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Medication Road
I have always cautiously bragged that my back has held up pretty well to the strains put upon it so when recently I made an ordinary maneuver and my back went code red, which means it only hurts when I move, I was not so worried because I figured it would go away in short time. After a day, which is what I consider short time, and the pain was still there, I entered into the fortuitous convergence of my needing meds and actually coming upon them. A big man said, here, take these, only one knocked me out cold, so I took the whole bottle with me and drove back home. It can only be maturity that has me not popping them on the road as a late night driver.
When I got home I waited for a friend to come over but the friend had conflicting interests and so after a reasonable time of waiting I popped one. After more time I figured the friend's interest in coming over was more theoretical than actual so I popped a second one, deciding that consciousness is an overrated state, especially when you are alone and the night is well advanced. The two little pills made my back pain seem like something I had read about but never actually experienced.
In the morning I felt so stupid with pill haze yet still had pain in the lower back so I decided to write the whole day off to pill popping and bed rest. And anyway, it was raining a little so work on a metal roof seemed inadvisable. I dreamed about missles flying over America. I got out of bed in the evening and had a drink or two and that made me feel better than I could have imagined, because the prescription warned against alcohol mixing and the pills were stronger than other prescriptions with the same warning which I have summarily ignored. I then smoked a type of cigarette and arrived at a place that, although pleasant, seemed infused with too much knowledge of the artificiality of my agreeable state. I realized I only felt as good as I should feel, without meds.
So that's where I am now, on the road to wellness without meds. Of course, the road is long and the meds are many and although my back pain seems well removed I have received this morning a crick in my neck that makes me move stiff-looking, like I'm in a brace, so I'm not making comforting promises of abstinence to myself or any other fool.
Flowers
So the forsythia has stopped blooming that yellow if it were red would be fire engine and the lush greening up the mountains is less shocking to the system and also your body is getting more used to the daylight you yearned for during dark winter but then when it came it made the days seem longer than you knew what to do with.
One person's wanting things to stay the way they are is conflicting with another group of person's wanting things to stay the way they are and so there may be a conflict out here in these parts and it may turn out that my skills of curmudgeon will come into play in the coming months. This morning, not getting what I needed from my dreams, I lay in bed daydreaming about chasing a particular citizen down the driveway while I waved a stick and gurgled gutturally threatening themes.
As a hobby this year I am growing flowers. I don't know if I've mentioned that before but its what I'm doing so if you got something to get off your chest about it then go on ahead with it. What? Oh I got about a thousand little plants in flats right now soaking up the early morning sun and some of them I have never seen outside of pictures, but the usual, you know, marigolds, cosmos, gallardia, rudbeckia, maroon coreopsis, painted tongue, balloon flower, agrostemma, shasta daisy, zulu prince daisy, south african pearl daisies, some moon flowers, petunia, gazanias, dianthus, coleus, a few morning glories for the pool fence and some sunflowers. I got some zinnias and other stuff still in seed packets which I may direct seed out here somewhere but truly I don't have anywhere near enough prepared ground to even take care of those aforementioned already started plants.
I was talking to a big burly man I contracted to dig up and move out of here some rather impressive concrete slabs and he comes and goes at will with his heavy machinery and one day he stopped and said whatchu growing and I said flowers. His wife likes flowers. On another day we were again talking about my flowers and he said are you gonna sell some of them and I said maybe but maybe just give some away and he said his wife said I am a man after her own heart because most men don't like flowers, and I said, oh yeah?, and he waved his hands like he was cleaning the plate glass window which may or may not exist between us and said hey hey hey, I'm not saying nothing.
I got beau coup chores so I'm a get on with some thing, probably up on the roof for a few hours, maybe drive in later, to RFK, for an afternoon game.
The Death Of Herman
Everyone is awkward around death. The veterinarians this morning were stalling with the inevitable news which had been implied in yesterday's phone messages. The bad news could only be death. Living patients were dealt with while Lorina and I waited for the attending doctor to doctor up her we don't know what happen he just died speech. Herman's reign at the top of the hill ended with two weeks worth of painful prodding and incising, the removal of a pebble from his bladder, more exploratory prodding and incising, more sickness, death, cold storage, and a sneaky exit out the back door of the veterinarians office, in the parking lot of which he was delivered to my outstretched hands. As a blue paper wrapped frozen package he reminded me of nothing, the lifting and transporting just a task. The shape not at all cat-like.
Herman was the bastard step-child of cats. Hoisted from one almost loving family to the next, leaving a trail of eye spooge and chewed up shoes from Brooklyn to Upstate to the DC suburbs and finally, a palatial 40 acre estate nestled in the foothills of the Shenandoah mountains, Herman was at the same time loveable, and, just a bit of an aggravating son-of-a-bitch. I will nonetheless have fond memories of our almost two years together and can say with the utmost sincerity that he was a good enough pal for that time even though I wouldn't let no human pal of mine wake me up yowling at five in the morning for no good reason.
As a Kung Fu sparring partner he was second to none.
Lorina shed a couple of tears at the office but I think as much as any reason out of politeness to the doctor, who seemed really upset and not sure of how to handle the proceedings. I tried to communicate that I held in my heart no enmity nor blame of wrong-doing and yet we were held captive for an amount of time which seemed longer than optimum, in a room the size of a broom closet. The doctor wielded her sorrow like a blunt object, not sure if she wanted to attack or just remain defensive. I think she was understandably unsure how to phrase the last part and so was dragging out the I'm sorry, we did everything we could, part. The last part was do you want his body and uh I'm sorry but its frozen.
