Tag: Me Myself I

Personal stuff

Cinematic Crap

Entertainment, Movies

Via Insty, here’s another piece about how today’s movies suck, from a sound perspective.  (The article is only listed as “Updated Sep 22, 2022”, so it may actually be a rewrite — and a lot of it seems familiar.)

I was going to comment on it in a post, but a lot of what I planned to write seemed awfully familiar to me.  And somewhere in my broken memory, I remembered that I’d already done just that, in Mumbles In The Darkness earlier in June of this year.

So that’s my comment.

Which leads me to a tangential thought.  In looking to see whether I had written on the topic earlier, I used the “Search” function on this very web site, to the right of the page, just under the header.

All I did was type “movie” in the search bar, and a veritable timeline of my writings on the topic followed.

And I found myself wasting spending the next hour or so re-reading some of my old posts, and apart from anything else, I was amazed at how little my opinions have changed (not too surprising, considering the writer, but still).

Here’s a thought.  If ever you’re horribly bored with life, are sick of playing on the Internet but couldn’t be bothered to get out of your chair, type in a random topic (e.g. “rifle”, “travel”, “Colt” or “socialist” and so on), and go back in time to see what I’ve written on the topic.

As journeys go, it’s cheaper than driving or going to the range (!!!!!!).  As to how much you might enjoy it, I make no comment.

Just In Case You Were Wondering

Health

After two weeks of feeling like shit, worrying about Covid, pneumonia and all other things what could kill me, I finally took me off to an emergency care place and got an X-ray.
Diagnosis:  nothing serious.
What I have:  a bad case of bronchitis.
Treatment: Mucinex, also something to suppress the coughing spasms at night, lots of rest.

Yesterday was the first day of such treatment, and last night I slept for six solid hours before being woken up not by coughing, but by inhaling saliva in my sleep, i.e. just my body fucking with me like it usually does.

So far today, from 5am until this post, I’ve coughed about a dozen times (all “productive”), which was more like my half-hourly (dry) rate beforehand.

Am I getting better?  Let’s just say I’m cautiously optimistic.  So unless you hear differently from me, assume the latter.

Final Update, I Promise

Plagues and Poxes

Annnnnnndddd:  it’s not COVID.

Seriously.  Last night I got the news from the Doctor’s Hottie that my ‘Rona test had come back negative. And so much for that.

What I actually have — WE THINK — is a simple, nonspecific upper-respiratory tract infection, so today I start a  Zithromax “Z-pak” treatment regimen which as explained to me is like shooting fish with a scattergun in that the drug targets “infections of the lungs, sinus, throat, tonsils, skin, urinary tract, cervix, or genitals.”

If we exclude “skin, urinary tract, cervix, or genitals” for obvious reasons (none of those bits hurt, or I don’t have them), that means that this little pink pill should address my sore throat, congested lungs and full-to-bursting sinuses, and about damn time.

And I’ve had that pennies-in-the-mouth taste over the past three days for nothing.

And I’ve also been feeling shitty for the past week for nothing — without the ever-popular COVID blocking the national consciousness, this would probably have been properly diagnosed on Day 1 had I said to the doctor — as I’d said to New Wife — that I’ve been dealing with this shit for most of my damn life.

Posts have been set up for the weekend (normal fare, btw), so I’ll see y’all on Monday.

Goddamn and fuck.

Closeup view of my throat, this morning:

Better Sleep Through Medicine And Willpower

Health

I should mention that even before I got the “No-COVID” news last night, I’d been feeling better.

Not because of the anti-‘Rona drugs, of course, but because in a rare moment of clarity, I worked out that over the past six nights, I’d had maybe half an hour’s uninterrupted sleep per night because the fucking painful continuous coughing was waking me up.

So I put on my Big Boy Slippers and slouched over to the medicine cabinet right after New Wife left for work.

How, I asked myself, was I going to put myself into a deep sleep without resorting to extreme measures?

Three simple ingredients came to mind:

  • Robitussin.  My old friend “Robi” has always worked for me in the past
  • Max Strength Tylenol.  Another old friend
  • Willpower (which I’ll explain in a moment).

Dosages:  1 British Standard Mouthful of Robitussin (none of that stupid little cup thing they stick on the bottle).  1 BSM, based on my drinking experience with 6X ale, works out to about a quarter of an Imperial pint.  3 Tylenol tablets (1500mg of acetaminophen, according to the bottle)

…which leaves us with the all-important ingredient, willpower.

In my case, this involves not fighting off sleep, but actively pursuing it.  (Anyone who’s done military service knows what I’m talking about here:  you grab sleep whenever you can get it.)  But the second facet of willpower is to refuse to let whatever happens while you’re sleeping cause you to open your eyes.  So a coughing fit?  recognize and ignore the pain.  Dog licking your face?  punch and go back to sleep.  Thirst?  fuck that; deal with it later.  Blowjob?  push her away roughly.  (This last did not work so well when I was younger, admittedly.)

But you get the idea.

So I popped the Tylenol, washed them down with a huge slug of Robi, lay down on the living-room sofa with but a stadium rug for cover (didn’t want to bring heat / cold into the equation), and closed my eyes.

I woke up over seven hours later, feeling so much better that I sat up suddenly.  That was a mistake, and when I sat up again, more slowly, I spent about five minutes coughing phlegm up — and felt really much better, despite the pain in my throat.

I was even able to throw some posts together for today and the weekend, which I had not had the energy to do earlier in the week.

Let’s see how it goes from here.