What Christmas means to me

I was about 6 or 7 when I finally figured out that it was my mom (yes, my mom - not my dad or Father Christmas, as we called Santa - who put the presents under the Christmas tree.) I told my mom and she fessed up and then insisted that I not tell my little sister.

But Father Christmas was never the center of the celebration in our family. That was always the baby Jesus. Maybe I didn't completely understand what my mom's words about Jesus signified but I definitely understood her meaning (and the spirit of her words as they gently touched my soul) when she told me that Jesus is pure love and that He had been born a simple human being because of His love for us.

Perhaps at that time, Jesus' love just seemed to me to be something similar to my mother's love for me: safety, comfort and happiness. It was a warm and tender love.

The other more serious aspect of Jesus' love of course is the sacrifice of His life - also out of infinite love. All I can say is that, even though I am not a theologically correct Christian, I am happy to think of myself as a believer in Christ.

Maybe I don't believe everything that a Christian is supposed to believe in but one thing that I do know as sure as anything is that Jesus did die for my sins. His sacrifice showed me what a human being is meant to be - not a demon-worshiping barbarian but an angelic being made in the image of God's infinite love.

And, once you know that that's what a human being is, well then to me there is no excuse for not being as perfect as any mortal can try to be. Jesus saved me by showing me what it means to be human and He has invited me to live in eternal joy and love with Him through his sacrifice.

But I won't dwell on that now. Christmas is about the baby Jesus, about birth and joy not about the hard cold and terrible fact of the adult Jesus' ultimate sacrifice - which is the foundation of all that is perfect in an imperfect human world.

Home for the holidays

What's been so surprising is getting comments from people who've read my blog but have not yet commented before. I don't think I could ever convey how wonderful a revelation that has been. And that's not to mention the funny, sweet and silly comments from those of you whom I have grown to love, trust and respect over that past few months and years.

Right now I am at home eating like a horse. Unfortunately the massive doses of prednisone that I am taking stimulates the appetite enormously. So far today I've had marmite and cheddar cheese with toast and a slice of dark chocolate cheesecake just for first breakfast. Second breakfast was a cheddar cheese omelet with hashbrowns, fried tomatoes and a chunk of mixed dark and milk chocolate cheesecake with a cup of coffee and two glasses of milk.

Then it was non-stop munchies of spicy peanuts, pistachies, pecans, bananas, macadamia nuts, a bag of gummy bears, a bag of Lifesavers, a bag of cheesy Goldfish, three satasuma mandarin oranges, two bowls of tropical fruit salad with English custard, a pack of beef jerky, with about ten cups of sugary, milky English breakfast tea and two glasses of pomagranite juice (to help reduce the fluid which the prednisone has built up in my lungs and feet - yep I look like Jaba the Hut.)

Dinner was a New York strip-steak with and green beans and two helpings of butter-mashed parsnips - and two slices of red-velvet cheesecake. Our best buddies popped over with a fruit and nut busket the size of the USS Enterprise. And then for supper before watching a silly Hallmark Christmas movie, I had two sardine sandwiches ( goof for lubricating the lungs) with lashings of Thai chilie pepper sauce. And that doesn't include all the medications: a Lasix pill to drain the fluid from my lungs and feet, enough prednisone to suppress the immune systems of a entire football team, two types of antibiotics, a tranquilizer, a sleeping pill, two brochodilators and partridge in a pear tree.

And tomorrow we'll be going to the neighbors' cookie potluck just after dressed dungeness crab for lunch and a walk on the beach with the dogs and just before roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner. And I still don't need any Alka-Seltzer but I'm thinking may be you do by now.

This post may have been boring but I used it as therapy. When I had a stroke 6 years ago, what helped me to recover best was to read, write and especially type. Struggling to think straight, going back and painstakingly correcting typos is what pulled me through.

Did you hear the joke about the three old ladies sitting on a park bench when a flasher walked up to them, whipped open his coat and flashed them with his willie? The first old lady had a small stroke; the second old lady had a medium stroke but the third old lady refused to touch the flasher's willie at all.

Not quite my death bed yet

All your prayers have been cherished and appreciated. I'm having a hard time typing - mostly because my brain is not functioning at 100% yet and this episode seems to have set back whatever progress I had made against the mental and physical weaknesses caused by my stroke 6 years ago and I've lost my left side again and half my brain.

It's been very interesting to see how such total strangers can be so caring. Just proves to me that we aren't really strangers at all but simply members of the same human family who have not met yet.

I don't know why Chas and Andy had to take pics of me in hospital.


















But I liked the view from my window of the very crowded parking lot of the country hospital.
















































It was a real thrill to find that one of the windows could actually be opened. First thing I did was reduce the thermostat from 82F down to 58F and get a fan to cool me off. This post took an hour to do.

