My Heart's In the Right Place

Almost

I went in for my echocardiogram two days ago. That's where they use sonar to take pictures of the heart pumping away inside you.

The last time I had one done, they confirmed that my heart was tilted, leaning at an angle they told me was about sixty degrees (where ninety degrees is straight up, the normal configuration). In other words, I had about thirty degrees of tilt. That was eight or nine years ago. Now my heart has resumed a more normal position, having only a very slight tilt. The reason for the tilt is that I have a very large chest cavity, leaving plenty of room for my heart to move around.

My doctors have been after me to do a treadmill stress test for a couple of years. They finally got me to schedule one by telling me I had a suspicious faulty rythm to my heart. I have had a bum rythm since I was a teenager and people have been trying to get me to see doctors about it for most of five decades.

The heart consists of two large pumping chambers called ventricles and two smaller chambers above them called atria. A heart beat begins in the atria and is transmitted to the ventricles from them. There are normally 60 to 80 heartbeats per minute.

But the atria can twitch. They can vibrate at 400 to 600 beats per minute. The ventricles can't keep up but they do accelerate, usually to 110 to 180 beats per minute. This is tachycardia. Or the ventricles can react to the twitching atria by giving a big thump once in a while. Or, as in my case, the irregular beat called palpitations. Any of these could be accompanied by weakness, fatigue, dizziness, shortness of breath or chest pain. Well, I've been a bit short of breath from time to time for a while now. It may be time to consider a pacemaker or one of those machines to detect and deter the fibrillation with small shocks. Either can now be implanted with microsurgery. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I read the cardiologist's stress test report yesterday. Nothing basically wrong, but he did observe some "signs of distress" that caused him to break off the test before reaching the goal. I felt fine and don't know what triggered his decision. Perhaps that's why he was so interested in my doing the echocardiogram.

I'll have the results in another three weeks or so. All I have for the moment is the technician's assurance that she saw nothing serious, just some minor signs of aging.

Message Board

LiveJournal Rants

I recently chose to do a rant on LiveJournal. Although I have a link to my LiveJournal site in the collection at the left, few of you have investigated.

I am going to be making more and more of my entries on LiveJournal, and fewer on Xanga. There are a number of reasons for this, the subjects of future Weblog entries both here, there and on my Am0 Xanga Weblog site. I may even figure out how to automatically move Xanga entries to LiveJournal, making Xanga superfluous to me.

Come take a look.

Bird Dog

Rocky is a small dog, weighing about ten pounds. He remains inside the house most of the time but when he goes out we usually put him on a forty foot stainless steel cable that allows him access to most of the front yard while keeping him out of the street. When inside, he will either sleep or stand on the bed with his head under the curtain, watching through the bedroom window.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was eating the soup I had prepared for my lunch, Rocky came up to be let out. He had already been out a short time before, so I guessed he had been watching through the window and had seen some animal he wanted to investigate or chase, most likely a lizard or the shaggy old cat that sometimes crosses our yard.

Rocky usually waits patiently for me to attach the cable. This time, however, he jumped over my leg, placed to block his exit, and ran onto the porch. There was a hummingbird on the porch, looking into the window, and Rocky went after him. The bird took off, zig-zagging across the yard just a couple of feet off the ground. Rocky leaped over the planter of ferns and took off in hot pursuit, ignoring my commands to return. The bird and his follower crossed the access road into the neighbor's yard and entered the street when the bird finally headed straight up and disappeared. His quarry gone, Rocky returned to allow the cable to be attached so he could mark his territory again.

Colored Eggs

Delia wants to invite friends over for Easter Sunday. For part of the table decoration she wanted "a few" colored eggs. She also wanted to make a few stuffed eggs for appetizers. I said I would pick up three cartons of 18 eggs each. Her reaction was that we wouldn't need that many. I still bought three cartons. The store had just run out of older eggs and had wheeled in a fresh supply as I brought my cart up.

