Because I deserve one, dang it.
March 2017 in review: A mixed bag
March started out kind of sucky, with more of the seemingly endless snow piling up. It shouldn’t snow in March except maybe at the polar ice caps. March also ended kind of sucky, with the discovery of a lump down around my private parts. Even if it turns out to be something harmless (benign, to use the official parlance) it’s still going to require a little chop-chop to remove. At least with the snow, you only have to wait it out before it finally goes away.
In between the start and end of the month, work was extremely busy, but I helped successfully push out a major new initiative, so that was good.
I began to run again outside. I’m still not running regularly, but I’ve at least started. This is goodish.
The weight loss thing–well, I did have two donuts this month. *hangs head in shame* It could have been a lot worse, though.
The weekly write-ins have been a real boon to my writing. But I’m still not writing much outside of them–yet.
And finally, back to the weather: despite a whole lotta rain, temperatures are finally and reliably back in the double digits again. Yay.
I give March 2017 a rating of 6/10. Some bad stuff, but slightly outweighed by the good.
Now I must concentrate on resisting all the Easter candy out there on sale.
Writing prompts: Bean there, done that
From Writing Exercises.co.uk, a site that offers a random first line generator.
The part in bold is the generated text, the rest is my thrilling conclusion to the story.
She could smell gas even before she opened the door. That was the last time she’d let Frank borrow six cans of beans.
More:
After five years, he just happened to be walking down her street? She figured he would want something, he had a desperate and needy look in his eyes. She was right–he wanted beans and plenty of them.
Still more:
He had the urge to clear the ground, to look out and see nothing. He grabbed his magic world-erasing brush and with a few swipes back and forth was gazing upon a serene black void. After awhile he got bored of this but had left his magic world-creating pen at home and so was stuck with the black void for a very long time.
And finally:
More and more people were refusing to obey the laws of the land. Soon every last can of beans had been stolen.
Some things I wish I’d learned when I was a miniature version of me
Or “if I had a time machine and could only change my own history, here are a few things I’d work on.”
- learn to swim (without the tragicomic results that occurred when I attempted this as an adult)
- learn a second language (without the tragicomic results that occurred when I attempted this as an adult)
- learn a musical instrument (I kind of did this in school but my guitar-playing is close to my swimming, just without the risk of drowning)
- learn sign language (because it would feel like using a secret code to people who don’t know it, plus it looks cool)
- learn to be ambidextrous instead of mostly ambidextrous (just to make things generally easier)
- learn to square dance (haha, no)
- learn to overcome my addiction to making lists (who am I kidding?)
March 2017 weight loss report: Up 0.6 pounds
The good news is that unlike February, where I gained 2.2 pounds over the course of the (short) month, in March (a longer month) I only gained 0.6 pounds.
The bad news is I still gained weight, which is not a good way to lose weight.
Here are the stats:
March 1: 166.4 pounds
March 31: 167 pounds
And February’s by comparison:
February 1: 163.6 pounds
February 28: 165.8 pounds
The worst news is that in a little less than two months I’ve gone from 163.6 to 167 pounds, an increase of 3.4 pounds. Ugh.
It looks better (?) if you compare from January 1:
January 1: 165.9 pounds
March 31: 167 pounds
The difference there is a “mere” 1.1 pounds.
In any case, I need to get off my butt and start running more, doing my walks at lunch and purging the household of all snacks except for water and celery sticks, which is just green water in solid form.
Onward to April!
I do not like creepy coincidences
When you find an unwelcome lump of something or other in your scrotum, having this arrive in your email inbox just days later is a little disturbing:
On the other hand, it’s great timing.
You can check out any time you like but you can never leave
I recently bought the album Hotel California because it was cheap and I’ve apparently decided to live in the past. Given how 2017 is playing out I don’t know that anyone would blame me. I never owned the album when it was new (in 1976), though I was just old enough to, even way back then. I was familiar with the singles, though, notably “Life in the Fast Lane” and of course the title track.
When The Eagles reunited in 1994 (after splitting up 14 years earlier) I wondered how they felt about the song. Radio played it to death, back when people listened to radios. It’s their “Stairway to Heaven,” a song that is indelibly tied to the band. I can’t even guess how many times I’ve heard it before finally buying the album. More than a dozen but less than a billion.
But a lot.
