This is my 6500th post here at kelloggbloggin'.
1. It's now been eleven weeks since a third kidney was transplanted into my lower left abdomen. As far as my condition is concerned, if I could have one (impossible) wish come true, it would be for a home test that would measure my immunity. I trust that as the whopping doses of immune-suppressing drugs that were blasted into my system eleven weeks ago continue to wear off, my immune system grows stronger. I know that because I will continue to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of my life, my immune system will never be at full strength.
But, the goal of the whole transplant operation is for me to return to a similar everyday life that I lived before the surgery.
What I don't know on this eleven week anniversary is how close am I to getting out and being around more people and having it not be as risky as it has been?
I'm going to Spokane on Monday morning to have labs done again. Originally, I had this week off from lab work, but the uptick in my Tacrolimus levels last week moved the transplant team to want to have blood work done again this week.
After the blood work, I'll do what I consider some low risk things on Monday -- I'll try another coffee shop. I'll drop in at Great Harvest. I might do some pleasure shopping again at Trader Joe's.
I haven't had a haircut for well over three months.
I'm thinking of dropping in at the Supercuts I go to in CdA and getting my messy hair looking a bit neater.
2. Since its release in 1989, I've been curious about the movie, Drugstore Cowboy, but, until today, I hadn't watched it.
Possibly because 2024 marks the 35th anniversary of its release, comments about this movie began popping up on either my Facebook or my X feed -- possibly both.
More than anything, watching Drugstore Cowboy stirred up how much I've loved spending time in Portland over the years. In particular, I used to love walking in Portland, often aimlessly, and really enjoyed doing this when I used to take pictures in Portland.
The movie didn't really zero in on streets I used to walk, but all the same, just having this movie take place in Portland brought back fragments of memories, of concerts, garden strolls, bookstore visits, eating Asian food, conferences I attended, movies I watched, but most of all, miles and miles of walking, thinking, hoping, regretting, dreaming, and, most of all, feeling, feeling a lot of invigoration.
On occasion I walked with friends, went to a lot of concerts with friends, but mostly when I walked in Portland, and when I went to movies in Portland, I was by myself, never getting lost in the city, but often getting lost in my thoughts, enjoying my anonymity.
3. This evening, I listened to most of an hour long episode of the podcast Soldiers of Cinema, hosted by two film professionals, Clark Coffey and Cullen McFater. That they were both enthusiastic about the movie made listening to their discussion enjoyable - to be honest, had they been negative or nit picky about the movie, I wouldn't have spent time listening to them.
I'd read several reviews of the movie before tuning into this podcast. Each of the reviews, in one way or another, referred to Drugstore Cowboy as having many passages of dark comedy. As I watched the movie, I was much more caught up in the desperate lives the movie's drug addicts lived and didn't really step back from that to appreciate the darkly comic absurdity of much of what we see these characters do and what they say. Clark Coffey and Cullen McFater honed in on the comic/absurdist nature of scene after scene and then I got it!
As I listened to them discuss what made them laugh in Drugstore Cowboy, I too laughed, a little embarrassed that I hadn't laughed while viewing the movie, but happy that I could experience the movie as the blending of looking at the dangers and corrosion of drug addiction and laugh at the absurdities of almost slapstick things that happen. Upon reflection, I thought of moments in Pulp Fiction when I laughed out loud at scenes that were gruesome because these scenes portrayed horror and absurdity as happening simultaneously.
I thought, too, as I listened to this podcast, about how more responsive I was to dark comedy when I was younger -- it's been thirty years since Pulp Fiction first appeared in theaters. I was just turning forty years old. In the thirty years that have passed since then, for better or worse, I've become more serious. When I see these scenes of dark comedy pop up in movies or when I read them in books, the frightening, unsettling elements of these moments strike me much harder and tend to inform my response to them, whereas I used to respond much more immediately to the humor embedded in them.
So, yeah, I enjoyed how these two podcasters took me back to a younger version of myself and freed me up a bit to laugh at things that happened in Drugstore Cowboy that were simultaneously chilling and, by being so incongruous, also very funny.
No comments:
Post a Comment