Dylan Bolin

Hello again, friends.  It’s been a couple days since my last post, but there’s a very good explanation; I’ve been busy eating like crap in preparation for the ”Big Game.”  (Like everyone else, I have to use the term “Big Game” in place of “Super Bowl” because ”Super Bowl” is copyrighted, but now that I’ve used it twice, I have to send $20,000 to the NFL.  They’re pretty cash-strapped so I’m sure they could use it.)

On “Big Game Sunday” my diet consisted almost entirely of salted grease with the occasional bit of processed “meat” thrown in for texture.  Right now my tongue feels like a dehydrated slug and I can measure my heart rate by watching the arteries in my neck throb.  This is a particular bad thing because, recently, I was diagnosed with High Blood Pressure. 

You know, I always knew that I was going to grow old; I just wasn’t prepared to do it all at once.  I always thought that my body would deteriorate at a predictable rate.  I was prepared to age at a rate of roughly one year per year.  Like a car. 

Over the course of time your car gets dinged up.  At first you would take it in for the smallest scratch, but as the relationship wore on, you started to just accept some normal wear and tear.  “So there’s a dent in the bumper, that’s what bumpers are for,” you’d think.  You start to let things go. “I can probably go another year without an oil change.”  “Gosh, the engine light’s been on for a couple weeks.”  “Sounds like the muffler’s dragging.  Oh well, as they pass, the other motorists seem to really enjoy the sparks.”  Eventually, the car company stops making the parts that either seize up or fly off and the car dies, but all of this happens at a gradual rate.  The car doesn’t just hit 100,000 miles and explode.

Well, unlike a car, that is apparently what my body has decided to do and now I have high blood pressure.  When I was younger, my motto in my twenties and early thirties was:  “Better to Burn out than fade away.”  “I don’t want to die without scars.”  “Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse.” 

I know that’s actually three mottoes, but in my twenties and thirties, I could juggle three.  And I didn’t care. 

And then I got married, and then we bought a house, and then the distinguished tan man came on the T.V. and asked how much life insurance I had.  And then, when I mentioned it to a co-worker, and let slip that I didn’t have any life insurance, she looked at me like I had pulled out a kitten and began to eat it like a Hot Pocket. 

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, the series of events culminated in me standing in my bathroom peeing in a cup in front of a sweet, little, grey-haired lady named Doreen.  “How much do you need,” I asked.  “About half that,” she replied.  I panicked and she got double.

It was during this exam that I learned that I have High Blood Pressure.  Not this exact portion of the exam, of course.  I mean, she didn’t wrap the inflatable cuff…well, you know what I mean. 

Honestly, the last time I remember someone even mentioning blood pressure was on that old T.V. show Emergency!  Every show, Randy Mantooth would be hovering over a patient in the back of an Ambulance and every once in a while he’d shout:  “B.P. 120 over 80!” and then we’d watch his face to see whether that was good or bad.  Then he’d open some ringers, whatever those are. 

Well, compared to my situation, a B.P. of 120 over 80 is very good.  In fact, it’s normal; I am not.  So what exactly are they measuring when they put that cuff around your arm?  They’re measuring the pressure of blood against your arteries.  Basically, as your heart goes “lub dub,” the 120 is during the “lub,” and the 80 is during the “dub”  Or it’s the other way around.  The fact is that my heart is generating a lot of pressure with my blood as it sends it around my body delivering oxygen and nutrients. 

Now, you would think that would be a good thing.  Like putting your finger over the end of a hose increases pressure and allows you to water the farthest corner of the lawn without burning valuable calories by getting out of the lawn chair.  Likewise, high blood pressure would force blood into all those distant little capillaries.  If the circulatory system is a highway and blood is the traffic, my highway is the Autobahn and my blood is a Porsche.  Well, it seems that certain doctors (like all of them) disagree.

Apparently, there are many causes of high blood pressure:  Genetics, weight, caffeine, salt, stress, but I have a theory.  What if the problem is not that my heart is pumping too hard or that my arteries and veins are too thin?  What if I simply have too much blood?  Anybody who has ever added one too many quarts of oil to their 1987 Mercury Topaz knows what kind of pressure that can create.  (See what you can do with it, Rawhide Boys Ranch.)  And you know I haven’t had a cut or a scrape or a vampire attack in a very long time.  Maybe I just need a few leeches. 

In the meantime, apparently I’m supposed to avoid the many possible causes of High Blood Pressure including reducing my salt intake which I promise to do in spring.  It’s been a hard winter, and the only way I’ve found to keep my car truly clean is through a sensuous tongue bath.

And you can’t expect me to adhere to a strict low-sodium diet when the “Big Game” television commercials are compelling me to experiment with their products.  Take Doritos for instance.  According to the commercial, eating Doritos will make a woman’s clothes fly off, make an ATM spit money and turn a cop into a monkey.  However, this power has a dark side as wielding it will make you get hit by a bus.

I guess we all have to die of something.

-Dylan