Hermoine, Vintage Ricky, and Vintage Skipper are inspecting my heart monitor in this silly Paffooney Photo. I have been wearing the thing since Monday to hopefully detect an irregular heart-beat problem. It’s kinda like when you hear a knocking noise in the engine, but when you take it in to the car dealer, you can’t get it to make that sound even once. Two trips to the doctor and two EKG’s have not been enough to fix the knocking in my engine, and so I am still on a heart-attack/stroke watch. Four times in the last two nights I have felt the racing heartbeat and painful tugging sensation in my chest that could spell the instant end. But I am not worried. I now have the opportunity to lay in my bed all day and play with my toys… err… admire my collection. I apologize for Ricky not putting on proper clothes for this post, but they haven’t made clothes for a doll like him since the early seventies. They are a little hard to come by. And they always sold Barbie dolls in bathing suits when he was new to the world. So he goes about mostly naked and I have to apologize for him whenever we are in polite company.
“So, Mickey,” you are probably saying to yourself, “it’s a heart problem, not a brain problem, right?”
Well, if my hyperactive butterfly of a heart sends a clot the wrong direction, it could be a stroke, a brain-curdling, word-mincing, vegetable-making sort of brain problem. If it’s all the same to God, I’d much rather have a heart attack, thank you.
I am really, honestly not worried though. My career is ended. I can no longer get up in front of a classroom, a basically captive audience, and inflict upon them a never-ending spiel of word-wit and vocabulary-bloating that made kids laugh and love my class (based on the fact that even though they thought they were avoiding learning to write and read and speak in my English Class, we were actually practicing those things bell to bell). Though I miss it so terribly it probably isn’t helping my current condition, I really have done my job and taken my best shot at winning the ongoing War Against Ignorance. I actually make more money now on my full retirement pension than I was making month to month as a teacher. (Mostly due to deductions for health problems and absences from work). I have the chance to draw some and paint some and write a lot now. I can do more story-telling of the written-down variety, and not waste my tall tales in the very absorbent air of the classroom. I get to joke about my condition more, and hide my rotted out hulk of a body behind a computer screen so no one has to cringe while looking at my fuzzy, spotty old form. I can use words to be beautiful in the reader’s mind’s eye once more. Oh, and I made the mistake of promising to show you a self portrait. So, try to keep your lunch down, because here it is;
Catch a Falling Star 