Why I Blog: For My New Friends

I write this blog because I want my internal ponderings of so many years to be out in the world not just swirling around in my head. I hope at times I assist others on their journey, at times perhaps make you smile and either sense relief from my rantings or motivate you to rant back at me. The pictures I include are the real pleasure of my blogging; I enjoy both finding them and sharing with you.

Recently there has been a big jump in the number of internet friends who visit this blog for the first time. Partly this comes from several online chat rooms I have joined for "professional networking" purposes. I also have begun using the net for some other leisure activities and that means many of my new friends see the facebook promos I put up whenever a blog post goes live. 

Not all of these new friends know that I am a fairly active blogger, so I thought it might be a good idea to introduce this blog to new acquaintances and perhaps to clarify to olde friends exactly why it is that I write this blog.

I hope you enjoy what leaks out from my head, my heart and my soul into this blog, if not; please block my facebook announcements, I know I am not everyone's flavor of the month.

Here is some of what you might want to know about me before investing your time reading this blog:

-I am a writer and I often use the blog to test out ideas for articles, stories, even books;

-I have a wide range of interests; some might even say perhaps a bit too wide;

-I might be considered politically liberal but I often seem too annoy my lefty friends with what I write here; I have lots of olde and new readers from all walks of life spread around the world;

-I do have an advanced degree in psychology and I do sometimes write with big words; on the other hand I like to write on a wide range of topics, in particular my Saturday posts tend to annoy my old academic friends;

-when something interests me, I will often chase it around the internet for several hours or days and report back in a blog post;

-while my political posts are heavily United States oriented, the rest of my material is not, at least I hope it isn't;

-I often tell stories about things that happened to me yesterday or thirty years ago; these stories usually have a point to them, but I often forget to mention what it is;

-There have been over 500 posts since I began in 2007. Should you want to know more, you can find a blogger's list (100 things about me) here.


If you do drop by, I invite you to use the comments section on anything that you like, hate, don't understand, really like or completely detest. I enjoy the feedback or blowback as the case may be.

Most of all - thanks for reading. Writing is such a solitary act, it really helps to know someone is listening.

Upon Not Having an Accent

I don't have an accent, which is unusual because common thinking is that everyone has an accent. Linguists differ on just who does and does not have an accent but their estimates are all very high (96%+) on just how many of us do have one. I do not. I learned this from someone who would know.

In 1968 I was a student in Germany. My professor there was a wonderful gentleman named Guenther Spaltmann. He was a native german, an accomplished artist and an truly gifted linguist. He had taught himself over a dozen languages; he was an interpreter at the peace negotiations after World War II, where each speech had to be translated live into English, German, French, Russian and Italian.

On our first day of german language class, Herr Doktor had us each introduce ourselves in german. 

"Guten Morgen, Ich bin Tim Lavalli."

Dr. Spaltmann would then tell us where we were born or at least where we lived during our language acquisition years. When I spoke, he said: "You were probably raised west of Detroit but not in a close-in suburb or in eastern Iowa just over the Illinois state line." Apparently those are the two areas of the U.S. that have a complete absence of accent. What was called flat accent. 

One might think this is a good quality for public speaking or commercial voice work, but in fact the absence of accent makes one's voice a bit monotonous (as in monotone). You need some inflection and rhythm. When I began teaching in L.A. in the 70s, I added a kind of a cadence to my speech pattern to shake off the monotone. I never really mastered an accent or a dialect but the irregular up and down changes in my voice kept the class awake, most of the time.

For an overwhelmingly cool map of dialects in the US 

with clickable pronunciation guides - look here.

Las Vegas Boyz Trip 2011

We had one of our Poker Boyz trips to Las Vegas last week. Mike, as always, provides great photos for us and seemingly doesn't mind the intermittent nagging - "Get a shot of my with the stripper!" He also wanders around early morning and late at night for shots like this one. We did stay at the MGM this trip.

If you don't show up for a Poker Boyz trip, you get your head put on a stick and rude sometimes evil photos are produced. Viewing of those more seedy and salacious snapshots is restricted to bona fide PB members and blackmail.

OK, maybe not completely restricted.

Poker was played. This is me making a final table at Binion's. Two-tiered seven-way chop for the poker players out there.

Matty with Chihuly art at City Center.

Me, also with Chihuly.

