Coffee heat rising

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Eine Kleine Stress Reduction Trick…

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Uhm… D’you ever wonder where on earth your common sense went? Does common sense take vacations in the South Pacific? If so, is it possible for us to join it now and again? Preferably beside the gentle waves on an unspoiled white-sand beach?

So the blood pressure has now dropped, pretty consistently, into the “normal” range. Figures are pretty much the same now, all the time: 125/73 this morning; 127/77 after dinner last night. Not bad, for an old bat pushin’ 70. Years, that is, not millimeters.

Whence, you ask, this miraculous change?

Whence, indeed: from the coffee pot. As far from it as one can get.

I happen to favor very high-test black coffee: the best espresso beans I can get my hands on, fresh-ground and brewed in a French press. As you might imagine, this substance will raise the hair on a normal human’s head. Moi — it just wakes me up and gets me going, a desirable result in my book.

It’s not like I drink this stuff all day long: imbibulation is normally confined to about 16 ounces first thing in the morning. It is enough, however, to bring on a monumental withdrawal headache if I quit cold turkey. One time after I quit, the headache lasted a full week. That was fun.

Welp, the other day I was contemplating the return of the accursed palpitations and the painfully evident link between the palps and the elevated BP numbers. Got palps? Got systolic pressure upwards of 150. Don’t got palps? Systolic is down in the mid 130s. Hm. Exploring the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest for clues to this phenomenon, I realized that most sites discussing control of blood pressure mention caffeine and alcohol as culprits…naturally, my two favorite self-medicating prescriptions.

One site indicated that you need to go on quite the little binge for booze to push up your numbers; I don’t do that — presently I have a shot of whiskey a day, liberally watered down.

But then I recalled that spates of palpable heartbeats and light-headedness are nothing new. When I was in my 30s, a stretch of these moments visited. Once I was on assignment for Arizona Highways in southern Arizona when such an intense episode occurred that I really thought was was going to pass out. So did the people around me. It went away, though.

At that time, the connection between the amount of coffee I was drinking (in those days it was a lot more!) and the unpleasant chest sensations dawned on me. Quit drinking coffee for a few weeks, and all the irregular heartbeats and vertigo disappeared. Presto-changeo!

Like diets, though, coffee fasts do not last forever. I love coffee. I live for coffee. And so inevitably, every time I would go on a coffee-asceticism jag, sooner or later I’d take up the habit again.

And over time, I forgot about the coffee/palps connection. In fact, it takes quite a long time for enough caffeine to build up in the system for me to notice anything that looks vaguely symptomatic. Takes even longer when you’re only drinking it once a day.

So, not paying much attention, I’ve been consuming two cups of coffee so thick you can stand a spoon up in it every day for years now. Week or so ago, I decided to knock it off for awhile, just to see what would happen. And lo! After about three days of caffeine detox, the BP measures went down and stayed down. They’re pretty  much the same now, all well in the normal range.

Dang…who’d’ve thunk it?

If you have stress attacks or “palpitations” (sensation of your heart racing, skipping a beat, or thumping), you might want to try kicking all sources of caffeine, including soda pop. This gives you a roaring headache for a day or two (or more, depending on how much you habitually consume). You can ameliorate that, though, with a cup or two of green or white tea, both of which contain smaller amounts of caffeine than coffee and soda. Use the tea to ease yourself off the drug over the course of two to five days and then quit drinking that, too.

Hey. Nothin’ ventured, nothin’ gained. And it’s free.

If It Looks Negotiable…

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…Grind it up!

This whole accursed business of the college district’s having exposed everyone’s personal finance information to the effing Internet will not go away! Every time I turn around, here’s some new hassle to deal with.

Shut down, per the advice of the credit union’s assistant branch manager, the bank accounts; started new ones. Totalleeeee confused Fidelity, which direct-deposits funds to my cause. A couple hours of figuring out, untangling, explaining, fixing, reinstating follows. Nothing better to do with my time, eh?

Shovel out the office. Find box after box after box after freaking BOX of old checks.

Do I think they’re negotiable? Of course not. Do they look negotiable? Well, sure. Am I going to throw them in the recycling or trash? Don’t think so.

Grind up box after box after freaking BOX of checks, some of them ordered quite recently. Feels like money itself going into the shredder. Annoyed. Pissed. Wanna bite!

Dump three bins of shreddings into the recycling.

