Recently in True Tales Category

I've been working on a post since the 19th of April which is apparently too loopy even for me, because although I know exactly what I want to say, the words have formed into a big crazy ball of Sufism and Hermeticism, with a bit of Theosophy thrown in for flavor, all wrapped around a core of love, romance, and the immanence of God, which is a pretty heady mixture for an atheist to be writing about.¹ I'll get it finished eventually, but first I have to figure out how to not sound like a loon while I do it.

Let's leave that aside for a moment to ponder the mystery of the Beeping Dumpster Device in the Night.

Friday night, while out for an evening constitutional that had nothing to do with tobacco, I happened to pass by the dumpster enclosure that's below my bedroom window. My ears detected a faint beeping noise. Curious, I opened the gate to the enclosure, and, lifting the dumpster's lid, determined that the beeping was coming from somewhere amidst the trash inside of it: dit-dit-dit...dah-dah-dah...dit-dit-dit. Repeated, over and over. If you know a bit of Morse code you'll recognize that as: S-O-S.

There was an electronic device of unknown origin in the dumpster below my bedroom window, emitting an audible distress signal.

I couldn't immediately think of any such manufactured device: even an iPhone isn't smart enough to know you've accidentally thrown it away and call for help. I decided that I had to discover the source of the signal, and went to my apartment, returning to the dumpster armed with a flashlight. I propped open the lid, and lifted a couple of packed white kitchen trash bags out of the way. The beeping got louder. I poked and prodded at more well-stuffed garbage bags, noting the dark fluids that mushed against the plastic, and although I could narrow down the general location of the signal by its sound, I could see nothing with the flashlight. It was likely that the device, whatever it was, was inside one of those gloopy-looking bags. After a few more minutes ineffectually moving bags around, I decided that I'd had enough of being mistaken for a vagrant for the evening. It was cool, and my bedroom window would be open, so I covered up the general area of the signal with trash bags, muffling the noise. Closing the lid dimmed it further.

Later, as I lay in bed reading, I could--if I focused my ears just so--still hear the distress call: dit-dit-dit...dah-dah-dah...dit-dit-dit.

Saturday morning, around 7AM, the garbage truck came, dumping the crashing contents of the dumpster into its back and carting them away. I thought of the mysterious device, packed somewhere among coffee grounds and papaya rinds, still earnestly broadcasting its signal in the darkness of the truck's innards. Eventually, the truck would be emptied. Would someone better equipped or more willing to sift through kitchen trash hear the beeping, and seek out its source? Or would the device continue beeping, on into a landfill, its signal lost in the roar and crunch of dozers and dump trucks.

And, more importantly: what was the device? What sort of device does that, just beeps out a distress call that wasn't yet in common usage when the Titanic went down? Was it already beeping when it was placed in the trash, or did it somehow start transmitting after the dumpster's lid closed over it? Did the person who threw it out know what it was? Was it, perhaps, a device intended to spark exactly the sort of weird little evening encounter I'd had with it? A speaker, a couple of chips, a 9-volt battery, all pranksterishly intended to entice the curious?

I'll never know. It's Sunday evening, and while I wish now that I'd had a bit more fortitude and searched a little more thoroughly for the device, there's also something to be said for the mystery of it as it stands. A forlorn call for assistance, transmitted from a trash bag, intended for...whomever.

¹My particular problem with today's fashionable capital-A Atheism is that at the popular level, a good deal of it seems to be a exercise in pseudo-intellectual hipster me-tooism, with people who want to be publicly clever setting up massive god-shaped strawmen, knocking them down, setting them on fire, and pushing them off a cliff. Yes, that's entertaining, but reducing a human language project that's been going on for over 10,000 years down to a belief in the Bearded Sky Ghost and then oh-so-bravely declaring you Don't Believe In That Nonsense demonstrates all the intellectual depth of a puddle in Harvard Yard. It seems to me that too many people have mistaken reading The God Delusion for full engagement with the subject. Also: if your shiny new rational belief system is accompanied by merchandise such as a "hard enamel lapel pin with a silver edging and back with deluxe locking barrel style clutch," you're playing on the same field as that yahoo in the Ford F-150 with the Jesus fish on the tailgate.

I've stopped drinking coffee. I used to drink quite a bit of it--I had an espresso machine at my desk, and drank anywhere from one to three a day. Good stuff, too, from the roaster across the parking lot from my office. In January my ex came out to visit, and I brought the machine home so there'd be coffee in the morning, and I never brought the machine back to my desk. Since then, I've had the very occasional half cup of the weak office coffee. But in general: I no longer need coffee, because my recently transformed overall mood and outlook on life has been providing me with a wonderful and seemingly sourceless energy, and when I do have strong coffee like espresso, I feel a little strung out.

