Category: Essay

The Classic Revival Chandelier

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 2 Comments

We adopted a Classical Revival opaque-glass inverted dome chandelier suspended by “faux aged-brass chains” through which were woven obvious electrical wire then disappeared into a polished brass top which was surrounded by a poorly reproduced Victorian 36″ plastic ceiling medallion.

During some interior remodeling we decided our electricians would center a light fixture (yet to be determined) over the dining room table.  I decided that the “Old Girl” (the opaque-glass inverted dome) deserved a shot at redemption thus finding a permanent location in our home.

The following photographs show the restored Classic Revival opaque-glass inverted dome and rod chandelier proudly hanging above our dining room table.   The restoration included (3) new keyless sockets inside the bowl, new brown 16 gauge wire threaded through (2) 17″ lengths of copper pipe (per socket) and into rings attached to the breaker. The breaker and knob were cleaned and refinished in a muted, antique copper finish.  

I refused to reinstall the plastic ceiling medallion and instead hand made a canopy built entirely from century old oak moulding rescued from an Edgewater (Chicago) mansion before its demolition.  I wanted the canopy to step down and inward toward the breaker.  I chose an octagonal shape.  In all, there are (32) pieces of moulding and each joint is mitered at a 22.5 degree angle.

I’m a true believer in the rescue and restoration of objects once-treasured-then-discounted-by-cheap-materials.  I try to repurpose materials; it’s our duty to the environment to give all objects “a second chance.”

I think the chandelier has reclaimed its mojo.

Self-Interest: Corruption Guaranteed

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 4 Comments

I think it happened during the Reagan years.  It was around the time of power ties and the advent of cellular technology.  That was when the i in America became more important than any group pronoun such as us, we, our, them.  When self-interest became an ideology was precisely the moment that the we as a nation became a dirty word.  America’s current woes stem from an obscene degree of entitlement, a self-indulgent morality, and a despicable depth of greed; the sum of which creates an environment of distrust which is fed a diet of impossible promises by leaders (edited and misrepresented by news outlets (who themselves have self-interest)) and the disintegrating pride to be a citizen of the United States of America.

It’s not a coincidence that the dawn of the internet was cloudy at first; mainstream America had little use for its content.  But what ignited the web’s wildfire was the moment that disparaged and isolated men and women of many sexually divergent activities discovered each other through unmoderated global chat rooms; next to stumble through the door were the curious; then, like Alice following Rabbit, children handily navigated the new technology (like a game) and dropped dead-smack into chatrooms like raw meat tossed into the cages of nasty predators.  Adults indulged their reputations too long; their admission of ignorance and thus training in the technology of the internet might’ve invoked authorities to act, to infiltrate and prosecute, to protect; but it took adults way too long to grasp who exactly their thirteen year old sons were meeting at the arcade.  It’s an example of self-interest both on the part of the child predator and the narrow-minded adults.

The introduction of wickedly-fast download speeds, the steep decline in popularity of “graphical user interface and proprietary software” (think AOL), the advent of simple on-ramps to the internet cable or DSL, and of course the introduction of Yahoo! and CompuServe’s email system provided accessibility to a font of information and instantaneous communication.  All this access produced a phenomenal sense of urgency, a global reach, and a sense of self-importance which exponentially exploded once Facebook emerged and quickly became the equivalence of your Christmas Card List.  Overnight America went from millions and millions of nobodies to millions and millions of nobodies with friends.  And friendship is oft borne by common interests.  And conversations around common interests tend to illuminate injustice.  Voila!  Self-Interest is born.

But what happens when no one outside of your common interest group gives a crap about your injustice?

Deadlock.  Lame Duck.  Non-negotiable.  Blame.  Intolerance.  Even insurrection, anarchy, bloodshed.

Unfortunately we’ve become a country of individuals corralled in to two political parties neither of which we feel particularly expresses how we really feel.  And there we sit, millions of disenfranchised voters waiting for November to express our citizenship by voting for one of two people (our right to vote coerced like a false confession), but neither really represents me.

But maybe, maybe it’s not about me, maybe it’s about us, us with common interests like freedom and liberty and a free market and rights and that once cherished but now forgotten or a provincial joke, the American Dream.  Our America will collapse if its forced to support millions and millions of fractious self-interested citizens.  We’ve got to agree to disagree; to stop feuding; to reconcile our differences; and to stop the pettiness of self-interest.

