11) For my cardiologist, 4 months after triple bypass surgery. Although I've tracked my blood pressure readings, I haven't logged my eating, exercise, and sleep as they relate. Here I'll chronicle one day because it shows some of the typical trends. Saturday, July 18th.
I woke at 7 A.M. after around an 8 hour sleep. After using the bathroom, I took my morning meds (Coreg 6.25, Tamsulosin, microdose Aspirin, Valcyclovir). I measured my blood pressure before eating breakfast. This morning it was 138/93/66. It tends to be high in the A.M., but this may be in part because I take it soon after waking.
I ate a breakfast of Cheerios, strawberries, and cow milk.
By 8:00 I started my morning exercise. This day, I walked my neighborhood hills, a distance of about 3.3 miles in 49 minutes with some intervals of jogging. I am about 85% of my pre-surgery stamina and must walk up the higher hills. If I feel chest discomfort or strain, I back off. I sometimes notice feelings in my chest, but those have come and gone for many weeks and are not like the angina I felt before. I alternate days of high-intensity with days of leisurely walks or step-aerobics. I believe that the Coreg limits my heart rate and the duration for which I'm able to maintain more intense activity.
Upon returning at 9 A.M., my blood pressure has dropped to 96/64/98. To confirm, I check it again at 10 A.M. and get a reading of 98/75/80. This is a standard pattern after exercise with my blood pressure dropping substantially. In part this may reflect my kidneys' inability to manage fluid volume after kidney failure in 2021, although my medically-resistant hypertension predates that event.
For lunch, I had Surimi on bread with mayonnaise, a higher sodium meal than I typically allow myself.
Around 12:30, I hit the wall and became very fatigued. This is also typical, almost a daily occurrence. I believe it is in at least some part caused by the beta blocker. I lay down for a nap on the couch. At 2:00 P.M. I awoke. My blood pressure measured 140/87/63. Is the blood pressure elevated from my body retaining sodium, from being recumbent, from apneas, or simply from "waking up" hormones?
I then showered and went to do delivery driving for the night. I ate no further meals apart from snacking on cucumbers. I hydrated with decaffeinated, artificially sweetened tea. I was in and out of a truck and in seated, standing, walking, and stair-climbing positions for six hours.
Upon return home, my blood pressure measured 133/85/67. I took my night meds (Coreg 6.25, Lisinopril 10 mg, Rosuvastatin, microdose Aspirin) and went to bed by 10:30.
My blood pressure has been erratic since coming off HCTZ after 16 weeks. Some days it is high all day, sometimes low all day, sometimes low in the morning, high at night or high in the morning, low at night. But more often than not, it seems to follow this pattern: it is high upon waking, lowers as I am active, then spikes again before bedtime. Could this be fluid regulation or the fading effects of the Coreg 11-12 hours after the previous dose?
I don't know that the Lisinopril has much effect, and my blood pressure had been well-regulated by half the current Coreg dose with 12.5 HCTZ and no Lisinopril. On those two medications, my blood pressure never exceeded 125/85, although it sometimes dropped to 100/70 or below, accompanied by breathlessness, fatigue, and dizziness on standing.
See also my Aldosterone reading of 4 (possibly lowered by Lisinopril), Renin reading of .17 (possible lowered by Coreg). Kidney related: GFR 75 (low), Sodium 145 (top of range), Chloride 109 (high), Creatinine 1.2 (top of range), Protein 6.3 (low), Potassium 5.0 (top of range), Albumin and BUN normal.
***
10) Follow-up on the Cologuard. I finally shit in the box. The test was positive, so I have to get a colonoscopy. But I have to wait until 6 months after the triple-bypass, which was mid-March. They've scheduled me for October 1st.
***
9) I had a friend who I thought did delivery driving as a way to make extra money. One night we were sitting at our local bar sharing a pitcher, and he confided something to me. "I run drugs, dude." I scoffed at him and told him he was full of it. "No man, it's true," he said. "One day I was delivering this guy his chimichangas, and when we met at the door, there was like a wall of weed smoke, and I joked that it smelled good in there, and he was like 'come on in and hit this' and I said 'okay', and we got to talking. Dude was an operator, and he sized up that he could trust me, and he told me to come back the next day if I wanted to earn some money. That's how I got started. Turns out that 'delivery driving' is the BEST cover. As long as you're carrying a big red pizza bag, literally no one questions what you're doing or where you're going. I've delivered pizza-boxes full of weed next door to houses with police cruisers parked in the driveway, and the cop's over there watering his plants and waving hello to me and telling me to be safe on the road. I've walked into the retirement home carrying packages to hand off to the janitor, and everyone's like 'down the hall to the right' with a helpful, cheery smile on their faces, not knowing why their patients' blood pressures keep going through the roof or why Miss Betty's rolling like a maniac. No one's ever unhappy to see the delivery guy because everybody likes getting deliveries. It's like the 'Wells Fargo Wagon' song in Music Man. People are singing out loud because they're excited they might be the next to get a delivery. You've never seen that? It's got Opie in it. You don't know what you're missing. Anyway, you put a stupid DorkDash hat on, people let you go wherever. Military base, the projects, the mall, the boonies, guards at the jail, they treat you like Switzerland. You've got no enemies. No one ever doubts your uniform. Gate's always open." So of course I wanted to know how I could get in on that action. And that would turn out to be the first step in forming what would become a criminal empire.
