Move Along

“Hey Mark, how’s it going?” “Hola Marcos, ¿cómo estás?”

It seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? It’s a greeting that we utilize so many times during each day that it’s almost automatic with everyone we meet, even people we don’t know. We say it without even thinking, and that’s usually how we respond.

“I’m okay. How are you?”

For about a month after Francisco took his life, I had no idea how to respond to that question. I wasn’t okay, and I didn’t have the energy to even try to fake it. But no one really wants to hear your problems if you’re not okay, so I responded thusly, “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know how I’m doing right now.” And I left it at that. So did most of the people I talked to because they had no idea what to say in response.

I’ve gotten to the point where I can fake being okay again, though it very much depends on the day. As an example: I’ll be fine on Monday, but on Tuesday I’m a basketcase. I honestly don’t know how my wife has been able to deal with my volatile moods of late, and when I say volatile, that is an understatement.

I gave up driving for a couple of weeks because I found myself screaming at everyone whenever I got behind the wheel of our SUV.

* * * *

“What the fuck are you doing, you goddamn morons!“

“Honey, you need to settle down. Those people were sitting at the bus stop.”

* * * *

I’ve expounded on my General Theory of Guys in previous posts. Guys are simple creatures. Amoebas are more complex than most guys. Guys essentially have two emotions: they are either okay, or they aren’t. And that’s about it. Guys are not built to process complex emotions.

For me, it’s as if everything inside my heart and head were pureed in a blender then poured back inside me, creating a mélange of melancholia suffused with sorrow and regret, with hints of pain and loss. And yet, somehow, there seems to be some vital ingredient missing…

I would like to take a moment to thank the Cooking Channel for making that complex emotional description even remotely possible for me.

* * * *

Perhaps Little Known Facts About the Grieving Process: There are five stages in the Grief and Loss Process — Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. In situations like Francisco’s suicide, I think there’s a sixth step that precedes all of the others: Shock. And you have to recover from the initial shock before you can start fumbling your way through the other stages.

Progression through the five stages of grief isn’t linear — you bounce around in and out of all of them like unto a superball thrown in a hallway. It’s probably even possible that you can be in all five stages at once. More than once…

In addition, progression through the stages isn’t like playing a video game where you complete one level and move on neatly to the next. You can revisit each stage of grief as many times as you like — even if it’s a stage you’d rather not visit anymore. There’s no timeline on grief and loss. You can complete all five stages in five minutes and be done with them. Forever. Conversely, fifty years may not be enough time for you to get through one stage.

There are no rules. There’s no right way. There’s no wrong way. Every person goes through this process, and every person does it differently. When you look at it in that light, it’s amazing that any of us finds our way through the maze and comes out safely on the other side.

* * * *

Move Along is a song by the American rock band the All-American Rejects, released in early 2006. It was the band’s biggest hit, and it got a whole lots of radio air time. I bought the CD and have the songs on probably more than one of my playlists. The song, somewhat ironically, is more or less an anthem for suicide prevention. The lyrics encourage believing in oneself and persevering in the face of problems.

* * * *

It’s times like unto this that I wish life would take a time-out and give you the opportunity to get back on your feet before it kicks you in the balls again, but life doesn’t work like that. Life simply goes on whether you’re ready or not.

So I found myself in an incredibly vulnerable position when I lost another friend just a couple of weeks after Francisco’s death.

Her name was Hope. We were friends on Facebook. Hope was also a writer. In current lingo, I think Hope was what you would call an Influencer to most of her followers. She read at least one of my blogs, and had messaged me a couple of times about my blog. She thought I was a very good writer, so I thought she was a very cool person.

Hope was battling cancer, and I fell in love with her attitude. She was going to fight this disease, and she was going to kick its ass. In that regard, Hope was my polar opposite. I expect that I’ll be diagnosed with cancer sometime in the next twenty years or so. Unlike Hope, I have no intention of going into battle against that dragon. I don’t want surgery. Or radiation and chemotherapy. I plan on going on the M&M diet, and that is all.

M&M stands for Motrin and Morphine. Lea and I want to be as free of pain as possible. Beyond that, we don’t want any extraordinary measures taken to prolong our lives. We just had our Living Wills filled out this week and notarized here in Mexico because you never know when you’re going to need those kinds of things, and it’s better to be prepared than it is to wish you hadn’t procrastinated on getting that paperwork completed.

I followed Hope’s Facebook page daily. She had had at least one tumor removed before we became FB friends, and was undergoing radiation and chemotherapy when our virtual relationship began. No matter how lousy she may have felt physically, mentally and emotionally she remained positive and upbeat.

I enjoyed her numerous posts and her sense of humor — she swore a lot — and cheered on her progress against her disease, despite my opposing view on the level of treatment I was willing to endure. She was young and vibrant, and she felt she had a lot to live for. I am about twenty years older than Hope was, and I simply hope I have another ten to fifteen years left on this planet before God enrolls me in His energy recycling program.

Hope felt her treatments were going very well. Her scans were promising. All signs of her cancer had disappeared, and she believed she had won. Her jubilation was palpable, even on social media. All of her friends rejoiced with her. Including me.

Then her cancer returned in three places. Her liver, kidneys, and I cannot remember the third site no matter how hard I try. And within a matter of weeks, she was gone. I think she fought for as long and as hard as she could, and when her cancer returned, she had nothing left to fight with.

* * * *

In retrospect, I doubt Hope’s death would have hit me as hard as it did if it hadn’t come so closely after Francisco’s. Lately, I’ve had TV commercials reduce me to tears. Except the Charmin® commercials. They make want to kill those fuckin’ toilet paper hoarding ursine assholes.

Thankfully, Japan decided go ahead with the Summer Olympics despite the pandemic, despite the reservations of their people and some of the athletes, and despite the restrictions they imposed on anyone who wanted to attend the games.

The Olympic games — with all of their pageantry, ceremony, and competition — were just the distraction I needed. The backstories of the athletes were inspiring. Some of the competitions were riveting. Lea and I were on the edge of our seats more than once. And my lovely supermodel wife doesn’t really like the Olympics all that much.

She thinks the games last too long, and some of the events are, well, boring.

Because we’re US citizens living in Mexico who watch Canadian satellite TV, we found ourselves rooting for athletes from the three countries that comprise North America. And I always root for the athletes of the host nation. I think it’s the least I can do for all of the expense and effort that goes into producing and orchestrating these events.

The most significant moment of the Olympics didn’t have anything to do with performance or competition. It happened when Simone Biles dropped out of the women’s gymnastic events. It was the most courageous performance of any Olympics, ever. It highlighted the enormous stressors and pressures elite athletes are under, not just to perform, but to win at any cost. And when she said, No. My mental health is more important. It made a whole lots of people sit up and pay attention to an aspect of life that has been mostly swept under the rug.

* * * *

In a completely different but parallel universe, 25% of the front line nurses in America’s hospitals are seriously considering leaving their chosen profession because they just can’t take the workloads, the lack of support from their administrations, and the profound trauma that the COVID-19 pandemic has subjected them to.

I was a nurse for 30 years, and I can attest to the fact that nursing is a job you have to love in order to perform it — simply because it sucks far more often than it doesn’t. The worst part about nursing is it has a ton of responsibilities, but virtually no power. It is an incredibly toxic combination, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

If you think being a patient in a hospital is bad, it’s nothing compared to working in one every day, year in, year out. Hospital administrators are about as empathetic as Genghis Khan, and studies have shown that T-Rex was capable of more compassion than most hospital administrators are today.

Nursing burnout has been discussed quietly, mostly in whispers in the dark, for a very long time. But now it is being shouted in the streets in the light of day. It is the singular most important issue the healthcare industry is going to have to address, and quickly, unless they want to deal with the fallout of a crisis of their own creation.

I’ve occasionally wondered how I would’ve responded to the COVID pandemic if I hadn’t retired when I did. One of my work daughters answered that question for me the last time Lea and I travelled to Arizona, which, ironically, happened to be one year ago this week. “Oh, you would’ve been the first person they fired.” she said. “Oh, no doubt,” my other work daughter agreed. “There’s no way you would have been able to go along with all the bullshit they put us through. You would’ve demanded better treatment, and they would’ve fired you. Absolutely.”

* * * *

The Olympics enabled me to do one thing I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do again, and that is hope. Yeah, another little bit of irony there. But maybe, just maybe, something good can come out of the deaths that have recently impacted my life. And maybe, just maybe, we will defeat this pandemic and life can assume a semblance of the normalcy we all once knew and took for granted.

That last part is very large maybe, given the resistance some people have about getting vaccinated against a disease that has killed almost 4.5 million people worldwide. And that’s with several lockdowns and quarantines. Face masks and social distancing. And all of the other safeguards that have been put in place. 4.5 million. How many more people have to die before everyone agrees that no one else should be sacrificed to the Coronavirus?

The sheer unmitigated stupidity of these people is just…indescribable. This isn’t an issue of freedom of choice. This is matter of life and death. Period. End of story.

* * * *

There’s nothing I can do to help Francisco, but his death doesn’t negate the promise I made to him. I’ve been working with a friend of mine, Dave Naisby, to put together a group of donors to financially provide for Francisco’s widow, Oyuki, and his three children for the next several years. We call it Francisco’s Angels. Every peso, every penny we collect goes directly to the family.

Oyuki needs roughly $10,000 pesos a month to put food on the table and pay her bills. That’s approximately $500 US dollars a month. I don’t think I’ve ever lived on that amount — even when I wasn’t making $500/month.

Several members of my country club have stepped up to donate on a monthly basis, but not as many people as I thought there would be. These are people who knew Francisco, and claimed to be his friend. That has been very disappointing for me. Several friends of mine from the States have stepped up and donated to this cause, which absolutely stunned me and left me crying tears of gratitude. These are people that didn’t know Francisco, and never will, and yet they opened their hearts, and wallets, to help provide for a family that is in desperate need of support.

Providing for the financial stability of Francisco’s family has become a huge honker of a deal to me. In psychological terms, I’ve sublimated my grief into this cause.

I never envisioned myself being in this position, probably because I suck at being a prophet, but I have no pride in this matter and will take help from anyone that is willing to assist me. If you would like to donate to this cause, you can contact me by leaving a comment. We’ll talk.

It’ll take about a month for your donation to get to us here. If you write a check, make a notation to Francisco’s Angels in the memo thing in the lower left-hand corner. Lea and I will provide a free one week vacation at the Chula Vista Resort and Spa, including meals, for anyone who contributes to this cause. That is a no-bullshit offer, but you have to provide your own airfare to Guadalajara…

My deepest gratitude and thanks to anyone that decides to donate to Francisco’s Angels.

Future Shock

Hey there little buckaroos. How’s everything going out there? I am admittedly out of touch with most of the things going on in the world right now. My life has become a fairly insulated cocoon of intentional oblivion. I’m not terribly interested in much of anything that happens beyond our gate anymore. Perhaps you can relate to this. I don’t think I’m the only person that feels this way.

No news is good news. Ignorance is bliss.

There might a lots of truth in those statements. There might not be any. They aren’t mottos or credos that I try to uphold in my life. The only reason I mentioned them is they’re the kinds of things I’ve heard other people say when they’re not terribly interested in what’s going on around them either. And it’s not as if I’ve gone completely off the grid of current events. I don’t watch the news very often anymore, but I receive daily updates on what’s going in the world via social media and the Interweb every time I log onto one of my mobile devices.

* * * *

According one recent report I read, the Minnesota Vikings are suddenly considered to be serious Super Bowl contenders by at least one sportswriter. That made me laugh, so that guy might not be a sportswriter anymore. Football season hasn’t even started yet! That’s probably why the Vikings are contenders to be world champions at this precise moment in time.

Every team has the same chances of winning the Super Bowl right now because they’re all undefeated, and no one knows how good or bad they are. There haven’t been devastating injuries to key players, and there’s almost one or two of those that happen to just about every team as the season progresses. Unless the Vikings field a vastly different team than they did last year, that prognostication won’t stand up very long. They did spend a whole lots money this year upgrading their defense, and everyone who follows American football knows that defense wins championships. Right?