When I got home with my cargo of eggs, I put one carton on to boil. Two eggs cracked, about the normal number, so I ate them and let the rest of them cool. Delia gave me the package of colors and stickers she had picked up at bargain price. It looked old. There were six colors. I asked Delia how many of each color she wanted. Her answer was "Oh, three or four." That always translates to four. I counted my cooled eggs. Eleven had survived. It was time to cook the second carton. Only one cracked the second time. leaving me four spare eggs when they all cooled. There is still a carton of eggs for the deviled or "stuffed" eggs that will be made later.

I protected my work surface, laid out six glasses, each with the required half cup of water, and dropped in the dye tablets, one per glass. Three dissolved. By crushing the remainder I was able to get them to dissolve enough to do their job. All six left gritty deposits in the bottoms of the glasses. I placed the first eggs into the dye solution.

At this point, Delia decided I must be doing something wrong. I had set up to remove the eggs onto absorbant paper plates; she substituted a large china plate. It immediately became obvious that her plate wouldn't work. The eggs rolled through puddles of dye left by other eggs and took on a varigated appearance, losing their purity of coloration. Delia's plate was retired. Napkins were placed on the paper plates to increase absorption of excess dye.

Eventually all thirty eggs were dyed, dried, stickers applied and their surfaces oiled to give them a brilliant sheen. The colors were splotchy and uneven, some had merged, and the purple tended to divide into areas of blue and areas of pink, but it won't matter. The eggs will provide a spot of color on the table for a moment as we prepare to eat, then will be forgotten.

And I will be eating them for the next few weeks.

31 years

Panama doesn't have marriage licenses. In order to be married in a church ceremony, a couple must first be married in a civil ceremony, and it is the civil ceremony that the state recognizes. The state doesn't care what kind of ceremony you have -- or don't have -- after you are legally married and they don't recognize the legality of the church marriage. They do, however, recognize marriages that take place in other states.

So, legally speaking, Delia and I were married on December 16, 1971, on my 31st birthday (happy birthday to me), with plans to marry in the church in the middle of January. The ceremony was performed by Judge John Baker in his courthouse in Balboa, Canal Zone. An official translation of the marriage papers was then registered with the Panamanian government, who issued us papers saying they officially recognized our marriage, which authorized the church to proceed with the ceremony as planned.

But Delia came down with pneumonia and was hospitalized early in January of 1972.

The wedding had to be rescheduled. But finding a date when the church was available and our chosen bilingual pastor, Fr. John Kennedy, would be available was harder. We could wait until July or August, or we could have the ceremony on April 15.

At least I wasn't going to forget the date.

Skipping ahead 31 years now, we were going to celebrate with friends who live in Huntington Beach, about 95 miles away. We usually drive up there, but this time they were going to drive down here instead. Except, they told us yesterday, they couldn't make it today and would have to come tomorrow. Today they called to inform us they wouldn't be here tomorrow, either. Now it will be two or three weeks instead.

As a consolation prize, Cathy whipped up a shrimp dinner, treating us to one of the special wines she is saving for the future and, for dessert, opening a new cream sherry she is considering adding to her growing wine cellar / collection. I hadn't realized that Cathy used up all of our fresh garlic in a scallop dish she prepared for Delia and herself last Friday (the fragrance in the house should have been a clue, though), but the shrimp tonight was still pretty good even without the garlic that would normally have graced it. The pinot noir was light enough and fruity enough to make an interesting counterpoint for the shrimp; they went well together. The cream sherry was also lighter than expected with curious complexities. Still a bit harsh, it will be a real winner in eight to twelve more years.

The downside of the day is always taxes. Delia made much more money last year than the year before and was shocked that the amount of tax had grown so much as a result. She didn't do the work, she just saw the end result of my research and labor; therefore, she was upset with me for not keeping the amount of the tax smaller. It was, however, beyond my control.

Cathy had too high a tax bill, too, and asked me to take a look at what she was doing to see if I could find the problem. It took a while. Beware of tax software that does things for you without telling you. The year before last year, Cathy worked on a job that caused her to have expenses related to her use of her car. Last year she was self-employed and used her car expenses as part of her business expense. The program tried to use both sets of car data, resulting in about $700 too much tax being computed. When I removed the bogus entry, the excess charge disappeared like magic and Cathy breathed a sigh of relief.

