Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: September 2010
unparalleled
It’s all about the best bread and the best sausages. We mail-ordered some dogs once, right from the source. Calabrese, hot links, kielbasa, all from different vendors. You just know someone had made a regular study of this, buying Polish from every possible vendor, taste-testing, taste-testing again. Retesting regularly — is this one still the best? Choosing on the basis of quality, not price. They’re that good.
Heaven.
Many more pictures here at Foodhoe’s Foraging. But tandoori chicken sausage, really? Don’t know about the Top Dog on Center Street, but my Top Dog on Durant wouldn’t serve tandoori chicken sausage. Might as well serve up Tofurkey dogs.
It’s about a cloudless China blue sky and a gentle breeze and perfect 68F weather, geeks and jocks and hairy-armpitted locals and old farts like me who see this place as fair game for pilgrimage. Can I still eat one of their Kielbasas? It’s 1/3 beef, after all. Maybe I’ll settle for Calabrese, or a Brat. Maybe I’ll settle for three.
I went to Der Wienerschnitzel this last weekend. I was that hungry. The kid behind the counter didn’t know if their Polish was all pork or a mix, so I ordered their turkey dog instead. Would I make it a double, throw in a drink and fries? Sure.
Der Wienerschnitzel dogs have an indescribable texture. Kind of like if plastic could be beaten into a meringue, then boiled into submission. The buns are gummy and tasteless, the mustard fluorescent. Throwing on a ton of relish didn’t help.
I finished one, threw away the other. Told you I was hungry.
D.
Hands-off medicine
Bend over, I need to check your doody.
My Sis was bemoaning the fact that all her new internist did was listen to her heart, look in her ears, and check her throat. Frankly, I’m surprised she did that much. My last three docs (always changing docs because we’re always MOVING, go figure) reviewed my meds, checked my BP, and asked what drugs I needed refilled. End of story. Do you think my wife, who actually has some trouble, gets a closer look? Not really. They like to tap out her reflexes.
Notwithstanding the countless texts written in the 19th and 20th centuries predicated on the value of physical diagnosis (Zachary Cope’s Early Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen comes to mind, for one), one could make an argument that an internist’s job nowadays breaks down to algorithms crunching raw data: patient’s age? sex? family history? smoker y/n? drinker y/n? list of medications? and so forth. Turned fifty, let me send you for a colonoscopy. Eighteen months since your last mammogram, ooh, you’re overdue for another. Same goes for that pap smear. Not taking baby aspirin, well, take a baby aspirin.
I’m not an internist. I’m a surgeon. I practice physical examination and physical diagnosis with each and every patient I see. I’d be lost without my hands and eyes. Since I’m not an internist, you could argue I have no business criticizing them. And I don’t, and I’m not. What I want is to draw attention to the perception that internists are data crunchers who no longer practice the laying on of hands.
If we notice it, others will, too. Health care administrators, health insurance executives, health care policy wonks and politicians will notice. And what happens when these folks decide that the internist’s job can be replaced by a fairly unsophisticated computer program?
I do think that internists, most of them, bring a lot more to the exam table than would a computer program. I suspect they could argue very well for the necessity of their existence. But one thing I’ve learned in medicine these past 25 years: we doctors have little control over our own destinies. Bureaucrats have done a tidy job altering our professional lives to suit their fancies.
So doesn’t it seem logical that internists should strive to win the perception war before someone without an MD or DO after his name tries to debate them out of existence?
D.
9/11
On Thursday my anesthesiologist, a Fox-watcher and all around asshat, relayed with some glee that fellow asshat and would-be Koran-burner Terry Jones would halt his book-burning plans in a tit-for-tat deal with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to move the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Never mind that Jones was overstating his supposed deal, has since recanted his narcissistic plan, and that the “Ground Zero Mosque” would not be built at Ground Zero nor was it even a mosque. The media was all over it and this guy, my anesthesiologist, who incidentally knows my political leanings (I once told him that I, too, am unhappy with our President, since he’s far too right-wing for me), had to needle me with this non-story.
This is for him.
Lloyd Dangle, Troubletown, Buy this cartoon
Let’s hope no one does anything stupid today.
D.
Ars longa
The other day, one of my patients said, “I bet you’ve already blogged me.” Which surprised me a little because I wasn’t wearing my “I’m blogging this” tee shirt, haven’t mentioned to anyone at work that I blog, and certainly hadn’t mentioned it to him. Turns out he was just ribbing me, but before I realized that I said, “I NEVER blog my patients!”
