Category Archives: Health: Mental and Physical

I wonder if the word “spammed,” as in I got “spammed” by strange advertisements from people I have never heard of or that have been generated by a computer not quite randomly as based on keyword searches (damn you Google!) has any relation intended or coincidental to the foodstuff known as “spam,” though of course a coincidental relation is probably not a relation at all.

I remember we used to eat spam when I was a kid back in SC.  It came in this sort of oblong can and as I recollect there was this little key fixed to the top of the can, and you would pull this off and then stick the end of the metal strip that ran around the top of the can into the little hole on the key, and then you would turn the key and pull off the metal stripped from around the top of the can.  Then you could take off lid and there would be the spam all stuffed there in an oblong shape in the can and covered, as I recollect, with some jelly like substance.  God forbid, the key or the piece of metal would break because then there would be no end of swearing and you had to use a pair of pliers to pull off the metal strip to get at the spam.  As I recollect sardines came in a can like that too with a little metal key on top.

We would fry up the spam (though I think it was pre-cooked) and have it for whatever else there was for dinner.  I have met people who had spam sandwiches, but I don’t think I ever had one of those.  Also people fry up spam for breakfast.  Spam is a funny sort of all purpose food that way.  You can have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Spam isn’t particular. I mean, take your fried chicken.  Fried chicken is for dinner (though you could have it for lunch too); I doubt many people have fried chicken for breakfast.  In other words, some foods at least are meal specific, but spam is sort of universal.

That could be because what exactly is in spam is uncertain so given the uncertainty it could go with anything or any meal.  Spam was your original unspecified “meat product.”  I wonder what sort of wine would be most appropriate with spam.  Your white or your red?  Your Chablis or your cabernet?  Not I believe that many spam eaters have worried much about what wine might go best with spam.  In my research paper class on eating in America, I tried, largely unsuccessfully, to argue that foods were class specific. That middle class people ate certain foods and upper class people other foods, and lower or working class people ate spam.

So I would ask, since my students are mostly middle class, if any of them had eaten spam.  And mostly they had not.  But always a few kids screwed up my argument because they were middle class and had eaten spam.  I got wise to this and if they said they had eaten spam, I asked if they were from Hawaii because if they were, they didn’t count, since people in Hawaii eat spam since meat can be very expensive there.  And sure enough nine times out of ten the kid who ate spam was from Hawaii.

On my eating in America website, I had a link to the Spam website.  It’s devoted to a celebration of Spam.  Spam is 71 years old.  That tells you something about it.  I don’t know of any other meat that has a starting date.  Beef?  I mean when did that start?  There’s a Spam museum in Minnesota.  I think it houses the world’s largest piece of Spam.  The Spam website is pretty cool and thank god the Spam people have a sense of humor.

Continue reading Spam. The Meat→

Every now and then somebody writes a comment in response to one of the entries here.  But I don’t get many because this blog is sort of a soliloquy and doesn’t exactly promote dialogue.  So I don’t check to see if I get any comments or not except when I remember to do it, once a week or so. 

When I do check, the site will say I have like 70 comments or something, and I will know without checking that most of that is spam.  The subject line of the spam will say something like, “Great Site.  A work of Art.  Shakespeare would be jealous” or something to that effect.  Like they flatter your ass to make you click on the link and if I bother to click on the link—which I don’t anymore—it will turn out to be an advertisement for Rogaine or Propicia.  Those keyword searches work I guess because they have figured out I am old and losing my hair.  Of course, that might be easy to do since I have written about being old and losing my hair.

I also get ads saying Lipitor (which I take for high cholesterol) is bad for you and I should take vitamins instead.  And of course I get all sorts of ads for different anti-depression meds.  Also I get ones for Viagra and that other stuff, Celesta, or whatever that when you are in the mood one is called.  That stuff scares me.  They all warn about having an erection that lasts four hours and how you should go to a doctor if you have one of those.  I would be scared to death by a four hour erection.  I think it would probably kill me.  I can’t afford to have that much blood in one place.