And yet, I find myself listening to the song now and it crackles with energy and still feels fresh coming through my headphones more than 40 years later. I love the opening guitars, the ironically upbeat chorus, and the overall Twilight Zone creepiness of the lyrics, ending with the great line I quote in the title of this post. And so I award “Hotel California” my favorite old song of the moment and best old song from 1976.
(I can’t actually think of other songs specifically from that year. Probably something by The Carpenters.)
Okay, I cheated and looked up the top ten songs of 1976:
| No. | Title | Artist(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | “Silly Love Songs“ | Wings |
| 2 | “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart“ | Elton John & Kiki Dee |
| 3 | “Disco Lady“ | Johnnie Taylor |
| 4 | “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)“ | The Four Seasons |
| 5 | “Play That Funky Music“ | Wild Cherry |
| 6 | “Kiss and Say Goodbye“ | The Manhattans |
| 7 | “Love Machine“ | The Miracles |
| 8 | “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover“ | Paul Simon |
| 9 | “Love Is Alive“ | Gary Wright |
| 10 | “A Fifth of Beethoven“ | Walter Murphy |
This is what you call a study in contrasts. Some legitimate classics (“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”), predictable fluff (“Silly Love Songs”–this was #1 for the year? Or any year?) but disco was in full bloom, like a hideous algae covering your favorite swimming lake with a grotesque film and you prayed it would go away and a few years later, it did (then it came back). Still, no “Muskrat Love” so it wasn’t all bad.
It is the days of blah
I have been tired and kind of out of steam this week creatively, though I’ve managed a few trifling bits.
This post is essentially padding the monthly total of the blog because I have nothing to say but here are words to fill the void.
Also, since I haven’t written one in a while, a haiku:
The days of blah come
Inspiration eludes me
Fudge sticks and crackers
Now I’m hungry.
Book review: The Fireman
The Fireman by Joe Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Joe Hill prefaces The Fireman with a list of people who inspired him and cheerfully admits to stealing the title from Ray Bradbury and “all the rest” from his father. It’s true in a couple of ways–the story of a global pandemic that causes people to spontaneously combust has homages aplenty to King’s own end-of-the-world novel The Stand, as well as references and call-outs to The Dark Tower series. And it’s also true in that, like King, Hill tells a ripping good yarn, with vividly-drawn heroes and appropriately evil bad guys.
The story focuses on a band of infected that learn to control the “dragonscale” spores inside their bodies through group singing, something that not only prevents them from literally going up in flames but also leaves them feeling pleasantly buzzed in a communal sort of way. This turns out to have its downsides as the story plays out.
Harper Willowes, having escaped from her revealed-to-be-monstrous husband, joins the other infected in a summer camp where they lay low, wary of being found by “incinerator” gangs devoted to killing the infected. She meets the titular Fireman, a British ex-pat named John Rookwood who can not only keep the dragonscale under control but can use the fire it creates willfully.
Made pregnant by her estranged husband just days before she flees from him, Harper draws closer to the Fireman while growing increasingly concerned about the pod people-like behavior of the other infected in the camp.
As you might guess, things go sideways through intentions both good and evil, with plenty of fireworks (literal and otherwise) and mayhem resulting. Hill also demonstrates that he is not above using a well-placed fire pun. All the better to burn the reader’s expectations (ho ho).
The Fireman is a messy, bloody romp. The bad guys will have you hissing while the heroes are flawed but believable and sympathetic. The many call-outs to The Stand and The Dark Tower are fun to spot. Hill tosses curve balls from time to time to keep things interesting and doesn’t cheat much with coincidences, letting the characters largely push the story forward (there is one instance near the end where the sudden arrival of a character felt all too convenient, but Hill at least deals with it quickly and moves on).
This is an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys post-apocalypse stories or just quality horror written in vintage King style. Hill may steal from his father but he has his own voice and with each consistently excellent novel, proves himself a valuable addition to modern horror writers.
My shaved head
I shaved my head tonight. This is not new, I shave it every two to three weeks.
I love the way my head feels right after I’ve shaved it. It’s weird, but I do. It’s all stubbly and sexy.
It also reminds me:
- I don’t need to spend $100 a year on shampoo*
- I don’t need to comb my hair
- I don’t need to dry my hair
- I don’t need to style my hair
- I am at no risk of getting my hair caught in heavy machinery
- I don’t worry about going bald
- I never have a bad hair day
It’s win-win-win-win-win-win-win.