That’s a hope I’m trying to keep alive, though it has dropped precipitously on my priority list over the last few years.

Speaking purely for myself, I’ve been disappointed by the Vikings so many times in my life that I don’t care if they ever make it back to the Super Bowl again. If they do, my doctor is going to have to put me on a whole lots of Valium for the two weeks between the NFC Championship game and the Super Bowl. He’ll probably have to admit me into the hospital and have me sedated during the game because I won’t be able to watch it without having a heart attack or a stroke. And if they lose for a fifth time, he might just as well put me down. I’m not sure I could live through one more post-season heartbreak from them.

Maybe that’s a hope I shouldn’t try to keep alive anymore…

* * * *

A couple of weeks ago I read an article that former president Donald Trump shut down his radically new and revolutionary social media platform (From the Desk of Donald J. Trump), after just 29 days. It turns out that his SMP wasn’t much of a platform. Not even for him. It was, wait for it — a blog. That made me laugh, too. I LOLed. And LMFAOed. And I ROTFLed. Then I re-LOLed some more.

There’s a reason for my reactions. Mr. Trump originally said he was going to create a new social media platform that would redefine the genre and make Facebook and Twitter about as meaningful as Myspace. Both of those sites suspended his accounts indefinitely after he incited a riot that resulted in the deaths of five people.

Given the fact that The Donald is a failed influencer that needs to be in the spotlight, he had no choice but to create his own social media platform, just so he could put himself back into the spotlight, especially after those fascist assholes at Facebook and Twitter wouldn’t even let him appear on their stages anymore.

* * * *

I will never stop hoping that Trump will someday be indicted for a lengthy list of crimes, and imprisoned for a very lengthy period of time — and five counts of murder/manslaughter/homicide need to be on that list. I know this will never happen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to hope that it will. And it doesn’t begin to describe how disappointed I am in the American justice system for letting him get away with… everything… so far.

There. Are. No. Words.

* * * *

You’d think that this self-proclaimed genius would’ve known better, wouldn’t you? A blog? I mean, OMG! WTF?!? That’s a terrible medium for The Donald — for a multitude of reasons. He was at his best — if you can call it that — when he buffooned and clowned his way around the stage for his Trump-pets, speaking off the cuff in front of a microphone with a whole lots of cameras rolling.

It would appear that Donald Trump put as much effort into revamping social media as he did in creating a healthcare system that would improve upon on the Affordable Care Act. Or preventing the pandemic. Or fixing the American budget deficit. Or making America more better greater again… I can do this all day, people. I have a really long list of President Trump’s failures.

A blog, for the most part, is a written venue of communication. There isn’t any means for immediate interaction between the writer and the audience, and there is no opportunity to ad lib anything. Additionally, The Donald cannot spel. Nor can he write a complete, comprehensive sentence. And most of his supporters can’t reed rede read.

_{The Sharpie is mightier than the Quid Pro Quo}

According to the article, that was the reason an infuriated Donald Trump shut down his cutting-edge social media platform. I mean, his blog. No one was reading it. I might have actually had more people reading my mostly meaningless blog than Trump had reading his totally pointless blog. That makes me smile a smile of vast contentment. Unfortunately, The Donald wasn’t infuriated enough to have a heart attack or a stroke.

Oh well, maybe next time… Like, when he finally figures out the election he lost will never, ever, be overturned.

* * * *

I have a lots of hypothetical situations that run through my head, so I’m going to throw this one out there as an example: I doubt that any of the thirteen people who regularly read my blog are Trump supporters, but on the off-hand chance that you are, and you’re female, and you’ve been wondering if you could be in a relationship with me because I seem like an urbane, erudite, cool guy — um, no. We couldn’t.

For one thing, I’m already in a relationship. I’m very happily married to my lovely supermodel wife. But even if that wasn’t the case, no, we still couldn’t be in a relationship. To sort of paraphrase Meatloaf, I can overlook a lots of things. But I can’t/won’t do that.

* * * *

Maybe it’s because I’m no longer as young as I used to be, but keeping up with the pace of life has become exhausting. I didn’t have insomnia prior to the first Coronavirus lockdown. Oddly, I do now. I’ve had it for about the last year. And I consider my life to be more free from stress than it has ever been.

At some point in time in this post I plan on exploring that issue. We’ll see how long it takes me to get there.

The fact that I often have trouble sleeping now — like tonight — doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers my doctor. He seems to view my insomnia as a personal affront to him. I’ve been taking Melatonin regularly at night for the last couple of weeks to make him happy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I’m retired. If I don’t sleep, it’s not like it’s going effect my performance at work the next day. And if I decide to take a nap in the afternoon it’s not going to get me fired. I don’t see this as a big problem.

There’s at least one more thing I should take into consideration about my current level of physical/emotional enervation and semi-frequent episodes of insomnia: As my wife has pointed out to me several times, I’m not 64 anymore. It’s pretty much all downhill for me from here on out…

To quote my brother-in-law, N. William Pfaff, “They can only kill you once. Everything else is just foreplay.”

Like unto many things in my life, I’m going to stand pat with the Wait and See approach; continue to monitor and assess myself from a distance because I don’t want me to know that I’m under surveillance.

* * * *

Don’t you worry. When things get back to normal again, your life will get back to normal again, too.

Perhaps. But there’s this: The world has changed, and whatever it returns to will not be the same world that existed prior to COVID-19. And there’s also this: No one I know has ever used the word normal to describe me. You probably don’t want to be the first person to go there.

* * * *

¡Feliz Día del Padre! And it’s the first day of summer too. The sun is shining. The US Open Golf Championship is playing on the TV. I usually golf on Sunday, but I took today off for a few reasons:

I haven’t been playing much golf since Todd decided he needed a vacation from us and drove up to Minnesota in early April to see his son, his daughter, and his grandson. We’re assuming that he’ll return in about a month or so. But there was never a strict timeline on his plans, so everything is subject to change. It’s one of the perks of being retired. You get to play a whole lots of things by ear.

I was under the illusion that I’ve been in a bit of slump for the last year or so. I wasn’t pleased with my scores because they, you know, sucked. But the word slump implies that at one time I wasn’t playing poorly, and I’m not sure I can state that with a clear conscience anymore — if I ever could.

I seem to remember that just before the first quarantine I was consistently scoring in the low 80’s, and I was convinced that I was going break 80 in the very near future. But I’m also the guy that forgets why he went into the kitchen in 20 steps or less, so I’m not sure my memory of being an almost not-so-terrible golfer is accurate.

Theoretically, a slump should be time-limited. Shouldn’t it?? After a year of slumping through the fairways, the roughs and the trees, the sand traps, and the greens — I’m starting to think this isn’t so much of a slump as it is a strong indicator that I’m simply not all that good at golf.

* * * *

While we’re on the subject of golf theories, I’m going to present Naisby’s Postulate of Bad Shots. And Stuff. Dave Naisby is one of the members of my country club, and he explained his theory to me the last time we played together. He’s Scottish, so you have read the next sentence with that wicked cool Scottish accent.

“Bad shots are neither created nor destroyed. They merely rotate in a random manner from one hole to the next.”

It’s the most succinct explanation of the vicissitudes of golf that I have ever heard in my life. Based on the way I’ve been playing, I’m pretty sure I’ve proven Dave’s theory multiple times, and it can now be classified as a Law.

* * * *

Another reason for decreasing my time spent on the golf course is pure psychology. I have previously described golf as a fickle mistress. One day she’s all happy to see you and treats you really nice. The next time she doesn’t have time for you and slams the door in your face. I figure if I start treating Miss Golf like I’m not interested in her anymore, she might start being nicer to me when we get together.

That ought to to do the trick, eh.

* * * *

The final reason I didn’t golf today was the weather. I know I said it was a beautiful day here, but yesterday Tropical Storm Dolores hit the western coast of Mexico, and we’ve gotten about four inches of rain in the last twenty-four hours. It was extremely soggy here this morning, and I thought it would get even soggier. But the prevailing winds must have blown the remnants of Dolores off to the north of the Lakeside Area, and it turned out to be a really gorgeous day.

The Chinese Mountains to the west of the resort will green up and look like heads of broccoli in a few days. The temperatures will moderate and cool off a bit. The dust and pollen have been erased from the sky and you can actually see the other side of Lake Chapala clearly for the first time in months.

_{See? I told you it was beautiful here}

I love the beginning of the Rainy Season. Everything feels fresh and clean. It’s like unto a second Spring. And I won’t have to spend several hours a day watering the dozen or so gardens we’ve resurrected after subduing the Royal and Ancient Hedgerow from Hell. With all of my free time I’ll be able to keep the lawn mowed and trimmed, and make sure that the current hedgerow remembers the limitations its boundaries.

And I might feel like writing more often. We’ll have to see how that goes, too.

The only negative thing about the beginning of the Rainy Season is the bugs. June bugs. Flying Buffalo Ants. The Other Flying Ants. Mosquitoes. Giant motheses. They all appear at this time of year. In hordes. Lea absolutely hates the bug invasion. I have to admit it is kind of creepy.

The only good thing about it is it’s brief. And it does provide a veritable smorgasbord for all of the birds that live around here.

* * * *

It’s been awhile since I wrote anything in my blog about my mostly boring life. I’ve actually been too busy to write. And I’m not making that up. We had a few visitors here at the resort in May. Lea’s sister, Leslie, and her husband, Bill, flew down from southern Minnesota, and spent a week with us taking in the sights and the some of the food here in the scenic Lakeside Area.

I was mildly surprised that Les and Bill made the trek down here. Neither of them is in great health, and they both have varying degrees of mobility issues. I hope they come back soon, and often. They said they would. They’re both sweet people and you’ve already had a sample of Bill’s sense of humor. He makes me laugh.

* * * *

Here’s another hypothetical situation for your consideration: Leslie is eight years older than Lea, and Bill is two years older than Leslie. That part isn’t hypothetical. That’s actually true. Bill leaves Philadelphia in a train traveling west at 65 miles an hour. Leslie leaves Chicago in her smart car traveling east at 45 miles an hour. How many tropical fruits can a Bananasarus Rex eat before Leslie will have to stop to the use the restroom for the first time?

* * * *

Lea and I both took short trips back up to the States in May. Lea said she needed to do some shopping, so she flew to Austin, TX and spent a week with her daughter, Gwen. I suggested that she get the J&J COVID vaccine while she was there because I didn’t have any faith in the Chinese vaccine we had received here. No one — not even the Mexican government — knew when the second injection would be available. And neither of us wanted to spend another ten and a half hours waiting to get it.

* * * *

I thought that little piece of paper stating you had been vaccinated would end up being far more important than it has turned out to be, didn’t you? I’m disappointed that no one has asked to see it. If I wanted to return to the States, that piece of paper is worthless. I’d have to go get another swab shoved up my sinuses to get another piece of paper that says I tested negative for COVID.

That doesn’t make any sense to me.

* * * *

When Lea returned to Mexico, I flew up to Austin to get vaccinated. And that’s the only thing I did while I was there. I flew up on a Sunday. Got the J&J vaccine on Monday. And flew back to Mexico on Tuesday. When I returned, Gwen flew down with me. She spent a couple of weeks hanging out at the resort, and we played several rounds of golf before she flew home.

Gwen is not a good golfer either, but she has demonstrated moments of being just about the luckiest golfer I’ve ever played with. Sooner or later the golf gods are going to notice that. They always do.

* * * *

Future Shock is a book by the American author, Alvin Toffler. It was published in 1970, and I remember reading it in high school. I can’t remember if it was a reading assignment for one of my classes, or if I read it because I liked to read back then. One thing I do remember is it was one of least enjoyable books I ever read. It didn’t have a happy ending.

In the dictionary, shock is defined as a sudden upsetting or surprising event or experience.

In the medical field, shock is an acute medical condition associated with a fall in blood pressure caused by blood loss, severe burns, bacterial infection, allergic reaction, or sudden emotional stress marked by cold, pallid skin, irregular breathing, rapid pulse, and dilated pupils.

In the book, future shock is a psychological state created by “…too much change in too short a period of time”.

