We went to the mountains and me in a chemical haze. A drove. There was hiking and Uly remembered a dog on a sled from our previous visit on the trail. Then there was skiing and sledding and the requisite meltdown upon learning of the need to leave. We journeyed home to a dinner that I can't quite place at this remove save to know that it was good and filling and nutritious and all the doing of A. I had tutored PTSD guy but even that reality failed to blunt the crest of goodness that the day held. Later there was reading and untroubled sleep.
20MAR2019 - Vernal Equinox
Two weeks sans drink.
21MAR2019
I made a trek into Eagle River to meet with a doctor who has previously roto-rootered my colon. The way in, after a trip to the gym and some Taco Bell breakfast, was a blaze of Bach cellos reaching up my spine and ripping chunks of shivers from my temporal lobes. I arrived 30 minutes early.
The doctor is a specialist, liver, GI tract. He wears an orange-ish salmony colored shirt and a pinkish tie in a loose half Windsor that dangles undisciplinedly from his top button, as if he has loosened the noose for comfort. His shoes are similar to mine, calf leather, brogue-like. Creased slacks complete the look. His hands are meaty and soft, the way I remember my old man's being. In a different light, we could be almost contemporaries, him in his late 40s, early 50s, and me stolidly plowing through what is my own middle age.
The exam room is spare, thankfully, denuded of those posters of the human frame with layers peeled away and artistic renditions of all the grotesque and hidden abnormalities a body can hide, at great length, until they gather the needed resources for a final assault. I feel good, my blood pressure's down, yet I pace the 10 by 5 room like an animal shelter inmate.
We, the doctor and I, chat benignly about all the things that are likely wrong with me. I minimize, defer, unwilling to change behaviors. He can see this and I freely admit this is my tack. Tests are ordered, blood, CT scans, and schedules made to review/interp the reconnaissance.
I'm probably fine and would be wholly ignorant of my situation and possessed of the ego-less drive to hurry up and drop dead at 55 if I'm lucky were it not for diagnostic procedures and all the concomitant mental energy devoted to knowing just enough to be anxious about the non-consensual and absurd machinery of my life cycle. Fuck modern medicine.
The drive back is sublime.
23MAR2019
HIPAA violations up in this bitch like a mother. I can't imagine anyone would want my white cell count, but hey, look at that badass AST level. Fuck yeah within normal limits.
I went to the doc this morning again. It's absolute horseshit. I biked down under overcast battleship skies and chilled air with grimy puddles in the gutters and sad effigies of snowbanks crusted in gravel and filth. After the doc, I walked to the cafe and as I crossed the road to my ultimate destination, there was a woman holding her baby with a toddler in tow coming across the street in the opposite direction. The child saw me and smiled, waved, her wispy hair a cyclone in the street's backwash. I waved back, swamped with all manner of emotive chemicals.
This morning I awoke in a decent-ish mood but this quickly turned as the realities that I've been tamping down encroached - packing for AWP, the terror/anxiety of kissing Uly and A goodbye as they prep to ascend to cruising altitude, the uncertainties of condominium pools, rattlesnakes, scorpions, et al. in a nightmare scape Arizona of my imagining all conspiring to murder this boy in his beautiful curiosity and nascent independence. Christ is he a magnificent aberration.
They leave in 8 hours.
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