Author: shelly

It’s coming up on that time of year where i get to reflect on the changes my life has undergone since i began being treated for sleep apnea. In a few days, it will have been three years since i began sleeping with a bi-pap assisting my breathing at night.

When a stroke patient [that survives], receives an MRI, the damaged and necrotic tissue in the brain can be seen and quantified. The reason i bring this up is because of a conversation i had with my otolaryngologist. For years i felt stupid. I was unable to grasp basic concepts, follow instruction and was prone to being moody [not to mention my insatiable hunger and continual drive to sleep]. The first morning i had after using the bi-pap was a turning point in my life. I’ve written extensively about this. What i couldn’t understand then that i have since realized is that i believe that after 15-18 years of being oxygen deprived at night [to recap: my hypoxia index was at 53% and continuing to fall during my initial sleep study], it’s entirely within the realm of possibility to consider that a prolonged lack of oxygen would have an impact on my brain. Brain tissue wouldn’t be necrotized, as is with the case of stroke victims.
Continue reading “3 years of being awake and awaker and awaking”

A few weeks ago i’m at work and need to use the toilet. It happens to the best of us. There’s one in a wing of the school that isn’t as trafficked as the others- so that’s where i go. Besides, it’s in the middle of class so what are the chances that anyone else is going to need it?

I’m in there minding my business and a knock comes on the door. “Busy!” i reply. I guess i could have shouted something else like, “No thanks! I’m doing fine by myself” or “POOPIES ARE HERE!”, but i don’t. “Busy” seems to be relatively well contained and self explanatory.
Continue reading “bathroom rant”

I came across my Moleskine today. I bought it years ago but never got as much use from it as i thought i would. It cost me $17 then- which was a lot of money to me at the time. Anyway, i found this passage in the first pages.

It’s the 1st Saturday in May, 2005.

I’ve just bought the book you have in your hands now. I don’t expect greatness to come out of it nor for it to do for me what countless notebooks before this one have failed to do.

Continue reading “from my moleskine”

Tonight’s Listening: Plastikman : Closer – This is my 1st go with it, so no opinion yet. I’ve enjoyed Richie Hawtin’s Closer to the Edit, so that bodes well. Of course, i’m suspecting that only Amanda and Joanna (two of my most musically literate friends) know what the hell i’m talking about.

Apparently, it’s that time of year where guys reinforce their masculinity by watching guys in tight pants hold each other in a circle, jump and pile on each other, slap each others ass and jump in the air and thrust their nipples on each other in celebration when someone scores. Hello Sailor! It’s football season! Woo hoo! So manly!

In a few minutes, i’ll be leaving to have my first post surgery sleep study. This should be interesting to say the least. Technically there’s no reason for me to still have obstructive apnea but apparently i have begun to convulse while sleeping. Not sure what that’s about. I really, REALLY hope i don’t have central sleep apnea too.

There are a lot of ideas in my noodle and to my shame, i haven’t had the discipline to let them out. But they’re there. They coil and thrash and scream at me to be set free. I will work on putting pen to paper [as it were] in the very near future. Preferably this coming week.

I have a friend in Austin that’s going through a divorce. We don’t get to talk often; i’m on the west coast and busy. She’s in Texas and probably busier.

Her marriage wasn’t a terrible marriage in the way that those sorts of things go but it was fundamentally flawed. Ten years later and she’s single again.

And in one of our far too infrequent conversations, she made an interesting comment- one of the things she’s been pondering is what commonality, what common thread have the men in her life had?

Her question began the same question within me. But whereas her direction was probably more towards finding a common fatal flaw that she was initially either attracted to or overlooked, i took it a different direction. I started to wonder what the common thread was in the women i’ve loved; many of which i love to this day to one degree or another.

Continue reading “the common thread”

There’s a woman i was friends with for a few years although we never met face to face. She came across me during those evenings i spent on Austin Access during the year and a half or so that i’d moved back from SF. She was an intelligent woman whose sexual appetite was as voracious as i wished mine was. She loves cock. She loves pussy. What she didn’t love was her husband. That’s fine- i never judged her on this. I never judged her on the lovers that she had behind his back either. She deserved to be sexually fulfilled; we all do. The number of loveless and sexless marriages that other people have in this nation is truly astounding.

The arrangement she had with her husband was more of the norm than an exception; barely friends, no sex and only a modicum of respect for one another. But like i said, she deserved to have lovers. It may not have been perfect but at least it was something more than her mate would/ could give her.

We would chat and bounce e-mails back and forth for a few months, then go our separate ways for a while. Then we’d reconnect and catch up, always sharing the most explicit experiences or thoughts that we had.
Continue reading “so long- guess we see the content of your character now”

Over the last few years, i’ve tried writing this. I usually found myself getting into more detail and nuance than a simple post demanded. But again, it’s not a small statement of fact that i make when i say that this was one of the pivotal moments of my adolescence.

I’m writing this for both people that went to my high school and those that did not. There may be excessive explanations at times.

In 11th grade, i was signed up for chemistry. My teacher was a generally mild mannered man that we called Dr. Don. I think his last name was Williams or Walters. He was geek chic more than a decade before anyone acknowledged geeks in any fashion other than to taunt, torment, vex, harass and make their lives a living hell. I can’t say i was a good chemistry student. In fact, it’s probably safe to say i was a bad chemistry student. Come to think of it, i was pretty bad at everything school related or otherwise. The only thing worse than my academics at the time was my love life. But hey, i could cultivate a nice crop of acne that was the envy of OPEC. I lost count of the number of times i woke up to disturb the petroleum engineers that were prospecting my face.
Continue reading “how Dr. Don changed my life”