Summer of Bean

It’s been almost a month now since the night I woke up gasping for air, my heart racing.  It happens every now and then and let me tell you, it’s a scary thing.  It’s sleep apnea and it freaking sucks.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my first real experience with it was when I was a kid.  My dad usually spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons on the couch, Andy Capp-style, facing the couch back, arms folded against his body.  He napped for hours.  And as my brother and I watched TV, Dad would snore away.  Sometimes he would quit breathing for several seconds.  After a bit, he would finally take in a deep breath, and the cycle would start again.  This would go on for hours.  I had no idea this was apnea.  And I had no idea it killed.

My brother called me some years later and told me about his own experience with apnea and how he’d gone in for a sleep study and now had the CPAP mask.  My brother!  He’s 2-1/2 years younger than me and a hundred pounds lighter.  And he has apnea?  Crap.  That meant it was a matter of time before I’d need to face the same reality.

My wake-up call (pun unintended) came in two parts.  First, my dad announced a few weeks ago that he’d undergone his own sleep test six weeks ago and he would be getting his own CPAP mask.  Then came that night I woke up gasping.  It was time.  With my 38th birthday coming up, I figured I’d been ignoring my health long enough.  I needed to get this thing under control before it did me in.  The late-thirties seem to be about the time the really bad stuff starts.  Especially when you’re 300-plus pounds.

I made the doctor’s appointment the morning after my episode.  I had to wait a week, but I finally got in.  It was a quick consultation with the doctor.  I just wanted to get my referral and get out of there.  Of course a doctor can’t look at a guy my size and let me get away without a lecture about my weight.  I told him I’d been exercising regularly and watching what I eat.  He asked me what I did for a living.  I told him I’m a cubicle dweller.

“Well,” he said, “you should probably limit your caloric intake to about 1500 calories a day.  You really don’t need any more than that, particularly if you’re in a sedentary occupation.”

1500 calories?  Was he kidding?  Holy crap.  That was about half what I’d been told I needed to consume to lose weight.  But what he said really made sense.  He suggested it was easier to control calories on the front-side than it was to burn them off once they’ve been consumed.  To me that was a really interesting point and something I’ve meditated on for a few weeks now.  I haven’t been 100% faithful to his advice, but I’ve been better.  No more fast food.  No more M&M’s from the vending machine.  It hasn’t been that hard.

After the lecture, I got my referral.  And I succumbed to his suggestion that I get a full physical.  My insurance covers it 100%, so why not?  I got a call  from the sleep center the next day and made my appointment.  It was this last Saturday night.

I hate hospitals.  My mom was a nurse so I kind of grew up around them.  They smell funny.  And there’s always drama.  Ask my friends, they’ll tell you…I hate drama.  Walking into the place Saturday night, I was immediately greeted by both the smell and someone’s drama over their gout.  Blah.

The sleep center, thankfully, was segregated from the rest of the hospital.  It almost resembled a motel.  Clean rooms with regular beds.  And quiet.  Oh the quiet.

They took me to my room, had me fill out a couple of questionaires and watch a video.  The video was about 15 minutes long or so.  It showed a dramitization of how the evening would unfold.  They’d put sensors on me, stick me in bed, and video tape me choking.  Good times, right?

As I watched the video, it all became clear to me.  The guy playing the patuent in the video was playing me.  Couldn’t sleep.  Was having trouble concentrating during the day.  Falling asleep while he was driving home.  Waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom.  Like lots.  Weird.  It was funny, the technician came in after the video was over and asked me to tell him in my own words why I was there.  This was for the insurance.  I just looked at him, my eyes wide, and told him everything I’d just seen on the video was me.  Everything.  He chuckled, wrote something down on the form, and left the room.

A few minutes later, he returned and started applying electrodes to my head.  As he took the tape measure out, I asked him if my head was the largest he’d ever measured.  He took the circumference and said 62 cm.  He’d seen a few folks with 62 cm skulls in his day.  But after a few seconds, he said everyone else who’d measured 62 cm had hair.  I don’t.  He said with hair, I’d probably be 64 or 65 cm, so yes…I was the largest head he’d ever measured.  So I have that going for me.

Once he had me wired up, he left me alone to watch the rest of SportsCenter and think about hitting the sack.  Finally around 10pm I did just that.  And I quickly fell asleep.

Unfortunately it didn’t last.  After about a half hour I woke up, and I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning.  I may have slept for a few hours that night, but that’s it.  They came and woke me up at 6am on Sunday.  The tecnician told me I didn’t qualify for the CPAP mask.  At least not initially.  I needed to have something like 20 incidents in an hour as I recall.  And I didn’t come close.

“I had a few,” I protested.

He agreed, I did.  But not enough.

So it comes and it goes.  And frankly I’m happy.  I didn’t want the mask.  I wanted the mouth piece.  It seems less cumbersome and more portable.  Not to mention cheaper.  While I’ve decided expense won’t really be a factor here, there’s no price on health, I’d still prefer the mouth guard.  It looks like my wishes may be fulfilled.

The technician said it would take a week or ten days to get the results of the test back to my physician and we’d figure out what to do next.  In the meantime I wait.  And exercise.  And try and figure out how to get by on 1500 calories a day.

I’m terrible with the boy-girl thing.  It goes all the way back to childhood.  So shy was I in elementary school that when I went to make the first move of my life, on a girl named Jenni Myers, I was too chicken.  Instead I asked the kid who sat next to her in class to ask her to go steady with me.  She turned around and looked at me from across the room, pointed to herself, mouthed “me?”, and shook her head.  Five minutes later she came to my desk to ask for a pencil sharpener or something.  I still remember my arms feeling like they’d caught fire when she walked over.  I could have caught fire right there and disappeared.

My style has really never improved since.  I’ve had a few relationships over the years.  One with a girl in college who I was convinced was “the one”, as kids believe when they’re fresh out of high school and legally able to marry.  She dumped me at a homecoming dance and went home with another guy.  There was the waitress in Boise.  She was stone nuts.  I was 23 and she was 19.  She was “ready” to settle down and I was just happy to have a warm body lying next to me.  Actually it was her roommate I really wanted to get with, but she was taken.  So I settled.  An important lesson learned.  The roommate is still a dear friend of mine, and a part of me still holds out hope we can make a go of things one day.

There was the girl who worked for her mom.  There were a few girls in Arizona and a few more in Seattle.  And a few here in The Couv.  But nothing has really panned out.

Case in point, the last girl.  Christine.  We found each other on Facebook about six months ago.  We’d gone to high school together back in the day.  I had a minor crush on her.  Thought she was cute.  But she never really gave me the time of day.  Fast forward to today and she’s now twice-divorced with two kids, one by each husband.  That’s a lot of baggage, but certainly overcomable.  We went out a few times.  Had ourselves a good time.  But visiting her house, the whole place smelled like cat urine and stuff was just lying everywhere.  Add to that her constant insistence on buying me stuff and refusing to let me carry even my own bags, and we came to a problem.  I just couldn’t do it.  After a few weeks, I split.

Like I said, I don’t have much experience, either in longevity or in quality.  Come to think of it, it’s really not a whole lot unlike Jerry’s character on Seinfeld.  A lot of singles and doubles, but no real home runs.

Friday I took a home run swing.  And while I whiffed, I think I got her attention.  I ran a post-mortem on the whole situation with a female friend of mine and she informed me I’d made the biggest opening blunder a man could make.  I invited her to the movies.  In retrospect it was hardly a swing worthy of a home run girl, but it was what it was.  My friend informed me that high school was twenty years ago and I should probably step-up my game if I wanted to touch ‘em all.  And I do.

She went on to tell me about how she at first couldn’t stand her current beau and turned him down several times before finally giving in.

“You know what finally did it, Bean?” she asked.

“No.”

“He figured out what I was interested in and started asking me to do those things with him.”

An interesting concept, I suppose.

So what to do?  What activity do I invite her to?  Just dinner sounds boring.  As does a walk in the park.  I’m going to keep an eye on Around the Sun and see if something comes up.

The Amanda Peet Project is definitely going to take some time.

I watched a friend of mine flame out on stage at Harvey’s a few months back.  A friend of his gave him an opening slot just so he could cross it off his bucket list.  I came out to support my friend and to see what local comedians were up to.  It was equal parts enlightening and depressing.

Comedy is a tough thing.  If you don’t believe me, go watch Comedian.  It’s taken me until the last few years to develop a coherent thought on what makes comedy so difficult.  Here it is.  You know how you can flip on the olides radio and hear a song from twenty, thirty, or even forty years ago and you still enjoy it even after you’ve heard it a hundred times?  And how you’ll pay over $100 to go see that guy sing that same song again (*cough*Springsteen*cough)?  Well it doesn’t work that way with comedians.  Every time you see that person, you expect to hear something new come out of their mouth.  And if they spend a night telling old jokes, they’ll get booed off the stage.  And if a comedian rips off another comedian’s joke, they’re instantly blackballed.  But if Johnny Cash sings Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”, he’s hailed as a genius.

I saw Dennis Miller several months ago at Spirit Mountain Casino.  He did about a 45-minute set.  He kept it together by working off a wrinkled sheet of paper he kept on the stool on stage.  He’d tell a couple of jokes, then refer again to the sheet to remember what the next joke was.  It’s the same thing any band does when they’re on stage.  Yet when I saw Miller do it, I cringed just a little.  And he told at least one joke I’d heard him tell when I saw him two decades ago at the Schnitz when he opened for Louis Anderson.  A sin?  Heck no.  It was still a good joke.  And if you can go twenty years between telling the same joke, you’re a better man than I.

I’ve been listening to the Adam Carolla podcast for the past few months.  I like Carolla because he can riff on anything at any moment.  And the podcast format suits him to a tee because he can go on for as long as he wants on anything he wants.  The guy is equal parts genius and fool.  I dig him.

Anyway, he had Brad Garrett on last week.  They talked about their various TV projects and started riffing on unfunny executives.  In the middle of his rant, Carolla gave me a little nugget to chew on.  He said something to the effect of “rather than taking some time and working up a three-minute bit for an open mic night, TV executives are concerned about story.”  The “three minutes for an open mic night” thing got me to thinking.  Could I put together three minutes?  Getting back to the music analogy, it’s sort of like writing a single song.  Yeah, it’s different, but the craft and care are similar, aren’t they?  Not that I’ve ever written a song…but…

I digress.

So add that to the list for the summer.  Come up with three minutes to perform on someone’s open mic night at the end of the summer.  Where do you even do open mic in this town?

It seems a lot longer than two years since I declared the last Summer of Bean.  A lot has happened in that time.  I read The Dip and decided to try and live it.  I left a relatively stable job and struck out on my own to see what that felt like for a while.  I was published in the Portland Tribune, still one of the biggest and coolest things ever to happen to me.  And…  Well…  That’s about it.

So we take another swing at the Summer of Bean.  It’s all based, of course, on Seinfeld’s Summer of George, the summer in which George had been laid off by the Yankees and received three months severence.  You can read the Wikipedia entry here.  The episode’s script is here.  You’ll notice the categories on the right are based on the Wikipedia list.

1. Reading a book, from beginning to end and in that order.
2. Playing frolf. He plays at least once.
3. Watching television programming.
4. Relax and de-compress.
5. Mid-morning naps.
6. Insignificant telephone conversations.
7. Banging his head on tables.
8. Assisting Jerry in maintaining his relationship with Lanette (Amanda Peet), a younger woman Jerry is dating. 
9. Growing a mustache.

Not a bad list, no?  I’ve made some alterations, but I’m pretty faithful to the Wiki entry.  For example, rather than helping others out with their dating issues, I’ll be dating a reasonable substitute for Amanda Peet or at least attempting the same.  And as for the mustache, been there, done that.

 If you Google “Summer of George“, you come up with a couple of other websites with cool ideas based on a similar philosophy.  I may try and work a few of those things in too.  We shall see.

So this is going to be all about self-discovery and self-improvement.  A very mid-life thing to do.  Thanks for tagging along.