Please Don't Feed the Animal

Ugh, it's been one of those weeks again. Fan-tastic. To elaborate, it's playing out like one of those weeks where if I'm lucky, by the weekend I'll feel halfway decent. Up to now the weeks have been like this: I take Interferon on Sunday, feel crappy for ____ days, then Sunday rolls around again, and Interferon again. Lather, rinse and repeat.

It would be kind of nice if the day to day occurrences were a little less arbitrary and a little more predictable or consistent. That is a luxury I do not have, however, I can't tell the drug how to treat my body. Well, I can, but I don't think it can hear me. These days, I might get 6 good days out of a week (rarely), I might get 1 good day in a week, or anything in between. If I averaged it out, I would guess that 3 really good days and 2 super crappy days are my statistical averages, but the problem is, I'm not a statistic.

I'm offering the standard caveat before I write this next statement. I'm going to try to make it the last time I say it, because I feel like I'm sounding like a broken record, and being redundant doesn't make what I say more true, it's just annoying, so here goes:

I am not writing this to get a pity party, to grouse for no good reason or to elicit sympathy. There, that is the last time I will type that. I hope.


This last Sunday was week 21. There are 35 more to go, but who's counting? As of late, this is what Interferon and Ribavirin have been doing to me:

My white count has dropped dangerously low a couple of times. I started taking Neupogen (an injection, self-administered) once a week by Week 8. Then at week 16 it tanked again, so now it's Neupogen twice a week, plus getting my counts checked every 4 weeks. That can go up to daily if necessary (it won't), but for now, it's my Wednesday and Saturday injection. Neupogen is a genetically engineered version of a naturally-occuring hormone that stimulates the bone marrow to produce more white cells. There is also a drug called epogen, and it stimulates the marrow to make more red blood cells. I may end up on that as well, since my anemia is right on the borderline. They aren't bad, not nearly as butt-kicking as the Interferon and Ribavirin. For me, I get bone pain, mostly in the hip (the hip bones have more marrow than any other part of the body, so that makes sense), which is kind of a buzzkill, plus I sometimes get a low-grade fever the next day. It's also expensive as hell, like everything I'm taking.

Right now, I'm costing the insurance company (calculated at what they are getting billed by the MD's, hospitals and pharmacies) probably $10,000.00 a month at minimum. If I didn't have insurance or I just had crappy insurance, I can't imagine what I would do. Basically, I would probably be screwed. I can see how long-term illness can bankrupt families and force senior citizens to move into their children's basements. Then there is the time that a lot of people spend fighting their insurance companies, appealing denials of life saving therapies and at the same time, fighing serious illnesses. I've been very fortunate, I have good insurance. I've had them require my doctors to submit pre-approvals for expensive drugs or procedures before they will pay for them, but to date, I've not had one drug or test or procedure that my doctor has ordered denied by Blue Cross. I am doubly lucky, because I also have Medicare, and Medicare isn't perfect, but it's about the most seamless and effortless health insurance you can get in America. Except for the crappy prescription drug coverage, I think they're about the best health insurance an American can get. For all the talk about the evils of socialized medicine, ask these rabid Republicans, their mouthpieces on Fox News and the teabaggers that they've been riling up if they think Medicare should be abolished. The real true hardcore conservatives may say yes, but most of them will say no, either because they are already getting it and they know personally how well it works, or if they are a politician, they know that senior citizens get out and vote, and they know that if they even think about discussing dismantling Medicare, they would be run out of Washington on a rail. Now the funny thing is, Medicare is socialized medicine, and though flawed in many ways, it's the best insurance in the country, unless you're a member of Congress, and theirs is even better.

Ask physicians if they would rather bill Medicare or private insurance companies, and 100% of them will tell you Medicare. Ask why and they will tell you that they rarely if ever get denials for therapies that are standard of care therapies, they don't have to get pre-approvals and the billing is 10 times easier. You take care of your patient, you bill Medicare, and they pay you back. Payment is based on rates of reimbursement that the government sets, but nine times out of ten, Medicare reimbursements are equal to or better than private insurance. In fact, most private insurance companies take the Medicare reimbursements, chop a little off so they get a little more dough, and then reimburse doctors, hospitals and pharmacies the same or less, require more paperwork and busy work, and in the end, still deny reimbursement for a lot of therapies. I don't want to spend a lot of time on the health insurance debate soap box, but I can tell you from personal experience: the government actually does know how to administer health insurance, and they can do it more quickly and efficiently than private insurance companies. The reason is, they're not setting up loopholes, smoke screens and labyrinthine bureaucracies so that they can squander away as much cash as possible and pay out as little as possible. Medicare wants to make sure that senior citizens and disabled people have health care, that doctors get paid for their work, and that they can spend the least amount of money and time possible administering the plan. The government keeps their costs down by streamlining their administration of payment and reimbursement and investigating and preventing fraud so that more money can actually go into caring for sick people. Private insurance companies keep their costs down by denying care, committing either fraudulent or questionable fiscal practices, and oh, by raising premiums. OK, back to me, because this is about me, at least this story.

If the Interferon/Ribavirin therapy wasn't working so well, I would say "Interferon sucks" and "screw this" in the blink of an eye. It is working though, and I'm trying to not invite in the bad mojo, so I'll just say it's not fun. As of late, these have been the most frequent and pronounced adverse reactions:

1) Alopecia. My hair is falling out, thank God it is evenly distributed and not fast, like with radiation or chemotherapy. However, the hair that is growing back in its place is fine and wispy. If I have my hair in a ponytail, I look like I just stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. The static electricity that is so bad in the colder months makes all the little whispies stand straight out. I can't stand it, so most of the time I'm tying my hair back into a bandana. I look like a Berkeley hippie kid, but whatever.

2) Crabbiness. I'm still having to wrestle with that. I can handle it most of the time, plus I've set things up so that I minimize the people that are around me so that I don't shoot them down. Brian has gotten a lot of it, and it makes sense. You always hurt the one you love, right? I've just encouraged him to stay away most of the time until this is over. We're big boys, we can cool our heels and stay away from each other if we need to. I don't take it personally when he doesn't want to be around me, and I don't think that he takes it personally when I shoo him away. But it is an insidious kind of bad temper; it comes out of nowhere, and it makes a big entrance when it does. It is the uninvited house guest that I can't always get to go away.


3) Depression. Honestly, this is currently under pretty good control. When I feel it I understand where it comes from and I don't get a helpless feeling when it hits. I have a good self-check mechanism. I've been able to feel it coming and mitigate its damage. It's really just a lot of inner dialog, reminding me where it is coming from, and also that it won't be around that long.

4) Shortness of breath. It takes nothing for me to get winded, no exaggeration there either. At first I thought it was only from the anemia, but I've done some research and that can be part of it, but Interferon can also do it all by itself. It is annoying and inconvenient, but it just means that I have to pace myself.

5) Nausea and anorexia. It kills your appetite. I'm eating, and I haven't lost more than 2 or 3 pounds since I started it, but a lot of times I have to force myself to eat. I also have to be really vigilant and make sure that I am not missing meals. That is really easy to do when food doesn't sound good. When a nice little bowl of ice cream doesn't even sound good, I know I'm anorexic. Ice cream is my heroin. I can make myself eat though, at least most of the time. I am also consistently eating really healthy high-quality food. I am so glad that I had the foresight to make and freeze complete meals before I started therapy. It has made my life much easier than it would otherwise be; I am certain of that. The nausea sucks. Weed helps a little, but I don't like doing weed. If I smoke weed I can't do anything. I have to write off the rest of the day.

5) Fevers, sweats and flu-like symptoms. I've had low-grade fevers and nightsweats for years. Have HIV for 26 years, survive a couple of scary opportunistic infections, fry your bone marrow and then tell me that you don't have fevers and nightsweats on a regular basis, it's pretty much a given for a long-termer like me. Now that said, the fevers from this hit me like a freight train. It is sudden, it is hot, I sweat like a whore in church and it makes me totally worthless for the rest of the day. Tylenol helps a bit, but it is still sucky. I feel like I have a touch of the flu; wiped out, body aches and low-grade fevers.

6) Rashes and itching. This sucks, and it took me awhile to figure out that it was the Big I. I am kind of itchy all the time anyway. Again, because I've had HIV so long, I chronically have candidiasis (a yeast infection) in my hair follicles, and all over my body. If you've ever heard of thrush, which was one of the early indicators of HIV infection back in the beginning, well thrush is candidiasis in the mouth. In addition to people with advanced HIV, people on chemotherapy that have had their immune system temporarily wiped out often get it too. It can coat your tongue, palate and cheeks in a carpet of white, and can be painful as well. I can control the candidiasis somewhat, it somewhat, but it is always there to some degree. I won't take systemic antifungal drugs long-term, they are hard on the liver, and they make me nauseous. When I was younger and healthier, itching was one of the most unbearable feelings in the world, like torture, but it's amazing what you can come to tolerate. But what I'm getting with the drugs now is itching that is sometimes so bad I want to rip my skin off when it's at its worst. The rash is mostly on my scalp. I feel it more than I see it. I've noticed the bumpier that it is, the more hair that I lose that day.