Also: there's been chocolate, which may have helped me through any withdrawal I might have had. A bit each day, dark, single-origin stuff made with cocoa from around the world: places like Madagascar, Cuba, the Philippines, even a single village in Venezuela. I have a small piece of 100% dark by way of breakfast, which sounds awful if you're thinking of baking chocolate, but is really just phenomenal. I share it--the other chocolate, that is, my fellow devotees weren't all that mad about the 100%--at the office, which is fun and amusing, because the really good chocolate is psychoactive. It's a bit like handing out sweet mellow drugs at work. It's complex and rich, so we sit in the cubicle for a few minutes and talk about the flavors much as one would talk about wine: the notes, the roast, the finish. There's a bar made with cocoa beans from Cuba, produced by François Pralus, that is so...well, Cuban...that I swear it's got tobacco notes.

Which could just be me being a pretentious knob. But there's no denying that a bar from Ecuador is different than a bar from Chuao, and the whole experience is in danger of turning me into one of those hipster doofuses who's got that One Thing that he's really, really into, like bicycles or cheese or beer. I may have to move to Portland.

There's a shop in town, a little Mecca for the other brown bean, where I buy bars to stash in my desk drawer and dole out in the afternoon, when the slump hits. Every once in awhile I'll go to the shop during lunch, accompanied by a lovely lass if I'm lucky, bulk up the stash, and have coffee. A couple of weeks ago I had a double espresso and three different sorts of freshly-bought chocolate, and at 11:30 that night I didn't see how I was going to get to sleep much before one AM.

Today I restrained myself: a single espresso, with a mere two varieties of cocoa goodness later on in the afternoon. But around dinner time I said to my mother, "I feel a bit strung out right now, I'm not sure why." Then I remembered: the caffeine. The coffee, plus the smaller amounts in the chocolate, sets my chest to thrumming and my ears to ringing. I can't believe that I used to drink as much coffee as I did. No wonder I was such a wreck.

There's a lot of things I don't do now that I used to do which contributed to an overall state of mind that could best be described as "miserable." I don't really drink any more, that was a big deal for awhile. I stepped away from pot long ago. And now, it seems, caffeine has joined the list of Substances That Just Aren't Helpful. I don't think that chocolate will join those ranks, it's too fun and innocuous. Besides, it's good for you.

And now--having exercised such coffee-related restraint--it's actually time for bed, where I'll dream cocoa dreams and wake up with my face stuck to the pillow.

So this crazy thing happened last night--crazy, of course, being a relative term, related to a deviation from the norm--and what I remember about it are dead grandparents, and drill presses, and talking sticks, that last thing being particularly odd, as it meshes well with the novel I'm reading at the moment, to wit: there's an ambulatory Painted Stick in that narrative, which speaks, and if that's not a talking stick then nouns are not persons, places, or things.

There was music! And extreme paranoia! And three people who were just about the same age, which is a first for me in this town, this town being mostly the province of the newly wed and the nearly dead. There was, in addition, a vanishing woman, and a man with good cheekbones and a hat well worn, both of whom contributed, but were not essential (sorry folks) to the unfolding of the tale. They were embellishments, which is a fine thing to be, but! As we all know: nice to look at, great for adding detail and myth to the scene, but not, you know, vital.

Let's step away for a moment and consider that: were they vital? Something in me recoils at dismissing them as mere decoration, slight fillips of strange, and one of them did, in fact, buy me a beer. That alone should elevate the participatory importance of that hatted lad. Hutch--dear, cheekboned, hat-wearing Hutch--he vamoosed, skedaddled, was "Audi" before flame was ever set to vegetation, leaving me to the tender mercies of the apostles of hemp. And the woman! Had she not been so voluble at the start of things, I'd've left alone, two martinis poorer. Deep in her cups, she was, and capped in a face-hiding manner, and she vanished at some point unnoticed, out into the evening, leaving only a space on the couch in her wake, her absence only remarked upon minutes or hours--or perhaps even days!--later.

But even her disappearance was not so crucial as that of Zach, slider of faders and beater of skins, who was defined at first by a plate of pasta and his non-presence. Zach, who was not-there! Broken-hearted Zach! Zach by the dumpster next door, succumbing to the vagaries of his liver and alcohol. He disappeared before I ever met him.

And what, then, of Josh? Maker of furniture. Appreciator of vacuum tubes, drawer of lettered houses, player of keys! That's what of Josh, good-hearted Josh.

I'd gone downtown with a specific purpose: go to Roy, order a martini, and see what happens. Perhaps there will be people there, and we can talk. I've done it before, showing up there alone with my guitar, fresh from busking for drunken bridesmaids, and invited by strangers to join them at their table due to my apparently interesting look and the instrument by my side. The bar at Roy curves 'round at the end, so that we were in effect all seated at a table, Josh and Hutch opposite, Emily next to them, and an empty space next to me, like Elijah's place at the Seder table. Conversation was struck: where is the man who ordered that pasta? I'd never met him. But he'd ordered and then gone, and the three of them seemed unsure of his whereabouts. Eventually, it was determined that he was next door. "There's nothing next door but a dumpster," I said, whereupon the situation resolved itself into clarity. It had been a long night for those four, and consequences were being paid, out on the sidewalk.

