Survivor Man!

I like to think that I'm not easily defeated. By way of evidence, I submit that I have beaten cancer twice. One year ago today I was undergoing a gruesome 10 hour long surgery to remove a large tumor from my sinuses. The procedure involved peeling my face down over my chin, harvesting bone from the upper portion of my forehead, and reconstructing the bridge of my nose, my brow line, and bits of my right eye socket. The amazing thing is, not only did I survive the procedure but I still look mostly human. People keep telling me I look great, but that is a relative thing. They wouldn't say it if they didn't know some details about what I went through to survive.

The actual procedure was, of course, a piece of cake for me. I quite enjoyed it. All the attention, the care, the well-wishing and prayers and concern were gratifying. Plus, for the truly terrifying parts, I was sound asleep. When I woke up, I was surrounded by my wife and her sisters, my own sister, and some nurses. I thought I had gone to heaven. It was a wonderful experience. I'd do it again, although I don't think anyone else enjoyed it quite as much as I did.

The misery started the next day. It's been a year, and I'm still not back to normal. I have random attacks of pain and discomfort in my face and eyes. I'm kind of used to it by now. It's part of the new me—the guy who has trouble getting up out of a chair even though he's demonstrably tough as nails. The guy who has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and lived to tell the tale. Happy anniversary to me! Superhero. Survivor Man. I just need a Spandex suit.

My Doctor is Holding My Money – Another Heartbreaking Reality of U.S. Healthcare

This might pinch a little.

My oncologist owes me $1,500 and change. Her office insisted that I prepay my first two chemo infusions because my insurance company told them I had not satisfied my deductible. I knew this would become a problem for me, but I had cancer. What was I going to do, delay treatment until all the insurance foibles resolved themselves? Hell no. I paid up and took my medicine.

Cancer is expensive as hell. The total billings for my disease are approaching half a million dollars. Without insurance I'd be dead already. I wouldn't even have insurance were it not for the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare. I was able to get into the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan, or PCIP. My pre-existing conditions related to my hypertension. They had nothing to do with my cancer, but still no one wanted to give me insurance when I was already infirm. Too big a risk for them. Better I should just die and not burden the system that pays the insurance execs fat bonuses and annual sales meetings in the Caribbean.

PCIP is not free, but it is reasonable. My policy premiums were $376 per month for the first six months and $436 per month for the next six months. After that I qualify for Medicare, so PCIP coverage automatically terminates. I will have had it for exactly one year, but since the plan year is a calendar year, my coverage spans two plan years. This cost me an extra $6,250 dollars in out-of-pocket medical expenses because the out-of-pocket maximum for deductibles and co-pays reset on January 1. So be it. I still got pretty good coverage, and was only personally responsible for a little over $10,000 of the total cost of my care.

A lot of people with good insurance pay a lot more to deal with cancer. Cancer causes a lot of bankruptcies—even among people with insurance. This is why I am a big believer in universal healthcare. Sure it's costly, but it's not as costly as the system we've got now.

I'm a big fan of ObamaCare too. You can't get me to say anything bad about it. It may be flawed, but it saved my life. If that's not good enough for you, too bad.

So back to the oncologist. My guess is she doesn't even know that she owes me money. She deals with the cancer and she pays an administrative group to deal with the money. The administrative group's function is to make sure the doctors don't miss out on any money. I don't really have a problem with this until they decide to over-reach. My doctors work hard. They are smart. They are doing good work. They deserve to be compensated. That doesn't mean however that I am happy to let them earn interest on my money while I struggle to pay my bills. That's not fair.

They all drive German cars and live in big houses. They take nice vacations in exotic locations, and they maximize their contributions to their retirement plans.

I don't have any of that. I don't even have a job. So when the doctors' administrators decide to hold on to my money to make sure that they milk every available penny out of my insurance company, they are doing me an injustice. They are creating a hardship for me that I can't afford.

When my doctor's office made me pay in advance, they expected that payment to cover the deductible and the co-pay. They didn't want to have to come after me for the shortfall later. I understand that...understood it at the time. The insurance company however allocated the whole deductible and all the co-pays up to my maximum annual out-of-pocket cost to another doctor. So when they paid the oncologist, they paid her 100% of the contracted allowable for each claim. They didn't deduct anything, so the amount I prepaid was due back to me. I need it to pay the other doctor. Hell I need it to pay a lot of things. I do not need it to be sitting in my oncologist's bank.

