The Violence Behind My Silence This Time

A Tale of Accelerated Apocalypse, Part 1

It was quite the plot twist. A friend from way back in college days, whose second wedding I’d attended as best man, who’d given me the advice I followed on my first chapter of Bleeding Kansas that got my first novel off the ground, had taken ill and died in November. It was a completely freak thing. Still, I was nervous enough to schedule my usual physical and cancer screening for before Christmas, instead of waiting past the New Year as is my usual custom.

I was a shuddering wreck when I went in to have my blood drawn five days before Christmas. As the New Year came and became plain old 2018, I became more and more blasé about it. After all, what had happened to Steven was a completely freak thing. Given that my mother died at age 44 from colon cancer, and my father age at 52 from third stage non-Hodgins lymphoma, if anything was killing me it would have done so long before now. Given my record, I saw no reason for me not to live as long as my paternal grandmother, who made it all the way to 91.

When I got the call in mid-January telling me my PSA number was 10, meaning my prostate was three times its normal size, I assumed it was caused by nothing more than my underwear tightening as I gained weight last year. I bought bigger underwear. 

When things threaten to get a little too real, go into the cat photo folder.

Of course, I would have to see a urologist. I was told people have died with lower numbers than mine, and I didn’t doubt it. After a couple of weeks of desultory screwing around, I decided I’d bite the bullet and get an appointment at Fort Carson on the south end of Colorado Springs.

A three-hour ride, the midpoint through a high mountain pass, another hour waiting, and I saw the doctor. I learned nothing I didn’t already know. I had my blood drawn again for another PSA, and set up an appointment for a prostate biopsy, another month down the calendar. One almost had to laugh. If I had anything killing me, it had all the time in the world before we’d even get a look at what it was.

Before the biopsy, I learned that the second PSA number was 7. Now my prostate was only a little over twice as big. Score one for the Too-tight Underwear Theory.

Shot through a window screen, hence the odd visual effect.

March 23 was the day of the biopsy. It was also the day I got the idea that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to make the six-hour round trip alone. I got a brief blogpost out of it. Hard to believe that was more than three months ago already.

Posting is difficult when half your mind is somewhere else.

I had been told repeatedly I’d get a call within the next week, but I likely missed it. I get a lot of junk calls on my burner phone. I often wait to see if the caller leaves a voice message. Even so, since the beginning of this year, I’ve noticed the telemarketers leaving robotic messages, or tripping the voice mail without leaving any message at all.

My wife kept asking if I’d called them back to ask if I’d missed their call, and I was, ah, I’ll get around to it.

Sitting at my desk, Tuesday, 16 April — a day that will go down in infamy — I got the impulse to answer the phone when it rang, instead of looking at the number and clicking the mute button. It was the urologist himself. 

He’d been trying to get in touch with me personally because this was the kind of news a doctor gave personally. My wife broke down as she overheard me saying, “All right, so can I just get the thing cut out?”

To be continued (Part 2 right here if you're interested)....
Any contributions towards insurance co-pays, incidental expenses (those three hour drive to Colorado Springs), or maybe just a margarita for my long-suffering wife will be greatly appreciated. (Yes, that preceding block of text is the link.)

Another Windows Update, a Narrow Escape

Sometimes I long for the simplicity of Windows XP. Once they got that Service Pack 2 online, that was it. They had the closest thing to a perfect operating system businesses had to be forced to give up for the “better” iterations.

Tuesday night, 8 May, as I typed up banter between Derek Grace and his wife Agnes in Chapter 21 of The Wrong Kind of Dead, the fan on my custom-build PC began running hard enough to distract from the music I was playing. 

I run a 64-bit system on an 4 GHz AMD FX-8350 eight-core processor with 16 gigs of RAM. Although I could use more RAM—we can always use more RAM, right?—this is by no means a weak rig. After a few days or so of browsing and watching videos online, however, it does need a reboot. I opened up Start and proceeded to do just that.

Next time I’ll chance printing my galleys before I save. I thought I was losing everything. As you guessed, Windows was downloading its largest update in a while, full of unasked-for bloatware. In my case, the download hadn’t quite finished. This meant several reboots as the cooling fan in my rig built to a near scream trying to keep the processor from melting.

 

Calculator and Calendar have worked well for decades
without improvement. I suppose there was a crew that
needed something to do to justify its existence —
of which this proves the precise opposite.

I got through this, but for an hour I was resigning myself to having lost everything, including a computer I can scarcely afford to replace. Note to self: Comb through files from MCSA days, see if I can’t find a spare code for Windows 7. Windows 10 really is the disaster most of the Internet has made it out to be. It’s one thing that Microsoft is doing more to invade our privacy in collecting our information. It’s another entirely when it becomes apparent that elegance in design and maintaining continuity of productivity are nowhere in the company’s agenda. 

On 17 May, I opened my SonicStage program to tweak the playlist on a music mini-disc, and noticed the Gracenote add-on wasn’t working, forcing me to manually enter the titles and track listings of the CDs I was ripping. Figuring this likely had something to do with the big devastating update of 8 May, I went into my Update History only to learn that Windows 10 had been updating along the line of every two days. 

Also, the reason my fan was running hard wasn’t because that particular update was making SonicStage work harder. I was already 94% into downloading another update.

My rage burns with my poor overworked processor, forced to download superfluous nonsense like Cortana, Microsoft Edge, and Candy Crush Soda Saga, while inexplicably altering settings in my audio recording program, while installing pages of security patches every two days because they can’t get their architecture right the first 229 times, therefore stressing equipment I cannot afford to replace and putting my productivity on hold for the better part of an hour on their Big Patch days...well, what am I gonna do? 

Indeed, we are very unevenly matched.

For starters, I’ve taken some time off to uninstall the junk, and investigate ways to stem, if not altogether end, this nightmare.  There is a toggle to halt updates for 30 days, but that toggle can only be reset after letting Microsoft install its month’s worth of updates. Knowing the tremendous strain put on my machine letting Microsoft do its thing every two days, I’ve got a couple of weeks to figure a way to get my Windows 10 license declared as “enterprise,” which permits me more leeway in declining updates.

Google is the company you read the most about regarding Big Tech Megacorp Madness, but given the real-life disruptions here in my office, it’s apparent Microsoft has gone full-on throwing-fine-china-at-the-wall gibbering stupid on top of crazy. Something has got to give.