Category Archives: Adventures in Los Angeles

Building my fortress one camera at a time

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The security cameras are on the way – thank you, Amazon.

This weekend I’ll be climbing up the ladder, drilling holes, running wires, installing video cameras and looking manly in my tool belt. Female neighbors will bring me lemonade and cookies and marvel at my handy-manliness.

Wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it. Okay, pour the oil, honey. Pour it now.

Or, not. Probably not.

Perhaps they will if I wear my Stars & Stripes lounge pants.

It will take all of my willpower not to point each of the day/night cameras at my new neighbor’s house. Oh, how I miss the cold war – damn you, Reagan. 

Then, sometime this weekend I’ll be able to kick back with a cold one and spy the intruders coming up the walkway, at which point I’ll signal my daughter to pour vats of hot oil on them.

Is that an appropriate job for a young girl?

Ah, what the hell. Kids these days have it too easy. My daughter should know how to take down a bird with a slingshot and skin a pig at this age, not shoot pigs with birds.

After my security system goes in, a contractor will be over to tell me how much I’m going to pay for a wall so thick a helicopter can’t get over it, which I didn’t know was possible until you-know-who took a bullet to the face.

Unfortunately, I don’t live in Pakistan where building codes are lax, not to mention my neighbors might object to a wall of that size. Instead, I will have to build something decorative and nice looking.

Still, there will be a place to pike the heads as a warning to other criminals. Ah, London in the old days. Could they think up the best ways to torture people or what?

Would it be wrong of me to compare some of my hospital stays to being tortured here?

Then, when I’ve completed these two security upgrades, I’m going to sell the house and move to a cave with a gate. And there I’ll protect my family and live on bats and McGriddles.

That’s my story and I’m not sticking to it.

I speak to a police officer

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I would not want to be a police officer. At least not the kind who has to speak to annoying people calling to complain about their neighbors. No, not that kind, behind a desk, trying to decipher who is telling the truth, who is lying.

I'm looking good while patrolling the mean streets of Los Angeles. Kind of like Batman without the outfit and really cool car.

I’d rather go after perps in high-speed chases in the streets of L.A. And tap them in the rear bumper with my turbo-charged Hemi-powered Dodge and send their car spinning out of control. Then, I’d jump out and just shoot them. Well, not really. I’d play it by the book. But if they pointed a gun at me, I’d demonstrate the hours I spent on the range making holes in paper targets.

Back to reality.

I spoke to a police officer the other day. I told him the short version of the conflict I had with my neighbor. I’m sure it went down in the report as a “neighbor argument.”

Accurate, I’m afraid, but not quite what I would classify it as. Just as the police categorize incidents, I do as well. But try to explain how the type of communication someone uses, and the statements they yell out, differ from what most people might say in an argument. It’s not easy and I gave up trying to.

I’m talking about statements that make you say, “where did that come from?” Or, “that doesn’t make sense.” Or, “Am I talking to a rational person?” 

The verbal equivalent of a furry bat winging its way past your head in broad daylight. Was that really a bat?

How do you describe a non sequitur that might denote someone not playing by the rules most “normal” people play by? Then again, I wear a bag on my head.

“No, officer, he did not yell a profanity at my wife.” The point is he yelled at my wife for no reason. And after allegedly having a gun out in broad daylight a week earlier. So, I went to find out why he felt it necessary to call out to her.

Despite the officer being nice, I can’t say there’s much for the police to do now. It’s my psychological drama to live out. I’m committed to not provoking or speaking to the neighbor. Still, the memory of it hangs over me like smoke in a German restaurant in the middle of winter where no one will crack a window to clear the air, and four Germans at a table in the corner keep looking this way and laughing.

It’s uncomfortable and I can’t wait to leave the restaurant.

You know the economy is bad when . . .

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. . . your eye doctor works two jobs to make ends meet.

I went to the eye doctor today for my annual appointment. I’m not sure how the conversation about the economy started – it wasn’t me, I swear – but man o man did I get an earful – or eyeful?

Turns out she is working two jobs: her regular practice and at another company giving eye exams. Okay, so it’s not as sad as if she were serving cocktails at night in a club called Retina Scan, but she is the first doctor I know moonlighting to pay the bills. And despite her husband working, there isn’t enough to pay the bills and save.

I see all. And your office is a mess by the way.