Sunday sermon

Byron York on the latest Pew poll on religion and faith:

"Conservatives and Republicans report fewer experiences than liberals or Democrats communicating with the dead, seeing ghosts and consulting fortunetellers or psychics," the Pew study says. For example, 21 percent of Republicans report that they have been in touch with someone who is dead, while 36 percent of Democrats say they have done so.

Well, duh! Obviously more Democrats talk to the dead. How else can they get the dead to vote for them?

Eleven percent of Republicans say they have seen a ghost, while 21 percent of Democrats say so. And nine percent of Republicans say they have consulted a fortuneteller, while 22 percent of Democrats have.

There's more. Seventeen percent of Republicans say they believe in reincarnation, while 30 percent of Democrats do. Fourteen percent of Republicans say they believe in astrology, while 31 percent of Democrats do. Fifteen percent of Republicans say they view yoga as a spiritual practice, while 31 percent of Democrats do. Seventeen percent of Republicans say they believe in spiritual energy, while 30 percent of Democrats do.

There are some areas in which the two partisan groups are similar. When Pew asked respondents whether they have had a religious or mystical experience, 50 percent of Republicans said yes, as did 50 percent of Democrats.

Okay. I've talked to the dead (my mom and dad mostly) but none of them ever answered me back. I've also consulted fortunetellers and psychics. They were all worse than useless but maybe it's just me. Mostly they just seemed to predict new sofas and/or lovers, jobs, money etc. And anyway predicting the future is obviously just guesswork no matter how educated one's guesses are.

As for reincarnation. I've got a theory about that that I got from an insight I had on an acid trip once when it seemed to me that at the cellular level my body remembered all the other things and people it's atoms had once been part of. Later I read that there may well be something akin to cellular memory and DNA is basically the programming code for memorizing cellular structure and function. But, I honestly didn't believe that last clairvoyant I knew who told me that I had once been Cleopatra. I would never have married my own brother even if I'd had one.

Yoga? I've practiced jnana yoga for 37 years. It's basically the same as all meditation practices such as zazen (which means sit and be empty) and simply boils down to Psalm 46: "Be still and know that I am God" otherwise known as "Just sit still, shut up for a while and stop thinking about yourself all the time and you'll see Me (the Big Kahuna) right inside yourself." And really means "Be still!" Nothing else. It's not something that you can force. It happens by grace.

"Spiritual energy?" I've no idea what that means to others but for me it means sensing another person's vibes - either good or bad - but can it also mean feeling the Kingdom of Heaven within? Or is that a "mystical experience?" Again I'm not sure what others mean by that but for me that means being still and feeling the Kingdom of God within my own soul.

It seems to me that Americans (like South Africans) are very "spiritual" compared with Europeans. Maybe it's because people left Europe and moved to South Africa and America at about the same time in order to find religious freedom. My ancestors, the French Huguenots, left France for South Africa in order to avoid the Catholic persecution of Protestants in 1652.

Combining positive thinking and modern medicine

After another sleepless night caused by congestion, I asked Chas and Andy to take me to the ER as soon as they woke up this morning. This time I went armed with the thought that I would finally find a doctor who would prescribe the right treatment and look at the long-term (or at least long enough to get me through this blinking cold.)

Not only was he there but so was my favorite nurse, a very competent and cheerful woman who actually listens. Both she and the doctor realized that I could not afford to go the the ER every time I needed breathing treatment. My insurance will not pay for the ER if I am not admitted to the hospital so, so far, I've racked up three ER bills for over a 1,000 bucks a pop just for an hour of treatment and a few X-rays.

This time the doc skipped the X-rays and sent me home with a portable nebulizer and the nurse stuffed the bag full of freebie inhalants, masks etc. She knows that unlike half the ER patients who are uninsured, I will actually have to pay for my treatment and, unlike positive thinking, modern medicine isn't free or even cheap. God bless her cotton socks.

I sure feel blessed. I'm a firm believer in better living through chemistry - as long as you keep informed about the chemicals. And also as long as you have faith and trust in the love, beauty and goodness which is creating and sustaining this universe.

The nurse said an interesting thing today when I asked them to skip the X-rays, "Yes, they're a waste of time and money. All they show is what they showed before: you have COPD and a big heart."

Usually docs and nurses say, "You have an enlarged heart." An enlarged heart is caused by the heart growing big because it is working too hard but it was discovered that I had a large heart when I was a teen and had probably been born that way.

Heart defects are common among Afrikaners (which is what my mom was) because the Brits killed so many Afrikaners in concentration camps during the Boer War that the Afrikaner gene-pool was reduced and heart defects have been passed on ever since. I did a post about that in November 2005.

