PEG3350. OMG. KMN.

05 Friday Aug 2016

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I have reached that age when my body gets bored with getting me about and being the locus of pleasure.  It is now figuring out ways to kill me if I let it.  At my recent check-up with the internist, I crossed the bridge guarded by the insidious Prostate Cancer Troll. That was easy; a simple blood test screens as well as a digital rectal exam.   My heart still loves me.  My blood pressure has settled down. I don’t piss high fructose corn syrup or its equivalent, just yet.  Lung Cancer might be lurking, but I don’t smoke, even though a fine cigar tempts me like The Whore of Havana. Skin cancer seems to be on hiatus. The last of my body’s hit men, colorectal cancer, got the once-over this morning.

The screening colonoscopy was scheduled for 0800 hours.  Those of us who know the drill know that the actual test is like a vacation  in the Caribbean compared to the preparation for said test. That prep is no fun.  First, one (meaning I) must secure a four liter plastic jug with some innocuous white powder in the bottom, plus a lemon “flavor” packet glued to the outside, from one’s(my) friendly pharmacist ($15). This is the infamous PEG3350 mentioned in the title.   On the day before, one (I) dilutes this mysterious powder in four liters of tepid water, adds the “flavor” and refrigerates.  At 1600 hours, I begin drinking this stuff, an 8 0unce glass at a time, until I begin expelling  something most indecorously. And I keep drinking it until the ,uh, “output” is clear with a yellowish tint from the bile my body still produces. ( No wonder my body wants to kill me. To him, all he would be doing is evening up the score.) 

Last night I go to bed, a dehydrated wastrel, and attempt sleep. No such luck.  Morning comes, I shower, dress, and Mrs CorC? drives me to the hospital.  I show them my insurance stuff, sign the electronic form, go in the back where I undress and put on the accursed gown and wait on a fairly comfy stretcher while my vital signs are continuously taken in what sounds like a perpetual game of Pong.

Who appears, to me, to be a teen-aged girl comes in the room, introduces herself as Doctor Mc***h, and informs me that she is my anesthesiologist. ( Yes the years have passed me by). Later  Dr.T*****n enters the room. He is the Boy-Gastroenterologist.  He apologizes for a slight delay, stating one of the other doctors had a longer than usual procedure.  I suspect, however, that his mother was late dropping him off at work. ( He can’t possibly be old enough to drive.)  This is like a Doogie Howser, MD. episode brought to life and on steroids.

As they wheel me into the room, I notice that the nurses and technicians aren’t at all uneasy around these young whippersnappers. I fully concede to my innermost self, that these children really are adults and I am the one whose perceptor needs adjusting.  Before long, they knock me out, insert the appropriate pieces of fiber optic cables and such into the temporarily pristine reaches of my rectum and colon, do their probing and snipping.Then they wheel me out. I wake up, barely a half-hour later.

I learn I have one polyp. (Just one, for all this?),  some diverticuli, and, ahem, internal hemorrhoids. Said polyp appears to be noncancerous, but they have to biopsy the little bugger.  So I get to wait three weeks til the pathologist offers a diagnosis. OK. Things look good. I’m probably fine, but, worst case scenario, they caught it in time. At least, I hope

Tomorrow I get to see my family, including my sons, my daughter-in-law, niece, her husband, and my adorable 10 month old great niece, named either for our 40th President or a character from King Lear. It is my sister’s, stepmother’s and daughter-in-law’s collective birthday celebration, all falling within a two week interval. My stepmother is 91. The other two birthdays, you don’t need to know.

Life is good.

Hiding

02 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by in cooking, Exercise/ Fitness, loneliness, Love and stuff, Sexual Identity

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I do all kinds of things to hide out.  Mostly they are “activities”.  I’m being busy, waiting for the chance for something exciting, exotic, or just plain memorable to happen.  This is not unique to me and it’s certainly not a waste of time. Because there’s a lot of time between the exciting, exotic or memorable events of life. There are gaps to be filled.

