Fox, here. They’re selling a portrait of me on Etsy.com. Ladies, this is your chance to have me on your dresser 24/7/365. At $28, how can you go wrong?
I look like a million bucks
I, Fox, am a handsome animal
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Tag Archives: Fun
A new dog or not?
It feels like when I’m not eating or sleeping or sitting at the computer with a nebulizer, I’m buying something or thinking about buying something. Truth be told, I do buy stuff when I have a neb in my mouth, which makes sleep and meals the times I don’t? I can’t even guarantee that. Curse you, consumeristic country I live in. My value as a human can only be measured by how much I buy.
I digress.
As you may know, I spent over two months searching for a used car. Now the big decision is getting a new dog. I want one.
We have a lab and a rescued mutt. The grateful mutt is a chow mix and has some serious guard dog, bite your ass and never let it go, in him. I like that. Problem is, he’s around 14-years old and the gas and growl are going out of his tank. He can’t hear anymore, which downgrades his guard dog status to “if you step on me at night, I’ll notice.”
So, I want a dog with some physical clout – the looks and size to make anyone back away. And the ears to hear intruders coming a mile away. Oh, and the internal drive to remove their flesh should they try to harm my family while I’m lounging in a hospital room on the other side of the city getting my daily rub down. Or, if a brick falls from the sky and takes me out for good, I’d like to know my family is in good paws when I’m gone.
I’m thinking German Shepherd.
They're cute when they're 30 pounds
Although I’ve had dogs my entire life and believe myself to be a capable trainer, as is my wife, I’m not sure I have the energy to raise and train one of these powerhouse dogs capable of delivering serious hurt. I’ve had one bad dog bite in my life when I crossed through a neighbor’s yard and couldn’t outrun their dog. Yes, it was a German Shepherd and yes it did bite me in the ass, tearing away the entire backside of my white short-short tennis shorts. I have a healthy respect for these dogs after the embarrassment and hurt the one that chased me down delivered.
Labs are easy. Run them in the morning, give them a few carrots and feed them at night and bingo, bango bongo, they do what you say and love you. A German Shepherd is different. They are finely tuned with instincts to protect. You have to be careful not to send them the wrong signals lest you want to bury your neighbor in your backyard late one night because your new dog Fritzkrieg ripped open his throat when he held up a pair garden shears to wave hello. Oops, bad dog. You can kill a 200-pound man with your teeth, but you can’t handle a shovel? What good are you?
The discussion continues in my house. Any bets on how long it will take to make this decision?
Does this car come standard with panic attacks?
OCD, CF and buying a used car don’t mix. However, after over two months of shopping for a used wagon, my search is over. Drum roll, please.
And the winning wagon is . . . the Volvo V70 R in Electric Silver.
It's mine, all mine. A new used car.
Yes, I am done spending my nights looking for cars on Craigslist, Autotrader and cars.com. Thank god it’s over for now. No more going to car dealerships and dealing with salespeople who don’t say anything at all, don’t know the product they sell, or lament about the life they used to live before selling cars. No more sitting in wagons ruined by smokers, making me wonder if they destroyed the lungs of their children at the same time.
Cool thing about the Volvo I bought: No smoky smell and no ashtray (nice touch, Volvo).
I had the Volvo inspected by a third-party to make sure it was mechanically sound and the accident was minor, as claimed by the dealership and previous owner. Everything checked out with flying colors. The Volvo mechanics said it was one of the cleanest used Volvos they’d seen.
I didn’t get a great deal. I was tired of looking and the R is a rare version of the V70 with only 27 of them listed for sale in the USA. But it was the wagon I wanted and a standard V70 wouldn’t cut it after driving the V70 R.
Here’s the fun part: 300 horsepower, 295 lb-ft of torque and zero to 60 in 6 to 6.5 seconds depending on the information source. Yep, this wagon goes fast, especially when the high-performance turbo kicks in. The suspension is stiff and has three modes: comfort, teeth shattering, kidney bruising.
When I got it home the other night I had a mild panic attack worrying about whether or not I had bought a reliable car for my wife and daughter, if I should have negotiated a better deal, and over the money I’d spent – my wife and I don’t like to spend money (thanks, CF).
