photo by Juneva Boyden Green

 

Talk about yer virtual reality. I was there, for real. Strapped onto a stretcher while two emergency response guys in parkas with the reflector stripes on them tilt it sidewise to jam it through the door of a little plane.  Nothing to it. Like juice through a goose. Wild. October 31, 2009. Halloween. I’m getting medivaced (medical evacuation) to Yellowknife from my home town of Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. Way cool.

It was snowing and blowing some but I was snug as a bug in a rug. All bundled up in a sleeping bag and a government issue arctic parka with the hood up over my head.  Ambulance ride to the airport. Like on TV. A first for me. I wasn’t hurting at all. Just didn’t have any juice. Wet noodle mode.

Shoehorned into the plane. Strapped down. Dozed off. Reverse shoehorn off the plane in Yellowknife. Another ambulance ride to the Stanton Yellowknife Hospital. Kinda fuzzy about the next course of events. My partner Juneva was there, and my daughter Jaida.

Anyway, I was diagnosed with Polymyositis. My immune system had apparently gone haywire. Got confused is what it did. Decided that my own muscles were the enemy and attacked them. By the time I got to Yellowknife my shoulders and hip joints were pretty well shot; shut down. Couldn’t lift my arms. I could barely stand up. Walking was out of the question.

So they put me on a steroid called Prednisone and sent me home. Worked like a damn. Felt better within hours of taking it. The steroids held my immune system at bay and helped rebuild my muscles. I started to feel like there might be a tomorrow. But it took a long time to come back. I was in bed for two months. Had a lot of time to think.

The Prednisone had some side-effects that I could have done without. Had a sneaky tendency to blind-side me. Like being smacked up-side the head with a grain shovel. Bizarre spurts of brutal juices, baffling sensations  and slashes of disjointed, conflicting, emotions. Including paranoia. Not good. On the bright side, another of the side effects was euphoria. Oh yeah. I’m here to testify to that. Had some right fine little side trips there. And a lot of time to think.

The movie Bucket List gave me the idea; I decided to write my own. I was flat on my back for most of two months with nothing much else to do but read and talk to my dogs and work at my list as the mood moved me.

I had a clip board next to the bed and kept scribbling away when inspiration hit. I never looked back at what I’d already written. Kept scratching. But after a while it occurred to me that I’d been writing for a long time, so I read it over. Whoa. There was a lot of good stuff in there.

The first thing I noticed was something that had been missing for years. Focus. I seemed to have had a good grasp of the task at hand and was as focused as all get out. The only trouble as far as I could see was that if wanted to accomplish all the things that I’d written down, all 23 pages of them, I’d have to live another 40 or 50 years. At least. And I was already 69. Twenty-three pages. Some editing was in order.

Scratched the novels. All three of’m. Didn’t choose to throw them away. Maybe do something else with them. Cancelled any further marketing of various and sundry poetry manuscripts.  Mothballed several research projects. Back-burnered (as if they weren’t there already) a handful of magazine articles. Shortened the list. Pared it down.

And BINGO! There it was. The thing I wanted to do, to accomplish, more than anything else. I wanted to write my stories and I wanted to tell my stories. I wanted to write, record and produce and distribute my stories as Compact Discs or in any other digital manner that made sense.

And the next thing I knew, I was making another list. A list of the CDs I wanted to produce. I stopped when I got to 12 and knew there was at least a half a dozen more. Shortened the list. Pared it down. To four. I figured that was manageable. Four Cds. That was somewhere around the end of January 2010.

I started working on the CD manuscripts right away in early 2010. Here we are coming to the end of 2011 and moving right along. I’ve written the scripts for five CDs and recorded the voice tracks of three. Two more on stream. Well, what can I say: four became five. Five CDs in various stages of progress under the able management of a company called DRUM SONG PRODUCTIONS. Cooking.

There are a lot of good reasons for not doing steroids for extended periods so I gave up any dreams of joining the American Baseball League and switched drugs. Methotrexate works pretty good and it looks we may be together for the duration.

So, the list. My Bucket List. If you’ve read this far I hope you’ll take some time to visit other pages on my site and, if you’re so inclined, stop and order one or more of my CDs from my online Store. How soon will they be there? Watch my smoke.

Jim