Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

In Memoriam

I’ve been wearing this brand of daily-wear lens since the early 90s. They’re no longer being made and nothing else (including the recommended substitutes that I tried a several weeks ago) fit as well. In fact, the manufacturer has phased out all their vial lenses for the more profitable disposable variety. I mean seriously, WTF?

And I’m not alone. A quick search on the interwebs reveal a lot of folks who are plenty pissed off that these lenses have been axed. Hopefully I’ll be able to stretch a few more months out of my last pair of CSIs before I’m faced with having to give up on contacts altogether and go back to glasses full time. (Yeah, the “new” lenses I tried are that bad.) Since I’ll once again be insured after the first of the year I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find a competent eye doctor who is willing to work with me to find a suitable substitute. (PSA: Avoid Target Optical.)

 

3 comments

Posted on

It's all Bullshit

In response to this:

It’s all bullshit—the currently fashionable “God” is no more real than the pantheon of deities were to the ancient Romans, Greeks, or Egyptians (plus countless others) and yet I’m sure those folks believed in their mythic sky fairies just as fervently as the current crop of “believers” who also need to desperately believe in something—anything—to absolve them of all personal responsibility for their lives, give it meaning, and explain away the wonderful, horrible, brilliant, and often unfathomable mysteries of the universe.

Personally, I have no problem with anyone’s personal beliefs, as ridiculous and unsupportable as I may find them. HOWEVER…

2 comments

Posted on

Photo


I still find it so very odd to see snow covering a pool area. I guess it’s just the Southwest/West Coast boy in me…

And I still don’t understand why my iPhone camera sometimes takes excellent pictures, and other times they’re crap.

3 comments

Posted on

Insomnia. Again.

Sometimes when you can’t sleep, your mind wanders to some interesting places…

A Christmas Fantasy

We first saw him one afternoon as he was leaving Starbucks: an otherwise unremarkable older man in tweed coat, a button-down shirt, black trousers, black lace-up boots and a red bow tie.

I pointed out to Ben the man’s resemblance to the fabled Doctor Who of BBC fame (albeit much older) and added that with the Universe being as unfathomably huge as it is, the possibility of a character like The Doctor actually existing (if not in our unfathomably huge universe, then perhaps in one or more of the the innumerable parallel ones) was undoubtedly quite high.

I didn’t think anything more of it until this man reappeared at Starbucks several days later, quietly sitting in one of the padded chairs by the window. Neither Ben or I had noticed him sitting there when we arrived, or had we noticed when he’d come in. He was sipping some hot beverage, and I could tell from his expression he wasn’t quite sure if it suited him or not.  He’d take a sip, make a face as if trying to decide whether or not he liked it, and then put the cup back down on the low table in front of him, studying it intently. He repeated this several times until our eyes met.

There was a twinkle in them, something that said he was either much younger than he looked—or much older, having lived through enough that he now found wonder in the most common of occurrences.

I went back to my reading, but from that point forward, every time I looked up our eyes immediately met. He wasn’t flirting; I know what flirting looks like. No, it was almost as if he was studying me.

I got caught up in reading some article online, and the next thing I knew, this very odd gentleman was standing beside our table.

“Excuse me,” he began in a decidedly British accent, “but this beverage…what do you think of it?” And he held out the steaming cup.

I took a cautious sniff and said, “Peppermint mocha. It’s a seasonal thing they brew up. Not my personal favorite, but not bad overall.”

He looked at Ben and then back to me. “Forgive me for saying this, but you two are a very unusual couple.”

Ben looked up. “How do you know we’re a couple?”

“Oh it’s obvious,” he said. “The way you look at each other, your body language. How long have you been together?”

“A little over three years,” I said, wondering why I was even having a conversation with this stranger.

“Ah, newlyweds!”

“Not exactly,” Ben said. “We can’t get married in Colorado.”

“That’s rubbish!” he exclaimed. After a brief pause: “What brought you here?”

“Ben is in the Denver Teacher Residency Program,” I said.

“Brilliant!” he said. “This world needs more teachers!”

“Yes it does!”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, looking directly at me, “your voice…?”

“Cancer,” I said. “Nine year survivor and counting.”

At that point he pulled up a chair and sat down, and stared at me intently. I glanced at Ben, who had a frozen, puzzled look on his face, and then the rest of the world ceased to exist. It seemed as if a cone of silence had descended around the stranger and I.

He reached toward my neck and uttered those infamous words, “Don’t worry, I’m a doctor.” He palpitated my neck and gently drew back my collar. “A tracheostomy?”

“In the beginning it kept me alive, and my doctor said I would probably have it the rest of my life.”

“Barbaric!”

At that point I knew I’d slipped into an alternate universe, because from his jacket pocket he withdrew something that could only be a sonic screwdriver. It gave it a quick twist, the end lit up green, it emitted that distinctive sound, and he pressed it to my neck.

I blinked. He was gone. And the rest of the world had returned to normal.

I reached up and felt my neck. The trach tube was gone.

“OH MY GOD!” I said, shocked by the return of my old voice.

Ben looked up. “What?”

I pulled down my collar.

His mouth dropped. “Wha…? When…? Your voice!”

“Do you remember the old guy in the tweed coat?”

“Yeah, he came up to the table and commented how we were such an unusual couple and then wandered off.”

“No! He did more than that!  He’s fucking Doctor Who! We have to find him!”

We packed up our backpacks and rushed out onto the snowy street.  Looking back and forth he was nowhere to be found.

“It’s a Christmas miracle!” Ben said.

