Generalizations

I took this picture. . . before it was an illustration.  But again. . . I think I like the illustration more.  The incredible thing to me is that this is the original person's face.  Stylized, sure, but I would be able to pick her out of a lineup.  

Do they still have lineups?  

It's the eyes.  The eyes have it.  

The child would be about ten now.  I wonder how that turned out?  That would be a nice follow up photo.  

Gen Z, Gen Z, Gen Z.  Grandpa's been complaining (link).  

A lot of people have. 

I can't get onboard with this stuff.  I mean, I think it is funny, sure.  But it is a gross generalization as are all statements about "generations."  Studies show that kids have higher IQs than people in the past.  They are certainly the most beautiful generation.  They are better athletes.  They are talented musicians.  

See?  "They."  I like to generalize, too.  

Is Gen Z those disaffected midwestern youths smoking crack and shooting up heroin or are they kids at Country Club College?  Are they Progressives or are they Neoliberals?  

Yes.  The answer is yes.  

The Negro
James Emanuel

Never saw him.
Never can.
Hypothetical,
Haunting man.

Eyes a-saucer,
Yessir bossir,
Dice a-clicking,
Razor flicking.

The-ness froze him
In a dance.
A-ness never
Had a chance.

I used to teach this one.  It's easy to hate an abstraction.  It's hard, very, very hard, to hate an individual.  

"I thought you didn't like Puerto Ricans?"

"What?  Oh, you know. . . he's different."

Yup. . . they always are.  I mean, after Bill Maher's two hour dinner with Trump, he had some nice things to say about him, didn't he?  And for all of Maher's rant about Gen Z not going to work in the fields and factories, I can't imagine him working labor for a week, either.  

Even in the Middle East, but for the hatred of radicals, Moslems, Christians, and Jews have lived together peacefully and sympathetically.  

I have ideological friends.  Ideologues.  A few.  They are not the happiest people I know.  

Which makes me wonder now. . . who is?  

This is a topic best avoided now, I think.  So let me tell you about "The House of Guinness" on Netflix.  I just finished binging the first season.  I'm pissed off that I will have to wait a year or more for the second.  The first season is about religion, ideology, human imperfection, and folly.  And it is a treat for the eye.  I have to wonder, really, really wonder, how much of the show is A.I. 

I think I'll go and look it up.  

Man. . . I called that one.  

The production company, Kudos, collaborated with ReelMind, an AI technology provider, to integrate AI into the show's development. While the series is a historical drama, the AI appears to have been used to create historical imagery and elements that contribute to the show's authentic feel. 
AI use in historical film and television production is a growing practice and can include: Generating photorealistic historical images and textures
Upscaling and enhancing historical footage
Assisting with scriptwriting and developing storylines based on historical data

 Half the characters look like the illustration at the top of this post which is why I thought of it in the first place.  For you A.I. haters, try watching it.  

See?  

O.K. That's enough of my silliness for today.  I just wanted to say things I haven't said before.  Posting as much as I have, that seems impossible.  

What Have I Been Thinking?

I think AI has something against my mother and me.  When I upload other people's pictures and ask for a transformation into one or another painterly fashion, they don't look like themselves, but they don't look any worse.  And usually, the image turns out somewhat better.  But when I put a photo of me or of my mother, it always accentuates the worst features.  I want it to turn me into a Renaissance Romeo but I always end up looking like Shylock.  

Weird.  

Just more of the voodoo, perhaps.  Yesterday, I picked up a hand mirror in my bathroom at home, and it simply flew out of my hand.  I watched it fly through the air as if in a movie, the thing twirling in slow motion, me thinking "maybe it won't break" as it descended to the bathroom floor tiles.  

It broke.  

Holy shit . . . I don't need anymore bad luck.  What to do?  

I went to the internet, of course.  

"How do you avoid seven years bad luck after breaking a mirror?"

It is very complicated.  You must gather all the pieces and grind them into dust.  Then you need to burry them at night.  The idea is to keep the mirror from making any reflections ever again.  You can use flames to blacken the shards and you should burry them in a box or a piece of cloth.  

Or you could throw salt over your left shoulder.  That sounded much easier.  

But what was it that made the mirror fly from my hand?  It wasn't natural.  

