told couldn't be done, and then got asked how I managed to do it, my response has always reflexively been "nobody ever told me that I couldn't do it". That is the attitude that I want to take into my kinder 2010. My goal in that resolve to change is 100% success. I've been told that's nearly impossible; I've even told myself that, but the stronger voice in me keeps reminding me: "maybe so, but nobody has ever said that you can't do it". Nearly impossible isn't the same as impossible. I just need to remember the capacity that I've shown in the past to forgive what many would consider unforgivable and then to never give up on someone I love as a hopeless cause. Nobody is hopeless, period; challenging yes, but hopeless, no, I just refuse to believe that. To see no hope is to surrender to fear, plain and simple. I've never really been the surrendering type; I'm far too obstinate to be so. Among the many things that I refuse to surrender is my hopefulness. I'm the king of Plan B. I've never been the negative type by nature. I see the glass as half-full, and every obstacle as a surmountable challenge.

Being a child of an older generation, I come from a time of more rigid and divided gender roles. Of course there is much bad that has come of that, and I would not want to hearken back to the darkness of that period of our history, but I have to find a silver lining in everything, it's my nature. Back then, being a man (or manning up, as is the parlance of the present) meant that you were the provider. Though I don't buy a lot of it, and rather see it is as bunk, it has also impacted me in a positive way. It has made me understand that I need to both fend for myself in this world, and lead others to do so by example. If I expect people in my life to be self-reliant, I need to model the behaviors of self-reliance. The other part of being a man is taking care of those you love. That act isn't so easily defined, because sometimes throwing money or some other material lifeline at someone in self-created crisis only enables their downfall. Sometimes taking care of someone means that you never give up on their ability to bounce back, while still refusing to enable the destructive behaviors. You continue to let them know that you haven't given up on them, nor will you ever give up on them. But at the same time, you acknowledge to yourself and to that person that some lessons have to be learned the hard way, or they are never really learned. Sometimes you have to sit back and let the chips fall where they may. You don't abandon that person, but you do need to let them learn the lesson of the consequences of their actions. Only then do you intercede if you want to really help in a way that can have life-altering impact.

I want to be a good man. Success is great, but it would be empty if I don't love myself, or if I know that the success was the product of ill-gotten gains. More often than not, being a good man also means that you do every deed with the expectation that it will never be acknowledged. After all, what matters more: doing good, or feeling good? I at least know what my answer is to that question.






Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.runnymedesilkys.com.


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Baking Lessons

I've gone on, probably ad nauseum, for the last month or more about my holiday gifting this year; how I decided that I was only giving handmade gifts, and that they would be in the form of gift baskets filled with homemade candies, cookies and canned goods. Tonight I finished putting together the final baskets, and having had plenty of time in the last few days to ponder the whole experience, there are a number of lessons that I have gleaned from the experience. I share them not only to revel in my glories and tragedies, but also to give a heads-up to any future homemade gifters, specifically if they are gifting food.

Rule 1: Don't worry about baking too many cookies. I'm guessing that I baked at least 60 dozen cookies this year. That was for 9 gift baskets, 3 holiday dinners and/or parties, surprise treats to someone special, etc.. As of this evening, I don't have that many cookies left, less than 10 dozen. 10 dozen cookies really aren't that much. I did mostly small cookies, and I could have easily made more. Actually, I made another batch of Pfeffernusse cookies today. I only had a dozen or so left, and they are actually my favorite cookie right now. They are the one sweet that I've made this year that I still consistently enjoy. They aren't sickeningly sweet, and also have a pleasant bite to them, courtesy of a lot of strong spices (black pepper, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves) and dark molasses. They also have a nice bite to them, dense, but moist and chewy. They're fantastic with tea, and since I have so many, I'll just vacuum seal most of them, and I'll get at least a month out of them, probably more.

Otherwise, I can't stand the smell or taste of cookies or candy. As I said in a previous entry, if you want to get rid of a sweet tooth, bake a lot of sweets or make a lot of candy. The smell of sugar baking and sugar syrup cooking gets nauseating after awhile. It's like when you go the the carnival and smell the cotton candy, waffle cones and funnel cakes everywhere: it smells great for about 10 minutes, then after that, it makes you want to vomit.

Rule 2: Keep cookies that are dusted with powdered sugar to a minimum when you are making cookies in advance (I start a month and a half before Christmas, and store them in my garage, which stays below 55 degrees in the winter, usually colder). I get sheet cake boxes at the local bakery and stack them in the box with layers of cardboard and baker's sheets (kind of like parchment but different) between each layer, and only put one variety in a box. You don't want strong flavors like cinnamon, and peanut butter and molasses to taint the flavor of a more delicate cookie. But back to powdered sugar-dusted cookies: the coating just doesn't hold up, and the powdered sugar attracts moisture, which can make the cookies quite soggy. For some reason, the Pfeffernusse held up great, even though they are coated in powdered sugar, but they are the only one exception. The Linzer cookies still taste good, but the beauty of the dusting of the powdered sugar doesn't last, and the moisture wicking of the sugar, combined with the jam in the center can sog the cookies down a bit. Those are cookies that are meant to baked at the last minute, that is when they are their best. Same goes for Chocolate Crinkles. And while we're on the subject of powdered sugar: with any cookie that is either rolled in or dusted with powdered sugar, don't be stingy, go for broke. Especially for cookies that are rolled in the sugar, slather it on. Dusting can be a little more subtle.

Rule 3: For me, the jury is out on sugar cookies. Mine were good, I frosted them with fondant and they were sweet, thin and slightly chewy, just the way that I like them. Decorating them, however, is tedious, and in the end, I think my time could be better spent. Next year, I think I will substitute Pingoles (Italian Christmas cookies with pine nuts and marzipan) for the Linzer or the sugar cookies. Hey, I love them (the Pignoles), so I may as well get something for me out of all that labor. Now that it's over, I have 11 months to plan out my baking and candy making for next year's holiday season. I'm sure every year I'll iron out a new wrinkle or two, as well as learn from a mistake or two.

Rule 4: It is fairly impossible to make too much candy, especially peanut brittle. Everyone has gone bonkers over my peanut brittle this year; I think I could have made just that and people would have been satisfied; well, except for me. This year, 4 batches of fudge seemed to be pretty good. I get 49 squares per batch, and even though my pieces are small (1" x 1"), fudge is rich, and a little goes a long way. But good fudge seems to always be a hit, especially with the kids. The Divinity this year was quite the hit. Most people have never even had it, and nearly everyone went crazy over it. This was the first year that I put dried fruit in it; I did candied orange peel, and it was great. Next year I might do a batch with candied ginger. And since we're on the subject of Divinity, that is the perfect segue to:

Rule 5: Do not make 4 batches of Divinity in a row, without a break, unless you want to by a new stand mixer every year. I'm not joking; I did exactly that this year, and by the 3rd batch that night (and 6th overall), the motor was really starting to not sound good. Once the nougat started to firm up, it was inflicting a terrible strain on the motor, and I heard gears starting to sound like they were getting chewed up, and I lost a very noticeable amount of power to the beaters. This is a 25 year old Kitchen-aid stand mixer. It's built like a tank, and it weighs about what one weighs. Hopefully, I can replace the motor at a reasonable cost. If I buy a new one, it won't be nearly as well-made as the old ones are. Kind of like my 25 year old Cuisinart food processor. They don't make theme like that anymore. Mine is as good if not better than any commercial one you can get nowadays. I thought I burned out the motor a month or 2 ago - took it into the repair shop, he looks at it, and sees that the shaft cover (a plastic sleeve over the blade shaft from the motor) was cracked. Easy $15.00 repair, and a huge relief. When I told the guy that I thought I had burned out the motor he laughed. I asked what was so funny and he said "I have yet to see a motor burn out on a Cuisinart this old. This is from when they knew how to make motors, it's a 1 hp motor with a huge coil." I should have known that; whenever I pulse mine, the motor is so powerful, it will make the whole machine jump about an inch across the counter, any counter. I love that thing.

Rule 6: Don't think homemade gifts, if done well, are any kind of easy; they aren't, but making them is very gratifying. You need to know what you're getting into, however, and be very organized, planned out and disciplined. Even something as seemingly easy as assembling a gift basket can take hours. I have huge respect for anybody that does this for a living, it's tedious, time-consuming and at times, mind-numbing. I didn't just plop some crap in a basket and call it a day; these are professional quality. I made little covers for the canned food lids out of red and green gingham, made my own loose fill in my shredder by shredding red and green printer paper, and once assembled, sealed them with shrink wrap. Here is a photo of 6 of the gift baskets that I assembled in the last 2 days:





Do not put this project off til the last minute. Start assembling your supplies months ahead of time. If you have a craft/sewing room, even better, because it's a messy cluttered undertaking. Plan, plan, plan, and then plan some more. Right now, my sewing room looks like a giant ribbon exploded in there. I tried to go in today and clean up, but I had to just close the door, it was too overwhelming. I'll deal with it tomorrow.

It has been a rather surreal holiday season, much as they all have been for the last three years. Brian and I broke off our relationship on Monday, and it did cast a pall over the rest of the week. It doesn't matter if it was the right thing to do or not. It doesn't matter if you want to do it or not, it is still painful. You can't spend 2 1/2 years with someone in your life and not have their absence make an impact. That said, I am looking forward to turning the next part of my life into a more disciplined and goals-oriented soul-searching and personal values assessment.

I don't know if this is universal, but I know for me that as I have gotten older I have become more regimented and more set in my ways. I have also become more eccentric, and it's really nice to not have to apologize for or explain away my eccentricities, I can just let them be. It's far more relaxing than the alternative of trying to change the habits of a nearly 50 year old man, especially since there really isn't a compelling reason to do so.

I do, however, wish the outcome with Brian had been different, but wishing does not make it so. If it was meant to be, it still would be. I also think I let myself rush into a relationship far before I was ready to do it. That is nobody's fault but my own, I could have put the brakes on at any time, but I didn't, but hindsight is always 20/20. There was a lot of good that came of the relationship: I was introduced to and made a part of of a very artistically talented community, and it sparked a lot of creativity in me that I didn't know I had. Brian is a wonderful guy; talented artistically, sweet, soft-hearted, kind, well-liked and respected by his peers, and even better, he is a loyal, loving and hella funny guy. I have many fun, hilarious, outrageous and interesting memories from these last 30 months, ones that I'll cherish for a lifetime. But in the end, despite all that, I am not the guy he wants, needs and deserves - with me he is settling, instead of having a man in his life that shares the same goals and same way of looking at life. The old saying says that opposites attract, and that is true, but I now understand that the attraction is the excitement of the differences. Once you have to start intertwining your lives, what attracted you can become the personality type that pushes all the wrong buttons. If I lose his friendship that will only make this whole mess sadder, but I'm hoping for the best in that regard, and preparing for the worst. Hopefully I'll get the former.

