Today is the two-year anniversary of my diagnosis. Gadzooks. I barely remembered it. It almost slipped by me. But the past few days have seen so many major blips on my radar screen, it's almost understandable.

The five hundred pound gorilla was the Music4TheMan benefit my friends staged for me on Saturday at the Alligator Grill here in Austin. Matt the Electrician, Sara Hickman, and The Gene Pool stepped up to the entertainment plate and all hit home runs. And pretty much everyone I know in Austin showed up. And then there were friends of friends, people who had heard about it on the radio, people my wife works with, and a good passel of complete strangers. It was humbling.

I have never considered myself to be a social person. My self-perception has always been that my value to other people derived from my skills (by which I mean my sense of humor, intelligence, musical ability, athleticism, etc.) rather than from any innate charisma. I see myself as guarded and private; kind of a hard person to get to know. But even as my "skills" fade away, the relationships I have constructed seem stronger than ever. With this disease, I feel sometimes like I'm standing in the current of a swiftly flowing creek, fighting to retain my footing. How easy it would be to just pull up my feet and stop fighting the current. Just go with the flow, and drift downstream. Skip a meal, blow off a day of my supplements, stay cooped up in the house all the time...just watch tv and find distractions to burn off time. Drift. But a night like Saturday night was like a veritable parade of people (who must value me for some other reason than the skills which are falling away from me) slogging out into the middle of the creek to encourage me, bolster me, even hang on to me, and not let me be swept away. The "shot-in-the-arm" analogy falls way short. I still have to fight (nothing will change that), but the ennui and languor that undermine my will to fight just dissolved over the course of the evening. The negativity that insinuated itself into my attitude over the months of fighting with insurance companies was dispelled. I didn't know how much I needed it, but every person there Saturday night demonstrated that it IS important how I feel, how my fight is going, what happens to me and my family. More than a hundred people can't be wrong. So to have that kind of thing happen was an affirmation on many levels.

The other big positive was the purchase of a keyboard amplifier which will allow me to play with the trio in venues that don't have accoustic pianos. One of the ways I drift (in the sense above) is to ignore my playing. Not practicing makes me into such a hypocrite. And how do I combat that guilt? Well, by finding something to do other than practicing, of course. I handled studying for tests the same way all through high school. Anyway, now that the amp is being shipped, I'm all jazzed up (pun intended) and probably practicing more than I should. C'est la vie.

And it wouldn't be a garden without both roses and weeds. I subjected my family to a monstrous weed last night. We were coming home from Mangia pizza and I popped a hard candy in my gob. It stayed put for about 10 seconds, and then leapt into the back of my throat—a no-man's-land for food. I made some gacking sound that was enough to set off Linda's alarms, and before I knew it, I was out on the side of the road, shaking and thinking hard about my own death. I only had blockage for about 2 or 3 breaths, where air wouldn't go in or out. I think when I grabbed my throat, the candy slid out of the windpipe and up into top of my pharynx. I could feel it up there, and was trying to swallow it down, but it was happy right where it was. Linda gave me some water, and I would take a mouthful, swallow, reassess, and repeat. I was afraid it might slide down into my windpipe again as it got smaller, but it never did. Finally, I conjured up two mighty gags, and the second one squeezed it out. Needless to say, everyone was shaken up. It's enough to make a fella think about giving up hard candy. ;-)