Oh Owie OwieOwieOwieOwieOwie

OH, I said, This shit dont hurt, I said, What are these sissies talking about? Side effects, fuck that I'm tough..
Then I did #  second one last night and today I gotta make me some amends because guess what?
This shit hurts..

The Fat of the Land

I did some arithmetic. These pills cost 18k for a month. I take 6 a day. That's 180 per month, and it works out to exactkly a hundie a pill. I love that. For some reason I find that intensely gratifying, and symmetrical, and fairly brimming with ironic unity.
The silver lining is not, in fact, silver, it is saturated fat congealed inside my brains.
Every dose of hundies, 2 at a time, has to be accompanied by 20 grams of fat. I now read labels, and I'm telling you this is a disgusting unnatural and morbid requirement. I would NEVER allow myself to eat this shit otherwise.

These are the husks of this week's madness, plus the shit I can't show you, a box of the cutest little custom glass outfits you ever saw. They have this little hinged point protector/scabbard thingie you just fold up and wham, no needle sticks as you go for the sharps container. And then there's Ribovirin. Don't get me started on that shit we would be here all day.

20 grams of fat is a big glass of whole milk with 2 shots of half-and-half added.
It's a peanut butter sandwich with butter on both breads and peanut butter in the middle.
It's one and a half bun-sized wieners.
You cant just eat the fat. It has to have a matrix. Usually starch or sugar. Cake. Potato chips.
CHEESE.
I keep saying I'm just gonna do shots of olive oil. I even got the shot glass out from behind the coffee cups.
I'm not there yet,
But I will be.

Command Decision

This here Interferong Plus is starting to cook off up in here.
I told myself I wasn't going to carry on about all guarded and code word as Bubba says K-fave in meetings and make people guess when I share the irony of shooting shit now to save my life when for all those years it was slow suicide.
I did decide, though, that I would let myself share the joy in here where I can crack wise and say the shit that makes even the bad things funny, because they are, actually.
Starting to get that thick head, and not much gittup, and more and more whu?? and don't really be giving fucks very fucking often.
"You don' think it gon' be like that but it do!"

"Speriment

 

This is an experiment in getting the video from my new phone to play on this computer, which is running Vista which does not seem to want to play Mpeg4 video.

So I up load and then it will play through the QuickTime add-on in my browser firefox. 

The subject matter is really not that important but I just wanted to say that I like the personality that has been developing as I see myself on these little videeos and have tried to eliminate the phony overlay and just to be myself.

I'm With Stupid

Passed out on the toilet last night, taking a leak, at 3 AM. Woke up upside down in the most awkward contortion of my face on the floor in the corner where the tub surround meets the wall and my ass still, barely, on the seat, still peeing, and I couldn't figure out how to get up. I was amazed that my poor little neck was not broken clean off.
Got myself cleaned up, groaning like a pirate, struggled back to bed to lay there whimpering and wondering what the fuck did I just do. It reminded me of waking up from an OD.

The malfunction culminating in this goose egg wasn't even the stupidest thing I did last night.

I looked at the clock by the bed  and I was amazed that they had a time of day that was a 3 and then I figured out it was night because I was in bed. There was a little gel pack in the freezer so I got that on the goose egg on my forehead and eventually I got a 600 mg Ibuprofen down me and got my hands around where I could reach the knots in my shoulders and gradually drifted back off to sleepy-land.
It was a humiliating end to an evening that was wrong from the start.
AS I shall soon stop pointing out these stupid pills I started taking yesterday cost a fortune, and they have a rigorous routine involved, every 8 hours or they will cut your balls off whether you have them or not. I took mine at 8 AM, then at 4 PM and then my stupid button stuck in the down position and at 8 PM I took the last ones for the day. Five minutes later it occurred to me that I wasn't supposed to take them until midnight. There was nothing I could do
Maybe today will be a better day.

The Stones

I must have been a crow in a past life I always notice shiny things in the street or on the sidewalk, out of the corner of my eye. There's a big work table in my little apartment where they wind up, safe and warm and appreciated if not always utilized.
My pal Maggi and I were leaving Providence Hospital one Sunday morning after our NA meeting, and I saw something shiny on the haystack sized  pile of rectangular hay bales of granite block  in the courtyard of the new cancer treatment center

It took all my years of sobriety and my efforts at ethical regeneration to leave this where I found it.