Not done: find more old junk that should’ve been dealt with…

• unasked-for credit cards from lenders;
• unasked-for negotiable checks from credit-card merchants;
• plastic, piles of plastic.

Grind up pieces of plastic. How much time is going into this fun experience, anyway?

Financial manager’s admin sends a six-page form to print out, fill out, sign, scan, and send back. Realize she has the wrong auto-transfer and is about to redirect it to…what? If to anywhere, to the wrong account. Argha.

Become confused. Call credit union, get doughty assistant manager on the phone. She becomes confused. We study the online records. We think we have it figured out.

Call  financial advisor; explain. Financial advisor explains to admin. We decide nothing will do but what I have to traipse to their office tomorrow after the doctor’s appointment. Bleyagh. Remember to toss the “MCCD Flap” (aptly named) file into the car.

Hook self up to effing blood pressure machine. Systolic: not through the stratosphere, exactly, but reflective of stress. How am I gonna convince this new cardiologist that these spikes are the result of insane fucking pointless goddamn annoying inflicted-on-me-i-didn’t-do-anything-to-bring-this-on stress and not the normal goddamn state of affairs???  Well…except insane goddamn annoying stress IS the normal goddamn state of affairs.

If it looks negotiable, grind it up. Grind it all up!

Back from “Vacation”…with a New Book

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Hah! That was some vacation from blogging! Naturally, I got the nasty cold that’s been going around, probably once again picked up from sick students turning in germy hard-copy papers on final exam day. Have been sick as a dog the whole time I set aside for R&R. Of course, singing was out for the entire Christmas season, so there’s been pretty much nothing to do but sit in bed or a rocking chair and work.

But that itself has been moderately salubrious. Picked up a new client and have made decent progress through his and the other author’s magnum opuses (opi?).

One of these guys has written a vast saga of a novel. It’s pretty entertaining, but he needs some coaching on how to write fiction, he being by and large an academic sort of fella. As I was racking my brain trying to think of ways to explain how to blend setting, description, narrative, and characterization with the dialogue that he does best, it occurred to me that somewhere in the murky depths of an old hard drive, I had some examples that illustrate exactly those issues, and if I could find that stuff, I would know exactly where to go to find the right examples for the specific issues in question.

A plunge off the dock into the digital lake dredged up…yes! A novel I wrote way to hell and gone back in 2000! And yes, it did have examples of exactly what needed to be explained.

Huh. Think of that.

Out of boredom work-avoidance, I started re-reading the half-forgotten tale…and thought holy sh!t!

Did i write this?

REALLY???

The thing is incredibly good. It was good from the git-go, and right now — fourteen years later — it fits into a genre that’s selling briskly. It’s one of those things that leaves you wondering where these characters came from, where their story came from, and how on earth you ever came up with the skill to tell their story.

Why did I not try to publish when I finished it?

Well, because I got discouraged.

Stupidly — I knew better — I allowed myself to be talked into “workshopping” (yeah) the manuscript with a group of friends who wanted to be Writers with a Capital W. Two of them were taking graduate-level coursework in GDU’s creative writing program, at the time ranked among the top ten such programs in the country. Basically what creative writing programs do is teach people to run their copy past groups of readers who are interested in doing the same thing they’re doing (i.e., fellow authors of unpublishable fiction), subject themselves to criticism by these groups, rewrite, run the copy past…and so on to infinity. It’s an incestuous process that, in my opinion, produces just the kind of narcissistic snoozers that pass for literature these days. It discourages excitement and encourages conformity.

One of these women really did not like what I was writing, which, shall we say, ran to the swashbuckling and highlighted manly enterprise. And it must be said, in her defense, that the novel in question does contain some startling violence and alarming prognistications about the direction humanity will take in a post-post-apocalyptic era. This lady was into postmodern feminist Theory and New Age woo-woo (chakras! :roll:). My hero was the ultimate (male! :shock:) pragmatist in a Dark Age dominated by religious hoo-haw run amok. She hated that.

At one point, she announced that she refused to read any more of it. But she expected me to keep reading her endless naval lint-picking, which may have been wonderful as an exponent of the naval lint-picking genre but which, as it developed, she never had any intention of trying to publish. Because, she said, her feelings would be hurt if some editor rejected it.

Right.

As a result, I became so discouraged that I simply set the manuscript aside, even though it was essentially complete. My co-conspirator had me convinced that it was no good.

Wrong, lady!