We’re in a disaster and we need everyone to come together; it’s called brotherhood.

By-(pass) & Bi-(polar)

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

Please note:  If you know of someone who has had gastric by-pass surgery and is having similar experiences as I’ve described, please share this post with them.  They can send a note to: questions@bypassandbipolar.info.

Fact:  We cannot predict the future.  Fact:  Life has no guarantees.  Fact:  New ideas can be both liberating and debilitating.  Fact:  Those offering a service resulting in permanent physical modification should fully understand the immediate impact as well as future consequences.

Myth:  The Medical Community at-large fully understands the alternative treatment options researched and developed by medical professionals specializing in gastric by-pass surgery due to the post-gastric by-pass patients insufficient absorption of oral medications.

It’s been ten years since I elected to undergo the radical Roux-en-Y gastric by-pass surgery and permanently remove most of my stomach and a length of my small intestine.  The alienation of these two components produces significant weight-loss because: 1) You can’t eat much; and, 2) You can’t absorb much.  Yes, there is a fair amount of adjustment, but the weight literally falls off and stays off with an average regain of ten percent.

Remnants of the “old you” are carted to resale shops or, in my case, high-end tent and boat sail manufacturers.  Everything is absolutely wonderful until you hit a bump in the road say, like a complete mental breakdown. Psychiatrist’s whip out the antipsychotics and antidepressants like they were six-shooters; their effects are hardly immediate; many take as long as six weeks to burrow into your blood stream; still crazy?  No problem, the psychiatrist’s reach for the tommy-gun and another six-weeks pass; nothing.  Up and up and up we go until finally the two of us are sitting in a missile silo and his finger hovers above the launch button.  Dabbing his ever-perspiring brow with a cotton kerchief he mutters repeatedly, “this is unnatural, this is unnatural. . .”

It is unnatural!  Post-gastric by-pass patients have been modified, re-engineered; fundamental human mechanics, basic organ responsibilities, broad physical and chemical hypothesis tested and tried and approved by the FDA have little (if any) effect; we’re the svelte yet queer abomination of opportunistic, profit seeking surgeons that prey on the desperate obese willing to do anything to permanently lose weight.  Malabsorption is the snake oil the surgeons are hawking.

If I sound particularly harsh toward the bariatric profession it’s because I firmly believe that they have abdicated a large chunk of their responsibility not only to their patients, but to their fellow medical colleagues as well.  In  the ten years since I had gastric by-pass surgery, I have learned from a very reputable source, a doctor of some notoriety in the field of obesity, that to his knowledge, no one is, nor anyone has bothered to explore and/or discover and educate the medical community as to an alternative method of transporting medications into the body when oral absorption is impossible or only 25% effective (as is my case).  Or perhaps they could propose a mathematical equation which other medical colleagues could use to increase a gastric by-pass patient’s daily dosing.

The only medication that provides any relief from my mental illness is dextroamphetamine salt prescribed in a volume that aroused the suspicion of local pharmacists who publicly (in the presence of their staff and other customers) strongly suggested that I was either A) An addict or B) A pusher, then flatly refused to honor my doctor’s authorized prescription.

I suffer from a mental illness that kills 40% of those diagnosed by suicide; the commonly practiced treatment of prescribing oral antipsychotics and/or antidepressants is impossible because I elected to undergo gastric by-pass surgery ten years ago; if I become one of those 40% because the doctor’s that promote, promise, and perform these procedures have abdicated their responsibility to provide an effective treatment alternative in ten years, do me a favor: file a class-action lawsuit against every last one of them for their gross negligence!

Was It Something I Said ?!?!?

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

 

Ever since I fled from the Windows world and into the effervescent and perpetually happy Apple universe, I’d been sitting at a desk thrown together in twenty minutes and composed mostly of scrap lumber (different colors), 4×4 for legs, and a fair number of exploratory holes, saw marks, spinning-drill-bit-skid marks, a couple of awkwardly placed and slightly askew keyboard and it’s baby sister, the touch pad.  All in all if you saw it you’d immediately ask me, “Who built it, the 3 Blind Mice?”