***
8) Many years ago, I saw a documentary about penguins. They were out on the ice, and it was mating season. The film focused on one individual couple pair. The way I remember it, the narrator said the words "the male must keep his female serviced, or she will surely stray." And that stuck with me and has informed my sex-life and my relationships ever since. When you learn that to be a partner is also to put yourself in a position of service, a lot of problems go away.
***
7) Partial list of celebrities with dead eyes, presumed to be of The Horde: Fred Armisen, Amy Poehler, Johnny Depp, Aubrey Plaza, Billie Eilish, Kaya Scodelario, Rooney Mara, Cillian Murphy, Bella Hadid, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jeremy Allen White, Mary-Kate Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Lana Del Rey, Eminem, Kanye West, Victoria Beckham, Kylie Jenner, Dane DeHaan, Timothée Chalamet, Mia Goth, Cara Delevingne, Alexa Demie, Tilda Swinton, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Saoirse Ronan, Kristen Stewart, Mia Wasikowska, Jena Malone, Alison Brie, Mackenzie Davis, Ezra Miller, Dakota Fanning, Hunter Schafer, Alicia Vikander, Mia Farrow, St. Vincent, Sky Ferreira, Robert Pattinson, Vincent Cassel, Suki Waterhouse.
***
6) When I won the lottery in 1998, my smartest decision was to move to a new state and not tell anyone I was wealthy. I knew that otherwise I would never know if people were treating me based on who I am or by what they thought they could get from me.
While I was excited to get such a huge pile of money, my biggest concern was that I not become one of those people who blows through all the cash and ends up destitute. I bought a small shack on a plot of farmland outside of town, so I'd never have to worry about a good night's sleep. Then I found a psychic in the phone book and started seeing her regularly to get investment advice. I put my remaining winnings into the stock market and got a job as a convenience store clerk in order to pay my meager monthly bills.
In March of 2000, the psychic pointed out an unusual planetary alignment, so I sold all my investment holdings for a hefty gain. After the DotCom bust, I reinvested in Apple and Amazon and others and rode the market as those stocks boomed. When the psychic had a bad dream about a house falling into a river, I sold everything at the exact market top in October of 2007. I got back in at the bottom in 2009 and held for over a decade. When the psychic died of a mysterious respiratory illness in 2019, I sold again and avoided the COVID crash, buying in again at the bottom and earning massive returns through the 2020s.
Anyway, that's how I managed to turn millions into -- well, I'm not going to put a number on it for you and the lurking taxman. The psychic visited me in a dream recently and her ghost warned me of a tsunami of ramen noodles, so I liquidated all my stock again at what will turn out to be the market top in 2026. This is not investment advice. But I'm sitting on more cash than you can imagine.
I continue to wear patched blue jeans. I drove a 2003 Kia Rio until it finally died. I bought and still drive a 2014 Ford Fiesta. I don't flaunt my wealth. I make small anonymous donations to people I think deserve it. But mostly I use my money to support my passions: collecting comic books and developing chemical agents which will neuter all human males and bring an end to Gaea's suffering.
The comic book thing is pretty straightforward. I finished my full run of Amazing a decade ago, and I've been working on upgrading each copy to 9.5 or above. I don't even like Superman, but I hired a remote assistant and together we're cobbling together all those issues, too, just for fun. So. Many. Reboots.
But my true passion is getting revenge on all the people who picked on me in childhood by chemically castrating their male heirs. My team years ago developed versions of our -- proprietary blend -- which can be administered in Monster energy drinks, coffee, beer, anything with a strong enough flavor to disguise the faint raspberry taste of Orcidololopril-498. From there, it was just a matter of hiring private agents to pose as bartenders and new "friends" to confirm that each unsuspecting patient received a proper dosage.