When I picked it up again, fourteen years later, I could not believe I could have written anything that good. It is amazing stuff. Right now I’m preparing a proposal for an agent who says she’s looking for new authors (let’s hope this one isn’t into chakras). If she rejects, I may simply self-publish the thing — one of my business associates does Kindle formatting. One way or the other, this thing is going to see some kind of light of day.

So I’ve spent the alleged vacation dividing the days into thirds: half the daylight hours working on the client’s Micheneresque novel; half the day working on the other client’s memoir; and the evening working on the proposal. Let’s hope the index of 460 pages of medieval maritime history doesn’t drift in anytime soon!

As for the experience with the wannabe writer’s group: it pretty much confirmed what I’ve always thought about writer’s groups. It’s the blind leading the blind.

Want to write a book? Sit down and write it.

You don’t write it, jaw about it, and then rewrite, ad nauseam. You write it. You see if it works. You see if it works with professionals, not with a bunch of amateurs. It works or it doesn’t work. Then (and not until then) you move on.

 

A Phone Call to Daddy

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by Jennifer Kinnaman

Here’s a great kick-off for the New Year: a wonderful true story from one of last semester’s magazine-writing classmates. Some people think kids say the darnedest things!

Every once in awhile a confluence of incidents leads to a bizarre and somewhat hilarious event.  Such was the case on a sunny April morning.

The evening before, my husband had called our insurance company to tell them we did not want to renew our life insurance policies that were expiring in two days, due to the downturn in the economy and cost. The next morning, my five-year-old daughter wakes me up with phone in hand to ask if she could call Daddy at work. After grumpily telling her that she is not allowed to wake people up who are sleeping, especially her mother who is fighting a bleeding rash on her neck, I tell her that all she had to do is hit the redial button on the phone if she wanted to call Daddy at work. Since he was the last person I called on that phone, it should ring right into his office.

Ten minutes later, as I’m drifting back to sleep, my eight-year-old son runs into my room and tells me that someone is banging on the front door, looking in the windows and coming into our fenced back yard.  I leap from the bed to look through the window and discover that several Sheriff’s officers are trying to get into our house.  I bang on the window and say, “Can I help you?”  They tell me to come to the front door.

After quickly getting dressed, I open the front door to find police officers all over our front yard, three standing on our front porch.  I ask if everything is OK.  One says, “That’s what we’re here to find out, ma’am.”

They said they got a 911 call from our insurance agent this morning who said that they had a five-year-old girl on the line who was telling them that she can’t wake mommy or her brother up and that mommy has blood on her neck and that she needs to call daddy and wondered if they have his number at work.

Based on the things my daughter was saying, the insurance agent believed Daddy had possibly killed Mommy for the insurance money before the policy expired the next day and had called the police. Mortified, I apologized profusely.

And that’s why my daughter is not allowed to use the phone for the next five years!

QUESTION. AUTHORITY.

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Hot dayum!

I’m back from New CardioDoc, an “authority” picked from that bazaar of authorities in all genres, Angie’s List. Wanted a second opinion to original CardioDoc, who aggressively insists that I need to be on a drug that makes me sick and puts me and everyone around me at risk when I’m behind the driver’s wheel.

Old CardioDoc, having viewed what happens to my blood pressure when I suffer a stress attack in his goddamn office, refused to brook any questions and would not even listen to me when I tried to point out that if I fall and break a hip, I’m here alone in the house and could very well die on the floor before anyone notices and that the vertigo caused by his favored medicament was making it dangerous for me to drive my car. Neither would he take the slightest bit of notice of the fact that overall my average BP is in the normal range, even when one adds in the occasional spike engendered by this or that moment of hysteria.

So before I agreed to return to gulping down a med that does quite the number on me, I decided to pick another quack, any quack, and see what he thought. On Angie’s List, one cardiologist (count him, 1) was both highly recommended and within reasonable driving distance. Made an appointment with him.

Today, with vast trepidation, I slinked into his office, bearing a list of five questions and seven months’ worth of BP figures.

I happen to have, neatly registered in Excel, blood pressure figures going back to June 1. This is how I know what the averages look like. The anxiety-induced spikes are indeed alarming…but most of the time, when I’m not worrying about identity fraud or scared shitless from being in a goddamn doctor’s office, the figures average about 128/79. Not bad for an old bat.

