Vikar's Rant

“About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.”
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Why is there so much controversy about drug testing? I know plenty of guys who would be willing to test any drug they could come up with”
- George Carlin

Before I get started, I need someone to explain something to me: What is it that makes old people select the express line in a supermarket and then pay with a check?

I’m trying to figure out the logic that goes through these models of geriatric contradictions. Here they are ambling around the market as one of “God’s little speed bumps”, forcing people to slow down and figure a way past these random obstacles, when they decide that they found all of the Preparation H they’ll use for the week with all of the Geritol that they can swallow. At that point they start their “Day of the Nearly Dead” migration toward the cash registers. As they look up through their milky cataract eyes, they see the sign that I’ve been frantically racing toward – “Express, 15 items or less”.

And they get there before I do because they have to be two feet away from the sign to read it.

Somewhere in the back of their minds they remember what the term “express” means, as well as the number 15. They do a basic inventory of what’s in their walker/cart: 6 tubes of Preparation H, Geritol, Ex-Lax, Viagra, cane polish, denture glue, and a gallon of prune juice. That’s under 15 items.

However, I think the full meaning of express has eluded them. “Express” to me means to move quickly. We get on an express train. We travel in the left side express lane. We use American Express.

There is a concept of “speed” involved with the term “express”. When I go to the express lane I’m prepared. Normally I do my food shopping at Wegman’s because 1) I like the produce there and 2) the customer service is excellent. It’s a tad on the pricey side, but you get what you pay for. Which brings me back to the express lane cashier and speed. When I buy my groceries, which usually are made of potato chips, lox, bagels, coffee, cream cheese, fresh dill, yogurt, sorbet and Tabasco sauce. I usually pay with my Amex card because if the price is under $50, I don’t have to sign for it. I’ll have my items lined up in their divider. When the cashier takes them, all I have to do is swipe with my Wegman’s Price Card and my Amex Card.

Heck, I even help the guy bag so I can get out of there.

Grandpa, in front of me, insists on 1) handing the items directly to the cashier, instead of putting them on the conveyor belt, 2) argues price, 3) brings coupons, 4) hunts for his reading glasses and pen, and 5) pays with a check. He feels that the machine is wrong this time and wants the cashier to scan his items again. The cashier, bound by the standards of the company’s excellence, obliges Grandpa. After all, he’s got nowhere to go.

I, on the other hand, do.

As he’s doing this show, I watch my blood pressure go up a point when my sorbet starts to melt on the conveyor belt. The sorbet juice is mixing with my fresh dill. And we all know that there’s nothing better than bagels, cream cheese, lox, and sorbet flavored dill.

They tell me that “Soylent Green” is a horror movie. I look at it as a documentary full of realistic options. I’ll even eat some… with fresh dill.

You see where I’m going with this. Some people just have to go places. Some people just need to go.

Okay, so maybe, I’m in a bit of “a mood”.

Maybe I’m just a bit cranky. I get like this when I’m out of work. I know. My wife tells me frequently. She’s used the term “bit of a bear” when she wants to be kind and sensitive. When she doesn’t, she just calls me “a full blown asshole who desperately needs to be punched out”. When I’m at work, the laws of professionalism keep me from getting like this openly. I need to be nice for eight hours. From 8:30 AM to 5:PM, I am a human being. My Vikar side is sleeping and I let him sleep. There are very few places in the corporate world where my Vikar side is an asset. I’m not saying that he can’t be useful at times. It’s just not pretty when he visits.

When I was doing QA bug meetings at my old company and service level agreement reviews, my Vikar side came out often. In those cases, people needed a six pack of whoopass, and Vikar was there to shake up the cans.

At 5:01 PM, provided that I’m out of the office, my Vikar side starts to rub his eyes and stretch his arms. He also doesn’t subscribe to the rules of “God’s little speed bumps” on the way to the subway or PATH trains. He’s missed too many buses and trains for that. He has one objective – to get home. He doesn’t want to wait in the baking hot sun for another bus and he doesn’t want to wait on a subway platform and sweat with people who make curry another food group.

So Vikar has been out more since I became a “man of leisure”. However, Vikar is not the topic of this rant. He is a bit of spice to this essay. What I want to talk about is a bit more philosophical. I want to talk about an astrological phenomenon called “Mercury in Retrograde”.