They packed rare Zach into a cab, a poacher, no less, who'd just happened to drive by after the call was made. Then the four of us wandered northwards, while the jilted cab company called Josh every few minutes to complain. Eventually we crawled to a bar with a keeper of a legendary and accomplished flirtatious nature, and a tale was told of that. You see that fellow there, in the black ball cap? Her boyfriend. He comes here and drinks and watches her until it's time for him to leave, said Josh, and there he goes, now! Just watch what happens to her demeanor when she's not under his watchful eye. Tits out, winks on! There she goes. And that pair at the end of the bar: not sisters, no, but enough alike in habit and appearance be be considered such. Slaves to the bottle, them, with their beers and shots lined up before them like brave soldiers.

A-wandering, then, to yet another establishment, where Hutch pulled a story about being pantsed by a Balinese monkey for the peanuts in his pocket out of the air. A cash-only establishment, this, which meant that new friend Hutch bought cash-poor me a Boont amber ale. Embarrassing somewhat, that, though he was gracious about it. Then: more wandering! Off into the misty evening on fog-slicked streets. Hutch departed, having had enough of our nonsense, but the four of us went on, seeking shelter and smokables. Which we found, in a small plaster-walled dwelling wherein the walls met the ceiling with gentle curves rather than molded angles. Zach had made it home with the taxi poacher, and was wrapped in unconscious tartan on the couch. Flame was struck, and he awoke! Then be-capped Emily disappeared into the night, without a word that we could recall, leaving the three of us--mixer of sound, worker of wood, smithy of words--to the tender mercies of our neurochemistries.

Imagine, for a moment, that you've developed a sort of cosmology, not overt, not a System of the World, but more of an overarching viewpoint derived from the sum total of your experiences. It shouldn't be hard to imagine--you're doing it whether you want to or not--but it might be something that you don't pay a lot of mind to. Then imagine that you encounter, in the course of one befogged evening in a city by the sea, a pair of other people who for some reason seem to have laid down a similar experiential substrate. They use much of the same notional shorthand that you do. A simple phrase--"I have the talking stick!"--is freighted for them with the same meaning as it is for you. It's really an amazing thing, if you'll take it down from the shelf and look at it, shuffle it from mental hand to mental hand: the common viral idea, a hot nest of a concept, shared among strangers, saves months or years of discussion. It's the ideological equivalent of a single word, but no one spends much energy on being amazed at a shared noun or verb. That's just what communication is, isn't it, and a single word can easily bear as much meaning as a concept that can be unpacked in a phrase or three.

We had that going on for us, though it took a lot of work to bring me into the room, befuddled as I was with the consequences of toddler dexedrine and methylphenidate. By that I mean: I was acutely aware, suddenly, that I was a jumble of experiences and chemical impulses, and that, furthermore, my own path from birth until just that moment had assembled a unique consciousness that was given to rattling the bars of its cage and occasionally pissing in the corner. So it was difficult for me, just then, to focus on the realities of these two shiny new people, or to even believe the stories I was hearing: had grandparents really died, just that day? Was that drill press that seemed as though it had been there for quite some time actually a recently acquired heirloom? The story of the broken relationship I believed, having seen Zach booting into the street wearing Josh's borrowed white pants. But all else was uncertain, lost in a fog of paranoia so acute that I am, even now, waiting for the video of my foolishness to show up on YouTube.

Which is, I think, a comment on mod'ren media, if I may slide into my pretentious theorizing. I blame Alan Funt, he started it. With the technology of his day, he entrapped people in ridiculous situations, recording them for our amusement. Now, ABC News has "What Would You Do?" a hideous program described as (and I quote): "ABC's hidden camera, ethical dilemma series What Would You Do? puts ordinary people on the spot. From bullying to abuse, racial attacks and public humiliation, John Quinones captures people's split-second and often surprising decisions when they're thrust into real-life ethical scenarios." Fuck John Quinones, though, to be fair, he's just riding the surveillance wave that's cresting on the Internet, where temporary idiocy lives forever. I spent some portion of the evening looking for cameras, so convinced was I that the situation couldn't possibly be unfolding as it was.

But it was. Strange and deep conversations. Matters of etiquette! Laughter in the garage, and a complete inability on my part to determine when the evening was actually over. Which is fine. My gracious hosts were patient with my neuroticism, or at least put on a good show of it.

