Friday, June 08, 2012

Following Marcus Around for a Day



This is Friday morning June 8, 2012, and I slept fairly well last night.  I woke at first light at 5:08 and got up at 5:22 on the digital clock and turned on Bill Press and made coffee.  Stephanie Miller was on at six and she was mocking some crank letter she received where she mocked the use of the term “dumocrats” when the person probably wanted to say “dumb-o-crats”.  He also spoke of rubbing “slat” into the wounds rather than salt” so the guy is a dyslexic among his other problems.  He was talking about Wisconsin.  Nobody respects an illiterate crank.  I just changed the wallpaper from “Central Park” to “Tea cups” to liven things up.  And (brother) Al is right.  I’m pretty sure this photograph has been doctored but I didn’t do it.  We had breakfast and for the millionth time it was a case of “hurry up and wait”.  The waiting to eating ratio these days has got to be around three to one or something.  John Powell says ‘patience is the name of the game”.  I disagreed and said ‘No, patients is the name of the game.  Being impatient isn’t going to change one bit about how much food we finally get served to eat”.  We had Cheerios and had to wait for the milk.  My bowl wasn’t filled as fully as the other three and I was done way ahead of the other three.   All the gains made with weight can be wiped out by a continuing pattern which basically hasn’t changed.  It seems the seconds cart has started on the other side of the room and we are dead last, if at all, like for the fifth time in a row, at least when it really mattered.  Some say that eating slowly is the way to go.  I disagree.  Picture this example.  Suppose you have a limited amount of energy you can use on hot water and it’s a cold morning and you want to shower.  Would you rather take a three minute shower where the water is a hundred degrees the whole time, or a fifteen minute shower where the water is maybe 79 degrees the whole time and you never get warm?  Simple, huh?  At least while you are actually eating, you know that you are not hungry.  Then we had a fried egg and one of those Mc Donald’s things of hashed browns.  Not the most filling meal in the world.  No toast.  No complains about the coffee size- today.  Yesterday I finally changed the Calendar page to June.
Dr. Levy said that the time gone and not here would “pass quickly”.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He probably won’t make it back here till July 5th so it’s a four week vacation for us and not a two week & some off day trip.  June has a reputation of a month of “unpleasant, funny surprises”.  That dentist check bill appeared out of nowhere and was too old for the bank to even accept it.  That occurred in June.  So is it any wonder that I fear some blood test I thought was lost may just “turn up” unexpectedly with bad results.  That Mark guy reappeared here last night after maybe six weeks unexplained absence.  I thought he was “gone”.  I owe him a pack of cigarettes and hope he’s forgotten.  Of course we have to make sure the Kings actually win the Stanley Cup because that isn’t a fate accomple yet, and it may go on to a game six back at Staples next week.  Hopefully Charlie Sheen won’t throw a fit like he did last night when some lady wouldn’t let him back into the game after a smoking break.  Now we hear they have smoking areas set  aside inside the arena for all the smoker addicts making it through a multy hour game.  Of course then there are the whole basketball play-offs.  Believe it or not these have not occurred yet.  Then there are the bunch of Supreme Court decisions they wait for June to tell us about, which I find puzzling but that’s the way they do it.  We learn whether Obama Care is legal.  And the Soap Opera has been proceding at a fast and furious pace in the plot.  And if Dr. Levy returns July 5th we will have celebrated July fourth.  So to say the next four weeks will “pass before you know it” is nothing short of silly.  I’d like to know I can make it till next Tuesday on my money.  It seems I have enough money for three whole packs of cigarettes.  I had fifty cents from Richard I’d forgotten about and ditto for Bill.  And another dollar just “showed up” in my pocket.  But on the negative side I think I’ll be out of coffee by then.  Yesterday afternoon Wally only gave me five filters.  Elizabeth wanted to borrow money from me for a soda but first I said “let he see the filters first”.  I was so disheartened at the number I only gave Her a quarter.  We did not type yesterday - - - at least in Word.
We are already on page six and we’ll probably go till page eight or so because there is just a lot of ground to cover.  Ok, let’s see.  Yesterday I turned on KPOJ and you know Ed Schultz was a rerun I was so disgusted I wasn’t even going to listen to but then relented and had him on and he said some constructive stuff for that hour.  We had Pastrami sandwiches for lunch, which were under filled by some standards, but Oscar came by with seconds, which we rarely get on pastrami.  I guess we had beets.  The soup was generic red vegetable and a little on the salty side.   We had a mixture or orange and banana slices or something for desert.  I kind of slept through the hour of Randy Rhodes.  The soap opera topic was that Will Horton is the subject that was arrested for the murder of Stephano because he alone failed the fun firing test.  All of the others were cleared.  Now Carrie is talking about “Perhaps in some other lifetime we can be together- - well, until then”, to Raphael.  I went down for coffee from Dora and got two cups and greeted the birds.  By now it was 2:20 and I went to the front room to wait for Dr. Levy to arrive with Arleen and others on the couch.  But it was 2:35 and I went back up to my room to listen to Randy Rhodes realizing I wasn’t going to get any money bail-out.
But then at a quarter to three Dr. Levy showed up.  There are a lot of developments you flat out just can’t predict.  Anyhow Dr. Levy was surprised I preferred the high back wooden chair with a cushion to those wicker chair torture devices.  No chair deigned is more uncomfortable to sit on from the bar jabbing your back to the metal bar cutting off your circulation to legs, to the “unforgiving, rigid quality” of the wicker itself.  We were supposed to be discussing the thirteen principles on that list but we never got to that.  I spoke of “lowering our expectations when we get older” but I was not speaking of expectation from YOURSELF but from your environment and rattled off the usual laundry list that constitutes “the elephant in the room” which Dr. Levy seems to be going to extremes into ignoring even exist.  There was talk about going to that picnic spot in Seal Beach come July “where I go with founders group all the time”.  Since I’ve been coming, some three years, group outings such as this have been virtually non existant.  We talked more about his Italy trip.  But in general the classes don’t have any continuity to them or organizational rhythm.  We broke up at a quarter to four and I had a cigarette on the patio- - and decided to head down to the dining room a little early.
We had ravioli for dinner with green beans and “bread” but we did have rainbow sherbet for desert, which was nice .  News all of yesterday was non existant and continues to be today.  I had it on for a while but turned it off at twenty after five and decided to play the Rush album “Grace Under Pressure”.  As planned I played all of the songs except tracks five and six.  The entire CD clocks out at just under forty minutes, so it’s an “old school” record.  Bill returned as I was only just into listening to it.  Usually when he returns the same day it’s just after dinner, or often he’s here waiting when I return.  I asked him how his Long Beach trip was.  It was the usual brief “OK” response.

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