So I swim. In the water I get lost. In my thoughts. In time. In my workout. I love feeling the water on my body as I swim. I love how my muscles feel.  I don’t care much about my pace or whether I am moving quickly or slowly.  I fantasize that a woman desires me because I swim, that she finds me attractive, that I’m wanted.

And I cook. I love the smells, the sounds of a whirring blender, vegetables frying, the colors of the vegetables and fruits.  I love to see heavy cream turn into whipped cream.  I love sharing what I cook with others.

And I try not to think about the void in Passion. The Love is there. Good old Love. Old Love, soon-to-be geriatric Love.  Selfless Christian Sunday School Love. But I need Passion, too. Passion that can flower because that Love is there.  Put all the chips on Passion.  Tattoo your name inside a heart on my bicep Passion.  Staying awake after one fuck, just so we can have another go Passion.   No “good” manners, dirty-talkin’ Passion that would make your friends blush on the outside, while they die of envy.

“Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”– John Mellencamp

501’s. My Kind Of Shrinkage

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in personal grooming, Sexual Identity

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They came from Amazon via UPS. That they still make shrink-to-fit 501’s with a button fly is most gratifying to me. They are made in Egypt now. Back in the 1980’s, when GQ had interesting things to say about clothes, they did a piece on S-T-F 501’s and it impressed me.  Now that I can afford to pay nearly three times as much for these as for a pair of pretty good jeans at BJ’s, I do so. This afternoon, I got naked, put on the unshrunk jeans and stood under the hot shower. I stood there, wondering what Mrs. CorC? would  say if she walked in, and let the jeans and me get good and wet. A nice little puddle of indigo-tinted water accumulates. When I feel as if the job has been done, I peel them off and put them in the washer in hot water. And Bob’s your uncle, when the washing and drying is over, they’re good to go.

Quite frankly, there is something erotic about unbuttoning the jeans to urinate, etc.  Call me crazy.   They look good, especially when paired with a white dress shirt.  I feel attractive and ageless and not 65, with titanium screws holding my spine together. They don’t look or feel like “Old Guy” clothes.  I own enough pairs of constipated khakis to last a lifetime.  I have not worn a suit in ages.  Things have changed fashion-wise.

Wherein A Cubano At The Mall Inspires Musing About Suburban Living.

26 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by in food, Suburbia

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The Cubano is another name for the Cuban sandwich. Yesterday, in a bit of defiance against Weight Watcher point-counting, I ordered one at Cheesecake Factory.  I put one half of the beast aside, ate one half. Then, after 30 seconds of not too careful thought, I ate the second half. I now had this agglomeration of ham, roast pork, cheese, pickle and Cuban bread churning around in my gut for what seemed to be an eternity.  I confided to Mrs CorC? that this would be my Cuban sandwich for the Third Quarter. It could be my last one for a long time. Meat, it has been said, doesn’t really have much flavor. We constantly put stuff on it to give it flavor.  This Cubano brought that message home in a big way. I could taste the pickle and the mustard more than anything else. This morning when I scrambled my egg whites with fresh tomatoes, artichoke hearts, fresh basil and Gorgonzola, I had an explosion of taste which I did not experience yesterday.

Maybe it is Cheesecake Factory that ended my affair with the Cubano. Their food is calorie-laden and over-priced.  But it is in the mall near our house. It isn’t a bad mall as malls go.  It isn’t one of those enclosed nightmares.  It has plenty of plants and foliage plus a rather nifty water garden with koi swimming about.  The irony of this mall is that it is a place we drive to in order to walk around.  Weird, huh?

