Clam Sauce and Vertigo

The dizziness from the water gun treatment (better known as ear wax removal) in my right ear was easing up until, a week after the appointment, yellow smoke from the fires in Minnesota and Canada descended on the Cape made the air unhealthy. I was up most of the night and in the morning and could not make the room stop spinning.  I was suddenly pushed back days into having trouble doing everything.

Now I’m slowly improving. I can do a little more each day. My doctor finally took my dizziness seriously and prescribed a pill for dizziness. I started on it yesterday. I had 6 hours sleep last night, the most since last Thursday morning when I woke to the room spinning like a crazy merry-go-round. Spinning fast.

We had friends over last night to a simple meal of Woody’s spaghetti and white clam sauce, my zucchini ambrosia, and the last of our homemade gravlax. They brought a fine dessert.

We were invited out tonight but it’s still impossible. We agreed with them to put it off till next Saturday. The new pill makes me drowsy. I almost dozed off writing this paragraph. We happened on the Johnny Cash bio on Max and enjoyed it very much. I still have the original LP from his Folsom Prison concert.

I have not been able to write except for a blog post.  It’s hard to concentrate when the room is revolving.  I am doing more and more but somehow it never feels like enough. It’s tough to slow down after a lifetime of constant activity but as Kurt Vonngut famously wrote, So it goes. Willow knows something is wrong and is very attentive. The boys (Shaman and Schwartz) don’t understand why my schedule is so wacky and why, in the daytime, I’m only going between the couch and the computer and bathroom, although I am regularly going downstairs for meals with a bit of Woody’s help. I can climb the stairs, but need a spotter going downstairs as I’m scared of falling forward.

For this moment the skies are blue instead of yellow but forecasts tell us the pollution will return. I’m a canary in bad air and always know when we’re polluted.  Growing up in Detroit, we were triangulated between a Ford plant, the Kelsey-Hayes factory and the gas works. My father smoked 24/7 when he was home, a proud  ‘two packs a day man.’  When I lived in Manhattan, we’d have to leave the city when the air was especially bad. Hence, my move to the Cape.

This is ridiculous. As I was writing that last sentence, I dozed off thanks to my anti-dizziness pill and woke to find I had typed half a page of nonsense. Forgive me, if you’re able to plow through all this.