Amy at our annual visit to the Cat Condos at the LV-SPCA.

me with kittums at spca

Two Years

Two years ago today our book, Check Raising the Devil, was released. It has sold right around 25,000 copies since then and small royalty checks arrive every six months or so. I was talking with my writing partner, Amy Calistri, about this anniversary and what we learned from writing the book.

First we learned a lot about bipolar disorder, ADHD, meth use and conditions in the Clark County jail. I also got some really great poker lessons sweating Mike through numerous tournaments in Las Vegas.

We got ourselves a New York Literary agent and we are thankful to both Sheree and Janet for everything they did getting CRD to a publisher. Plus they have been most helpful on current projects - professional publishing advice is invaluable to new authors. We also learned a lot about how the publishing industry works and unfortunately in these times of economic stress, how it doesn't work as well.

Finally, we learned what a rare treat it is to work collaboratively. In the two years since CRD came out I have tried to work with other writing partners to no avail. Amy and I had a rare working relationship and yes, we are casting about for another project to do together.

For now I am head down focused on finishing my current novel, would that you will have the opportunity to read it in 2012.

Favorite Bands/Favorite Songs

While listening to a rock&talk radio show on one of my drives around northern california, I heard a question that seemed too simple to have an easy answer:

"What is your favorite song by your favorite band?"

My thought, of course, was - can you actually have one favorite band? or one favorite song by that band? But lists can be fun, entertaining or revealing so I pose this question to you:

"Name your favorite song by your three favorite bands."

The comment section is open below, let's hear your choices. Here are mine in no particular order.

Yes, that's the Uncle John's Band up there at the top. My favorite Grateful Dead song is China Doll. Links are all to youtube versions of the songs.

I think it's fair in all musical comparison lists to put the Beatles into some sort of emeritus category and make other selections. But I left them in as one of my three and the song: A Day in the Life

My third band is Talking Heads and the song is Heaven.

Heaven, 

heaven is a place, 

a place where nothing, 

nothing ever happens

Your picks?

Fractals of the Past

Fractals of My Past: Serial Cerebral Eruptions in Both Hypnagogic 

and Hypnopompic States of Consciousness.

Sometimes the olde academic creeps out and we must have long titles with a strategically placed colon. What that jumble of mumble title refers to is a series of events I encountered not long ago, in which I experienced for several days a recurring pattern of thought. These thoughts occurred just as I was falling asleep, that transitional phase between wakefulness and sleep is called the hypnagogic state. They also happened in the early morning as I transitioned back from sleep to wakefulness or what is labeled the hypnopompic state.


Now we all experience some fairly jumbled mind-space imagery at times in the spaces between sleep and not-sleep. This is not unusual at all. But for two days, both morning and night I had a series of remembrances that were all of a very similar content. I vividly recalled incidents from my life in which I was either guilty of a social faux pas or some form of minor embarrassment. All of these events I regret but only in the incrementally smallest manner possible; anything less and I would not even be able to recall them. They were what are known clinically in the psychological profession as minor oopsies.


Yet time after time I would wake or drift towards sleep and find myself reliving yet another such memory. After several such incidents, I shook myself and began to consciously imprint a mental suggestion to avoid such cerebral cobwebs; a little shrink trick you can use when you start thinking about snakes or spiders or old girlfriends. But I stopped myself and decided to let the silly string play out on this one.


There was that too flippant comeback to the nice married lady at the Manhattan Beach party.


The rude slip of the tongue to the nun on the playground in third grade.


The unintentional sexual innuendo to that redhead and instead of politely withdrawing I followed-up, I wonder if she ever forgave me.


That tiny white lie that exploded in West Hollywood, how was I to know she had been to that motel?


I estimate that over two days there were at least ten or twelve of these mental machinations that welled up from the depths of my subconscious. The last was so vivid it awoke me at 3 a.m. but it was the last. The parade of mortification was gone as suddenly as it had begun and I was left with run of the mill prurient fantasies to lull me to sleep.


Strange what goes bump in the near night and dark mornings.

500th Post

If I continue at my current blog rate, I will produce another hundred posts about every six months. So the 600th, 700th and 800th posts are really not that big of a deal. For that matter neither is today's offering, which just happens to be number five hundred. I decided to make this is a working celebration. A couple of weeks back I thought I would be interesting to notice what SEO tags (search engine optimization) I had used over the years. That, of course, led me to completely revamp my SEO labeling system. I have removed any stray tags that got used only once or twice and have consolidated several of the others.