So after eighteen months of zooming around the internet on my sleek, gorgeous, fast, and sexy iMac which looked ridiculously out of place atop a “lean-to” or “slogbod” much like hanging your Chagall in the broom closet, we gathered our notes and set off for Ikea to buy a desk as sophisticated and natty as my iMac.  And what better place to look than Ikea where umlauts and chic Danish styling meet flat cardboard boxes and a picture-book as instructions.  It’s a maddening place, three oddly shaped floors keep inattentive browsers circling like planes above O’Hare during a blizzard.  The noise level rises with each entrance of a different language or dialect.  It’s the hunch punch of furniture stores!

Our excursion to the suburbs netted a sleek stainless steel desk and return, and a stout storage cabinet for office essentials which, unfortunately, never grew past page eight and was hastily disassembled and now waits in the back of the car like a repeat offender returned to jail.  The iMac went gaga the moment I placed its serpentine stand atop the stainless steel.  At the moment of contact I experienced goose bumps then heard Neil Armstrong’s voice from afar as he set foot. . .but the iMac’s new throne is less a desk and more a table, and the return is really a shelf, and it’s stainless steel veneer shrink-wrapped around a hollow-core interior: “All meat and no potatoes,” as my dad would say when characterizing anyone or anything that scores high marks in one area but falls woefully short in others.  My iMac’s stainless steel desk and return was more representation than substantial.

Today we decided to modify our chic and Danish modern representation of a stainless steel desk by adding a pinch of legitimacy: we installed a sleek, 5/8’s inch steel, pull-out keyboard tray. . .actually we only installed a representation of a keyboard tray.  As the drill bore into the fake under belly of the table it created an incredible vibration causing everything sitting on the desk top to bounce around like kids on a trampoline.  Including my iMac.  Which jumped around like a Walleye at the bottom of the boat.

The next thing I knew I went left and the iMac went right as it ricocheted off my head and landed, screen-first on the thickened edge of the stainless steel veneer.  As I write this my head is pounding, my wallet is weeping, and my iMac screen resembles a spiders web.

I’m sure there’s a hidden message in this debacle: never mix chic and cheap? iMac’s are really iWant so iGet? Now I know: Make sure that the pedestal upon which you place the one you love is meat and potatoes!

The Run For President Is A Bully’s Pulpit

~ Harlan Didrickson

Me?  I deplore competition.  I have hated competition since I was very young because, I assert, I was a fat child (that was before it was sassy, vogue and fattering – my modern form of flattering, as in “are these jeans fattering?”) and competition was synonymous with failure and embarrassment and yet another reminder that I was one of the periphery boys.

Although I joined seasonal teams through high school, I was never competitive, i.e. an athletic threat, to any opponent.  I weathered all those losses because it was smarter to belong to and be a loser, than to be a loner and a loser.  Loner losers were to high school what a duck that clangs is to a shooting gallery: irresistable to insecure men that accumulate trophies as proof of their asserted dominion.

Haven’t we witnessed too many examples of the tragic consequences when potent, tightly-wound, explosive or obstinate pack leaders torment the dissimilar, solitary and contradictory by exhaustive humiliation, unyielding fear, and physical harassment to an exasperated degree of hatred and revenge expressed externally as murder or the lowest depths of hopelessness that the victim’s acrimony and contempt is so great and that their thirst for retribution will never be quenched, so they turn inward to find their self-inflicted exoneration and release from misery.  When did we, as a nation, agree that in order to succeed we’ve got to hit the disenfranchised with such a degree of “shock and awe” that they’ll eventually submit to extinction?  When did we, as a nation, adopt bullying as our de facto reaction to threats and danger?  It’s the exact moment that the practice of instilling fear into the minds of the voting public by egregious negative attack campaigning accusing the opposing party or candidate of misfortunes, errors in judgement, or personal infractions so dubious or diabolical, that if the opponent won the election America would resemble the wasteland once known as Cherynobl.

When bullying is permitted, incited, or rewarded as a rite of passage or a strategy in a competition, it reinforces a recent and troubling change in our idea of sportsmanship.  Competition used to be the identification of “winner” as one that was better at <whatever> than his/her opponent(s) and was able to prove his/her superiority by way of fair, impartial, and equal sportsmanship.  Competition has become the identification of “winner” as one that was better at pointing out weaknesses, instilling doubt through repetitive and escalating degrees of fear, taking advantage of the recent breakdown in civility and propriety by deliberate and calculated unearthing, followed by wanton pillaging and inference, leading up to the zenith: a quiet, little leak to cable news outlets which, within a few pre-dawn hours hits all the major wires and airs as the lead story on every morning news program and goes viral in time for most voters coffee break.