Another thing to consider is that no one makes it easy to figure out where you are between your insurance company and your medical providers. My oncologist group doesn't even send out statements. I spent a week going through all my bills and benefits notices and matching everything up. I'm a degreed accountant, a former CPA. It was hard even for me, but I was able with effort to figure out that there was a credit balance in my accounts with several of my doctors. They weren't about to tell me about it. Apparently they expected me to figure that part out for myself and come ask them for my money back. What chance does some poor widow have, grieving for her dead husband and hard pressed by her doctors and hospitals, to figure out that her doctors are trying to fleece her in her hour of need?

I am not a fan of this. I shouldn't have to fight with my doctor's office to get my money back. I shouldn't even really have to ask them for it. They should just give it back. They don't though. Most of them will never tell you you've overpaid. They'll wait for you to figure it out. If you don't, well more money to put diesel in the yacht. Seems to me that profanity is the only appropriate response.

Even more so now that I have caught them out and asked for a refund. They still don't want to give me my money. They are going to make me wait until all their outstanding claims have been addressed by my insurance company. They are doing this even thought they know that my insurance company is reimbursing them at 100% for the remainder of the plan year. To me this is an unimaginably bogus state of affairs.  

KNIFE FIGHT!

Last night I dreamed that I killed a guy in a knife fight. I didn't just dream that I had done this in some nebulous past. I dreamed the actual fight in all its gory detail. What I didn't dream is why we were fighting in the first place. That is, I don't know why the guy I killed was fighting me. I was fighting him for my life.

You need to know that I never dream stuff like this. I don't as a rule have scary dreams, or violent ones, and if ever I dream something that seems like it's going to tip the scale in that direction, I wake up before anything serious happens. Not last night.

My opponent was relentless. He cut me several times. I cut him back. Neither of us was doing a lot of damage, but the intent was obvious. At some point my mind-set changed from merely trying to stay alive to a joyful determination to end the guy's life. I quit looking for opportunities to escape and started looking for openings in his defenses.

We were both dancing around. Our moves were punctuated by stabbing thrusts and whirling slashes. Blood was evident, but not quite flowing. I had cuts on my arms and shoulders, and one on my right side. I tried to slice his neck open, but missed. He tried the same move on me.

By this time in the fight, I knew how he moved. I took a chance. I was not afraid...either to fail or succeed. I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand as his blade flashed forward and stepped inside his swing. I got right up in his face where I could smell his spittle and his determination. I shoved my knife up under his rib cage and into his heart. He went down like a sack of potatoes.

That was the end of the dream. Short on philosophy and long on action...pretty much the exact opposite of me.

The most disturbing thing about it was that it wasn't very disturbing. I wasn't shocked or unnerved by my capacity for violence, nor did I have any remorse over the dead guy. I really had no feelings whatsoever beyond the understandable relief that it had been him rather than me and that things had turned out much better than I could have imagined beforehand.

I think it may have been the first dramatic dream I ever had from which I couldn't draw a lesson. If you know me, you know I like a good lesson. With no known motive for the dead guy's attack and no obvious reason for my response other that self preservation, there's not much about anything to be gleaned from this dream. A guy wanted to kill me. I don't know why. I killed him instead, drawing on resources I didn't know I had. End of story.

The only thing that makes this dream make sense to me is if the dead guy, the guy who was trying to kill me for no apparent reason, was cancer. Now that sumbitch I could stab without compunction.  

Researching the Hangover

A good hangover deserves a name. I call this one Glenn 'Stinger' Fiddich.

I posted Sunday that the chemotherapy induced headache and nausea of last week was probably the worst I'd ever felt. After a little reflection, I realized that is not true. The worst I ever felt was the day after an office Christmas party in 1991.

Nearly everyone who drinks with any frequency has been occasionally persuaded by circumstances and convivial friends to abandon reason in order to hold on to the fleeting sense of belonging that accompanies a range of intoxication. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that the same range of intoxication often serves to undo many of its own perceived benefits. Amnesia is just part of the equation.

