Stationary Bike Blues

Hammering on the proform stationary bike for hundreds of miles does not have the same ambiance as the open road, in fact sitting prone generates some of the most vivid memories of past rides, my mood has never been direr.  I am fighting a losing battle with the most ruthless state this side of the Siberian gulag, I made several trivial miscalculations which may prove fatal.  I had the stupid propensity to follow the advice of people who were supposed to be experienced in these horrible social welfare programs.  I am almost looking forward to the final decision in order to be done with all of these invasive personal questions that the state seems to want to disseminate to all and sundry. Honestly, if you wanted to paint a portrait of my abnormal personality traits, or my inherent dishonesty, you need to look no further than this blog where finally the blinders have come off.

I don't have one red cent to my name or a bicycle to ride or a job or any fingers.  People have to cut up my food or I would starve to death.  I can't fasten my seat belt or open car doors.  I can't write with a pen.  My hands suffer from chronic pain twenty-four hours a day.  I live with people who drink all day and argue all night about getting a divorce.  I play solitaire on the computer all night because I can't sleep.  I can't wipe my own ass.

Today is my birthday, I feel like I want to puke.  I want to get out of these ugly suburbs and back to the wide open spaces.  These giant size homes with puny backyards give me claustrophobia.  I could never understand how status is based on material possessions or what neighborhood you reside in.

I can't believe how I could have screwed everything up so bad.  I just wanted to be a good old boy with a steady job.  Wealth never interested me very much.  Can a person continue to live for long without hope?

I watched a whole boatload of old Tour films, bored without pleasure, to pass the time, something I thought would never happen.  I want some finality, I am tired of being monitored everywhere I go like some caged beast.  I want some faceless bastard to make a decision since they seem to be searching everywhere for a pretext to fornicate me.

Funny, when I was a normal person I didn't have two nickels in my pocket, but I survived years of environmental onslaughts without a qualm.  People would classify this behavior as insane, but the streets are full of sick crazy people.  Now, I need a shelter to survive or I will die?   I think if forced back on the streets that I will survive more environmental onslaughts, but my longevity may not be of long duration.  Without a bicycle, I may not last a month.

But as everyone knows nature punishes her freaks brutally.  I am looking forward to the challenge even though it is impossible to be victorious.

I am sure there are a great number of people who are sickened by the tone of my recent posts, but perhaps I want some detached mental health practitioner to do a clinical study of the aftermath of traumatic injuries, and who is better to document suffering better than a complete moron such as myself?

Black Days

The content of this blog has deteriorated.  This blog was focused on how dope increased athletic performance in cycling.  I never intended to focus on any other topic.  But since my frostbite accident, my blog has been more of a journal of my personal spiral into madness than a protest against doping in cycling during the "steroid era."  However, I have made small subtle references to a bicycle anti-doping agenda in an attempt to remain on topic.

The worse thing that could happen to a dysfunctional moron such as myself is to have an accident.  The only form of transportation I had was a bicycle or my feet, and the reason I bought a bicycle in the first place was so I could stop walking twenty miles a day.   Injured, without the ability to ride my bicycle, I nearly starved to death.  Currently, my poor bicycle is sitting in a garage with a rusty chain, I cannot ride the poor old thing, although I love and need that bicycle very much!  My hands are healing, the weather is improving, the primal urge is screaming, I need to go for a bicycle ride!

I can't even wipe my own ass.  If I wanted to off myself, I could do so very easily by riding down a large hill, and bang! collide with some rich ass hole's car.  Knowing my luck, I would fuck that up too.  I would probably awaken to the disapproving frown of some trauma surgeon.  "All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put Humpty Dumpty together again."  But knowing my luck, some surgeon wizard would put velovortmax back together again, much to my chagrin and endless suffering.

People in a surge of generosity gave me a large number of personal items, which in the end I will be forced to abandon, like my old bicycle.  Parting with a bicycle you love is like parting with a woman you love, the memories never die, good or bad.  A thought worthless bicycle thieves should keep in mind, people love and need their bicycles!  Bicycle thieves should be pilloried in the public square for depriving people of their precious bicycles, a suitable punishment for human filth.

