I got up about 08:00 anyway, puttered around for a while, made coffee, read the funnies, ate some cereal.

Got a call about 10:00 from the cardiologist. I needed to go in for a visit, they'd reviewed my holter strips, I was having a lot of arrythmias. Well, no shit, I told them that to start off with.

So we were at the office about 14:00, got weighed & BPed and all of that stuff, then Dr Meyer came in and we talked for a while. As an aside, he doesn't think that cigars are bad, heh.

I really like this guy. For one thing, he saed my life once, and once is all it takes for me to love you forever, y'know? For another thing, he's easy-going, but the most important thing is, he believes me and trusts my judgement on what's going on with my heart. Which is more than I do, it seems. Although like I said yesterday, I'm really convinced that my problem is cardiac, and I can actually pretty much say that it's in the right coronary.

At any rate, I'm gonna have a cath done on Tuesday, when we will find some shit out.

One of the things that I think that we will find out is that I need a pacemaker.

Oddly enough, something that Karen said really made me think about this: she said that maybe I wouldn't feel so tired all of the time if my heart was working right.

Well, duh, as the grandkids would say.

But that had never crossed my mind.

Anyway, what couses people to need pacemakers is that the conduction path in the heart is damaged, usually by restricted blood flow although ofttimes there seems to be no cause of the damage.

And Wednesday, one of the major things that I was thinking when my chest was hurting was that I was having multiple runs of PVCs. I could feel them in my chest against the background of pain, but I could feel them even better by feeling my pulse at my wrist.

Which is one of the reasons why I didn't want to go to the ER at that time, they would have done an EKG and slapped me in the ICU in nothing flat.

And I've lived with the PVCs for years and years, hell, about half of the time I'm in bigemini, where every other beat is a PVC. It's really no big deal, by itself.

The big deal comes when the PVCs degenerate into V-tach. With V-tach, the heart just essentially sits there and quivers.

And you die in about five minutes, without ever knowing what's going on. Pretty painless if you're asleep. If you're not asleep, you will probably fall down and hurt yourself, which *is* painful.

And I need to reiterate something that I've often said here, I'm not afraid of dying. I don't want to die right now, of course, but I realize the ineveitability of it. But I've got a lot of entries that I want to write here, a lot of songs that I want to write and play, a lot of love that I want to give to a lot of people.

I'm actually re-reiterating that, the damned computer froze and I lost about 30 minutes worth of writing there.

But I've got it all fixed up now, I hope. I moved the HDs with all of my music and programs to a different machine, so I now have everything available again, had a helluva time doing it though. For one thing, I tried putting the memory in upside down... it doesn't work that way at all. I finally got out the flashlight so I could see what I was doing.

And I'm saving this every 30 seconds or so, heh. Closing the barn door after the barn burns down.

I'm trying to think of a haiku that's not depressing, I've already had about ten up there that you all really don't want to read.

So the one that I've chosen is really pretty mild, comparatively.

My original idea on the haikus is that, strung together, they would present a whole. A whole *what*, I was never really clear about. A whole lot of bullshit? A whole lot of wisdom? Well, yeah. I'm doing the best I can with poor tools and no guidelines here, gimmee a break, huh?

I frequently find that it's really hard to think. And that seems to be getting worse as I get older.

I just keep going over the same damned things, over and over. BabyBush. Religion. Liberals vs conservatives. Me vs the world. A square peg in a round hole. No afterlife, no nothing.

I need to break out of my head, and I really don't have much time to do it, dammit.

My brother Dan has a really great philosophy about politics: he essentially ignores it. So he can put it out of his mind, and think about *important* stuff. I really admire that.

I am just living too much in this world, and not enough in mine.

My world is rather pleasant. It only has the people that I love in it, and they all love me, and that's really cool. Everyone is happy in my world. Including me.

So, why the fu** do I want to be worrying about the rest of the world?

I really need an attitude adjustment, I do.

And I'll get one next Tuesday.

O'yeah! Tomorrow? That's my birthday!