I’ve had terrible pain in my upper back on the left side for about three weeks now. I went to a chiropractor to try to determine the cause and he said I had a small tear in a muscle in that location. That, combined with a general tightness in the muscles which were overcompensating to make up for it, was all there was to it. Good enough for me. I hate doctors and only grudgingly go to a chiropractor (who aren’t really doctors)* to keep my spine in line or else I am in constant pain from nerves being pinched -a condition dating back twenty-five years.

In this case, after three weeks there has been no improvement. Any motion of my head to the left or right hurts like hell. Turning it hurts pretty bad, but if I try to tilt it to one side or the other it’s unbearable. It’s actually kind of a fun game to play. It hurts worse the more I tilt it, so I can tilt it further and further to see where my pain threshold is -trying to beat my record each time. I wish I had the tolerance to actually get my head all the way to my shoulder, but I simply can’t do it. I don’t know if it’s me actively being a pussy or if my brain is hard-wired to keep me from knowingly causing myself enough pain to render me unconscious. Seems like something that shady bastard would do; he’s always scheming against me. It’s one thing if I grab a hammer and smack myself in the head with it -I can totally sneak up on my brain and he’ll never see it coming- but it’s different if I have to try to get my brain to be complicit in causing aforementioned pain. That bastard just doesn’t care about science!

So after three weeks, I finally decided I’d better go to a doctor for a second opinion (or first, really, since chiropractors aren’t really doctors)*. Not able to get an appointment with a primary care physician on short notice, I had to go to urgent care. The one I chose uses the website InQuicker.com to allow you to schedule your visit in advance. I was quite pleased to find that the appointment I scheduled for noon on Thursday meant I walked in the door at 11:51, was in triage at 11:59, in the exam room at 12:05 and actually saw a doctor by 12:10. That is nothing like any experience I’ve had with a medical facility to date, so kudos there.

In the brief time I was alone in the exam room, I took time to look at the pain chart posted on the wall so as not to overstate my condition. That chart looked a lot like this:

The verbiage on the particular chart I looked at was slightly different, but the gist was the same. After careful examination of the chart, I locked in my pain levels: level 3-4 constantly with spikes to 6-7 when I try to turn or tilt my head. When the doctor arrived, the first thing he asked was the pain levels, and I gave him my numbers. After I did, he asked for clarification. I said, “It’s a dull ache at all times, like someone is pulling or stretching at it. When the pain spikes, I have to close my eyes, clench my fists and face and concentrate on breathing for a couple of seconds while it passes.” He said that others would rate that pain higher. Looking back at the chart, I think others are overstating it. How much worse than “Cannot focus on anything except pain” can you get? I can’t possibly rate it a ten. I’ve never experienced a ten. I’ve broken bones, been in multiple car accidents, had a thumbnail ripped completely off (attempting to remove the leafspring of a car when a jack stand slipped), experienced dozens of cuts and burns requiring medical treatment, but I could always imagine a worse pain.

I’d have to say, of all the pain I’ve experienced, having the thumbnail ripped completely off hurt worse than anything else. So imagine if you had all ten fingernails and toenails ripped of simultaneously -that would obviously hurt worse, but still not a ten. Because, what if while all those nails were being ripped off, someone grabbed both your nipples with a vise grips and ripped them off, too. Still not a ten, though, because what if, while all that was going on, they were also slowly breaking each of your ribs with a railroad spike and a hammer? Still not a ten, though, because what if, while they were doing all that, they were also simultaneously, and slowly, pulling every single hair out of your body with thousands of tiny little tweezers? Still not a ten, though, because, what if, while doing all of that, they were also forcing you to listen to Nickelback? All right, that might be a ten, but I certainly wasn’t at that level when I got to the doctor on Thursday.

That digression aside, the doctor asked me a few questions and felt me up a bit. After that, he put on some rubber gloves to start the exam. After describing the location of the pain and bouts of numbness and tingling in my back and left arm, he began by feeling around on my upper back. He noted that I have a lot of scar tissue in the muscle there, but wasn’t able to identify a cause of the pain and numbness/tingling, so he ordered some X-rays. He said he didn’t see anything wrong with my spine, but followed that by saying that they were going to have a radiologist look them over for a diagnosis – which made me wonder why he said anything at all if he wasn’t qualified to do so. Then he gave me copies of the X-rays and sent me on my way.