So here today on the moment of my 500th blog post, I offer my current list of SEO tags, which do say a lot about what I have and haven't been writing about for these last 4+ years.


Right there at the top, of course, is poker with 75 tags and probably a few more if I had been really diligent and thorough in the early years. These days there are only one or two poker posts each year but in '07 I started this blog as a supplement to my poker media gigs. It makes sense then that poker shrink comes in second with 51 tags. I wrote a lot of articles on commercial poker websites using the Poker Shrink pseudonym.


Next comes the nexus of tags that indicate what I have been blogging about the last several years: politics [41], commentary [44], life [39], psychology [26], books [40] and writing [35]. I would imagine these will crawl ever higher on the list.


Back in '09 there were a lot of posts from my fourteen months on the road - my undomiciled period: travels [34] ranked high. I also like to acknowledge holidays [27] of all sorts, including birthdays, halloween, anniversaries and solstices of all kinds.


Earlier, while writing the poker book - Checking Raising the Devil [12] with Mike Matusow [30] and my co-author Amy Calistri [16], I also wrote quite a bit about Las Vegas [31] and the World Series of Poker [24].


Recently a range of life ponderings [27] have asserted themselves as I look out of the window at my Berkeley view [21]; I never get far from various forms of philosophy [17] both near and not so. And I often regale you with my life-long fondness for cats [18]. More recently, with prompting from a friend who also blogs, I have begun to tell more of my stories [27] - two academics walk into a fetish bar . . .


Wonder what will the next 500 bring?

Traffic Jam at the Top of the World

I do sometimes write short pieces that come to rest other places than this blog. I am going to be doing a bit more of that in the coming months. Here is a bit of Himalayan fiction I wrote that my good friend Pauly used in the March edition of his blogzine Truckin'. 

I call it Traffic Jam at the Top of the World - offered for your enjoyment.

About Truckin': "The contributors at Truckin' write for the love of self-expression, which is a clever way of saying that they generated these stories for free. I'm amazed at their collective bold leap of faith, because the scribes exposed their inner souls to you. With that in mind, please spread the word about your favorite stories. Good karma and many blessings will come your way for exposing new readers to our amazing writers."

Saved by a Collie

I told a friend a childhood story the other night and she said: "Have you blogged that yet?" Wow I have really infected my friends with this blog. But no I have not told my collie story and I should, so I will.

We grew up with two Blue Merle collies. Kerry was the first and Shane the second. They were each with us about a decade. We got Kerry soon after we moved out of Detroit, so I was just about two at the time. A little over a year later a house was being built across the street from us; the basement had been dug but heavy rains had delayed further work and there was about three feet of standing water in the hole.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon a 3 year old Timothy wandered away and a semi-frantic search was underway when someone spotted the wagging white underside of Kerry's tail through the bushes across the street. They ran over and found me half-in and half-out of the basement hole, a laid out Kerry sprawled across my body with her teeth holding onto my belt. I don't know if I would have drowned, how tall are 3 year olds? Needless to say everyone was happy not to have tested the science of kid and muddy water in a hole.

Those were wonderful dogs, we had cats too of course and as I grew up I became a devoted feline lover but Kerry and Shane hold a special place in my heart, perhaps a bit more special for the collie that may well have saved my life.

--

photo: that is a blue merle collie, not one of ours but the closest I could get in an internet search, I wonder if any of my siblings have old photos of those dogs.

Imported From Detroit (II)

Over twenty years ago I was visiting back in Michigan and took my mother to visit my Aunts Alice & Doris in Detroit. We decided to go out to dinner but discovered it was prom night and all the local restaurants were full of high school students in limos. The ladies suggested an old hangout they used to go to, a Hungarian family style restaurant, so off we went. The place was as they remembered it - long wooden tables, huge plates of food served family style. I was fascinated listening to the stories from their youth. When the waitress overheard one story she spoke up and it turns out she was the granddaughter of the restaurant's owner they all knew fifty or more years ago.

What visually stuck with me from that evening was the view from the two story ceiling to floor windows. We were on the second floor and across the street was a narrow strip of land on the bank of the Detroit river. There posed on the very edge of the river was a former five story receiving building for offloading raw materials headed for the auto plants. I say "former five story" because the top three floors had collapsed and crushed the floors below. I was stunned both at the decrepitude and at the lack of governmental action to force the demolition and clean-up. This was probably 1988 or '89. Today there is small industry of photographers and journalists engaging in what is being called "ruin porn", chronicling the erosion and deconstruction of the great cities of the rust belt.

