Friday, October 31, 2014

Dalla Biblioteca

Capri, Island of Pleasure, by James Money, first published in Great Britain in 1986, is one of those books essential to one's sanity, and to one's over-all sense of well-being that one picks up at random, reads desultorily--skipping from this oddity to that quizzical reflection over the space of a week or so till it dawns on you:  This is the most important damned book that you have read this past decade.  It even has the true story of that perfect little wine called 'Tiberio' that we had at lunch--with the absolutely fucking sublime spaghetti alle vòngole--at that quite reasonably priced (on Capri!) little resort that Alexei, the Russian lad from Vilnius, and I, spotted down at the end of the goat path running down from, and for a little ways along side, with but a low stone wall between them, the  suffocatingly glitzy Rodeo Drive that flaunts its treasures on the top and in the middle of the island, and which we venturesomely jumped over the wall of and scouted out, and where we (our guided tour group far behind us) spent the afternoon swimming ("bathing," as Somerset Maugham called it), sun-bathing, and, like I say, having lunch with real, moderately priced Italians and their squealing kids: True story being that, along with the vintage from the vines you see growing under the funicular, it's a blend, with other white wines of the Campania, and so maybe not as special and grand cru as its nom d'empereur suggests--but I defy anybody, though with white burgundy which it resembles, or champagne, to make a more delicious wine-pairing with spaghetti alle vòngole, plain and simple, perfectly seasoned and cooked, and at first blush almost too chewy.  Oh God.  You may believe that I tipped 20%.

Well, one of life's savory mysteries has been elucidated by this wonderful book--and many more besides, some quite unsavory:  How the English colony, for example, pursued the persecution of the recently-imprisoned Oscar Wilde, walking out en masse of whatever unfortunate establishment he happened also to frequent.  The brutal Axis and Allied bombings of Naples.  Who Gracie Fields was.  The ménage à trois hommes that the ("indefatigably prolific") E.F. Benson was living in on Capri, while Austria and Russia, and Germany and England and France, armed and threatened and negotiated and rendered pompously inevitable the fucking bloody end of civilization, and how aghast they all were at the very idea of a female roommate.  Jeez, guys, priorities?  It reminds me (those high summer months on the Isle of Capri in 1914), for all the world, of how we were, in Seattle in 1970, with Nixon bombing Cambodia and declaring war on marijuana, while we (fashionable bright young masculine Gay Liberationists) entertained the Cockettes (a guerrilla theater group from New York City!), no less, at the swankest three-day parties in the biggest and fanciest Old Victorian houses (which, in those days before gentrification, pretty much fell into our hands as club houses) on the West Coast--and asked our Lesbian/Feminist sisters (for thus much we would acknowledge them to be) kindly to define if they pleased "Patriarchy," or to shut the fuck up about it.

Just the man to have got so many narrative threads woven into their exact historical context is James Money, whose qualifications, credentials, scholarship and interests are simply too numerous to mention in complete detail, but of which I like particularly his having graduated from Cambridge with a degree in Classics Parts I and II, and his having written the first draft of Admiral Mountbatten's Report on the South-East Asia command--being fanned the while, and refreshed, I feel sure, by a few or several of Lord Louis' favorite 11-year-old punkhawallahs.  In those days before air conditioning--and long after the cruel, peremptory vandalism of the British Raj had shut down the pumps which once had drawn water  from the sacred Jumna to the Lotus Fountain in the Rang Mahal, whence flowed the "River of Paradise," dispersing the last coolness of Himalayan snows, in jets and pools and rivulets throughout the Red Fort--one took what comfort one could find on the vast, broiling sub-continent.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Bearing in Mind that we have no Control whatsoever over what we find sexually attractive, still,

Mightn't poor old, otherwise thoroughly discredited Ayn Rand have been on to something true and valid about ourselves when she said, "What we find sexually attractive is an expression of our deepest values and convictions"?  That would mean, that for many in this world (including all of the known users of an in-house Vatican male prostitition service, and, I confess, me) the object of most profound veneration, admiration and esteem would be--not Jesus but--a Southern European soccer player, preferably of Roman extraction, in his early thirties, with muscular thighs (but I'd also go with a similarly constituted Portuguese or Brazilian Carioca of mm-mm Italian descent).

