transdermal celebration

Still working on it…not sure what is next or when.

I have had an odd 2020. In many ways, it has been genuinely wretched for everyone, but compared to the issues I see others facing, I have very little to complain about. Health issues are a good metaphor for my year…specifically, I am in at a new Ortho clinic and had the MRI and tests redone, and what do you know, my pain isn’t a fiction of my mind! I really do have something wrong with me – quite wrong actually. Long story short, I need an entirely new left shoulder. This is enough to keep me busy, but I am in a weird spot; mainly, that I am probably too young to have this surgery. I am 50. The doc says most replacement shoulders of the kind I need have an expected life of no more than 20-25 years. That means my new shoulder would wear out some time in my early 70s. The problem is that if it wears out then, I will be too old to get ANOTHER new shoulder, and that I would find myself in a real state of ugly needing another new shoulder at 70. As the doc says, I likely wouldn’t be able to get another new shoulder at that age, so the plan is to wait to get my new shoulder for as long as I possibly can. Ideally, I would wait for…TEN YEARS! That means a decade of the very ugly situation I find myself currently in. Not cool, but in truth, my options are to suffer now at 50, or suffer more at 70. The wise thing is to do my suffering now, and it looks like that is what we are going to do. To make it 10 years, I have to make some changes. The biggest one is that I likely need to move to a place with no winter. I should have never left California (and I wish I never had to), but I have to eat, and my job moved to NYC, so I did too. Now my job can be anywhere (if I continue to HAVE a job), so I can go west or south without much grief. That is good news and deep down, I am good with it. The only down side is that I am very much enjoying living here in Iowa again. The weather is beastly, and I am not a fan of the winters here, but on balance, it ain’t all that hard once you git yr mind right about it. I mostly have my mind right about it, so even though it is nasty enough outside to get penguins to go back to the open ocean, I am surviving pretty well. My lease is up in a few months, and I could easily make a clean break, but in a few months, things will start warming up. That means I could just ride it out here through spring and summer and then get myself out when the coats come back out of storage. I would like to do this, but I could also just get out in 2 months and figure out where to go now. Not the worst problem…The other thing I am facing though is that to survive these next 10 years before I can go bionic, I am going to have to start taking lots of drugs that fuck up livers and kidneys. I had my blood work done, and lucky for me, my liver and kidneys are in good enough shape to take the drugs without killing myself with them. You get a finite amount of liver and kidney function, and 10 years of the killer dope is going to chew up all the function I have to spare. It will be a tight-run thing to be sure. If the drugs provide real relief, then it is a good deal. If they don’t – it ain’t. This is kind of emblematic of my 2020…I have many many things to be thankful for (and I am thankful), and I have many things coming which will test my positivity on some high stakes issues. I am in pain and suffering in ways that I don’t like, but I am grateful that my issues actually show up on the diagnostic test. My life would be dramatically worse if I was suffering the exact same amount, but I had no clear diagnosis and no clear malady to point to which explain the suffering. So many people in pain are allowed to dangle above the abyss because their issues don’t show up on x-rays or MRI’s. I experienced that for years, and it drives one to despair quickly. I don’t have that issue. I know I have issues and every doctor who has seen my labs and imagine knows I am not lying. This is something I thank God for. It increases the chance I will get my pain treated without being treated like a drug-fiend. I am everything but a drug fiend…when you take opiates 24/7/365 for a decade, that doped up feeling is the last thing you are interested in. Frankly, by the end, the constipation from Fentanyl was bad enough to blot out any euphoria – I promise! Anyway, I have a very full few months ahead of me. I have lots to ponder and wonder, and thankfully, I have no distractions. If I can keep my pain levels down during these wet and cold days, I will be fine in time. Between now and fine, I will be tested no doubt, but I know that I am just one of many. Many of us are being tested and there is no reason to think it will end any time soon. I am not gonna push church just to hear myself do it, but in all sincerity I can say that the Christian explanation of pain is the only one in which pain makes any sense, but I will have to prove this later as it will take more space than I have here. For now, I will take a quick turn through recent headlines and leave you with a Happy New Year for 2021. I sincerely hope this year is better for humanity than 2020 was. I hope this year finds you all well, and richly blessed. I especially help you can feel the warmth of your blessings, whatever they may be, even as the cold and ugly goes on around us:

