Absence and Sorrow

I've been somewhat absent from my blogs (and from as much of life as I can cancel) for several reasons. My dad has dementia and that has involved my own grief as well as his acute sense that his "mind is failing." Dad who is still driving a car (no thanks to the State of New Jersey for giving him back his license even after I informed them of his deteriorating condition) has been up to see us several times over the past few months.

Additionally the iron-deficient anemia (which I thought I had only had since August but the blood doc tells me I've had for three years) remained unmedicated for a month thanks to the shenanigans of the mail-order pharmacy in cahoots with my medical insurance plan. I could not tolerate over the counter iron. The medical insurance plan required a pre-authorization for the iron script. The mail-order company sent me back the script 28 days after they had received it. Insurance company refused to pay. Pre-auth was turned down I guess but I had not been informed directly by the insurance company. Price of prescription that was turned down: 39.99 for a thirty day supply. I need the iron pills and specifically I need the prescription iron due to things like a severe hiatal hernia and an irritated colon. So I shelled out the two twenties and practiced being glad that I had the money.

Meanwhile though, I suffered through several months of extreme heat sickness and tiredness. The t.b.i. gave me cognitive fatigue and some physical fatigue as well. The C-PAP machine stopped the feeling that I was sleep-walking through life, even though t.b.i. fatigue remains. The anemia finished me off for awhile. I am actually looking forward to visiting the gut doc in January. I feel so un-well that I am looking forward to the kind of testing that comes with visiting the gut doc.

Sometimes I think medical insurance companies run the numbers like a bettor would run the horse races. As long as the horse is winning (doesn't access the medical insurance benefits much) everything is gravy. When the horse begins stumbling a bit (needs medical attention for chronic conditions) the bettor begins to doubt his choices. When the stumbling horse falls down deal-- there is no longer any problem. Business is business. I understand that. But I also understand that human beings are not race horses and that somehow our lives should matter. My insurance company insisting that I should be able to tolerate taking over-the-counter iron for an anemia which I've had for three years flies in the face of a certain reality. So the company gets to save on my iron medicine by refusing to pay for it. A certain amount of denial on their part saves them money. But that same denial forces me, an adult on disability through no fault of my own, to spend extra money on a medical necessity. Thanks pal.

There is some inherent wrongness with insisting that a patient be able to take iron over the counter in spite of conditions that are counter-indicative to that. There is some inherent wrongness with the A.A.R.P. lobbying against any state motor vehicle agency requiring adults of a certain age to submit to driving retesting. And along with that consequently, many insurance companies failing to pay for driver evaluations conducted by a professional upon order of a physician. My dad's insurance-- a combination of Medicare and A.A.R.P. supplemental Medicare-- naturally refused to pay a dime toward his eval (one that he utterly failed I will add). That bill amounted to around 400 bucks.

So to say that I am a bit testy, irritable, and sluggish is accurate but doesn't really cover the whole truth. I've had all I can do to continue to be a participant in life rather than an observer on the sidelines. I am filled with grief. Dad knows he has dementia and he is aware that his brain is on strike. He continues to steadfastly refuse medications for all of his medical conditions as well as the brain scans that would make a definitive diagnosis possible. We do not even have a name for the monster that is beating on his brain. I love my dad and when he dies, I will miss him for the rest of my life. I hope he dies in his sleep peacefully before the real misery sets in. I feel like there should be more or better things to hope for but I haven't found those things yet.

sapphoq healing t.b.i.

A Murder of Crows - Volume 27

Well as my daughter’s boyfriend just came back from boot camp, I am pretty much convinced that I am his surrogate parent. It’s an ok thing because I like him and think he’s a very good match for my daughter in general, but it also makes me rather sad that it has come down to that as well. What I mean in general is that I can’t for the life of me understand his mother and the way that she thinks. Her son basically joined the military to get out of his subservience to a mother that doesn’t work, and has no problem leaching off of her sons. It’s amusing that as long as I have known him I just found out today that he is the YOUNGER brother of his mother’s brood, and that worried me a bit, because he had always taken care of his mother and his older brother?

You see, I knew most of the story because his mother had thrown him out of her apartment prior to him leaving for boot camp. Why you may ask? Well it was because she was furious that she wouldn’t be able to pay her rent while he waited for his first paycheck. Yep, you heard that right, it was because she wouldn’t be able to pay her rent without him paying it for her. Apparently he and his brother had been splitting the bills for years, and his mother found no shame in this whatsoever, because after all she had given birth to them and they were fortunate for that. I really didn’t know the entire dynamics until today when I took him out to get my other car repaired {the one that I loan him when he is in town because he has nobody else to loan him one} and I made the comment that it was hard to worry about your younger brother. He then corrected me that the sycophantic brother who was also angry that he ran off to the army instead of taking care of their mother was the OLDER brother. Holy moly.

