Beginning Year Two of My Second Life

One year ago this minute I was a little over two hours away from the beginning of the end of my life. I didn't know it, had no idea it was coming, but that is the way life is. You never know what it has in store for you. In a little over two hours, a year ago, it had a heart attack waiting for me. Ten or fifteen years ago it might have killed me; one of my arteries was 100% blocked, but due to the miracle that is the modern cath lab, it didn't kill me. Only it did. It killed who I was; it killed the life I was living.

As I lay on the table in the cath lab and the miracle workers opened my blocked artery from the inside of the artery, there was that moment when I felt my heart jump in my chest and I didn't know if I had just died. And in that moment the regrets of my life, things I had never admitted to myself, flooded over me. And though I didn't physically die, the person I was, the life I was living, did die.

Within three weeks I would leave my wife and lose the respect of my son. I left the big house on the hill and wonderful neighborhood. I left the neighbors I called friends. But it wasn't all bad.

I found a new/old love; a woman who loves and respects me like I really don't deserve. I found a simpler life, of less things but richer moments. I found my new life.

And now in just a few hours, the first year of that new, second life will have been lived and the second year will begin. This first year has been a year of transitions and not everything from the old life has reached its completion, but they all soon will.

The world is not quite my oyster, not yet, but it has the possibility of being that and that is a beautiful thing.

Here's to new beginnings.

Turn and Face the Strain

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

Yeah, my life is all about changes these days. Some painful changes and some quite the opposite, but changes none the less. When last we talked I confessed to having a heart attack, which seems like a real game-changer in the game of life, but in my case it was only the tip of the iceburg. Something happened to me that was unexpected as I lay on the table in the Cath Lab at Pomona Valley Hospital.

Like I said before I had an angiogram, angioplasty and three stents placed in my Left Anterior Descending artery during the hour and half procedure. I was awake through the entire thing and to be honest even through the wonderful morphine haze I was scared shitless. I knew as soon as I got on the table that I would be a different man when I was wheeled out, if I was wheeled out. As they cut open the artery in my groin and began pumping dye into my blood I knew with 100% certainty that I had put myself on that table, that the poor choices I had made in my life blocked my artery, though at the time I didn't know it was 100% blocked.

Something else happened that changed me as well. While I was laying there at one point I could feel them working inside my heart. It felt like my heart jumped and at that moment I did not know if something really good had just happened or if I had just died. So I held my breath and waited to see what the afterlife was like, if there was one. And while I was waiting I felt the deepest sense of regret for the way my life had gone, in particular for my marriage.

I've been married 26 years and neither my wife nor I are the same people who tied the knot lo those many years ago. We had drawn apart; where we had few common interests in the beginning, over time we had even fewer. For a number of years now my wife would tell me, once a month or so, how unhappy she was being with me, how I brought little joy into her life. With these changes came a decided lack of passion and desire in our relationship. Still, it wasn't deplorable, it was livable, hell it was comfortable and that was the problem. My wife was not happy and I was not really satisfied but it was a comfortable existence, so we stayed together even though we maybe should not have.

When the moment ended and I was still alive I knew that my life had really changed, that I could not live causing my wife pain and that I could not live the rest of my life longing for a passion that just no longer existed. So, while recovering from a heart attack, while my wife was being the sweetest to me she had been in years, I hurt her again, hopefully for the last time, because though I still love her deeply, it was no longer enough, and I moved out of our house and my comfortable existence and into the unknown.

When I try to make a list of the things I have lost in the past two weeks, it is scary, but I have to feel it is worth it. My wife will no longer be hurt by me and will have a chance at finding someone who doesn't make her unhappy, but instead fills her with joy. And I have, amazingly and unexpectedly, found the passion and desire I so missed. More on this next time.

M.I.A.