• Our pandemic response has been bad across the board here in the US, but I think all should be forgiven and we should stop convicting all who made mistakes in good faith. I think that covers most of the mistakes on both sides.
• Clearly, it was also a record year for getting wisdom teeth pulled.
• We now get VD from the VD drugs.
• Acetaminophen must be killing stunt men if this is true.
• Fine with treatments that work. We could also stop being vicious to each other.
• This is a person of high position and esteem.
• White Coat Privilege kills people.
• As I have noted multiple times, Illinois is so rotten they can’t avoid screwing up weed dealing with a legal monopoly. The people there who tolerate this stuff deserve Illinois.
• Drug test the administrators to make sure they cut back too.
• Does this article imply that the Opioid Crisis is just a jobs program for losers with a uniform fetish? Big if true!
• We’re all WalMart now. I find myself admiring WalMart in ways I did not anticipate!
• And we keep telling the kids to get a STEM degree.
• A friendly reminder that Oxycontin was developed specifically to be abuse-resistant, and was approved by the same geniuses now suing “Big Pharm”.
• Old, but new to me. Go team.
• WRONG. The source of the issue is wisdom teeth extraction.
• This is supposed to undermine the organic nature of “voices”, but to the contrary, I would not expect people to hear something genuinely foreign to them in their own language in their own mind. It is also why I think a lot of “speaking in tongues” is performative and not really of the Holy Spirit.
• Let’s not pretend this is done to save addicts – it is designed to keep doctors and paper-pushers from looking bad. Any port in a storm.
• Ironically, one needn’t have any scientific training to understand why self-important asses are shameless.
• Someday, humanity will need to come to grips that it is very common for all of us to accept death for those whose problems prove too hard for society to solve easily and cheaply.
• We will never ever address the demand for recreational drugs because it requires a mirror.
• Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it often buys better problems.
• All should be forgiven. Many mistakes were made. We have to let it go and try to get better at this.

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If me being a born-again Christian is going to interfere with your enjoyment of my work here, we might be on short-time together. I am finding more in the Christian faith on the topic of legal and illegal drug use for pain than I thought likely, and I think I am just gonna give this weblog over to that realm. Half my entries here have been “hold on something’s coming” so don’t expect any regular reader here to buy even one word of this, but I think we are there. I am gonna work on the first stuff of that kind over the weekend. If the work is as good as the outline, it should go up relatively soon. When it does, that will sort of act as the starter pistol for the race we are joining. I don’t think anything for me, from here on out, will ever really be totally secular. I get why non-believers wouldn’t sign up for all of that (I didn’t go our of my way to read Christian stuff when I was in unbelief – that’s for sure), but I would ask you give me a chance…yes, I want you to convert to Bible-believing Christianity, and I may even ask you nicely to do so, but you will not find me as one-dimensional as is usually the fear. I live in the same world you do. I am not an ascetic, and never intend to be one. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it worked. It is on me – and my ability to generate results for Christ – that will dictate whether this succeeds. I only succeed if I reach people. I won’t reach people with condemnation, so I don’t intend to bring any to the party! All of this is easy to say of course. It simply remains for me to do and you to decide. Let’s see what happens! Til then, here is more of “what happens” in the worldly world. It may not edify. It may not satisfy. But, it does get the product out the door on time, so here goes:

• The DEA gets its ass handed to it every single day. When they fight drugs – they lose; so instead they fight poor people, and they “win”. Pretty simple stuff
• Cool. Now let’s do this here.
• Everyone knows.
• This is done to make drug warriors feel better about themselves. This is how they are walking it all back so they don’t get held accountable. That won’t work.
• IA State gets one right.
• Every city I have ever visited creates a connection for me such that I hurt when I see them hurting. I loved visiting London the handful of times I did, and the idea that a new mutation can jump in like this and rough them up really sucks. Thoughts and prayers raise a smirk these days, but I believe in them and intend them for all suffering there. I definitely need to also figure out how exactly to get the same level of concern going for places I have never seen!
• International institutions exist only to maintain the integrity of borders. Daniel Goldhagen was right.
• Consent, schmonsent.
• The right-wing mob and the left wing mob deserve each other; the rest of us deserve neither of them. Both sides abuse their power and discretion and do so for entirely selfish reasons. It is best no one going seeking the truth from either.
• No institution is beyond the reach of the powerful.
• STEM degrees.
• The idea that rogue organizations run the black market for drugs is laughable.
• These people will face God.
• The good news is that most of the drug debt is also student loan debt and the kiddies will be paying usury on bad ditch weed for 30 years. These are the people we considered smart enough to give an advanced education!
• The DEA lost the drug war without ever losing a battle. We might as well just pay tribute directly to the cartels ourselves and eliminate the middlemen at the DEA.
• I refuse to believe anything bad about Canada.
• When you let humans decide who is a human being and who is not a human being, pain is sure to follow.
• I know almost nothing about Hillsong, but the energy off of the people they cover from that church have energy on them that make the recent news about Hillsong not seem very mysterious.
• If you mix it up you will also keep it up.
• All of our prisons are inhumane and it is time for a mass amnesty. – not just this one.
• They lie to you because it is effective. If you lie to them, they will try to put you in a cage.
• These are the things you are supposed to discuss BEFORE making policy decisions.
• Medical consent really isn’t all that thorny.
• When this era passes, we really need to try to help each other readjust together in a healthy way. 2020 has been unhealthy.
• The contortions people are willing to go to in avoidance of plain speaking is pretty incredible.
• Big lessons from 2020 apparently are that cigs prevent COVID and porn prevents serial killers.
• D Party Leadership.
• More people dying of OD’s in San Francisco than of COVID. No one cares.
• We pay them to gas us.