The Omniblog (May 2009 Edition)

I’ve been sitting on several posts lately that I just haven’t had time to get to. Figure I’ll get them all out of the way tonight. Let’s start with the oldest one… this one is called:

Dirty little secrets

I’m not one to complain. Anybody who really doesn’t know me would agree, I’m a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy. “Stoic,” I think, is the word most often applied to my temperament by strangers from all walks of life.

But a lifetime of assiduous attention paid to not taking care of myself is beginning to bear bitter fruit. I am getting old. The physical plant is finally succumbing to the dirty little secrets of mortality.

Not as bad as old my pal Floyd. He’s only a couple years older than me and just had to get his hips replaced. And they’re not rich and he lost his job because, I presume, he could no longer physically execute it due to his fucked up hips.

So I’m not complaining, exactly. But after I got my shoulder surgery over with, I thought I’d be on the bounce back to good health. Not so.

To make a long story short, my lower back is all fucked up. I’ve got the x-rays and MRIs to prove it. I’m on NSAIDS and muscle relaxers and just finished a round of steroids and I can’t say that any of them have done a damn bit of good. The only sure cure for what ails my back is to sleep sitting up, or reclining.

If I sleep the night in our perfectly comfortable bed, I wake up with lower back spasms that drive me to my knees. If I take a handful of OTC downers I sleep like a baby sitting up on the couch and wake up in the morning feeling fit as a fiddle.

My doctors don’t know what to make of it so they’re contracting me out to various specialists. I’ve already gotten off the muscle relaxers and I’m ignoring the pain clinic referral. My physical therapist (with the stripper’s body and the heart of gold to go with it) assures me the back surgeon I’m going to see next month is going to give me an injection or two that should dispatch with the symptoms for up to several months.

If it works, I’m golden. Every time I need to travel away from my reclining couch I can just get an injection from Dr. Feelgood. As if holidays away from home don’t come front-loaded with enough stress factors for borderline agoraphobics like me. I already feel like I’m being beamed in from Planet Wrong Side Of The Tracks, I’m not looking to add Must Sleep Sitting Up to my resume of quirky character malfunctions.

So that’s that.

The next entry is an update on Obi, Woody’s replacement dog who likes to bite houseguests and everybody tells me we gotta get rid of. It starts like this:

We have three dogs

One is the cuddly lap dog of my dreams, another is a terrific rough-housing companion to our 3-year-old and the third one is just a goddamned walking nightmare. They’re all named Obi.

When Obi and I are home alone during the day, most weekdays, he’s the perfect house pet. Comes in the office to hang out with me while I work, lets me know when he has to go out, doesn’t get into shit even if I leave it laying out, even rests his head on my leg and looks up at me with those big brown eyes.

That’s dog #1.

Dog number two is the goofy motherfucker who likes to jump into the stream of hose water when we’re watering the yard and chases bubbles and lets our son visit all manner of indignity upon him without rancor or retaliation. The one who runs circles in our back yard at Mach 2, doubled over like a greyhound.

It’s when he’s dog #3 where he still falls down. Dog #3 is an insufferable shithead. He’s like pure id and a destructive force to be reckoned with. He’s completely disobedient, raiding the garbage, the kitchen counter, the sink (!!), the clothes drifts that dot our happy house... He digs up The Missus’ garden repeatedly and he totally disrespects her personal space. And he can barely be walked for spazzing out on the leash, $300 dog-whisperer be damned.

And he only acts this way when the wife and boy are home. It’s like a switch clicks over inside in his tiny brain and all the energy he’s been storing up while being perfectly behaved during the day comes bursting out. I hate this fucking dog! I’m constantly, eh, er, admonishing him, chasing him into the metal cage he sleeps in in the kitchen, throwing household items at him to correct misbehavior that is occurring inconveniently across the room.

The bastard knows better, which is why I see red when he repeatedly, flagrantly misbehaves when the rest of the family is home. I don’t know what to do. He’s the boy’s best friend but one of these days, one or the other of us is going to tear the other’s throat out with our teeth.

The last item concerns our transition to digital HD TV. It’s called:

We have met the digital revolution…

…and it has made us its bitch.

We decided to sink some of our tax return into a flatscreen, high-def TV, like all the in-laws got. It was hundreds of bucks, but it was gonna be so worth it. Went to Costco and comparison shopped, bought a lesser name-brand but with the same tech specs as the big boys. Then it cost $50 to have it delivered and set up, which consisted of them dropping it off in our front room, plugging it in and beating feet before we had a chance to test it out.

We soon learned to get true HD on the satellite, we had to spring for a new box, so I called up Direct TV and ordered us up a new box. The Missus gets home and discovers I have fucked up ordering the new box. I’m still not sure how or what I did wrong, but I’m confident she’s correct when she says I fucked it up.

So she calls Direct TV and rescinds the old order and places a new one. Turns out we not only need a new HD box, but we need to have an installer come out and hook it up. More money.

Then she discovers that our DVD player does not work with the new TV, so we have to run out to Target and get a new DVD player to go with our new TV and new box-gizmo. We also have to buy a new kind of connector cable that is 30¢ online but $20 at Target.

So we get home and hook all that shit up, bit the TV still looks skeevy because our new Direct-TV HD box is not hooked up yet. The installer shows up the next day, today, and proceeds to spend 4+ hours in, around and on top of our house, building stuff up and tearing it down and re-building it elsewhere. Our neighbors to the south have a very tall tree, so finding the satellite signal is hard.

Oh yeah, and we need a new high-def satellite dish to go with all our other new tech. We now have a 200-pound old-school 36” television, a TiVo machine and 2 DVD players – along with their individual clickers – gathering dust and cockroaches out in the garage.

And while the Direct TV guy is hooking up the new DVR box he brought with him (more money), FedEx drops off the DVR unit that The Missus called a couple of days earlier to have cancelled so I have to get back on the phone to customer disservice tomorrow and try to get them to take the Fed-Exed unit back without incurring even more extracurricular financial hemorrhaging.

On the plus side, bazillions of dollars later and we don’t even have a high-def DVD player yet, the local news anchor’s ill-fitting suits are more threadbare and laughter-inducing than we ever could have imagined. And the chase scene at the beginning of “Casino Royale” is even more vertigo-inducing than it was at the theater. I think this is one ridiculous overindulgence that is going to amortize well over the long run.

And that’s pretty much what’s been going on this last month. I’m falling apart, the dog is still a lawsuit waiting to happen and our modest investment in the digital transition has turned into a money pit rivaling Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ back in the nineties.

And my job is still killing me by degrees, but I promised myself I wouldn’t write about that anymore.