A walk in the park is not

Does my MS bother me? I only notice it every time I take a step. Or get leveled by heat. Or use the bathroom constantly. Or consider consuming liquid, weighing how accessible bathrooms will be in the near term. My urologist explained it that MS makes you think you have a full bladder when it’s like 10 percent full. So yeah, it comes up a lot. It’s not all I think about, but I think about it all the time. Barely figuratively.

Consuming liquid was an issue a couple of Saturdays ago. It seemed possibly the last nice weekend day in Boston for the season, although it turned out we’ve had at least one more. Maybe if the reigning kakistocracy keeps nixing wind and solar we’ll be Miami soon. Newbury Street was jumpin’, largely younger-than-me-un’s. Sad to say it’s a sizable demo.

I typically need a two-hour bev blackout ahead of a long loo-less stretch, longer if possible. I completely forgot this before our afternoon Back Bay jaunt, kept slugging my customary iced black coffee while the Awesome Wife pilatesed herself. I hit the bathroom before we left, then needed it again as soon as we parked 20m later. It adds up – typical grocery runs feature a visit at both the start and finish. No drinking in between, just continued processing of the original coffee. That day, I had stopped drinking 90m ago and needed the bathroom twice in that time. And I’d soon have to go again. MS rules!

Boston did look beautiful, and Newbury Street was a scene. I thought of my late ‘90s days at The Boston Phoenix when a cadre treated Newbury Street like the center of the world. I was more Newbury Comics, although I do love walking through the action, and it boy was this filled with action. The plan was to check out a new sandwich spot and picnic in the Public Garden.

Negotiating an onslaught of pedestrians with a stick is not easy. I usually use my ski pole as a walking stick, a third point of contact to keep me steady, nearly twirling à la la Mr. Peanut. But walking at the pace of foot traffic means sticking more like a cane, operating with my left hand, syncing with my right foot as I lift lefty. My MS manifests most in problems raising my knee and toes, which makes walking a challenge. Caning left while also stepping left means a high risk of kicking the cane out from under me. So I need a wide berth, and that’s not great when surrounded, especially when it’s not instantly clear I’m a wide load.

We discovered 40 people in line who also had heard also about our preferred sandwich spot, so we found food elsewhere and shifted our walk to Comm Ave’s lush and lowkey interior. We set our own pace, the Awesome Wife delighted in the higher ratio of dogs. We reached the Public Garden, which was gorgeous and similarly jam-packed. It was a crisp fall day, even crispier in the shade. Soggier? Whichever is colder. We found sun-heated grass that wasn’t prohibited and nearly went halvesies on sandwiches. Hers was too good to surrender much more than a Man Bite. (Dan Bite?) My factory of satis was Sufficient.

The Garden was so gorgeous that we both neglected to take any photos. And after a long walk from the car, with a return voyage ahead of me, I didn’t feel up for a stroll deeper into the Garden. I’d woken up wobbly, abandoned exercise after a botched lunge ended with a light head-bonk against the wall. Like an Alzheimer patient, I have my good days and bad days. This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good.

We headed back to the car, but as we crossed Arlington, I steered us right into the swanky hotel where I got staggeringly drunk at 19 at a family wedding. The Ritz then, the Taj later, the Newbury now, the bathroom was lovely yet again. I had many issues on that long ago wedding day, but that bathroom was not one. Progress? Decline?

Sometimes physical therapy quizzes me on bladder trouble and how much it negatively impacts my life. That second one remains an open question, but for our Back Bay Adventure Day, it was a 3 out of 10. Not bad!

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I collaborated with the brilliant Vee to make a webcomic (2009-11) that failed to become syndicated across the globe. I’m still super proud of it, I still think it needs to be seen, and I am pro-recycling.

An all-time favorite. I think The Awesome Wife has never asked what I’m thinking, and it’s well-trodden ground that men are rarely thinking about something serious. I took it in what to me feels like our standard direction. The original bear was different:

I wrote to Lovisa.

Hmm. I don’t mind the bear, but I did envision him as more of a cute, Urban Blah-world bear. Oversized hamster actually might not be so bad. Something along the lines of the lemur guys from Bored Meeting?

And I think we want to see him full on in panel 3. In fact, can most of that panel be his thought bubble, with just a zoom in on his head instead of the two of them at the table?

In 6, let’s add a comma before thanks, and maybe she’s heavy-lidded. Do we maybe even bold or underline “honey”? The one thing I liked about his (cut) last line was that it emphasized that she was making the joke. Or at least it was supposed to.

His expression in 4 is stupdenous [sic]

Good notes, except for the honey stuff. Underline it, bold it, maybe draw circles around it with flashing stars and fireworks? His last line was “Nice one” which she cut, and rightly so. Let her have the punch line. And her bright expression totally reflects how The Awesome Wife often responds to my jokes with her own that are at least as good. As seen here.