I started rereading On the Road. It’s been a while, and even though I’ve read it a dozen times, I always find myself on vacation or living in a different spot mentioned in the book, and the reread mixes with the firsthand to create something new. I have this old orange-cover paperback edition, the 25th anniversary one, that I bought for $2.49 at that old used bookstore at Third and Jordan, the one with too many books in too small a space and a crazy lady running the place. Anyway, I always swear I bought a new, not-falling-apart edition and then realize I was thinking about Orwell’s 1984. (Although even with the new version, I still read my falling-apart paperback I got at TIS in the summer of 92 for a polysci class that was somewhat mentioned (fictionally, of course) in Summer Rain.

Kerouac was in Denver, of course - that’s how the book starts. And everyone around here is “Kerouac-Kerouac-Kerouac” and/or “Larimer Square-Larimer Square-etc”. Kerouac didn’t live in Larimer Square though, although Neal Cassidy did as a kid, when the place was a wall-to-wall beggar-filled shithole. Now it’s a hip and trendy shopping mall type thing after they bulldozed all of the historic buildings and built martini bars and expensive clothing stores. Still, it’s interesting to hear Kerouac’s descriptions of an old-timey Denver with the same crossroads as the current one. It’s kindof like when I read parts of John Sheppard’s up-and-coming book and dug the stuff about the old Lowry AFB, although it’s all strip malls and condos now.

Speaking of Lowry, I’ve gotta go out there tomorrow to an arthritis clinic. Yes, the foot is still fucked up. On maybe Monday, after my last shot wore away, it was at about the same point as when this all started. So yesterday was the internist and more prednisone for the next 12 days. Today was a podiatrist at the same hospital, and a deeper shot of cortisone into the ankle. Tomorrow is a surprise, because I booked for like mid-July, and they called today and asked if I could come in. So mostly paperwork, prodding, the same stupid questions, but maybe the rheumatologists there have a better idea on a long-term plan for this shit.

Until then, I am so fucking sick of telling this story that I just tell people I’m on crutches because I’m an attention whore. Or because of the dotcom crash. Or global warming. Or George Bush personally came to my apartment and hit me in the ankle with a tire iron. The only problem with that is the person might start talking about dubya and not shut the fuck up. The worst part of this is talking to doctor after doctor after nurse after intern after billing representative about what happened and when I was diagnosed and if I can move it this way and if my great-great-grandparents ate shellfish. Imagine every stupid question you’ve been asked in the last ten years, and then imagine being asked all of them a dozen times a week, and that’s just the forms you have to fill out to see the doctor. I don’t know which one of you got all EFF privacy-fucking-apeshit about health care places implanting an RFID chip in your ass to store all of this, but fuck you very much for stopping that technology. If I had back all of the time I’ve ever spent filling out the same stupid form in doctor’s offices, I’d seriously have another five years of my life back.

Today’s worst moment (other than the giant tentspike needle they put in my ankle joint) was this total bitch of a receptionist who INSISTED I was on an HMO and needed to walk downstairs and get a referral form and then walk backup. I did not have the heart to tell her a) I was in a waiting room full of gimps, all of us with walkers, canes, crutches, wheelchairs, and Rascals. None of us could walk downstairs if a gunman was spraying lead with an AK down the hall. And b) I AM NOT ON AN HMO. THE CARD DID NOT SAY HMO. THE FILE DID NOT SAY HMO. THE PEOPLE AT THE INSURANCE COMPANY DID NOT SAY HMO. LADY, YOU WORK IN A HOSPITAL - GET SOME FUCKING HALDOL IMMEDIATELY.

The good news is that I can mostly walk now. Oh, I couldn’t get any more Vicodin, but maybe that’s a good thing.

