Spring Cleaning Sunday

I made some progress on my work assignment on Saturday, enough to sleep well on Saturday night.  This week is the home stretch, and I can see the finish line finally.

Today, we spent the day getting the house in order for my sister’s visit this weekend. For some reason, my wife always wants the house to be guest-friendly, which means basically perfect in every way, as if my sister was meeting her for the first time.

Of course, I’ve known my sister for more than sixty years and we have no pretenses left. We are both cheerful slobs in many respects, which is not to say that we visit each other’s houses and make messes. We’re just comfortable being ourselves when family comes around.

Not so much for my wife, who has known my sister for over forty years.  She views a clean house as a sign of respect for visitors, which includes my family, in and out of town.  So we did some spot painting and rug cleaning and dusting to approximate a utopian ideal of a guest room.

I took the opportunity to also straighten out our various utensil drawers, which include vast collections of spatulas, cheesecloth, graters, and, weirdly, chopsticks.  Like my closet, these drawers would benefit from aggressive editing, but every implement I review has enough utility to merit its place in the crowded drawer.  I just have to remember that I have a herb chopper, a garlic press, a ricer (the best thing in the world for silky mashed potatoes), and a zester when I am cooking.

If I was a better cook, I’d reduce it all down to a chef’s knife, a paring knife, a fish spatula, a Microplane grater, some tongs, an electronic scale, and a probe thermometer.  

But when you go to Sur La Table or Williams Sonoma, you find yourself needing pie weights and a strawberry trimmer for that lattice-crust pie you’ve been wanting to make ever since seeing it in the New York Times cooking app.  So you get them, forgetting that a pound of uncooked pinto beans are just as good as the ceramic beads you just bought, and that your paring knife, spinning the strawberry on the edge of the blade, is just as good as the charming red plastic device gripping the leaves and core of the fruit with the same motion as the claw machines in an arcade (and with about the same rate of success).

And once bought, you keep them, even as you are trimming and cleaning berries with your paring knife.  There has to be some kind of parallel to my approach to personal relationships here, but that’s a discussion for another day.  Suffice to say, I am always inclined to hope for the best, in kitchen implements and in relationships, until either of them become so useless or toxic that I have to let them go, which explains my vast archive of spatulas and my long list of holiday granola recipients.

Speaking of cooking, I made my third batch of pesto from the basil plant in my backyard, a record return on investment due to my unusual level of care and attention this year.  I have been aggressively and strategically pruning the basil plant, just above a node of leaves, prompting the plant to get bushier and more productive.  Same for my rosemary and my sage, which are doing great.

On the other hand, my tomato plants keep teasing me, lots of yellow flowers, each a precursor to a fruit, none of which are actually getting there yet.  I’ve caged them, water and feed them regularly, and check on them for bugs and blight every morning, but nothing yet.  I’m kind of hoping that they will fruit all at once, an explosion of red blobs, as organic and fresh as a tomato can possibly be.

I aspire to what my friend Steve has in his backyard.  I visited him last year, and he had six or seven plants all fruiting.  He casually reached down and snapped off two or three cherry tomatoes, no big deal, and gave me a couple, letting me taste the fresh acidity exploding in my mouth all at once.  That’s what I want this year in my back yard.

Until then, pesto abounds.

This week, poker on Tuesday, my sister visits on Thursday for the weekend, and I have a tour of the Rothko Chapel on Friday.  Plus I finish my pending matter and start something new.

The watchword is focus.

Where Have I Been Friday

This is the longest break I’ve taken in this project so far.  

It was not for lack of material: I played a pretty good game of poker on Tuesday, worked out every day this week and walked one morning, even as I am still recovering from my recent illness.  I even found out that my trainer’s wife is related to Mary Todd Lincoln.

I also celebrated my wife’s birthday today by making a dolce de leche cake from a recipe by the owner of the Momofuku Milk Bar, Christina Tosi.  I also made ravioli lasagna, cucumber salad and focaccia, all of which were very successful.

The whole family attended the birthday dinner, including the bubby, who was in high spirits.  He is now actively imitating us and trying real hard to speak, not quite there yet, however.

I guess I’m slowing down a little because I am worrying in tbe back of my head about my professional obligations, and spending time writing in this blog seems like an indulgence until I finish what I need to finish.

