Two Jabs Accomplished!

And other tales from the Ozarks

(Sorry, no musical theme this time.)

Mom and I got our second doses of the Covid vaccine and everything went smoothly just like the first time. I was impressed by the organization of the operation. And we had no side effects whatsoever. But this will have little to no effect on our lifestyle. We're secluded and will remain this way for the foreseeable future.

Mom's dementia has increased. She can no longer read books and this hurts me a lot. I don't know how I would cope without having books in my life. The time she used to spend reading is now spent with me and this decreases my "me time" a bit. I still have anywhere from plenty to too much "me time" left.

We're beginning to simplify our health care. We decided not to return to the hematologist because last time she gave Mom a clean bill of health. The other fact that figured into this was that Mom did not take one of the tests the hematologist ordered for her and if we aren't going to cooperate with the doctor then why are we going? The test required Mom to collect her urine for 24 hours in a large plastic pitcher and keep that pitcher in the refrigerator between collections. --Well, this simply was not going to happen.

But we did go into town to visit with Mom's cardiologist's practice. Mom was scheduled for her regular, six-month echocardiogram and this visit did not go well. To begin with, Mom started becoming anxious the morning of the visit, so much so that she developed diarrhea. Normally, I give her a Xanax as a prophylactic measure for the anxiety, but Xanax has been struck from her list because it might create confusion and the last thing Mom needs now is more confusion. So we drove down to Fort Smith to Mercy Hospital where the practice is located. We got to the appointment a bit early, but they took Mom early so that worked out ok. I was prepared to accompany Mom in the examination room, but the nurse told me that the test required Mom to be naked from the waist up and that I probably wouldn't want to be there for that. The nurse was right and the last thing I told the nurse was not to frighten Mom. And that turned out to become an omen of what was to come.

Marcel Duchamp

I retired to the waiting room with a good book, a chess biography of the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. I knew that Duchamp was a chess player, but I hadn't known that he had a chess career that someone thought warranted two volumes singularly focused on where he played, when he played, and how well he played. I became lost in the book.

Based on what I saw in my peripheral vision, I saw that some patients were going in for their examinations and coming back out already. I checked my watch and saw that Mom had been back in the examination room for about 90 minutes. Having once had an echocardiogram myself, I knew that they don't take that long and that something had gone sideways.

And it was about that time that a nurse came out to fetch me. She said that Mom's blood pressure had seriously dropped during the examination and that the cardiologist on duty had started to examine Mom and that I was needed to discuss the situation. The nurse also said that Mom appeared to be having an anxiety attack. Again, based on my experience, I knew there's nothing worse than getting sick while you're in the doctor's office. Those sort of shenanigans result in a Great Deal of Excitement with the medical professionals. I knew then that there was going to be a big hassle to go through to get out Mom out of the doctor's office and back home, if she was OK.

When I got to the examination room, the nurses were about to give Mom an EKG and test her blood sugar levels. With that accomplished, Mom and I waited for the doctor to review the results and report back to us with her findings and suggestions. It was a bit of a wait, but when the doctor did come in, she said that the results of the echocardiogram were actually quite good, the EKG was good, the blood sugar was good but there still was the issue of Mom's blood pressure dropping.

By now, Mom had eased down a bit and the doctor believed my presence had a calming influence. The doctor said that we were going to need to adjust Mom's blood pressure medications (well, duh) and remove one of them altogether. The doctor also said that if Mom was her own mother, she would recommend some sort of surgical procedure where the surgeon goes in through Mom's groin, up to her heart, and install some sort of cap that would help prevent a stroke. Oh, and we would have to go to either Tulsa or Little Rock to get this done. I let the doctor know that probably wasn't going to happen.

And we left. We had arrived at 2.30p and it was now 5.30p. To reward Mom for having survived the visit, I took her across the street to Five Guys and bought her a hamburger and fries which wasn't based on any clear thinking on my part as Mom's digestion was already lopsided and she doesn't digest greasy food very well. And the results were entirely predictable. But Mom did enjoy the meal and felt that she deserved it. I did too.

My own mood tends to swing from ennui to despair. I try to stay connected with my friends, especially from my synagogue in Madison, but I miss everyone so much. Seeing them over Zoom just isn't the same. It would be worse without Zoom, but that's cold comfort for me. Probably making matter worse is my sleep. I tend to go to bed at the same time, around 8p. Ideally, I'd like to get up at 6a, but that's predicated on actually sleeping through the night and that hasn't been the case for me. It is all too common for me to get up at 2a or 3a and be up for an hour or two or three. This morning introduced a new wrinkle in my sleep schedule: Mom woke up at 5a and was cold so she decided to get me up to fix that. Amazingly, I was already up and reading the paper upstairs in my bedroom, otherwise Mom flashing the light on the stairs off and on would have panicked me. It panicked anyway because I didn't know what was going on nor the nature of the difficulty.

Regarding my own health, I've been trying to act of my psychiatric referral from my primary care physician. I've called a couple of times now and learned that my referral is on file, but that they'll call me to set up an appointment. The old, "don't call us, we'll call you" routine. In the meantime, I'm not taking my regular dosage of anti-anxiety meds so there's been some discomfort and I don't seem to be weaning off of it.

In other news, I've been spending my time, as usual, watching movies, studying Torah, studying chess and reading -- not necessarily in that order.

These are some of the movies I've recently seen:

Bullitt, 1968. Steve McQueen as a cop tearing up the seedy streets of San Francisco in his Mustang. It's really interesting to me the way San Francisco is depicted in Bullitt and the Dirty Harry movies. It's shabby and filthy.