After a few minutes we gave up looking for him and started walking back home. As we passed the parking lot north of Starbucks I happened to glance left and saw it: the big blue British Police Box, sitting right in the middle of the lot. People were getting out of their cars and walking right past it, as if it was the most common sight in all of creation.

The door opened, and the bow-tied stranger stepped out.

“All right, you lot. Don’t just stand there! We have places to go!”

1 comments

Posted on

GPOY

Baby it’s cold outside…

To clarify my earlier post, I don’t mind the cold, or even the snow. It’s driving in the damn stuff that I loathe. To that end, I’m going to start taking public transit to work on snow days, even if it takes me twice as long to get there. (One bus to the train, and then one train to work.) It just isn’t worth the stress to drive. (I almost didn’t get back into my apartment building this afternoon.) Since I brown bag it already, I don’t need the car to run out at lunch, and as long as I don’t have to go to our Colorado Springs office, this will work out just fine. (I’m reasonably certain that if an emergency arose there on a snow day that required my physical presence, my boss and I would drive down together in his car.)

9 comments

Posted on

Over It

There are snow people and there are non-snow people. Despite my initial optimism, I am discovering I definitely fall into the latter category. (And to my friend Mark in Duluth, you are more than welcome to go ahead and say, “I told you so!”)

That’s it. I’m over this shit. Unless things change drastically over the next five years (Ben’s obligation to his teaching program) it is very unlikely that Denver is going to be a long-term home. In the meantime I’m either going to have to start taking public transit to work when it snows like this or I trade Anderson in on the four-wheel drive model. Considering the MINI will be paid off in about six months, that isn’t going to happen.

The state of Colorado and the City and County of Denver had 24—if not 48—hours notice of the impending “snowpocalypse.” The white stuff started falling at 6 pm last night.  So why was I greeted by unplowed roads (including the I-25 freeway) this morning? I almost didn’t even make it off our side street onto Colorado Blvd. this morning…

The only reason I actually came into the office instead of attempting to work from home was because my boss was planning on being out today and someone had to set up for a video conference…that was, of course, cancelled.

2 comments

Posted on

Insomnia and Some Reflections On Mom

Insomnia: just one of several unpleasant symptoms associated with the declining levels of a specific hormone in men of a certain age. Yeah, that hormone.

Being able to sleep in on the weekends is one of the things I miss most about not being 25 (or 35, for that matter) any more. These days I’m lucky if I can pull off anything over 8 hours on a good night.

And those times when insomnia strikes at 3:30 or 4 am, I often find my thoughts drifting back to the last few weeks of my mom’s life. Prior to the fall that led to her eventual passing, she had told me on several occasions she had been ready to go.  She wasn’t happy.  She had always been a very independent, active, self-sufficient woman, and the fact that Alzheimer’s had robbed her of all that and forced her into assisted living with a set routine had no doubt made life unbearable.

Mom adored Dennis, my first partner. She was heartbroken when we split up, and after he passed from AIDS in the early 90s, she refused to remove his photo from her nightstand, always referring to him as her second son.

The same could not be said of my second partner, Bernie. They were at odds almost from the moment they met. I think that was because Bernie was as independent as she was, and  she knew our relationship would end in heartbreak. She didn’t hate him, but she also didn’t shed a tear when we eventually went our separate ways.

On the other hand, although she was outwardly pleasant toward him on her visits to San Francisco, Mom loathed Rory. Moms know; that’s all I have to say regarding number three.

But with Ben it was different.  She loved him from the moment they met and I think that despite her diminished mental acuity at the time, she sensed that he was the man in whom she could finally entrust her son to happily live out his life.

And that is why I still find the timing of her fall—for lack of a better word—suspicious. It happened very shortly she and Ben met, and at the risk of making this all about me, I now believe that since she felt I was safe and she was ready to go, she set the wheels of her departure in motion—if perhaps only unconsciously.

The fall in assisted living (which led to an initially undiscovered fracture in one of the vertebrae in her spine—thank you very much Abrazo Fucking Healthcare—and forced her into a nursing home and a wheelchair) was only the first. I mean, how many times can you “accidentally” fall out of bed or from a parked wheelchair?

(My brother-in-law immediately suspected negligence on the part of the nursing home which may in fact have a ring of truth to it, but I think the repeated falls were far more likely her desperate attempt to get the hell out of this life.)

I feel no guilt about any of  the decisions my sister and I made during her final weeks on this earth, but I regret that she went through so much suffering—both physical and emotional—during that time. I also regret that I didn’t spend more time with her during her final weeks—even if, for all intents after the final fall she wasn’t really here any more.

And perhaps selfishly, I find myself missing her even more these days, not being able to pass on all my adventures and tribulations in Denver…

4 comments

Posted on

American Horror Story

Try as I might, when American Horror Story debuted, I just could not get into it. I saw the premier and maybe one or two additional episodes before abandoning it. Shows with as much graphic violence as this show possesses aren’t my thing, and the storyline wasn’t really engaging—or coherent—enough at the time for me to justify sitting through the blood splatter.

Several weeks later, out of curiosity and because I am a fan of Zachary Quinto, I returned to AHS and unexpectedly found myself completely caught up in the story. It’s dark, twisted, and things are finally beginning to make some sense. (Although it seems that just when I think I’ve got it all figured out, the writers come out of left field and whup me up the side of the head as if so say, “Nope. Try again. That’s not it at all.”)

I now consider it an excellent reboot of a genre that had all but become a caricature of itself. Bravo, FX!

1 comments