It's morning now--and will remain so for another fifteen minutes--and what I really want is pancakes. I see that in my future. I feel as though I've made a foray into an uncharted land, because I'm strange that way about new people. Who are they? I don't really know yet. Sometimes I'm struck dumb by the sheer oddness of our skull-encased consciousness: we toddle around, a perceiving "I," a thing-that-sees, an awareness wrapped in meat studded with sensory receptors, bumping into similarly-clad and equipped Others, each of us truly alone because of the quarter-inch of bone which forms the tureen that holds our neuronal soup. We can pass messages out of the mixture, information encoded in the vibrations of the air, with subtlety lent by the light that bounces from the expressions of our faces. But all of that is just packets moving from hand to hand, letters from the soul, their true author always hidden, never really seen.

One can achieve great facility with the language, become a raconteur of personal experience. But in the end?

We're never entirely sure that we're not just making the whole thing up.

TYLER: Did you know if you mixed equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate, you could make napalm?

JACK: No, I didn't know that, is that true?

TYLER: That's right. One can make all kinds of explosives using simple household items.

Fight Club

Actually, that's not right. Chuck Palahniuk said, "Well, Ed Norton changed one ingredient in every [recipe] to make them useless. So, that really pissed me off because I really research those really well. Actually it's styrofoam and gasoline - it makes the most incredible explosive."

Which isn't true either. This I know because I put that mixture together myself, as a hormone-infused adolescent male. I don't even know exactly how I figured it out--I think I have dim memories¹ of putting gasoline in a styrofoam coffee cup, which promptly shriveled and dumped its contents onto the garage floor. So I discovered that you can dissolve styrofoam peanuts into gasoline and it'll make a stinky greasy plastic mess that will burn quite handily, giving off gouts of black smoke. But it doesn't explode and it doesn't burn underwater. Real napalm was supposed to burn underwater, according to the knowledge of explosives somehow common to all teen boys. But I didn't have any white phosphorous, which is what the inventive folks at Dow added to the jellied gasoline so that it would stick to Enemy Combatants and keep burning after they'd jumped into rivers to make it stop.

This is the second post in a row that mentions this particular movie. I don't have a thing for it, no real affinity, it just happens to be on the television. And once more I'm sitting in the recliner at my mother's house, mostly because she's got cable and I don't. TV serves as background noise, a distraction that I can check into and out of as needed. There's nothing else on that makes the right kind of familiar background noise. So, Pitt and Norton it is. It forms a jumping-off point for my brand of dashed-off tripe. Completely irrelevant to the larger point here, if there is one.

A new friend of mine recently remarked that I have a "hard shell." It was during a chat, typed rather than spoken, which is how we've had most of our conversations to date. Very modern. She's young and lovely and makes interesting music, and is a quite recent acquaintance, a matter of months, really, so it was interesting to hear that I give off this armored impression. I didn't feel especially well-plated, until I thought about it some more, trying out the imagery, seeing how it fit. And it fit well: I can almost see it, an intricately articulated, chitinous exoskeleton, dark, with deep and iridescent blues within the plating. It's not lightweight--although it doesn't weigh much for the amount of protection it gives--and I've gotten used to carrying it around. I can almost feel what it would be like to strip it off, and that removal feels intimately biological, as though the components of the armor are partially bonded to my flesh. Not to the point where removing it would be painful or bloody, but I have the definite impression that peeling it free would expose skin that would be ever-so slightly damp and new, pale from being hidden from the sun for so long.

I've never thought of myself as having a hard shell. But that's not necessarily the sort of thing you can readily see about yourself. Sometimes it takes fresh eyes with an outsider's gaze. It feels a bit like new knowledge, but it fits within my self-conception too readily to be entirely new. It makes sense. So I'll accept it and see what happens if I behave as though it's true.

---

¹That sounds vague because I have a loose grasp of the difference between actual memories and the memories of dreams from certain periods of my life. It's not really a problem. I'm just more comfortable with the total lack of certainty that truly lies at the heart of the stories we tell ourselves about our past than most people I know.

I wish that my own experience of becoming unstuck in time would produce a collection of words as memorable and absorbing as those that Kurt Vonnegut used to describe Billy Pilgrim's. That in itself is a cop-out. Fake and lazy. Experience doesn't assemble collections of words, people do. Writers. Authors. Words don't just happen. Left to its own devices inspiration sits there like a pile of dog shit by the curb. It doesn't do anything. Leave it alone and it eventually dissolves and washes into a storm drain. Gone, never there.

My issue...challenge...call it what it is, my problem--fuck that positive spin, this is a damned-by-god negative thing, not some call to a contest, a lesson-ridden metaphorical confluence to be overcome, victory over which will result in a brief spurt of positive growth. It's a problem. There is doubt. Uncertainty. Difficulty. I'm not going to reframe it, I'm not going to recontextualize it, I'm not going to do some New Age personal development hoodoo on it to turn into something fuzzy. You don't grow by making something small and then stepping over it. That is four AM bullshit available on ten DVDs for four payments of $39.95. You grow by hurling your body up and over the jagged and looming peak that's in front of you.

So yes. The problem. My problem is that I am never...here. I'm mostly where I've been, or--especially lately--where I'm going to be. The little green guru in the swamp with Frank Oz's hand up its ass would be very disappointed with me. I wouldn't be able to lift the X-Wing. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.

