Harleys, Cars, Girls & Guitars

We All Fall Down

Three surgeries in the past two months! Two months of enforced physical inactivity, opiate pain medications and not even being able to babysit my grandkids. I'm seeing the surgeon on Thursday, and if he gives me the OK, I will be able to resume my normal physical regimen of bicycling, yoga and weight lifting.

Kids fall down all the time. My grandkids, ages 1 through 3, are still learning how to control their bodies. The one year old twins fall down every 30 seconds or so. The three year old is starting to get her act together.

The worst part of my two month long struggle with health is that I haven't been able to get down on the floor with my grandkids to play and rough house.

Every aspect of my life is at a standstill because of the physical inactivity. Can't wait to get started again.

We all fall down.

Kids take it all in stride. If you don't get up when you fall and try again, you'll never learn how to walk. My grandkids fall down, scrape their knees, cry and show the boo-boo to grandpa. I kiss it and we start all over again.

I've been through this picking myself up and putting myself back together so many times. I no longer get depressed or angry about it. It just seems to be the reality of life. People get sick and die. Economic disasters strike from time to time. Completely unexpected problems overwhelm us.

My midwestern upbringing and Catholic indoctrination taught me stoicism. In rural Illinois in my day (the 50s and 60s), nobody wanted to listen to your whining, your excuses or humor your bitch. My family's background is hard ass Irish and German peasantry. I was taught from childhood that nobody was going to help me and that, if I wanted anything, I had better get it for myself.

This is quite a sensible philosophy.

I know how to put myself back together. I'll start out slowly with the physical exercise so that I don't hurt myself... the first consideration for an old fart. I'll get back down on the floor to play and rough house with the grandkids. Today, I got started playing music and drawing. (Even those things went by the wayside, since the opiates put me to sleep for most of the day.)

The biggest smackdown of my life was, of course, Myrna's death. Took me years to want to go on with life. It's still a struggle without her. 12 years ago, the money was flowing in from two big paychecks and we were thinking we were on the verge of retiring to travel the world in luxury.

Everything changed in a few moments.

Then the grandkids came along. I'm not ashamed to say that they gave me a reason to enjoy life and to be positive and enthusiastic again. Caring for them has become my full time job in retirement, and I'm happy with that. In a few months, I'll be moving into an in-law apartment in a new house I'm buying with my daughter and son-in-law so that I can be full time Mr. Mom to my grandkids. Goodbye, Woodstock! (A good thing. It's time to become un-Woodstuck!)

That will come to an end to, but experience has prepared me for that. I already know that the day is not so far away when my grandkids will have other things to do than hang out with grandpa.

Surgery Prep Day

One of the reasons I decided to drive cross country to Chicago last week... I'm facing serious surgery. I wanted to indulge myself with a little adventure. Might be the last time in my life that I'm physically capable.

I made it to 66 in very good health, so I'm lucky. 

Today will be purge day. I'll be downing a solution of MiraLAX and water until I poop out my guts. Can't eat. Can't drink coffee. I'm restricted to clear liquids.

I learned from experience when Myrna was in the hospital that surgeons are far too impressed with their skills and tend to always predict positive results, so I'm skeptical of my own surgeon. What can I do? I don't have the knowledge to really evaluate his diagnosis. I've been through three doctors, all of whom disagree to some extent about possible treatment.

Oncologists tend to be much more blunt than surgeons, but I'm not yet at the stage of needing an oncologist. When Myrna was dying from cancer, we shopped around for an oncologist who was willing to treat her. The first was a woman who told us bluntly that Myrna would die in a few months and that the best we could do was to make her comfortable.

In desperation, we worked our way through several oncologists until we found one who promised to cure her, at least temporarily. That only led to what the surgeon described as "butchery." I had to pull the plug. The oncologist, who had been charging the insurance company $750 for each visit to Myrna's room, was furious.

Am I afraid? Worried?

Yes. I'd like to live long enough to see my grandkids reach adulthood. I don't know if I want to live with a colostomy bag, if it comes to that. My mother is almost 90. I just visited her in Illinois. She wishes that her doctor would recommend the colostomy bag no matter whether she has cancer. She's fed up with old age induced incontinence.

Yesterday at Mass, my priest anointed my hands and forehead and prayed for my recovery. I don't know whether that helps.