I want to walk away.  I need a bicycle to survive.  Men walk away from their women and die.   I walk away from my bicycle and die?

Read the Old Curiosity Shop.  When Nell and her grandfather wander the streets all day in some old sooty industrial town, they decide to bed down in a stairwell of a doorway on the cold rough cobblestones.  A furnace tender comes to the rescue, he tells Nell and her grandfather about the bad things creeps do to young helpless girls at night in industrial towns.  Charles Dickens was a master of painting stark canvases of his day, the industrial revolution was a tough time, there was little compassion for human life.  People tangled their limbs in the machinery, surgeons were busy with the most primitive tools.  Injured people were left stranded to fend for themselves without any form of assistance.  Modern life, the information age, has an abundance of material possessions, fat bloated people, but disabled people are still left to fend for themselves without assistance.  People still live outdoors and are caught in windstorms, their frozen body parts are amputated.  People still die of hunger, people go blind from lack of nutrition, people cannot afford medical care, there is very little if any improvement from Charles Dickens' day...

I am the brunt of insidious jokes, people want to use me as a cheap Halloween prop.  They wish to employ me to terrify children because my hands look like something out of a cheap horror show.

I thought I was an enterprising sort of guy, always living on the edge, pushing my luck, daring fate.  Then Mother Nature exacted her revenge, and She is waiting cold and unfeeling for my return to finish me off.  To Mother Nature, human life has no value.

I have a date with destiny.  I was convinced that I would die on a bicycle ride, but the fates seem to have something more gruesome in store for me.  I am suffering from mental derangement.  A jaded social worker would love my anguish and attempt to intensify my angst.

I have fallen on black days, the Sun refuses to shine in my vacant world.

Odes to Post Graduate Social Isolation, 1986

An Outside View

I awoke from an enchanting dream where
A vast labyrinth barred my path,
Strewn with broken pillars, cornices, casements.

A large white balcony stretched over a yawning precipice
Embossed in pure marble!
But this idyllic view was besmirched
By an encircling dank moat.

Hopelessly lost in a perpetual maze of stupid ironies!
A diminutive candle, if you don't mind, PLEASE!

Oh, Muse! Where is your guiding beacon?
Somewhere beyond these obstacles lies a solution to the Myth!
Are not all things discernible with the aid of a flickering candle?

Mixed with a sweet lyrical strain of a cherub's faultless innocence
Came a far distant rumble.
Under a sight of an infantry gun,
Or reports from a darkening sky filled with anvil clouds?

A moth flies precariously around the open tallow flame.
Agape! A spectral vision, nowhere to implode?
But yet the light quivers!

Another Boring Tangent

Muse! When I begged you for inspiration you cruelly deceived me!  I asked only for an audience, but my lyre was met with deaf ears.  My tongue is silenced; a rotting corpse.  But my head is inundated with the stinking excrement of our time.  I have tried various methods to exclude unpleasant sensory impressions; songs, poetry, rudeness, all to no avail!  And my critics have crucified me with exile!

Terry D. Holfeltz
Salt Lake City, Utah
1986

Gabapentin Causes Post Traumatic Dementia?

I never expected to go through post-traumatic depression from a nasty bilateral four-finger frostbite amputation I experienced recently.  I applied for assistance from the government and was told to drop dead twice.  I can't pay the medical co-pay for my prescriptions.  I think I will fly a sign, help a homeless bum pay for his medical, food, and shelter costs.  I wonder how long it would take before some deranged cop tried to arrest me for creating a nuisance.  Would the inmate population treat a fingerless person with more respect than the police?  But being so vulnerable, perhaps I would be robbed of my nefarious gains by a fellow street person and would require the assistance of the police before I was arrested.  Are crippled people targets for thieves?  When I run out of medication do I go through delirium tremens, and will this require further hospitalization?  Will they control my hallucinations with a good dose of Thorazine?  Do the police assassinate deranged visionary cripples who create a disturbance from sudden medication withdrawal, people who shout at cars, and wave their stumps about in a frenzy while baring their teeth like rabid dogs?  If rabid dogs are removed to protect society why not remove indigent unemployable cripples who are nothing more than stinking parasites who siphon money from productive taxpayers?  The city could employ squads of angry citizens who would round up undesirable bums much like animal control rounds up stray animals.  They put down animals, why not bums?  In ancient history when I was a productive person, (not to be labeled a hypocrite), I would have favored a platform that called for the extermination of bums.  Now that I am disabled, I am ready to volunteer as an example to others.  Civic duty requires worthless people to step aside to create prosperity for others, as there are a finite number of resources...

