Life Sucks.

 I am broke. I don't have more than a couple days worth of food and I don't get my next disability check for two weeks. I feel like shit. My (soon-to-be-ex) wife has spent much of the last two days telling me how awful and evil I am and how much my children hate me.

Yes, I know I'm whining. I don't fucking care.

I want to die.

We, The People

A lot of people seem to have forgotten something about Us. You know, the capital letter Us, as in:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for t...

he United States of America."

We are a commonwealth, as that term was used at the time. We don't stand in opposition to our government, we all share rights and responsibilities, with respect to our government and with respect to each other.

I say it's time we remembered we all stand together or we all sink alone.

Do Not Buy Toshiba Products

I have a Toshiba Satellite C655 laptop. The Toshiba proprietary software often prevents me from being able to to close those annoying floating pop-up ads one encounters on the net. If, like me, you believe that your computer should not be hamstrung to prevent you from avoiding or shutting down these assholes then you should not buy their products.

The company that is currently preventing me from using my computer to read the news is a company called Vizu. Vizu's corporate address and phoe number is 185 Berry Street, Suite 5200, San Francisco, CA 94107, Phone: 415.362.8498. Go ahead, give them a call. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you how much consumers love their product. Vizu is a Nielsen company. Their media contact is Julia Monti, Nielsen - 646-654-4412 - Julia.monti@nielsen.com. Give here a call or drop her a line, too. She'd love to hear from you.

Still Ticking

I collected another stent on Thursday. That makes 8 total, so far. Then on Friday, I had an ablation in my heart's upper chamber. Nobody really told me everything that was involved with that. I assumed it was a lot like the ventricular catheterization angioplasty. I was wrong.

A cath takes about 45 minutes, give or take, absent complications. The ablation procedure is more like 4-6 hours. I was in the lab for 5.5 hours. Second, they knock you pretty far down, anasthesia-wise for an angiogram. Not so with the ablation. I got a lot of lidocaine (a numbing agent) in the entrance points: they poke a hole in your right and left femoral artery and insert the catheter. However, they can't give you much sedation or it masks the arrhythmia. So I was concious and in a good amount of pain for the entire procedure.

In an angiogram or similar procedure, they close off the artery with a stitch, so you are up and around alot faster. With the ablation, they just lean on the two wholes they've poked in your very, very upper thighs until the hole they punched in your femoral artery forms a clot. In my case, that was another 30 minutes. Then, because you don't want to throw that clot or cause the hole to re-open (you can bleed to death very quickly if you start bleeding out the femoral artery), you have to spend another 6 hours lying flat. By flat, I mean almost completely. They do let you elevate your head about 30 degrees.

Once the small amount of versed and sometimes phentynal they give you wears off, you are in pain. A lot of pain. My nurse kept me waiting about 90 minutes before she gave me my first dose of pain medication. I lay there, actually wanting to die, I was in so much pain. Finally, she comes in and asks me if I want a pain pill or a shot of morphine. I said "Yes." It took her a second to figure out I wanted both. By that time, a couple of other patients had heard me moaning and crying and come in to see what was wrong. One of them actually called the charge nurse on my behalf.

So. Now I have dead heart on the bottom and dead heart on top. And yet my body keeps on going. I take that as a sign that there is more instore for me. I just wish I knew what my second act was. And all the cardiac issues are getting rather old. I wish those would either kill me or go away. Selah.

Okay, Now I Have Seen It All

Okay, so now the new thing in tattoos is anal ink. Her mother must be soooo proud.

I'm Scared

Last month I went to the cardiologist and one of the routine things we did was to check thee history on my defibrillator. I have an implantable cardioverter defiblrillator, or AICD, to give me a jumpstart incase my heart goes gonzo. It's something a lot of people who have congestive heart failure get as a prophylactic measure.

But, anyway, to get back to why I am scared. Last month, we checked the history of the AICD and discovered that there was a dramatic increase in cases of ventricular tachycardia (V-tach or VT). Well, my cardio doc was concerned enough that he wanted me back in a month to get a new echocardiogram (ECG), re-check the AICD, and talk to the electrophysiologist.

