Category: Life

By now you might have heard, or maybe you were party to the chaos all along as I Tweeted the hell out of my Vegas experiences. I got pretty sick while I was down there. I still don’t know what ailed me–I see Dr. Gravitas tomorrow morning–but it set me on tense-edge and I’m still [...]

Ah, this city! The city that shouldn’t be. A criminal offense of a city! My  moral inverse! And thus of course I would come here as a destination for my transformation, because it is an oasis free of meaning in a landscape so stark even Philip Glass would be intimidated. From here–12th floor of the [...]

Alaska Airlines flight 622 PDX-> LAS Me Seat 1A Various happy sounds. Now am very tired. More later?

And now we begin! Clue #1 You will want to find my copy of Shakespeare’s play that takes place, partially, in a town with the same name as the street we live on. You’ll find a marker inside. Note the page number of the left-hand page that this marker denotes. DM (Twitter-tweet) the page number [...]

Ultrasounds picked up what Dr. Gravitas calls “sludge” in my bits. Let me try to rehash what he explained. Later I’ll fact check this. For now, heck, it’s the Internet, anything goes. There is no real “truth”, anyway, right? Bile apparently act as a kind of emulsifier, keeping cholesterol (a fat) in suspension in water-based [...]

While Wednesday’s GloopGloop episode was bemusing (if disgusting/nauseating/lengthy/incompetently executed), Thursday’s ultrasound was nerve-wracking (if well-performed/quick/not gross). My technician was an elegant, kind woman in her late 30s who seemed to know a lot about a lot, but I lost my nerve in the procedure room and asked her not to tell me what it was [...]

Today was a tragicomedy in two-and-a-half acts. I think I’ve reached journeyman or maybe green-belt status in medical tests, because now I’m given far, far fewer specific directions about what I’m supposed to do and what’s going to happen. Such that “fast 12 hours” is the entire, terse explanation I’ll get and it’s left as [...]

Yesterday my gastroenterologist (Dr. Gravitas, his blog-pseudonym) was sitting next to me “brainstorming,” as he called it, about why it was that I felt so vaguely (but convincingly) bad. We were in one of the GI examing rooms in the Portland Clinic, which I should mention (now as good a time as any) are some [...]

I’m a hairy person, in respect to my head. All of my life I have garnered expressions of shock or, yes, even jealousy about the thickness of my mane. Mostly it is good, but it does mean I can’t have short hair because I look exactly like that wedge-shaped Alice character from Dilbert: Lately I [...]

It took a few years of angry searching. Condescension at wide-ruled “plebian” notepads. Eschewing of perfectly nice notebooks brought thousands of miles and placed at my feet as gifts. Finally, I have found The One True Notebook. Or at least the closest thing I’m likely to uncover. Meet the Rediform Chemistry Notebook, 9.25 x 7.5 [...]