I don’t know why they gave me copies of the X-rays. I think I may have overstated my credentials when I chose to wear my “I’m the one they call Dr. Feelgood” ball cap to the appointment, but you’d think they would ask for something more than a ball cap as evidence of my medical training. After all, it said ‘Dr Feelgood’ not ‘Chiropractor Feelgood’*. But give them to me, they did. So I’ve spent several hours going over the images trying to determine the cause of my pain (which, in many states, would be enough to certify me as a chiropractor*).

The thing is, the images are fucking terrifying. Take a look at this one (the left is on the right and vice-versa):

I’m obviously not qualified to be making any sort of a medical diagnosis, but what the hell is that spot about a third of the way down from the top and a third of the way in from the right? It looks like that rib is snapped in half. But that’s not the side with the pain, so I’m ignoring it. Follow that rib across to the other side and look at the one above it. This one I have in both the cervical spine X-rays and the thoracic spine X-rays, so I have a better view of it:

About halfway down and two-thirds of the way across, what is that? Is that normal? It puts me in mind of when you crack a pencil but not all the way through; the top is splintered but the bottom remains intact. Of course it could also be (and probably definitely is) just a trick of the light, which is why radiologists have to go to school for this instead of starting out with basically zero medical training (like chiropractors*).

So now instead of thinking I probably have some minor problem causing a nerve to be pinched, I think my entire ribcage is crushed, broken and splintered. Thanks for giving me the X-rays, guys!

*I make a lot of fun of chiropractors in this post, but it’s just that: fun. I don’t mean to in any way diminish the profession or the countless minutes of online schooling they had to attend to get their licenses**

**Damn it, I did it again.

Cross-posted to DonnieJBurgess.com

Update 01/08/2021

A quick update to this post I sent to the internets almost 6 years ago…

My prediction on the first home was just about right. I got it paid off in August of 2019 after requesting a payoff amount from the bank. So that one was free 13 years ahead of schedule, just like math said it would be.

On the new house, one thing I had not anticipated was the natural increase in my monthly payment due to property tax and insurance premiums going up. Both make perfect sense, because the house has doubled in value (on paper) since I purchased it. That is quite literal. The value it shows now on major real estate websites is about $218,000. When we purchased it, that price was right at $100,000.

So the monthly payment was increasing each year as escrow had to account for these things to pay tax liability and insurance. I noticed this in May of 2016 and adjusted my payment schedule to then include an extra 100 dollars per month instead of the 88 dollars and change initially planned. There were a couple of lean months in there where I didn’t add that additional principal (or rounded to the hundred) but by December of 2021 I can see that my handy amortization calendar from back in 2015 is off by less than 40 bucks on how far ahead I am on the overall payment.

		Payment	Interest	Balance	added	Interest	Balance	Actual
end of year 6
73	Apr-20	$462.73	$309.90	$80,254.43	$88.58	$281.50	$72,767.93
74	May-20	$462.73	$309.31	$80,101.01	$88.58	$280.46	$72,496.66
75	Jun-20	$462.73	$308.72	$79,947.00	$88.58	$279.41	$72,224.34
76	Jul-20	$462.73	$308.13	$79,792.40	$88.58	$278.36	$71,950.97
77	Aug-20	$462.73	$307.53	$79,637.20	$88.58	$277.31	$71,676.55
78	Sep-20	$462.73	$306.94	$79,481.41	$88.58	$276.25	$71,401.07
79	Oct-20	$462.73	$306.33	$79,325.01	$88.58	$275.19	$71,124.53
80	Nov-20	$462.73	$305.73	$79,168.01	$88.58	$274.13	$70,846.93
81	Dec-20	$462.73	$305.13	$79,010.41	$88.58	$273.06	$70,568.26	$70,608.25

Math still works!