If you remember there was a derogatory line in the Eminem/Crysler ad about writers who "have never even been here" telling the story of the city. I am going to deal with ruin porn in my next Detroit post. But for now let me just establish my own street cred - I do know Detroit and I have been thinking about that city for most of my life. I am guessing my opinion of its future will not be enjoyed by everyone, but that also is for a later post.

What is clear is that Detroit has been leading the way in how this country will deal with its industrial decline. At this moment the response has been dismal. Neglect and corruption have contributed to the slow but steady abandonment of what was once the 4th largest city in the United States. We cannot say: "As goes Detroit, so goes the nation" that is simply not true. But it might be enough to say Detroit is the big, soot-stained canary in the mine of America's previous industrial might. Some would say the future is a slow burial.

More to come soon as I ponder further on the city of my birth.


Imported from Detroit Part I

--

The photograph at the top is of the old Michigan Theatre in Detroit. As you can see it has been turned into a parking lot but in the demolition process the decision was made to preserve the outer walls and towering ceiling of what was once a theatre that could seat four thousand. It makes for an interesting or harrowing juxtaposition which speaks to the condition of the city.

Paying Attention to All the Wrong Clues

Ah life, sometimes it sneaks up on you when you least expect it and other times you least expect it to sneak up on you. For over three months now I have had in my medicinal arsenal some fairly strong pain medications for my slowly recovering back. Growing up as I did in a pharmacy, I am well aware of the multitude of side effects drugs of all varieties can potentially have. I also know that just because you have taken a pill or a potion for days, weeks or months does not mean it will not suddenly have unforeseen and previously absent consequences.

So the other day whilst traveling on mass transit here in San Francisco, I was noticing an uneasy feeling. I wasn't exactly ill but neither was all together okey dokey. When the metro passed into a tunnel I realized I was hallucinating. Nothing too outlandish but hallucinations none the less, I grew up in the sixties, I can identify a good visual cortex non-sequitur. The train emerged from the tunnel and I got off at my intended stop and took a seat on a bench. I could perhaps walk a few blocks to my prior destination, where several friends could help me with this dilemma or I could get back on the train going in the opposite direction and head back to the safety of a comforter, a cat and some sleep. 

I was sure I knew what was wrong, my diagnosis was that single pain pill earlier this morning had just taken a wrong turn somewhere around the medulla oblongata. I took the train back through the phantasmagoric tunnel and made it back to the safety of my temporary cave. 

However . . .

You knew there was going to be a 'however'.

It wasn't a drug reaction at all. I was genuinely ill with something akin to the 24 hr. or less flu. Felt fine, if tired, after a long nap and right as acid rain the following morning. Good decision-making based on a completely false diagnosis. Not that 'head for bed' is not a wise panacea for many if not most of the twists and turns of daily life.

--

The Art above is way over the top for what I experienced but I found it on a medical site I searched for the potential side effects of the meds I am taking, so at the time it felt appropriate if mildly excessive.

Imported From Detroit (I)

I admit it, I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials; I just am not a sports fan anymore. Unfortunately, since the recession the super ads haven't been that super. No one wants to spend the big bucks make those great ads like they used to. All the way back to the 1984 Apple MacIntosh ad, super sunday has been the place to make big announcments, remember during the dot com boom when over half the ads were for companies you never heard of and didn't know what they did even after you viewed the commercial. 


But this year not so much, a few CG animations that were interesting, a bunch of trailers for summer blockbuster wanna-be movies and then came the Detroit ad - "Imported from Detroit" - if you didn't see it go here. If there is such a thing as a great ad, this is it. You may have already run across it, the Chrysler ad with Eminem. It really is a two minute piece of art or at least an ode to Detroit. And it sets out the basics of the larger critique of fate of the city that is Detroit.

The reason I bring it up is because I too am imported from Detroit. I was born there and for the first 25 years of my life, Detroit was the large metropolitan area that filled the niches for what big cities do. Sure I had Ann Arbor for lots of things, but Detroit was the big city and many of my relatives lived there, holidays were celebrated there and when family stories were told they all happened in Detroit.

