So, it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. Things have actually been pretty good overall, which tends to make me less inclined to write. I’m more of a “foul weather” blogger than a generalist. I’m also really, really distracted by my other projects.

In general, I feel great. I went to see a psychiatrist who prescribed some medication that has helped me overcome my anxiety and depression. I had a horrific anxiety attack last month that was a wake up call for me. Apparently, my experience of being diagnosed with congestive heart failure and cardiomyopathy may have given me PTSD. It sounds crazy, but it’s true.

My defibrillator was installed in March, and after my last bike stress test, I am now convinced that it may never go off. You see, I pushed myself to my physical limits, and my heart rate never entered arrhythmia or the heart rate danger zone. If that doesn’t do it, my every day life won’t either. I’m getting used to having an iPod-sized bulge under the skin of my chest, and the pain has faded. I can even sleep on the same side as the implant now, which is crazy.

The bike test brought forth good news — last time, my score was 14, which is the threshold for transplant. This time, my score was 20.7 — not perfect, obviously, but above the threshold. Hearing that number was the happiest day of my life.

Through the process of grappling with my disorder, I’ve been doing what I’ve called “closing the loop.” That’s reaching out to old friends, righting past wrongs and indiscretions, generally dealing head on with issues that made me feel guilty or filled me with remorse for years. As a result, I feel like I’ve been granted a true second chance at life — I feel more at peace with myself than I’ve felt in years, and I generally believe I’m a better person for having gone through my experience. I even went to the doctor who misdiagnosed me and forgave him for that mistake — he needed to know what he did, but that I didn’t hold it against him. These things happen. There will be no law suit, or anything like that, though I suspect I will soon be finding another primary care physician.

The last loop to close is Archie, the splendid Boston Terrier that died last year. I’ve felt horrible for not having been able to make his death less painful, for not having gotten him to the vet in time. And I have felt a hole in my life without him — a need for the companionship of a good and trusted dog. I have had a dog for the past 20 years of my life — my year without one has been fraught with grief.

So last night was the first night that I slept with a dog burrowed under the covers next to me, or woke to having my face licked. Yesterday, Tina and I adopted a 9 month old Beagle named Charlie. He became a member of our family almost instantly — it was like he had always been with us. I will always miss Archie, but I love having a young, generally well-mannered beagle — hounds are such fine dogs, and there’s no finer sub-breed than that of the beagle, that hunted game in Great Britain in 200 AD and is one of the oldest breeds in history.

Charlie is young, but he’s a delightful friend. Full of energy, loving, intelligent. He enjoys exploring the neighborhood as we go on walks, and for the first time in a long time, my life feels complete.

I don’t know what will happen to me in the coming days, weeks, months, or years. But I am content that I have made peace with my demons, that I have a wonderful family and now a new companion animal, and that I have lived the best life I can live. Oh yeah, and my Halo 3 skills are back up. Could anyone ask for more?

One of my favorite songs and videos at the moment.

It’s weird — some days I’m completely fine, nearly normal. Other days are awful — and often with no discernible explanation. Yesterday was one of those days. It was one of those nights where I did not want to go to sleep for fear that I would not wake up. It’s an odd feeling, that lack of confidence in your body to carry you through the night. But here I am.

On those days, I’m in my sick guy persona — or worse, dead man persona. Jeff the Zombie. The walking dead — it’s hard to get out of that depression, but it happens. Yesterday was also one of those days where acquaintances want to talk to you about how you’re doing, but when you tell them — honestly tell them — they recoil, as if you really are a brain-eating monster. Some people just want to hear good news –I’m just fine! Hoo-haa! — but is that really the right thing to do? To lie?

When you tell them the truth, they want to get the fuck out of the room. Jesus Christ, there’s a brain-eating meat bag in here! Run for the hills!

Some days I do lie. “I’m just feeling tired,” I say, when I’m not tired at all, but experiencing the weird feeling I get when I’m aware that my heart isn’t beating right. Lying makes people happy, though. Good for you! Keep up the good work. You’ll be fine in no time.