I miss the city, though. I miss walking places.  You could walk to places in the ‘burbs but it would 1) take forever and 2) be inordinately risky with limited sidewalks and street lighting.  Why not move?  The house is paid for, for starters , and I like our townhouse development.  I have dreams of fixing the place up to be the pleasant home I’ve dreamed of.  But every time I drive down to the urban neighborhood  where my lovely parish church is situated, I see tree-lined avenues with sidewalks and streetlights.  There are shopping districts within walking distance.  That urban neighborhood is diverse, but my townhouse development is no monoculture either.  Should we stay or go? We’ll chew on that some more.

Saturday Miscellany

23 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by in Health Issues, Love and stuff, personal grooming

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( I wrote this post two years ago when I thought Senator Kaine had a modicum of decency about him. That was before his moral cowardice on abortion truly disturbed me, before his going along with the travesties of of the current Democrat coup d’etat in slow motion has crippled this nation, before the FBI and DOJ’s perversion of the FISA process brought shame to that great law enforcement agency. So long, Tim)

The buzz around Richmond today centers around Mrs. Clinton’s Vice-Presidential selection, Tim Kaine.  He is well-liked in these parts. Republicans who don’t agree with him respect him as a decent guy who lives by his principles.  A friend of mine who went to high school with his wife admires him tremendously.  His father-in-law,  Linwood Holton, was the first Republican governor since Reconstruction.  Governor Holton kept his children in the Richmond Public Schools when white flight, accelerated by a mandatory busing court order, dramatically changed the demographics of the schools.  Tim’s a good guy and the son-in-law of a good guy.

But enough politics. Today was my Weight Watchers weigh-in and meeting. I lost another 1.6 pounds and could break the 200 pound barrier as early as next week.  There is one remarkable lady at this meeting who is always cheerful, shares from her heart and invariably has something wise to say. I told her that she was the reason I came to this meeting, even though it starts at 7:30 AM. She was genuinely touched and cried when I told her.  I was surprised at her response because I thought everybody in the whole wide world could see that she was a truly remarkable woman and that she must have heard that praise day in and day out.  Moral of Story:  Do not ever hold back praise! Never. Ever.

I got a haircut yesterday and I really like what Karina, my barber at Sport Clips, did. She did something to the back that looks pretty good.  Hopefully I got it to post right.  There were several young boys in there with their mothers getting haircuts and it was fun to watch them. One little boy, maybe 8, looked very, very serious when told  to sit still. And still he sat, as if he were sitting on a land mine that would go off if he so much as flinched. He looked pretty sharp, cleaned up.

My big plans for dinner evaporated when Mrs C or C? worked late again.  It was OK. I was basically too tired to cook. There is a nice piece of sockeye salmon waiting in the fridge I can cook tonight or tomorrow.

The sex piece with Mrs C or C? is still a work in progress. Don’t think for a moment that the only people messed up around sex were raised Catholic.  She was raised Southern Baptist.  We shall see.  (Note: Both parties being awake and in the same room at the same time increase the likelihood of meaningful dialogue taking place.  Baby Steps)

 

 

Flashback To 1979, Formerly Titled Saint-Saens Flashback

21 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in Classical Music, food, memoir, seduction

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The Compact Disc set arrived yesterday. I have always been a fan of the Saint-Saens Piano Concerti from the time I first heard them back in 1979.  However, until I put the first of the discs in the player yesterday afternoon, and heard the french horns open the Concerto #1 with the orchestral response, I didn’t realize how deeply this music had affected me.

You see, it was the background music of an affair, of a romance that morphed into a marriage.    I don’t know the precisely first time I heard them. The pianist on that first recording , on vinyl, of course, was Aldo Ciccolini,  a great interpreter of Saint-Saens.  What I remember was a dinner at her house. There were grilled chicken breasts, and a salad with slivered almonds and mandarin oranges on romaine, tossed with olive oil, lemon juice and parmesan cheese. Rice? Perhaps. Memory goes in and out. But there was wine, dry white wine, that generic “Chablis” that came in a three liter jug. She was very genteel and tastefully decanted that dreadful swill into a lovely decanter with a lovely stopper, etched glass at the base with a solid glass sphere atop it. The dinner and the music were pleasant and cordial. We talked of our pasts. I came with the baggage of a broken marriage, she with a live-in relationship that did not end well. We drank more wine. We were not yet lovers.

