One more reason to move west

The Red Sox are going to Anaheim to play the Angels weekend after this.

My daughter, who still never misses a chance to mock the old man, told me last night that she has seats for all three games: "only" bleacher seats, she says. They cost $18.50 a game.

Recently, she bought the parental units a pair of bleacher seats for one game at Fenway. She spent a good deal more for one of those seats than she did for the entire Angels series. I'm not sure I can buy a hot dog at Fenway for $18.50.

So I'm living here why, again? Oh right, Kelly's fried clams.

Never short of topics

Getting old sucks because you're falling apart. On the other hand, you're never short of topics.

Sometime between now and the first snowflake, I'll be having shoulder surgery to "clean up" (an exact medical quote) the ruins left by my long-ago bike accident.

Oddly enough, my rotator cuff is more or less intact. Everything around it turns out to be a disaster. There's the famous golf-ball size wad of something. Whatever it first was, it's now a calcified arthritic mass, perched amid the pointy fragments of some badly battered cartilage, with little pointy bits digging into muscle tissue. The joint has more fluid leaks than the 1969 Fury I once owned, and lots of little opportunistic arthritis colonies scattered here and there.

What got me to "yes" very fast on surgery was hearing that the upper biceps attachment is in rags.

I saw someone blow out their biceps once, doing weight training. When it detached, the muscle rolled up under the skin exactly like a windowshade. Clinicians like to ask patients in these situations if they are "experiencing any discomfort." You betcha dupa this guy had discomfort. I remember it was sort of a struggle to get him to lie still until the EMTs got there. Yes indeed, people do writhe in pain.

The discussion of the week, then, is whether to wait until we have some summer activity under our belts, or to get the thing hosed out soonest even if it blows the rest of the summer. The jury is still out, but the memory of that blown bicep sort of biases the decision. It's judgment vs. stupidity.

When I get back to work, I think I can finally code the Dx for "what a mess."

Invisiblity cloaks

It's sardonically amusing to see society lurching and staggering toward the realisation that they don't have to swoon exclusively over today's wounded and veterans. Why, my goodness! There are other veterans still alive in the tens of thousands!

One can have a self-righteous swoon over some poor bastard with various visible body parts missing. I have long wondered whether anyone would swoon over those whose wounds were invisible in street clothes.

Like the Corpsman a bed or two away from me in ICU, who spent most of the first night I was there bleeding out faster than they could pump blood into him. Bleeding out because he'd had most of his intestines removed along with the claymore mine bits. Toward dawn the input got ahead of the output and stayed there, and he lived. You wouldn't know about his wound today if you met him on the street.

Mine's a little one by comparison but you won't see it, either. It was merely a mistake by a hurried (charitable) or incompetent (more likely) Navy surgeon. I got opened oblique to a feature of muscle tissue known as lines of cleavage. If I spent eight hours a day in the gym for the rest of my life, I would never have six-pack abs. The surgeon ruined that side of my abdominal muscles, and myofascial tissue, beyond repair.

Not a very grand and glorious war souvenir, is it? Yet there are more of that sort of wound around than most people suspect. There is this idiotic obsession in some quarters with lionising only combat veterans, and beyond that the ones with visible wounds.

OK, fools: if you mean to treat veterans decently, treat all of them decently. Don't parse and qualify and this and that. I can only fall back on a cliche that is probably as old as war itself:

How do you know? You weren't there. How can I make you understand?