That's me,, missing in action. I have had quite an interesting threee weeks. First I had my gall bladdre surgery, which messed me up quite a bit. Then, while home recupterating from that I had a heart attck. Good one too. I had a 100% blockage of my LAD (Left Anterior Descending) artery.Through the absolute magic of the Cath Lab they wre able to repair my heart while the attack was occuring. My attach started just abert midnight and the blockage was cleared completely by 4:00 AM. I was awake through the entire proceeding as they broke up the plaque blocking the artery, expanded balloons and inserted three stents. I cannot even come close to describing how this all felt as I lay there on the table.

It was one of those life changing experiences, and more than that I cannot at this time say. As a nifty souvenier I did get these wonderful picture of by heart, before and after stents:

Concentration

Besides being an old TV game show hosted by Hugh Downs it is also something I totally lack since my operation. I thought I would be able to use all this "free time" I have on my hands, you know, while the holes in my body seal up, for posting to my blog and doing some painting and some writing and, shit, I just can't concentrate on anything other than how shitty I feel. What a wasted opportunity this is turning out to be.

It's Gettin' Real in the Hyundai Commercial

last month I saw this commercial making the rounds and something about it seemed familiar. Talented people get to do their thing:



If you are like, "Huh?" check out the Whole Foods Parking Lot video This one always creacks me up:

I'm Alive!

Well, I got that pesky gall bladder removed and as the Hollies say, "I'm Alive!" I'm in pain, but I'm alive. I don't know what I would feel like if it weren't for the Percocet. I have four new openings into my body, two of which rip right though my abs and make it frankly hard to pee. But things could have been worse and I thank everyone who was in the operating room on Wednesday and who helped me in my room that night and the next morning.

How Smart is This?

This has got to be the smartest commercial I have seen in years. Man I wish I had written this!

Just Hold Your Gall Bladder

So two weeks before Christmas I am driving home from work and I start to get this ache in my stomach, really high, just under the rib cage on the right side. My first thought is indigestion, though it is getting worse with every passing minute and so my second thought is pancreatitis. This nasty ailment is something I have had once before, about four years ago and it hurts like a, well, let's just say, it hurts. So is the pain I am having that day driving home. About a third of the way home it starts shooting through me like a knife drilling through my body and then the pain starts spreading across my back. I am waiting for it to begin shooting laterally across my stomach, like it did the time before, only it doesn't do that. So though it feels really reminiscent of pancreatitis, I'm just not sure.

I get home and my son says, "Go to the ER Dad. You can go now or the ambulance can come and take you later." Me, I don't like going to the ER, so I say I am going to give it another hour or so to get worse or get better. It does neither. So, at 9:00 that evening, we go to the ER. As soon as they get me in and into a bed, I start to feel better. Now I feel like a fool. Indigestion I think. They run battery of tests including an ultrasound, but find nothing and I get home around midnight, my insurance company now $4,000 the poorer.

A few days later I go to my doctor for a regularly scheduled check up and he pulls my records from that night and tells me they missed the gall stones when reading the ultrasound that night, but the guy whose job it is to read these things sees them the next morning, so my gall bladder has to come out.

I see a surgeon a week ago and he schedules me for the Wednesday with the pre-op visit today. I go in, spend over an hour waiting to be seen, I see the doctor, I see his assistant, I see the doctor again and the assistant then starts asking me questions. The last question she asks is when did I stop taking my daily aspirin. I say, "What do you mean stopped? I took it this morning."

Seems they forgot to mention that I had to stop taking the damn aspirin, so I am now scheduled to have my gall bladder removed a week from Wednesday. I'll let you know if it happens.

Slashed!

I had said a few days ago that I was able to remote access my Kindle Fire using Slashtop and that was true up to a point. The point where it was not true was when I left my internal wi-fi and went out into the wild blooming yonder of open access wi-fi. From there I could not get to my desktop. I searched the Kindle Fire Forum and found another app mentioned, TeamViewer and downloaded it.