And I get ads too for penis enlargement.  That’s sort of insulting in a way; I mean who are they to suggest my penis should be enlarged unless the assumption is that there is no such thing as a penis that is too big.  For years I didn’t know what this penis enlargement stuff was.  Back in the old days, back at the end of the sports section of the paper, you could find these little ads (not that I looked for them) advertising “Male Penile Enhancement.”  The male part seemed a little redundant since I don’t think there could be female penile enhancement.  I don’t even know if “penile” is a word.

I was too embarrassed to look up the stuff to figure out how they went about this enhancement stuff.  Once I was talking with my students about something, penises, I guess, and said, “How the hell do they enhance the penis.  I mean do they like hang a rock on the end of it and stretched it out or something.  Or do they have this little exercise machine that you stick your penis in to work it out a bit and give it like more muscle.”  I went on like this some time, acting all perplexed, and completely dead pan, and the students were like dumbfounded except for a couple of guys in the back who were about to piss themselves trying not to laugh.  Actually, this was one of my regular routines.  I say “was” because I don’t know if it’s appropriate for an old guy to talk about the penis or even to have one for that matter.  I always concluded, “Do any of you guys know what they do to enhance it.”

And nobody ever did.  So finally I looked it up and one thing at least that they do is operate on your damn penis.  I mean they take fat tissue from one part of your body and stick that fat tissue into your penis, to sort of bulk it up I guess.  I wonder if they use a local anesthetic for that.  I would want to be knocked out totally were someone to operate on my penis.  I don’t know if this is true or not, but I read it somewhere.

I have pretty ugly feet.  Possibly I exaggerate.  They are not that awful really.  And actually it’s mostly the left one that’s ugly.  The right one is pretty much a-ok.  Though, it too suffers from dry, chapped skin, and heavy duty callus buildup.  I don’t know what else to call it but callus buildup.  It’s not technically a “corn,” I think.  I am not sure what a “corn” is, but I am pretty sure it’s not one.

Just that on the inside of both of my big toes, one may locate a lot of what appears to be callus.  The buildup is the worse on the left foot, so if I am in bed trying to go to sleep and I lie on my right side, sometimes the inside of my left big toe presses against the bed, and after a while, sometimes, the corn or callus buildup starts to hurt.  Actually, the callus itself is pretty insensitive, but it starts to press on the sensitive tissues beneath it and they start to hurt.  The pain of the hurt—though not in the least extreme—is enough to keep me awake.

All I have to do to keep the pain away is to wear a sock on the left foot.  That’s enough to pad the callus a bit and keep it from hurting.  So sometimes, I go to bed wearing one sock and walk around in the morning with one sock.  Why I don’t wear two socks, I don’t know.  But it’s only the left foot that really needs it.  And I believe in airing out your feet whenever possible.

I believe in the airing out of feet because for years I had one whopper of a case of athlete’s foot.  I would try this or that to try to get rid of it and usually failed through lack of patience and perseverance, and hell I am a live and let live sort of guy.  But then they came out with this stuff—I forget what it’s called—but wham! That stuff really worked and all that really evil athletes’ foot between the toes went away.  But I just couldn’t get rid of the dry, scaling skin on different parts of my feet, especially the heels.

I figured that was a really tenacious form of athletes foot, since athletes foot is really a whole host of different sorts of fungi (?) or funguses (?) that the powerful lotion had not been able to kill off.  So when I was at the dermatologist I asked him if there was anything I could do for it. He sort of shrugged and said no; some people just get that stuff.  Could be virus, could be genetics.  Nobody knew for sure.  Then I said, what about this callus buildup on my left toe here.

Hmmm, he said, maybe I have some salve for that.  So he gave me a prescription for some salve to put on my left toe.  Carol picked it up from me and I got a bit freaked out when the label on the box said, “Urea Cream.”  I mean in my mind Urea had something to do, I was pretty sure, with Urine.  I didn’t really like the idea of putting urine on my toe.  So while I was complaining about it, Carol looked it up on the web for me and sure enough Urea is a central ingredient in Urine.  Turns out there are about 1200 medical applications for Urea.

