You might as well face it, your body will deteriate and I will try to give you a
preview of things to come as we never get to hear about all the weird things
that happen to your poor old body as it ages.
Here are a few things that surprised me as I aged….;
1.
One of my fingers curled under and It was
difficult to get into my pocket. It is called_Dupuytren’s Contracture . Minor operation on that.
2.
You tend to get a lot of “barnacles” all over
your body. Nothing serious, but you won’t win any beauty contests.
3.
. One of
your toes may curl up and it’s called Crooked Toe . Only uncomfortable.
4.
If you’ve
spent your youth in the sun and sea at La Jolla and Waikiki, you probably start
getting spots of Melanoma Cancer here and there. Not to worry, if caught early,
your Dermatologist will just exorcise it and you may not even have a scar.
One on six of you will get it. Minor surgery.
5.
Once in a while, your kidney or gall bladder
will toss a “stone” and it will scour down your little tube and end up in your
bladder where it will disappear. Mine only last for an hour or 8 at the most.
Just bite the bullet (A tip from me; take a Cannabis lozenge for it and forget any pills doctors give for
it)
6.
The latest fashion is to have Sleep Apnea, which
means you will have to get a small machine to help you breathe at night but
Medicare will pay for it and all the accoutrements to go with it. Mostly, you
will not need this but all Doctors will prescribe it. However, it does help a
snoring problem.
7.
They will also prescribe a bunch of pills to
take each day, one of which will be a Blood Thinner”, after your heart attack, a
super expensive pill, about $230/month, but Medicare will pay for half of it. Of
course, every time you have a little cut or bang into wall, you will get a big
purple bruise or bleed.
8.
By this time, your eyes will have a bunch of
clouds and you see stuff floating around
in your eyeballs and will have to have it cleaned out if you want to read or
see. Not to Worry! Your Optometrist…… will just give you a little drug, cut a
slice in your eyeball, vacuum up all the shit in you cornea, then insert a
small taco that will replace your glasses and send you on your way, with a Pirates
eye patch for a couple of days. That should last you for the rest of your
miserable days.
9.
Can’t
hear what the little wife is saying anymore? (Also called “Blanking out the
Wife”). You can get a couple of swell hearing aids for only a thousand dollars
each, but Medicare doesn’t cover that either, so tough shit.
10. What’s
left? Teeth! You’re also on you own here as there is no help from your local
Health Program. All I can say is “Just Keep on Brushin”. I was kind of lucky as
I began my tooth journey by getting all my fillings from the University Medical School (Washington)
where it was all free but you were a subject like a gerbil for the soon to
become dentists who needed some live bodies to work on.
11. You
may get a heel spur, they like to cut through your tendons and cripple you,
also called “Planter Faciatis” then you get to do stretching exercises to
stretch the tendons, also sensible shoes with arch supports.
12. Bunions. When you can’t get a foot into a
shoe without lots of pain and start wearing slippers because that is the only
comfortable item . Stay tuned for how much that hurts to have it fixed. Can’t
believe surgery would be worse, but that’s what “they” say.
13. Gas. Oldsters seem to manufacture more
internal pressures than you might think..
14. Breathing spit. This is a great gagging scene,
as it seems you can die for lack of air.
Very uncomfortable. Doesn’t look good ,either.
15. Vertigo - Musn’t
forget this one as it may occur at any time. Mine only lasted for a few minutes
and has not re-occurred, but my mother had it
a lot (Well, hell, she was 95).
16. Mystery
eyebrows - This is a guy thing; If you don’t trim your
eyebrows, they will get huge and may curl up. Or curl down, or just straight
out. But here’s what is weird, they will change direction overnight sometime,
but it has nothing to do with how you sleep. Then a few weeks later, some will
change direction again. (Just become a curmudgeon.)
17. Of
course, none of this talks about cancer, which may signal the end of your stay
on Earth. Well, you have to die of something.
GOING POSTAL
I really
have to rant a bit about this! Your Post Office (Not Mine!) is always broke and
having a hard time keeping up the Head guys Limo seem to have unlimited funds
to design and create a [plethora of stamp types . But that’s not the big
problem I have. They are still cutting them with perforated edges, even though
they are peel & stick items. Wait! There’s more! Then they have the
audacity to leave a 1/8” strip between the perforations so that it comes off
when you are trying to peel a stamp off.
AAhhg ! You may have noted that since they raised the price so often they don’t print the cost of the stamp on it, it’s just a “Forever Stamp”. What does that mean? If I buy one thousand stamps today for 50 cents each and hold them for a couple of years I could sell them for a couple thousand more cents than I paid?
AAhhg ! You may have noted that since they raised the price so often they don’t print the cost of the stamp on it, it’s just a “Forever Stamp”. What does that mean? If I buy one thousand stamps today for 50 cents each and hold them for a couple of years I could sell them for a couple thousand more cents than I paid?
ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER
I just can’t let this one go! Did anyone build a zillion dollar shrine for
the boys who died at Pearl Harbor in ’41?
The same number died on the twin towers (about 3,000). Here’s even more history. ..in 1945 a B-24
bomber crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. 11
dead on the building + 3 from the plane. Foggy day, an ugly accident. Firemen
had to haul hoses up 80 floors.
Wait – There’s more! In 1993 terrorist exploded a huge truck
bomb in the basement of one of the World Trade Towers, trying to topple one
into the other. This killed only six people but injured thousands, mostly from
smoke inhalation. They mostly were trying to get us to stop supporting Israel,
an arch enemy of Iraq. (When did that start? 3,000 years ago?)
But meanwhile, back at the SACRED SITE, they finally
finished the most expensive building in the world, in their infinite wisdom
that “ Nobodies goi’n knock this baby
down “ mentality. The base is a70 foot high
fortified concrete fort to fend off any more truck bombs. But it’s all
glazed with special blast-proof glass, that doesn’t shard when blown up. The rest of the building’s glass is 1” thick
that maybe could stop a Piper Cub. The original cost estimate of 3 Billion
escalated to 4 Billion by the time it was finished. The insurance paid 1 Bill., The Port
Authority chipped in another Billion, and the City of New York put in 250
Million Dollars. That might be about
$1150 per square feet). So who is the first tenant? A Chinese Real Estate firm
took seven floors Next up was Conde
Naste Publishing (Moving from Boone, Iowa?) who leased floors 20 to 44
! Since money was no object, the
builders had to invent concrete with a strength of 14,000 psi (pounds per
square inch) when normal high strength concrete is about 4,000 psi. At least the
architects made the stairs a little wider to accommodate the screaming,
panic driven crowd flowing down the stairs. However, if
you think we threw money at that project, let me tell you a bit about the
replacement of the Transit Hub that was also destroyed in the attack.
First off, you hire one of the current
“Starchitects”, Santiago Calatrava,(He
must have been scared by a “Comb of Venus” (Mure Tiremus in his infancy) so he can design his standard “Winged bird
about to fly off” or a giant “Spiney Shell”. , the type of project that was
initiated by The Sydney Opera House’ ; in other words, a form totally unrelated
to it’s function, a budget that will be doubled to 4 Billion. (but to be fair,
the Sydney job was ten times over the budget).
The Director of the Hub said “A Symbol of Excess”, other comments were
“Costs of the Hub were “Troubling at a time of limited resources for
infrastructure” . “The Cost of Beauty is High”. By the way, the ceiling leaks.
BOOK REPORT
A study of THE BROTHERHOOD OF ETERNAL LOVE ,by Nick Schou; where a bunch of hippies in Laguna Beach in
the 1960’s who initiated the smuggling and distribution of Cannibus, Hashish, and especially LSD on scale that may have initiated the DEA. I had no idea ! I was there and knew a lot of these folks but
didn’t know about the filling of Volkswagons with Hash oil and shipping it to
Long Beach from Afganastan. Most of the happenings were in Laguna Canyon (called
“Dodge City”) and ‘The Mystic Arts building on the main drag. The whole thing
started to unravell when a plane flew over a rock concert and dropped thousands
of tabs of LSD on the crowd. You can imagine!.
UNDERSTANDING THE
UN-UNDERSTANDABLE
Just the other morning, over the breakfast table, I was
asking my lovley wife the burning question of the hour; “What keeps all the
planets in their orbits around the Sun and why are the orbits elliptical? It
seems too far for gravity to keep them pulled in.”. Well, strangely, she didn’t
have an answer for me, other than “Are you fucking nuts?”. Hmmmm, I guess I’ll
have to look elsewhere for that answer. Well, if you believe in coincidences like I
do, my neighbor Steve stopped by a
couple of days later with an exquisite
little book by Carlo Rovelli entitled
“Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” that he laid on me. Opening it up to “First
Lesson”, it is the story of Albert Einstien and what he had actually
discovered. But prior to him, Newton had
some ideas on how some of the planets worked. (Force of gravity). But how did this
work in a vacuum? ) . A couple of physicists, Faraday & Maxwell, said this
void was actually filled with a magnetic field and can transport magnetic
force. Einstiein posited that gravity,
like electricity, must be conveyed by a field as well: a gravitational field
must exist. Then he thought “ the gravitational field is not diffused through
space; the gravitational field is the space itself”. Space is no longer distinct from matter ---- it is one of the “material” components of the world. But wait-
there’s more - Einstiens’
E = MC2 means that space curves where there is matter, and somehow
that’s were all the planets follow their orbits. It goes on to explain how space bends around
stars (suns) and all that to readily convince me that that must be how planets
keep to a trajectory for eons. If this
leaves you confused, the following equation by Riemann should clarify it all:
Rab – 1/2Rgab = Tab (But you’ll need a font that will drop the
lower case letters part way down the line to make it read correctly).
.
