Category Archives: Reflections

Happily, Ever After

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(I took a few months off because I didn’t have much to say. and I wanted the tangible rewards of “döstädning” (Swedish death cleaning). We emptied the storeroom Peg rented for her parents‘ things after her father’s passing. The memorabilia and the coming New Year’s Eve folderal prompted this memorial.)

Many people make resolutions on New Year’s Eve, most of which won’t last the month. But this one lasted a lifetime.

Mike was born in Chicago in 1919 to James and Anna Sullivan, immigrants from Ireland and Yugoslavia, respectively. They lived on the West Side of Chicago where the Irish and Italian neighborhoods met. His father worked for the railroads and his mother was a housewife; back then married women didn’t aspire to anything else. His little brother Johnny was born a few years later. Mike and his family emerged from the Great Depression intact but, like many from that time, he saved every little thing because, “you never know when you might need it.”

Mike enlisted in the Army when World War II started, earned a sharpshooter rating during sniper training, before becoming a tail gunner in a B-17 Flying Fortress. His plane, the Opissonya, was mortally wounded during Operation Tidal Wave, a raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. Mike was badly wounded and his parachute was riddled with bullet holes. The bombardier, David Kingsley, strapped Mike in his own parachute, tossed him out the door and went down with the ship. He was captured and sent to a Bulgarian prison camp, returning home with memories and secrets he would only share with fellow veterans. When his wife pressed him for details many years later, he would say, “Honey, you don’t want to know. It’s not something I want to remember.”

Sketch from Mike’s diary done while in the POW camp

After the war Mike returned to Chicago and moved back to his parents’ house. A budding artist, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago and then landed a job as a graphic artist. On Saturdays, he and his buddies would go to one of the many dance halls around Chicago for a night of revelry. Sometimes they would crash Italian wedding receptions because there was always great Italian beef and no shortage of gorgeous young women who loved to dance. The revelry would often last until the wee hours of Sunday morning, when they attended the sunrise. Mass before hitting the sack. He was a confirmed bachelor with absolutely no interest in settling down and raising kids. Or so he believed.

Gloria was born on the South Side of Chicago 1933, to Joseph and Nadezda Shiplov, the last of eight children. They emigrated to the United States from “the old country,” although which “old country” was always a mystery. They might have come from Yellow Russia (now Belarus), or maybe Russia proper before it became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Family members were always evasive about their history and any information pried from reluctant lips was suspect. There’s an old picture of Grandpa Joseph in a Cossack uniform, prompting speculation he may have fled the Bolsheviks. He arrived at Ellis Island with, according to his travel papers, a woman who was NOT Nadezda and whose fate remains unknown.

The only person who knew everyone’s secrets was old Muzyka, the undertaker for the Eastern European community, and he took those secrets to his grave. Peg says, “The Shiplov family crest should be engraved with “??? ???? – Everyone lies!”

Nadezda died when Gloria was two years old, and Joseph was ill-equipped to care for a tosed around among the siblings’ families until her sister Ann, twenty years her senior, and her husband John took Gloria in and raised her as their own.

Ann Morgan and Gloria Shiplov, age 6

Gloria graduated from Jones Commercial High School, a prestigious and rigorous institution that provided students a well-rounded education with business and personal training highly sought by employers. She learned secretarial skills and bookkeeping, but she dreamed of becoming a nurse. She was lucky enough to get a full scholarship to nursing school, on the condition that her family provide a small monthly sum for “incidentals.” Her father refused and never offered an explanation, so Gloria found a secretarial job at Teepak, a company that manufactured meat casings. Maybe his decision was rooted in Russian pride, or maybe he believed a woman should never aspire to be more than a housewife and mother. I’d like to think it was divine intervention, a little nudge in the direction of the inevitable.

On Saturday nights Gloria and her pack of girlfriends made the rounds, dancing with eager young men at the dance halls or sometimes with soldiers at the local USO. One sultry summer evening in July she and her best friend, Marge, went to a “28-and-older” dance, even though Gloria was only 22 at the time. Mike Sullivan was also at that dance, and at the time had been dating three or four women, including one who assumed they were engaged, although no such proposal had ever been offered. He was still footloose and fancy free, committed to remaining single.

That changed at 11:35pm.

Gloria may have noticed him first because she later wrote “Finally asked me to dance at 11:35pm July 2, 1955” in her bridal keepsake book. Twenty minutes later they went to Honolulu Harry’s Waikiki for their first date. That was a much different time as few women today would leave with a man she’d only known for 20 minutes. But the heart knows what it wants. Later he would tell his daughters “I knew she was the one.”

A few weeks later Mike was in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, on his way to Canada and then Detroit to visit family. Never one to worry about minor details, he sent several postcards to Gloria “Loveship.” He lamented she was not with him in the hotel lounge to “sip the gin and tonic with me” and vowed to make up for the separation upon his return.