I got the full scoop of what it costs to go to medical school for Ophthalmology – mucho dinero. And how long it takes to pay off a student loan – mucho años. And how much interest there is on a student load – mas dinero. (She’s bilingual.)

I’m sure she gets paid some minimal amount per visit and has to churn through patient after patient to make ends meet. The conversation made me start to worry that she wasn’t paying attention to my eye exam and might miss something important, like how stunning my blue eyes are (my opinion, not hers). And I fully expected, based on my past experience with doctors, to have some rare eye problem to add to my list of ailments.

But not today. The health Gods looked down upon me and decided not to make by eyes turn bright purple or swell to the size of cantaloupes or shoot flames and burn off my eyebrows. Today, they gave me a pass.

What did hit me is that there are people in the 99% percent I never expected to be there – first timers when it comes to feeling like they are barely making ends meet, which makes me wonder how my parents ever made ends meet when only one of them was in the workforce? And why are two incomes today not bringing in moola by the boatload?

If only I had the vision to understand it. 🙂

How men treat my wife when I’m not around

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My wife pulled into a gas station talking on the vehicle’s hands-free phone system. She parked at the far pump, turned off the engine, and transferred the call to her handset. She had just come from the hospital where her mother had spent the night with chest pains and was talking to her sister about how they would support her in her golden years.

What if I showed up in dressed like the Captain and delivered some bone crunching pain?

The gas station wasn’t crowded and a man in his 40s driving a red BMW convertible pulled up behind her. While she was on the phone in the car, the man came over and looked in the driver’s side window and gave her a disapproving look. She got out and pumped her gas and spoke on the phone while Mr. Bimmer gave her more of the looks you’d expect from someone with the job of policing the use of cellular phones in a restricted area.

He finished pumping his gas, got back in his BMW, backed up and as he drove away in the safety and comfort of the Bimmer’s leather cockpit, he yelled, “get off the f***ing phone” and continued driving. If only my wife ran as fast as the Flash and carried a machete.

Now wherever my wife and I drive in the general area where we live, I look for this man. And whenever I see a red 3-series BMW convertible, I ask my wife “Is that the guy?”

And one day she is going to say “yes, that’s the guy” and I’m going to etch, “She’s off the phone, knucklehead,” on the hood of his car.

This story is one of dozens my wife has of angry men who feel compelled to unleash some of that anger on my wife .

There was the aging rock star at the grocery store who used his cart to block her from passing in the aisles and laughed about it as he followed her around the store, and the grocery worker who gave her a hard time about getting past him while he was stocking shelves, and numerous other guys flipping her off while driving when they were the one in the wrong.

And there are the men in cars who expose themselves to her when she runs in the morning, which is an odd but true fact of L.A. that there are naked guys driving around in the wee hours of the morning enjoying the feel of cloth seats on their bare bottoms.

This is my favorite cereal. Oddly, I couldn’t find it on the General Mills web site. Are they not proud of creating and selling the world’s greatest cereal? Or, it is really bad for me, which may explain a lot?

And they’re all on my list. And one day, I’m going to find them and hope it’s in the last hours of my life and I can use the gun I finally broke down and bought to shoot them in the knee caps, an injury they’ll remember every time they take a step for the rest of their lives.

My wife once asked: “why doesn’t this stuff happen when you’re around?”

Hmm, let me guess. It doesn’t because these guys wouldn’t say anything like that with another man around.

One day, I dream I will be with her at the grocery store – though I hate going there – and I’ll be out of sight when some a-hole blocks her way with a shopping cart in the cereal aisle. And I will walk around and witness it.

And you, my dear friends, will get to see the black & white security-camera footage on youtube.com with the title, “Man forced to eat 5 boxes of Captain Crunch in grocery store brawl.”

And to think he ate them box and all without the aid of milk. Amazing.

Are people in Los Angeles getting angrier? (A non-political post for Margie)

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One of my neighbors “displayed” his gun to another neighbor’s gardener the other day. I was on a conference call and missed the fun that ensued when my two neighbors got into a heated argument about it (my wife’s description, as she caught the last two minutes). It’s a good thing I missed it because I would have called the police. When a gun comes out, that’s process step 1 for me.

If cannons, not guns, were legal, we'd have a fewer killings and more people going to chiropractors instead of prison

Today I saw the good neighbor, who is a friend and the one who didn’t brandish a gun in the light of day, and he filled me in.