I wonder if any other form of excrement has so many medical uses.  I also wonder where the urea I am using comes from.  Human Urine?  Horse Urine?  Elephant Urine.  Are there people out there who get paid to pee all day?  Or maybe it can be synthesized.

I remember as a callow youth looking down my nose at old people who sat around doing nothing but discussing their doctors, their diseases, and their operations.  Not that I was around your old people much, but when I was around them that’s all they seemed to want to talk about.  When there were many other things of greater importance, I thought, like war, world peace, and the state of the economy that one might be discussing.  Maybe I just envied them because, man, you could tell these people were really into what they were discussing, like you know when I had my hip removed, and they would go on savoring every detail even using occasional medical terms.

And then when the folks hit their late 60s it seemed like the big event of their week, whatever week it was, was to go to the doctor.  Well, what will you be doing, and it was like, well, on Tuesday I go to the eye doctor and I will be getting back the results of the blood test, and I have this corn that needs looking into.  And I though, Jesus, what kind of life is that when the high point of your week is to have your teeth cleaned.

Well, age humbles us all.  When we went down to visit Carol’s mom last, I called ahead and made a date with an old friend whom I have known since 1973. So I we met up and talked while Carol went to spend time with her mom.  We talked up and down over a thirty plus year period about this and that and what happened to whom, and so on, and what do you know but we had a good hour in there talking about our diseases. 

I described my colonoscopy and tried to talk her into getting hers, but I probably failed.  She has an ongoing problem.  Once she was swimming and felt a pain in her ear, and thought well it was a whopper case of swimmer’s ear, and went to the doctor, and he gave her antibiotics or something.  But the pain did not relent and so after two weeks she went to an ear expert and the expert said her eardrum had burst and what was worse a horrible infection had set in that eventually complete screwed up the little parts in there—the “hammer” is it called—and the other thing, so that she went deaf in the ear pretty much and began to suffer also from vertigo.

The vertigo thing sounds pretty terrible because there are no warning signs at all.  I mean none.  Just suddenly and for no clear reason you get vertigo and you start to lose your balance for no reason at all.  That must be awful.  Here you are one second taking a step forward and the next you are falling.  There doesn’t seem to be any cure for it.  They did an operation on the ear to try to get the hear back and put in plastic replacements for the broken parts, but they went out of whack and didn’t work.  To do that operation, they had to cut her entire ear off.  Of course, they sewed it back on.

So far I have avoided having my ear cut off.  In fact, no doctor has yet to make an incision in me.  Yesterday, the skin doctor blasted me in a couple of spots with liquid nitrogen to get rid of some pre-cancerous lesions.  And for the first time ever, he started fingering his way through what remains of my hair and blasted a couple of spots on my scalp too.  I have to face the fact that the skin up there has lost most of its natural covering and I better make sure to wear a hat.

I was out road testing the new seat for my bike when my neighbor, out walking her unhappy dog, motioned me over and said I might want to know that something terrible had just happened.  I got home to see the second of the Twin Towers go down.  I don’t know what I felt exactly.  I didn’t feel angry.  I just felt this was bad in and of itself and that it was probably going to be really, really bad in its long range repercussions.  I had some work to do at school and while there, still turning over inside what I had seen, I started fiddling around with my computer and made a flag like this one.

I ran it off on my computer on good photo paper and tacked it in the upper left corner of the message board right outside my office door.  I have not moved it.  It has been there ever since.

I am turning over emotional stuff right now what with WB’s death, February of last year, Joan’s death just this last April, Dan’s stroke, and a whole host of other lesser things all coming together in a big clot.  I guess when I start feeling maybe too much or something very strong I do as I did with 9/11.  I try to make or build something.  I think that’s why I have been working so much on what I call “Tingle Territory” when I am not cleaning out the garage.

I don’t think of this “making something” as necessarily therapeutic.  I am not sure what therapeutic means; if it means getting better or curing, I am not sure “making something” does that.  More as if, making something requires material for the making; and if you can make something out of that material, you give it a kind of shape or solidness that other stuff you make later on can build on.  It’s more a way of constructing a continuity or holding together and shaping a diffuse anxiety that might otherwise be overwhelming or get buried and fester down there somewhere just out of sight.  The anxiety is still there though and shows in my having become a bit obsessive about putting Tingle Territory together.