In that regard, all of the events of the last year have unquestionably met that criterion. This profound physiological state — that’s how I’m going to describe this flashflood of multiple noxious stressors — can be experienced by individuals, a group of individuals, and even entire societies.

* * * *

In the dictionary, stress is defined as a feeling of emotional or physical tension. It can be caused by almost anything, depending on the person and their perceptions. Something that one person experiences without stress can produce a goddamn pants-wetting panic attack in someone else.

A Perhaps Little Known Fact About Stress: Stress is not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, stress can help you face difficult challenges and achieve your goals. The right amount of stress can help you accomplish daily tasks more efficiently. That’s right. Stress can actually make you elevate your game.

Stress can also serve as a sort of early warning system, producing the fight-or-flight response. When the brain perceives a possible crisis situation, it starts flooding the body with epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. These hormones focus your senses, enabling you to quickly react and avoid potentially dangerous situations. Stress can actually save your life.

It’s only when you’re overwhelmed with stress that it becomes detrimental.

* * * *

The term future shock seems to be incongruous to me. It’s not the future that shocks us. It’s the present set of particularly nasty circumstances that make us wonder whether or not we will even have a future. And that’s where the shocking part comes into play as far as I’m concerned.

According to Toffler, all of this shock and awe about the present/future has been caused by industrialization. Just in cases you were wondering, the first Industrial Revolution started roughly in the mid-1700’s. All we have done since then is streamline the process to the point that it now has a super-charged Hemi engine complete with a couple of twin turbos.

In Toffler’s opinion, we created a monster that has become an out-of-control juggernaut. The genie has been let out of the bottle and there’s no way to get it back in there again. All we can do now is hope we can keep pace with it or we will surely be crushed to death if we don’t.

When I look at the situation in this way, the pandemic appears to be more of a blessing than a curse. It forced us to slow the fuck down, son. It gave us the opportunity to catch our collective breath and reassess almost everything we had been doing.

We have been an industrialized society for almost three hundred years. There’s no way we are going undo that process. Even if we all wanted to do that, I’m not sure it would be the smartest thing we could do. I absolutely love the fact that I have access to an ocean of information at my fingertips, even if I’m not interested in 97% of it.

It took a little over two hundred years before Toffler came up with a name for the menace we had created, even if it’s a stupid name. And we’ve spent some of the last one hundred years trying to figure what we could do about it.

In recent years, a paradigm shift has occurred. The dark future that Toffler was convinced would occur is by no means etched in stone. He may not have been able to see a path that would change his outcome, but that doesn’t mean other people couldn’t. Individuals, groups of individuals, entire societies, and most importantly, corporations have started making a conscious effort to to raise the bar of ethical standards in everything from agriculture to zoology. And that includes pretty much everything in-between.

These are very good things. These are the things that enable me to keep hoping for a better tomorrow. And if enough of us can keep this up, we might not end up destroying ourselves in the process of improving our lives.

To be sure, we still have a lots of work to do. And we have long way to go before we sit back and try to believe that we’ve done enough to correct the error of our ways. But we are doing something. And that’s the most important thing.

It’s All in the Wrist

I’ve heard it said that growing old is a privilege because it’s something that is denied to many. Yeah, that’s probably true, so I don’t have an issue with that.

But it probably isn’t true about being old. Being old appears to be more of a pain than it is a privilege. And I mean that in the most literal sense that I can.

* * * *

I think it was last week that I finally realized that my blog has become an on-line diary of my incredibly bucolic and mostly boring life. I’m not a smart man, but even I know that. It mostly surprises me that it took me so long to figure it out.

I’m starting to remind myself of our 1997 Chevy S-10 Blazer. We had it for 11 years, and it’s my favorite vehicle of all time. It was a deep metallic maroon color. It had running boards and heated seats. And it had four-wheel drive. Because of the length of time we had it, and possibly because of the way we utilized it — we took it down the most spurious roads we could find on the North Shore of Lake Superior– the Blazer required far more serious maintenance than all of the other cars we’ve had in the last 33 years combined.

I’m pretty sure I ended up replacing every mechanical apparatus on it except the engine and the transmission. And I upgraded the sound system at least once. Lea eventually got tired of all the upkeep on it and more or less demanded that I get rid of it.

* * * *

It’s all in the wrist is a phrase typically used to indicate a certain level of skill or mastery at something where the hands are involved somehow. It’s a reference to the deft skill required to successfully perform certain activities. It’s mostly a sports reference.

Toss a ball in the hoop with nothing but net. Sink a long putt in golf. Throw a Frisbee. Throwing a perfect spiral with a football. Casting a line or better yet — fly fishing — you got it. It is all in the wrist. That’s the latest part of my body that has been malfunctioning for the last month. And I’ll apologize in advance for putting you through this yet again

* * * *

The weird part is I couldn’t think of anything I had done to injure my wrist. The only thing I did on the day it started hurting was wait in line for my first COVID-19 vaccine injection. It took ten and one-half hours. You wouldn’t think that any mishap could befall you by doing essentially nothing except play on your phone while you wait seemingly forever for the process to run its course, but that’s what I was doing on St. Patrick’s Day this year. And that’s the only reason why I remember that date.

* * * *

Why am I here? That’s a question I have asked myself countless times in my lifetime. Not necessarily in any spiritual or existential sense. It’s more like unto Why did I come into the kitchen? I was in the bedroom, and I know I came in here for a reason… I just can’t remember why anymore…

I can’t even say that this is something new. I did it thirty years ago, too. The only difference is the number of stairs I have to climb before I forget why went up them in the first place. Here, it’s only one. In Minnesota, it was a flight of stairs that led up from the basement. And it usually took three trips up and down the stairs before I could remember what I was trying to accomplish.

_{If anything, you’d think that my ability to concentrate would actually improve…}

* * * *

If you’ve read any of my previous posts about my adventures with the aging process, you know that the first thing I do when something like unto this happens to me is diagnosis my ailment. I have described this as the process of ruling shit out until you can’t rule something out anymore. Because I am both a guy and a nurse, I tend to pick the worst outcome I can think of, then work my way back to sanity from there.

So, yes, we can eliminate getting stabbed by knives and being attacked by wolverines. Some of you might possibly be thinking, You know, a much more common wrist malady is Carpal Tunnel Syndrome… And that’s what I’ve come to believe it is, too.

* * * *

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a condition that causes numbness, tingling, or weakness in your hand, or a combination of any/all of the above. And a ridiculous amount of pain in your wrist. It’s my right wrist, and I am right-handed. It has changed almost everything about my life, so much so that I’ve contemplated coming out as Left-handed and trying out that lifestyle for awhile. I’ve even stopped playing golf because I don’t want to have start wearing Depends®.

CTS is caused by too much pressure on your median nerve. It runs the length of your arm, goes through a passage in your wrist called the carpal tunnel, hence the name, and ends in your hand. The median nerve controls the movement and feeling of your thumb and the movement of all your fingers, except your little pinky.

The main cause of CTS is chronic, repetitive motion — like typing, or any wrist movements that you do over and over when your hands are lower than your wrists, like, playing with your mobile device while you wait in line for ten and a half hours straight without a break.

Studies have shown that the incidence of CTS exploded with the emergence of the Computer Age for one simple reason. Not everyone used a typewriter before the age of computerization. Then, pretty much just like that! Everyone was using a keyboard to conduct business, for personal use, and entertainment. Up to five percent pf the world population is currently effected by CTS with varying levels of severity.

I have broken bones, sprained both of my ankles, pulled muscles, damaged my right knee three times, and partially separated my left shoulder. Those things hurt. But there is nothing that compares to the sheer motherfucking agony of putting too much pressure on one little nerve for an extended period of time.

It takes your breath away. It consumes all of your attention, so don’t get any stupid ideas about going into another room for anything. You could get lost for hours. You might end up as a Silver Alert, and that would just be embarrassing when the search party finds you in the bedroom staring at the ceiling…

* * * *

Being a nurse probably caused my CTS. At the very least, it played a significant part in my developing it. I’ve had CTS symptoms on and off for the last twenty years. My decision to try to become a rich and famous author certainly didn’t help any. And writing my blog is probably the stupidest thing I could do right now.

See? I told you I wasn’t smart.

I have a wrist splint that I have sometimes worn when I go to bed ever since the late 1990’s. I only use them whenever my right wrist greatly pains me. Historically, it has happened in streaks, then has disappeared for sometimes extended periods of time. I wouldn’t have described my symptoms as severe, until this last flareup. At least, that’s how I remember it.

I don’t think my CTS was progressively getting worse. This was more of an unanticipated blitzkrieg of pain. From hell. This was, hands down, the worst recurrence of it ever for me, and I’m hoping that it will go away again and go bother someone else for awhile. That’s probably how that phenomenon works, too.

The treatment of CTS is simple. Rest — stop doing the stuff that caused the flare up, Wrist splinting. A splint that holds your wrist still while you sleep can help relieve nighttime symptoms of tingling and numbness. And NSAIDS, drugs like Motrin® and Aleve®. And if those don’t work, you’ll probably need surgery.

* * * *

I’m not a huge fan of surgical interventions for anything, especially when there are so many non-surgical options available, so I’ve been doing all of the preventative measures mentioned above, plus, stretching exercises to try to pop my wrist into non-pain producing positions My caddy taught me how to do them. And I bought a new splint because I figured splint technology has probably changed a little in the last two decades.

My right wrist is mostly better now. Except for the low-grade ache that never really goes away, and sometimes hurts like unto two hells whenever I try to do something manly, like, open a jar of pickles. And the tingly sensation that sometimes extends from my elbow to my fingertips. And the fact that my fine motor skills are sometimes greatly diminished. My only fear is this flare up has lasted longer than any of the others. I’m not sure it’s going to bounce back all the way this time.

All of these things are more annoying than they are anything else most of the time, and I am more than accustomed to dealing with stuff like unto that on a daily basis. There are several parts of my body that are working at 80% of the capacity they had only ten years ago. As much as it sucks sometimes, getting older still beats the hell out of the alternative. It just seems to be the price most of us have to pay for staying alive.

* * * *

I want to jump back to the ten and a half hour wait that Lea, my lovely supermodel wife, Phyllis, my golf wife, and I had to endure for our first COVID-19 vaccine. It’s probably the most exciting thing I’ve done all year.

Obviously, it wasn’t well-organized. If it was publicly advertised, I didn’t see or hear about it. Almost everyone we talked to while we waited, and waited, and waited some more — had heard about from word of mouth — like us. Or they read about it on Facebook.

It was held in the little village of Ajijic — in the park down by the malecón, and it was a first come-first serve administration of all the vials that happened to make it into town on that particular day. It was sponsored by the Mexican government, and was free of charge to anyone in the country. All you had to do was produce three pieces of mandatory paperwork at the time the vaccine was being dispensed.

One of these pieces of paper was a form you actually had to fill out on-line to register for the program, then print out that form and bring to the administration site. Yes, you’re absolutely correct. You would think that once you registered on-line that would’ve done the trick. It probably would’ve worked in any other country on the planet. The other two pieces of paper contained essentially the same information as the on-line form. Failure to have the three correct pieces of paper meant that you could not receive the shot, no matter how long you had waited.

Lea said she filled out her online in form about ten minutes. It took me more than half an hour to even sign into the goddamn website. Phyllis was easily as challenged as I was by the process, and at the end she couldn’t get the form to print. Phyllis emailed all her information to Lea, and even she couldn’t get it to print. Fortunately, Phyllis had brought along almost every piece of legal paper she has collected in her time here. A government official somewhere in the vicinity of the park okayed a different piece of paper as an acceptable alternative, and she was allowed to receive the vaccine.

I’m going to guess that Phyllis wasn’t the only one who wasn’t able to print the registration form.