7) Fatigue and malaise. Fatigue and malaise are my constant companions. When I started Interferon/Ribavirin, and I saw that fatigue and malaise were the most commonly reported adverse events, I thought to myself "well geez, it can't be any worse than it already is, can it? After all, I have chronic fatigue syndrome already" A word to the wise: don't ever ask yourself a question like that unless you're ready to hear the answer. I've been a zombie, a couch potato and a sloth. Some mornings, it's all I can do to get out of bed, and if I didn't have dogs that needed to go to the bathroom and eat, then I might sleep away even more of the days than I already do.

8) Impaired healing. If I get the tiniest scratch, within a couple of days it ends up looking like I got mauled by a tiger. I have to be careful about breaking my skin, it's kind of a big deal if it happens.

9) Mouth sores. I've gone over that at length already as well. Look back to earlier essays.

Now, what is going well. It really is important to remember these things.

1) It's working. As of 4 weeks ago, my hep C viral load is still undetectable. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

2) Reflection. I've had a lot of time to think a lot of things over, and I've taken advantage of that. I've really learned a lot about myself. What you find out about yourself isn't always an easy pill to swallow, but it is what makes me stronger. More importantly, it's what makes me a better person.

3) My relationship with God. I've covered this a lot, I don't need to say anything more right now, save one: in the face of all this adversity, I am feeling a deep and and abiding sense of inner peace. It makes everything easier, every day, in every way.

It's really kind of a "duh" thing to say, but in every possible scenario that I could have imagined happening over these last 3 years, absolutely none of the monumental events I've experienced would have even been within the realm of what I would have imagined happening. It's a good lesson in the importance of not trying to plan out every next step in your life. You never know for certain what is going to happen next, and what actually does happen can change your game plan completely.

I've always found it easy to say how I think it's best to just let things happen organically, avoid trying to map out every inch of your journey before you atart and also to avoid trying to plan preemptively. It's easy to say, but not as easily done. What has changed that has made it easier for me to live this philosophy is being forced to slow down physically. As such, it's made it much easier to slow my mind down. When I'm more deliberate in my thought process, I find that it is much easier to just tell myself to sit back and relax and see what happens and then go from there. This might sound like a reactionary strategy at first, but in reality, it's really not at all how you might think it sounds. If I over-think, try to guess too often about what might happen next or over-think a situation and an action plan, I'll often make the wrong call about what to do next. Then I'm forced to stop whether I want to or not, make a 180, and then make a decision with a lot less time to think out if I'm doing the right thing. Have you ever pre-planned an entire argument with your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, co-worker or boss? You have everything you want to say planned out in your head, in outline form, with bullet points. You think you know what their responses to your concerns (or attacks, really) will be, and you have rebuttals planned out for those as well. Have you ever had this argument play out in the manner that you had anticipated and planned for? As of recently, I have found that if I slow down, wait and see what happens and then decide how to proceed, it is not just less stressful, it is actually more pleasant. For me, that is something kind of new; not feeling stressed about having to make a decision.

Right now, though the body may not be very willing, thankfully the mind still is, at least for the most part. I'm definitely more fuzzy, actually noticeably so. On a bad Interferon day, my brain can absolutely refuse to work. The simplest task, like washing a dish, becomes overwhelming. The me of 3 years ago could not have handled that, I guarantee it. But now, I'm usually able to just step back, take a deep breath and take it in stride. In those situations, forcing an issue only makes me more disorganized. Just surrendering to the situation is usually the best way to stop the free fall.

Aging, in many ways, sucks. Because of everything I've got happening right now, I feel like I'm getting a free preview of coming attractions. An aging body slows you down, whether you want it to or not. You can slow down the march to the finish line, but you can't stop the game. Bodies are, unfortunately, impermanent vessels that have a shelf life. Not everybody's body deteriorates at the same speed, but eventually, if you live long enough, the body dies, whether the mind is willing to let it go or not. They are subject to the wear and tear of the environment, our health habits, our diet, and many other factors, some of which are intangibles. For example, the effects of attitude on the speed of aging are well-documented, but we don't really for sure know why on a physiological and biochemical level. Having a negative attitude will speed the decline almost every time, but think: how many of you have ever known a nasty, miserable and angry elderly person?

Pretty much everybody has somebody in their family or close circle that they can say "is too mean to die". I've had friends say that about my actually, including my best friend. I'll say that I'm just too stubborn to die; I refuse to see it as a reasonable option. But nonetheless, almost all of us know somebody that fits that bill. I had a neighbor like that when I was a kid. She was probably about 95 at the time, and she was absolutely miserable. Every cloud had a black lining, and everyone was out to screw her over. My grandmother was another person of sort of that personality type. She was stern, a task master, had a very serious countenance. She was impatient, a no-excuses kind of person and just in general, kind of a bitch. I loved her a lot, but she really was not that fond of children in her later years (interesting, since she bore 8 of her own. I guess 8 was enough). Because of that, me and my siblings always felt like we were walking on eggshells in her home. There was another factor as well; my Mom was not the favorite child, Grandma was pretty obviously partial to her sons. Her sons and their children could do no wrong (and they did, trust me). Oftentimes, I felt that me and my siblings could do no right, and I'm sure that my Mom felt that she got the same treatment from her mother for most of her life.

She lived to be 95 or 96, unfortunately though, her last 8 or so years were spent in a nursing home, as her memory and mobility had declined to the point that she could not live alone (she had outlived 2 husbands). But I will say this about my grandmother: she didn't say "I love you" a lot (sound familiar?). She really wasn't comfortable with displays of affection in general. If you hugged her, you would feel her body stiffen up a little. She was a stoic, strong British lady (born in the UK) with a thick coat of armor. But in spite of all of this, she never ignored me or talked to me like I was a child, even when I still was one. She never made me feel that I couldn't learn or do something, and I learned a lot of my homemaking skills from her and her daughter. Even if it was something that I wasn't ready to do safely (like work with a big pot of hot frying oil), she would encourage me to watch if I wanted to, and she would explain what she was doing. She taught me how to fish and how to smoke meats (she had a real smokehouse on her property) and how to hand-feed the squirrels on her property. What I didn't learn about baking, canning, gardening and cleaning from my mother, I learned from her. Her love was shown to me (and felt by me) by the attention and genuine interest that she exhibited to me. Her love may have not been expressed with words, but words can be cheap. Her actions spoke volumes, as actions usually do. To her, I wasn't a kid or a child, I was a young person, and a bright one (her statement, not mine) that was inquisitive and a quick learner. I wouldn't describe her as a jolly or upbeat person. She was serious and strict, but consistent in her expectations most of the time. She was taciturn and could often come off as somewhat cold or unfeeling. Because of all these traits, she often could be absolutely impossible to be around. But there was a lot more to her, and I'm glad I was able to see that, even as a child. It was what seemed normal to me, so I didn't find her necessarily unusual. Interestingly, my paternal grandmother, another stoic British lady, was her polar opposite: loving, demonstrative, complimentary, and patient. The only thing that Gram had in common with Grandma was that they shared the same heritage and they were both strong hardy farmer's wives who came from good healthy stock.

In adulthood, I was really able to finally appreciate where my Mom's issues came from. Grandma wouldn't tell you that you did a good job, but she would tell you when you had failed and why. I think because of that, my feelings are not as easily hurt as the average person. She made you tough. I can maybe remember her telling me 1 or 2 times that she loved me, and that was toward the end of her life. I don't spite her for it. She didn't have the easiest life, but she never gave up (sound familiar?). She was, in many ways, too mean to die. That didn't however, make her a bad person. Interestingly, of all the children (save for maybe my late brother Curly), I am most like my mom and Grandma, and the rest of my siblings (the ones that are still alive) are more like my Dad and Gram. For me it makes perfect sense, I'm the youngest, and was 4 when my parents divorced. Until the day he died, my Dad was more of a casual acquaintance than a parent. I really did not know him, other than in at best, a cordial but not intimate way.

I am, in many ways, my Grandmother's creation. I'm not really comfortable with emotional situations. I'm not really good with the warm fuzzies, I'm more of a facts and figures type. I'm not a bliss ninny or a process queen. I get a curve ball, I deal with it and I move on; I don't want to talk about how it makes me feel. I don't want to dissect every emotion. Other than my therapist and sometimes my best friend, I really don't talk about my feelings at all, and I don't want to either; it makes me very uncomfortable. I'm not heartless, but I'm also a bit more austere romantically. I don't like public displays of affection, I've never even been that keen on holding hands in public. It's not contrived, it's what I am, and it's not that I'm ashamed of being gay, PDA's just make me uncomfortable. I've said it many times. In my home growing up, there wasn't a lot of yelling or fighting. There also wasn't a lot of hugging and kissing and crying or talking about our feelings. Things were discussed, solved and we moved on. My Mom was trying to raise 4 children on her own, no spousal or child support, and on the salary of a waitress. We really didn't have the time or the inclination for a lot of process or opening up. Actually, in the last 20 or so years, I've seen my mother open up a lot more than she did when I was younger. She is more demonstrative now. She gets more excited about things she loves to do and about things that interest her intellectually. She is very personally engaging to be around, and socially, she always has been. She has more friends that anybody I know. I cannot go a single day in my hometown of over 60,000 people and not meet at least one person that knows my Mom. These days the other thing that is really obviously different is she looks like she is having a good time, and I'm talking about in private, when she will let her facade down and show the real Viv. I think she is just more relaxed, and let's face it, you don't make it to 86, still be as healthy as she is and inside be a bundle of nerves. Also, I think that all my health issues scared the crap out of her and really did bring home how fragile life is and how quickly you can lose people. I have to remind myself sometimes that she has already buried a son and a grandson; life has taught her some very painful and difficult lessons. I think she wants to make sure every day that I know that I'm important to her. Even if I don't talk to her, I feel her energy every day. She still worries too much, but she also has found ways to be able to let it go.

