Holiday Tour, Part Two

This month I went into the District to do a holiday decorations tour on a bicycle. I spent a little time enjoying the National Tree with the National Menorah and the Washington Monument bookending it.

Downtown I went into the Willard Hotel and the Trump International Hotel to see their trees and warm up for a little while.  DC in December can be cold and raw even when the sun is out.

The Nutcracker Sentries were manning one of the the Willard Hotel entrances and outside the Portrait Museum some life size wooden soldiers stood guard.  The Hotel Monaco had a nice little tree in its tiny lobby.

The Smithsonian Castle always has a tree.  The nice thing there is that there's never a line to get in and it has bathrooms and even a small food court.

The Capital Tree was nice, although it's always dwarfed by the Capitol.  After seeing it from afar, I went up to Union Station to have lunch in its food court and see the tree in the massive lobby.

I headed back to Haines Point to retrieve my car and drive home.  Along the way I ducked into the almost totally underground African Arts Museum to see its tree and conclude this year's holiday decorations tour.

Holiday Lights Tour, Part One

I went on my yearly Holiday Lights tour in the District this month, fitting it in before my mid-month operation which limited my mobility severely.  I bicycled over to the Ellipse from Haines Point, where I parked my car, to view the National Tree.

From the White House, I entered the Willard Hotel to see its Christmas tree, always very well trimmed.  The old Postal Pavilion, now known as the Trump Emolument Violation Hotel, is across the street.

      

I went into enemy territory to see the Trump Tree. Inside I fell into a conversation with a Californian lawyer who was arguing before the US Supreme Court the next day on the interesting question of national sovereignty for Indian tribes, and the more I chatted with him the more I started to think he was in the Trump Hotel for a reason, as when he boasted that "Kamala Harris always lost to me."

I went to the Portrait Museum next, where they had a holiday tree set up in its inside, covered courtyard.  I love the way the shadows created by the iron lattice roofing play off the walls.

From there I went to visit the Peace Officer tree outside the DC courthouse.  The tree is adorned with ornaments honoring slain police officers in the DMV area and I was saddened to see that the previous evergreen tree had been removed but gladdened to see that it had been replaced, albeit with a tiny new one.

My next stop, midway through the tour, was at the US Botanical Garden to see its tree.  That stop was memorable because while I was inside, the Federal Protective Service called me outside over the PA because I had parked my Capital Bike-Share bicycle by the entrance, which, it was carefully explained to me by an armed policeman, is definitely a big no-no for some illogical reason concerning a skinny little bike with no bags upon it.

2018 Movies

I saw six movies at the theatre in 2018, two of them very excellent films.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri.  Although this was a 2017 film, I saw it early this year and I thought it should have won the Best Picture Oscar for last year.  It's a very complicated film, and very violent, which has created a lot of controversy about it, but doesn't that describe the way life is?  Anything with Frances McDormand is bound to be a riveting film.

The Green Book.  This is my choice for Best Film this year.  It's also a complicated film with violence, injustice, suspense and subtle humor, and which involves loyalty to clan, duty and self, as well as growth and redemption.  Its depiction of an at-heart-a-good-man Italian bouncer, trying to support his family in 1960s New York City through dubious enterprises and low-level crime while remaining true to his tribal community, is fascinating and the film features jarring culture clashes from which compromises, accommodations and friendships emerge.  I am sad to say that until I saw this movie, I had no knowledge of the Green Book, although I was fully aware of Jim Crow America.  It features noteworthy performances by Viggo Mortensen as the Italian protagonist Tony Vallelonga, who drives and protects black classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley, portrayed by Mahershala Ali, on his musical tour of Southern American towns.

First Man.  This film features Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon as he famously said, "A small step for a man, a giant leap for all mankind."  This is a film depicting a different America, a crew-cut time of greatness when America could and would accomplish astonishing things like landing a man on the moon within ten years of setting out to do so.  Included are the heart-breaking setbacks like the module fire that killed three astronauts to the soaring triumphs like the successful moon launch.  This is nothing like the current America.  A fun, quasi-suspenseful look back.

The Nutcracker Suite and the Fourth Realm.  A musical, live and animated action mashup that was entertaining for its 90 minute length.

Vice.  (Seen December 31st.)  A movie about a dark and truly evil man, Dick Chaney, basically a psychopath turned vigilante says one reviewer, who was instrumental in leading our country down the path towards ruination as Dubya's VP and the chief whisperer to that reckless fool.  I thought it might be funny because if you can't laugh at tragic events you are just left to cry.  But it's not funny, except for a few guffaw moments like watching Dubya try to shuck and jive his way through his handed-to-him-by-Scalia presidency.  This black biopic just gets grimmer and grimmer as we watch our nation get taken down a darker and darker inglorious path by power-drunk powerbrokers.  I might as well as have spent 132 minutes in a dentist's chair as looking backwards at this grim exposition of America's tragic missteps so far in this century.  

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.  An animated tale of petty revenge and venality perpetrated by a crabbed, self-centered man living alone by circumstances and choice trumped by redemption engendered by love, devotion, civility and inclusion.  This obviously is a morality tale on how the current America might yet emerge back to greatness. 

Do you read?