What is “Mercury in Retrograde” you ask? Well, to people who follow their astrology, it’s a time that happens approximately 4 times in a year. It usually stays with us for about three weeks. It’s those three weeks that make people a little edgy.

Here’s why.

According to people who follow astrology, the planet Mercury is responsible for communication. It’s very much like his mythological counterpart. Mercury was messenger to the gods. If Zeus had a message for some hapless mortal or some other god, he’d send Mercury to run quickly to the distant party with a message. He was the mythological answer to cell phones. I’m certain that the founders of “Sprint” telecommunications, and especially FTD, who uses Mercury as their logo, were inspired by this.

When Mercury is “in full”, it means that communications come easily. Things happen quickly. Plans go well. Speed is on your side.

When Mercury is “in retrograde” it’s the opposite. The absence of Mercury means that plans go awry. The universe has gone haywire. Things backfire. People argue more because there are more misunderstandings. Plans get delayed or move backward. In general, it’s a time of bad luck.

Now I know what you’re saying. “Oh, it’s just superstition. Vikar, you’re just being a bit paranoid. It’s astrology – it’s pseudo science.”

Sure it is.

Just remember, there are people who believe that if you eat meat on a Friday during Lent, you’ll go to Hell. Plus, if you miss a weekly mass, it’s a moral sin. So, pick your battles. I really don’t believe in astrology. While I have every mark of a true Aquarian, I don’t really subscribe that it was the stars that make me that way. That being said, let me say that I still fear Mercury in retrograde.

The budget for a contract I was on fell through when it went retrograde in 2007.

This year Mercury went retrograde from December 6 2009 to January 15 2010, then from April 17, this year to May 12^th . It was during that second cycle when there were layoffs at my last job. This last cycle, that we’re currently in, is from August 20^th to September 12^th.

Let me tell you what started happening on August 20^th, I got an ear infection. It was so bad that I had to leave work early. It wasn’t just a small bit of swelling. By that evening, it was getting very uncomfortable, and by 2:AM, I was at the ER because the pain could not be ignored.

So, let’s review. Mercury in retrograde essentially means trouble with communications and plans. I could not hear. Which means that people were having problems communicating to me. My own body had problems with its sensory nervous system because fluid collected within my ear and kept the ear drum from working with the anvil in my inner ear. My inner ear wasn’t working properly and made me susceptible to dizzy spells.

The other bit of bad communication was between myself and the attending physician. I told them that I was in severe pain. Severe pain to me means that I need it to stop… now. Severe pain to the attending meant, let’s give him Tylenol with codine – it also meant that he should only take it every four hours.

For those of you who have never taken Tylenol. In the world of pain relievers Tylenol is the 90 lb. weakling who gets sand kicked in his face at the beach. In my case, the guy kicking the sand was one of the more steroid infused wrestlers of the World Wrestling Federation. The Tylenol with codine given to me was just enough to make the two Percocet that I took earlier that evening work. It was not enough to keep me from screaming in pain the next morning.

I’m not being fair. I had an ear infection mixed with a migraine the next day. This is proof that Hell exists. By Sunday, I decided that the attending had no idea what she was talking about and took the Percocet instead. The pain went away.

Also, I knew when the pain medication was about to wear off. Whenever the pain would start again, it felt like there was a small squirrel monkey stabbing the inside of my ear with a tiny spear… just jabbing me – because that’s what small squirrel monkeys with spears do.

When I went to the ENT specialist (Ear, Nose, & Throat doctor – not a Tolkien tree doctor) on Monday, he looked at me and saw that I was in agony and prescribed – yup, Percocet. Know how Percocet works? It interferes with the pain receptors and blocks nerve communications. It’s Mercury in retrograde in action.

In the middle of all of this, I’m trying to interview for a new job.

The recruiter for the first job interview thought it would be a good fit. He wanted me to take off on Thursday so I could travel from my home, in Freehold, to King of Prussia, PA. That was a 70 mile trip – one way. While the thought of doing a 140 mile round trip commute – daily – was just nightmarish, the thought of not having a job was even worse. So, I gambled and took off one of my few working days left. I’d already taken off Monday for my ear. I took off Thursday for an interview. Total income lost for two days off: $800 gross.

Some communications work quickly. I found out that night that I didn’t get the job. One could only reason that having the interviewer repeat the question several times might have had something to do with it.

