At my own peril
The LVN who’s been visiting me a couple of times a week told me I need to go to a cardiologist because my blood pressure is as high as the Himalayas, but I don’t want to because a cardiologist is going to find out how good my insurance is and will say, “Let’s try something different with this guy. How about we give him a howler monkey heart and see what happens.”
Instead, I go to my regular doctor who’s kept me alive for a good 20 years longer than I had pessimistically predicted, and to my relief, he just prescribed some pills instead. I like pills, and I’ll happily take a chance with them over, say, having my chest cracked open with a medical-grade Jaws of Life so my heart can be beefed up with one from a barnyard animal or one from overseas arriving in a carpetbag.
Then, the LVN advises me that since I’m retired I need to get a hobby. I don’t know how one gets a hobby. You just wake up one morning and decide you’re going to buy a jigsaw and some paint and go out to the garage and build whirligigs to sell on Etsy? Can’t I just take a pill instead?
My hobbies are basically centered on being left alone to read books and pursue the goal of watching everything offered by every streaming service and then hauling myself into our suite of offices at the Long Beach Post and writing about it.
The LVN’s work with me is finished now, so I’m no longer getting free advice from her.
Failure as a flamingo
Also dispatched is my physical rehab expert Steve who was extraordinarily amiable and tall, at 6-foot, 2-inches, and earned a walk-on spot on the roster of the hoops team at Kansas University. He had me do some easy stuff, like getting up out of a chair several times and waving my arms around, as well as some high-degree-of difficulty drills like balancing on one leg, which has never been a skill in my wheelhouse, and which could explain why I never scored a role as Flamingo No. 2 in the nativity scene in the 1971 Christmas Pageant.
So, with his services no longer needed, I’ve got more time to devote to my hobbies.
Reading and viewing
I’m crushing my new hobby with all this new time that’s landed in my lap.
I’ve read Graham Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter,” (5 stars) one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors.
In fact, most of the books I’ve read in the past few weeks are works by some of my favorite authors, including “Three Days in June,” about how a woman and her daughter spend the weekend of the daughter’s wedding to a man who might’ve had a brief affair just days earlier (4 stars).
Also, it’s been years since John Dufresne has released a novel, and his new one, “My Darling Boy,” is marked by Dufresne’s crisp and sprawling storytelling as a father tries repeatedly to find and rehabilitate his once-joyful son who has been swallowed up by drug dependency (5 stars). It’s a book that ranks among Dufresne’s finest, including “Louisiana Power & Light,” “Love Warps the Mind a Little” and “The Way That Water Enters Stone.”
On your streaming services, I’ve been watching classic works by the recently departed Gene Hackman. Haven’t re-watched classics like “The French Connection” or “The Conversation” yet, but enjoyed the powerful “Mississippi Burning” (with Wlllem Dafoe) and “Runaway Jury” (with John Cusack and Dustin Hoffman).
I also sped through the entire new season of Hulu’s rough, rowdy and hilarious Canadian hockey series “Shoresy” — no rigorous feat since the season is only six 22-minute episodes,’” and, finally, the first season of the excellent emergency-room drama “The Pitt” on HBO/Max.
That hasn’t left me much time to practice standing on one leg, like my former LVN advised me to do. But you know how that goes.