I didn’t sleep well and woke up to a major panic attack with my heart racing and missing beats. I thought I was going to have to go to the ER because I was worried I was having a heart attack. A full dose of xanax took awhile to kick in and save me from that hell, but I can’t get it out my head that maybe I did have a heart attack and now I’m damaging my heart. See how screwed up I am.
I’m feeling better about the purchase and really dig the wagon. Beats the 13-year-old SUV I’ve been driving. It’s nice to have working headlights that show the road ahead and AC that works – features I haven’t had for awhile. Ah, the little things in life.
Stay healthy.
Life Stew with Onions
If you read my previous post on the LA Times signing me up for free daily papers without my permission, then you’ll appreciate this nugget. Despite my recent 20-minute excursion into futility trying to cancel the paper, and the rep saying she would cancel it, the free paper continues to show up on my driveway each day. I can hear the rep laughing to the other reps when she got off the phone: “Screw him. It’s free. Cancel THIS, asshole customer who refuses our generosity. You’ll get our paper and enjoy it.”
I f**king hate the LA Times now. Each day I kick the paper as hard as I can to the trash can and curse their subscription department. It sits there with the other free papers until I throw them away en masse. I look forward to the demise of paper newspapers. Long live online news.
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My wife and I were talking about craigslist and the buying binge I’m on now to the improve the house. If it were up to her, we’d still have the teal carpet the house came with when we purchased it. Thanks to my creative visual genius and my ability to look in magazines with room designs and duplicate them, poorly, I’ve upgraded our house. But do I get the credit I deserve? No, of course not. I’m an unappreciated furniture picker and room designer.
All of this type of talk drives my wife nuts, which is what living with me is like. So, I asked her if she’d like to go back in time to the night we met and change her plans, not show up at the disco, forever altering her life for the better. Based on the gleam in her eyes, she looked like she’d say “yes,” but I pulled the daughter card before she could answer. She wouldn’t want to change that part of her life. I am always saved by our daughter. Without her, my wife would have built a time machine by now.
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The universe is conspiring against me when it comes to getting a used car. The Volvo dealer called me yesterday to tell me they had a pre-owned V70 R wagon, which is Volvo’s performance wagon with over 300 horsepower. A family rocket to the moon or grocery store, whichever one comes first. Nice, I’m interested, I said.
Today, I test drove it and it was wonderful. I was so happy. Finally, my two-month search over. I made an offer. Here we go, it’s negotiation time. But when the sales rep left to tell the manager, I looked at the CARFAX: “Accident/Damage reported.”
In the movie of my life, that’s me looking at the sky yelling “nooooooooooooooooooooooo” to the heavens. Oh, how you torment me, god of used cars, teasing me, making me believe I’d found the Holy Grail of Volvo wagons. Tell me this isn’t happening.
It was too good to be true. I was so close.
Now I have to decide if I want to pick up the wagon tomorrow and bring it to a third-party for an inspection to see if the impact repair was extensive or not. Or, I can give up on it. It’s a rare wagon, so it’s not an easy decision. Decision? No, not one of those again. I hate them. Argh.
Anyone want to start a pool on when I’ll buy a used car? 2012 is a good bet.
Stay healthy.
My romance with craigslist
[Adult Language]
I love craigslist. I hate craigslist. But I love it more than I hate it. I only hate it when I don’t love it, which isn’t very often, as I love it most of the time.
How did I decide on this topic tonight?
My brother from another mother, Josh of Joshland, emailed me and asked me what I had been up to lately. I’m been absent on Twitter and haven’t tweeted about McGriddles and the Broncos and other fascinating topics. Nice of Josh to check in.
And my answer to him about what I have been up to was craigslist, or one of the things I’ve been doing, along with searching for a used car, which I’ve been using craigslist for (and if the 2002 Volvo V70 had had leather seats and not fabric, my search would be over).
I can’t remember if I’ve written about craigslist here in the past or not. If I have, you can stop reading now, which you may have already done. I don’t care. That’s not that I don’t care about you – I do. I don’t care if you continue reading or not. Well, I do, but I like sounding like a tough guy tonight, hard on the outside and inside. No Jay Cutler softness here – my skin is thick like an alligator’s.