I wasn’t that worried. Actually, I was a little relieved. I wouldn’t have to waste three hours of my day driving a car. I also had a telephone interview the next day. This one was in New York, which while not ideal, was more commutable.

Poor communications.

The interview was done over my cellphone at 5:PM. The interviewer spoke through a speakerphone. Combined with my bad hearing, I may as well have done the interview under water. Bad reception, through a bad medium, to a guy who can’t hear. Through some miracle, I got a second interview.

When my recruiter called me, she wanted me to do the interview on Monday. It was the same day that I was going to see the ENT for my follow up. While I couldn’t hear anymore from my right ear, I didn’t have any more pain. The antibiotics got the swelling down but the fluid still has to be sucked out of my ear. I gambled that I could go to the interview in New York and then go to work right after – instead of going to the doctor. What would you do? As of today’s writing, I still can’t hear from my right ear.

I went to the interview. I’m not sure if it went well because, I still had to have the interviewer repeat things. I can never tell if they go well or not. As this Tuesday was my last day of work, I decided to work the full day despite losing $250 in gross pay on Monday. Total lost in gross dollars to interviews and sickness: $1,050.

I went to work on Tuesday. I said my goodbyes, had a few drinks (non alcohol because I was on pain meds), and went home. I decided that I was not going to go on a full blown job hunt this week because it was just in time for the Labor Day holiday and most of the people I’d need to speak to would not be at work. Once again, communication problems.

I did decide to do a little bit of work on Wednesday. While I did some in the morning, a loose connection to my cable modem knocked out my access to the internet. I reconnected everything to troubleshoot the router problems I was having and got everything working that night. That meant I lost a day of job hunting and emailing that day. I could have gone to the library but at that point, I just lost all desire to try until after the holiday. The good news is that while I wasn’t working, LinkedIn and Facebook were. My cousin said that she’d pass my resume to some contacts at Credit Suisse and two of my contacts from my last job forwarded some recruiting options. All was not lost.

So I started to compose this rant in my head instead.

The entire point to this rant is not to have you lose hope in the universe or me whining about the bad luck that seems to descend on me every so often for no reason. What I want to say is that bad stuff happens. Sometimes it happens in extraordinary and copious amounts. However, there’s really nothing you can do about it.

I don’t subscribe to the Christian view that “the Lord doesn’t give you any more than you can handle”. I believe insane asylums across the world are filled to the brim with people who got more than they could handle from the universe. I know some of them. On days when their meds are just right, they can be quite lucid.

I do believe in this, though. You can’t give up. As much as it sucks, there is no real place where you can retreat and say, I’m not going to try any more. I don’t believe that taking yourself out of the game is a real option.

It’s the way the universe works.

Try as we might to either make it go faster or more efficiently, we can’t rush it. The universe has its own set of Preparation H tubes and Geritol bottles that it has to run through its own cosmic scanner and we just need to wait for it to process things before its ready for us. And there’s no amount of planning or preparation we can do to make it come any faster than it will.  When it happens it will happen without any kind of preamble and without any kind of announcement.

And you might have to eat it with sorbet juice, too.

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”
- Douglas Adams

“Is it too much to ask for (fill in the blank)?”  I find myself asking this question more and more lately. 

Before I go on, I would like you to understand that, in many respects, I consider my life blessed.  I have a beautiful wife, a large piece of property, a pool that I can swim in, a roof over my head, and eight pets that provide no end of amusement.  I also have many friends that are somewhat concerned over my welfare and two living parents that provide their own unique brand of “silver lining” manufacture.

That being said I want to turn the clock back to the beginning of the summer.  My wife and I decided to celebrate our good fortune by having a barbeque with some close friends.  With many thanks to my next door neighbors for lending us some extra chairs, tables, and other party stuff – as well as helping us set up and tear down, things went well.  The only real shadow that lingered over the event was the still recent loss of our friend Trooper Marc K. Castellano.  A police officer, friend, and family man whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I will not go on about this as the story was well documented in the local papers and his presence is still sorely missed among all of us here.

Otherwise all in attendance had a great time and my wife and I finally put our first major bash in this house behind us.  We settled down and started to make very detailed plans on how we could accomplish absolutely nothing for the remainder of the summer.