Lyrics in real life

Well it's a strange old game you learn it slow
One step forward and it's back you go
You're standing on the throttle
You're standing on the brake
In the groove 'til you make a mistake

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you're just a fool in love
Sometimes you're the Louisville Slugger
Sometimes you're the ball
Sometimes it all comes together
Sometimes you're gonna lose it all

You gotta know happy - you gotta know glad
Because you're gonna know lonely
And you're gonna know sad
When you're rippin' and you're ridin'
And you're coming on strong
You start slippin' and slidin'
And it all goes wrong because

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you're just a fool in love
Sometimes you're the Louisville Slugger
Sometimes you're the ball
Sometimes it all comes together
Sometimes you're gonna lose it all

One day you got the glory and then you got none
One day you're a diamond and then you're a stone
Everything can change in the blink of an eye
So let the good times roll before we say goodbye because

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you're just a fool in love
Sometimes you're the Louisville Slugger
Sometimes you're the ball
Sometimes it all comes together
Sometimes you're gonna lose it all

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you're just a fool in love

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you're just a fool in love

--Mary Chapin Carpenter*

Sometimes, you're both. In days of yore, when I was a bicycle commuter, I had changing facilities at work and the ability to stretch a three-mile trip one way into six. Now it's a trip under two miles, I usually go straight there, and since I don't have a place to change, I go in work clothes.

Let us all be grateful for casual dress.

However, cyclists in the early morning can be both bug and windshield, and arrive decorated with mud (if lucky) or insect remains (if not). Thus a quick rinse-off in the tightly-designed john has become part of my morning ritual. (Maybe I should take up Hawaiian shirts.)

* Some readers of this blog may be deeply concerned by the thought that I might be a Mary Chapin Carpenter fan. Relax: it's only a situational interest.

Long weekend

Along with several thousand other people in or close to my line of work, my three days off were clouded by the decision of our favourite Federal agency to release an important document the afternoon of July 3. I managed to keep my mind mostly off it, so spent my kind of Monday (busy as hell) doing what I had to do with the information.

What I did *not* do over the weekend was go to Beverly Fahms for their horribles parade. Ours is a kid's event. The Fahms' is typically PG as I understand it. (Beverly Farms is a very rich enclave of a more diverse city, and is practically a town in its own right.) The float mocking pregnant Gloucester girls and its accessories reached an R rating very easily, and has now reached a national audience, thanks to the blunted judgment of pack journalism.

Listen: spoiled rich kids have been ridiculing poor kids with crude, tasteless humour since the beginning of time. and that's all this was. It merits no further attention and I won't supply any links for those who don't know what I'm talking about.

What I *did* do was go kayaking on fresh water for a change. Motivated in part by a body of water filled with loud (absolutely), drunken (possibly) people in rented canoes, we took an actual, liquid, road not taken.

Marvelous. At our starting point, the boors were making so much noise that they failed to notice how they frightened all the local wildlife into silent invisibility. Within a few minutes, we had red-wing blackbirds for company, then a pair of cormorants and a great blue heron. The latter is always a treat, but that day was outshone.

We saw great white egrets: they're a rare site most places, but especially in New England, at the extreme northern end of their range. They are large birds, nearly as large as the blue herons, which stand four feet high. While discretion moved them away from people--even kayakers carefully shifting to the other side of the waterway--they were quite calm around quiet people in quiet boats. They were content to fly briefly away, then circle back to water they rightly called their own.

The canoe clowns don't come this way, perhaps because it's a dead end that leads away from the place they rent the canoes. The wildlife does, perhaps on account of the clowns. It was a pleasure to share the water with them for a couple of hours.

From what I saw of the other animals, I hope the canoe rental shop has good liability insurance.

Another trip through the warp

Just back from my third MRI, this time for the decrepit shoulder. Meditations are:

• You get the sound effects whether they're zapping your head or not. They are just not as loud when it's some other body part.
  
• Why is it that no two machines have the same sound track? This one sounded like callouts from the original Star Trek during a rippin' good space battle with the Klingons.
• Either the operator's choice of music was guided by serendipity, or he had a sense of the appropriate as twisted as mine. First choice was Les Patineurs, which absolutely could not complete with the Klingons. But then, we moved on to selections from Act One of Die Gotterdammerung. Now there is a bit of music that can hold its own with an interstellar conflict. Next time, I'll compile my own Wagner selection. Maybe I should also audition the machine.
  
