“You’re on the road to hospitalization.”

That’s what my shrink said, and he never does, speak, that is.

I was wondering how I was gonna make it another week to the Rituxan infusion. I’d already canceled my trip to Colorado. I was supposedly on the road to improvement, so why did my body feel so bad?

I grew up in a house where it was illegal to be ill. If you said you felt bad my mother insisted you go to school to get better. Doctors were for other people, with real problems.

Suddenly I had a real problem.

My shrink asked to see my back.

Then he called the dermatologist and the internist on my dime. Saying I needed to go to the hospital right away. But they were wary. Because when you go to the institution there are high odds of infection, and with pemphigus, infection kills. Used to be eighty five percent. Now it’s somewhere between three and fifteen. But the bottom line is if you get one, good luck!

So I’m driving home after my shrink appointment facing the very real possibility, this could be the end. And how does it end anyway? Maybe you get cornered, by maladies that don’t seem so bad and then intersect and no one lives forever and certainly not me, not you either.

So the following morning the dermatologist squeezes me in. I lift my shirt and she is stunned, she says I immediately have to go to the hospital. But there’s a problem, UCLA is closed because of the fires and Cedars-Sinai has no rooms. But it gets worse than that, since Puerto Rico is down and out there are not enough IVs, so even if I check in…

But we devise a plan. I should see the wound doctor first, as scheduled, and then go to the ER at Cedars and wait for a room to open up.

The wound doctor wouldn’t touch me. Said in the hospital they’d just rip off his work. So we went to the ER and waited and waited and…

If I’d known it was gonna be four hours I would have pulled rank. Yup, it’s all about who you know, but I wasn’t in the mood to make contact with the outside world and I figured it would never take that long but the real problem is when I finally got to the room it was after six and therefore it was…

The weekend.

You don’t want to be in the hospital on the weekend. It’s a holding tank, nothing happens until Monday. And since I’d waited so long in the ER I was going to go untreated, but I didn’t know that yet.

So they want to give me pain pills. Which I don’t want to take, because I want to be fully aware. But they convince me otherwise, I get an IV drip of steroids, and in the elevator up to my room I see a sticker on the door, saying there’ve been no hospital incited infections in three years, and this makes me feel better, until I wake up Saturday and feel worse.

Meanwhile, the hospital is an alternative universe. Where celebrity and fame are irrelevant, all the totem pole markers of the regular world. You’re a patient and they’ve dedicated their lives to saving you, D.C. be damned.

Now the truth is they started the IVIG at 11 pm. It takes four to five hours. Illustrating they do work on the weekends. But as for my wounds…

They weren’t gonna touch ’em.

I’m stuck to the plasticized bedding they’ve laid down for my leaking. I can’t move without excruciating jolts of pain. I’m stuck in the bed, barely able to reach the button for the nurse, movement was almost completely out of the equation.

And the hospital is organized and disorganized. And you worry about alienating the infrastructure. But I said thanks and made conversation and they never burned out on me.

But I could not get wound care.

The hospitalist, an internist who only works in the edifice, told me nothing could be done, she’d put in a request, but the odds were low.

So I text my dermatologist. Isn’t this why I’m here, for wound care?

And no one shows up and I’m getting deeper and darker into my mood and at 9:20 PM, that’s right, a plastic surgeon comes in, wraps me up like the Mummy and disappears, after I take a shower that has me screaming at the top of my lungs, after he put this yellow tape infused with Vaseline all over my body, I finally felt good, but he said I’d be there a week.

But two days later my dermatologist showed up and said I could go if the plastic surgeon said so and he showed and I got wrapped again and exited.

You don’t want to be in the hospital, they don’t want you in the hospital, but do you feel safe enough at home?

So I got three infusions of IVIG and steroids inside. Ultimately, they speak to the symptoms, they kick out the bad guys to give you temporary relief. The plastic surgeon said my skin was twenty percent better in two days, but it had been totally gone before, the entire top layer. The only good thing is pemphigus foliaceous only affects the top layer, otherwise I would have been checked into the burn ward.

And the following day, Tuesday, after three days in the hospital, I went back to the plastic surgeon, who re-dressed me.

On Wednesday I went back to Wilshire and Doheny for my second Rituxan infusion. Which could be accelerated since it went smoothly the first time through, it took just shy of five hours instead of more than six.

And I was wearing mesh underwear and still had leaking sores on my legs and butt, but on Thursday night I got the dreaded blisters again.

So I’m starting to peak and freak, this has gone in the wrong direction from day one, but I’m seeing the dermatologist the next day…

Who gives me a positive report. She doesn’t think I need another IVIG this week. I should recover, or not. You see not enough people get pemphigus, there’s not enough data, usually after two infusions of Rituxan most people get better in eight weeks. But since I had the IVIG and steroids, maybe it’ll be three to six weeks. But I might have flare-ups. Anything could happen!