I retired four years ago, even though I could have continued working, to focus on doing the things I enjoy and to contemplate my mortality and my relationship with God. I've enjoyed this long period of rest and reflection, and I'd like for it to continue.

Only six weeks ago, I went through two surgeries for kidney stones. So, I know the drill. No much drama, really. You go to sleep and then you wake up, and somebody tells you the results. That's about it.

Both the diagnosis and outcome of my physical problems are unknown. CAT scans taken during my hospitalization for kidney stones revealed some abnormality in my appendix. All three doctors I've consulted disagree on what that abnormality might be. Everything from a cyst to a tumor. 

So, my surgery could just be an appendectomy, or it could be major resection of the bowel. Won't know what happened until I wake up.

No Health Insurance in the Philippines

My girlfriend's brother, Robert, who lived in Cebu, died of a massive heart attack a couple of days ago. He had visited a hospital earlier in the day. The doctors told him that he needed double bypass surgery. 

Filipinos don't have health insurance. So, doctors and hospitals demand cash payment in advance of performing any procedure. Since Robert didn't have the cash to pay for the bypass, he was sent home. The extended family was in the process of gathering up the funds necessary to pay for the surgery when he died from that heart attack.

"He never would have been sent home from the hospital in the U.S.," my girlfriend said.

Filipino funeral customs are quite different from ours. The family parks the coffin in the front room or on the patio for a seven day wake before burial. Church and family members visit every night for dinner and to comfort the family. As you can see in the photo above, it is common for there to be a window in the closed coffin so that the family can view the deceased's face.

Filipinos in the U.S. constantly talk about retiring and dying back in the Philippines. One of the most important reasons is that your family will tend and visit your grave.

"Here in the U.S., they just throw you in the ground and forget about you," the girlfriend says.

Robert was only 66... my age. 

I don't have a sermon to offer here. There are good and bad things about living in an over insured society, as opposed to living in a society in which nobody is insured.

On the plus side, Filipinos aren't litigious. People accept injury and death in accidents with a shrug and go on with their lives instead of engaging in a vendetta for money. Few people have the money to hire lawyers.

I'll be forgotten when I die. Nobody will come to pray over my grave. I don't know whether that matters. Filipinos think that it does. Then again, most Filipinos are seriously religious.

Dramatic Entrance at the ER!

My first kidney stone attack, and I knew what was happening immediately.  The pain quickly became unbearable. I called my daughter and asked her for a ride to the Kingston ER. By the time we arrived, I was gasping. I walked up to the reception desk and damned near collapsed. While I tried to convey my basic information, I was heaving.

"We'll take care of the pain first," the young woman doctor said. The RN put me on a morphine drip.

Massive doses of morphine eventually took the edge off the pain. I was completely incoherent, watching my vital signs on the board above my bed. My heart beat had dropped off the 45! My RN, pretty young black woman didn't seem very concerned, or at least as concerned a I wanted her to be.

"You're having a vagus nerve event," she explained. When you're in excruciating pain, the vagus nerve tried to shut your body down. Here's a little pic of the vagus nerve and the organs it services.

I spent all Saturday morning in the ER getting hydrated and saturated with pain killer. As I said, my black woman RN was quite attractive and I almost motivated myself to flirt with her. Every time I tried, the pain returned. We men are such animals!

For the past 4 days, I've slept 20 hours per day, tried to fill up on water, and I've eaten very little. My appetite is non-existent.

At my age (66), one always worries that the onset of a new disorder is the big one that will finally take me out. I missed Mass on Sunday, but I called and asked Father George to pray for me.

I hope the kidney stones don't become regular occurrences. My dad suffered from them. I don't think you can ever acclimate to the pain. Doctor says drink a lot of water and take my calcium and magnesium supplements.

Happy Easter!

The Good News today is that Christ has arisen!

Painting by Peter Paul Reubens (1577-1640).

Good Friday... the Crucifixion of Christ

I'll be taking the day off from the internet to observe the Holy Day. 

Mastering the Pipe Organ

For the past year or so, I've been responding to ads for church organists. Not much success so far, but that has been my own fault. I play a synth keyboard at my current church job. So, I haven't been dutifully practicing my organ chops, particularly my pedal board chops.

My church does own a Baldwin knock-off of a Hammond B3. So, I do have an organ with a pedal board for practice purposes. But, I've been practicing sporadically, only when a job opens up. A week or two of frantic practice on the pedal board is not embedding the skill in my feet. I'm still looking down to locate the proper pedal, and making a ton of mistakes.