* * * *

It is a well-known fact of modern life that all bureaucracies run on paperwork. But the Mexican bureaucracy appears to worship paperwork. Getting a legal document down here can be one of the most frustrating processes you will ever experience. Every document has to drawn up by a notario. They’re like unto attorneys down here, only more important. All legal documents are written in a highly specialized form of Mexican-Spanish that is so stylized it’s almost incomprehensible, and the entire thing must be correct down to the punctuation. If there are any errors, the entire document must be completely re-written and that process can take months. And months…

That’s why notarios are so important. They make sure every i is dotted, every t is crossed, and every comma and period are all in the right places at the right times.

And there isn’t much logic when it comes to what is deemed to be the correct pieces of paper to have in any given situation. There are a few forms you always seem to need, but after that it is anyone’s guess.

You have to fill out reams of paperwork to get a Mexican driver’s license — which has your name, your address, a picture of you — and a shitload of other information that the Mexican government generates — but it cannot be used to prove who you are, where you live, or any of the other numbers and codes that the government provided to you, and only you.

A driver’s license is just that. Something that allows you to get behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle and do pretty much whatever you want when you’re on the roads down here. And that is all.

A rental agreement, something that is written in that very specific Mexican-Spanish jargon of inestimable profundity, cannot be used to provide proof of residency. You need something much more vital. A utility bill for telephone or internet service. Or you need a bank statement.

Evidently, commercial billing is far more of a reliable source of information to the government than anything the government actually produces.

* * * *

At the end of our ten hour wait to get our injection, there was another half-hour process where dozens of high school volunteers filled out one more piece of paper that verified all of the information we had already provided to get the shot, and they also wrote down telephone numbers and email addresses. I asked if anyone was actually going to contact me so I could get my second shot of the vaccine. Everyone that heard my question laughed. Even the people taking down all of our information.

* * * *

Yes. Three weeks later we had to go back down into the little village of Ajijic, in the park by the malecón again and wait in line once more, but this time for only two and a half hours. We had to have the three all-important pieces of paperwork with essentially all the same information again so we could to receive the piece of paper that had been filled out for us, but not given to us, after we received our first shot. You know, the one with all of the same information on it one more time, plus our telephone numbers and email addresses that no one needed because no one contacted us. We heard we had to go get this piece of paper by word of mouth, again.

This is just a guess, but I figure we’re going to need four pieces of paper to qualify to get the second COVID -19 vaccination, whenever that might be. Phyllis will probably hear about first, and then she’ll let us know once more.

* * * *

I have serious doubts about how effective this global vaccination program is going to be in the long run. I’ve read reports about people who have received the vaccine coming down with COVID. I even saw one report about a woman that survived the illness, got the vaccine, then came down with the ‘Rona again. I guess the good news is she’s still alive, but this disease doesn’t seem to play by the rules, and that’s a serious cause for concern.

The Mexican government bought all their vaccines from China. By all accounts I’ve seen, this vaccine is the least effective of all the vaccines that are currently being employed against the pandemic. I may have wasted half a day of my life for a vaccine that might not do anything against the disease it’s supposed to prevent. I had lab work done about two weeks after I received the vaccine. One of tests I had done was a COVID antibody titer test.

It came back negative.

I have no idea if I have any COVID antibodies in my system even though I may have had COVID when we went to Mexico City in December of 2019, and I most definitely received the vaccine in March of this year. The world has changed. There isn’t as much certainty as there was before the pandemic. There aren’t as many answers as there used to be. And many of the answers we have right now are I don’t know. We’ll have to see. Maybe…

* * * *

The world has been in the closest thing to a total shutdown that it could achieve for the last year. People have quarantined, worn PPE, and social distanced during that entire time. Pandemic fatigue started occurring about ten minutes after the lockdowns started, and it has continued to fester away ever since. It has been boiling over for awhile, but now it’s starting to reach a fever pitch almost everywhere on the planet

I watched a news story this morning about revenge travel. It’s a visceral reaction to not being able to travel anywhere. With the gradual relaxation of travel restrictions, people are starting to hit the road and airways to any place they can. They don’t even care where they’re going. It just has to a be a destination that isn’t the fuckin’ couch in the fucking living room.

It’s possible that this is going to be the most dangerous stage of the pandemic. Only time will tell. We’ll know soon whether or not all of the things we have done as a global society will be enough to stop the spread and continuation of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The Big Question is, have we done enough?

* * * *

I remember the first time I had to administer an injection as a nursing student. My patient was an elderly nun. If I screwed this up, I’d probably get kicked out of nursing school, and I would surely go straight to Hell for torturing Mother Teresa. I’m pretty sure my hands were shaking as I drew up the medication. I told my instructor how nervous I was, and she reassured me that I was going to be fine.

“Take a deep breath. Relax. Giving a shot is easy. Pretend you’re throwing a dart. It’s all in the wrist.”

I did all of those things, except the imaginary dart I threw probably would have traveled halfway to the moon. I felt the tip of the need hit the periosteum of her femur. That had to hurt like unto three hells. It was the worst shot I would ever administer in my life. And it was probably the worst injection Mother Teresa ever received in hers.

And she didn’t say a word.

My next injection went much better. By the time I gave my third injection it was like I had done it hundreds of times. It no longer produced the adrenaline rush that it did the first time. And I had gotten past the idea that I was intentionally inflicting pain on another human, even if I was doing it for a good cause.

* * * *

There comes a time in everyone’s life when you cease to be a highly-skilled participant and transition into being a once-great-but-now-mostly-forgotten spectator. For me, that transition started on the day that I retired. Four and a half years later, I had assumed that almost everyone I used to work with had forgotten all about me.

Yesterday, something I wasn’t expecting happened. I received a message from a nurse had I worked with at the last hospital I worked. She had just started a new job a new hospital — the second hospital I worked at in Phoenix. I worked on a Gero/Psych Unit there. All of the nurses on the unit knew how to handle the myriad of medical issues their patients brought to the hospital with them, but they had no idea how to address the psychiatric issues their patients had been admitted for. I taught my Med/Surg nurses how to think like Psych nurses.

Lynn said the staff there still talked about me all the time, and what a great mentor I had been to them. She ended her message saying, Thank you for the difference you have made in all our lives!!!

No. Thank you, Lynn. And Julia. And Al. And Liligene. And all of the rest of the staff on the SAGE Unit at Del E. Webb Medical Center.

You see? Being a psych nurse is easy. All you have to do relax. And find a way to make your patients laugh. It’s the most important therapy you will give them.

It’s all in the wrist.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Almost fifty years ago, I started writing my first novel. I was living in an apartment in Little Falls, MN at the time. I don’t think it had a title. I had no idea what I wanted to write about. I didn’t even own a typewriter. My novel consisted of a bunch of notes I had scribbled down on a yellow legal pad. Probably when I was drunk.

I don’t think any of the notes I had scribbled down actually looked like a novel. It was mostly ideas I was contemplating trying to turn into a novel. I had a few of the chapter titles written down in my notes. You know, like, I had an outline or something. The only thing I’m sure of is the title of this post was the title of one of the chapters of one of the books I never wrote.

* * * *

In one of my previous posts I mentioned that I suffer from Involuntary Musical Imagery, otherwise known as an earworm. Usually, it’s just annoying. But for the last month or so it has been almost intolerable because the song that was stuck in my head was Coward of the County by Kenny Rogers.

I know, right!

The song was bad enough when it was released in 1979, having to hear it 20 times a day or more on the radio. There are no words for the torture that it was having to hear it for all of your waking hours for 30 days in a row. or more. I’m just relieved that it somehow got kicked out of my mental playlist. Finally.

* * * *

Hey. How’s it going? I hope you’re all surviving the seemingly never-ending saga of the Coronavirus pandemic. I don’t think it’s even been one whole year since this thing started. And yet, it somehow feels like it’s been going on for most of my life. And I am old.

I don’t think I know anyone that has died to death from COVID-19. Several of my friends have had it, and they have all survived. However, several of my friends have lost friends or family members to the Coronavirus. I’ve been extremely fortunate so far. I hope my luck holds out for a very long time to come.

Up in the States, most of my friends have received one of several types of vaccines that are now available. Most of them have posted pictures on social media with their official documentation, which is something we’re all going to need in the future if we ever want to travel to another country, or possibly, even leave the house.

I don’t think any of the vaccines are available here in the Lakeside Area. My doctor thinks they might arrive here by June or July. Or maybe next year. This is Mexico. Time is very relative here. And there’s this: Many of the people that live here are gringos from different countries. Canadia. The US. England. New Zealand. South Dakota…

I’m not sure we’re a huge priority to the Mexican Government.

Up until he contracted COVID-19, the Mexican President didn’t believe the pandemic was real. I’m not sure how much his experience has changed him. Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been a bit a of an enigma while he’s been in office. He’s turned out to be a disappointment to almost everyone that voted for him.

Much like unto the former President of the United States, AMLO didn’t do much of anything to stop the spread of the Coronavirus in Mexico. He left that up to the governors of the 31 states. The governor of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro Ramírez, has been very proactive in trying to keep the people he represents safe and healthy. and alive. And that hasn’t been an easy accomplishment.

Not because the people of Mexico haven’t complied with most of the preventative measures that we’ve all experienced. No one down here has protested about alleged infringements on their rights or freedoms. It’s the whole family thing.

Family ties are huge down here. Ask any Hispanic person you happen to see and they will tell you that family means everything to them. Families here get together as often as they can to celebrate anything and everything. Or nothing.

Hey, man. The ‘Rona might kill me, but if I don’t go to my abuela’s birthday party– She’s gonna be 95 this weekend! — I’m a fuckin’ dead man for sure! At the very least she’ll slap me silly with her chanclas.

And that’s not an exaggeration. Not going to a family gathering can have serious repercussions. So now you have a better idea of the situation down here.

Governor Alfaro has ordered at least three major lockdowns in the last year, and I don’t know how many minor shutdowns. His latest directive will remain in effect until December 15th — pretty much the rest of the year. I think he just got tired of having to re-issue statements every other week.

* * * *

Despite the fact that there isn’t much to do here because there just aren’t many things to do not only here, but pretty much everywhere right now — we’ve been keeping busy here at the Chula Vista Resort and Spa. Retirement has turned out to be a helluvalot more work than I ever imagined. That probably wouldn’t be true if we weren’t the Stewards of the Realm at the Chula Vista Resort and Spa.

We’ve spent a lots of time and money improving a place that doesn’t belong to us, and more than likely, never will. Those things weren’t part of our rental agreement — we aren’t obligated to do any of them. I’ve written about all of them in previous posts, so I don’t think I’m going to list them all again. But the longest and most expensive endeavor we’ve taken on has been renovating the yard and all of the gardens.

* * * *

Every living thing goes through various stages of development in its lifetime. According to a guy named Erik Erikson, humans have eight distinct stages. I know I had to memorize them when I was in nursing school. And then I forgot almost everything about them because once you get out of nursing school, no one is ever going to ask you about them again.

The one thing I do remember about them is they all had kooky-sounding names — like, your biggest challenge in each stage was not to kill yourself, or everyone else you meet. Trust vs. Mistrust. Autonomy vs. Shame & Doubt. Initiative vs. Guilt.

See? I told you.

According to Mr. Erikson, the stage of development I’m currently in is Integrity vs. Despair. Whatever. I see it more as a setting in of the Three G’s. In alphabetical order: Gardening, Getting Older, and Golf.

* * * *

Lea and I both prefer things to look neat and orderly. And so does Todd for that matter. Todd is our roommate. He moved here from Idaho about a year and a half ago, and took up residence in one of our guest rooms. He’s Lea’s oldest friend, and he’s become my closest male friend and golf partner.

That whole neat and orderly thing: that was probably the greatest impetus in our decision to improve the appearance of pretty much everything in the yards. That’s why we decided to have the pool repainted. And to annihilate the Royal and Ancient Hedgerow, and all of the other vines and vegetation that hadn’t been trimmed or manicured in the last forty years. All of those things started way back in the middle of last October.

I’m sure the lockdowns and shutdowns and restrictions from the Coronavirus had something to do with our decision There wasn’t much of anything else to do, and we had been here long enough that looking at the overgrown hedges and shit really started bothering us.

Lea and I have improved every house that we’ve lived in for an extended period of time, whether we owned them or not. It’s become kind of a habit for us.