Gloria and Mike were inseparable. They celebrated Mike’s birthday at their favorite restaurant, Honolulu Harry’s that fall and her birthday a few months later.

New Year’s Eve 1955 was very special. They were gathered at the home of her sister and brother-in-law, Alice and Bill, to see in the New Year. At 7:40pm, Mike took Gloria’s hand into his, slipped a ring on her finger and said, “You’ll get the mate in six months.” When asked decades later why he didn’t formally say, “Gloria, will you marry me,” he replied, “There wasn’t any need because I knew she’d say ‘Yes!’.”  In June 1956, she “got the mate.”

Gloria and Mike’s wedding

Mike, the formerly confirmed bachelor, settled down with the love of his life. They had two daughters and moved to the suburbs in 1964. He worked as a commercial artist at several companies in downtown Chicago until retiring in 1989. He turned down any promotions that would have meant less time with his family. He became notorious for “train-skunking” – scavenging the METRA commuter cars for newspapers and things left behind – a habit which once netted him a new bottle of scotch. Gloria was a stay at home mom until the girls were in middle school; then she worked as an office manager and bookkeeper until she retired.

They had a special ritual they followed every New Year’s Eve. Gloria would remove her rings that morning and Mike would hold on to them. Later that evening during whatever gathering they attended, Mike would have a Manhattan and Gloria would have a martini. At 7:40pm, he would quietly take her hand, slip the rings back on her finger and ask her to marry him. It was a private moment upon which the family would never intrude. They did that for 47 years until Mike’s passing in 2003.

Sometimes there really is a “happily, ever after.”

© Can Stock Photo / FotoMaximum

The Mighty 1090

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I worked the midnight shift as an orderly at the local hospital during the summer of 1971, often stayed up late or all night when I wasn’t working so I could maintain the same biorhythm.  Sometimes I’d listen to the radio, which in the mid-1960s, fed us a steady diet of three-minute paeans to love, life and the pursuit of the fairer sex. The main sources of pop music in our central Illinois town were Chicago AM stations WLS and WCFL. WLS was the favorite with a host of memorable jocks: Art Roberts, John Records Landecker, Dick Biondi, Clark Weber and the irascible Larry “Uncle Lar’” Lujack.

Pop music started to change during the late 1960s to heavier stuff like Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Steppenwolf, The Hollies, The Kinks and The Who. Two of The Turtles joined Frank Zappa and the Mothers for a raunchy concert at the Fillmore East.  Even the Four Lads from Liverpool had gone to the dark side of drugs, mystical music, and infighting. John Lennon took a lot of shit for claiming the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. We scoured the White Album’s inserts for clues to Paul McCartney’s “death.”

A few of my friends and I were the “goddam hippie-freaks,” as if small-town America had hippies in the early 1970s. High school dress codes banned long hair and beards. Girls still had to wear skirts, even during a -20° windchill winter.  There was no heavy drug use (at least of which I was aware). One of our classmates was found sitting up in a sleeping bag in a garage, dead after sniffing airplane glue. Don tried putting peyote buttons in a Dairy Queen strawberry milkshake only to promptly puke it up. Herb bought a test tube of marijuana – mostly stems and seeds – which we stared at intently while huddled in the back of his dad’s Econoline van. I imagined the police would bust in on us at any moment and we’d spend the rest of our lives doing hard time in Stateville among murderers and thieves.

Our band of gypsies gravitated towards less conventional groups, the stuff one would never hear on Top 40 radio: Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Santana, Traffic, The Band, Grateful Dead and Hendrix. While our classmates listened to The Who’s Tommy, we were splitting our eardrums listening to Live at Leeds, Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, and Roger Waters’ piercing scream in “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” from Ummagumma.  In 1969, Jefferson Airplane’s rebellious Volunteers was the first rock album to get “motherfucker” past the censors (although the OCR of Hair beat them by two years).

A year later, Paul Kantner released Blows Against the Empire, with collaborators Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, David Crosby, Graham Nash, and others. The album was a counter-culture fantasy about hijacking a star ship and leaving the earth for utopian pastures, getting a Hugo Award nomination.

One night, while fiddling with the tuner on my compact stereo, I stumbled across a world of music, largely foreign to small-town Midwestern ears, on a radio station out of Little Rock, Arkansas.

KAAY 1090AM is a 50,000-watt radio station in Little Rock, Arkansas. I could only pick up after 10 pm when all the smaller stations shut down for the night. Hearing it for the first time reminded me of when I discovered Radio Havana in 1967 on a leather-clad shortwave transistor radio my grandfather had given me. (Ironically, KAAY also reached Cuba, subverting the “ideological purity” of a generation of Cuban youth. Fast forward 50 years and the Stones play in Havana.)