I've been thinking a lot about aging this year. I know that it's partly because I'll be 50 in a few months, but that isn't even close to a major reason. I've never really had an issue with my age; it is what it is. I think it has more to do with the precipitous physical decline that started toward the end of last year. It was far more disconcerting when I didn't know why it was happening, but even knowing that now, I still see a lot of what I'm going through as a window into the future. I can accept it, fight it, or resign myself to it. I'm halfway between accepting and fighting right now. I think both are good survival tools, used in moderation, as long as you find a balance between them that works for you. I don't think that resigning myself to decline does anything constructive; to me that is kind of the precursor to giving up. Giving up isn't and never has been in my vocabulary or play book. I do, however, have to be a realist and accept the fact that things have changed. That means I'll have to change as well, but I know I can do it. I'm still here because I've found ways to adapt to my situation; I need to just keep reminding myself of that.

I also need to remind myself of what is on the first page of my play book of life: there is always a Plan B. And a Plan C, D, and E if necessary. I am never really backed into a corner unless I think I am. There is always a way out, and things are never really that bad. Really. It's something I have to remember now as well, with everything that is going on. There is an end in sight, I just need to stay the course. I need to keep my chin up, my eyes on the road, and by all means, don't feed the beast by having a pity party. Deal with it. It won't always be this way.




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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Can You Use It In A Sentence Please?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a moment that was so transcendentally joyful, so memorable, and yet, to a dispassionate observer, so monumentally unimportant, that it's hard to really explain it and do the moment any kind of justice. It was a flash of light, the blink of an eye, and to anybody but me, about as forgettable of a moment as one could possibly imagine. To me, it was like the feeling I had when as a boy of about 8 years of age, I put on my first pair of cowboy boots. Pure, unadulterated joy, untainted by even any semblance of cynicism. On this warm October afternoon, as I was unpacking the last of my boxes from my move (of 2 years ago), I found something that I thought for sure had been lost. Though its monetary value is next to nothing, to me it is pure gold.

Tucked way down in a box of reference books (scientific, financial, sociological) I found a small, 3 book paperback boxed set that I thought I would never see again. It was and is my Webster's New World dictionary boxed set containing The New World Dictionary, The New World Thesaurus and the Instant Spelling Dictionary. Since almost immediately after their reappearance and up to now they have been sitting in their box on my bedside table, a mere 18 inches away. There are a few reasons why these books are so meaningful.

First and foremost, I bought them right around the time I met Ken, back in very early 1991, at a used book store in San Francisco. These were new, but in the bargain bin nonetheless. Their copyright is 1990. Every time that I look at them, I think of Ken and that time in our relationship. We were newly coupled, getting ready to set up house together, madly in lust, and quickly falling in love as well. These books will always have a connection to that feeling, and in part, that is admittedly conscious. I don't ever want to forget how wonderful that time felt. Since then, there are few times that I can compare to it. We were happy, optimistic, looking to the future, all while trying to figuring out how to make a good marriage.

Secondly, the books are all copyright dated 1990. This means that you won't any of the following words or phrases contained in these books: internet, cell phone, bizzitch, emoticon, threat-down, blog, Al Queda, carbon footprint or supersize (yes, that was added in 2009). To a man of my generation, this is about as Norman Rockwell as it gets. This is a reference book that truly does reference a moment in time right before one of the most monumental periods of transition in the history of the human race: the technology explosion was at our doorstep, and ready to knock the door down. This was a world of DOS. I don't think Windows 3.0 was even out yet, or if it was, it was just freshly released. To people from today's younger generations (especially young adults), we may as well have just emerged from caves wearing animal skins; it's that hard for them to relate to it. Did your parents used to regale you with stories of great struggle, sacrifice and difficulty from their early years? My mother grew up during the depression, so I certainly got an earful (and by the way, that wasn't a bad thing). I have to think that what I felt back then when hearing these tales is very much like how we older adults make the current generation of young adults feel when we start to get sentimental.

Another reason I missed these so much was because they had been my bedside mate for many years until I moved out of the Diamond Street house. When I am reading, I can think of little that I find more pleasurable than finding a new word, or one that I'm not 100% sure of its definition. When I had these books and that happened, it would mean that I could reach over to the bedside table, pull my beautiful little dictionary out of it's box and rifle through real paper pages. In the time since these books went MIA, sometimes I'll go to the computer and look up a word, but it's just not as satisfying of an experience. I'm old school; I want to feel the paper, and if it's an older book, I love that musty smell as I leaf through the pages.

Eventually, books printed on paper are going to be virtually obsolete. I am sure there are doubters in my generation and the ones preceding it who are thinking "no way" to what I am saying, but that is what they said about newspapers too. I don't think that there is a single major-market daily that is making money, and if there are any that are managing to make a small profit or break even, I'll bet that they are seeing a profit by cutting the bottom line. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, has cut 50% of their writing and reporting staff in the last couple of years. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is gone. The Kansas City Star is on it's way down too. Even the behemoths such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times are not immune to this trend. If you know any newspaper journalists ask them. I have a good friend who is a section editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The PD is actually doing better than a lot of big papers, but my friend says that market research has shown that they have a demographic that comprises a large part of their subscriber base who collectively still refuse to get a computer, or even learn how to do the most basic things on one at a public library. That is probably one generation only, and after they are gone, if not even before, even the PD will probably not be immune to having to change in a big way, or go dinosaur.

I'm sure that digitizing printed media has many advantages, including some important green ones. I am all for conserving natural resources, but printed media is one of the few indulgences I continue to hold on to and rally for. If we're going to talk about wasteful use of wood products, I'm going to say "yes it is a problem", but I would like to know how much paper is consumed annually for book printing, and how much is consumed printing the huge wad of grocery store ads that are in my mailbox every week. Then add in all the junk mail and (my pet peeve) all the paper that is wasted on the obnoxious flyers that are put on my car windshield and put grooves on my wiper blades so the wipers never work well after that, all the excessive packaging so our Hot Pockets stay fresh and pretty, the excessive use of things like paper towels (use a rag and wash it), paper and plastic waste generated by grocery bags and all the unnecessary paperwork that is generated by industry. If we're officially in the digital age, take everything that you possibly can digital. I feel pretty confident in saying that my generation (The Baby Boomers) is the last generation that will have any significant percentage of its members that will bemoan the loss of the printed paper media. Change is inevitable, and as history always shows, the younger generations are always the first to adapt to those changes. That will leave me and my fellow generationals sitting on park benches mumbling to each other, grousing about all the change that is too much happening too quickly. I am on the verge right now of becoming my grandfather, or my crabby old neighbor from when I was very much a young boy (less than 10 years), who would come out screaming and shaking his fist every time my and my friends would step on his lawn or commit what he saw as some other grave infraction upon his property.

As the line goes from a number from the Broadway musical Avenue Q, "The Internet Is Made For Porn". I have no problem whatsoever with that. Since I'm not a huge fan of porn anyway, I would say that I consider porn on paper to be a wasteful use of the resource. Keep it on the internet, so that while I have my John Irving in my hands, you can have your Johnson in yours. Eventually, the rare book dealer of today is going to have all the surviving books that aren't in public libraries, personal libraries, university libraries and collections or museums. Amazon and Wal-Mart are already killing local book stores. Before too long, the Kindle and other e-book readers will be inflicting the final fatal blows on the paper book.

Eventually, all the writing talent will be found via their blogs. Now I'm not saying that is a bad thing. There are some really brilliant talented writers putting out blogs, but I wonder if this probable phenomenon might have a couple of downsides. Is this going to lead to furthering the dumbing down of our society? I have to seriously wonder this. If you read enough blogs (or for that matter, watch enough YouTube or listen to enough popular music) you'll see that more often than not, success and popularity has little to do with the artist or writer having genuine talent. I wonder how many people know who Perez Hilton is compared to the number of people who know who Arianna Huffington is. One has a blog that is amazing. Tons of great writing talent, producing writing that forces you to think, and a clear mission that guides her project. The other one is a bitchy queen gossip monger, who I would venture to guess doesn't get laid much. Sadly, I'll venture a guess that he is far more well-known to the masses, and is also far more widely "read".

