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Nobody warned me that 66 was the year my body would take a good hard look at my life choices, print out a PowerPoint presentation, and schedule a mandatory all-hands meeting. No agenda. No RSVP. Just a pop-up calendar invite that said: ‘Your body requests your immediate and undivided attention.’

I didn’t RSVP. My right foot showed up anyway.

It started subtly. I went to pivot left — a perfectly normal human maneuver I’ve executed maybe a hundred thousand times — and my right foot looked at me like I’d asked it to speak Mandarin. It dragged. Across the floor. Like a disgruntled coworker who just found out they’re not getting a raise. My foot staged a small but unmistakable protest, and I went down.

I didn’t fall. I performed an unscheduled relationship check with the floor. It went poorly.

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Let me set the scene. It’s Friday morning. I’ve just used the bathroom, a perfectly ordinary human activity, except now I’m standing there wondering why my body has decided to add a little encore. A few uninvited drops. No reason. No warning. Just my nervous system freelancing.

Welcome to my life, where even the most mundane bodily functions have become a neurological adventure.

That was Friday morning. By Friday night, I had a severe ache digging into the left side of my eye socket like someone had parked a Buick behind my face. I took two Advil and went to sleep like a reasonable person. A hero, even. At 2:45 a.m., I was awakened by what I can only describe as my body filing a formal complaint with management. Not quite nausea. Not quite dizziness. More like my stomach and my inner ear had called a joint emergency meeting and didn’t invite the rest of me. I genuinely thought: this is it. This is how it ends. Not fighting a villain. Standing in the dark next to my bathroom at 2:45 in the morning.

I took a clonazepam and an ondansetron, because apparently I’ve become the kind of person who has a 2:45 a.m. protocol. And it worked. I went back to sleep. Superman lives to save another day.

But here’s the thing they don’t tell you about being Superman: the cape gets heavy.

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I woke up this morning to find that both of my ankles had apparently convened an overnight meeting — without me — and decided to stage a slow-motion protest. Not painful, exactly. Just wrong. Not right, in that maddening way where you cannot even properly complain about it because there is no word for the sensation of joints that feel like they have been partially replaced with wet sand.

The knees held their own grievance session last night, especially on the stairs. And so here I am, making my best impression of a fully functional human being, having negotiated with my own body just to get to the coffee maker.

If you have ever thought to yourself, I did not sign up for this shit. Well, welcome. Pull up a chair. Mine is the one with the good armrests for getting up from.

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People often ask what it’s like living with the unknown. Truth told, this morning started exactly where last night left off.

Brain fog.

It’s not romantic. You know, that Hollywood mysterious scene in movies where the protagonist stares pensively out a rain-soaked window and see the person forever adored. No. This is the kind where you open your eyes and your first genuine, unfiltered thought is, “Why the fuck did I wake up?” Then, looking at the ceiling, “What the hell God?”

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The first time I went public with Parkinson’s, my bladder made the announcement. I have not talked about Kappa Light Chain Deposition Disease. It’s the enemy within. It’s the cancer that will likely kill me.

Consider this the follow-up nobody asked for. You’re welcome.

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Congratulations, freedom lovers. Patriots. Defenders of the republic. Holders of handmade signs. You did it. You showed up. Three thousand, one hundred marches strong — stretching from the sunbaked sidewalks of the West Coast to the windswept parking lots of suburban New Hampshire. Every single march sent an unmistakable message to power:

We are here. We are loud. We have comfortable shoes and strong opinions.

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I had planned to tell people on my own terms. I had a whole timeline. There would be a right moment, a considered conversation, perhaps a tasteful announcement. I would control the narrative.

Instead, my bladder did it for me.

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For several days, I lived inside the kind of pain that hollows you out. Not just physical pain, though that was real enough, but the accumulated weight of years of being managed into silence. Then one morning, steadied by rest and a small mercy of pharmacology, I made a decision. I reached out to my supervisor and contacted a VP directly. I handed them a log of everything that had happened since January 1984.

Could I be fired? Yes. Likely? Probably not. But something shifted the moment I sent that message: my supervisors no longer controlled the narrative. And with that shift came a question I could not stop turning over in my mind.

Would a spiritual person — a Buddhist, a Christian, a person genuinely trying to live with compassion — have done what I did? I have been sitting with that question. Here is what I have found.

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Nicholas Kristof’s sobering column, “The $1.3-Million-a-Minute War,” forces a number into your conscience and refuses to let it go. At its peak, the war in Gaza was costing roughly $1.3 million every single minute. Not in lives — though those too — but in dollars. American dollars, mobilized with breathtaking speed and political unanimity, flow toward destruction while funding for the most basic human needs crawls through years of gridlock.

Kristof calls this a failure of “moral accounting.” He’s right. But the reckoning he demands doesn’t stop at Gaza’s border. It lands, uncomfortably, right here at home.

A Crisis We’re Choosing Not to See

While Washington debates the next defense supplemental, America is quietly sleepwalking toward one of the most predictable catastrophes in its history. By 2040, an estimated 11.2 million Americans will be living with Alzheimer’s disease. By 2050, that number approaches 13 million — and among Americans aged 85 and older, one in three already has the disease. A landmark NYU Langone study delivered perhaps the starkest finding of all: one in two Americans can expect to experience significant cognitive difficulties after the age of 55.

Read that again. One in two.

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Peace Beyond the Pain

What a Hallmark actor’s breakdown taught me about my own silent crisis — and why Wednesday would never have come if I hadn’t made it to Sunday.

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