From 10pm until 2am Clyde Clifford (real name: Dale Seidenschwarz), a laid-back guy with a smooth baritone voice, hosted Beaker Street on “The Mighty Ten Ninety.” It was four hours of “underground” music: much longer tracks; complex musical structures instead of the three-chord formula of pop music; and sometimes controversial subjects. The show’s intro – click here– used a segment of Jimi Hendrix’s If Six Was Nine. Later the intro used a snippet of “House of the Rising Sun” done on a MOOG synthesizer.

Beaker Theater followed at 2 am, broadcasting old radio plays. The only one I remember was a dramatization of Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” a short story about a civilization on a planet with six suns goes mad when an eclipse that occurs once every 2000 years brings total darkness, something they’ve never experienced. (Click here to listen.)

The KAAY managers were too cheap to pay both a DJ and an engineer, so Clyde did both, broadcasting Beaker Street from the station’s transmitter site in Wrightsville, AR instead of the studio in downtown Little Rock. Between song tracks Clyde played ethereal background “music” from “Cannabis Sativa,” by Head, to cover the transmitter’s sounds. Occasionally it ran for several minutes, leading me to believe Clyde had either nodded off or was taking a bathroom break.

Beaker Street introduced me to obscure groups and albums. Spooky Tooth. The Flock. Hawkwind. Bloodrock. King Crimson. Black Oak Arkansas. Black Sabbath, long before Ozzy became an addled old man yelling “Sharon!” Sometimes I’d tape parts of the show with my cassette recorder. The nature of analog tuners meant the signal would periodically drift in and out, interrupting the track, but that was part of the charm when I listened to the tapes years later.

One of my favorites is Jamie Brockett’s “Legend of the USS Titanic.”  It’s a completely bizarre fictional account combining historical fact (Jack Johnson, was a turn-of-the-century black boxer), blatant inaccuracies (there was no U.S.S. Titanic), racial stereotypes (“Jews from Miami trading wives and Cadillacs and diamonds”), and modern drug culture (a dope-smoking first mate who carries around “four hundred ninety-seven and a half feet of rope”). The track, running a then unheard-of 13½ minutes, explains the ship sank after the captain, stoned out of his mind, went mano a mano with the iceberg.

Many people remember Welsh guitarist Dave Edumuds for his 1971 AM hit “I Hear You Knockin’.” I remember him for Love Sculpture’s album Forms and Feelings.  A heavy metal version of “Mars,” from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets, segues into an “amphetamine-fueled rave-up” of Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance,” which concludes with the last few bars from The William Tell Overture. (“Mars” wasn’t on the original U.K. Parlophone release of Forms and Feelings due to a dispute with the Holst estate, but was included in the U.S. Parrot release.) I kicked myself for not buying the album when I first saw it in the early 1970s before it went out of print. I spent the next four decades years looking for either an LP or CD version, finally acquiring the latter in 2008.

But one song was totally unlike most of what aired on Beaker Street. Late one night I heard “White Bird”, a haunting song by an obscure group with the unlikely name It’s A Beautiful Day. It was exquisite; I would think about it when I stared out of an empty hospital room window during my 2 am break. I began a frantic search for the album, eventually finding it at Arlan’s discount store in Peru, IL, about 30 miles from home.

Clyde left Beaker Street in 1972; the program continued with other personalities until it was taken off the air in 1985. The show was resurrected in 1995 on various Arkansas FM stations before taking another bow in 2011.

Now die-hard fans congregate on the Beaker Street / Clyde Clifford Fans Facebook page, reminiscing about the music that defined us and decrying what passes for contemporary music now. One can now listen to Beaker Street on Friday nights at 9pm Central on the Arkansas Rocks Radio Network.

Some would argue our music was better than what came before and after, but that would be missing the point. Every generation continues the tradition of adding onto that invisible road, paved with infinite combinations of just twelve notes, stretching back millennia. Our music was just a scenic turnout along the way.

Favorite Albums From High School
Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland
The Who – Live at Leeds
Paul Kantner – Blows Against the Empire
Quicksilver Messenger Service – Happy Trails and Just for Love
Derek and the Dominos – Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed
Pink Floyd – Ummagumma
The Band – Music from Big Pink
Jefferson Airplane – Volunteers
The Doors – Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine (2-LP compilation)

Beaker Street Staples
Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth
Black Oak Arkansas: Lord Have Mercy on My Soul
Chambers Brothers: Time Has Come Today
Spirit: Animal Zoo, Morning Has Come
King Crimson: The Court of the Crimson King
The Flock: Green Slice / Big Bird
The Animals: Sky Pilot
Spooky Tooth: Tobacco Road, I Am The Walrus
Vanilla Fudge: You Keep Me Hanging On
Mason Proffit: Two Hangmen
Bloodrock: DOA

Featured image: © Can Stock Photo / photoslb

Bare Bones

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“And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.
Matthew 6:28-29

“Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.”
E. M. Forster

We come into the world, cold, naked and wet. It’s downhill from there.
Some anonymous cynic

I’ve done two things in my life that might be described as adventurous, daring, courageous or stupid, depending on one’s perspective. The first was jumping out of an airplane at 3000 feet, not once, not twice, but three times. (I was sure I was gonna die the last time because I had to pack my own parachute.) I’ll write about it in a future blog.