To reciprocate her invitation, I invited her to dinner at my apartment. I fixed the quiche Lorraine  I learned to make from The Joy of Cooking.  We had a pleasant dinner, although the news that day featured a plane crash and an execution. We talked some more. Then we made love for the first time. I remember the skirt she wore, a pale blue skirt with flowers on it, in a very light material and it draped beautifully from her full hips. She proudly told me later that she had a “black lady’s ass”. She did.

We went on trips together in her blue 1970 Olds F-85. with a cassette player. The pirated cassettes of the Concerti  went with us. We drove to Highlands, North Carolina to see a friend of hers. A great trip. Sex. Wine. Pot. Music, Saint-Saens.  A few weeks later we drove to Utica, New York where she interviewed for a college teaching position. By then we were deeply in love. I was ready to quit my job and follow her to Utica if she were hired. And again we listened to Saint-Saens in the blue Olds as we explored the countryside of upstate New York, towns like New Hartford  that featured a green town common reminiscent of Norman Rockwell.  We went to Cooperstown to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where we both concurred that one old baseball glove from the 1930’s looks like any other old baseball glove from the 1930’s. We went to the Oneida Community, where John Humphrey Noyes, in 1848, founded the commune that would spawn the flatware manufacturer and Noyes would experiment with a group marriage, what we would consider polyamory today. Plus ca Change… eh?  More Concerti and the  Septet in E Flat, Op. 85, filler on the album, but a perfect gem in its own right.

The music played on  that summer. We discovered we both loved sailing.  One Sunday night, after a day on the water, we made love on her green printed sheets that featured sailboats and wooded islands, evocative of Maine, I guess. That night, I proposed. She accepted. We smoked more marijuana, listened to Paul McCartney sing  Maybe I’m Amazed, made love some more.

Maybe it should have stopped there. Maybe I would have grown up sooner, quit drinking sooner, stopped using sex as if it were another drug sooner,  faced my demons sooner. Maybe there would not have been the penultimate nightmare of divorce, the ultimate nightmare of her untimely and secretive death. Mixed in with all that pain and all that folly was all that love and hedonism and passion. That’s right, our deepest yearnings.

Rest Day

20 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by in cooking, Exercise/ Fitness, Sport

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Back in high school, fifty years ago this fall, I went out for cross country, then track.   I got used to working out five days a week.  Five workouts a week mean I’m serious about the program. I like the self-discipline it fosters. Yesterday I finished my five workouts (lap swim 2050 meters 82 lengths of a 25 meter pool) I started Friday. By then my body was feeling the fatigue and the work I had put my body through.

Workout #5 was not without drama, all internally generated.  The mental fatigue wanted me to just skip it, wait till the next day or the next. I left the house, did some errands first, and  got to  the Y around four P M.  Looking at the sky, I saw dark and ominous storm clouds in the northwest sky.  Usually the storms come out of the west so I thought we might miss this batch of nasty. No such luck. The pool closed just as I was ready to go in. So I got dressed, went home, resolute to return. I had time to go online, and take a nap before I ventured to return . When I got back the lifeguard was outside and he told me the pool would reopen in about 25 minutes. OK.

I get in the pool and start. Every little tweak and funny feeling I magnify into a re-injury of my shoulder or my back.  I find that groove that distance athletes can find, where I feel I can go on forever. I finish my distance.  It was faster than yesterday.  The feeling of accomplishment and being on “purpose” is great.

Home again. Mrs C or C? had already texted that she was tired and hungry. Fortunately I had brought some steaks down from the freezer to thaw that I would fix on the George Foreman grill. Paired with the fresh local tomatoes, we enjoyed a delightful supper, with minimal effort.