And what, besides deft footwork, a sense of humor, and a willingness to lock lips with his team mates in recognition of a great save or well placed serve, would we worshippers of a footie Prince of Peace ask that he grant us?--Well, certainly not as much as we would ask of Jesus; hardly more than that he should just relax and be himself, the wonder of physical nature that he is, and let us help him enjoy himself.  Ritual cannibalism and vampirism are not at all on our agenda.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Madness, Hubris, Incredible Conceit--

But just suppose that the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, having gained the presidency (as in fact they did) through a series of preposterous promises and commitments to organized crime, political machines and corporate interests that they had no intention of keeping or honoring, and imagining that they could, at least in the short term, prevent themselves from being murdered by seizing control of the Justice Department--Might they, through certain key, pre-emptive assassinations (of Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Dulles bothers, etc.), have kept a grip on power that would have abolished the military draft in peacetime, ended the Cold War, and prevented the creation of the Evil Empire of Prison State America?  Ah, if only!  

Sunday, October 26, 2014

How desperately Bad Things Are (Time for a Top to Bottom Revolution, wouldn't you say?)

A "controversial" area of law known as civil asset forfeiture empowers the IRS to confiscate "significant sums" of money from run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation and without ever filing a criminal complaint, leaving the owners to prove they are innocent, the New York Times reports (posted in truthdig this date).  Law enforcement agencies get to keep a share of whatever is forfeited.  This "incentive" [Critics say] has led to the creation of a "law enforcement dragnet," with more than 100 multiagency task forces combing through bank reports looking for accounts to seize.  The median amount seized by the I.R.S. was $34,000, according to the Institute for Justice analysis, while legal costs [of protest and appeal] can easily mount to $20,000 or more.  I am reminded of the Mughal system of taxation, during the good old, bad old days of wicked but perfectly fascinating emperors, which they, naughty ones, but not afraid to face facts, called frankly "eating," as in "consumption by vampires."

Thursday, October 23, 2014

I have this, furthermore, to say about sexual fantasies:

If the sex you are having isn't many times more wonderful, exciting and beautiful than anything you could possibly have imagined or pre-programmed it to be--what's the point of having sex?

I forget sometimes how much I dislike the fat, slow, unblinking, constipated sex, who haven't a clue as to what I'm talking about.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

The Reason that, although I Adore the Exhilaration of Cocaine, I don't do it any more, and might even Refuse it now if it were offered to me, is, simply,

that I don't at all like myself when I'm stoned on cocaine.  You see the left-hand white-bitch figure in the so-exquisite, infinitely campy Mucha poster, portraying the Goddess of Coca(ine)?--full of disdain, snottiness, derision and utter self-absorption:  That is me when I'm stoned on cocaine. You see the humble, suppliant, brown-skinned native kneeling before her?  That is everybody else, as far as I'm concerned, when I'm high on cocaine. It isn't just that I blush, when I reflect, appalled, on the assholery I've committed when I was high on coke, it's that I feel a strong need to leave the country and hide out in a monastery in a foreign land for a couple of decades, till the panic of shame and self-loathing has subsided.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Third and Final Thoughts about Islam: Islam and the Holy Virgin

Withal, the single most educational aspect of the stunt I pulled off--or, if you will, of the hoax that I perpetrated--in going back to school in my late fifties, and becoming what universities, in their innocence, call a "non-traditional student" (i.e., a somewhat old candidate for a dual Bachelor of Arts Degree in French and Italian), and, by dint of combining my by-then well-honed skills as a Welfare Queen (I continued to draw my unearned stipend) with the prodigal scam of Student Aid, such that awards and scholarships (that I, in my advanced age had somehow got the knack of acquiring), were virtually showered upon me (along with various credit cards which I welcomed, but had in no wise solicited), to finance the "finishing" of my education with a decently leisurely eight months' Grand Tour of Italy and Europe, was: As a student at university (of Perugia and Siena, respectively) being totally, promiscuously immersed, on terms of absolute social equality, with the greatest conceivable variety of my fellow humanity (well, high-income fellow humanity), with no common bond among us but our several needs and desires and capacities to learn the Italian language. You never know in such a situation who your friends (among, say, a couple of hundred fellow students)--the ones that you will sit and drink coffee with on breaks--will be.  You have no guide but elective affinity, and a good-humored determination to make the best of chance encounters.  