There's imprecision lurking--I'm supposed to be all about choosing the right word, hip to the difference between "lightning" and "lightning bug"--and that imprecision lurks because the "here" in question isn't spatial, it's temporal. Obviously I'm always here in the former sense. Right now I'm in the recliner at my mother's house, Fight Club is on the cathode-ray tube--I am Jack's wasted life--and I'm typing on my Asus laptop, the little computer with its extraordinary battery life and its overly flexible island-style keyboard, while a few miles away my mother recuperates three-to-a-room and six-to-a-bathroom because, in the end, the place she ended up wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, but still represents a future that may await me, and you, whether we sink into the demagogues' predicted state-run senescence as delivered to us by the dreaded Obamacare, or some other bureaucratic clusterfuck of an elder care system cobbled together for the fractured remains of middle class families. And even that isn't really the issue, isn't really the problem, the problem isn't what's going to happen to me, or to you, the problem is what's going to happen to her, the problem is that her disease will progress, that age is inevitable, and what's going to happen over the next four to six weeks is just a precursor, it's going to get worse, and you see? That's what it's like. I can be sitting here--right fucking here!--and yet not be here at all. I'm in some future of assisted care and immobility, loss of dignity, and the experience of watching someone become truly pathetic. That's a word that's used too often and too lightly. Look it up. It's compassion and sorrow and sympathy all gathered together around a core comprised of the suffering of others.

Right now--temporally--none of that is here with me. There's the computer and the television and a slice of cold pizza in the fridge. But that's not where I am. I've got the knot in my chest from anticipating waking up tomorrow morning and hauling my resistant ass back to the office, and if I work at it a bit I can get a more pleasant vibe from the forthcoming pleasure of sleep, but that's not now either, is it? That's in an hour.

I tried it a bit, on the way home this afternoon, driving south along the 101, with the mountains rising to my left, the sky clear blue and high above me, and I tried, for that five mile stretch, to just enjoy what I was seeing. It worked, for those ten minutes. But then it passed, and I spent some time not looking forward to actually visiting the convalescent home, and while I was there, I looked forward to not being there, the temporal now always just ahead of me, or behind me (which is embarrassing) and so I spend far too much time being elsewhere, and not here, which should, I think, take care of the aforementioned imprecision.

None of which, it seems to be, is anywhere near as memorable and absorbing as Billy Pilgrim. That man had something to say. Those were meaningful experiences. This?

I'm just unstuck.

Inexplicably. But genuinely.

So peculiar.

Such an unusual way to start the day, for me. I felt like a child who'd been given twenty dollars to spend as he wanted and then sent alone into KB Toys, and I wanted to have something else to do with the day, something other than simply going to work. But I didn't, so I took my odd morning glow with me to the office, and did my usual office type things. Not with any extraordinary amount of vigor, mind you. But I was just...content. The kind of state that you want to bottle and keep for later. Maybe sprinkle some on your salad at lunch.

I was glad to have my gladness! And I needed it mid-morning, when the first choice for my mother's post-surgical assisted living arrangements fell through due to four of the facilities' paying residents having the bad grace to all return from their hospital stays on the same day, each in need of a bed. The admissions coordinator at the facility had told us that might happen: paying full-time residents have priority over any Medicare-funded guests. There's another facility in town with open beds, but it's of lesser reputation, which increases my level of concern, due to my mother's particular needs regarding general mobility and assistance. This might mean that I don't get to relax quite as much as I'd planned to over the next four weeks. There's still the possibility of getting into our first choice--a bed is opening up there on Tuesday--but getting that bed will require the intervention of my mother's General Physician. It seems that despite patients supposedly having the right to choose which facility they enter, such places apparently don't like to "poach" patients from each other once they've been admitted. This doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me--if the level of care doesn't meet with my requirements, I don't give much of a damn about what effect my desire to go somewhere else has on the relationships between skilled nursing staffs or whether it's a breach of institutional etiquette. But that's how it works.

My mother has a good medical team around her, and a favorable result is by no means assured, but I know that her GP will do his best to get her a bed in the place she wants to be. It's a testament to who my mother is, I think, that she has so many people around her who are willing to extend themselves to make sure that she gets the care she needs.

Which, once more, brings to mind all of the many millions of Americans who don't have such support, who are simply fed into the medical industrial complex and are completely at its mercy. After my mother dislocated her artificial hip picking up the cat (not a particularly fat cat, mind you, just an unfortunate seating angle combined with weakened hip musculature), I happened to be in the room while a hapless technician attempted to rig a horizontal lifting sling to place her on a table for an X-ray. There, on the lifting sling itself, was a clear piece of iconography depicting the exact way that the technician was rigging the sling...surrounded by a red circle with a fat red slash through it. After pointing this out more than once, I finally had to say: "Look, this clearly says not to do what you're doing, so stop doing it. Why don't you go find someone to help you out, here?" Had I not been in that room, the end result would have been my mother being dumped onto the floor and landing on her dislocated hip. The fact that her hip was still dislocated and undiagnosed 24 hours after her admission to the hospital was the result of the ER physician's apparent unfamiliarity with the basic concept of referred pain, and is part of another story. The point of this story is that I've seen enough mistakes made by experts and competent people to know that most patients and their family members put far too much faith in the impressively-degreed and white-coated gatekeepers of our medical establishments.

