The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
If, like me, you don’t drink at all, and if, like me, despite not drinking at all you find yourself in a position where you’ve had a long fucking day and fuck it you want a glass of wine anyway, and the only wine in the house turns out to be mango wine, and your wife says to you “shake it up before you open it, so the mango doesn’t settle”…
don’t fucking listen to your wife.
That is all.
I did, in fact, manage to make it through my doctor’s visit yesterday without any invasive examinations, which I mostly wasn’t super interested in anyway. The part of me that was super interested was the bit that writes blog posts, though.
I discovered a new way that the world can degrade me today, though: I needed to visit the doctor mostly because she needed to re-up my refills for my blood pressure medicine, and she insists on twice-yearly checkups for anyone on maintenance meds, which I’m okay with in principle. The real reason, on my end at least, was that I’ve decided it’s time to start moving toward getting robot parts, and I need referrals for that. My knees are fucked up, guys, and fucked up in a way that manifests itself by my feet sticking out in directions that feet are not supposed to point while I’m walking. As you all know, because I gripe about it all the fucking time, I have three eleven-hour shifts a week at my job in addition to the two six-hour shifts, and at the end of those shifts I have to drive home. By the time I get home, half an hour or so later, my joints have locked themselves up so thoroughly that I can barely walk. I occasionally wonder whether the neighbor kids have made a sport of being by the windows when I get home from work so that they can watch me hobble down my long-ass driveway to check the mail. I’m fat, yes, but there are tons of people way fatter than me and my mobility issues are, I think, at the very least at the long end of the tail for people my size.
So, yeah: can I have a referral to an orthopedist, please? Or whatever a knee doctor is called, because I always feel like the word is the wrong word even if I’ve just looked it up to check? And most of the time I want the word “osteopath,” but I’m pretty sure osteopathy is voodoo, even if I like to say the word better?
Sure, patient, you can have an orthopedist. Which one?
(As an aside, the horrified look on both my doctor and the types-rapidly-on-the-laptop person who always seems to come into the room with the doctor nowadays when they really looked at my feet for the first time was hilarious.)
Well, my mom liked this one dude who replaced her knee. Can I use him?
Sure!
And then I wait a day, and then the degradation happens. Get this: I got a call from my doctor’s office today, from the incredibly apologetic person who drew the short stick and had to make this call, and get this: this orthopedist who I specifically requested said that he was not willing to treat me because I’m too fat. As in, I’m not allowed to even darken his fucking door. Not “you’ll need to lose weight before we do knee replacement surgery.” I’m not even at “you need knee replacement surgery” right now despite all the jokes about robot parts. I want a medical professional to tell me what to do about my knees, and yes, I’m fully expecting to hear “losing weight will help,” and yes, it will, but it will not solve the problem that my feet point the wrong fucking direction, and that’s not because I’m fat, even though the fatness makes the pain and stress on my knees worse. But maybe I don’t need new knees! Maybe I can just wear a brace or something! I don’t know, that’s why I need a doctor!
But no. He won’t even see me, because my BMI is too high. What’s my BMI? I dunno, but it’s apparently over 40, because he flat-out refuses to see any patients with a BMI of 40 or above. Ever.
So fuck that guy, gimme an appointment with someone who isn’t a dickhead.
(Which, by the way, I just GISed “40 BMI”? And holy shit I do not look like this:
Anybody with the profile of the King Kong Bundy-lookin’ motherfucker on the right there has got to be pushing 500 pounds, if not more. I’m 5’10” and just over 300, which, granted, is probably the heaviest I’ve ever been, but my profile matches the gray one in the middle much more than either of the other two. Holy shit.)
Anyway, here’s to hoping that my new doctor isn’t an asshole, and can fix my stupid knees and my stupid obtuse-angled feet, and fuck that other guy.
Last night, at approximately 4:30 in the morning, I was bludgeoned out of a sound sleep by the sudden and overwhelming need to vomit. Like, threw the covers damn near off the bed, kicked the cat, scared the shit out of the dog, damn near fell over clawing for the bathroom before I projectile vomited all over my entire fucking bedroom. And then… nothing. I got into the bathroom and absolutely nogoddamnthing happened. When my alarm woke me up this morning, I spent a moment reflecting on the fact that I was able to breathe normally and thought oh, hey, maybe I’m better! and then got out of bed and was damn near forced to my knees by the virulence of the ensuing coughing fit. How the hell I made it to work this morning is a mystery, and instead of the usual caffeine product that I make sure to bring with me every day (a bottle of tea, most of the time) I brought Robitussin. I literally do not know how I got through the day, but I managed it, and with enough sales to make the effort more or less worth it.