So it naturally fell out that at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, beginning in June, I had a sort of circle, after a few days (and long schooldays they were, starting at eight in the morning and running till past two in the afternoon), of friends that I found charming:  The Russian Lithuanian, Alexei, whom I have mentioned before; a smart young woman, Eva, from Boulder, Colorado; a Polish Friar Minor, Zbigli (in plain dress--I called him, teasingly, "Padre."); a Romanian computer technician; a couple of Taiwanese businessman;  and a handful of Moslems, business men from Libya and Egypt, and one bare-footed, be-turbaned, long-robed, bearded holy man, Mohammed, from Iran, whom his fellow, younger Moslems treated with great respect and deference, and who, somewhat to my embarrassment (probably because of my age), treated me with great politeness and respect, which I was always at pains to reciprocate.  Part of the embarrassment and the difficulty was that the Blessed One's Italian was easily the least proficient in the class. 

Of all my fellow students, the one I saw most of outside of school was Ahmed the Libyan.  We often encountered one another on walks and on municipal buses, and I had the honor on a couple of occasions, at his invitation, of visiting him in his lodgings.  Our Italian was adequate for the discussions that by mutual consent we engaged in on the nature of God, of Abrahamic religions generally, and of Islam in particular.  Ahmed was certain, in the way that a sincere and well educated class of Moslems tend to be, that just my evident good faith and intellectual probity would bring me to an appreciation of Islam as the purest, simplest, and truest of the Abrahamic religions--He reminded me for all the world of one of those pure, sweet-souled university converts of Cardinal Newman, and talking with him I felt  very much that I had drifted back into a kind of Islamic Oxford Movement.  Indeed, I had no objections to Islam more than to other sorts of monotheism, and I have always had a good deal of respect for its practices (except of course for circumcision), and its historical importance as conservator of arts and knowledge.  Still, as a heedless American Transcendentalist, Buddhist, atheist, individualist, there are some places I will not go:  Goddess worship, no thank you very much.

A couple of weeks before term ended, around the first of August, I ran into Ahmed one afternoon on a municipal bus, and he had a hot new topic to discuss with me:  la Vergine Santa.  Didn't I admire the holiness and purity of her Cultus, especially as practiced here in Italy?  Harshly and curtly--speaking rapidly because I didn't have much time before my stop--"La santa puttana, vuoi dire?   Mio nono diceva sempre che la Vergine è una Puttana.  Non lo sò io.  Devo scendere qua.  A domani. Ciao, Ahmed!"

Next morning before classes, in the courtyard of the Palazzo Prosciutto, the mood of the fifty or sixty students gathered there was subdued, expectant.  The few that I waved to when I walked through the outer portal seemed embarrassed and hesitant to return my greeting.  Then, as though choreographed, everyone stepped away from me, and I found myself, and the holy man Mohammed alone together in the center of the courtyard.  There was absolute stillness.  Slowly, clearly, holding me fast in his gaze, he said,

"È vero che tu, Anatole, hai detto che la Vergine Santa è una Puttana?"

A great many things went through my mind as I looked at the unsmiling, silent faces around us, and at the face of the holy man in front of me, in which compassion and pity and a kind of noble regret were oddly mixed with zealous contempt and indignation, until finally my own sense of indignation and defiance seized me, and I replied,

"Sì, l'ho detto, e dico io, ora e sempre: la santa Vergine, così chiamata, è una Puttana."

The holy one smiled a bitter little smile, quite like the curses of Gypsies (as I came to know them), bowed, and stepped back.  I returned his bow and swept past him, with an obdurate little smile of my own, to my classes on the first floor.  And all the rest of the day, and a mostly sleepless night, I felt doomed.  The next day, hurrying to class through the stony streets, I fell and broke the ring finger of my left hand.  As I stood up and looked at it, remembering that I had twice called the Virgin a Whore,  I said, "That's one!"  A week later, having been to hospital and got my hand and arm in a cast (with funny wires through the fractures), hurrying again to my morning classes, an "illegal" young Albanian woman who worked in the school bar without a valid work permit, backed over me with her car in the school parking lot, breaking the same finger, in the same place, again--and I said, somewhat relievedly, "That's twice!"  The young Albanian woman was never seen again.