Cathy still had to pay an uncomfortable amount. She almost had to pay a penalty on it, too. But most of her earnings came at the end of the year, so my calculations were able to show she couldn't have predicted the earnings correctly and she barely escaped, her deductions just $35 over the recalculated minimum.

Okay, I saved her a few bucks. I still hate doing taxes. It gives me heartburn. Doing taxes with Delia is particularly difficult because I'm incapable of performing miracles, an incapacity she neither understands nor tolerates. She has, after all, friends and co-workers who (claim to) pay much less or (claim to) receive all kinds of strange discounts / exemptions.

I suspect that if anything happens to me, Delia will be ripe pickings for every scam artist around. She believes in things that no rational person would accept. For example, when we had the latest postal increase, somebody told Delia that the Post Office was giving out free stamps the first day and she got mad at me for paying for the stamps I got.

But she keeps life interesting. That's yet another way I escape boredom.

High Class Eating

Delia insisted we attend a baptism and the reception that followed today. She insisted so strongly that she was willing to get me a new silk sport jacket and silk tee to wear for the occasion (and for two weddings that are coming up later this spring). We arrived, as usual, a bit late for the baptism, but we went right from there to the reception.

The restaurant used to be called Cafe del Rey Morro but they simplified the name to the Prado. It's in the heart of Balboa Park and is a high class establishment for the very rich. The family who invited us are far from impoverished and many of them live in / come from Mexico, at least part of the time. They've been feeding us and entertaining us since 1989, when we arrived in San Diego.

The fiesta took place in an upstairs room called the Loggia. There was a bar out on the porch. They were making a strange drink called a mojido: fresh mint is mashed / mulled in a sweet lime mojido syrup, after which rum and some kind of soda are added. It was served in a glass rimmed with powdered sugar. One of Delia's friends, Gloria, made sure Delia had one.

There were musicians, a bass and two guitars, amplified enough to make it impossible for me to carry on a conversation but not quite reaching the point of becoming painful. They sang and played the entire time we were there, so I wasn't able to talk to anybody.

The salad looked as if somebody had forced a variety of greens and other things into a cylinder a bit over an inch deep and six or seven inches across. The primary green was spinach, but there was also cress and something that looked like dandelion leaves. Mixed in were strawberry slices, black fig slices and very thin slices of something white that Delia thought was cheese. She kept asking me what kind of cheese it was and I kept saying I wasn't sure it was cheese -- it might have been daikon, white radish. The green mix was turned out onto a plate of walnuts and topped with a sweet, sticky brown sauce. Delia guessed it might be balsamic vinegar.

Delia wasted a lot of time trying to find out what the ingredients of the salad were, as she had earlier with her drink. I just wanted to enjoy it without trying to analyze it. I ate without scrutinizing what was going into my mouth, although I did admire its appearance, taste and texture.

The main course was chicken. We could have chosen fish but seafood often gives me problems and Delia chose to have what I was having. Anyway, it was a boneless breast on a pile of rice with strips of crystalized ginger on top. Worked into the rice were some kind of long sprout, possibly clover, and a variety of other flavorful ingredients I made no attempt to identify. Well, there were obviously very thinly sliced large mushrooms but I have no idea what kind of mushrooms they were. The outside of the rice pile was ringed with a creamy white sauce of some kind.

There were many flavors built into the rice. I couldn't pass it up. I can always go back on the diet some other day.

Dessert, in which I also indulged, was what somebody called a Mexican cheesecake. There were several layers of thinly sliced almond brittle with the cheesecake custard layered between them, then that was topped with a cone of more custard studded with raspberries with a large chocolate triangle stuck in the top. The triangle was dark chocolate with white chocolate stars in it.

It is my theory that desserts are made to look better than they taste. This one both looked and tasted good.

Even their coffee was good, a rarity for restaurants in this country.

Following the meal, the family practiced what I'm told is a Mexican tradition, passing the baby back and forth between the parents, godparents and grandparents. Then the kids were all assembled and several handfuls of quarters were thrown out for them to collect. I guess that's another tradition.

