Dumpster Satori

Power sander hums

Perplexing flies in dumpster

“Hey… what’s this buzz?”

Well, after the final indignation with my sweetie of having a valet from a fancy restaurant outright refuse to park my monkeyshit brown Mitsubishi on purely aesthetic grounds, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands – literally – and, armed only with a small power sander, a bit of moxie and elbow grease, head out into the ally behind our l.A. townhome with a facemask, sanding pads and a little A.M. radio tuned to the local Cumbia station. This is what Labor day is all about, I think to myself as I settle into the rhythmic grind of stripping the defective withering clearcoat.

Though I’ve lived here for almost a decade, till today my relation with the ally has been only a transient, passing thing – pass through to drop off a big bag of poo and diapers from the little ones, an occasional quick stroll to the main street to save a few steps….this and nothing more.

Yet, spend a full day in the ally and it reveals a life of its own, patterns repeating yet always theme and variations. Bottle People living on a recycled economy, the occasional cholo wandering through his turf, wondering, ‘so, is this all there is?’ Unlike when passing through as a homeowner, where eye contact is rarely made here, a quick look, an acknowledging glance

Indicating either peaceful coexistence or mutually assured destruction

(‘hey—you fuck with me and I’ll kill you’ and

“hey-you fuck with ME and I’ll kill YOU! Ok good…we’re friends!!!) –

imagine, a working microcosm of cold war US/Soviet relations just outside your doorstep.

Most surprising, though, was my interaction with the natural world. The prolonged low buzzing drone of the power sander was enough to draw many curious onlookers, the type with compound eyes – flies, disturbed from their reveries and bacchanalian refuse orgies, disturbed and – I know, I flatter myself – just maybe attracted by the powerful manly drone of my black and decker ‘MiniMouse’ sander – flies come by to check me out and do the hang where the action is. Not to be outdone, a mammoth bumble bee or two join. Everyone is having a blast as I cut deeper into the evaporating color of the Mitsubishi only to find that -- hey, waddyaknow -- the base metal you would expect to see at the end of the road was only masonite with a thin veneer of aluminum foil…..now I know why it was cheaper than the camry!

So, its now quite a scene, the sander sings sweetly while the flies and bumblebees sway gently to the distorted Cumbias and Cha-Cha-Chas blaring from my radio. All good until LAPD show up, no doubt summoned by some pesky neighbor no doubt wondering why an unlicenced Auto repainting shop was operating within earshot.

And so the day ends, an order to appear in court to answer charges of illegal operation of an environmentally impacting business and disturbing the piece my only souvenier - and, just before I sink into the enuie of legal worries to add to the myriad of others that have found me in my 5oth year a trio of dumpster flies, having followed my back from the ally no doubt, zip by me, back and again in perfect time to the last cumbia of the day still blaring from the radio.

Go figure......

What 500 Channel Cable can Teach Us 'bout PD

Thanks to 500 channel cable I recently caught a few late night 'Kojak' episodes - 'still have more hair than that grizzled SOB but I actually used to drive the same Kojak car - a monkey-shit brown Buick Century V8 around the Bronx back in the early '80s.

So, they get a bad guy, but they ain't got the evidence and next thing you know they've got him hanging out a 12th story window held only by the greasy hands of a coupla'thugs - you know how these shows go - and either they drop him (rarely) or pull the broken and repentant bastard
back in and get whatever info they came for...then they wack him ......

At first, the diagnosis of PD is - if you'll permit a wide metaphor - much like being thrust out a window held only by an ankle - your entire perception, your innerscript of how your life would play out is scrambled and spinning -- but then

then...its different.

No one pulls you back in. No one drops you. Nothing happens....yet you're still looking decidedly at the pavement as if the goons who got you into this decided to go for lunch and cuffed your inverted feet to a pipe - and then forgot to ever return after 3 boilermakers too many....

I can accept complete change
I can deal with a brush with peril.
I don't know how to deal with this 'dangling'......and this is the crux of the existential challenge by the longterm progressive degenerative reality of P.D.