I plan to spend most of tomorrow on that matter, mostly for my own mental stability.  I read somewhere that the way to overcome anxiety is to directly confront your fears.  I almost never do that, however, preferring to tamp down my trepidation until I can’t.

But I’m hitting that point now, so tomorrow is a work day.

I will report back on whether I actually do it tomorrow or if I find another reason not to.

Sigh…

Catching Up Monday

It was a nice Mother’s Day on Sunday.  For the first time (well, technically the second time, but last year the bubby was barely seven months old, so it didn’t feel like a true holiday for my daughter because the bubby was still so new), we had a three-generation event with my mother, my wife and my daughter all celebrating their day.

We went to Killen’s Steakhouse, which is ordinarily closed on Sundays but …Mother’s Day, and how can you not be open?  The bubby was in good spirits, pointing and babbling and walking and eating and throwing stuff, but not crying or being difficult.  We played peek-a-boo and cover your head with a napkin and surprise-face and he genuinely laughed out loud and then pounded the table with both hands like a boss.

I love that kid.

These family events are about shared history.  My mother tells stories about my childhood, and my wife and I tell stories about our children, and in telling the stories, we reaffirm our links to each other.

The flip side to this is about the people not at the table.  When I was in fifth grade, around 1973, my family moved from upstate New York to Texas.  Until then, we gathered at one family event or another for the holidays - my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, all of my cousins - and we made memories.  

While the adults sat around the kitchen table sipping coffee or beers, the cousins would gather outside and act like the idiots we were, playing football or throwing snowballs or wandering around the small towns we visited, entirely safe in our recklessness.  We all played our roles - I was the skinny nerd, my sister was pretty and athletic, my cousin Doug was stocky and reasonable, my cousin MaryAnne was fun and spunky and her brother Frankie was annoying and sarcastic.  We opened presents, gorged on sweet corn and freshly pressed apple cider.

And then we moved.  No more extended family events.  Just the five of us in Texas while things continued without us in upstate New York.  We were the ones not at the table.

Years later, after my father died, I reconnected with my aunts, who had missed us.  My aunt Vicki pulled out old photo albums and we looked at pictures from long ago.

“This is your seventh birthday party,” she said, pointing to me in a form-fitting turtleneck sweater and thick plastic glasses, a cheerfully punchable face leaning forward to blow out candles, surrounded by cousins.

We flipped ahead through the album, through Christmases and Easters and summer weekends and winter vacations, until we got to about 1973 when we were erased from the pictures, as if Marty McFly had gone back in time and broke up my parents before they could meet and eventually get married.

On Sunday, the person missing from the pictures was my father, who I miss every day, and who would have loved the bubby with the unqualified passion of a proud patriarch, surveying all of his progeny and finding it good.  Dad was the glue, the one person everyone loved and respected, and he would have made sure that my brother and sister and my nephew were there, either in person or in spirit.

At 62, I try to be the glue now, but it is harder than you think to be that guy.  We live our separate lives, my siblings and my children and my nephews, separated from each other by hundreds of miles in some cases, separated from each other by personalities and pride and ancient resentments in other cases.  We are not as willing to compromise for family harmony and have all become more inclined to be the center of our own stories rather than being parts of a larger family saga.

But we do what we can.  When the bubby grows up, he will look at these pictures and ask who’s that, and who’s that, and in telling him the stories, he will become part of the story himself, the story that continues on and on and on.

_____________________________

Today was a good gym day, pushing sleds and sprinting on the exercise bicycles and treadmills and stair climbers, then doing leg extensions and wall crouches and lateral shuffles and not much lifting.  My trainer seems to be taking it easy on me as a recovering invalid, easing me back into more stressful stuff.

Then it was a Mom day, replacing air filters in her townhouse and spreading mulch and dropping off cookies with the nice ladies at the tax office who had been so kind to her last week.  

It’s powerful stuff, giving cookies to public servants.  The clerk who had helped us was there and she was genuinely confused for a second as my mother handed her the box before realizing that it was a gift and she then just melted with gratitude.  Collecting taxes has got to be the ultimate thankless job.  I think it might have been the first time anyone had ever brought cookies to the tax office out of appreciation for a job well done.

Dinner tonight was leftovers - a mystery sandwich wrapped in foil in the outside refrigerator and a burrito with unknown contents.  The sandwich turned out to be chopped beef my son had brought home from his job, and the burrito was chicken and cheese, which reheated nicely.