* * * *

The pool had been bothering us for awhile. It wasn’t on good shape when we moved in. Additional time, and continued use, didn’t do anything to improve its appearance. So we made a deal with Lord Mark, our landlord. He would pay for the prep work, paint, and any miscellaneous supplies. And we would hire a painter to paint the pool.

We drained the pool and let it dry out for three months. In January we had all of the pool surfaces prepped by Tacho, and Lea and I pressured washed every inch to get it ready for paint. Francisco Flores Bernini, my friend, caddy, and the guy who has painted almost the entire inside of our house, painted the pool a deep, dark blue. Jaime Mendoza, our property manager, had 40,000 gallons of water delivered in two huge trucks.

I have to say it turned out better than I thought it would. If we ever have any visitors here, I think they’ll love it, too. It’s the jewel in the crown of the resort once more. Or it will be once we get the solar heating system working again.

The solar heater is on the roof of the master bedroom, and it is a Mexican technological wonder. It’s so complicated even other Mexicans haven’t been able to understand it. We’ve had a few guys come over to look at it to repair it, and they all say it just needs to be replaced.

We’re going to start that process this week, according to Jaime. We’ll see how that goes. There’s more than one person involved in finding a solution to this problem. It might take awhile to get them all together over here. Personally, I think we’ll end up with a new heating system eventually, simply because that’s what everyone has been saying we’re going to need. But this is Mexico. When it comes to stuff like unto this, nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems.

* * * *

When I was a kid, I spent almost every summer working in the fields on my grandparent’s farm by day, and was preyed upon by my pedophile uncle by night. As a result, I had no interest in becoming a farmer when I grew up. And yet, as an adult, I have done far more gardening than I ever thought I would. And that is all because of my lovely supermodel wife.

Lea loves gardens, but she doesn’t want to do any gardening. That’s where I come in. And the Five Languages of Love. I’m a guy. So you can believe me when I say I had no idea there were any love languages.

* * * *

This couple gets married. On their honeymoon night the guy looks at his beautiful bride and says, “Hey Mrs. Stevenson, you wanna retire into the bedroom and let me fuck your brains out?”

“That is just so rude!” his wife snaps. “I knew I wasn’t marrying a Casanova or anything, but couldn’t you at least try to be polite about it?” The guy thinks about for a minute, runs his hand through his hair and decides to try again.

“You’re right, honey. I apologize, and I’m really sorry I said that. Now, could you please pass the pussy?”

* * * *

Lea’s favorite love language is Acts of Service. In my case, that ended up translating into Build me a garden. Or in Lea’s case, a lots of gardens. I constructed at least three gardens for her in Minnesota. In Arizona I transformed our backyard into a desert oasis. Okay, I didn’t do anything except sign the check in that instance. But the results were worth it.

Here at the resort, the gardens had been completely swallowed by the Royal and Ancient Hedgerow and all of the untrimmed vines that covered the fence in the backyard. All Todd and I had to do was find them again. And I should add that Lea played her part in hedgerow annihilation, too.

Lea doesn’t like digging in the dirt because it ruins her manicures. If I spent any money on taking care of my fingernails, I probably wouldn’t want to do anything to fuck them up either. Oddly enough, Lea actually enjoys trimming shrubs and vines. It’s that whole neat and orderly thing again.

* * * *

All of the things I’ve already mentioned are true, but there’s one more reason why I decided to tackle the daunting project of hedge demolition and yard improvement. I really suck at sitting on my ass all day listening to the TV. Yeah, it kind of surprised me to discover this, too.

Lea says she’s not surprised. She apparently understands me better than I do. We have been married to each other for over three decades, so her comprehension of me isn’t all that surprising. I’m pretty sure I understand her better than she understands herself, too.

Speaking of TV, I’ve been able to get our streaming devices to actually work on a consistently reliable basis. So we’ve actually been watching a couple of series: The Crown, and The Mandalorian.

I’ve found that I actually like the young Queen Elizabeth II. And I detest pretty much everyone else in her family, the fucking royal sissifated sniffle-snaffles that they are.

The Mandalorian guy reminds me of The Rifleman. It was a TV western way back when I was kid. They were big back then, and there were a lots of them to choose from. I really liked The Rifleman when I was a kid. I watched a rerun of it a few years ago on a quiet Saturday morning, and I changed the channel after five minutes. I thought The Rifleman was just about the stupidest fuckin’ show I had ever seen.

That’s pretty much what I think of The Mandalorian too. It’s very predictable. The dialog is mostly boring and repetitive — except Baby Yoda is so damn cute I put up with all the stupididity just for him. I’ve watched five or six episodes. I’m still waiting for the Baby Yoda kid to say something. I don’t know if he ever speaks, but I’m hoping like hell that he does. And soon.

* * * *

Earlier in this post I said that restoring the gardens was expensive, and you night think that I spent a bunch of money buying plants to put in the gardens. That would be incorrect. I’ve probably spent less than two hundred bucks on new plants.

The expense was hiring someone to haul off all the shit we chopped down.

A guy named Guillermo was driving by the resort in his beat-up pickup when he saw Todd dragging a bunch of branches out to the curb to be picked up by the local garbagemen. He asked if we would be willing to pay him to do it.

Our garbage guys can haul off only a very limited amount of branches and stuff at one time, and everyone in our development always has a bunch of yard debris that they need to get rid of. If we had waited for them to perform this task for us, we would still have a mountain of debris to get rid of, and we started almost five months ago. For the very reasonable fee of $25 bucks a truckload, Guillermo hauled away about 20 truckloads of branches and vines and shit whenever we needed him.

It ended up being a good deal for all of us. Guillermo couldn’t find any work because of COVID-19, so we were an absolute godsend to him when he was desperately looking for a way to make some money. And we were able to demolish stuff at a much faster rate because we weren’t limited by the local garbage collection limitations.

* * * *

With the debris removed, we could focus on making the yard and gardens all pretty and cutey once more. We took the hedgerow out in sections, therefore, we also reconstructed the gardens in sections. With that in mind, we now have gardens that are very well established on one hand, to gardens that are just beginning to sprout flowers. If that pattern continues to repeat itself, there will always be one part of the gardens in bloom, no matter what time of the year it is. There isn’t really a winter season here. It’s more like unto varying degrees of summer all the time.

Now you understand why I think this place is a paradise.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the flowers that started growing once they could see the light of day once more, and that was what convinced us that our resort used to have gardens at one time, long ago in the past.

Morning glories, brown-eyed susans, amaryllis, dahlias, and lantana have sprung to life, adding pops of color along the south side of the house. Lilies and geraniums started growing around the bougainvillea and the monster poinsettia tree. At least seven varieties of vines are climbing the stone walls and fences that enclose our grounds. And we uncovered a mango tree, a papaya tree, and an avocado tree.

Unfortunately, flowers aren’t the only things that have sprouted up in the once-forsaken gardens. We also have a very impressive crop of weeds growing, too. This is where the helluvalot of work started coming into play for me. And Todd. And it involves the two W’s of the first G of my version of this stage of my development in life.

Watering and Weeding.

* * * *

To the best of my knowledge, there’s no such thing as a garden that doesn’t require any maintenance. If there is, I sure as hell didn’t plant it here. We used to have a gardener — well, he was more of a yard maintenance guy than he was a gardener — and that was our main reason for letting him go. He was one big reason the Royal and Ancient Hedgerow had grown to such outrageous proportions.

Miguel is no longer our gardener, but we did hire him to maintain the pool. He’s probably the only person on the planet that knows how the enigmatic plumbing for the pool works. Just in cases you were wondering, he likes what we’ve done with the gardens.

According to a reliable source that I can no longer remember, the one thing that all plants need to live is water. That makes sense to me, so I’m not going to research it any further. It’s the Dry Season down here right now. It won’t rain in any appreciable amounts until the middle of June. The gardens we decided to uncover need to be watered on pretty much a daily basis. At the very least, every two days.

Yep, I’m going to be busy for awhile.

Todd tends to set up sprinklers to water any part of the yard or gardens that he takes care of. I’m a bit more hands-on. I bought a shitload of hoses and wands and nozzles with a variety of settings and strengths, and I more or less water everything by hand. It takes me a few hours every day to make the rounds to all of the gardens. It’s one of the reasons why it’s taken me so long to write this post. I think I’ve been working on it for at least a month. Maybe two… I honestly can’t remember.

I like to see how my plants are doing. Are they looking okay? Do they need more water? Less water? More sunlight? What’s that fucking thing? Is that a new weed I’ve never seen before? Is it a flower? Maybe I’ll leave it there for awhile and see what it grows into… That’s kind of how I roll when I’m watering the gardens.

* * * *

Gardening is a fairly mindless enterprise for most people. There is nothing mindless for me. My mind is always running, and it hasn’t been my buddy for quite some time. I have to seriously counter the natural tendency of my mind to make me feel as bad about myself as it possibly can. It’s become more or less a full-time job lately.

Age has given me some perspective on my life. This is the second G of my version of this stage of my development in life. Being sober has given me an extended period of time of reasonably sane behavior. But the more I seem willing to embrace myself, warts and all, the more my mind seems to think it needs to step in and do something about that.

It’s probably still mad at me for quitting drinking…

We’ll work this out sooner or later. I’m smarter than my brain thinks I am, and I am way more patient than it is. One of these days it will realize that and leave me alone.

* * * *

A weed, by definition, is any plant that you don’t want growing in your yard or garden. And they are pretty much the bane of my existence right now. Mostly because weeds don’t come to you. You have to get down to their level to get rid of them. My back is no longer built for that kind of movement. And I’m sure this is true for more people than just me, but for every weed I remove, ten weeds seem appear out of the ground to take its place.

And I don’t know what is in the soil here, but it took a toll on my hands. After one week of weeding, the skin on my hands took on the texture of 90 grit sandpaper. Then my skin started to crack around the beds my fingernails. It surprises me how something so tiny and seemingly insignificant can hurt so goddamn much. I couldn’t have typed anything even if I had wanted to. I could barely hold a golf club without breaking into tears.

I’ve started wearing work gloves out of sheer self-preservation. And I’m applying lotion on a daily basis now. I think my hands will recover and return to their previous state of feeling like I’ve never done an honest days’ work with them.

* * * *

Most of the garden restoration was accomplished simply by relocating the plants we already had to different locations, which was another back-breaking exercise for me, and seeds. I love seeds because they’re inexpensive and I don’t have to bend over to get them onto the ground. I more or less throw them in the general direction of where I want them to grow, and add water.

I’ve kind of become the Marky Flower Seed of Mexico.

My helter-skelter approach to gardening drives Todd crazy. He’s much more scientific and methodical in his approach to. He tests the soil and makes his own compost. He grows a lots of plants in small pots, then replants them exactly where he wants them to be, in more or less specific numbers.

Last year I sowed a few hundred seeds and almost nothing grew. This year I sowed a few hundred thousand seeds, and almost all of them germinated. Yeah, I don’t get it either. It’s one of the mysteries of Life in Mexico. I may not understand why it happened, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. And I really don’t care what Todd thinks when it comes to my gardening techniques. I have created the gardens of ten thousand dreams here, and I am well pleased.

Marigolds, zinnias, sweet alyssum, and cosmos. Lavender, lupines, bachelor’s buttons, and daisies. Calendaria, dianthus, and carnations. Salvia, asters, delphiniums, and mums. Sunflowers, snapdragons. scarlet pimpernel, and foxglove. Ageratum, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, and sweet william.

We have a lots of garden space, therefore, we have ended up with a boatload of flowers to try to fill them all. Most of these I’ve grown from seeds or cuttings from monster-sized plants. And almost all of these plants produce more seeds. I may never have to buy another packet seeds for as long as I live, even if I live for another two decades. There’s no such thing as too many flowers. Or too many types of flowers.

The end result of our labors has been so dramatic that it’s hard to adequately describe. It’s like unto a caveman/hippie/beatnik guy that decided to cut his hair and join the human race. It opened up the outdoors and let the sun shine in. Now all we have to do is keep it trimmed and manicured until we die, and then it will become someone else’s problem.