It is not comforting when a doctor tells you he isn't sure what is going on, or if there is a problem. Not comforting at all. Now, I have to get two separate catheterization procedures on my heart. Within the next week. Not that there's anything to worry about yet.

I would be able to find a way to make peace with the news that I was getting worse. I would do cartwheels if I was told I was getting better. But the doctors don't know.

And I'm scared.

Yes, I Really Was That Big an Asshole

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the events leading up to my marriage ending. But I have been thinking of it more these last few weeks. It had me feeling (and acting) depressed and introspective but I didn't know exactly why.

I realized that I had not felt at peace for a long time. Among the many compliants I had about living with my wife and kids, one thing I never felt there was like a stranger, an interloper. Happy or unhappy, from  day to day I had a place I knew I would be each night, with food on the table, the isolation of the basement to retire to. I may not have been happy, but I was at peace.

I think if you were to ask Wife, there would have been times when she was convinced that we were on the verge of disaster. I remember her acting, and I have since learned she was not misrepresenting herself, like we had a moral and legal obligation to start packing and give up the house the first time we had a late mortgage payment.

Over the years, she became far more comfortable with the fact of being in debt and being overextended, but she has still not accepted it emotionally. But, there is more here than merely my failure to live within my means and her disapproval of it even as she enjoyed the fruits of our overspending. What I stole from my wife is much more valuable than money or dignity or even happiness. I  stole the last bit of her sense of peace.

You see, my wife was born in an atmosphere where she was regularly assured, through action and routine, that she was safe. I was raised in the same community. My own experience was a little different because my family had neither the wealth, the connections, or the bloodline of the Gilded Cage (the name I have for the suburb on the North Shore of Lake Michigan, a collection of suburbs where nearly everybody has lots and lots of money, land, or stock. But Wife was the real deal.

For some reason, Wife continued to have that sense of peace with me until the very end. She wavered in the last 10 years, but hey, when push came to shove, she was on my side. And because she was on my side, things would turn out fine.

I stomped all over that sense of peace, of being loved and protected, sheltered. I stomped all over it with other women. I stomped all over it by managing to sabotage my career at every opportunity. She will never not worry about money, or her mental health, or the mental health of her kids. Hell, she'll worry about me. I don't know if she will ever open herself up to a man again.

I killed off her sense of peace and mine. I knew it as I was doing it. I didn't want it, I kept telling myself. And yet, I did little or nothing to stop it.

This is a complicated thing. But it's kind of at the center of the shitstorm, if you know what I mean. It isn't going to be particularly fun for me. It will be incredibly boring to some, self-indulgent shit to others. But I gotta get over this hill before I can see what lies beyond it. We're gonna be her for a little while.

Qualitative Difference

I have never seriously contemplated killing myself. But I have many days when I would not fight to stay alive.

One More Saturday Night

I just noticed my birthday is on a Saturday this year. I'll be 51. Last year, I spent my birthday in the hospital, having my third heart attack. This year, I'm hoping for something a little different.

When you're married, and you have been for a long time, Saturday night tends to lose its specialness. It's not like in your 20s (or your teens) when Saturday night is something you start getting ready for when you wake up Saturday morning. When you're young, you get your hair cut, you get your shoes shined, or whatever it is that your personal sense of style (or the totally unique look you have with 100 of your closest friends) demands.?

When I got older, we may still have gone out to dinner on Saturday, or even more rarely to the movies. But it wasn't like date night. We'd do our thing, then we'd go home. Let the dog out, feed the cat, watch a little tv. Sometimes, we'd have sex, more often not in the later years. But the mystery, the anticipation, the sense that at any minute something totally cool and unexpected might happen goes away. When you're 40 and have two kids and have to teach Sunday School at 9, it's pretty much a lock you aren't going to just decide on a lark to drive to New Orleans.

