Woozy Horndog

hot off the haiku press......

Stalevo horndog

With Woozy lusty lustings

So Rigid yet shakey!

Well, suppose the good news is I ain't dead yet....probably won't be for a good long while.

This stuff does seem to futz a bit with you libido...in a positive way, but not a good enough reason to advocate for the bright side of Parkinson's....

Baby Aspirin, Turkey & the Calendar

Interesting to note how you note the years passing....now I can do it by paying attention to when I run out of a bottle of lo-dose baby aspirin, recommended for cardiac health, just around Thanksgiving each year So, another 365 tiny hazy yellow baby aspirins go by..... maybe I can just do 'em all washed down with some tasty cranberry sauce.
Heading down to San Diego for a short vacation with the family ....looking forward to it, but it brings me back to the time a year ago just before getting a diagnosis. Had my chain yanked but good then....all kinds of tests till they found something: cervical spinal stenosis - narrowing of the spinal column in the neck.
I was euphoric! No 'freakin PD - now all I had to do was get on the list for one of those amazing new neck transplants you see on the science shows and home free! Alas, twas not to be...
Neurosurgeon looked me over- nothing there causative of my symptoms. Instead, I get BOTH prizes....hard hit at the time, even harder due to the window of unfounded optimism.

Mortality sucks, but it does make for compelling drama...

I dunno...gonna try to enjoy each moment as it comes.
Happy Thanksgiving!

My Urines So Bright I've Got to Wear Shades!

My urines so bright

I've got to wear shades!

M-M-M-My Stalevo!s

Hearfelt apologies to Huey Lewis & the News who never in their wildest dreams could think that their little gem of an '80s song would turn up in the 21st 'freakin century as a witty jingle for Parkinson's medication. It they ain't dead this'll kill'em!

This stuff does f**** with your metabolism, no doubt. Anything that turns your pee glow-in-the-dark highlighter yellow and crosses the blood-brain barrier is highly suspect in my book!

With baby boomers now entering the Geezer years we are already seeing a statistical bump in new P>D> cases -only a matter of time till marketers seize the opportunity to 'service' this new consumptive and drug-hungry market niche.

Stalevos biggest competitor is Sinemet. Which sounds better to you?

I'd pick Sinemet! Sounds like a breath freshener...

mmmmmmmm, cinnomeni!

!.. or maybe a pharmacological add on to your favorite Starbucks drink (mmmm-maybe I'll have a
lowfat double Sinemaccino). Now that's good branding!

Stalevo, well geez, thats another story....damn fine drug, IMHO, but needs a marketing makeover. Sounds like it would make your 'shit stanky(!)....which it don't or turns your pee glow-in-the dark yellow, or, in some cases orange (which it do!) is a percieved negative in need of being creatively reframed, re-envisioned as an asset.

'M-M-M-my Stalevo! Its your personal, portable liquid highlighter!

or new STALEVO SUNSET with Orange Affluent!

I dunno....not quite there yet but its a start....

Blue Velvet & Ecstacy

'Gots to ask the question:
was I complicit in the premature frying of my own brain?
I sure hope not, but 'gots to wonder....

A recent study in Science magazine examined the intriguing possibility of a linkage between Young Onset PD and Ecstacy/MDMA usage - it was, however, thoroughly discredited once it became know the the unfortunate club monkees used in the study were injected with high doses of the wrong drug....
So the study in no way proves anything - but, conversely, does not disprove the nagging possibility of a causal link (see link for info on the now discredited study

http://www.mdma.net/toxicity/ricaurte.html

http://www.mdma.net/toxicity/retract.html

But back to the story. So, these days I live a clean and healthy lifestyle here in sunny California,
eat organic mostly, and no drug use for many years (not including of course the Azilect, ReQuip,baby Aspirin, Crestor, Co-Q10 and Neotine Creatine). I wasn't always so disciplined - back in my wild and frisky days as a New York musician I used a considerable amount of ecstacy over a ~ 3 year period while making the rounds of the downtown club scene. Did I inadvertently fry my own brain? I 'dunno...don't really have a 'freakin clue. So, just how did a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx get there? Easy.....