---

05/06/2015

I recently bought my second home. Or, to be more accurate, the bank recently bought my second home (and how old am I that I consider a year ago recent?). After about thirty years I will have bought it. Thirty years. I was 39 when I signed the contract (only months away from being forty) and the thought of still paying on my house when I was 69 just didn’t work for me. My life plan had always involved me being retired before sixty. In a perfect world, at 55 -we’ll see how that goes.

When I bought the first home, I was poor as fuck. My monthly payment on that was (and still is) about five-hundred dollars a month, and that was about all I could afford to pay on it. That contract is scheduled to be completed in 2032. About five years into that contract, I got a major upgrade in the job department. This allowed me to start adding principal to the monthly payments. Unfortunately for my love of data, I was all punk rock about it; I just threw some extra money on principal depending on what I had left over from each paycheck. Sometimes it was twenty bucks, sometimes it was three-hundred. Because of the lack of records, I don’t really know how much I’ve applied to the loan to know just how effective it is. What I do know is that when I sent in my payment for the month of May, 2015, my loan balance was equal to what it should be in August, 2021. Or, roughly six years ahead of schedule.

This loan is going away extremely quickly though, because I don’t intend to make payments on two mortgages for any longer than is strictly necessary. The aforementioned five-hundred dollar monthly payment only applies $168 to principal, but I’m currently adding just under $400 a month to principal on top of that. I can see each month that the remaining balance is coming down in chunks which skip several months in the payment schedule. Which is to say that this month’s payment put me where I should be in August, 2021, while next month’s payment will leave me where I should be in November of 2021. This handy amoritization calculator allows for added payments beginning with payment number ‘x’, and according to it, ignoring all added payments prior to February of this year, I will have shortened the loan by 130 months – nearly eleven years. This fits in with my expectation of having that mortgage paid off by 2019. I just don’t have any solid data on the prior added payments to know exactly how much the previous added payments helped me.

And if there is one thing you should know about me, it’s this: I love me some data! If something can be broken down into a spreadsheet, I’m breaking that shit down. That desire is almost so pervasive as to be an illness…

The plan was to pay only the required monthly payment on the second mortgage and apply everything I could to that first loan to try to pay it off as quickly as possible. But since the second loan payment is $611.42, I decided from month one that I would just go ahead and round that up to $700, applying the extra $88.58 to principal. I have been doing that each month, and I made my twelfth payment recently. Now I get to see data in action!

Below you’ll see my loan payment information for the first twelve months, as calculated by this payment calculator. I chose this one in particular because I have twelve months of actual data to compare the their calculator to check its accuracy. I am actually ahead of this schedule by $9.86, but this was the closest to accurate that I was able to find.

		Payment	Interest	Balance	added	Interest	Balance
1	Apr-14	$462.73	$346.88	$89,884.15	$88.58	$346.88	$89,795.15
2	May-14	$462.73	$346.43	$89,767.85	$88.58	$346.09	$89,589.51
3	Jun-14	$462.73	$345.98	$89,651.10	$88.58	$345.29	$89,383.07
4	Jul-14	$462.73	$345.53	$89,533.90	$88.58	$344.50	$89,175.84
5	Aug-14	$462.73	$345.08	$89,416.25	$88.58	$343.70	$88,967.81
6	Sep-14	$462.73	$344.63	$89,298.15	$88.58	$342.90	$88,758.98
7	Oct-14	$462.73	$344.17	$89,179.59	$88.58	$342.09	$88,549.34
8	Nov-14	$462.73	$343.71	$89,060.57	$88.58	$341.28	$88,338.89
9	Dec-14	$462.73	$343.25	$88,941.09	$88.58	$340.47	$88,127.63
10	Jan-15	$462.73	$342.79	$88,821.15	$88.58	$339.66	$87,915.56
11	Feb-15	$462.73	$342.33	$88,700.75	$88.58	$338.84	$87,702.67
12	Mar-15	$462.73	$341.87	$88,579.89	$88.58	$338.02	$87,488.96