For now, there are three of us on the job so it hasn’t become a major ordeal for anyone. But we all can see that it’s something we’re going to have to be very proactive about or we’ll end up another Hedgerow from Hell in no time flat.

* * * *

And that brings me to the third and final G of my version of this stage of my development in life. Golf. Prior to the onset of all the COVID-19 lockdowns and precautions and stuff, I was consistently scoring in the mid-80’s. I fixin’ to get ready to start to begin to break 80, and go onto the Professional Senior’s Tour.

And then one day, for no particular reason, pretty much almost everything about my golf game just fell apart, and it stayed there. I was scoring in the mid-90’s and golf became a whole lots less fun than it had ever been.

I’ve tried to remain philosophical and positive about sucking at golf once more. Everyone goes through a slump. You’ve just got to play through it until it gets bored and goes away to ruin someone else’s game. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.

That’s how dieting works. For example, if you lose several pounds, they float around through the atmosphere until they run into someone else, and that person suddenly gains several pounds. I’ve lost 15 pounds since I retired. And I’d bet at least one person reading this has gained 15 pounds in the last four and half years.

I rest my case.

* * * *

And that’s about it from the Chula Vista Resort and Spa for now. We’re still accepting reservations, and we now offer special Friends and Family Rates that will be available for a limited time — like unto those TV ads for Dr. Ho’s Circulation Promoter and Pain Relief System.

Y’all take care of yourselves and stay safe out there. I’ve come to the conclusion that gardening is an apt metaphor for life. Plant a lots of seeds. Keep the weeds away. And water as needed.

When you look at that way, life isn’t away where near as complicated.

Apocalypse Now

Does anyone reading this remember the Duck and Cover drills from the 1950’s? Just in cases you missed them, the drills were part of President Harry S. Truman’s Federal Civil Defense Administration program and were aimed to educate the public about what ordinary people could do to protect themselves in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.

Like this was going to save you from being turned into radioactive Rice Krispies

I don’t remember doing these when I was a kid, but I didn’t start going to school until the 1960’s. By that time everyone had probably figured out that ducking and covering was a stupid idea, so they started smoking pot and protesting against the Vietnam War and marching for civil rights. And stuff.

You wouldn’t be allowed to have a mass protest right now because the whole world is on double-secret probation lockdown in an attempt to control the Coronavirus pandemic, including the Lakeside Area. Yesterday, my golf course closed until sometime next week, but probably maybe later. There’s a whole lots of nothing to do here right now.

I’ve completed every home maintenance project within my ability here at the Chula Vista Resort and Spa. I added about five hundred gallons to the pool yesterday. It took seven hours and twelve minutes. If you think watching paint dry is boring…  And I watched five hundred videos on Facebook and the YouTube®.

The first two were funny.

I’ve weeded some of the gardens. Todd has weeded all of the others. Miguel, our gardener and pool guy, is going to cry when this quarantine is over. I repotted all of my plants on the patio this morning that I was planning to get around to doing, someday. 

Right now, I’m listening to my collection of Mozart CD’s that I bought twenty years ago and never took out of the box. And it seems like a good time to try to write something/anything to pass the time away…

* * * *

Way back when I wanted to become a rich and famous author, I wrote an epic, three volume tale about the End of the World. There were a couple of plagues of Biblical proportions in it. Hundreds of thousands of people got dead. I thought I had a pretty good idea of how people would react during a crisis, but I know I didn’t write anything about people hoarding toilet paper…

But wait, there’s more!

There were a shitload of natural disasters that ruined the lives of almost everyone on the planet. And more than one unnatural disaster that, if you were unlucky enough to survive, would probably make you wish you had gotten dead. And there were a couple of world wars where millions of people got killed to death.

My book was a lighthearted comedy romp through the worst fucking things you could imagine, and then doing them all over again because you just weren’t miserable enough yet.

And I seriously wondered why no one wanted to publish it at the time.

I know I didn’t foresee the current political divide in American politics. Even if I had, I’m sure I would’ve predicted that the two parties would put aside their differences and work together to try to save their country from ruin.

That has not turned out to be the case with the Coronavirus, has it? It’s like unto those old Miller Lite commercials:

Tastes great. Less filling!  Bitch! Whore!! CUNT!!!

It’s time to grow up, you politician guys. And it’s time for America to wake the fuck up. No party in the current system, not Republican nor Democratic, has all of the answers to fix all of the problems America is facing. And if they can’t start working together, neither of them will.

* * * *

The End of the World has been predicted pretty much ever since civilization began. And the one constant I can see is this: every one of those predictions of imminent doom, destruction and death has been wrong. Including mine.

As far as I know, there has been only one (unverified) case of complete and total worldwide death and destruction since human beings appeared on the scene.

The Great Flood.

* * * *

Some of you probably know the story about Great Flood and Noah and his ark. As the story goes, wickedness and evil were prevalent all across the world at that time. It was like unto the Sin City movies, only worse. And if you’re looking for a story about a compassionate, loving God, you won’t find one here.

According to legend, a group of angels called the Grigori were living on Earth to keep an eye on things while God was busy doing other things somewhere else. One of the things these angels noticed was the daughters of Men were some serious babes. They broke General Order #1, the Prime Directive, and interfered with the normal and healthy development of Earth life and culture. The children of this mixing were called Nephilim.

They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

Think back to those mythology classes you thought were stupid and boring because all that crap had to be made up by someone doing mind-altering drugs. All of those gods, demi-gods, and heroes: Zeus. Osiris. Apollo. Odin. Vishnu. Thor. Achilles, Perseus, and Hercules. Bilibobus Thorntonicus.

They were half-mortal, half-divine beings with an impressive array of abilities and  powers unknown to the rest of the world. And they were most likely the real reason God decided to destroy most of the civilized world when He did. I don’t think He liked all of the competition. And He clearly kicked the shit out of all of them. There were a lots and lots of stories about their exploits. And then, kind of just like that!, there were no more stories…

Something happened to all of those guys.

* * * *

According to the Bible, God regretted ever creating humans because they were so fucking wicked bad. According to the way I interpret this story, the cause of all that wickedness appears to be a group of rogue angels that decided to have unprotected sex with a bunch of hot girls. And they produced a race of Giants with magical superpowers. So God decided the best thing He could do to fix this problem was kill every man, woman and child on the planet by drowning them in a great flood.

Everyone except Noah and his family because Noah was a righteous dude, like unto Ferris Bueller. And you probably know the rest of the story. Noah built an ark, then he gathered together a bunch of animals and herded them into his big-ass boat. And then it started raining like unto a bastard, and it rained for forty days and forty nights. 

According to the Bible,  …everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.  Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Afterwards, God made a covenant with Noah and his family. God promised Himself He would never destroy the world in this fashion again, and He set a rainbow in the clouds as a sign of the covenant He had made. It would be a reminder to God that the next time His children disappointed Him, He wouldn’t kill them all to death again.

You know, just in cases He forgets or something…

* * * *

I’ve always thought the story of Noah’s ark was the kind of story that parents would read to their children when they went to bed at night to encourage them to be better people, or God will drown your rotten little asses, too!

I thought that for a couple of reasons. One, God is supposed to be all-knowing and perfect, therefore, incapable of making a mistake. Ask any pastor you happen to see, they’ll tell you. And yet He appears to have done fucked up a couple of times in this story. I’ve said this before: if God wanted a perfect society, He should have stopped with bees.

The other reason is God supposedly doesn’t labor in vain. Everything He touches works out to perfection. But here we have a world gone to hell in a handbasket, with corruption and crap everywhere. God rolls up His sleeves and gets to work. He cleans up the mess His wicked and evil children have created by drowning them all in the bathtub.

And yet, after all of that, wickedness and evil still exist? That shouldn’t be possible, should it? Nor does it appear that God was even successful in killing all of the Nephilim. It clearly states in the Bible that some of them continued living after the flood.

Yeah, I know. It doesn’t make any sense. And yet if you want to be a good Christian you have to believe it’s true because it’s in the Bible and everything in the Bible is true. It’s one of the reasons I’m not a good Christian.

* * * *

There was one part of the story that I thought had to be true. After the flood Noah planted some grapes, made some wine, and got drunk. And it says he passed out naked in his tent.

But I imagine this as the first block party after the flood. Noah had no doubt been very stressed out from building an ark, gathering a herd of animals and somehow feeding them during the super storm that drowned the earth. But those may have been small change compared to being quarantined with his family for more than six months straight.

It’s something we can all relate to right now. With adjustments for inflation and the cost of living, six modern days are easily equal to six ancient months.

I imagine Noah drank a few flagons of wine at the Postdiluvian Block Party. Then he drank a few more… The next thing you know, he’s telling his family what a bunch of fuckin’ whiners they’d been during the dark days of the storm. His sons were almost no help. Their wives, those bitches, he would’ve fed them to the lions if God would’ve let him. Then took his clothes off and twerked his naked ass in front of all of their faces before he stumbled into his tent and passed out.

According to the Bible, Noah was 600 years old at the time of the Great Flood. That could not have been a pretty sight.

See? I told you

Don’t be surprised when this whole quarantine thing ends if you see crowds of drunken naked people dancing in the street. It could totally happen.

* * * *

At least one of my Facebook friends is convinced that the Coronavirus pandemic is the beginning of the end, and the End of Times is upon us. I was pretty sure the Gulf War was going to usher in the events that would end the world…

Yeah, I really do suck when it comes to being a prophet.

That said, I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, so here’s a couple of things to consider about the End of Times:

“Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.” Revelation 12:7-9

Every pastor I’ve talked to about this says that war was fought long ago. Go ahead, ask your pastor. See what he thinks. I think it’s a battle that is yet to be fought. And the reason I think that is this verse in the Book of Revelation:

“Therefore rejoice, you heavens
    and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
    because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
    because he knows that his time is short.”

For a malevolent spirit of ultimate evil, Satan has thus far appeared to be a bit of an underachiever when it comes to being, you know, a really bad guy. The worst thing he’s done lately is prevent the Saturday Women’s group from having pancakes. From what I can tell, he appears to be content to watch Netflix® and chill, just like the rest of us. 

Desperate times require desperate actions. When Satan starts acting like a Russian mobster on a meth binge, then you’ll know that shit just got real.

And there’s one last thing. Revelation 19:19. That verse describes the armies of the kings of the earth assembling to wage war against the forces of Heaven.

Two billion people on this planet claim to be Christian. Every Christian will tell you the Second Coming of Christ is something they look forward to with great anticipation. Every Christian alive would say this is true, even if they happened to be a king of the earth.

If that’s true, then why would they gather their armies and prepare for war?

There’s only one thing that I can think of that could unite all of this world’s fractious leaders enough to pool their forces and fight together. And that thing is an invasion from outer space.

April Fool’s! Or is it?

* * * *

Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. But if you can think of anything else that would make all of the world leaders unite like that, I’m open to your ideas and suggestions.

Jesus Christ claimed to be the King of Heaven and Earth, and he said he would return again one day to rule. One quarter of world’s population believes with all their hearts that this is going to happen, and the sooner the better. But according to the Bible, Jesus will have to go to war to claim his throne.

You’d think he’d have an army of supporters waiting to welcome him when he returns, but it doesn’t appear that that is going to happen. Can any of my Christian friends explain to me how that’s possible?

I have one. When Jesus returns, he comes back in a spaceship. And because of that, no one is going to lay down a welcome mat for him

That, however implausible it might seem, would explain a whole lots of things. I’m not going anywhere or doing anything for a few days. If you have a different idea, leave a comment.

* * * *

Hang in there everyone. This quarantine isn’t going to last forever. It probably won’t last much longer. Maybe another week beyond what everyone has been predicting. But then simple economics will have to take over and the world will have to get back to business again.

But if it doesn’t, a lots of people are going to start praying for spaceships.

Virtu-ality

I once heard this bit of advice when I was interested in becoming a rich and famous writer.

Write what you know.

Unfortunately, I didn’t follow that advice at the time, and it may be at least one reason why I became neither rich nor famous as an author. I’ve probably gotten better at following that advice. Most of my blog posts have been about things that I know. Psychiatric nursing. Getting drunk. Doing stupid stuff…  However, I doubt I’ll ever become rich or famous no matter how many Rules of Writing I follow.

