The Tribulations of Christianity.

I will sit here this Good Friday evening amidst the disturbing traffic noise of Fayettenam.  I will open my window to let some of the eighty degree air out.  I will write a blog entry.  I would wish the air conditioner I removed during the winter still was in place, yet the effort of removing it was cathartic.  Bramble Builders, while installing new windows and siding on our home, placed this portable white air conditioner in one of those new windows.  They assured us its installation would not be a problem.  It wasn't.  It was not different from my own process of installing it in the old window, except that they caulked it.  They caulked it nice and tight with silicone glue right in the grooved channels in which the window opens and closes.  After removing the unit for winter and to ensure my peace of mind despite Fayetteville's horrific traffic noise, I lament that removal.  Yes, scraping the caulk out of those channels by hand with a single edged razor was cathartic.  I enjoy labor of most kinds.  I enjoy using my fingers as I used to do playing the piano for a living.  Despite either arthritis or carpel tunnel syndrome, still I like to remind myself I have control over my fingers.  Removing this air conditioner was a rite of passage.  It was me saying "Screw Fayetteville and its mass transit," and "Hello quiet mornings."  No longer would I have to wake to the sounds of annoying low flying airplanes, diesel locomotive horns, rumbling garbage collection trucks, and selfish intimidating SUV's.  Our street it replete with all of these things, and an open vacuous cavern  inside a metal box allowing these sounds to penetrate my bedroom were unacceptable.  The removal of the box was successful, until now.  Now once again it is hot, eighty degrees to be exact inside.  It is too hot to think effectively, yet I am writing this blog entry.  I will have to install the air conditioner again presently, and I will do a better job the third time.  I will not caulk the vinyl grooves, the channels upon which the window travel.  I will build isolating panels of Owen Corning fiberglass to baffle the traffic noise.  I will secure the closure of the window with wooden slats.  It will be good, and once again I will have cool air.  This time the cool air will not be in the room in which I sleep.  I have made a change.  I have changed my bedroom into a music room.  The double bed once that inhabited this room now is gone, and its comfortable Original Mattress Factory mattress and box springs now are at my brother-in-laws home.  It was an amicable trade.  I get a dedicated music room, and Ed gets a much more comfortable bed upon which to slumber.  This transformation is not yet complete.  The majority of my musical equipment now is upstairs in this temperature controlled room.  It is integrated with my Apple Macbook Pro, so if I did feel inspired to make music I could record it.  I have not yet felt so inclined.  For a few weeks I did experiment with the "new" system."  I recorded miscellaneous projects that incorporated recording my own top notch Fender Precision Bass and my recently restored Rhodes 73 Stage Piano.  They sound phenomenal, better than I could have wanted.  My drum kit, which all ready I had devised and implemented in the later l990's, still sounds the same.  It is mixed, expressive, and musical.  I have the tools around me to make great music, but I have not had the inclination.  Instead I have had either diverticulitis or a peptic ulcer.  A resultant CT scan and an MRI revealed no real anomaly.  I have a small cyst in my right kidney, and I have a small collection of blood vessels making a lesion on my liver.  Everything else was normal but still discomfort.  This abdominal discomfort felt like an abscess.  It felt and still feels like bad fluid sloshing around in my guts.  After receiving no diagnosis from these two scans, I used my mind to try and unravel the mystery.  It seems a peptic ulcer makes sense.  Its symptoms are my symptoms.  The kicker is to make it heal, I cannot drink alcohol.  Ouch.  The ouch of the ulcer is far worse than the ouch of having to give up my evening buzz.  It took several months to make that determination.  After weeks of suffering pain in my hips, extreme fatigue, despondency, and nausea I have decided that the sacrifice will be made.  All ready after one day I am feeling better.  Still I will see a specialist on Monday, and still I will have a preventative colonoscopy.  I am fifty-two, so that test is overdue for the prevention of cancer.  Also with the doctor's consent I will begin a two week course of H Pylori killing antibiotics.  Ironically I have taken this treatment before.  After an endoscopy in Spain while working on a ship, the attending physician found what appeared to be H Pylori in my stomach.  After the two week treatment I was healthy again for the first time in months.  This time it became much worse, and it is exacerbated by noise.  It is exacerbated by low frequency noise, the noise that is emitted from low flying jets, prop planes, diesel locomotives, and garbage collection trucks.  These are the things that comprise Fayettenam.  We after all host the world largest military installation.