But will I be “fine” in no time? Really? Will my heart, which was born broken, suddenly fix itself? Not a chance.

I recently told an old friend of mine what was going on — the email I got back was about as impersonal as anything a complete stranger has said to me since finding out about my cardiomyopathy. Seriously, it could have come from American Greetings, it was so canned. I suspect he may have pulled it off of a “Miss Manners”-style article: “How to respond when an old friend tells you that they’re going to die.” The tone basically turns you into an object — written off, undead, not at all normal or human. It’s like you’re already dead and this person — this former best friend — is talking to your animated corpse, and not a living breathing human being who just happens to be sick. Sorry if you don’t like the smell of leaking guts, man.

The thing that I’m learning is that sick people, dying people, are human beings. There’s more to their lives than just their disease, but so many people around them want to put them in that box. We struggle for it not to be that way — we try as hard as we can to live as normally as we can. I treat my disease as an inconvenience, not a defining personal characteristic. Even less so now, after it because clear to me what was wrong and what the ultimate prognosis was.

Ask them about their families, the weather, the economy. Dying really is a very mundane way of life, especially the slow-motion death march of cardiomyopathy. Someone pointed a gun at me and pulled the trigger — there’s a bullet creeping through time and space and headed straight for my heart. This bullet was probably launched the day sperm met egg and mitosis began. But there’s no way for me to dodge it or take cover — it’s going to hit me some day, but I just don’t know when that day is. And if I end up by some miracle getting a heart transplant, then another slow motion bullet will be launched, this time from within my own body — a bullet called rejection.

And as much as it seems like I care about the bullet, I really don’t. Do you worry about the external forces that can take you down? The possibility of cancer, or heart attack, asbestos poisoning, the impending doom of old age, a car wreck? I’m tired of being defined by the bullet. I’d rather talk about what happened on Lost last week or Battlestar Galactica’s finale.

If there’s been one thing that’s kept me off antidepressants through everything that’s been happening to me in the past two months, it’s Andrew Bird’s new record, “Noble Beast.” “Anonanimal” is one of my favorite songs on the record (among many). The part where he sings “I know this song” always gets me. Unfortunately, this is an early version, and that section doesn’t appear to be in it.

Here it is:

Seriously guys? Armed rebellion? Are you kidding me?

Eight years of George W. Bush, and American liberals threatened to move to Canada or Scandinavia. We actually have friend who moved to Latin America — that’s really taking your position seriously, IMHO.

But here’s the deal folks: Bush won the election in 2004 (and sort of in 2000). Obama and the Democrats won in 2008. Fucking deal with it.

You can’t claim to be for democracy if you don’t accept that sometimes your side loses. That’s part of the bargain. My side lost consistently from about 1994 – 2008. That’s a lot of losing, but you know what — I lived through it. I played video games, watched TV, hung out with friends and family, ate dinner, that sort of thing. I lived through it and so can you.

And let’s say for the sake of argument that rather than pulling a Timothy McVey or Eric Rudolph and attacking “the enemy” in their own red states, that the new militia movement gets organized enough to send a group of fat middle-aged dads armed with hunting rifles and semi-automatic assault rifles down to DC, what do you guys think will happen when you get to town? The night Obama won, I saw something like 200,000 people on the streets of D.C. march down to Lafayette Park to tell Bush not to let the door hit him in the ass on the way out.

Do these people honestly think they can just invade a city where President Obama has something like a 100% approval rating? Are they insane?

Seriously, they should go back to playing Call of Duty: World at War online, and then when they’re done feeling like they actually lived through World War II, they should work on getting their guys elected. Be adults instead of whiny, pathetic little babies who can’t deal with the fact that five million more people supported our guy than supported theirs.

Because these dreams of rebellion just aren’t very realistic. And secession– without the blue state federal gravy train, how would the south pay the bills? Get real.

