According to The National Center for Biotechnology Information: Sudden death likely or possibly related to catheter ablation occurred in 7 of 334 patients (2.1%). That is a big number – big enough that, if it were the death rate for flying to New York from San Francisco, everyone would take the train – but the success rate at Sequoia Hospital is better, much better and more importantly it is a stat I didn’t know until very recently. Still, going in, my thoughts kept returning to the possiblity of going into the hospital, going under anthesia, and never coming back. I was the second in the queue yeterday and I was a little concerned while I waited but my biggest concern, and the biggest risk, is that the proceedure will not take.

The ablation itself is a technological marvel. They put an IV into an artery – or, sometimes, a vain – at the patient’s groin and fish a catheter up from there into the heart – in this case, my heart – inwhich they burnoff the nodes that are producing out of rythum heartbeats. The the lab/operating room which is huge and chock full of equipment is like something out of a sifi movie by Ridley Scott with a huge array of 42″ flat screens, maybe six or eight of them and when I am wheeled in I am stunned. My first thought is how I would like to take a couple pictures and I think how much Michele would like to see this. I ask if she can come in just to see it but I’m told no because the room is disinfected. I say something like “But I haven’t been disinfected.” but figure out the answer to that one before he tells me I’m already infected with me. 

For me, being in a hospital is a spiritual expearance. Everybody we interact with is in deep service, starting with the doctor who meets with me several times to aswage my fears and answer my questions. It continues with the nurse who walks us from the waiting room to the prep area where she preps me for the operation by, among the other usual things, shaving my front and back while another nurse puts in an IV, marking pulse points on my feet with a felt pen to the nurse that wheels me into the lab/operating room. It continues with the nurses who take care of me that night and the next morning. Everybody is here to help and it is deeply comforting. 

Now I am home, the ablation seems to have worked, and I am very much alive. Life is sweet. 

Shit, my A-fib – Cardiac Atrial fibrillation – is back. The Cardioversion, that I was so hopeful about, didn’t take.

In a strange way, I feel both betrayed by my doctor and I want her to do exactly what she did. Betrayed because she gave me such hope that a Cardioversion would work when the chances of it working were so slim with a heart that has a replacement aortic valve, like mine. And happy because I have a doctor who is positive, hopeful, and very pro-active. Now I am looking forward to an Atrial Fibrillation Ablation on July 17th. (According to the dictionary, Ablation means the removal or melting away of an unwanted structure or tissue and I can’t help but think of that scene in India Jones where the Nazis’ faces melt off.)

I’ll end this with a long quote from Adam Gopnik in an article on aging – or the prolonging of aging to be more accurate. As part of the research on said aging, the researchers developed an aging suit and his description of the suit is a good description of the physical side of growing old.

Slowly pulling on the aging suit and then standing up—it looks a bit like one of the spacesuits that the Russian cosmonauts wore—you’re at first conscious merely of a little extra weight, a little loss of feeling, a small encumbrance or two at the extremities. Soon, though, it’s actively infuriating. The suit bends you. It slows you. You come to realize what makes it a powerful instrument of emotional empathy: every small task becomes effortful. “Reach up to the top shelf and pick up that mug,” Coughlin orders, and doing so requires more attention than you expected. You reach for the mug instead of just getting it. Your emotional cast, as focussed task piles on focussed task, becomes one of annoyance; you acquire the same set-mouthed, unhappy, watchful look you see on certain elderly people on the subway. The concentration that each act requires disrupts the flow of life, which you suddenly become aware is the happiness of life, the ceaseless flow of simple action and responses, choices all made simultaneously and mostly without effort.

The annoyance, after a half hour or so in the suit, tips over into anger: Damn, what’s wrong with the world? (Never: What’s wrong with me?) The suit makes us aware not so much of the physical difficulties of old age, which can be manageable, but of the mental state disconcertingly associated with it—the price of age being perpetual aggravation. The theme and action and motive of King Lear suddenly become perfectly clear. You become enraged at your youngest daughter’s reticence because you have had to struggle to unroll the map of your kingdom.