My wife watched me eat these mystery entrees with a combination of disgust and fascination.  “I know you’re trying to be frugal and I’m not trying to be mean, but I could never do that,” she said.

I grunted and took another bite of the burrito.  Leftovers are free food, and I have an iron stomach.  I’ll probably be fine.

Tomorrow: more exercise and poker night!

Tepid Friday

Not much to report for today.  My health continues to improve,  I went to the HFSC board meeting, which was mostly perfunctory.  Some interesting briefings on the operations of the company, a couple of quick votes, and it was over in about ninety minutes.  Everyone who was there was very pleasant and collegial.

Then lunch at a Chinese restaurant (chicken lo mein, fried rice, egg roll, and wonton soup), me and a couple the only people in the place.  They were amusing to eavesdrop on - the guy was burly and tattooed and about my age, and the woman joining him for lunch was trying hard to be charming.  He told a story about trying to feed leftover “mash” he had obtained from a microbrewery to his pigs, but they passed on it.  

“Now the cows, they thought it was like candy. They couldn’t get enough of it,” he said between bites of sweet and sour chicken.

“Ha!” his lunch date responded.

I then went to an auto parts store and got my mother a shiny license plate frame with enameled daisies for her new Texas plates.  I had borrowed her car to attend the meeting downtown, so I returned it with a full tank of gas and some new bling.

She loved it.  I also got her a couple of decals for her back window, which she wanted to be able to spot her car in a crowded parking lot.  A bedazzled queen’s crown and a metallic American flag now make her car hard to miss.

The rest of the day was a reading day.  I plowed my way through a new biography of the Rolling Stones, which pretty much told me nothing I hadn’t read in the other biographies I’ve read about the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.  I am kind of amazed how much Keith Richards has rehabilitated his reputation after spending the Seventies in a fog of addiction and amorality.  He’s like everyone’s favorite burnout uncle now, albeit an uncle who co-wrote some of the best songs ever written.

I looked up from my book to see that the day had slipped away, and had some dinner (enchiladas) and watched some pro basketball with my wife.

My car is still in the shop.  I’m getting the seats reupholstered, and the battery replaced, and they are working on the front brakes.  When it’s all done, the repair bill will be about one-third the total value of the entire car, but still cheaper than buying a new one.

My wife does not agree with this logic.  She wants me to get a new car, but I am holding out for a little longer under the logic that (a) we may be on the cusp of self-driving electric cars with solid state batteries, and I don’t want to own a practically obsolete car; and (b) the next car will be the one I use to drive around the country and to travel with my grandson, so I want it to be the best for him.  I don’t want him telling my daughter, “Mom, I don’t wanna go with him.  Grandpa’s car smells bad and is old, just like him!”

At some point, however, the decision may be taken out of my hands.  I can see my wife having the old car towed away and sold for scrap, then having my son drive up with a new car, hand-selected by my family, forcing me to politely accept their largesse.

If that happens, that happens.  But until then, I will continue to putter along in my bucket of bolts.

Tomorrow: Saturday!  I’ll probably cook something and keep trying to get a little better.

Reaffirming Thursday

I tried to work out on Wednesday, but only made it about thirty minutes before I had to give it up.  Still too wiped.

I spent the rest of the day in a half-stupor, talking quietly because talking at normal volume took too much air and effort.  My son noticed, telling me that I was obviously out of it.

My wife is also working furiously on a case in our office, spending hours in front of her monitor, sweating out what she believes is a case of writer’s block.

I can relate, except that for me the block is usually not about putting words to paper - I can write about pretty much anything at any time, as this blog evidences - it’s about anxiety over the subject matter.  I freeze when it looks like I will not be able to find a way to solve a problem to my own satisfaction.

I remember having that problem in the early Nineties on a tough case against one of the DeGeurins where they had raised several appellate issues that I just could not solve.  I got two or three extensions and the next deadline was looming and I had nothing.  I mean nothing.  I would come home and obsess over the problem, sleep on it, go back to the office, stab at an argument or two, delete it all, and stare out the window, completely confounded.

And then, as the Greeks say: deus ex machina.  For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to how Greek playwrights would write themselves out of an impossible plot corner.  A god would lean down from the rafters and solve the human problem with the wave of a hand. It was a giant cop-out for the playwright and was kind of a lame outcome for the audience.