Turns out his large tree overhangs Dirty Harry’s property. And as an act of kindness, his gardener went to the front door of Mr. Harry to ask permission to move something on the property to access the tree and to make sure his cars weren’t damaged from falling debris. But no one answered the door.

When the gardener tried again, he was confronted by Mr. Harry who had a shotgun or machine gun – some kind of big gun. Then the argument started about it not being a polite gesture to greet a gardener with a weapon of death instead of a rake or hoe.

Now I know most of my neighbors probably own guns. This is Los Angeles where it’s almost mandatory, though I’ve managed to resist the impulse, thinking that I’d probably use it on myself in those dark moments of blood clots and hemoptysis. But here’s a neighbor who feels like we’re living on the open range and he’s protecting his property from cattle rustlers.

What do I do? Or don’t do?

This is the kind of photograph that lures people to California. It's all Hollywood magic. The bird is fake and the beach is a painted backdrop.

Move? I don’t know, but it was the first thought that crossed my mind.

It does make me wonder if my unscientific theory that people are growing angrier is true.

I don’t have any facts to back this up.

It’s the feeling I get when I see how people treat each other in public, how they drive, how certain neighbors could give a flying fudge bar if they return a “hello” while I’m walking in the neighborhood – to the point I feel like flipping them the bird when I see them – a pre-emptive strike – which would illicit a response from them or a comment like, “you’re the worst neighbor ever and I wish you’d f’ing move.” Hello to you, too, neighbor, glad you finally acknowledged my presence. 

I experience this hostility in the way men treat my wife when I’m not with her (another post coming soon).

I wonder if this city is suffering from traumatic or post-traumatic stress syndrome. We’re going through our days carrying so much stress and tension that we’re ready to snap at anyone, and are too burned out to be courteous.

It’s a just a hunch, but I feel it in my bones.

Unemployment is high in California; illegal drugs are popular; foreclosures with For Sale signs in the front yard and near-foreclosures with brown lawns, broken picket fences and half-finished additions lace neighborhoods. Do these daily images impact our sub-conscious?

Worry. Overrated and un-fun. (Creative Commons: Photo by Steve Snodgrass)

And then there is the constant worry we’re not working hard enough at our jobs and could be laid off at anytime to save the company money. And we’re working longer hours to make up for the whole “do more with less” mentality of companies during the recession. And there are the bills.

If we lose our jobs, where would we be? Brandishing a gun at a hard-working gardener? Walking into a beauty salon in Seal Beach to kill eight innocent people in an unspeakable, tragic act of violence?

I don’t know anymore. The older I get, the less I know.

Maybe I should have taken the advice of the first bumper sticker I saw when I moved to L.A.: Welcome to California, now go home. 

Standing in line is agony

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I’m not a patient person. It’s one of the reasons I was such a screw-up early in life, though one could argue I haven’t changed. I do feel I’m able to manage my impatience now, as an adult, and understand the value of working hard toward long-term goals.

But standing in line is still my Achilles heel and forces me into mental tailspins.

No, there are three registers and one line. What if someone makes a new line?

This weekend, at Barnes and Noble, I entered their line at the point the sign says to enter the line. But thanks to the incompetence of B&N line designers at that store, there is also an opening in the line at about the spot where you stand waiting to be called to the next cashier. So, as I walked closer to that point, a woman with two kids and man broke into the line, failing to see the beginning of the line or choosing not to walk that far to enter it.

As I was still waiting for my wife to pick out some new reading glasses, I said “go ahead” to the woman to take the first spot. I thought the man was with her and the kids. Then I noticed that he wasn’t and was on his own with a separate purchase, but had taken advantage of my hospitality to the woman.

And that’s my problem with lines, I find them very stressful because they force me to put my “asshole” hat on, to confront other people who are trying to scam to get ahead or are just plain clueless.

At B&N, I had pent-up anger left over from the day for reasons unknown, and had been a bit snippy with my wife. So I held in my need to have a deep conversation with this man and ask him what he was thinking, lest I blow up, get in fight and knock down rows of gift cards and discounted books, leading to my arrest and subsequent new profession making shivs from old nebulizers.

Lines make me feel like a chump. They are pianos being loaded to an 8th-floor apartment waiting to fall on my head and crush me.

Our next stop was World Market where a couple in their 30s walked up to the cashier ahead of me, but chose the wrong side, which happens there because the layout to pay is confusing. I’ve done it a few times myself.