Today, on the rest day, I had a nap that was more a continuation of the night’s sleep. I’m enjoying the luxury of doing what I wish to do, write. Then I will read,starting a novella by James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room. It is a gay-themed story, from a major American writer of the Twentieth Century. I read some essays by him in high school,  Notes of a Native Son.  After I finish reading Baldwin, I’m moving on to Nelson Algren.

Retirement. It’s about creating your own world. Cool

Monday Evening 

19 Tuesday Jul 2016

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I’m sitting here with a cold pack on my shoulder. It’s a little sore from my swim. Not unusual.

We had a cold summertime supper, spiced shrimp, fresh tomatoes, artichoke hearts, pickled red cabbage. I’m drinking my decaf, watching a World War Two documentary,  The World At War. Upstairs Mrs C or C? is watching. The Bachelorette,  perhaps the most effective form of birth control ever created. It is a real erection-killer.

The heat is kicking our rear ends as it always does in July.  There may be a break on Wednesday. We shall see.  I would prefer to write at the computer, but that would mean sitting up and keyboarding for a while. And my energy is draining from me. 

Goodnight all.

Saturday Morning

18 Monday Jul 2016

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“Out of the clear blue of the Western sky comes Sky King!”

That sentence is burned forever in my brain. It was the opening of a popular children’s show on Saturday morning, Sky King, from the 1950’s and 60’s.  It’s  funny what my mind recalls about this show. The star was an actor named Kirby Grant. The name of his aircraft was The Songbird. His niece was named Penny and she called him Uncle Sky.  The sponsor was Nabisco Wheat Honeys and Rice Honeys and cartoon bees were involved in the promotion for said cereals.

Cooking In Modern Times

15 Friday Jul 2016

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A few weeks ago, I went to my new favorite cooking store, Sur La Table, after Sunday brunch at a restaurant in the same mall. They had this rather fancy device called a Lux Multifunction Cooker by Fagor. It is a slow cooker, rice cooker, yogurt maker, and pressure cooker all combined with a control system that allows all these functions at different times and temperatures, under pressure or not.  I’ve always been intrigued and somewhat intimidated by  pressure cooking, the fear of a malfunction present in my mind dampening my enthusiasm.

Last night, I decided to use the device for the first time.  I started by making yogurt. The tricky part, for me, was getting the milk to the right temperature to kill any microbes that might be in the milk, 185-190 F (85-87.7 C). I did not have a candy thermometer and the meat thermometers I had didn’t give an accurate reading, so I wasted a lot of time. The cool down to 100-110 F (37.7-43.3 C) was easy. I added some fresh yogurt, set it to “yogurt” and went to bed. The function prepares the yogurt over 8 hours, (longer if you wish).  When I woke up, I had a rather tasty yogurt all ready to eat. So I am generally happy with the yogurt making function.

This morning, after soaking the garbonzo beans overnight, I used the pressure cooking function to prepare the beans for the homemade hummus  I’ve been contemplating. I put in the beans, the water, to the right amount maybe, 1:1 beans to water, and 2 tablespoons oil (their suggestion). I pressed the pressure setting  to high (9psi), set the timer to 25 minutes and pressed “start”. It does cook automatically once the pressure is reached. And it does shut off automatically.  It has two cool down function  “Fast” and “Slow” also called “natural”. All “Slow” means is that you leave it alone once the device is turned off and the pressure escapes through the safety valves. I allowed 60-90 minutes to cool down, but I suspect you could use a shorter interval.  I just checked on the garbonzos. They were ready and delicious! These garbonzos are unadorned, no spices, not even salt.  This multifunction cooker is  a keeper!

On to making the hummus.  I will get out my copy of Moosewood Cookbook and use that recipe. I may make felafel also. I feel like a hippie again.  Gonna go light the patchouli incense and put on my Ravi Shankar CD.

Later.