Last night I
watched a recorded Nova presentation on math.
Sometimes
around midnight I went to bed. After
getting my junk adjusted and my pillow just right I lay there waiting for
sleep, but could hear my pulse beating in my ear. I readjusted my head to cut out the sound,
but one of the monkey in my mind started counting numbers:
The average
heart beats sixty time a minute
60X60: that
would be 360 times an hour
and then the
Count takes over:
360X24=
8,640 beats a day;
All right I am running at the limit of my brain math, but I have got to answer the question if I am ever going to get to sleep
400X8000= around 3,200,000 beats a year
( actually 8,640X 365=
3,153,600);
Over the
hump of seventy years… round off…
Something around
a quarter of billion heart beats in my lifetime – that’s close enough.
Damn, hearts are really an impressive muscle
that we take for granted until they start to wear out.
Nonstop, a quarter of a billion…
Then I wake
up – it’s three-o-clock and I’ve got to pee.
DID I RUN and
AM I TIRED?
the Ol’Buzzard
Buzzie. The above written images the three am conversations I used to have with my veryownself back to when I snorted coke. Lie in the bed with the ticker clicking off maybe 180 beats per minute and thinking that there might possibly be a heart attack headed my way.
ReplyDeleteThen one night years later, I'm on my back in bed and that cramp started--seized my chest and near paralyzed me. I mustered the strength to reach for the phone when I realized I had a massive cramp in my diaphragm muscle.
Asked my doc a couple months later, he tells me he thinks the difference between a heart attack and those cramps is minimal as far as the pain side of things.
"But the heart is an amazing creature, Mooner. Even with all you've put yours through, there's still years left on its warranty."
So, fuck Walmart!
Buzzie. The above written images the three am conversations I used to have with my veryownself back to when I snorted coke. Lie in the bed with the ticker clicking off maybe 180 beats per minute and thinking that there might possibly be a heart attack headed my way.
ReplyDeleteThen one night years later, I'm on my back in bed and that cramp started--seized my chest and near paralyzed me. I mustered the strength to reach for the phone when I realized I had a massive cramp in my diaphragm muscle.
Asked my doc a couple months later, he tells me he thinks the difference between a heart attack and those cramps is minimal as far as the pain side of things.
"But the heart is an amazing creature, Mooner. Even with all you've put yours through, there's still years left on its warranty."
So, fuck Walmart!
I am soooo bad at math that numbers never inter into my sleep..but that pulse beating in your ear shit drives me nuts.
ReplyDeleteI get both my ears drunk and sleep like a man with no conscience.
ReplyDeleteThe heart pumps about 5 litres of blood per minute so in your 70 years it has pumped 184 million litres or 48.5 million gallons. And if you breath another 300 million times, you will be 100 years old!
ReplyDelete