Odds and Ends 09

Today they are cleaning the blood off the streets in places like Chicago, Baltimore, etc. It’s not entirely new, but it’s the scale of things that speaks to us. This is how it will go, I believe.

I’m not expecting a formal announcement. The chaos will ramp up over a period of time. The next American civil war will be running easily a year before the average citizen recognizes it for what it is. The people who are most threatened by the current ruling regime are the ones who will deny it the longest.

This isn’t going to be neat and clean anywhere, anyhow. The US will stumble into conflict. The resulting decentralization will be ad hoc. Among those who are saddled with making the decisions, there are very few minds currently working out any kind of planning about this. Just a few state leaders are aware of the implications of what they see.

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For all their common expertise and vast experience with bureaucracy, the VA medical system cooperates with other providers very poorly. All the other civilian systems together are more integrated with each other better than the VA is with any outside services.

VA Orthopedics ordered an MRI of my knee. The VA has only one machine working, and I couldn’t get in for a scan before my next Ortho appointment in October. So the folks in booking offered to send me out to a third party. That was then passed through another office, which then passed it to some contract agency that barely works with any of the other medical providers, and we have dozens in the OKC Metro. Still, they eventually made the appointment for me.

Then they told me the wrong place to go. It turns out they handed it off to a medical provider that has been buying up facilities left and right (Saint Anthony), and they are constantly moving stuff around. I ended up driving almost 20 miles to a facility with an MRI machine up near Edmond. Then I drove 10 miles to another place near Downtown OKC to pick up the images, because there was no direct way they could get them to the VA. They can’t even identify the doctors working inside the VA hospital.

Then I hand carried them to my clinic within the VA system. It was like a workout just doing all that hustling around trying to find the right place for each step in this process. It ate up half of my day. The medical system will end up killing more people through simple inefficiency than it saves.

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Yesterday’s workout was very interesting. On the bike path heading to the park, there were three crews cutting tree limbs that had grown too close to the utility lines on poles. The first was not too hard to avoid; they had small traffic cones suggesting I simply go around them on the grass. Doing so was no challenge at all. The second crew didn’t have cones, but when I started off the pavement, I hit a crater hidden in the tall grass. The bike flipped end-over, which means I vaulted over the handlebars. I’d given anything to see myself doing that on video.

No harm done; I landed in the soft grass. The biggest problem was that my long-tailed t-shirt was caught on the handlebar, which was partly under me, so I was a little trapped. One of the crewmen got it out from under me and upright. I got a little muddy, but no big deal. The senior crewman had this look on his face like he was worried I’d make a scene or sue. I just smiled and walked my bike around the cut limbs on the ground and continued on my way. It had no effect on my workout.