You’ll see there that I am about $1100 ahead of schedule after just twelve payments (and as I said before, I am actually $9.86 better off than the calculator shows). That makes sense, since $88.58 x 12 = $1062.96. But where the data really gets interesting is down the table a ways:

		Payment	Interest	Balance	added	Interest	Balance
257	Aug-35	$462.73	$152.56	$39,273.81	$88.58	$3.29	$306.03
258	Sep-35	$462.73	$151.37	$38,962.45	$88.58	$1.18	$0.00

The payoff with my current additional monthly payment will be 8.5 years ahead of schedule. But the part that I find interesting is the difference in the balance in September of 2035. It is 38,962.45 without additional payment, 0 with additional payment. At that point I will have been paying on the loan for 256 months, and have paid only an extra $22,676.48 to principal. So $16,285.97 just disappears over the course of twenty years. Free money!

There still is an unknown factor to all this though. My first mortgage payment (the one which with current payments will end in 2019) keeps going down. After each twelve months of payments, they send me a revised loan statement with a lower monthly payment. It’s like they don’t want me to pay it off early. But I don’t lower my payment, I make the same payment, but apply the difference to principal as well. So with each passing year, the additional amount applied to principal goes up. Unfortunately I don’t know how the back end of this works to know how they calculate how much to lower the amount, so I can’t add that into these calculations.

There are a lot of fun numbers I can come up with using those calculators. For instance, once the first loan is paid off in 2019, if I start applying that extra $400 a month to the second loan, I will cut a full 17 years off of the length of the loan. I don’t think I will realistically be able to keep up with a payment that high, but it is fun to do the math.

My purpose here was not to get into theoreticals though. My purpose was to put down some real world numbers, from a loan that actually exists, to compare to the numbers from a calculator. I can look at calculators all day long, but without those results they are just numbers.

Does adding a little money to principal every month really work like the calculators say? Yes, it does. Almost exactly.

If you aren’t doing this, you really should consider it. If you have a $100,000 loan with 5% interest, your monthly payment will be about $537 (principal and interest only). If you add just $20 extra to that each month, you will shorten the length of the loan by almost 2.5 years and save over $8500 in interest. If you go a step further and just eliminate that $2.59 can of Monster that you buy on your way to work each day, applying the $56.12 that this will save you each month to principal on that same loan will pay it off over 5 years ahead of schedule and save over $20,000 in interest.

If there is one piece of advice I would pass along to young couples* it would be this: Pay the money to get your wedding professionally photographed. It will save you much regret later.

When my wife and I got married, fourteen years ago, we were both poor as hell. We rented the local American Legion hall for the service, which cost around $150. She did all the decorating herself, with supplies mostly purchased at Michael’s. I burned cd’s for all of the music using Napster (when that was still a thing), set up a stereo under one of the tables, and controlled it using a remote (which was in my pocket throughout the service). The entire ceremony cost us only a few hundred dollars. At the time, that was all we wanted or needed.

On that budget, we obviously couldn’t afford to have it professionally photographed. At the time, we couldn’t even afford to have it amateurly photographed. So we went with the old -disposable-cameras-on-the-tables trick as the primary photography solution. Let’s just say that didn’t work out. We ended up with hundred of grainy pictures of floors, walls, ceilings, people’s thumbs, etc. The few photos that were taken of the correct people, at the correct time, were in such shitty light, and in such poor resolution, that nearly none of the wedding photos are of any use. An example photo here:

Note that this is the best picture we have of us with her family. It is very dark and grainy as hell, even on the 4×6 or 5×7. That would also be on the negative since it was taken with those shitty, disposable cameras, so even if we still had those (and I’m not sure that we do) it wouldn’t improve if we got larger prints made from it.

The same was true for photos of the bride and groom. There are exactly two pictures of us that are even remotely passable. One of them was taken by my boss at the time. That one is a profile shot of us exchanging vows, and we have an 11×17 of it hanging in the house, it was framed and given to us as a wedding gift. The other passable picture is of us dancing. It is also grainy as hell, but we are both smiling so big and obviously so happy that it is the perfect photo -disregarding the graininess of it.