Why do I want a different church job?

Well, I'm not sure that I do, which might account for my unpreparedness for the auditions. I would like to have access to a good grand piano and a custom pipe organ, and my church does not have either. Nor is either instrument within my budget.

Making a significant salary as a church organist might be a good thing. I say "might" because the result of increasing my income could be higher taxes on my Social Security payout and little net gain in spendable income.

Most of the well paying organist jobs are in Protestant churches. I'm not planning on abandoning my Catholic faith, and I'm not sure how to navigate that dilemma. Or whether I should even try. I figure I can do a Sunday service and a weeknight choir practice at a Protestant church, and still attend a Saturday night Vigil Mass. 

I have decided to get to work on my organ technique. That means getting back to Bach, in this case back to the Preludes and Fugues for Organ. I ordered this set of 8 from Amazon yesterday.

The plan is now to stay after Mass to practice organ for an hour, and to attend a weekday morning Mass and stay afterward for a practice session. Within a few months, I should be able to play the pedals reflexively, without looking down at my feet to check out their position.

So, next time a worthwhile position opens up, I'll be ready!

Knowing Who You Are

The world is not being held together by fretting over "social problems." There is nothing for me to fix... except for myself. The "current events" obsession is embedded in us by our public school indoctrination. The purpose of that indoctrination is to prevent us from knowing who we are as individuals.

When I was a young man, I was one of the worst of the cause mongers. I thought that I had to change the entire world. It was my responsibility to end war, end racism and save the environment.

The results of this obsession were entirely negative.

My first marriage went up in flames because I wasted my time on that bullshit, instead of simply having children and attending to the needs of a family. And my wife was a wonderful, intelligent woman. We made the mistake together and paid for it together, too.

One day, I'd like to see her again to commiserate over our mistakes.

I wasted my time in political activism until the struggle to raise my children forced me to stop. I was so damned bull headed about it. I was almost 30 when I finally understood that what I needed to do was to change myself, not the world.

Somehow, it did not occur to me either that my belief that I was responsible for saving the world was ridiculously arrogant and stupid.

I misdirected my work as a musician for a very long time, and once again the cause was confusion over my own nature. For a very long time, I tried to be the leftist folkie, and I sincerely believed that that was my nature. How wrong I was! I was just pandering in an effort to attract an audience. Playing the lefty got me invited to perform at benefits and social events.

I let go of two critical elements of my heritage, classical and sacred music, in this confusion over who I really am. In my old age, I am reclaiming that heritage.

For years, I fought against my own natural source of occupation, technology. Everything I needed was in front of me from the start. My first job after I graduated from the University of Illinois was at the Center for Advanced Computation, where we built the ILIAC IV supercomputer. That endeavor "bored" me.

In retrospect, I can see that I was afraid of the challenge of mastering the technology and incapable (at the time) of seeing how mastery would free me to do what I wanted to do, as well as give me the ability to live anywhere in the world.

I had to push my life into chaos and collapse before I came to terms with my own nature. I sank to the bottom, broke and in despair before I looked inside myself for the answers.

Once I confronted myself and began to pursue my own self-interest, it took me two decades to repair the damage of my years of wandering in confusion.

So, here I am in old age, finally in command of my own senses and aware of who I am. The comic irony is that I have so little time left to live the life and do the work I was always intended to do.

Porn Leads the Way in Virtual Reality

A workable Holodeck is what everybody wants, right? Step into a virtual reality appliance in the privacy of your home, pick your program, and become whoever you want to be in a 3D full immersion environment. As usual, in the multimedia field, porn leads the way.

Back in the dot-com era, as CD-ROM and internet technology matured, developers struggled to create original content that would pay back the development costs. Hiring a roomful of programmers at $50 an hour in the mid-90s was ruinously expensive. Porn was the first business to pay back on costs. A ready and eager market of users ponied up their credit cards to pay for masturbation material.

VirtuaDolls is kinda gross. What can I say? Masturbation games played out in the virtual international brothel will be the initial big money maker in the VR universe. VirtuaDolls offers both a hardware solution (a mechanical vagina) and a software solution (doll partners performing sex simulation scenes). Coupled with the Occulus Rift VR headset, something close to a 3D full immersion environment engulfs the user in a virtual bedroom with a virtual whore.

