THB and DB are off to London and Venice. For the first time in a long time, THB is not planning to live-stream the trip. He'll save up the pics, make a few notes, and if his usual cheerful and abnormal self send out a few post-trip posts.
Sidewalk closed due to excessive sea lions in Moss Landing Harbor
Emeryville Warehouse Lofts courtyard loses five palm trees, replaced with traffic cones;
same-same but very different
Annual Grandparents Day at Neil Armstrong Elementary School
just below the window outside THB's exer-bike...is he pedaling too hard for the building's superstructure?
LB gifts THB a golden oldie ballpark t-shirt; we saw a game at the Vet 32 years ago. With BB - grandpa / dad - we were on a Jay Buckley baseball tour and our seats were in the 2nd deck, deed centerfield. It was Camera Day and we got to walk on the field (astro turf). THB is pretty sure none of the 3 of us had a camera with us on the 2 week trp.
Does THB have Parkinson's?
THB spends the day getting a Dat Scan to determine if he has Parkinson's. The UCSF Radiology department for this scan takes place across the street from a famous local landmark: Oracle Park.
How big is the building? They have to number the various entrances....
THB arrives at 9am (shuttle to BART, 1/2 hr walk from BART) and at 10:20 gets a radioactive infusion (takes 30 seconds). Told to come back at 1pm.
THB spends the last 1.5 hours until 1:20 in the waiting room. This couple re-enacts My Dinner With Andre...guess which one is Andre and which one is Wallace Shawn. THB's MRI is 15 minutes long followed by a 5 minute CT scan with his head a bit further inside the same machine.
The Big Reveal: Pretty anticlimactic. Here's the summary from the neurologist (the test was on Monday, THB got the radiology results early Tuesday, the neurologist's e-mail arrived late Thursday)
So we just got the results of the DaTscan, which was found to be abnormal, which might suggest Parkinson's disease (PD).
The neurologist was leaving town to attend a conference. We are leaving for Europe. Follow-up appointment is Oct 28! THB does not know if he has PD, and if he does have it, he doesn't know for how long; could be for 1 year, 5 years, or maybe 30 years. In other words, he feels the same as he always has. Abnormal!
the twins are turning 9 while we are in London so with auntie we have a mini b'day celebration (one of three for the twins): adventure park, gifts, banana splits
lava lamps that match the décor of their new bedrooms
Stress Echo Test: the day before leaving for London, all goo! Phew....
Emeryville Celebration of the Arts, open the month of October. THB recommends you go take a look!
Photographs by Richard Misrach, he was a year behind THB at Uni High School in LA
this small photo is the raffle item, priced at $15k, funds go to support artists' fees in subsequent shows
Book Reviews - Highly Recommended
Ambivalence - An Education, Brian Dillon (read by author): a short memoir, this is pure THB. Written in the third person, the Irish author refers to everyone including himself by their first initial, and summarizes his dilettante years in high school, university, Masters and Phd years during which he somehow manages to progress without doing any work (school work or actual labor for money). During these years both his parents die and he fights constantly with one of his two younger brothers, spends most of his time drinking, carousing with friends, reading, and thinking about critical literature theories. And, most of this embarrassingly short memoir takes place in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is copied from other “work” he scratched out at the time. The epitaph for this book could be “there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all.”
The Midnight Special, the Secret Prison History of American Music, Colin Asher (read by Ron Butler): focused on 5 musicians , all of whom ran afoul of the U.S. prison system (except for Johnny Cash). If you haven’t heard of it, THB recommends you consider donating to the Prison Literacy Project (https://www.prisonlit.org/).
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