But sometimes it happens in real life.  As I despaired, I got a call from DeGeurin’s office that the appealing defendant had dropped dead.  As a result, he told me that they would be filing a motion to permanently abate the appeal (which is how appellate courts weirdly resolve an appeal - they don’t dismiss the case, they just abate it, I guess to leave open the option of reinstating the case if, like in The Princess Bride, the defendant turns out to be only “mostly dead.”)  I breathed a sigh of relief and shelved the case.

With thirty-plus years under my belt now, I don’t think I’d have had the same problem with that case today - I’d have found some kind of argument - but it’s still something you worry about.  Which is Reason # 328 for why I don’t need to be an active lawyer anymore.

Today, my mother and I almost had another example of that kind of thing, but we were rescued by a couple of true public servants.  

The problem was this: my mother wanted to register her car in Texas, having moved here from Arkansas.  For reasons not clear, Texas charges sales tax for new registrations but offsets the tax with whatever sales tax you paid in your home state.  So all we had to do is find my mother’s receipt for the taxes she paid in 2018, or else she would have to pay $900 to the State of Texas.

Despite our best efforts, we could not find the receipt.  We had a cancelled check made out to the Arkansas tax authority dated a week after she bought her car, and she had several receipts showing that she had re-registered the car, which they would not have done if she hadn’t paid the tax.  But no receipt.

The clerk at the county tax assessor’s office was really sympathetic, and how could she not be?  An 88-year-old lady and her aged son politely arguing (and really proving) that she was going to be paying double tax unnecessarily, but she said, not unreasonably, that they needed a receipt tying the payment to the particular car and we didn’t have that.

I grimaced and told my mother that it wasn’t the clerk’s fault, that the law just didn’t have room to bend, and I’d take it up with the State Comptroller to see if someone up there could grant a variance, but in the interim, we were going to have to pay the sales tax.  My mother looked like she was going to cry.

And then - deus ex machina!  A senior clerk, who had been watching the events unfold, leaned over and told the younger clerk that if my mother transferred ownership of her car to me (while keeping a co-ownership herself), there would be no sales tax, just a $10 transfer fee.

Oof.  We all looked at her, gobsmacked by what had just happened.  The younger clerk smiled, admiring the workaround, and started the paperwork.  I became co-owner of my mother’s car and she saved $900.

Having been a government employee for over thirty years, I always resented the cheap shots taken against public servants as lazy or entitled or dull.  In my experience, none of that is true (or at least no more true than in any other business endeavor): these people are caring human beings trying to do the right thing and serve the public.

I admired their imagination and moxie.  Those two clerks reaffirmed my faith in public service.

Tomorrow: a Board meeting and I get my car back from the shop. And hopefully, I make a little more progress on getting better.

Recovering Tuesday

Almost back to health.  The crunchiness in my lungs is mostly gone, my coughs are more productive, and the fatigue is slowly passing.

Which is a good thing because May has all of a sudden become a hairball month for me.  A work project that I had thought would be quick and easy has become much harder and time-intensive.  Fortunately, the short deadline on that project has been extended to the end of the month, giving me some needed breathing room.

I worked on it pretty much all day Monday in the way that one does when one’s internal procrastination clock is ringing and cannot be turned off.  I was feeling sick, fatigued, anxious and slightly terrified - but I figured out my path forward and got more time to execute it.

This is, of course, why I retired in the first place.  I hate, hate, hate working on things that are out of my control.  I hate, hate, hate being under professional stress.  At this point in my life, I just want jobs that have no stress (election clerk) or that only call for me to be smart (legal advice, not litigation).

With deadlines still out there for this project and the conflicts book, and other things pending decisions, I am beginning to seriously reconsider my business plan.  Putting, puttering around the house, exercising and reading seem to be plenty to do without taking on seriously time-consuming work, especially when I am feeling ill.

This may all change when I get back to feeling better, but I need to start setting new goals.

For example, my book.  My real book, which has been percolating in my mind now for about three years.  I have been struggling with the framework of the book and with the ending, but while lying in bed, listening to my lungs crackle, I had a moment of unfettered clarity … and solved both problems.  The book will now write itself if I can just commit to it.