It was a relief when the musicians finally quit for the day and the relative silence of the roar of numerous conversations replaced their music, which would have been pleasant at a lower volume. I was finally able to talk to a few people. Then we left.

"Machine People"

Cathy and I both gave blood today, Double Red donations, her donation at 12:30 and mine at 15:30. I tried to schedule mine at a closer time, but they are running pretty much full time at the blood bank right now. It's a very popular place to go.

As I've mentioned previously, there are three kinds of Super Donations: Double Red Cells, Double Platelets and Super Size (extra plasma and platelets). Each requires its own special machine and each takes a lot longer than a regular donation, so you have to make an appointment. I do Double Red because my blood has extra iron and it is beneficial to me to get rid of it.

As I filled out my forms, I noticed that when they gave a regular donor his blood bags they also gave him a slip of yellow or blue paper. After being screened, I was sent to one of the three red cell extraction machines and started my donation. As it proceeded, I noticed several of the other regular donors also being given yellow or blue papers along with their blood bags.

There are two stages to a Double Red donation, each repeated twice. First, about a pint of blood is taken, enough to fill the bowl of the machine's centrifuge. Then, while the centrifuge is being spun up, first saline solution and then the donor's own plasma are pumped back into his vein. With the plasma out of the bowl, the red cells are washed into a storage bag. Then the cycles are repeated once more.

During the second return cycle, when I was almost done, I asked a question that cracked the two phlebotomists up. One, an older woman, had to sit down for a moment; the other, a man, wound up holding his sides. My question was: "If a client dies while connected to the machine, do you crank the machine up into high gear to drain him all the way, do you slam the machine into reverse to return everything you've taken, or do you just turn the machine off and disconnect him?" The woman finally told me she would never know because if one of her patients died on her she would run out of there and never come back. Both of them agreed that I had a strange sense of humor.

When I finally got disconnected, I asked about the yellow papers. They hastened to get me one, a ticket for a free meal at a restaurant in National City, La Maze. There were three optional meals listed, the first of which was a 12 ounce steak.

When I got to the canteen, they had plain doughnuts for the first time since I've been donating there. I've been complaining for years that they never get plain doughnuts that you can dunk in the coffee, and today, for the first time ever, there were three of them. I took two. Yes, I know that is against my diet plan but ... well, it's a special cause and a special occasion. I couldn't ignore their gesture after all those years of complaining, could I? So I took two doughnuts, I broke them in half, I got several cups of coffee, and I sat in the canteen dunking my doughnuts.

When I was done with the doughnuts, I called Cathy on my cell phone and asked if she had gotten a meal ticket when she donated. She told me that they hadn't mentioned it, so I went up to the front desk and asked if I could have a second meal ticket for her. The answer I got was, "I'm terribly sorry this happened. Yes, here's the coupon. We pass them out to the regular donors with the blood bags, but they keep sending the machine people past us, directly to the machines, and we never get a chance to give them either the meal tickets or the comedy show passes."

I headed home immediately and gave Cathy her yellow meal ticket. She promptly informed me that she was hungry and wanted to cash it in. But Delia wasn't there and we had no way to contact her; she had gone to lunch with some friends about noon, over five hours previously, and wasn't back yet. We decided to wait for a while and to leave her a note if she didn't show up in a reasonable amount of time. I let Cathy set the time, which turned out to be a little over half an hour.

The restaurant was easy enough to find, just a short ways up Highland from where Fedco used to be. An old place, it appeared large enough on the outside but was small on the inside. It had been established about 1940 or 1941 but nobody was sure exactly when. Anyway, it is unusual to find a restaurant as old as I am that is still standing and still doing business. About 40% of the space was devoted to a bar or cocktail lounge, which may account for its longevity.

Once inside, we were universally ignored. When I forced someone to pay attention to us we were seated, then they continued to ignore us. Well, that told us that the service wasn't the secret of their success. Eventually a waitress found us, brought us drinks (Cathy wanted a Rob Roy and I ordered a draft beer) and vanished once more. When, eventually, we ordered, the food appeared promptly enough and was both of high quality and prepared to our specifiections. That is, Cathy's meat was pink but dry, while mine was burned on the outside and bled when cut. Other people were paying $12.95 for what we were getting free and they were getting their money's worth. Even I will put up with bad service for a good steak.