As a society, it seems that we have devolved into a gluttonous mass of functionally illiterate no-nothings who want their food supersized and their news dumbed down and condensed into sound and video bites that say what they want to hear (Fox News anyone?). We are more interested in The Octamom than we are in picking up a geometry book and learning about octagons. Millions of people know that a tragically unmedicated bipolar Britney Spears walks into gas station bathrooms barefoot and drives with her children on her lap. How many people know about the forced child labor in third world countries (mostly in southeast Asia and mainland China as well) who make our Nikes for salaries of pennies? Real food is facing virtual extinction. Most of the world's population is undernourished, malnourished or starving. Meanwhile, most of us in America get too many calories from food-like products that are laden with toxic chemicals, a plethora of unhealthy corn products and byproducts and little real whole food in it. Even so, they still tout their health benefits, because they have been fortified with antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, magic mojo and probably eventually, Viagra.

There is a really good movie that has been out for a few years called Idiocracy. If you haven't seen it, it's on the pay movie channels all the time or you can rent it. The premise of the movie is that the army is testing a program where they will take their best and strongest soldiers and cryogenically freeze them for future use. Before they use it on their "good ones", they need to get two test subjects, and they need to have no family or other living relatives and they need to be average in as many ways as possible. The first subject comes from within ranks: there is a slacker soldier (played by Luke Wilson perfectly) who has worked in an Army archives warehouse for years, flying under the radar, and as such, has set it up so that his work days involve doing nothing. His name is Joe (Average Joe). Both of his parents and all the grandparents are dead, no siblings, no wife, no children. Best of all, he tests out as absolutely average in every category (health, intelligence, age, strength). They then go to the civilian population for the second subject and find "working girl" Rita (played by Maya Rudolph, probably one of best recent SNL alums) who is on the run and trying to hide from her pimp, a thug named Rerun. They get frozen, the program gets shut down and they get forgotten.

Fast forward 500 years. Their pods are unearthed in The Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505. They come out of suspended animation outside the apartment of Frito (played brilliantly by Dax Shepard, who is very underrated, and I love him), who is eating some nasty looking glop from a tube and watching his favorite TV show, Ow, My Balls. If I had to give an accurate description of Ow My Balls, I would describe it as the bastard child of America's Funniest Home Videos and Jackass. Joe and Rita step out of their pods to find out that America has basically turned into a giant garbage heap, literally and figuratively. Over the centuries, because the most intelligent in society had borne very few children and the ignorant masses had babies with impunity, within 500 years there were no intelligent people left. The President, Dwayne Elizando Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, is a professional wrestler. Everything is bought at Costco, and Costcos are about the size of small cities. You walk in the door and the greeter says "Welcome to Costco, I love you". The population lives on fast and junk food. They don't drink water, they drink a Gatorade-esque product called Brawndo. "It has what bodies crave, 'cause it has electrolytes" is what everybody says, even though nobody seems to know what electrolytes are. They are even irrigating their crops with Brawndo, and can't understand why all the crops die ("but Brawndo has what plants crave; it's got electrolytes"). Brawndo Inc. is 2500's equivalent of Kraft or Nestle'.

You can figure it out from here. Joe and Rita are the smartest people in America, they save the country, etc. It's directed by Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill fame), and though slapstick and expected to not be not very insightful, it actually ends up being underrated and kind of brilliant (kind of like the humor I described in Scrubs in my last essay). Because I think it's so brilliant and insightful, I love it. It also gives a great play-out of what might happen if society continues on its current path that I've been bitching so vociferously about in this writing.

I can't resist; here is a short video montage of clips from Idiocracy, gleaned off of YouTube. YouTube really is good for something I guess:




As I find myself here now, I'm wondering if it's going to even take 500 years for that much devolution to be realized. I have to think that I can still be hopeful that America will stop glamorizing ignorance, but look at us: our last President was, as Wanda Sykes says, a C student. His grammatical and syntactical offenses were never challenged. Quite the opposite, I think he made a lot of the general population feel comfortable: "he's one of us!" The current President seems to be scaring the crap out of these same gen-pops. A lot of people that I tend to agree with think it has more to do with race than anything else. Partly. Maybe. I think it also has a lot to do with his intelligence, and his incredible unbelievably calm demeanor. They have slung everything, including Hitler and the kitchen sink at him, and the guy doesn't even twitch or bat an eye. When he won, I was not nearly as surprised that a black man got elected President as I was that such a scholarly, intelligent and deliberate-thinking person was. Before Obama, when was the last time that you actually heard a President say that he was going to do his research and get some learned counsel before taking a stand on an issue? The first time that he said that he was going to do it, my jaw hit the ground.

If you still don't think that America glamorizes ignorance, chew on this: one of the most popular game shows on TV is called Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader; I'll fess up and admit that I've watched it a handful of times, though I don't think that I've ever watched a complete episode. That this show is so popular speaks volumes about the character of the American television-watching majority. Inside that little factoid is another even more pitiful factoid: the adult contestants almost never win! I actually did happen to see an episode where the contestant won the big prize ($100,000 perhaps?), and what do you think that contestant's profession was? She was an elementary school principal! Not only is all this a sad enough fact, but that most of the people watching this can relate to the ignorance of the majority of the contestants and see no problem in their lack of knowledge; that is something I find even more pathetic and disheartening.

Before Fifth Grader, there used to be a late-night game show called Street Smarts. The premise for this show was that the producers would go out onto the streets of LA and find the 3 most ignorant people they could possibly find (and I know for certain that was their goal, since I know one of the former staffers on the show that would go out and comb the streets. He told me that he had the easiest job in the world). He could find a week's worth of panelists on any busy LA street at the bat of an eye, or so he told me. The panel of 3 would answer questions on camera on a street corner. They would have 2 contestants in the studio, and the contestants would win points by basically guessing which of the 3 supposedly street-smart people was actually the most stupid. Most of their street panel could not answer one current events question accurately, but if the question was about celebrities, especially celebrity gossip, they could answer correctly nearly every time.

I won't lie, I watch TV. I also consciously shut it off frequently, rather than just letting crappy content play in the background while I'm doing something else. If I need background noise, and I often don't, I'll turn on some music. I've set limits with myself on the number of hours of TV that I will allow myself to waste time on. Once I use up my allotment, as I sometimes do, if I have nothing better to do, I have to either write, read a book or meditate; no TV. Honestly, I'm never disappointed when that happens. I end up getting far more satisfaction out of any of the other 3 activities than I would have gotten from shutting off my brain and turning on the television. I don't think that television is inherently bad. I do, however, think that it has become far too much of a friend to people who don't want to read and babysitters for tired (or lazy) parents. A little goes a long way, that's all I'm saying. If you have to watch it, there is enough quality content on the air at any given hour. Rarely do you HAVE to watch garbage. Every time you power up that box, you stand a good chance of having a better and more enriching choice, than to just sit there watching crap, if you are compelled to keep the TV on.

Maybe, if we're lucky, society won't continue to devolve. Perhaps we'll start eating real food again and put the Hot Pockets in the trash. Maybe people will start reading books that teach them something of value instead of watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Maybe we will stop trying to have the greenest lawns while most of the world's population still doesn't have a safe, reliable drinking water supply. Maybe, instead of growing corn on every acre of farm land in Iowa, farmers will start to understand the benefits of crop diversity.

Or possibly after a few hundred years have passed, what, if anything, remains of the human race will be shopping at Costco, coming home and eating pureed junk food through a tube and drinking Brawndo ('cause it's what your body craves, it has electrolytes) while they watch Ow, My Balls on the super mega-giant ultra high-def 400 inch flat screen TV. At least they aren't a bunch of fags or scros.

It's Wednesday night, late. I can't sleep anyway, so I'm sitting up in bed and working on this. I'm trying to finish this essay, go through and do the (hopefully) final editing, publish it and then either fall asleep or read my book. My dictionaries are at my side, mere inches away. As I reach this point, I'm having a moment of clarity, a bit of an epiphany. In Angels in America, Tony Kushner calls it "the threshold of revelation", but perhaps that might wax a bit hyperbolic. What I'm realizing is that in a way, this writing is becoming something that I didn't want: I'm afraid it is turning into a rant fest.

There is so much ranting in the world right now, and the internet has become a major springboard for many ranters, or wanting-to-be ranters. I had some very specific goals when I set out to do this. My first and most important goal was to document this period in my life. For me, this really is a watershed moment, and by moment, I mean since late 2006. I'll even narrow it down a little more: this time, right now, is my watershed moment: the Hepatitis, Interferon and all of its various and sundry unpleasantries, my spiritual path, the isolation (medical, not mental), more than half a life lived with HIV...I think I've said enough; you get the point, yes? I knew that if I didn't commit this experience to writing, I would lose most of it. My memory is not the greatest to begin with, it's gotten worse, and this is a lot to take in all at once. At some point, I'm certain that I'm going to want to look back and see how I felt when I was in the eye of the storm.

My next goal was to get back to writing before any skill that I once had was allowed to completely go to rust. I am a man of words. I like to read them, hear them and write them. Something that both gives me joy and is a constructive endeavor deserves to be given a chance to spread its wings. I wasn't going to set a lot of rules with my self at the outset, but I did want to reassess my goals from time to time. I wanted to see if they were changing, if I was meeting them, or if they were even realistic or valuable goals in the first place.

