A dinner for music students at a college. Long tables and benches. My friend Bob is there, far off. He's a mentor for a lot of wannabe musicians. Surprising, since he doesn't play.

I sit next to a short white girl with brown bangs and pixie ears. Cute. In tank top and shorts, but with a huge yellow rain slicker beside her. She says "I know your music!" Bob endorsed me and she knows and trusts him. Also, one of her music classes showed a video of me performing live--she liked my originality. I didn't even know anyone had shot a video of me.

I ask "What music do you do?" She's nonplussed, vague. "Oh... ballads, jazz, love songs, pop..." mixing subjects and styles.

We start talking of goals. I blurt out (surprising myself) "This semester, my goal's to find other players and singers who can handle my complex stuff. I can't--I'm a clumsy instrumentalist." Talk about how far this goes--I personify objects and assume they're out to get me.

In fact we're in a real-life example right now. We're sitting and eating in my car, here in the hospital cafeteria. It slowly shrinks until we're sitting on a hospital gurney, as if we're surgery patients.

I try to park the gurney in a corner so we don't block the hall, but as I back up the gurney I ding the corridor wall. Out drops a plasterchunk big as my fist. Oops! Clumsy! Or the perversity of things. I shrink the gurney further, into a wheelchair, then to a wheeled walker, and fold it up and lean it against a table. There's a cane too. Topple it. Personify it as it falls. The cane is perversely falling, out to get me...

Why do I indulge this paranoid farce? I'm not THAT disabled, or even that clumsy--just slow to learn arbitrary codes like typing and piano, where the keys aren't logically arranged. Lots of people are. It's only a disability if you're musically ambitious. I can't dance like Fred Astaire, either, does that mean I'm a cripple, or that the universe is sabotaging me?

Here I am, standing on my own... gurney to wheelchair to walker to cane to nothing. And no Jesus in sight! Just time and practice.

• Believe things victimize me: I do this. When I'm clumsy, even my own fingers are out to get me. Learned this martyr-game from my father. Thanks, dad!
• Short singer: Sunshine Corazon on the TV show Glee, which I saw today. Sunshine panics just before going onstage. Her great rival Rachel apologizes to her: "I sabotaged you last year because you can sing! You're my only real competition. Now get out there!" A very Rachel peptalk, but it works--Sunshine sings a great number. Message: I'm in the same boat--my own thoughts are all that hold me back.
• Goals this semester: on Glee, goofy Brittany sums up her year--what the glee club's meant for her. "We fight, we fall in & outa love, but we're family."
• Gurney to wheelchair to walker to cane to nothing: on Glee Brittany says "I'm in it for the long haul. When Artie steps out of his wheelchair, I'll be there." Her naïveté suddenly looks more like loyalty and perseverence. And I need to be the same--there for the long haul.
• Hospital setting: I've had recurrent fevers and headaches for years, and my medical plan won't even test me any more. So I researched my symptoms on my own. I got the first high fever soon after playing as a kid in a tick-infested canyon, so I'm testing a hypothesis that it's tick-borne--Lyme, babesia, ehrlichia or bartonella. Following Stephen Buhner's advice in Healing Lyme, I take Polygonum cuspidatum (Japanese knotweed), Eleutherococcus senticosis (Siberian ginseng), Andrographis paniculata (Andrographis), Artemisia annua (Chinese wormwood), and Uncaria tomentosa (Cat's claw), about 2 g/day each. My symptoms faded, but if I skip the herbs even a day, they return. Buhner warned it's a long haul; like TB, these illnesses take at least a year to cure.
• ACTION 1: Keep plugging away at music and dating even if I see no miracles. I need Brittany's faith in the long haul. Gurney to wheelchair to cane...
• ACTION 2: Keep taking the herbs, no matter what! Healing from serious chronic illness takes equal faith in the long haul. Gurney to wheelchair to cane...

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