All this really shouldn't be any harder because of the holidays, at least theoretically. Christmas is just another day that has arbitrarily been assigned December 25 and labeled as "special" and "important". Don't get me wrong, I love the holiday season, and it holds a lot of meaning to me, but at the same time, I also have to remember to keep it in perspective. In the grand scheme of things, it is just another day on the cosmic wheel of life.

I really still love many of the traditions of the season, save the materialistic orgy that ensues for most people. But I love the holidays of the Advent. I'm a sucker for cultural traditions, for which there are many this time of year. For the most part I avoid the feeding frenzy of consumerism gone amok, and just enjoy the traditional celebrations. I've integrated many cultural traditions into Christmas over the years: English (I'm 100% brit by descent), Scandinavian (specifically Swedish and Finnish), Italian and French. For me, that part of the holiday season used to be very gratifying, and is starting to be so again. Next year, my goal is to make it to Sweden to celebrate St. Lucy Day (December 13), and then be home in time for Christmas. If I can't make it to Sweden, I'm going to try to have my own little St. Lucy Day party, and have any friends over who are interested in being a part of it. I'm thinking the way to go would be a traditional Swedish dinner, including of course, Lussekatter, followed by some caroling, warm glüg and flaky cookies and sweet cakes, and making our own little festival of lights to light up a long dark winter night. As I think I've said before, Celebrating St. Lucy Day in Sweden has been a dream of mine, and my goal is next year, but we'll see how the money situation is and how adventurous I'm feeling (that is usually not a barrier for me to travel). Sweden is very secular (REALLY secular), but this is one of the most important national holidays, and as I've said before, one that speaks to me deeply and poignantly, for some unkwown reason.

This last Sunday was week 28 of 56 in the Interferon protocol, and I don't know if it really felt monumental to me or not. I did make note of it, processing that I was hopefully coasting downhill from here on out. It's a nice idea, but with Interferon, there is no coasting. Right now, it's more like Groundhog Day. All the side effects that I had in early therapy: mouth sores, psoriasis flaring up, boils on the skin, 1 or 2 at at time and a continuation of the nausea, especially in the morning. It's weird, now I'm wondering if my cluster of adverse reactions is going to be cyclical; that it will basically run the same course, with the same adverse reactions at the same time as before. It's an interesting postulation, but probably unlikely.

It's funny, but since I cut all my hair off, it seems like I'm losing less. This is of course untrue, it's just that shorter hairs look like less hairs, and I'm likely missing many that just get washed down the drain. I remember that when my hair was long, it looked like there was a mouse in the shower drain every morning; now it's barely noticeable. This is, of course because I'm losing 1"-4" hairs instead of 9-16 inch hairs that I was losing a month ago. It also looks a lot less thin now that it's short; I would have expected the opposite, but in retrospect it makes sense, since what hair I didn't lose was fried and fine in texture, making it look stringy and thin long. Now that it's short it still looks finer than my hair usually is, but not necessarily thin. If it's going to exact any permanent changes on my hair, I would love it if it would straighten it. I'm tired of curly hair, straight is so much easier to manage and neater in appearance. Somehow, unfortunately, I doubt that I can make special requests of the drug, however nice that thought may be.

I continue to be frustrated by my lack of energy and my severely compromised physical endurance. Over the last many years it's been far from optimum; Chronic Fatigue Syndrome saw to that, but Interferon actually found a way to make the fatigue even worse, and then it put a cherry on top of that by making me so anemic that I can't even walk up one single hilly block in San Francisco without getting so winded that I often need to stop mid-block to catch my breath. That is truly frustrating. Again, I can fight a futile battle with this, or I can just surrender to and accept my limitations. I keep reminding myself that it won't likely feel this bad forever, and there is a payoff, but in the moment, it's usually cold comfort. Right now, I'm just trying as much as possible to make lemonade (i.e., when life gives you lemons...). Sometimes you have to really dig deep to put a positive spin on every situation. Good news, however, is that I'm still able to do so, for the most part.

I'm still cranky and bitchy and terse all the time. That is one good thing about being on medical house arrest (as I call it); I'm not going around either constantly apologizing for myself or biting my tongue so often that my teeth have left permanent grooves on my tongue. It's also allowing me to indulge my daily weepies. It's really nice to be able to just burst into tears without embarrassment (I do not like to be seen crying, not in the least), and actually enjoy the catharsis. As I've said before, these moments are never ones where I really feel depressed, I clam up when I'm depressed. The only way that I can accurately describe it is to say that it feels very purging and cleansing (an emotional enema perhaps?), and I always feel a deeply profound sense of relief after these episodes. Hell, sometimes I'll inflict them upon myself by watching a sad movie or overly dramatic TV drama. Law and Order, SVU has been my go-to device as of late. It doesn't matter what episode, pretty much everyone I've seen lately has incited the same response in me. Go figure.

Once again, as it always seems to happen, I look at the clock and it's after 2am. That seems to be my witching hour. I would love to keep going, but my brain and eyes aren't cooperating, so I'll go ahead and publish now, even though this chapter is likely incomplete at this point. I'm trying to honor the promise of an online friend who has been following my adventures and wants to know how the holidays all turned out for me. So here's to you Ray, enjoy.




Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.runnymedesilkys.com.

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Shell Game

Note: As you see above, this post is dated December 15, but to minimize confusion over what may seem to be a screwy timeline, this post was actually written over the course of 6 days, starting on December 15 and ending in the early morning hours of December 21. Now we go back to programming already in progress:

I can't believe that I'm going to swallow my pride and admit this, but without this admission, the heart of what I'm trying to tell would be at best skimmed over and at worst, it would be purposefully inaccurate. With that in mind, I'm going to suck it up, let go of my hubris and just say it. My health insurance has managed to utterly confuse me.

This admission might seem unimportant or overblown in my mind, and maybe it's true, but there are two reasons I always felt that I would be impervious to this ever happening: 1) I have a health sciences education, and I've worked in health care, in big teaching hospitals, both government jobs, with a labyrinthine bureaucracies that one would expect and 2) I've lived more than half my life with chronic life-threatening disease. I've spent countless hours of my life in physician's offices, emergency rooms, on MRI tables, in invasive procedure rooms, and in surgical suites. I've been drained of probably gallons of blood over these 27 years for diagnostic testing and research studies, had biopsies taken of various and sundry tissues, head to toe. I've had ultrasounds, CT scans, MRI's, thallium treadmill tests, colonoscopies, endoscopies, angiograms, PET scans and X-rays. This is what I remember without even having to rack my brain, so imagine how long this list could be if I actually sat down, reviewed all my medical records and then made the list. I find the thought of that alone staggering, much less actually doing it.

But finally, I have to break down and fess up - my health insurance programs have me now utterly and completely confused and caught in a web of circular thinking and movement in trying to figure out what the heck is going on. I am exhausted from hours on the phone, frequently calling the same company and asking the same question multiple times, just because my gut was telling me that the person in the call center had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, or they were working with faulty or just downright bad (mis)information. The typical outcome has been that I get a different answer every time. As such, my new rule is that I have to hear the same information from three different people (and I take down their names) before I'll feel fairly comfortable that I have the right information and got an accurate answer. Even then, it's no guarantee that in the end, I'm working with accurate information. As an example of this, I'll describe something that actually happened yesterday morning (since it's now after midinght).

Today I went in to get pick up my new foot orthotics for my plantar fascitis in my left foot. Basically, they're outrageously overpriced custom insoles for my shoes that will support my feet in such a way that I'll minimize the discomfort in my left foot and hopefully, prevent if from happening in my right foot. This all started about a year ago, when I started having a problem putting weight on my foot in the morning when I first get out of bed; a classic symptom of PF. After my podiatrist ordered them, I called my insurance to find out what my out of pocket expense would be for these, before I decided to shell out any money.

Now I need to take a sidebar here, and first explain how my insurance works. I have 2 policies, one is Medicare, the other is Blue Cross. My Medicare is primary, which simply means that they get the bill first, pay out what they will reimburse for any care, and then the rest of the bill goes to Blue Cross and they decide what, if anything, they are going to cover that Medicare didn't. Now to make things even more complicated, my Blue Cross is divided into 3 different sub-plans. The first is called POS, which stands for point of service and to give a simplified explanation, means that I go to the doctor I want, it doesn't matter if they are in my network (more later on that, don't worry), but this has the lowest reimbursement rates and often doesn't cover what Medicare didn't.

Then there is my PPO, which stands for Preferred Provider Network. These are the doctors, hospitals, labs and allied health care service providers that are contracted with my Blue Cross, and they agree to accept the reimbursement rates that Blue Cross negotiates with them. This usually has lesser out-of-pocket (patient responsibility) charges than service reimbursed through the POS plan. Then finally, there is my HMO. This is the program that almost always ends up having the lowest out-of-pocket, but it is also the most restrictive of the three. I have to have a physician that is a member of one of the physician groups that contracts with Blue Cross, and that for what seems to be almost half of what my physician orders, they need to get a prior authorization for the treatment (or drug or device or whatever) before it is covered under the HMO reimbursement. The HMO seems to operate somewhat autonomously of Blue Cross, at least as far as I can tell, and the decisions as to what to authorize or not is made by the physician group. Then, and I almost forgot this, Blue Cross (my group policy anyway) now contracts out all their pharmacy services to a company called Wellpoint (or as I call them, Hellpoint), including prior authorizations and billing.

To further clarify the relevance of all this information to my experience yesterday at the orthotics company (contracted with my HMO, by the way), I need to take you back about a month ago when I decided to find out if my orthotics were covered by any of my insurance. I call the main number for BC, ask if orthotics are covered and what is my co-pay? I am told that they are covered at 100%. Any limitations? Nope. Thank you very much. I call back a few minutes later, just to confirm (this has become SOP as of late). I ask the question, and am told that there is a $500 deductible. Whaaa? I tell her that I had just spoken to another customer rep and was told that there was a $500 deductible. (Keyboard clicking) and she comes back and says "that is if you go through the HMO", nonchalantly, as if the discrepancy is just pennies.

"Well, first of all, what do you mean by my HMO? I have BC and Medicare, no other insurances". (Keyboard clicking) "No sir, your BC has an POS, PPO, and HMO cost tier". I swear to God, I have never heard that before. "I thought that this policy was a PPO". "Yes sir, but as I told you, there are three tiers, POS, PPO, and HMO" as if I'm either deaf or an idiot", but I keep my cool. I don't want a little black mark that means I'm going to get hassled and end up needing prior authorizations for them to pay for an aspirin." "I know what they all mean, I just had no idea that this was part of my policy". "Yes, it is sir, and for foot orthotics if you use a POS (non-network provider) the deductible is $500 (they cost $570 by the way). If you use a PPO provider the copay is 30%, and if you use your HMO, they are free to you, as long as your doctor get a pre-authorization. Me: "so my pre-auth goes to you guys?" "No sir, it goes to Brown & Toland". Holy cow, I think, I almost had one by that point.