I read a little in 2018.  I wish I had read more, but my vision was occluded by my retina degeneration and I spent many weeks in recovery.  Reading books for information, knowledge or pleasure is a lifelong multifaceted enterprise--history, philosophy, biography, literature, fiction, the sciences, great books, poli-sci, but I think many modern Americans will default to a one minute search of wikipedia, and done. Knowledge stored and confirmed.

Here's the baker's dozen list of books I read in 2018, in order of how significant I thought they were to me.  Past is  prologue, and knowledge is power.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.  This book took me a year to read and I read it in response to a course I took on Victorian female authors, whom I had never read as a boy growing up in the 1960s.  The book was very dense and went on very long but it had its interesting moments, and now I can read a novel by Jane Austen and be done with this enlightening quest.

Legs by William Kennedy.  Crime in the 1930s brought to us (along with the Mafia and scoffing at laws) by the Prohibition Amendment.  Molding our country's more's through constitutional amendments, and this novel describes the unintended aftermaths.

1493 by C Charles C. Mann.  The Columbian Exchange, which was mostly one-way, foodstuffs towards Europe, diseases to the Americas.  This book was very interesting but it went on too long, getting into very obscure subjects.

Codename Downfall by Thomas Allen and Norman Polmar.  The American plan to invade Japan in 1945 and 1946.  It would have been very bloody, involving millions of casualties and probably would have seen the tactical use of nuclear and chemical weapons on the battlefield and resulted in a Japan divided into a communist north and a democratic south, just like in Korea.

Why Germany Nearly Won by Steve Merctante.  Germany (the Nazis) acted very badly and lost World War II.  The Americans, British and Canadians stormed Fortress Europa on D-Day in 1944 and won the war in ten months but meanwhile the Soviet forces were tying up two thirds of the Wehrmacht's forces.  Not that I feel sorry or grateful for the Russians, they participated with the Nazis in dismembering Poland in 1939 which was the naked invasion that started World War II.  The Russians did most of the fighting against the Nazis for four years but they got what they wrought.

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson.  The greatest natural disaster in US history, a hurricane that devastated Galveston and killed 15,000 Americans.

The Storm of the Century by Al Roker. Yep, 15,000 Americans drowned in Texas in 1900.  A story of meteorology, racism and fake news.

Operation Sea Lion by Leo McKinstry.  Would the English have thrown the Nazis back into the sea in 1940, and thereby saved the world we now know?  America barely helped, but thank the lord that the British developed radar and produced the Spitfire fighter and barely saved history.

The Origins of the Second World War in the Pacific by Akira Irtiye.  The war actually started in 1931 when the Japanese threatened then invaded China.  Japan couldn't actually subjugate all of China to end the fighting and had its own Vietnam there.

Asiatic Land Battles by Trevor Dupuy.   Yep, we beat the Japanese, with some Australian and British assistance.  Ours was more of a naval and aerial war, but there was ground fighting in Burma and on the islands, large and small, in the Pacific.

World War Two, The Battle of the Bulge Re-Assessed by Charles Whiting.  No matter how you look at it, the Allies won.  The Nazis threw their last reserves against American forces in the Ardennes in December 1944 in the greatest battle in U.S. history, and thereby greatly aided the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.

The Profiler by Pat Brown. My guilty pleasure, crime scenes deciphered (I was a policeman for nine years before I went to law school).

Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton.  Another "found" manuscript by a science fiction author who died more than a decade ago.

Year In Review

Although 2018 is a year I will happily put in the rear-view mirror, it started well enough for me when I published my settlement with my former agency, which I retired from involuntarily in 2016 because of pervasive age discrimination in my division, in which the agency (i) paid me $5,000 in settlement; (ii) changed my last performance rating from Acceptable to Outstanding which is what it should have been all along were it not for the ageism perpetrated against me by some of the management; and (iii) required training for the managers of my former division, focused on combatting age discrimination.  The settlement importantly did not have an NDA clause, and so I settled it for much less money than were my actual damages, and the resistance lives on.

Things nationally and internationally went to hades as the year wore on, from bloody school shootings to phony summits between two two-bit strongmen and an American phony, and I participated in rallies in the District during the first half of the year against the rapid deterioration of American greatness, including at the Supreme Court against voter suppression, the schoolchildren's March for Our Lives, and the protest at the White House against Zero Tolerance at the southern border.  These anti-democratic trends are shocking departures from traditional American values and thankfully the midterms showed that America is on the road back to its former greatness after two nightmarish years.  Still, there's a lot of work to be done by thinking, patriotic Americans to combat America's lurch towards isolationism and nationalism by people who don't know a thing about the history of the 1930s.

My year and my life changed mid-summer when I started suffered a torn retina which necessitated three surgeries so far, two on an emergency, same-day basis.  Although my activities are severely limited while I heal, I was able to attend a cousin's funeral but missed a nephew's wedding, and I was able to undertake half of my annual rocky scramble along the rugged Billy goat Trail but missed out on my yearly autumnal drive along the Shenandoah Ridge.