On the way home, I drove past another fucking wild turkey. I live less than a mile from what is effectively open prairie and woodland (yes, both, in different directions) so the occasional deer and the much-less-occasional herd of deer in the neighborhood isn’t unheard of, along with the other usual urban wildlife, but I swear I never saw a wild turkey before this year and now I’m seeing them all the time. Wild turkeys are fucking weird, guys, and I have the same reaction every time I see one, which is to briefly wonder why the fuck a dinosaur is that close to my car. This particular wild turkey was even weirder, because I watched it in my rear-view mirror as I was driving past and the damn thing was hopping, not walking, across the street. So maybe it’s a one-legged wild turkey? I dunno. I’ve never been one for hunting but I kind of do want to see if these things make for good eating or not.
A minute or so later, I had another massive coughing fit and came very close to swerving into oncoming traffic. Frighteningly close, actually. Probably should have pulled over.
And then I got home and made the sumptuous feast you see in the photo above for dinner– yes, that’s turkey– and for dessert I plan to have codeine. I will try to post something more generally useful and less hallucinatory tomorrow; for now I’m just happy to be alive.
The end.
I became aware a couple of weeks ago that Dr. Jekyll (and, along with him, Mr. Hyde) appeared in the new Mummy movie. I have no interest in seeing that movie at all but it reminded me that I’ve never actually read the original book.
Wherever I was when that thought occurred to me, I mentally scanned my bookshelf and decided that I probably already owned a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but that I wasn’t sure. Normally the idea that I don’t know if I own a book is very unusual, but in this case I had a decent reason: at some point several years ago those cheap Barnes and Noble classics editions went really cheap– like $2.50 a book– and I scooped up a ton of them on the assumption that I’d want to read them eventually. I was pretty certain that DJ&MH was among that list, but I wasn’t sure.
This is a picture of some (yes, some) of the bookshelves in my living room, taken from the perspective of my recliner, which is where I spend a substantial proportion of my time when I’m at home, to the point where my son calls it “Daddy’s chair”:
Helpful pink arrows are indicating where the Barnes and Noble editions I was referring to are shelved. You will note that some of them are behind a rocking chair and a few of the boy’s toys. Those items were not put into those places for the purpose of this picture; that is where they generally live– meaning that my view of the shelf on the right was blocked from my recliner. In addition, my eyes aren’t quite good enough anymore to resolve individual titles of the books on that shelf from my chair, although I knew the rough size and color of the spine so I was pretty sure it wasn’t in the bunch on the left.
It took two weeks for me to simultaneously 1) remember that I had been wondering if I had a copy of DJ&MH when I was actually in the house and 2) have the energy to get my lazy ass up out of my chair to go check those books on the right. There were multiple occasions where the first happened and the second did not. Multiple.
The answer was yes, by the way.
My kid’s day care was supposed to have a Father’s Day party today, but I’m kind of pissed at my kid’s day care right now– more on that later, maybe– and so instead I picked him up early and we’ve been having a Daddy/Kenny day at home. Which means lots of toys (there are Transformers everywhere) and lots of binging terrible Korean animated shows on Netflix. This is probably the fastest any show has gone from “I’ve never heard of this” to “I must do a CCPR post on this immediately,” by the way.
Meet the Mini Force:
They’re little talking animals. The pink one is a girl, which I’m sure you’ll all find tremendously surprising. The red one is a bird, although he doesn’t seem to fly. Other than the red one, I have no idea what kind of animals they are. Maybe they’re all cats, other than the bird? The blue one might be a skunk? I have no damn clue. Anyway, they talk. And they live with a girl named Susie, who in animated kids’ show fashion appears to have no parents or adult influences. Susie knows they talk and can talk back to them. They look just like Octonauts.
Here’s how every show goes: each episode starts with a bunch of woodland animals being inconvenienced in some way, most of the time by a purple Shredder-looking dude named Pascal or some robot he’s created. Sometimes Shredder’s boss is around; he’s dressed like some sort of Spandex-wearing supervillain and I don’t know his name.
The degree of the inconvenience varies. Sometimes it’s special pop that makes the animals fall asleep. Sometimes it’s a snake monster that turns them to stone. The stakes tend to vary.
At any rate, after the animals are inconvenienced, we cut to the four Mini Force dudes at home with Susie. They have some sort of interpersonal problem that will not be resolved and are then summoned via some sort of blinky device that one of them carries. Where to? Not clear at all; they run away and then are suddenly inside some sort of giant complex. I’m not sure if Susie knows about this part of their lives; she probably wonders where they go all the time. They meet with a hologram of a cat. I don’t know what the cat’s name is– they just call him Commander– but he has a mustache and wears sunglasses and a Kangol. I don’t get it.
If Pascal isn’t the villain, then the robot causing all the trouble will have -mon at the end of its name. Every time.
Then they become Power Rangers. I’m not kidding:
Like, the theme music even refers to them as the “Super Rangers Mini Force,” although there’s no credits for Saban anywhere and I’m pretty sure this is just a knockoff and not an official thing. But anyway. The very next scene after the transformation, they’ve teleported to wherever the bad guy is– no time for exposition here!– and then there’s a fight. The fights are those Power Rangers-style fights where there’s always time for lots of talking in between people shooting at one another and your weapons have to be summoned by saying very long phrases out loud.
They lose the fight, and one of them is generally incapacitated somehow. There is a lot of grunting. Seriously, the dialogue in this show is maybe 60% grunts. It’s amazing.
After they lose, they summon their “Force Cars.” Why they didn’t just drive to the fucking fight in the Force Cars isn’t clear. I assume everyone just sits around while the Force Cars drive out to wherever they are. The Force Cars are, no shit, Transformers:
Somewhere in here, the villain gets super large, also Power Rangers style. And not all the time, but sometimes, the Force Cars have to– wait for it– join together to make a single, much larger Force Car. At which point the show becomes Voltron. And then they win, and the show ends abruptly, most of the time with no indication of whether the inconvenienced animals at the beginning of the show were ever made better or not. Maybe they’re still asleep or made from stone or whatever; who knows?
It is impressive to have ripped off that many well-known properties so blatantly and still not have been sued into nonexistence.
The boy’s back in day care now that school is out. This is his fourth day with his new group, which I can only assume has a mess of other new kids in it as well since just about everyone just got out of school. Today was the first day I’ve picked him up, though. As I walk in, he and another boy are a a table playing with a bunch of plastic dinosaurs. He looks up and sees me.
“I need just four more minutes, Daddy,” he says. And the simple fact is I ain’t really got shit to do at that particular moment, so, sure. “You have two,” I say, because it’s not like he can tell time anyway. And I let him play for a couple of minutes and kind of observe the rest of the kids, and then nudge him toward the door. He doesn’t move immediately or anything, but he complies quickly enough that I don’t have to ask twice.
“You must be a really patient dad,” one of the teacher says to me. And at first I feel like it’s either a compliment or a sign that these folks spend the day dealing with angry lunatics, but now a couple of hours later I kind of want to spend some time interrogating the boy to see if he spent the day driving them insane.
On the way home we take the new car through a car wash. Apparently the local sparrows all got diarrhea while I was at work yesterday and were able to figure out which car was the new one, so the thing is a huge mess. I’m a little nervous about it because he got really scared the last time we went through a car wash and I’m hoping it doesn’t happen again.
At some point he asks why I’m driving so slow, and I explain that I’m not controlling the car– that there’s a track I’ve driven onto that is moving the car for me and keeping it at the right speed for everything to work.
“Oh. Is that like alien hand syndrome?” he says.
…
“Sort of,” I say.
Someone explain to me how the fuck my five-year-old knows about alien hand syndrome, please?
My wife is out of town again, through Friday this time, and as he tends to do when one of us is out of town the boy has requested to sleep in the “big bed.” I put him off last night because for a five-year-old he takes up an astonishing amount of room and is somewhat less receptive than my wife to the occasional nudge if he strays past his side of the bed.
(For the record, I have no idea how receptive I am to such nudges. I’m sure I do it too.)
My wife is reading IT for about the hojillionth time right now in preparation for the upcoming movie. We have at least three copies of the book in the house and two of them are on her nightstand– the paperback copy she started reading, and the hardback she ganked from her parents when she realized that reading a thousand pages of the tiny print in the paperback might not be in her eyes’ best interest.
As I’m reading the boy his bedtime stories, he notices the books and asks if tomorrow I can read IT to him instead of, oh, Disney’s 5-Minute Fairy Tales or whatevertheshit.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too scary for you. You can read it when you’re old enough,” I say to him, reflecting upon the fact that my first Stephen King book was Misery, published in 1987, and therefore first read (I stole my grandmother’s copy on an overnight visit, and I was 2/3 done with it before she realized what I was reading, well past the point where she could have objected) when I was in fifth grade. I went on a serious King bender after that and so it couldn’t have been much longer before I got to IT.
“Oh, okay,” he says. “They taught me to read yesterday at school. I can do that now. Can I read it to myself?”
I think about this for a second.
“Sure. You can start tomorrow, though.”
“Okay,” he says, and hands me the fairy tales book, apparently satisfied.
I’m really gonna feel ridiculous if he actually did learn to read yesterday, I imagine.
Just spent some time with one of my oldest friends, as he’s in town for Mother’s Day. I described our evening to my wife thusly:
“His mom just divorced her third husband, his friend and her boyfriend just broke up with their girlfriend, and his former grocer-turned-manwhore has syphilis. He’s fine.”
My life feels kinda boring right now.