Not sure if I'll blog tomorrow as I have a doctor's appointment. At least we've gotten the ball rolling on getting the electricity in the park fixed and the flooring in the apartment replaced. It's time for me to pamper myself a bit - maybe do a few "Movie stars I loved as a kid" and remember the beautiful women who made my large heart go pitter-patter as a boy.

Tying the two previous posts together

Actually I started writing the previous two posts as one which had a message. I started off by thinking of how my mother's attitude towards illness finally helped me and that was meant to lead into how modern medicine also has it's place and the final moral of the story was meant to show that turning either "positive thinking" or modern medicine into a religion is not sensible.

Modern medicine is not infallible and we should be informed consumers not religious worhipers at the altar of science. Same goes for "Christian Science" and its many offshoots. There's a lot of common sense to positive thinking but, when it's turned into a religion, as it was by Mary Baker Eddy, it quickly becomes nonsense.

Just tonight I was saying to Chas and Andy at dinner that I could have been stinking rich if I had turned my inner knowledge into a religion like Mary Baker Eddy or Swami Deepfried Okra but there's one small problem: I can't communicate my real knowledge in words - not even to Chas and Andy. (God knows I've tried but we all always realize that it's futile.) In order to do so, I would have to dilute it and therefore it would not be the full truth but a half-truth and, as everyone knows, half-truths are the most dangerous kind of lies.

Mary Baker Eddy, my former guru, Swami Deepfried Okra and all the other founders of religions were probably all well-meaning at one time but their religions are nonsense because they are half-truths. All religion is necessarily but a half-truth. The ultimate truth cannot be put into words which is why I always have a chuckle when my religious neighbors talk to me about the "Word of God." Which language does God speak? Does God speak the Word with finite lips or write the Word with finite fingers?

No, there's no need to speak or write the Word. We were all born with the knowledge of it. It's built in and comes standard with the human body which is why the wise men wrote that we were made in the image of God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And that Word is not secret or hidden. We know it because we were made in the image of it. It gives us life.

For Andy - real old-fashioned Christmas cake

Pam and Andy sent me fresh pecans for Christmas for which I am very grateful. Pecans are my favorite nuts but unfortunately we can't grow them here. Pam also included her recipe for pecan muffins. So my Andy (not Pam's) and I got talking about baking for Christmas.

My Andy is a great baker and had just finishing baking scrumptious nut and chocolate chip cookies which we had hot out of the oven with afternoon coffee. Today our neighbors announced the date for their usual Christmas tea and baked goodies potluck for the hood next week. Andy thought of baking Christmas cookies but that's what everyone else will bring.

I'm thinking more evil thoughts. Our neighbors are very strict Christian teetotalers so obviously I'm thinking about baking with booze - my specialty. I could do tipsy cake (fruit cake soaked in brandy) but the name will give it away. So I think I'll do South African sjokolade hawerkoek (chocolate oatcake.) The name sounds so innocent, wholesome and it's chockful of healthy coconut flakes too. The fact that the cake is then soaked in a pint of ruby port makes it even healthier as far as I'm concerned and I'm hoping that my neighbors will also enjoy it. Or is that too evil?

Anyway that got us talking about baking with booze. As a kid my favorite Christmas treat was plum pudding. I loved it not only because it had coins buried in it: a dozen or so "tickies" ("thrupenny" coins), some sixpence pieces, a few shillings, (twelve pennies) and one half-crown (2 shillings and sixpence) but because, just before it was served, it was covered in brandy and set on fire, then sliced and covered in hot English custard.

Then I had an inspiration. I said to Andy: "Let's bake a real old-fashioned Christmas cake this year." He said: "Gimme a recipe." I said: "Okay." And here it is.

Real Old-fashioned Christmas Cake:

1 lb flour (4 cups)
3/4 lb butter (1 3/4 cups)
1/2 lb soft brown or castor sugar
1 lb sultanas (2 2/3 cups)
1 lb currants (2 2/3 cups)
6 oz chopped mixed peel (1 cup)
1/4 lb glacïe cherries chopped (2/3 cup)
6 large eggs
1/4 lb almonds (1 cup)
1 teasp grated orange rind
1 TBS black treacle (molasses)
1 level teasp baking powder
1/2 teasp mixed spice
1 wineglass (or more) of brandy

1. Sieve the flour with the baking powder, spice and a pinch of salt.

2. Blanch the almonds and finely chop; chop the peel or put through a mincer; quarter the cherries.

3. Put the butter into a bowl and warm it slightly; beat with a wooden spoon. Add the sugar and continue to beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, using a level dessertspoon of flour as each egg is added. Then stir in the treacle (molasses).

4. Add half the rest of the flour, all the fruit, almonds and orange rind. Put the other half of the flour on top, stir and mix well but do not beat. Put in the brandy. If the mixture seems too stiff, add a little milk - the mixture should drop easily from a spoon.