I gotta say that the two weeks that I spent then in hospital, instead of going to school, while having my left-hand ring finger reconstructed, wired, braced and encasted, were the most educational of all my time in Italy:  Long hours' waiting, such as you expect in dealing with any official Italian institution, and wouldn't dream of protesting (because, for heaven's sake, that's the way things are), put me in close contact with others similarly detained, of all ages, sexes and conditions, with whom there was nothing to do but pass the time chatting about everything under the sun.  I even got to understand and appreciate a little bit about the social and humanitarian organization of a large, fully-functioning Italian hospital, from the god-like specialist surgeons, terribly over-worked interns, and the army (armies, actually) of nurses who actually did everything.  And how beautiful they were those nurses!  As if pulled from the wall-paintings of Etruscan tombs, with wasp-waists, "heifer" eyes, coal-black hair in ringlets, and voices like harpies, that would startle me awake for my 2:00 a.m. injections, and leave me laughing hysterically at their hopeless attempts to sound soothing and soft-spoken.

In light of my real-life experience, and in the Italian tradition of grading you as much by what you deserve as by what you've earned (with the recognition that those can be somewhat different things), the university gave me a grade of 3.85 for the quarter.

Footnote: For the final, more extensive surgery on my poor, much-broken left-hand ring-finger, I was more heavily sedated than I had been for the first, and while the sedatives took effect, and to be sure that I was completely under before they began, my surgeon (a courtly, whimsical, middle-aged  gentleman from Bologna) and his chief assistant (an alarmingly beautiful, volatile, twenty-something Neapolitan, like a Sal Mineo with muscles)--the latter virtually holding me in his lap--talked me into somnolence.  First the assistant (whose chief job was to hold me still, while the surgeon operated) berated me uproariously in his half-comprehensible Neapolitan dialect, for the idiocy of twice-breaking my finger, in a fantastic rant, straight out of Don Basile, that left me shaking with laughter.  I told him not to mind, that in their care, though an utter fool, I was completely confident, e che non ero affatto inquietato--the classical tone of which causing them both to chuckle.  Then, as consciousness began to recede, the surgeon, leaned toward me, and said, in English, "But tell me now, was there not somewhere, when your finger was broken, a woman?"  And he repeated, in Italian, "una donna?"  I pretended to have fallen asleep and did not answer.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Second Thoughts about Islam

Let's just consider the water gardens at Kashan, Iran (completed 1531), which, without modern hydraulic technology, pumps or siphons, and with only gravity-flow to direct the course of a spring coming out of a nearby hillside, have reproduced to the satisfaction of Believer and non-Believer alike, the River(s) of Paradise as described with idealized, parched, Tantalizing Sehnsucht by Allah Himself in the Holy Qu'ran.  Frankly, if it were only for the great number and beauty of Islamic water gardens, from Spain to Kashmir, I might consider converting to Islam.  

The sexism--complete disparagement of the female sex, which I guess I must acknowledge as central to Islam--doesn't bother me (Indeed, when I notice it, I rather enjoy it or am amused by it); nor even am I troubled by the historically quite recent ideology of anti-homosexuality.  We have seen, in numerous French (gay male) pornographic films of the past four or five decades that the uncircumcised 'Beur' is, if anything, more photogenically and animalistically virile than his mutilated countryman--a revelation for which we thank the intransigeant, classical humanism of French medical doctors. The time, after all, will come--when the CIA and MOSSAD and their peculiar, sadistic interest in tormenting, harassing, reviling and persecuting (robbing, raping and despoiling) the Islamic peoples of the world, will have faded into the annals of no-longer-profitable iniquity, like the horrific piracies and genocides of the Crusades--and those whom I call the Comely First Race (Ossetians, Pashtou, Arabs, Hamites, Iranians, Bengalis, Aryan Hindus) will at long last, after so many centuries of oppression, be free once more to do what they have ever done when unmolested: Build gardens and orchards, write poetry, and in dreams envision the mathematics that lie at the heart of the universe.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

First Thoughts about Islam: Seeing as so many, with so little qualification to do so, are weighing in on the subject of Islam these days, I might as well join the chorus:

Unlike most of my compatriots,  I can, just, give a bare account of the   Five Pillars  of Islam:   (1) There is but one God, Allah, whose Prophet is Mohammed; (2) Prayer is to be performed/recited (in Arabic) five times a day (with, I believe, concomitant ablutions); (3) Alms are to be given to the poor at an established minimum rate of 2.5%; (4) you must faithfully observe the fast of Ramadan, in all its minutiae;  (5) wind and weather, and other circumstance permitting, you must visit Mecca at least once in your lifetime.