So for our anniversary this year, I decided to see if I could get a better image of us from our wedding day. Obviously, lacking the availability of a time machine, I was limited to images that already existed. I took the best image I could find that showed us from the front and sent it to someone to have some photoshop work done on it. The person I sent it to was able to do quite a good job, actually. They were able to remove most of the shadows and get the tones set to more reasonable shades. They were able to remove a bit of the graininess, but it still just didn’t look very good. Definitely not good enough to try to have it embiggened.

Without a lot of options remaining, I decided to see if I could find someone to paint a portrait from the image. I found out that it was ridiculously expensive to commission a painting of that type, and I couldn’t be guaranteed of the results. So, on a whim, I contacted someone to see if they would draw the portrait digitally. Working from the photoshopped image, he drew our likenesses on an arbitrary background. He followed the original portrait as nearly as he could.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect as I’ve never really seen a portrait drawn digitally. The resulting image was amazing … But wrong:

(the image size is greatly reduced in the embedded image above) Viewing it on a computer screen or handheld device, one could almost believe that it was an actual photo. Probably airbrushed quite a bit to soften it and remove blemishes, but you can almost believe it is a photo. Again, the guy really did an amazing job, but it just looks … off.

Uncanny Valley is a term that was coined for exactly this reason. The features are too realistic to be purely computer generated, but too perfect to be a photo. At least that’s what I think. Here’s a shot of just the faces from the photoshopped photo above the digital portrait (you can click through this one to enlarge it):

As I said, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I had this portrait created. The result is certainly amazing, but I can’t figure out if I like it or not. I keep bouncing back and forth between thinking it looks amazing and thinking it looks downright creepy. If I had it done with paint instead of digital, I don’t think that would be the case. If it was with paint, it would be obvious that it was a painted portrait, which would likely strip away the eerie feeling that keeps creeping into my mind when I look at it.

However, an image on the computer won’t look the same in real life. A 2700×3300 image on the computer will only print out at 9″x11″ with 300dpi, which could make a huge impact on how the image looks. Of course the images he produced for me were in a ridiculously large format (capable of producing 24″x30″ prints). I decided to take a shot at having them printed to see if I liked them any better on paper. I chose to print them on canvas instead of paper though, because I thought that if the image was too smooth, the creepiness would set in again. I further had only the black and white version printed at full size (24″x30″), thinking that it would look less creepy if it wasn’t in color (so it wouldn’t look so much like it was trying to be an actual photo). I had a much smaller (10″x12″) printed of the full color portrait. Having them now in my possession, I am still undecided. From a distance of even a few feet, they look like they are photos … Or supposed to be photos, but they are just a bit off. But if you take a step towards them, it gets downright creepy again. Here are both of them leaning on my couch (and I assure you that the graininess here is from my shitty camera and not the actual prints):

So I remain torn on whether these images represent an amazing anniversary gift that will last a lifetime, or just some creepy experiment. I guess only time will tell.

*If I were passing along two pieces of advice, the other piece of advice would be this: take nude photos of yourself often -videos too, if you have the ability. You won’t want to look at them right away, and certainly won’t show anyone, but twenty years from now, you will be showing anyone who will look. You’re never going to look any better than you do in your late teens or early twenties. Preserve that shit and show it off when everything starts sagging.

I was driving home from work the other night in my little Mazda B2300 -some of you may remember this pickup from it’s starring role in my first (and to date only) cinematic production Tailgate: The Movie, which I am embedding right here just in case you happened to miss it at the myriad film festivals that I never entered it into, but probably should have just to be an ass:

It’s been a good little truck for the last couple of years. I have put about 40,000 miles on it since I bought it sometime in 2009, and it hasn’t left me stranded (okay, once). Upkeep has been pretty minimal: I’ve changed the oil a few times, I replaced an alternator a week or so after I got it (that was the once), I had to replace the flimsy, plastic intake manifold along the way, a heater exchange valve was replaced, and now it is leaking a bit of the refrigerant for the air conditioning -so I just keep pumping more in as opposed to getting it repaired because honestly global warming is taking way to long to come to a head to really have any effect on me personally 🙂

