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cluster of palpitations
Thursday, December 4 2025
Our neighbor A came over this morning to walk Charlotte in the snow. Her dog Henry didn't like the snow and didn't come, and Neville didn't go either. When they came back from their walk, I made a french press of coffee for A and me, and we talked about a few interesting topics [REDACTED]. Gretchen said something about her own spidey sense when it comes to being exploited by people, and A responded that, as a former child actor, she never developed such a sense. I asked her to clarify this point, and she said that people don't make for great child actors if they are overly sensitive to exploitation. [REDACTED]
Later in the morning, I had a cluster of heart palpitations worse than any I've ever had. I've noticed such palpitations ever since 1994, and I've associated them with the sudden appearance of better coffee in our culture (and in my life). But there's probably some underlying pathology as well. This concerned me back in the early 1990s when the palpitations first appeared. But since then, I've decided they're a benign quirk and not anything to worry about. But late this morning, they were coming so fast that I became a little concerned. My heart would skip a beat every fourth or fifth beat, which is a lot of palpitations. This went on for about a half hour and then my heart started behaving more normally, so I didn't worry too much more about it. But what had triggered this weird cardiac behavior? Maybe I've been drinking too much booze at night, and perhaps the rare dose of ambien I took last night played a role.
This evening, Gretchen and I met up with Cathy and Roy, the falafel merchants from the east bank of the Hudson, at La Florentina in Kingston, a restaurant we really only ever go to for double dates. (And we really only ever order the same thing, which is the sformato with tahini sauce, though today for some reason we forgot to order a big puffy bread full of steam.) Soon after arriving, Roy was very excited to talk about the Tesla Model Y he'd recently started driving. (He'd originally planned to buy a used one, but ended up leasing a new 2026 model.) Gretchen had told me all about this car earlier, and the purchase made sense given Roy's needs. He's an airline pilot, and after landing at JFK or Newark, all the wants is to be driven home. And the autopilot on Teslas is now so good that this is genuinely possible. All it requires of him is that he sit in the driver's seat with his pupils pointing forward (something a camera is there to track). But other than that, he doesn't have to do anything. He doesn't even need to have his hands on the wheel. (The human requirement is entirely there for liability reasons; if that was less of a concern, the car could be fully autonomous.)
We also talked a little about my recent drive to Clinton Corners (near where they live) to buy cheap solar panels and my plans to install them at the cabin. [REDACTED]
Roy had some inside baseball on how it was that the socialist mayor-elect of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, got his meeting with Donald Trump and why it went as well for him as it did. Evidently a woman in the outgoing Eric Adams administration (who is leaving because Mamdani is "too extreme") arranged the meeting as one of her outgoing acts. But she also cautioned Mamdani on what not to tell Trump. Evidently Mamdani at first planned to say things that would've pissed Trump off, and she convinced him to instead say good things about real estate developers (such as Trump), which had the effect of turning Trump into mush by the time Mamdani appeared on camera with him.
The sformato was especially good at La Florentina this evening, and, since we hadn't ordered bread, there was little to take home with us after the meal. Before actually driving home, though, Cathy and Roy took us on a little drive to Home Goods and back in their Tesla to show what its self-driving was like. It was amazing. The wheel just turned itself, and the car did all the things a human would do, including waiting for cars to pass before heading out into traffic. It also changed lanes as needed, all on its own. The only instant that the car needed Roy to take over was for a few seconds as Cathy was changing our destination while the car was also turning itself onto 9W North. The experience of riding in a car so technologically advanced was so jarring that I remember it a little like it was maybe a dream.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251204 feedback
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