5. Prepare a cake tin about 10 inches in diameter, grease the tin then line with buttered grease-proof paper high enough to come 2 to 3 inches above the top of the tin.

6. Put in the cake mixture, slightly press in the centre to make the cake rise evenly and stand the cake on a layer of coarse crushed salt on a baking tin (or cookie sheet). This will prevent the bottom becoming too brown before the cake is cooked.

7. Have the oven preheated at Gas 4, electricity 350F. Put the cake not higher than the centre of the oven - just below if possible. Lower the heat at once to Gas 2, electricity 300F for one hour, then lower the heat to Gas 1, electricity 275F. The cake will take from 5 to 6 hours to cook. Test with a warmed fine skewer or knitting needle after 5 hours.

8. After removing from the oven leave it in the tin for half an hour, then turn out onto wire rack, remove the paper. After about 12 hours, wrap in double sheets of greaseproof paper and store in a tin with tightly fitting lid until required for icing.

If preferred, the cake can be baked at Gas 3, electricity 325F for 1 hour, then turned to Gas 1 electricity 275F for the rest of the time.

MY TIP: I made the cakes in mid-October and wrapped them in brandy-soaked cheesecloth in tightly closed containers, removing and resoaking the cloths (in brandy) and rewrapping them a couple of times before I did the marzipan and icing a few days before Christmas.

ICING THE CAKE: - in two stages

ALMOND PASTE (Marzipan)

12 oz ground almonds (3 cups)
6 oz castor sugar (3/4 cup) (or fine fruit sugar)
6 oz sieved icing sugar (1 1/2 cups)
3 egg whites
few drops almond essence
3 TBS apricot jam, sieved

ROYAL ICING - (three days later)

4 egg whites
2 lbs icing sugar, sieved (7 to 8 cups)
4 teasp lemon juice
2 teasp glycerine

1. Mix almonds and sugar in a bowl, then blend in egg whites and almond essence to make a soft paste. Knead until it is smooth, then divide into three equal portions.

2. Roll one piece onto a sugared board to an 8-inch circle. Roll remaining two-thirds to a strip the same depth as cake, and long enough to go all the way around the edge.

3. Brush the sides of cake with apricot jam. Press long strip around sides and press firmly to join. Place circle of paste on top of cake. Allow to dry for at least three days before icing.

4. Whisk egg whites for royal icing until they become frothy. Add sugar, a tablespoon at a time, and beat well after each addition. Finally beat in lemon juice and glycerine. To prevent the icing hardening, cover bowl with a damp cloth.

5. Spread icing thickly over top and round sides of cake and smooth flat. Leave for a day to set and then decorate with red ribbon around sides.

Tip: Using glycerine in the icing ensures that it is not hard. The lemon juice adds flavour and helps tp make a softer icing.

Source: The Margaret Powell Cookery Book - London 1970.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Now it's time for dessert. Andy made pistachio pudding. We'll have that with some of Pam's pecans, seedless grapes and whipped cream - oh and one of the chocolate chip cookies from this afternoon.

Organ recitals

When I first got sick two weeks ago I wrote:

I'm sick. I had to go to the ER yesterday. I'm convinced that politics made me sick to my stomach. I won't go into details. As my mother used to say: "Save the organ recitals for church."

Well, so much for not doing organ recitals since my previous post was pure organ recital. But there's something to be said for not talking about illness - not only because it's usually only interesting for the person doing the recital and totally boring for the audience but also, as my mother insisted, it's not healthy to dwell on sickness.

When my mom was 70 and was widowed for the second time, she started to volunteer at an old folks home. Many of the old folks whom she served were actually younger than her. But she was healthier and happer. She was also the South African Womens' Lawn Bowling champ and active in the WWll vets' association, Members of the Tin Hat or MOTHS, as care-taker of their hall and their caterer. My mother was seldom ill. She claimed that was because her father had taught her never to dwell on illness.

Her father, Gustavus Adolphus Joubert, was also an unusual man, a dairy farmer who was also a vegetarian, a poet, philosopher and school-teacher but also the local post master. I don't know when he discovered Mary Baker Eddy but he became convinced of that her Christian Science was the answer. He never became a member of the Church of Christ Scientist (like everyone in my family he was allergic to churches and preachers) but would read from Eddy's books to his 5 kids.

Only my mom took his teaching seriously. She was not fanatical about it - after all she was a nurse. If anyone in the family became sick, she would call a doctor but quite often, after she had assessed the situation and decided it was not serious she would say: "It's not a big problem. Here take some castor oil or epsom salts or milk of magnesia and you'll be fine. Just tell Jesus to chase that sickness away."