Like all cars, though, this one came with some quirks. Probably the worst of which is that someone had removed the stock “60/40” seat and replaced it with a couple of bucket seats. Why is this bad? Well for one the bucket seats look damn near identical to the 60/40 seat, only without the center compartment for storage, elbow leaning, and cup holding needs. Secondly, the bucket seats they chose came from the back of a mini van. So while they look pretty much identical to the stock seat in shape, and could probably pass for stock in a pinch, they have a cupholder that can only be expanded if the doors are open (and why they put the cupholders on the outside edge of the seats instead of the inside I gots no idea). Thirdly, and probably the only issue of real importance, is that the seats, being from the back of a mini van, do not have the sensor hardware necessary to use the airbag switch cables … so the airbag light on the dash has been on since the day I bought it (and probably well before that, as there is evidence of a piece of electrical tape covering up the position of that light on the instrument console).

As with all things, I told myself I would fix it one day. All it really should take is a seat from a similar Mazda or Ford Ranger to be installed and I should be able to hook the switch back up to solve the problem. Of course finding the seat has been all but impossible. I’ve seen a couple of them advertised on ebay over the years, and have seen them a couple of times on some auto salvage parts websites, but invariably the shipping on them just kills any thought of making it a reality. If I can buy the seats for 200 dollars, but it costs 150 more to have it shipped I simply can’t make myself to it. One of these days though, I will finally fix it for real: I’ll just remove the light bulb in the dash that shows the airbag status. (And here I should point out that this is all conjecture. I bought the pickup for well below low blue book, and it did come with a salvaged title. It could be that the airbag was deployed in an accident years ago and the seats were only changed to get rid of the blood stains from the horrific crash…)

Another of the quirks was discovered quite by accident when I was fumbling around for my Slim Jim lockout toolkit. To elaborate on that, I once locked my keys in the pickup, and even though I had never attempted to break into a car, I went ahead and dropped 15 bucks on one to try it out before I spent over a hundred to get a locksmith out. Once I got to the truck and chose my weapon, I had the door opened in under 10 seconds. No one was more surprised than me. Since then I have had a bit of a flair for unlocking cars with the little toolkit (which looks very similar to what you see to the left here). My next break-in attempt was for one of the cashiers at work, she locked her keys in her Pontiac Grand Am -which had electronic locks and I thought I certainly wouldn’t be able to crack, but I tried it to humor her. Perhaps 2 minutes in the door popped right open. Next up was a Ford van from the late 70’s. That one practically opened up just because it saw me coming… But to date I am most surprised that I was able to pop the door on a 2007 Ford Mustang. This one also had power door locks, but this one is certainly new enough it should be using all of the preventive features that are supposed to make the slim jim lockout toolkit obsolete. I’d like to say that I got right in, but I didn’t. This one took me a good 10 minutes of fumbling around to finally get to pop open, but it was all worth while to see the relieved look on the woman’s face when I got in. In fact to date the only car I was not able to get into using the old slim jim method was a 2001 Camry. I was able to get into it, I just had to use a different device to manipulate the electronic door lock on the driver’s arm rest after the attempts with the slim jim had failed. So breaking into cars thus far is a 100% success rate. I would also like to point out that I am doing this for customer service in my official capacity at work -not to go joyriding.

My how I digress… It was when I was reaching behind the seat for the slim jim lockout toolkit (and isn’t it ironic that I now keep the thing behind the seat? So if I happen to lock my keys in the truck again I will have to buy another lockout toolkit to get to both the keys and the lockout toolkit) that I happened across a thick electrical wire with frayed ends from where it had been ripped off of … something … Apparently I must have hit it against the metal on the back of the cab or something, because a huge spark shot out and (as I would only discover later) it blew the fuse to my turn signals. I took the time later to trace this wire up under the dash and remove it from the fuse block -where it had been haphazardly smashed into an existing spot instead of using one of the several empty (but powered) slots. I thought it may have been to an audio amplifier, but unless they had the stereo rigged to make the lights flash with the beat I can’t figure out why they would have wired it on that circuit. Just another quirk.