• Sidebar for the curious. Tonight's tech was an ex submariner, who mentioned in passing that the inside of an MRI machine is just slightly wider than a torpedo tube. He could attest to this by having been inside both. I find the environs soothing, but it's not for the claustrophobic.

I decided the experienced justified a visit to Chandler's Redux: about time.

Culture Clash

Interesting, isn't it? Everybody going nuts over the alleged Gloucester High School pregnancy pact is from over the bridge*. I imagine the locals are pissing themselves laughing.

Wakeup call. Although Gloucester is another unique community that is being poisoned by gentrification, it hasn't quite succumbed yet. For two years that I'll just call "interesting," I worked as a contract data centre manager there. The critical mass of the people who worked for me were Gloucester women: natives, not gentry. Yuppies, these are not your kind of people, but in a lot of ways they were mine: earthy, flawed, very hard-working. They came out of a society in which being pregnant at 16, certainly by 18, was still common, though not as universal as it had once been. I have no problem at all believing the "pact" idea began as someone having the principal on. When the supremely gullible media, and especially Time, got on to the story the locals must have thought they had died and gone to Heaven.

I don't have quite enough time in the evenings to run down to Pratty's** for a look around, but if I feel the earth moving down here in the next day or two, I'll figure it's the collective laughter of about 10,000 Gloucester natives, having put one over on the entire country, and that dive will be the epicentre.

* If you don't know what that means, you haven't been inside the mind of Gloucester.

** At this link, you have to scroll down a little to get an honest take on Pratty's. Let me put it this way. In Gloucester, if you want a quiet drink, you go to a bar with windows (or the Crow's Nest, now that fame has gone to their heads). Avoid 1) bars that have glass block windows and 2) bars that have filled in the windows with concrete block. Both are signs that one drunk too many has been thrown through the windows. Pratty's is a squat concrete block bunker. You figure it out.

How terribly apropos!

Just walked out on some wingnut on the News Hour, fearful of the legal consequences of people from the 26 Red bastions getting married in California, coming home and filing suit.

Somehow I thought those states were like Iran: they don't have homosexuals (chortle).

But all this recalled to mind a bit of verse I hadn't heard in 40 years, so I surfed around and found it. It is the work of a sardonic mind too often forgotten these days, Richard Armour:

So leap with joy, be blithe and gay
Or weep, my friends, with sorrow.
What California is today,
The rest will be tomorrow.

(I made a particular point of getting an exact quote.)

A different spin on sobriety patrols

I'm the first to admit that it's been many, many years since I lived in Portsmouth, NH. However, I worked there much more recently, and from that I can attest that Portsmouth's drinking habits remain, shall we say, robust.

That's why you can't convince me that only 1.25 percent of Port folk on the roads between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. of a weekend night were so drunk that they should be arrested. And just one stoner? Come on now!

I would have expected the reverse. I suspect a news leak. I imagine this news was posted on every john wall of every drinking establishment in the seacoast area. The ten arrested were probably too shit-faced to read the warning graffiti. That in itself is a sobering thought.

Now of course, the results are published for all the (sober) world to see, so that earnest hope expressed in the story is likely to come true. Some day very soon, the seacoast NH gendarmes and MADD madames will indeed have zero drunk driving arrests in their 10-2 sweep.

All the drunks will smarten up and drink until 2:30 a.m., because nobody in authority can resist having their 15 minutes of fame.

Meat's back on the menu!

It was a sad day during the winter when the new chef at my favourite waterfront bistro decided that the steak bomb pasta was too declasse and took it off the menu.

Voices of protest were raised. Repeatedly. Especially from the bar end of the establishment, where I usually hang out. Even the addition of three more taps failed to mollify the irate mobs of hungry Headers.

I don't know if it was the voices of protest, or the imminent reopening of Maddie's, that prompted the recantation, but I was down today for a business lunch and steak bomb pasta is BACK! In all it's tri-colour pasta, grilled tips, don't ask for the calorie count of the sauce glory!

Happy day!

(PS: my fasting cholesterol was last Friday. Pfft!!!!)