This means I need a start date.  On that day, I will commit to no other responsibilities, no legal work, no public speaking, no other books.  Just a friendly five pages a day for six months, then see if I have something.

John Kennedy Toole did it with A Confederacy of Dunces.  Harper Lee did it with To Kill a Mockingbird.  Joseph Heller did it with Catch-22.  They wrote great first novels, books that had lived inside them, waiting to be unleashed and set free.

Will I write a great book?  I hope so.

Let’s say September 1.  Wind everything up by then and spend the next six months finding out if I am a real writer.  

This blog is about accountability - so hold me accountable.  You want to read my book, but you won’t be able to unless I write it!

Deal.

Endless Saturday

I did not sleep well.  

I was later to bed on Friday than I had hoped because of the damn Rockets, who played a late game against the Lakers and did not pull themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves in the first half.  My wife was at the game with one of her best friends, so I watched on the couch, eating mediocre pizza and dreading my last shift at the polls before giving up and going to bed at about 11:10.

In my weird congested state, I can’t seem to fully enter the Room of Sleep, the small chamber adjacent to my Waiting Room of Light Sleep, which is where you think you are not asleep while you are actually sleeping.  The walls of the Room of Sleep are covered in purple velvet, and the atmosphere is half-gravity and highly oxygenated so that you drift effortlessly, listening to a pleasing, somnolent hum.  It is the room you enter during a colonoscopy procedure while experiencing the best drug-induced sleep that you will never have in real life.

By contrast, the Waiting Room of Light Sleep is your bedroom.  And you turn and turn like trapped in a revolving door that once entered has no openings, just glass walls showing you the better places you cannot visit.

At 5:30, the revolving door deposited me where I started, my bed, and I got up to shower and prepare for the day ahead.

And what a day.

The best way I can describe it right now (at 12:43 a.m. on my sleepless Sunday morning) is to draw a comparison to my former posting.  In 38 hours spread out over four days of early voting in a municipal election, we processed about 800 voters and I had four hours of lunch and no manual labor.  On Saturday, I worked from 6:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. with a thirty minute lunch break, processing nearly 2000 voters and then spending an additional hour breaking down and completely storing the voting room into secure storage.

It was like going from handing out towels at a sleepy beach club to working the line at a Vegas buffet.  Like going from dropping your kid off at school to driving the neighborhood school bus.  Like playing a friendly home game of poker then finding yourself in Day One of the WSOP Main Event.

You get the picture.

It just started right away and never stopped.  I rotated every two hours to a different station and got to take lunch at 12:00, which is when I reloaded all of my waning meds and snarfed a couple of chicken salad croissants and some Fritos before returning to the crowd at 12:30 and not letting up again until the door closed at 7:00 p.m.

We had two supervisors at this location, both of whom were wonderful friendly people who had worked together at this precinct for twenty-plus years.  They were both addicted to the adrenaline of elections, problem-solving with ease and grace amidst the swirling chaos.  They were funny and charismatic and committed to the job and the highest examples of public service to practical democracy.  Donald Trump could accuse them of corruption and it would be so utterly implausible that a giant abyss of truth would open up underneath him and swallow him whole.

It also rang completely true when one of them said, “We get people trained and broken in just the way we like them and then they leave us for other precincts.”  Well, yeah.  Eventually, just like people decide that working for the bomb squad is what has been making their hands shake, and they open a yoga studio instead.

I haven’t decided yet whether I will go back and work with these two in future elections.  They said they liked me and my good humor, so they may ask me back.  But I kind of wish I could work with them in smaller measures.

It’s now 1:15.  I know I’m not in the WRoLS because I have not yet been diagnosed with sleepblogging, which is not to say that it is impossible, just mostly unlikely, because it would probably look like hdhdhrjrurjid ywgwhdjajiddj hJjeehwhaj whsgdhdjoeleo so no, not yet.

But no major plans tomorrow other than self-care and contemplation of things to come in May.  I hope I am well-rested, finally.

Dealing with It Friday

Man, whatever this thing in my lungs is has been kicking my butt all week.

My nights have been the worst.  I take two NyQuil tabs with the expectation that they will dry me up and put me down, but nope, these bright green OTC bubbles of gel, evoking memories of the Vapo-Rub my mother rubbed under my nose as a child, have become pretty much useless to me, a placebo that no longer works because I no longer believe.

