Happy Trails

I’m almost afraid to say it, but I’m happier now than ever. I’m afraid to say it because I fear by doing so I will activate Murphy’s Law. I’ve always noticed that if I think about something bad, it increases the chances that it’ll happen. I suppose that’s why we all admonish others for thinking negative thoughts. Subconsciously, we want to keep the good vibes flowing, and why not? Deep down, we’re all self-protecting creatures; we all want to ease carefree through the day undisturbed by worry and fear. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not completely selfish; if it’s good for you then it’s good for all those around you. So from that point of view, striving to not jinx my good spirits is a way of doing good deeds for those around me. Hopefully, my positive thoughts will outweigh the bad, and Murphy will be safely contained in his jail cell when I boldly proclaim, I’m happy.

Despite being legally blind, half deaf with a bad back and bad knees, being in debt and not knowing if I’m ever going to be able to make a living as a writer again; despite all that, I’m happy.

I’m happy that I celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary yesterday with my dear wife, Leslie, who has upon many occasions told me I was more trouble then I’m worth. I am happy with our home and the paths that wind through the woods around it, even though both my wife and I fear we may lose it.

Needless to say, I have not always been this happy. I have at many times in my life been suicidal. Thankfully, I did not act on that inclination.

But I can’t say that I’m clueless as to why I‘m in a state of bliss. I’m sure a psychoanalyst would say I’m suffering from grandiosity or some sort of delusional disorder, and I might well be. Be that as it may, my current peace of mind came about after I made the unorthodox decision to disassociate myself from those with whom I often disagreed. To be more specific, I took a cutting axe to my friend’s list on facebook. All those “so-called” friends who wanted to constantly attack my politics are now gone. But wait a minute. I don’t want to sound like I’m some virtuous creature free of sin and guile, with only good thoughts toward my opposers. It’s just not true. I’m as guilty as they are for making smart-aleck jabs at them on their facebook page when I've disagreed with a political story or statement they posted. Absurd isn’t it? Yes it is. It’s absurd that I would let bad vibes into my life or even initiate them because of a silly political ideology. But then again, prior to W.W.II., some might have said it was absurd to argue about Nazism. Whether these new Right Wing/Left Wing politics that confront our daily lives in America are on that scale, history shall measure, but either way, I admit that at first glance, it might appear radical of me to cut ties with so many people I once called friends. But it’s not really. That’s just the way people are. As the old saying goes, birds of a feather stick together. Even the Old Testament prophet, Amos, asked, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” The obvious answer is, “no.” That’s why there are different denominations within Christianity; that’s why there are different religions. People who are going to be arguing cannot coexist peacefully. So is facebook a religion then? It is certainly a community. All religions have a congregation of some sort, and a congregation can be described as nothing other than a community. And most all world religions share another thing in common, they all teach that happiness is found by loving your fellowman. Whether or not facebook is a religion, I don't know, but it does expect everyone to abide by its social norms. People on facebook refer to their friends as their facebook family. So I suppose in order to be a happy facebooker, you'd have to love your facebook friends.

But I broke the cardinal rule, didn't I? I didn't love my fellow facebookers. I dropped ‘em like hot potatoes and have been a peaceful, happy person ever since. I have reached a conundrum, an impasse. Could it be that my current state of happiness has come about because I stopped loving my fellowman? Can I have happiness if I love some and omit others? Maybe I just lost my religion. I hope Murphy is not religious; l hope he has dropped me from his friend's list and that he leaves me alone. I'm happy and I want to stay that way.

Happy trails, Murphy, may we go our separate ways.

And now I leave you with....the Plumlee Woods

War Is Hell

Becoming disabled means dealing with change. Change is a part of life. Everyone knows that. Many comfort themselves with that reliable old saying when the storms of life unexpectedly blow a tree across their path. But most people never deal with immediate change, such as when my eye doctor told me I could no longer drive. That one little sentence uttered several years ago affects me every day. I have to navigate around that roadblock constantly.

Even something as simple as getting a new set of hearing aids can be a logistical nightmare. Yesterday, I had an appointment to pick up these new contraptions. My wife leaves the house a little before seven o’clock for work, but my appointment was for later in the day. I didn’t want to sit in her office for hours before she could take me; plus, she doesn’t like for me to leave the house with her when she’s going to work because she says I slow her down. She calls me King Piddle because I’m always going back into the house to get something, or check on something, after we’ve locked the door. Of course she doesn’t confess that King Piddle’s trips back into the house are often a good thing. Many times, I have turned the coffee pot off, or worse yet, the iron on the ironing board. Consistently and predictably, I always turn off lamps. My wife was born with a genetic defect that doesn’t allow her to cut a light switch off or turn a lamp off. She is just simply unable to do it. Once she’s on the path to the door, nothing else exists but getting out of that door. It’s as if she’s caught in a tractor beam on Star Trek. Scotty has pulled the lever and she’s being transported to the car. It never occurs to her that leaving these utilities on will cost us more money, but I do because I’m now on a fixed income. I’m not pulling in the extra dollars anymore. I fear the Starship Enterprise is going to run out of fuel. Plus, I fear the cats could theoretically knock a lamp over and start a fire. So King Piddle’s trips back into the house often avert tragedy. But no ever brags on a stop sign at an intersection, they do; however, lament woefully if it did not have a stop sign and someone speeds through it, causing a horrible crash. King Piddle is the Stop Sign that saves the day.