Now I had a choice. I could have ducked in and been first to the register, having mastered the puzzle, or I could be a nice guy and wait for them to return from the dead-end they’d scurried into. I was a nice guy and let karma guide me by allowing them to come back around and go first.

But I paid a price for my niceness, or what I might argue to be wimpiness in the city of Los Angeles where we all want to kill each other with our cars.

I was punished when I saw the couple carrying a tall stack of dishes, each one having to be individually wrapped by the cashier. Edvard Munch, you were a genius, because The Scream was really about standing in line, wasn’t it?

More pain and suffering when the man tasted the sample chips, and liked them, doing his best to be cool for his lady and the cashier, who I’m positive wondered why anyone would spend a Saturday night at World Market, as she could attest to the torture of the place with its rugs “fresh off the boat” emitting an odd odor that made her dizzy and which she was sure wasn’t good for her health, made worse by the constant temptation of the food from countries she longed to visit but would never, but which she relived her pain by opening up cherry-gummy packages to see how many she could stuff in her mouth at one time – 16  – or eating a blood-orange chocolate bar one piece at a time by hiding it in her apron right next to a picture of her mother, whose house she would live in forever because no one would ever marry her if she didn’t find a way to lose the 35 pounds she had gained since she started sampling different foods from around the world with her five-finger discount.

Who was here first? I don't know. Did he just walk up? Hey, he's not with her. Line-cutting asshole.

So, did this dude pay for the chips when they were ringing up the endless stack of dishes? No, of course not. He decided to buy them after the first transaction was over, bringing my head close to the point of a total blood-swelling explosion. I watched the crumpled bills come out of his pocket one by one and his quest to pay with the exact amount of coins and the clock in my head slowed and I thought about paying for the chips to speed up the process or just smashing him across the face with my plastic bottle of wasabi mustard from Germany. But I didn’t.

When another employee, fresh from her nap in the stock room, opened another register I ran to it like a fire-starved pyro to a warehouse fire.

Then Sunday night we went to dinner in Topanga Canyon. At the restaurant, you stand in line and order dinner and drinks and they bring the food to the table. But you have to go to the bar to pick up your drinks. Madness at the bar, of course. No clearcut line, one bartender and every person for himself.

So I was patient, and a small line formed behind me. But other people came in and wedged forward, so I started moving forward, fighting for position.

After we received our drinks, a loud, attention-seeking woman who came into the line after us, made some passive-aggressive remark about “this guy (me) needing his drinks really bad” and that’s why she hadn’t been helped yet. I told her she came after us, but in the din of the restaurant and her own need for attention – this is, after all, a community of actors and artists – she didn’t hear me and I let it go.

I hate lines because they make deal with the clueless, the scammers, and the idiots in life who cut you off on the freeway then flip you off. They’re the people you can’t reason with, who see life in a way the rest of us can’t. The sky is blue, but they’ll argue it’s raining and believe it, or when caught in a lie will lie to cover the lie.

I like places with numbers. I take one and roam around. I don’t have to worry about jockeying for position or monitoring the line for anyone who tries to cut ahead. I just have to watch the display and listen for my number to be called.

And with numbers I get to go ahead of the people I see waiting with frustrated faces because they just F-1’d their Land Rover through traffic, making over 50 lane changes, to get to the grocery store. And they walked in knowing they were more important than anyone else there, and smarter and wealthier. But with the number system there was no way they could push forward, intimidate anyone or work their way to the front of the line ahead of the guy in dirty shorts and a ratty t-shirt smelling like he only takes showers every four days or so – what the fuck is he doing in a grocery store like this ahead of me, Mr. Range Rover thinks.

And I look back as I place my number on the counter and grin, ordering the last of Tuesday’s night’s delicious and highly sought after beef stew. Sorry about your bad luck, number 13,  I say and walk out into a world without order.

How I spent (and didn’t spend) my summer vacation

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I didn’t spend summer in the hospital. [Fox applauds, then passes out.]

I feel like I won the lottery by not going in, though the pattern for me has long been one without summer hospital stays. With falling leaves, colds and other viruses on the way, you can bet that I’ll soon be returning to hell.

Ebony and Ivory, living in perfect harmony on the beach

I didn’t spend June, July or August coughing up blood, though summer hasn’t officially ended.

And if you’re a betting man or woman, I’d bet on the blood thanks to the blood thinning shots I’m stabbing into my McGriddle-fattened six-pack twice a day. And I’ve just tempted fate by mentioning it on the blog, which means I’ll probably be in the hospital coughing up blood within the next two or three days.