In their cups, for example, many people are unable to distinguish the lethal among their various verbal armaments, so they might, in haste, launch a photon torpedo when the occasion would have been better served by activating a tractor beam. Conversely, these same people, thinking they are safely under the tender protection of mother alcohol, also have a habit of dropping their shields. Then every stray volley, no matter how well intentioned it may have been when it was fired, has the potential to breach their hulls and send them tumbling into deep space. The implications are clear. Fans of the science fiction genre should not drink at office parties.

Unintended verbal skirmishes are tales for another time, however. I'm a reticent soul, and thick skinned, so verbal assaults and their aftermath are not usually a problem for me. My problem is forgetting what I did, what I said, and the order and proportions in which things may have happened. This particular party is a case in point.

I may have been that drunk before—and possibly since—but I have never been that hungover. The throbbing in my head was as relentless and compelling as the piston slap of a giant coal-fired steam engine in a tramp freighter. The nausea as debilitating as could be attributed to the roll and pitch of the self-same freighter in a quartering sea and gale force winds.

I only remember bits and pieces of the manner in which I arrived at this pitiful state, but I remember every excruciating second of the hangover. I remember the individual atoms crashing into my forehead. I remember each balmy zephyr that bestirred my aching hair follicles until I had to take a seat from the exhaustion of it. I remember every chirruping bird and buzzing insect who had the temerity to disturb an otherwise peaceful day in the tropics with their callous, raucous indifference to my suffering.

At one point we set out in the car from Tampa to Deland to celebrate Boxing Day with my wife's sister. My wife drove. I was incapable of either navigation or remembering to keep the accelerator pedal depressed between stops. I rode in the back seat on a pile of ad hoc padding with my eyes shut against the admission of any stray rays of sunlight and prayed for a deliverance that was not forthcoming. I knew it wasn't forthcoming principally because I also knew that I didn't deserve it. I lasted twelve minutes until I begged my wife to turn the car around and take me home where the bed was at least proceeding at something less than the speed limit.

Sometimes, when I am busy pondering life's imponderables, I consider that I might actually have expired that day, and that my current iteration exists in an alternate parallel universe where I do not have to pay for the sins I toted up prior to that fateful party. If that's the case, my wife saved a bundle on my cremation as I'm sure I was not only combustible but volatile for several days thereafter.

The party itself was no more or less memorable than I would have expected. We started off in a lovely community room attached to a well-heeled golf course community. I had a few scotch whiskeys with a splash of water. I danced with my wife. I danced with my boss's wife since he was holding court and couldn't be bothered. I visited with co-workers, trading shop tales and office hijinks. I tied with the boss's son by correctly guessing the number of Hershey's candy kisses in a big jar. The prize was the jar and the candy. I thought the boss's kid ought to step aside in favor of the hired help. He didn't see it that way. We both loved milk chocolate more than justice.

When the party finally wound down we found ourselves trooping to a local country bar in a gaggle comprised of the company inner circle and assorted hangers on. The boss, now well into the holiday spirit, opened a tab. We got the band to join us at our table. He bought their drinks as well. It was shaping up to be the best party I had ever attended.

I danced a bunch of country waltzes with my wife. Neither of us had ever done that before, nor have we since. We don't know how. I did that night though. I was the Baryshnikov of boot scootin', the Fred Astaire of country hoofing. In short, I was a marvel in an area where accountants rarely excel...certainly not I.

Back at our table I noticed that the band had not touched their drinks. 'No sense letting those go to waste,' I thought. I can drink those and save the boss having to buy me another.

If you are paying close attention, you will recognize this as the moment when I began to take leave of my senses. If you have not been paying close attention, you will still recognize this moment anyway when I tell you that the band had left on the table for my personal enjoyment and gratification some combination of Stingers, Brandy Alexanders, and nameless but colorful concoctions of fruit and unpronounceable liqueurs.

Not only that, they came back to our table and ordered another round after their next set. They left those sitting there as well. I doubt that I have ever been so spiritually edified in a barroom setting, nor so enthralled with the generosity and fellowship of musicians.

To my everlasting credit, I decided sometime during the next stinger that I ought to switch back to my more staid and usual scotch and water before I did something foolish. Of course that ship had already sailed and it had taken me the better part of an hour to realize that the mooring lines were coiled on the wharf and the quay was empty of vessels.

Still I managed, by marshaling my focus and slowing my pace, not to do or say anything that would be historically noteworthy. I was a model of decorum and restraint, but while I was concentrating on escaping the rushing tide of foolish behavior, I failed to realize that I had already done as much damage to my physical self as I could likely tolerate. I was just playing games with my own head until the toxic chickens I had already hatched came home to roost in it.

When the bar closed down for the night, the boss decided that we should all go over to his house to continue the revelry. My wife, designated driver on this as well as most revelry-suffused nights of my life, thought this was ill-advised. I disagreed, demonstrating, in stark hindsight, the effectiveness of the designated driver process. I was very persuasive, so we went.

Things took an odd turn at the boss's house. When we arrived, my wife and me, the rest of the group was already there. They had arranged themselves on the floor in various states of dishevelment and repose, and they were, some of them at least, draped over one another in odd parings that bore little resemblance to those that I had observed at the beginning of the party. I knew, by hearsay and anecdote, that random odd couplings in the aftermath of a party do not lend themselves to continuing good relations among the participants. I won't say this development was particularly sobering, but it was enlightening enough that my wife and I beat a hasty retreat. The rest, as they say, is history.

I don't know what happened after we left. I don't want to know. What I do know is that all those oddly draped souls from the boss's living room floor made it to work the next day, and not one of them seemed the worse for wear...except me. They were all somehow capable of functioning in a work-a-day milieu while I was challenged by the effort of remaining upright and gripping a coffee.

When I was a youngster, and my mother made me take some medicine, she would invariably point out that, if it was disagreeable to swallow or painful on its application to my sundry hurts, that meant it was working. The worse the medicine, the more powerful its restorative effects. My current oncologist told me much the same thing. One of the more unpleasant side-effects of the Erbitux is a painful rash. Getting the rash, she assured me, is a sign the drug is working. Better to get the rash than not, in other words, but I have to say the jury is out on that one as far as I'm concerned.

I never thought to apply this adage to the hangover, but in retrospect, I have to wonder whether a truly formidable one is a sign that one has had a healthy amount to drink, and so done oneself a good turn. To carry this thought a little further, a truly bad hangover and the effects of my first Erbitux infusion have a lot in common. I would say that they feel nearly identical. I could not differentiate one from the other except I know what I did or didn't do to get them.

It follows then, in some perverse bit of logic, that my hangover of 1991 and the more recent one caused by chemotherapy are both good for me. They are curing what ails me—no matter how much I might wish that they were not. The feelings and sensations engendered by that fateful concoction of random adult beverages was identical in every respect to the sensations caused by my initial loading dose of Erbitux.

What I mean to say is that I may easily have invented a cure for cancer all those many years ago, one as effective as the most modern of chemotherapy drugs and certainly cheaper, but, given the transience and ambivalence of an alcohol fueled thought process, I have no earthly idea how to repeat it.  

A New Balance in Cross Purposes

Balancing life between survival and usefulness, malaise and creativity.

 I've had a ton of creative ideas in the past couple of days. Some to do with art I'd like to make and some to do with stories I want to write. This little spate of inspiration has done a lot to dispel some of the darker thoughts that come with battling cancer. That is a good thing.

Unfortunately, I have also been rendered nearly senseless over the past couple of days by my reaction to Erbitux, the 'mild' chemotherapy drug that is supposed to tread lightly with the side effects. I got the IV infusion on Thursday afternoon. By Thursday evening I had a headache that would fell an elephant. Then came the nausea.

The nausea wasn't actually that bad. If it had entered my consciousness unaccompanied, I would have taken some sodium bicarbonate and been done with it. No the nausea only served to remind me that the headache was born of a chemical toxicity, and it wasn't going to go away with Excedrin. Well, maybe it would have, but I can't take anything with aspirin in it because I'm having surgery to install a port on Monday, and I couldn't take anything with caffeine in it because I was having a PET scan on Friday.

I didn't sleep a wink Thursday night. I tossed and turned all night trying to find a section of pillow that did not jar my brain with its hard edges and incessant noise. I think it may be the worst I ever felt in my life.

It's Sunday afternoon now, and I still have vestiges of that headache. I don't know how long it's going to take to get entirely shed of it, but it better hurry up because I have another chemo session on Wednesday and then I have to drive to Miami on Thursday for a follow up visit with one of my surgeons. Oh, joy!

I have learned that it's no use to try executing a creative impulse when you feel like a Panzer division is rumbling through the fissures of your brain while your stomach keeps trying, unsuccessfully, to throw up a horseshoe. I just have to write stuff down and hope I can make sense of it when I feel better.

One good thing is that I'm more determined than ever to survive this disease. I'm telling you, I've come up with some good stuff, and it would be a crime against nature and a sin against all I hold sacred not to make the visions reality.  

Bursting at the Eyeballs with a Creative Impulse

It's been a long time since I updated my blogs. I feel like I have a pretty good excuse. Apparently it takes a long damn time to recover from 9 and a half hours of open craniofacial resection surgery. Who knew?

Everyone says I look great. This is mostly because I have taken great pains over the years to surround myself with people who are kind. I may look pretty good for a guy who had his face peeled off and stitched back on, but that's a relative thing. That's like saying a woman looks good for her age. Everyone may agree, but the woman herself will not be pleased that you have noticed the ravages of time and qualified your assessment of her beauty accordingly. Relativity sucks.

I have an incision that runs across the top of my head from ear to ear. It is thick and pink and hairless and scary. It's also the only conclusive physical evidence that I've had major surgery. When my hair grows long enough to comb over it, no one will know the troubles I've seen unless I tell them. I'm trying not to be that guy...you know...the guy who burdens everyone else with his problems. (Writing about them in my blogs doesn't count. My blogs. My rules.)

I also have a mohawk now. It's not full blown because it starts well back on my head. It's more B movie interpretation of a Mongolian horseman than Mr. T. It's much duller than the one my granddaughter sports on occasion.

A friend of mine said the look combines the best aspects of Genghis Khan and Frankenstein, so I've taken to calling it the Genghis Stein. It's good for some distracted stares when I'm out in public, but I can't help noticing small children circling back to hide behind their mothers' skirts. I can't recommend it, no matter how many people tell me I look great.

How I look is really the least of my problems. More important, at least for the time being, is how I see. Not very well, although it is getting better.

The cancer had eaten away a lot of bone in my forehead and in my right eye socket. It also attached itself to my right eye. The surgeons had to remove significant amounts of bone and some eye tissue to establish what they call clean margins—that is tissue in which the pathology lab couldn't find any more cancer. They replaced some of the bone with bits of skull that they harvested from the top of my head. This still left my eye socket misshapen and my eyeball swollen.

Since then I've had a lot of difficulty getting my right eye to operate in concert with my left. The result is double vision, especially when I try to read or drive or even watch TV. After a few short minutes, the pain and discomfort from trying is more than I care to bear. The upshot is that I'm not getting anything done that I would call productive.

I've got picture frames to build to hold some of my latest large images. Operating power tools without depth perception or clear focus seems ill-advised. I've got blogs to write, a novel to finish, and new photos to take and edit. None of these thing are possible until the healing process has got my vision closer to normal—or the new normal, whatever that turns out to be.

Meanwhile the most productive I can be is to catch up on my reading via audio books. I'm into some science fiction just now. When I'm hard at work, you will see me lounging in an overstuffed chair, staring out the window at the squirrels and painted buntings in the back yard, ear bud wires tangled around my neck while Ben Bova and Poul Anderson transport me to worlds and times where existential crises result from stuff a lot more frightening than mere cancer.

It's okay, but it doesn't feel like creativity. I need to be making something. Not being able to is as bad for my soul as radical surgery is for my eyes.

Curating a Bucket List on the Fly

Today you need to head over to Studio 30 Plus where I am featured writer in the members blog with a post about my ever changing bucket list.

http://studio30plus.com/profiles/blogs/curating-a-bucket-list-on-the-fly

Poke around while you're there. They have a lot of excellent writers and an active community.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Time for me to change things up.

As I pointed out in my last blog entry, I've got a lot of stuff to do and I may be running out of time to do it. I don't necessarily think I'm about to die just because I've got cancer, but I have to treat it as a possibility until someone tells me otherwise.

So far my doctor has been loathe to bear bad news. He is handing me off to another doctor though, one who specializes in cancer in the sinus cavities. He's at the Sylvester Cancer Center at the University of Miami. My first appointment with him is Thursday, Oct. 4th. I am not wildly optimistic.

Optimism is not in my nature. This is why I suck so much at working the so-called Law of Attraction. Some of you will remember that I am trying to attract $749 million. So far I have received something like $87.50. I've got a ways to go.

From now on this blog will cease to be personal anecdotes and rants about politics and religion. I am going to concentrate on art and fiction here. I have a lot of works in progress, but I never seem to finish anything.

From now on I will be posting about my progress in this arena and including occasional excerpts from my work. You should help me out by commenting and making suggestions.

Eventually I will redo my tabs so that I can segregate the photography and graphic arts content from the fiction.

I don't suppose for a minute that I will be able to give up politics and religion cold turkey. When I am overcome by passion or anger or disbelief I will post about it on my other blog, Letters to Nineveh, which is way more aptly titled for such content anyway.

To get things started I submit a prototype graphic that combines a poem I wrote over a background that I photographed. I originally envisioned a series of these called Poemography. This ought at least to give you some idea how my mind works...or doesn't.

TRUDGING THROUGH THE GRAND MAL FUNK

The Thinker: too much on his mind

So my doctor, the one who told me on Thursday that I have cancer, was supposed to call me on Friday to tell me how bad it is. He was waiting for an additional report from the pathologists. He didn't call.

I didn't call him either, which is what I imagine any normal person would do under the circumstances—call the guy and find out. I don't want to find out. Ignorance of these matters is as blissful as it gets. I'm already imagining the worst I can. Why would I want to find out it's worse still?

Meanwhile, I'm exhausted all the time. Much of this is due I suppose to the fact that I just had surgery. I keep telling myself that it was endoscopic, outpatient surgery, and shouldn't be that big a deal. My doctor keeps reminding me that I was really sick when I first came to see him so I shouldn't expect my recovery to be a simple thing. Bolstering this view is the fact that, after two weeks, I'm still hosing saline solutions up into my head and blowing alien life forms out several times a day.

On the other hand, it may be depression that's making me tired. I was actually feeling better for a few days. I had more energy. I was staying up for longer periods of time. I'd weaned off the pain meds. I was busy conceptualizing a new series of artworks featuring tubas of all things, and feeling a renewed sense of excitement about that as well as writing. Then I found out about the cancer.

Now I'm suspended between feelings of not wanting to be in bed and not wanting to be walking around as if nothing's the matter. I spend a lot of time also suspended between really dark thoughts and trying to manage a bucket list that contains not one item that I can afford. My fault really. I mean I didn't have to load the list up with Lamborghinis, waterfront properties, exotic vacations, and a stable of Triple Crown contenders. What the hell was I thinking?

I'm going to have to trudge through this grand mal funk. I don't really have a choice. I figure it will take a couple of days. That's all it took the last time a doctor told me I had cancer. I've got prior experience, so I ought to be better at this process than some poor schmuck who just found out he's got cancer for the first time. Experience counts for more in living than it does in the current job market where, apparently, it just means you didn't have the good sense to move on when you had the chance.

I've done this cancer thing before. I intend to survive cancer however many times I have to in order to die from old age. Fortunately I'm already pretty old so I think I've got a legitimate shot.

In any event, it's a shot I have to take. I've got stuff to do. The tubas are not going to photograph themselves. Nubile young women are not going to come knocking on my door to ask would I mind very much taking their pictures with gigantic wind instruments.

The several books I have in various stages of completion are not going to finish themselves, even though the characters in them seem determined to do stuff that I haven't asked them to do. The characters may be free agents, but in my experience they just won't write anything down. They certainly don't make my life as an author very easy.

Now that I'm jobless, retired, and mostly idle, I don't have any time left over to be sick and dying. I'm just too busy. It's not easy to save up for a Lamborghini when you don't have any income. You've got to stay focused.

WHERE LESS IS LESS

So yesterday I felt great. I even posted a tweet that it was the first day since my sinus surgery that I felt better than I did before the surgery, which was proof enough to me that the surgery did some good.

Today I went to the doctor for a follow-up. He had the pathology report finally. Turns out they found some cancer cells in among the other gunk they scraped out of my head. I was afraid that might be the case, but was hoping for the best. Still hoping for the best. It's hard to get satisfactory resolution any more. Everything wants to drag on forever.

Too bad really, since now I'm in a race with the Romney/Ryan campaign and the Republicans to get as much done as possible before they overturn ObamaCare and take my pre-existing condition insurance coverage, which I pay for btw, away from me. I tell you Romney/Ryan, or as I like to call them, Voldemort/Vader, will never be mistaken for compassionate conservatives...whatever that means.

Competent? It Depends

Paper towels: always at the ready. We decorate with them.

 So yesterday my wife tells me that my blog's not that funny. This is a surprise to me, as I mostly think it's hilarious. I go back and read a few entries, and I think she's right. I'm not that funny—certainly not anywhere near as funny as I'd like to be.

I'm thinking about this problem while I'm trying to cook dinner. I've got some leftover yellow rice and peas that I'm going to reheat in the microwave to go with a couple of sauteed chicken cutlets. I don't want to microwave this stuff in the plastic storage container I got out of the fridge because heating stuff in those ruins them—not the food but the containers. They get etched and pitted, and you have to wonder where the missing plastic went. Actually I'm pretty sure I know where it went, and that's not something I want to be doing to myself when I've already had cancer once—not that uninhibited microwaving was the cause necessarily, but you never know so it's probably best to err on the side of caution. I decide to dump the rice and peas into a ceramic bowl and heat them up in that, only instead of spooning the rice and peas into the bowl, which would be the sane thing to do, I put the bowl, which is round, upside down on top of the storage container, which is square, and then I turn them both over at the same time so that the bowl is now on the bottom and the storage container is now on the top. As you may have surmised I now have a huge puddle of pea juice all over the counter that just spilled out of the gaps between the square container and the round bowl.

I really hate spillage. It's not just that spilling things slows you down, which it does because you have to clean it up before you can get on with your life. It's that spillage is evidence of incompetence. Wherever you see a puddle of something other than rain, you know someone has screwed up. Often, I find, it has been me. I leave evidence all over the place. There is evidence on the counter tops, on the furniture, on the floors, on my shirt. There is plenty more in the bathroom, but I don't even want to talk about that. Just based on spillage alone you would have to conclude that I am no longer a capable human being, that the simplest of tasks are now beyond me.

This is when it occurs to me that I am wasting my time writing stuff down to amuse myself, and hoping that other people will find it funny or edifying, and visit here in sufficient numbers that I can make some money. What I need to be doing instead is having my wife follow me around with a video camera to document my gradual slide into decrepitude. We will be rich in no time. The ad revenues from paper towel manufacturers alone will buy us a new house. I can't even imagine how much we're going to get from the folks over at Depends. I'll finally be able to buy that Aston Martin DB9 I've been wanting. I'll have to get plastic seat covers though.

Day 82 - The Unbearable Lightness of Almost Not Being

          The drive from Orlando to Clearwater isn’t so pleasant as one might hope. There’s always a lot of traffic in I-4, and everyone is in a hurry. The landscape is flat and overbuilt with strip malls and tourist attractions on the Orlando end, transitions to endless stretches of scrub palmetto in the middle, and finally becomes industrial corridor as you come into Tampa. The only pretty stretch is the bridge over Tampa Bay between Tampa and Clearwater. I had plenty of time to reflect on what my interview with Henry’s son might portend.

          On the one hand it was kind of exciting. I knew it wasn’t up to me to convince them I could do the job. They already knew that I could. The job would be mine if I wanted it. The burden of proof was going to be on them. They were going to have to convince me that the job was worth having. Given my history with them they were going to have to go some distance to make a case.

          I already had a pretty good idea that they had fallen on hard times. The boat industry is particularly sensitive to consumer mood swings in a troubled economy. Boats are expensive and unnecessary. Even for the well heeled, the purchase of a boat almost always requires financing, especially in the market price ranges where Henry operates. While the higher end market is somewhat insulated from downturns in normal circumstances, the current recession is broad and deep and scary, and the financing sources have all but disappeared. The boat industry is comatose. The manufacturers who were setting the world on fire when I first went to Albatross are now reorganized, sold, or padlocked. Henry is still standing, but I don’t think he can be long for this world. If he’s been sensible about managing his cash he may be able to hang on trading used boats and taking orders for new ones from the few customers who are not affected by the economy. If he’s overextended and/or trying to build inventory on spec, he’s screwed.