However, that was not to be.  I, being God’s favorite cat toy, was way overdue for my regular share of strife and aggravation.  It was as if some silent alarm had been triggered.  Somewhere in the eternal cosmos, the great Creator saw that my life was too far in the green and because me being happy would cause, through chaos theory and causality, galactic empires to crumble and otherworldly planetary strife. 

Ergo, the scales needed to be balanced. 

Somehow the existence of proper serotonin levels in my body is bad for the universe.  And while I, as an individual, find the correction of this to be terribly inconvenient, I tell myself that it is for the greater good and that as a lowly mortal I can not possibly be privy to the workings which make the grand scheme of things.  After all, who am I to spit in the face of science?

After I ask that question, I usually have to swallow a pent up loogie.

In the beginning of July, I had just acclimated myself to the daily nonsense that comes with any project manager’s job.  I had become adept at seeing the oncoming screw-ups of the current corporate machine I work for.  As a side effect, I was able to correct them from a distance.  I saw pieces that were reliably unreliable.  Knowing the strengths of the components of a project is half the battle.  Knowing the weaknesses and how to turn those into advantages is the other half.  So, while my life and job were stressful, it was nothing I couldn’t handle. 

What’s more, a holiday weekend was coming up, my complex plans for doing nothing had gone well and were right on track.  I still had beer left over from the party and the pool was nicely heated from an abnormally hot sun beating down on the water for more than a week.  My grill was primed and ready to go.  All I had to do was get through Friday.

I came home and saw my wife in “discomfort”.  I’m using the word “discomfort” because I like using the pain scale that doctors use.  When a doctor uses the term “pressure”, it means discomfort.  When he uses the term “discomfort”, it means pain.  When doctors use the word “pain”, prepare to scream.

My wife, being Irish, does not like to show pain.  It really is an Irish thing.  I have another Irish friend who doesn’t like taking Advil until he’s in a sufficient amount of “pain”.  Right now, he’s looking to have both of his knees replaced in the near future.  I’m not like that.  My Irish side is balanced by my Italian side.  Italians believe that there are perfectly good pain relievers out there that should and will be used in the case of “pressure”.

I buy ibuprofen by the case.  I even stock some at work.

My wife was dressed in her sweatpants while standing in the living room.  Her hands were gripping the side of the couch as if she was trying to figure out the atomic density of the wood frame beneath the fabric and fluff by touch. Her face is red and screwed up in pain. 

“What’s wrong?”
“I shouldn’t have had that eggplant for lunch today,” she said as if this would naturally explain everything.
“Why don’t you lie down?”
“I can’t get comfortable.  Every time I sit down, I can’t get into a good position.”
“So, standing is better?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”
“NO!” she screamed.  It was as if I asked her to eat one of her kittens.
“Have you taken anything?”
“I took a Prilosec.  It worked last time this happened.”
“What do you mean, ‘last time this happened’?  This has happened before?”
“Yes, a few days ago.”

I had a supervisor in my last position that could actually watch my anger build like a barometer despite my not showing any kind of facial expression at all.  Were he there at that moment he’d swear I was having a stroke.

I need to back up a little here.  There are two key factors you are not aware of.

The first factor was that my wife, like her mother before her, has a thing against modern medicine.  Her mother managed to avoid going to the doctor for… wait for it… 40 YEARS.  When they did examine her they found thyroid issues and cancer.  She’s dead now.  Ironically, her father will go to the doctor for almost any reason and that bastard is still living… like a cockroach.  My wife’s reasoning is that she doesn’t trust western medicine.  So rather than go to a practicing doctor, she’ll trust her life to a man with bones and rattles.

The second factor in play is that my wife and I just switched health insurance carriers.  We switched carriers at the end of June to begin at the beginning of July.  When conservatives bitch and moan about the health carriers and this country’s reluctance to have universal healthcare, tell them that paying $900 a month for two people to have insurance and not use it regularly is like buying a large flat screen TV every month and, after not watching it once, smashing it with a sledgehammer. 

This was one of those cases that I didn’t know how the insurance was going to handle an emergency visit.  Nevertheless, I’d sell my eyeteeth to be sure that my wife would get proper care.

I told her to sit down and wait it out.  Eventually, the pain began to subside and she started to rest.  I told her to make an appointment with a doctor on the plan and see him tomorrow.  And while she argued about seeing a “non bone rattler”, she could not fight the painful experience she just had.

That night she lay in bed and moaned.  Then she sat up in bed and moaned.  After vomiting five times she asked me to take her to the hospital.  It was 3:AM.