I’m glad I watched the Democratic Debates even though, at first, I didn’t think I had learned anything new. I week later, I’m not so sure about the not learning anything new part.  Elizabeth Warren was the standout for me on Wednesday, both in the completeness of her answers, almost if she had thought about the subjects, and her passion (I also agreed with most of her answers so that influenced me, I’m sure). I’ve had several people say that she comes across as a scolding schoolmarm but I did not get that impression.

More than a couple of the candidates, both Booker and O’Rourke come to mind, evaded answering specific questions, instead, they talked about how we have to do the right thing and they would be the ones to do it. About the time I thought O’Rourke was all fluff, one of the moderators asked what was the single biggest threat to the United States in one or two words. The first candidate said “China”, then the second said “Russia” and the answers went back and forth in that vein until it came to O’Rourke who said something like “Global Heating” and completely changed my impression of him. I thought Julián Castro was surprisingly impressive and my hopes for Tulsi Gabbard were crushed (although I have since read that Google searches for her have gone way up). Ditto for Governor Inslee. 

At one point John Delaney and Ohio Congressperson Tim Ryan each went off on a sort of rant on how the Democrats have to go back to the party of working people instead of the party of Coastal Elites. It sounded strangely out of place and I think they are dead on. Somebody, Julián Castro, I think, brought up abortion rights for transgender people and I thought, “Come on, talk about how the lives of average people are going to be improved.” One of the things that I most admire about AOC is that, as she puts it: I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working-class Americans. With the notable exceptions of Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard – and maybe DeBlasio from the way he raised his hand for Single Payer – the candidates in the first group seemed more Socially Liberal than Economically Liberal. Most of these people got here with, among other things, the help of some rich benefactors, and siding with the working class puts the candidate in opposition to the biggest Democratic donors who are definitely not working-class.

The next night, the heavy hitters were Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, with supporting roles by Harris, Buttigieg, and Gillibrand. Bernie, in my opinion, is the most influential candidate up there, pulling almost everyone else left, still, I don’t think he will get the nomination. It just feels as if his campaign has peaked and I think that’s why Harris went after Biden first, thinking he is the top dog. Speaking of which, watching Kamala Harris eviscerate Biden reminded me of Trump taking on Jeb! only much more nuanced. Whereas Trump made an ad hominem attack, saying something like “Look at him, just low energy, he won’t get anything done”, Harris went after Biden’s actions and made them personal. As an aside, when somebody starts out with, “I don’t believe you are a racist, but…”, it probably won’t end well. End aside. The thing is, I think Biden is a racist, almost all of us are. It is how we react to that innate racism, acknowledged or not acknowledged, that sets us apart. In Biden’s case, I think he reacted defensively which is why Clarence Thomas’ accusation of “High-tech lynching” was powerful enough to get Biden to close those long ago hearings. I suspect Harris saw that weak spot and pounced. Biden said he didn’t see the attack coming, which he should have, but, even so, I can’t think of a worse defense than states rights.

South Bend Mayor, Pete Buttigieg, was charming but he has a race problem that will not be easy to minimize. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Colorado Governor Hickenlooper were there but I don’t think either helped their cause much. Both Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang conducted themselves well, but I can’t see any scenario that results in either of them becoming president.

If the Democrats go with an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders Progressive, they will lose some rich people to Trump, probably more than in 2016 because of his tax cuts for the rich but, if they don’t run a candidate who inspires voters from the bottom, they might lose even more. It is a dilemma that should be terrifying for the Democrats because the party reliance on the money bundlers and big donors contrasts with the reality that This election will ONLY be won by convincing more people like me to vote for you. according to a reTweet by Rashid Talib, who goes on to say 90,000 MI voters left the top of the ticket blank, meaning they didn’t vote for either Trump or Clinton. He won MI by only 10k votes. Let that sink in.

Michele gave me a new mechanical watch for my birthday and I want to brag about it (without seeming to be bragging too much, of course). It is a Chinese watch made by the Tianjin Watch Factory which, at first glance, doesn’t seem like much to brag about but Tianjin has a great history.

The Tianjin Watch Factory, under the brand name Sea-Gull, is the world’s largest manufacturer of mechanical watch movements. According to Wikipedia, the Tianjin Watch Factory makes about twenty-five percent of all the mechanical movements worldwide. That is a whole bunch of watch movements, even if most of them are in watches with other names, including many Swiss names. As an aside, according to Google: a watch movement is considered Swiss if: the movement has been assembled in Switzerland and, the movement has been inspected by the manufacturer in Switzerland and; the components of Swiss manufacture account for at least 50 percent of the total value, without taking into account the cost of assembly. End aside.