Most notably were the midterm congressional elections, in which I worked for the successful congessional campaign of Democrat Jennifer Wexton against GOP incumbent Barbara Trumpstock in the Tenth Virginia District, helping to flip the seat as part of the blue wave washing over America in November.  My adventures canvassing were exhilarating, from having a man threaten to shoot me to having several loyal democrats and many renounced republicans literally seething as they assured me that they had a plan for election day--to vote a straight democratic ticket.  Most importantly I had my third and hopefully last eye surgery in mid-December, so by March or April I can finally get back to regular activities.

Christmas 2018

Christmas this year was a very wonderful day, to add some cheer to an otherwise very difficult year.  It started with fruitless stop to pick up fresh bagels at my local bagel shop--I should have known it would be closed!  As I proceeded to my friend's house to celebrate the day, I stopped to wish a Merry Christmas to my friend Treavor at his workplace on the corner of Highway 29 and I-66 and I stopped briefly as the noon hour approached at my local pizzeria, but I didn't recognize anyone who was around.

Bloody Marys made with a succulent mix and celery and horse radish made up for the absence of bagels, and then we had stuffed omelettes and ginger cookies to cap off the meal.  Because of the weight-limitation imposed upon me because of my recent surgery of five pounds, I didn't bring over to my friend's house my five-foot artificial tree to trim, rather we made do with a lightweight plastic snowman as a tree this year.  We opened our gifts, reflected upon our ties to other loved ones with phone calls and thoughts, and enjoyed holiday cheer for awhile by watching the puppy channel and dancing to Chuck Berry on the jukebox.

Before dark, we drove back to my house so I could drop off my car before darkness, because of my nighttime driving limitation for now, and as we drove around my neighborhood, we were amazed to see an owl with a 5-foot wingspan fly right past the windshield before it perched nearby on a fence where we watched it for awhile as it occasionally rotated its head around to see us; I have never seen so large an owl before.  Then we went to the teeming Eden Center in Falls Church and walked around its grocery stores where we marveled at the mostly Asian products offered there, two-feet tall thick carrots, long-neck clams with necks protruding eight inches out of the clamshell, lemon grass with chili peppers, and coffee laced with chicory, a New Orleans treat which I haven't seen in my supermarkets for decades and which I enjoy very much; I bought a can.

We capped off the wonderful day with a dinner of Indian fare at the Haandi's in Falls Church, where we split a bottle of its signature beer, a Taj Mahal IPA.  I received some wonderful, thoughtful gifts this holiday season, the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Vietnam War, a graphic bound comic book on the Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination, two bottles of whiskey barrel aged especial beers, a handsome flannel work shirt, a bottle of Argentinian wine and a pound bar of Belgium chocolate.  Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

A Christmas Greeting

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Happy New Year.

I wish peace on Earth.

And for our endangered Republic to be saved by true patriots like Mueller and Pelosi and their kind.

And for a long and healthy life to each of my three children.

2018, 4th Quarter

October dawned and I started volunteering for the Jennifer Wexton for Congress campaign in the Virginian Tenth District, one district over from mine, a district a few miles to the west that stretched from McLean to the West Virginian border through the vineyards and horse country of Northern Virginia, one that had been bright red for the last forty years.  There was no sense in working in my deeply blue district inside the beltway, a house seat that was so safe for the Democrats that during the lead up to the Midterms I even met my Congressman, Don Beyer, in a Wexton campaign headquarters about to go out canvassing for her!  The volunteering was satisfactory work as I knocked on forty-plus doors from a dedicated list each time and spoke to 30 to 50 people, collecting pledges to vote and distributing or leaving behind campaign and voting information hung on doorknobs.

In addition to many loyal Democrats I encountered, there were, apparently, a lot of converted Republican voters I spoke with, people who were seething to vote against the two-term GOP incumbent Barbara Comstock in a passion that barely disguised its anti-Trump nature in this suburban, barely outside the beltway district.  The month-long effort produced a gamut of responses to my knocking on doors, from the household where the occupant threatened to shoot me if I didn't get off his property and assaulted me as I turned to leave to several sincere statements of thank-you-for-coming, with a particularly nostalgic, for me, encounter where an elderly gentleman patiently listened to my verbal windup while studying my sweating visage and kindly said that he was a loyal Republican but would I like a glass of water or a cold soda before I left, the way people in our great country used to treat each other, including the occasional stranger.  I was excited and mightily satisfied to see that the Virginian Tenth District was the very first Congressional district in the entire country to be called as flipping by the networks about forty minutes after the polls closed, presaging a mighty blue tsunami of house seats flipping resulting in a forty-seat democratic majority in Congress, including the Virginia congregation going from a 7-4 gerrymandered Republican majority to a 7-4 Democratic majority overnight.

I was scheduled for an operation early in November to remove the oil from my right eye that had been placed there during the second surgery in August to repair my failing retina once the first surgery in July failed in that regard by the insertion a self-decomposing gas bubble, but shortly before the date it was reset to late December because my doctor broke his arm and couldn't perform surgery during his recovery period while he wore a cast.  Although sorely disappointed at this, as my eye-filled eye bothered me greatly as I feel that my body intrinsically knew there an important organ with a totally foreign substance within it and wanted it out, this pause at least gave me the opportunity to travel by car to Columbus to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my sister there and her family.  During that visit I was also able to visit with my college freshman roommate who was there visiting his ailing uncle.