I also wanted to have a way of keeping my loved ones updated about what was happening with me without having to spend all my waking hours on the phone. I hate the phone in the first place; to spend an inordinate amount of time with it glued to my ear sounds interminable.

Finally, I wanted to give myself a voice in a way that I hadn't tried before. I am opinionated, that is not news to anybody that knows me or has read my writing. That said, I had this in the back of my mind all the time and promised myself to maintain vigilance regarding it. I did not want this to turn from an outlet for sharing my thoughts into a bully pulpit, a bitch fest, an "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" litany of things that bother Parry.

There is a fine line between being observational and/or sharing my opinions and becoming a teabagger. I don't want to be that irrational guy screaming in a town hall meeting, even figuratively. I don't want to shove my opinions down other people's throats, thinking that I'm doing them a favor. I don't want to be angry. I would rather be a part of the solution that part of the problem.

I'm making no decisions right now, but I am concerned and I'm going to be a little extra-vigilant as I write and then edit my writing, at least for the time being. There are more than enough people out on the internet who are telling everyone how and why they are right and the dissenters are not only wrong, they are the bad people. I don't mind sparking debate or getting people to think. What I don't want to do is to feed into the rancor, discord and unhealthy conflict that I think is sabotaging much of our ability to have civil debate and/or treat our neighbors with respect.

I'm done for the night, more to follow soon. I love you all, remember to be good to each other.




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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The Book of Love

If you have seen the TV sitcom Scrubs, the way I'm going to use it as a reference to make my point will make a lot more sense. If you've not seen it, Scrubs is a dramedy set in a fictional teaching hospital, and set in a city that is never given anything more that the most vague references. They shot almost the entire show in a decommissioned hospital in North Hollywood, and almost all of the interior and outdoor scenes were shot onsite. In the outdoor filming they never made any kind of attempt to mask the premise that it was set somewhere in California. Cast and crew on the show often referred to the location as San DiFrangeles — a marrying of San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles that is likely meant to read as "Scene: California, an unnamed major metropolitan area".

Scrubs started its first season with three of the main characters having just graduated from medical school and starting their residency from Day 1. Episode 1 was Day 1 as an intern. For the most part, the story is seen through the eyes of and narrated by John Dorian, played by Zach Braff, kind of like how "The Wonder Years" was narrated by Fred Savage's character, only far less annoyingly so. Nearly every episode's title, save for a collective handful of episodes, starts with the word "My", so the pilot was "My First Day" and the final episode was "My Finale". Many of the episodes had very clever titles, such as "My Bed Banter & Beyond", "My Heavy Meddle", My Ocardial Infarction", and my personal favorite: "My Hypocritical Oath".

Another aspect of the show that was somewhat unique was how well they integrated an incredible library of music (mostly current, off the mainstream, more college radio fare) into every show. I probably have found more new bands and rediscovered some of my old and forgotten favorites than anywhere else, like Colin Hay, the lead singer for to oft-forgotten one hit album wonder from Down Under, Men At Work. He has continued to have a long, moderately successful career since the early 1980's and he is one of Zach Braff's favorite musicians. For the record, he is an incredibly talented songwriter, musician and performer, but because of a purposefully and horribly marketed cutsie image that was Men At Work, he ended up getting, in my opinion, highly underrated. He has also had some pretty funny bit parts in a number of the episodes. Probably my favorite is an episode called "My Overkill" (in homage to the Men At Work song by the same name).

But I digress here, and I'm probably going to do it again as well. In addition to their really artistic way of incorporating popular music into the soundtrack, they also have had some stories that are equally as funny as they are the fodder for the tear factory, and they can switch back and forth between humor and pathos at lightspeed, so often so that I've been sitting on the floor watching many a time and I was simultaneously laughing myself into a side-ache as tears rolled down my cheeks from a particularly touching aspect of the same scene.

It took me a long time to warm up to the show, and I'm not the first person that I've heard say that. When I first watched it in the early seasons, I never really got myself engrossed enough to get hooked. You see, there is a side to the humor of the show that is so slapstick, it teeters on the border between cerebral slapstick and just downright corny. If you're not a health care professional, and more specifically, if you had never worked in a hospital (especially a teaching hospital), you can walk away thinking that their take on hospitals is so ridiculous that it's unbelievable. In actuality, it's so ridiculous that it's spot-on accurate, an almost a perfectly executed recreation of the real-life insanity that is the teaching hospital. There is a good reason: the show's creator, Bill Lawrence, based the show on a very good college friend's recollections of his early years practicing medicine. This man, Dr. John Doris (John Doris - John Dorian), also served as the medical advisor for the show.

As one would expect, and it's the case with even the most accurate of the medical dramas on TV or the Silver Screen, the writers take a lot of liberties in regard to the actual technical aspects of the practice of medicine and nursing (and other allied health sciences) and how a hospital really runs day to day. A perfect example of this, and one that took me a long time to appreciate that what they were doing was calculated, involved the main interior set, the space where the largest percentage of scenes were shot. It was obviously the the same space from scene to scene, but they never tried in the slightest to mask it. Sometimes you thought it was an ER. Sometimes it was supposed to be the ICU. Sometimes it was supposed to be the oncology ward, and a few times, it was even surgical recovery. That used to drive me crazy. I would think "why can't they get that one detail right?" But then after further mental deliberation, it became obvious that this was "A Scrubs Thing": vagueness. You didn't know the city and you didn't know what part of the hospital you were in, you didn't know what time, it was, what shift they were working, and on and on. It was kind of like the feeling you get when you spend too much time in a casino and completely lose track of what time it is. With some of the liberties they took, it might driven a few real life doctors or nurses crazy, but that wasn't the point. Had they been humoring or catering to that audience, they might have made a few nurses and doctors happy, but in the process they would have bored 99% of the audience into a coma. And remember, this is a half hour show, so they have 22 minutes to tell a story.

Where they didn't take liberties (well, maybe a little) was in the depiction of all the various and sundry characters that occupy a hospital. If you've not worked in a hospital (especially a teaching hospital), you would think that the writers had exaggerated the characters past the point of farce. In truth, they exxagerated very little, sometimes not at all. If you ever want to immerse yourself in the world's largest dysfunctional family, work in a hospital. You will see some of the craziest (and most brilliant) mother-f'ers that you have ever seen in your life. They have pretty much every other kind of workplace beat in spades for the sheer number of different personality disorders that you will find.

But I digress again. Why I'm talking about Scrubs is because it is a great example of the kind of entertainment that as of late has had me crying at the drop of a hat. Even before I started on the Interferon Emotional Roller Coaster, that show could, as I said before, switch me back and forth between laughing and crying at the speed of a ping pong ball in a Chinese championship game. But now, oh hell, anything that is the least bit tragic, sappy, or even overly uplifting can and usually will work me like a puppet on a string. Every baseball game this year where they showcased a feel-good story between innings (and they do that a lot, and I watch a lot of baseball. Actually a lot of sports for that matter), I've fallen for the tear jerker hook line and sinker. Many a time I've had the waterworks start with the opening music for the the vignette, before it even starts to get sappy. If you think this is hyperbole, walk up the me sometime and just say "The HBO biography of Ted Williams" and watch my eyes well up.

Actually, this has been really great, believe it or not. Interferon (and everything else that has happened in the last couple of years) has shown me a side of myself that I've rarely seen. I am by nature not a crier. I'm really not that emotionally expressive on either side of the spectrum. I don't argue loudly, I don't fight really that much at all. I'm British by heritage, and I can tell you this: that whole "Be British", deal with it, stuff emotion down, don't show weakness personality profile must at least to some degree be genetic. Historically it has always been hard for me to cry. I've rarely seen any of my siblings cry, even in private. Taking each family member individually, I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I've seen any member of my immediate family cry. We just don't do that, and I've never thought that to be very weird. That is, until the last couple of years when I have turned into a blubbering fool that can cry at even the most seemingly inconsequential thing.

The flip side of that coin is that often in my life, I've felt heavily weighed down from what is usually a bottleneck of unprocessed emotional conflicts. Typically, I've gone through a period of abnormally high stress and in the process there are a lot of emotions that I've brewed up and then pushed back down my proverbial throat, often for months at a time. I've always known when I need to open the pressure relief valve in these situations, and for me, the pressure reliever is a good cry. Since, as I've said, I've not been much of a crier in my life, that creates a challenge for me in trying to open the valve and have a good old-fashioned cathartic cry. Even though I know I'll feel better, I can't manufacture those emotions that will produce the desired results (many can, and it's a great tool to have at times like this). Where that leaves me is needing to find some device that can trigger the necessary switch to get the waterworks going, and for me, that usually is a sad (or very touching) movie. I have 4 or 5 on my go-to list. Even though I've seen every one of them more times than I care to count, every one of them works nearly every time, like clockwork. Off the top of my head, these are some of my greatest hits: Sophie's Choice: that one is the most reliable tearjerkers for me, and usually produces the most guttural cathartic cry. Then there are The Shawshank Redemption, The Laramie Project (oh my God, have a big full box of Kleenex on hand) and Legends of the Fall (and take note: if you've never seen this movie, it is so worth it just to see Brad Pitt cry. He is, without a doubt, one of the best man-criers in Hollywood). Finally, I would have to include A River Runs Through It. If for nothing else, it's another performance of pathos perfection by Brad Pitt (oh, and there is the eye candy factor).