Part of me secretly envys the quick exit enjoyed by some. Take Omar, from the 'Wire' shot in the back of the head by young thug...never saw it coming...
As in all things, the anticipation of the thing itself is the most difficult to bear - all of us come and go....'suppose we all get a different view of the process depending upon our karmic need, tikkun, luck of the draw?
....go figure.... :)

Flushmeister 2000

Went to see an orthopedist today, the goodly Dr. G...spousal unit was hoping he'd write a 'script for Vicodin...me, only trying to get some relief from an increasingly problematic left shoulder. So, off I go, gimpy arm and all....
After a half hour wait in the examining room deftly completing a crossword in he comes...quick discussion of my orthopedic woes...and then to my utter surprise,

"So, have you given much thought to intellegent toilets? They've really come a long way, technology and all"

say whut?

"You know, the day may come when reaching back to wipe...'not gonna happen. Never too soon to prepare the plumbing...."

say whut?

"Yup....down the road without one of these babies your only hope is to go for the shower..."

say whut?

"Here, look this over" as he hands me a glossy tri-fold brochure on the Flushmeister 2000, with a rent-to-fucking-own option.....and off he lumbers to get the big needle....

Now, I got some problems here, yes. I'm not in 'freaking denial, but I do believe that living as fully in the moment is what's called for to cope...and in THIS moment I am, thankfully, fully capable of wiping my own behind, thank-you.

Seeing my reaction, the good Dr. takes a different tone, and says "look, I'm only trying to get out information that you might find useful, if not today, well, maybe next Thursday"....
"Patients don't always like to hear the truth. Like last week....I got a 500pound whale of man in here 'needs an MRI....but he'll never fit in the machene...so I write him a special admission to the LA Zoo Large Animal Medical Unit....now, no one likes to hear this stuff but....well look me up if you ever need more info on the options"

Which one, the auto-asswipe or large animal MRIs? Sheesh...

So, to cut to the chase...I get a cortisone shot the size of a yardstick in the back of my left shoulder....a new script for physical therapy....and a glossy trifold brochure on the wondrous Flushmeister 2000, with a rent-to-'fucking own option....

And, failure of a spousal unit that I am, 'failed to get a 'script for Vicodin.....
there's still hope...next week I go to the perio-freakin-dontist.....

say 'ahhhhh!
ModemDavid

Up the Down Staircase

Watching a child grow is like watching a flower ever-so-slowly unfurl and grow - and I'm blessed and fortunate to see this process in the growth of my two daughters, a toddler and part-time terrorist and a first grader. As an adult, and as a parent, you watch your kids knowing that much as they love you they cannot possibly know you in a pers0n-to-person way at this stage.....whatever they see you as is to irrevocably clouded by your role as parent, and especially with those of us who put off parenting till we 'found ourselves' -whatever that now means - with 40 or more years difference in age, the temporal distance is very real and extensive - room for a whole 'nuther generation in that gap.
So, its later in life for me to watch the early life of my girls unfold - I'm reminded of the old wooden escalators at Macy's 34th street, which provided endeless hours of cheap thrills and near-death-experiences when we were kids, trying to evade holiday shoppers and store security for the thrill of running up the down escalator.... or just watching the people move up as you are automatically moved down the down side....
On the down side is where I is....not to be morose, but this is chronic, decline sort of stuff -
and as I watch my kids move smiling up the up side I cannot but wish that I could somehow
make it stop....to meet them at the middle, and just stay there, here, with all their grace, beauty,
potential ...(just not the whining...:) and enough of my facilities to be here fully, to have that longed for time when you are young enough and your kids are old enough to really fully encounter each other as fully human beings, not just as a parent or a child.