We were about half way through the meat when Delia called and promised to join us. She wasn't hungry but she was curious about the restaurant. Cathy ordered a cheesecake, which the two of them split when Delia finally arrived.

By the time we finished, the restaurant was almost empty and the waitress was able to pay us some attention. I mentioned being the same age as the restaurant. It turns out that Delia and our waitress are the same age, too. A snow-maned gentleman at another table dismissed us all as a bunch of kids. We all parted on good terms and I might even consider returning some night, either early enough or late enough to avoid the crowd.

And if you are a machine person, be sure to ask questions. Failure to ask questions may cost you a pleasant evening.

Peace As an Alternative

It Can Happen Eventually

We began, several million years ago, as animals that would band together in groups of, probably, fifty to three hundred individuals. This grouping was determined by evolution as the optimum for the survival of the species and it works for almost any species. There are exceptions, predators that seem to lead a solitary life and other creatures that form gigantic herds or schools, depending on whether they are at the end of the food chain that seeks to feed on others or that tries to avoid becoming food.

Some time in the last 40,000 to 100,000 years we developed the ability to use language and to express our spiritual beliefs and fears. At about the same time, we began forming larger and larger groups. We have finally reached the point of having to seriously consider how to live together as a single species sharing a single planet, a global community.

When we were composed of small groups, the typical response of one group to another was a violent confrontation. Warfare between groups guaranteed that the groups would remain isolated, which protected them from disease destroying the entire race. But as our groups have grown, our ability to commit violence has increased to the point that we have had the ability to cause the complete extinction of our species for several decades.

If our species is to survive, we must abandon the use of extreme violence between groups on our world. It is no longer needed for protection from disease now, our technology giving us other options for developing necessary protection.

But that doesn't imply that the lion will lie down with the lamb any time soon. It only means we must eliminate the worst and most abusive of our tools of destruction. It does mean that all groups must give up their nuclear weapons technology and allow inspection by international teams.

Guess who is least likely to cooperate. The United States? Israel? China?

The United States believes themselves to be the last remaining superpower. They think this gives them the responsibility to police the rest of the world, and they can't imagine doing so except from a position of power.

Israel, the Paranoid Pimple of an East European country created in the middle of a Semitic territory, constantly on the warpath to get revenge for some act ancient or recent, imagined or real, believes they would cease to exist if they couldn't threaten genocide against their enemies.

China operates under a regime and policy that hardly admits that AIDS exists, much less is a problem, and that would have done nothing about SARS if it hadn't spread so rapidly and violently. Their nuclear policy might be rational today but they are capable of an overnight shift with a change in leadership, this tremendous giant of a country being under the near-absolute control of a relatively few people who are likely to be reluctant to allow any of their power base to slip away from them.

Nuclear non-proliferation is a start. But it only keeps the problem from growing. Eventually the problem must be made to go away.

That means nuclear disarmament.

A Mongolian Evening

The so-called Mongolian Barbeque is food cooked on a heated metal surface. The customer selects the ingredients and turns them over to a cook who tosses them on the grill, turns and mixes them, breaking up large chunks, until they are cooked, then scrapes the finished product from the grill to a plate and returns it to the customer. The food cooks quickly and presumably to the customer's taste. It doesn't always work that way.

We went to such a restaurant last night. Being the middle of the week, we went early in the expectation that we would pretty much have the place to ourselves. Lots of other people had the same idea. We had to wait in line to get in and get a table, then we had to wait in an even slower line, one of a pair, where we filled our bowls with the raw ingredients and sauces for the plates we were having, then those two lines merged into a single line where four cooks walked the meals around the heated drum to cook them.

