The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
funny Don’t know if you ever read the obits in your local or national paper. If you don’t, you should. They contain some of the most interesting and significant reporting of our time.
Here’s one that you you need to know about. Every now and again a person comes into this world that all of us should thank. A person whose presence all of us should be grateful for. Col. Mize was one of them.
Know a veteran? Don’t just stand there. Thank him or her for the service.
So I’m cruising home from points north and west, passing through a meth-head–infested slum that borders the canal to the north of the ’hood. My face itches. Again. Couple weeks ago, the dermatologist remarked that this particular kind of annoying itch is often caused by an overgrowth of the yeasts cells that naturally inhabit your skin. Not the kind, he said, that infects women, but just the ordinary everyday flora of the face that for one reason or another get out of hand. An inexpensive solution, he added, is simply to wash your face with Head & Shoulders shampoo, the stuff people use for itchy dandruff, which is caused by the same little critters.
This is not the type of woo-woo eco-friendly organic stuff sold at places like Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. While it may be available at Costco, I feel no inclination to buy a lifetime supply when I have no idea whether it’ll work. Nor have I felt any urge to make a special trip to the Safeway or to the run-down Albertson’s nearby.
Went into a Walgreen’s on the way back into town from Scottsdale last week. But there was only one little guy at the checkout, all alone in the store from what anyone could tell. Ten or twelve people were standing in line; some nut at the front was arguing with the fellow. Give the kid an average of two minutes per customer to move people through: that would be a twenty-minute wait. At an optimistic one minute per customer, we were still looking at 10 minutes of standing in line. No thanks. I put the junk back and left.
Okay. So there’s the backstory.
On the way homeward through the slum, I pass a CVS, a joint I patronize on rare occasions. It’s clean and usually has some version of whatever you need. This day I need a) a L’Oréal mascara wand, the kind with the white undercoat on one end and the black stuff on the other end; b) a bottle of non-aerosol hair spray; and c) the proposed Head & Shoulders.
In the make-up department, they do carry L’Oréal, but they do not carry mascara in that brand. Ohhhkayyy…
Now I search the shampoo aisle for a bottle of Head & Shoulders, and I can’t find it.
Huh? What kind of drugstore doesn’t carry dandruff shampoo?
I find a stockboy and ask him where the Head & Shoulders is to be found. He directs me to — get this! — a locked case!
No joke. The dandruff shampoo is kept under lock and key in this store. When I make some remark like “you have gotta be kidding,” he says, “if we don’t lock it up, people steal it.” It crosses my mind to ask how it’s used in the manufacture of meth. But I restrain myself. Who knows? Maybe the locals drink it.
Welp, there’s no such thing as easy: Head & Shoulders now comes in all sorts of vanity versions, not just the anti-dandruff variety. Most of them are just ordinary shampoo with various kinds of conditioners and BS in them.
Foolishly (what was I thinking?) I say, “Which one has the active ingredient?”
Of course, the kid has no clue. He’s not the brightest rhinestone on the cowboy shirt, I’ll tellya that. He says he doesn’t know, but I could go up to the pharmacist — he kindly offers to accompany me, he being friendly as a puppy — and ask which one has it. I say I have other things to do with my time than wait in line at a pharmacy counter to ask what’s in a bottle of dandruff shampoo, and I suggest that reading the ingredients would be a faster way to figure this out.
This possibility has never occurred to the kid. Now he proposes to hand me one bottle at a time of each of about eight or ten variants, so I can study the contents. One at a time. Lest given free access to the shampoo safe I might make off with one, I suppose. Silently, I wonder how the lad ever learned to tie his shoelaces.
Oh well.
I leave without the mascara and without the shampoo, but do pick up the single bottle of spritz-type hairspray in the store. When I get this stuff home, I discover why it was sitting there, all by its lonesome: the squirt nozzle doesn’t work. Somebody else must have brought it back.
And now I’ll have to drive back up there sometime in the next few days and take it back myself.
I imagine this is what it’s like in any retail store that caters to poor folks. Sucks to be poor, doesn’t it?
She’s in love with her new Rope Toy: carries it everyplace she goes. Problem is, it’s almost as big as she is!
Cassie and the new sidekick:
So this morning it’s off to New Cardiodoc, a fellow whose practice is SO busy he has no time for nonsense.