For nearly a year I have off and on had a curiosity with the current state of the city and yes it is a bit of a morbid fascination. I have collected some stories, some pictures and some memories I have had them queued up in the draft folder. The super bowl piece brought it all out into the open. Time to write about Detroit.

I probably have three or four posts worth of Detroit material, but we start with the Eminem/Crysler ad, it really is a masterpiece. Please take a look and I will continue with this in a few days after a bit more reflection on the place of my birth.

--

Art: Joe Louis' Fist sculpture from downtown Detroit
Video link: youtube.com has been removing some links to the ad, I will attempt to keep an alternative link open here

M&M Monday - Blow Out the Candle

Champagne and canapes all around. Talk among yourselves, avoid discussions involving your lastest medical procedure or persistent aches and pains.

Next year, a Beatle's Song.

--

Birthday Art by me

Hair, less Hair, Hairless

For many years I had a hairy tradition of growing a winter beard and taking it off during the spring conference I attend in late March or early April. Intervening warmer climates, like Las Vegas, disrupted my hirsute practice.

This year I grew the beard and the hair, which is to say what hair I still have; but I find myself unable to wait until late March to divest as I will be returning soon to more temperate climes.

Several friends tell me the beard makes me look older; must be the grey.

While other friends, all of the female persuasion, prefer me with facial fuzz.

As I say in all of my relational endeavors, if there were a consistent female presence in my life, she could request any flocculent configuration she desired.

Until that time, it will be a thermal decision.

30,000 Words or thereabouts

Last month while I was taking a break from blogging I was working on a novel. I had thought that by middle to late December I would have the first 30,000 words ready to send to my small cadre of readers for evaluation and critique. The way I have this novel structured there is a big reveal, a climax, a turning point at about a quarter of the way through the story. At least that is how I thought it was going to go.

Last night I reached that all important reveal at something over 60,000 words. A tad beyond the first one-third of the book and double the number of words I had expected to expel getting to that pivotal point in the story. Rather than make some arbitrary adjustment I decided to let the readers have at it. But I couldn't possibly throw sixty thousand words at readers who have done nothing wrong other than be my friend and let me have their email eddress.

So as a compromise I sent out three chapters, around 8,500 words. If anyone likes those I will supply the remainder. After all, if I can't hook you in three chapters why would you want to read more? I was reminded of that last night when I was looking around my friend's library for something new to read. I started four books and each time I tossed it aside when the author failed to grab my attention with the first chapter. One was so confusing I didn't get past the first page.

Why do some authors think they don't owe their audience some semblance of value. I paid for your talent, okay in this case my friend paid for it, but the point is - have some respect for the reading audience and give them something to hold on to.

Hopefully, my readers will find something to: sink their teeth into, wrap their arms around, dip their toes in, tickle their fancy, capture their spirit, let their heart take wing, or simply enjoy.

I'll let you know.

I'm Back

Well at least "I'm back" to blogging if not back to Berkeley quite yet. The remodel on my apartment back in the Bay Area is going as slow as expected, so I will be up here in Weed/Mt. Shasta for a continuing indefinite period of time.

As for the hiatus from this here blog, I must admit for the first week or so I was queueing up a goodly number of posts for the new year but more recently I have been happy to just not think about blogging at all. We will have to see how that all plays out over the next weeks and months. I will admit to having twenty-one blog post topics all dated for January or February, again let's see how that goes.

I have been working on my current writing project, a novel. I am close to having a large chunk of pages to offer to my victims kind volunteer readers. I will talk about that when the time comes in the next few weeks.

The other issues of life and limb continue in a miasma of yet mysterious origin. I sense that 2011 will be a period of exploration unlike anywhere I have personally ventured in the past. I anticipate being moved to provide you with footnotes and references along the way; crystal clarity will be optional.
---
photo: Me & Midnight

Away

Enjoy as many of the holidays as the waning of the calendar may bring your way.

We shall return in the new year.

Penchant for Penguins

An extremely astute (and possibly OCD) reader noticed several penguin references recently, so I guess I should fess up. In the 70s & 80s I had a penguin thing. I collected penguins of all kinds but I also read a lot about them in both contemporary and scientific literature. Yes, I had a thing for Opus but mostly because Berkeley Breathed endowed him with many characteristics I could relate to, particularly the little feathered fellow's distain for all things scatological.