There was a nasty social worker who asked me some of the stupidest questions when I was in the hospital.   Why do social workers exist and do they serve any useful purpose in this world?

The family took me to a local bicycle shop, maybe out of some sort of sadistic prompting.  When I saw all of the new beautiful bicycles that I could never afford I almost cried.  The salesman treated me like a piece of crap.  Salesmen are only interested in generating sales of high-end bicycles, I understand this sort of morbid reasoning.  People are insisting that with some bicycle engineering modifications I may be able to ride again on a road bike.  I doubt that this will ever be possible because the muscle functionality in my hands has not returned to the extent where I can apply enough pressure to the brake handles even to work hydraulic breaks.  There may be some future improvement, time will tell, but if not, there is always an ugly cruiser which does not require a hand brake.  Wandering around the shop I even found a copy of Tyler Hamilton's book The Secret Race.  Seeing that book made me feel violently ill from noxious disgust.  Tyler Hamilton was a doper extremist and my favorite target.  Tyler Hamilton was so gifted as a rider it was difficult to understand his bipolar depression.  But athletic gifts do not absolutely preclude mental instability.

They gave me something called gabapentin to kill phantom pain.  I hate all medications illegal or prescribed.  The side effects of gabapentin constitute a virtual syndrome of symptoms, including a lethal mix of depression and dementia.  Maybe I should call a doctor.  Some strange physical sensations seem to persist in my hands.  I attempt to describe these sensations to the bored outpatient clinic workers who tell me these sensations are not uncommon.  They doubled my dosage of gabapentin, maybe I am taking too much.  I am having weird memory lapses.  I should call a doctor.  These sensations in my hands are not normal.

Wired in a hospital bed while in perfect health is a strange experience.  I kept trying to convince the staff there was nothing wrong with me and perhaps the bed could be more usefully filled by someone who was really ill.  The hospital staff assured me there was plenty of space.  Being in a burn center, I saw faces of children fried from burn accidents, beautiful innocent little children scarred for life.  How could a compassionate loving God allow innocent children to go through the trauma of being burned?  How could a loving God allow frostbite?  Have me burned for being a blasphemer, heretic, an infidel.  I welcome death.  Death would be preferable to these horrors.

They could have amputated my thumbs, but then again there is voice recognition technology.  There is really no excuse, failure to adapt to modern-day technology is not a systemic failure, it is an individualistic failure.  I see families who sit around the kitchen table for hours with their noses buried in their cell phones, oblivious of each other and the surrounding environment.  The new normal. I had no desire for a cell phone and was happy.  The rustic life I loved has been taken away.  I am bored cooped up in a house all day.  I want to heal and then to vanish into thin air.  Demented thinking takes on many colorful hues, as an expanding soap bubble.

My surgeon, Dr. Amalia Cochran, has a blog herself, Life in the Wild West, the musings of a burn surgeon.  I could not refrain from reading some of it.  She was complaining that at an academic conference some of her male colleagues commented unfavorably upon her flowery attire as lacking in professional etiquette.  I wanted to be an organizational sociologist once, I even read, Men and Women of the Corporation.  Have we as a society yet to emerge from the stone age of male/female professional relations and is there still a gender-specific double standard?  I hope people are beyond such mundane concerns as to what constitutes proper attire in professional settings, there are more pressing concerns, all this nonsense seems so trivial...