So I call one more time, and get the same answer as last time, so I figure I'm good to go. I call the podiatrist, his office submits a pre-auth, and a week later, I get an approval letter, with a list of orthotics suppliers that are in my HMO. I call, make and appointment, go in, get fitted, wait 10 days, go back, get my new orthotics and the technician tweaks them, then says "ok, we're done. Just head up front and take care of your co-pay". Oh holy hell. So I get up to the desk, and the receptionist/billing clerk says "that will be $107.50 Mr. Tallmadge". Me: "umm, these were ordered through my HMO with a prior auth, there is no copay. " (keyboard clicking, as she goes to the BC website) "No sir, according to their website, with your policy you are only covered at 70%". I'm getting slightly irate: "you need to call Blue Cross then and figure this out" As I wait, she calls BC and ends up in phone tree hell for a while. Finally a person answers, she explains the issue "oh, that isn't us" she is told, "you need to talk to ____ I'll transfer you". Another hold, then again, she explains the situation. Lots of yakking back and forth, she keeps rolling her eyes at the person on the other end, tells them what information I got from the insurance company before I ordered these. Finally, she says "thank you", hangs up and goes back to the computer (keyboard clicking). She then tells me "you were right, Mr. Tallmadge. The problem is, BC's website doesn't show an HMO tier for your policy, so that is why the confusion happened".

This whole situation was minor compared to some of the bull that I've had to deal with lately with BC. Case in point: I call to order refills for my Interferon 2 weeks ago. I call the mail order pharmacy, and am told that I have no refills left, and they need to contact the Dr's office. Two days later I get a call from the pharmacy, telling me that my claim was denied. OK, that is it, I go off (but not at the poor customer service agent, it's not her fault. She is as much of a pawn to those bastards as I am). She then tells me that Wellpoint has supposedly called my physician's office 3 times in the last 2 days and they haven't gotten the required documentation to approve the claim. This has happened more than once before with Hellpoint already, so I know that was a flat-out lie. If nothing else, my physician's practice is very responsive with issues like this. I call the office and talk to the office guru that handles all this insurance company bull, and she tells me she is getting right on it. A few hours later I hear back from her, and she tells me that it was rejected, but she had requested an expedited re-auth, which they will do for life-sustaining therapies, and they have to respond within 72 hours (not business days, 72 hours from the time that they get the fax from my physician's office.

The following day Karen from the physician's office calls me back, as does my physician, telling me that they are still denying the claim. Supposedly my cirrhosis is too advanced and I'm not having an adequate enough of a response. I call BC and give them my "what the hell is going on" speech, they tell me that I can appeal again, and I have 60 days to do it. How nice. I tell her that this is a life-sustaining therapy, and unless the insurance company wants to take the blame for potentially screwing up a good response to treatment, it needs to be fixed NOW. She tells me to tell the physician's office to call and request another expedited appeal. I do, the following morning I hear back from the physician: "Parry, did you ever have a liver biopsy?" Me: "no, Marion Peters at UCSF said it was a wasted procedure since I was an acute infection, it hadn't been lingering in me for years". My physician then says "well I don't know where they are coming up with that, because that is what I told them was the case, and they didn't seem fazed; I told them that you were infected sometime after August, 2007, when you last were tested and was Hep C negative. They then tried to tell me that I hadn't sent in all the labwork, and there wasn't evidence that you were responding positively to the therapy. I told them to look in the file, everything was emailed over. I told them that you went from a viral load of 2.3 milion at onset of therapy, and by week 8 the viral load was undetectable, and had remained so. You can't ask for a better response than that. I also reminded them that standard of care, especially with HIV/Hep C co-infection, was 48 weeks of Interferon. I told them that they were risking compromising a so far robust SVR (sustained virilogical response) by truncating your therapy. They were jerking me around, I asked for a medical director. She got on the phone, I repeated everything to her, and all they said was "we will review it". The following day, my physician comes into the office in the morning to find an approval letter sitting in the fax machine. Egads. Oh, and btw, my physician told me in that final long conversation that we had that he had been told that he couldn't get request an expedited appeal over the phone. I told him "well call them back and rip them a new one, because that is the opposite of what I was just told.

Have you ever noticed that in all the insurance company's advertising, they always show robust, happy smiling (and usually white) people? They are probably smiling because they have never had to deal with their insurance company. Swear to God - these days, I think the way these crooks operate is so frustrating that they could probably get Mother Theresa to cuss like a sailor. I know know why there has been such a push for more anti-depressants to get to market. By the time people get their insurance company to pay for them, they are already past the point where the drug can be helpful and they now need a bigger and better one. If you haven't see Sicko, you really should. I've seen all of Micheal Moore's films. I respect him as an artist and as a humanitarian, but I'm not an apologist for him. He can be known to tinker with the facts to make his hypotheses work. He can be prone to hyperbole and to being fast and loose a bit with the truth now and then, as does any story-teller, of which he is one. I use that term in the most complimentary possible manner, by the way. But Sicko is a different story. In this movie, and I think I can speak from the perspective of someone who has a fair degree of sophistication with working the system, he really didn't have to stretch the truth, even if he had wanted to.

I've watched our health care system devolve over most of my adult life, both from the inside and the outside. Health care barely resembles what it was 25 years ago when I graduated from nursing school. We actually had a better system back then, and that is a pretty sad thing to observe. When Cuba, one of the poorest countries in The Americas, can provide free health care to their entire population, something that we so far haven't been able to do, that is downright embarrassing. That we are one of the most prosperous nations in the world, and are still the only country in the western world that doesn't have free universal health care is an abomination. I'm not very hopeful about any reform that is going to come through this year. I've not been watching the debate that much, but every time that I do, I see the same thing happening in Washington: finger-pointing, pandering to the whims of fellow legislators and giving every whiner a little pork in their pocket just so they can pass "something". To me, that is expediency at the expense of doing the task correctly.

What really scares me with the current "system" (what a misnomer that is) is knowing that if somebody like myself, who for the most part knows how to work the system better than most can still get dicked around, what is happening to people who don't know any better? Most people don't have the medical sophistication and education that I have been blessed to have. I can't tell you how many friends and loved ones I've walked through a fight with their insurance company. I have to know that for every one of them, there are thousands who don't have a voice or an advocate, and that is what the big business of rationed health care in our country depends upon. Their profit margin factors in and depends on a certain number: how many people will stay ignorant and uninformed? Then to go to the next step, how many of those people will then just roll over and take it when they get denied care by that insurance company? They want nothing to do with the government taking over the system; they stand to lose a lot, and they know it. Their little shell game of hiding the money and shuffling it around and burying it in a morass of paperwork will come to a screeching halt if the government takes over. Like Medicare already does, the reimbursements are set, the doctors don't spend half of their time and resources dealing with getting paid for their work. Ask 90% or more of doctors out there, and they will tell you how they love dealing with Medicare vs any private insurance company. The paperwork is less in volume and more efficiently handled, and the drug companies and hospitals are bound to take the reimbursement that the government will give. There is no negotiation, take it or leave it.

Our country is going to get sucked down the crapper unless we finally decide that every American has a right to free health care. Some crooked CEOs and their poorly-run companies will fail, and I think that is a good thing; we don't need to be trying to save all the AIGs and Enrons of the health care sector. If some of the bad apples fail, the sun will still come up every morning like it always has. The Ann Coulters and Glenn Becks will still be around, decrying the moral decay of our country as we slip into a socialist state, and I fully support their right to do so. I just hope that they are seen for the charlatans and crackpots they are. I'm just stunned that in our supposedly democratic country where the rights of all are sacred, that we still let so many among us fall through the cracks: no housing, not enough food, and the worst and most minimal health care that can possibly be doled out.

On Saturday, both the denial and subsequent approval on appeal letters for the continuation of Interferon therapy arrived - same day. The statements in one letter completely contradicted the statements in the other letter. It was a little funny, because in the approval letter, they went out of their way to make the point that the review and decision on appeal was made by a completely different person from the denial letter. Well duh! All you needed to do was read the letters, it was a perfect illustration of the right hand not knowing what the left hand isn't doing. Another gem in the approval letter was that they stated that I was approved for another 36 weeks, but if you count the dates that are covered by the letter (12/21/09 - 7/14/10), I get 29 weeks and 3 days by my count. Supposedly they only want to approve me for a total of 48 weeks, but with this approval, if it is honored, I would have enough drug to go for a total of 64 weeks. Whatever, I'm not complaining, I got the approval so I'm good to go in that regard.

On a lighter note, I made three more batches of peanut brittle this weekend, and if I can say so myself, it came out brilliantly. I had an interesting observation today. I don't know if you have actually taken note of this, but have you ever observed that most candy makers, chocolatiers and pastry chefs (as in professionals, and I said most, not all) are not obese? I think I've now figured out why. If you spend hour upon hour, day in and day out, smelling sugar syrup being cooked down, it becomes kind of gross, and rather quickly so. I have no interest in cookies or candies. I've eaten very little, but it's atill been seeping passively in my pores for weeks. My sweet tooth has been euthanized, and I am craving anything savory: meat, a salad, some dairy, something spicy, some vegetable, anything. I just don't want anything sweet right now, and all the sickening, sugary, sweetly smells have destroyed my appetite.

Since I've wandered back into a culinary topic again (actually it's a nice respite from talking about drugs, disease and insurance), I got an email from my niece yesterday. She is an adult, the only child of my sister Pam, and she is 33 yrs old. She had spoken to my Mom and was looking for a good cookie recipe. She was going to a party that a friend was having; it was a recipe sharing party, and this one's topic was cookies. Rachael doesn't bake a lot, so she was lost and asked me. Over the course of a few text messages, we narrowed the list down and finally came up with Chocolate Crinkles, when are easily my favorite chocolate cookie, and one of my top 5 favorite cookies. I emailed her the recipe and then sent her a text, telling her to check her email.

Later in the evening I got a reply from her, thanking me for the recipe, then out of the blue she says "I just saw Julie and Julia, and I'm wondering: what really inspires you in the kitchen?" I sat for a moment, thought it over, considered giving her a short and incomplete answer, since it was late and I was tired, but very early on into my response letter, I realized that she deserved better. That was a really insightful question, one that I have never been asked before, and not one that she obviously wanted me to just give lip service to with some perfunctory answer. So bleary-eyed and more than ready for bed I went for it.

