two steps back

I was going to write about life in a physical rehab facility, but now I’m back in the hospital instead. Steps back indeed: I am not judged ready to do that, and must lie in bed until my tuckus aches.

well, that's torn it

This post was supposed to be a review of Saturday evening's Redwood Symphony concert, featuring the Paganini Rhapsody (which is by Rachmaninoff). References from my posts of the last few days about my health issues would serve only as background to illustrate what physical challenges I overcame to get there.

It didn't work out that way. After a few bites at a local restaurant (my laxative had done its work, so I wasn't stuffed but I still had no appetite), I was driving down a residential street towards the theatre when the car drifted over, as it's been doing a lot in my hands lately, smacked into a parked car and then slammed into unoccupied kerb. Obviously it was going nowhere under its own power tonight. Strangely, the car I'd hit was not at all damaged. Me, I was shaken but not stirred.

B. had told me, before I left, that she didn't think I should be driving tonight, and she was right. The answering cop told me he was suspending my license, and I agreed that was the right thing to do. So, since B. couldn't do the driving - she fears traffic and hates going out at night - that puts paid to most of my concert going for the foreseeable future. I will be looking out for substitute methods of travel, but not too much of it. I said before that my illnesses over the last year and my recent hospital stay are a major life transition, and they surely are.

But though the circumstances were miserable and my evening plans were ruined, I couldn't have had a better time of it, thanks to the extraordinary kindness and helpfulness of several neighbors, including even the owner of the car I hit, who came out of curiosity and promptly pitched in to find me a chair to sit, call my insurance, fetch a tow truck for the car and a Lyft home for me, etc etc, and otherwise just hang out and pass the time with agreeable conversation.

jabbed and otherwise assaulted

Yesterday afternoon I went in for my flu and covid shots. Unlike others reporting this year, I did not feel seriously wiped out by the shots. But that may be because I was already so enervated that there was no more wiped out to get.

I've been using a cane when I walk for some years now. Originally it was a response to attacks of bursitis, arthritis, and other itises, but more generally it's to keep me steady on my feet, and not to wobble and fall over, which I have a tendency to.

But since my latest hospital stay, that's changed and I've entered a new phase of aging. Those four days of lying in bed doing nothing, plus two surgical operations, did seriously wipe me out, both strength and stamina, and I came home ready to curl up and forswear everything. Gradually I've been recovering just a little, and by pacing myself carefully and devolving to B. some household tasks that I'd thought I could still do until I tried them, like taking the trash bins to the curb for pickup, I've gotten to the point where going up and down stairs two or three times a day is manageable.

But I'm using the cane indoors almost all the time now, where previously I'd just held on to handy objects, and outside I have graduated to a walker, one of the cheap metal four-legged ones (but only two wheels! why not four?) which is much more stable and allows me to walk faster, though still very slowly, than with a cane.

Other complications, such as bags hanging off accumulating strange fluids, aren't worth much discussion (this is not supposed to be permanent, but I have to wait for my next operation), oh, and you know the stuff you take before a colonoscopy to clean you out? I've been chugging it by the gallon without much effect.

concerts not attended

I had tickets to all of these:

Friday, San Francisco Symphony, A Concert for MTT. The eagerly-awaited memorial concert for the beloved former music director, Michel Tilson Thomas. Critic Joshua Kosman called it "part concert and part Jewish wake."

Saturday, South Bay Musical Theatre, Once Upon a Mattress. Musical by Mary Rodgers based on "The Princess and the Pea," the show that originally made Carol Burnett famous.

Sunday, Symphony San Jose, Copland Billy the Kid, Dvořák Symphony from the New World, and a new piece by Jonathan Leshnoff, Rhapsody on America.

I didn't get to any of these because I was in the hospital, again. Frustrating to sit there waitng to learn what they're going to do next. (MRI - that's an interesting experience.) In fact they only let me out so that they may spend a few days cogitating on the next step, and in a couple weeks I'll be going back in again, more concerts to skip I'm sure.

My tablet has accompanied me on this, so I could theoretically have written posts. But one feature of being ill is that I don't feel I have much to say, or the ab8lity to say it cogently if I do.

anatomy of a scandal

Of all the silly things happening in politics lately, my candidate for the silliest is Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO)'s attempt to play "gotcha" with Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who pulled up so many cases for DT's criminality, earning from his antagonist the label "deranged." You can see the whole thing outline by Seth Meyers here; I've cued this to delete a couple minutes of preliminary fooforall.

But here I'd like to deconstruct it slightly. Schmitt's idea of a gotcha was to imply previously-unknown collusion between Smith and Fani Willis, the Georgia state prosecutor who was pursuing her own cases against DT for election fraud. And to show collusion would prove what, exactly? We never got that far, but presumably if you could get Smith to deny it while showing it was true, you'd have presumption of malfeasance.

But it never even got that far, either. All we had was Schmitt claiming and Smith denying that he'd been in Atlanta on a given day. All Schmitt claimed he had evidence of was Smith attending a basketball game that day, an NBA match between the Atalnta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors. Anything involving Fani Willis would have to lurk unspoken.

But, of course, Schmitt didn't even have that. Asked about the game, Smith said he wasn't there; where he was, he said, was at a college basketball game hosted by the University of Maryland, near D.C. where he lives, vs. the University of Iowa Hawkeyes.

Hawks. Hawkeyes. It was Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) who suggested that Schmitt had just confused the teams' nicknames. And that's how the story is being told.

But in fact it didn't even get that far. The posterboard showing the supposedly damning e-mails from Smith's staff was waved around but hard to see. But it does appear clearly between 9:45 and 9:50 on Meyers' video. At which point it reveals that the e-mails were just a qu8ick exchange about Smith's seating arrangements and confirming he was there. It doesn't even say it was a basketball game! Maybe Schmitt had other documentary evidence on that, but he admitted (clips at 11:07-11:15 of Meyers' video) that he just looked up the NBA schedule for that day, found the game in Atlanta, and figured he had his gotcha. The similarity of the team names was a pure coincidence.

What a moronic excuse for a political scandal.