But I started to feel better. Sunday I could walk around like normal. I was slowly beginning to feel optimistic.

And then today I woke up with blisters all over my body.

Will they dry out and fade, like the ones from Thursday? Or burst and hurt, as some did last night. Am I climbing up or slipping down? I DON’T KNOW!

So let’s start at the beginning. I have pemphigus foliaceous. Which thank god is not pemphigus vulgaris, which starts in your mouth and genitalia, you cannot eat, but both are pretty damn bad and rare.

It went untreated for a year and a half.

They don’t know exactly what caused it. But the underlying conditions can be triggered by surgery, which I had, on my shoulder, eighteen months ago.

But it could be a drug reaction, to the Gleevec I take for my CML leukemia. But I stopped that for thirty days and got no better.

But did I get so much worse because I went back on the Gleevec or was the disease just taking its own course?

The hematologist believes the Gleevec is a red herring, but for now I’m not taking it, even though it keeps me alive.

Sometimes immunological diseases, of which pemphigus is one, burn out…IN FIVE YEARS!

Some people have two Rituxan infusions and are cured.

Others need another in six months.

Others need one every six months in perpetuity.

So now you know as much as I do, which ain’t a whole hell of a lot.

So right now I’m functional, can eat and drive, even though I’m itching and scratching. Will this maintain? Your notion is as good as mine.

And to tell you the truth…

I had this all planned out when I was going through last Friday’s shenanigans, entering the hospital, I was gonna write something great.

But I crashed the following day when wound care didn’t show up and still haven’t recovered.

I was waiting to write until I was cured!

But that point has not arrived.

But I’m writing this, so how bad can I be?

I’VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!

(Well, on my hands and forearms and thighs.)

John Oliver confronts Dustin Hoffman and then Anderson Cooper confronts Roy Moore’s spokeswoman about his misdeeds.

This is a sea change. The press has removed itself from the debate. Trying to be neutral. Allowing heinous behavior and incorrect views to skate.

But not anymore.

We’re influenced by the news. You think you’re an independent thinker but the truth is you’re swayed by what comes over the transom. And it’s not only the newspaper and cable news, but online too, that’s what the Russians hacking the election is all about. You think it’s a tribal thing, MSNBC versus Fox, NYT versus WSJ, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Google and Facebook give different results to different people. We’re losing our commonality, we’re not even coming from the same starting point. At least in music we’ve got charts. What’s wrong with the “Billboard” one is it’s manipulated, in an era of overwhelming b.s. you lead with truth. At least the Spotify streaming chart is accurate, you know what the most popular tracks in America are. And it influenced the Grammy nominations, without the Spotify chart hip-hop wouldn’t dominate. But Spotify demonstrates what people are really listening to.

Kinda like when SoundScan started twenty five years ago and it illustrated how large a market country was, before that people didn’t know.

But these are raw facts in a world where facts are abhorred, or we each have our own, or what we believe to be facts are untruths.

So the hoi-polloi are fighting. The underclass and the powerless are arguing, lobbing bombs from their own bunkers. But above them lives an elite that is completely out of touch. This is how the “New York Times” missed Trump, essentially all the media and insiders, even the right wing outlets did not expect him to win, because they had little to no contact with the actual voters.

It’s a mess.

But the elite camp is all nice and friendly. There’s decorum, there are rules.

And then John Oliver starts shooting at Dustin Hoffman.

It’s always artists who lead, always. That’s the essence of being one, taking risks. And since they have followers, what they do gains attention. If someone other than Oliver, a traditional newsperson, confronted Hoffman, we wouldn’t hear much about it.

But no conventional newsperson would. It takes an outsider to become an outlier.

Personally, I’m shocked. This is kinda like the sixties. Where your heroes take positions and act in a way you’re not fully comfortable with. What youngsters today do not understand is most people were for the Vietnam War before they were against it. It’s these artists and the leaders they dragged along who convinced us to change our opinions.

Similarly, there’s this inane position posited today that we can remove ourselves from the world economy and achieve greatness. Feels good, like the U.S. can defeat any enemy, it’s just patently wrong.

And once Oliver opens the floodgates, everybody else pours through. Suddenly, it’s open season to confront bad actors, untruths. He did it, now you can. The civility employed previously is out the window. Because we refuse to condone bad behavior and we refuse to allow perpetration of untruths. Furthermore, you have to back up what you stand for, which is where facts come in.