The way through this unfortunate reality is not found in belligerence, it is found in vigilance and the refusal to equate expertise with infallibility. I have learned to make myself part of the team that forms around my mother with every hospitalization, many of whom she knows on a first-name basis due to the frequency of their encounters. I say "please," and "thank you very much," and I mean it when I do. I remember that nurses and medical technicians are generally hard-working people who are responsible for more patients than just my mother, and that they are usually where much of the real power to provide proper care resides. When things go wrong, I know that the Nuclear Option does not consist of anything other than a steady voice, unwavering eye contact, and a very clear statement of two things: what I need, and when I need it. This I learned last year, when I showed up for a visit following my mother's allergic reaction to her routine IVIG infusion and found her propped up in bed, unconscious, her vomit-stained gown half-off, with a wheezing BiPAP strapped to her face. I need to speak to a doctor. And I need to speak to that doctor immediately. The haste with which the charge nurse picked up the phone was gratifying.

I don't anticipate anything like that this time around, but then I never do. It doesn't make much sense to anticipate things going wrong, because when they do, they always seem to do so in some novel way that I never would have thought of. There are just so many ways, large and small, in which my mother's body can betray her that it seems best to just pay attention to what's actually happening rather than attempt to prepare for what might happen.

And, if I happen to wake up smiling one morning, I keep that for myself, as a gift.

Another one of those days where I end up with all the energy I needed at around 2:00 this afternoon now, when I'm supposed to be going to bed. So I've spent the last three hours in a flurry of computer-based activity, including (in no particular order):

• Designing production schedules for several books
• Setting up a Google Books account
• Revising a document about royalty schedules for authors
• Setting project milestones and an all-important launch date
  

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Taaaaantalizing, perhaps? Whatever could I be up to?

All in good time, dear reader, all in good time.

As expected, mom was not quite as cheery today as she was yesterday, what with the narcotics wearing off and all. A brief bit of confusion about the exact timing of her move from the medical/surgical wing of the hospital over to the skilled nursing facility that will be her home for the next four weeks sent her into tears, apparently (she hates that). We'd spent a lot of time with the doctor emphasizing that a) she needed to be moved into in an assisted living situation directly from the hospital on Friday, and that b) acute rehab, once the sling came off, would happen after that. Which of course resulted in the doc sending a discharge planner into her room to talk to her about moving her to acute rehab tomorrow. All straightened out when I got there and spoke with yet another discharge planner, but I'm often amazed by the propensity for people--intelligent people, busy, yes, but generally on top of things--to completely forget very specific conversations and set processes in motion that are the exact opposite of what's just been discussed.

I have a great deal of empathy for people who are routinely caught up in the medical system. My mom's a former RN, and sharp, and I'm quick with the thinking on my better days, so between the two of us we're able to muster up the knowledge needed penetrate the Medicare bureaucracy and make sure that she gets the care that she needs, when she needs it. I can't imagine what it must be like for people who don't have the inside track that we do, or who are constitutionally unable to march up to the floor station and politely demand to speak to the charge nurse, or to have a doctor summoned when necessary because the appropriate level of care is not being given. My mom and I make a good team: stuff gets done. If she's upset because there's confusion among the staff, I'm perfectly capable of following the discharge planner into her office while she's on her cell phone, and getting things straightened out. I'm sure that most people just get shuffled through the system, hapless and sick, without an advocate to help them navigate the medical maze.

Because my mother was a medical professional, she's afforded a certain degree of professional courtesy. It's subtle, and it shouldn't be that way, really, but it is, and we take full advantage of it. It also helps that she's not afraid to write letters when things have not gone the way they were supposed to: she's old school, with high standards, and is able to speak the lingo, so when she writes a letter to the hospital ombudsman and cc:'s exactly the right people on the board, things change. They do actually make note of such communication: notes go into your patient file and accompany you on your trips through the system, and I'm pretty sure that my mother's file has the equivalent of a sticker on it that says Do Not Fuck With This Woman.

Which is yet another reason that it's so profoundly unjust that shes been stricken in the way that she has. We shouldn't have to do these things, to make these arrangements so that she'll have the right people around her to help her walk and go to the bathroom and all of the other tasks that I, and probably you, just take for granted, because our bodies mostly do what they're supposed to do. She's only 66, and she's been robbed of what should have been a graceful and active retirement by her clusterfuck of an immune system. It's fortunate that she's always had black sense of humor; often it's the only thing that's been able to see her through an intolerable situation.

