08.27.25: Saw the MDS today and made what felt like our 300th plan to improve sleep. We’ll see how it goes. 08.21.25: It’s been almost two weeks since my last check-in, so I’m popping in to say I’m fine and so are Crankenstein and Muriel. A Parkinson’s volunteer project has kept me busy this month […]

This is going to be even messier than usual and probably won’t be worth reading until tomorrow. Alongside Motown, the Beach Boys, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant and chocolate milk, detective novels were one of my earliest and most enduring loves.* I read the usual suspects as a child: Nancy Drew, The Boxcar Children, musty old

The last couple days have been brutal on the sleep and dystonia fronts, which delayed (and then canceled) last night’s musings. I’ll post it here instead, with a bit more meat on its bones, but this won’t be edited until tomorrow. “Faith Healers and Blue Heelers,” a very silly post I worked on this afternoon,

One of the better celebrity coming-outs I’ve read in recent memory was published today on the official website of a-ha, everyone’s favorite Norwegian synth-pop act of the 1980s. Alas, there’s no disco ball glittering from the ceiling of the closet from which the band’s enduringly handsome frontman has cautiously emerged, because Morten Harket isn’t gay.

We’re two days into June and Pride Month has already been hijacked by utter nonsense, from the furor over the timing of an ‘intimate’ JoJo Siwa photo to batshit insanity over the death of Jonathan Joss, who voiced John Redcorn on King of the Hill. Before ranting about any of this I’d like to note

Obligatory ‘unedited!’ reminder, just in case nothing makes sense. I wasn’t sure whether to shriek or cry when the substitute MDS gently closed the door behind herself this afternoon and I caught a glimpse of myself in its full-length mirror under harsh hospital lighting. Sitting on the exam table, waiting for her to return with

Quick 05.24.25 update: I’m going to bed early tonight after a long day of fighting the urge to nap, but wanted to update this first and say that so far I haven’t had much pain despite the dentist’s warning (even when skipping OTC pain relievers). So far my only concern is how the ends of

The power’s been restored and Crankenstein’s back home, rattled and relieved in (almost) equal measure. We’d planned to celebrate a special occasion this weekend and some of those festivities have been postponed, but there’s cake and she’s chosen The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug for tonight’s viewing. Though we seem to watch it annually, I’m

Five paragraphs, most of them satisfactory. That’s what I saved before lunch today as a draft for a post I planned to finish tonight. After I’d eaten, while Muriel slept, I dragged the empty wire shelves from the office closet and fumbled with the cruel plastic packaging of a $3 pack of dowel pins. One

Last night was the same as every other miserable night since a rendezvous with ZzzQuil in early April: I slept for 2.5 hours, then got up with Muriel and dozed again for about as long. Five hours of fragmented sleep kept me awake enough to join Crankenstein on a shopping excursion to replace her desk