The word of God was  written, in Arabic, by the Prophet Mohammed, in chapters called Surahs, subdivided into verses, as these were dictated to him by the Archangel Gabriel; the whole body of which were compiled into the Holy Qur'an.  All prayers, scriptural and religious instruction are given in the Arabic language; converts are obliged to learn Arabic.

So far, so clear, and, if different at all from other Abrahamic religions, differing rather in the direction of the distinctness and isolation of thought which can only be formulated in one unchanging, classic (if not dead) language.  Above all, absolutely Monist in its conception of God. You get, from the punctility of its prayers and ablutions, from the institutionalized charity, and the humbly assumed religious duties and obligations, that the practitioners of Islam are a polite, hospitable, decently behaved, cleanly people.  And certainly if you have any experience of them personally or socially, you will be confirmed in your glow of approbation for them ("They," of course, being the men and boys who, only, are permitted to have a social presence):  They are passionate, exquisite friends; wonderful fathers; charming children, perfectly secure in their fathers' love, playful and polite.

Then you begin to hear of something called "Conversion by the Sword"--of which Allah and his Prophet (as recorded somewhere in the Holy Qu'ran) are not the least ashamed, and have never renounced.  No more than, say, the Church of Rome has ever repented of its having for so many long, bloody centuries maintained a Holy Office of the Inquisition.  But Moslems--never having experienced an "Enlightenment" which openly mocked all Faith as Superstition--seem a good deal more reluctant than Christians to acknowledge the Absurdity of Religion, and are much more inclined to get testy, even violent, when Islam, Allah and Mohammed are ridiculed.  Silly of them, but that's how they are.

Fantasies, Musical, Sexual and Otherwise.....

Happily, 16th and 17th century English composers seized on the word "Fantasy," and before anybody else could drag them down with a contrary definition, said, "Well, my idea of a Fantasy is whatever I happen to be thinking about--Could be anything actually." Which is pretty much what Papa Bach  meant with his term "invention." But it is odd, nonetheless, that "invention" has just a tad more restricted significance than "fantasy"--with the idea of a figure or device, of a musical thought working itself out, rather than just floating freely as a "fantasy" might, sort of.  Both are notably male vagaries, without anybody having decided that they should be.  But can you imagine sitting still for some female's "fantasy" or "invention"? Indeed, I dare say, (not) hardly.  And the same may be said, in spades, for female sexual fantasies. No male, gay or straight, has any desire, ever, to hear through a woman's sexual fantasy.  God help us all.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The "What do you want to do?" Test.

What is it that is the single greatest fault in determining what is natural to man, and what is unnatural?  The fact that nobody has seriously entertained the free and open investigation of the question of what, exactly, it is that people want to do--and with whom they want to do it.  But suppose that, in a free and unstructured environment (except by preferences of the test subjects), and with no restrictions but that test subjects may not hurt or harm other test subjects (or anybody else, for that matter), we introduce human beings of all ages and sexes, with all the foods, drugs and entertainment devices and living support systems that they require, to live and do exactly as they wish to, and freedom to live in contact with one another, and with members of the opposite sex, or not, as they wish to.  Be it therefore proposed.

Curious little Life it's been...though I was unconscious of much of this at the time,

Being old already, eight years ago, during Evo Morales' first run for the presidency, at a time when I was having lunch regularly in a Senior Center in a city on the Mainland, I used often to encounter 'Maria' there, an even older (say, twelve or thirteen years older), proud and native aristocratic daughter of Bolivia, whose enthusiasm for the advent of democracy and nationalism, and the end of alien, oligarchic fascism in her country was like a flame of splendor and purity which far outshone my own however generous, yet somewhat tepid, by comparison, enthusiasm.  Though twice married, and twice widowed--her last husband having been a Naval Surgeon in the entourage of the King of Sweden, and very much a woman of the world, Maria could scarcely believe that I was gay, and when she had made it perfectly clear that I had been give the opportunity to seduce her--and that, unforgivably, I hadn't--there was a hell of dust-up or brouhaha of comic opera proportions; which, in an earlier time would have ended with her stabbing me in the thigh with a dagger.  If she is not in Heaven, I wonder if Maria will have returned to Bolivia to savor the latest, most far-reaching triumph of Evo Morales--Surely it's been a long while in the history of the world since so radical a populist enjoyed the support of his country's most patriotic aristocrats.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Soldiers, Female Soldiers at that...

