From Ryan Tamares, a gay Xmas and pandemic-chasing card “Adam Likes Santa: Red Santa”, featuring cartoonist Bobo Nisi’s gay bear character Bobo-Bear (sometimes Bobobear or Bobo Bear):
(#1) The card
(Also demonstrating some newly recovered abilities of mine at formatting my blog postings.)
… with Jacques and me in a bit part.
(Another posting from my time in rehab in Palo Alto, this one originally written up on 12/2. As before, it’s very much a bare-bones posting — there’s a lot about posting to my blog that is still a cognitive mystery to me, thanks to alcohol poisoning.)
(In addition, this posting talks about sexual acts in very plain language and so is inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest.)
I used to be pee-shy; which is to say, I was once a paruretic (paruresis ‘the inability to urinate in the presence of others’). See the rambling hilarious depiction of paruresis in The Mezzanine (1986), the astonishing first novel by Nicholson Baker.
No longer. I can now use a urinal — the porcelain fixture or the portable item — in front of anyone, in any circumstances (including noisy rooms with people going in and out). I can lie in bed peeing into the portable object under the covers while carrying on a conversation with a visitor, then pull out the urinal for emptying by an aide.
I have lost all modesty. I don’t care who sees what, though I don’t actually display my privates. My penis has always been small and unthreatening, but now it’s a fat old man’s penis, of no consequence to anyone, indeed scarcely noticeable.
I still have a very high sex drive, though not as urgent as when I started masturbating, at the age of ten. But those are private pleasures, for me alone. Occasionally, though, I marvel: 70 years of jacking off — not to mention other forms of sexual release — and still going.
[Added notes 12/6. Jacking off has been my entire sex life for more than 15 years now, and when I am generally good physical shape (which is very much not the case right now) I expect to jack off about three times a day — mostly quickies, the sexual equivalent of fast food or snacks, but sometimes in delicious drawn-out dick play fueled by satisfying gay porn: using the porn to pull me slowly along just short of shooting my load, while dirty-talking out loud, then backing off and repeating the routine with a different scene from the porn, until I finally let myself come. I miss the quickies and I miss the tantalizing dick play as well. Something to look forward to when I get further out from under the fog of the alcohol.]
(Another posting from my time in rehab in Palo Alto, this one — about my body’s schedule — originally written up on 12/4. As before, it’s very much a bare-bones posting — there’s a lot about posting to my blog that is still a cognitive mystery to me, thanks to alcohol poisoning.)
For a long time, my “natural” schedule was to go to sleep around 8 p.m. (unless the prednisone I was taking made me crazy and unable to get to sleep until exhaustion took over as midnight approached) and woke around 4 a.m. (one hour into MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, which begins at 6 a.m. Eastern time. I generally awake on my own, within about 15 minutes of 4 a.m. So it’s “always 4 a.m.”
As I emerge from alcohol poisoning and alcohol withdrawal syndrome, a natural schedule has asserted itself very clearly. I become sleepy at about 7 p.m. and doze off then, despite interruptions for medication, checks of vital signs, blood draws, and the like.
I then wake up, on my own, at very close to 3 a.m. on the nose. I am in fact jerked into consciousness suddenly at 3 a.m. And I’m up and into my day. I started writing this piece at just after 3 a.m. in fact.
So: now it’s always 3 a.m.
I puzzled over this for some time, until I realized that 3 a.m. PST is in fact 4 a.m. PDT. My body is still on Daylight time.
I’m not sure how to fix this, or indeed whether it needs fixing. Here at the rehab facility, I get CNN rather than MSNBC, but when I go home — tomorrow morning! — I’ll be up for the beginning of Morning Joe.
I have long been an unfan of the Standard – Daylight time alternation, which I find surprisingly hard to adjust to. I would like us to pick one scheme and stick to it. I don’t really care which one.
[The aftermath. Back home on 12/5 and full of excitement over how easily I managed physical movements I had fretted about; I had in fact been cleverly prepared for these by the rehab’s therapists. So I was giddy and my mind raced on until way late, until I eventually dropped off to sleep. Thinking: well, at least this should reset my body clock. But no: up at 3 a.m. again, dammit.]