I think it’s important to make something out of the things we feel.  Most of the time, I think we do, not always beneficially though.  Still, maybe something powerful happens and you decide to lose weight, and actually do.  But that’s a pretty big thing to do.  Making something doesn’t have to be a big thing; maybe you just start parting your hair in a different way.  Making something is a way of accommodating change by recognizing it.

If you don’t make something out of the change you are just going to become more and more rigid and eventually the change will break you.  Hell, it will no matter what you do.  My shrink’s mother, in her dotage, went hay wire and took to collecting empty cans and yogurt cups and filling the drawers of her dresser with them.  Maybe the only difference is that if you try to make something out of the change when you open your dresser drawers, they won’t be full of empty things.

Oh, I have made a separate web page that gives access, in one place, to the various bits of Tingle Territory I have so far assembled.

I was feeling sort of washed out and blue yesterday, Saturday, maybe because Friday was a really social, perhaps excessively so, day for me.  I saw my regular shrink at 1 and had my guitar lesson at 300 and saw my psychiatrist at four thirty.  As you can see, my social life is so lame I have to pay people to talk with me.

I see the psychiatrist every four months for a med check.  He sees people at his house, so I have to go to this place up on the mountain that is worth maybe 8 million dollars.  He charges 100 buck per half hour.  I decided long ago not to stint when it comes to my mental health and my tendency to excessive moodiness, if you can call it that exactly.  So in the half hour I talk real fast and hit the high (or more precisely, low) points of the last four months. Maybe that’s what wore me out, recapping and re-remembering the hecticness of these last four months.  We decided to stay status quo on the drugs for now.  I don’t know much about him because he doesn’t say anything (that’s because he is not supposed to).  But I do know he was raised in Louisiana and his father owned a hardware store there; and I know he knows his stuff about meds.

My shrink told me a week or ago that she will be retiring at the end of this year.  She is 82 or 83, I forget which, and decided not to renew her license to practice, not so much because it costs to renew as because to renew you have to go to some stupid classes to show you are keeping up with the so-called “field.”  She is pretty much sick of those classes and is convinced the “field” is going down hill because of all the new rules and regs being generated by the state as the result of actions by insurance firms and lawyers. 

My shrink’s daughter is a shrink too and raised up under the new rules and regulations has been on her mother’s back (my shrink’s back) to stop seeing me for about five years now because she (the daughter) feels my relationship with her mother is probably illegal, seeing as how her mother talks to me in ways that could invite a law suit.  Also at the end of each session my shrink and I hug and that is probably grounds for a suit too.

So nothing is stable in this world not even your shrink.  Hell, I figured we would terminate when she died; maybe this retiring thing will be better and less dramatic.  Anyhow, she is crazy.  She has this thing for animals of all kinds and has had numerous cats in her house over the years.  She so dotes on the cats that she leaves her back door open a notch at night so the cat can do its thing, and right outside that door all around her patio she had constructed a chain link “cage,” like in a zoo or something, that allows the cats to go outside but not to run away or get eaten by ever more daring coyotes.  I am not paying much attention and get confused when, as she walks me to my car, she says that she woke up with a skunk walking around her bed. I think maybe she has begun to hallucinate till I remember the business with the cage and the back door.  Somehow the skunk is getting into the cage and then into the house and walking around my shrink’s bed.  She wakes to see this big fluffy white tale moving around in the darkness.

So far this has happened twice and she is rightfully worried that the skunk will get in, get upset by something, and let go its load of stink.

Went to Costco yesterday because we needed some food items.  Costco is probably not so familiar to east coast people.  It’s a kind of food warehouse.  It looks like a warehouse and businesses come in before regular people hours and buy wholesale.  Everything comes in huge quantities—I think here of the food stuff.  Once I forgot to buy that little box of salt with the umbrella lady and rather than go back to the regular store I bought five pounds of salt at Costco for a few cents more than the umbrella lady salt.  I had salt up the wazoo; it put it in bottles and stuck it in the pantry.