When I was younger I didn't take much notice of her "mind over matter" approach to illness but, after I went to pharmacy school, I became very skeptical about it and for years tolerated and patronized her "quaint notions." Then I became very ill in 1984. Every doctor I went to diagnosed a different disease. I just got sicker and sicker for the next ten years. It didn't help that I was on permanent night-shift for 7 of those ten years. Night-shift did not agree with me. This time the "mind over matter" approach to illness became my last resort.

Chas had become interested in the New England "New Thought" which was started by Phineas Quinby. Quinby had several students one of whom was Mary Baker Eddy. Many of them wanted to call their philosophy Christian Science but Eddy was quite the businesswoman and copyrighted the name. But basically they were all the same: positive thinking, mind over matter, faith healing.

The strain that I was most attracted to has come to be known as Science of Mind. The idea is that you can change the way you think by contemplating your mind, identifying what unexamined almost subconscious negative thought patterns have become bad habits and changing them. Changing them is accomplished not by fighting the negative but by practicing the positive.

I discovered that I had a lot of unexamined negative thought patterns many of them going back all the way to my late teens and early twenties when I was a very frightened kid who was harassed, tailed, phone-tapped, jailed and threatened by the Secret Police for opposing apartheid in South Africa. A recurring nightmare was of when one particularly vicious Zulu officer threatened to throw me out of the window of the fourth floor jail. I buried all this fear and paranoia and kept on trucking but it left ugly negative impressions on my mind.

Then, as I delved into the roots of my fear and negativity, I found more. Subconsciously I had over the years fallen prey to blaming others for my misfortunes. I realized that I had been thinking of myself as a victim for most of my adult life. That was the turning point for me. I saw that blaming others made me even sicker; that thinking of myself as a victim left me powerless and vulnerable. I practiced affirmations of strength, love and forgiveness and slowly turned my life around. But practicing affirmations is only a temporary measure. You can get trapped into "thinking positive" instead of just "being positive."

But all those years of negative thinking had left me physically unhealthy and I got one illness after the other. At least my mysterious illnesses were no longer misdiagnosed. In 1999 I succumbed to diverticulitis, emergency surgery, colostomy etc. In 2003 I had a stroke and in 2004 I had a heart attack. After each episode I recovered and felt better than I had before and I now count them as blessings in disguise.

I also count what I've just been through as a blessing. I had been feeling under the weather for the past few months. No I didn't blame Obama but I did blame it on the awful politics. I had also become very negative about the tenants in the park - seeing them as white trash welfare bums. But, since evicting the last two druggies, I can now say that I have really nice, non-criminal tenants.

Again I was blaming others for my own problems and that was eating away at me. It took a crisis for me to see that because I am a slow learner. In the end the most positive thinking that you can do is feel gratitude. Now it's time to just ignore the nasty politics and sit back and enjoy Christmas.

I didn't always love Christmas mostly because I spent so many of them alone, a stranger in strange countries - usually working because I had no family to be with. But, since Chas and Andy are now my family, I've really gotten to enjoy Christmas. Chas has already put up the outside Christmas lights and tomorrow I'm going to dig out the inside decorations and put up the Christmas tree.

Health and weather update

Thank God our two weeks of global warming is over. Last night a warm front rolled up from California raising the temps from the bone-chilling 10s and 20s into the 40s as it should be at this time of the year. It also brought a delicious soft soaking rain.

What a roller-coaster ride the past two weeks has been. The cold snap made the tenants in the trailer park run out and buy huge electric space heaters. The electric grid is designed to provide only 30 amps per tenant. Suddenly usage shot to nearly 50 amps and blew all the circuits. There were often 3 or 4 outages a night. Between the cold weather and the stress, I got sick.

When I first went to the ER two weeks ago, I had two problems. I had such severe intestinal pain that I was convinced that I had a gallstone trapped in my pancreas - which can be deadly. I was also struggling to breathe. I know I have chronic bronchitis (COPD) which I got from smoking most of my adult life but it has not been a problem till now.

The well-meaning ER doctor took my self-diagnosis at face value, pumped me full of morphine for the pain, gave me two inhalers, told me to contact my own doc, gave me a taxi voucher and sent me home. Morphine does not agree with me so I spent the whole ride home asking the cab driver to pull over so I could vomit.

That was a Monday. I spent the next two days using the inhalers and getting sicker. The morphine was still affecting my mind so I did not think to check what drugs were in the inhalers. My lungs got worse so I called my own doc. He said I had a lung infection and needed IV antibiotics and checked me into the hospital. That night, as I lay in the hospital being given an inhalation treatment, I had a moment of clarity through my drug (Ativan) induced haze: maybe the inhalant was making my breathing problems worse. I couldn' t take a chance. I checked out against medical advice.