So tomorrow she'll move to what she's been calling "the home," which is by all accounts a nice place to be if you have to be in such a place. I'll see her tomorrow there, but probably not Friday, because I have to go down south to have cocktails with my partners and some potential investors.

Which, if you'd asked me six months ago, is not something I thought I'd ever be doing. Funny old world.

No, of course they didn't. But someone somewhere thought it was a good idea. They drew up project plans and had Powerpoint presentations made which explored the improbable intersection of the ice cream and gum-chewing demographics. I suspect this new gum atrocity is related to the proliferation of yogurts with favors like Red Velvet Cake and Key Lime Pie: there's a company that produces flavor essences, and this company is doing business with the yogurt and gum-makers of the world. There's probably a whole realm of horrors that we have not yet seen: Prime Rib yogurt, or the Wonkian Turkey Dinner gum. A wonderful and terrible age we live in.

I am currently fighting a nebulous battle with some sort of sickness. It kind of wrecked my Sunday plans, then retreated yesterday, and now has remounted its assault by hitting me with fatigue and facial pressure. I would rather have two days of knock-down-drag-out viral devastation than this sneaking guerrilla crap. With this kind of mucosal quagmire there's always the possibility of getting stuck on the roof of the embassy while the last helicopter sails over the horizon, leaving you to die buried beneath a mound of used Kleenex and empty Sudafed blister packs. Stand-up fights are superior.

Spent some time in the hospital today, this morning at six AM and then in the afternoon, after they'd hacked off the useless portions of my mother's humerus and replaced them with shiny new titanium and plastic bits. The surgery seemed to go well--which is to say, she survived--and she was very much on Dilaudid when I saw her this afternoon, chatty and hoarse. Ready to do the other shoulder, she said, but that was most likely because the spinal block they'd given her was still working, keeping the pain-beast at bay. I'm sure she'll be less enthusiastic about the whole thing in 24 hours.

Had my first look at potential cover art for the novel today, which was interesting if not entirely satisfactory. I liked approximately 50% of the concept--a promising enough start, I suppose. I've never done this before, and I have no idea what percentage of authors actually end up liking their covers. I'm fortunate to have as much a say in this part of the process as I do (and there are some unique reasons for that), and I suspect that my experience of it will therefore be unusual. But still: cover! Art! For my book. That's some heady stuff right there, which I'd be able to muster up more enthusiasm for were my head not quite so stuffed. Ha!

And that's about all the fingercize I'm going to be able to muster up this evening. Very exciting, I know. But I feel like I've done a small thing, now, and it's the small things that keep me going.

Apparently it's a blog. And it still works! I feel like I've wandered onto the bridge of an abandoned ship, listing at a rotting dock, and found that there's still enough power to light up some of the buttons when I poke at them.¹ Maybe a begrimed radar screen flickers into life, the blurred green sweep leaving dim trails in the half light. Of course, the ship will never go anywhere again, but it's fun to idly flick switches and sit in the musty captain's chair.

How much farther can I extend the metaphor? This far, no farther. The line must be drawn heah!

And while I was away, the year rolled over, giving us a fresh and shiny 2011 to play in. I expect a lot from this year, mostly because I know some things that you don't, which I'll be telling you about soon, but also because last year was such a...what's the calendrical equivalent of a clunker...a turd...a veritable--yes!--shipwreck of a year. (OK, maybe I'll extend it a little farther.)

To be fair, it wasn't the worst I've had, but it was close. It improved a bit starting in August, with the discovery of a whole group of new and fabulous people that I didn't know I needed in my life. So the year did have that going for it, but for the most part I'm glad that it's over, and I can be thankful for that as I peer ahead towards looming successes and known challenges. One of the things I'm going to try to do is kick some life back into this place, mostly because I'm feeling rusty in the word-smithing department. It's like any other skill. You get creaky and stiff if you're not exercising the typing fingers and the bits of the brain that make them go.

So: this is for me, and will be the written equivalent of watching me do the Stairmaster. It will be dull. But at least I'll be stringing sentences together. One! Two! Three! Huff puff puff. Maybe even on a daily basis.

The first of the aforementioned challenges is fast approaching: maternal shoulder replacement surgery, on Tuesday. Routine for nearly everyone except my mother; her medical history is a page and a quarter, single-spaced, and not one of her numerous other encounters with the scalpel has gone entirely according to plan. Her various chronic maladies almost guarantee a long and difficult postoperative recovery, and the chances of something going terribly wrong are much higher than I'd like. But bone-on-bone is very painful, and she doesn't have much in the way of options. Her choices reduce to the certainty of ongoing, sharp and grinding pain, and the near-uselessness of her arm, or the possible reduction of ongoing, sharp and grinding pain and the not-much-better-than-uselessness of her arm. And then, of course, she'll need the same damn thing on her other shoulder, which is also dissolving into an osteoarthritic mess. All of which is set against the relentless progression of a rare auto-immune disease that has already reduced her quality of life to a barely tolerable level. At 66, she has the mobility and weakness of a not-very-spry 86 year old.