So I bought some eggs for around three dollars and was informed at the counter that it was a two pack, not 18 eggs for three dollars, but 36 eggs.  They asked did I want the other pack of 18.  I said skip it.  I had plenty of eggs, but they acted like I was breaking store policy or something, so the lady went back and got me 18 more eggs.  On Sunday I went to the farmer’s market in the Costco shopping center and got 12 eggs for about three dollars.  These were brown eggs though.

As you can see from the pictures, the white Costco eggs look almost identical.  Indeed, all 36 eggs look as if they were perhaps deposited by the same chicken.  Or maybe by clones of the same chicken.  The brown eggs though are various.  One is bigger than the other and browner too.  There was even a bigger egg than that one but I ate it.  So the brown eggs are much more irregular and appear to come from different chickens or maybe the same chicken on a good day or a bad day.

When I was teaching a research paper class on what I called “Eating in America,” I began to realize how distant and detached we are from the sources of our food.  Take hamburger for example.  It comes all neatly packaged in a square box.  What the hell is the relation of that to a cow?  Or let’s say, that neat package makes it easy to forget that it came from a cow.  The irregular brown eggs tend to remind one of chickens.  The regular white ones could have been produced in some programmed egg factory.

Many of my students—I have polled them over the years—have never seen a live chicken, except maybe in a zoo, and they are not sure if that was a chicken or not.  But they remember having seen something chicken like.  I have seen chickens in the flesh.  I have stepped with bare feet in warm chicken poop that lets off quite a stick as it oozes between the toes.  I have taken eggs out of the nest still warm from the chicken sitting on them.

It’s odd to think how we have become so distant from our food.  Indeed sometimes we are very distant from it.  Some experts say the average piece of food travels about 1500 miles to get to your mouth.  These figures are probably a little distorted since Americans are eating more and more food from all around the world.  Take coffee, as an instance.  Experts are concerned about such things because of all the energy required to transport the stuff and in most cases to refrigerate it while in transit.

There’s a little Utube graphics show about this at.

I am recovering from our trip, though slowly.  My internal clock was stuck on SC time, so Friday morning and yesterday morning I woke at 430.  Way too early, though I got to see the sun rise.

Going to sleep I found myself thinking about Brother Dan and realized that I will be emotionally tense and anxious until he has his procedure this very Wednesday.  As I said, he is optimistic, and he should be.  But I think I have what Henry James had, an imagination of disaster.  I intend to be at the hospital when he has the procedure, but I don’t know the time of it yet.

Also, among this huge pile of mostly junk mail that I found awaiting me upon my return, was a thick batch of paperwork from the lawyers in charge of the Tingle Trust.   I was happy to see it because it meant the lawyers are finally getting off their collective asses and doing something, but reading over the documents the list of things I should do and things I  shouldn’t do as Trustee of the Trust was perplexing and a bit horrifying.  I mean I don’t want to make some mistake.  But as far as I can understand what I read, I think I—and the rest of the brothers involved in managing aspects of Joan’s finances—have done a good job and are on the right path.

Some of the paperwork has to do with the government.  They want their piece of the pie.  I will have to file income taxes for whatever income the trust receives, while the money is still in the trust, from the time of Joan’s death until the estate is distributed whenever that might be.  Legally, the trust is considered some sort of separate entity and was given its own tax identification number.

A lot of the other stuff has to do with trying to clarify or negotiate or minimize possible fighting, suits and counter-suits, among the heirs over what I as the trustee did with the trust while it was in my trust.  In other words, the law anticipates that my brothers and I will start suing each other and wanting to go to court over the terms of the trust or how it was administered. 

The law is much like the rules established in a bureaucracy.  Decent people have to concern themselves with the rules because the bureaucracy makes everybody pay for the deeds of the incompetent, the vicious, the vile, and the venal.  The law is aimed at regulating, in other words, the lowest possible common denominator of the human race—the operative assumption being we are all already or potentially mean creeps motivated wholly by our own self interest.

All this is tension and anxiety making too and I won’t rest entirely easy till its over and done with.

Oh me, oh my!