When I first separated, I told myself that Saturday night was going to be a magical night again. That I was going to hit the bars, theaters, and be the carefree, totally up-for-anything dude I was in my 20s. And I went out the first few weekends I was on my own. I worked my way through the bars and clubs all along Clark and Halsted and I hit the newer scene in Bucktown and Wicker Park. But I quickly discovered something. It's kind of weird and icky to be partying with 20-somethings when you're old.

So I withdrew for a while, and started staying in, or going to safe places. The movie theater is ageless. Anyone can go. I found the clubs like Jazz Showcase and Kingston Mines that played music for grown-ups with a limited tolerance for Rhianna or Lady Gaga. Slowly but surely, I found my footing.

Last birthday, I turned 50. It was the first birthday I had spent on my own in over 20 years. I found a remarkable way to spend it. After breakfast, I had chest pains and wound up in the hospital, having a heart attack. The morphine was kinda cool, but that may just be because it made the garbage truck get off my chest.

So, this year will be my first birthday on my own. I'm taking a mulligan. And I think I'm going to go a little wild. Have a few drinks, dance a little (like nobody's watching), and howl at the moon.

And if I start to get an ache in my chest, I'll just do a few tequila shots and see if it goes away.

One Day Does Not a Boycott Make

So Chick-Fil-A sold a lot of chicken and waffle fries yesterday. So what. It's not a secret that there are a lot of people out there who think that the State should be determining its policy based on a Christian ethic. They're wrong, of course. The First Amendment makes that much clear if it is clear on any matter at all. There are two reasons why I will continue to boycott Chick-Fil-A and you should too, no matter where you stand on gay marriage.

First, Dan Cathy and his family have supported groups that actively oppose legislation to afford civil rights protection to same-sex couples, using the company's money. Any person is free to believe what they believe, free from persecution. However, commercial speech, speech by a corporate or other business entity, is subject to less protection. Because the purpose of the entity is to make a profit, it is not appropriate for the entity to be enaging in political speech except in very limited circumstances. Chick-Fil-A has not played bby those rules, so the Court has interpreted the First Amendment to afford less protection to commercial speech. One of the areas in which corporations have less freedom than individuals or non-commercial organizations  is advocating a discriminatory treatment by the State of a protected class.

Second, the purpose of a boycott is not to make a big, flash-mob style media event and then go back to business as usual. The purpose is to make the object of the boycott feel financial pain. I don't care how much chicken the Cathys sold yesterday, or how many pounds Mike Huckabee gained back. It wasn't enough to keep them from feeling the pain of every citizen who believes the Government has no business telling folks who they can and cannot marry based on what the Bible says (and let's face it, you can find a passage  in the Bible to support any position, including incest, rape, murder, and mob attacks) deciding they won't add their hard-earned money to the profits the Cathys use to make them moe hated or make their life more difficult.

The results of the boycott will be evident in the decreasing quarterly earnings the company reports. This match ain't hardly started.

Catching Out of Work

Every few weeks I find myself bored and resolve that, health or not, I am going to get back to my professional life. Even if it kills me faster, at least I'll be able to go out engaged with the world again.

People tend to withdraw from those of us who aren't employed. At least, the employed tend to withdraw. It's almost like unemployment is a disease and they don't want to get infected.

Half-Assed

I spent the day doing a number of different things, flitting from task to task. It allowed me to cope with a real tendency to lose interest in whatever is before me very quickly; I just moved from one task to another. On the other hand, I didn't finish a single thing. I have a dozen tasks all part-done.

I guess what I'm trying to say is



Hey! Let's go to the movies!

Introduction

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American Life. We don't have a "middle period" in which we may take time to appreciate our accomplishments, take stock of our talents, before we begin that slide into old age.

For better or worse, I have been given that second act. I'm 50 years old. I have managed to blow up my marriage, my career, my relationship with my children, and many of the people I once called friend.

So I am here to take stock. Maybe I will find redemption. Maybe I will just fade away into a cloud of indifference. Bear witness, if you wish.