Now I have made jokes about his mother before, because before the days of Oprah Winfrey and the rest of the bad behavior apologists, you were allowed to pick on people like this. She doesn’t have a job because she has “emotional problems.” Well as my ex-wife has “emotional problems” I consider myself a forced expert on these things and often “emotional problems” don’t exactly mean “emotional problems” and from what I have discerned these are those types of “emotional problems.” My daughter’s poor boyfriend was raised to look forward to the day when the food stamps or the welfare check came in. He'd come home from school where his mother would be video taping soap opera's with the money from the welfare check. This was what my children went through until I ended up with them and in the exact same manner, welfare check meant new VCR tapes or liquor, and food stamps meant junk food with the change going into the alcohol redemption fund. I am not saying that everyone does these things but I am dealing with these two examples.

Using the “bucket of crabs” theory that there are always crabs in the bottom trying to drag you back down, my daughter’s boyfriend escaped and is doing his best to refuse to jump back in the bucket. I had told him what I have tried to tell my ex-wife, which is that parents are parents and not surrogate children. Parents that treat their children like the parents need to be escaped from and I support his decision. I also told him that my mother was along the same lines, and surprise surprise, I made sure I married women just like her. I of course had to recommend to him that he might want to be wary of these things. My daughter has actually made me so amazingly proud of her as she has been what most men would hope their military wives would be like. She’s been unwaveringly loyal to him while he is away. She couldn’t consider anyone else, and even her boyfriend appreciated that as a lot of the men that he is in the army with don’t get that luxury. I told him that we are what our parents make us, and if we choose to stay that way we only have ourselves to blame, and he already understood that one.

I appreciated how well he took it when at the dinner table last year, I was asked by my aunt what I really thought about my 16 year old daughter dating a 19 year old. Between bites of food I simply said, “I thought about it for a while, and decided that there are distinct advantages to my daughter dating a 19 year old man,” and my aunt wasn't happy that I wasn't immediately banning the concept from the first moment she brought him home. I wasn't put on this earth to back up all of her thoughts, but as I continued I left the audience shocked, “seriously, if she dated a boy her own age then I would have no recourse if he did something stupid. If he does something stupid, I could tear his head off and beat him within an inch of his life, and most likely get away with it in court,” and the way he started choking on his food was the perfect response. Needless to say he has been the best boyfriend I ever could have wished for my daughter, and in turn he made out pretty well, as I adopted him as my son-in-law to compensate for what little he has in lines of his own family. It's been pretty fair.

There was a benefit to spending the day with what most fathers would consider “the enemy” and transporting him around to grab my other car for him, giving him one of these extra too heavy coats I bought recently {oh yeah the airline lost his and the other three soldiers on the plane’s luggage .. nobody else’s just the big green duffel bags .. I smell fish} and a few pairs of my jeans that the army helped him fit into while he was gone. I was the only one who knew he was back in town. When my daughter got home from school, I was able to grab her and tell her to go downstairs to my office, and look at something I had on my computer. I stayed upstairs so the scream wouldn’t destroy my ears. It came close with a floor between us. I gave them about 15 minutes to kiss and catch up and then threw them both out of my office. I can only take being a human being for so long out of the day ;8o)

Other Crap This Weirdo Publishes... Mental Notes& Random Musings {Daily Blog} Jeremy Crow on NewsVine {Political Blog} The Crow's Nest {The Homepage of J~ Crow}

Nothing that was printed here was intended to offend anyone, and if it did, screw ya, you begged for it. If you believe that there are some measures that can be taken to change me, then please feel free to pray for me, and while you are at it yourself, because you read this far, and if you hated every minute of it, then you are an idiot, not me, or the other people who like what I have to say! .. Jeremy

All writings Copyright © 2009 .. The Crow's Nest

A Murder of Crows - Volume 26

I think I am going to try to break the Itching For Coffee record for “Long Boring Blog Entries” with this one but it all falls into my plan to keep three separate places for my thoughts for a while. I am sick of my different types of blog fans clashing over what should and should not be my norm so I have been posting here with the more general “life and health” stuff. Newsvine for my political stuff, and Mental Notes for whatever the hell I want because it's my own damn blog. Yeah that didn't sound bitter but let me explain my day in the best way I can.

Those that have known me long enough know that I have a few interesting qualities that don't always blend together very well. I tend to be extremely manic and I tend to be extremely brilliant. When you mix the two together it becomes dangerous on different levels than most people truly understand, but is understood quite well by many of the people that have gotten close to me over the years. This is one of the major reasons that I write. It originally started as one part soul cleansing, one part tattling on myself, and one part something to do. I take long breaks from it, and then when I come back again it is usually one of those three things that drive me to it. Times like it has been lately, when I come charging out of the gates it is usually the first two in combination, and a third part that got added along the way, which was the quest to become a better human being. I haven't been a complete failure on that one but I always have some steps backwards along the way. It's all in what you do with it.

Today was innocuous enough, with what little I had to do during the day, I think I was probably having it to easy and should have seen the warning signs. I have written a lot lately about the impending doom that politics in this country have been lately and how it has felt like one personal attack after another on myself. I have talked about my health issues and how it effects me as well, especially when you consider that I am for the most part extremely healthy and have done most of the right things to stay that way and in a “life isn't fair” manner things still effect me physically. These things alone don't do very wonderful for the psyche but when you add other things that are out of a person's control, and throw in the propensity to over analyze things in an unhealthy manner. I like to equate the inside of my head as Oprah Winfrey and Albert Einstein arguing over the correct way to say potato, and neither ever giving in. If you think about it long enough it makes more sense with every passing minute. This is where you throw in the drama, and the things that are out of my control. Then you throw in the insane ways I try to deal with them, and then throw in the aftermath of over-analyzing what I did wrong and how it destroyed the world, and you are about half way there.

I was playing around on Twitter and totally lost track of time. This is never good, but I ran off to get my son from school so I could take him to his therapist. He was late getting out of school so I had to haul ass to get to the therapist. The therapist was late, so we had to cram session what ended up being a rather good session. We were then trapped in her office for an extra half hour because another patient was going psycho outside her door and the police were trying to subdue him. I was then a half hour late getting to work for a company Christmas party that I was supposed to set up. The caterer was late, so I was still on time but that didn't change that I was late setting up the Christmas party. The people took it out on ME, for a while anyway because I started getting “that look” which in combination with my low grumbling voice when I get angry usually stops people from continuing on my case. From what I heard anyway. The party went well and the food was excellent. I over ate really badly and now had a sore stomach because my bad spine was now in collusion with those abs I have dedicated many hours a week to making beautiful to create a new pain that I had never experienced before. Snowball effect.

Now on a brighter note, the employees cleaned up and put everything away after the party without me having to nag any of them to do so. I think this links back to “the look” and “the voice” and I think most of the people there were happy to just get it done and go home. This would leave me alone at work to stew over the crap that I had to deal with already today, and the excruciating pain in my mid section that I had completely caused to myself. I of course still had a lot of work to do since I had used my usual work time to set up a Christmas party and had to finish cleaning and ordering and setting up trucks for the crew in the morning. Did I mention that my stomach was killing me and I was spending every free moment of brain activity to beat myself up over this. The heat had tripped out and I forgot to wear the big ugly yellow jacket that I wear so my arms don't curl up on me, and now the pain was getting agonizing in my arms. Again this is a relatively new issue in my life so I was simply using the pain in my elbows and my hands as another gauge of how horribly my life sucks, and by the time I realized that my big ugly stupid yellow coat probably would end this I felt stupid and could start using that brain activity to abuse myself over this now.

On that big ugly yellow jacket. It gets me some strange looks but it is extremely warm and for my own comfort I have to get used to being extremely warm or the arthritis cripples me. Thanks to 8 years of not having to own or care about wearing a jacket I realize that I have no taste in jackets, as well as being cursed with the male gender it didn't occur to me that sooner or later I would feel stupid wearing THAT jacket when I purchased it because it looked the warmest. I do look stupid in it and that gave me something else for Oprah and Albert to argue over. It was like a satanic tribal council dedicated to voting ME off the island but I might have had an immunity idol up until this point. The easiest way to look at it is that I was grumpy. I had to make several trips back and forth across the street to get all of my jobs done and that was making me grumpy, and I had just about run out of gas and THAT made me grumpy.

At the gas station was one of those moments that could have changed my life. Perhaps it did, but it might have snapped me out of it all after a good long Oprah v Albert beat down. This will come from the mind of a genius and not exactly the mind of the animal that was there, so please bear with me. I should point out to those that haven't met me in person that I work out a LOT. I am 5' 9” 192 pounds with a 30' waist, 17” arms, and a 44” chest. When I get really angry I act like it too, and all the working on that in the world gets me nowhere but I try. As I was pumping my gas a car pulled up behind me and out jumps two early twenties, most likely drunk, people. The girl was having a hard time letting her boyfriend pump his gas without putting her hands all over him, and between that, poor education, people who have fostered the belief in him that he can say anything he wants without consequence, and as I said before liquor he summed me up. He then looked at one of the several bumper stickers on my car and said “You're proud to be stupid huh?”

Ok, before we get into what happened in less than one minute let me point out to you that the one W04 sticker in my window, is most likely still there because I haven't gotten around to removing it yet. The two pink ribbons are for the women in my family and my best friend that beat breast cancer. The “Easy Does It” sticker is because I have a problem with alcohol, mostly in me, but trust me I tend to have a problem with alcohol in others too if it becomes MY problem. The two stickers that say “Meow” and “Woof” because I support the local animal shelters, and the one that says support our troops mostly because I always support our troops but partly because my daughter's boyfriend is one of the troops. We all know what one he was talking about, but it doesn't matter because he would have gotten this response from any of them when I let go of the handle and started walking towards him saying, “If you ever speak to me again I will break all of your fucking teeth!”

Now let's analyze along with Oprah and Albert about how horribly this went. In reality he stopped pumping his gas, practically threw his terrified girlfriend in the car, and after fumbling himself into the car almost hit mine as he tore out of there. I guess I still had “the look” and “the voice”and after pumping my gas I pulled out my cell phone and in a wonderful feat of righteous anger I tweeted {what a loser huh?} “I thank God that I am physically intimidating enough to be able to tell libtards to stfu and the pretty much have to” which actually made things worse just because it put all of it into perspective for me that I am allowing my hate over a world that pisses me off transpire into hate. On the way back to work I actually chuckled when the thought came to me that that loser probably was taking it out on his girlfriend right now, and then that was when I felt like the worst human being on the face of the earth because I might be right. All of my self righteous indignation and lust for physical violence as of late just crashed down around me and I really should be ashamed of myself. I am.

Last month when I called my ex-wife's grandmother {I still call them family} in Oswego to see what had happened in the NY-23 elections she had told me some of the usual stories you hear from really heated elections. Purple shirted SEIU thugs hanging out at the end of the street to the school she voted at, and a steady stream of them “voting” which I guess is how they get around the “on property” laws in some states. She's in her late 80's so you can imagine that she gets easily intimidated and she made that known to me. I was thinking about that as I sat in my car and finished my cigarette, because the first thing I thought after that was how I lamented that SEIU Thugs never hang out around my polling places. It's always been a fantasy of mine to make at least two or three of them completely unemployable the second I got the excuse to. That's pretty sick isn't it? I was having a field day at what a rotten human being I can become with the slightest bit of lapse in effort to not be. That little twit at the gas station didn't start this realistically because I obviously was in the middle of an epic moral breakdown long before he hit that button. To think I actually started the day with the most beautiful woman at the gym {ask anyone there} making a point of coming over and having an actual conversation with me, which gave me the opportunity to fumble all of my words and try to talk while praying to God I didn't say anything stupid. The resentment stick can reach any pink cloud and knock your ass off if you let it. Let go, let God and get back to trying to do the next right thing Jeremy ;8o)

Other Crap This Weirdo Publishes... Mental Notes& Random Musings {Daily Blog} Jeremy Crow on NewsVine {Political Blog} The Crow's Nest {The Homepage of J~ Crow}

Nothing that was printed here was intended to offend anyone, and if it did, screw ya, you begged for it. If you believe that there are some measures that can be taken to change me, then please feel free to pray for me, and while you are at it yourself, because you read this far, and if you hated every minute of it, then you are an idiot, not me, or the other people who like what I have to say! .. Jeremy

All writings Copyright © 2009 .. The Crow's Nest

A Murder of Crows - Volume 25

I never cease to amaze myself, but even I have to take a moment to look at the times, like today, where I have an epiphany about something so easy to realize that it almost makes me look stupid. I'm reasonably intelligent, or so some people tell me. I'm reasonably well read, and I can use really long words in sentences with proper pronunciation and all, but the simplest things elude me for a lot longer than most people, and then when I finally catch on, I want to tell everyone about it. I don't imagine I am up to Oprah Winfrey standards of imbecilic self aggrandizement and justification, but I definitely fall into the Hillary Clinton “waiting until she is 50 to realize she isn't the center of the universe” that I had scoffed at myself. I assume that we are all capable of this, but I am starting to bring it to an art form that wouldn't sell in Cleveland.

Some things aren't completely my fault. I came down with a raging case of Chicken Pox when I was 31 and that has done a lot of interesting things to me. My doctor had told me that some neurological issues always come up with most cases of adult chicken pox, and you never know what they are going to be or why. I accepted that because of all we know about the human body, it is still eclipsed by all the things we don't know. Thanks to this philosophy I don't get on my imbecility too much when I finally realized that walking around in shorts and a tank top in November while everyone else was bundled up, didn't make me a complete fool. It made me someone who realized the hard way that I had lost the ability to tell hot and cold. It's a very strange thing to happen, but it did. That was a revelation that I couldn't wait to tell everyone about. I also did this type of thing when I realized that ibuprofen would get rid of a tooth ache, with different looks from everyone.

Using this same philosophy that I do stupid things and justify it, and then realize how stupid they are and then brag about it, we need to go back to the whole hot and cold issue. I never drink hot coffee if I can avoid it. If you haven't had a throat full of blisters, then you really are missing out. Yes I talked about that revelation in great detail, and at least was shielded by the fact that it did fall under a who knew? I never wear jackets in the winter because they are uncomfortable, and what's the point when you just don't feel the cold? I do feel the bite of the wind, so I will usually wear a slicker of some sort if it is rainy, snowy or windy. I will then talk, using my oversized brain and mouth about how cold weather doesn't actually give you a cold or the flu, and that's true it doesn't. My self righteousness up until YESTERDAY could justify this type of crap for the longest time, and you can even throw in the fact that I live in the unheated basement of my house so the kids can have all the bedrooms. Aside from the fact that I haven't noticed discomfort in years, it was a selfless act that should get me into heaven someday.

Now lets throw in a new wrinkle that I never talk about really. The last few years have been a long slow crawl into early onset arthritis for me. I'm not actually a whiner {despite my rantings in my blog, but it's my blog} so I just go about my life and try to figure out ways to deal with it. I take a bevy of supplements everyday, and I do the correct stretching in my hands and arms to try and keep it from getting to me. Lately it has been intense and quite painful, and last night in particular, it was slipping me into quite a depression as the agony in my forearms and elbows was killing me. I sat here at my keyboard watching “Bones” reruns, and just started falling into the “why me” attitude, that makes a drunk like Jeremy a real treat to be around. That was when I started seeing my breath in front of me. How freaking sad is that when you sit in a 40 degree room day in, day out and have no concept that it probably aggravates, if not outright makes your arthritis worse? I felt stupid {but at the same time couldn't wait to tell everyone what a genius I was for figuring this out!} and just did my best to make it through the night until I could go out and get a heater with a thermostat for my office in the basement.

Well I did just that this morning, went out and got heaters for my office {at time of heater placement 42 degrees} one for my bedroom {at time of heater placement 40 degrees} and one for my bathroom {at time of heater placement 36 degrees, so add potentially ruptured pipes to that list of why Jeremy is too stupid to be left alone with a cigarette lighter} and then started cleaning. Yes I started cleaning, because OCD has made it impossible for me to put anything new, and with an actual use in a room without cleaning and reorganizing the room first. I guess this is a good thing in itself because my office in particular was going to require “weight loss” to get to my desk sooner or later. All the heaters were set to a {what I am told} comfortable 72 degrees, and I will adjust them to give me the best pain management level. I'm 39 freaking years old and I have arthritis, and no common freaking sense! On that note, the pain is down so much that I can actually type this at my usual lightning pace that I had been losing over the last month pretty quickly. The next time I start spouting off something that sounds reasonably unintelligent, yet overly intelligent, I can only hope that someone smacks me. ;8o)

Other Crap This Weirdo Publishes... Mental Notes& Random Musings {Daily Blog} The Crow's Nest {The Homepage of J~ Crow}

Nothing that was printed here was intended to offend anyone, and if it did, screw ya, you begged for it. If you believe that there are some measures that can be taken to change me, then please feel free to pray for me, and while you are at it yourself, because you read this far, and if you hated every minute of it, then you are an idiot, not me, or the other people who like what I have to say! .. Jeremy

All writings Copyright © 2009 .. The Crow's Nest