You cannot imagine, especially if you’re a young pup, what it means to someone in my generation to question a doctor. Especially for a woman to question a doctor. Especially a male doctor. Here I was not only questioning a doctor, but questioning a freaking high-powered male specialist.

Sorry, but I just was not buying what CardioDoc1 said: he was telling me things that directly contradict what credible sources say; he was refusing to listen to me when I described the side effects of the crap he’d put me on; and he was blatantly trying to frighten me by way of manipulating me. I hate that kind of thing. All of those kinds of things.

But I was equally scared shitless of going to a new cardiologist and telling him I suspect his colleague is full of beans. So I’ve been racking my hot little brain for weeks trying to come up with a humble, tactful, boot-licking way to ask this new guy to give me a straight story.

And as you might imagine, I had myself mightily worked up by the time New Cardiodoc came wandering into his examining room. Blood pressure was through the stratosphere. However. I had the figures.

He actually believed that anxiety sends one’s blood pressure skyward. And he believed that was what was happening this morning. After he reviewed the figures I’d printed up, with their averages, he announced that he did not believe I need treatment with medication at this time.

Thank you, God!!!

It’s three hours later and I’m only just coming back down to earth. If I took the BP now, it would probably be pretty close to normal. From his office I went by the financial guy’s office to deal with the current stage of the Identity Fraud aftermath. And from there to Whole Paycheck, there to purchase one slice each of two exotic yuppie pizzas and a four-pack of Guinness. Figured I deserved it.

Pizza and two cans of stout ingested, I’m feeling a bit better. Have already had a mile-and-a-half walk today but think I’ll invite the dog out for another stroll by way of burning off some more nervous energy.

That was soooo hard! Soooo scary!!!! And sooooooo goddamn difficult!

But I did it. I questioned authority and came away with a sane answer.

A New Year’s Eve Tale: Penny and the Poltergeist

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Back in the Day, my mother had a long-haired Chihuahua. She’d coveted Chihuahuas for quite some time, and while I was still in high school in southern California, she’d managed to bring herself to buy this little dog from a breeder. The pooch was chocolate brown all over, and my mother called her Penny. We brought Penny with us to Arizona when my father retired to Sun City.

Well, Penny was quite a little number. Unlike many of today’s specimens, she wasn’t especially aggressive, although in her tininess she could be alarmed by large moving objects and humans. Though she didn’t bite or threaten to bite, she yapped incessantly. This dog would bark at the sound of the sun rising and going down. She barked for no other reason, as far as anyone could tell, than to hear her ears rattle.

One December, I had come home from the University of Arizona for winter break. My father had gone back to sea, claiming he needed to earn some more money to make their retirement secure but really, I suspected, because he’d found full-time shore life less than the paradise he’d hoped for. So it was just me and my mother.

It was New Year’s Eve. My parents’ old friends, Capt. Karl and Mrs. Mabel Brunberg, had recently moved to Sun City, trailing my father as did a number of his other friends and his brother. They invited my  mother over to their house to ring in the new year. Since a fair amount of drinking would be done and I was not of age — I was only about 17 then — I was left at home with the dog.

So, along about 11 p.m., when my favored TV shows went off the air, I climbed into the sack, with the dog ensconced on the foot of the bed.

Down the road was a grody little burg called Surprise. Today this town, having fallen into the clutches of the developers, is a middle-class suburb of stick-and-stucco look-alikes, but in those days it was largely an immigrant labor camp. It was small and quite a ways from Sun City, maybe eight or ten miles off. But real people did live there.

Well, along about quarter to twelve, the locals could no longer restrain themselves. The car horn-blasting, the firecrackers, and the pistol shots in the air began well before midnight.

The celebration was way, way in the distance, so far away it was barely audible to me.

But Penny could hear it. And she didn’t like it.

She started to yap at the first faint sound of a horn blaring into the black sky.

I figured she’d have a little frenzy at midnight, when everyone went outside to shoot and holler, and then she’d calm down and I could finally get to sleep.

Uh huh.

Right on one count. Wrong on the other.

Once she got herself wound up, she stayed wound. Along about twenty to one, I finally gave up and went into the living room to await my mother’s return. Figured I sure wasn’t going to get any sleep in the bed. And maybe a change in venue would quiet the beast.

So now we’re perched on the living-room sofa. It’s a tiny house, no bigger than any of the two-bedroom apartments where my mother and I had lived over the previous six years. The living room, which was too small to accommodate a dining area if the residents wanted to devote space to a television set, was demarcated from the galley kitchen by an L-shaped wall that created entries to the kitchen from two ends.

