kvetching up

Entry 1 I lost my first entry in the ether.  Willow is in love with the dog sitter. This is amazing news for me. She keeps sitting on her lap. Willow has been on several long walks, which just makes it even better. We stayed in Swansea last night and met up with Amy, "I'm not your therapist" Lanham and her husband Mark. Abby had shipped a ton of things to them and we went to retrieve them. They fed us pizza and showed up their new giant home. Their basement is about 1600 square feet. The place is beautiful and the sound of crickets coupled with the blue moon took me back to summers in Massachusetts with Jenny--visiting her grandmother and aunts. We stayed at the Swansea Holiday Inn Express-sparing no expense on this trip. It was fine, although it clearly has seen its better days. I love quirky, and was surprised to find the painted ceiling in the storage room, a kind of rural, trailer park homage to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ROAD TRIP! Somehow, after much repacki...

Entry 1 I am exhausted. It's 10:37 eastern standard time. What a long day. Up since 3:30, I'd expected the day to be long, and I wasn't wrong. Abby had enough things to outfit a small traveling circus. How we get it all to school is an entirely different question. 205 lbs shipped via plane via 2 giant and one large duffle bag and 1 very large suitcase. Last year I spent a small fortune on updated suitcases,btw, and she managed to find a decrepit old thing with a handle stuck in the closed position, making it even more fun traveling today. We ended up spending 40 dollars on luggage carts to boot. Tonight we went to see Amy and Mark for pizza and retrieval of the Amazon boxes. All involved were careful not to mention Jenny. It's a good thing.  When we finished with dinner and a tour of their lovely home, we packed the boxes and headed back to the Holiday Inn Express, the finest lodgings in town. I spent a lot of money today. A lot, between the car rental and the hotel roo...

Entry 1 " Qui s’excuse, s’accuse ." This is the last day of the family-rearing era. We take Abby to Massachusetts tomorrow. Jane, Leiney, Abby and I board a plane at zero dark thirty tomorrow morning. I am tired just thinking about it. I'm stressed about the housesitter and dog. I'm stressed about coming home to the sprawling empty cave. I'm stressed about Abby being 3000 miles away for the first time. I am just terribly uncomfortable in general.  I feel utterly unmoored without Jenny. I feel incredibly proud of this kid and > feel excited for her future. Tomorrow afternoon we will see Jenny's best friend who conveniently just moved to Massachusetts after her husband landed a job at Brown a couple years ago. Abby has shipped items to her. Entry 2 I hate anxiety. I want to take a Xanax, haven't since Jenny died, but really want one right now. Confirmed our flights, paid for our bags and got our boarding passes squared away. I have an SUV rented for tomor...

Entry 1 I am sure I learned cynicism at my mother's knee, listening to her deconstruct bullshit about the Vietnam War, Watergate, talking about Nestlé killing babies in the global south for fun and profit, U.S. sponsored death squads seemingly in every country that July 11, 2018, top of Notre Dame, avant l’incendie . . dared to seek liberation from colonialism, etc. I was raised to understand the world is a hard place, and as Leo Getz says in Lethal Weapon II, humans, given the chance, "They fuck you at the drive-thru." I like to think that the jadedness of my teenage years was as real as it was justified.  My mom, and life generally, is complicated. She also taught me to give back to my community, and without saying it, she had a belief that all people are good. She was a member for a time of a small sect of radicals, and they would meet at our house. It was the 70s, and the idea that a revolution was coming didn't seem so crazy. She had my sister and I go out and pu...

Entry 1 1:35 p.m. This made me tear up: Downtown LA, 2014. Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.  ~Louise Erdrich from her book,  The Painted Drum      

Entry 1 6:00 a.m. Crash cart at my gym My knee recovered by yesterday afternoon . Go figure. After two rounds of ibuprofen in the morning, I laid off. By mid-afternoon I had full range of motion, albeit with still some swelling and discomfort, but the pain is gone, and the remaining swelling is what I normally have with this knee. The only thing that I can think is that my knee, as I have experienced in the past, was impacted by the change in barometric pressure. No matter. I skipped exercise yesterday, and will determine which machine I will get on today, as I move through the hours. I met with the dietician on Monday. She was 12--okay, maybe 15. Her instructions were not what I was expecting from my interactions with Heidi the nurse. I was under the belief that she would recommend either a vegan or vegetarian diet. Neither was true. She told me to stay away from Atkins and Paleo, as research has shown it consistently leads to early death for people with Type II diabetes. I get it. In...

