If you were a major player in professional basketball, had a supposed NY Times Bestseller novel and ran a not-for-profit foundation with core values such as “Accountability to having quality standards” and “Empowering, and improving the quality of life for, our community” would you be flogging the rip-off experts Rent A Center? (seriously, $2,500 for a $450 computer? What a BARGAIN!) If you were Magic Johnson you would.

I’ve seen two ‘well known’ NASCAR drivers hawking 3rd party car repair insurance. Sadly I care so little about NASCAR I’m not going to spend the time tracking down their names. Turn left! Turn Left! Go straight! Turn left! Turn Left! Repeat hundreds of times. Meh!

Supposedly rich, supposedly well off people doing jobs that make them look, if not downright moronic, then, at least in Johnson’s case, just plain bad. I don’t know about you, dear readers, but if *I* were a rich man (can you hear the Fiddler on the Roof music playing?) I’d have a nice, large, log cabin on a lake somewhere in the middle of nowhere and I’d be flying my friends in for weekend and week-long visits whenever they wanted. I would NOT be making an ass out of myself on television (what IS wrong with Trump’s mouth, he looks like a fish out of water!) or debasing myself trying to get you to pay five times the price to ‘rent to own’ junk. If *I* were a rich man, I’d still live frugally. I can’t even bring myself to buy a $6 DVD of one of my favorite movies even thought I’ve got the spare coin right now.

What’s up with these people? Is Trump not as rich as we think? Has Johnson blown through those millions and millions of dollars he was paid to bounce a ball? Are these people THAT desperate?

ENOUGH!

I’m sorry the man’s dead. Any death is a tragedy for someone and I’m sure his family and a lot of his fans are sad but is this ‘Breaking News’? Is this so important as to interupt all other news? He’s not going to get better people. He’s dead. We don’t need live, 24 hours a day coverage of a corpse.

ENOUGH!

Personally I never cared for his music and the last however many years of the stories about him and young boys creeped me out something fierce. Farrah Fawcett’s dead too but it seems no one gives a shit about her now that some pedophile’s croaked.

ENOUGH!

Come to find out she didn’t even bother to note the pain and discomfort, which I discussed with her SEVERAL times yesterday, in my chart. Not a single reference to the patient being in pain, NONE. That bitch!

The doctor, a real MD, discussed my condition. Noted down my discomfort. Actually TOUCHED me while doing an exam. Witchy-poo from yesterday looked at me (not THERE either) from five feet away. He brought up my medical history and went over it in detail. He was shocked that I was sent away yesterday with no pain medication. He was shocked again when I told him the Nurse Practitioner from yesterday told me to “Rub some Vaseline on it if it hurts.” and agreed with me that doing so would have caused serious problems. He even thought she’d under medicated me on the medication for my ‘condition’ and wrote another scrip for that in case I need it. He also gave me a scrip for pain medication.

He cared. He listened. He didn’t judge based on appearance. THAT is what a doctor is supposed to do.

She did next to no exam. I have an infection in my ’special place’ (she never even took a peek at it) that the OTC products weren’t working well enough on. It HURTS. To avoid going into too many gross and personal details I’ll just use two words “split and cracking” if you’re plumbed like me I’m sorry you just flinched. If you don’t have the same plumbing… sorry for the visual.

I got to sit, once again, through the diabetics lecture. I explained, several times how horrible the pain is especially when I have to pee (and being a diabetic I do pee a LOT). I then got to sit for another half hour in the exam room waiting for someone to do a finger stick to check my blood sugar. When the nurse came in she also wanted a sample of urine. She showed up and told me the extra fees $27 for the urine and $8 for the glucose test. I agrees to the glucose test thinking they’d do something more than break out a low budget meter from Walgreens… She then broke out a low budget glucose meter from Walgreens *sigh* failed to get blood from my finger twice and then used up more than half a dozen test strips because she had no clue how to use the stupid meter. Each strip costing me a squirt of blood from my fingertip (I had to do the squeezing, she couldn’t squeeze hard enough) and we found out what I could have already told them. I have high blood sugar. EIGHT freaking dollars! If I’d known I’d have brought the free meter Liberty Medical sent me and done the test for them. Hell I’d have only charged THEM $4 to stick myself!

The Nurse Practitioner (BTW, nice beard and hairy warts, wench!) came back in after another five or ten minutes and handed me three prescriptions. One for the infection. One for a possible UTI I’m almost certain I don’t have, and some junk to help my blood sugar levels. She then smugly, condescendingly told me she wasn’t going to prescribe anything for the pain and that I didn’t need it (even though I told her 600mg of Advil every six hours wasn’t helping) and if I wanted relief I should ‘rub some vaseline down there’. I’ve had this happen before. I’ve got long hair, a beard and tattoos. This to jaded medical professional sets off every ‘drug seeker’ warning siren they have. I’m SICK of being in pain and being treated like a fucking addict jonesing for a fix. It’s belittling, embarrassing and it fucking hurts to be thought of that way. Screw you, FurBitch, I won’t be back to your clinic. Oh, and I had a similar problem a bit over a year ago in which the Physicians Assistant I saw (are there no damn doctors in this state?!) told me that the Desitin and other rash treatments I’d tried had sealed in the infection making it ten times worse. That’s exactly what this bitch told me to do instead of giving me something for pain. You can’t imagine how enraged I am. I’m seriously considering looking into what’s involved in filing a complaint against these people.

My adventure concluded with a broiling hot ride across town to Walmart to get the ’scrips filled. They’re the cheapest in the state with many being only $4 for a month’s supply. I then spent over an hour sitting, alone, there were no other people waiting at the pharmacy, for them to whip the snails into action. At least I’m assuming they used snails to move the pills the three or feet necessary.

Still doubt I’d go back for future problems but we’ll see what happens tomorrow morning. I plan on being there the moment they unlock the doors as I’ve got to get the grocery shopping done too.

A couple weeks ago I was at the library and snagged a copy of ‘An Underachiever’s Diary’ by Benjamin Anastas. This HORRID volume of crybaby ‘feel sorry for me’ angst fiction took me four, almost five, days to get through it’s 160 or so pages of drivel. Several times I just wanted to set it on fire or take it into the bathroom as a toilet paper replacement. It SUCKED. The author should have his fingers broken if he even thinks about publishing further.

In contrast, I picked up ‘The Map of Moments: A Novel of the Hidden Cities’ by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon (the 2nd book by these two authors I’ve read this month) yesterday around 9:00 PM and finished its 360 or so pages this morning around 5:00 AM. I was glued to the pages. Going as far as fighting off the need to pee (more than once!) just to finish a chapter. This book sucked me in and held me captive until the very end.

In conclusion, oddly, bad books have longer, if not better, entertainment value. Anastas book may have been garbage, boring, insipid dreck, but it gave me days longer reading value than Moments did.

Good books suck!

The sarcastic bastard in my wants to stop right there but that’d be mean.

I was, many moons ago, a subscriber to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. My folks found out they had a reader on their hands and went out of their way to ensure I had access to as much that interested me as they could find. After a few years we hit some financial hard times and had to let the subscription run out. This was back when they were serializing Stephen King’s first Gunslinger novel.

So I agreed to blog about the issue they sent. Kudos for using Simpsons stamps to cover the postage guys, that was spiffy. So, back to blogging about the issue, by the way it’s the up coming August/September. So, do I review every story in the magazine? Do I just generalize… I’m torn.

Ok, the issue itself. They’ve changed size since I was a subscriber. It’s more paperback shaped than I remember. Cost, at least on this issue, is $6.50. Pretty sturdy and thankfully printed in a font size I can read. I’ve come across several story anthologies in the past few years that, to save money, printed in near microscopic type making them completely unreadable for me. This wasn’t the case here. Yay!

The insides. Refreshingly, surprisingly, ad free. I’m sure this contributes to the relatively high cost per issue but it’s nice not to have to dig through page after page after page of ads like in most magazines to get to the stuff you want to read.

The comics… sucked. I used to dig the Gahan Wilson comics they printed in the past, they were funny. The ones in this issue were horrible. None of the jokes (were they even jokes?) were amusing, few made any sense. The art was poor.

The editorials were ok. The review of Watchmen was a bit long winded. The book reviews were on items I don’t think I’ll find interesting.

The stories… do I review them all? Do I just say I liked some, some were passable, one was horrible and one I couldn’t finish? I did try, very, very hard, to read the entire magazine cover to cover since I did agree to post about it. Let’s just start typing and see what happens, shall we?

The one author who’s name I recognized and who had top billing on the cover, Bruce Sterling’s ‘Esoteric City’ was atrocious, I found myself reading a sentence or two and then putting the book down over and over until I finally admitted I wasn’t going to be able to read it.

Sean McMullen’s ‘The Art of the Dragon’ was good even amusing in places though it did touch on the herd/crowd mentality we humans too often suffer from.

I enjoyed, thoroughly, Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘The Private Eye’ an amusing take on psychic powers and corruption in small southern towns. Even the down home southern dialog was well done and not over done although I could have done without the many references to lotion and it’s uses…

‘Icarus Saved From the Skies’ by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud (even his name annoys me) was one of the worst stories I’ve ever come across. It’s only saving grace was being just four or so pages long.

Nancy Springer’s ‘You Are Such a One’ was interesting. Written in a perspective I’ve never seen/read before the reader becomes the protagonist and the narration of the story is directed to/at you. It was rather different and refreshing.

A reprint from yesteryear; ‘The Goddamned Tooth Fairy’ by Tina Kuzminski was pretty good. I enjoyed it even if some of the content was rather disturbing and dark.

All in all, if I had the money to spare (sadly living on a fixed income I don’t) I’d probably pick up a subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction again. It’s a bit expensive but no more so than most anthologies and collections of short stories.