Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Loneliness. Another one of those human conditions that at some point in life requires a psychological procedure known as "A Complete Personality Change." Fortunately for me I had mine done before I got lonesome. My friend Mike taught me in college to practice procedures that might be necessary should one become disabled sometime during life, but before the disability afflicts oneself. I won't get into details as I believe there are disabled people out there who might take Mike's sense of reality as an insult to the disability they have to contend with now. I can only say to them; maybe you should have practiced some skill sets you need now a long time ago and you'd be better able to be disabled. I'm not mocking here. I'm one to assist the disadvantaged when it seems appropriate or I'm asked. I know something about 'horseshit luck' so I'm again, not one to bring up this because my personality change resulted in me being a shithead. It did, but that's beside the point, right beside it, in fact. For example, when I cross streets here in my town, I always wait for some little kid to come along and help me across. Another case in point I wrote about in previous blogs. I don't shovel snow anymore due to my Minnesotaiasis. This disability causes one to get irritating pains in the back of the neck and running down along the trapezoid muscles and causing a type of irritation I usually vocalize as, "Damn that sonofabitch is back". So, I'm writing today about the disability or disadvantage I call "loneliness" and as Tess, you know, my dog, can tell you, on some days it's better to roam far out and not come in when commanded with the suffix used after, "Come, Tess, Come" aka, "You sonofabitch, Come". Here's how I believe the personality change has benefited me.
First, when did I have the procedure? I believe it was within about 7 minutes of having a robotic prostatectomy. How many of you have had a "robot" in your abdomen with four remote controlled alloy appendages and equipped with tiny stainless steel tools designed to snip, and tuck, sometimes suck, remove and stitch? Okay, that's a reasonable response. Well, for those of you who haven't enjoyed your own personal inter-abdominal robot, fear not. You'll hardly know he's been in there, kinda, if you have an anesthesiologist who is worth her salt. "Drugs help keep the robot seemingly away", is the mantra of my surgical experience not just in the Air Force as a surgical techy, but also having been on the rubber conducting surgery table a couple of times and being completely drugged out of my obituary column. After the surgeon, who operates on you from the other side of the room inside his own personal plastic bubble video studio, removes the robotic appendages via his "joystick" (Do you see how the jargon of the video era is coming back to haunt us?) the personality is replaced simultaneously. The assisting surgeon then applies about three stitches to each of the lacerations that were needed to get the 'robotic arms' into one's gut. So, when all is said and done and you've had a day or two to get unhappily undrugged, you look to your gut and you have four little bandages covering four (sometimes three) scalpel divots where the robot inserted his "tools" to remove your personality or that and your prostate, in my case.
Now, it takes a day to recover from robotic surgery. Yes, you heard me, a day. Wonderful, right? Right! Had I bent over the table and had a rear end entry prostate removal by a surgeon with hands that helped him win All American honors for Stanford's NCAA tournament winning basketball team, I'd be in the hospital a bit longer, maybe six or seven years. This second method is like having a 17 lb. baby vaginally delivered if you mothers out there get my idea here. Yes. By all means men, when cancer starts making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of your prostate it's time to call for "The Robot" s'il vous plait. Now, back to the overt changes noticed post "men-o-paused" surgery. I'm putting on my clothes to leave the hospital room when I notice the flowers on the window sill. How beautiful, how anther-obvious, how wonderfully lavender. Huh, one says to himself. Never noticed that before as the process of hoisting on one's pants begins with some abdominal anguish. Yes. The robot still had to do some splitting of the abdominal wall and like any good hernia surgery there is that sensation that you are about to buckle over and puke for hope of relieving some of the pressure of that butcher knife the robot left sticking in about six inches below your navel. A call for more drugs is okay at this point, you've earned it. Finally, though, the nurse gets bitchy and hustles one through the dressing process. Your ride home caregiver is pacing not knowing what to expect as the day moves toward night and the pain moves toward druglessness....
