I haven't done an FR in a while. This one is a long one, and you're going to think I'm crazy. Maybe you do already. This will cover a lot of weird ground, so hold on, here we go on a crazy roller coaster ride.

I had a really shitty week. I mean that literally. I had a colonoscopy Thursday, which means you spend 3 days before that fasting and drinking a 4.5 liters of laxatives and then you sit on the toilet almost constantly until you have nothing left to shit out. Then you go in to the doctor and they knock you out with valium and fentanyl so you don't feel it when they shove a 3 foot long endoscopic camera up your ass, looking for polyps and removing them. Oh no, I had 3 polyps. It's a good thing I had the procedure, that could have turned into cancer. Recovering from the anesthetic was pretty rough. I figured I'd be up and around on Friday night, about 36 hours after the procedure. But I was still just exhausted. I was thinking of forcing myself to go out but it started to rain really hard, and I just said fuck it and went to bed.

But this little medical thing got me thinking a lot. I mean, it wasn't like I could do much of anything all week but lay around and think. I have been watching a lot of material, and even reading some criticisms of the scene. It got me thinking about why am I doing this and what do I want.

I decided a lot of this had to do with mortality. Medical procedures like this always make me feel like I had a brush with death. Yeah, I'm getting old. I don't look old, I tell people I'm 42, but I'm 52. And I often feel like I'm 18 years old, fucking up like a young kid. But I've been fucking up like that for 30+ years. Now I can't party like I'm 18 anymore, and I don't have my whole life ahead of me to fix it.

And it's possible I could be dead soon. I haven't told people the big reason I have lost the last 15 years of my life and haven't had a relationship that whole time. 15 years ago, I had a brain tumor removed. It wasn't really a big thing, it wasn't malignant, it wasn't inside my brain, actually in my ear next to the brain, it was supposed to be easily removed. But they fucked up and I had a horrible brain injury. It took me almost 10 years to recover. For the first few years, I could barely get out of bed. I lost what was supposed to be the best, happiest, most productive years of my life. Now I have worked hard to recover, and I have to make up for lost time. No more waiting for happiness, it's time to make the situation where I can be happy.

Then I got some bad news. Several months ago, I went to the ear doctor after a damaging exposure to a live band that was too loud (while chasing The Woman, more about her later). The doc gave me some steroids that were supposed to save my hearing (but they didn't work, I lost 20% of my hearing in my bad ear, which was already 25% deaf). He also said, "hey, you haven't had a followup MRI since your surgery 15 years ago. Let's do one now!" Oh no. The results: my tumor is back. It is microscopic, but it either grew back, or perhaps the surgeon left a little bit, perhaps getting it all would have caused total deafness in that ear. Oh shit. I lost 15 years, all for nothing. Now I face the same problem I had 15 years ago, except now I'm 52, not 37. There is approximately a 20% chance the tumor will grow and kill me within 3 to 5 years. There is an 80% chance I will live the rest of my life without it growing or having any effect on me at all. So I have to go in to have an MRI every year, and see if it grows. That's what I should have done back then, not had the surgery and waited to see if it grew. But hindsight is 20/20.

But I have already made a decision. I will not have the surgery if it grows back. I can't face the risk of losing another 10 or 15 years of my life, trading 2 or 3 good years now for an unknown amount of good years when I'm 65 or older. I'll take the good years now, and an early grave, if it comes to that.

So, I am determined to live each day for today, I may have no future. And I am kicking myself for wasting the last 2 years chasing after The Woman, only to be rejected in a most cruel fashion, and then to have this diagnosis of my tumor returning, making those 2 wasted years into time I didn't have to waste.

As I see it, The Game is about having fun now, not about pulling girls into your bed. It is about changing your life, putting behind you the problems that torture you. It is about using those bad experiences to drive yourself forward. As I mentioned before, it is the "leverage" that you use to change your life. So you can see I have a hell of an incentive to change my life, to make the best use of every minute of what could be a short life. Hell, I could even step in front of a bus tonight, any of us could, you never know.

I don't mean to get onto such a downer, but you can see where I've been at this week. So on Saturday, I decided to get out and put the past behind me. The Woman hasn't been seen here in months, maybe she moved away where I'll never see her again. I went down to the coffee shop with the hope of chatting up the clerk. She needs a nickname, I guess I'll call her Coffee Girl. She was cheerful as usual. I was still in kind of a bad mood, but she came over and started chatting me up. She initiated the conversation, rather than me chatting her up. It was a busy morning, lots of customers, but it slowed down after a while, so she came over. This was an interesting part of the chat:

Coffee Girl: I am not working as hard as I used to. I just don't have the energy lately.

Me: I know what you mean, I've been sick all week. [making sure I don't mention the colonoscopy thing]

CG: yeah, I was sick for the last 4 days.

Me: [time to add some mystery and intrigue to my persona] Well, it's been a hard week for everybody, and it's an especially strange day today. The astrological aspects are ominous. Uranus is conjunct Jupiter, and that is opposite Mars conjunct Saturn, and that means there could be unpredictable outbreaks of anger and mischief, and you might have to be the restraining force to crack down on the bullshit.

I suppose I should mention I'm an astrologer and Tarot card reader, I've been trained by some of the best. One of my teachers told me, "You have great mystical powers, the only problem is, you don't believe in mystical powers!" And it's true, but maybe that's why I'm so good at it, I'm the skeptical mystic. I mostly started learning this stuff to be able to understand my crazy girlfriend who believed in this shit. But over time, I got to be really good at it. Then I came to understand, this stuff is Chick Crack. Now back to the conversation.

CG: Oh really. Well that explains what happened last night. I was tossing out drunken, angry customers all night.

Me: I suppose that's all part of the job, especially in a place like this. I wonder how much this aspect will affect you directly, what sign are you?

CG: I'm Taurus, Aries ascendant [she knows her ascendant so I know she's into this shit]

Me: Oh no, Aries ascendant! This stuff is all happening at the Aries Zero Point. Better watch out, or the shit will hit the fan! But you're a Taurus, an earth sign, so you have the stability to handle all this stuff while everyone else goes crazy.

CG: What sign are you? [IOI, she's asking me personal questions]

Me: I'm a Taurus too, Leo Ascendant. So this stuff doesn't affect me that much.

Oh but I was wrong about that. More on that later. Anyway, she works a bit, and then what appears to be her boyfriend comes in and gives her a sandwich. After she leaves, she comes over to chat me up again.

CG: Well that was a crappy lunch. My sandwich had grapes in it.

Me: Grapes?!? That's weird. What kind of sandwich was it?

CG: Chicken Salad.

Me: Oh, sometimes they put grapes in chicken salad, I think that's weird. Anyway, aren't we still supposed to be boycotting grapes? The Cezar Chavez boycott and all that? [remember she's latino, this might mean something politically to her]

CG: I don't know [apparently not]. But they don't belong in chicken salad.

Well that was funny, we were previously conspiring against her boss, now she's bitching to me about her boyfriend bringing her a crappy lunch. Or maybe it's just a friend or maybe even her brother. I will have to find out eventually. But there is some peril here, I don't want to befriend her too much, or I will get LJBFed, that might have happened already. And anyway she's a minimum wage clerk in a coffee shop, I am way above her league. She's not really even my type, but she's good practice. I don't care one way or the other.

So I had to go, I had to attend a meeting at noon of a civic group I participate in. As I pass her while she's ringing up a customer, I say, "Bye, and don't forget, you're the sane, stable one around here." She laughs and I am outta there.

[Continued]