By now, you’ve probably heard (or heard of) Rick Santelli’s rant about the people who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford. And he is correct in the sense that they were part of the problem we’re now all suffering through, but they weren’t the source of the problem. Need we forget the heady years of the housing bubble, the insistence of the media, the banks, the predatory lenders, our friends and family, a big swell of peer pressure to buy a house? President Bush called in the ownership society. People made a lot of bad decisions during the housing bubble, but it wasn’t like the entire world wasn’t cheering them on.

Everyone was making bad decisions.

Tina and I almost made one of our own — a real estate agent and her friend at the bank kept telling us that every crummy overpriced house we looked at was a great deal. “If you don’t get into the market now, you’ll never get in!” she warned.

We opted not to buy and stay renters. Not bad, considering the quickly depreciating values of the homes we looked at not two years ago. I bring this up not to say that we’re somehow better than the people who did opt to buy, but that we were pressured to get a bad interest-only loan predicated on the notion that someday we would cash out the equity in our house and refinance. Tina and I are educated and, in regards to big expenditures, fairly cautious. Other people aren’t and they paid the price — and now we’re all paying for them. But it wasn’t like they were solely responsible for their mistakes. The financial and real estate industries are just as responsible as they are for offering them risky loans and promoting properties that people obviously couldn’t afford.

Santelli’s error is that everyone who participated in the bubble is at fault — not just the people who joined the “Ownership Society” when they couldn’t really afford to. Blaming the “losers” alone means shifting blame completely from the creators of the shell game.

I’ve always been skeptical that markets regulate themselves — I think it’s pretty clear that without regulation and a referee, markets work the way they were meant to: to get the people who run them stinking rich through any possible means. Greed often overrides common sense, and it certainly doesn’t regulate itself. Greed by its nature is selfish and reckless.

And it seems to me that the gatekeepers of the economy like Santelli still haven’t learned their lesson.

Back in 1991, I had my greatest high school-era experience — I attended the Duke Young Writers Camp at Duke University. It was the summer before my Senior year, and my first glimpse of what college would be like. To say that I changed my outlook on life in the two week session, would be an understatement.

There was this kid there from Falls Church, VA named Mark. Mark was a real dick to me, knowing that I was from Hagerstown, and was quick to discount my claim that I lived near D.C. He was also one of those guys, who seems untouchable, morally superior and right about everything. He was always quick to condemn me and my friends (who, in retrospect, weren’t probably the best people for me to have aligned myself with, but I was only 16), and made himself out to be this great paragon of honesty and virtue.

Yet, for some reason I remember seeing Mark running through the quad with his girlfriend’s bra on, and how she cried because of the embarassment and humiliation. She was slightly overweight and her bra was enormous. It was classically juvenile and cruel, and did completely broke the illusion of Mark as the “good guy.” My friends were dicks, but they didn’t do things like that.

The lesson, of course, is that everyone — even the most morally upstanding like Mark — has the capacity to be a great douche bag.

I don’t know why I thought of this, but it flashed in my head while on the way to work this morning. It had absolutely nothing to do with the story that was on NPR, which was about Charles Darwin.

The hardest thing I’m going through right now is this constant state of uncertainty. I’ve been sick with a cold for about five or six days now. The problem is that cold symptoms are very very similar to heart failure symptoms. I’ve called the Heart Clinc twice now about it, and they assure me that if my family is sick (they are), then it’s probably all that’s wrong with me, too. I’m not gaining weight — I’m not swelling in my hands or feet. But I’m still unsure. Maybe this is heart failure again, maybe my heart is giving out despite the medicine?

Being chronically ill is like being placed in a state of constant limbo and panic. Every bout of sickness takes on greater weight. And with no contact with doctors for weeks on end, it’s hard to know where you stand, what your future may be. You can only hypothesize and worry, and I am a terrible worrier. In the end you guess that you don’t have a future.

I don’t know what I would do without Tina’s constant support and optimism. She makes me feel that I’m not alone, even though some pretty bad things have descended on me, and she can skillfully talk me off a cliff when panic sets in. Without her, I would have already lost this.

I’m sick of people giving me advice.  Yesterday, someone at work, after lecturing me naively about my low-sodium eating options as if I haven’t done 30 days of research already, advised me on getting my affairs in order.  In getting a will.