So America will become unified when artists take a stand for truth, they’re the last bastion of the American way. Comedians walk the line every day, they can take the heat. Too many other so-called “artists” are so worried about crossing the line that they don’t. Credit the elimination of arts programs in schools. You see a Jackson Pollock painting and you ask yourself where it came from, what inspired him to forgo painting people and start dripping paint. Actually, that’s why Picasso is so famous. It’s not just the pictures, it’s where they’re coming from.

Where do you come from? Are you proud of your ignorance, are you proud you take a stand and don’t change it?

We’ve got some hard questions coming down the pike. Regarding sexual harassment, are you now guilty until proven innocent? Can you be rehabilitated? I’m not saying these guys didn’t do it and shouldn’t be punished for it, just that now that we’ve broken down doors, we need to have a set of rules to proceed.

We’ve been marching without a set of rules for twenty years, since the internet took hold. Google said it was benign, Facebook was allowing us all to connect, but we ultimately found out these entities had more power than any previously. That letting them run willy-nilly in a capitalist way hurt our culture. How much regulation is appropriate? I don’t know, like I said, these are hard questions, which we’re trying to investigate and answer, and all we hear is they’re out to get Trump. I’m far less worried that Trump stays in office/gets away with it than truth is eviscerated online.

We keep hearing about AI, how machines will save us. But the truth is it all comes down to humans. Mark Zuckerberg pursued profits until he might have changed election results.

But then John Oliver comes along and there’s a reset. Anderson Cooper too.

What is truth. Do we ignore it, do we fight it, do we expose falsehood?

Those are the questions we’re asking now.

And we are because one person was willing to cross the line and make a celebrity feel uncomfortable.

Be sure to ask the hard questions and make people feel uncomfortable today.

“John Oliver and Dustin Hoffman Spar Over Sexual Harassment Statement”

“Cooper presses Roy Moore spokeswoman on sexual abuse allegations”

Rumble-The Indians Who Rocked The World

There’s a moment in this movie…

They’ve gone on about Jesse Ed Davis. Showed him playing with Taj Mahal, being flown over to England to participate in the “Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.” Hooking up with John Lennon. And I know who Jesse Ed is, or was, but these kinds of credits don’t mean much until…

Jackson Browne shows up and says he called Jesse Ed to play on his initial solo LP.

And Jesse Ed says he really doesn’t hear himself playing on that track.

So, Jackson has the engineer cue up another and Jesse Ed says this one will work.

So Jesse Ed goes into the studio, the track is playing, but he’s not paying attention, he’s tuning his guitar, and then when it gets to the space for his solo he rips something off in one take and then is done. Just like that. But what makes this story so great is that was the solo in DOCTOR MY EYES!

I can’t say there’s a plethora of those hair-raising moments in this movie, but there aren’t many solos like the one in “Doctor My Eyes.” Or as Randy Castillo says, you can practice in your bedroom all you want, but you won’t get great until you play with others, he sat behind the kit for Ozzy.

Yup, you learn about all the famous Indians, they seem okay with that word, we whites know them as Native Americans. And of course they have a chip on their shoulder, that’s why they made this movie. The head-scratcher is now it’s the whites who have a chip on their shoulder, believe they’re oppressed. Hell, look at rock and roll, scratch an older white male and you’ll find out he hates rap. Someone took his rock away. But where did the rock come from?

This film posits it came from Indians.

Is that true?

Hell if I know. That’s why you watch a flick like this, to be edified.

And they end up focusing on this one early bluesman Charley Patton. I’ve only heard his name, I’m more familiar with Robert Johnson, but Patton was an Indian and played that sound that influenced all those English musicians, you know, the ones that put rock and roll over the top. And Charley Patton taught Howlin’ Wolf how to play the guitar and when the Stones came to America they insisted on putting him on a TV show with them. You get it when you see the footage. That’s the power of the sound.

You get it listening to Charley Patton too.

Quincy Jones talks about going to juke joints. This was before the internet, if you wanted to get loaded and eat and dance and…this is where you went.

And one of the greatest revelations is the footage of Mississippi, a place most people have heard of and almost no one has been to. I’ve been there barely, when I went to Memphis. It’s different.

You see the countryside and you can envision how this music was engendered.

And there have been a lot of Indians in rock and roll. Famously Robbie Robertson, and Redbone, and many argue that Link Wray started it all, with “Rumble.”

But what this movie does best is provide context.

That’s what we’re missing today. A roadmap. That will tell us where to start, where to go and illustrate the attractions along the way. That was blown apart by the internet.

We were moving along swimmingly, with AM and FM, and then MTV came along to create a monoculture, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed radio consolidation and then the internet blew it all apart. I guess you just can’t hold the public back that much.

