Stand Up Right

Overcoming back pain. Regaining mobility. Learning to stand up right.

Death Metal and a Depressing Revelation

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And, no, it’s not that Death Metal is depressing. Some of it is, much of it is not. As it happens, head bangers tend to be a fairly happy, well adjusted lot, present company excepted.

Anyway, a long time ago, my beautiful, long-suffering bride and I decided to go to Beijing to study Chinese. “What does this have to do with Swedish Death Metal and a depressing revelation,” you might ask. Follow along.

One of our classmates turned out to be a head banger, and as I’m also a head banger, we hit it off pretty well. It turned out that L was into a much harder end of the metal spectrum than I, and he introduced me to a whole segment of metal that I didn’t even know existed.

One of the bands L introduced me to is Arch Enemy, and although I hadn’t even heard of Death Metal at that time (for reasons way outside the scope of this story) I loved their stuff, right from the git go.

“You’re still not connecting this to any depressing revelation, Andrew.”

Patience, Daniel San.

Fast-forward 15 years.

I’ve finally admitted out loud, to other people, including my beautiful, long-suffering bride, that I struggle with depression. Among my keys to dealing with it are quiet time and exercise.

I was out on my kayak yesterday, getting a little exercise, a little fresh air, some peace and quiet, enjoying a very nice cigar, and tormenting a few small mouth bass. I had my iPod set to random, play all songs and up popped a track from Arch Enemy’s 2017 album, Will to Power,

The track in question is A Fight I Must Win (link is to Arch Enemy’s official YouTube channel). When I realized just how big my problem with depression is, I knew I had to fight it, if not for me, then for my family.

And I’ve seen the devastating consequences of suicide; on parents, siblings, children, friends and acquaintances. Hell, I’ve suffered some of those effects. So, in this battle with depression it is, simply, a fight I must win.

A Revelation

Which brings us to my depressing revelation:

I can’t win.

That’s it, I can’t win this fight. No matter how often I score a victory, no matter how often I beat the monster back, it’s temporary. He always returns. Sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, but he always comes back.

I. Can’t. Win.

At least, I can’t win absolutely and permanently. After 40 years, I finally get it, I’m not fighting for final victory, I’m fighting a holding action, drawing and holding a line, “Thus far, and no farther.”

What does it mean going forward? I don’t know.

But I’ll figure it out.

Do You Like Working In An Office? I Don’t

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I Hate the Office

No, no, no, not “The Office” starring Steve Carrell, not the British one with Ricky Gervais. I hate the office, no caps. You know; the place we all go to work. The place where you suffer:

  • The jackasses on the roads, just to get there
  • Constant interruptions
  • Incessant background noise
  • The lighting conditions, too bright or too dark, never right
  • The environmental conditions, too hot or too cold, too dry or too humid, never right
  • Your obnoxious coworkers and their disgusting eating, drinking and personal hygiene habits

What if there were an alternative to working at the office? You know, where you have no commute, no irritating co-workers interrupting you, chewing with their mouths open, slurping their tea or coffee, hawking loogies into the sink (You think I’m kidding about that one? I’m not). A place where you don’t have to suffer the inane chatter of others, who then complain if you talk too loudly. A place where you control the lighting, the heat and humidity.

Heaven on Earth

What a heavenly place to work this would be, if there were such a workplace.

Well, the advent of high quality, high-speed internet, in conjunction with the Kung Flu, has given many of access to just such a workplace, our own homes.

When I graduated Engineering school, we were in the depths of a nasty recession. I spent the entire summer of 1992 searching for work, any work, watching my meagre savings dwindle, wondering if I was ever going to get my career going.

That summer at my annual physical, my doctor told me I had slightly elevated blood pressure. Not a big concern, because I also had a nice low resting heartrate, and that slow heartrate meant my heart just had to do a little more work each beat.

Over the years I have never not worked in an office, except for the time I spent teaching English in China. Oh, and the 7 years I spent travelling North America teaching how to use CAD software. I have never not been in an open concept, low cubicle walled hell space where there was no privacy, no peace and quiet, no peace of mind.

Through all the years, through 4 different family doctors, I have never not had mild diastolic hypertension. You know, the lower number on your blood pressure reading.

Until August of this year.