The most important thing, according to the people in the know, was to just keep writing. Just in cases you were wondering…

I’ve had a lots of time to ponder the wisdom of those words, but I think you actually have to be a good writer in order to achieve fame and fortune.

I doubt I’ll  ever attempt to write another novel. I’m content with an occasional post in my blog. And is there such a thing as a rich and famous blogger? I suppose it’s possible, but only because I believe almost anything is possible.

I have a lots of time to ponder life; its many facets and mysteries. I get a lots of different points of view from my friends on social media.

One of the things I started pondering recently came from a post on Facebook from one of my friends:

Is it just me, or are people getting stupider?

Technology is a wonderful thing, but with so much knowledge and information available at our fingertips, maybe we are getting stupider. Well, not my generation. The ones that followed us.

I’m pretty sure every generation thinks they’re the only cool generation. The preceding generation is over the hill. The following generation doesn’t have a clue. And there may be some truth to that.

And then again, maybe my generation is responsible for producing a couple of generations of moronheads. They may not know shit, but they are technological wizards when it comes to finding what they want/need to know.

There’s an app for that.

That bit of advertising genius was aimed at Generations X, Y and Z. Not at me or my generation. We’re still trying to figure out if the Snapchamp is cute or creepy.

* * * *

I used to belong to a lots of groups on Facebook, but I’ve bailed on almost all of them. I found myself getting annoyed by the things the stupid people in the groups posted. It’s one of transitions you go through when you retire.

I used to belong to a Classic Movie group. I like classic movies. I thought there might be some valuable insights posted by other classic movie fans. I was wrong. This was one of the insightful posts from that group:

What’s your favorite Doris Day movie? I like Pillow Talk

There were literally thousands of posts like unto that, just change the name of the actor, and the movie.

But this post still has me scratching what’s left of the hair on my head:

I love Robert Redford. I love all of his movies! My favorite is Paul Newman!!

That was pretty much my reaction, too. I’m no longer a member of that group.

* * * *

The Winter Olympics started a few days ago. I love the Olympics, too. So I became a member of the Official Winter Olympics Facebook page last Friday. And then I waited for the Opening Ceremony on come on at 8:00 PM.

While I waited, I read posts from my fellow lovers of the Olympics. There were a lots of posts like unto this:

Hello from Seattle! Go Team USA! Where are you and who do you want to win?

And I was okay with that. I mean, it’s the Olympics. Of course you’re going to root for your country. Who doesn’t? I responded that I was in Mexico, rooting for the Mexican Bobsled/Curling/ Ski Team.

Someone from Nigeria posted that she was proud of the Nigerian Bobsled team, the first African bobsled team in history. And a guy from the US responded, I think Jamaica was first.

And I responded, Yes, the African nation of Jamaica!

I could feel the Sands of Stupididity starting to flow into the hourglass, and then it happened, at 4:00 PM. Someone posted this:

I can’t find the Olympics on my TV! Am I missing something?

My first response was this: Yes! Your fucking brain! But I toned it down and said this instead: Yes, the Olympics.

And then I bailed on that group, too.

If there’s a message in this post, it’s this:

Never underestimate the power of stupidity

* * * *

I spend a lots of time on Facebook. I’m retired. Time is a resource that I have in abundance. I keep up with all of my virtual friends; their triumphs, their heartaches.

A couple of them just got married. A couple more of them are pregnant. One of them might be going to prison for some things she did several years ago when she was strung out on drugs.

When I read her post, the first thing I thought was, There but for the grace of God…

I’ve become much more selective about the people I send Friend Requests to. I haven’t had anyone ask me if I want to see naked pictures of them or sex chat in months. But I have been getting requests for something else.

Money. Or an iTunes card, whatever that is. I’ve only given serious thought to sending money to someone once, but I actually knew her, and she’s a sweet girl. I’ve never seriously considered sending money to someone I’ve never met.

And there’s one other thing some of my virtual friends are looking for:

A relationship.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. I’m not sure I could ever admit I met my wife on Facebook. I know online dating sites have become very popular, but I’m not sure I would ever use one.

And the thing I don’t get the most is Why me? I mean, there’s nothing on my Facebook profile that indicates that I would be interested in dating anyone. Maybe I should have a few people look at it, just to make sure…

This is an amalgamation of several conversations I’ve had over the last six months or so. I doubt any of them have been this long or detailed.

Random Girl: Hi  where are you from

Me: That information is on my profile page. If you don’t mind my asking, why did you send me a friend request?

Random Girl: Im looking for a serious relationship with a serious man.

Me: Sorry. I can’t help you. I’m not a serious man. You can ask around. I’m probably the least serious man on the planet.

Random Girl: lol your funny

Me: It’s you’re, not your…

Random Girl: what ever I want to meet you

Me: Are you on drugs?

Random Girl: no when can we meet

Me: Let me ask my wife. She doesn’t think that’s a good idea.

Random Girl: your married

Me: It’s you’re, not your… Yes, I’m very married. My wife is a supermodel. You would’ve known that if you had read my profile page.

Random Girl: thats okay. I still want to meet you send me a picture

Me: No. There’s a picture of me on my profile page

Random Girl: okay your really handsome

Me: It’s you’re, not your. That’s not my real picture. I look hideous. I was blown up by a bomb during the war.

Random Girl: you were in the war which one

Me: All of them since the American Civil War. I was almost killed at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Random Girl: okay I still want to meet you

Me: No, you don’t. The Battle of Gettysburg was fought in 1863. Besides, I live in Mexico. You’d hate it here.

Random Girl: Ive never been to mexico do you live on the beach

Me: No, I don’t live on the beach. I live in the mountains. It’s boring here, you’d hate it here after twenty minutes. Besides, I’m probably old enough to be your father.

Random Girl: how old are you

Me: I’m 62. How old are you?

Random Girl: Im 28 age isn’t important

Me: Jesus! I’m old enough to be your grandfather! The only people who say that are stupid young people!

Random Girl: lol I don’t like boys my age  I want a mature man who will treat me nice like you

Me: You don’t even know me! I could be a serial killer!

Random Girl: lol what do you do in mexico

Me: I just told you, I’m a serial killer. Why else would I be in Mexico?

Random Girl: I dont think youd hurt me

Me: That’s what the last three girls like you said. I’m running out of room in my backyard

Random Girl: for what

Me: To bury bodies

Random Girl: okay when can I come see you

Me: You can’t. I’m married. And if I don’t kill you, my wife will.

Random Girl: why would you’re wife want to kill me

Me: It’s your, not you’re. She’s a serial killer, too. That’s why we make such a cute couple.

Random Girl: but I want to take care of you

Me: I weigh five hundred pounds. I haven’t had a bath in a week. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.

Random Girl: its okay

Me: Oh, that’s different. I just shit my pants. How long will it take you to get here?

So far no one has hung in there after that line, no matter how much they said they wanted to meet me.

From the Odds and Ends Department

Have you ever watched something on TV, or read something, and thought, Man, I could do so much better than that! You might even be thinking that right now…  Especially if you’ve read more than one of my blog posts.

I mean, all this guy writes about is getting wasted, his slutty girlfriends, and how all of his relationships fell apart! There was that story about his nympho Russian girlfriend, Ivana Sukyurkokov. And his heartbroken Chinese girlfriend, Wat Wen Wong. Jeez, his blog is dumber than putting wheels on a ball! I liked him more when he wrote about crazy people!

And I hear you. Before I started writing my blog, I thought bloggers were people who needed to get a fucking life, man. They were probably people who thought Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian were the epitome of American society and they all wanted to be Paris-ites, or biffles, or twat waffles with them or something.

I’ve started reading some of the blogs that are out there on the Interweb, and I was wrong about bloggers. Most of them appear to have lives.

Except me.

I’m retired. If I were to write about my day-to-day life now, my blog would consist of restaurant reviews in the Lakeside area, and stories about how much I love my Sleep Number bed®.

And to be honest, I probably liked me more when I was writing about crazy people, too. But those stories are relatively easy to write, and like everything else in life, it’s only when you step outside of your comfort zone that anything meaningful happens. It’s the stories I didn’t want to write that taught me the most about myself. It was the stories that hurt like hell that showed me how far I’ve come.

And how far I still have to go.

And the other thing about writing about my nursing career is not every person I cared for resulted in a story worth telling.  Knife wielding homicidal maniacs were the exception, not the rule, thank God. Most of my patients were never a problem, unlike medical dramas on TV. I’d probably hate being a TV nurse, unless my work partner was the hot nurse with the big tits…

The majority of my nursing career was pretty ho-hum. Mischief was managed. Shit got done. No one died. And that was that. But there were a lots of snippets and moments and oneliners, and if I could patchwork a lots of them together, I might be able to spin a tale or two…

* * * *

I’ve discovered that time management is still necessary once you retire. I certainly have more time to do things I enjoy now, like reading. And because other bloggers sometimes read my posts, I feel a certain obligation to read some of their posts, too. My favorite blogger is a young woman in New York who writes about her struggle to overcome her eating disorder. Her blog is called Beauty Beyond Bones. And while I love her now, I probably would’ve hated her as a patient.

Back when I was a psych nurse in Arizona, there were a couple of eating disorder treatment facilities in the little town of Wickenburg, about thirty miles northwest of Surprise. Remuda Ranch and Rosewood Ranch. She’s never come out and said if she was a patient at either of them, but I’m going to guess she was at Remuda. I hope she doesn’t mind me saying that. I interviewed at both facilities, but decided not to take a position at either one of them. I absolutely sucked at working with eating disorder patients.

Remuda is a Christian based treatment facility. One of the questions they asked me in the interview was did I think the Bible was the sole source of truth. I said no, it wasn’t, and I wasn’t even sure all of the things written in the Bible were true. After my interview, they told me I wasn’t Christian enough to meet their criteria. I told them that was okay. They weren’t the first Christians to tell me that.

A few weeks later they called me back and told me that they had changed their mind about me, and asked if I was still interested in working there. I wanted to say something like, God, you guys must be fucking desperate! But instead I thanked them for thinking of me, and told them I had found another position and I wasn’t available anymore.

Well, it was the truth…

Like most every psychological/psychiatric disorder, eating disorders are caused by a multitude of complex factors, and as with every psychological/psychiatric disorder–except dementia–the successful treatment of anorexia or bulimia depends completely on the patient. If they don’t want to change their behavior, there ain’t nothin’ anyone can do for them once they’re discharged from the hospital.

It’s like alcoholism or drug addiction, only worse. Just as the drinking and chemical use are usually a symptom of a deeper, darker pathology, eating disorders are about far more than food.

Eating disorders are incredibly difficult to treat, mostly because eating disorder patients are the spawn of Satan. I mean that in a Christian way. They are sneakier than a ninja. They can vomit silently so they can purge without anyone knowing. They stockpile food so they can binge feed when no one is looking. And if their lips are moving, they’re probably lying.

The other thing I remember most clearly about most of these women, and they were all females, is the majority of them were gorgeous. And that is truly one of the great mysteries that used to keep me awake at night when I was learning how to be a psych nurse. How could someone so beautiful be so fucking miserable?

One of my first posts was about one of my patients at the MVAMC. I called him the Piano Man because he liked to play the piano. About the time he walked onto the unit for one of his many admissions, we had just discharged a gal with anorexia. She had been on our unit for a couple of weeks, and none of the staff were sad to see her go.

After we got the Piano Man admitted, he sat down at the piano and started playing, and the piano sounded like a wounded moose. We opened the top to find the eating disorder girl had hid enough food inside of the piano to feed Hannibal’s entire army when he crossed the Alps to attack Rome. Including the elephants.

For someone who has never worked in a psychiatric setting, it would be easy to say that we, as staff members, totally sucked at our job, and I really don’t have much of anything to say in our defense. We were hardly specialists at treating eating disorders, and the fact we were so happy to see that particular patient leave speaks volumes to the level of struggle we all had with her.