But you watch this flick and you think about music. When you used to play and sing and…

This is what the younger generation doesn’t understand. We oldsters lived through something. The only equivalent thing in my life is the internet. There was essentially nothing and then something came along to dominate, we all got onboard and rode the wave. The Beatles hit and it changed life. Not only were we addicted to the radio, we bought instruments, we went to shows, and you had to leave your house to do it.

Now you can stay home and connect and most people don’t play and you go to the gig to text and shoot selfies.

Not that there is not a music scene today, but music does not drive the culture.

Nor does the internet.

We’re in a strange malaise.

But when you watch a film like “Rumble” you realize there’s a way out, and it’s got to do with story. People have to keep telling their stories, and connecting the dots. Knowing when they’re right and wrong. And in it not for the money but for the experience. We’ve gone topsy-turvy. But when you see “Rumble,” you know they got it right.

Just say if it’s too late for me.

And for those not in the know, that’s the cue for Jesse Ed to wail, a little beyond the minute and a half mark in “Doctor My Eyes.”

Most of you know it by heart.

Should I stay or should I go?

That’s what went through my head after I gained consciousness.

Felice was shaking me, I’d been up so late, I’d ultimately taken a Zyrtec tablet for the itching. Why was she waking me up so early?

Betsy called. She gets up early. There was a fire.

That makes sense, Betsy lives in the North Valley near the hills.

But as I listened to Felice I heard there was a fire near us.

But on the other side of Mulholland.

Yet our next door neighbor was hosing his roof off.

And a policeman had knocked on the door and said evacuation was now optional but if it became mandatory he would probably not be able to come back.

Huh.

My mother thinks she’s inviolate. Nothing bad will happen. Maybe that’s why I’m on the outlook for pitfalls 24/7. When asked about the Cuban Missile Crisis she said not to worry, if they dropped bombs we’d all die.

So my inclination was to stay.

I know, I know, stupid.

It was just too much effort to get out of bed with my sores, and I wanted more sleep.

But then I thought about it being too late to go, and I got up.

What do you take?

Most of my valuables are at my house in Santa Monica, then again, do I have any valuables? Get old enough and you don’t, all possessions become meaningless. What’s even weirder is you can no longer remember certain things. Which is maybe why people leave with their photo albums. But I don’t have any of those, my father was so busy taking pictures of our youth that I haven’t. Even in this modern camera phone world I’m not a big snapper.

Well, I should take my pills. You never know how long you’ll be gone.

And my computer. Sure, I’ve got a desktop at home, but why put all that money at risk.

And a few clothes.

But what route should I take?

The map apps were confusing. Google said to go down Roscomare, but wasn’t that where the fire was?

Apple said to take a convoluted route to the 405, but wasn’t that partially closed?

By time I put everything in the car I decided to check again. Both map apps said the south 405 was open. I made my getaway.

Then again, was I being stupid? I was driving towards the fire. But if I wanted to go further east delays were greater, better to jet down or risk getting caught in the hills if the fire spread?

And traffic was light for this hour, but when I got to Mulholland it was inundated with cops. And firetrucks. The barbecue foodtruck that’s there every day was not.

Cops were directing traffic. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to go the way I wanted.

That’s what people don’t understand, Los Angeles.

It’s a giant suburb with a row of mountains separating it. The wealthier you are the more you gravitate to these mountains, where roads are narrow yet views can be spectacular. It’s a self-defining separation between rich and poor. If you’re financially-challenged in Los Angeles, you’re likely not at risk from natural disasters. Oh, that’s not fully true, but the fires start in the mountains, and once you get east of the 405, there’s little spare space.

And how can this happen in a city anyway? You can imagine an apartment fire in New York, but not a whole block going up in flames, multiple blocks, what’s gonna burn?

So I finally get on the 405, which is slowed down by firetrucks. And the northbound lanes are completely closed, which is weird, because they’re oftentimes gridlocked.

And then I see it. The hillside’s smoldering. Looks like they’ve got it under control.

But no, when I get down the hill, near the 76 station in Bel Air, I see flames. That house on the ridge… It seems to be on fire, or close to it.

So it can happen.

But then I’m in Santa Monica and it’s like it didn’t happen at all.

P.S. You used to rely on radio, TV and the newspaper. But in the age of the internet their faults have been illustrated, they’re just not up-to-date. AM news has gone by the wayside, replaced by sports and Latin programming in Los Angeles. And TV can only do a broad overview with pictures. I saw a reporter by the Skirball, what the hell does he know? As for the vaunted L.A. “Times,” the fire is not at the top of the app and it’s cut so many reporters that it is hobbled. Either you double-down and go for it in the internet era or you’re toast. Which leaves you with Twitter. I’d be checking it, but right now I’m out of danger. As for the house..?