Eventually you are on your way home and you are practicing your new personality on your wife or boyfriend if you've already changed brands because the prostate is one of your testosterone producing buddies. Looking out the window and trying not to laugh lest the knife in your lower abdomen begins to rotate, you notice all the birds are flitting about, the automobiles and semis are racing about frantically, the sun is 286,000 miles per second closer to the earth than you've ever noticed before and your goddamn sunglasses are in the other car. No problem. You have a new personality. You'll just close your eyes and try not to puke because your driver is swerving all over the lane and you can't do a damn thing about it belted into your disabled corner of the car. You begin to daydream about what you just had done and hoping that before long you'll have a real "BM" and not have to live with a catheter up the wizzoo for the rest of your life. Ahhh, the new personality kicks in and the little guy that now lives on your shoulder (the one without the horns) whispers in your left ear, "No sweat, lots of folks learn to live with a catheter". So, your new personality is already teaching you tolerance for your first symptom of your new closet full of disabilities. You lean toward your driver with a smerk on your face and say, "This catheter will be great in the boat, don't you think?" She smiles and swerves back into her lane only crossing the double yellow line once and not engaging any police sirens in response to the near head-on collision with a Collin's Furniture Van.
Finally at home. All the comforts are there again. The catheter is now irritating the delicate lining of your urethra and the bag is full of reddish yellow matter you don't even want to claim ownership of and you decide to practice emptying the bag in the bathroom that now after five years of using it carefree as a dog on the lawn, you notice is too small to perform bag emptying duties. You can hardly turn around in it in fact and you yell to your caregiver, "Has this bathroom always been this small". "Of course Mr. Crete. Remember you wanted a small farmhouse so there would be little need to be cleaning house with all the other farm chores that are so much more fun than cleaning a large bathroom." "Yeah, forgot about that." A few days go by adjusting to the inconveniences of everything that was once conveniently taken for granted and you begin to get feeling quite well and sort of back in the groove. The next round of personality changes kick in.
Horniness. Not a chance down there. But, your new personality isn't located down there anymore. We had a significant portion of that robotically removed, remember(prostate, testosterone, blood supply, etc., etc.,) But, your new psyche is starting to fire on all cylinders and your personal caregiver is looking mighty fine and the checkout girl at the grocery is lovelier than ever, the clouds above are forming little circles in all their glory and all the commercials on TV are now announced by high school girls in full bloom. Your new personality can't tell ages of women anymore, just secondary sex characteristics are proportionately obscene, yet winking at you. Of course your "urologist" has given you excersises to reinvent your manliness and you've been diligently practicing them ever since your new personality has begun to inform you that you should not think of yourself as a "unick", but as an infertile, hormone reduced anomaly in a world set anew on a course of sexuality never before known in any global culture. You are living in the first global culture of sexuality. After a visit with the "urologist" (I'm beginning to want to punch him for not telling me everything, but making me read about certain personality changes that would or could occur 99 times out of 100 in prostate excavated males aged 65 or older, you think he should be called a "unickologist", not to coin a psychologically damaging phrase.
Fine. My new personality realizes that life as a man as I once knew it has changed. "They have pills for that, you know". So you ask your "prickologist" for a case of them in doses appropriate to match the statements made in the commercials you now noticed come on World News, NBC News, CBS News and The News Hour every night at precisely 10 minutes before the hour AND so you can't escape the joy of knowing "your are a man that gets things done" and other such catch phrases. But, as I was saying you realize you are on this new journey, your urologist will go away eventually, your caregiver will jump ship, your catheter will age and be tossed and your pills will save your life if you ever again need such elevating experiences. Your new personality carries you out into the void of your new world and you feel free at last, "Lord, I am free at last" as the saying goes and you actually do experience a sense of freedom when your life has completely changed and your personality is totally not your old self and you still have all your mental agility to carry you forward into a "NEW LIFE". So, off you go--after you sell all that old stuff that seems to weigh down your new lightness of being.
