Floofgon (floofintion) – A large container in which drink is served to housepets.
In use: “During the hot summer, multiple floofgons were placed around the house so the animals always had fresh water to keep them hydrated.”
Confloofsion
Confloofsion (floofinition) – Intimate information or insights people share with their pets.
In use: “Living in the small travel trailer with a long-haired black cat named Bob, he shared confloofsions about his drug-use and mental health during the cold and snowy Minnesota days. Speaking them aloud helped him understand who he was and what he faced. The cat never did anything more than nestle against him and purr.”
For Her
The house was always silent except for his quiet and her cats. He was aware of how much he sighed, and the cats…the cats were always darting underfoot, jumping up onto the furniture, counters, and tables, and peering around corners.
Flowers and plants were everywhere. He’d told everyone to send money to her causes in lieu of flowers and that shit, but…well, here they were. Here he was.
She was always trying to get him to eat healthy. The ‘frig was lousy with salmon and salad ingredients. Sighing (but what else?), he prepared the salmon per the instructions, sharing some with the cats, who were enthusiastic in their enjoyment, and made a salmon Caesar salad and poured a glass of wine for himself. Eating, he told himself, for her, chewing and swallowing the despised flavors, washing it down with wine.
For her.
The Healer Dream
The healer dream followed the wrestling dream last night.
The wrestling dream was about me taking another’s place in a wrestling match. Throughout the dream, I mocked myself for being part of this crazy scheme where I would wrestle a high-schooler. I was doing so to keep the team from forfeiting. My match was either going to be first or second. I told myself and everyone else that I had no chance, that what we were doing was illegal, and that we were going to be caught, humiliated, and disqualified. In the end, I handed someone my watch, some expensive and exotic time piece, went and dressed for my match, and then waited, learning at the last second that my match would be the second one.
Dream end.
The healer dream was brief. I walked into a room. The room reminded me of a classroom, with desks, windows that looked out onto a lawn and playground, but I have no idea where it was. I don’t know why I was there. A woman dressed in a dark blue sundress in there told me she was sick, and then rattled off her health complaints. Brunette, with auburn shoulder-length hair, she looked tired and pale.
“I can fix that,” I said. Then as I touched different places on her, I would say something about infusing her with healing energy. For example, I touched her shoulders and said, “Infuse your shoulders with healing energy. Infuse your joints with healing energy and strength. Infuse your collagen, ligaments, tendons, and muscles with healing energy and strength. Infuse your bones with healing energy and strength.”
Although I did this all over her, it was done in a couple minutes. She stood up and said, “I feel great. All my pain is gone.” I nodded, like, yeah, that’s what I expected. That’s what I told her she was going to do. I was quite casual about it.
A man had entered while I was doing this with her. He was wearing clay-white walking shorts with a gold, short-sleeved shirt, sweat socks and activity shoes. He seemed in his fifties, with sandy hair cut short but casual, bangs across his forehead. Clean-shaved, he looked healthy enough, tan.
“Do me, do me,” he said.
I didn’t think he needed it, but he’d asked. Shrugging, I started healing him as I had her. When I did, he squatted down and grinned, continuing to grin as I healed her as I had him. He seemed very happy and satisfied with what I was doing to him.
Dream end.
The Story
Called Mom today to wish her happy birthday. I was born sixty-three years ago, today, if the records and Mom’s memory are accepted. I accept both, especially Mom’s memory. I wished her a happy birthday because she did all the work. I’m not lyin’, I don’t remember any of it. It was barely like I was there.
“Wasn’t I overdue?”
“Yes, eight days,” she answered.
“Oh, eight days. That’s nothing.”
“After nine months, it feel likes eight years.”
###
I woke up with pain. I knew it was time and woke your father up. “The baby’s coming. We need to go to the hospital now.”
I was already dressing. He got up slowly. While he dressed, I went down to the car. Our apartment was on the third floor. There wasn’t an elevator. I knew it would take me time to get down those three flights of stairs.
I was down in the car, and hard labor had begun. I wasn’t surprised. You sister took just three hours. I was in enormous pain because it was all happening so fast. I was wondering, what’s taking your father so long and kept blowing the horn, shouting, “Come on.”
He finally came down. I said, “What were you doing?”
He said, “I was combing my hair.” I could’ve killed him. No jury would have convicted me, if there was a woman on it.
He started driving, came up to a stop sign and started to stop. I said, “Do not stop.”
A motorcycle cop pulled us over right after that. Your father told him that I was in hard labor. The cop said, “Follow me.” He turned on his sirens. We blew through every red light and stop sign.
When we arrived at the Fort Belvoir hospital, the nurse came out to meet us. She said, “Oh my God, you’re in labor. You should have come in as soon as it started.”
I said, “I did. I got here as soon as I could.”
She said, “Let me get a wheel chair.”
I started labor right at six in the morning. You were born at seven twenty-four.
After giving birth, I was taken to the maternity ward. There were seventeen beds, all with women who’d just given birth. A major came in. She said, “All you ladies who gave birth yesterday need to do your exercises.” This was a military hospital, remember. They didn’t coddle you. They were military, and they treated you like you were in the military. Visitors and flowers, candy, all that wasn’t allowed, because they worried about germs and infections, and they began exercising you right away.
Well, I’d just given birth, so I didn’t exercise. The major said to me, “You. Why aren’t you exercising?”
I said, “I just gave birth four hours ago.”
“Do your exercises. Now.” So I did.
The next day, we dragged our iron beds down the hall to another ward, where we were discharged. You were thirty-two hours old when I took you home.