It also didn't help that, when I requested phenylephrine nasal spray because the oxygen treatment dries out my nose, they brought me oxymetolazine nasal spray in spite of specifically telling them that I have an adverse reaction to the latter. Both nasal sprays are over the counter meds known as Neo-Synephrine and Afrin respectively. I know that most nurses don't know drugs so I wrote it all down for them. More about oxymetolazine later.

That was a Friday. The Ativan had not yet worn off and I continued using the inhalers. I got sicker and sicker. The problems at the park were also wearing me down. Meantime I had become convinced that one of the inhalers was the real problem but by now I was so sick that I could not think straight.

Finally on Sunday the Ativan wore off and I checked out what inhalers I was using. Sure enough one of them, ipratropium, is known to cause upper respiratory infections (URTIs) in some people - just like oxymetolazine and 38 other drugs. I'm sure you've all seen those adds for allergies and COPD meds which end with a warning that "some side effects may include upper respiratory tract infections." The cure is sometimes worse than the disease. I'd much rather have a few allergy sniffles than get a URTI from oxymetolazine and a bunch of other allergy meds. Buyer beware.

So last Monday I went to see my own doc and told him that the ipratropium was the problem. He agreed that that was a possibility but still figured that I had an underlying lung infection and needed to be hospitalized. I explained that the last thing Chas and Andy need now was for me to be in hospital and asked him to treat me on an outpatient basis. So he loaded me up with oral antibiotics and theophylline to ease my breathing.

I then went to pick up my scripts only to find that they were all out of the one thing I desperately needed: the theophylline without which I could not breathe. I trudged back to my truck and phoned my doc. It was still only 20F with an icy wind out of the Gulf of Alaska. The doc didn't answer the phone so I drove to the medical center to asked for another script to take to another pharmacy.

By this time Chas had been filling in for me at the park for so long that he was behind with farm work so, the next day, Tuesday, I went into the office to relieve him. On the way, I popped into Walmart to pick up some things including phenylephrine nasal drops (Walmart calls it Nasal Four and sells it for just over two bucks. If you need a nasal decongestant use phenylephrine not oxymetolazine which Walmart simply calls Nasal Spray. Check the fine print for the drug names.) While I was waiting in the check-out line, my eye itched and I rubbed it and immediately thought: "Oh shit! I've had my hands all over the dirty shopping cart."

I may not have caught my cold at that time but at the medical center the day before. The joint was crawling with coughing and sneezing people. But, by the time I got home that night I had the sneezes and sniffles. Usually I enjoy being cold but - blame it on my sick state of mind - I didn't notice that the RV that I use as an office was freezing cold - too cold for someone who was sick.

It was downhill from then on. I couldn't sleep lying down by Wednesday because my lungs would fill up with congestion. By Thursday I was barely breathing but I just kept taking the antibiotics and breathing pills and hoping the cold would soon break. It didn't seem like a really nasty bug. But, after another sleepless night, I felt like I was at death's door by Friday. My brain was no longer functioning after two nights of no sleep. I got the phone intending to call Chas and Andy and ask them to take me to the ER but it took me two hours to remember what I was supposed to do. When I finally remembered to call them, they could hear that I was in trouble and came rushing home.

Then followed 6 hours of dithering. They didn't want to push me to go to the ER because they knew I was concerned about getting the wrong treatment again. I struggled to write down everything about my symptoms, drugs and adverse affects. I was determined to get the right treatment this time. I suggested we eat before going but I couldn't eat because I couldn't breathe. I told Chas and Andy that I knew I was not dying because the three times that I had started dying (when my diverticulum burst and caused peritonitis and septic shock, when I had a stroke and when I had a heart attack) my mind had gone into some sort of coasting mode. I felt peaceful and calm and resigned to my fate. What else is there to do if you know you're about to kick the bucket? Supposedly the brain starts kicking out endorphines when it senses that the other organs are dying. But this time I was still in fighting for survival mode.

Eventually we set off to the ER at 9pm armed with two pages of Dos and Don'ts. Fortunately there was a lull in the usual Friday night ER drama and I was treated right away - this time with the drugs that I insisted on as well as IV cortico-steroids. Three hours later I could breathe again and was discharged, came home and ate my rewarmed steak, new potatoes with parsley butter and broccolli. Yes, cortico-steroids like prednisone give one a raging appetite. I haven't stopped eating since I started breathing agin.

As I write this, it all seems so ridiculously egotistical and trivial compared with Right Wing Prof' predicament. Last month he was diagnosed with untreatable lung cancer and is currently blogging his journey towards his immanent death. His faith in God is what is giving him his equanimity and it's very inspiring. I'm not going to link to his blog because it has, in recent weeks, become a very private affair for close friends and family. I will always be grateful to Right Wing Prof for urging me to keep blogging when I first started 5 years ago.

