The doctor’s visit yesterday was all over the place. in the past he has advoated Tai Chi and other eastern philosophies. yesterday he said that I was in such a better place now compared to previous times i had seen him that he thought I was ready to explore those things more deeply. I don’t know where he got the “better place” thing from, as he said it moments after i sat down. He started talking about EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). EFTs involve tapping your body and head at certain spots. This is said to relieve emotional distress and anxiety, but one must fist confront that anxiety. So you shouldn’t use the EfT tapping stuff preemptively. Or something like that. next thing I knew he ws tapping himself all over the fucking place. i was being sympathetic to the guy, even as i started hearing duck noises in my head. I might have stayed with im if he hadn’t said something like “depression hangs out here”, and then started rapping at a certain oprtion of his head. “Sadness hangs out here”, and he tapped another part of his head. I haven’t studied the brain since college but I had always understood that no one of repute seriously thought the brain was segmented into areas which control or host specific emotions. Functions, maybe. But not emotions. Of course I am happy to be wrong about such things, as I assume phrenological studies have evolved some since the 1980s. I have, it so happens, become more familiar with and interested in eastern philosophies of existence and reality but this shit looked a bunch of hocus-pocus to me.
Otherwise the annual checkup was just fine. He drew bloos, which in the past has made me want to fucking scream, but for whatever reason it went without incident this time. As usual there was some fuckup with the prescription but I’ve come to expect that.
One of the odd things about about this doctor is that he was not my originall assigned PCP. That’s not so odd but what is is how the PCP originally assigned to me had a 2- or 3-month waiting list for routine appointments. This guy you can see same day. That was true for my previous PCP, too. The original PCP assigned by the insuror was over by the Ravenswood and Queensbridge houses. That PCP and the one I saw yesterday are not even one mile apart, yet the number of patients they see appears to be exponentially different. I wonder why that is… I’m inclined to think it is relative to the concentration of people who live in those projects, but maybe it is just a fluke of this insuror. Maybe that doctor is only on site once a week, and they are the only one there who uses that insurance? Or maybe there is a more unpleasant societal imbalance at work.
I celebrated my ace doctor’s visit with a couple of high-octane IPAs at the millennial bar, where I sat at the bar for the first time. The IPAs tasted like poison. They are. I remember impressing someone with the information that alcohol is a toxin. He was incredulous until I pointed out that it’s right there in the word: Intoxication.
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That is where i am now. The millennial bar. I skedaddled from the ghetto coffee shop (where I was in previous paragraphs) when that awful cunt of a woman who hangs out there made her presence impossible to ignore. There was 5 empty seats but she conspicuously chose to sit right fucking next to me, where she proceded to start barking out comments and observations to her friend who was standing at the other end of the store.
I meant to say that while the doctor yesterday was tapping and rapping himself all over, treating his body like Buddy Rich’s drumset, I couldn’t help think “Maybe this is why you never have a waiting list for appointments…” Hah.
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I watched “Anaconda” yesterday. About half way through I was inclined to give it an award for one of the worst movies ever made until I spotted a user review on IMDB that pointed out the obvious, or rather what seemed like the obvious once I thought about it. “Anaconda” is not a film to be taken seriously as horror. It’s more like a comic book. The reviewer’s point was that it was a great re-creation of the 1950s weekend double feature matinee, with their silly damsels-in-distress poltlines that no sentient human would take seriously. Once I started watching “anaconda” like that it made perfect sense, and I felt stupid for having tried to watch it as a serious horror flick. The particle of substance in the film which might have made me take it so serioiusly was the fact that Jon Voight was freakin’ amazing.
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Last week I took a bunch of crap to my storage room, which has become an irritating expense. I write it off for tax purposes but monthly rent has increased to a point where it is way out of proportion to whatever value it brings ot my life. I got the room years ago after I got mugged at knifepoint outside my apartment. They got away with my drivers license, which had full address info on it. Imagining these street hooligans to be way more ambitious and resourceful than they actually were I rented a storage room where I stashed certain items which could or could not be useful to me should everything go to fuck. I don’t think anything like that is there any more. It’s just a bunch of crap.
Speaking of crap and my ongoing mission to get rid of as much of it possible I had an amusing eBay experience on Sunday. The eBay app on my Galaxy Note 5 makes a “cha-ching!” cash register sound whenever someone bids on an item you have listed for sale. I listed a pair of headphones I found in the closet. I stole them from corporate, and they sat in my closet mostly unused for about 15 years. I never used them because I fucking hated them. Sony studio headphones, product number MDR V700 (no idea how or why I remembered that last detail).
I have been throwing away 32-gallon trash bags full of crap. The space opened up in cabinets and closets has been consciousness-expanding. My bedroom in particular feels like less of a bunker with my past piled up around and staring down at my naked sleeping body.
Here or there I check ebay to see if something I have is worth more than $5. Those headphones had sold for as much as $90 in recent months, so I took a few pictures of them and posted the MDR V700s for sale.
It was amusing at first. A bidding war brewed between two people who had only 4 feedbacks. One of them had one of those military AFO (?) addresses. i’ve read in the past that eBay bidders claiming to be from those type of addresses can be questionable.
The bids increased by pennies. Opening price was $45. After a dozen bids I think the price was about $50 when out of nowhere a question from an eBay buyer with almost 8000 positive feedbacks asked if the headphones had the words “MADE IN JAPAN” anywhere on them. I responded in the affirmative. Within minutes my phone was experiencing quadruple/octupal orgasm, belching out that “cha-ching!” sound multiple times a minute, even overlapping three or four times in a second. The real eBayer had arrived and he was not going to humor himself with these low-level scrubs. The automated bids and re-bids came pouring in. I don’t know what this person’s highest bid was but the headphones sold for $130, leaving those poor eBay novices in the dust. I was going to ship it Media Mail but after making far more $ off those headphones than expected I sent it Priority.
If only I’d stolen more gear from corporate…
I remember when the first-ever issue of “Sports Illustrated For Kids” sold for something like $18,000 on eBay. I remember remembering that I once held copies of that magazine in my grubby hands. Shaq was on the cover. But it wasn’t Shaq that made the magazines valuable. It was the trading cards inside. Each issue of SIFK had a sheet of trading cards that most kids tore out and cut up to trade. If you had a fully intact copy of the first-ever SIFK then you had something rare, because it contained the first Tiger Woods card ever published. Your copy of SIFK Vol. 1 No. 1 was worthless if that sheet of trading cards was gone. It was the Tiger Woods thing. He was still an amateur golfer.
I am voyeuristically dipping in to the
conversation nearby. Two thirty-somethings on a date, sounds like a first date. He seems cool. He is letting her talk, she is letting him talk. She is moving her silver-shoed feet closer and closer to him as the conversation endures.