Now this person recently lost someone close to them, so they were thinking practically — what I needed to do to make things right for the people I leave behind.  And getting a will is on my list of things to do — but Christ, was it really any of their business to talk to me about it?  It’s one thing to be the survivor after a family member dies — God knows, I know what that means after losing my father — but it’s one thing to presumptuously counsel a person who actually might be dying.

Seriously, work colleagues should not be doing this.

Now here’s the thing, I don’t know if I’m dying.  All I know is that I have a weak heart and that I’m currently in fairly stable condition.  I had a right-side heart catherization a week ago, and the cardiologist told me it looked better than before.  Not normal, obviously — but better.  My gas levels and pressures were fine.  No one knows my risk level yet.  I may need an assist device, or I may not.  I may need a heart transplant, or I may not.  I may only need medication, or I may need more than that.  The point is, no one knows.  But this person treated me as if death was a forgone conclusion.  

Now, death is a foregone conclusion for every human being on earth.  But that doesn’t mean it’s happening tomorrow, this year, next year, ten years from now, etc.  Anyone can die at any time — shit happens.  Shit has happened to me.  I watched my father die of cancer for half a year, and I’ve recently quite suddenly lost a family member.  But I’m not dead yet.  And I’d prefer if people would stop treating me as if I’m going to die in the immediate future.  Because no one knows — I don’t know, my doctors don’t know.  I don’t even feel that bad.  

I have accepted that I may die, and I’ve also accepted that I may live.  I’ve come to terms with that — I’m not in denial.  But I believe very strongly that to get through this I have to fight death with everything I have.  And that means avoiding conversations with well-meaning douche bags who have no idea what it means to have been told things like “you may need a heart transplant” or “you may die.”  Until someone has said those words to you, keep your fucking advice to yourself.  I have enough advice from my top flight health care providers, thank you very much.  Nothing spoils morale more than someone treating you like you’re going to fail in the struggle you are now committed to.  

Even if this does eventually kill me, no one will be able to tell me that I just gave up or rolled over.  I am stubborn and driven.  As a boy, my father taught me how to suck it up and keep going despite pain and doubt.  I clawed my way out of a possible future of dead-end service industry jobs to work in the white collar professional world of Washington, D.C.  

I have modest goals — live to see my girls graduate from high school.  Get my master’s degree in communication.  Live as long as my dad — if I can make it to 50, then I will have succeeded.  That’s less than 20 years.  I can do this.

And if it means replacing my heart and a lifetime of immune-suppressing drugs then so be it.  I will do whatever it takes.

And anyone who wants to tell me otherwise, or focus on the worst possibilities over the best possibilities can go fuck themselves.

As John Darnielle once said, “I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me.”

Last week, Tina and I took a walk with the girls on inauguration day to head down to the U Street Rite Aid. I actually felt pretty good on the walk — something that seemed to impress my doctors when I saw them later in the week.

U Street was filled with vendors hawking unofficial Obama souvenirs — everything from posters to calendars to books and videos. It was pretty overwhelming. There was even a store called “Everything Obama” which, I presume, is being honest about its wares.

One cannot underestimate the power of Obama’s inauguration for the African American community, but I worry that the expectations on what he can achieve are too high. Many of the posters I saw for sale depict him as a messiah figure, some even quoting prophecy and scripture describing him as the one that was promised.

I’m a supporter of a pragmatic, center-left politician named “Barack Obama,” but this other Obama, Obama the savior, is a bit disturbing. It reminds me in some what of a mirror image of the evangelical view of Bush as being god’s own President.  I like my Presidents as human beings — capable, but not infallible.  I loathe the idea of American Caesers and the cult of personality that develops around human beings.

When human beings get elevated to messianic god-men, there’s nothing but disappointment ahead for their supporters. I have high hopes for Obama, but there’s only so much one man can do.  I just wish some of my political allies would dial it back a bit and try to think of how crazy some of this sounds.  Obama can be a great President and leader, but he’s not a prophecized prophet or anything.  Setting him up as such doesn’t serve our side very well.