 . Turns out that pile of stone is actually supposed to be a fountain. They put a lot of money into these new buildings, and it is nice that they added some art. Although the whole effect is rather bleak, angular, austere,  it is still winter or it was at the time anyway and maybe later on they will turn the water back on and we will have a bit of a gurgling rivulet for this little turtle when he warms up enough to move about and maybe even go swimming.

Chocolate Therapy

So it turns out a dessert called a "tort" is not the same as an action at law called a tort it is in fact pretty much chocolate scrambled eggs. It's a cake without flour. A day without rain. A summer without Interferon. Oh, wait, it snowed last night while I was making this, on the second day of spring. And I went down to Central Drugs today to pick up my shit: eighteen thousand dollars worth. Pegolated Interferon, Ribavirin and Telaprivar aka Incivek. But fuck that shit this here dessert is in my refrigerator right now and it is callin' my name.

Finished product I will be consuming for the next few weeks as I struggle to get enough fat in my system to carry the medicine deep into my liver

This dessert took about three hours to produce and another hour to decorate. There is $16.00 worth of chocolate in there altogether, half a pound of butter, six jumbo eggs, and a pint of heavy cream. And I did it all, including the whipped cream, with a pastry whisk. It was a workout, first to whip the yolks with the melted chocolate/butter goop, and then to make meringue with the whites and cream of tartar. The recipe said to make stiff peaks, and I dare you to try that with a whisk. I didn't get there, to be honest, but I did get pretty close. Fuck it.
You know when you space out and leave the scrambled eggs too long on the burner? How they get kind of pasty/grainy? Turns out if you add enough sugar and chocolate and butter it makes a great texture and binds all the sinful stuff just right.

Under the influence of infra-purple heating element in my secret laboratory the expansion factor of butter, eggs and chocolate increases exponentially. And this is after I left the oven open to go find my new phone with  fabulous camera.

It takes almost an hour to bake at 350 I set my online egg-timer which is a simple graphic of an hourglass with the virtual sand spilling down so the top part is empty when the annoying and extremely loud Westclox-type bell clangs off when the time, measured to 3 decimal places is up. As it baked it rose beautifully clear over the top of my new $17.00 spring-form pan as I plunged my little  handcrafted toothpick analogue into center-mass to test for done.
Then, like so many things in life, it fell. So much that I had to turn the basic tort upside down after it cooled overnight to make a flat enough top for spreading the ganache, white chocolate flakes and raspberries. (I got that trick off the Internets!)
Still you have to plane off the rim-crust so it will lay flat. And afterwards I mixed up my tort-shavings with the leftover ganache (semisweet chocolate and heavy cream) to make a giant bitter-chocolate candy bar I would kill children to hog for myself. It's the size of a bundle of hundred dollar bills big enough to pay for a month of medicine. 180 hundies. Think about it.

Adults Only

I'm waiting for my drug connection to call. It's been a little over 24 hours. I'm still patiently trying not to stare at the phone.
It took repeated telephone work but I arranged for the money. Finally. Everybody did what they said they were gonna do and the guy called Monday to tell me they had it in hand and I could go ahead and set the hookup.
There's a guy I know downtown says he can get the right shit and I like the guy enough to take him at his word about it.
They try to get you to go to some online deal out of Florida but I googled it and it isn't nothing but a drugstore in Orlando and there is no reason in hell I'm doing that kind of a number with somebody I don't know and don't want to know and would pretty much cross the street to avoid. I don't think the setup is crooked, that's not what I'm saying but some wannabe big pharma rep has done some bamboozling somehow so the punters get shunted in the same direction with a bit of doubletalk and a wink and a nod.
Guaranteed I will be copping $18,000 worth of the shit in this first score, and if the shit's as good as they say it is I will re-cop three and maybe six more times and there isn't a price break for repeats.
These people are cold.