I did spend June working on what the Donald would call a “super-big, important, super-large” project at work. It was a success and once again I proved it’s better to be lucky than good, and assembling a talented team always makes one look better than they truly are. Go Team Unknown.

We did spend the summer with a new puppy – a goofy, mischievous, shower-squeegee stealing, whining, scared of her own shadow, mystery of a black lab that I wanted to give away, but was outvoted by my wife and daughter, who are both attached to the black shadow-thief. (That’s all I can write about the dog, otherwise my friend @onlyz tunes out at this point and starts to read the back of the vegan muffin package.)

I didn’t spend this summer blogging or watching TV, but I did spend it reading. I read over 8,000 pages and enjoyed every minute, staying up late and making the most of when time takes its mandated-by-law break.

Malibu coastline on a nice summer day.

I did spend the hot months milking every bit of fun I could. I filled every weekend with an activity and dragged my wife and daughter to all kinds of places. From the American Idol concert, to the beach, the circus, a dog agility trial and canyon roads we’d never driven. We didn’t take a summer trip this year thanks to the blood-thinner shots, but we still had a great time and spoiled ourselves by eating dinner at restaurants more often.

The end of a great concert at Theatricum in Topanga. Check out a play here if you're in Los Angeles.

Monday, Labor Day, we ended the “holiday to holiday” summer with the annual benefit concert at Theatricum in Topanga. What an amazing afternoon filled with talented singers singing Burt Bacharach songs. A great way to finish my favorite season of the year watching some of Los Angeles’s most talented musicians, like Inara George and Sara Melson, play music for two hours.

So, I’m happy with the job I did having fun this summer. I cannot guarantee I’ll see another one. I hope I do, but it’s not written in stone that I will.

Now it’s time to focus on autumn and the Denver Broncos winning and me staying out of hell and not catching colds or the flu or coughing up blood. I’m optimistic, but know sometimes there is nothing I can do but ride out ill-timed surprises.

Here’s to a healthy fall and winter to all.

Bye bye, Tooth. Hello Happiness – I think I’m gonna cry

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It’s gone. Lost forever. Pulled out by an oral surgeon who went to medical school to learn how to do it without a hammer and chisel, or string and doorknob. Or black magic. Thank the universe for good, old-fashioned science.

This is the same type of x-ray they took for my tooth extraction. Scary looking. It reminds me of the alien Predator. Creative commons.

It wasn’t as bad I thought it would be. I tapered off the blood thinner to avoid a small gusher when he pulled it, but it wasn’t as bad as the root canals I’ve had, which last a couple of hours.

Five minutes of tugging on it while I was loaded up on a full dose of Xanax and listening to Mumford & Sons’ “The Cave” and life was good again with a piece of gauze to bite down on for an hour.

I was so happy when it was over I think the dentist thought me to be a wee bit mad, as in “Mad Hatter” mad.

It’s just that the stress of the decision to get it removed while stabbing myself with generic Lovenox twice a day worked me over in the head for a few weeks. I had visions of bad things happening, something I’m sure a mere dentist couldn’t understand.

And when I lived, I was so damn happy, I must have confused him by acting like a lottery winner who was happy to lose a tooth because he still had a million bucks in the bank.

I’ve alive. How do you like those apples?

Pulling my big fat tooth, which cracked thanks to the stressors of life causing me to grind my teeth, didn’t kill me – yet. I survived another medical procedure, one of hundreds, which I’m experiencing like restaurants on a “Best of” list.

The dental assistant told me it would take 45 minutes, which meant from the time I got in the chair and received the many Novocaine shots, including one into my infected gum that brought tears to my eyes.

“That area was a little sensitive, huh?” the dentist said, which makes me think it would be hard to lie to dentist, as they’re probably good at reading minute changes in facial expressions, and could have second careers working for the CIA ferreting out lying informants, thus bringing down the need to waterboard every enemy in Iraq.

So, I drove home, carefully, but happy I didn’t transform into a Bellagio Fountain of blood and that it didn’t take 60 minutes of chipping away and drilling to dig the tooth out. Pull, pull, pull – it’s out, go home. Yay.

But I do miss my tooth because, slowly, life is chipping away at me one piece at a time, most of which I cannot see, but feel.

But I can see the bloody socket where the tooth was and work at it with my tongue.  I have a feeling of loss, along with memories of drinking 8 16-oz bottles of Coca-Cola a day when I was younger. And letting the sticky soda work its magic on my teeth for hours at a time.