* this may be an exaggeration, I haven’t bought shampoo in awhile to really check
The overactive bladder
You know the best part about getting older? No, neither do I.
But until I can be cryogenically frozen and thawed out a thousand years later when people live to be 2,000 years old, I must contend with the fact that now, in my early 50s, things will break now and then.
In this case, man things.
A month or so ago I noticed a sensation in my groin. It wasn’t the pleasant kind brought on by lascivious thoughts, it was more of a persistent and annoying pressure. It felt like I had to pee all the time, whether I had to or not. It even felt like I had to poop a lot, which I didn’t. I tried to put this phantom pressure out of mind but in the end, it was too persistent and so I went to my doctor.
He scheduled blood and urine tests, with a tentative prognosis of prostatitis, (infected prostate, which I’ve had a few times before but not recently). He warned that the blood test would test for prostate cancer and often came back with false positives, so I wasn’t to freak out. At least not right away.
I delayed on getting the tests done because I am a man and men are like that. I finally did and almost immediately after I began experiencing new symptoms, namely a pressure or cramping in my lower abdomen as if whatever it was had started to spread. This alarmed me. After a shower, I fondled my crotch in a non-lascivious way and found the left testicle had a neighbor and it wasn’t the right testicle. It was a hard lump of something or other. I was pretty sure my crotch (or any crotch) is not meant to have a hard lump of something or other in it and was even further alarmed.
My follow-up appointment with my doctor (to discuss the test results) wasn’t until April 6 because he was on vacation. I didn’t want to wait nearly two more weeks while the unwelcome lump of something or other cuddled up to my left testicle, so I called the doctor’s office and they scheduled me to see another doctor today at another one of their clinics. He would have the test results.
The good news is the test results came out negative. The doctor said a prostate infection seemed unlikely. He speculated that I might have an overactive bladder. I nodded in my head because I’ve often thought my bladder is about ten times smaller than average based on how often I need to pee (I even tested for diabetes a few times because of the frequency). He recommended that I avoid beverages in the evening and see if it made a difference. As I write this it is 10:19 p.m. and I have a glass filled with diet soda next to me.
I had pizza tonight. It made me thirsty!
And I’m a man. Men are kind of dumb about these things (I’ll do better tomorrow, I promise.)
I then mentioned the lump of something or other and the doctor told me to drop my drawers so he could cop a feel. He used somewhat more professional language.
He confirmed the obvious–I had what seemed to a cyst where a cyst should not be. Well, a cyst really shouldn’t be, period. He said he was going to schedule an ultrasound and they would let me know when and where.
Medical sonography (ultrasonography) is an ultrasound-based diagnostic medical imaging technique used to visualize muscles, tendons, and many internal organs, to capture their size, structure and any pathological lesions with real time tomographic images.
Pathological lesions. Hooray!
Anyway, I’m not really alarmed since being alarmed will not actually change anything. I actually feel better than I did yesterday because the initial test results are clean and the unwelcome lump of something or other is getting probed.
What I’m trying not to think about is the inevitable plan to remove it. It’s tempting to enter “how are cysts removed” into a Google search but I’d like to sleep tonight (trips to the loo to pee notwithstanding).
Anyway, this concludes more of getting old. It’s always an adventure, like a dark ride that gets stuck partway through, probably next to one of the speakers blasting awful looping music.
Rainy early Spring writing prompts
- It’s raining so much you think it might be a good idea to build an ark in case the world floods. Write a shopping list for the supplies you will need, including all of the pairs of animals. Remember, unicorns are not real, so don’t include them.
- With trees starting to bud and bloom again, write a story about happy trees. Except these trees are happiest when eating small dogs and children, like those scary apple trees in The Wizard of Oz.
- Write a poem that includes the following things that rhyme with spring: ring, ding, sling, fling, ping, Emperor Ming
- Spring is a time of renewal. Write a short story about two countries renewing their bitter, pointless war. Make it a romantic comedy.
- Spring is also a time when the land again becomes covered with the lush green of vegetation. Write a story about a giant green blob that scours the land clean, leaving nothing but the desiccated bones of all humanity. Also make this a romantic comedy.