I was sitting here kind of at a loss for what to write about. And then I remembered the wierd dream I had last night. I usually don’t remember my dreams, except the ones involving unnatural acts and rache. I was driving through this incredible mountainous landscape with my dad, who died in 1970. It was India, but the road was way too good for India and we were driving really fast. Dad was at the wheel I was in the passenger seat. It was a roller-coaster ride.
How is one to interpret such a dream. Was it a premonition of death? Was Dad giving me a tour of heaven? Heaven, for me, would include mountains and I’d be in good enough shape to play in them. Or was riding shotgun with Dad driving too fast at the edge of thousand foot cliffs a vision of hell? Or had Dad returned to give me a little driving lesson in the road rally of life, since he didn’t stick around to guide me through my young adulthood? Or were the dream god’s just providing some cheap entertainment to prevent an endless loop of Dianna Taurasi pumping her fists and celebrating UConn’s victory over my beloved Gophers. Or was it just the Garlic Lover’s chip dip?

I volunteered, I should say I was volunteered, to work the clock in a youth basketball tournament today. Four games, starting at 7:45. I would have been an hour late if the clock on my computer didn’t spring ahead automatically. The games were young boys, fourth graders and maybe fifth graders. Pretty cute. Some of it was pretty brutal basketball though. By the fourth game I was having a hard time concentrating and my friend Deb who was keeping the book and the refs and the fans had to keep yelling at me to start the clock.
UConn beat the Gophers so the Lyndsay Whalen era is now over. But I think Minnesota is going to have a great Women’s hoops program for years to come.
Obviously I’m too tired to come up with anything either entertaining or informative.
Good night.

My company just changed health care insurance as of the first of the year. I’ve been covered by the previous company for eleven years at least. I’d never had a problem. I thought this was going to work out fine, the clinic we go to was in network so we could keep our GP’s and Alergists and I could keep my same poop doctor. Trouble was just lurking in the shadows ready to pounce. I guess the company went with Joe’s Cheap Ass Health Ins. Low cost and incompetant. I had some lab work ordered by the Rear Admiral and I got a bill for the tests. They claim the doctor out of network. But it says right on their useless piece of shit website that he’s in network. I called customer service and they said they would resubmit the claim. Didn’t hear from them until today. Actually I didn’t hear from them, they heard from me.
I’ve decided to pursue this ADD issue. I’ll go into more detail why I think I have it another time, but let me just say that it never dawned on me until recently, but looking back on my childhood I said in my daughther’s vernacular, “duh.” Also Q told me recently that she thinks she has it as well. My first response was, “Kids with ADD don’t get straight A’s” But wait, I did. And remember, I’ve told you I worry about her because she’s so much like me. The other day she told me, “I want to read, but I can’t sit still long enough to read a book.” So, anyway, I’m looking to get an eval and go from there. It turns out that one of the guys on my tennis team is a “mental health professional.” I started talking to him about the situation and he said he couldn’t see me because he knows me, but he’d make a recommendation. He works for the large local clinic that I’ve gone to for years and is in network so I assumed that the shrinks there would be covered as well. He gave me a name and yesterday I made the call. I started this at work at about 3:30. I had everything done that really needed to be done, Friday afternoons are usually very quiet and I thought it would only take a few minutes to make the appointment. What follows is an account of the kind of customer service nightmare that seems to becoming all too common these days:
I called the number on the web page print out that my friend gave me. I got an answering machine left a message. Half an hour later I got a call back and was told that I needed to call a different number for first time patients. I called that number and got someone on the first try without being on hold too long. My plan was to set up an appointment for myself and then bring up my daughter and plan a course of action for that once I talked to the shrink. The person on the phone took my info and then asked me what I wanted to see the psyche about. “I want an evaluation for adult ADD.”
“That would not be appropriate with a psychologist, adult ADD evals are done by psychiatrists, the counsellors do child ADD evals but not adults.” That has a certain dinosaur logic to it, but I guess I can play along.
“OK….how about an appoinment with a psychiatrist then.”
“Do you want one at the same clinic?”
“Um….sure.”
She set up the appointment and then asked me if I was sure I was covered, because it would be about $400 bucks if I wasn’t. I told her I was sure that I was, after all my all of five of the other doctors that my family sees regularly are with that clinic. But I’ll check just to make sure. I made the appointent with the understanding that I could call back and cancel if I wasn’t covered.
No problem, I’ll just check myincrediblyhoseduphealthcare.com the web site the HMO has out there to make me think they are easy to deal with. It’s agonizingly difficult to navigate and you usually can’t find anything that really answers a question and the contacts are really no contacts at all and the only phone number in the whole site is for “customer service” and I think goes to a call center in Bombay. It does have a find a physician search engine. You can select either Primary Care or Specialist If you select specialist there is a pull down menu. Psychologist, psychiatrist, mental health professional, head shrinker, none are listed in the pull down. There’s a button under the pull down labeled “Medical Specialties” I click on it and then click on “psychiatrist” it takes me to a definition of “psychiatrist.” I know what a fucking psychiatrist is! I’m starting to get irritated. I spend another five minutes searching the site for some way to get answers. You can email the webmaster if you have technical problems with the site, you can chat live with a nurse about your ingown toenails, but the only way you can get any answers about coverage is to call the customer service number. which I’m fairly reluctant to do since, as we have all come to learn, calling customer service these days is like falling down a rabbit hole. But it seems I have no choice.
I am not a Xenophobe, OK. Well OK maybe I cringed a little when the woman who answered the customer service line had a thick Indian accent. She was polite, well trained and tried to be helpful. In her defense I didn’t have the spelling of the shrinks name, so that held things up. BUT. My hearing is suffering from the effects of way too much loud rock n roll music without ear plugs, if I’m in a place with a lot of background noise or trying to follow the dialogue on West Wing I’m pretty much SOL. Accents over the phone really throw me. She kept getting frustrated and sounding peeved that I had to have her repeat everything two or three times. I never got the feeling she was really understanding me either. To make a long story not too much longer, after much confused back and forth which included this exchange:
“The Brookdale location only has optomitry.”
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
“The Brooklyn location only has optomitry.”
“Brooklyn Center?” This is the town that Brookdale is in.
“Brookdale.”
“Yes, well, I know that’s not true, because I go there all the time it’s a full service….er, a regular or….I know it’s not just an optomitry clinic, place um facility. fuck”
“I will research further.”
“Thank you”
“You are welcome.” I have no problem with the woman personally, she’s polite and helpful, even though she appears to hate the hearing impaired. Nevertheless, I’m starting to get pissed.
“He is not in network.”
“Not covered?”
“It looks like he is not in network.”
“OK, can you tell me who someone is covered?”
“I can refer you to someone who is in network.”