The Chicago Seven, 2020. Aaron Sorkin's interpretation of the famous trial.

Judas and the Black Messiah, 2021. The story of the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton by the FBI.

One Night in Miami, 2020. An imagined account of an evening spent with Malcolm X, Muhammed Ali, Sam Cook, and Jim Brown.

Malcom X, 1992. Spike Lee's biopic of the rise of Malcom X and the forces that led to his assassination.

You can probably see a theme in the previous four movies. They are all very political and of a certain period of American history and a certain perspective on American history. It's a perspective I've held for a long time.

I've started watching Godzilla vs. King Kong because Rebecca Hall is in it and she has a Powerful Effect on me. My favorite line so far in the movie is Rebecca Hall saying, "Kong bows to no one."

Oh, and I tried watching a mockumentary called Street Survivor about the plane crash that almost killed everyone in Lynard Skynard, but it was too awful and a big waste of both disk space and bandwidth.

And I've also tried to watch some standup comedy by Bill Burr, Lewis Black, and Dave Chappelle but these haven't aged well. The amount of homophobic ranting is horrifying. I couldn't finish any of those three shows. It's amazing far our society has come and how times have changed, for the better.

I can whole heartedly recommend the new movie streaming on HBO, Shiva Baby. What starts out as a comedy morphs into a horror movie (that's still falling down funny). In the movie, we don't just observe someone who's having a nervous breakdown, we experience it for ourselves. For those of us who are Ashkenazic-centric from NYC, there are countless triggers and cues for laughs. I don't know how it plays in the "midwest," but from my perspective, it's dead on the mark. Here's the review from The Forward.

My chess skills continue to improve even though I'm not playing any games, just taking lessons and solving puzzles. As of this writing, I've taken 68 lessons and completed 708 puzzles. (That doesn't mean I've successfully solved 708 puzzles, just that I've tried to.) I watched the Magnus Carlson Invitational on Twitch and was greatly entertained. I don't have any real favorite players, but I did find out that one of them, Russia's Ian Nepomniachtchi, is a Jew so I was rooting for him. He's the Russian champion and came in second place in the tournament.

Ian Nepomniachtchi

A new thing I'm learning is an elaborate, international, chess notation system that was developed in Yugoslavia. (Wait, is Yugoslavia a country anymore?) Anyway, regarding this notation system, think of something as elaborate as the notation of music. One thing that has interested me is the intellectual property of chess. Who owns the moves that are made? The notation system invented by the Yugoslavians was put in the public domain. What I've learned is that the moves made during a chess game are also in the public domain. What can be protected, as in sheet music or a book in the public domain is adding something to the work. In sheet music, for example, there's a lot of latitude with the dynamics or speed of the piece. For a book in the public domain, footnotes and or a preface can be copyrighted. So, if someone annotates a chess game that work can be copywritten.

In my previous update, I wrote about how I was going to deliver a program to my synagogue's Men Chavarah on Torah, Kabbalah and Sex. Well, I did make the presentation and it was, from my perspective, a disaster. My peers in the group are about my age or older and they are successful professionals with a liberal perspective. It was my intention that the program would be sensitive and thoughtful. What I didn't expect was that my peers would be cracking jokes and giggling. Lesson learned.

A couple of weeks ago on NPR, Mom and I heard an interview with Carrie Underwood about her new album, My Savior. It's a collection of old time hymns from when Underwood was growing up. The snatches of music Mom heard in the NPR story touched her so I opened my Spotify account and played her the album. It brought tears to her eyes to hear (and sing along with) the hymns she learned in church camp. Now, I have the album on heavy rotation and my Spotify algorithm is destroyed.

This year, I'm making a deliberate effort to count the Omer. The Omer is the forty-nine day period between the second night of Passover to Shavuot, our holiday celebrating receiving Torah at Sinai. There are kabbalistic interpretations for each day. What you need to know is that everyday at sundown we say a blessing and say out loud the number of days that have passed during the period of the Omer. I have a couple of workbooks for counting the Omer, a couple of apps on my telephone, and an elegant but completely unnecessary laser-cut, wooden Omer counter that looks like a sundial.

I'm still reading the Tom Stoppard biography by Hermione Lee and it is so good. It isn't just the detail she has been able to pull together about Stoppard's life. She has made a very close reading of all Stoppard's works, very close, and is able to map the influence of Stoppard's life on his work. Why did he write the play? How did he write the play? What does the play mean? The result is a very dense explanation that's engaging and persuasive. I can only read one chapter in a sitting due to how dense it is. Right now, I'm starting the chapter on Stoppard's play Travesties.

Sir Tom Stoppard

I'm also reading How to Read the Bible by James L. Kugel. This was recommended to me by one of my Torah study partners. I'm looking forward to reading a book of literary criticism, Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson; a comedy, The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell; and a book on Kabbalah, Ehyeh by Arthur Green.

I made it official and resigned from the Jewish Burial Association of Madison. My synagogue was able to find a replacement representative that will do a much better job than I have during the past several years.

In a couple of weeks, I'll be taking a new class my synagogue is offering, Exploring the Structure and Meaning of Jewish Prayers. It's being taught by Rabbi Rena Blumenthal and I've taken a couple of classes from her already. She's very impressive.

Folks, I need to wrap this up and commence winding the house down for the evening. Mom will be going to be soon and I am unprepared. Until next time,

Peace & Love,
brian.