In the winter of 1980 I even went to Antarctica (it was summer there) saw many different species of penguins and other animals, including a single rookery of over three-quarters of a million brooding penguins. When I moved to San Francisco in 1991, I only unpacked about a quarter of my collection, ten years later when I left the City, I gave away many of my favorite artifacts to friends and shipped the remainder to another collector. It is always heart warming for me to visit friends around the country and see a single piece of my old collection gracing a mantle or acting as a door stop.

These days I collect absolutely nothing of material form or space. Words are my medium and they can exist quite easily in the vacuum of cyber-space. I will be visiting my lonely storage locker in the next several weeks, if I can easily lay my hands on the photo album I will post a thirty year old photograph of me and a gang of Antarctic penguins.

Rainy Sunday Street Scene

Still trying to get my meds balanced, the consequences of applying the pain patch too close to ingesting a muscle relaxant is apparently a nap. Yesterday, a grey saturday, I nodded off in the early evening only to wake up in what I thought was the middle of the night. There was to be no going directly back to sleep, so I snapped on the reading lamp and dove back into The Historian. Sometime later I heard the too loud talking from eight floors below, a gaggle of Cal students headed back to campus from a night of partying. A weekend annoyance that must really bother lite sleepers. 

But wait . . . the parties break up between midnight and two, it must not be the middle of the night after all. I started to check the time and then let it go, who cares -- I have a book and a quilt, what matters the parsing of the night. 

Some time later I nodded off. When I awoke again it had turned light, well grey actually and moist. Sunday was going to be rainy and dim -- some of my favorite weather. I lay in bed looking out on the the seamless sky, my mind drifted to a scene I had written yesterday where I mentioned a character's stance on breakfast. I wrote that he was "not a big bacon and eggs man." Neither am I but that sure sounded good on this particular morning. So I rolled out, donned some sweats and with a peremptory face splash and tooth scrape I was off to the market. The dashboard suggested it was 7:45 and 52 degrees, no mention of the rain, I clearly need a more technologically advanced mode of transportation, one that can tell me when its raining.

I ducked under the store awning and grabbed a outlier cart. There was a street guy neatly arranging all the other shopping carts and telling the universe -- "It ain't no right weather for a dog, no dignity in being rained upon." I pondered that bit of wisdom in the produce aisle and decided it was well worth a dollar when I left the store. Street wisdom is a commodity that should be rewarded.

Not a lot of shoppers early on a rainy Sunday, I grabbed only the basics: eggs, bacon, bread and chocolate. One check stand open, the only other customer handing her check and ID to the checker. There was a three or four minute technical issue with getting the computer to accept her check for $12.01, which included two dollars cash back. While the clerk struggled with the scanner, the customer told us how much of an accomplishment she consider it to actually get herself out of the house on "such an awful day." She was quite fashionably dressed in 1950's school marm, with black horn-rimmed glasses and the mandatory hair bun; not to mention that rain equated with awful and she wrote a check for two dollars cash back. Oh she was going to make it into a story for sure, a living breathing archetype.

The manager floated by, punched a few buttons solving the check issue and the flow of commerce began anew. A change of clerks slowed my checkout by a minute or so, when I was again outside under the awning, headed for my chariot, I saw her and the street guy by her car. He was too close, she had her hands drawn up under her chin, arms tight to her chest. Shit! Sometimes being the large, white male who does the right thing is just a pain in the ass.

I set my bag on the hood of my car and walked towards them.

"I think you're frightening her."

"We just talkin'."

"I don't think she wants to talk in the rain."

"Dis is none of your business."

"How about five bucks to leave her alone?" I snapped the bill in my hand.

"I ain't no fuckin' beggar!" He turned aggressively toward me, then immediately lowered his voice, cowering his head. He had instantaneously converted to ultra-submissive. Before I could sort it out, she pointed over my shoulder and said: "Police."

I glanced back and two Berkeley uniforms were headed our way.

"Is there a problem?"

I turned back to my groceries, "She can fill you in," I said.

"Sir, we need citizen complaints to take any action against violent offenders."

"He wasn't violent towards me, but as I said, you might want to speak with her."

I wasn't about to parse the interaction between those two psychological complexes. I mean two dollars cash back, really? Besides there were bacon and eggs waiting not to mention a grey, rainy day to enjoy.