In December I finally had my third, and hopefully last, eye surgery and it was painless, in stark contrast to the first surgery which was, well, agonizing albeit brief (I was totally out during the second surgery at my insistence, but this wasn't an option for the oil removal procedure for some reason which has never been satisfactorily explained to me) and so far the retina has continued to "adhere" to its wall of rods and cones and the tears in it have fully healed.  There has been no period of face-down recovery this go-round, although I am severely limited to a sedate recovery for six more weeks (no lifting anything over five pounds) and then to a less-than-strenuous period (no running) for two months after that, and if that all goes well (my fingers are definitely crossed, I'll be as "fully" recovered as I am going to get with this apparently genetically caused occurrence.  I was able to go around the District solo on a bicycle prior to my operation last week on my annual holiday-lights "run."

2018, 3d Quarter

July dawned hopefully when on its first day I toured the wine country in Virginia with a friend and we settled into a delightful afternoon of sampling wine offerings from at the Stone Tower Vineyard, and the future looked bright.  The month closed out with a medical emergency which I am still recovering from--the sudden loss of sight in my right eye due to a torn retina requiring immediate eye surgery.  Two more eye surgeries later, it finally seems that perhaps I will save much or most of my sight in that eye.

In between that yin and yang, I attended a memorial service at a lovely church in Ambler, PA  in honor of a cousin of mine, Andrea, who led a notable life as a social worker.  Enroute to that somber event I enjoyed a minor-league baseball game in York, PA, once the capital of the USA for a short while, and paid tribute to a friend of mine who lost his life in 2010 defending our freedoms in Afghanistan, whose likeness was emblazoned on a flag alongside the road on a hill overlooking downtown York amidst a sea of other flags honoring other fallen heroes from the York area (Adam was born in York) in this century's wars.  I also watched July Fourth fireworks from my back steps after enjoying a holiday lunch at the local gourmet pizzeria, forlornly hoping that any or all of my estranged children would finally show up, had lunch with my mentor from my former workplace, ran a few miles on the Mall with a colleague from my former agency where we ran by and momentarily joined in with an active rally for a woman's right to choose the medical provisions she desires or needs for her own body, and hiked the Billy Goat Trail in MD with a friend.

August was tied up with healing from my two surgeries of last summer in a mode of recuperation  known as face-down recovery, where you lie face-down in stillness for 14 hours a day for a couple of weeks following retina surgery, an infamous procedure known only to those unlucky persons who have the onset of torn or detached retinas, largely, I am told, due to genes and can suffer from multiple eye surgeries in amelioration of the condition.  It sucks bigly, and in the second surgery the medical team filled my eye with oil to get the retina to adhere to its bed of cones and rods, a procedure which requires a subsequent surgery to get the oil back out again.  Late in the month I did go for a walk around Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River with a friend, ate out a few times with friends and had a friend take me to see a baseball game at a minor league park in MD.

September was similarly spent sedately, wherein I enjoyed a holiday lunch on Labor Day at my local gourmet pizzeria, discovered that some miscreants had stolen my spare tire sometime during the prior months from my vehicle while it was parked in my driveway most likely, and armed my household following this second expensive invasion of my curtilege during this century.  Mostly I hung around waiting for the day when the oil would be scooped out of my afflicted eye and replaced, naturally, with eye fluid, a procedure I yearned for because the eye never felt right, being filled with a foreign substance within a closed system, and it led to the infrequent but maddening onset of white flare outbursts within my vision in that eye when, as the doctor explained to me, the optic nerve was momentarily uncovered by some movement of mine, a condition which I scrupulously sought to avoid by trying not to have any sudden movements of my head.  Late in the month my sister came to town on business, and we spent a wonderful evening and a day wandering around the District visiting museums, eating in Chinatown and drinking in Irish Pubs.

Some Good News for me

In July I started on a long medical journey to save my sight when I started to lose vision in my right eye and I called Kaiser Permanente on a Saturday for an eye appointment, which it gave me within the week, with an optometrist. By Monday I determined that I needed more immediate assistance and I called back and after describing my deteriorating eye condition, it gave me an appointment for the next morning.  Kaiser called me back that evening and told me not to eat or drink anything after midnight, never a good indication for an upcoming appointment.

Thank God I have excellent insurance, a byproduct of working for a quarter century for the federal  government, one of the few so blessed people in this great, rich country where lifetime beneficial health insurance is so niggardly given out.  The next morning, after my $20 co-pay, I was seen by a surgeon ophthalmologist who scheduled me for eye surgery that very day because I had several tears in the superior region of my retina and was losing sight in that eye rapidly as the aqueous humor fluid got behind the retina through the tears and was shutting my eye sight down.  I paid a $75 copay and was rolled into vision saving surgery.

That surgery didn't take and on my week-after visit, where it was determined that my retina was "rolling up," I was slapped back into surgery that very day after paying another $75 copay and they surgery filled my eye with oil (which would have to come out later in a third surgery, another $75 copay) to keep the retina in place during the healing process.  That third surgery to remove the oil was last week, and I went to the doctor's office today for the week-after checkup full of trepidation that I would be slapped into a fourth surgery if my retina was still "rolling up."  As I silently sat as the doctor examined the inside of my eye with his lighted magnification helmet, I heard him say, "Looks good, the retina is still adhering full."

