Balance, later

It’s been a weird year.

(how long has it been since it hasn’t? I don’t know that I remember that far back)

HST once said “It never got weird enough for me.”

I once would have agreed with that sentiment, but honestly these last few years, i’m it being weird. Weird isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

IN the last year i’ve seen such fun things as:

  • being threatened with job termination because of a disability accommodation request (and then all the rigamarole surrounding fighting over that)
  • Winning the battle over termination, only to be punch-fucked with a followup threat of termination for under-performance (ie, no matter how good you are, we want you to be a different kind of good)
  • Finding out my adult daughter had a severe drinking problem, and having to sort THAT out (rehab, in an ongoing process)
  • Opting to leave my employer of 23 years when it became obvious I was at an impasse with my management’s view of what I was supposed to be.
  • Dealing with my diabetes and the side effects of a new medication that tends to make me feel really ill, but which has induced significant weight loss.
  • Beginning a job hunt at 61 years of age, in an industry that favors the young, cheap and over-educated.
  • Asking myself if I really want to be doing this, or iof I want to re-set and figure out how to live a different lifestyle for whatever years are left to me.

Weird, as I said.

 

This ain’t all bad, though certainly there’s bad in there. After leaving my job June 1, i’ve done a few things put off for years while I struggled with family issues, tried desperately to be effective at work, and generally put myself second or third in priority. Pre-pandemic, I had accumulated a long list of tattoos I wanted to get, starting with finally tattooing my neck. That all got kiboshed by pandemic, but since I have time now, i’ve finally started to get that moving, including tattoos on neck, collar bone, and calves. I’m basically filling in spaces at this point, while getting ready to do a couple big pieces.

At 61, after a 40+ lb weight loss, i’m finding my skin is finally showing age, so I feel a ticking clock on how much longer i’ll feel like tattoos will look good. There are already spots that no longer feel tattoo friendly (losing weight at 60 is ALSO weird). So i’m hoping to interconnect a lot of smaller pieces with fill-in things.

This post won’t have pictures, but i’ll follow up with them.

I’ve got two appts on the books now, and as soon as I can schedule travel, several more by tattooists in SO Cal.

I’ve also spent a great deal of time getting organized. This includes hacking through years of accumulated stuff (a family that tends toward hoarding present a physical challenge, but i’m finally winning that); i’ve consolidated two stores spaces into one, and FINALLY have my garage back to the point where I can start to remove big racks used to handle all the crap that over-flowed my kids bedrooms when they lived with me.

I’ve begin to travel, at least a bit, though there’s more of that to come, and i’m finally catching up on my own health care, getting stupid but needful tests out of the way.

What I can NOT stand to do, at this point, is be at a desk and near a computer, which has impedes my feeling that  should be writing. I still have a sense of urgency, though it’s not quite clear what is urgent; I feel a ticking clock which tells me not to start things I can’t finish, though in fact I have time to finish things. Only hard physical effort relieves this feeling, so I’ve become a perpetual motion machine until fatigue poleaxes me. Tasks I can do with muscle are getting done, but the ones that need focus – despite my ADHD meds – are being avoided.

Balance eludes me, but I am pursuing it. There are things I want to do that require sitting still; I have two guitar customization projects, not to mention just playing  more. I have paperwork and phone calls that similarly need focus.

But not yet. I’m mot ready for balance, so long as it’s warm outside, and the doors are off my jeep, and the dogs want to go play. Balance tomorrow, maybe.

But I owe myself posts:

  • My new jeep
  • Inventory of new tattoos
  • My fitness and health progress
  • some erotica, because my head is there, if I could just sit down and do it.

Later.

 

 

 

Proof of (something akin to) life

it’s been a minute, as the kids say, since I’ve been here (or fucking anywhere).

I’d say sorry but who’d notice?

life fucking gets in the way. Family shit, health shit, job shit.

just, you know, shit.

details later. I’m ok, but too overwhelmed by piles of trivial stressors to get my mind back in a writing frame as yet.

to be continued at some point.

Something needs to explode

I’ve had a lot of conversations lately about some complex emotions.

A friend whose marriage may be on the rocks, who thinks her husband is cheating on her.

A friend who’s dealing with an immense array of traumas from childhood, from adulthood, from disabilities and ailments.

A friend who’s commemorating two lost parents in the last five years.

A friend who recently suffered a devastating loss of a pet, who is struggling to deal with a pain unlike any she’s felt.

A couple of men my age who are dealing with mental illnesses, in ways none of us have typically felt able to discuss.

A young adult who’s trying to turn their life around, who’s been (so far) unable to take advantage of all the tools therapeutic practice has to offer.

It’s not news, I think, that mental illness is yet another side effect of pandemic, of trumpian fascist politics, of a world in which hate and ignorance has some our from under it’s pointy hood.

We’re not well, broadly speaking.

Yesterday at a small gathering, two separate (beautiful) friends hugged me with a sweet, desperate affection. Neither they, or I, wanted to let go, holding a platonic hug far, far longer than would have been the norm not long ago.

Ok,  I admit it, it’s never completely platonic with me. I’m aware of every inch of flesh that’s touching, and am damn pleased with it. Wait, i’m distracting myself now.

Maybe it’s the age group; maybe it’s that we’ve all had to confront things we’ve never dealt with in our white, middle aged, middle class, able lifestyles.  I do not recall any time where so many of my close and intimate friends seemed so desperate.

I find myself in a cycle of needing both to comfort, and to be comforted, in ways i’ve never experienced. Not that this is worse; it’s not. But there’s a constant, traumatic sense of need that feels like it’ll never end, as we go into another winter of surge, waiting for something, good or bad, but something.

Wound’t it be easier if we could all drop acid and get in a naked, sweaty pile? God knows we’d all be better for it. Or taking turns with the whip, turns on the wall in cuffs.

I need to feel something stronger than boredom and dread, which describes most of my last three years. And I need to elicit responses.

I think that’s what made me go revisit my novella, because it reprensets both. It represents my own intensity of some 20 years ago. It represents a period in my life where everything I felt was dialed all the way up; when I felt everything, and engendered similarly strong responses in others.

I can’t be back there; it’s been an incredibly long 20 years. But I can visit that place, that time. Re-writing, and then sharing, are about that intensity of feeling in a way I can control. It’s about that sense of directed chaos. It’s the feeling of making someone else feel, in a profound and visceral way.

I’ve had a taste of it again; three or four friends who’ve read my work, in the last month, who’d gotten hard, or wet, who have reacted mentally, emotionally, physically, to my words, my voice.

It’s powerful, but it’s goddamn ephemeral. You can’t have a first time more than once, and so I find myself needing more first time feeling.

I want to extend that intensity to loved ones, friends, to the women I hugged yesterday.

I can make you feel, I want to say, I can touch you everywhere, without touching you, and you, then, can repay in kind just by letting me know how it felt.

Something needs to explode; I wish it could be all of us.

Rabbit in the Moon

“The Rabbit in the Moon” – a pendant made by my father. I just found this one while cleaning up my office. I still need to polish it up, but here it is as I found it.

Dad made a lot of things like this; it’s one of the things I miss about him; his abstract logician’s mind turned concrete in silver.

He made these out of old silver coins (a 1940’s Australian florin in this case). He said he learned the skill in the army; he was in the south pacific in WWII, and spent long, tedious hours on troop ships. Jewelry was one of the ways he passed the time, sitting on deck to catch cooling breezes, working with small hand drills and files to shape bits of silver coin (in the days when coins were still made of silver).

The image is of the Rabbit, pushing a wheelbarrow down a hill; my father used to say the wheelbarrow contains “books with pale blue covers, about the goodness of life”.

Miss you, Dad.

rabbit_moon

easter beast

I have a particular problem with easter. Oh, long time readers will know I have problems with several holiday. One might take this all to mean I’m just a sort of joyless, curmudgeonly bastard. And I guess that’s a little right. But generally my objections have more to do with the general pointlessness of american […]

I have a particular problem with easter.

Oh, long time readers will know I have problems with several holiday. One might take this all to mean I’m just a sort of joyless, curmudgeonly bastard.

And I guess that’s a little right.

But generally my objections have more to do with the general pointlessness of american holidays than they do with the idea of holidays in general.

BUt my problem with easter is a bit different than my issue with, say, st patrick’s day (a day for those who aren’t irish to celebrate irishness), or valentines day (a day where love is celebrated by those who have no idea what love is about).

My feelins about easter have less to do with meaning than with lack therof.

MY family were, like me, staunch atheists. We profoundly and strongly believed in a purely physical universe, one without gods or demons. For us, holidays were meaningful only in that they were cultural events, and celebrations were enjoyable for the simple pleasure of ritual.

When I was a child, waking on easter morning to find a carefully composed basket filled with chocolate eggs and minor toys was more about the break from routine than in was about deeper meaning. Once I was old enough to have figured out there was no mystical egg-laying bunny, the pleasures had more to do with my parent’s inventiveness in basket composition than it had to do magical wonder or reverence. I had absolutely no idea, when I was a child, that easter had anything to do with jesus; at that age, I don’t think I even had a clear idea of who jesus was, other than that it had something to do with god.

Unfortunately, once the basket-bringer stopped being mysterious, the holiday degenerated into a simple opportunity for aquisition. It was about getting something. Which is when my p[arents stopped it.

It wasn’t a big deal; the sort of gifts we got were on the order of mouse-sized plus animals, inexpensive chinese teacups, pocket-knives, or small plastic animals. So when we started to ask for things, presenting easter wish lists, my parents rightly decided we’d outgrown the whole thing.

Once I was beyond childhood – and i mean childhood in the sense of, too young to really grasp things in the universe, not in the modern sense of ‘under 18 – I was too old for easter baskets and bunnies.

My the time my age was in double digits, easter was a day when everything seemed to be closed, and when my brother and father crammed themselves with sees buttercream eggs until they were nautious.

The day was meaningless.

Later, when I had the puzzling realization that people, commonly, actually believed in god, jesus and various things saintly, it occurred to me that easter could possibly have some meaning beyond eggs and rabbits and baskets full of minor toys.

IT’s been odd, however, watching as my kids grow up, and my frineds

Gangster Grandparents

Chuck and Cookie Dillingham, circa 1927. My grandparents on my mother’s side. (click to embiggen) He was from southern Oklahoma. She was a daddy’s girl from Sherman Texas; her name was Hazel, though I never once heard her called anything but Cookie. They were drinkers, card players. She was a flapper with temper – he […]

Chuck and Cookie Dillingham, circa 1927.

My grandparents on my mother’s side.

ChuckAndCookieSepia.jpg

(click to embiggen)

He was from southern Oklahoma. She was a daddy’s girl from Sherman Texas; her name was Hazel, though I never once heard her called anything but Cookie. They were drinkers, card players. She was a flapper with temper – he was an inveterate ladies man, a baseball fanatic, a guy who liked to dance. He was ten years her senior, a dashing, masculine figure who loved fast cars and what she called ‘dirty blonds’.

He worked for the merchant marine in the years after WWI, then later, after they married and had their one daughter, they ran a diner in Long Beach (Chuck ‘n Cookie’s Diner). Later, they lived in Reno where he made a living playing poker (often as a shill for casinos, one of those guys paid to play on the house’s dollar, to dither people to the tables).

Cookie named her daughter Greta, after Greta Garbo. She loved movies and elegance, and felt deep shame over her own working class background. Low-class, she’d say, her favorite adjective for anything she didn’t like. There was nothing more loathsome to her.

The list of things I don’t know about them is far too long; things I should have asked my mother to write down. I have only a handful of photos, and an old photo-diary of Cookie’s. I don’t know when or where or how they met – I don’t know if it was at some bonfire my lake Texoma, or at some wild jazz dancehall, or if they met in Long Beach where he worked in the ship yards.

When I knew them, they were a retired couple. He smelled like tobacco and smoke, from the pipe he always had in his mouth or his hand. She smelled of gin and butter mints, and always had a jar full of cookies (which as a child I found ironic – gramma Cookie gave us cookies). When I knew them, they lived in an odd, incredibly tidy upstairs apartment in Long Beach. We saw them rarely – we lived in mostly in norther californis, they in southern. A couple if visits a year at most, apart from the one year we spent in east north-east LA when my father worked at at Cal State).

Later, her drinking got away from her. She’d struggled, my mother told me later, for most of her life. She was the vodka-for-lunch type of drinker, the flask in the purse type. She was also, most likely, bi-polar or something similar; the mood swings were worse when she drank. One day she had what people used to call a ‘nervous breakdown wandered away, and no one saw or heard from her for a week.

My grandfather faded after that; Cookie was in and out of a home, never really the same. As his health failed, we moved him north. He lived with us for a couple of years, before his heart finally gave out. he was near 85, and still fierce and proud, listening to sports on the radio and smoking his pipe.

Cookie held on longer. Her mind trickled away slowly, and each visit was harder for my mother, as Cookie asked who are you and what have they done with my daughter.

I never knew them, not in any real way. My mother’s relationship with her mother was strange, hostile and bitter, and I Cookie only as a plump little story-book gramma who cooked and handed out snacks.

What I have of them, the image that for me most defines them, is the picture above. That picture sat on our mantle from the time Chuck moved into our house; I saw it every day when I lived at home, every time I visited my mother after I moved out.

Who knows what story lives behind that picture; honeymoon? Road trip south, for the wild border-land fun of 1927 mexico? My mother was born in late 1928, so cookie would soon lose her flapper’s figure to pregnancy (she never regained it.)

In my head though, they are Bonnie and Clyde. There’s a shotgun under the seat in the car, maybe a tommy gun in the rumble seat (hidden in a violin case, of course.) He’s got a .45 under that jacket, and a straight razor in his pocket. She’s got a little pearl-handle .25 in her bag, and has used it more than once.

The money they’ve been spending, on a romantic trip to Tijuana, is ill-got and quickly gone.

And whose shadow is it in the foreground? She took that picture? It’s ominous, somehow, and all the more when we imagine them wheeling away in a hail of bullets, maybe minutes after this picture is taken.

My grandparents never were gangsters. He was an average guy, who worked average jobs. They didn’t own weapons, or have a secret past. But that’s how I know them; the wild and dangerous young couple on the back of a model-T ford. She’s the very image of a moll, and there’s something about his shadowed eyes and the un-easy set of his hands that says potential for violence.

I love these people – these grandparents who never existed. I want to meet them, and hear the stories they’d tell. I want to visit Cookie in jail, bring her cigarettes, and ask her about the day the road ran out for them, and how it ended.

They have a story to tell, those two. I just don’t know what it is, yet.

RIP, one year later

One year ago tonight, my mother died. It feels like many times longer than that; the only reason I’m certain it was only a year is by checking the death certificate. This last year has been so absolutely brim full of business that I feel like I haven’t caught my breath but once or twice […]

One year ago tonight, my mother died.

It feels like many times longer than that; the only reason I’m certain it was only a year is by checking the death certificate.

This last year has been so absolutely brim full of business that I feel like I haven’t caught my breath but once or twice since she passed away.

365 days ago at this moment, I was sitting in a dark room, watching a heart monitor slow; waiting.

THe lead up to that night was an un-believable up curve of stress, as I watched my mother decline. I spent those last few weeks fighting with Kaiser to have them take her condition seriously, and tryinb to figure out how the fuck to get my mother into a nursing home without wiping out her small savings.

As it turned out, when a doctor at Kaiser finally took the time to look, that my mother was barely hanging on. Her lungs where shot to hell by a lifetime of smoking, and everything in her was only weeks away from shutdown, starving for oxygen, poisoned by the C02 she couldn’t fully exhale.

When we took her off CPAP machines are artificial respiration, and dialed the morphine up, it was the first time in three years that she didn’t look afraid.

“I’m so happy,” she said, almost her last words, as a high dose of morphine freed her from pain or care.

I watched her breathing slow, and resolved to stay til the end. But I didn’t make it.

She died around 6am Sunday, NOvember 9. 2008.

I don’t really know, even now, how I dealt with it. People kept tilling me it would hit me; but it didn’t, not in any huge way. There were tears, and sadness. But there was massive relief, a pressure and worry I’d carried for years, alone.

It’s only in the last few weeks I’ve been able to miss her; only as the last few items of estate business have gotten resolved that I’ve been able to think of my mother, the person, rather than my mother, the burden.

Missing her feels better than worrying; I welcome it.

worst october since last october

So here’s how it’s been the last month or so.

First, about a month ago, Barb had to go in for abdominal surgery – a long story, which maybe I’ll tell much later. The short version is that the surgery was more complicated than planned, lasted twice as long as planned, and had a much longer recovery than planned.

The week before surgery, one of my kids brought home some ailment, the primary symptoms of which were dizziness and fatigue. Barb came down with it the evening she came out of surgery. Which means that in addition to pain and wooziness and nausea from surgery, she had spectacularly bad bed spins for the better part of a week.

At this same time (the actual day oo surgery), my eleven year old daughter Ruby sprained her ankle so badly we all thought it was broken (clearly she inherited my feline grace; she did it by trying to walk while her foot was asleep). She wound up on crutches, barely able to move; her whole foot wine purple and her ankle swollen up like a grapefruit.

Also around this time, we took one of Olivia’s favorite pet rats (Eddie, which is short for Edgar Allen Poe) in to the vet to have a cyst on his foot looked at. The conclusion was that it wouldn’t heal, and the choices were looking like euthanasia, or amputation. Now, normally I’m opposed to major intervention of any kind with pets that don’t live more than a couple of years; but I think we all transferred a bit of worry about the rest of the members of the family onto this big gray lump of a rat; we made a choice that’s opposed to my rules, and had him de-legged.

Since that time, Barb has caught every ailment that goes around. She’s had two or three different cold-like viruses (one of which might have been swine flu, her doctor says, though he can’t tell for sure). The last round developed into – in order – a sinus infection, then bronchitis, and then into full-blown pneumonia, with a lovely case of pleurisy (just take a look at the famous cases for a fabulous list of people who died of pleurisy.). She was very close to needing to go back into the hospital. She’s been fighting that – with an array of meds that makes me very, very glad I have good health coverage) – for well over ten days, and is still unable to do much of anything.

So it’s been a bit of a rough patch.

Last week, Eddie (legless ed, eddie the tripod, eddie three legs) took a turn for the worse. He’d been healing well; he was moving around like a tiny fuzzy elephant seal, eating like a champ, and seemed happy to get picked up twice a day for his medications. We figured he was out of the woods. And then infection set it.

I again had to make that hard choice; follow my rules and euthanize, or spend more damned money. I broke my own rules again. The vet had to remove a hunk of infected muscle the size of a sugar cube, and then stapled him closed again and sent us home with a double dose of antibiotics.

We though we were losing him; he pulled out his staples and left behind something like you’d see on a battlefield. And then, suddenly, the wound started to fill over with granulation tissue, stopped weeping, and Eddie started to come out of his little house to greet us when we come to get him out. He’s back to moving loping like an elephant seal, pathetically clumsy and yet fully able to get around his cage. He’s not, as they say, out of the woods yet. But we’re starting to hope.

Eddie and Barb and Ruby all seem to be on the same schedule; Ruby just got put of her cast, Barb’s ailment is slowly receding, and Eddie the Gimp is looking better. So (I almost want to knock wood here) maybe we’re past the end of one of the worst octobers in memory (at least the worst since last October, but more on that later.

Amazingly, Olivia and I have gotten through all this without ever getting sick, despite stress and severe lack of sleep. I’ve missed way too much work due to my nurse-and-single-parent role this last month, and I’ve been at no better than half capacity when I’m there; but I haven’t picked up a case of the flu, haven’t come down with a sinus infection, didn’t pick up the swine flu.

Either there’s a crash coming, or it’s my immune system doing that hyperdrive thing it does when I’m under extreme stress. We’ll wait and see how that plays out this next week or two.

the things we do

This is what happens when you drink with videographers. You get your beach house weekend turned into a music video. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp_QvObmulo&hl=en&fs=1&] This was a long weekend in Dillion Beach, CA; four couples, three children, seven cameras, 20 bottles of wine, fifty oysters, many cases of beer, and no internet connection of cell phones. It […]

This is what happens when you drink with videographers. You get your beach house weekend turned into a music video.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp_QvObmulo&hl=en&fs=1&]

This was a long weekend in Dillion Beach, CA; four couples, three children, seven cameras, 20 bottles of wine, fifty oysters, many cases of beer, and no internet connection of cell phones.

It was over too soon, but now thanks to film maker Dave Manzo, we won’t be able to forget it.