What inspires me in the kitchen is the food. If I fail, I'm inspired to make it better. If I succeed, I'm inspired to try something else I never thought I could make. There used to be a long list of things I thought I couldn't do, mostly because I could never get them to turn out right. This last year, I've taken that list, and called it my challenge list. I told myself that there is nothing that I can't make. Cooking is part skill, part inspiration, part innate talent, and I have all three. But all those are meaningless without practice. Failures are inevitable, but that is how you learn. If I keep making the same mistake every time, I need to figure out why, all time reminding myself that I'm the problem, not these words printed on this page of a recipe book. If I make a new mistake every time, I'm learning. Cooking has a learning curve, even for the best of chefs.

Few things are as universally satisfying as good food, not even good sex, I reckon. Preparing good food is its own reward and creates new inspiration for me. I'll never get to a point where I can say I've peaked. If I do, then I'm delusional. I can, however, continue to set loftier goals, and I now approach these goals differently. Rather than thinking to myself that I hope I don't fail, I can instead set the expectation to succeed. It's semantics, but often those seemingly insignificant shifts in perspective can have far more monumental effects on one's expectations and outcomes. It's also interesting to me that as I have put into action these new ways of looking at my culinary path, I'm finding that what I used to perceive as flops and monumental failures seem to be very small. I think it's partly that as my skill has improved, I am at a stage of honing my skills rather than starting at square one. I also think that it's probably due in great measure to my generally new outlook on my life. I spin nearly everything differently when I'm analyzing data, which I do constantly. I don't see insurmountable odds or no-wins, I see challenges, I don't see illness, I see opportunities for both growth and also learning to adapt to the tools (my body) I have to work with, and the condition of those tools. I also have continued to get a deeper appreciation for the importance of honoring and respecting my mind and body. I'm getting a bit off-course here, but there is a point: in every endeavor that I've undertaken in my more recent life, especially with the even greater health challenges, the outlook with which I approach these challenges and the methods that I employ to meet the challenges are nearly identical, and nearly universally adaptable. I think I'm finally figuring out that the complicated solution is rarely the correct one. Thinking small can produce very big results.

It's funny, but the more that I write, the more that I realize that so much of our life is repeated experience, only altered enough to deceive our minds into thinking that we are seeing distinctly different occurrences. It seems to me that once you start distilling down your thought and decision making processes, you usually find that it's the same problem in a slightly different form. The same goes for the solution: same answer, slightly different form and content. Maybe life is really only one question asked and answered in an infinite number of slightly different ways. Personally that makes the most sense to me, and makes it easier to make sense of senseless situations. Again, this is another quantum shift I've experienced; there are no senseless happenings in life, there are only happenings that one may not necessarily understand at the moment. Eventually, all the puzzle pieces fit together, and in the end, the picture in the puzzle is the story of one's life.





Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.runnymedesilkys.com.



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In The Land Of Cockaigne

I need to start this chapter with a qualifier: I am going to be referencing a movie that I have never seen. The references are short, minimal and of questionable significance, but in the interest of full disclosure I will say it again. I have not seen Julie and Julia, but I have no reason to believe that I will be in any way inaccurate, it's anything that you can get from a reputable review, or for that matter, probably IMDB.

In this last half-year plus a little, I've been pulling a bit of a Julie and Julia. I haven't been quite cooking my way through a cookbook and finding it to be a form of self-discovery, but I have been turning my kitchen into a psychiatrist's couch. It started quite innocently, and out of a practical necessity, but starting in early May and pretty much continuously up to and through today and into the foreseeable future, I am in the kitchen nearly every single day. I am in there cooking, baking, candy making, canning, preserving and preparing food in nearly every conceivable manner. If I have enough energy to get out of bed (and honestly, some days it doesn't happen and some days it barely happens), but if I can do it, even if it's for an hour, I go in the kitchen and I cook. And when I do, I feel better. Not physically, but emotionally and spiritually, I feel better. Cooking has been therapy for me, because it's something that I know but it's also something that I really can't ever peak at no matter how long I keep at it. Like art, if one has talent, they only get better with practice.

These last couple of months have involved planning and now executing my gift project for this year. I decided months ago, really at the very first thought of Christmas, that if I gifted this year (and there are years that I haven't), that the gifts would not come out of a store, at least directly. To anybody I'm gifting this year, they are getting a basket of homemade foods: pickles, homemade canned pie fillings, jams, jellies, chutneys and other sauces, and finally, baked goods and homemade candy. It's personal, full of love, and something that I would love to receive. I started first with candies, and this was a leap of faith thing for me. I've never been very successful at candy-making, so I wasn't sure if I could pull it off or not. Candy, more than almost any other food making, is exact, precise and governed by a set of rules that are, for the most part inflexible. As Elle Woods says in legally blonde in a court room scene: "the rules of hair care are simple and finite. Any Cosmo girl would have known". The rules of candy making are finite, and sometimes simple, sometimes not. It is also dangerous - ask anybody who has ever sustained a burn from 375° sugar syrup. And it will happen to you if you make enough candy. I've yet to meet anybody who has made a substantial amount who doesn't have at least 1 scar from sugar napalm. Hint for candy making virgins - when you are candy making, keep a big bowl of ice water close to the stove, but also at a safe distance. Close means that you can get your appendage with searing skin in it in one second or less, but also not so close that you can splash ice water into a pot of boiling sugar syrup. It won't be pretty, unless you consider a sugar lava facial pretty. This trick is also a good one to do when you are working with a hot glue gun. As with candy making, I don't know anybody who has ever worked with a hot glue gun who has not burned themselves, and usually this happens first with your first attempt at using it. Anyone who has used a glue gun for any appreciable amount of time and claims to have never burned themselves is lying.

I entered the candy making venture with a lot of trepidation. I knew my past history with the craft and my monumental flops were not forgotten. I really didn't want a repeat performance, so I decided to take a novel approach: I would follow the directions to the last word (none of my typical winging it), and I would not try to do it without a candy thermometer. And so far this year, everything that I have made has turned out beautifully, and I'm not just doing Candy 101 recipes, I'm picking a couple of the most temperamental candies to make. Of all the recipes I've done, the one that appears on the surface to be the easiest but is in reality the most temperamental is called divinity. If you've never had it, the best description that i can give is that it is a real old-time American heartland candy that is something of a hybrid of meringue and nougat.

If the temperature of the room isn't right, divinity will fail. If it's too humid or not humid enough (25-30% seems to be about ideal), the divinity will fail. If the egg whites aren't just so, it will flop (I've found that if the whites are too fresh, it's not the best - for some strange reason, 3-4 week old whites seem to be ideal). If you look at it the wrong way, it can and will fail. Before this winter, I've never had a batch turn out right. My Mom, who is a very good candy maker, has probably about a 70% success rate. I've done 3 batches so far this year, every batch has turned out great. Unfortunately, I've already eaten about half of it (oops) so I have to make more, maybe tomorrow.

Other than divinity I've also made fudge and and peanut brittle. In my entire life, I've probably had fudge turn out perfectly once or twice, and I've made a lot of fudge (or attempted to) over the years, undoubtedly it is the candy I've tried to make more times than any other candy. It usually ends up grainy from undercooked sugar, or runny and won't set for the same reason. This year, two batches so far this year, both spectacular. I have 2 batches left to go. I've never made peanut brittle prior to this year. I love it, but I've never made it. Brittle, like divinity, is a deceptively simple recipe, yet one that I've been warned can be prone to disaster. I've found that again, if you follow the directions to a T and use a candy thermometer, you greatly improve your chances for success. Another important hint is use raw peanuts (or whatever nut you're using), unless you like the acrid taste of burnt nuts (and please don't tell me a peanut isn't a nut, I know it's a legume - go stuff it).

Raw peanuts can be somewhat difficult to find, at least this year for me, but I've found the best bet to be a health food store. And please, don't go to Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck, or any of the other mega Wal-Mart-esque operations. You are getting ripped off, and you're not keeping your money in your community. It might be pretty and shiny in there, and I hate to burst your bubble but the truth is, the food isn't any better than what you're going to find at your local, old hippy-run, mom and pop health food store. Every town has one, and it's good karma to support small local merchants. You might end up getting your chakras aligned or your aura adjusted without your permission, but I promise, it won't hurt. For that matter, it probably won't do anything.

Most recently I've been working in earnest on the cookies. A few weeks ago I started out by making test batches of the recipes to make sure that I could reproduce them consistently. I know what all the recipes I'm doing are supposed to look and taste like, so if it's not going to work, best to know early so that I could make adjustments or choose and make an entirely different contingency cookie. So far all's well, so it looks like this is my assortment. I've done 3 different kinds of spritz (cookie press cookies). First was standard vanilla (wreath-shaped) with sprinkes and gaudets for decoration, then peanut butter (flower-shaped) with a chocolate chip in the center of the flower, and finally chocolate-espresso (trees and wreaths) drizzled with a white chocolate ganache (slurp - these are my personal favorites). After the spritz I've done sugar cookies (baked and awaiting decoration). I did the following shapes: snowmen, stockings, stars and trees. Then this week, I started on linzer sandwiches (hazlenut cookie sandwiches with jam in the center) and pfeffernüsse (a very spiced traditional German cookie with cardamom, nutmeg, anise, black pepper and cinnamon, and dusted with powdered sugar after baking. They have a very spicy, molasses-infused flavor; not really a kid's cookie, but I love them. They shout Christmas for me. I'm also going to do peanut butter blossoms - a small thick and chewy peanut butter cookie with a chocolate kiss on top. Then maybe one more, but I haven't picked one out yet.

Once all the cookies are done, all I have left to do is prepare the baskets, and I'm done. I don't know if I've really saved any money, but these gifts feel to me as if they are filled with my love and have a bit of my heart in each one. This really has been a very therapeutic experience for me. I've really been able to open up my heart a little bit more each time I go into the kitchen, and I'm given back much reward - good food, good feelings, creation, artistic expression and pushing myself to be better. I've always known that the kitchen is a place of comfort and safety for me. I can nurture both my body and my spirit. It keeps my mind active and forces me to find focus. When I'm running on an empty tank (energetically), I can do as little or as much as I want to and am capable of. My home smells better, my belly is full (if I can eat, and that has been a challenge lately), as is my heart. I really don't have any friends or family that have quite the relationship I do with the kitchen - perhaps the closest is Deanna, but I think I even get more than her in the kitchen, at least emotionally and spiritually.

This is really the first year that I've had even a semblance of the lust for the holiday spirit that I used to have. It's not the same, but it's far better than the last two. I keep being surprised by how much sadness and loss I still feel this time of year, and I don't think they will ever likely be anywhere near what they used to be like for me before Ken died. That it happened 4 days before Thanksgiving will always place a pall over this time of year. I'm sure that over the years it will be likely to diminish somewhat, but it will never go away. Ken loved Christmas as well. Every time I hear Hark the Herald Angels Sing on the radio, my eyes pool with tears. It was Ken's favorite carol, which slays me to this day (avowed atheist that he was), but I know it wasn't the words, even though he knew each and every one in the song, it is, quite simply, just a very beautiful song. It is now probably my favorite carol as well, but every time I hear it, the waterworks open up. I just have to give in and let the tears be. They aren't mournful and dismal and depressed, they are tears that feel good. They are not just cathartic; they are, far more importantly, tears of loving homage to the man I love as I have never loved anyone before or since.