The rapidly diminishing ingredients started with a selection of meats: cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, carp (well, they called it white fish, so it could have been anything, including shark). The meats had been thinly shaven, then frozen into big blocks which hadn't been allowed to defrost completely, making it difficult to get exactly the amount you wanted while supplying more liquid than was really necessary. In other words, what you ended up with would be much less than what you started with. After placing your meats in your bowl, you could add a number of veggies and a single kind of wide noodle (white rice was provided in covered bowls at the table). Then, when the bowls were full, you could add your sauces: sweet, salty, pineapple, lemon, bitter, garlic, hot, curry, ginger, hotter, barbeque, and dragon (hottest).

Now this was a very busy night. On a normal night, they would clean off the grill every once in a while, so that your food tasted pretty much like the ingredients you chose to include, nothing more. But I was sure that some of the people ahead of me, to show how macho they were, had dipped a few extra scoops of dragon into their bowls. So I didn't. But the rest of our little group didn't figure that out in advance. They were somewhat disappointed to find their meals somewhat more feisty than they had anticipated.

I was the only one at the table who repeated. We could all have gone back as many times as we wanted, but the rest decided that one big plate was enough. I don't do buffets on the basis of one big plate. I prefer several small plates. My first had been a peppery lamb dish, so I decided on a sweet, gentle chicken pineapple dish for my second plate. I waited until there was a general slowing in the traffic to the grill, then prepared my second bowl. I should have asked the cook to try to keep it rare, but even overcooked it was pretty good and noticably different from the first dish.

Toward the end I was the only one at the table still eating. I could have gone back once more, but that seemed antisocial and pointless, so I didn't bother. Two small plates was enough to satisfy me and I didn't need to be full to bursting. We returned to our host's home.

I had prepared a binder with some of my writings and some photos. I read three of my essays, which we discussed briefly, then we started recounting stories.

Two decades past, give or take a few years, I took the kids to see a movie about a post-apocalypse world in which a group of west coast survivors, hearing a radio signal from Albany, New York, set out in two giant vehicles to try to contact the people transmitting the signal. Along the way, the band is attacked by flesh-eating cockroaches, who consume several of the group, leaving only the skeletons. This left Cathy traumatized and with a permanent fear of cockroaches. Well, last Sunday that same movie was showing on one of the 300-numbered channels on cable and I watched it again for the first time in a couple of decades. On Monday, Cathy was watching movies with a friend of hers from high school and they got to discussing why Cathy was so terribly afraid of cockroaches. Cathy called me from her friend's house to ask me, "Dad, what was the name of that movie we saw when I was a kid about the group crossing the country in the funny truck that ran into the man-eating cockroaches?"

I immediatly replied, "Damnation Alley."

I heard her tell Wendy, her friend, "Damnation Alley. See, I knew he'd know what it was called." I heard Wendy in the background say, "I've never heard of it." I told Cathy that I watched it the previous day, while she was at work.

That was just one of the stories we recounted to Don and Anita while we polished off bottle after bottle of Don's Shiraz (seven by the time midnight arrived). Every time Don dived into the closet, Delia would say, "Oh, no. Don't open another. We won't drink it. We've had enough. We've got to be going." She said that for at least the last four bottles. It made no difference.

We discussed intelligence. Technically, Derek's intelligence measures much higher than Cathy's does. On a practical basis, Cathy often shows more smarts. For example, Cathy has never been arrested by the Panamanian police. But I had better not go there except to say that Derek didn't think clearly while Cathy did.

We did discuss Cathy's recent run-in with the law here and how she is doing relatively well compared to Brad, Don and Anita's son, arrested at a Padres game for trying to help a friend who was being arrested for fighting. It's always nice to have something in common we can discuss. We talked about diving and driving and all kinds of other things, too. When we spoke of cooking, Don decided to give Cathy a morter and pestle he was no longer using.

In trying to get the gear out of the cupboard, Anita knocked over some empty beer bottles and broke them. Their 15 month old Labrador, Buddy, picked up one of the pieces of glass, a fragment of neck, and started to walk off with it. Delia and Cathy immediately tried to get Buddy to relinquish his prize, but he thought they were playing with him so I warned them not to chase him. Anita, being on the ball, offered him a dog bisquit and he immediately dropped the dangerous piece of glass.

