Oh, demerol good.

Uhn, demerol bad…

I survived my colonoscopy and now I feel like a very empty tiny kitten.  I slept the day away and felt groggy and faint and HUNGRY. 

I don’t recall ever being shot up like that.  The icy burn of a narcotic in your arm.  Not much fun, really, because I was out for the next two hours and when I woke up, I was not feeling all that great.

Interesting, but I didn’t have an addict’s response of wanting to do that again.

They also gave me some kind of artificial amnesia drug, but I didn’t catch what it was.

Anyway, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know a large number of people connected to St. Anthony’s Hospital over the past few weeks and i must say that they were all wonderful people, down to the very last one.  I had absolutely NO hint of a bad experience with anyone from my family physician, Jeffrey Hirsch, to the XRay and Cat Scan people, to the ER room from my car wreck, the cardiopulmonary center led by Dr. Bajaj, and now all the people connected to St. Anthony’s North Ambulatory Care Center and Dr. Deborah Blalock. 

Lawyers and doctors aren’t supposed to mix well, but this lawyer has nothing but good stuff to say about my doctors and their staff at St. Anthony’s.

Of course, I haven’t looked at the bills yet.

When I find out they charged me $5 for a single Kleenex, I might well go ballistic.

Anyway, for another year I’ll be through with checkups and tests and being poked in the arm with needles after my final checkthrough with Dr. Hirsch in about 10 days.

I’m proud of myself for taking care of myself with this round of exams.  I won’t do anything this rigorous next year, but it’s good to have a “clean bill of health”. 

If I’d quit smoking, even Dr. Bajaj would join the rest in talking about how relatively healthy I am …wait for it … FOR MY AGE.

Speaking of my age, my birthday is July 6.  I share the birthday with my old friend and sumii master, Claude Anderson.  We share a birthday with the war criminal, George W. Bush.  I will be 57.

Lots of people have a crisis on the zero birthdays.  My “seven” birthdays have usually been a turning point for me, but uniformly for the better. 

I’ll be glad when my birthday is passed.  This time of year leading up to my AA birthday and belly button birthday is always, according to my journals, a horrid time for me.  This year, the car wreck.  Years past, breakups and breakdowns and other turmoil.  Then, it seems like I can live without chaos for a few months and get back to “normal”, whatever that may be for me.

I’m thinking about going down to Dallas this coming weekend for a modeling shoot.  It’ll be a nice break.  Road trip.  However, the money is really tight after buying a car, paying $800 for tag, title and tax out-of-pocket, and a whole buttload (couldn’t resist) of medical bills and medicines.  To make matters worse, I haven’t billed any clients this month because I was too busy with the doctors, so … I may just stay home and lick my wounds.  (Of course, Suz, if I could lick there, I’d NEVER leave the house.)

So, the moral of the story is that I must be getting stronger because nothing’s killed me yet.

ttfn

I might have headlined this post “Intimations of Mortality”.

Or “Meditations on being the Grasshopper and not the Ant”

Or “Eat Dessert First: Life is Uncertain”.

 Today, I’m staying home and prepping (read:  shitting my brains out) for my colonoscopy procedure tomorrow morning.

Soon, I’ll have my 57th birthday, another big inch toward the big 6-0.

Meanwhile, I’m floating through life like a teenager.

Sometimes, “teenager” gives me more credit than I’m due.  Sometimes, it’s “like a toddler”.

I’ve actually made the “won’t grow up” thing work for me for a remarkably long time.

Some parts of it would be impossible for me to give up — it’s not like it’s a conscious decision I’ve made to treat the world as a wonderous place full of curious things and people that are endlessly fascinating.  Most of life is to me like a shiney thing you see on the ground and have to stop and pick up and put it in your mouth to see what it tastes and feels like.

I’d be charitable if I gave myself a D- in delayed gratification.

One of the AA “gurus” at one of the meetings I go to says AA should be renamed “Grow UP”.

A lot of the suggestions and “rules” for AA are about being more adult in our relations to other people, our jobs, etc.  It’s about self discipline and a social conscience.

To the extent I am grown up, I owe a lot to AA.  I’m not as selfish and controlling and arrogant as I once was.  Neither am I cured.

Anyway, some of my Peter Pan syndrome is catching up with me these days.

I’ve never saved a dime in my life and when it comes to spending money, I’m a child.  Every gadget and sweet capitalism has to offer has captured my attention and money at one time or another.  No savings and no retirement is not a pretty picture for a man my age.

It’s the same with women.  I have no serious long term exclusive relationship going on and no prospects for same at the moment.  I’ve gone for the flashy but shallow more than once.  Being a droptop batchelor has been fun, but the prospect of a lonely old age is not an appealing one and I’m not doing a very good job of looking for a woman to share my life.