I just came back in from taking the dogs for a walk in the garden. It's a balmy 53F and another perfect day in paradise. Now it's time for coffee and cookies and maybe watch a silly Hallmark Christmas movie. Life is good. I sure hope I have a few years more. I still want to live to 102 and play golf with Bob Hope in Palm Springs. Oh, he's dead. But golf with Clint Eastwood at Pebble Beach sounds good.

Movie stars I loved as a kid - Rita Hayworth

I was mesmerized by Rita Hayworth twice: the first time when I was just a kid watching her movies when they were shown in the townhall on Saturday nights in South Aftica; the second time was when I was 21 on a cold winter night watching TV in London.

It was 1968. I had recently seen TV for the first time in my life and I was hooked on it. In those days you could not buy a TV in the UK. You had to rent it after buying a licence at the Post Office. I earned 12 pounds a week working in a pharmacy. I paid half of that in rent for a bedsitter in a garret in Notting Hill Gate. I couldn't afford to rent a color TV. So I rented a little B&W one for one pound a month.

The other thing that I had recently discovered was LSD. The first time I took it I laughed for a few hours at what I saw, felt and realized. Since that day I've been convinced that the universe was created not from a Big Bang but from a Big Belly Laugh, God's guffaw. The second time I took it was that winter night alone in my garret watching Rita Hayworth in "Gilda" on my postage-stamp-sized B&W TV. No, the TV didn't somehow magically become color but yes, I cried a lot watching Rita getting smacked around by Glen Ford but once again Rita mesmerized me as she sang "Put the Blame on Mame."

Rita Hayworth (October 17, 1918 – May 14, 1987):

She appeared in 61 films over 37 years and is listed as one of the American Film Institute's Greatest Stars of All Time.

Born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn, New York City, she was the daughter of Spanish flamenco dancer Eduardo Cansino, Sr. and Ziegfeld girl Volga Hayworth who was of Irish and English descent. Her father wanted her to become a dancer while her mother hoped she'd become an actress. Her grandfather, Antonio Cansino, was the most renowned exponent in his day of Spain's classical dances; he made the bolero famous. His dancing school in Madrid was world famous. He gave Hayworth her first instruction in dancing.

"I didn't like it very much," revealed Hayworth, "but I didn't have the courage to tell my father, so I began taking the lessons. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, that was my girlhood."

"From the time I was three and a half," Hayworth said, ". . . as soon as I could stand on my own feet, I was given dance lessons."

She began her professional career at the age of 17 as a nightclub dancer in Tijuana and worked hard to break into movies.

In 1948 she left her film career to marry Prince Aly Khan, a son of Sultan Mahommed Shah, Aga Khan III, the leader of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam. They were married on May 27, 1949.
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Hayworth once said she might become a Muslim like her husband. During the custody fight over their daughter Yasmin, Prince Khan said he wanted her raised as a Muslim; whereas Hayworth said she intended to raise her in the Christian faith. In fact, Hayworth turned down a $1,000,000 offer if she'd raise Yasmin as a Muslim from age seven and allow her to go to Europe for two or three months each year.

"Nothing will make me give up Yasmin's chance to live here in America among our precious freedoms and habits," declared Hayworth. "While I respect the Muslim faith and all other faiths it is my earnest wish that my daughter be raised as a normal, healthy American girl in the Christian faith. There isn't any amount of money in the entire world for which it is worth sacrificing this child's privilege of living as a normal Christian girl here in the United States. There just isn't anything else in the world that can compare with her sacred chance to do that. And I'm going to give it to Yasmin regardless of what it costs."

The Hayworth-Khan custody battle for little Yasmin was one of the most public custody battles in the history of Hollywood. Hayworth feared that Princess Yasmin would be kidnapped by her father, taken to his foreign country, and she'd never see her daughter again. She didn't trust him.
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Naturally shy and reclusive, Hayworth was the antithesis of the characters she played. "I naturally am very shy," she said, "and I suffer from an inferiority complex." She once complained, "Men fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me." With typical modesty she later remarked that the only films she could watch without laughing were the dance musicals she made with Fred Astaire. "I guess the only jewels of my life," Hayworth said, "were the pictures I made with Fred Astaire."
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Hayworth struggled with alcohol throughout her life. "I remember as a child," said her daughter, Yasmin Aga Khan, "that she had a drinking problem. She had difficulty coping with the ups and downs of the business. . . . As a child, I thought, 'She has a drinking problem and she's an alcoholic.' That was very clear and I thought, 'Well, there's not much I can do. I can just, sort of, stand by and watch.' It's very difficult, seeing your mother, going through her emotional problems and drinking and then behaving in that manner. . . Her condition became quite bad. It worsened and she did have an alcoholic breakdown and landed in the hospital."