Not a pretty picture, I admit... a guy with his pants down, a VR headset on his noggin and a mechanical vagina attached to his dick, sitting in front of his computer. Hilariously ridiculous! Of course, said guy will be jerking off in the privacy of his front room. (Or so we think. The ability of clever hackers to surveil users should never be underestimated!)

If I were still interested in working, I'd have moved by now to virtual reality ("VR") programming, because that's where the money, excitement and independence reside. I'm no longer closely enough involved with the business to know what programming languages dominate the market. I'm sure, however, that VR programming is the place to make the most money. (In fact, the promo video above includes a pitch to programmers to joint the VirtuaDoll team!)

Online porn has already produced a devastating attack on traditional sexual morality and further undermined the stability of sexual partnerships. It has become common for marriages of 30 years to fall apart as the kids leave home for college, and porn is a major reason for that. Heightened expectations for sexual pleasure is one of the outcomes of readily available porn. 

The need for a compliant partner is now about to come under attack from the VR porn business. If it is possible to satisfies one's lust without dating and mating, a whole lot of people will decide that the VR world is preferable. None of the mess and conflict of relationship, and a bigger, more predictable orgasm.

My interest in the VR field has always been in how to create a new and workable story telling paradigm. For story telling to be truly realistic in the Holodeck, every possible outcome must be available to the user. For instance, in a simple story of an afternoon car ride, the user must be able to choose any route as he drives. Good, bad and indifferent outcomes along each route must be available to the user. How to program an infinite number of outcomes in a manner that is cost effective?

To my knowledge, the only contemporary solution is to program each possible outcome or "branch." This is an incredibly time consuming and costly process. If you're employing a roomful of programmers at $75 an hour or more, a development project can blow through tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars very quickly. 

Clearly, some other programming method must be developed.

I suspect that Artificial Intelligence ("AI") will be the answer here. In other words, given a rough game scenario, an AI enabled computer will think through all the potential outcomes and program that infinitely branching story line. How do we teach this skill to a computer?

Think of the multiplicity of branches in the simplest sexual encounter. (Of course, within the international whore house, the user will prefer positive outcomes according to his preference, which will simplify matters.)

I suspect that the whore in the window will be the starting point. This tech developed first in Times Square, back in the bad old days of the 70s and 80s. A naked girl or a boy/girl team would do their exhibitionist act in a circular tank. Users (horny men) would enter booths, pop in their quarters and a little window would open for them to view the action. This model moved almost in its entirety to the webcam model. Choose your girl from a menu of pics, plunk down your credit card and the virtual window opens for your personal exhibitionist performance.

With the VirtuaDoll technology, that experience is obviously amped up and enhanced. A mechanical vagina does the job of relieving the client while the whore in the window does her job. Playing out this scenario in the privacy of the user's home eliminates potential embarassment and victimization by scam artists.

From the standpoint of a traditional Catholic, this could not be more sinful or objectionable. But, this is the wave of the future, at least for a very large percentage of people. How will the dowdy and reluctant female of the future compete against a beautiful and totally willing VR actress? Of course, at some point, a version of the same technology will be developed for female users. Men, I think we can be certain, will be the first to plunk down their credit cards for VR sex.

Get Me to the Church on Time!

Getting up and preparing for 8 a.m mass now. What the hey! I'm awake by 4 a.m. almost every day anyway. After several years of doing the church organist/song leader thing for Mass, I've just about mastered the job.

I wish I was playing that type of organ. My church has a Baldwin knock-off of a Hammond B3 that is certain useful and adequate.

Cabin fever is setting in as we head into the heart of winter in the Catskills. So far, temperatures have been 10 degrees above normal and we haven't had a serious snowfall. I've been here long enough to know that this is part of the natural weather cycle. But, I don't doubt that climate change propagandists will seize on it as proof that The End is Near.

I prefer for my religion to be religion, not politics. Certainly, I slugged my way through a significant period of my life in which politics was my religion. Anti-Vietnam War activism segued seamlessly into one cause after another until my life was consumed with causes.

Somewhere along the way, the cause mongering got mixed up with music. Lefties invited me to play at rallies and benefits and that certainly helped to build up an audience.

Although I could make this seem like a nefarious process, it is in fact simply the result of being young and idealistic. The young are primarily leftists because idealism is the nature state of youth. That fades away as children and mortgages and death start to creep into one's life.

My primary audience is now my fellow parishioners. They are very appreciative.