So yesterday’s trip to the hearing aid store had to be coordinated with my son’s departure time from the house. He leaves for work an hour and a half later, so I rode with him. He dropped me off at my wife’s office a full two hours before my appointment. My wife took me. She and I listened while me man told us several things, which we both forgot most of, about the new, hi-tech hearing aids that cost more than thirty-five hundred smackers. But in order for my wife to take me to the appointment, she had to make sure someone could cover her schedule at work. Fortunately, the cute little girl from India who works part-time for her was able to be there yesterday. Whew! Good Lord.

One simple trip is a logistical nightmare somewhat akin to planning the Normandy invasion.

After the battle, we finally got my hearing aids. The man who sold them to me warned that they might have to be adjusted. Sure enough, the longer I wore them last night, the more I realized I can’t hear any better out of these thirty-five hundred dollar contraptions then I could out of my old ones; therefore, I’m going to have to schedule more appointments for them to be adjusted. My wife has a business trip tomorrow, the next day her sister is having surgery, so I don’t have a clue how we are going to coordinate the next battle plan; there will be guerrilla attacks, booby traps, moral breakdown among the troops, etc.

War is hell.

Temporarily Out Of Order

Yes, I had every intention of blogging more often, but being a typical human being, I've done too much too soon. Laying dormant for several months after eye surgery has surely made me a wimp because I did a lot of yard work yesterday and today, I'm a hurting MoFo. My back hasn't hurt me like this in years. The last time it hurt this bad I had to have back surgery. My surgeon has since retired and the doctor that saw me last at Vanderbilt has since moved on, so there's no one I can call for pain medicine. That means I'm going to take it easy, lay on the couch and watch the Idiot Tube for a few days. Oh no, anything but that.

A Thief In The Night

So, here I am back on my blog after a long absence. Got it all spruced up with a new look, paying tribute to my English heritage with the cool red British phone booths. I’ve recently made a decision to start writing again. I thought the phone booths might serve as a visual reminder that I come from good stock. After all, some of the greatest writers, both new and old, are English, i.e., Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Jeffery Archer, etc. Not that I’m from England, but I did trace my linage once and three Plumlee brothers decided to make the trip across the pond to the new world some time during the 18th century. I don’t know why they left the fair island of Albion and I don’t care to know, because the reality of why they left would probably shatter my illusions of coming from good stock. It’s a given that they were probably not aristocracy. But they were English, and that gives me some hope, delusional though it may be.

I never meant to stop writing. It’s just that I got so busy drumming that I had neither the time nor the inclination to do so. Neither did I aim to get that busy drumming; I only started doing it again for physical exercise. I was in truth, getting old and fat, my blood pressure and cholesterol were through the roof. I’ve always been an extremely intense drummer, fancying myself after the likes of Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, so I figured drumming would help me lose some weight. I lost 40 some-odd pounds and went from a size 41 waist down to a 31. But life is a constant trade off; you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Beating drums with that intensity also means beating them loudly; therefore, while my heart attack risks decreased, my hearing loss increased. So much so, that I can rarely understand what my six and eight year old granddaughters are saying anymore. While I might be young at heart, they surely think of me the “old man” who always asks my wife, “What’d they say?” But, I kept drumming because I like being skinny.

A recent close encounter with blindness made me re-evaluate my decision to drum. On April 14, 2011, I had surgery on my right eye. The doctor inserted a tube in that eye to relieve pressure caused from glaucoma. I had to have this done because I lost quite a bit of eyesight between January of last year and February of this year. Glaucoma is a dastardly deceiving disease; you can coast along for a few years thinking you might not lose anymore vision and then WHAM BOOM BANG, it steals a bunch of eyesight when you’re not looking for it to happen. That’s why they call it a thief in the night.

Looking back at it now, I suppose the surgery was successful; the pressure in my right eye, the one my doctor put the tube in, is down to nine, which is where she wanted it. But for the first several weeks after surgery, my vision was extremely blurry in my right eye. Imagine squirting KY Jelly in your eye and maybe you’ll get a clue as to what half of my world looked like. I’ve lost about a third of the vision in my other eye and that was all I had left to navigate my way through this world. I spent weeks stumbling over the toys my granddaughters left in the floor at our house, and trying to listen for the sounds of people’s voices or footsteps as I made my way through Wal-Mart, so as not to run straight into them. It was a rude reminder that I’m slowly going blind and that I also have progressive hearing loss. I joked with my doctor once that I was on the Helen Keller Highway. She worriedly replied, “Please don’t joke about that.” Sometimes I think she’s more worried about me ending up being blind and deaf than I am. She says I have one of the worse cases of glaucoma she’s ever seen. It’s a blinding disease. I hate to be a fatalist, but unless God intervenes, which He might do since I’m such a lovable guy, I will go blind unless I get drunk and fall off a cliff first. My hearing loss is more speculative, no one knows for sure why I keep losing hearing. But one thing’s for sure, beating drums like a madman is like playing Russian roulette with the main sense I will have to depend on when I do go blind. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that drumming will only hasten my hearing loss.

So that’s it, I’m through, I quit drumming! Fate has forced me to return to writing. To be truthful, I’ve felt guilty for drumming for quite sometime now. I knew I was hurting my hearing, and I also knew I was neglecting my other gift, writing; the one I went to school for and got a degree in journalism. I believe that willful neglect made me bitter, mean and angry. In the past three to four years, I’ve been way too quick to challenge to a facebook duel anyone who opposed my political views. But that’s fodder for a later post. So I hope you and I both enjoy the foolish words that follow.

Cheerio.