kvetching up

 Entry 1 The Bar In Which My Father Drank Himself To Death In 1969. Years ago I knew a woman who was around my age of 22 or so. She was in love with her professor, but apparently there were no strings at the time. I was fascinated by this woman, so foreign to this working class boy. She had gone to Boston Latin, and Bard College, her parents were two very famous and influential Marxist philospophers when that kind of thing still meant something. They summered in the south of France. She got almost all her clothes from J. Crew, a company of which I hadn't heard of before.  As I recall, she liked me AND was very into the woman I was dating at the time (her roommate, who liked women but not her), despite her love for the geriatric professor of poetry. I took this woman out for a beer once or twice. I recall telling her my dream was to grow my hair long, get my college degree and drink at the Blue Moon Tavern (whether I meant it or not, isn't material). We were walking to the Blu...

Entry 1 Last summer , as we traveled the Atlantic Seaboard, I wasn't updating my journal. It seems criminal now, given the amount of amazing things we did. A highlight of the trip was our visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We went on a lark. We walked to the Museum on a warm summer's day, a few miles from our hotel. There is a satellite building a few blocks from the main museum, where I encountered one of Rodan's The Thinker , a giant piece, sitting outside the building. The museum itself was, in my estimation, one of the greatest museums around. The Henry Privat-Livemont poster shown here , a work included in the  exhibition of posters of the 19th century Art-Nouveu movement, and showing on our visit, was a favorite of mine. The poster, and others he made which were very similar, had been created for a Belgian tea company. And people say imperialism and colonialism never brought anything good into the world. The entire exhibition, along with others, sucked me in for...

Entry 1 The best boy. Early Friday mornings wth Willow are pleasant. It's a bright and cool pre-sunrise, reminding me of showing up early in the morning at the fair. I loved going to county fairs when I was growing up. I would go to "The Puyallup" several times a year well into my 20s. The charm, I guess wore off after that. I fell in love with the fair again with the arrival of kids. Whatever illusion of charm I was convinced as a child was exuded as the bucolic charms of the fair, I understood was subsumed by the Jack Daniel's mirrors, the deep fried twinkies, the Ginsu knives and blaring pop music. Still, even now, days like this fill me with nostalgia. There is a smell to early summer mornings that also take me back to working at camp. Alone, I would leave whatever cabin I was in charge of and wander over to the mess hall to get the terrible camp coffee. At times one or two of the people who ran the camp would be out, but usually I would be alone, walking between ...

Entry 1 Thursday creeps up on me every time. It always feels like I have enough time to get things done, whatever those things may be.  I don't hate working, but hate work . I dread it every day. I hate being interim, albeit I have no clear direction. It wouldn't matter if I did, I seem to have lost whatever meaning I found in working about the time the troubles began some three years ago now. We are in the thick of it, regarding history. So far, not so good . Jenny's mom died three years ago next week. Jenny's CT scan that started our journey into darkness and the results given that same day happened yesterday or today. Strange that I didn't write it down, but I wasn't keeping a journal then. I can still feel the pain, the terror she felt when hearing the news, and the certainty I felt that she was just handed a death sentence. I cam hear the placating tones of the PA delivering the news, Jenny repeating over and again, "OMG, I'm going to die," an...

Entry 1 5:50 a.m. After fighting to get my sugars up last night? I most likely went overboard with feeding my face. Today, the goal is to be in range of the target goal for much of the day. I did awaken at 1:15 a.m. and ate a very ripe peach, this after my dinner. While my numbers never breached 200, still, they hovered around that level for a long time. If you read this journal back when Jenny was being treated, you know how much I loved to slice and dice the data. This new cgm software--btw I switched from the reader to my phone for scanning, does it for me. For reasons I don't quite understand, blood glucose often goes up during one's sleep. Mine was crashing back to normal levels, right up to the point I ate that peach. That much is apparent from the graph adjacent to these words. I sit each morning and drink my coffee. Earlier this summer or late spring, Willow was rousing me between 4:00 and 4:30 a.m. She would jimp into bed and hit me with her left paw until I stirred. S...