Relief flooded over me, because eye surgery and its onerous recovery (google Face-Down Recovery) sucks bigly.  The doctor cautioned me that I'm still "not out of the woods yet" as I face two months of sedate living without lifting anything over five pounds and then another two months of non-strenuous activity.  But I am so encouraged that finally I might be on the road to recovery in trying to save my sight, at least in one eye, no matter how diminished the sight in my afflicted eye comes out to be (right now it's 2400/20).

2018, 2d quarter.

In April, I viewed the flowering Cherry Blossoms in the District when I ran around the Tidal Basin once with a friend and also walked around it twice more, once with a friend and once alone.  I also made stops at the National Tulip Library near the Washington Monument and enjoyed its three-week burgeoning glory.  Other flowers important to me came out that month, including flowing phlox and spherical alliums.

In May, I visited downtown Leesburg, forty miles west of my house, and had a delicious lunch there in an old restored bank building, afterwards wandering around its shopping outlets.  I picked up my running pace as I increased my three-times weekly mileage from a mile or two each time to 5-mile loops around the greater neighborhood and a couple of 10K runs on the W&OD Trail, including one weekend run where I was given a free bottle of chilled water from a for-pay fluid stand set up at the top of a long hill by a child, supervised by his mother, because I looked so hot and sweaty.  I ran in the Memorial Day 3K fun run in Falls Church, my first race in a year, and had lunch at the local gourmet pizzeria afterwards with the Empty Chair.

I acquired an I-Phone in June, obviously a life changing event, for the better, right? and donated blood products for the last time to date (maybe I'll get back to it again someday) and went out to lunch or dinner with friends a few times.  My running continued, with 5-mile runs around the 'hood and with friends in the District a few times at noontime.  I enjoyed lunch at the Lost Dog Pizzeria in Westover on Father's Day with the Empty Chair again and arrived at a plan to forego this so-far useless exercise on future holidays and birthdays when my youngest estranged son turns thirty, which will be happening soon enough.

The most notable day in the month was the last day of June when the Protest Against Zero Tolerance was held at Lafayette Park in the District on a very hot day.  This well-attended rally protested against the inhumane current administration's policy of tearing babies from their mother's arms at the southern border and jailing the children at points all over the country, possibly for forced adoption later by eager American parents.  Again I was the Street Fighting Man, just like in the late sixties and early seventies, decades after I thought those days were long gone in America.

Looking at 2018, the first quarter

In January I published my settlement with the FTC for its age discrimination as evidenced by my premature retirement in early 2016 due to a hostile work environment created by management in my former division.  The Commission agreed in September of 2017 to pay me $5,000 in settlement of my claims, to change my latest evaluation from Acceptable which was biased and wrong to Outstanding which it should have been all along, to issue me a certificate of superior service and most importantly to me, to provide training to the managers in my former division specifically for age-discrimination and to, in what I informally call the Chris Clause, require the same training for any former manager of mine who left the agency and who also returned within five years.  I am proud of the settlement I achieved against my agency by myself after a year and a half of litigation and negotiations, in a blow against what I consider to be prevalent age discrimination, and which importantly to me did not contain an NDA agreement so that it would be buried in a veil of secrecy.

I also attended a rally at the Supreme Court protesting voter suppression emanating out of a case brought against Ohio for aggressively purging voter rolls of persons who didn't vote and then check their mail from the voter police, and I predicted to the spineless Republicans in Congress that "We're coming for you in November."  Which us Dems did, to the tune of a turnaround of going from four Democrats in Virginia versus seven Republican Congresspersons then to seven Democrats versus four Republicans now, and a blue wave sweeping over the House by forty flipped seats.  We're coming for you all in the Senate and White House in 2020 too, just you wait.

In February I kept up going to lunch program at the local pizzeria on holidays and my estranged sons' birthdays, since two of them have birthdays in February and someday I hope to see one or all of there on one of those special days.  I also started running again, slowly, after letting my restricting Achilles strain heal for half a year.  My doctor threatened to schedule me to see a surgeon if it didn't get better by wearing a Boot, so I gave it plenty of time to heal since I'm not a surgery-first guy.

In March I got into the District a few times to run a mile or two with former running buddies and to walk around to see some of the city's omnipresent famous sites.  I had the unpleasant experience of dealing with the Social Security Administration trying to "disenroll" from Medicare after I had already quit the program by letter, including a dreadful visit to a social security office which is like visiting a third-world bus station and cooling your heels there for an entire day.  Late in March I played the Street Fighting Man in the District again at the schoolchildren's March for our Lives, as our offspring plead for sensible gun regulations like no more sales of assault rifles to teenagers and prohibitions against mega-30+ round clips, where I signed up people's pledges to vote in November.

   

At best, it's going to be a long four months.

I saw the doctor yesterday for the day-after appointment, and he said the retina looked alright, that it was still adhering to its wall of cones and rods so that was good.  The pressure in my good eye is normal at 18 and the pressure in the recovering eye is 5, which he said would come upon by the one-week appointment.