My holiday music this year is primarily coming from Sirius (DISH TV gives you the Sirius music channels), and I'm listening almost exclusively to the classical music. I don't want to hear any Christmas rock this year. It turns my stomach, to be perfectly honest. My trees are up, my lights and most of the decorations are up, and now the house really looks and smells like Christmas.

This coming Sunday, December 13, is my favorite holiday of the Advent, even more so than Christmas; it's St. Lucy's day. Most famously celebrated in Sweden, it is also celebrated in a handful of other countries as well. It honors St. Lucy, who is the patron saint of fire (she was burned alive by the Romans, and survived). No matter what they did to her, they could not get her to stop preaching the gospel of Christ. Not only did they burn her, but they gouged out her eyes (she is also the patron saint of the blind). She still continuted to preach, and the Romans only finally succeeded in getting her to stop by killing her, thrusting a sword through her throat.

It's quite interesting that Sweden is where it is celebrated most fervently, because Sweden is considered to be one of the most secular countries on Earth, but in Sweden St. Lucy's day is a national holiday, and a very big deal. Each town elects a young girl to portray St Lucy. She wears a long white robe with a red or blue sash at the waist and a crown of candles (6 or 7, I believe). She leads a procession of other children (traditionally all girls, but now co-ed), the girls wearing the same robe and sash as she, but instead of the crown of candles, they wear a crown of twigs from the lingonberry bush. If the choirs have boys in them as well, they wear long robes with tall pointed hats (like a wizard hat), both adorned with stars. They are actually called Star Boys. They typically start in a church in the evening, and then the Lucy leads her girls and boys in a procession through the town singing traditional carols, starting with, of course, Santa Lucia. I love that song, it is probably my 2nd favorite song of The Advent, close behind Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Here is a native Swede, now living in New York, who has a video blog on YouTube, and he gives a great description of St. Lucy's Day and its meaning to him:



Also, here is a really good performance by a St. Lucy's Day choir in Sweden. In addition to each town (and sometime each school) there is also a national St. Lucy comptition, and the winner's performance is broadcast nationwide. Here is part of the nationally televised celebration:


Here is another performance, probably my favorite one on YouTube:



I've never been able to be part of a St. Lucy Day celebration, and I want to some day. Actually, in the next few years I would love to go to Sweden and celebrate the day there. The other significance to this day for the Swedes is that this is one of the shortest days for hours of daylight in the year (originally it was believed that this was the shortest day of the year in Sweden), so St. Lucy Day is also a festival of lights, with entire communities aglow from candlelight. Some Swedes will actually stay up all night with candles burning, traditionally believing that lighting the darkness would give them safety and respite in the middle of a long dark winter. There are also foods specific to the day, most famously a saffron sweet bun served in the morning called Lussekatter. Translated literally it means "Lucy cats", for the shape (a twisted S) which supposedly looks something like a cat's eyes and whiskers. There is a raisin put into the center of each loop of the S, so if you lay it on its side, well...I don't know, it's a stretch to me, but come to think of it, I just might make this tomorrow for Sunday morning. I don't know why I like this holiday so much: I've never been part of a traditional celebration of St. Lucy day, but for some reason, it speaks to me, and deeply so. I think partly it might be that Montana, as many of its neighbor northern border states (North Dakota and Minnesota) and their Canadian provinces to the north (eastern British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan) have large Scandinavian populations. I had access to and ate a lot of Scandinavian food as a child, and it is definitely one of my favorite regional comfort food cuisines: meats, fish, potatoes, breads and cheeses - seriously, how can you go wrong there?

A couple of months ago, I finally went out to Target and bought a small assembly-required (a la Ikea) bookshelf for my cookbooks in the kitchen. I had just opened my last boxes from the move (a mere two years ago), and found my cookbooks. Let me qualify that; I found a few of my cookbooks. Somehow and somewhere, a vast majority of my cookbooks, many irreplaceable, were lost in the move. There was an entire 15 volume series of Family Circle recipies - all but 2 lost. There were a number of old family cookbooks, cookbooks made as fundraisers for churches, club or schools, Julia Child's The Way to Cook (replaceable, but I liked the one I had), a number of cookbooks from restaurants and wineries all over Northern California. I know that these are just things, and I've become accustomed lately to letting go of what I can't get back, but it still does hurt, and mostly because I really can't remember everything that I lost. Some of them aren't irreplaceable just because they're out of print; they're also irreplaceable because I can't remember which ones are gone. Thank God for the internet at least. It is a veritable embarrassment of riches as far as being able to find a recipe for pretty much any dish that has ever had a printed recipe, no matter how esoteric many of these recipes are. This loss has had another positive effect in this regard, that being that it has also nudged me, at times not much subtlety, to move out of my comfort zone and try new things: new recipes, techniques and cuisines. That has been my Julie and Julia experience. That, and the emotional healing that I get when I cook. It's the kind of healing that I don't think I have ever gotten from any other specific activity, except for maybe meditation, but I think the outcomes for me have been more personally meaningful and profound in the kitchen, for better or worse.

Joy of Cooking has been my go-to for the holiday season this year. There are some traditional recipes in there that you really can't find a more accurate recipe for than what is in Joy. A few weeks ago, as I opened and started to leaf through Joy semi-haphazardly, I remembered how many recipes in it have Cockaigne in the name of the recipe. In every chapter, I can guarantee you that there will be multiple Cockaignes. I was reminded how I alway wondered what the f- that word meant, and to that point I had been far too lazy to look it up. But thanks, of course, to Wikipedia, I now know what Cockaigne means. Cockaigne: "Cockaigne or Cockayne is a medieval mythical land of plenty, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist." Screw the medieval, I want a Cockaigne now. I think the 21st century could benefit greatly from having a Cockaigne, or for that matter, at a minimum, at least one on every continent. Forget Bermuda, Dubai, The Dutch Antilles, the Greek Isles and Monte Carlo - I want a real honest to goodness, kicking it medieval style Cockaigne. MTV Presents Spring Break in Cockaigne. Girls Gone Wild in Cockaigne. Cockaigne and Godzilla Destroy Las Vegas. I lost my virginity in Cockaigne. Now, instead at looking at every damned Cockaigne recipe in Joy and asking myself "what in the hell does Cockaigne mean?", I now look at each Cockaigne recipe and chuckle to myself. For a mythical land, there sure are a lot of recipes that got out. From here on out, anytime somebody asks me "what do you want to do with the rest of your life?", my pat answer will be "get to Cockaigne".

Right now, it is a beautiful and cold California winter. My house looks and smells like Cockaigne, I mean Christmas. Things are going pretty damned well, considering. Still, there is a deep and unsettling uneasiness down in the pit of my stomach. Either something is missing or something needs to go missing, but that is about as far as I've gotten in dissecting this feeling. I don't know if it's the holiday blues amplified by deeply missing Ken, infirmity or just generalized unease. Whatever it is, I am coping. I don't feel like I can't handle it, but something is definitely not right. I'm just not sure I'm up to figuring out what it is, because if I do, then I have to do something about it. For now, I'm just getting through each day, keeping my head above water, my future outlook positive, and doing the best I can to live in and be fully present in each moment. For now, that, and keeping my eyes on the road and my hands busy is about all I can muster. That means it has to be enough, at least for now.

I'm also missing Montana. If I could, I would drop everything and go home for the holidays and a good month of winter. Until I build a home up there, that is not so easy. I've been trying to focus my future thinking on finding a way to make manifest building my retirement home in Montana. For a very long time now, I've wanted to have the option to be able to live around half of the year in Montana and the other half in California. I want a month of cold, snowy, crisp winter wonderland weather, but only a month. I want to be able to get away from that for the rest of the winter. I want to watch spring bring the forest to life, but also have some California spring, the prettiest time of year out here. I want the summer thunderstorms, comfortable climate and big beautiful outdoors of Montana. I really don't need much Walnut Creek summer; honestly, it's too darned hot. I really don't like having so many days of temperatures over 110° that I can't keep count. I want to watch the leaves turn color in Montana, then come to California a month later and watch it all happen again. Don't get me wrong, I love California, it is my home now, and it's a good place for me, but it isn't, never has been and likely never will be my real home. That is Montana; it always was, and it probably always will be. I've now lived half of my life in each place, so I think I know what I want. What I want is both, but if I'm pressed to say where I feel at home, that will always be Montana; it's my land of Cockaigne. I'm probably going to become the crotchety old snowbird that I used to ridicule, but that is for time to tell and is going to be my own thing to figure out as I have my Julie and Julia moment.

(Sunday morning, 3am)

This chapter is turning into a 3 day project. It's 2am, Sunday, December 13, 2009 - St. Lucy Day. After I dragged my ass out of bed around noon I did get some baking done today. Nothing else, unless you count calling Deanna and reading emails. Oh and a trip to Bed Bath & Beyond for more cooling racks (for baking, of course). I did indeed end up making the Lussekatter today. Well, that was after I got some saffron at Safeway (1.7 gm. for a mere 15.00). This was my first foray into yeast bread making in longer than I can remember. I've never had much luck with yeast doughs, ever. I really can't ever remember making a single loaf of bread that I ever thought "dang, this is good!" as I ate it. For some reason, this last half year in my Cockaigne, I mean kitchen, has been littered with a series of successes with things that I had never had success with before. I don't know what it is all about, but I'm not going to ask. I think the strategy that I've used and need to continue using is that I have induced selective amnesia about my prior culinary belly flops, and that has allowed me to work without the voice on my shoulder saying "you can't do this, you always mess it up". More than anything, I think muffling the drone of that voice that spells doom has more to do with my success and resultant confidence-building than anything else I can put my finger on.