Of course the quirk that I came across the other night was a factory one.

I was leaving work at right around 3am -I generally leave anywhere between 3-6am on Sunday morning. Taking a page from the old-school truckers, I keep a bag of corn nuts in the pickup. The idea is that if you are driving a long stretch of straight road in the dark, crunching on seeds or nuts will keep you from dozing off or getting hypnotized by the road. I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced either of those, but the crunch does keep me alert. I was reaching for that bag of beauties just after I left work (Barbecue this time, though they are generally Ranch), but I couldn’t find them. Alone on the road, I reached down to turn on the dome light to aid in my search. There was a bright flash of light, and then … nothing.

Driving in the wee hours and being the only car on the road can make your mind do some pretty neat stuff. There will be times when I am on the road and I literally don’t see another car -going either direction- for the entire 50 mile ride home. Sometimes my mind wanders off and I wonder if maybe there was a Langoliers type event that left me as the only human remaining on earth. Then I generally grab some corn nuts, because that is some bizarre shit to be letting yourself think while you are driving, and thus -in theory at least- at the height of your senses. Such was the case when I flicked the switch and the bright light flashed and faded inside the cab of the truck.

I was still going down the road, but when I looked down I saw that the speedometer was dead set on 0, and the odometer wasn’t moving either. This is what appears to be an old-school, mechanical odometer and speedometer rig, and it’s a touch eerie to look down and see them suddenly frozen in time as you speed down the interstate. In an instant, my mind thought: oh Fuck! That fraction of a second that I took my eyes off the road … There must have been something there … I must have crashed… Maybe this is death… Maybe the crash is so horrific that my mind produced some wicked hallucinogens to keep me from seeing it. Another fraction of a second and my rational mind was able to take over: this isn’t nearly hot enough to be hell, I’m obviously not dead. I pulled off the interstate at the Casa Blanca exit and took stock of my surroundings. Cars speeding past me on the interstate. The ground beneath my feet felt real enough. Maybe a bizarre coincidence caused the speedometer cable to break at precisely the same moment as the bulb for the dome light blew out? Where can I buy a lottery ticket at this hour?

Once I decided that I wasn’t dead, I grabbed my phone and downloaded a speedometer app from the Android market. I put the phone where the speedometer ought to be and was back on my may. Although the story would have been much more interesting if it had been a Langoliers type thing…

Once I got home I was able to fire up google and find a copy of the 2003 Ford Ranger Owner Manual online. While it still took some guess and check, I was able to find that the speedometer and odometer, while they appear to be mechanical, are actually completely electronic, and controlled by a fuse. And, for reasons unknown, the fuse panel remained the same size, shape, and layout for a decade but they moved fuses around inside it year to year. Once I found the correct fuse position for my pickup (fuse 26) and replaced it, my speedometer and odometer came back, and my dome light came on. But what an odd combination of things to have on the same circuit. That is the only thing in the instrument cluster that was affected. All the lights still worked -even the lights for the odometer and speedometer- it was just the controller for them that is tied to the dome light. Nonetheless, the problem is solved.

As I said, it has its quirks. I just hope that next time it’s not like the cigarette lighter gets stuck and when the fuse blows it also takes out the headlights and the power brakes… I can’t be certain of that though, because that would make every bit as much sense as the speedometer and dome light being on the same circuit. But if that does happen I’d like to have some electrodes attached to my head to figure out what the hell part of my brain is causing those insane theories to pop up.

But I suppose I should flesh out that concept a little bit.

I have never been the type of person to be overly concerned with the aging process. When I saw a guy like say George Clooney just seemingly getting more handsome as he went through his 30s and 40s, I said bring it on. Even Richard Gere pulled it off until he was darn near 60. So I was thinking that age wouldn’t be something that I would be bothered with.