There's blood in the eye and I have maddening tiny bubbles floating all around my field of vision which he said were silicon oil globule since they can't get all the oil out so I guess I better get used to a moving cloud in my eye.  If the recovery proceeds well, I will have to be on severe restrictions for 8 weeks--no sneezing, coughing, bending over, picking anything up over 5 pounds, and taking eyedrops every 4 waking hours, ointment at night, a daily stool softener, with travel restricted and no driving for now.

But, no face-down period of recovery.  I am grateful for small, or perhaps big, things in light of this misfortune.  After that down period, for two more months I have to take it very easy, no running, workouts or strenuous activity.

Then if all goes well, sometime next spring, I can start getting back with my life.  I'm starting to think that my big car trip around the good ol' USA that I thought I would take after I retired will never happen.

Third Time's The Charm

This morning I had my third eye surgery since July, and hopefully the last.  I have been anxious about this because my right eye has been filled with silicon oil since my last eye surgery in August, necessitated by the failure of the first surgery for a detached retina, which was the most painful surgery I have ever endured or would ever want to endure.

I was totally out for the second surgery, at my insistence, intubated and of course I didn't feel a thing.  But for this morning's surgery my doctor insisted that I was to have only a local anesthesia, just like the first surgery, because he might need me to move my head or eye upon command as he worked inside the orb with his tiny instruments and magnification gadgetry, in case the retina started rolling up off its platform of cones and rods as my eye was being flushed of the oil.

I greatly feared another agonizing moment as the scalpel cut into my eye, and I fixated upon that possibility, already once realized, as the weeks approaching surgery drearily went by.  I had a long talk with the anesthesiologist this morning pre-op, who was very sympathetic to my experience during the first surgery as I described it, and she said she had never had any other patient complain about eye pain during eye surgery but every case, and every head, is different and sometimes the nerves leading into the eye alongside the temple or maybe the cheekbone ridge aren't in exactly the same place as normal when the doctor put in the local pain-numbing or blocking cocktail of drugs.

I tried to be a big boy and I forced, or willed, myself to lie as still as possible if the incision hurt again, because that too would pass, as I lay on the gurney in the cold OR and everyone in scrubs bustled about me and spoke in clipped, precise sentences or issued crisp commands.  The next thing I knew I became aware of being wheeled out of the OR with only a trace of memory of people moving about or above me and I hadn't felt a thing, and I was so euphoric about not experiencing any pain during the procedure that an hour later I was dressed and having breakfast with the friend who picked me up (all surgery is ambulatory these days) at a nearby diner.

Surgery

Tomorrow's the big day. Report at 6:30 am to pre-op to save your sight.

Anxious?  Yeah.

Didn't get your bloodwork done this week?  Oops, I forgot, I'm old and can't remember things.

Maybe they'll send me home because I didn't get it and push the eye surgery further down the road.  Couldn't be worse than obviating the October 30th surgery because the dock broke his arm right before that date, necessitating a delay because of him.

I'm O+ anyway so any old blood will do, I think. At least they keep calling me to donate because they love my blood.

The first (of three, counting tomorrow) eye surgery didn't go so well, it hurt a lot and failed to boot so I am leery, to say the least.  They won't tell me exactly what went wrong but I think they blame me for both aspects of the botched surgery.

Me, I blame the first anesthesiologist, because I never felt such shocking pain, in my eye no less. I wasn't expecting it, having had several surgeries before, including where I've been aware of my surroundings, where I never felt a thing.

But this was different, and I never willingly want to experience that again.  Unless I was forewarned, so I could be forearmed.

Perhaps I am wrong, and every so often surgery hurts so much that you'll never forget that first cut for the rest of your life.  Luck of the draw maybe, or perhaps I pushed my so-many-times-painfree quota past its limit.

Or perhaps I got someone who went to Western Florida State instead of Harvard and skipped most of her classes.  I certainly never saw her after the surgery (the surgeon called me as I was being driven home) and although I have voiced my suspicions about the reason for my difficulty in lying still for the surgery, no one has confirmed or disputed my stated inklings.

I can safely say that I never want to get operated on again.  But I'll show up tomorrow and hope (trust) that I won't suddenly feel crushing pain.

Anxious

I am a lawyer.  Do you think I ever get completely accurate information from doctors?

My 3d eye surgery comes up next week because the first emergency surgery, for a retinal tear, failed and the second emergency surgery filled my eye with oil which now has to come out.  I can't wait for it to be over because I am dreading it.

Why did the first surgery fail? There was no reason given except that, me being an anomaly of that one in 10,000 people who inexplicably develops retinal detachment, I was further statistically unlucky in being in the ten percent of recipients of corrective surgery whose procedure did not adhere. How well I remember the first surgery where, having been given a local anesthesia, I shockingly felt the scalpel go into my eye like a hot spike and the doctor yelling at me as I thrashed around on the operating table to Be Still!

The surgeon explained to me on the day-after follow up checkup that I was extremely "anxious" about the surgery and therefore I reacted badly to the operation as it occurred and he wasn't able to fully "cement" the "background" of my eye with his laser as he wished to because I was moving around too much but he was able to fully zap the tears in my retina so the operation was a wrap although shorter than he wished. Except that a week later I was under the knife again because at the one-week checkup the retina (but not the tears) was detaching, but for that procedure I was totally under so I didn't (obviously) feel a thing. 

For the third operation next week I am going to get a local again because for some reason, I have to be sentient during the delicate procedure while they swap out the W-40 for saline solution because otherwise I might retch involuntarily under general anesthesia but such an unlikely occurrence would "ruin" my eye if they had to . . . what, work to revive me?

Furthermore, with the white flares that erupt in my right eye several times daily bedeviling me, which the doctor said was my retina "flexing" and therefore exposing my optic nerve, I wonder if when the eye is cut open to drain the oil, whether my retina will "roll up" as the doctor explained to me might happen, in which case he would insert the gas bubble to keep the eye pressure up, which returns me to the July 31st surgery, the very first operation (that failed) and two weeks of face down recovery.  Did you ever watch Groundhog Day?  Go straight to Jail and do not pass Go.

I greatly fear the possibility of a stabbing pain in my eye during next week's operation similar to what I felt during the first operation because my memory of it is strong and my control of my body in response to such sudden intrusive pain is weak.  But I have also come to think that the anesthesiologist for the first operation might have botched her part and they're not telling me that, and in my sudden pain then I moved involuntarily and that ultimately caused the first operation to fail, because it wasn't completed fully.  I hate to be fearful, and I am wont to be suspicious, which leads me to be anxious.

Thanksgiving 2018, Part Three

Thanksgiving day came and went with the fun of it centering on finding food for dinner that evening (a Korean joint) and navigating the milling frenetic chaos of Black Friday, on Thursday night, to get a cake for my nephew for his birthday party after our meal of Korean BBQ.  That impromptu party dispelled the lingering gloom on the holiday caused by the very serious medical condition of my sister's husband's mom who had been moved to hospice in the hospital.  The next day dawned and I took a frigid walk at dawn in the nature preserve a few blocks from my sister's house.

Then I drove to the nursing home to say goodbye to Jimmy's uncle there, glad that his condition was noticeably improving, especially with the advent of the visit from Jimmy, who was already present at his bedside, cajoling him into arising from bed to walk the hallways as part of his rehabilitation so he could return to his house soon.  I returned to my sister's house midmorning and she and I went to the hospital to visit her mother-in-law who was still unresponsive as my sister read to her from a book but seemed to stir when her daughters, and son and grandsons, arrived soon afterwards to be with her.  Discussions were resumed to have a traditional Thanksgiving meal in Dublin at the house of my sister's sister-in-law the next day and my sister and I returned to her house to do a little meal prep for that upcoming meal.

I was driving back to DC the next morning so I packed to get ready to depart early in the morning; then Jimmy came over to visit and stayed for an enjoyable hour.  He had never met my sister before and he too, was leaving early the next morning to fly back to his home.  Later in the evening my sister and I drove her husband's webber grill over to her sister-in-law's house in my truck, about fifteen miles away, so that the cooking of the turkey could begin early the next morning.

I left at 6 a.m. on Saturday on the nine hour drive home and it was a miserable trip as it rained the entire time and there was pea soup fog in the West Virginia mountains, where for about forty miles visibility was reduced to about 60 feet, or three lane marker stripes.  Regretfully, my brother-in-law's mother passed away peacefully last week.  Although I am sad at her passing, I am glad that I was able to see her again, even though it was in a hospital setting, after not seeing her since my sister's wedding in the eighties.

Thanksgiving 2018, Part Two

The day before Thanksgiving I was in Dublin, OH driving around with my college roommate Jimmy, who lived there for many years.  We visited his mother's and stepfather's gravesite, which had an interesting gravestone for the two--it has an Eastern Airlines commercial jet inscribed on it under his stepfather's name, Peace.  It's quite distinctive, remarkable even, with the prominent word PEACE across its top in bold letters with a jet flying underneath it.  Harvey Peace was a pilot for Eastern and retired when the airline followed TWA into oblivion in the shake-out that occurred following the de-regulation of the airlines in the sixties and seventies.

At noon I went to the hospital where I met my sister and we visited her mother-in-law in the massive Riverside Methodist hospital complex in Columbus.  She was lying comfortably with one of her daughters in attendance, although she wasn't responsive for the most part.  Her son came in and two of her grandsons as well, so she had plenty of loved ones at her bedside.

As evening approached, I went to stay at the place Jimmy was staying at and we called three or four of our friends from our Sewell Hall days at CU.  It was good to catch up with the ones we reached, although we talked a lot about heart attacks, surgeries and other medical maladies in addition to the raucous good old days.  Thanksgiving day I went to visit Jimmy's Uncle with Jimmy and then at noon I went over to my sister's house and we went to visit her mother-in-law, whose condition was pretty much the same, where I met one of the other daughters, who had flown in to spend Thanksgiving with her sister, brother and mother.

That evening there was too much personal sadness going on for a Thanksgiving turkey to be cooked, plus my sister's husband, a gourmet cook, was ill, so we procured some take-out Korean food to enjoy for dinner and braved Black Friday at Walmarts to get the birthday boy in the house a birthday cake.  Black Friday now starts on Thursday.  The birthday party was nice, I gave my nephew a book on the Little Bighorn Battle, which in my youth was called the Custer Massacre.

41 will be missed

George H.W. Bush, our 41st president who died last week, was a great American. Although I didn't vote for him, he was a strong president too. 