It's kind of a funny (but shouldn't be) story that came to mind today for no apparent reason, and it was definitely inspiration for my muse. I don't know if this is urban legend or if it's true (I would guess true), but there is an old Hollywood story that has circulated for years, and if it's true, I'm a bit ashamed at myself for seeing any humor in it. In Shirley Temple's Hollywood era, her movies were always known for her tragic scenes. They were corny as Iowa, but they were also brilliant and they still get me (and if you tell anybody I'll have to kill you). Well, as the story goes (allegedly), Shirley was pretty good at cry-acting and producing waterworks, but there were a couple of times that they were unable to get it out of her. The director would call cut and tell everybody to go to lunch. Then, about an hour later when Shirley got back (and they would make sure to get her back last so that they could have the scene set up and ready to go), she would walk onto the sound stage and see a room full of shocked faces. Once, they told her that her that they had just received a phone call, and both her parents had just died in a car wreck. Another time, they told her that her dog had gotten out accidentally and was hit by a car. Of course she would start crying, but what made it even sicker was that they would then tell her that she HAD to finish the scene before they would let her leave (oh, the 1930's, such a child-friendly era). They got their tears, and Shirley got scarred for life. I wonder if you can put a price on emotional scarring.

Like I said, I hope this is urban legend, because even though I get how wrong this is on so many levels, it's also sick beyond the point of absurdity, and that is what my humor is responding too. Or so I keep telling myself anyway.

But back to my stifled emotions dilemma. Since Project Interferon started, I've probably needed and had a good cry at least once a week. What is different is that I don't have to use any devices to get the desired response; usually it hits me without me even expecting it, and the triggers are so gross that it's almost sad. It can be a touching commercial. It can be a feel-good sports story. It can be a story about triumph in the face of adversity. Or it can just be garden variety, really sappy stupid television. I don't need to flip a switch either, the switch is flipping itself.

I can't say that I've ever had a time in my life when I have enjoyed crying more. I know it is a good thing, because the afterglow that I get is an intense feeling of relief, calm and inner peace. There is no sense of hopelessness or demoralization, either preceding the crying or afterward. I have to think that I am just processing so much that my mind has turned my body into an emotional catharsis rendering plant (sorry for the unpleasant visual, I grew up near a stockyard, so that is what immediately came to mind). I am so weird: "That Parry, what a lulu; he's crying every day and he loves it" (followed by a shrug of pity).

Yesterday, the final episode of Scrubs was playing (it's in syndication, has been for a few years already, even though the series only ended 5 months ago), and so I sat down and watched it again. I've only seen it once, and I really didn't get to watch it distraction-free the first time, so I expected that I might have missed a lot. First of all, I have to tell you that I've seen every episode of the show, but I'm amazed at how I can rewatch nearly every episode of this show multiple times, and yet each time walk away with a completely different experience. For me, yesterday was a bit of an anomaly. I had pretty much been teary-eyed or on the verge of it for most of the morning. When I turned on the show, it immediately became a 22 minute sob-fest. The last scene, which I have now watched at least 10 times since yesterday is the most emotional for me. It is a glimpse into the future, shown as a montage of "home movies" spanning 20-ish future years. The film is accompanied by a song that I don't think I have ever heard before, but one that is now my current favorite: the name of the song is The Book of Love by a 2 man group who call themselves The Magnetic Fields. The frontman (and songwriter and singer and guitar player) is an extremely talented man by the name of Stephin Merritt.

First, here is the final scene of the final episode of Scrubs, with The Book of Love being covered by Peter Gabriel:





Although that is a beautiful cover, it is, in my opinion a little over-produced. As evidence for this claim, this is, I believe, the original video for The Magnetic Fields version of their own song:





So by now you can probably guess where this is going if it wasn't already obvious from the get-go: watching that final episode, hearing that song, researching it, dissecting the lyrics has really had me for the last two days reflecting on what love means to me. There is the spiritual aspect, there is romantic love, there is fraternal love, and there is the love you (hopefully) have for members of your family, to name a few examples.

The Course (in Miracles) teaches that there is only one kind of love, that the different kinds of love that we choose to define slightly differently, are in actuality, illusory experiences, which Jesus calls "special" loves. One of the traps of seeing different kinds of love for different relationships is that it engenders this internal thought process (at least for me) that starts one down the road of creating some hierarchy of loves, and doing it out of some necessary moral imperative of sorts. In actuality, at least as I believe and have finally been able to now wrap my head somewhat around, there is only one kind of love. Love is love, and you are truly loving if you are loving everybody in your life in the same way. It's really kind of hard to wrap your head around at first, but if one believes it, as I do, what it does (for me at least) is stop me from trying to decide how I am going to love one person versus another person, because of my ingrained belief that I have to express it differently for different people (or so I thought). No one person who crosses my path, be it my parent, my partner, my best friend, my supposed mortal enemy or a stranger that I pass on the street, deserves any less of an expression of my love than any other being, nor do they deserve any more or any less of my love in quantity, as if love could even be rationed out. I believe it is limitless and infinite.

It's not my desire for this to come off in a manner where I am or appear to be pontificating. To be even more specific,, it is not meant to be a statement that once distilled down to its purest truth comes across as me declaring "this is the way it is, and I expect you to believe it and take every word exactly as I give it". Put quite simply, this is how I think, it's not what I expect everybody else to believe because I think and/or proclaim it to be so.

I guess my point here is that I'm really more than a bit stunned at how some little pop culture reference can bring home for me so clearly a concept that has eluded me for the last 2 1/2 years that I've studied the course. It is really hard to understand on a very deep level how you love everyone in the same way, and to take the obvious next step in the thought process, how you integrate it into your day to day life. I can read and regurgitate it, but until now, the understanding and integration has eluded me. When you open up that big blue book that is the written course, the first words that you see are the most telling. On the surface they seem so simple, but once you try to live them, they become unbelievably complex and seemingly hard to understand:

"This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at any given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:

Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God."

So simple! But seriously, you can see why it can take time to wrap your head around it. I've felt a real satisfaction for the last 48 hours, because something that has seemed impossibly complex to grasp is finally within my reach.

This is the reason I love the song so much: it really portrays the simplicity, complexity and seemingly contradictory characteristics of what we call love, when in fact, this Book of Love, which is so big and all-encompassing that "no one can lift the damn thing" is also something that is so simple, there is nothing else in reality. It is conceptually singular instead of dualistic. It is without an opposite or any even any contradictory characteristics. It is not at conflict with fear, its supposed opposite, because that opposite is only an illusory figment of a collective imagination.

As I understand it, love is not a part of reality, it is reality. It is all-encompassing, simple and not as incomprehensibly complex as it appears to be on the surface. It is infinite instead of being limited in supply and as such, it has no need to be rationed and/or handed out differently to different people depending on one's relationship with that person, or any other arbitrary criteria. Whether or not you buy what I'm saying doesn't really matter, that isn't what I'm trying to accomplish. I think I'm still trying to wrap my head around something that can't be truly understood by a dualistically thinking mind. But if at another time you hear me talking about what love means to me and it makes some kind of sense to you, then I'll feel a sense of accomplishment. I was actually able to build a bridge between two beautiful minds.



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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Vanity, Thy Name is Alopecia

As the old saying goes: "stereotypes are exaggeration, not fiction. All have a basis in reality". A very common one about gay men is that we are appearance-obsessed, vain, self-centered, fussy, body-obsessed, and fashionistas. If you were to ask any of my friends if I fit that profile, they would all tell you that I would have to turn in my gay card if that were the case. I've never really cared that much about clothing, as both my appearance and closet would attest to. I have a lot of clothes, but they are mostly a lot of jeans (and not Diesel or any other expensive label; I don't even know any of the other fashion denim labels!), t-shirts, athletic socks, tennis shoes and hiking/walking shoes, sweatshirts, sweatpants, house pants (as they now call PJ bottoms) and a few sweaters. I have two indulgences in fashion:

1) I have a lot of very nice fitted (tailored) dress shirts, which, by the way, I almost never wear, and
2) I have expensive underwear (bottoms). This is an indulgence that I developed some time after Ken died, and the one apparel indulgence that I continue to entertain. I'm talking briefs (boxer, mini boxer, boxer brief, briefs) that are $15-25 a pair. Part of the reason for this indulgence is that I like cute underwear, even if I'm the only one that sees it most of the time, but more importantly, they fit right. I've endured a lifetime of ill-fitting underwear, and now that I've appreciated how nice well-fitting ones feel, well, there is no going back. I have a weird body, and one that has gotten even weirder as I've gone down to a healthier weight (and aged). I have no hips, virtually no ass and big meaty muscular thighs (all from God in the leg department, no effort on my part). My dilemma has always been if I buy them too big, even slightly, they get baggy and I feel like an old geezer that can't fill in his shorts. If I get them too small, even ever so slightly, since I don't have a good shelf (round butt cheeks), but big thighs, i.e., ones that are too big for the leg holes, I walk around with a permanent wedgie. Seriously, I've taken underwear off in a public restroom and thrown them away because I've gotten tired of pulling them out of my ass crack. Too-small underwear on me becomes, for all intents and purposes, a thong. I'm really not fond of walking around in public picking at my ass to pull my undies out of it.