In 1972, aged 54, Hayworth no longer wanted to act, but she signed up for "The Wrath of God" because she had money problems. The experience, however, exposed her bad health and worsening mental state. She couldn't remember her lines, so they had to film her scenes one line at a time. Extreme memory loss left her very nervous and resistant to doing at least one scene, which was then done by a double.
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Rita Hayworth's drinking problem confused her family, friends, colleagues—and even doctors—who were unable to immediately recognize Alzheimer's disease. "For several years in the 1970s, she had been misdiagnosed as an alcoholic."

"It was the outbursts," said her daughter, "She'd fly into a rage. I can't tell you. I thought it was alcoholism-alcoholic dementia. We all thought that. The papers picked that up, of course. You can't imagine the relief just in getting a diagnosis. We had a name at last, Alzheimer's! Of course, that didn't really come until the last seven or eight years. She wasn't diagnosed as having Alzheimer's until 1980. There were two decades of hell before that."

In July 1981, Hayworth's health had worsened to the point where a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that because she was suffering from senile dementia, and no longer able to care for herself, she should be placed under the care of her daughter, Princess Yasmin Khan of New York City.

She then lived in an apartment at The San Remo on Central Park West next to her daughter, who looked after her during her final years until she died.

One of the few color pics I could find:























This one's big. Click to enjoy:























And here she sings "Put the Blame on Mame" from "Gilda":

I have to go back to the slammer

The drugs that they gave me yesterday finally wore off this afternoon and I realized that I made a big mistake checking out AMA. It's become pretty obvious that my doc is right: I do have a lung infection and need IV antibiotics. Yesterday I disagreed with him and said it was only chronic bronchitis (COPD) which I got from smoking most of my adult life but it's clear that I am struggling to breathe.

I checked out of the hospital just as they were about to hook me into the IV. If I'd stayed I'd probably be breathing easily by now. What an idiot I am. This time I'm telling them: "No drugs!" Morphine and a bunch of other drugs just do not suit me. I can't think straight. The fact is that I become paranoid on drugs in strange places with strange people. I think it's because I'm a stranger in a strange land and pretty insecure deep down.

But I'm going to check myself back in tomorrow. The only way is to go through the ER which is a loony bin on Saturday nights. So I'll wait till morning.

We've just had a good dinner of roast beef, potatoes and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon and now it's time for chocolate cake and a good old-fashioned Christmas movie: "We're No Angels" with Humphrey Bogart. Last night, after I got home from the hospital, we watched another Christmas oldie but goodie: "The Shop Around the Corner" with Jimmy Stewart.

Life is good. I think I'd like to stick around a little bit longer.

Movie stars I loved as a kid - Betty Grable

Back to normal programming.

Betty Grable (December 18, 1916 – July 2, 1973):

Her iconic bathing suit photo made her the number-one pin-up girl of the World War II era. It was later included in the Life magazine project "100 Photos that Changed the World". Grable was particularly noted for having the most beautiful legs in Hollywood and studio publicity widely dispersed photos featuring them. Hosiery specialists of the era often noted the ideal proportions of her legs as: thigh (18.5") calf (12"), and ankle (7.5"). Grable's legs were famously insured by her studio for $1,000,000 with Lloyds of London.
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It was during her reign as box office queen (in 1943) that Grable posed for her famous pinup photo, which (along with her movies) soon became escapist fare among GIs fighting in World War II.

Quote of the day - only the brave are free

Boortz quotes H.L. Mencken:

"The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. He can imagine and even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty-for example, the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell for the more obviously dishonest-but the reality is incomprehensible to him. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. More, he must be able to endure it-an even more arduous business. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without ..."

What jumped out at me is "he must be able to endure it." That reminded me of how I had to learn to tolerate freedom when I first came to the USA. I had never lived in a free society before. South Africa was a police state and so was the UK (and still is.)

To my eye, unused as it was to liberty, American society looked like anarchy. I was horrified by how thugs seemed to rule the streets at night. Of course crime was much higher 30 years ago than it is now and it seemed to me that just a little bit more law and order was necessary. I was horrified by how much freedom (and money) unruly youngsters had. I was horrified by the immorality and greed of some capitalists. In short, I wanted less freedom for others so that I could be happy.

But that's not how it works. Freedom is for everyone (until they abuse it by trampling on others' rights.) Freedom means allowing everyone to be free to do as they please; to be smart or stupid, rich or poor, nice or nasty. Of course that means that America is a much more competitive and tougher, less safe and secure society than the socialist peoples' paradises of Europe or police states of the Third World. It's not a place for wusses and sissies.

Unfortunately the wusses and sissies are now in power and are trying to make America a safe and secure socialist paradise/police state. You can't have freedom and security. You can only have one or the other. They cancel each other out. Only the brave are free.