 Entry 1 WSP, Greenwich Village, 2022 175.0 lbs. Pretty happy with that. It too shall pass. My goal weight is so ridiculously low (or is that high?)--not set by me but by a chart. I will be happy when I hit 160 lbs.--my intermediary goal. 160. It will happen. I would like to be alive long enough to see my girls finish college. If I can become obsessed with this, well, there may be hope for living for another decade or so. After two years, and sparse use, I have taken to using my treadmill to supplement my cardio rehab. It knows my name, my goals and talks to me as I work out, addressing me as Geoff which is a bit forward if you think about it. It is pseudo-AI. I can't wait until all the workout equipment, and the fridge, stove, oven, microwave, debit card and all the items in the store are all connected by AI. I can see it now. I go to open the bakery door. It is voice activated, no more nasty germ contact. I say, "Open the donut cabinet doors, pal." A voice emanating fro...

Last night's sanctuary .   Entry 1 Sitting outside cardiac rehab. I picked Abby up after 1 last night from light rail. When I got home, Willow was glued to me, but unable to sleep and so I couldn't close my eyes. Around 2 I fell asleep. At 3:00 Willow decided she needed outside time. This early morning rising has been going on for a couple weeks. When we came back inside she thought it was snack & play time. I decided it was sleep time. Unlike at 2, she respected this. All of this to say I am exhausted. The scale this morning said I have GAINED .8 lbs. Time to go run it off. I'd like to brag and say I work out harder than any of my cohort, but they all appear to be 10-15 years older than me. I feel love Kramer bragging he is the top of the kid's karate class. Entry 2 Weirdly, the cardiac rehab team neither helped me start my workout, nor did they check on me and adjust it or take my blood pressure during my workout. Apparently,  no one had me on their list. Go figur...

Abby is 18. I know this. Still, her decision to take the train from SeaTac down to Lumen to hang out with friends in the footprint of the Taylor Swift concert aura caused me no small amount of stress last night. Part of it is I just know she isn't as street wise as I was when I was her age. I rode the bus regularly through Rainier Beach as a kid, not infrequently, and always alone. I saw more crazy things by the time I was her age then she can know. When I expressed concern about her plan, she countered with, "I used to ride the train every day to go to school." This is true. She did.  From the U-District station to the first stop downtown. For context, that is like going to the petting zoo where they give out free cotton candy versus going to a hunting park dressed in a meat suit and armed only with a kazoo.   So, she left last night around 7, drove to the SeaTac Park and Ride, an adventure in itself, and got off down at the stadium stop. At around 10:00 I texted asking ...

Abby and I are baking in the morning sun, sitting at 3rd and Williams, our traditional spot for the Renton River Days Parade since she was a wee one. She actually was up and ready to go at 7:30--miracle dictu. We have spent the last 24 hours watching videos about her new dorm room and talking about her two new roommates, one from Zimbabwe, the other 🇬🇭 Ghana. If she were any more excited at any point in time, I don't remember it. Meanwhile, as we sit here, she is making bracelets to wear to tomorrow night's Taylor Swift concert. This first one is a reference to a line is a TS song.  I'd post pictures  of the event, but it was not exactly the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, or even Torchlight. If I am being honest, it was kind of depressing. Renton High School barely participated--no band, no cheerleaders. Just a rag tag group of basketball players. Jenny and I braved zero degree weather with Leiney (bundled up in the stroller with a plastic rain cover to keep the cold...

 So, I can now get an ECG whenever I want, and soon will be tracking my blood pressure too, through my new watch.  Amazing, actually.

Entry 1 I have rearranged my cardiac rehab back to 8 a.m., after the RN I work  with called and reported someone outside of the department had inexplicably changed the appointments on Friday and some Mondays to 10 a.m. He couldn't figure out why this was so, and I had no explanation--no clue really.  I left too late on Monday, got stuck in traffic and arrived 10 minutes late. I got my cardio in, but just, barely managing to do any weight lifting. I had chest pains last night--transient really--more like a pain in the arse, scary but not worth going to the doctor about as passing as they were. There was no shooting pain down my arm, just a short, sharp, shock in my chest. If it happens again, I will consult my doctor.  I went to my GP about the late night glucose drops that have been reported by my monitor. My doctor's fill-in while she is on vacation gave me a rudimentary answer--if drmy sugars drop into the 60s or below, eat something and check again in 15 minutes. No sh...