Demented reasoning again?  But, you know, a woman commented, without fingers how do you jerk off?   I did not expect an existential question of such probity.  How do you respond to such a question without being gender-specific?  If I respond I need to hire a prostitute does that make me sexist?  Should I fall upon my knees and beg the first woman I see?  Would she have me arrested for perversion?  Since I have no wife and am not gay, do I risk offending anyone and does anyone care about being offended anymore?

This is 2015, not the stone age.  We regard ourselves as very sophisticated people, at least we enlightened ones do.  The unwashed are the same old dullards, unable to grasp the concept of equality for all regardless of circumstance.  Thus utopia is foiled once again, nipped in the bud by the same old prejudicial nonsense, the inability to share power between the sexes on a level playing field.

Anyone care for another gabapentin?

Addendum:

I was looking at the neurotransmitter, Gamma-Amino Butyric Acid (GABA) out of scientific interest.  GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter found in the central and peripheral nervous systems.  GABA seems to slow the firing rate of excitatory amino acid-dependent neurons. GABA has been touted as a natural tranquilizer and has been given to patients with anxiety disorders under the hypothesis that over time, increased platelet levels of GABA induces beneficial sedative effects.  However, oral administration of GABA may not pass the blood-brain barrier, therefore, GABA taken orally may be nothing more than a high priced placebo.

Okay, everyone knows my opinion of supplements.  Bodybuilders seem to think that GABA increases levels of human growth hormone (HGH) and muscle mass...seriously?  GABA is being taken as a performance-enhancing drug?

Mode of action of gabapentin from the Physicians Desk Reference:

GABA analog; has not been established. Binds with high-affinity to the α2-delta subunit of voltage-activated Ca²⁺ channels. Analgesic Effects: Prevents allodynia and hyperalgesia (animals).

One of my doctors said that gabapentin blocks excitatory amino acid-dependent receptors.  A very generic explanation as no doubt there is a whole constellation of excitatory amino acid receptors.  Nevertheless, there is no doubt that gabapentin crosses the blood-brain barrier, the drug is prescribed for seizure disorders.  Seizures are postulated to be caused by scar tissue from injury near the corpus callosum, or the area of the brain that contains neurons that connects the hemispheres of the brain.

In the good old days, scientists experimented upon themselves with unknown drugs and they recorded their own physiological reactions.  Nowadays crazed researchers use laboratory rats under stringent ethical rules to establish medical efficacy of drugs. Then there are cumbersome human trials and voluminous recorded medical data sets.

Good enough, but consider this, how does a rat express his or her mindset without language?  If a rat sits all day in the corner of his or her cage with a languorous demeanor does this indicate a depressed state of mind? May an inference be made as to the state of mind of a research animal based upon a downcast expression?  Perhaps.  But the complexity of human reactions does not generally generalize between species, people can mask depression or anxiety with cheerful expressions.  Therefore, human verbal descriptions of changes in psychological health are required to determine how side-effects of drugs can be adequately described, measured, or predicted.  Radical invasive measures are forbidden.  Living human tissue samples from the brain cannot be extracted for the research purposes except in extreme cases of radical surgery where large tracts of damage exist, but even so; neurons that survive in vitro work beyond the ken of human understanding.

I would willingly contribute slices of my limbic system to expand knowledge of affective disorders like the intrepid researchers of old, but that would be considered unethical as long as I am alive.  Better would be to dedicate my corpse to science, medical students could spend all day carving up my cadaver marveling at the abnormalities.

But damn it! gabapentin does not block dead excitatory amino acid-dependent receptors, does it?  [Indeed: calcium channels are dependent upon stimulation of receptors to perforate the double membranes of the vesicles that are contained within the presynaptic neuron.  The perforated membranes then release neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft.  So I am uncertain as to what sort of receptor blockade my doctor was referring to.]  And my GABA receptors can't report to me what is happening, damn it!

Another scientific breakthrough squandered by limitations of the human brain!