Communion Of Dreams

It’s now been three months since Martha Sr died.

You’d think by now that I’d be caught up on sleep. You’d be wrong. As I look over the last few month’s posts I note that time and again that I mention sleep. It is still the default that I want more, more, more. Even when I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep, and am not fighting any kind of cold or flu, a nap in the morning or afternoon tempts me. For someone who thinks of himself as energetic, productive, it kind of goes against the grain. For someone who has a backlog of work running to years, it can be a little maddening.

Yet, sleep is still the default.

* * * * * * *

My sister called the other day.

“Thirty pounds?  Wow. Be careful.”

I assured her that I wasn’t trying to overdo anything. That it was just my body moving back towards a natural set-point, as mentioned in that blog post.

But she has a good reason to be concerned: in our family, weight loss is one of the markers for the onset of the family genetic curse, Machado-Joseph disease. To be honest, this is one of the major reasons that I have always felt a little comfortable in being a bit overweight - it provided some sense of protection against the disease (which was very poorly understood or even known as I was growing up). That’s not how it works, of course, but it was always there in the back of my mind. If you’d lived with seeing what the disease does, you’d be willing to risk obesity, too.

* * * * * * *

Go back to any of the entries from last year under the tag Alzheimer’s, and you’ll see that one of the most common things I talk about is just how tired I was. For years - literally, years - my wife and I had taken turns being “on call” each night, lightly dozing while listening to a baby monitor in Martha Sr’s room. On those nights you’d barely get anything which amounted to real rest. When you weren’t “on call” sleep usually came, but wasn’t as easy or restful as it could have been - having your partner there more or less awake next to you all night wasn’t that conducive. Sure, there were naps whenever we could squeeze them in, but I would still say that my average sleep per 24 hour period was probably about 5 hours, maybe 6. Things did improve once we had a health aide three nights a week, but by then we were in hospice care, which had its own stresses and demands.

* * * * * * *

ATLANTA - People who sleep fewer than six hours a night — or more than nine — are more likely to be obese, according to a new government study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies.

* * *

The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don’t get proper shuteye, said Dr. Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

“The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don’t do so well,” Kramer said.

The study released Wednesday is based on door-to-door surveys of 87,000 U.S. adults from 2004 through 2006 conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Surprise, surprise.

* * * * * * *

I’ve got a pretty strong work ethic. And it was shaped by conventional standards: get up, go to work for 8 -10 hours, come home. That’s not how I work - hasn’t been for years - but it is still the baseline instinct for me, the initial criteria I use for whether or not I am “getting things done”. So it is frustrating to feel sleepy and want a nap. That doesn’t pay the bills, get the backlog under control, get the next book written or the ballistics research written up.

Three months. Seems like a long time. And our culture doesn’t understand grief well, nor leave a lot of room for recovery that takes time. We expect people to “get over it”, to take a vacation and come back refreshed. It is part of who we are - part of who I am.

But I try to listen to my body. It is naturally shedding the excess weight I put on, now that regular sleep and exercise are again part of my life. Realistically, it is only halfway done - I’ve another 30 pounds or so to go to get back to a point which I consider ‘normal’ (though that’s still about 20 - 30 pounds heavy for me, according to the ‘ideal’). Does that mean I have another three months of wanting naps all the time? Yeah, maybe. Maybe more. I’ll try and give it that time.

I’ll try.

Jim Downey

This afternoon I was getting ready to take some books back to Special Collections, and since it was still a bit cool out, thought I’d toss on a nice leather vest I have.  This is a vest which was a gift a couple of years ago, designed for concealed carry, and which I find to be very useful for other purposes as well.  Anyway, I put it on, and noticed something . . . it felt a little loose.

Hmm.

Now, I knew I had been shedding weight since Martha Sr had died, as a natural function of getting regular sleep, more exercise, and not eating to excess as a function of stress.  Pants fit better, I’d taken my belt in a couple of notches, all those sorts of things.

But this vest was a new one.  For the first time in a couple of years, I could actually button the thing up, and it felt comfortable.  Excellent.

I have no illusions about getting back into the sort of shape I was twenty years ago, when I was honestly in “fighting trim”.  But in the last three months I’ve probably shed close to thirty pounds.  If I can lose another twenty, I’ll be happy - thirty would be just about ideal, particularly if I can change some of what remains from fat and slack muscle into toned muscle.

Anyway, just a small personal triumph I thought I would share.

Jim Downey

When I went away to college in 1976, I took with me the small black & white television I had received for my eighth birthday. Mostly my roommates and I would watch The Muppet Show before going off to dinner. Otherwise, I really didn’t have the time for television - there was studying to do, drugs and alcohol to abuse, sex to have.

Post college I had a massive old console color TV I had inherited. But given that I lived in Montezuma Iowa, reception was dismal. I found other things to do with my time, mostly SCA-related activities and gaming. I took that console set with me to graduate school in Iowa City, but it never really worked right, and besides I was still busy with SCA stuff and again with schoolwork.

For most of the ’90s I did watch some TV as it was being broadcast, but even then my wife and I preferred to time-shift using a VCR, skipping commercials and seeing the things we were interested in at times when it was convenient for us.

This century, living here and caring for someone with Alzheimer’s, we had to be somewhat more careful about selecting shows that wouldn’t contribute to Martha Sr’s confusion and agitation. Meaning mostly stuff we rented or movies/series we liked well enough to buy on DVD. I would now and then flip on the cable and skip around a bit after we got Martha Sr. to bed, see if there was anything interesting, but for the most part I relied on friends recommending stuff. And besides, I was busy working on Communion of Dreams, or blogging here or there, or writing a newspaper column or whatever.

Now-a-days we don’t even have cable. There’s just no reason to pay for it. I’d much rather get my news and information online. So, basically, I have missed most every television show and special event in the last thirty years. There are vast swaths of cultural reference I only know by inference, television shows that “define” American values I’ve never seen. I don’t miss it.

And you know what? You are becoming like me, more and more all the time.

* * * * * * *

Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, this very interesting piece by Clay Shirky on the concept of ‘cognitive surplus’:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

* * *

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

OK, I try and be very careful about “fair use” of other people’s work, limiting myself to just a couple of paragraphs from a given article or blog post in order to make a point. But while I say that you should go read his whole post, I’m going to use another passage from Shirky here:

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

It is a huge change. It is the difference between passively standing/sitting by and watching, and doing the same thing yourself. Whether it is sports, or sex, or politics, or art - doing it yourself means making better use of the limited time you have in this life.

* * * * * * *

And now, the next component of my little puzzle this morning.

Via MeFi, this NYT essay about the explosion of authorship:

You’re an Author? Me Too!

It’s well established that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year — a state of affairs that has prompted much soul-searching by anyone with an affection for (or business interest in) turning pages. But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there’s a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

* * *

Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of a forthcoming book on the impact of creative writing programs on postwar American literature, agrees that writing programs have helped expand the literary universe. “American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” McGurl said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”

An interesting discussion about this happens in that thread at Meta Filter. John Scalzi, no stranger at all to the world of blogging and online publishing, says this there:

I see nothing but upside in people writing and self-publishing, especially now that companies like Lulu make it easy for them to do so without falling prey to avaricious vanity presses. People who self-publish are in love with the idea of writing, and in love with the idea of books. Both are good for me personally, and good for the idea of a literate society moving forward.

Indeed. And it is pretty clearly a manifestation of what Shirky is talking about above.

I’ve written only briefly about my thoughts on the so-called Singularity - that moment when our technological abilities converge to create a new transcendent artificial intelligence which encompasses humanity in a collective awareness. As envisioned by the Singularity Institute and a number of Science Fiction authors, I think that it is too simple - too utopian. Life is more complex than that. Society develops and copes with change in odd and unpredictable ways, with good and bad and a whole lot in the middle.

For years, people have bemoaned how the developing culture of the internet is changing for the worse aspects of life. Newspapers are struggling. There’s the whole “Cult of the Amateur” nonsense. Just this morning on NPR there was a comment from a listener about how “blogs are just gossip”, in reaction to the new Sunday Soapbox political blog WESun has launched. And there is a certain truth to the complaints and hand-wringing. Maybe we just need to see this in context, though - that the internet is just one aspect of our changing culture, something which is shifting us away from being purely observers of the complex and confusing world around us, to being participants to a greater degree.

Sure, a lot of what passes for participation is fairly pointless, time-consuming crap in its own right. I am reminded of this brilliant xkcd strip. The activity itself is little better than just watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island or Seinfeld or whatever. But the *act* of participating is empowering, and instructive, and just plain good exercise - preparing the participant for being more involved, more in control of their own life and world.

We learn by doing. And if, by doing, we escape the numbing effects of being force-fed pablum from the television set for even a little while, that’s good. What if our Singularity is not a technological one, but a social one? What if, as people become more active, less passive, we actually learn to tap into the collective intelligence of humankind - not as a hive mind, but as something akin to an ideal Jeffersonian Democracy, updated to reflect the reality of modern culture?

I think we could do worse.

Jim Downey

Sorry I haven’t posted much the last couple of days.  Honestly, I am in a funk - the sort of deep-seated inertia which comes after completing a protracted project.  On one level, it is just the downturn from the ballistics testing.  But more, it is the still lingering exhaustion from care-giving.

Which is not surprising.  You can’t expect to recover from years of poor sleep and intensely caring for someone else 24 hours a day in just a few weeks.  Particularly not when we’re still very much dealing with resolution of the estate (strangers are here right now going through things, giving us estimates on the value of some items) and trying to play catch up on professional and personal obligations.  We collapsed immediately following the memorial service for Martha Sr, but then tried to pretend that we were recovered, to get on with the life which had been put on hold for so long.

But now it feels like it is catching up with me again.  Like how a battery can get a ’surface charge’ quickly, but also wears out again quickly.  I need a prolonged period of recovery and recuperation.  That, however, is not likely to happen.  There are books to repair, bills to pay, years worth of things to catch up on.

So, forgive the slight break.  I’m not burned out - I still have a lot to say, to do, to write about here.  I’m just tired.

Jim Downey

It is enlightening, if sometimes dismaying, to discover what sorts of things motivate people. I have found that one of the most reliable ways of doing this is to see what sorts of motivations they perceive in others - what motives they attribute for a given behaviour.

Case in point: our caring for Martha Sr. I had mentioned previously that there was some discord in the family about the distribution of her estate. And what at the time seemed to be a misplaced guilt (that still may be the base motivation, actually) causing this has now manifested as a perception that we cared for her over the last five years out of some financial motivation. Yes, it seems that some thought that we did what we did in order to benefit from a more favorable disbursement of her estate.

*Sigh* This is so wrong that it took me a while to really wrap my head around it.

As I told a friend via email this morning:

Needless to say, this is not why we did what we did - honestly, no amount of money (well, no reasonable amount of money) would be sufficient inducement for me to have cared for someone like that for so long. It was done out of love - for her, and for my wife.

And I’ve been thinking more about it. Why? Because I like to understand my own motivations, and to keep them as honest and clean as possible. I’m an idealist, and try to approach the world that way, knowing full well that the world is not an ideal place and that reality will likely not be kind to my approach. When my motivations are questioned, either directly or by events, I like to step back and reconsider - and will make changes if necessary to insure that my motives are clear.

We were favored by Martha Sr. in her will. Not to a great degree - the value of it was less than I could have earned in the intervening years, had I been working rather than caring for her. And it was considerably less than would have been spent on either hiring full time care-givers, or moving her into a nursing home for that time. But because this additional benefit was there, some made the assumption that this was our motivation for caring for her. And this has caused the discord mentioned above.

So, after discussing the matter with my wife, we’re going to wipe out the benefit, just split up her estate equally and without consideration. It is not worth the grief. We didn’t do what we did for money or property - we did it because it was the right thing to do, and we could. Removing the benefit should resolve in anyone’s mind what our motivation was.

Everyone grieves in their own way. We may have wiped the slate clean, but that doesn’t mean that the grieving process is over. Not by a long shot. There are still sympathy cards on the mantelpiece. There is still a sudden slight panic over where the monitor is when I forget for a moment that Martha Sr is gone. There is guilt over the times we failed in some way, and joy over memories of happy moments Martha Sr had even in those final difficult days. And there is a profound gratitude I feel in having experienced this role of being a care provider.

I think that I am richer for this experience than others who have not been through it. I sometimes wonder whether the tendency to put people in nursing homes is partially done out of a fear of grieving - to create a distance from a loved one who is reaching the end of life, and so to mitigate the pain of loss. If so, those who take that path have indeed curtailed the amount of pain that they would feel, perhaps even cut short the time needed to completely grieve. But they have also cut themselves off from a remarkable human experience.

Jim Downey

Updated, April 13: I cross-posted this to dKos yesterday, where it generated some interest and discussion you wish to also see.  You can find that here.

JD

Seems a bit ridiculous for someone 6′2″ and pushing 250 pounds to be “feeling small”, but that’s about the best characterization of my emotional state today. Bit of a headache, some intestinal issues - not ’sick’ exactly, but just under the weather.

And what weather. What was mostly sunny and near 70 yesterday and Saturday is cold, grey, wet and very unpleasant today. 35 for the high, sleet/freezing rain this afternoon and snow scheduled for tonight and tomorrow. The kind of day that makes the cats curl up on the radiators and refuse to budge.

Both my good lady wife and I are feeling this. I think it is just part of the natural let-down, the ebb & flow of recovery from being care providers for so long, of grieving. I cross posted this diary (with some additional explanatory material) to Daily Kos yesterday, and it generated some really good discussion. But I think it left me feeling a bit wrung-out. For the longest time I have been able to attribute any mild depression or exhaustion to the stress and demands of care-giving, but the fact remains that I do have a mild bipolar condition. I suspect that for a while things are just going to oscillate before reaching some kind of equilibrium once again.

So, take it a bit easy today. Maybe go watch Blade Runner or something this morning, then see if I can accomplish some more conservation work this afternoon. One step at a time.

Jim Downey

Last night, my wife washed off the blackboard which hangs in the kitchen.

* * * * * * *

I just got back from a quick trip to KC to pick up the first large load of books from the seminary. Simple. Got up this morning, usual routine, jumped in the car and drove to KC. Met with the client. Selected about 60 volumes to start with, wrapped them in cling film, boxed ‘em up. Put the boxes in the car, drove home, pausing to check out a new store just off the highway - and amazing myself that I didn’t have to call home to coordinate the slight delay.

* * * * * * *

I sent this note to a friend:

Mostly I’ve been getting work done, at least in the afternoons. Feels good to be able to focus in and do it - a nice affirmation, and there is that joy that comes with doing something well which most people can’t do. Still struggling to shake off the last effects of the flu, which is annoying, but there is clear progress.

And that has been the real change this week. Each afternoon I’ve been able to just dive in and work. For hours. Very productively. Such a change.

* * * * * * *

It’s the little things. Yes, there are the larger changes: more sleep, no need to go around always listening to a monitor, being able to come and go as I please. Those I expected, even if they have taken some adjustment. But it’s the little things that catch you unprepared.

Last night, my wife washed off the blackboard which hangs in the kitchen.

The blackboard which for years had our contact phone numbers on it. Those were first put there by Martha Sr. years ago, when her memory was becoming undependable and she might need to call someone for help. Then they remained even once we moved in here, since both my wife and I still had our jobs elsewhere during the day. After I closed my gallery and moved home that was no longer the need, but by then they were an institution. More recently, long after Martha Sr had stopped using the phone, the numbers were there as a quick resource for the various respite care workers and whatnot, in the event of an emergency.

Last night, my wife washed it clean. It was time to move on.

* * * * * * *

Jim Downey

Last night we settled down with some dinner to watch a bit of Firefly, settling on Serenity (the episode, not the movie). At one point fairly early on, when plans have gone south at several junctures, the captain of the ship (Mal) is considering options, trying to make the best of a not-great situation. There’s this little bit of dialog:

MAL: We don’t get paid for this, we won’t have enough money to fuel the ship,
let alone keep her in repair. She’ll be dead in the water anyhow.
(Mal turns to the others)
We just gotta keep our heads down and do the job. Pray there ain’t no more surprises.

I looked at my wife, and we just nodded to one another.

* * * * * * *

We did a hard thing. And we did it well.

Caring for my MIL for years somewhat warped my perspective. First and foremost in our consideration was always what her needs were and how best to meet them. I’ve often talked about what that meant in terms of rewards and sacrifices, and I don’t intend to rehash that now.

But a couple of things have changed with her passing. First off, is the odd sense of disorientation. I’ve compared it in discussion with friends with almost having a sense of agoraphobia - a nervousness when out in the world I’ve never felt before. It’s really just a conditioned reflex, and will fade as I adjust to the lack of need to always being worried about Martha Sr.

Another thing which has changed is the need to return to something resembling a ‘normal’ life, with the usual requirements of work. I don’t mind work, never have. My life has never been easy (though it certainly could have been harder), and I’ve never expected it to be otherwise.

But sometimes you wonder if maybe it couldn’t be just a little bit easier.

Caring for Martha Sr those last weeks was more demanding, and lasted longer than anyone expected. Getting hit with the flu so hard following seemed a bit gratuitous, in the sense of the universe having fun at our expense. Both my wife and I are behind on our work, and while our clients understand, that doesn’t help the cash flow situation. I knew these days would come, and things would be a little rough for a while until we got settled again. But we’ll manage.

* * * * * * *

We did a hard thing, and we did it well.

What has come of a bit of surprise has been how some people have responded to that. There’s been some discord in the family about the disposition of Martha Sr’s possessions, borne mostly out of a misguided sense of guilt, from what I can tell. It’s really unfortunate, but everyone has their own way of reacting to death. If we’re lucky, with time the matter will sort itself out with a minimal amount of damage.

I’ve also seen others in different forums who have almost felt like they had to defend their own decisions regarding a loved one who has Alzheimer’s or some other debilitating illness leading to hospice care. I’ve witnessed those who almost seem resentful that we did what we did, because it somehow implies that they did less - that they cared less.

No. We were able to make this work out. Barely. Everyone has a different situation, and each family, each person, must come to their own conclusions, their own solutions. None is better or worse than another. Because my wife and I don’t have kids, we didn’t have to juggle that aspect of life at the same time. Because we live here in the same town as Martha Sr, and have professions which allow a considerable flexibility in terms of work hours, we were better able to adapt to providing care at home than most. Our solution worked for our situation - barely. Those final months were very demanding, and I will admit that I was pushed further than I would have thought was possible, and failed and succeeded in ways I never expected.

I will not judge another - this experience has taught me humility.

Jim Downey

No, no, not downloads of the novel. That would be something. Rather, that’s the number of words I’ve written in the last year in posts here which have the ‘Alzheimer’s’ or ‘Hospice’ category tags. Why is that significant?

Because I am thinking about using those posts as the basis for a book about being a care-provider. With the feedback I got to my posts here, and those I cross-posted at UTI and Daily Kos, it became evident that there is a real interest in this topic. Because almost everyone either knows someone with Alzheimer’s, or they know someone who has a family member with Alzheimer’s, or they are afraid of developing the disease themselves.

With editing and culling of the current material, I probably have about 30,000 words done. If I supplement that material with explanatory notes and reflections, I can easily boost that to 60 or 70,000 words, which should be more than sufficient for this kind of memoir. And while my thinking on this is still rather vague, I’d probably see if I could pair-up with the Alzheimer’s Association, with some or all of the proceeds of the sale of the book going to help that organization with their research and educational programs.

It’s a thought.

Jim Downey

I was half expecting it.

As mentioned previously, I suffer from migraines upon occasion. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the last couple of months have been fairly light in that regard. But I have one now, of the “stress-release” variety.

Last night, for the first time in the better part of a week, we cooked dinner and relaxed watching a couple of episodes of Doctor Who (more on my getting acquainted with the new series later). I had a couple of scotches, but that’s not a lot for me over the course of the evening. I fell asleep later in front of the computer, catching up on news of the world. In other words, I was starting to spin down from recent events.

I went up and went to bed, while my good lady wife did the dishes and caught up on some email. I woke sometime after midnight (not sure when) from the pain of the migraine. Got up, went and took some OTC stuff I hoped would shut it down, went back to bed. Woke up again about 4:30, pain worse. Got up and took some more OTC stuff and something stronger to give it a boost. Unfortunately, those meds include a fair amount of caffeine, so getting back to sleep was not much of an option. I laid down, let them work for a while, then got up.

It may seem odd to you that I would be suffering a stress-release migraine going into what is likely to be a fairly stressful and emotional weekend, what with the memorial service tomorrow and all. I’m fairly introverted, and the prospect of a large public gathering and all that concentrated emotional outpouring is rather daunting.

But that is nothing in comparison to the stresses of caring for someone with dementia who is dying. Even now, all my instincts and conditioned reflexes are concerned first with taking into account where Martha Sr is, who is keeping track of her, what needs to be done next in the usual care regimen. Yesterday, returning from errands I needed to run, I glanced at her bedroom window as I drove up the driveway, to see whether my wife had her up from her afternoon nap and had opened the drapes. This morning before grinding my coffee I went to shut the door from the kitchen in order to muffle the sound and not disturb her sleep. And those are just two of the dozens of examples I could cite from the last 24 hours. It will take months, at least, to set aside these reflexes, to fully become ‘free’ of the ingrained habits of years.

So, yeah, I have a migraine. Not horrid, with the meds I have in me so far, though this post may be a bit less coherent than it could be. I should still be able to play house-elf today in preparation for the visitors we will have this weekend, and to make the memorial book for the service tomorrow. If it doesn’t get a lot worse I should even be able to function well during the public outing tomorrow (I got a lot of experience with that sort of thing while I owned the art gallery). But there it is - perhaps the first marker of the real change in my life.  We are, after all, born in pain.

Jim Downey