Month: October 2012

No bigs, as it turns out, though it was a far more involved process than I was expecting. I anticipated some betadine, some local numbing agents and bing bang boom, all done in five minutes. Instead there was an hour of prep, a half hour of recovery, an IV line, a sedative, constant blood pressure and oxygen-level monitoring, a gown, a hairnet, and a big bag to keep all my S in for the duration.

But it’s done, and I have laid around the house and done fuckall today, and will do fuckall in an abbreviated day at work tomorrow. And maybe by this time next week, I’ll be better.

It’s weird, knowing that people you barely know and have never met are thinking of you and wishing you well in your time of need. And yet. Maybe that’s how this grace thing works.

It’s all of a piece, when you think about it.  The Me Generation, that sobriquet of opprobrium for the Baby Boomers, is especially appropriate when looking at Team GOP’s plans for Medicare – if you’re over 55, you have nothing to worry about, you will get the same quality government-run free health care as ever.  If you’re under 55?  Root hog or die.

When you think about it, that’s the Randian ethos at its finest: I got mine, fuck you.  It’s become elevated to a cultural imperative – think of the solipsistic drivers that make driving in California so noxious, especially since they always seem to be one-to-a-vehicle. Think of the reality-TV ethic, which is how we wind up with everything from Kardashians to Jersey Shore to Honey Boo Boo – it doesn’t matter why I’m famous so long as you spell my name right, and often. Look at me, look at me, look at me.

Hell, just look at the whiny-ass titty-babies who fancy themselves captains of industry, masters of the universe – they got filthy rich off the Bush Decade, they got made whole by bailouts, they got the stock market roaring all the way back, and yet because Obama hurt their precious fee-fees and suggested they might need to pay the same tax they did during those brutally business-oppresive 1990s, he is beyond the pale and must be vanquished. I got mine, fuck you.

Maybe that’s how I got to be how I am. I didn’t have Boomer parents, so I didn’t get the Millennial you-are-a-very-special-snowflake routine (which I can only assume stems from projecting yourself on your kids) – I was legit gifted and all I ever got was browbeaten with enough humility for any three Buddhist monks.  Think of others.  Think of the greater good. Non nobis solum. Team spirit.  Born to be second-in-command, vice president, senior noncom, the wingman.  I wonder sometimes if the egomania I affected back in the late 80s – or in 2003-04 – might have been better off as real arrogance, real self-confidence, as something other than a front.  Actually, by the end of 2003 it probably wasn’t a front – I was genuinely supremely confident in my abilities, at least at the office.  Honestly I wouldn’t mind getting back there at some point, and I’d even try not to be an ass about it.

Ultimately, that’s the question: because if you think of others, and nobody else does, you’ll get plowed under.  Prisoner’s dilemma.  If everyone else is a dick and you aren’t, you get crushed; if nobody else is a dick and you are, you get your way (at the expense of being liked, I suppose), if nobody is a dick then we’re living in fantasyland, if everybody’s a dick then there is no society.  So if society as a whole is radically oriented toward the mad dickish – where the hell do we go from there?

Actually, never mind. Hell kind of covers it.  Sartre was right.

Five years ago, I went under the gas to have my knee scoped. I was more nervous about it than I let on at the time, because anytime you black out, bad things can happen. Ask anyone who ever woke up on a frathouse couch with someone’s junk traced on their face.  But ultimately, that was my knee, nothing to get too bent out of shape about.

Tomorrow, I will get my neck numbed and a huge needle stuck into my spine, to deliver steroids straight to an inflamed disc that is, to all accounts, the principle issue behind my ongoing shoulder pain these last couple of years.  I am a little sensitive about anything to do with the spine, partly because of my dad’s issues and partly because it’s your goddamn spine. It’s the core of the nervous system, it’s where the action happens, it’s the next thing after the brain.  It’s nothing to fuck with.

On the one hand, my chiropractor recommends this guy as being an artist at that sort of thing, that he’s had thousands of patients and never a glitch. On the other hand, there’s a rash of fungal meningitis back East owing to a bad batch of drugs from a compounding pharmacy (an outbreak that was identified by Vanderbilt University Medical Center after the first case popped up at another Nashvile clinic; Anchor Down).  On the third hand, the scrutiny of drugs is going to be tighter than ever, which means whatever they give me will have been inspected and sorted properly.  On the fourth hand, it’s a fucking needle in my spine.

I’m not freaking out, honestly I’m not. Of course it’s not happening yet.  I’m very good at la-di-da right up until the moment that I’m confronted with not being able to feel my neck when they numb it.  Hopefully they’ll have space to plug in an iPod or something else distracting while the action happens, but probably not.  Price of doing business.  A couple days rest and maybe this’ll be an end of it for a while…maybe a couple more years of normal function before it starts to twinge again.  This is just the price of getting old.