But telling people I’ve been to a nudist resort raises eyebrows and prompts some tittering, no pun intended.

Little kids don’t have a problem with nudity. They’ll tear their clothes off without warning, which isn’t a problem unless Mom is in a ZOOM meeting with a two-year-old running around naked in the background. But as we get older, we learn, directly or by inference, that unclothed bodies are shameful and if you don’t agree, you’re a pervert.

Americans can’t disassociate nudity and sex, which isn’t surprising given they descended from the Puritans, a group that was so uptight it outlawed Christmas celebrations. That “nudist colonies” even existed provoked righteous indignation from some and snickering from others.

Public nudity enjoyed tacit acceptance briefly in March 1974. Much warmer than normal weather induced thousands of college kids to run naked across public spaces for the sheer thrill, a phenomenon immortalized by Ray Stevens’ hit “The Streak.”

Now, before I go any farther, I should point out I’m not a narcissist or an exhibitionist. Far from it. Poor body image and self-esteem isn’t restricted to women. I couldn’t look into a mirror from about 7th grade until my late thirties. I don’t recognize the reasonably attractive guy in pictures from decades ago as me. As I’ve gotten older, fatter, and greyer with far less hair, I’ve learned to accept my dad bod.

My interest in outdoor nudity, (naturism to the faithful) was born out of 25 years of life-sucking Midwest winters. I lived in Arizona until I was 11 where we had abundant sunshine, occasional rains, and the rare sun shower, an odd mixture of both. Snow was rare and exciting and usually melted by noon.

Then we moved to Illinois, the Land of Lincoln and the Never-ending Winter, when clouds obscured the sun from November through March. Clouds obscured the sun from November through March; snow a month earlier or later wasn’t unusual. I moved to Michigan for my residency and then stayed in the state to practice for another 13 years.  More snow, less sun and -30° in January. Strolling naked in a warm climate while everyone else froze their asses off sounded better.

I joined the American Sunbathing Association (which became the American Association for Nude Recreation – AANR – in 1995) in the early 1990s. I don’t remember how I connected with them since there wasn’t much of an internet back then and websites were more than a decade away. They didn’t advertise on the backs of matchbook covers like the “Learn to Draw” folks.

I bought Lee Baxandall’s World Guide to Nude Beaches & Resorts, back when we still had bookstores. I discovered that, with few exceptions, naturist resorts are family oriented. Some are permanent residents. Men do not wander around with a cup of coffee in each hand and stacks of donuts on erect penises. Women aren’t an endless parade of Playboy bunnies. Naturists come in a wide range of ages, shapes and sizes. They are just regular people who don’t wear clothes.

There are a few rules when visiting a resort:

  • No lewd behavior
  • No gawking with your tongue hanging out.
  • Don’t take anyone’s picture without consent
  • Carry a towel with you at all times, just in case you sit somewhere
  • Be a decent human being.

I planned to visit a resort outside of Tucson in 1992 during a trip to Arizona for a conference. The now-defunct Jardin del Sol (Garden of the Sun) lay off a dirt road outside of Marana. It was a modest place with a few wooden buildings, a swimming pool, a place to play volleyball and sites for camper hookups. I parked my rental car and checked in with the owner, a short older woman who looked at my AANR membership card.

“You’re here alone?”
“Yes, I’m on a business trip and my wife couldn’t make it.”
She eyed me for a minute and said, “Well, you look all right. The pool is down the hill, and there’s a group having a picnic.”

At that moment a guy in a well-worn white Chevy pickup, who looked and sounded like George Kennedy, stopped and excitedly said something to my host about pending naturist legislation before driving down to the picnic area.

I went back to my car, stripped down to my shoes, grabbed my towel, and headed back. Footwear is essential in the desert; desert sand can become very hot.  Goat heads, the hard, pointed seeds of an obnoxious weed that seems to grow everywhere, prey on bicycle tires and bare feet. And while crawling predators like the scorpion are largely nocturnal, one might run across the foot-long giant desert centipede.

And don’t forget sunscreen.

Thirty years ago, I was uncomfortable around strangers, nude or otherwise, and I wasn’t interested in small talk. I just wanted to sit by myself, work on a sunburn and forget about sub-zero temperatures back home.

I started on a foot path that led away from the pool and stopped at a miniature Boothill Graveyard. The tombstones bore amusing names and the nature of the departed’s crimes, namely violating resort rules (one took pictures without asking). They reminded me of a fake memorial in Boothill:

“Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les, No more.”

Just then an older gentleman, short, bronzed and the spitting image of Buster Keaton, walked up to me.

“Hello, young feller! Can I help you find something?”

“I’m looking for a place to sit awhile and read my book.”

He pointed towards a trellis farther along the trail. “There are a couple of lounge chairs over there. Is this your first time?”

“Yeah, I was born here but I live in Michigan. I miss the sun.”

“Well, there’s plenty here. Welcome!”

I thanked him and headed for the loungers. I put the towel across the seat, lay back and enjoyed the desert, naked as the day I was born, as they say. I stayed for a couple of hours, reading, napping, and baking before driving back to my hotel.

A couple of years later I visited Forest Hills Club in Saranac, Michigan, just outside of Grand Rapids. The resort sits on a heavily wooded hill off a two-lane blacktop and isn’t visible from street level. I drove by it twice before noticing a small sign by a dirt road into the trees; there was an intercom next to the utility gate that blocked the entry.

I pressed the button and a young woman answered. “I’d like to visit for a bit.” The gate opened and I drove up to the site. I showed her my AANR card, and she gave me a brief tour. I went back to my car and took off my clothes and my shoes (no goat heads in Michigan), then grabbed my towel and a textbook. (A textbook? Seriously? How anal-retentive can one be?) I helped her move a large folding table before settling into a lounge chair.

The day was overcast and warm and I lost interest in the book. I lay back in the chair and closed my eyes, forgetting how burned out I was becoming being one of three physicians trying to manage a patient load that demanded five. I imagined spending the rest of my life sitting naked on a beach sipping margaritas and staring out at the ocean.

I haven’t had any further opportunities to indulge, although I maintained our membership in AANR partly to shock a family friend whom we call the Bald-Headed Stepchild. I worked as a traveler for more than twenty years; spending time at home decompressing with Peg was more important that trying to find the nearest resort (there’s only one in Illinois).

If I had my druthers, I’d buy a condo in Mira Vista Resort and try to establish my reputation as a renowned writer-slash-curmudgeon. For now, sitting naked in bed in the morning with coffee and my Kindle while my faithful companion (no, it’s my 15lb Shih-Tzu Baxter, not Peg) eats cookies will have to suffice.

For More Information

American Association for Nude Recreation

AANR: Social Nudism: Behavior Guidelines and Etiquette

Mira Vista Resort

Nude Hot Springs Around the World

Big Think: Nudist Beaches of Central and Eastern Europe

New York Times: Articles on nudism and nudity

World Naked Bike Ride

Featured Image © Can Stock Photo / chrisbradshaw

Writing Exercises

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Disciplined writers commit to writing something every day, but that’s been a struggle. This is my latest attempt.

March 15-16, 2021

Beware the Ides of March.
I admit to being a chronic master procrastinator when it comes to writing, which should not be confused with a chronic masturbator. I am not the disciplined writer who gets up at the butt crack of dawn every day and writes furiously for two, three or more hours.

I’m not a new writer; I’ve been putting pen to paper for more than 50 years. I don’t carry a Moleskine journal, furtively writing everywhere because a newly found voice and sense of outrage is brimming with ideas. My outrage started with an alcoholic stepfather and increased exponentially with the Vietnam War. I’m old and tired and cranky.

I often think of things when I’m driving or out for a walk, neither of which is conducive to putting pen to paper. (Also, my handwriting is so bad I have to ask Peg if she can figure out what I’ve scribbled: “You wrote ‘small Bailey’s’, not small barley.”) I roll things around in my brain, editing and revising until I finally have something to record for posterity.

That, and I’m a poor judge of my own writing. I’m never sure anyone will want to read what I have to say.

I’ve tried to analyze my reluctance with little success, but I can attribute a lot of it to two things: I hate trying to write when the muse isn’t there, because it just makes me frustrated and angry, and I hate being interrupted when I’m in the groove.

Until I alter my habits to something more productive, my days look like this:

I get up after a fitful night’s sleep made difficult by annoying and sometimes terrifying dreams (I was a psychopath being taken to a mental hospital in the last dream I remember). I shower, take my meds from the seven-day pill case I keep in my nightstand, and make coffee. If Baxter is still sleeping – sometimes he won’t get up until 10am or so – I will sit at my desk and try to write or waste time, knowing he’ll be up soon.

When His Lordship has awakened from his slumber, I will take him downstairs and out to pee, then we will negotiate breakfast. Sometimes he is hungry; other times he tries to run back upstairs because he’s just not interested. Occasionally I can entice him with sliced turkey but if he has a case of the fuckits, it’s an exercise in futility. If he does eat, I have to catch him to give him his insulin before he bolts. If I’ve thought fast enough, I put the gate up in front of the stairs.

That being done, I will sit in bed, drink coffee, and play Kindle games or read while Baxter buries, then eats cookies on the bed. I started doing this because if I go directly to my office to work, he yells from the bedroom until I return. When he finally settles down for his all-important early morning or mid-morning nap, I will go to my office and engage in the usual timewasters.

I approach Facebook as the 21st century morning newspaper. My FB friends and acquaintances post news links, often from sources outside the United States. I’ve contacts in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as one guy in Norway, but he doesn’t appear very often. Reading how the rest of the world sees us is sobering and sometimes infuriating, especially when some asshole here says we shouldn’t have universal health coverage because, “it’s socialism and I don’t want to pay for some illegal’s health care.” Presumably, his own financial ruin, the result of unpaid catastrophic medical expenses, is just dandy.

Then I’ll read the notifications for previous posts which, more often than not, draws me back to running arguments with die-hard contrarians. Common topics include:

  • how Joe Biden is wrecking the country, and how that other guy was so great,
  • people who wear masks are sheep, and coronavirus is a hoax,
  • how the Democrats are coming for your guns,
  • why the national debt is now a problem when it wasn’t during the past four years,
  • poor people are poor because they don’t try hard enough, or they are lazy.

I’m trying to limit myself to thirty minutes as I can spend hours foaming at the mouth.

Next, I’ll check my email and then the ADD kicks in. I get distracted, remembering something I wanted to look days ago, or something I’d promised to send someone.  Last Saturday my lack of progress prompted me to start reorganizing my office. I tossed some shit but just shuffled most of it around.

I’ll give some thought to what I’m going to make for dinner. If I’m really busy I’ll default to takeout. Famous Dave’s on Tuesdays when they have the Feast for Two deal. Popeye’s, El Famous Burrito or Chinese from the Golden Wok on other days.

I have my weekly routines. Tuesday is getting recycling and garbage ready for pickup on Wednesday. Thursday is towel day – washing all the dirty towels. Saturday is for changing and washing the sheets. Somewhere in there I’ll empty the hamper and do my laundry. Peg is particularly finicky about her laundry; for some reason she doesn’t like delicates dried on “incinerate.”

I’ve tried to do the shopping strategically. I’ll do a Costco run once a month, as soon as they open, because otherwise it’s insane. Same with Aldi. I’ll go to Mariano’s nearer to dinnertime when most people are home. Peg and I made up printable shopping lists for Aldi and Costco.

Housework is done as needed. I’ll empty the dishwasher if it’s been run. I vacuum the rug next to our kitchen island as it picks up crap from walking or eating. Getting the Dyson vac we keep in the family room was the best purchase we’d made in a long time. Light, quick and efficient.

After dinner Peg and I collapse on the couch and binge-watch something on Netflix or Amazon Prime until the master realizes it’s around 9pm and starts barking until we go upstairs to the bed.

This all brings me to “The Finite and the Tangible,” a blog post I started years ago and still haven’t finished. Medical school had no definable end in sight. We were expected to acquire useful information from textbooks numbering hundreds, if not thousands, of pages. (Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine was about 1,500 pages in 1975. It’s now a whopping 4048 pages in two volumes weighing 13.2 pounds!)  I felt like there was a mountain of books, papers and trash piled into the middle of a school gymnasium and I was the janitor with a whisk broom and dustpan.

Writing provokes the same anxiety and trepidation.

Long ago I learned to derive a sense of accomplishment from simple things like housework, laundry, and cooking. They are finite tasks with tangible results. I don’t have to wait months or years to see the final product. I especially like cooking because cutting things into little pieces is very therapeutic (and, unlike murdering one’s tormentors, legal). I’m a reasonably good cook but I am not a chef by any stretch of the imagination, even though Peg chastises me for doing “cheffy-chef” things like trying to flip a large pancake using just the pan. Hey, practice makes perfect and at least I did it over the sink instead of the bare floor.

A good friend of mine is an artist who, in retirement, has committed to finishing one drawing every day.  I spent the 30-40 minutes writing this when I started, another hour revising the following day, and about 20 minutes just before posting. I’m trying to force myself to write something every day, but it’s still a struggle.

Maybe I’ll ignore the call of the long list of timewasters and go back to “The Finite and the Tangible.” But let me check my Facebook page for just a minute…

The Prostate Saga – Rehab

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WARNING: This post contains material of a sensitive and sexual nature. If you are easily embarrassed or squeamish, you might want to sit this one out.

I saw the Urology Department Physician Assistant the week after my surgery to take out my catheter. She gave me a prescription for 50mg sildenafil (generic Viagra) tablets and told me to take a half tablet every night “to keep the blood flowing” – a prophylactic Roto-Rooter®. I made an appointment with her and the Vacuum Erection Device Clinic for January as “the December clinic had already passed.” I was supposed to talk with the clinic about acquiring a “medically approved” vacuum erection device in January, but I pushed to get it ordered in December since they run upwards of three hundred bucks and I’d met my deductible for the year.

I got a mysterious text message from FedEx alerting me to a delivery from upcrx.com that required my signature. Often “signature required” means either someone is sending alcohol, or the IRS wants to do an audit. Google helped me find University Compounding Pharmacy in San Diego but did nothing to alleviate my confusion.

The package arrived the following week. I scrawled my name on the driver’s tablet and I now possessed my very own prescription “Austin Powers Swedish Penis Enlarger.” I wasn’t supposed to use it until after my postoperative appointment in January, and then only “under medical supervision,” lest I somehow injure myself.

I had an appointment in January with Dr. Fine for a postoperative visit. The PSA level I’d had drawn the previous week was undetectable; I’d get a PSA level done every three months for a year, then every six months if all went well.

He asked about my recovery.

“It’s going fine. The big incision burned every time I moved but that went away in a week and I used the Norco maybe three times. I got by on Tylenol. And I’m back to my pre-surgical level of incontinence.”

His eyes lit up!

“You should really see one of the pelvic physical therapists. There are a couple of people who specialize in male incontinence therapy.”

“I’m fine.”

“You really should consider it; nip it in the bud right now.”

(Like I have the time or inclination to have some dude teach me Kegel exercises, which I’d taught women for decades.)

“Ok, I’ll give them a call.” (No, I won’t.)

Many physicians are hardwired to offer as many labs, procedures, and referrals as possible. That is probably why sleep studies have been such a standard for anyone who is fat, diabetic, hypertensive, and/or chronically tired. He gave me the phone number which I tossed into the trash on my way to the car.

It’s been seven months since surgery; I don’t wear underwear shields anymore and the urgency is almost nonexistent. I may not be able to write my name in the snow but it no longer feels like I’m trying to urinate through a urethra in a death grip.

The following week I saw the P.A.  She had asked me to come in early because she had to go somewhere. Today she was a little frantic and hurried through her instructions.

“You’ll be talking to Jonathan about the vacuum. Stop taking the Viagra while you are using it. Try the Viagra after a couple of weeks. If you don’t see any results after several tries, it’s time to open this little white bag and take the pill that’s in there. If you’re still not getting any results after 2 months, you need to come see me. Here’s an instruction sheet. Now I have to go…”

My next stop was the pretentiously named Vacuum Erection Device Clinic. I figured I’d be in a classroom with several other men discussing our surgical recovery, led by a physician in the requisite white coat giving us a talk on the mechanism of tumescence and how our recent surgery had interfered with function.

Instead, I went to another room and met with the “physician liaison” (read: equipment rep).

“I’ll need to order your device and when it comes in, we can talk about how to use it.”

“Uh, I got it last month.”

“Ok, then. Here’s what you do. Put it over your penis. Pump the vacuum for five or ten seconds, then wait forty-five seconds. Release the vacuum, wait a minute, and then pump it again for five to ten seconds and wait forty-five seconds. Do that for 10 minutes a day. If you have any questions, here’s my card.”

I wasted an afternoon for this?

How an erection works.

The cross-section of the penis looks like a cartoon monkey face. The shaft of the penis contains two spongy cylinders, the corpus cavernosum; a sizeable artery runs through each. A vein flanked on each side by an artery and a nerve runs above the corpus cavernosum. All this is surrounded by a layer of fascia, like a hot dog casing. A third spongy tube, the corpus spongiosum, surrounds the urethra and runs the length of the shaft below the corpus cavernosum while the dorsal penile vein runs the length of the shaft on top. All this is enclosed in loose tissue and covered by thin, flexible skin.

The arteries in the corpus cavernosum normally aren’t fully open, which is why men don’t have permanent erections. When the brain is stimulated, a combination of nerve impulses and chemical signals open the arteries which fill the corpus cavernosum with blood. The engorged tissue presses on the veins, blocking return blood flow and, voilà, an erection is born.

It’s been suggested that men hit their sexual peaks at 18 and it’s downhill after that. Research, however, shows men’s testosterone levels peak in their 30s before gradually declining. Getting an embarrassing, spontaneous erection for no apparent reason disappeared by my late teens.  Sexual function can decline as early as one’s 40s; I started noticing a difference in my late 40s. Other things can affect sexual drive and function besides purely aging:

The nerve bundles required for achieving an erection are often damaged during a radical prostatectomy. Scarring around my prostate required taking out the neurovascular bundle on the right side. The left side was spared but the trauma from surgery is enough to keep the remaining nerves from doing their job. It may take up to two years before being able to achieve an erection with or without ED drugs. If that doesn’t work, the alternatives are injections into the penis or penile implants.

This is my device. It has both battery-operated and manual vacuum pumps which attach to an acrylic cylinder. There are five silicone rings (sizes 5 to 9); the cone is used to slip a ring onto the other end of the cylinder. The ring ejector twists to push the ring onto the penis before removing the cylinder to maintain the erection. The body shield is that circular thing resembling a old-fashioned floppy disk drive and provides a barrier to prevent scrotal skin from being sucked into the pump. The gel is used to form a seal around the base of the pump and to lubricate the penis; without it the penis will drag along the cylinder wall like an anchor on concrete.

Note to self: make sure to grab the correct white squeeze tube: the lubricating gel tube, not the menthol gel I use on sore muscles.

The Vacuum Erection Device, aka the “Austin Powers Swedish Penis Enlarger”

The caveats in the instruction manual were disturbing.

“Vacuum therapy may cause a small “blood blister” on the head of your penis. This is normal and not harmful.”

“The rings may bruise the base of your penis. Some bruising is normal and should not be cause for alarm.”

Wait, what? In what alternative universe is a bruised and blistered penis “normal?”

“If you wear a ring for more than 30 minutes, you may severely bruise or damage your penis.”

So, if that happens, do I just get a new one from Amazon with 2-day Prime delivery?

I looked over the instruction sheet I’d gotten from the P.A.

You were given samples of ED medication to try at your leisure. Please use the paper form you were given (to) track your response and side effects of each medication. The goal is for you to try one tablet every 3rd day followed by (significant) stimulation.

  • Tablets work better on an empty stomach
  • Tablets take one hour to become effective
  • Space out your trials by 2-3 days at the minimum

If tablets do not work, you may still have intercourse with the vacuum rubber bands.

Common side effects – headache, facial flushing, nasal congestion

If you are on Cialis and are experiencing leg cramps – Please stop Cialis immediately as Cialis can sometimes be linked to tendon inflammation, possible rupture.

Oh, goody!

I discovered the vacuum doesn’t work immediately, which was disappointing. One cannot hope to instantly inflate the penis like a balloon that a clown twists into animal shapes for kids at a party. At first it took fifteen minutes to achieve anything resembling an erection, which decreased to around five minutes after three months. The least they could do is make pumps entertaining with indicator lights and an alarm that goes off when one has reached maximum height (or is it length?).

Anyone who played with a vacuum cleaner hose as a kid knows it can inflict some pain if left on a body part for too long. Moving blood into a penis with negative pressure is an uncomfortable process and certainly not erotic. And few things are worse than having a large chunk of scrotal tissue suddenly sucked into the cylinder along with a testicle. The barrier did not help at all; it was too flexible and got drawn in as well.

It didn’t take long for one of the rings to break and the replacements cost twenty bucks each. I ordered a different kind of ring that looked like a flat, silicone bagel (the penis goes through the hole and the surrounding material blocks wandering skin, but it was for a rival brand and didn’t fit my pump. I found another type that looked more like a foam-lined chip clip (or a cigar cutter). I settled on a silicone loop I bought from Amazon.

The battery pump died after a month. The company said they’d send a replacement which never arrived, and I don’t feel like calling them again. The manual pump is equally effective but using it leads to spasms in my right thumb and pain in my right wrist, caused by old nerve damage from two separate lacerations. The recommended forty-five seconds on, one minute off did nothing, even after multiple attempts over three weeks. I finally just pumped and left the vacuum on for several minutes while amusing myself with my Kindle game. (I may not have sexual function, but at least I’m doing my part to delay age-related dementia!) My erections promptly deflated as soon as I released the vacuum, despite the ring. There was never sufficient rigidity to close off the penile veins.

I then tried using 100mg sildenafil without the pump or any kind of stimulation. I got a slight flush but nothing. A few days later I made another attempt. I got distracted doing other things but applied the pump three hours after I took it. I got a reasonable erection which again deflated after taking off the pump and using the loop. I tried the pump again and then manual stimulation which made it last a little longer but still wasn’t anything to write home about. And all this took about 25 minutes, not including the minimum one hour wait for the drug to take effect.

George Burns said, ““Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.”

But all is not lost. Men can have orgasms without an erection, although it may take some mental adjustment. If you’re a New Ager into Tantra (and you have a lot of patience), you can have an orgasm using just your mind. Radical prostatectomy removes the prostate and seminal vesicles, meaning there’s no more semen, along with the sphincter between the urethra and the prostate, which normally prevents retrograde ejaculation (semen going into the bladder instead of out the penis). The result is climacturia, the release of urine with orgasm and a common side effect of the surgery. One can prevent this with an adjustable loop around the penis, muscle training or surgery, but emptying the bladder beforehand is the simplest.

More information than you ever wanted to know, eh?

Finally, nothing is more important during post-prostatectomy rehabilitation than a loving and supportive partner. Peg says she would rather have me alive and annoying than six feet under, and for that I am grateful.

Monkey illustration © Can Stock Photo / yayayoyo