* * * *

To be sure, it’s very easy to be an armchair quarterback or a wheelchair general, and criticize someone doing a job you’ve never attempted. And when you’re in a service oriented occupation like Nursing, you are never going to be able to make everybody happy. No one is that good, and people can be incredibly demanding/entitled. And it is generally the people who were making the least positive contribution to anything who were the most demanding and entitled.

You guys have to be the worst fucking nurses I’ve ever seen! I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that one. And it was usually a guy that you and your team had spent a month busting your asses trying to arrange housing and follow up for, who had been discharged from your unit forty-eight hours earlier, and was already back because he chose to drink as much alcohol and smoke as much meth as he possibly could before he came crawling back to the hospital.

Most of the time it’s better to just agree with someone like that, and walk away. But there were times when I couldn’t.

“Maybe you should get out more…  That means a lots coming from you…”

I said something like unto that to one of my unhappy frequent flyer guys at the MVAMC who probably spent as much time in the hospital as I did. His name was Ray. I’m going to guess that the total bill for the many, many times we detoxed him off of alcohol, sobered him up and set him up to succeed was in excess of one million dollars, and he had this response, “You used to be a good guy, but you need a new job. You’ve been inpatient too long.”

“So have you.” I replied.

He froze to death one cold December night in Minneapolis. He had gotten drunk and was walking to the hospital so he could be admitted again. His body was found propped up against a tree across the street from the hospital in the morning. He had stopped to rest before making his final stumbling trek to the ED, and had fallen asleep.

You meet a lots of guys like unto that when you’re a psych nurse. There was Charles. He was another MVAMC guy who spent an inordinate amount of time getting drunker than fifty guys combined, and the rest of his time detoxing on my unit.

We had safely detoxed Charles for the umpteenth time, and discharged him at 9:00 AM on a Friday morning. At 2:30 PM that same day, I answered the phone. It was Charles.

“Hey, I don’t think this discharge thing is going to work, man. I’ve been out of the hospital for about six hours, and I’m pretty fuckin’ wasted, man.” he slurred.

“Hey, Charles. Has it ever occurred to you that you need to quit drinking?” I decided to ask. There was a long silence, and then Charles said this,

“Is there anyone else there I can talk to?”

For one of the few times in my life, I had no response. I handed the phone to one of my co-workers. Charles would also die to death as a result of his alcohol abuse.

Sometimes the disease wins.

* * * *

You never know what you’ll see or hear as a psych nurse, and there’s a reason for that. People are capable of an infinite amount of kooky stuff, not that you have to be a psych nurse to experience the full spectrum of kookiness available out there.

All you really need to see that is a family.

But one thing you may not experience unless you’re a psych nurse is the dreaded Dissociative Identity Disorder, or more commonly, Multiple Personality Disorder. In my thirty year career, I met a lots of people who claimed to have multiple personalities, but none of them ever seemed to be legitimate to me, or anyone else I worked with.

Multiple Personality Disorder was virtually unheard of until the 1970’s. That’s when the book Sybil was published, 1973 to be exact. Three years later, the TV movie of the same name was broadcast on NBC, starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward, and like magic, suddenly everyone had multiple personalities.

For my money, all of the people I met who claimed to have multiple personalities were just assholes looking for an easy excuse for their behavior.

* * * *

I was working nights at the MVAMC fairly early in my career. I was the Med nurse that night, so anyone needing any medications had to see me. Enter Sam. It was around 2:00 AM. We had detoxed Sam off of alcohol with a Valium protocol. Once someone had been safely detoxed, the protocol was discontinued.

Sam had been off the protocol for a day or two, but he wanted more Valium. I explained to him how the protocol worked, and Sam had a five star meltdown. He screamed at me, waking up everyone on the unit. One of the other nurses called the POD and got a one time order of Valium for Sam, and he went back to bed.

At 6:00 AM, Sam came up to the nursing station to get his morning meds. He was quite pleasant, and I remarked that he was much nicer than he had been at 2:00 AM.

“Oh, that. That wasn’t me. That was Samuel.”

“No kidding. He looks just like you.” I said.

Sam gave me, and anyone else willing to listen, a detailed description of his three personalities: Sam, Samuel and Sheryl. A line of patients had formed behind Sam. They were waiting to get their meds so they could go smoke. According to Sam, Samuel was the troublemaker. Sheryl was the lover, and Sam was the drunk. I listened to Sam, and gave him his meds.

“Well, the next time you talk to Samuel, give him a message.” I said. “If he ever talks to me like that again, I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ mouth.”

Sam’s jaw dropped. He turned to the guys standing behind him, “Did you hear that! He threatened me!”

“Hey! Take your goddamn meds and get the hell out of the way! And if you ever pull that shit again, if he doesn’t punch you in the fuckin’ mouth, I will.” one of the Nam vets growled.

Yeah, not one of my better moments, but Samuel never made another appearance.

* * * *

I think the last time I met anyone who claimed to have multiple personalities was at Aurora. I walked onto the Canyon Unit, and Nikki was on a 1:1. She was a frequent flyer, and I was usually her nurse.

A 1:1 is a special precaution, usually reserved for patients that are acutely suicidal. In essence, one staff person is assigned to one patient, and that patient is never more than an arm’s length away from the person assigned to watch over them.

Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, but it’s rarely played out that way.

I went over to talk to Nikki. She had scratched her wrist with a plastic spoon on the evening shift. She didn’t even break the integrity of her skin, and her nurse had placed her on the 1:1.

I’m shaking my head while I write this. I don’t usually like to criticize the actions of other nurses, but that was a lazy-ass intervention. If the evening nurse had taken even five minutes to talk to Nikki, that ridiculous waste of manpower and resources wouldn’t have been needed. We barely had enough staff to cover the units, let alone have one staff assigned to watch someone for no good reason.

I asked Nikki to tell me what happened.

“I didn’t do anything! It was Alexandra!”

“And whom might that be?”

“She’s one of my three personalities! She–”

“Stop. Cut the crap, Nikki. You’re on a 1:1. You can’t smoke if you’re on a 1:1.” I said.

“But they let me smoke last night, and this morning!”

“I don’t care what they did last night. This is my unit, my rules. If I can’t trust you to be safe on the unit, I’m sure as hell not going to trust you to be safe off the unit, with a lit cigarette in your hand. What if you decide to burn yourself?”

“It wasn’t me! It was Alexandra!”

“I don’t care who did it. None of you get to smoke.”

“I’ll be safe, I promise! Please!!”

Less than five minutes. Mischief managed. And I never heard another word about Alexandra again. Ever.

* * * *

There was a fairly consistent response whenever I told someone that I had just met that I was a psychiatric nurse. Their eyes would widen, and they would say something like unto, “I bet you’ve seen it all, huh.”

I would reply, “No. I’ve seen a lots of strange stuff, but the kookiness of humans is infinite.”

And that is the fucking truth.

Every time I thought I had seen it all, something I didn’t think was humanly possible walked through the door. I eventually made peace with the fact that I would never see it all, and I was okay with that. My two other personalities are still sulking about that a bit, but they’ll get over it.

Or I’ll punch them in the mouth.

Paperback Writer

When I started writing my Reflections posts on Facebook, many of the people that read them said, You should write a book!

My response was something like unto, Forgive them. They know not what they say.

Writing, like cunnilingus, is dark and lonely work. If you don’t believe me, try doing either one of them exclusively for a year or two. A writer spends hours, days, weeks and months doing nothing but writing. On the Fun Scale, it doesn’t even register.

For starters, no one writes everything perfectly the first time. I sure as hell don’t. I have to edit and rewrite almost everything I write, even grocery lists, and that includes these posts. When I was trying to become a published author, I spent eight to ten hours a day or more parked in front of my computer monitor almost every day for two years. My only companion was a glass and a bottle of scotch.

I’m probably not a very good writer. I doubt I could tell you the difference between an adverb and an adjective. I mix past, present and future tenses. I leave participles dangling all the time. The only reason I know what a conjunction is is because I watched Schoolhouse Rock when I was a kid. I wrote what popped into my creative mind, irregardless of its grammatical correctness. And yes, I know irregardless isn’t a real word.

I’ve written a book before. It was a monster; over 1500 pages. After a lots of discussion with other hopeful authors and people in the publishing business, I broke my magnum opus into three smaller books. If you’ve never heard of me, or any of my books, there’s a simple reason. None of them were ever published.

I titled my book Seven Trumpets. It was a fictional interpretation of the Book of Revelation, the Two Witnesses, and the End of Times. And you have never seen a more pissed off person than I was when Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins came out with their Left Behind series.

I still hate those two fucking fucks.

I wanted to be a rich and famous author back in the 1990’s. And a prophet–I really wanted to be a prophet, too. Granted, the publishing business has changed a lots since then, but what hasn’t. Would I have a better chance of successfully being published now?

Possibly. But the publishing business isn’t the only thing that’s changed since then. I no longer have the desire to be a rich. I no longer desire to be famous. Okay, I still want to be a prophet. That part hasn’t changed much.

And I still like writing–writing is a creative process, and I’m a fairly creative guy. But I have no desire to write another book. And that’s all because of the publishing process. Publishing is a business. Publishers aren’t interested in creativity. Publishers are interested in making money.

Back in the 1990’s, once you wrote something you wanted to see in your local bookstore, you needed a publisher. To procure a publisher, you wrote a query letter that briefly described your book and why it should be published, and sent it out to every publishing company you could find an address for. I’m going to take a wild guess here, but publishing companies probably received hundreds of query letters from guys and gals like me every day. I don’t know the statistics of novels published based on a query letter, but I’m going to take another guess here and say not very damn many.

There were actual published books that were little more than lists of publishing companies and their addresses, and you could find them in bookstores. Publishers probably loved them because potential authors bought them by the ton.

I know this because I bought a few/several of them. I wrote query letters by the dozen and mailed them out every week. And I received a lots of letters in return. I can still remember the excitement I felt when I saw my first response from a publishing company I had queried in my mailbox. My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly open it. Good thing it wasn’t an engagement ring!

Alas, the first letter I received from a publishing company was a what authors referred to as a rejection letter. Come to think of it, the last letter I received was a rejection letter, as well as all the letters in between. I had a stack of them over a foot high.

I’m not the only author that has experienced this. Norman Vincent Peale received so many rejection letters he threw his manuscript in the garbage. His wife pulled it out of the trash and convinced him to try, one more time. You might have heard of his book, The Power of Positive Thinking.

Robert M. Pirsig received over one hundred rejection letters before his manuscript was published. Maybe you’ve heard of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you haven’t, read it. It’s one of my favorite books.

Rejection is part of the publishing process. My experience certainly wasn’t/isn’t/will be unique. As I was to learn from the mountain of rejection letters I received, publishing is a very subjective business, and just because Random House wasn’t interested in publishing my manuscript didn’t mean another company wouldn’t be. Good luck with your career…

After two years of writing, and editing, and rewriting almost every sentence I wrote, thanks in part to double vision from the scotch I was drinking. After another three years of writing query letters, and attending seminars on getting published, and making follow up calls to any publishing company that would talk to me, I finally decided I’d had enough and quit. I threw every copy of my manuscript I had in the garbage. I trashed every note of research I had done. Any scrap of paper even remotely related to my writing got tossed. Even my pile of rejection letters.

I have no desire to go back down that road again. I like to think that all of you who encouraged me to write a book did so because you enjoyed reading my stories, and I appreciate that more than I can say. A writer lives to have his or her work read. A comedian lives to make people laugh. I have at least two reasons to live right now. Writing a few humorous and perhaps poignant short stories every week has fit into my new lifestyle very well so far.

Lea would never tell me, but I think she was overjoyed when I finally gave up trying to be a rich and famous author. And a prophet, though I’m still holding on to the slight possibility it could still happen. I look upon it as my last chance at redemption and recompense. I’m sure I ignored my lovely wife terribly during my writing days. She was one of the few people that actually read my monster manuscript from start to finish, and I know I didn’t take anything that sounded like criticism or correction from her gracefully. I don’t know how she put up with me. I could be a real bastard to live with back then.

Thanks for not divorcing me, honey.