Last December, my doctor took my BP, and was a little worried. I told her about my history, and the 1992 diagnosis and conversation with that doctor. She didn’t care, wanted me in for a follow up to really check my pressure.

Fast forward to January

In January, I went in for that follow up. The doctor’s assessment, diastolic hypertension and I’d best come in for a follow up in six months. You see, as a non-drinking, non-smoking, lean, fit, healthy man with a good diet, my only risk factor is genetics…you know, family history.

Later that month, I crashed the ribbon cutting ceremony at the new wing of our local hospital. Dad, the longest serving doctor at the hospital, was part of the ribbon cutting and there was no way I was going to miss that.

At the meet and greet before the ceremony, I bumped into my doctor, as I was chatting with Dad. I introduced them, and she got the family history of hypertension. Turns out there’s a lot of it, and now my doctor is thinking about how we’ll plan my future course of treatment.

Fast forward to March

The Lung Pao Sicken Lockdown began, and I left cubicle hell for my spare-bedroom-cum-study. Six months of working from home; feeding, educating, raising and playing with my children later, my doctor’s office started taking in-patient appointments again, and I went in for another BP test.

Results?

“Everything is perfect, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

The modern office may not be a place purpose designed to suck the life out of you. But if it were, would it be designed any differently?

Well, Today Was Almost A Day of Shear Agony

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Yesterday for Ergonomics Wednesday, I got to bitching about gardening tools and the way their designs are an ergonomic horror show. Well, today is wellness Thursday, a day on which I usually wax rhapsodic about something that has improved my general health and wellbeing.

Today Imma do a little mix and match.

You see, Dad and I were continuing to work on cleaning up the bush around the cottage. Part of this job included clearing out the dead trees in the back lot. I won’t bore you with the details, mostly because I don’t really want to relive them as I type them out.

What I will say is this, when you’re clearing out the underbrush and dead trees, there is a whole lot of bending, twisting, stooping, tugging, yanking and dragging involved. After which, a lot of 6 inch (diameter) trees have to have their branches cut off.

The connection to poor ergonomics in gardening tools would be the arms and grips of the large shears you use to trim these branches off. Cleaning off those trunks left my poor carpal tunnels screaming.

And the process itself, along with actually getting the scrub out of the woods, involves a whole lot of less than ideal spinal movements.

Lemme say this, all those years of working on my posture and spine paid off in spades today. A day of work that 7 years ago would have meant three painful recovery days hardly phased me. In fact, the only ill effect I felt from the whole day was a headache from the pop up rainstorm this afternoon.

Actually, that wasn’t the only ill effect of the day. As a treat for the boys, we had fish and chips for dinner. I ate a little too much fried food tonight, and my poor tummy let me know I overindulged a little.

As for the rest, I feel just fine.

It’s Late August, and The Clock is Ticking Down on Summer

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It’s August 22, and the clock is ticking down on summer. All is well; the lawn is mowed, I’ve made a dent in the weeds, and we’re preparing for the boys’ return to school.

Part of those preparations is to get kid one a decent bike, in good repair so that he and his best bud can ride to and fro. Leastwise on days when the weather permits.

In an effort to do this, I’ve kludged together a couple of bikes, picked up from here and there, along with a couple of new parts, into said decent bike, in good repair. The next step? Have him map out and do a few practice runs on the route to school.

To do this, I had a choice, get my bike into working order, or roller blade with him. I didn’t feel like blading, so fix my bike it was, and I did. Or so I thought, right up until I finished inflating the tires on his bike.

As luck had it, I filled my tires first. By the time I had his filled, and he took a couple of quick turns to make sure everything was in working order, my front tire was already going flat.

Sigh.

Time for a new inner tube, but first, I don’t want to go back to the bike shop again, and second, time was winding down. So I took another kludge of a bike, checked its tires, raised the seat, and off we went.

The ride was a blast. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but I have great kids. Number 1 and I had a lovely ride to his school, testing out the route and his new bike.

On the return we got a little more experimental with his gearing, which led to a race between kid 1 and ol’ daddy. He had the better bike, but I’ve got experience and a foot of height on him. Plus I wasn’t gonna let a 12 y/o beat me in a bike race.

Last week I asked you to think about what you have to be grateful for.

As for me, among those things I’m grateful for is pretty much everything that happened today. It was, simply, a wonderful, magical, late summer day.

Be well.

