I went to the emergency room on Friday.
Heart rate repeatedly 37 beats per minute. Heart failure is imminent at that low rate.
I was wheeled directly to the intensive care unit. A temporary pacemaker was immediately shoved through a vein in my hip directly to my heart.
Of course, they don’t settle for that. Once my heart stabilized, they switched the pacemaker off again, thinking it was a side-effect of my blood pressure medicine that caused the problem. It was. My heart beat normally for eight hours. Then my heart rate got bad again in the night. The pacemaker was switched back on, stabilizing me until morning. Sunday morning, they turned it back off again. I stayed stable for another few hours, and they told me they would take the temporary pacemaker out again and send me home on Monday. My body had recovered from the side effects.
But my heart had other ideas… at the same time of night as the previous bad night started.
They left the thing off for the rest of the night, and without telling me ahead of time, they scheduled me for a permanent pacemaker.
I actually spent a lot of that night thinking I was going to die. I saw the number 37 again, and I knew they weren’t being honest with me about what was going to happen.
But Monday morning brought a serious surgery. And they control the pain, but you have to be conscious for that implant surgery. That was a wonderful experience I hope never to have to go through again. But I probably will.
Life is simply poetry.
So, why do I live my life in prose?
Because I am intensely didactic,
Is the reason, as I suppose.
And that’s the ordinary level
At which I drink from Life’s firehose.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why We Doo
I remember when Scooby Doo, Where Are You? premiered on Saturday Morning Cartoons in 1969. I was thirteen and in the 7th grade. I had been six during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, seven when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, ten when I was sexually assaulted in 1966, and still twelve when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon in the Summer of 1969. I was obsessed with monsters, horror comics, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the Pirates threatening Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I knew what fear was. And I was mad to find ways to combat the monsters I feared.
Don’t get me wrong. I was under no illusions that Fred, Daphne, Velma, Norville “Shaggy” Rogers and Scooby Doo were the answer to all my fears as viable heroes and heroines. They were goofballs, all of them, based on the characters I vaguely remembered from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. I was aware that Shaggy was just Maynard Krebs in cartoon form (the hippie character portrayed by Gilligan’s Island actor Bob Denver.)
One of the critical things about the show for me was the fact that there was a rational explanation for the monsters. They were men in masks, special effects and projector tricks, or remote-controlled mechanical things.
And the way you overcame them and saved the day was by having Shaggy and Scooby act as bait, cause the traps to get sprung at the wrong time, and then fall on the villains, trapping them under the butt of the talking dog.
Villains and horror could be overcome by laughing at them. They were more likely to be clowns than carnivores. And even if they were carnivores, the teeth were not real.
There was a universal truth in that. Danger and horror and fear were easier to handle when you could laugh in spite of those things.
And to top it all off, those meddling kids and their stupid talking dog were with me my whole life. Those cartoons got remade and spun off so many times that my kids learned to love them as much as I did. And those four meddling kids and that talking dog are still making new stories even now.
And that is why we do the Doo!
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Filed under autobiography, cartoon review, cartoons, commentary, humor, monsters, Uncategorized
Tagged as hanna-barbera, horror, Netflix, review, Scooby Doo