By the time I was nine years old (1951) I had formed the opinion that a standing army in peacetime is an abomination, and that those who permit themselves to be made soldiers of are fools--or worse.  I have never since seen any reason to change my mind; nor has the subsequent addition of females to the category of soldiers in any way softened my verdict:  All soldiers, male and female, who are so by preference, and not by force of involuntary conscription, are fools, cowards, thugs, criminals, and moral cretins.  It doesn't surprise me that female soldiers are commonly raped by their superiors, nor do I consider the raping of soldiers a criminal act.  

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Losing a Friend, though never so old--

I said to him who was my friend, just yesterday, on the phone, "I've heard Obama make little jokes about killing people."

Said my former friend:  Nothing.

Today I say, "I was never friends with the man I've known for forty-nine years, who, when I tell him I've heard Obama make little jokes about killing people, says nothing."

Bye, Stephen.


Who blew up those massive statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan?

I just assumed it was the CIA.  Too neat a job for it to have been the Taliban.  And besides, really, who else would have done it?  

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

I wouldn't say that I've so much got a subscription to Salon magazine as that it just shows up in my inbox, every day, along with detailed descriptions of what the current issue has in it...

The days when Glenn Greenwald was Salon's leading political columnist are long gone.  Nowadays the  chief political writers are painfully obvious establishment hireling-hacks (earning their whores' wages as detractors from "Libertarianism," or anything else that offers a genuine alternative to the official two-party three-card monte game of U.S. government-for-hire), or hiccupy-hysterical "feminists" boldly asserting, contrary to all reason and evidence, that the majority of women do too have orgasms (and that it's important somehow) and are so ¡raped! (or threatened with ¡rape!) pretty much all the time, everywhere, by men, boys and jocks.  Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald are hardly ever mentioned these days in Salon magazine--much less Bruce Ivins, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Aaron Swartz or Michael Hastings.  Still, nearly every day, I click on the Salon magazine in my inbox, just to see what my fellow Americans think they understand about themselves and the world, and to watch with mingled apprehension and  exhilaration how near they are to overstepping the boundary they have set for themselves of disbelieving that 9/11/2001 was an inside job, or false flag operation, of precisely the same nature as the German Reichstag fire of 1933.  Only just today, it was announced that the Terrorists "tested" the response of emergency services in the week before 9/11, and, somehow, were ignored.  Imagine. 

Friday, October 03, 2014

Phone Message from my PCP yesterday afternoon

Saying the chest X-ray done on me the day before gives no cause for immediate alarm, and I'm sure that, for her part, that's true.  Damn, I do like the woman--a (typically Hawaiian) Chinese/Caucasian who used the extra brains bequeathed her by her Chinese father to become a doctor, but whose Caucasion mother and Virgo birth-sign conspire to give her a sincere, rock-solid, honest character and utter lack of side or pretense,  which I, as a Virgo myself, find captivating, and, as a gay man/patient, utterly persuasive.  Plus, I think she likes me as much as I like her.   So I'd hate to lose her to a mere Ace Cardiologist, simply because she completely missed the boat in the diagnosis of my congestive heart failure (hereafter to be referred to as CHF).


But now then, as I read the material online about CHF, the reason it appears to be so invariably fatal and incurable seems, as I look at it, overwhelmingly due to the inability (or sheer unwillingness) of the (stick-in-the-mud, crotchety, old) people whom it afflicts, to alter their lives and habits in ways which would alleviate their condition, and even reverse it.  I am not such an one as who must persist in behaviors which are fatally injurious simply because I have got used to them: Remember that I quit smoking cigarets 29 years ago (after 30 years' addiction), cold-turkey and over-night.  I can do anything.  


Thursday, October 02, 2014

Alack and Alas

Saw both my PCP (primary care physician) and my shrink (psychiatrist), by chance on the same day yesterday, the former in the morning, the latter in the afternoon--and from the latter I got the bad news I should have got from the former:  I have congestive heart failure, brought on by years of obesity, inactivity and amphetamine abuse.  I don't know why my doctor hasn't spotted it, but Dr. Chan, my psychiatrist, laid it out in a few, dead-on accurate sentences.  "You are a doctor," I said to him ironically (meaning, "by what right do you mess with my mind?").  And he replied simply, "I try to be."

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Robert de Visée Prélude et Allemande, Jonas Nordberg, theorbo