My pill bottles. This is not what it looks like. Up at 2:30 AM with mild chest pain. It was not serious, nor related to this photo. My [earlier] attacks occurred while [I was] sleeping. As a precaution, I never take any medicines that work overnight, particularly anything like painkillers that may dull the senses. While I normally sleep deep and sound, I have adapted to awaken instantly at the slightest symptom. These have dropped in frequency from twice a night to twice a year. I stay awake until it passes and you get much longer journal entries as a result.
Stepping to one topic aside momentarily, there is a new test from Scripps that may give me back some freedom. (When I travel more than an hour away from my clinic, I’m actually playing hooky.) If you haven’t heard of this procedure, that’s because it was only discovered four hours ago. They’ve discovered circulating endothelial cells, produced and shed by damaged vessel walls. Their presence predicates a heart attack. This is a bigger deal than you think. As it is, patients who pass the regular tests drop dead at the rate of 30,000 per year, often mere few weeks later. I wish I’d kept my microscope. Question: did I just experience a heart attack? No. I’ve already beat the odds, but I will forever remain wary, that’s a given. Those odds, in case you wonder, were 85% negative in early 2005. What surprised me since recovery was how many small twinges in the upper abdomen have nothing to do with the heart. But they keep me on the alert, and in this case, wide awake.
Being super wide awake is always a good time to make important decisions. So I made some. And I’ll leave you hanging on that. But I will tell you that part of success is developing the harsh ability to make value judgments. All the cute equality-empathy majority-view college-grade philosophies don’t help a bit at the time you simply have to consider your doctor or lawyer more important than your friends and lovers. I make many of these judgments by considering the consequences of each decision.
One such conclusion is I may be getting out of Florida. I say “may”, because there is still a chance of spending the winters here. I would have to buy a place large enough to rent out a portion for the entire year to keep the place functioning and viable. Wallace overlooked this at his own expense. It’s not like I’m packing already, this would not be until May 2014 at the soonest. But it is something to look forward to.
Would I go to Colorado? Probably, at least initially. There is no place else that beckons, no particular place or person to visit, hell I’d consider the weather ahead of looking up old girlfriends now. For certain, I’m no fan of snow drifts and twenty below. I have the day off, so I’ll be checking cabin prices in the foothills. When I was growing up, I remember how so many folks in town had “summer cabins” at Green Acres River that were nicer than our house.
ADDENDUM
Future planning is good. So is planning, period. I have some doozies from the past that never materialized and here’s one of them. In 1992, I was going to see Australia. Sure, and so were a lot of others. But I wonder if the highlights of their plan were the same as mine? I had the days checked on my calendar. I was to buy a second-hand motorcycle in Brisbane and head west, through Adelaide, and across the Nullarbor. On to Perth, stopping at all scenic places along the Bight. North from Perth to Eighty Mile Beach.
Then Darwin, and for lack of roads (no Google Maps back then) south to Alice Springs. Then over to Queensland for an indistinct route back, sell the bike, and return to SeaTac. The entire trip was to be logged, along with location and altitude bearings, on the then-new Internet and GPS systems. The trip was to cost $8,000 exclusive of airfare. What stopped me was a huge decline in exchange rate for my then foreign paychecks. Instead, I believe I went to Venezuela twice that year for around $2,600.
The plans were posted above my work desk for all to see the progress over time, including changes as new information came in. Accomodation was to be found by placing a series of ads on private telephone company publications, anyone who wished to be credited could do so by putting me up for a couple of days. I’d had replies from such places as Broome and underground at Coober Pedy. This was also the first time I had considered a sidecar motorcycle and was put off by the high cost. I had failed to find a radio station that would sponsor a contest or documentary of the trip.
Ten years later, in 2002, I was living in North Miami. This was due to a job transfer and I didn’t like it. No women, the same complaint I have about the rest of Florida. I worked three days a week on Key Biscayne and generally hung out with JP. Back then, he had an old truck and I drove a Cadillac. I hung out at Denny’s most early evenings. Between January 1 and September 23, another friend and I counted one million toothpicks. We wanted to see exactly a million of something. On average, we counted nine hours per week spread over three days. That was a fascinating feat that eventually took us to California. I still have the toothpicks.
Let me check my records for 1982. Ah, we have a complete set of journal entries for that year. I was new on my corporate job so had limited time off. However, I did go Hawaii in the autumn for the first time on vacation. I met up with Rusty who was on his way back to Saudi and Guy on the way to Singapore. I won’t go into detail, as those pages are slated to be published in 2013. Shouldn’t leave the task much longer, as I have long forgotten some of the names that appear, such as Heather Valance.
Ah, hold it. Heather was that crazy alcoholic army brat I shared a place with (utterly non-sexual) when I first moved out west. I was still working construction in the summers to pay off my student loans and I bet the crew she could drink them under the table. All of them drinking together, they only had to buy. They did and she did. I stopped counting because I went home after she had finished 36 or 48 bottles. “C’mon you guys, buy another round.” Except she pronounced it “rah-wund”. Her cat’s name was “Punker”. That was in 1980, not 1982.
Note: you will occasionally find the name of a season capitalized here. This is not a typo, but a search and replace error. I am fully aware of the rule that applies but decided one day to replace “fall” with “autumn” without thinking of the consequences. One thing led to another, and those misplaced capital letters still crop up at times. Do I go back and read my own blogs? Rarely. Used to, but takes too much time. Contrast that with my other writings, where every word and phrase is checked meticulously, often several times. But what you read here is largely spontaneous.
I said today’s photo wasn’t what it looks like. That’s because this is several months of empty prescriptions that I am returning to the pharmacy for recycling. I bet I had some of you going. Watch out, in real life I do that kind of thing a lot because I dislike people who make assumptions. I rather enjoy giving such stupid, nosey people the wrong impression. I once had a bitchy co-worker convinced I couldn’t read. Did she look the part when she tried to blow that whistle.