Since we last met, along about the end of December, I’ve dutifully tracked my blood pressure, every goddamn day. Since diddling away time with a blood pressure monitor is not my favorite activity, it’s been a pain in the tuchus. BUT…the result was a nice little data trove that showed…
a) my monitor calibrated almost perfectly with Young Dr. Kildare’s, suggesting it’s reasonably accurate;
b) the average BP, even with a couple of stress-induced spikes, is 128/75;
c) the average BP when I’m off the sauce is as much as 9 points higher than when I’m on the sauce.
And…and…What’s this spike in December?
That’s where Old Cardiodoc was yelling at me.
What? Why?
I stopped taking the meds he prescribed because I wanted to see what would happen if I lost weight. You’ll recall I lost 30 pounds and started exercising regularly. He flew into a frenzied shitfit.
So…you can identify specific circumstances associated with this and these other two or three spikes?
Yup. They have to do with my annoying work.
Well, hell. New Cardiodoc’s response to all this was that I do not need to be on blood pressure meds.
Do I do upper-body exercise as well as all the walking? No? Well, spring for the cost of a personal trainer: one session should be enough to learn how to do all that’s needed. For hevvinsake, have one drink a day. Two is OK. Three is excessive. Come back in one year. ’Bye!
heh heh heh heh… I’m beginning to like this doctor a lot.
Here’s what I’d say, for general consumption: If you ever have even the slightest doubt about what a doctor says to you, GET A SECOND OPINION!
If the second doc agrees with the first doc, then fine: you have a consensus and a credible diagnosis, even if you don’t like it.
If the second doc disagrees with the first doc, then maybe your suspicions are confirmed. In that case, any other cost to you is decidedly worth it.
😉
Next week, lhudly sing huzzah, I finally get to go back to the cardiologist for his requested three-month check. Not exactly looking forward to it. But I have some kind of cool stuff to report to him…some anecdotal stuff that’s possibly of interest to the rest of the world.
As you may recall, the bodacious CardioDoc delivered a large litter of kittens when he discovered that I’d discontinued gulping the pills he’d put me on, because three or four weeks into the thing they were still making me so dizzy it was dangerous to drive and I felt at risk of falling in my house, where I happen to live alone, with no one to notice me laying on the bathroom floor with a broken hip. He also tried to convince me that the side effects, of which these were only two, were all in my silly little head.
Despite his sh!t-fit, I still felt doubtful that my blood pressure readings were consistently so high that I should make myself sick by swallowing pills that may or may not be necessary. So I tried another cardiologist.
He said, having viewed the record I’d made of almost daily readings tracking progress on and off the drug, that he did not believe I needed to be on blood pressure meds, but he asked me to continue keeping track and to come back for another consult.
So…after three months of dutifully pumping up a blood pressure cuff (dutifully checked against the doctor’s equipment) and faithfully recording every measurement every day, a few interesting phenomena emerged out of the fog of data.
First, I do occasionally experience alarming blood pressure spikes. These happen during or shortly after particularly stressful events or periods: a long, long hassle with a difficult, frustrating, ENRAGING editorial project; a visit to the doctor’s office (I just hate going to the doctor!); day-long stretches of ditzy, stressful work; a couple of days of drinking too much (three drinks in a day is too much for me). These subside, and in between the readings are in the normal range, and in fact fairly low for someone my age.
Second, swearing off the sauce, weirdly, does not cause my blood pressure to drop. In fact, it seems to do the opposite. I hopped on the wagon shortly before Lent started, figuring this would be a good little Lenten sacrifice. Heh. What that has now done is provide data showing average BP on and off the sauce.
Five days off the sauce in March produced an average BP of 127/74, and that included a stress-induced spike of 140/80.
Five days on the sauce in February and late February: 118/69.
Say what? Must be a fluke!
Trying again: five days on the sauce in early February: 126/75. Not great, but still less than the teetotaler’s average. That’s nice. I guess whenever Lent is over, it’ll be safe to go back to my evil ways.
But there’s more: These figures are showing something else that’s much more interesting.
Lately I’ve been working on another novel. This has caused me to spend several hours, whenever I could break them loose from paying work, at creative writing. This is not necessarily easy work. At one point last week it took two days to grind through about three paragraphs.
That notwithstanding, every time I’ve taken the BP after an hour or more of living in a fantasy world and writing about it, the readings have been way down. I mean, like 107/69, 110/68, 112/67…wow!
D’you suppose there’s a connection?
I find I feel a great deal more relaxed after choir rehearsal, even on an evening that follows a perfectly crazy-making day. Haven’t tested the BP directly after walking in the door from rehearsal (it’s usually late and I want to go to bed, not fiddle with the annoying and uncomfortable gadget).