Behind me over there, with its cloth covered foam burnt orange seat, is the last piece of furniture Herman ever shredded, and he did that during his last two day hurrah of feeling over the top perky, between his two nearly back to back multiple day stays at the vet.
When I think back to our first summer together when he jumped up onto my naked back by the pool, with his seventeen pounds of weight behind the claws dug into my flesh, and how he slid a few inches down my back like that, and how I screamed and turned around and shook my fist at him and swatted in his direction with my nearby shirt and how he just stared blankly back with nary a flinch in reaction to my movements, it is that reaction or lack thereof which makes me realize he did have that one essential characteristic of all the cool cats before him. He was inscrutable.
It turned a little cool and drizzly today. A grey day as good as any to bury Herman under that dogwood tree over yonder. Herman RIP.
Poison Ivy Etc.
I have poison ivy blisters the size of lady bugs on my fingers. Some that face each other between the fingers are like lady bug lovers, doing God only knows what all while I sleep trying not to scratch them. Or I try not to scratch them while I don't sleep. I haven't slept through a night in months and that may only be part of getting old(er). Locals tell me they have seen worse but I have never in my life seen something under any name erupt so grotesquely on my or any other body.
The blisters are in the red ripened stage, almost done being themselves and will soon either burst by some casual contact of my work day, and bleed a mixture of blood and viscous poison ivy puss, or just recede, leaving perhaps mild scaring. Those could scar J said looking at my fingers. I looked at my hands and thought I bet you won't be able to tell a difference.
I got these blisters from Morton, Lorina's ex, whom I got to see this week so soon after voicing the desire to kill him that the possibility of it for one tiny second became in my mind real enough in all the inherent unpleasantness of such a deed that I immediately lost the desire to do it. Lorina said she didn't set up the potential train wreck of our meeting but if she didn't it was either God or the Devil so you pick. Morton's act of innocence was sufficiently convincing and I had to at least give him the credit I would give a street hustler or lie n' deny artist with an equally convincing pitch.
I got the dose, on my fingers and both sides of my face, from cleaning vine off the tiller that both Morton and I had borrowed from Lorina. But Morton say hey, he just don't know, which is probably true and either way is fine with me. Live and learn is what I say. And killing is so permanent. I was mad for awhile though, which of course is no reason to kill somebody.
That Lorina is friends with her most immediate ex is something I write off to the occasionally annoying inconvenience of living in a community the size of a small desert island, where every public gathering is guaranteed to have a hodge podge of ex-lovers intermingled in the mix. As for the witnessing of the ex-spat, where former lovers relive the past negative energies that made them so loveable, well, I'd just as soon have a dull needle inserted in one of my testicles.
My mom in Dallas with Alzheimers is getting a little more used to the idea that her children are going to be messing in her affairs and called my sister in California to leave a message on her machine that apologized for being rude to her earlier in the week. My sister handles some of mom's banking. We got somebody in the house with her, coming by a few hours five days a week but while my mom is somewhat polite to the person, the person is just too young to have any experience in common with her, or so she thinks. Another woman has been introduced recently and my mom is apparently taking to her better.
I was starting to panic about the cumulative disarray of my affairs so attempting proactivity I sent a pointed email to my New Orleans property manager and said what up? I expressed the concern that I felt my luck was running out regarding having a house left unoccupied in that neighborhood for this long. I applauded them for the high standards with which they qualified perspective tenants but that maybe now was the time to lower those standards, and maybe the rent too. I received a response telling me, oh sorry to have worried you, we leased out your place earlier in the month, (and for fifty dollars more than what was already questionably high rent for the size of the place.) In a neighborhood pretty constantly on the edge of destruction. So if improving a ghetto property without contributing to gentrification is a good thing then this is me stroking myself for accomplishing that (or just thinking that I have*).
I still have the business of convincing my insurance underwriter not to cancel my policy on the house, which they think is over-insured by almost a factor of two. I believe an appraisal delivered to the desk of the underwriting agent 90 miles away will take care of that. I've been given a deadline and that may be construed as a good thing.
So like a tree frog burrowed underground for the winter but without the ice crystals around his heart I have started to emerge from my less than active winter work schedule and the work is emerging faster than I care to think about and the same goes for Lorina who has several thousand vegetable and flower plants outgrowing their individual planting cells, at least two weeks before potential last frost.
I have too many projects started and a few I have contracted out. Firstly I need to scrape and paint the metal roof of the bighouse (while not completely ignoring the back porch which I sanded down after fixing the few rotten areas.). I got the ladders set up and a rope tied around one of the chimneys and I made a little plywood platform to hold my paint buckets level on a slanted roof. I have started scraping with a six inch mud knife taped to a stick and am about ready to start spot priming the first section and the goal will be to finish this before it gets too hot and also not to slide down one of the 10 or 12 gables to the detriment of my burgeoning well being.
Their is rumor of a future beach house needing the attention of one skinny caretaker so my territory may expand. Curmudgeon International, Slim speaking, what the hell you want?
(*my nephew sends me an email yesterday, from which I excerpt: "... but should see [your former neighbor, Melba]
maybe tonight at a meeting or something, and will be
sure to inquire on what should be her latest gripe
towards you: the increased chance that the tax
assessor for your district, under steadying pressure
from state tax commission to stop the tax breaks to
under-assessed uptown mansions, undertakes a
comprehensive reassessment of the entire district,
thus driving up her/your/everyone's insurance rates.
what are you some sort of bougeoise (I don't even know how to spell your kind) gentrifier?"