Sarah’s uncle was here all week, staying with us. He was taking a class at DU - it’s mostly online, but he came in for this crash course where you’re in lectures from 7am-9pm each day. So we didn’t see a whole lot of him, but he’s a cool guy and we got in a good roadtrip to Colorado Springs for an excellent dinner at the Blue Star, and a day trip out to Idaho Springs, plus a quick spin around the DU campus, which is damn nice. Sarah’s sister Liz and brother-in-law Matthew were also in town yesterday and today, and we’re going to a picnic at Matthew’s. They’re on an Ohio-to-LA car trip for some professorly conference stuff at UCLA, but it’s good to see them for a bit. The only thing that I suddenly realized is that I just about have her family tree down, and I will have to re-memorize various titles, like “Sarah’s sister’s husband” will become “my brother-in-law”. Of course, when I told Sarah last week that she has already become Aunt Sarah because she’s been buying my nephews and niece crap, and she sort of freaked the fuck out over that.

As an aside, I am still not used to the girlfriend => fiancee thing. I mean, I have no problems with being engaged, it’s just when a car dealership or realtor or secretary asks, the first thing that pops out of my mouth is still “girlfriend”. If they ask “married?”, an “almost” sometimes works. Sometimes it’s easier to say wife, and that bothers me less. It’s shorter, doesn’t have the accent, easy to pronounce. Sometimes to fuck with healthcare people, I say partner, and let them wonder if I’m some huge biker dude’s shackjob. We were somewhere, I forget where, and some clerk either said “Mrs. Konrath” or “Sarah Konrath” and we both sort of freaked out. I’m not into the name change thing or the hyphenation. You’re born with a name, you keep it until you die, unless you become a musician or something. It took me long enough to ferret out all of the shit online with my old address, I couldn’t imagine doing it for my name too. Anyway.

Lots of baseball coming up. Sarah got free club seats from work for tomorrow’s game. It’s against the Devil Rays, and provided none of their players shoot their wives or knock up any 17-year-olds in the next 24 hours (which is probably like even money in Vegas sports books) it will be interesting. We also have tickets for the Yankees-Rockies game on Tuesday, although Sarah can’t go because of work. I am reluctant to go dump the spare ticket on StubHub because then I might end up sitting next to some total joker for nine innings. (And no, this one won’t go extra. I’m guessing 24-3.) If you have a good pal that is not a total social leper and needs a seat, I would be willing to work a deal. (Like a hefty discount if they’re willing to not be an annoying fuck and/or take the bat to the head if that happens again.)

So I just got back to seeing the Rockies-Astros game. Rather than try to write this up in any cohesive way, you get a bulleted list:

• Coors Field is really nice. It does remind me a lot of Miller Stadium in Milwaukee, except if you’re sitting right of the plate, you see a giant mountain range on the horizon.
• The stadium is literally one block from my apartment. I cross one street, cross another, walk a block, cross a street, there’s the north entrance.
• I had to gimp in on the cane, but for whatever reason, that meant I did not get searched, while I watched a group of schoolchildren getting wanded.
• Aside from the typical hot dogs and cracker jack, there’s a microbrew attached to a semi-nice restaurant. I went there (because buying a bunch of to-go carryable food and a gallon of Coke in a giant bucket is a lot less fun when you have to carry it all in one hand) and I got a spicy buffalo and cheddar bratwurst. It wasn’t bad.
• My seats: extend the line from third to home in that direction, and I was 15 rows up from the wall. If you’re sitting down, the dugout is immediately to your right (I mean right across the aisle immediately) and half of your field of vision (to the left) is the net, but everything to the right is a really good view of the field.
• Walking down all of the steps to my seat was absolute murder. I knew two things: I could not under any circumstances go to the bathroom, and I would most likely be killed when trying to get out if I stayed the entire nine innings.
• Over half of the attendees were either geriatric or pediatric.
• I left the house and it was 60, so I wore a jacket. When I got to my seat, it was very hot and sunny, so I dropped the jacket and cursed the fact that I would be getting horribly sunburned. Seven minutes later, a cloud rolled in, it looked moments from a t-storm, and it was 60. Repeat this 297 more times.
• The game starts. I am amazed at how young NL players look. When I was a kid, the Astros looked like giants. Now they look like scrawny punks you’d see loitering outside of a 7-Eleven.
• They seem to change the ball out an insane number of times. I read somewhere it’s because of the humidity. They keep the fresh balls in a humidor.
• One of the first Colorado hits is a massive home run. Based on what John Sheppard has told me, I assume there will be about 28 more home runs this game, due to the altitude.
• …Well, except there is a freakish windstorm, and there are bursts of 20-25 mph winds going right at home plate. Hank Aaron could hit a full-on slam to the back wall and have it end up behind the umpire.
• Because of said winds, at least ten pop fly balls go up, behind the batter, over the net, and land within 20 rows of me. In good health, I probably can’t catch a pop fly if the ball’s painted orange, so I’m somewhat scared shitless since I can’t walk or run, I don’t have a glove, and it’s cloudy out. And given my luck, I absolutely know I will get beaned, and some other fuck will take the ball away from me.
• Of the women from age 20-40 ate the game, 95% of them have the same exact haircut.
• There’s a group of grumpy old men a few rows in front of me, all of them taking score on paper. At least one of the vendors knows them on a first-name basis.
• I really want to root for the Rockies, but they’re fairly pathetic. Houston scores four runs in two innings; the Rockies can’t even hit the ball, and it’s their stadium.
• A group of women in their early twenties sit a few rows behind me, at about the 5th inning, and they will not shut up. Their overly loud conversations were about the most inane things, and they were so stupid I don’t even remember. But when certain Rockies players came to bat, they would SCREAM AND SCREAM their names. Their first names, only. It was not based on most popular players - I think it was largely based on who they wanted to fuck. I would have assumed they worked at a tanning salon or something. But later I deduce from their excessively loud conversation that they are third-year medical students.
• The game got worse and worse, and I promised myself that if the Astros got ten points ahead, I would leave.
• Here’s where it gets interesting - Lance Berkman is at bat for the Astros. He swings, and loses his bat which HITS A BEER GUY IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD. Beer guy hits the deck, Coors is everywhere, and the crew of white-haired old ladies that check your ticket stubs freak the fuck out. They try to stop the game; cops are all over; paramedics jump out of nowhere; everyone is standing up to see if there’s anything cool to see. (The game does not stop, BTW.) One of the old ladies took the bat, and everyone in the section starts chanting “GIVE HIM THE BAT! GIVE HIM THE BAT!” I mean, if you get clocked in the head with a bat, you might as well get to take it home and put it on the bookshelf as a conversation piece, right? Also, everyone in the section started chanting for Berkman to apologize to the guy, and he didn’t. So everyone booed, and only because of the fact that nobody outside of our section could figure out what the fuck was going on, there was no riot.
• I decide maybe I should root for the Rockies.
• It looks like it’s about to pour rain, and I feel a drop or two. I also realize that it will take me 45 minutes to climb the stairs to the main level. See above comment about being trampled.
• Top of the 8th. 6-4 Astros. There’s no way they’re going to pull out of this one. I get up and leave.
• At home, I get on MLB.com. THEY PULLED IT TOGETHER IN THE LAST INNING AND WON 7-6!!! FUCK!!!
• From now on, I am not leaving a baseball game, even if it’s 28-1 at the bottom of the ninth and the stadium is on fire.

I redesigned the front page of 34.216.9.77/, so go check it out. If you’re bookmarked 34.216.9.77/index.html, that won’t work anymore. I won’t bore you with the details - just go to 34.216.9.77/ and tell me what you think, or if your browser dies a horrific death. The style stuff is not done, and might never be, but I spent forever getting the rollover and image stuff working. It uses Ajax do to the random image thing - I have wanted a simple project that uses Ajax, so there you go. It was still a major pain in the ass to get working. I will eventually get more of the site’s pages reworked, but it’s a slow process. I also want to rewrite my photos page, because it sucks, and I also want an easier way to get all of my photos up and to ditch flickr.