I took her to the hospital this morning for her regularly-scheduled IVIG infusion, which should have happened on Thursday but didn't, due to the hospital being out of women's beds. Apparently they get full to the rafters in the first weeks of the new year, as various financial and regulatory annual limits reset themselves. So instead of having one last weekend at home before her surgery and subsequent six-week stay in rehab, she's in the hospital tonight, home tomorrow afternoon, and then back into the same hospital at five AM sharp on Tuesday. I am much more familiar with the layout of Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital than I want to be...these days, I'm there every three weeks for IVIG, and once or twice a year for the medical crises that occur with distressing regularity.

Now I'm sitting in her recliner--the one that I mounted on 4x4s to make it easier for her to get in and out of--paying some attention to Hellboy while awaiting the delivery of a pizza I probably shouldn't have ordered. Stress eating, most likely, but then again, Marty's does make a fine barbecue chicken pizza. The cats that I'll be feeding and tending to while she's having her shoulder rehabilitated are hiding somewhere, having already spied the packed suitcase, knowing with feline certainty that something in their world is about to go horribly different.

As do I. Well, not horribly different. But different nonetheless, with the undercurrent of fear that always accompanies these medical interventions in my mother's life. The complexities of her various conditions make everything riskier, decrease the good odds, and increase my fears. But: hope for the best, prepare for the worst and all that.

That's what I've written this evening. And look at that! Hellboy II: The Golden Army is on next, and here's my pizza. My evening is thus planned. Off into it I go.

---

¹Which is entirely different from feeling like it's an empty stage. Totally different vibe.

Not like a crêpe. Like soda water that's been left out too long. A friend of mine remarked that this is because I'm using it quite a lot these days, but it doesn't feel that way to me. What it feels like is a certain loss of capacity. I just don't do some of the more intellectually adventurous things that I used to do: I'm not reading the heavy-hitting books, or writing the large amounts of fluid prose, or thinking the limber thoughts. I am doing other things, admittedly. Working a job, taking care of my mother, writing a novel (although not at the moment), and also collaborating on a big secret project that I can't tell you about but which adds up to a whole other job. So it's not as though my mind isn't occupied. But I am aware of a kind of airy, empty feeling towards the upper reaches of my mind which I'm pretty sure is the mental equivalent of the first vestiges of age-related stiffening in the joints.

Which should be enough, I think, to put me back on the trike and set me pedaling to work again. Exercise is a proven spur to neurogenesis. It's also good for improving the taste of your neurochemical soup, depression-wise. And, for fuck's sake, it's only five miles to the office. There's no reason I shouldn't be riding, and every reason I should. So I think perhaps I'll start doing that on Wednesday. I couldn't do it today, or tomorrow, on account of having to drop off and pick up my mother from the hospital for her regularly-scheduled IVIG infusion. (That's how this usually works: when I get the impulse to start riding again, there is almost always some reason I can't act on that impulse immediately.)

If nothing else, the abundant evidence for the forestalling of age-related decline ought to be enough to set me spinning again. Neurologically speaking, that decline starts at about 30 (sorry if that's alarming), and I'm sensitive enough to my own ways of thinking and being to spot the nascent fuzziness here and there. But! It's also reversible, if you do and eat the right things. The most effective remedy is exercise, and if I expect to be up for all the many things I've got planned for 2011 (not least of which is publishing one novel and completing a second) I need give my little bucket of gray matter every advantage.

Speaking of which: getting enough sleep is also crucial to proper brain function, so I suppose I'd better shut down the computer and see about putting my flat brain and me to bed. Ta!

Quite awhile ago I spent the summer doing theater in Princeton,and I was able to spend some time in the theater between shows, when the house was empty, the lights low, and the sets shrouded in shadow. Once or twice I was able to be on stage by myself, facing the rows of unoccupied seats alone.

Treading those quiet boards felt a lot like this place does: all set up for a play, but lacking its player and, doubtless, an audience.

There's a very small stack of Draft posts in the Entries section of my Movable Type control panel. One of them, in particular, started out as a blog post about Serious Things and quickly morphed into something else, something that might be destined for places most unblogly. About all I've been really been able to muster up have been little bursts of text over on Facebook. I've also been recording some music again, having figured out how to properly mic the new Guild (you can listen to it here).

I've never been an obsessive chronicler, like some people. I've also never been particularly cheery, that peculiar brand of general optimism that lets one push on through the rough times without getting too bogged down. Me, I get bogged down, and the past couple of months have been boggy indeed.

There is, however, a certain amount of light over yonder, which is simply this: in the summer of 2011, you'll be able to hold my first novel in your hands. And that's all I'm able to say about it at this point. Further bulletins as events warrant.