Other than that, I really don't care about clothes. I have 3 nice, beautiful designer suits, but I didn't buy them, they were Ken's. We were very close in size, so I was able to have them tailored to fit, and I just couldn't stand the thought of consigning or donating all of his dress clothing. Additionally I have 3 or 4 nice dress jackets, but I have them for one purpose only: dog shows. Dog shows are (ridiculously) a formal attire event. Like you really need to be in dress clothing to get down on your knees in the grass or on a dirty concrete floor to stack (pose) your dog. Cleaning up dog poop looks really classy in a nice suit and tie as well.

So other than those few exceptions, I have a large walk-in closet full of probably 100-200 t-shirts (and very few with a designer label), a lot of jeans, a lot of Giants (as in baseball, SF Giants) game gear and a lot of very un-trendy lounge wear for schlepping around the house.

I've never been much of a primping type either. I don't live in front of the mirror. To the contrary, I can say with confidence that on most days I look in the mirror twice: once in the morning when I'm shaving and doing oral care and once before bed when I'm brushing my teeth and brushing my hair to put it in a ponytail. That's it. I have friends that can't walk by a mirror without looking in it (or worse yet, getting glued to it). I usually don't look at myself in passing if I pass a mirror. I really could care less, and again, those who know me well would attest to this not being an understatement on my part. I really don't care. I care about my words, and want people to listen to me, not to look at me. Not because I think I'm hideous, I just don't choose who I associate with based on superficial things like appearances. I want to know what's going on inside the head. I hope that my friends feel the same way about me: that they are interested in me because I'm intersting; not because I'm pretty or a spiffy dresser.

Other than for about the first year after Ken died, I've never been the body-obsessed type either. I'll exercise as much as I'm physically up for, but in general I've never been interested in turning into a gym bunny to get big guns, tight 6-pack abs and big beefy pecs, even if I could. During the first year AK (after Ken), I hired my friend Brian, an amazing, albeit expensive personal trainer, and went on a rampage of exercise to try, for once in my life, to have a gorgeous physique. I learned a couple of things from the experience:

1) It's a lot of fucking work, and more than I was usually was capable of. I would kill myself, pushing way beyond what I should have and what I was able to put out, and exhaust myself to an uncomfortable (as in sick to my stomach) point; one that often took me days to recover from, and:

2) I also learned that my body isn't made for that gym bunny look. I have a slender frame that doesn't carry weight well (fat or muscle), and is better off just being toned and flexible. Over the last many years, even this has been a struggle to maintain, with my health often being so precarious and my endurance being abysmal. But even when I'm feeling my best, about the most I can do is a mild yoga class or low-impact, low-intensity cardio (walking, some swimming). These days: well, a lot of days it is a major success to just get out of bed. Between my blood being a viral soup, poisoning myself pharmaceutically in order to keep the most dangerous viri at bay and on top of it all, just dealing with the changes of aging, well, to say it's been a challenge is an understatement.

I've also never been terribly fussy about my grooming. I am clean, clean-shaven or facial hair well-cropped and hygenic, but I've never been terribly vain about the grooming, especially my hair. Or so I thought. I've always had profuse, fine (but voluminous) healthy hair, but I've not been one to get the every-six-week qoiffure and spend hours in the morning getting every hair in place. I've either had it so short i've not needed to even comb it, or long and in a big jew-fro, which is impossible to do much with anyway.

I've always said that if I started going bald, no biggie, I would just shave my head and be done with it; no problem. I thought I really meant it too. It's funny, because if I ever said it around a man who was balding, no matter how I said it, to say what I said above would make most of them visibly cringe. I just didn't get it, why was it such a big deal.

That is so easy to say, when it's not you. And now, with the interferon making my hair fall out, I'm obsessing on my locks the same way that most of my balding friends obsess on theirs. I have a new-found respect and appreciation for how much losing your hair really does mess with your body image. Now I'm really lucky here, because the loss is very gradual and well-distributed, so I don't get bald spots, it's just getting thinner. Nobody has even noticed it so far (or so they say), and when I show it to them, they still say that they can't tell a difference. Plus, it will come back once I stop the Interferon (8.5 months from now), to pretty much the same way it was pre-Interferon.

You see, the real irony here is that for the second time in my adult life, I decided to grow my hair long a couple of years ago; actually a few months after I lost Ken. I now think that it was subconsciously a David and Goliath thing; my hair was my strength, and if I got it long, the longer it was, the safer I was, and something like Ken's suicide couldn't happen to me again. This is, btw, a fairly recent insight, but one that rang true and close to home almost instantaneously after the thought.

So now, with my hair past my shoulders in length (I would guess my average hair length is 10-12 inches), every hair that falls out seems to be ten times as much hair as it would feel like to me if my hair was short. Every time I touch my hair it falls out in my hands. My scalp is sore and irritated, so it's hard to leave it alone, which is the best thing if I want to save as much hair as possible.

So now, I am obsessing on my hair. I tell myself that there is a lesson and a bit of payback here. I now know what my friends felt like when I would say that losing hair is not that big of a deal. To hear that makes me cringe. It's kind of the same feeling I get when people tell me that they like me better with shorter hair. So what? What am I supposed to say to that? Thank you for telling me that you don't like the way I choose to look? Saying either thing is disrespectful, and only now do I really grasp how disrespectful my past statements about hair loss have been when I talked to balding men. Even platitudes like "yeah, but you look good with your head shaved" or "you're more than your hair" are cold comfort, and in the future, I'll keep my mouth shut. At least for me, when I've moaned about losing my hair from the Interferon, I don't want to hear that I look ok or that it might look better if I cut it short. I just want someone to listen to me and to listen sympathetically and sans the dispensing of advice and/or platitudes.

Well, once again it's 1am and I'm just getting started. The problem is, if I don't stop now, the next time I look at the clock it will be 4am, so I am going to publish a partial essay. I'm doing it mostly because I'm feeling a little guilty that it's 3 danged days shy of it being a month since my last post. Plus, I know that if I publish it unfinished, it will drive me nuts if I don't finish it. Let me rephrase that: it will eat at me until I finish it, so that will force me to keep up with this project. Now it's become far more than a vanity project, though that is definitely part of it. It has also become therapy for me. Equally as importantly, it has also become a lifeline for me to reach a number of you, and not keeping up on this is akin to not returning calls, or calling to check in with your friends on a regular basis. So until tomorrow, or actually now, until tonight. There is a lot more for me to say. Imagine that, how novel: me with something to say.

(next day)

Monday, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. I know, said it before, but Interferon has put an entirely new twist into Mondays. I actually find it ironic that I (not purposefully) set it up so that Monday is my crappiest day. My reasoning was, I didn't know if I was still going to want to attend dog shows on occasion. Generally, dog shows run over a weekend. If they are more than 2 days in a row, they will wrap around a weekend. I figured that even if I was wanting to go to one, I wouldn't want to go for 4 days in a row, that would have been stupid. As such, I decided that since Sunday and/or Monday are the most common show days, I would inject on Sunday night, figuring that I would probably end up throwing away Mondays (and I was right, and sometimes more than just Mondays).

What I forgot to consider, but it ended up working anyway, was how exhausting I find a day at a dog show, even if I'm only there as a spectator. I know too many people in my area, so if I go, it turns into a "royal visit" day. This last weekend I actually tried to go 4 days in a row. In my head I had good reasons, but let me tell you: never again. I was so wiped out by the time that I got home last Monday afternoon it was ridiculous. I even ditched early, which I almost never do, but even though I left on Monday shortly after noon, I paid for my decision to do so much for the entire week. Yesterday I actually started to feel halfway "normal", whatever that is, but then what do I have to do in the evening? Take another dose of Interferon.

Mondays have gotten progressively nastier. Today, before I laid myself on the sofa and put my computer in my lap (this is my current status), I spent probably an hour and a half sitting on the sofa, staring into space. I have no idea what I was thinking about, what I thought I was doing, or even if I was really "here". It was one of those "lights dimly on, nobody home" moments. Only minutes before I started writing, I crawled out of the stupor and told myself "do something; anything". Well, I haven't eaten anything since early morning, when I had 2 hard boiled eggs (quick breakfast, had to get to the dentist), so maybe I should eat? Nope, not hungry. OK, maybe I should fold some laundry, or go through some bills and other sundry paperwork, or maybe I should clean up the kitchen, or maybe I should vacuum the house? Nope, too tired, too much concentration required, and I'm in LaLa Land, too much work and too much work. OK then, maybe I could work on my writing? Bingo, that I can maybe do. I go to the bedroom, get my laptop, come back into the family room, plop on the couch and spend almost an hour reading 3 short emails. Again, I thump myself out of my stupor, and here I am now.