(Another posting from my time in rehab in Palo Alto, this one originally written up on 12/2. As before, it’s very much a bare-bones posting — there’s a lot about posting to my blog that is still a cognitive mystery to me, thanks to alcohol poisoning.)
In the U.S., medical staff ask patients a series of questions to discover how well the patients are oriented to their contexts — where are you? What city is that in? What state? What year is it? Who is the president of the United States? The governor of the state? And so on.
Early in this inquisition comes a question I now believe to be unreasonable and insulting and which I will now accordingly refuse to answer, even when I know the answer: what is today’s date and day of the week? (On the day on which I am writing up this WordPress posting it is Sunday December 6th. I know this because I now carry a calendar, provided to me by my speech therapist at the rehab center, in which I mark off the days one by one, so I now always know the answer.)
Here’s the problem. The questioner expects the patient to remember the date and weekday for the previous day and then update these by one day. That is, the patient is expected to calculate this information, in the absence of information about these matters: most medical institutions are informational deserts, so calculation is the only avenue available, though no normal person figures out the date and weekday by calculation; instead, this information is provided to us, from many sources.
So … My landline telephone displays the current date (and time). And as soon as I look at my computer, the date and weekday are conveniently displayed, often in several different places. Meanwhile, the daily newspaper displays both pieces of information prominently on its front page. Normal people are awash in the relevant information and would view the idea that they should somehow calculate it from shards of memory as lunatic.
Institutions should be supplying this information for their patients, in the same way that the way normal people are given it: the date and weekday should be prominently displayed in a place visible to everyone, to help orient them in their context.
(Originally written up on 12/3 at the rehab center in Palo Alto.)
A striking, and very distressing, effect of my alcohol poisoning is memory gaps. Some afflicting me:
— (Gap 1) the name of the company my caregiver, Kim Darnell, works for: Wells Fargo.
— (Gap 2) The name of the company my daughter, Elizabeth Daingerfeld Zwicky, works for: Yahoo! (The company itself has a different idea about its proper name, but I’m sticking with its older label.)
— (Gap 3) The name of the native language of my neighbor when I was a patient at Stanford Hospital: Punjabi.
— (Gap 4) The name of the long-standing affliction of my joints (causing significant pain in random joints, different ones on different days); in the context of either alcohol poisoning or alcohol-withdrawal syndrome, I don’t know which, magnified to an exquisitely painful condition: osteoarthritis.
— (Gap 5) The name of the governor of California before the current one, Gavin Newsome (whose name has always been firm in my memory): Jerry Brown.
When I was first asked for this name by a doctor probing my awareness of the cultural context surrounding me, I got nothing at all.
Then the last name, Brown, came to me (apparently spontaneously, out of the blue) and was firmly fixed in my memory thereafter, but the man’s first name eluded me, and in the context of a medical institution where I had no means of searching for information, continued to elude me, until this morning, when one of my therapists provided me with Jerry.
Now, in the interim I could automatically retrieve not just the family name Brown, but also the information that this governor’s father was Pat Brown, an earlier governor of California; that the Brown I was after had himself served as governor a while back in a hippie-esque period, when he was sometimes mocked as Governor Moonbeam; that he then went on to serve as mayor of the city of Oakland; and that he then returned to the governorship in a much more serious guise.
That is, I knew a hell of a lot about this man Brown, but could not for the life of me retrieve his first name.
The general pattern is typical of my word-finding difficulties: I am enormously knowledgeable over a wide range of facts, but there are seemingly random gaps in word-finding.
This is not a matter of personal significance to me. It’s true that Jerry Brown’s first name is of no particular importance in my life, but the identity of Kim and Elizabeth’s employers are central in my life, and my grave difficuty in retrieving these names fills me with shame and distress.
It’s as if some malefactor were firing shotgun blasts at my word-hoard, taking down some items willy-nilly.
An additional wrinkle is that some of the gaps are persistent — the items vanish again and again, even after being found. This is strikingly true for Gaps 1-4. I rehearse them thousands of times, but still they vanish.
The key to recovering them is having a mnemonic. For Gap 1, ths is the song “The Wells Fargo Wagon” (“The Wells Fargo wagon is a-comin'”) from the Broadway show and movie The Music Man. For Gap 2, it’s about what the cowboys shout when they see that wagon train a-comin’. For Gap 3, it’s “word play poke” (pun + jab). For Gap 4, it’s “bone joint” (Greek roots osteo– ‘bone’ + arthr– ‘joint (of the body)’).