Parked on the sofa, Penny has calmed down a bit. I pull an afghan over me and hope to catch a few Z’s.

Wrong.

She just settles down, and YAP!!! She’s up and barking. Settles down again and YAP YAP YAP!!! and settles down and…

Damn. This is going on and on. I begin to wonder if maybe someone is actually outside in the darkness.

Not being the brightest of young things, I open the front door. Can’t see anything, so I step outside to investigate.

A light breeze wafts past and whistles through the fronds of the Mexican fan palm in the front yard. And YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP!!!!!

Holy cripes. She’s barking at the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves.

I go back inside and we take up our position on the sofa again.

Penny has just settled down when BING-BONG!

The doorbell rings.

Whaaa? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP  It’s now one in the morning. YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP Who the hell is at the door at one o’clock in the morning? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

I look out and see the neighbors from across the street. Open the door. They’ve come over to wish us a happy New Year. I return the compliment and say my mother is at the Brunbergs’ house. They, probably noticing that I’m a bit pale by now, ask if I’m OK. Stupidly, I say everything is just fine. They go away, leaving me with my nerves unraveled and the dog vibrating like a gong.

This, I think, is getting out of hand. Enough is enough. I decide to call the Brunbergs and ask my mother to come home.

But they haven’t lived there long enough for their number to have been published in the current phone book. (In those days, the Internet had not even been dreamed of.) I get out my mother’s address book and find it is just chuckablock full of scribbled names and addresses. It’s so full that she no longer can list her entries alphabetically. I can’t find the Brunbergs’ number.

So I decide to call information. In those days there was no 4-1-1 (nor was there a 9-1-1). You dialed “0,” got an operator, and she would use the phone company’s records to look up the number you needed.

So I dial “0.” The phone rings and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP rings and YAP YAP rings and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP YAP rings and…. It’s New Year’s Eve. Everybody and his little brother, sister, and yapping dog must be calling their relatives long-distance. The operators’ lines are maxed, and I can’t get through.

I consider calling the sheriff, but think better of it. What am I going to say? My mother’s dog is yapping, please come protect me from the wind blowing through the palm fronds?

I consider walking across the street to the neighbors’ house, but…what if someone is out there? Walking around in the near pitch-darkness does not present itself as a wise idea.

The dog and I go back on the sofa.

Penny continues to doze off, jerk awake, and yap frantically, doze off, jerk awake, yap frantically, doze off, jerk awake, and scream YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

She just settles down after a round of yapping, when all of a sudden a weird noise emanates from the kitchen, followed by a loud KEEEE-RASSSHHHHHHH!

Holy SH!T

I leap off the sofa, hair on end and heart pounding. The Chihuahua bounds to the floor, her hackles up, in full dwarfish ROAR.

She charges the kitchen in a cloud of purple YAPs.

I holler Get’em, Penny! Sic’em, sic’em!!!!!!!!!

YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

Penny barks her way fiercely toward the kitchen door, but she’s afraid to go near it.

Finally the adrenalin load subsides enough to restore a modicum of common sense to my addled young brain. I realize that while we were on the sofa we had a clear view of both the hallway and the back door. No one could have gotten into the kitchen without my having seen him. And it’s not very likely that a burglar has been hiding in the kitchen all night.

I work up the nerve to creep over to the kitchen doorway. There I see…

A decorative holiday liquor bottle lid — one of those fake cut-glass lash-ups — has somehow fallen off the countertop and tumbled to the floor. My mother and her friends must have finished off the booze, and she evidently left the lid to the empty bottle sitting there.

But WTF? The counter tilework, as was the style at the time, had a border of lipped tiles that formed a little barrier to keep water from dribbling over the edge and small objects from rolling off.

I actually heard this thing slide across the counter before it fell to the floor. The sound was not CRASH but r-r-r-r-r-CRASH. How the hell did it move, on its own, and cross the lipped tiles to tumble off the counter?

That is a mystery I have never solved. Possibly it was the vibrations from the dog’s high-decibel yapping.

I figure she called up a poltergeist. After all, I was a teen-aged girl, and we know poltergeists are drawn to adolescents. And poltergeists are great tricksters. The spook must have thought it would be very funny to see what the little wind-yapper would do if a real, credible noise set her off.

BOO!

YAP!