----

photo from a Sam's Club in China

Spinal Confession

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth -- anonymously and posthumously. -Thomas Sowell

One of my very closest friends once commented that he had learned more about me from this blog than he had from nearly twenty years of face-to-face conversations. I plead guilty to being circumspect about my personal life. Another friend observed that I never actually avoided any conversation but after an evening of discussion I may have spoken in depth on how early Aegean cultures felt about a certain issue but he still didn't know my personal feelings on the subject.

Today I make a leap of self disclosure. I am doing this is response to a confluence to two factors. First, I have had conversations with both friends and family in the last two weeks in which I have hidden my current physical condition from them. Second, several of my dear friends have pointed out that such behavior may be less than optimal for everyone and with the deepest respect they told me to knock it off. After much reflection I have come to believe them to be much wiser than I on this issue, therefore I am going to change my behavior. So here goes:

In the fall of my sophomore year in high school it appeared that I had suffered a back injury while playing football, I was 14 at the time and the problem was misdiagnosed. The x-rays were read without my age being attached and the assumption was made that I was an adult male instead of just barely a teenager. For several years I took many aspirin a day for severe rheumatoid arthritis; a disease seldom found in young adults. Later in college I was reexamined by an orthopedic surgeon and father of a close friend and received my true diagnosis.

I have a congenital malformation in the small of my back. A teenage growth spurt and not football had been the aggravating factor. The facet joints at L4 & L5 (lumbar) on my right side are not well formed and do not perform their structural function of providing full range of lateral motion. I have been aware of this problem every day for the past 48+ years. Mostly I have kept this information to myself but the problem has become more acute in recent years. 

Last week the pain became so severe that I had to make my third trip to an emergency room for narcotic induced relief, the previous ER visits were in 1974 and 1986. Other than these three occasions I have managed the discomfort with exercise, pain meds and bed rest. I have missed scores of social events, dates, even intimate encounters over the years and used a variety of excuses other than the truth about my back to cover my absences. With the helpful yet still annoying prodding from several friends I have decided to stop deflecting sincere concern from those in my life, that process begins with this disclosure.

I won't bother with a complete history of my back pain, instead I will focus on my current situation. The most recent ER visit was two weeks prior to the date of this posting. I had been unable to stand upright for about 36 hours, getting out of bed was a full ten minute ordeal, any activity below knee level was simply out of the question. I had spent the better part of one entire day on the floor. Many thanks to M for getting this bound up old man to and from the hospital. As an aside, I apologize to anyone I spoke with on the phone that first week; I probably do not remember what we spoke about and I just wasn't ready to talk about all of this just yet. 

Once the ER physician heard the clinical details of my history and recognized my depth of understanding of the problem, we concurred in our diagnosis. The short term solution was to break the cycle of pain and spasm with major drugs. I was given injectable Dilaudid and Valium. Twenty minutes later the doctor returned to find me standing, back against the wall, a position that offers some short term relief, with obvious surprise he said: "I have never seen a patient standing after that much Dilaudid." I mention that part of the story because in the realm of silver linings, it appears I can now tolerate high dosages of pain medication without the buzz usually associated with them. And while that doesn't sound like much fun . . . I am now able to use Oxycodone on a regular basis to minimize the pain without being mentally altered.

One week later (a week ago today) I met my new primary care physician and fortunately found another doctor who recognized that I really am an educated adult able to understand and articulate my somatic issues and we rather quickly agreed on a course of treatment. I now have pain pills, pain patches and muscle spasm prescriptions with refills and liberal dosage limits as needed. Also I have a referral for physical therapy and once I am past this critical period we will go for a complete physical and perhaps even an MRI peek at my lower back before reassessing my condition.

For now, thank you for listening. I shall attempt to be more forthcoming about my condition, including public updates here on the blog, perhaps once a month in the near term. I would make one point from my decades of experience with a persistent medical condition -- anyone who has a chronic condition literally lives with it every day; talking about it is often simply tedious and annoying for us. I will try to be more open in conversations with my family and friends, if you will try to remember not to see me as merely a degenerate spine or a weak back. Illness, chronic injuries, syndromes are only one aspect of a person's being, but quite often the sickness becomes an all-encompassing label and the person begins to fade away.

My sincere appreciation for your concern, prayers and invocations; yes I will be availing myself of the myriad of interventions not found behind a medical school diploma. I am as open to a shaman's smoke as I am to a doctor's prescription pad.