I skipped the gym yesterday and went to the hospital to see a friend who just had a knee replacement. It felt good to break with routine, good to walk across an unknown parking lot in the late afternoon. Good until I got inside. Hospitals are scary places. I walked by rooms that reminded me of the future. Mine, I mean. It was disheartening, and I had horrible dreams last night all night long. But my friend will be free of pain now. It is an unbelievable surgery, I think, that is well done. I've known a number of people who have undergone double knee replacements and they are very, very happy. I just wish that the Republicans would step down and let us do some stem cell stuff. New organs, etc.
Walking to his room, I saw this:
I showed it to him when I went into his room. "I don't think this place is very sterile," I said.
After the visit, it was really too late to go to the gym, and with all I had just seen, I had a better idea, anyway.
I hadn't had a good cocktail for awhile. Ginger in the Rye. Two of them.
But today I'll repent. I read an article in the N.Y. Times that people who exercise are much younger than their chronological ages. Maybe I'll at least stay even.
Tonight we sleep under the Full Buck Moon. Makes me think of an old joke.
The National Poetry Contest had come down to two semifinalists: a Yale graduate and a redneck from Wyoming. They were given a word, then allowed two minutes to study the word and come up with a poem that contained the word. The word they were given was "Timbuktu".
First to recite his poem was the Yale graduate. He stepped to the microphone and said:
Slowly across the desert sand
Trekked a lonely caravan.
Men on camels, two by two
Destination---Timbuktu.
The crowd went crazy! No way could the redneck top that, they thought. The redneck calmly made his way to the microphone and recited:
Me and Tim a-huntin went,
Met three whores in a pop up tent.
They was three, and we was two,
So I bucked one, and Timbuktu.
The redneck won hands down!
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