Back to craigslist. I’m a huge fan of it. And my OCD makes me a pro when it comes to hunting down items I want. I’ve furnished most of my house with furniture from craigslist. It’s one of the reasons my wife thinks I’m crazy, but she likes the thousands of dollars I’ve saved. And though I like chasing down the perfect item, the money saved, and being “green,” I also like the “meeting interesting and cool people” part of it – most of the time.
There have been a few odd individuals and people who tell you the item is in great shape but it’s not – like the elderly couple who told me the red leather Pottery Barn chair only had “minor wear” and a small hole. When I got there it looked like a cat had fucked it a thousand times over. There were scratch marks everywhere and rips. And it smelled like cat piss. It was all I could do not to let loose on the two geezers and give them a little cat scratch fever of my own. But I didn’t. I was polite and drove the 20 miles home fuming about the waste of time and misrepresentation of the item.
The good and kind and friendly people have outweighed the not so nice and bad. I have this fantasy of writing a book about all of the people I’ve met. I think I remember most of them. That’s another part of craigslist I really like – the items I buy have a story behind them, like the dining room table and chairs I bought from a famous disc jockey, a total L.A. story. I have a signed headshot from him to show my friends when I tell the story of the table, though they’re all tired of hearing it. I look at the different things I’ve bought and they say something about my life and the lives of others and the moments when our lives intersected. It doesn’t get better than that.
That’s all for tonight. I have some searching to do.
Stay well.
Fox designs more hospital T-shirts
Saturday Funhouse – Fox Returns with Inventions
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am one handsome hunk of fox
Fox here. I’m back. Did you miss me? If you didn’t, you can kiss my furry butt. I’m Fox and my middle name is “polarizing.” There is no middle ground with me. So, for those who love me, keep reading. The rest of you? Well, you can all F-F-F-Fade away.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Where have you been, Fox? The answer you may be expecting is “I’ve been partying,” which is a good answer, but not correct. You see there’s a side of me most of you don’t know about. I’m an inventor. I have patents for all kinds of inventions. And for the last three months, I’ve been holed up on an island in the south Pacific with my assistants Malorie and Julie, who are both top-notch engineers and help with the math I chose to ignore back in my school days (party or math class? Not a hard choice.)
The three of us have been working on inventions to make the lives of those fighting cystic fibrosis easier, even that jerk-off bum of a CFer named Unknown, whiny loser that he is. A little blood and he runs to the hospital. You didn’t see me passed out in a hospital bed after my four-day bender with Keith Richards had me spitting up blood in a bathroom in the south of France. Some of us can take it. But I digress.
During the past four months, my brainy assistants and I have come up with four excellent inventions. I’m here today to share them with you. They’ll be available soon to buy, but I’m giving you a preview because that’s the kind of fox I am – generous and sober with my 1-day AA chip, which I’m going to bet on red to win.
Pull back the curtain, please.
Stay out of my room. You're covered in Pa.
Bacteria-finder sunglasses. Wear these glasses and you can see all bacteria harmful to CFers. Pseudomonas shows up in orange. Cepacia in red. MRSA in Yellow. You name the bacteria, we have a color for it. Friendly bacteria show up in blue shades. These are great to wear in the hospital. You’ll look like a rock star to doctors and nurses, while knowing who’s been naughty and nice when it comes to washing their hands. “Come back when you learn to use soap and water,” you’ll say to the nasty Respiratory Therapist fresh from the bathroom and covered in C-Diff. He’ll stare with a sad-dog grin as you bust his ass for spreading germs and almost giving you the world’s most dangerous case of the squirts.
Am I still alive? iPad/iPhone app. Ever wonder what your temperature is, your O2 sats, blood pressure, heart rate, and heart rhythm are — all at once? Simply download the “WTF is going on in my body” app from Apple and you’ll know in the time it takes you to set down your mojito grande and place two thumbs on your iPad or iPhone. The CF version of the app also tells you if your lung has collapsed or if you’re just a big hypochondriac like Unknown is. And as a bonus, the Fox version has a built-in breathalyzer. Just place your mouth on your iDevice and blow (just the fact you’d do that tells you that you’ve had enough to drink).
