The Ego / Health Connection Exposed

by Thomas Orton

Liv Fun: Vol 4 – Issue 1

I was exhausted. I couldn’t help cutting corners. And where there were no corners, I cut whatever was there. This fatigue, a symptom of my Parkinson’s, had saddled me with a repertoire of some bad but necessary habits. By bed time every night, I was so tired I pulled off my jeans and shorts at the same time, not bothering to separate them before dropping them in a heap on the floor.

One morning, I put on fresh shorts, then pulled on the same jeans, forgetting that the old shorts were still inside. I went to work as usual. Through the morning, the old shorts began working their way down the back of my right pant leg the way a piglet, swallowed by a python, slowly moves through the serpent’s gut. I had no idea this was happening. I felt tightness at the back of my thigh but assumed it was one of those dry jokes by which Parkinson’s only makes it seem you are developing yet another symptom.

At noon I left the office for lunch, walking up the carpeted hallway when the shorts finally made it out the bottom of my pant leg. Flew out is more like it, landing some ways down the hall at the feet of a woman just coming out her office door. My face burned hot and I realized something terrible: I was no longer cool.

OK, I probably have not been cool or stylish since I hit 40. Despite the corrosive effect of simple aging in the decades since, I have managed to keep deluding myself that, if I wasn’t actually cool, the possibility still existed.

In my current shape — stumbling, slurring my words, kicking my underwear at strange women — only an idiot could think I was cool. Dignity was hard enough to come by; if I tried to be cool on top of that, I would surely make a jackass of myself.

The underwear had to go.

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Liv Fun

by Leisure Care
Spring 2015
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Three Mind Tricks to Ease Your Pain
by Elana Zaiman

Our imagination all too often takes us to places we don’t want to go: “My daughter didn’t call when she said she was going to call. She must have been in a car accident.” “My friend’s headache won’t go away. She must have a brain tumor.” “My feet are in constant pain. The pain will never end.”

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Talking to The Animals
by Skye Moody

Mystery novelist Bill Fitzhugh keeps chickens in his Los Angeles backyard. Each hen has a name: Aunt Ray, Watermelon, Woody, etc. Occasionally, Fitzhugh posts a “Chicken Report” on Facebook, narrating his videotaped visits to the henhouse and lush grassy pecking yard.