Since late May I have lost almost 11 lbs. That loss has accelerated since I began using the Freestyle Libre 2, the continuous glucose monitor. Like my old Fitbit, I am constantly checking my progress through the day, scanning the monitor dozens of times. The bad news is that my glucose levels are not good. For instance, this morning at 5:30 I ate a regular-sized bowl of pumpkin seed, flax and chia seed granola. I also had a peach.  I had already woken up with my blood level higher than I would like, which is common for people measuring their glucose levels. I didn't eat again until 2:00 p.m., because my levels were shit for the next 9 hours. Just before I ate a snack at 2,  my glucose level was 130. I ate a handful of lightly salted mixed nuts. It should have minimally impacted my sugars, but instead they cranked up over 150. Blood sugar should be below 120.  So, I stopped eating lunch. There is no way, given the propensity of my body to maintain high sugar levels, that I...

  In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Manhattan, July 2022. It hit like a ton of bricks, really. The 25th wedding anniversary is the hardest thing I have faced yet. This is the hard time, the time a friend, worried about me, called to talk about just 3 weeks ago. I didn't see it coming. Now, like Stockton Rush when at the helm of the Titan III, I feel the weight of the ocean is pushing in from all sides, and I have stupidly bolted the hatch shut from the outside. Curled up into my snail-sized shell, I am holding on for all its worth.  I have been out to do things with Abby, as I am trying to swallow the dreaded thought that she will be in Massachusetts in just a few short weeks, and I will truly be alone in this house with Willow, surrounded by memory and regret. Gardening has offered some respite from dwelling on the gloomy prospect of loss. I am doing all I can to get used to the idea of being solo. How does one do it? The only time I have lived alone in my entire life I failed miserably. The only thing that saved...

Central Park, summer 2022 . I ordered an SUV and hotel rooms for our trip to Massachusetts and Mt. Holyoke the other day. Abby will have lots of stuff shipped to Jenny's best friend's house in Swansea. We will pick up the stuff the day after we arrive. The following day is orientation. I am already stressed about parking--nebbish fuck that I am. In a theme in my life that has happened a few times in the last year, I discovered extra money in my bank account yesterday. I filed my taxes on time, but the IRS took its sweet time sending my refund of almost 10k. I am not complaining and its certainly a game changer for the summer.   Leiney is going home on the 2nd, and then Jane and I will have a few days to explore Boston. I had a great time last summer wandering the streets of Boston's downtown with Abby. I didn't get to do all the exploring I would have liked, but I did have a lobster roll. I am excited to go again and see more of our early history. Friday night I had din...

I went to my GP this morning and can truthfully attest I have lost 7.44 lbs . I wasn't trying. I mean, I have been eating more healthily and getting some exercise. I have to believe its a medication I am taking, Jardiance, that pushed most of  that spare tire off of my belly. I lost 4% of my body weight. I wasn't expecting to lose any. Not all people respond to Jardiance with weight loss.  I also got a couple of vaccines today. My second shingles vaccine and another COVID booster. With how much I have won in the genetic lottery, you can bet I needed another booster. I think its my third, but it could be my fourth. I dunno anymore. I wouldn't be so worried, but Leiney's Jared just flew to Idaho and came down with COVID two days later. Anyway, I got two shots, one in each arm, and it is a bit discomfiting, and uncomfortable, coupled with my sore shoulders. I'd say getting old sucks, but this is all on me, and I am doing something to make these things better, finally. ...

Entry 1 Yesterday, I finally started cardiac rehabilitation. I have to drive all the way to NW Hospital, where the UW has centered It's cardiac rehab program in Seattle to attend. Believe it or not, I actually tried to sign up at Valley Medical for rehab. If you call there yourself, you will be sent straight to voicemail. They promise to call you back. Despite calling several times, I never did get a call back. NW is materially different--and much farther away. I called last week--and they found a cancelation and got me in yesterday morning.  My nurse, whose name escapes me, is amazing. Yesterday was really mostly a two hour interview, where I talked about my diet and exercise regimen, the former not much to talk about, the latter a discussion about how I don't exercise at all anymore. I had to disclose my depression level through the standard survey. I am never very aware of where I land on the scale, meaning I am simply not in touch with my feelings, but yesterday's  outc...