I had a piece of coconut cream pie after our dinner out and I drank my share of the wine last night, but my blood sugar this morning was only 153, and this is one of the few mornings lately that I have wakened without a headache.

My Attitude Towards Doctors

And Other Authority Figures

I started early. I began rejecting authority in Kindergarden. The teacher would tell the class to do something and I would be the only one who refused to do it ... at first. They promoted me out of Kindergarden as quickly as possible, before my rebellious spirit contaminated the other students.

Somehow I caused fewer problems in grades 1 through 6. I didn't cooperate but they ignored me. Middle School, then called Jr. High, brought a few clashes with authority but nothing serious. In High School I balanced my high academic skills against my rejection of authority figures and somehow managed to graduate despite a number of pranks I was never quite accused of promoting or committing.

While still in Middle School, I learned of one of my unique physical characteristics that many doctors would refuse to accept for years and years afterwards: I was immune to local anesthesia. At first it was novacaine, totally useless on me. This was in the days, too, when dental drills were mechanical things run by a motor-driven cable, basically a rubberized cord, like a thin fan belt. They ran at low speed, they were awkward to use, they jumped and bounced around inside the tooth being drilled and they were thoroughly unpleasant. In fact they were better than the high speed, air powered drills that replaced them in only two respects: they didn't make quite so shrill a scream and they didn't generate so much heat when being used. I had to face these old low speed monsters, basically, with no protection from the pain ... and the dentists wouldn't believe me.

Well, most of them wouldn't. I found a dentist in Panama who not only believed me but could explain why I had the problem. He asked me if I could drink large quantities of alcohol without getting drunk. When I admitted that this was the case, he told me the two situations were related and were genetically determined. Those who could rapidly metabolize alcohol, so that they rarely got drunk, would also rapidly metabolize anesthesia, showing a virtual immunity to pain killers. But that explanation came much later, when I had already determined that most dentists were terribly ignorant on the subject of anesthesia.

Then there was the dermatologist who had been happily prescribing PABA as a sunscreen for his patients ... until I pointed out to him that PABA was one of the B vitamins. If it was a good thing when he didn't know it was a vitamin, why did it suddenly become a bad thing when he learned that it was a vitamin? But he stopped using it. I thought that was both petty and stupid ... but that's just me. You can't force doctors to accept vitamins.

I've discussed vitamins with doctors many times. Until just a few years ago, some of them became highly irrational on the subject. It was as if they feared I might be an AMA spy, out to see if they would violate the official party line. Others just seemed to worry that their clients might become healthy and disappear from their business ... not that they would express it quite like that. They would talk about vitamin poisoning and other improbable events, as if people were killing themselves with vitamins every day.

Hyprocasy? Stupidity? Business tactics?

I've had more than my share of unique problems, mostly harmless, but greeted with skepticism by the medical profession. I match their profiles for many problems that I seem to have demonstrated, over and over, do not apply to me. They are at a loss what to do with me. I'm not going to be very helpful, less and less helpful as they appear more clueless. I'll do my own research, ask appropriate questions, make sure no real problems exist, then do my own thing.

I don't consider doctors to be generally evil. I think there are far too many doctors, most of them far too specialized and too poorly educated in general medicine. They are far too worried about problems with the legal profession, the bottom line and their social lives. They devote far too little time to each of their patients (or shuttle them off to specialists far too quickly) to be able to guess at any but the most obvious of problems. They've become accustomed to treating symptoms instead of getting down to basic problems and fixing them. And they've become so frustrated with the mess they've created that many of them are doing drugs and making things worse.

You'd never guess, would you, that over the years I've had many doctors as close personal friends?

But I treat all authority figures with equal disdain. I could get away with disrespecting my supervisors while working for federal Civil Service, although I rarely got any rave reviews. I didn't play the game but I was too good at what I did to fire, so I got the dirty and interesting assignments. I guess that if I somehow manage to get myself a new job I'll have to learn how to play by the rules for a while, long enough to put some money away.

I can be friendly and charming, for days and sometimes weeks at a time. But it always wears off. That's what I've got to watch out for.

After all, nobody likes to have themselves proved to be an idiot.

Or do they? Should I go into political commentary?