Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Sodden Holiday Thoughts

We’re approaching that holiday time of the year once again.  Actually if you believe corporate it’s been holiday season since sometime around Labor Day.  Time to buy the little woman a Lexus or a Mercedes to go with the thousand dollar bauble from Zale’s.  Break out the camping gear because Black Friday is a-comin’ and you gotta blow off a couple weeks of PTO so that you can save a hundred bucks on a TV.  Every year about this time I try to come up with some holiday theme.  It gets a little harder every year and I was despairing a bit until Starbucks dropped a big present under the tree and a self-styled evangelist put a giant bow on it.


Sunday, November 15, 2015

A Night in the Emergency Room

“The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.” ~ Florence Nightingale

“A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.” ~ Groucho Marks

“I joke, but only half joke, that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.”  ~ Abraham Verghese

As firsts go it wasn’t exactly my idea of a memorable milestone.  But there I was strapped to a gurney, taking a ride in an ambulance.  And this one came complete with a paramedic in training.  “Do you mind if our trainee treats you today?” one of the paramedics asked?  “No it’s alright; go for it.”

It all started when I came home from the gym and sat down to watch sports.  I felt a crappiness that I'd never felt before.  The wife and I debated what to do and I decided that maybe we just ought to drive down to emergency.  We’d just about got out of town when feeling crappy turned to feeling like ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack.  “You know I’m not feeling at all good.  Let’s just swing around and go back to the fire station.”  

Three firefighters greeted us and led us into the garage where they hooked me up to a cardiogram.  My racing pulse had slowed down and the irregular heartbeat was back to normal.  I was actually feeling a bit better than when we pulled in.  That’s the way it always works isn’t it?  That toothache that felt like a cattle prod in your mouth all day long turns benign the minute the dentist walks in and you end up feeling like a dumb ass.  I tried to beg off of the ambulance ride but I was talked out of it by all three firefighters and the wife. 


Saturday, November 7, 2015

Mountain Musings

“I believe that a man gets closer to God out there in the big, free West,”  ~  William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody.

There’s something both invigorating and spiritual in sitting on a porch in the warmth of the late afternoon sun, listening to the gurgle of a creek not 10 yards away. Aside from that creek the only sounds are the wind and the occasional screech of a circling hawk.  I’m alternately reading and glancing up from my book at the red cliffs that overlook the cabin.  Bighorn sheep clamor on those cliffs.  Downstream the green, yellow and orange leaves on young aspens shiver in the cooling autumn wind.  They shine and shimmer like colored coins. 

Wow I guess I didn’t fully appreciate the quiet until I got back home to the San Francisco Bay Area and went to my gym a week later.  The noise was like getting whacked in the face with a baseball bat; clanging steel, grunting and shouting and of course the dreck and cacophony that the tone deaf call music.  Walking in I hunched over from the sheer weight of the din.
             Ante Up! Yap that fool!
Ante Up! Kidnap that fool!
It's the perfect timing, you see the man shining
Get up off them god damn diamonds! Huh!
Ante Up! Yap that fool!
Ante Up! Kidnap that fool!
In the locker room I got ready for my work out and said to myself in disgust that “I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics.”  Maybe a little too loud as the guy a few lockers down shot me a look.
High mountain valley

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