Okay, here’s a question that I’m sure I will not get an answer to. Last year, I went to a Men’s Wearhouse and bought three or four dress shirts. The dude there measured my neck, measured my arms, and said “here’s your shirt”. I tried them on in the store, but it’s possible I was high, or maybe the torture of the place made me say “fuck it, whatever” and throw a credit card at the dude. But the bottom line is that I have these shirts that mostly fit my neck, and the sleeves are about right in length, but the shirt basically looks like what Tom Hanks wore in Big when he shrunk back into a kid. Seriously, the armpits are about down to my waist, and the sleeves hang like they belong on a wizard’s robe.

So today, in a fit of stupidity, I took every single dress shirt I owned, threw them on the bed, and then tried them on, one at a time. I took notes and the fit and general status of each shirt, wrote them on an index card, and stapled them to the hanger. After a few hours, I found that the shirt that fits me the best is from Target, and I bought for like eight dollars. Second place is a shirt from the Gap, which fits me about like those pants MC Hammer used to wear, prior to getting busted by the IRS. In a distant third is a $50 shirt that looks like something you’d wear parachuting.

My first question/thought was to take all of these shirts to a tailor and ask if they could be ripped apart or hemmed or whatever the hell a tailor does. Does that work? I don’t know. I’d be willing to pay like $20 or $30 a shirt to get that done, if only to avoid the next option.

The next option: buying a bunch of shirts from some store that has sizes that fit my disproportionately large neck. Look, this shirt problem is not because I have a giant gut. These shirts fit fine over my almost-giant gut. It’s that the entire shirt industry’s crazy idea that if you measure someone’s neck, you know exactly what the rest of their body is like. And they figure that if I have a 20-inch neck, I have an 87-inch chest. I thought maybe if I went to Saks or Nordstrom or something, I could throw money at them and get an odd-sized shirt. And of course, it’s the absolute worst time of the year to buy any mens’ wear.

So yeah, dicking with XMLHTTP and worrying about dress shirts: it’s been an exciting week. I do have tickets for the Rockies game tomorrow, so that will be interesting. And then we have a huge spate of various family coming in to town, so lots of fun, and I’m sure there will be lots of eating at fancy restaurants.

Oh yeah, speaking of fancy restaurants, we went to this place on Saturday, and I have totally forgotten the name, but it was a Japanese/Mexican fusion place that was absolutely incredible. One of the appetizers was this little sterno grill type thing, but with a stone on it, like one of those black stones you see in a zen fountain you get at Brookstone’s. And it came with kobe beef, little chunks of it, raw, and you threw it on the grill, counted to five (or ten, whatever), and then ate it. Also for my entree, I ordered this Indian tandoori chicken, and it was probably the absolute best Indian food I have ever had, ever. And it was a Japanese/Mexican place. It also had a very cool interior, a huge curved bar with like three bottles of everything ever made that could get you drunk, and we were barraged by staff members asking us if everything was okay or if we needed anything. It cost way too much, but it was good.

And now, lunch.

Larry’s dad died the other night. There are a lot of very heavy things running through my head about that. First, Larry’s dad died. And I feel bad for Larry and his whole family. I mean, if anyone could deal with a situation, it would be Larry; I think if he lost three limbs from a freak case of gangrene, he would still be riding around on his motorcycle a week later using a broomstick and some duct tape to shift gears, as if nothing happened. The dude has seriously seen Papillion far too many times to really be affected by anything short of a close nuclear strike. But I do feel bad for the rest of his family. And while a lot of us seem to be either dealing with or avoiding our parental units, it seems that Larry had a genuinely decent relationship with his old man, and that makes the whole thing a damn shame. So my thoughts and condolences go out to the whole Falli clan.

To a lesser extent, the whole death thing really fucks with me. As an atheist, I don’t believe in many of the stock things you’re supposed to say at this time, and I really feel like a vegan at a hog roast. In some way, death doesn’t bother me, but it bothers me that I can feel that way when others are truly affected. And others have mentioned that they thought at some point later in life, I would have a schizoid episode and the grief of 40 years’ worth of funerals would all hit me at once, and maybe that’s true. I don’t really know.