When you're autistic and you spend enough time around people, almost everyone eventually drops their guard and loses their mask. It's like people are compelled to let you know their contempt for you, like they'll just die if they don't reveal how beneath them they think you are. So you learn that people are basically bad. Bad monkeys. I learned this lesson when I was poor, and I learned it some more when I was rich and no one knew it. You discover that everyone is just pretending to not be evil, and you stop wondering why the world is the way it is when it doesn't make sense, and then you start to have diabolical notions.
The team is very close to having airborne variants of our chemical agent ready for mass-distribution by aeroplane. We've been testing chemtrail distribution for months in the skies over Texas, and we're happy with the results we've engineered so far. It turns out spraying corn gets it into just about everything.
When the testosterone-driven impulse to plunder the Earth's resources, war over territory and influence, and erect monuments to man's murderous greed and ego are purged from this world, Order can have a chance to recover. The green shoots coming up through cracks in the sidewalk are only the beginning.
***
5) There's a box from Cologuard I'm supposed to return still sitting in my office. I keep moving it so it's in my way and I have to step over it to remind me to -- fill it -- and return it. To this point I haven't opened it.
I saw a meme intimating that there are two types of wipers: sitters and standers. And that each group is entirely unaware of the other's existence. As a former sitter, I can understand people get locked in their ways and stop using their imaginations to improve their lives. But having tried both methods, standing is clearly superior. At the very least, lift yourself into a half-squat so you get a good angle. I feel like I'd have to be a gymnast or yoga-master to contort my middle-aged back and arm to reach around behind myself while seated.
Usually, and this is often because I go a few times a day, I will shower after. At first, I liked to make sure my outside was thoroughly clean. It always seemed like toilet paper was just kind of a half-measure and never actually got it all and I was just fooling myself. Then I realized there was always just a little bit inside, too, so you had to soap up a fingertip and irrigate, and that made you feel fresh. Then I realized that the whole rectum often had residuals and that you could flush that stuff out with the shower head and an extended middle-finger. Eventually, I got to the point where I can navigate my whole arm through my intestines and back up my esophagus and wave at myself in the mirror with my hand sticking out of my mouth.
Ultimately, though, I realized that to be truly pure, I needed a method to avoid defecation completely. I started calculating the specific number of calories it takes me to survive and have trained my body through intense exercise to be a nuclear furnace which burns every morsel of food as I eat it, including fiber. I've reached an equilibrium where what I consume exactly equals what I need for energy. On average, I have a bowel movement once every six months now.
What can I say? I like being clean. You people disgust me.
***
4) Eleven weeks after triple-bypass surgery, and I'm still struggling. This third month has in some ways been more difficult than the second. Physically, I'm better. I can walk the walk I used to walk, my neighborhood walk I mean, forty-five minutes to an hour, up and down hills.
I tried jogging, but since I'm not allowed to do push-ups until my sternum fully heals, my softened pecs bounced and hurt and made me more understanding of the merits of a sports-bra. I can march up and down the stairs twelve times. But I still get a little winded. Not as much as when my blood pressure was low, 110/70. Then I'd get dizzy standing up.
Now my blood pressure is running high. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, it spikes to 140/95. Ish. Doctor is still tweaking my meds. The thing with blood pressure meds. "Hey, these meds may make you feel terrible, but at least they don't control your blood pressure." Am I right?
I get tired every afternoon and stumble to the couch for a half-hour coma. It's hard to wake up on time in the morning, and when I do, I don't feel like exercising. I'm eating right and avoiding salt, but I'm still slowly gaining weight. I make my own healthy turkey-sausages and bean-burgers and flax-seed chips. But I'm still fatigued. Too much so, all the time. I'm not horny for anything.
I haven't mentioned the worm yet. I first became aware of it in my teens. There's a thick, black worm that lives in my intestine, and it sucks all my energy. It wants me depressed. It likes when I sleep thirteen hours, so it can eat my life-force. I don't talk to the doctor about it, but it's a problem. Please don't say "Ivermectin" or "SSRI," those makes it bigger. Same with meditation. Anyway, it doesn't surprise me that after open heart surgery, the worm is having a gay old time in my gut, controlling my every thought and feeling! Opportunistic little shit.
Did you know they call the gut the "second brain?" It's really interesting, actually, 90% of the body's seratonin is produced and stored in the intestinal tract. Anyway, I'm supposed to be doubling my Carvedilol, but it makes me so tired. Who can live like this? It's either take the meds and not be able to function or not take the meds and walk straight into a stroke.