I put on my shorts, a T-shirt, and slipped on my flip flops.  She had her new insurance card with her and I headed  to the local hospital for an emergency visit.  As she waited for the attending doctor to get to her, the nurse gave her a “banana bag” of saline to keep her from dehydrating.  That’s when the pain stopped.  The doctor thought that it was a kidney stone or a gallstone.  However, as there was no blood in her urine, the doctor couldn’t get a definitive answer.

We left the hospital after doing nothing.  My wife, who considers herself a doctor when she can get to WebMD, diagnosed herself with a kidney stone.  I’m always under the philosophy that “the doctor who does his own diagnosis has a fool for a patient.”  In actuality, she has gallstones.  She does not want surgery.  Instead, she believes that if she changes her diet radically she can avoid it.  This means the entirety of the food that she’s now allowed to eat, being that she’s already a vegan, comes down to cool mountain water and fresh dryer lint.

So now I’m a nervous wreck.  I can’t sleep well because I worry that she’ll have another attack.  She thinks that I’m overreacting. 

Fast forward to a week ago. 

She’s controlled her diet and is still attack free.  I’m not sleeping anymore.  What’s more, just before going to bed, I spot what appears to be a white breast-like protrusion coming from the ceiling of one of the upstairs bathrooms.  I can tell that it’s full of some kind of liquid.  I went downstairs and grabbed a small pair of scissors.  Then I climbed on top of the sink with a plastic bucket and punctured the sack.

Water spilled into the bucket from the ceiling.  I went upstairs to the attic and saw that the pan under the central air conditioner’s condenser was full.  I grabbed a sponge and another bucket and started to empty the pan.  As it was about 90 degrees outside that night, I didn’t shut down the AC.  I filled a 40 lbs. kitty litter bucket and dumped it into the bathroom toilet.  At that point I thought, “Swell, that goes on my task list.  Call AC people to check the unit in the attic and call a contractor to replace the drywall and paint over it.”

We go to bed that night.  After I finally stopped tossing and turning I fell asleep.  My nose wasn’t asleep, however.  My nose wanted to know what that very toxic smell was.  If it had been a conversation, my nose would have said to my brain, “Hey. Hey. HEY!!!  I SMELL TOXIC!!!!  WAKE UP!!!  WAKE THE F%$# UP!!!!” 

My brain who had just found that sweet spot in the mattress where it was just cool enough to produce the perfect REM cycle said, “Nonononononono.  I don’t want to get up.  Can’t this wait?”

I woke up and sniffed deeply.  Yup, definitely toxic.  It was 2:30 in the morning.  I went outside the bedroom and went into the hall.  The smell was much stronger.  I turned on the light to the bathroom.  There, in the light socket by the sink, was a smoldering Glade night light.  I removed the light and tossed it into the sink.  From inside the socket, I heard crackling and buzzing.

Oh no.

I called to my wife and said, “I’m not entirely sure what to do at this point.”
“Idiot, call the fire department.  Dial 9-1-1.”

Before I grabbed the phone, I went to the other side of the bathroom wall and it felt warm.  There was definitely something wrong.

I called 9-1-1 and spoke to the operator.  I told him what the problem was.

“Do you see fire?”
As if on queue, fire shot out of the outlet.  “I see fire.”
“Get out of the house.”

Now was when the comedy started as 1) I discovered I was having some trouble breathing and had no water in my mouth and 2) we had to evacuate the animals.  I grabbed the bird and put him on the stairs outside the back.  My wife grabbed the cats and was trying to get them into the carrier. 

I screamed, “Get the dogs out of the house!”
She screamed several things that I wound up not doing anyway.  I knew the order of what to do and I knew that she had to get the dogs.  I called my next door neighbor quickly and told him that we needed help getting the animals out of the house.  He came over and found another of the cats.

It occurred to me that since the fire was in the main house, it was not in the separated garage.  I took the dogs and put them in.  Then I took the cats and started to throw them into the guest apartment over the garage.  By the time the fire department got there all the cats were accounted for except one.  Later, after they asked me to come back in and get to the fuse box.  I found him.

The fire department smashed through the bathroom wall and made sure that the fire didn’t spread.  However, we discovered why.  The wall, which had newspaper for insulation, was saturated with water from the air conditioner. 