My hair has been slowly turning gray since I was in my 20s. I think it is still mostly brown, but whenever I visit the barber and see that pile of trimmings I do wonder why it seems disproportionately gray compared to my head, but that is probably just a trick of the light or something. I have been forming little wrinkles on my face for nearly the same amount of time. Unfortunately spending a decade at a job that I really hated gave me some rather menacing ones that really amplify when I frown, but at the same time I also have the typical laugh lines and crows feet well established so that I can just imagine them all a bit deeper to see what I will look like in another decade or so. Still, this doesn’t bother me.

What I really, really hate about getting old is my metabolism. As recently as my 30th birthday I was still able to eat damn near anything I wanted without gaining much weight. I was (and still am) very active at work, so I did (and still do) burn a lot of those calories off, but it was just so much easier even just a few years ago. In fact the leanest I have been in my adult life was in early 2005 (making me just shy of 31) when I was down to just over 170 pounds. I wasn’t eating right, I wasn’t exercising, I wasn’t really doing anything that I should have been doing to maintain that weight, I just wasn’t eating. This, of course, was shortly after I had quit drinking, so my body was used to an extra 1500 or so calories a day from beer, so when that was cut off the weight started dropping faster than I could keep track of. Of course having had a chance to look over my eating habits at the time, I was still in the habit of eating a piece of beef jerky for breakfast/lunch (real jerky, not a “beef stick”) for about 120 calories, then a largish meal just before bedtime which I would estimate to be around 1000 calories. No snacking, nothing else, just 1100 calories a day.

Of course as anyone who has starved themselves knows (and mind you I wasn’t doing this consciously) you don’t really feel all that well. I was hungry a lot of the time, I felt weak a lot of the time, and worst of all I had these random blackouts -which generally lasted only a second or two, but would happen in all situations, be it driving, walking, sitting on the couch, whatever. For a time I thought I might have something seriously wrong with me, but once I actually started eating they went away. But so did that slender (ish) build.

Since roughly my 35th birthday, I have been in constant struggle with my weight. Being ~5’10” and 190 puts me smack dab in the middle of average on both height and weight for my age range, but I just don’t like it. The useless Body Mass Index would put me as “overweight”, but not into the “obese” category. All that is well and good, but I just don’t like the way I look at 190, and it is getting harder and harder to maintain this shit body. As recently as April, I weighed myself at 200.3 pounds. That is the spot where I have to do something about it; I made a deal with myself a long time ago that if I ever got to 200 pounds I would do some dieting and exercising to get myself back down into the 180s. It took me about 5 weeks to do it, but I got myself back down to a much more reasonable 187 pounds. My dieting wasn’t really a diet at all, but just portion control -one of the things that has haunted me my whole life is overeating. I think partially as a result of having been brought up to always clean my plate, and partially just from going through some pretty tough times when I didn’t know when I might have another good meal, I tend to gorge myself. It takes me a lot of discipline to keep from doing that, and discipline is a hard thing to come by.

So today I was feeling particularly fat, and I made the horrible mistake of stepping on a scale. 201.9. I have gained 15 pounds in under 2 months. What the fuck? The wife has been helping with the portion control on the days we have dinner together: 3/4 of a pound of ground turkey in the dishes as opposed to just over a pound of ground beef, frozen meals that I can fit on the plate in one trip instead of two enormous mounds, my meals are actually not that bad. In theory… In practice, of course, trying to control my portions leaves me hungry, which then leads to me cooking an extra burrito, or an extra corn dog, because my brain thinks I need more than usual since I am hungry. That is where the discipline is hard to come by …Well, that and the god damned Doritos… Why the hell do they have to be so delicious?

But that scale reading 201.9 means that the deal I made with myself is in effect again, I have to get back down into the 180s. So lunch today was a 340 calorie french dip (no sauce) and dinner will be 700 calories worth of frozen chimichangas (plus a bit for some grated cheese), and that’s it. I dusted off the elliptical machine tonight for a 22 minute go (1.6 miles it says, although I think think their math may be a bit suspect. And 22 minutes because that is how long a tv episode is on Netflix). But damn it, even 5 years ago I wouldn’t have to be paying such close attention to the calories I am taking in and exercising every day just to maintain the shitty form I have always had… So I say agin, Fuck I hate getting old.