Stay Away From The Fan

I had a great half-hour chat with my new friend Jennifer last night in bed.
She is my friend because she laughs at my jokes. Not the Ha-Ha-you-made-a-joke but the I can't-stop-laughing kind which only makes me worse. Back in the day me and my brother could make our mom cry begging us to stop cracking her up. Sometimes we would but usually not.
So you have to eat 20 grams of fat every time you take this incivek bullshit, and the thing was an image of a guy on the bus, looks at his watch, takes out a pill bottle and a stick of butter , takes the pill, peels the butter like a candy bar and starts munching. Oh well. You had to be there.
I should clarify. I was in bed. Jennifer was not. She was at work at Care Oregon my health insurance provider. I had just lain down for a nap when my new smartphone rang, which I like because it was so effing expensive I like to get some use value out of it, and I can always nap later.
Anyway Jennifer works for a special division at Care Oregon exclusively set up for dealing with people taking the Interferon triple cocktail and the horrendous side effects it causes. They got somebody there 24/7, and Jennifer had been assigned to get with me because the Pharmaceutical Review Board has accepted my appeal and authorized about $60 K worth of drugs to hopefully avoid having to spring for a new liver down the increasingly short road ahead.
So if you are anywhere near the fan I suggest you step back.

"Build a man a fire, he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

No Art this time Sorry

I'm gonna share an impression. And that involves memory. I'm not saying that this impression is fact, only that I have it, and that it came from something that appears to me to have actually happened, though the two other people that could back me up on it with their own impressions are both dead which is a shame they were great guys.

One winter's day back in December of 1968  Bill Heckard and one of the Sheldon brothers, I believe it was Dave, took me steelhead fishing way up in the mountains at Elkhorn Ranch.
This was a legendary place in my personal mythology. It had been homesteaded by the Gould family, in a spot halfway between Allegany and Loon Lake on the Coos River, more properly the upper MIllicoma, the west fork thereof, homesteaded way back in the day by these hard guy pioneer types, larger than life, who market-hunted Roosevelt Elk or Wapiti for the tables of Coos and Douglas Counties around the turn of the previous century.
I was befriended by Norman Gould when I first came to North Bend back in 1951 I was 3 and Norman was 4. As I was growing up there we stayed friends. By the way Norman is a brilliant artist, the best feel for the female figure since Tintoretto, utterly unknown, still living up Kentuck Inlet north of North Bend. And although Norman would disappear with his entire family every fall for the Elk hunt at Elkhorn, I had never actually been there myself. I digress.
I had been up all night and probably the night before, and I didn't expect the boys to actually show up but they said they would and they did and I didn't have any gear  but they had some spare tackle and we spent a cold drizzly day thrashing the river with no result except that I was tired and cold and pretty much in this Coos County Hillbilly Heaven. I was a city kid and a speed freak and a hippie and this country boy stuff was exotic and strange and these guys were good people and good men the both of them talented musicians and outdoorsmen all their lives. Now I could say I had seen Elkhorn Ranch.
And they were both big and attractive and vital and thriving men and I was pretty much in heaven sitting there between them with the heater blasting.
We were riding back in Dave's pickup or maybe it was Heckard's Dad's truck anyway there was the usual crap on the dashboard that accumulates in a man's pickup and one of the things that caught my eye was a box of Remington Nitro Express shotgun shells. It was, after all, duck season.
I asked Bill what was in the box, and Sheldon answered like you would to a little kid that they were shotgun shells and yes I could look at the box. I was, like I said, a hippie and a peace-freak and guns and gun stuff were utterly foreign to me. I fiddled around with it, looked inside that there were still some in there, more than half. It said birdshot on the box, and it was heavier than I thought it would be. I put it back, reading the name out loud and thinking how cool it sounded to say the words in that order.
"Hey, I said to no one in particular and without having thought about it,"That would be a great name for a band, if you just changed that one word"
"What?"
"Elkhorn...Nitro...Express"
"Naww" came the response pretty much simultaneously from them both, dismissive, thinking about their own worlds, not really interested in mine "Naw, nobody would know what that meant."