So I’m due to have a cortisone shot this week.  This is the ultimate culmination of two years of going round and round on this weird neck thing that went away for a year or so only to rear its head again this spring past – I’ve run out of patience waiting for it to go away on its own and this is the logical next step.

Problem is, in the week leading up to this procedure, I can’t take almost any of the normal NSAIDs. Ibuprofen, naproxen, etc etc – all of them are contraindicated with the upcoming injection. So the doctor who’s doing the injection called in a prescription for Celebrex, which is hepatic rather than renal and thus all right to use in case I need painkillers for the duration.  And I went to pick it up…and Blue Shield refused to cover it.

See, Blue Shield doesn’t see anything in my prescription record that says I’ve taken two other NSAIDs, and they think I should take those first. Despite the fact that everything they cite as an alternative is on the list of contraindicated meds for this procedure. Despite the fact that my primary care physician specifically told me to take prescription-level doses of Advil rather than write a script that she didn’t expect Blue Shield would cover, because it’s an OTC drug.

In other words, Blue Shield is second-guessing my doctors. And incorrectly, given the nature of the problem. The doctor tells me not to use these drugs, and Blue Shield says I must use those drugs. Impasse. The catch is, one of those parties is making decisions based on (presumably) medical training and experience, and the other one is making decisions based on what the three-ring binder says to do.

And ultimately, this is why privately-insured health care will fuck you: because a private insurer’s entire business model depends on them not providing you with the coverage for which you paid.  So far this year, Blue Shield has refused to pay for these meds, and refused to pay the MRI provider because they didn’t have the right pre-authorization. I haven’t delved into that at all, because I’ve never yet gotten a bill, but I fully expect that at some point it will come back to me, at which point, well, if I have to go around seeking pre-authorization for everything I do, what’s the point of paying through the nose for a PPO?  If I want to be in an HMO, I’ll pay Kaiser less money for the privilege.

This is why the teabaggers can kiss my ass: because the bureaucrats between you and your doctor are already here. They have been for years. At this point, the dipshits with their tricorn hats and Medicare scooters are fighting like hell for Blue Shield’s right to keep screwing me while they ride off with their own government-provided health care, and I’m not about to sacrifice myself so a bunch of fucking baby boomers can have gold-plated care in their dotage.

And here’s the thing: I can afford those pills.  Vandy Lifestyle, bitches. $5.71 a tablet means nothing to me. How many people are there who need medication that they can’t afford to pay $180 a bottle for? What are they supposed to do? Well, the doctor thinks you need this, but oops, insurance company doesn’t think you do, so you can lump it or find the scratch to pay for it all yourself? Or forget about the procedure? Get the doctor to write a script for something else and hope that gets covered, then hope that when it doesn’t work, Blue Shield will deign to let you try what the doctor originally wanted to use?

This is why I back Obamacare. This is why I back single-payer.  Perfect? No, but it’s not going to insult my intelligence by screwing me over and charging me for the privilege while telling me this is the greatest system of health care in human history and how lucky I am not to be a poor benighted Canadian or Briton. Non nobis solum, assholes. Not for ourselves alone. That’s what society means.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

We’re a long way from the 90s, technologically speaking.  Removable rewritable media of all types – floppy, Zip disk, CD-RW – have been replaced by flash drives. Token Ring and LocalTalk are long gone; it’s all Ethernet and (more likely) wi-fi these days. Smartphones and tablets are evolving a post-PC world.  I can’t remember the last time I heard the word “Netware”. 

And yet, right there in the middle of everything: Word, Excel, PowerPoint.

Microsoft’s leveraging of Windows to give it a monopoly in the productivity space has left us, in the present day, with the same package everywhere.  There are more Macs in the workplace than ever, the browser wars have returned and given us Safari and Chrome in addition to the revived Mozilla in the form of Firefox, and even Windows itself seems to be headed toward a hybrid desktop-tablet model, but Microsoft Office bangs along, largely uninterrupted by the likes of iWork or Google Docs.

Which is a shame, really.  I don’t know what presentation software was out there before PowerPoint became the standard and then the cliche, but aside from a few Keynote devotees, there’s nothing else out there.  And Excel is literally the only spreadsheet I’ve ever had to support – hell, it may as well be the operating system as far as some users are concerned.  I miss the hell out of WordPerfect – in fact, I still maintain that WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac OS was the pinnacle of word processing and Office still has yet to catch up – but everybody is using Word to this very day.

So we creep slowly on with whatever Microsoft churns up, and maybe something else will get traction but probably not.  Not when we get brand new MacBook Airs with Mountain Lion and the first thing we still install is Microsoft Office.  And then there’s the browser issue. In the previous iteration of the aforementioned browser wars, Microsoft tied Internet Explorer into the OS as tight as they could, to the point where Word is now the default HTML editor (synergy!) and the file systems is still technically being viewed through browser windows. 

The downside, as we all struggled with ten years ago, is that linking the OS to the productivity software to the browser to the email client to the mail server system means that you end up with a nice vulnerable monoculture with a million possible vectors for malware. Which means we have to overlay everything with security and antivirus software, which has to be maintained and updated constantly.  Which is how we had the situation a couple of weeks ago where the Sophos Anti-Virus updater changed its heuristics and decided that every software updater on a Windows system was malware…including its own updater.

And so I’ve spent the last week wrestling with one single Windows laptop, trying to figure out if the spontaneous recurring flash of a DOS window represents an actual infection, damage to the system files as a result of the malfunction, or just some other updater that’s missing or broken and failing to work properly.  And I don’t know if the problem is due to something exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of the Windows ecosystem or the result of a flawed attempt to protect it.

This is no way to run computing, people. Underhanded moves made during the Clinton era so that BIll Gates could own the world are still causing problems throughout the IT world fifteen years later.  And it may not get any better, because Microsoft’s much-vaunted Surface tablets focus on having a keyboard and trackpad available for the window-and-pointer set…because they include a traditional Windows environment for backward compatibility.  Everything comes back to working with Windows, because Windows is still the whole shooting match.

We let them get too big long ago, and now we can’t get rid of the results.

So the new BLS numbers are out, the last ones before the election, and they show continued (albeit extremely sluggish) growth.  The economy is turning around – could be faster, but it’s going the right way, more or less.

And sure enough, right on cue, here comes Jack Welch, late of GE, to proclaim that it’s a conspiracy, and that the Bureau of Labor Statistics – which currently has a career interim boss, replacing a Bush appointee who lasted most of Obama’s term; there has never been an Obama appointee running BLS – is cooking the books to help Obama. And all manner of radio hosts and elected Congresscritters jump on the train.

Just like, presumably, every single pollster – including Fox News – was cooking the samples to give Obama a lead in the polls.  I wonder if that same level of skepticism will persist if those same polls show Romney narrowing the gap after the debate.

The right wing in this country has entered a completely post-factual phase.  It makes me wonder just exactly what will happen if Obama wins.  Is Conservatism, Inc. ready to deny the reality of another Presidential election? Will ACORN’s zombie ghost steal a second straight vote? And more important – what are they prepared to do in that instance? How far is the conservative establishment willing to go into the fever swamp?

The answer to that is very very important. And presently unknowable. And Dave Weigel, longtime observer, is a little curious about that himself…

The news comes out that the Harrison twins have committed to Kentucky. This after a huge push from Maryland, the involvement of Under Armor, and the absolute certainty of the Junks from reliable sources that they were in the fold. And yet…UK.

Add this to Noel and Poythress and…oh, why bother. We’re screwed, again, as always. Kentucky is reloading every year with the next year’s starting lineup for the All-Star Futures game while we try to bring in guys who can graduate from Vanderbilt and are willing to keep coming back. And even when we have three first-round NBA prospects on the roster, it’s barely enough to get over once on a Kentucky team that may not have even mentally checked in for the game.

How the fuck are we meant to compete with this?

…Because you don’t need to. The story isn’t in the substance, it’s in the takeaway. How people react is a lot more critical than what was said. Which blows, absolutely, but welcome to the postmodern campaign. If facts don’t matter, why waste your time?

From the sound of it, Obama came out in a prevent defense which does exactly what a prevent does. In this case, it let Romney keep throwing underneath for one quick completion after another. Factually challenged and at odds with two years of stated positions? Who cares? It looked good, and a political press dying for a horserace will gladly float that the GOP team has stopped the bleeding and is hard on the comeback trail.

Much depends on the follow-up and whether Romney’s base is willing to overlook his flexibility. But given that they care far more about landing blows against Obama than any actual policy position, I have to think the only way that Romney doesn’t close the gap here is if somebody comes back with some serious in-depth and aggressive fact-checking.

Oh, and like Josh Marshall says: if you’re complaining about the moderator, you’re losing. I seriously doubt that “he was mean to Jim Lehrer” is going to shift things. On the bright side, we’ll probably have a sudden return to belief in polling by the weekend.

Every teabag retard who gets all oogy-boogy that Obamacare means death panels, and bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor, and you won’t be able to get the care you need, and all that?  We have that right fucking now.  It’s called American private health insurance, and it’s the natural result of what happens when a company has a financial incentive NOT to provide the goods and services for which they were paid.

I will stand in a Soviet-style bread line for bureaucratically-encumbered health care for the rest of my life if it means that Blue Shield and all its sister companies would be reduced to radioactive craters of smoking rubble.  You know why?  Because I’m already standing in the goddamn bread line.  At least I should be spared the indignity of paying out of pocket for the privilege of being lied to about what an unsurpassed quality of health care I’m being provided.

China knows as well as Blue Shield: play your cards right and you can have communism for profit.