Yesterday, I was just a goddamn lump of aching fatigue.  Partly, the day before I took a Claritin D to get rid of the allergy stuff.  It wiped out the allergy—pretty much—and me as well.  But most significantly, I forgot to take my morning meds and by mid-afternoon I began to think if this is what life is like when you get old then I really don’t want to do it.  Then I thought, did you forget to take your meds?

I thought about turning out a bumper sticker:  Did You Take Your Meds Today?  I figure maybe getting people to remember to take their meds would cut down on road rage.  They had to completely close down a road that was being worked on in LA because the motorists were starting to attack verbally and physically the guys working the on the roads.  I hate to say it but I have felt the urge myself.  Here I am sitting there stewing in the heat, late of course, irritated because I have forgotten to take my meds, and there is this imbecile standing there doing nothing but holding up a little red sign that is blocking my path.

While I was feeling like a lump of fatigue, I was reading through a batch—about 50, I guess—of research papers.  I was getting them emailed via emailed attachment.  I would get through a batch; then I would check my email, and there would be more of them waiting for me.  I did this over and over again.  Read, click, more to read.  And for some unknown reason, the students are all writing the full 12 pages I asked for.  One was even 15 pages.  Damn!  I kept thinking I will find a short one or a really screwed up one.  I can do those fast.

I am doing them fast, as fast as I can anyway, because I want the grading stuff pretty much taken care of before we head out to South Carolina to bury Joan’s remains.  Sure I will still have email contact wherever I go, but I don’t want the student papers on my mind, hanging over my head to be done, while I am trying to “get away” a little bit, though I am not sure going to a funeral counts as “getting away.”  Although, what’s that joke I tried to make up:  A Tingle’s idea of a vacation is to get pneumonia.

Actually, one of the best vacations I ever had was when I threw my back out for nine days.  I couldn’t stand up straight. The doctor gave me a powerful muscle relaxant, and for nine days I just forgot the outside world, work, all that crap because I couldn’t move and the muscle relaxant produced a sort of high.  I just read stuff on the Battle of the Bulge, for example, and the making of the Panama Cannel.  I didn’t mind at all except getting up and going to the bathroom was pretty painful.

We have to get up before 5 am tomorrow to get a flight that will take us straight to Dallas where we get another flight that will take us straight to Charleston, SC.  So we should be there by about 430 ECT.

Knock on wood.

I must say I felt a little light hearted upon learning that the blood flow to my brain remains relatively unimpeded.  I had dreaded the occasion of course of the examination itself  and my light hearted-ness was somewhat dampened by what might be called post-anticipatory anxiety exhaustion.  Still, the potential for some light hearted-ness was there, but on top of the post-anticipatory anxiety exhaustion what happens but that I should have a massive allergy attack.

Actually, the attack started sometime last week.  The winds kicked up and Carol and I on the same days started sneezing like crazy.  I had felt I was fighting it off.  But Tuesday, after learning the blood is flowing correctly to my brain, the allergy attack hit me full force and now I am concerned what with the constant flow of PND (post nasal drip) that the attack will deepen into a horrible cold or possibly even bronchitis.

So while the blood is flowing to my brain, you could not have proved it by me yesterday so complete was my fatigue from the allergy attack.  I don’t know if I can describe how miserable a thing it is to go to bed with a stuffed up nose and runny head and have to wear on top of that whole mess a sleep apnea mask.  Trying to breath through the nose with a cold while wear a sleep apnea mask is like totally frustrating; you could sleep with your mouth open but that would defeat the whole idea of the mask which is to help you keep your mouth closed so your tongue doesn’t flop back in your mouth and cut off your air supply. 

So I tossed and turned and finally to alleviate my agony had to take some of that fearsome Nyquil.  I don’t know what the hell is in that stuff, but it usually knocks me out every time.  So Wednesday and yesterday, passed pretty much in a fog of fatigue, drugged up stupor and excessive snot.  I became very irritable.  I had wanted to rest up a little before tackling the 50 odd research papers about to come in over my email.  Instead, I will be reading through them with rheumy and drippy eyes.

Speaking of which—some of the research papers have come in and I must now turn to them….