Instead of the old NyQuil slide into temporary oblivion (and even when it works, it’s always too temporary, snapping you back into full consciousness five hours later, forcing you to decide whether to take a second dose that will knock you out into mid-morning), I now lay in bed listening with clinical exasperation to the crunchy rattle in my lungs, knowing that I can’t really ignore it for long because I am going to have to take a deep breath, and then hack the irritating mucus out of my lungs for a moment of relief.

My coughs have the rhythm of deep ocean swells - hack, hack, haaaaack, KAAACK, hak hak hak hak - and I know they are heard by my wife as she tries to sleep and I feel terrible about it and want to say to her, “It’s not my fault, I’m sorry, but please don’t resent me over something I cannot control!”

But I don’t say it because, with wifely grace, she is not visibly reacting to my expectorations.  She pretends that she is in deep deep sleep and she silently forgives me for my sad condition because that is the deal we struck with each other 36 years ago.

She only indulges in a single “told you so” moment when I tell her this morning that I will go to the urgent care place down the road for better drugs.  “That’s what I suggested yesterday,” she says quickly before disappearing into the bathroom, and she is right, of course.

I don’t know why I didn’t go yesterday other than that I was still deeply fatigued and hopeful that this malady was going to run its course.  I was also committed to taking my mother to her guitar lesson (I passed on it myself) and then to the tax assessor’s office to register her Arkansas car in Texas, so I imagine I was trying to preserve my strength.

(“Preserve my strength?” I have to pause for a second here to say that this whole discussion, as I write it, amuses me greatly because I’m writing about a cold as if I am persevering through Stage 3 sinus cancer.  A few years back, I shared with my friend Randy some of my diary entries about a poker trip to Vegas and in his usual way, he sneered and said, “All this about a card game?”  To which I should have said (and say to you now), “I work with what I have.  There can be profundity in banal things.”)

Back to my health.  What ultimately prompted me to see the doctor was something on Thursday night that had never happened to me before.  I was dreaming about something - I don’t remember what - when the feed … glitched.  It was like I had flipped my television to one of the old paywall scrambled shows where you needed a cable converter box to unscramble the images.  Instead of dreamstate linearity, I felt like I was inside a lava lamp.

I have done little reading on dreams, but as I have aged, I have become more conscious of the extraordinary storytelling work your subconscious brain does while you are in REM sleep.  Story arcs, set design, soundtracks, dialogue - it’s all there within the boundaries of what your mind can understand and accept.  It’s really remarkable.  

In fact, my theory about great artists is that they have the capacity to tap into that dream overdrive while conscious, as the rest of us only enjoy (or fear) those stories in the one-seat theater of our minds.

But nothing at all?  Jumbled shapes in random motion drifting in and out of my line of dreamsight while my subconscious is turning knobs and flipping reset switches, reboot, reboot, reboot.  It was awful and alarming and felt like a little glimpse of insanity.

All because of a cold.

So I made an appointment and went to the urgent care clinic at 10:00 a.m.  I like this clinic - no wait, a reasonable copay, and a no-nonsense nurse practitioner with a nice smile who has treated me before for cuts and foot pain and, yes, colds.  She said, “Hello again!” which I liked, and after I described my miserable week, she said. “Well, let’s take care of that,” which I also liked, and she prescribed a Z Pac, some Prednisone, some cough syrup and an inhaler.  

“That’s that,” she said and she told me to come back if it didn’t work and so, having a half-hour to kill while waiting for the scrips to be filled, I decided to get a long-overdue pedicure on my gnarly feet, because why not?

It’s 9:30 p.m. now and I have a long shift tomorrow at the polling place in East Pearland (my last one, thank goodness) and the real drugs seem to be making some progress.  I am still breathing with crunch, but less so, and the cough syrup will almost certainly send me into slumber and hopefully the night shift has worked out the glitches and they will have a good story for me to savor in my one-seat theater tonight.

And I may get my first tattoo after this week.  It will be on the side of my right index finger next to my thumb and it will say in small letters, “Now, not later,” which is unexpectedly profound, a mantra for procrastinators, whether for doing work or doing exercise or seeking medical assistance sooner.

Now, not later.  Words to live by.

Postscript: After I wrote this, I read this article about dream generation.  Bottom line: we have theories, but no one really knows. I think I prefer that.