Entry 1 Excruciating pain wakes me up at zero dark whatever. My right knee is throbbing, it's range of motion reduced to that of statuary. Oh, I can move it, but if I do, hellzapoppin'. It is so stiff, the pain so terrible, regardless of  how I reposition myself, it feels like a vice was tightening around the joint. No matter if I prop it up, lay on my side, or whistle Dixie, the knee aches.  I wasn't going back to sleep, although I wanted to and I tried desperately.  The dog heard me stir.  Mind you, it was the middle of the night. She came in wanting me to get up and play with her or  to give her a snack. I convinced the gratitude beastie to lay down and roll onto her back and I rubbed her belly, racking my brain on what to do. My range of motion--or should I say my pain tolerance, sat at about 1 percent, and that hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. But I had to get up. So, ceasing the belly runs, I lifted my legs up off the bed, swung my hips around toward the edge o...

 Entry 1 August 21, 2023 . Entry 1 7:40 a.m. I haven't eaten in better than 15 hours. I took my meds. I am at rehab. My blood sugar is not cooperating. It is better than last week, when I clocked a 356 at rehab. But I had stupidly eaten breakfast on that day. This is a fasting blood sugar, and it is off--way off at 203.  In better news, BP 110/62.  I have been having chest pain for almost 24 hours now, right where my heart resides, but think it's a pulled muscle from yesterday's workout. I made it through the night, so we will see. 10:45 a.m. My blood sugar levels, despite having no food intake now for almost 16 hours has gone up all morning. This makes zero sense. I don't  understand.

Entry 1  5:50 a.m.   A movable crop. When a dog looks you in the eye and punches you with her paw, well, it's just the best. Sunday mornings are my favorite time. I get nostalgic. Today I am remembering driving around in the ridiculous convertible Camaro in California last Spring with the girls, going to In-and-Out burger, driving with Abby to Balboa Park and down to the Drive-In 10 minutes from the border with Mexico. Abby had a good time, in spite of being stuck with her dad, and I certainly made memories to last through my last days, or dementia, whichever comes first. I am intending to do some yard work this morning. Last night Abby and I schlepped the bucket with the mammoth sunflowers in it over to the fence. This allows the giant flowers a place to lean. The planter, a large red bucket, can't hold the top heavy plants without listing, nor without falling over in a brisk wind. The stakes I planted in the dirt when the sunflowers were half this size have been outgrown, an...

Entry 1 Saturday morning it is. Abby and I have two more Saturdays, this one included, before Holyoke. I am blue this early morning, for a bevy of reasons,  none controlling. The soft trumpet on Brubeck's Take Five sounds melancholy, but I'm sure my ears are just distorted by my mood. Flu shots today, clothes shopping for Abby. I may go to Dick's Sporting Goods and get the spin bike that Amazon was supposed to deliver on Thursday, but balked. I'm going to go buy some small concrete bricks to border a portion of the yard where berry plants have been planted. Other things are on the too list and I hope to tackle them all. When I grew up in our 800 square foot home, most of the time I lived in the bedroom above the garage, which was tiny, had a closet with  painted plywood walls, Parquet floors and wolf spiders. Abby has an 1100 square foot apartment, with a bath, bedroom, living room with a built-in surround sound system and video projector, a kitchen with a full-sized re...

Entry 1 In 2015, when Leiney first showed signs of depression, our world was rocked. The suffering she was going through was painful to watch and experience. I was just about that age when I went through my first bout of clinical depression, so I could feel her pain. At the time our kid fell ill, I was struck by how many tools Jenny had in her toolbox to help Leiney. She knew who to call to do intervention. We pulled together as a team to help Leiney, but Jenny, because of her profession and job, knew what to do, and got Leiney the professional services she needed. I remember spending days with Leiney, taking time off work and caring for her, snuggling with her on the couch, and watching television. We watched Deadpool on our big leather couch together--her first R-rated movie.  What strikes me about these memories is how hard Jenny and I worked as a team. I always was the one who stayed home with Leiney those many days she was too sick to go to school. There was a lot of good stuf...

 Entry 1 Around 1975 my neighbor Don, who had the most amazing comic book collection--Archie, Richie Rich and Little Lulu are the ones I remember, did the most amazing thing--he ordered Sea Monkeys. We were so excited, we could barely wait for the mailman to bring them. When they arrived, and Don's dad told us that they were only brine shrimp, we ignored him. We'd seen the images in the back of the comic book. Who did he think he was dealing with--the unlettered? As one can clearly see above, these were tiny alien beings, who lived in the sea. The image I remember, not pictured here, is one of a Sea-Monkey Poseidon, wielding a dangerous-looking trident. Dangerous-looking only, because we knew they were tiny little beings, these sea monkeys. When they came, my recollection is you got something that was dried, and you put it in water and they activated. I know we checked over and again, but I don't think our Sea-Monkey friends ever amounted to more than just dust in water. Th...