It goes on like this for awhile, and she gives me the name. “Pastor (spells it out) Colon (spells it out)”
I reply, “Pastor Colon?”
“That is correct, sir.”
At this point I decide I need to try a different tack. Not with her, a different tack altogther. I need to end the conversation.
“OK!”
“Is there anything else, sir.” Please stop with the sir….it makes my knees hurt.
“Weeeeeelllll, I was notified that I owed for some lab work that you were supposed to cover…..”
“Do you have the claim number.”
Amazingly I did.
“I will research that, sir.”
Thiry seconds of silence.
“Yes, you sent this claim for review. It was denied.”
“Denied, Thanks for letting me know.” OK I didn’t say that but sitting here, I wish I had.
“Yes sir. It says you were out of network at the time the services were provided”
“The services occurred on 1/26 and your company started covering my company on the first of the year, that was the cutover.” My voice is taking on a tone.

On and on it went, we agreed that she would resubmitt the claim and I calmly (I’m so proud I stayed reasonably calm, there was a time when I would have been standing on my desk waving my fist and screaming into the phone which doesn’t work in a corporate environment although it might work to my advantage as an intimidation factor; don’t mess with the crazy guy) gave her some notes she could put on the claim which actually got a laugh out of her.

Then I left the office and hour after I started this mess. M.N. if you read this go ahead and dock my pay. I was going to the store to get asparagus and lemons to go with the Halibut fillets in the freezer.
I forgot to take the route that takes me past the grocery and had to backtrack. When I arrived at the store, I realized my wallet was still on my desk and I had to drive all the way back. Kind of brings us back to why I made the call in the first place, doesn’t it.

I’m in the midst of composing a long rant. If you’re lucky, I’ll accidently delete it.

If you read anything today, read the last two posts by TooOldForThis

Unfortunately the mission has been called off. They got the guy with the old exploding goat trick. I could’ve used the extra cash.

Geese

In the late sixties Canadian Geese were rare enough in Minnesota that one day around this time of year when there was still snow on the ground and I saw a small flock of them land in Lyman Lakes from the printmaking studio at Carleton, I ran to the back door and tried to sneak as close as possible to get a good look at them. They were wild and spooky and took off when I was still 20 yards away. I was utterly enthralled my the magnificent beauty of these giant graceful birds as they lifted from the lake, wings whisting, cheerfully honking. Today in this part of Minnesota you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a goose. They are the worst of vermin. Every putting green on every golf course is covered with goose shit. Can you imagine having to clear fifteen thumb sized green plugs of bird crap from the path of your putt? It’s virually everywhere that’s anywhere near water. And of course in Minnesota you’re always pretty close to water.
The Lake of the Isles, one of the gems of our urban chain of lakes, is particularly badly infested. I think that’s because the hot shot lawyer from Kenwood that used to drink at my bar got some goslings and put them in a chicken wire compound on one of the islands to protect them from foxes and got a flock started there. They come back to the same place to breed and twenty years later we had a huge flock. They were going to round them up during molting season with nets, and feed them to the homeless, but the animal rights folks stepped in. So they just netted them and hauled them out to North Dakota or some other desolate wasteland. They came back in about two days. You can see them flying around town all year long, many don’t even bother to migrate, there’s plenty of open water to be found. They once tried to find out where the ones that did migrate went. Rochester. Ninety miles south, where an power plant keeps a large area of water open all year. I suppose they were just getting their annual checkups at the Mayo clinic along with the movie stars and royalty.
Leo Kottke the great finger picking guitarist claims that his voice sounds like goose farts on a muggy day. I don’t know about that but I think the sound of their voices and wings and the sight of them skimming the tree tops on a foggy day as they land in the cemetary for dinner is still kind of exciting but for the most part these days its “just another fucking goose.”

I will not be able to post for awhile. I’m going to be out of the country for a couple of months. I can’t tell you too much about what I’m doing, but let’s just say it’s sort of a government contract thing. Because of the mountain warefare expertise I gained fighting as a mercenary on the side of the Tibetans during the Chinese invasion, and my experiences in Kashmir, I sometimes do some freelance work for the DOD. A quick little counter insurgency gig in a mountainous country. It seems there is a problem warlord who’s …. nevermind, I’ve said too much already. If you don’t hear from me after the middle of June, assume I won’t be coming back. It’s been nice knowing you all.