WHERE'S C PAPA?

"I seem to be a verb." Buckminster Fuller, genius

it's cold and dark.traffic is sparse except frot the occassional daring ninja on bicycle or skateboard.the medical complex is dark with recessed lighting and my first thot is WHAT A GREAT PLACE FOR A MURDER or other heavy felony.two cars in the parking lot, lots of dense shrubbery, zero eyewitnesses.. a woman skitters out to her car. she doesn't look back...
first thing i note inside the elevator is that someone has peed in the corner, it will still be there in the morning.
i am on time for my appointment, a little early as usual for me. ALLI is a tall young white woman in dark blue scrubs, she guides me to ROOM 3 and has she sit on the bed and fill out FAQs again. i have been on a C PAP machine since late june but of course that is no help tonight.after a while alli and Jeffrey, a pudgy east indian machine tech in street clothes come in to fine tune the new machine and fit a mask over my beard. this takes about an hour until both are satisfied. i adopt a light patient trance until this part is finished. i use what are called NOSE PILLOWS which are small and light so of course they use first a FULL FACE MASK then a PROFILE NOSE MASK then add a CHINSTRAP which makes me look and fell like HANNIBAL LECHTER in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (it was on cable again recently, still creepy good!)
next is the ordeal, a hour spent sitting quietly while 30 electronic leads are pasted on my upper body and extra large head....we make chit chat but it soon peters out.she likes DEXTER has never watched TRUE BLOOD, got her husbands name tattooed a week after they met, it was mutual,has a child despite contraception (like me) and seems to be an ordinary decent human being.
they let me go pee, made the mistake of having coconut ginger soup with rice noodles for dinner...i waddle with my 30 leads and electronic noose to the toilet and back then they HANNIBAL LECHTER me up again and put me to bed...but first there are the calibrating tests-eyes open, eyes shut, blink ten times (yawn?),look left and right ten times,up and down ten times, grind your teeth, false snore now GO TO SLEEP.yeah right.
i think of ZYKLON B (poison gas) in this noisy machine a foot from my head, it sounds like a small V2 rocket when it starts up, if it get this SM will be sleeping in the next room again...Jeffrey says i will probably need on the rest of my life. i tease him about replacing all these masks and leads with a NASA style space helmet, he had an atrophied sense if humor (like most techs,think DILBERT) and starts talking about DEAD SPACE PRESSURE. he doesn't get it but i prod him with compensating factors hoping he will get the joke, i soon give up.
i wonder how HANNIBAL slept at night and whether he dreamt of murder,bloody murder in darkened anonymous rooms...

i wake up before dawn, my back is killing me as usual.
my homepathic nasal spray cannot cope with the heavier plastic load and my nose is leaking, luckily i brought along tissues and a towel this time. i lay there trying to sleep/not sleep and eventually alli issues a wake up alert and comes in to de electrode me.i am left with patches of stickum on my scalp,beard,throat,neck and chest. looks like i cut myself shaving with a haybaler...i fill out more FAQs and dress, the urine is still in the elevator and even with dawn breaking this still looks like a good place for a felony...NPE is babbling something safe on the radio, wonder if i will have to go thru all this again????

so now u know what it's like...
nanamste yawn
semper gymbally
mega

P.S. for the non cinefreaks among u, punny WHERE'S PAPA is a funny Ruth Gordon movie, a 70s classic. should be on DVD by now.