Time, Reflections on a Life Half Lived

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Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way

From “Time” by Pink Floyd

My lovely wife and I watched Bad Boys for Life last week, and while doing so we saw the effects time had on Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Last night we wanted to watch something light and silly, so we watched the original Bad Boys.

It’s one thing to watch a movie and note that the actors have aged, we all do it, and there were 25 years between the Bad Boys and Bad Boys for Life. However, it’s quite another to watch them a few days apart and see the contrast between just-finished-with-Fresh Prince Will Smith and 2020 Will Smith.

What does this have to do with health, well-being, exercise, yada, yada, yada? You know, the normal topics ‘round these parts.

An hourglass with half the sand fallen
Time

Time

What it has to do with is time. That first Bad Boys came out shortly after I graduated university, now the characters are now middle-aged men, one a grandfather contemplating retirement.

So here I sit, basically the same age as both of those men (Martin is a little older, Will a little younger). Between those movies I’ve had 3 careers, lived in 3 countries (on 2 continents), gotten married, had some kids, and a whole lot more.

Recently, it dawned on me that, medical miracles notwithstanding, I’m now closer to my end than my beginning. My parents are in their mid/late 80s, healthy and vigorous. Everyone on either side of my family (at least those who avoided the pitfalls of booze and cigarettes) has lived into their 80s or beyond.

There’s no reason I can’t expect to make that also (a fast moving city bus notwithstanding), but that is just a wordy way of restating,

I’m closer to the end than the beginning

A Sobering Thought

It’s a sobering thought. Not a tragedy, not depressing, just…sobering.

When you are young and life is in front of you, you tend to be quite frivolous with your time. See that Pink Floyd song; there’s just so much of it, it seems trivial when you waste it. However, while there is a lot of time, it is finite.

  • 60 seconds per minute
  • 60 minutes per hour
  • 24 hours per day
  • 365 days per year
  • 10 years per decade
  • 9 or 10 decades per life

Every second gone is…gone, it’s not coming back, and it’s one fewer left to you. So stop wasting them.

Stop Wasting Time

I used to play hockey with a guy who had 4 kids very quickly, and at a young age. He was too busy running the family business to spend a lot of time with them, and in their teenage years, he was trying to repair the relationships. Maybe he did, but the time, those precious childhood years? Gone.

I know a man who had a falling out with his brother. They lived less than a half hour’s drive apart for decades, yet never saw each other, not even for Christmas. They only reconciled when the brother was dying of lung cancer, and the intervening 30 years? Gone.

Eight years ago I lost my dearest friend to a heart problem. We’d drifted apart through family and careers, but that was no worry, we were in our early 40s and there would always be time to reconnect. Except there wasn’t. I never had the chance to introduce her to my boys and those last few years of friendship and camaraderie? Gone.

Time is too precious to waste, so don’t waste it. Spend it wisely, with the ones who are most important. More important if you need to let someone go, let him go.

Letting Go

My parents have an old friend who has become very angry as the years go on. When GW Bush was president, he was difficult to deal with but with the election of Trump, he became intolerable. This man is in his 80s, and I can no longer stand to be in his presence because he can’t read a newspaper headline without losing it.

He’s been happy for 8 of the last 20 years, but what good does it do a Canadian, in his twilight years, to waste them fretting over American politics? What good does it do anyone to so poison the atmosphere around you that long time friends simply have to let you go?

I miss the relationship we once had, when I was a boy he was a wonderful surrogate uncle, but I’m about health, and fitness, and my family, and hockey, and fishing, not about raging over the politics of another country. He’s become toxic, so I had to let him go.

I had a friend who was a committed, militant atheist. At the time, our circle included serious Catholics, Muslims, Jews, a bunch of Christmas and Easter Christians and, yes, other atheists. We all could talk about anything and everything, for hours on end, unless Big C were there.

You see, he had the uncanny ability to turn any conversation to religion. He literally could shift a conversation about sports, or Star Trek, or the second term engineering course load, into one of his patented anti-religion rants. He was toxic, so we had to let him go.

I’ll bet you didn’t expect me to take you from Bad Boys to here, did you? But I did, and for a purpose. If you are blessed, as I am blessed, with health, a wonderful family and time, understand this, your time is limited. Every tick of the clock is one fewer in your account.

Don’t waste them.

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