          I saw encouraging signs and signs of disaster when I pulled onto the lot. There was a lot less inventory on the lot and in the water than the last time I was there, and that is a good sign indeed. Henry always saw inventory as a store of value in spite of my many and repeated attempts to convince him that his inventories were killing him. With low inventory levels he just may be positioned to weather the storm. On the other hand I also noticed several motorcycles, two Hummers, and a sports car out front under the sign. This means Henry and his family are selling their toys. That is a bad sign. Henry is always happy to trade his toys, but he would never put them out front like distressed merchandise unless things were truly…distressed.

          I met with Henry’s son, let’s call him Stew. Stew acted as if he was happy to see me. We’ve never gotten along very well, Stew and I. I always thought he was spoiled and greedy and eaten up with unenlightened self-interest. We had a conversation on the phone once that devolved into name calling and threats of physical violence. When Stew offered to come by my office and whip my ass I told him to come ahead on and try because I would yank his artificial leg off his stump and beat him around the head with it. Yes, that was me, threatening bodily harm to a handicapped individual. When I think back on it, I am embarrassed by what must seem cowardice at worst and a complete lack of sensitivity at best. The fact is that Stew could easily clean my clock any day of the week, artificial leg or not.

          I used to refer to Stew as the poster boy for nepotism. I thought it was hugely clever, and I got a lot of laughs using it around people who knew him. This was before I met the poster boy for ADHD, the poster boy for heartlessness, the poster boy for the listening impaired, the poster boy for misogyny, and others too numerous to mention. Nepotism lost its luster amongst a whole litany of maladies that cause things to go seriously wrong in business. There are way too many poster boys, and it seems that I have met them all.

          Stew got right down to business. Things were as bad as I imagined. Henry’s floor plan lender was pulling his credit line. The bank had given Henry 90 days to find another source of financing before they shut him off. This would put Henry out of business overnight. Henry’s daughter was leaving because she didn’t want to be there to record the end. The ugly truth was that Henry was not in default. In fact the company was actually in pretty decent shape given Henry’s history. I guess Stew had been keeping him honest. The problem was entirely the bank’s, but the bank was going to make it Henry’s by pulling the plug. Meanwhile Henry and Stew want me to help them get out of this trick box. Unfortunately they don’t want to make a serious commitment to me to get me to help them. They don’t want to pay to relocate me. They don’t want to give me any benefits. They don’t want to pay me what I’m worth. They don’t want to give me any staff. They don’t want to make it a permanent arrangement. What they want is to pay me less than half of what I made last year—an amount that adjusted for inflation is less than Henry offered me to go to work for him 18 years ago. And they don’t want to take advantage of my ability to actually help them either. Rather they want me submerse myself again in the daily grind of bookkeeping and meaningless report generation while they finish driving the nails into the coffin. You may have gathered by now that I’ve decided to pass.

          I spent some time with the daughter to get her spin on things. Her biggest problem is that although they’ve cut everyone’s overtime and not given out any bonuses or raises, Stew refuses to cut his enormous salary. I don’t know how much it is, but she seemed to think that it was obscene under the circumstances. Last I heard Stew was knocking down about $250 thousand so I’m guessing that ‘obscene’ must be somewhere north of $300K.

          I went to lunch with Stew and Henry. Henry looks terrible. He is a broken man—a shadow of his former formidable self. He’s had some health issues, and the business has to be weighing heavily on him. He still talks a good game though, and seems not to be overly concerned about the bank's latest play. He may be right. If they’re in too deep, and they may well be, they won’t be able to liquidate Henry’s inventory if they just shut him down. Henry will have to help them, and that means they’ll have to make some concessions along the way. Henry may make out okay in spite of his precarious situation. He’ll just have to do it without me. I could actually help him. I know exactly what to do and exactly how to present it to mollify the bank. It might not work—especially if the bank is motivated by its own troubles, which seems likely at this point, rather than Henry’s financial condition—but it’s the best shot he’s got. He’s too cheap to take it, and I’m too used up to do it for nothing.

          Henry’s wife came by to see me before I headed back to Orlando. Her last round of chemo hasn’t helped her much. She looks good all things considered, but she’s down to about 80 pounds. She was her usual gracious and effervescent self, although she couldn’t hide the strain it is on her to just get around. It’s too sad really to see her like this. I’ll be surprised if she lives more than a few months. One good thing—she’s learned to hug really well. I imagine it has to do with the unbearable lightness of still being when you know you won’t be for long. She should become the patron saint of long suffering wives of difficult men.