There’s also the issue that I have a dad the same age as Larry’s, and he’s not exactly running triathalons these days, and sooner or later, I’m going to get the same phone call in the middle of the night. And that used to be an abstract concept, but now it really fucks with me. Even more, I am 23 years younger than my dad, and my doctors are bitching about my blood pressure and cholesterol, and the whole thing makes me think I should eat nothing but wheat germ and vegetable shakes and buy a treadmill and put it in front of my computer, because seriously, I’m going to snap my fingers twice and I’ll be 60. Fuck.

----

I went to the doctor yesterday. My foot got all better after predisone, and after a ten-day course, I stopped, and then the foot got worse and once again looked like a canned ham with toes. I went in and they decided to give me a cortisone injection in my ankle joint. This involved first giving me a couple of shots of lidocaine, and then pulling out some fluid, and then the actual injection. Because I go to a residence clinic, this meant the tiny exam room was filled with my doctor (a resident), an attending, a med student, and a nurse, plus a big old cart of supplies. I had to sign a waiver before they could give me the shot. The med student asked me a barrage of stupid questions that weren’t entirely stupid, but made me think she read about five paragraphs about gout in college and now for the first time had a real live case on the table. So yeah, the “do you eat shellfish” stuff was annoying, but maybe that helps in the long run, and she won’t misdiagnose her first real gout case in the wild, like 80% of the docs who have stared at my feet in the last decade.

When I’ve had the same procedure done in my toe or my knee, it was by a solo orth surgeon or podiatrist, and the banter consisted of nothing but “okay, here we go”, followed by many jabs of needles. This time, there was a whole mini-lecture of shop talk, with the attending saying “you want to go in shallow into the meta-subcarpal-lingual-inner-whatever and then turn to the left”, which was weird. The injection itself was not bad, at least not as bad as the inter-joint toe injections I had before - I was pretty much confessing to war crimes I didn’t do during that one. But any injection that first requires other injections is not that fun. This time, they used one needle apparatus and multiple syringes for the draw and the shot, which means I only had one hole in my ankle. It also meant I looked down and saw this giant piece of hardware stuck in my ankle for no reason.

I think the oddest thing is that when he was pushing fluid into the joint space and sort of jockeying around my ankle to get more in there, I had this really intense sensory memory experience. The injection, or the way he was pushing, felt entirely like one of the large-bore intramuscular allergy shots I used to get in my arm. And for a split second, it was like I somehow mind-melded with some ancient memory of being in the Elkhart Clinic in 1980. In that millisecond, I remembered all of these distant facts of the place - the hospital smell of the air, the bell in the elevator, that paging bing-bong sound in the office, the chairs, the cotton alcohol rub, the downstairs lobby waiting room. It was all so strange that all of that hit me at once, as if I touched an alien obelisk and was suddenly infused with the knowledge of another planet’s cultural secrets. I always thought smell was my strongest sense, but having my inner cells pushed around by a few moments by a liquid infusion seemed to trump that.

Anyway, the shot did good, although it was not as magic as I would have liked. I also got two prescriptions to try, and I am now on colchicine, and hoping it won’t make me shit my pants in the near future. I also got my blood tested - see previous discussion on cholesterol. I know I have high cholesterol. I know I can’t radically modify my diet without becoming a basket case. I know I could not have any of these problems if I ran five miles a day. I can’t do a treadmill on crutches. So there.

I think I’m starting another blog of technical stuff. I always run into a problem when I’m coding or writing and spend half the day researching it, and then find the stupid answer, and six months later, I’ve forgotten and need to start all over again. So I should be writing these down. And since 90% of the ruby on rails docs I find are consultants who do just this in an effort to scare up work, maybe I should do the same.

Okay, busy day. Gotta get on it.