As for my Lussekatter today, well, it is somewhat dense of a dough, very yeasty. The recipe calls for 50 gm. of yeast, which is the equivalent of 4 single-use packages of the typical yeast that you find on store shelves. It is a European recipe, so maybe the yeast is different over there. The bread does have a definite yeasty taste to it, but I've had a lot of Eastern European rolls and buns before that are equally as yeasty tasting if not even more so. They look exactly like the pictures of them from recipes and from Lucy Day celebrations in Sweden. They have a definite Scandanvian look to them; the shape is one that is very typical to Scandinavian sweet rolls that I've eaten before. They are pretty darned tasty, and the saffron gives them a very interesting flavor - complex is the best descriptor I can come up with. They aren't spicy, savory, rich or overpowering, but the flavor is most definitely complex, not your typical breakfast bun. I took a picture with my phone today, and here are the fruits of my labor (by the way, pardon the shadow in the picture. No matter what angle I tried to shoot from, I couldn't avoid the shadow from my giant cranium):


















My friends Tom and Dan in San Francisco (they used to own a deli about a block and a half from our home on Diamond St, and have been friends since 1992) are having a holiday open house tomorrow. It is also our friend Ida's 85th birthday. I'm taking over the Lussekatter, and I also put together a goodie package for Ida: some of each of the cookies that I've made, as well as some fudge, divinity and peanut brittle. Ida isn't much of a cook, but she loves good food, so I know she will appreciate it. It's my first large gathering of people since my immunity went down the toilet, but I won't stay long, and I'll keep a safe social distance. I can't stay in a bubble. I've never been that way, and it is getting to me. Not the solitude, I love that; it's the living in fear.

I just looked at the clock, it's 2am. I'm far from finished with this, but it's been sitting on the burner for 3 days, so I'm going to publish it, barely edited and definitely incomplete. More to follow from Outpost Viral.




Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.runnymedesilkys.com.


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A Time For Every Purpose

As of late, letting go has been a theme that has capitalized my thoughts. I've thought about it in ways that I never have before, and because of that, I now really feel its importance in my life. I really want to be able to practice it on a daily basis, rather than to continue to just give its value merely lip service.

There is a time for every purpose, but there is also a time to say goodbye to folly and misguided goals. Everything has its time, and because of that, everything has a time to go. To me, only the soul and God are eternal, everything else eventually is reduced to cosmic dust and blows into nothingness. I've understood these principles for some time now, but the problem has been and continues to be my ability to walk the talk. The silver lining, however, is that I am getting better at it.

Not only that, I've finally found a way to stop the tape loop in my head that has always tortured me. I'm a failure, I'm stupid, I can talk a good line, but I can't execute. And worse yet, way down at the bottom, when distilled down to what it really was, because of all these perceived failures, I saw myself as being unworthy, not salvageable, lost to eternity, because when it gets right down to it, I'm a bad person who wasn't worthy of love. That is what used to play in my head. I could somehow successfully squelch it just enough to get through the days, but it was always down there. Even now still, I'll occasionally hear the pitiful whimpers of that dying voice, but the good news is that I don't believe it anymore.

Losing Ken has been probably my most dramatic and profound experience of letting go that I've felt thus far in my life, but there are many more experiences that I've had in the last three years that really do allow me to feel I've let go and moved on. I have to give credit where it was due, and I'll have to first give much credit to Ken. Not only did losing him force a brutal, painful and involuntary experience of having to let go, but a lot of good came of it as well. I think I got a deeper awareness and understanding of the origins and miscreated purpose of that voice in my head by seeing Ken battle with it for so much of our time together. For him, from what I can tell from talking to his friends that predated me and to his family, the battle was lifelong for Ken. His mother once described him to me as a melancholy child with a look of deep sadness that always seemed to emanate from his dark brown soulful eyes. Friends from his years of young adulthood would describe him to me as a sweet, kind, generous and loving person; one who always tried to help pick up those around him who were struggling, and a funny, charismatic and fiercely loyal friend. They also told me about a man who always seemed to be fighting a losing battle with his inner demons.

Ken felt he was never good enough: not good enough for himself, me, his family, friends, co-workers, or really for anyone. I lived watching that eat away for years at a man who was most definitely not what he saw in himself. I saw how it took somebody who was easily the most loving, intelligent, compassionate, patient, kind-hearted and beautiful man I have ever known and leave him in ruin. It didn't matter what you told him, how much you showed your love for him in concrete ways, how much praise you watched being given to him liberally and continually. Despite all this, Ken never felt worthy. All of his many successes were failures in his mind. He felt he could have done better and that what he did was never enough. All the wealth and material abundance was nothing: never enough, never good, never of value. In the end, I watched that voice literally kill the man I loved as I have never loved anyone in my life.

This invaluable lesson could have easily been squandered by me, thankfully it was not. If there is any good that came from Ken losing his life, I have to believe it is that he saved mine. I wasn't that far behind him, I think I was just a little better at muffling the voice. I could never let go of it and let it die, but I did have a little more luck in quieting my voice. Surviving my voice gave me the chance to observe and hopefully learn from him giving into his. I was merely lucky to be just a bit more successful at ignoring the voice, and because of that, what I learned from his death became my lifeboat. Ken was an avowed atheist, and for him to hear this would have I'm sure made him shudder: but because I was able to hear the faint cries of a better voice, Ken helped me learn how to reconnect with God.

There is more here. How one sets their priorities in life is directly proportional to which voice is winning at that time. For Ken, there really wasn't an experience of living life that often. More often, what I now realize I was witnessing was somebody trying to outrun what he saw as complete and utter ruin and eventual death, and losing that battle as well. This is another lesson Ken gave me that I'm glad I didn't squander. Tell me honestly, how often do you sit down, quiet your mind, listen to your heart and then try to figure out what really matters and what is nothing? How often do you take then take notes and really try to figure out a way to integrate a better way into your daily life? I'll go out on a limb and say that for the vast majority of us, that answer is "never".

These last three years has been a period of a lot of sorting things out. It's been a time of looking at what needs to change and figuring out a way to do it. It's also been a time of looking at what no longer serves me, and finding a way to truly let those things go. I've not been fully successful at any of this, but I can honestly say that I've gotten a whole lot better at it. I've let go of money, of possessions, of dysfunctional relationships (not necessarily the people, but the way I relate to them), of grudges, grievances, hurts, fears and animosities. I still struggle with letting go of all those things, but again, I've gotten a whole lot better at it. I'm also glad that I've maintained enough genuine humility to see that I'm not a screwed up mess of a person, I'm just a work in progress. Also, and again this is largely thanks to Ken, I've been able to look at my relationships with people and not only know when to let them go when they no longer serve either of us, but to also look at what poison I bring into the relationship, not just seeing how I perceived myself as being unfairly treated.

Life truly can seem unfair and arbitrary much of the time. One can either throw up their hands in defeat and blame the universe, or one can ask if there maybe isn't another better way to look at the situation. Our life really is our making, at least I think so. Things don't just happen willy-nilly and without context. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every response that we have to the current state of affairs we're in is a reaction born of the events the preceded it. Life experience plays into it as well, but it's an indirect connection. We have contributed to every occurrence around us, be it small or profound. Whether or not it's what we want to hear, acknowledge and/or believe, it is the truth. What we also frequently fail to consider is how our reactions affect the next person down the line past us. Nothing that we do in this world is without consequence. In the world of linear time, every moment of "now" is completely dependent upon what happened before, and every now is entirely responsible for the now that follows. All actions have significance, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. I've looked back a lot in the last three years at my life past. This has not been approached in some kind of sentimental or melancholy way, but with much more of an analytical eye. I'm trying to figure out what got me there, so life can become more experience and less something that I'm reacting to.

I've always been fascinated with the concept of how our choices have consequence upon the future. It can be as dramatic as the moment when one decides that they're not too drunk to drive and get behind the wheel and kill an innocent bystander from driving impaired. It can also be as seemingly banal as choosing which direction we go when we pull out of the driveway that morning, and which street we decide turn down. In most instances, what we may perceive to be an inconsequential reaction to some seemingly insignificant choice we just made isn't really that inconsequential. At least I don't think so. There is a great movie that came out about ten years ago called Sliding Doors. In the movie, a woman named Helen is catching a train to work in the London Tube, and by a second, she misses the train, watching the train doors sliding shut in front of her face. Then, time steps back a second and the situation replays slightly differently; Helen makes that train. The rest of the movie shuttles back and forth between the two realities that are borne of a seemingly inconsequential moment. The differences the two Helens experience are far from inconsequential. If you haven't seen it and want to, I'm not going to be a spoiler, I've gone far enough to make my point anyway. Here is the trailer for the movie:





Seeing more clearly how every moment of my life is of consequence has been life-altering. As I've said before, I continue to struggle with many of the same pratfalls that have led to what I might see as a defeat, but I've also become much more aware of the impact of my actions and what is often borne of a defeatist attitude. What I continue to struggle far more frequently with is the letting go. If I'm going to lose money, give up a possession, lose a loved one or sever a tie, I need to see that there is a positive that can come from every seeming loss or defeat. For me, succeeding means that I am learning to put less value in my material attachments to the world, and all the things I've accumulated; it's also about knowing who I am and being true to my real self. Not only that, I've also learned the importance of focus and being fully present in life. Instead of dwelling on the past or tripping on the future, I'm getting better at really living in the moment. Additionally, I've become better at filtering out all the self-created distractions that can take me out of the present. That is something that in my earlier life that I never even thought was important. Distraction begets distraction; it's self-feeding beast, and without focus and awareness it's nearly impossible to let it go back into the nothingness it really is.

I believe that there is a way to live in the world, be fully present in the moment, and using that moment to learn invaluable lessons, like unconditional love. Even though to most I appear to be completely engaged these days, I am also detached to some degree from all the things I used to covet and enjoy. I now realize that very often, these things are of no value. To some degree, that is pretty much every material thing. I've learned that material things can have a value, but only when I am using them to learn something. I can do this without denying sadness pain and injustice by becoming a bliss ninny with a raging dose of denial. Instead of depriving myself of things, I can give them a new role; that of being a lesson in something, like learning to ask myself why I might covet something so much, or also learning that giving it away doesn't take away from who I am, it makes me a better person. I can take the route of pious deprivation, thinking that it will lead me to some great truth, and then find out that I never really learned anything or grew in any way of lasting consequence. I have a monumental choice I can make here, and if I make the right choice I learn that to see the contents of the material world for what they are: they can be educational, but in they end, they are also impermanent. I see the world now not so much as my home, but my classroom. What is me is not the shell of skin and bones that make up my corporeal body, what is really me is my soul and my mind. Every material thing here, including the planet itself (or for that matter the universe) is impermanent. This is even accepted science, not just my little idea of things. If I'm valuing what or who I have over what or who I really am and what part I'm playing in the grand scheme of things, then I am valuing the impermanent over the eternal. To me, that is skewed thinking and as such, it no longer seems to be either logical or something that I can justify giving value to. Letting go isn't losing or giving up, it is merely not valuing the valueless.