Still, mercessly, efficiently the escalator moves and snatches me from my reverie....kids moving up, I'm on my way on my way. The words of Frank Zappa, that iconoclast from the last century, come to mind though, a quote from his Studio Tan album, subtitled "The Adventures of Gregory Peccory".........where he brilliantly defines chronologic time as

"eternity and fractional divisions thereof"

What is a fraction of the eternal? Equally eternal, no? So, maybe there's hope - that in that one moment, that fractional division of eternity, where I meet my children, my wife, and all who I encounter on the metaphorical escalators, that in that moment, secreted, are all moments, timeless, wholly, present, now.....

go figure....:)

Parkinsons Patients: A Logical Choice for the Advant Garde in Virtual Reality!

So, where are you? I mean it….literally. Just where does your consciousness reside? To what dimensions does it expand itself, and to how small of a non material ball can it become? Like a hermit crab, can it move into any vessel that comes its way?

I’ve been pondering these questions more of late, as I’ve noted with growing concern the gradual seepage of PD symptoms into, what till now, has been the safe harbor of my right side….so long as I could do the hang over there, I’ve been able to compensate fairly well for the interminable tremor and rigidity which Increasingly characterizes my left hand, arm and now leg.

I’m starting feel like I’m being leveraged the ‘hell out of here….here being the body I’ve generally regarded as something ‘I’ fully own. Not the case, as is increasingly more obvious, and clearly a new tenant has taken up occupancy and shows the same singlemindness of purpose that drove our forefathers across the plains in fulfillment of their vision of manifest destiny.

So, I think and I ask: if not here, where do ‘I’ go? And where have ‘I’ gone before…and I think, first about driving.

My dad’s classic ’68 Plymouth Belvedere that I learned to drive…and how difficult it all was to manage up until that magic point where ‘I’ became one with the car….my consciousness expanded to reach to the rusty bumper and back to the tailpipe hung with a hanger which in a previous incarnation held a newly dry-cleaned tweed coat with a cigarette burn on the lapel. That’s when you can drive – when your essential awareness of whatever your driving expands to the full contour of what you’re piloting. Till then – better have some good insurance and a hard head – I remember a few good run-ins with the immovable train trestles of the uptown number 6 train on Westchester Avenue, indeed I do.

Over the years my driving consciousness has contoured itself to operate other memorable vehicles, including a 1973 monkey-shit brown Buick Century (yes, the ‘Kojak’ car), a Chevy Nova, my old favorite ’86 Celica and my current family man sedan, a 2001 Mitsubishi Galant with a skin condition….don’t get me started ‘bout the Mitsubishi. To move on….

I’ve had some fascinating recent experiences futzing around with 3D virtual reality community….second life…...and the beginnings of the strange realization that, yes, it is possible to conceive of – and, even now to actually experience – the beginnings of the porting of your consciousness into an online avatar – and just as the compentent driver is ‘aware’ of his car body, so to does the online avatar become the fringe, and as technology improves no doubt, the focus of consciousness.

So, in recent weeks I’ve experimented with letting my consciousness seep (…hmm…sounds messy) into a variety of avitars including bodies of a winged animal, a Blue Tuxeoed Elvis, a provocatively attired female avatar, and George Bush’s worst fear – a human animal hybrid! What these characters seem to do best, thanks to some amazingly clever programming efforts – is

Dance, dance, dance, with ease and grace and, at times, depraved abandon.

You try that with PD sometimes…..

I remember some time back, maybe around 2000, trying an early 2D chat program and, after a brief interest ( ~ 10 minutes) found the paucity of movement so completely inferior to ‘real’ reality that it held no lasting interest.

But now, two trajectories seem to have crossed – the technology has gotten to a point where it has impact and the movement through the 3D terrain and interaction with ‘others’ has the beginning of depth.

Any my ‘technology’ – i.e my failing wetware which increasingly has difficulty in processing signals in the necessary ways to allow for ease of moment – is on a decline. So as these two trajectories cross the prospect of critical mass – ie. Where an improved virtual reality becomes more enjoyable and compelling than the real thing – a tipping point appears, where, if not just yet, soon we could all be living in a radically transformed reality, with the most disabled here the most ardent adventurers there. Dancing, dreaming, and moving with ease……when this stuff is fully merged with the new field of teledildonics, all bets are off....