One day, lets say, yesterday, your new personality leans over into your least tinnitus affected earhole and says, "You're lonely." Christ. You almost swallow your gum. You turn around 180 degrees looking for someone or something to be standing there ready to explain "loneliness" to you and there is no one there. "No inside, dummy!" your new personality says over the dinging din of your tinnitus. Inside?, you say to yourself. "I thought I had all that cut out by a robot", you say out loud to no one. So, you go deep within yourself for about 60 days seeking this new personality trait called "loneliness" and you kind of believe you're starting to feel it. First, though you wonder, is it something you feel in your guts or chest, or does it stink or taste; this loneliness?. About five months later you start getting the feeling that your dog Tess is providing great opportunities to get off your ass and go for walks everyday, sometimes twice a day, but she is not exactly the cribbage player you'd hoped for. And you also realize you have not slept for 11 months, in fact you have not slept well enough since your mother blew you out into the atmosphere on your 'birthday'. You're new personality has no idea how to respond to this because it lacks any sense of the feelings that come with a good game of cribbage or a seven or eight hour nights sleep or for that matter what a poor replacement a body pillow is for your personal caregiver now fast asleep in eternity or maybe in some cases hustling men who have not had a personality change like the one we're talking about in this missive.
There's always the "Internet", right. So, going there and reading about "loneliness" brings up about 1,124, 841 pages of scantily clad illegal women you hope are older than 18 so you and your new personality don't have to go to prison just yet. That's not what you're looking for anyway. The Internet fails miserable except for those sites that advertise what harmony there is in buying a page of advertising on their site and providing all the information you want to publish to the universe about yourself to attract "unloneliness". You have no idea what the chances are of getting a reasonably likable person via this route of un-loneliness seeking for a fee other than recommendations from your best friends who got lucky going this route. You take Tess for another walk. Walk number seven that day I believe it was.
So, there seems to be no choice. You decide to do up a bio of yourself and post it on all the telephone poles in your town like people do looking for lost pets or kids or odd socks missing after the last washday. Hey, why not? Well, maybe because you have no data whether those pets, etc., ever got found. You only know the signs get unstapled or torn down and sometimes new sets are put up every so often as if the last set really did work. It's about as lucky as playing for companionship via a game of marbles as previously discussed in the last blog I hope you didn't have to read. So here goes. Let's get a poster ready to go and I'll get them up until May when I take off for the wild blue yonder in search of what Steinbeck and Charlie found in 1960, a notebook full of anecdotes. Problem is now in 2014 times are only worse than 1960 because we're still in a "growth economy mindset" and we know it can't work, but like a guy without a prostate, you have to believe there are more ways to meet a cougar than trying to build an economy on the catch phrase; "How much is enough". Which, bye the bye is not a bad way for a 65 year old to look at a future companionship given a good roll of the dice.
Here goes, then. I'll get a picture for the telephone pole ad before I print this out and take Tess around town sniffing every pole whilst I staple up my bio:
Single, no Widowed, young 65 year old somewhat disabled male
Seeks companionship with a attractive 40++ year old unmarried female.
Personality has been changed to protect the innocent.
Owns dog who demands most of the bed, begs at all meals and
Has to be walked two or three times a day to relieve chronic anxiety.
Dog does not need a personality change, she loves everyone and has to go
Everywhere no matter what, when, where or how you try to leave her behind
For five minutes of your own personal peace and quite.
Lonely person pictured on this post (add picture here of course)
Is not bat-shit crazy as sometimes referred to by the millennial generation.
This seeker is not seeking an immediate commitment on either side
Of a monogamist friendship, yet will go with whatever the hell is in the cards.
Will do dishes, laundry and pick up dog turds, etc.
Hand holding or other seemingly harmless body contact relieves loneliness.
There should be no expectations of missionary erotica, much encouragement
In alternative means of "having sex" may be relevant and discussed quickly
If prospective "female"partner is in a hurry for a frustration abatement episode.
Likes, movies, reading, cribbage and walking or trekking.
Person is reliably psychotic and probably safe to take out in public.
New personality is in place having been installed post robotic surgery.
Person is mechanically functional kinda.
Training to basic commands has been completed.
A certainty exists that dependency will be apparent once taken home.
Eats "paleo" foods and occasionally sneaks snacks violating all dogma.
This guy is a keeper. Has monthly paycheck and loves shopping for food.
If you tear this post down, it will be replaced. I'm serious, ain't you?
Well, that should about do it, don't you think? I'll save the rest of the good news for that first coffee klatch should anyone call the number posted under the picture of Sean Connery.
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