A WW2 hero, he was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific War, who crashed in action and everyone in his crew died but him. Live with that all your life. 

As I reflected on his life, I came to a startling conclusion that he was the last president to project typical American power throughout the world by presiding over the end of the Cold War when the Berlin Wall came down and assembling a coalition to throw Iraq out of Kuwait. He wisely ended the 100-hour war after he destroyed the Iraqi army but before he irrevocably disrupted the fragile status-quo in the Mideast that carried with it an uneasy peace. 

Shockingly, we have been in decline internationally since then for the last 26 years. Clinton foolishly didn't support his Somali mission with armor, whether it was used or not, and when it was desperately needed it wasn't there, and he allowed fatal mission creep.  Dubya Bush was a reckless novice ("Bring 'em on!" " Mission accomplished!"). Obama was weak in allowing his redlines to be crossed and not following up his warning to Putin to stop meddling in our 2016 election with deliverables. Trump is a hopeless, dangerous dotard (I love Kim! You can sleep well at night because I fixed the N. Korean nuclear threat!). None of these served (Dubya was in the National Guard but he was mysteriously AWOL for much of his stateside tour). 

The generation of presidents forged in the crucible of participation in world war (Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41) were respected or at least feared internationally and kept America strong (great). Carter was weak (he should have sent one more helicopter on the abortive Teheran-rescue mission) but he was a one-termer. 

James Polk and George H.W. Bush will be one seen in history as the best one-term presidents. Can America come back from 28 years of steady international decline once Trump is voted or thrown out in 2020?  I hope so!

American military strategists project and plan for our next big war to be with China, in the 2020s. How will we fare, especially if Russia joins in and creates a second front for us?  We have been busy shedding allies under our current president, either deliberately or through insult, like Germany, Japan, S. Korea, Poland, France, the UK, Australia, and Canada, terming them deadbeats who don't pay us. These nations will seek strength through their own coalitions or militarization, perhaps even becoming potential adversaries to us. Will we have to go it alone the next time?

A Somber Thanksgiving in Columbus 2018, Part One

I went to visit family for Thanksgiving this year, traveling to Columbus to spend the holiday with my sister and her husband and two of their three sons.  Coincidentally, my college freshman roommate was there visiting his uncle who had taken ill and was recovering in a nursing home in Upper Arlington.

The nine hour drive there on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving was uneventful except for the disturbing call I received midway through it that my sister's mother-in-law was in the hospital after suddenly collapsing and was being considered for hospice due to her unresponsive state.  Once I got to Columbus I dropped off my stuff at my sister's house, which was deserted because everyone was at the hospital except for one of her sons who had been sleeping and was unaware of his grandmother's condition, and I went to visit my friend Jimmy at his uncle's institution.

We visited for awhile with Jimmy's uncle and then I spent the night with Jimmy where he was staying and we caught up as I hadn't seen him since shortly before the Trump disaster in 2016.  We had a pleasant time discussing how the midterm elections was a good harbinger for America being restored to greatness again in the next election and I checked in by phone with my sister who indicated that the prognosis for her mother-in-law was not good.

The next morning I took a walk around the neighborhood where Jimmy's uncle's assisted living place was which was a vibrant neighborhood full of shops and restaurants and parks.  Then we went to visit his mother's gravesite in Dublin and afterwards stopped in to see Jimmy's daughter-in-law who was staying in Dublin with her parents while her husband was away at sea, and I met Jimmy's grandson, a fine baby of four months.  We spent a pleasant hour there while I arranged to visit my sister's mother-in-law's hospital room where the stricken person's children were keeping vigil.

Veterans Day times two

This month I got a twofer.  The centennial commemoration of the end of The Great War I, formerly Armistice Day which became Veterans Day in America, fell on a Sunday, and the federal holiday fell on Monday.  So I got to go at noon on both days to the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover in Arlington, my favorite pizzeria besides Joe and Pats on Staten Island, to have lunch in my ongoing attempt for the last decade and a half to re-establish familial communications with my estranged sons (the divorce, you know), especially since it was such a notable holiday, especially since my middle son is, I believe, a military history buff as am I.

No one showed up, of course.  My sons are interesting people for sure, very unusual in their human motives and emotions.  I regret to say that research into PAS shows that children abused by one parent utilizing it for their own advantage in the divorce wars grow up insecure, lacking affect as adults and many experience failure in their own relationships.

But the pizzas were delicious each day.  More for me, yay!  I'm going to give up my quest to finally encounter the white whale soon, probably on my youngest child's thirtieth birthday.

I hope they have a nice life.  Their lack of interest in or simple concern for a single aspect of anyone on my side of our family is abnormal in the extreme but it is typical of Parental Alienation Syndrome.  Sharon, Meg, her intimate friend the psychologist who cleared the lowly LCSW's grotesque counseling conflict, Vic, Bill, Joe, Van Sicko, and all the rest of the parasites in the coterie of "professionals" ruined, in my opinion, my children's lives, and these vicious murderers of childhoods are fine with the devastation they unleashed as adults against my tender children (they drove the most vulnerable of my minor children to overtly express suicidal and violent ideation against me in his pathetic attempt to please them during their relentless and heartless badgering of him).