You’re not a rock star…

…until you whap yourself in the face with a spotlight. Now I gotta go get new glasses… Oh well. It was a fun party! (Anytime you have a band playing and people jumping out of a cake, it’s a fun party.)

Doctors

Love ’em or hate ’em, eventually someone’s gonna tell you that you gotta go see one. It comes in different forms. “You’d better have that looked at,” is common, or “wow, that’s gonna leave a mark!” or “oops — sorry!” Or, in my case, it was my vundrous Viennese bride, Dagmar, telling me at 10 at night, “I made you a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow morning. You can’t eat anything after midnight tonight, und you can’t drink anything but vater in the morning. Be there at 8:15.”

“What?” I said. “Did I miss something? Am I bleeding? What? Why am I going to the doctor?”

“You’re going to the doctor because you can’t breathe right und you snore like a train.”

I kicked and fussed and hissyfitted, but when push comes to shove she’s right. I haven’t been able to breathe much through my nose for years now, and I often wake up in the night gasping for air… And how long can it take? I go in, he looks up my nose, tells me to squirt some over-the-counter inhaler goop in my beak, and I’m done. Right?

So, 8:15 in the morning found me fidgeting at the nurse’s desk, filling out paperwork. I’ve never been to this doctor, so it’s all new to me. “Okay, follow me, please,” said the nurse-lady. She walked me up to a scale which told me in digital glory that I need to grow a few inches taller, then into an exam room. “Here’s a robe. It ties in the back. I need you to take off all your clothes and put this on,” she said. “The doctor will be in in just a moment.”

“Wait! All I need is for him to see why I’m not breathing right. Do I have to take my clothes off for that?”

“Yes.”

She walked out, closing the door. Bowing to the inevitable, I took off my clothes and stacked them in a corner, put on the breezy little gown, and sat down to wait. In a few minutes the doctor came in… “Hello,” he said, “how are you today?” I told him I missed my undershorts and I was uncomfortable. He ignored me and grabbed my chart-doohicky.

“So,” he said, flipping through my medical history, “what can I do for you today?”

“Well, I’ve been having trouble breathing through my nose, and it’s affecting my sleep and I snore a lot.” The doctor nodded, mumbled “mmm hmmm” and flipped a page. “Having trouble breathing,” he said, distractedly. “Oh. You turned forty this year, didn’t you.”

“Yes,” I answered. “I’m officially old enough to drive a car and everything now.”

“I need you to turn around and bend over please.”

“I tell you I can’t breathe out my nose and you’re gonna shove a finger up my bum?” I said. “Ain’t you kinda going about this backwards?”

Oh, the indignity.

So anyway, turns out I’ve got a deviated septum or some such thing. (Insert deviant joke here.) They can fix it surgically, which sounds like loads of fun — especially after the LAST procedure I had (my right testicle is STILL twice the size of the left) — but I gotta have a sleep study done first. Yay. A night in the hospital. Fantastic.

They also found out that I’m half a step away from having serious heart troubles. I guess my triglycerides are high. Normal people are below 150, I’m at 850, the pancreas starts shutting down when you hit 900. I get to take a pill now, and Dagmar bought me a bag of carrots.

Am I rich yet?

No. But HippieBoy Design is really keeping me busy! I’ve gotta learn how to take an hour off here and there. I’ve quite literally been working nearly every hour I’ve been awake for weeks now. My beloved Alpine bride Dagmar will occasionally drag my carcass away from the computer and park me on the couch for a few minutes just to let my eyes focus on a screen that’s more than arm’s length away from my nose, and I did get away to do a quick photo shoot Saturday morning. It was raining. I did get to jam with the band Saturday night, but I felt guilty the whole time ’cause I wasn’t getting any “work” done, even though I was getting paid to play…

Now all I gotta do is get comfortable charging customers (I ALWAYS feel guilty when I ask for money) and find a way to take a day off now and then.

Speaking of work, I’d best get back at it.