Today, from my Dr.'s waiting room, I was able to access my home PC and work on my novel. Pretty cool. The problem I had with Slashtop was that it only saw my internalal IP address, not the external one being generated by FIOS. TeamViewer doesn't seem to have that issue.

All Fired Up!

I am all fired up, Kindle Fired up that is. My son bought me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I have been giddy ever since. I've had it for over a week now but I am really just beginning to see the potential in the product.

Bezos should have come out singing, "I am the God of hell fire and I bring you FIRE!"

I bought a nice leather case for it with a stylus. That comes in handy when I want to use Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile. It will take some getting used to the stylus which is not nearly as easy to use as my Wacom Tablet on the PC, but will suffice for now.

It's Kindle, so all of my Kindle books are available to me for reading at my leisurere. Though not an e-Ink screen, I can still use the Fire as a reader while on the go.

I'm not really much of a gamer, never owned a gaming device, though I have played with my son's XBox 360 and Kinect a number of times, but I seem to be loading the internal memory with  games like Asphalt 6: Adrenaline, Back Stab and Madden 12, all of which play amazingly well on the Fire and for each of which I paid 99 cents. The graphics and the response of the machine are pretty damn amazing.

Video is another treat on the Fire. From YouTube to streaming full movies and TV episodes, the Fire is a smooth experience.

A few months ago I ripped all of my CDs to my PC and then moved all of them to the Amazon Music Cloud so that I could listen to them on my phone or at work. With the Fire I have access to my entire music collection.

A few months ago I gave my laptop to my step-son who needed it for work and so I went through November's NaNoWriMo without benifit of a way to go out and socialize while writing. I wrote my first novel using Scrivener for Windows and put my Scriverner data files into my Dropbox folder which allowed me to have access to them on my PC and my phone and anywhere else I had a Dropbox folder. Well, though not natively supported on the Fire, I was able to side load Dropbox onto the Fire, so my novel is now there as well. My problem is editing the files. The Fire does not have an editor for RTF (Rich Text Format) files, which is what Scrivener uses, so though I have access to them on my Fire, I still cannot edit them. Enter Slashtop!

Slashtop is a remote access app that allows me to have access to my PC desktop on my Fire. Utilizing Slashtop I have been able to work on my novel from my Fire. Not a perfect solution, but it does work and for the time being, that is enough for me.

So let's see if I can bottom-line this. I can surf the web, play amazing games, read my books, paint and draw, watch movies and TV, listen to my music and write my novel all from a $199 tablet, all for $300 less than the cheapest iPad. Only a complete fool would waste their money on the big Apple.

I am So Ashamed

I don't know what to say, I laughed. I really laughed at this. I don't know if this bodes well or bad for this new year.

LED Astray

For me, one of few stress relievers during the holiday season has always been to lay on the living room couch at night in the darkened room and spend some quality time gazing at the Christmas tree. I can lose myself in the reflections of the tree lights off of the glassy sheen of the ornaments. It induces a kind of hazy daydream effect that sort of washes over me, letting my troubles and the not inconsiderable stresses of the holidays float away in the soft glow of the lights. Or at least it used to.

This year I fought the strings of lights for about a half hour before giving up and telling my son to go buy some new ones. He did, only they were the new LED lights. "You and burn them all year Dad and they never get hot and they take about as much electricity to run them as a fart." he promised. OK, they are cost effective, they are safe, but they emit a harsh light that has totally ruined the one sure stress relieverer I had. I tried to lay down on the couch and lose myself in the tree, but those damn lights were burning holes in my eyes.

Oh soft glowing lights, why have you forsaken me?

One of the 36,774

Someday, and I swear it will be soon, I will stop talking about the NaNo. But today is not that day.

They released the stats this week for the National Novel Writing Month and they are pretty impressive:

• 256,618 participants, up roughly 28% from 2010’s total of 200,530 writers.
• We wrote a total of 3,074,068,446 words, up 7% from 2010’s collective word count of 2,872,682,109.
• This averaged out to 11,979 words per person!
• We had 36,774 winners, giving us a 14% win rate!