Monsieur Le Presidente

This here is so much of a much newer of a thing that that old new thing ain't hardly a new thing at all anymore but this here new thing is not only new but also the shizznit of a thing for sure. The business end of an amazing smartphone camera that will practically give you blowjobs it has so many megapixels and features and as you can see has also an enormous aperture. High def video shoots in 1080 p. Shoots panoramas, you just hit the switch and sweep the camera across the intended view and it shoots a continuous stream of images. And instant shutter, no delay, touch the button and that is the shot no waiting thank you I jate to wait. Jaters gonna jate, ese. (This is an example of the difference between rationalization and reasoning, that I typoed a j for an h and went on to cover up the mistake by pretending to make a joke about espanish and ghetto talk. I rationalized my mistake).

Tried the lesser model for 4 days and I couldn't make myself pretend I was anything but ripped off but that Garmin was dead the gps receiver broke when I dropped it so I got the mid-range which wasn't shit they were nice took it back and for an extra couple hundie put this in my life.

There exists an old artistic tradition called the grotesquerie. Now I am an outsider, relatively untrained, but I think of myself as an artist, not a particularly productive artist, but an artist with a personal vision nonetheless. My old pal Jack Devore , and I take it as evidence, referred to me as such even in conversations with his big-time-art-world friends. I say this because it is my best accomplishment in life, to BE creative. Besides my beautiful kid but that is more luck and fortune. This here art work is hard work, no mistake.

Introducing Monsieur Le President  

Materials for the little object int the presentation above were precious and semiprecious stones and fake gold adorning and exceedlingly ugly T'agua nut

I conducted an experiment today.I wanted to see how many pixels this unit would produce in a macro.
This photograph went from my phone to my computer via email, and then copied onto my hard drive and left on the desktop I opened it up in MS Picture Viewer and blew it up a bit.
You will remember the 4th of July "with teeth" photograph from an earlier post, and how I blew it up to put teeth in my otherwise derpy meth-freak smile in the picture Lynne took as I sailed past wearing my little red Bikini.
Well, when I blew this image of Monsieur Le Peresidente  up bigger and bigger I never did get it big enough to see pixels. No kidding, the bigger it got the more detail it showed, knife scratches, file marks, lint, an eyelash on the lens, until it scared me and I quit in disgust.

New Thing

I'm in the exam room yesterday and this nice 50 something puts her head around the corner its my new pcp. Ok SO far. Then this goofy looking asshole follows her in and she asks if her student can sit in. What the FUCK? What the fuck are you thinking, lady, I'm letting some retarded looking doofus into the most important doctor patient conference of the year? FUCK YOU....So I politely allowed as how I would really rather not.
The rest was great, not a MD but a lpa or whatever they call the almost-but-not quite that infest big practices in public health with the budgets the way they are.
Pat Buckley, Doctor Substitute, nice lady, looks like a dragon boater, grey hair, short, Danskos
Does a very competent ROS, good rapport.
Side note: this is in the 8x8 building, massive and airy and new fucking teak handrails. Atrium with ferns.
Ending with a review of the fucked up situation over at TOC
Says she will find out what is going on with the Oregon Clinic and this interferon situation.
So on the way home I get to Fred Myers and some drunken half-negro followed me out of the store and down toward my building. When he started muttering foul abuse right behind me I started to freak, and then he wouldn't stop following me and I finally had to confront this shit which seemed to piss him off. I don't know if he planned on doing something but I think he was working up to it.
When I got here I went online and I signed up for the WomenStrength classes for April, taught by my pal Nikki Morris the cop. Get me some theory.
The day started out well enough cute little Brian at the T-Mobile store walked me through choosing getting a
new SmartPhone, one with hard keys.
But later, at 5:30, finally ending a weird afternoon, I was damn glad to get home and lock the door.

Delicates

This is the shit that gets me in trouble every time. I'm pretty sure somebody is fucking with my shit and I am having to be very extra careful because that particular somebody is in a total power position.
My health insurance provider is doing a denial of service for the interferon, they say because this l'enfant terr...at the Oregon Clinic didn't send them the documents requested.
She says they denied because of the documents.
On one scenario she is at fault, on the other she is blameless.
In either case she, and only she,  has the position of conducting the appeal process. Thus she remains in the power position and I dare not offend said same.
If she didn't send the document, a report on my previous failed go-round with interferon, then she dropped the ball, and she knows it, and is white-lie-ing to escape blame.
Or she doesn't know what she's talking about.
If she did send it they are lying, but their position is on paper and confirmed by several of their people who have no dog in this fight and thus are probably telling truth case.
She doesn't return my call. She tells others but they don't either.
I have to sit on my hands and not yell.
I don't have a good track record in that department.
I had a meeting with her yesterday before I knew the what's what and I noticed she is a talker. On and On. I don't think much gets through to her besides her own interior stream. Not a listener. What the british call a blatherskite.
tum da dum tum
ooooohhh
(EDIT on Saturday)
It is  that bad this chick needs managing I finally wormed it out of her excuse being that they would have denied anyway, or that there wasn't any such report to send. Now she knows I check up on shit.. That can't be bad...