The three year theme has come up a few times here. Two Thursdays back (November 19) was exactly 3 years since Ken's death. I marked it as I have done each year since he left; me, my friend Marna, and this year Ken's best friend Brian go down to Ocean Beach shortly before sunset. I set up a very small and simple sacred space and place a photograph of Ken, a lit Sterno can, a flask filled with Maker's Mark bourbon (Ken's favorite), and three shot glasses onto it. I pour us each a shot, and we offer a toast to Ken. If we want to, we each write some words down on a piece of Vellum, light it from the Sterno flame, and let it burn up. Then, as the sun starts crossing the horizon, I wade out into the cold water to about knee-deep water and scatter a small amount of ashes from Ken and all of our departed pets. I walk back out of the water and in silence we watch the sun pass over the horizon. Every year the weather has been good, but this year, the weather was uncharacteristically mild at ocean beach, and the sky was clear except for a few cirrus clouds at the horizon to accentuate the sunset, which this year was incredibly beautiful and spectacular. As I think of it now, that is a good metaphor for what good comes from letting go, for as the sky is letting go of daylight, the sun can give us one final and dramatic light show.

Each year I am still surprised at how much I miss Ken and how much pain I still feel at his loss. I've tried to cut myself a break and make note of it without painting it with judgment about the feelings, but still, I remain surprised at how much it still hurts. There was a reason for why all this has happened, whether I choose to understand and accept it or I don't. The cycle of life is something that I can only exert seeming control over very small parts of, and only for myself and those whose lives I impact. Letting go does not involve capitulation, but it does require surrender, and that is not a bad thing. Surrender, as I define it isn't quitting or giving up or losing, it's accepting the reality of the situation and understanding that that what no longer serves needs to be let go of. Surrendering, instead of fighting that reality, allows that moment to become a moment of learning and awakening instead of a moment of futile struggle; one that I'll eventually add to the list of many defeats and failures that I think I've been victim to.

Rather than leaving me feel defeated and like a failure, surrender as I now understand it has brought me an inner peace that I've not had at any point in at least my adult life. It has given me the clarity to see where I really need to focus my energies. This is my classroom, and there is no reason to squander any of that time I that I can potentially be learning how to live a happier, more fulfilling and more loving life.

My understanding of what love is continues to grow. I never pictured myself really understanding such a seemingly simple but incredibly complex concept like understanding that all love is the same. There are not better, greater, different or more special kinds of love; love is love. It is also one of the eternals and it doesn't change. What is perfect doesn't need to change, nor does it ever die. Unconditional love is a different story, and something that I'm currently struggling with far more. For lack of a better one, I'm going to use pets as an example of unconditional love. No matter what a schmuck we might be, our pets still love us, and they do it completely and unconditionally. Very often it will even continue beyond what energy we might think any rational being should give to a cruel person. Those more skeptical may be saying "yes Parry, but they are dumb animals, not capable of the complex thinking that we are". Why is that necessarily a good thing? Is it not possible that there are times when it might serve us better to quiet our minds, quit trying to analyze things and simply experience them? Unconditional love as I define it means that I love those who I have to that point considered unlovable. It means that I'm not going through my list of their character defects as I see them and then deciding how much of my love they are worthy of. Love is unlimited and self-creating. The more that you give away, the more that it will leave you with, for it is a true gift; one whose giving adds to both the giver and receiver. I will tell you right here and now, this is the toughest lesson of all, at least for me so far.

Take a minute here, and think of the one person you loathe the most. You can't stand even the sight of them, and they are such an asshole or loser, they deserve the love of no one. Then imagine yourself finding out how to love them unconditionally, and furthermore, doing it. Trust me, I'm no better than most at this. At this point all I can say is that I'm at least trying to do it, when my scattered mind focuses for a minute and remembers to do it. Try it in a couple of situations with a stranger who is irritating you. Practice seeing them as perfect and fully deserving of love. You may not be able to, or necessarily want to, but by trying to look at the situation and the person in a different way, perhaps the outcome will be better, even if that means the outcome is only that you find your frustration level drop and maybe, you can empathize with the person. I think we often forget that everybody around us probably finds us about as irritating and caustic as we find them to be. I think very few of us are spared that kind of a judgment, and those are the real "saints" on earth: the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, the friend or neighbor of yours who seems to always give without ever expecting anything in return. Those people, and I've known a couple of them personally in my life have a completely different mindset. When you turn to them and say "that Bob is such a raging a-hole" their response is "just think how sad and lonely their life must be. That must really be painful." In the past, hearing that would irritate the hell out of me, now it is a tap on the shoulder that reminds me "there is another way to look at this thing".

Those nine words have become a mantra of sorts for me. A big part of now looking at things differently, for me involves more honesty. A couple of weeks ago I was at my therapist's office in the middle of a fairly sober discussion. Per my usual MO, I was talking a really creative and verbose line. He had asked me something that warranted a yes or no answer, and I did everything I possibly could to avoid fencing myself in with any kind of an absolute answer. Mid-sentence, I raised my head, looked him in the eye and said "OK, that's bullshit. I'm going to stop lying to you. The answer is no. I'm tired of telling you what I think you want to hear instead of what you really want to hear, which is the truth, and wasting 50 minutes of our time." Then I proceeded for the first time in a long time to sit down and really speak the truth, full frontal honesty. I'll have to add to those nine words now; I'll remind myself as much as possible: there is another way to look at this, and part of that way is that I will approach it with truth and candor. I can call it evasive, creative truth-telling, explaining, qualifying. All of those are a nice words to substitute for lying, and for the last few weeks, I've pledged to myself that I'm instituting a policy of truth, and I encourage all around me to help enforce this policy. I invite any and all suggestions that I check myself, and will do my best to do so. The funny thing about the truth is, the more that you use it the easier it is to repeat.

To clarify things here, I'm talking primarily about lying about emotion, feelings, and my perceptions of a situation, especially one that is emotionally charged. I'm not creating fictional identities, cheating people, etc. I'm talking about emotional honesty, both with myself and with others. I'm talking about dealing with difficult situations with evasion and half-truths. I'm talking about not being willing to ask the tough questions and/or give the honest but tough answers.

Another part of the "seeing another way" resolution is how I see and respond to adversity. The most current and probably the best example of this is how I'm dealing with my health challenges. I'm so tired of saying that I'm sick and I feel crappy. Everybody knows it already, I'm sure people are getting at least as tired of hearing it as I am of saying it. I perceive it in a different way now: I'm not sick and I don't feel crappy. I'm just facing some extraordinary health challenges right now, and with bigger challenges come the need for bigger ideas. I know it's semantics, but most of the time it works. Even if the body isn't willing, at least the mind isn't giving into perceived defeat. Because this is working, days are better, to put it simply. The mind is indeed a powerful tool.

Tonight marked Week 25 of Interferon, with 31 weeks to go. The challenges continue, and for me, the one thing that I struggle the most with is the unpredictability. It used to be that I injected on Sunday. Monday Tuesday and often Wednesday were toughest. A couple of times the tough days would go all the way to the following Saturday, not allowing me even a little reprieve. Now Monday and Tuesday tend not to be so bad, it's Wed-Fri. It's not always three rough days, sometimes it's two, sometimes it's one and sometimes it's five. At the time of my last post, my most aggravating adverse events were alopecia, crankiness, fevers, nausea and shortness of breath. That was four weeks ago, now my main issues are alopecia, anorexia, shortness of breath, the mouth sores came back with a vengeance and a flare up of my psoriasis. That's about it. Oh, did I mention the visual changes?

Over the last couple of months, I've noticed that my vision has been getting wonky, mostly in my right eye, but a little in my left eye as well. It came on slowly and insidiously, so add to that a little denial and things continued to get worse. The final straw was when I was in bed one evening watching one of the World Series games, and I couldn't read the print...on my 60 inch screen. Not only that, I started to get what I can only describe as distorted vision in my right eye. Imagine looking through a window that has water streaking down it from a rain storm, only that window is your glasses, and it is constant. I got a bit concerned and made an appointment with an ophthalmologist in town to figure out what was going on. She tested my acuity and my nearsightedness had substantially worsened, especially in the right eye, any there was some new astigmatism in my left eye. She dilated my pupils and took a look inside, and saw something that she described as suspicious. That was followed by a sci-fi exam called an optical coherence tomography, or OCT. I'm not going to try to explain what it is and bore you to tears, if you're interested look it up on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_coherence_tomography Suffice to say, my eyes go into a scope and I look at what looks like a fly-over of the surface of Mars. She looked at it, came back and told me that I have macular (retinal) edema, probably secondary to the Interferon. It is bothersome, could become a big issue though that isn't likely, so the plan was to go back in a month for a recheck.

After a week or so, I just got the intuitive feeling that she hadn't covered all the bases. At my next MD appointment I talked to my Dr. about it, and she recommended that we go to see a specialist in retinal disease associated with retroviruses, and not surprisingly SF has a number of them. I was walking out the door and my PA (Physician's Assistant) was also heading out the door for lunch. John manages all the Interferon patients in the practice. I've always thought he was nice, now I absolutely love him. He is incredibly smart, studied and has good critical thinking skills. And as no small bonus, he also has incredibly good bedside manner, as does my PCP (Primary Care Physician). I filled him in on the development and asked him what he thought. He tells me: "well, I send everybody to Everett Ai. He is the guru of retinal disease in patients with retroviral disease(s)." I give myself a big D'oh; I know Dr. Ai (pronounced "eye", I kid you not). He's been in this since the first days of the AIDS crisis.

I called his office and asked to make an appointment, and am told by the receptionist that his first available appointment is in mid-January. No way, I then tell her "can you talk to Dr. Ai, and tell him that I have HIV disease for 26 yrs, acute Hepatitis C and I'm on interferon therapy. An ophthalmologist just did an OCT and diagnosed me with macular edema. I want to get a second opinion from an expert. She tells me that she can't double-book him without his approval, but she will get the message to him. A few days later I get a call saying that Dr. Ai will see me asap. I am so glad that I know how to work the system. For most people, they would just accept an unsatisfactory option. This is one case in which I've known for a long time that there is another way to approach this. It hasn't failed me yet; I don't abuse it, but I use it when I have to and for me it's successful.

This last Wednesday was the appointment. I don't think I've ever met him, but he is infamous for not only being brilliant but also for being very down to earth and approachable. That is a well-deserved reputation, he is awesome. I give him my history, he tells me what he's probably looking for, and then he dilates my pupils for an exam.

Sidebar here: I don't know what in the hell he uses to dilate, but I have never had my pupils that dilated. They were big black circles, absolutely no iris. It lasted probably 6 hours too; typically I'll reconstrict in 2 hours tops. I left the building and it was a bright sunny day. I had forgotten to get some temporary sunglasses, so I say that I'm just going to wing it. Bad choice, it felt like my eyes were being fried like chicken.

He looks, and says he wants to do another test, and his technician will be in to do it shortly. I ask if he's going to do another OCT, and he tells me "no, we're doing what is called a fluorescein angiogram. Hmm. The tech comes in and before starting explains what is going to happen. First, she will shoot some baseline images. Then, one of the doctors will come in and give me an injection of fluorescein while she concurrently shoots a series of images.

If you don't know what fluorescein is, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescein. Suffice to say, it is a very strong and bright fluorescent dye. It's bright red, and once injected intravenously, it will quickly travel the bloodstream and get to the retina, in a couple of seconds or less. I've had fluorescein drops put in my eye to examine the cornea (since it will light up abrasions and areas of inflammation), but I've never had it injected. She tells me that my urine will probably be bright orange for up to a day, and I might even look like I'm a little jaundiced, but it's all good, it's government-approved, so that means it's perfectly safe. So they inject, and start shooting a series of images. I forgot to mention that when she was doing the baseline images, I found out that the images required a very bright flash, which is just ducky when you've got fixed and dilated pupils. Once the injection started, she shot what had to be at least 25 images. When she stopped I swear all I could see was a bright white light. Maybe that is what dying looks like. She then tells me that as soon as the flashing goes away, that I'll also see a pink tint to everything for up to a half hour. As soon as the flashing stopped, damned if she wasn't telling the truth. I can now officially say that I've seen the world through rose-colored glasses. To be honest, it was awfully pretty, I was in no hurry for it to go away. As for my pee, well suffice to say it was interesting. Ironically, I had to go give a urine sample at the hospital afterward (for something else, another challenge). I warn them that my urine will be day-glo, they say no problem. I would have loved to have seen the face of the lab tech when he got that sample. It was glowing like the Uranium rods that they show all the time on The Simpsons. The dye was so bright and so strong that I had to flush 2-3 times to keep my pee from staining my toilet permanently.

They shuttle me back to an exam room and shortly thereafter the doc comes in. He sits down, puts his hand on my knee and says "are you the kind of patient that will go to the internet and look up a diagnosis after I give it to you?" I say "of course!" (by the way, he knew that I am an RN, so he could shorthand a lot for me. He then says "good! When you get home, I want you to go look up retinal branch vein occlusion. Basically, there is a clog in the pipe where a retinal vein crosses behin an artery. The back pressure bulges the retina out, thus explaining the distorted vision. He tells me that this can happen spontaneously, and the demographic of the typical patient is an intelligent male, 25-50, highly educated, and prone to high stress. Ouch. He asks me if I'm feeling a lot of stress. I look at him, and he smiles back. Then I tell him "well Everett, considering all that is on my plate right now, I think I'm handling it pretty well, as does all my medical team, so not really so much, no." Then he tells me that there have also been a handful of cases that he is aware of in patients that are on Interferon therapy. He tells me that a fellow that is working with him now has done some research on this, and he is going to have her come in and talk to me about it.

So she comes in and tells me pretty much everything I already knew. She had started out dumbing it down, but then remembers that I speak medicine and shorthands it. She then starts giving me some statistics and findings from the research that has been thus far, and what she recommended as a course of action. About that time, she turned into Ms. Gloom and Doom, you would have thought that my eye was prone to exploding at any moment. She then tells me that if it doesn't resolve there are some treatments (I'll get to that later), but that I and my Infectious Diseases Dr. might want to consider terminating the therapy early. She then says "you are seeing an ID Dr., right?" I tell her know, and she asks why. I tell her "well, I went and had a Hepatology consult at UCSF, and got the royal runaround without any follow-up. This physician was supposed to be the preeminent expert on HIV/HepC co-infection (which is true). I got frustrated, and so my physician's practice is managing it. One of the PA's in the practice manages all the Hep C patients' treatments, and he probably treats at least 25% of the co-infected patients in Interferon/Ribavirin." By the look on her face you would have thought I told her that I was flying to Haiti to be treated by a witch-doctor. I listen to what she hast to say, because she did have some good research data, but for the moment I decide to take her recommendations with a grain of salt. Before she leaves I confirm with her that Dr. Ai is coming back to talk to me about treatment and she says yes. Whew.

A few minutes later, in comes Dr. Ai, and he says we're going to talk treatment options. The first thing he says is that this is not an emergent situation. Standard of care is that you usually watch but don't treat this for a minimum of 2-3 months. There is no reason to panic, what has happened is unlikely to worsen (not what the fellow says). The fellow had also said that I was possibly at a very high risk for further ones to occur. I tell myself that I'll take that under advisement but not act. Without trashing his fellow, I ask what the risk is that more will happen. "Minimal" he tells me. This isn't an emergency situation. He asks me how long I've had the distorted vision, and I say I can't remember, but it was at least a month and a half, maybe two months. He then says fine, we'll recheck in one to one and a half months. And don't worry, most of these spontaneously resolve, and it's likely to resolve after I finish the Interferon, so don't panic. Thank you.

So that is Parry's Excellent Adventures in Ophthalmology. Also last week, my vision insurance through Marriott (COBRA) was expiring in days. In consideration of that, I decide that it's a good time to get some glasses that will correct some of the changes. The distortion can't be corrected, but I can deal with that. Knowing that these changes have a good chance of being temporary, I decide to get some cheap but not ugly glasses. I've wanted some flexible titanium glasses for reading in bed (so that when I fall asleep in them they don't get all wonky. The frames have a memory, are ultra-light, but are also very strong. I found some that are actually reasonably fashionable and durable, and as a bonus, pretty inexpensive. Score.

I got my glasses on Monday, and hallelujah and praise Jesus, I can actually see reasonably well again. The distortion is still there, but I can handle that. It's really not much more than a nuisance, and only made more of a bitch because it's in my dominant eye. If it were in my left eye I probably wouldn't even notice it a lot of the time. The most irritating things I have to deal with are 1) eye strain makes my vision worse, so I have to limit my time on the computer, since the refresh from a computer screen will exacerbate eye strain, even more so than a television because it is closer to your face, and 2) My visual acuity is dynamic, not static. In other words, my nearsightedness isn't consistently impaired as it usually is. My nearsightedness can vary noticeably in the course of a day. What is predictable is that when I fatigue and/or subject my eyes to too much strain, my vision will almost certainly suffer, either by me getting more nearsighted and/or seeing ghost flashes of light (which are actually kind of cool if they don't disorient you).

I've been baking and candy-making like a fiend these last few weeks. On the low-energy days it's one of the more productive things I can usually manage. My Christmas gifts this year are all going to be homemade. I'm giving gift baskets that I'll put together full of canned goods, cookies, candy and maybe a special individualized little trinket here and there. So far, I've tested 3 cookie recipes. I have made peanut butter blossoms (a peanut butter cookie with a Hershey's Kiss in the middle), chocolate crinkles and spritz (dough for pressed cookies). I still want to test recipes for sugar cookies, pfeffernusse and linzer cookies. I'm going to eliminate the chocolate crinkles from my gift boxes. They are one of my favorite cookies, but they just don't box up well. They're rolled in powdered sugar before baking, and the dusting doesn't do well once packed. They're more of a "bake and serve the same day" kind of cookie, so I can make those to take to parties or to Christmas dinner. In the candy department I've done 3 batches of Divinity and 5 batches of peanut brittle. Divinity is one of the most temperamental candies to make. It's sort of a cross between nougat and meringue. Hot sugar syrup (hard ball) is slowly added to stiff-peaked beaten egg whites, at the end you ad vanilla and nuts or dried fruit (I do nuts), then when it looks ready, you spoon it in dollops onto paper to set. This was my first time making it (it was one of my mother's specialties), and it can be a royal pain. If it's too humid it won't set to the right consistency, or worse yet, you'll get a grainy sugar tast in your mouth. It should be smooth on the tongue, puffy and and lightweight if it turns out right. For a recipe with 5 ingredients, it is the one of the most fussy recipes I've ever prepared or seen prepared. I'm also going to do 3 or 4 batches of fudge and maybe one more candy if the spirit moves me. The baskets will hopefully speak of the love that went into making them and how personal they are. I'm excited about these gifts, and I don't usually get that excited about gift-giving.

As my energy level allows I also want to get some Christmas decorations up. Of all the holidays and their traditions, Christmas remains my favorite, so I'm pretty certain that when I get them up and can enjoy them, the pleasure will be something that I could stand a dose of. Christmas really has never been about the gifts for me, at least as an adult. There are many things that I do love about the season; the rituals, in and of themselves, are healing and resorative for me and deeply meaningful to me as well. Growing up in a northern climate gives me a different perspective from many people I know who are California natives, or those from another warmer clime. For me, the winter has always been both wonderful and terrible, happy and melancholy. There is something about the short days, the long cold and dark nights, the grey skies, the falling snow. The season casts a sadness and barrenness over the landscape, but that also feels very cleansing to me, like Mother Nature is taking a long sleep to renew herself. I really do miss being in Montana, especially at Christmas. There is a very strong Northern European influence (Scandanavian and otherwise), and that part of Europe is especially steeped in traditions for the Advent season: St. Lucy's Day (December 13), the start of Advent (4 Sundays before Christmas, which is also when my family traditionally put up our tree), Chrismas Eve (our Family's traditional present exchange day; done in the evening, after supper), 12 days of Christmas (December 25 - January 5). There are so many, and a few that I haven't yet done, but want to do sometime, like have a traditional English Christmas dinner: crackers, paper crowns, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, brussels sprouts and Christmas (Figgy) pudding for dessert.

Christmas to me is family, cold dark nights and a yule log in the fireplace. So many amazing foods, like bûche de Noël, pfeffernusse cookies, hot cross buns, rosettes, mince pie, gløgg, Joulutortut (Finnish prune jam pastries), Christstollen, panettone, Julegrøt (Danish rice pudding with an almond hidden in the center), pepperkake (similar to pfeffernusse cookies), persimmon pudding and eggnog. For me, Christmas is family, and not the once a year, pretend to get along kind of affair that has become so common; it's about really being with the ones you love, and as a child, I remember that grudges and grievances got left at the door, Christmas was about being thankful for being with the ones you love. I miss this more than I can ever express in mere words. To return now to where this all started, perhaps I need to let go of these nostalgic memories, perhaps they are of a time gone by that is never going to be seen again. I hope not though. For the moment, I'll not let go of these warm sentiments I keep for the season of Advent.

And as a final footnote on the subject of letting go, today I did indeed put into action my desire to let go of material attachments in a concrete way: I cut off my well-past shoulder length hair today. By cut off, I mean a close, short high fade barber cut, and it felt great. I remember the first time I cut off my long hair, back in 1989; I went into a protracted period of mourning, pretty much starting minutes after my locks were shorn, and lasting for over a year. Today, I felt nothing but relief and catharsis. What hair the Interferon hasn't made fall out has been left dry, brittle and prone to breakage. My hair just looked like shit, plain and simple. Besides that, I was too attached to it; it was mattering too much to me, and getting rid of it was overdue. I so look forward to only looking in the mirror when I brush my teeth and wash my face. I am, in a word, relieved. It had its season, and its season is over.




Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
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