I really can't bitch that much. It is a beautiful day today: warm but not too warm. I have the sliding door cracked open so I can hear the waterfall cascading into the koi pond. I have Bobby and Hillary (the two easiest dogs) in the room with me, the sky is sapphire blue outside, and my birch trees are quaking in the gentle autumn breeze, slowly shedding their summer clothing. I have a bunch of trees changing color right now: my Japanese maples, the red maple, the birches the pear trees and the curly willow. It's a show of autumn color that I never got when I lived in San Francisco, and I am now reminded of how much I missed that about autumn when I moved away from home 25 years ago. To live surrounded by a lush landscape populated by a wide variety of deciduous trees hearkens me back to a time I cherish. It also reminds me why autumn has always been my favorite season, and living in a City that really prides itself in how many trees it has is something quite special.

Walnut Creek is the greenest place that I have ever lived, even more than Montana in some ways. Not that Montana is lacking for flora, it's just that because of the mild 3-season Mediterranean climate in this valley, it supports an incredibly diverse landscape of greenery. There is just something about looking out the window, and instead of seeing a hillside packed full of houses, I look out my back window, coincidentally in the same direction as my back window in San Francisco (west), and see trees, flowers, ferns, my herb gardens, the pond, birds, squirrels and other wildlife, and bees and butterflies galore. I'm not saying that my view of Twin Peaks in my San Francisco home wasn't lovely, it was. The hillside of homes often reminded me of a Greek fishing village, but much bigger and denser than what one would actually see in Greece. What I am saying is that my view out of my current home's back windows is spectacular, and more importantly, serene. Granted, I do see a bit of my neighbor's rooftops behind me, but especially in the summer, they are mostly covered by the trees. Even my next door neighbor's house is difficult to see. I can't see it at all from the inside of my house, and out in the back garden, I can only see a small corner of it, and even that is pretty unobtrusive. Were it not for this peaceful sanctuary-like environment that I've been able to create, I shudder to imagine how crappy it would be to have to go through what I'm going through and not have my little oasis to escape to.

I'm having issues with vision now, most probably from the Interferon. For the last few weeks I've been noticing some blurring. At first I thought it was dirty glasses, then I kind of just ignored it somehow. What finally made things click for me was when I went to a meeting last Thursday at UCSF for all the retirees, so that they (the pension managers) could explain why the pension fund is in deep doo-doo, and what they're going to have to do to hopefully fix it. Cheery session, to be sure. Well, I was sitting probably 2/3 of the way back in the auditorium, and when they started the PowerPoint presentation on the big screen and I couldn't read a damn thing, I knew something was fishy. I was in a room of people where probably 90% of the audience was older than me. That not one person complained that the print was too small on the slides finally slapped me into reality. Since then, I've noticed that my glasses aren't cutting it for either my distant or near vision (I have progressive bifocals), and pretty much all print, unless it it big, is blurry. Actually, everything in my field of vision is blurry to one degree or another. In the last few years, I've had the usual "normal" degradation of near (reading) vision, but my myopia (far vision) has not changed in probably 30 years. That was kind of a big clue that something isn't right.

Well, this weekend I went online and did some research about Interferon, and lo and behold, there have been reports of visual changes by some patients on therapy. Quoting directly from VA (as in Veteran's Affairs) website:

Visual Changes

Visual changes are fairly common, but the exact incidence is unknown.(10) The most commonly documented eye complications are “cotton wool spots” and retinal hemorrhages, but most interferon-related retinopathy is asymptomatic and reversible.

Management

1. It is reasonable to perform a baseline eye exam in any patient with diseases associated with the retina (eg, diabetes, hypertension) to establish a pretreatment baseline. Any patient who develops visual changes while on interferon should be evaluated by an ophthalmologist. Treatment changes can then be made in consultation with the ophthalmologist based on the findings observed. Patients should know that there have been instances of serious eye injury (eg, optic neuritis, visual loss, retinal detachment) in patients taking interferon, although these are rare and may improve with discontinuation of the medication. (end of citation)

Great, retinal changes. HIV can also cause retinal damage, especially in advanced disease, in patients with severly depressed T-cell counts. I've only flirted with T-cell counts that low once, and it was years ago, But I will tell you this: for someone like me, who is primarily a visual person, and I define the for me by noting which of the senses are deemed most important, and the sense that gives the greatest initial impression, anything that affects my sight is terrifying. I am doing a good job of keeping that worry in check until I know more, but still, there is the faint cry of that scared little boy way back there in the far reaches of my consciousness.

But honestly, what can I do to change it anyway? Still, it's pretty scary, and I'm having to do a lot of self-checking to keep me from worrying myself into a panic. I have an ophthalmology appointment tomorrow, so that will at least tell me what is really going on. Also, and equally as important, the visual changes, same as most of the potential side effects from the drug, are usually self-correcting after discontinuation of therapy. This leaves me with having to continue to recite my mantra: This is working. If it's working, it's worth all the unpleasantries. Though uncomfortable, disconcerting, frightening. painful, whatever: it is a temporary situation. I'm strong I can deal with it.

That really is true, I am a strong person, in spite of sounding like a whiny little complainer. I have a very high tolerance for pain and discomfort. I am, by nature, a positive person, even though that has been mightily tested in the last few years. I can make it. But please God, can I keep my eyes? I know that isn't too much to ask.

Next gripe: When did people become so self-absorbed that they can't even maintain the simplest measures of infection control? We are officially in a flu pandemic. I swear, the next time I hear that walking pneumonia, death rattle cough in a public place, and then see that the person coughing isn't even covering their face, I'm going to go off.
It's bad enough to know you're sick yet still go out in public, almost willfully spreading infection by your reckless behavior, but come on, if you're not going to wear a mask, can you carry tissues and cover your face? And if you have sick children, do you really have to bring them with you if you know they're ill? If the answer to that last question is yes, then you, the parent, bear 100% of the responsibility for keeping your children from being vectors of disease, spreading infection like a sprinkler spreads water on a lawn. The infectious airborne droplets ejected by a sneeze travel in excess of 100 mph and can reach across a ballroom. Remember this please, and be considerate of your fellow human beings, aas well as setting a good example for your children to follow.

True story: I was in the grocery store about a week ago, maybe less, maybe more. I'm in the checkout line, and in front of me is someone holding a young toddler, probably around 18 months, talking on the cellphone, rifling through her purse and acting like she is using her very first ATM swiper ever. Meanwhile the little kid all of a sudden stirs, and I hear a rattling cough starting out in his chest. It's one of those that is so loud that I don't need a stethoscope to hear it. Now I'm pinned in line, between her and the customer behind me. It was a space not unlike the chute after the paddock in a slaughterhouse, the one that leads to a guy with an air gun to point at your head. There is forward momentum, and you can only go forward or backward. This distracted Mom, still trying and failing to do about four things simultaneously and yet completely oblivious to all humans around her, is completely ignoring the kid (he is in one of those front of the body papoose-like carriers), and this kid proceeds to start coughing and sneezing, directly in my face. I was so dumbstruck that I didn't know what to do, so I ended up standing there frozen, with what I'm sure was an expression of aghast disbelief. The Mom looks directly at me (actually directly through me), and walks off with her little virus sponge attached to her torso.

This is 2009, we know what causes infectious disease, and that many can be passed by casual social contact. Even though there are many simple ways to mitigate the damage that you can inflict, people continue to walk around in their little clouds, completely oblivious to their surroundings, and spreading viruses like they're going out of style. I thought this was supposed to be an age of enlightenment, one where we as a people are supposed to have a heightened awareness and understanding of the implications of one's behaviors on the community at large, and because of this, behaving in a more socially responsible manner. I guess not.

I will not be the responsible behavior police. If people don't get these incredibly basic concepts and principles, and understand the importance of being responsible for yourself and your children and reflecting it in your behaviors, then it's a lost cause. I just end up looking like a rude bitch, so I give up. If, however, I walk into a building or a room and hear a single person coughing or sneezing, I'm history. I don't have the luxury of taking risks this flu season. I can't get vaccinated while I'm on Interferon, and with all the insults I'm presently meting out onto my immune system, it's a policy of protection first, questions later. I'm not hugging people, shaking hands, kissing or eating out if at all possible. In the situations that require me to be around groups of people, I'm on red alert. I carry around a small bottle of hand sanitizer now, and act like an obsessive-compulsive germophobe. There is, however one very important difference between me and a germophobe: my fear is not irrational. At least I don't think so. I can get on my soap box in the town square and bloviate until I'm blue in the face, but where will it get me? Being right is cold comfort when I'm in an ICU on a ventilator and getting my veins pumped full of antibiotics for a pneumonia I got from "a little case of the flu"

I like my home. I have plenty here to keep me occupied, and enough food to make it through an apocalypse of biblical magnitude. I can keep my mind busy and my mood upbeat. I'm actually pretty self-sustaining, at least emotionally.

I love my friends, don't get me wrong, but consider yourself duly warned as of now: I would love to have any you visit, human contact rocks. But if you show up my door with so much as a scratch in your throat and I find out, I will kill you. Don't test me, I mean it. I will kick your ass.


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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