Ray Kurzweil, a major figure in modern computer science ( voice recognition software, music synthesis, and futurist extraordinaire) in his provocative “The Age of Spiritual Mmachines' posits that soon…sooner than most think,we will bear witness to the full porting of human consciousness into software.It’s a fascinating premise which, the more I experience the things I’m experiencing, start to seem plausible, possible inevitable.

So, what does the future hold? Stem cell cure? Or maybe a relatively painless decline, drooling and shaking on the outside, while inside, deep with dancing …dancing…dancing with myself…

so till then or something better in day to day reality, on with my virtual blue tuxedo jacket and back to the dance, already in progress…….

Blue Elvis :)

….

.

…

The Patience of Parkinson's.....scary!

Chronic, progressive,

As water saps strength from stone

Cliff breaks as I tremble

I like my politics progressive, thank-you - not my ailments if’n I had my druthers.

But my druthers are handled by others, largely at least in regard to PD..….and this time around I’ve taken on a partner who’s calmly steering the ship to a rocky shore . One of the things you can learn by experiencing the slow creep of Parkinson’s is the power of patience and persistence – at least from the disease process itself. It's in no rush, hakuna matata, and while you don’t have all the time in the world, it does. So things change, slowly, subtly and seriously…

Still doing better than not in all regards, but I note some disturbing new symptoms – occasional involvement of my right arm, till recently not at all involved and – equally if not more troubling, some difficulty swallowing. Swallowing is not the type of thing you think about very much, till it becomes less than fully automatic. And, believe me, you start thinking a lot then. So, tell me, how do you swallow?

Peristalsis….(add short segment here)

So, while the disease won’t officially off you itself, it sets up a myriad of ways to deliver your
demise (we deliver!)….falling without reflexes to recover is a popular one, choking growing out of swallowing difficulties, also a perennial, or complications from pneumonias becoming more common with progression of disease all among the top ten ways to check out growing out of this withering away of motor control we call Parkinson’s.

As the process commands and deserves great respect for its patience and persistence, so too must I gird myself to be strong enough not to yield my center, my power to resist that which I might and accept unavoidable changes as they occur, the strength to open a tremorous hand and release with the appreciation for having had them the powers the precious capabilities that collectively form the dowry of health which the more fortunate among us bring to each earthly incarnation.

On Spaghetti and Billiards and Conducting....

'Trying to make 'zee love without 'zee woody,
is like shooting pool with wet spaghetti"
Pepe LaPieu

Fear not, gently reader, for Modem's Woody is strong (read my 'Stalevo Horndog' entry) - why I'm hornier than a two-peckered billygoat roaming free in the cialis-patch, truth be told!. Yet the quote from the grand Warner philosopher has new meaning to me as I wrestle with the existential 'is-ness" of what these changes in control of basic bodily movement translate to in day to day experience. These days, I am hyper aware of how having the Heebie Jeebies (i.e., the disease formerly known as Parkinsons) challenges me in playing and conducting music. As for conducting:

Conducting, in its essence, is all about communication of intention through gesture. Movement disorders, Parkinson's for example, strike at the medium between the two - and as they challenge your ability to control the nuance of your own gesture, so to do they impact your ability to shape and mold the fine gesture and subtlety of movement of the 5 or 20 or 40 musicians in front of you. As a frequent keyboardist/conductor for musical theater, it's been truly dismaying to witness the loss of specific skills once taken for granted - i.e., playing the keyboard with the right hand while conducting with the left - grow undependable, risky and
atrophied. Any yet, you struggle, you find ways to compensate -

some truly amazing histories come to mind in this regard, foremost among them Django Reinhard, Hot Jazz Gypsy Guitarist who made his mark with only three grotesquely fused digits on his left hand, the result of a high-intensity cellophane fire that left him maimed. And, in a wider perspective, we're all on our way out once we've made our way in, so heebie jeebies or not, it all comes back to making the most of what you've got while you've got it.
.......carpe 'freaking diem!

How do we do what we do, while we can do it?