It’s also the same with my health.  Smoking two packs of cigarets a day for 40 years is not a prescription for a long and productive life, it’s a guarantee of a long period of virtual confinement to a room.

A colonoscopy is a sign of my advancing age.  It’s not something one is asked to do at age 30 or even 40.  It’s the province of those of us who are over 50.

I feel like the man in the joke that Steve McQueen tells Yul Brenner in The Magnificant Seven:  A man jumps off a tall building and the people on each floor hear him as he falls past saying “so far, so good”.

I’m not sure I want to post this.  It’s gonna be maudlin, self involved crap, so you might want to pass it up.

 I have a deep sense of being not quite good enough tonight.

It’s the message I’m getting from the universe, no matter what the universe might actually be telling me.

It’s a feeling of inadequacy that I’m comfortable having.  I’ve often felt this way.

It’s an old, damning, shaming, guilty friend.

I can’t meet your expectations and that means I’m less than perfect and that means I’m shit.

“snap out of it,” was my X-wife’s answer.

Damn, I’d think.  Why didn’t I think of that?

Well, of course, that’s what you’d do if you could.

And, of course, I couldn’t just snap out of it or I’d already have done it.

Which made me feel even more inadequate than before.

It’s why we were able to stay together for 30 years. 

I feel different from the rest of you.  Alienated, I believe is the word.

I want to go live in the cave or monastary one over from MCARP.

Once more, I’ve decided to give up on dating.

I’m going to isolate.  I hope I get more done around the house this time than the last time.

My sister is in town.  She is so radiantly beautiful and funny and charismatic.  She has a gift for life that I really envy.  I don’t think I’m the only sibling that feels that way.

Poor Sinatra has had his shots, his manhood taken away and his displaced hip reslotted.  He’s a very quiet kitty right now.  Doesn’t much feel like playing fetch, you know.  I try to pet his furry face every chance I get, but he’s mostly sleeping in corners.

Saw DeShan tonight and briefly kidnapped her and took her to Sidecar.  She fell and I don’t think she felt all that pretty.  I just wanted to hang with her for awhile before she leaves for Down Under, so I didn’t mind her having a fat lip, poor baby.

Tomorrow’s gay pride day parade.  It’s an event described to me tonight as the most audacious, creative thing that happens in this city all year.  memorial park at 36th and Classen — Be There OR Be Square! Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!  (I wonder whose voice they used for those radio commercials?  You know, the drag car races commercials?)

I’m going to go take an ibuprophen for my elbow and get some sleep.  I took two naps today and i still feel sleepy.

Dr. Max?  Am I depressed?

Fuck.

OK.  I’ll snap out of it anytime now.

The Mandarin pictograph for the word “chaos” portrays two women under one roof.

Go figure.

The Gary and Rena, fast friends since their freshman year at OCU, turned 55 this week. 

Today, I’m 11.

Two different kinds of birthdays.

My “birthday” is the 11th anniversary of my first AA meeting and my first day of sobriety.

I had been drinking myself into oblivion every night for almost two years after my closest law school buddies asked me to leave our law partnership.  I was suicidal and had all my paraphernalia in the car to go out to the lake and take my own life in a way I thought would look like an accident so that the insurance would pay off to my family.

Instead, I got arrested and went to jail.

I came out of jail pissed off and jonesing for a cigaret.

Then, I had “a moment of clarity”.

What was wrong was my drinking.

I called a guy I had practiced law with when I first got out of law school.  He was a heavy, heavy drinker, but had sobered up five years before.  I called him and said I wanted to know how he did it.

He stopped what he was doing, left his law office and came to my house and got me and took me to the Western Club on 51st and Western. 

I didn’t know what this place was.  I didn’t know it was an AA clubhouse or an AA meeting until things got started.  I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about AA.

All I knew was desperation.  I didn’t really want to die, I just could not live another day drinking.  I had reached the point where I wouldn’t answer the phone, open the mail or come to the door if someone knocked.  I couldn’t get out of bed most days.  I had sold my car to get money to drink.

At first, I went to AA meetings to get out of the house.  I couldn’t hear what people were saying because I was too busy thinking in panic what I would say if I were called upon to speak.

I had no car and no driver license.  I walked to meetings that hot summer from my house in Heritage Hills. 

I LIKE to remember what it was like 11 years ago.  It reminds me of what I must never forget.  I am an alcoholic.  My life of drinking was miserable and deadly.  All I have I owe to my sobriety because without my sobriety I would be dead.  My friends, my beloved family, my law practice — EVERYTHING — I owe to AA and my sobriety.

I would have missed my precious grandchildren.

Sobriety has not all been wonderful.  My 30 year marriage disintegrated and my father died by inches.  I could not have survived those events while drinking and while having my drinking attitudes.

I did not just live and I don’t just abstain from drinking.  AA has given me some wonderful tools to use to live a happy life, joyous and free.  Somedays, I trudge.  Many days I live from one prayer to another.  More often than not, I’m a pretty damn happy camper.

My best days are the days I live by the AA instruction manual, the so-called “Big Book”.  I honestly believe that book is as divinely inspired as the Bible’s gospels.  It tells me that if I have a problem with people, places or things, the first place I need to look for the problem is within myself.  It tells me that if I am feeling sorry for myself, the best cure is to find someone else with an even bigger problem to help.  It’s as counterintuitive for me as “turn the other cheek” and “a kind word turns away wrath.”

It works.  It really works.

Yes, I was clinically depressed and I went to therapy.  I take an antidepressant.  That helps, too, of course.  My therapist is Jolly Dr. Max.  I also owe my life to him and his professional help and his sturdy friendship that began before he began seeing me and goes on after he sent me along my way.

In AA, I found a belief in a “power greater than myself”.  It is not strictly the Christian God I was raised to believe.  It is a far more forgiving and loving God than the Baptist God I was taught.  As a Baptist, I often made the mistake of confusing God the heavenly father with my punishing and perfectionist earthly father.  It isn’t the fault of the Baptist church, it was my own childish thinking.

I cannot prove to you that God exists, I can only tell you that God proved to me he exists.  i could not quit drinking on my own.  I tried many many times.  When I asked for help from a higher power, I got it and quit drinking.   Make of that what you will, but I believe.

If you think you have a problem drinking, you may very well have a problem.  Seek out AA.  It really works.

It’s a very happy birthday for me.  I have a great deal to celebrate, starting with all of you.

The pod person still occupies my body.

I was seeing a client last night at 7:30 p.m.

I’m not just working, not just working overtime and after hours, I’m enjoying the work.

I’m intent on not overanalyzing it, and just going with it because I need the work/money.

It’s wierd, though.

Because baby sister is in town, I missed my exercise hour yesterday and it bothered me and I WANTED it.

I give up.

Another day with no red meat or yellow cheese.

Who,  me?

I did get an uptick on my libido last night and that calms me down a little.

It’s one thing to have your body occupied by a working, exercising, eating healthy pod person, but I was afraid that the adolescent in me had also gone.  Thank God sex is more powerful than pod people.

tonight is Paseo dinner night and with any luck, my baby sister will regale and charm the group.  I’m really hoping she can be there for part of the festivities.

Sinatra is hobbled AGAIN.  I don’t know what to do with the boy.  I can’t tell yet how serious it is, but he doesn’t want to put any weight on his back paw and screams at me when I try to pet his haunch.  I’m afraid to take him to the vet (I can’t afford it) and I’m scared not to.  Being a father of such a wayward child is a lesson in life.  I can barely take care of myself and here I am trying to caretake another being.  Buddha forgive me.

A former Bush administration aide, the top procurement official for the feds, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in the Abramoff Affair.  You read it here first some months ago:  this is a big deal and it’s only going to get bigger.

Let there be light in your life.

See Skip’s wonderful work here:

http://www.thepaseo.com/

And, while I’m at it, here’s a pic from Ed and Mandy’s “sauced” homepage of someone I used to know:

The woman smoking told me the following joke:

How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb?

One to get on the ladder and 99 to say: “Isn’t that a little high for you, dear?”

My baby sister is cominng to town.

YIPPEEE!!!

MindoverMary, linked at right, will be here late tonight, courtesy Continental Airlines.

I just can’t hardly wait.  I’m like a kid before Christmas wanting to tear open the packages.

Mary taught my whole family to hug.  I mean that.  She was the one who insisted on physical affection in a family that wasn’t physically affectionate.

If she did nothing else in her life, that one loving decision would make her a saint in my eyes.

She’s the baby, but she wasn’t spoiled.  She faced her own hard knocks and problems, no doubt about it.

When Mom told her that it was as easy to fall in love with a rich guy as a poor guy, she took that seriously and married two guys with money.

It’s not how well you marry, it’s how well you divorce, they say. 

Mary’s daughter, her oldest child, will be getting married in December and we’re all going to Charleston to see the nuptials.  That will be so much fun.

If I seem to drag a little tomorrow, it’s because Mary and I couldn’t go to sleep tonight doing the sleepover talk and laugh thing.

OH I JUST CAN’T WAIT!!!