In actuality the entire event was a perfect storm of failures that I somehow survived.  The pipes that drain the water from the pan were apparently blocked by a wasp’s nest and didn’t allow drainage.  The water pan under the condenser filled up and its sensor did not stop the AC.  The water trickled down the wall and shorted the ground fault interrupter (GFI for you electricians), which failed to shut down the power.  And most seriously, the smoke detector through all of this never went off despite the electrical smoke.

On top of all of this, the township police were as charming as a whistling piece of snot.  They did nothing except make us angry and keep anyone from finding our unaccounted for cat.  While the fire chief had vouched that these two specific officers were decorated and were good police officers, I could not ignore my own senses that told me they were belligerent and that if the chief’s story was true, getting a commendation from my town is truly a low bar to pass.

The only consolation we had at the time was when my wife said aloud, “Marc would never have acted like that to anyone.”  After which I explained to the fire chief how our only real experience of police conduct came from our late friend, Marc Castellano.  I found that even after his passing, Marc’s name still meant something to the fire chief.

After everything was declared safe, my wife and I settled into our guest apartment over the garage with the animals.  I decided not to go to work the next day.

I called the insurance company and made a claim.  Normally, I don’t like to drop specific names in my rants but I would like to commend Liberty Mutual for its service and efficiency.  That evening they had a clean up service visit us and the adjuster came on Saturday.  It was quite painless – other than spending about a week in a cramped apartment with every animal I own.

I should rephrase that.  I found it painless.  My wife had to live with me in close quarters.  She had to endure me.  I can say with all honesty that I’m a man best taken in doses.  I have no illusions of anything else.  I can be one of the world’s most annoying people when I try.  Of course, it didn’t help matters that I kept telling my wife how I “saved her life with my nose.”

“Hey do you know how I did that?”
“How?”
“With my nose.  I have a superpower now.”
“Are you going to continue this forever?”
“Only until it stops being fun.”

The cleaning people set up fumigators within the house that ran uninterrupted for 4 days.  By the time they were finished, the house smelled like a swimming pool.  No exaggeration – a swimming pool.

But now comes the real fun.  It’s funny how people take a lot of things for granted.  For example, the innards of their own walls.  The adjuster suggested that we call an electrician and he came while I was at work the following week.  My wife was his primary contact that day.  He called her three times when looking at the electrical work.

“Who did this installation – a drunken monkey?”
“What do you mean,” my wife asked.
“I need to take some more of the drywall down.  But the wires, they’re just kind of hanging. None of this was inspected and none of this is up to code.”
“That’s not good.  Go ahead.”

The second time he called he said that he needed to rewire the entire thing.  It seems the electrical work was done piecemeal.  He wanted it to be safe.  We agreed.

The third call wasn’t any better.

“I hate to tell you this, but the wall really needs to be reframed.”
“Reframed? Why do you say that?”
“Well, the beams in the wall, they just sort of… end.  They’re not attached to anything.  Whoever put in the medicine cabinet must have done it with a chainsaw.”
“A chainsaw?”
“You really have to see it to believe it.”
“We believe it.”
“Before I do anything, a contractor has to reframe the wall.  When he does, I’ll do the electrical before he seals it off with new drywall.  And maybe he should use insulation, instead of the newspaper we found from 1973.”
“1973?”
“That’s what it says.  There’s a nice ad for an 8 track stereo.  Are you interested?”

So that’s what I’ve got going for me right now.  The very last installation is that I just found out on Friday that it is very likely that my contract with my current employer will end at the end of August.  One month short of the minimum time promised.  For the next month, I will be engaged in a frantic job hunt because, if knowledge serves me correctly, I need six months of employment to qualify for unemployment aid and this will end at five.  My stress levels are now high into the red zone now because all I can think of is that I own a house with precarious electricity, I love a wife who now has shakey health, and I have nothing to look forward to except financial uncertainty and death.

With all that in play, I can say is that somewhere, somehow, deep in the heart of a galaxy far, far away, a cosmic balance has been met.  Little green children play on alien streets while flying saucers buzz over their heads somehow knowing that all is now right within the universe.  They know that everything is going to be just fine because somewhere an imbalance was quickly corrected.  The green sun is shining in a purple sky and the mammalian equivalent of a bird flies into the air chirping a song that will never be heard on this planet. 

Things are even to my eternal regret.  I wish they weren’t.

Is that so much to ask?