From conception to intention without a hiccup...until the hicupping begins...
'Stitch got a glitch' sort of thing, only its happening to you, you and not some marginally
cute animated disney-'freakin space alien....and that makes it mighty personal!

So how does the quarterback throw the flawless spiral, the dancer the impossibly precise kinetic gesture, or the master musician one focused note so emotionally charged that someone back in the nosebleed seats is propelled into a profound emotional catharsis, a node struck on their string of inner experience, as a doctor would tap your knee in a neurologic exam, only this time with a sonic hammer weilded by a muted trumpet played by a dying jazzman?

There's so much we take for granted... being able to balance, to extend a steady arm, to swallow.
It's been a little disturbing to experience challenge to each of these formerly taken-for-granted
abilities of late - and as a keyboard musician and conductor of a reasonably solid high school jazz ensemble and orchestra I cannot deny that ability to acurately control gesture has begun to impact how I work....."mr. stictch got a glitch.....daaaaaaang!" (said in the vernacular of a contemporary high school terrorist)

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....

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....

Shots over the bow / first symptoms...

quivering pinky

fresh-caught fish spasms and gasps

PDs cold first kiss . . .

Just when does something - a process - actually begin? When you eat an apple at what point does apple stop being apple and start being you? And when a chronic disease process eats you when do you stop being you and start becoming a manifestation of the process?

Texts on PD state that by the time any symptoms become noticable a huge portion - ~ 80% or thereabouts, of the dopamine producing cells in the substancia nigra portion of the brain have packed their bags and checked out - so in clinical terms, this disease process is a real futher-mucker for most.

My first clue that something was rotten in my inner Denmark was a very tentative, almost shy pinky tremor on the left hand. As a keyboard musician I probably took note of this earlier than most, hyper aware of sensation and feedback from the perspective of a musicians hand. Thought not-too-much of it for a while....

After a few months it became more regularly present, usually only when at the keyboard. Made mention of it at a regular physical - couldn't produce the tremor on demand and, at that initial point, we both dismissed it as nothing of concern. But next day, there was my little friend, back in the pinky happily waving and dancing in the wind..... the battle was on

On Diagnosis & PD

s t a r k d i a g n o s i s :(

"in 10 years you'll be hit by a truck"

have a nice day ! :)

Keeping it all in perspective is important, no doubt. I enjoyed at least 45 years of excellent health - you don't have to look far to see small children wrestle with serious disease or injury, young veterans of unnecessary wars broken, shattered or dead leaving families in the wake - so the element of tragedy is relative. Still, as enlightened as we like to pretend to be most of us still spend most of the time living as if we're the center of the universe. So, no matter what, you still feel it as a mule-kick to the gut to be diagnosed with a chronic and progressing disease process .... slow brain-death, while you still have lots of big plans for your grey matter is not for the faint-hearted.

Biggest difficulty with something like in PD dx is its nasty and insistent trajectory - have a stroke, and the doc is likely to consider you at your lowest point and work with you to regain functionality. With PD, essentially, you're at your best now and on your way towards inevitable loss of function, motor control and then some.....while it doesn't officially kill you, it sets the body up for death. Short of any real breakthrough therapies - and there may be some on the horizon -- at best treatment offers a very dubious and tentative promise to slow progression and alleviate some of the symptoms -- often only to create new and more devastating ones. Hard to get happy after being hit with that :(

So Figuring out how to carve out a a place / mentally / coping not to be completely subsumed by the negative has taken on added importance for me- the present, while more challenging, for me is more good than not - the challenge is to stay in the moment - and not to time-travel to a totally f***** future and bring back a great big heaping slop-bucket of tsurris (yiddish-'troubles) to annoint yourself, friends and family in the present. Not so easy for the non-zen masters amongst us - and even if you manage somehow not to do this, good chance your spouse, helpful doctor or concerned friend will inadvertently find a way to do it for you.

My challenge is to live positively in the present......

I will now invoke the ever-handy transcendental Yiddish

(into the full lotus position.....deep healing breath in and......

'oyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy'