Horrible Diagnosis: Confirmed!

I'm pretty sure that there isn't anything that I obsess about more than my health.  It is my great Go-To issue when I want to get upset, which is apparently something I really love to do given the fact that I'm upset so much of the time.  When everything is going fine - when the skies are blue, a gentle breeze is blowing, and the angels are singing nicely, I can always count on the status of my physical form to bring the pain if receiving the pain is what I want to do.

I am of the opinion that the internet was created so that people can confirm The Truth of whatever they're currently worrying about.  It's very easy to take a set of symptoms, log on, and find out that you have a terrible, craven disease that's going to take you down and take you down hard.  I mean, it's on the internet so it has to be true, right?  The only medium more irreproachable than the internet is The Television, the greatest teller of truth since that night I tried to talk my way out of a DUI.

And the cruncher is that I'm really remarkably healthy.  It's one of the things I'm most grateful for when I'm not too busy trying to find a horrible disease to afflict myself with on the internet.

I really should enter a monastery or buy a sensory deprivation tank and use it as my home - dark and quiet, sloshing around in a warm bath.  Sounds nice.  I went for many years to a semi-annual men's recovery retreat held in a Jesuit retreat house.  At first I wasn't too thrilled about a priest running a retreat - recovering alcoholic or not - but those guys drank as much as I did. The point is that there were no TVs or radios and phone use was discouraged - the individual rooms were spartan - a bed and a writing desk.  There were no distractions.  It was comforting. It helped me reduce the tumult in my head to a dull roar.