It all catches up to us at some point down the road, they say. And they would be right, whoever they are, #&$#@*s who want to be right all the time. Well, they are.

What not to do when someone tries to break into your car at 2:30 in the morning

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[As if readers of this blog needed more proof of my stupidity, here’s more evidence. Clearly, I could place “what not to do” on most of my posts, but this is more glaring than the rest.]

I was having a bad dream, which is not to be confused with the parts of my life involving cystic fibrosis. This one happened while I was sleeping and woke me up at 2:30 a.m. I’d also been fighting a virus all week and my body temperature was screwed up, which made me feel more discombobulated at that hour (building the excuse for my idiot behavior right now).

What's a leek?

As I am the most paranoid guy in the world, I looked out the window of the front door on my way to the bathroom, as I always do, and noticed a white SUV in front of our house. Double take, it’s really there and the door is open.

Unfortunately, I’d been too lazy to replace the bulbs in the fixtures near our garage because I would need to find the step-stool, and because the light fixtures are a pain in the arse to unscrew and there are spiders in them and I didn’t have bulbs and hadn’t gone to Home Depot to buy any because even though I’ve passed the store 50 times in the last two weeks, I was too lazy pull into their parking lot, get out of my car, lock my car, walk into the store, find the bulbs, pay for them, get in my car, drive home and find the step-stool.

So, the driveway was darker than it should have been thanks to me, creating the perfect environment for thieving scumbags to go to work. Oh, and I didn’t have my eyeglasses on either.

So, I moved to the bathroom window to get a different view and I saw someone standing next to my wife’s car with an object in their hand – a tire iron? I don’t know what it was. All I know is after all the years of people stealing shit off of my car at night, I was pissed. A spark ignited in my brain, or what there is of one, and any chance of rational thought fled it as I walked with pace to the front door.

I didn’t disable the house alarm when I opened the door because I wanted the high-pitched squeal of the 30-second countdown to start in case one of them came running at me and I had to shut the door in a hurry. I can’t hear the sound anyway thanks to years of IV tobramycin, but I figured they would hear it loud and clear in the dead quiet of night.

Geek does Rhyme with leek

I opened the door and in what my daughter would call my “big voice,” I yelled “Hey you guys, get away from that stuff.”

I had to confirm this is what I said with my wife at least a dozen times because I couldn’t remember and I thought I must have yelled something like “get away from that car, low-life scum, before I come out there and rip your bowels out of your throat” or something cool like that.

But no, I didn’t say that. I said “you guys.” Not “you scum sucking criminals’ or “demon-spawn from hell car thieves.” No, instead I said, “you guys.”

Oh, and by the way, while I was using my big voice, my wife disabled the alarm because I’m always activating it by accident, which she thought I did again, unaware I was having a conversation with criminals.

At about the time I opened it door and yelled, it occurred to me at the very second the words left my mouth that I was yelling at exactly the kind of people in Los Angeles who worship and carry guns. The kind who probably don’t like being told what to do in a loud voice.

And there I was standing in my t-shirt and J. Crew boxer shorts covered in a charming “carrots and leeks” pattern (picture included) in the glowing light of the porch.

Could there be a more perfect and easy-to-shoot idiot in the history of targets?

I’m a lucky idiot because the perps ran to their SUV like the vermin they are and pulled a U-Turn in front of our house as my wife and stood in the doorway watching like dopes – defiant dopes – providing yet another possible double-homicide, target-shooting opportunity for the crooks, and headlines for tomorrow’s newspaper, with our daughter growing up parent-less.

And though I was calm during the incident, after I shut the door I was wound about my stupidity and it took me two hours of replaying my missteps before I could go to sleep.

Now the hindsight part of the story.

Though everything turned out okay, I’ve been flogging myself daily for not calling the police as the criminals did whatever they were going to do, which is a mystery still stuck in my mind and a question I can’t answer for friends who hear the story. What did I really see in the street-light dim of night?

I would have loved for the police to catch these guys. I love stories like that. But I blew it. I blew it. I let my anger overcome my rational thoughts and even endangered my family by opening the door, a key defense (the sound you hear right now is the whip hitting my back).

Though I may have saved the $500 deductible for my car insurance, it cost me almost a grand to have an electrician, locksmith and our alarm company come to the house on Friday. We now have new motion detector lights around the house, stronger locks in the doors, and a soon to be upgraded alarm with a panic button for my wife when I’m not home – and a different tone control panel I can hear when I am home.

Oh, and I did drive to Home Depot to buy five bucks worth of light bulbs. And I did take out the step-stool and climb up to unscrew the tops of the light fixtures to reach in past the spiders and cobwebs to unscrew the bulbs and replace them, which had they been replaced may have stopped all of this from happening by causing the criminals to go to a different house with a different idiot lording over it.

The silver lining: when I’ve away, I’ll feel a better with my wife daughter at home with improved security. But I’m not done yet. Soon to be installed: a fence or wall. A good fence may make for good neighbors, Mr. Frost, but an electrical one with barbed wire makes for a big FU to criminals when they’re flat on their backs unconscious waiting for the police to scrape their electrocuted, bloody bodies from the sidewalk.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. This is a lesson is what not to do when criminals pick your house to rob. Call the police. They like to catch bad guys. Unless you own complete body Kevlar®, of course, which means you can walk right up to them and beat them with your flail, which would feel pretty satisfying.

Stay safe.

Eating wet dynamite while the universe shoots me in the groin

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Gunshot #1: I’ll be saying goodbye to a tooth soon. It’s fractured and needs to come out. Gunshot #2: I have big clot in my neck from my four-month old port. Thank you, universe, for the double tap to my groin. It hurts so good.

A month ago I started having pain in one of my back teeth. I grind a lot and have been too busy to get a fancy nightguard to prevent it. I ate through the last one. Along with the pain, I noticed a lump on the gum that would fill up with blood and pop and repeat the process.

The first dentist called it a fistula, which made me think of Dr. Nanos’s research cows that still cause me nightmares. The third dentist, a periodontist, told me I fractured the tooth and it needed to come out. Oh, and better yet, I have very dense bone and the tooth is quite attached to its current location. No rusty pliers and go-go juice will pull this one out. Bring in the power grinder and drill.

Yet, that wasn’t the best surprise of the week. Tuesday during my treatments I felt pain in the right side of my neck and trap. I had been to the chiropractor the day before and thought the neck adjustment must have injured something. But in the back of my mind I thought that it felt like clot pain.

Wednesday, the pain was still there on and off. When it started throbbing on Thursday, I went to the mirror and looked at my neck and there was a large golf ball bulge behind my collar bone. When I pressed on it, a pulse of fluid shot up my neck.

What hellish medical practical joke is this, Universe?

This is the Urgent Care television. Why do they even have it on the wall? I felt like ripping it down.

The doctor at urgent care took one look at the bulge and told me to go to the emergency room because they had a scanner for clots.

Off to the ER, my favorite place in the entire world. What a joy. And the visit didn’t disappoint.

I was lucky enough to draw the doctor who watched too much of the TV show E.R. and longed for the drama of patients with fence posts through their heads and fifty gunshot wounds to the torso – not patients with bulging necks.

“Urgent Care sent you here?” she asked, letting me know my case wasn’t worthy of a visit and that she’d never seen a clot in the vein that was swollen. Clearly, I was a douche bag to her at that point and an interruption to her day of more interesting patients who needed their heads sewn back on.

She called for the scanner, reluctantly. The scanner scanned me and found nothing, which brought about relief on my part. No clot. Doctor Thrill Seeker hated me even more and couldn’t explain (didn’t care) why I had pain and a pulsating lump in my neck. Go away, uninteresting patient. Come back when a gang banger has put a cap in your ass and your blood is spraying like a Yosemite geyser. Then I’ll be interested in helping you.

Ah, the joys of the random ER doc. Wonderful and delightful. But luckily, I have a good CF doc who agreed to take a look at it the next day at the hospital, even though there was no clinic.

After he looked at it, he ordered another scan. The result: a clot at the point the port enters my vein. The ER didn’t scan low enough by a fraction of an inch. I couldn’t believe it. Instant depression in a cup. This meant more Lovenox shots, of which I’ve done over a 1,000 for past clots. And being prone to coughing up blood, the shots are the equivalent to me eating wet dynamite. It’s not if my lungs are going explode like a dragon spitting fire, it’s when and where. 

So, that’s where I’m at right now. 5 Lovenex shots down. Who knows how many to go. The banging sound you hear right now is my head hitting the wall.

Or, is it the sound of irony since I got my port to avoid the clots the PICCs gave me?

Stay clot-free.