Yes, yes, this is patently false. Although if you’ve paid attention, you’ll note that I don’t blog my patients in any identifiable way. I would prefer to think their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them in these posts.
Anyway, I started to realize that this blog is all the writing I have anymore. I’m not creating anything, and I miss it. I really do. It’s hard to believe I could have written something like three-quarters of a million words, and now nothing. Like the reservoir has dried up.
I’m not lacking ideas. The ideas are there, but the words are not there. The voice is not there. The drive is not there.
And something inside says that if I could just start, the words and the voice and the drive would come. It’s a bootstrapping operation. I need to re-read some old work, perhaps, or set aside a tiny block of time every day and make it longer and longer, do one or all of those little tricks I’ve read about but just can’t bring myself to do.
It’s an awfully weird state of paralysis. But I can still blog, after a fashion.
D.
Creepy video, great music
You really need to listen to this. (Watch, not so much.)
Yet another great group of musicians my son and I discovered by playing video games. BTW, the CD containing this song, Book of Silk, is out of print (or whatever you call it). Downloadable as an MP3, or you can pay some exorbitant amount to sellers on Amazon. How does a great CD like this go out of print?
D.
Bukowski
Charles Bukowski has been on my must-read list for some time now. Perhaps it was an offhand comment by some author I admired — Michael Chabon, perhaps — how depressed he was when he realized he’d peeled through all of Bukowski’s work and would never again have the pleasure of reading one he’d never read before. Or, much earlier, someone told me Bukowski was the author behind Drugstore Cowboy. He wasn’t, but the name still stuck with me.
Tonight, while busting it on the elliptical trainer at the gym, I ripped through the first sixty pages of Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical Ham on Rye. Usually I don’t gravitate toward memoirs, since I prefer to think my own childhood was appalling and it always humbles me to discover that someone else had it much worse. Cue the Four Yorkshiremen. But Ham on Rye is something else altogether: a memoir with narrative drive.
Where does this narrative drive come from, that’s what I want to know. Is it my desire to see someone kick the narrator’s father’s brutal ass? Hopefully the narrator, Henry Chinaski, will do the kicking. Is it my secret wish to see his mother grow a spine, knowing full well that such people never grow a spine? No. Mostly, I want to see how a kid so damaged by his parents turns into a person who somehow, even if only tangentially, fits into society.
Below the cut, a poem by Bukowski that I found on some other guy’s blog. Enjoy.
Another one
I didn’t get to sleep until after 5 AM* and when I did, I had one of those terror-full end of the world dreams. At one point I recall looking in the bathroom mirror, wondering if I was dreaming, but it wasn’t the insightful “Is this a dream?” question that always yanks me from the dream, it was the “Is this a dream?” question you ask when things are going to hell and you wish half-heartedly that it would be a dream.
That we were living in my grandparents’ old house on Atlantic should have been a clue. Or the pet bear, but we’ll get back to him in a moment.
I was in the living room, looking out upon a darkening sky. There was a storm coming from that direction but it was like no other storm: horizontal rain, the droplets hitting the window like pebbles. As I watched I realized these were indeed pebbles, and the pebbles grew larger, had traces of light as if they were tiny comets. The sky had turned black. I realized the window wouldn’t last so I hurried Karen and the pets** into the kitchen (at the back of the house) and told her, “Good thing I bought a 2.5 gallon water jug yesterday, but I’m afraid there isn’t much to eat.”
Whereupon our pet bear, big and shambling like an overgrown dog, looked at the cats and Karen and me and said, “What are you talking about? There’s plenty to eat.”***
I blame Discovery Channel, or Animal Planet, or whatever Karen was watching yesterday. There was a bit on a trained bear that had bit out its trainer’s throat, killing him, and another bit speculating about different end of the world scenarios, such as the meteor that’s going to almost miss us in 2028.
The scary thing about the dream was not knowing what had happened. I went on the computer and was surprised to find power still working, the internet still functioning, but there was no news. And so we passed the time, waiting with our cats and talking bear, while I was torn between waiting for the inevitable and venturing back into the living room. To watch.
Like the Cowboy Junkies sing, I just want to see what kills me.
D.
*Insomnia from hell, despite giving up all caffeine and chocolate, doing cardio for a hour yesterday afternoon, and taking my usual meds.
**Sorry, Jake, but my subconscious spared you from this end of the world fantasy.
***I pointed out that by the time he’d finished off Karen and me and the cats that the rest of the population would be dead or, at any rate, inedible. He appeared non-plussed. My logic had defeated him.