I take my barbaric gulp on the rooftops of the world

In what may easily become a daily ritual, I am sitting on the roof of my apartment building in the pacific heights, sipping a stereotypically delicious local San Fran beer, reading up on my patients for tomorrow while the sun sets into the pacific.

I will post more in a bit but right now I'm enjoying myself too much to look at a screen.

evil twin

I realized that my mate' gourd looked like a cartoon bomb, so why not embrace it.

The thought xray

They left an old mind xray in the apartment for us so I figured I'd fire it up on the apt. balcony for my first morning on the job.

41 years beyond the summer of love

I walked to the corner of Haight and Ashbury to have a local beer at a brew pub, passing the corner, a man with one arm gone above the elbow lazily asked "spare change" -"sorry man, all out"- "right on"...the city of San Francisco should pay that man a historical re-enactor's salary.

As I sipped my beer I thought of these words by the late Sir Hunter S. Thompson:

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

"The Coldest Winter of my life...

...was the summer I spent in San Francisco"

No, Mark Twain didn't say (or write) this. But since whoever did is unlikely to be as interesting as Twain, I won't go to the trouble of finding out who the quipper actually was.

I'm sitting in the C terminal of Boston's Logan airport waiting on a straight shot Virgin America flight to SFO. Not that the weather is bad, 10 days of cartoon sunshine according to weather.com - which could mean anything.

I spent the last hour in the Legal Seafoods restaurant watching World Cup, drinking a fresh Boston Lager with a bowl of clam chowder and a half dozen fresh east coast oysters completing my culinary farewell to New England. My guess is that the west coast can and will answer in kind. Probably with crab stew in a sourdough bowl with an Anchor Steam. Predictable, but respectable. Should be a good fight.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I am going to be present at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil even if I have to sell a kidney to do it.

On Thursday I had my first day of rotation specific orientation, internal medicine in my case. Luckily when the preliminary pimping began, it was over a medical subject that I happen to excel as compared to my peers, random historical medical trivia - subcategory: illicit drug related.



They showed us this picture, a portrait of 4 founding fathers of medicine painted by John Singer Sargent. After reading us a venerable quote they asked who the speaker was. Not knowing the quote, but realizing I was in the company of Internists, I hazarded "Osler", meaning Sir William Osler the Abe Lincoln, Santa Claus, Dumbledore of Internal Medicine. Then they asked, "Now who is this gentleman lurking in the shadows?" This I knew, "Halsted", referring to William Stewart Halsted, the father of modern american surgery and who incidentally introduced the practice of wearing gloves during surgery not for asepsis but because his assistant (and wife)'s hands were irritated by the insane scrubbing routine which involved something like burning your fingertips off with carbolic acid. "And why is it appropriate that he's back there in the dark?" Anyway, I knew what they wanted to hear, and frankly what I thought was hilarious to say on my first day as fake doctor, and spoke up "because of his raging cocaine addiction"

An auspicious beginning...

The Pager Ceremony

Today we received our pagers, picked from a disappointingly unceremonious fold-out card table covered in bic pens and old school motorolas that weigh 2lbs and probably emit enough radiation to glow in the dark. The kind of pager banned from high schools in the early 90's because only drug dealers carried them, supposedly. They might even be refurbished 90's drug paraphernalia, the telecommunications equivalent of the 'Ghetto Blaster.'

Since the school was heartless enough to so carelessly distribute the millstones to be worn around our necks for the next 40-60 years, I devised a 'Pager Ceremony' for myself and my roommate Kendall. Ideally there would have been a guy with a bull horn, holding a pager over his head shouting "statistically this device will ruin 1/4 of all marriages you as a group undertake, be responsible for 61% of your gray hairs, 88% of your childrens' missed birthday parties, recitals, and graduations, 92% of the weight you will gain, the tums you will swallow, the coffee you will drink, the sleep you will lose. Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?"

Since that person was markedly absent, I stepped in, spoke thusly, and handed Kendall his pager placed inside of an (empty) Spam can, since that's what he'll be eating for the next 8+ years. He in turn asked me the same immortal question "Are you sure you want to do this?" and handed me my Albatross within a can of Espresso, since that will be my fuel for the coming decade.

1st Day of (non) School

1990- 1st day of Kindercare
91' Kindergarden
92' 1st grade
97' middle school
2000 High school
2004 1st day at Rutgers
2008 1st day of med school
2010 1st day of NOT SCHOOL

20 years of standing in lines, being told where to go, to clean up my messes, do my homework, eating lunch in cafeterias, putting my things in cubbies and lockers and now finally, freedom...

... "you have locker number 123, keep the locker room clean, wait in line over there for your id, the cafeteria hours are 6-11, WASH YOUR HANDS after going to the bathroom, share the lounge area, be nice, don't throw things..."

and in that spirit of the great tradition of pedagogy, here is a picture of me on my first day of (not) school, in my brand-new grown-up disguise.



still not as sharp looking as this guy though

Vox Clamantis in Vapidity

So I'm working on some video editing for a study , which requires me to spend time in the Dartmouth undergraduate library's media center. Here's a brief snippet of the gems of insight I'm privy to at this Venerable Ivy League institution.

"So like, that's something that, like, probably our society can't accept yet maybe, ya know..."

"....yeah so I'm graduating, like, tuesday"

"whoa, that's so like..."

"yeah... I'm gonna be like, an Alumni..."

"yeah...."

"Whoa! are they like sewing in that video!?"

"ugh, that's like.... crazy"

My reply:

BLAME CANADA!

It was Quebec all along! I knewed it!

"Smoke from fires burning in southern Quebec has spread south and east across parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. The Upper Valley has been affected by this smoky condition which is expected to linger for the next 24 to 36 hours when forecasted showers will help clear the atmosphere.

The National Weather Service predicts the acute condition will break up in the next few hours. The following URL provides smoke maps for the current time period and the current conditions: http://www.weather.gov/aq/

We recommend avoiding strenuous exercise outdoors, and to wait until conditions improve"



Take that!



*also
today too is turning out to be kind of weird. So far:

1) Overheard this guy with a cane at the video store asking if his special order "porn video with the midgets" was in yet, and when told no
"But it's been like 3 weeks!"
and then his creepy buddy chimed in " heh heh heeehhhhh...."

2) I saw a girl with Oculocutaneous Albinism doing jumping jacks at the gym. That's the first time I've seen jumping jacks done since 4th grade.

3) Then an 60+ year old man smugly wearing a YALE shirt at the dartmouth gym walked by in a pair of these.