To sort of start at the beginning, in 1955, the Chinese government put together four Chinese watchmakers to form the government-owned Tianjin Watch Company. In those days, the three main chronograph movement manufacturers were all Swiss: Lemania, Valjoux and Venus. To raise expansion money, Venus wanted to sell the machinery they had that made their excellent, but expensive to produce, Caliber 175 movement so they could upgrade to a less expensive design (they changed from a tower of gears that moved to start the stopwatch function to a simpler cam system). In 1963 the government – a committee, actually, that according to the factory was headed by the Ministry of First Light Industry and included the Air Force Command, Naval Command, Naval Supplies, Naval Navigation units and other departments totaling 38 senior officers participated – assigned Tianjin Watch Company the task of producing a Pilot’s Watch for the Air Force and Tianjin, the Chinese government, really, bought the Caliber 175 equipment and the design rights from Venus. Tianjin then upgraded the original 17-jewel movement to a new 19-jewel movement, the ST19, to make a more robust watch that could take the vibration and shock of being in a fighter jet. The final design was approved in 1965 – but, for some unknown reason 1963 has become the identifier – and Tianjin built 1700 of them for the Air Force under the name Sea-Gull.   

Ten years ago, in May 2009, I bought a fake Patek Philippe mechanical watch, from a fake watch dealer in a back alley off of Nanjing Road in Shanghai. As an aside, I was going to say Nanjing Road is roughly the equivalent of Fisherman’s Wharf or Times Square, but that isn’t really quite accurate. In Europe, many cities have a blocked off walking/shopping area that is both a tourist area and a local hangout, Chinese Cities have similar areas, except they are always a long, wide, main street (at least the shopping streets we saw were). Nanjing Road is Shanghai’s version. End aside. The fake Patek Philippe, it turned out, in an ironic twist, became my favorite watch. Watches have been getting bigger and my fake Patek Philippe was the largest watch I have and my other watches, being older and smaller, seemed increasingly outdated, it kept good time, and I liked the way it looked with its simple case and see-through back that showed off the mechanical works. Even though it was relatively expensive for a back alley watch, about $225, Michele remembers, ten years on, like any mechanical watch, it needs cleaning to run accurately. The last time I had a mechanical watch cleaned and oiled, it set me back $350 and I haven’t wanted to spend that much on this watch. Actually, I probably would except that the fake stainless steel finish is wearing off.

Michele wanted to replace my now non-op fake watch and she thought that replacing it with another Chinese watch had a – for lack of a better word – whimsical symmetry. After wandering around the web for who knows how long, Michele came up with the Tianjin Seagull Watch Group’s Sea-Gull 1963.

A digital watch is a tool for keeping time – in Formula One, they measure lap times to a thousandth of a second, no mechanical watch can do that – a mechanical watch has a slightly different raison d’être. They are artifacts of human mechanical cleverness and design, in a way, and they are also jewelry, in a way. Nobody pays $150,000 for an A. Lange & Sohne Richard Lange Perpetual Calendar Terraluna – or even $35,000 for a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, for that matter – because it keeps better time. Yeah, they keep pretty good time but, if you really want to keep time, use your smartphone. Mechanical watches are sold on heritage, among other things, and more than a couple of watch companies have reissued their most iconic designs to play on that heritage. Sea-Gull is not only a huge manufacturer of watch parts but they have been making mechanical watches since 1955 and they have been both expanding and moving upscale so in 2011 they decided to show their heritage by reissuing the Sea-Gull 1963, upgraded to 21 jewels, to celebrate its 50th Anniversary {sic}.

Since the original reissue was the same size as the original 1963, and the current reissue is now even larger, Michele spent even more time online finding the original reissue, at an online shop specializing in Russian watches in Munich, Germany. He likes them so much, it is the only non-Russian watch he sells. Now, thanks to Michele, I am the proud owner of a Sea-Gull 1963 Chronograph Official Pilot’s Watch with a Seagull ST19 movement, which arrived with a package of German Russian-style crackers.