Walker's Island

It's down by Cathlamet, well out of the marine air that is so cold and blustery so when you are running up from Astoria bugged by the howling-ass sea-breeze you keep right on going around  Puget Islandfor another halof hour or so and there it is on the Oregon side. Go on past and then cut around behind. Walker's Island. It isn't very big and you wouldn't really think it would be so excellent an anchorage. I think your eye gets jaded by the size of all the islands in the lower river.But I like to snuggle back there in the lee of the seabreeze and I can feel like I am someplace.

Gillnetters think they own the river. This guy came steaming over and made me move a hundred yards up the beach for no real reason he didn't even set where I was at before, he just wanted to fuck with somebody in case he didn't get any fish he could blame me.

Like I said that's a big bay and you can see how the wind dies down back there

There was one other cruising sailboat back there, a young couple with a baby having a wonderful time, swimming and dinking around in their little inflatable.

A bucket full of flowers from the island is also a bucket full of bugs.

I like to sleep out "on the hook" and I would rather that than some marina, even the nice ones, and I have paid attention to my anchor gear to where I can put the hook down and generally stay right where I put it right on through the tide changing and the wind shifting and the ships passing in the night. There's a deep spot that is just out of the wind and a sandy beach on the island and all wildflowers and willows on the beach and its real pretty and just a truly great anchorage and nobody goes there but the cruising sailboats that don't want to tie up with the sissies in town

No Rest For The Righteous

I post shit on here because I hate Facebook. I am not a violent person by nature but I would punch that guy Zuckerberg in the neck if I ever had the chance  just for being an intrusive megalomaniac. My ex-husband Ish says the same only she had the stones to actually de-list herself. I'm too much of a sheep.
But, like I said, I have this so I can get shit off my chest when I need to. And it's a longer form which means I can say more complicated things. Or simple things in a more complicated way. Whichever.
Back in 2000 when I was at DePaul in rehab the DePaul nurse sent me downtown to see this Dr that she knew about. He turned out to be a cute little guy in a t-shirt and bluejeans. We hit it off and he was my doctor and my friend ever since until last year when some genius at Multnomah County decided it would be a good idea to close the West Side Clinic and Dr Thayer left for greener pastures at Hooper Detox. Some pasture that.

That's me on the left when I was young and good-looking and had a wife named Sue. I was a badass. I ran with a bad crowd. We had a wonderful time, 1981or maybe 82. In a lot of ways I was at the top of my game. Sue kept right up but it was a strain. Now she acts all ashamed of those days. Not me. We finally broke up in 87. She no longer speaks to me, unlike my ex-husband Ish.

Anyway back then in 2000 I had made the commitment to myself to change genders and I had read the horror stories about finding a physician that was down for the hormones. It came as a bit of a surprise when Jim, as I knew him later,  said "Sure, whattaya want?" as he reached for his PDA and his little Rx pad. We got along great, he was there for me the whole time, supportive and curious and beyond accepting. He was participatory.

 When my computer crashed in 2008 I lost all my shit. Getting all meta about it, this is a picture of the picture they took at the tattoo removal clinic when I got Volunteer of the Quarter for spring 2005. I still cannot see the guy in the other picture in this chubby-cheeked little hippie girl. Not one bit. And I know them both

 Anyway it was a total  bummer after ten years when he left the clinic.
I just got back from my intake appointment at Old Town Clinic where they transferred my case. Finding a copacetic Dr is a nightmare, but the Old Town  joint was crawling with addicts in and out of recovery and bright young leftwing social service people so I felt right at home.
I didn't meet the Dr yet but I'm set up to see her next Thursday, and I have a good feeling about it.