Entry 1 I rowed at  cardiac rehab today for the first time. I was about two feet from a floor to ceiling mirror. Let's just say, the Michelin man and I could have been separated at birth--but never too far apart given our girth. I was feeling all proud of the weight I've dropped, but with every move toward the front of the rower, the illusion of meaningful weight loss was clear. What made the day more sobering is working out with the very fit exercise physiologist. There are a couple. One is easy on us, the other has us werk. This was the latter. I am grateful he is there, because the clarity I see my physical shape (think hum bao) after he puts us through our paces is invaluable. I like being pushed--which is something I didn't know about myself. I dislike not being able to keep up, and I can't. I do my best. The cohort has changed. A few are worse than me, some quite a bit better. I now have a realistic assessment of my pumpkininity and real goals. I am 172.8 lbs. aga...

Blackberry bushes are encroaching on my newly built fence. I will handle that soon enough--I have a plan and money to carry out the plan. My concern has always been, how far back I should cut the bastards--also fuck Luther Burbank for introducing Himilayan Blackberry to the Seattle area. According to neighbors, prior to my purchase of the home, there had been a homeless encampment on the county land adjacent to my property. The sticker bushes cover all that land now, and are on the lower 3/4 acres of my land. This means no homeless encampment--or so I thought. It also means rats, field mice, possums, coyotes, and raccoons. I have seen all since moving in. No rats close by, but I know they are here. As a bonus, raptor sightings are not infrequent--a bald eagle was in my yard a week or so ago, and it isn't uncommon for a Cooper's Hawk to seek prey on my property. Willow coaxed me out of bed last night at 1:00 a.m. I got her out into the yard to do her business--a yard well illumi...

Entry 1 I am not that guy who takes before and after pictures when I am trying to lose weight. Truth is, I have rarely ever tried to lose weight. We didn't ever own a scale until Jenny had to try and put on weight because the cancer, taking all her caloric input, had turned her into Flat Stanley. When I started walking when Jenny was ill, it was to keep my sanity, to work off stress. I ended up working off 40 lbs in a few months and kept it off until Jenny was close to death--when the comfort food was everywhere and all I wanted, and when I honed my already supernatural ability to slack into a superpower.     Matt planting a Western Red Cedar in July. I have had times in my life when I was over 190. I've had a time in my life when I was over 200 lbs. But mostly, I have a resting weight of around 180--well too heavy, rather unsurprising given the recalcitrance of my pancreas to process sugar. In general I shed weight quickly, but aside from exercise and caloric monitoring,...

Abby leaves in 19 days . I am so excited for her, and certain I will be lonely without her.  This morning I weighed in at 173.2 (173 on 8/12, reflected in chart below). It feels like a dam is breaking. I am exhausted from this morning's workout, but it feels good to see results so quickly. Because I am bone on bone on my right knee and having significant pain, they put me on the special treadmill this morning. I am cranking up the angle I am running and cutting down on the speed, to see if that helps my knee. On any given workout, my knee pain gets to about 7 or 8. Monday I will be rowing. I have a great rowing machine in my home gym, so I am going to use it here as well. I am still discovering, every time I go to the gym, how much I let myself go since losing Jenny. Because I have a history of depression, at rehab I have to complete a questionnaire every few weeks. I write a lot here about life, but I am introspective-avoidant. This means that the answers to the questions are alm...

Entry 1 It's just six. A sad Brazilian guitar is playing in the foreground, the cool air, carrying the scent of the mid-summer morning's garden is in the room. I am sitting here almost alone--a sleeping Willow just a few feet away.  I am sore from the hardest workout I have done in years that I did yesterday in cardiac rehab. I ran uphill at a ridiculous angle for 30 minutes. I did weight training with a higher weight than I have been doing soon after. My legs ache as if they are angry at me for letting their once muscular build atrophy. I sound like a strolling fire full of wet wood, as my knees and hips loudly pop and crack whenever I move. 

Hoh Rainforest in drought, 2017. Entry 1 I miss the forest, the primordial Pacific Northwest forest. This is the second summer in memory where I haven't been out day hiking, backpacking, or camping in recent memory. I don't see it happening, however nourishing it is for my soul.     A couple of evenings ago, as I lay in the bath, I saw something extraordinary. Over the course of 30-45 minutes, countless numbers of crows--serial murders if you will--flew by the window, heading in a southeasterly direction. Now, adjacent to my yard stands a large deciduous tree where a couple hundred or more crows make their home for some of each day and much of each evening. But this murderous bunch appeared to be heading toward the Kent Valley. Apart from my awe at the number of these birds passing by, I thought little of the incident. I have read about a place out between Kenmore and Bothell where tens of thousands flock to each night. So, I assumed there must be a place in Kent--I mean what ...