Other gaps are temporary: once I have recovered or learmed te vagrant item it’s firm in my memory from then on.
Just so for Gap 5, for both parts of the name. Once I had spontaneously retrieved the family name Brown, I had it as automatically available as any familiar name, like Newsome. Then, once I had been told the personal name Jerry, it too became as automatically available as any personal name, like Gavin.
Similarly,
— (Gap 6) the name of the shop on Caifornia Avenue in Palo Alto that provides the closest thing to genuine New York City bagels locally: Izzy’s (full name Izzy’s Brooklyn Bagels).
In talking, with some feeling, about the world of bagels, I could recall the location of the place and remember that it was Joel Wallenberg who brought me to a full appreciation of the place, and even picture its interior, and recall that its name was an affectionate abbreviation of a specifically Jewish man’s name, but Izzy eluded me. Until a friend supplied it for me, and then it became an automatically available local food name, quite unproblematic.
Similarly, for a brief period, it took some work for me to recall the name of the college Kim’s daughter Maggie attends — Emerson (in Boston). But once I’d retrieved it, it was as automatically available to me as any school name — much like the name of the prep school my granddaghter ttends, Northfield Mount Herman (in rural western Massachusetts), NMH for short, which never presented me with any difficulty whatsoever.
A higher-level memory issue. For persistent gaps like 1-4, the menomics provide a device for getting at the problematic item, but of course, the mnemonics themselves must be memorized. They could be subject to the same effects of the malevolent shotgun-wielder as the items they’re aids to.
In my experience, this seems not to happen — presumably because the mnemoncs are ostentatiously playful and so resound rewardingly at a personal level. But the topic deserves a more thoughtful treatment than these facile remarks.
A series of postings written up at the Palo Alto Subacute and Rehabilitation Center in Palo Alto CA, where I moved for about two weeks afer some days at Stanford University Hospital, entered in the grip of alcohol poisoning and also alcohol withdrawal syndrome (prominently featuring the tremors of withdrawal, the famous shakes).
It turns out that an assortment of afflictions i had attributed to other causes were actually facets of alcohol poisoning. I have now largely emerged from this fog of disability, severely damaged but in overall shape better than I have been for many years. (I am pushing the positive here, as I strive to recover what I can and work around what I cannot).
The crucial fact is that the shakes have vanished (though I still occasionally shake from the morning cold of my glacial hospital room.) As a result, I can write up more or less legible commentaries on my experiences — subject only to the proviso that my handwriting has always been problematic, especially when I’m in a hurry.
Those commentaries are severey stripped down, almost entirely to plain text, largely without links of any kind, or any sort of interesting formatting; one of my cognitive defects is the disappearance of knowledge about how to achieve these things, though I’ve already been helped to recover some of this knowedge. Here I insert wild cheers of gratitude to the therapists at the rehab center, who are the truly bright point at the place (don’t even ask about the food). They brought me along, fast, from grave disability to facility at many things, and provided me with work-arounds for the more intractable stuff. In addition, I enjoy observing people performing their jobs, and in this case I got to see how the various therapists achieved ther goals — a whole new sphere for me, even as I was the object of their efforts.
I can stand on my own two feet and walk across a room (though for safety’s sake I have promised to use a walker for support). I can learned to assess my new cognitive deficits and find ways of coping with them, in good spirits. All of this is a gift from the rehab center’s therapists, and I am immeasurably grateful. And, yes, they are also very nice and interesting people.
In any case, as I said, this is a bare-bones project. The postings are dated — the dates are of when I wrote them up in my notebook, not when I originally conceived of them. I will present them in still another order, according to my whims of the moment.
Perhaps someday, when I become more secure in my posting abilities, I’ll be able to supply some of the bells and whistles. But for the moment it’s pretty much the barest of demonstrations that I’m Not Dead Yet.
The postings:
— 0. The rehab postings [this posting]), from 12/4
— 1. Memory gaps, from 12/3
— 2. On the orientation questions, from 12/2
— 3. It’s always 4 a.m., from 12/4
— 4. Pee-shy no more, from 12/2