Savory Oatmeal
After reading about savory muffins this week, I thought I’d do something similar with my morning oatmeal.
Fruit, cinnamon, nuts, and coconut usually finds its way into my oat meal. Today, nutritional yeast, shredded Mexican cheese mix, sliced Kalamata olives, and diced onions and green peppers were tossed into the oatmeal.
Sensational. I imagine sauteed or grilled mushrooms, onions, and peppers would also work well. Looking forward to trying some new ideas. It puts a whole new spin on breakfast.
The Medical Bill
My latest medical bill arrived. This was a follow-up to the doctor’s office. On that day, I was weighed and then peed in a cup connected to a computer to measure my flow and output. Then a nurse asked me some questions about how I was doing, before the doctor came in, read the reports, and made some follow-up actions. Including waiting — they were overbooked and I waited twenty minutes to see him — peeing, and talking, I was out of there in about forty minutes.
Before going further, I want to say that I’m amazed and grateful that my military retirement gives me health benefits. I can’t say that enough. That’s not what this is about. This is about a neophyte in the healthcare’s billing process.
The bill began as a total of $277.10. That’s not bad, I thought. Insurance covered $59.36. Cool. Then, total adjustments and discounts were $180.84. Of that, $4.10 was a discount given to me for the prompt payment of previous bills. The other $176.74 was an insurance adjustment. The total due for me to pay is $36.90.
I’m not complaining so much as stating my surprise and confusion. What in the world is that insurance adjustment that reduces the bill by sixty-three percent? Is it a volume thing between Tricare and Asante? Makes me wonder about the original bill and its legitimacy.
I don’t know. The discount wasn’t explained. I suppose I could do an Internet search, but, well, I’d rather just note it and press on, at least for today.
Floofamine
Floofamine (floofinition) – a catecholamine neurotransmitter in human’s central nervous system acting within the brain to help regulate movement and emotion when dealing with pets.
In use: “Floofologists who study psychological disorders have long been interested in how floofamine works and how relatively high or low levels in the brain relate to behavioral changes when people are interacting with their housepets.”
The Habit
It started after the doctors declared his death was probably less than six weeks away and recommended that he be placed in hospice. Family members were called, rushing home from around the world.
Their visits perked him up. The doctors reversed themselves after three months, returning the ninety-eight year old to a nursing home. That’s when he began his habit.
Every night at seven, he would prepare for bed by walking around his bed, straightening the blankets and pillows. Then he folded the blankets back, adjusted the pillows, and circled the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles. His process consumed about two hours.
Nobody complained. How could they? It was good for a man of his age to be active, even if his habits mystified everyone. After all, if they reached his age, who knew what their habits would be?
Beetroot Juice Insights
My wife pursues an eternal quest to improve our health. Frequent new food stuffs are introduced to the home. I usually try them to observe what impact they seem to have on me as well as how they taste.
Not all work out. Our pantry has a shelf of forgotten foods and drinks that neither of us adopted as part of our normal diet habits. I think one jar is marked “Best By Oct 2003”. We can’t bring ourselves to throw it out. We’re just too sentimental.
Today, I give you beetroot juice.
Beet juice, according to WebMD, is supposed to be terrifically healthy. Well, juice from the root is supposed to be even better, a superfood that will amaze you.
Okay, we said, buying some from our local heath food store. Amaze us.
It comes in a fine, whitish powder form, like chalk. Adding the desired amount to a glass of water and stirring gives you a red drink that looks like cherry Kool-Aid.
It don’t taste like cherry Kool-Aid.
It tastes like beets. That’s not a problem, if you like eating soiled old socks. I know that I probably seem old-fashioned, but I take exception to the taste of socks in my mouth.
But holy-moly, the beetroot juice has a kick.
The first time that I drank it, it was like I’d been injected with niacin. I felt flushed and hot. Every pore was utilized to let the sweat burst out of me. I drank it late in the evening. That wasn’t a good idea; I then had too much energy to sleep, as if I’d had a quint-shot mocha right before going to bed.
We’ve learned that this isn’t an uncommon reaction. Besides that, we discovered that our beetroot drinking should not be done around the same time as our coffee drinking. Some people suggested drinking beetroot instead of coffee. Oh, how we laughed as we plotted on how to eliminate people making such cruel suggestions.
The coffee wasn’t given up. I moved my beetroot drinking to the late afternoon. My reaction isn’t as severe as that first venture, but let me tell you, it’s like my brain has been vacuumed clean and my senses have been blown out. My thinking and memory both seem sharper. My creativity level seems to have been kicked to another level, too.
I’m more ambivalent about its impact on my dreams. I already dreamed and remembered my dreams (or imagined that I did), and this beetroot juice seems to have me dreaming with my clarity and remembering them with more details.
It could be a coincidence, but my writing output jumped after I started drinking the beetroot juice. I typically typed about twelve to fifteen hundred words a day. Now I’m typing twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred a day. I’m typing an extra half hour because I just don’t want to stop. That’s a significant difference over a ten day period.
It also helped my walking output. I’d been riding a streak of sixty miles per week the day that I began drinking the beetroot juice. I frankly didn’t think I’d be able to sustain it for another week, which was a bummer. But the beetroot juice revitalized me, so I’ve now gone six weeks averaging sixty miles a week.
The one drawback that I’ve noticed is that the beetroot juice doesn’t go with other foods, especially anything sweet, and especially bananas. I swear, I’ll never eat a banana and drink beetroot juice again.
Bank on that.
Michael Seidel, writer 