Working on a recording project with Steve A. and Kevin Z. (names changed to protect the guilty-as-hell) ,' headed out after the session to a place Kevin knew of, the MUDD club during its heyday, 1982 or thereabouts. Kevin had a few extra hits of something sent to him from a lab on the west coast....Ecstacy, the real deal, long before most anyone anywhere had heard of it. Always one for an adventure, washed it down with a Heinekin swig and away we go.

Nothing. Nope. Nothing.... Nothing....... Nothing...... and then

(20 minutes later) I turn into a complete, and surprisingly effective, dancing fool. You have to understand that I don't dance....playing music while others dance, yes, been there and done that, but I had rarely ventured onto any dance floor unless the occasional mandatory hokey-pokey at your cousins wedding sort of thing counts. But this, this was different.....

Before long I was holding it down with one, two, even three very hot, sultry and very naughty downtown hoochie-mamas - at least two of which were definately real women / as for the third, looked maybe like Ann Coulter with a hint of a 5 oclock shadow....but thats another story. Steve and Kevin stared in disbelief.....I had found a niche, a groove, a rhthmic place in the universe where I was completely at one......

Wasn't long till I bugged Kevin to hook me up with his connection - and for a year or two I was a regular at the MUDD, an irregular at local afterhours (open at 4am) and even the after-after hours ( recall seing sunlight at someplace aptly called 'The Nursery"). Supported this new habit by selling off the 40 or so crushed blue velvet tuxedo jackets with oversize black lapels my pal Jeff sold me cheap....insisted that they fell off the back of some truck, and who the hell was I to question his integrity?

So there I was, a snapshot in time, dark figure in blue velvet dancing provocatively into daylight with anonymous skanks from a lost era.

And, here I am, approaching fifty with the heebie jeebies, dancing with myself.......

All I know is that if/when this shit gets REALLY bad I think I'll pull off the patch, stop the stalevo, dust off my old blue velvet tux sit back and enjoy the sunset with a few ecstasy hits washed down by a cold frosty beer ....

If you live your life well, I hear everything looks better at closing time....

Fatal Triangulation...

Live in the moment....some are more difficult than others. Case in point:

Regular visit to movement disorder clinic last week...disturbing wait, today. In the center of the waiting area was a man writhing in a wheelchair, breathing hard breath with great labor, his mouth an open cavity with lips pulled back over a tootless rim. On another side with a Persian man in his sixties, also in a wheelchair, but otherwise relaxed, accompanied by his wife and a daughter of twenty or so. And there was I....
For one moment there was a connection between all three...I looked at him, looking at me, looking at him....each, as if for a moment acknowledging a silent but implicit linkage. This is not your Disney's "Circle of Life".... hakuna 'f****** matata, indeed!

As for the deathly ill, man - he was seemingly all on his own, in terrible and loud distress, even in a hospital with various medical folk walking by. Everybody seemed to assume, even I for a while, that SOMEBODY was looking out for him. No one was - I finally went to the desk to tell the receptionist...just as I did he fell rigid from his chair to the floor, drooling. Several onlookers, including myself, rushed to set him upright - his body was heavy, tense, petrified, ready for rigor mortis. While you never really know where you're heading, looking at this as a possible end trajectory for your own journey was truly disturbing.

As a young child, I remember many times closing my eyes and pressing just so to see an internal mosaic within, and imagine meeting my future self walking the other way as I returned from school heading north on Crotona Avenue in the Bronx. Invariable, my older self was a handsome, smiling and accomplished business-sort-of-guy who would smile, give me a big 'thumbs up!" and head along his way to whatever sort of hip important stuff it was I do in the future now past.

Now its more like the Matt Groening cartoon I can't find....visiting self from the future pops in, diseased, ill and broken, says to his younger self, he sez....'son, I'm you from your future.....and I've got bad news!" Maybe from this point on I just commune with my younger self.....