Huh. Kinda stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you’re doing something that makes you crazy and you do it all the time because (arrrhhhh!) you do it for a living, the stress load would tend to push your blood pressure skyward. Substitute something you find satisfying (even it it’s also fairly uphill work), and maybe you’d feel less stressed. Ergo, maybe those BP figures would come back to earth.
I wonder what would happen if all you did was creative work? That is, work of the kind that you enjoy because it’s challenging but satisfying, and because you find it fun or enjoyable. To use a current trope, work of the kind that puts you in “the zone,” where you’re not even aware of time passing.
The bead-stringing, for example, doesn’t fall into that category, at least not for me. It’s just another ditzy and frustrating activity…hours of focusing on something that’s so boring it glazes your eyes and that often has to be undone and done all over again.
But the fiction writing, even if I have to go back and rewrite – and I do commonly write and rewrite and rewrite again – is utterly absorbing, in a pleasurable way. It is, in effect, a form of daydreaming.
Come to think of it, I started writing the first novel during a period when something was needed to distract from a great deal of psychic pain. I had recently divorced and was discovering that was evidently a mistake – or if it wasn’t a mistake, the temperature out of the frying pan wasn’t any cooler than it was inside the pan. I was living with a guy who was driving me screaming nuts, and I didn’t seem to be able to get free of the relationship. Though I had a full-time job, pay was low and I suffered from bag-lady syndrome in a big way – probably for good reason. My father had disowned me. My son refused to speak to me. And the work and politics that come with an academic job are, shall we say, not much fun.
Today I’m certainly not wrestling with that kind of nonstop, day-and-night distress. I no longer need anything to spirit me away from a crazy-making job and a crazy-making personal life. But nevertheless, apparently dreaming up a fictional world, reviving old characters, creating new ones, and putting all that in action is a relaxing thing to do. De-stressing, we might say. Maybe even objectively stress-reducing.
You know, if I could make money off these things – and it wouldn’t have to be much money – I would cheerfully quit the editorial labor, drop the teaching, and spend the rest of my days living in various fantasy universes. If it’s true, as it appears, that one needs a great deal less money than one thinks, I really wouldn’t have to earn much on these things…maybe a net ten grand a year. Peanuts!
If I were doing this all the time – four to six hours a day – I’ll bet I could crank two of these things a year. Over the course of say, three years at that rate, one would build up a backlist of self-published e-books that just might return that much. Hm.
Let’s say, for the sake of a round number, that you netted $2 apiece on an electronically published novel. To net $10,000, you’d need to sell 5,000 copies. But if you had six books out, then to generate 5,000 sales you’d need to sell only 833 copies of each book. Per year, that is. And that, in the strange alternative world that is Amazon, may not be unreasonable.
Wonder if you can have your low blood pressure and eat it, too…
### Sorry, folks! I don’t know what’s wrong with these photos or why they all uploaded looking underexposed. The fix doesn’t appear to be easy — reuploading brightened pix doesn’t work — and I don’t have time to fool with it right now. Wrote this post over the weekend because I knew there wouldn’t be fiddling-around time this week…argh! Will try to come back to this later today, if the opportunity presents itself.
Spring has noticeably sproinged here. My gosh, it’s been gorgeous. And flowers are blooming all over the place. The air is saturated with the perfume of orange blossoms, has been for weeks. Check out what’s growing in the yard:
As usual, click on the image for a larger, higher-resolution view.
The iris have erupted in gay profusion this year, after several years of near dormancy. I forget what those red things are next to them — some other kind of bulb. But here’s some of each, close-up:
Long as we’re peering at things close-up, isn’t echeverria charming?
Here’s a blue hibiscus, a plant that’s never bloomed before. I’ve always assumed it wasn’t happy in a pot. But after I moved it under the shade of the olive tree, it perked right up.
In the blue and purple department, the mountain laurel’s in bloom again:
The lady banks rose is now big enough to hide the pool equipment. It’s only taken…what? three years?
The agave I planted when I moved in here — good lord! ten years ago! — has shot up an otherworldy bloom:
Strange, huh? Also in the xeric department, we have these things:
Cassia and bougainvillea. Neither requires (or gets) much water. Here’s a different rose, growing in a pot on the back patio:
And the salvia made it through the winter, amazingly enough. It really was a warm winter.
Not bad, considering we’re in the tenth or eleventh year of a dire drought.