Ring of hemoptysis fire
Dragon Gum. Nothing worse than coughing up blood. It’s a drag unlike any other. Chew this new gum and blood turns to fire. It’s quite a trick and we’re still working out the kinks, like timing the combustion of when the blood turns to flame after contacting the gum. I had a hard time kissing my PhD’s for a week after I burned my mouth on the first stick. Plus, my mouth smelled like dead flesh, making me off-limits to the opposite sex. But when this sweet tasting gum works, hello, King of the Dragon Colony. You’ll be spitting fire balls across the room. Take that cystic fuckbrosis.
IV fluid Clothing Pads. If you’ve ever been on home IVs and used IV balls, then you know it’s a pain to wedge it under your shirt by your shoulder while you’re infusing it. Hey there, Jr. Hunchback. We have a solution to solve the IV geek look – IV Bra Pads for the ladies and IV Speedos for the men. Now instead of IVs making you look like a geek, you’ll look like a Goddess or God with amazing physical gifts. And you won’t mind when the zosyn dose runs three hours. That’s three hours you’re eye candy for the opposite sex. “Why is there a line running from your bathing suit to your arm?”
I’m glad to be back and contributing to the CF community again. No need to fill my comment box with Thank You notes. I know you love me and what I do. But, hey, if you have to leave a love note, it won’t hurt me. I am, after all, a sensitive Fox who only wants to fill the world with love and happiness. Or beer and Vicodin chasers. I forget.
Party like it’s your last.
Fox out.
In the Cement Mixer
[adult language and anger warning]
It feels like someone, I mean CF, threw me in the back of an empty cement mixer and turned up the rotation speed to high. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, someone, I still mean CF, threw rocks in the mixer with me. The noise alone hurts my ears and the rocks cause bruising and welts. Then, as if that isn’t enough to cause pain, someone, you know who I mean, adds broken glass to the mixer. The glass cuts my skin and I start bleeding.
Life with CF - some days
Meanwhile, the cement mixer keeps turning and turning and the rocks keep banging against me and the sides of the barrel. The glass keeps cutting.
Then someone pours salt into the mixer, which makes my cuts from the glass burn.
All in all, this is what CF has felt like lately. First, the bleeding two months ago, two embolizations and 20 days in solitary. Fuck you, CF. Then more bleeding the day after Thanksgiving to show me who is really in charge – it’s not the doctors who perform embolizations – and eight more days in the hospital. Fuck you, CF. The hospital kicked me around too. A blown IV puffed up my left hand and I now have a two-inch vein made of rock. During the PICC line procedure my heart went nuts and a doctor actually had to come to the room. When someone was drawing blood, they hit a nerve and now I have nerve pain in my forearm. Then, one day out of the hospital I caught a virus and my white cell count shot up and set back my progress with the IVs. That’s the nutshell version.
Do I need to repeat tonight’s mantra? I think I do – Fuck you, CF, fuck you, because I’m still the luckiest guy in the world.
Why doesn’t CF make us stress resistant to life’s troubles?
Cystic fibrosis stress is difficult to describe to others outside of the disease’s reach. But it’s not that nuance of stress bothering me tonight, though when I think of going back to the hospital one day I feel like an ex-con who says he’ll never go to prison again. They’ll never take me alive. Now that feels stressful.
Where's the hospital bed in this ICU picture?
Tonight, the part of CF irritating me revolves around being stress resistant to non-CF related stress. At one point in my life, in my 20s, I had that power. I didn’t care what happened and somehow survived my own consistent stupid acts of defiance.
I want that feeling back.
Cystic fibrosis should come with superpowers when it comes to fighting work and life stress in general. But it doesn’t. I worry about too many things and I feel I shouldn’t. CF should protect me from the bullshit. Perhaps, it helps reduce stress a bit. After the last two embolizations, I don’t sweat the small stuff at work as much because I don’t know how long I’ll be able to work. I’m in extra time now. I don’t get too bent over trivial matters.