Happy to have been a part of it all. Of the 25 writing buddies I had this year, 13 of them completed the NaNo or 52%. Not too shabby for my friends.

Lessons Learned

This should give you an idea of how I managed my NaNoWriMo. Pay particular notice to the graph on the right and the long flat area starting about half-way through. In looking back at my first NaNo to see what it taught me, and hey, that is what all of us winners and loser are doing about now, I came to four lessons learned. They are as follows:

1. When the going gets tough, Barry takes nine days off.
2. Though I tend to complain about things quite a bit, they are usually problems that I have caused all on my own, and in actuality, I sort of get off on the drama, as it allows me more time for self-absorption.
3. Eventually I will rededicate myself, after I have waited the prerequisite amount of time to make the outcome once again somewhat in doubt (this also relieves me of any responsibility for how bad it might turn out as it is now crystal clear to all that I just don't have enough time to do it the right way).
4. I can do anything to which I set my mind.

3,073,176,540

National Novel Writing Month Total Collective Word Count for 2011:

3,073,176,540
 

The Truth About the Appleheads Among Us

I saw this first over the weekend as an in-theater ad shown before Melancholia and it cracked me up. These snooty, lame-ass, self-absorbed frauds and the perfect commentary on the army of unthinking iPhone users. Assholes standing in lines for hours to get a phone that looks just like the phone they already have and worried that people won't know they have the new phone, 'casue it is all about image and not at all about having a great phone, not even sure of the specs to the phone they are standing in line for hours to purchase. This is simply priceless.

I Came, I Saw, I Nano'ed!

That's write! I mean that's right! I Came, I Saw, I Nano'ed! You have no idea what a rush that was. Had I not taken nine days off it would have been a snap, but those nine days of 0 words made the last six days a little tense. My first NaNo, my first novel.

OK, confession time: my novel is not done. It needs maybe 10,000 more words in its rough draft form before I begin a serious edit. But the NaNoWriMo task is to write 50,000 words of your novel, and I beat that by 208 words.

So, to be clear: Is my novel done? No.

Did I win NaNoWriMo? Fuckin' A Bubba!

To NaNo or Not To NaNo

That is the question.

I had pretty much given up on my NaNo on November 16th. I was on track that day, having written over 27,000 words, but I was realizing I was no longer sure who my main character was or where she was going. So, I stopped writing and waited for divine inspiration to occur. Still waiting!

Then, yesterday I started thinking about the 10,000-Hour Rule and decided that though I am not going to end up with something very good, I can add to my practice of writing so that next year I will be more prepared for the task. So, I wrote almost 2,000 words last night and need to write about 14,000 in the next two days to "catch up." See ya later!

The Bird!

Yep, it's that time of year again; time for the unveiling of the LA Times Brine Bird!

We have been using this same recipe from the Los Angeles Times for, I think, six years now, and it results in the best turkey you ever ate. The best part about this is it comes out perfect every year and all it takes is maybe a half hour of preparation Monday morning. You clean it, salt it and bag it on Monday, turn it on Wednesday, unbag it Wednesday night and stuff and cook it Thursday morning. The result is the juiciest, tastiest bird you ever ate.

It's not complete though till you carve it. I take my carving instructions also from the LA Times.  The same year the LA Times put out the brine recipe, they put out a video on how to carve a turkey (you can still find it on line) and I started following it. This year's bird did not want to cooperate, but I managed. The result is a plate of meat that can't be beat. Instead of dry slices of meat, you get big juicy chunks; the perfect way to display and consume the brined bird.

The Kinect Effect

I saw this commercial on TV twice in the past day or so and had to share it. It moves me. Ah Microsoft, what a great commercial and what a great technology. The Kinect is surely the "big-titted hit" it deserves to be.