Bodies are frail and foolish and fragile, and if we're made in God's image, He's a fucked up, decrepit, falling-apart flesh-bag of bones, meat, blood, and pus. Why does He have skin-tags and hemorrhoids and sinuses, and why do I have to have them?
Even sexy people are disgusting, if you ask me. Even with their stunningly ignorant smiles, a stray clot away from vegetative.
***
3) Last night I had a fever and dreamed fitful dreams. I was seized by the gravity of the Darkness beyond measure of physicality and tumbled across the void for decades, gently, a journey on which I saw many things which changed my mind. Planetoids, echoes, burdens, multiplicities. Once I saw a feather of light become a sun. Once I saw a vast mouth die into itself. After the learning, I arrived, stretched thin and wound like a ribbon, to the central thought which animates the spark upon the wick. Through it I squirmed claustrophobically inside a soily burrow toward that dim light, unable to feel my limbs and unable to breathe. Every moment was the imminent collapse of external structure and internal frame. I was like an earthworm, my bones long since jellified, yearning to surface. Above me at the tunnel's opening, there came to gaze a grave eye, and she said to me to not stop now, because nature still had need of me. That I should join the willing mass in our natural purpose to eat the fruits of the land and make manure as we walk. And at once, cast high into the new sky like a geyser, I saw from the position of the vulture circling, far below, the factory of it, the churning miasma of naked pink flesh a million strong, making mewling noises, pressed up against one another as we march in endless circles, knee-deep in our own excrement. I accepted the evidence of my eyes and rested there a while in my fever like a cloud before I rained down on the green lands.
***
2) I'm not one to shit on my ex, but...
We ended up getting a cat and named it Doreen. My ex never adored her like I did. I think she was weirdly jealous of the cat's affection, as though Doreen was plotting to come between us. I'd try to be reassuring, but I guess in my ex's worldview it wasn't possible for someone to have the depth of feeling to love both a partner and a pet at the same time, that somehow my petting the cat diminished the love I had left available for my partner.
My ex was in charge of feeding, and I realized after some time that Doreen was always hungry and had gotten very frail. Doreen became a little aggressive at the table, and I took to feeding her myself when I got home from work. I asked my ex about this, and she said, "we can't afford to feed her twice a day." I told her we could do without ordering food delivery one night a week, and I started bringing home extra cans and bags of food.
A couple weeks later, Doreen, who was indoor/outdoor, went missing, which she had never done before. I was really worried, and my ex acted concerned as well. After a few days, I started to give up hope. But one night, I heard meowing and scratching at the back door. Doreen was dirty and starving and she had hitchhiker seeds stuck in her fur which took hours to pick out. She looked like she'd walked for miles. My ex was unexcited to see Doreen return and acted strangely nervous about it.
While I was at work the next month, my ex -- without telling me -- took Doreen to the vet and had her declawed. I was shocked when I came home, and all my ex would say was "she scratched me," even though she wouldn't show me where. When I became upset, she said Doreen was lucky to be declawed because she almost had her "depawed" and that she "knew a guy." For two weeks, I had to try to keep Doreen from jumping or climbing while she healed. One night, I found a printed diagram of feline skeletal anatomy among some papers. My ex had made a red circle around where the foot meets the tibia.
Anyway, Doreen and I now live in Florida. If anyone wants the name of my ex's employer...
***
1) One thing I don't talk about much is my grandmother. She was a serial killer.
Mom's relationship with her was strained. There are no photos. Once I got $5 in the mail from her for Christmas.
Her name was Lena Griggs, and she lived in an old white house in Choctaw for thirty years after our grandfather died. My parents took me to visit that house a couple times when I was little, but I don't remember anything about the woman, just a fence along a dirt road with grass growing up the center, and green blackberries, and a nest of yellowjackets.
So it came out in the 1980s that my grandmother had murdered several men. Out in that old country house, she'd take in laborers passing through looking for work at neighboring farms. Apparently, she used pesticide mixed into food, a little at a time. Buried their bodies near the crick - she would probably have had to chop them into pieces and use a wheelbarrow - and planted rows of beans over them.
One year there was a huge storm washed everything out. A fisherman spotted exposed bones up off the bank. They found four bodies. There might have been more. It was in all the papers. She was sick and died in jail before there could be a trial. She denied everything.
My grandmother was known to be a kind-hearted woman. There's a hobo sign, a cat, used to direct travelers toward a "kind-hearted woman," the sort of friendly old widow who might provide a meal. I think about that. And I wonder sometimes because I believe I am a kind person. But who knows what we're capable of.