That’s not to say I’m not a perfectionist. I care about the work. I just try not to worry about what might go wrong or when something does. There is always a solution. Unfortunately, not everyone has spent a portion of their lives in the hospital. My co-workers stress over details that will never make an impact in life, or they’re afraid to take risks. Fear overwhelms them at times.
Why can’t I ignore all of these stressors when I know today might be my last? Well, bills have to be paid; daily life must be lived. I need health insurance. My life is not the romantic vision of dying with the mantra of “you’ve got two months to live so go crazy and take care of your bucket list.” It’s a constant internal back and forth of living for today and planning for tomorrow. Blow all your dough today and you’ll be poor tomorrow.
Life would be much easier if when we were born, we knew exactly how much time we had. I’d like to know when I have 60 days left to go. Watch the partying of all time begin – I wouldn’t worry about a thing. Not one thing. That is until day 61 rolled around and I woke up flat broke, addicted to coke and sleeping in my wrecked Porsche 911 stuck in two feet of Pacific Ocean surf and sand. Worst of all, I’d still have CF.
Life is all about the correct timing of one’s recklessness, isn’t it?
Angry Birds, Californication, used cars and work
[Please excuse typos. I’m tired from doing all of the things in this post.]
I’ve been living in the CF netherworld of not feeling great, but not feeling bad enough to go in for IVs. It’s like riding a mediocre wave for as long as you can before you fall into the water. I’m on colistin, so it’s not surprising that I only feel “okay.” When I go back on Cayston in December, which was planned that way, I’ll feel better. This is the time of year where I do my best to stay out of the hospital but know I’m one bad cold away from an infection. I wash my hands a lot, give people knuckles instead of a handshake, and touch door handles with my shirt sleeve. Oh, and I don’t kiss supermodels because who knows where they’ve been. I ain’t taking no chances this time of year, crazy tall lady who wants to break up my marriage.
Speaking of my obviously better half, my wife got me hooked on Angry Birds, which may not make her my better half right now. I’ve been resisting games on the iPad because they’re productivity killers (have you seen many blog posts lately?) She downloaded the game on her iPhone. I followed. Holy f**k. This game is like crack cocaine – not that I’d know what crack cocaine is like, but my supermodel friends tell me about it all the time. Angry Turds, as we call it sometimes to great laughter from my daughter, mirrors crack in two ways. First, you think you’re only going to play one or two scenes or puzzles or whatever they call them. Nope. You play 10 puzzles. It’s hard to stop. Second, you lie to yourself that if you start you can stop in five or ten minutes. “I can handle it. I can play at 11:45 p.m. and be done at midnight. Liar, liar. Argh. I feel like a junkie.
When I haven’t been playing the birds game, I’ve been watching the third season of Californication. I watched the first two seasons in the hospital and got hooked. (Lots of talk tonight about addictions. Nothing like my OCD maxed out.) Great show. California is a cool place to live if you’re a stud book writer. Or you live by the beach. Otherwise, it’s full of foreclosures and polluted air.
The process of buying a used car bites. Plain and simple. It’s not fun. It takes a ton of time to find the right car because unlike the stupid commercial that showed 40 red Mustangs pulling up to a driveway with one staying – the perfect car – it’s quite the opposite of having fun. It’s “let’s drive to faraway places to look at cars that don’t match the description in the ad.” Occasionally, it’s cool to see new parts of L.A. I drove to an area north of Sunset Blvd the other day. Old-school L.A. with narrow streets and no parking and big houses wedged together that cost millions of dollars. Very nice. I can only imagine the weekends in that area. A couple of Brits I know would party hard and wake up in a pool the next morning.
Work, work, work. What can I say. It’s work. I’ve been getting rush projects one after another, including the large one I had to keep moving while I was in the hospital and technically not allowed to work. But they didn’t mind me working because the work had to get done. Even not working the last week in the hole didn’t kill my deadlines. So there work gods, I got one over on you. Or did I? Who got hosed here? Nothing like pushing off all of your scheduled projects for ones that are “hot” and “urgent.” Madness, I say. Madness.
That’s it. That’s the update. Time to go play Angry Birds before I go to sleep. I can handle it. I’ll only play one puzzle. Just one. Yeah, that’s right. When’s the intervention?
The Unknown Cystic 