I'm just saying.  

I did take my mother to get her cortisone injection yesterday.  It took maybe ten minutes.  She said it didn't hurt.  When I brought her back to her house, it was still early, so I made us breakfast.  After that, she went back to bed.  

Then I did, too.  

When I got up just before noon, she was still sleeping.  I got dressed for the gym, put together her afternoon pills, and went in to tell her I'd be back. 

When I got back at five, she was still in bed.  Or, as it turned out, in bed again.  I made dinner, but she didn't get up.  At eight, I gave her her pills and a glass of water.  She took them and went back to sleep.  This morning when I got up, she was still sleeping.  Only just now she got up.  

"You slept for about twenty-four hours," I said.   

"Seems like it."

You can imagine the thoughts that have been running through my head.  

The rain continues.  

Every day now, I wonder if I should stop writing this blog.  I have no life, no experiences to write about other than the most mundane things--cooking, taking care of my mother, and the problems of maintaining two houses.  Were I a Proust or a Flaubert, I might make the mundane more profound, but I am not.  In truth, I've never enjoyed reading either writer.  I've had to, of course, but I felt it a chore.  I can't be sure I am writing to anyone here any longer anyway.  All I can see is that for the past month or so, I have been getting a thousand hits to the blog a day.  I am certain these are not readers or lovers of art.  They are bots scraping my blog to teach A.I. how not to write.  They are stealing my photos, I am certain, to use in their vast A.I. libraries.  

My first post here was September 9, 2007.  Over eighteen years of writing here now.  6,735 posts to date.  What if I wanted to print them all to hard copy?  How long would that take?  Let's say I printed ten a day.  It would take me, what. . . two years?  WTF have I been thinking? 

Oh, you know.  It's all here.  

The journals of a faux-author.  Isn't that a hoot?  If you just started as a reader and began with the first post and read ten posts a day. . . . 

It is unfathomable.  

More than Tired

I take my mother to the doc today to get an epidural in between her lumbar 4 and lumbar 5 vertebrae.  Cortisone.  Fingers crossed.  If it works, she will be out of pain for awhile.  The treatment lasts around six months.  Then, I guess, you do it again.  We need to be to the office at 8:30.  My mother has been worried about this for days.  We had dinner across the street last night, and my mother was saying all kinds of wild things.  She said I told her she couldn't eat, that I said we had to be there by seven, neither of which were true.  When we got back from dinner, she thought we needed to get ready to go.  She went to bed at 8:30.  At ten, when I was shutting down the house, she got up and asked if it was time.  

Maybe her mind will be better if she is not in such pain.  

The hearing aids are another matter.  She won't wear them.  We go back to the ENT on Wednesday.  I told her I would take her, but when they call her back, I was staying in the lobby.  I didn't care to hear her lie to the audiologist.  She was free, I said, to tell them whatever she wanted.  

My mother is a stubborn hillbilly.  

Here is the photo, one of them, I put up on the magnetic chalk board in my kitchen as I consider getting this haircut again.  The one that makes people like Mr. Tree ask in astonishment, "Was that you?"

As my mother reminds me, I was younger and had a thicker head of hair then.  That's a funny phrase. . . "head of hair."  I think that is a hillbilly way of talking.  I need to send the photo to my beautician and ask her if I can still sport such a look.  In my imagination, I think, I believe it will make me look younger.  Not "younger," exactly, but less like the homeless man I am starting to look like now.  My beautician had a hip replacement, so I haven't seen her in over two months.  The blonde is becoming something else.  If I wear my hair down, I look like Buffalo Bill Cody, so I tie it back which makes the roots of my hair more prominent.  I haven't cared so very much since I go nowhere anyway, but it has gotten hard to look in the mirror.  People tell me I look "tired."  I am.  This sole caretaking feels like it is killing me.  I am reduced to sitting in my mother's house for too many hours a day.  

As the song goes. . . what a long strange trip it's been. 

Otherwise, things go swimmingly.  The carpet in my mother's living room is wet again.  I've been dicking around with the a.c. drain lines for a week.  I pour vinegar and half an hour later a gallon or two of hot water.  The line drains.  I've had all sorts of advice on how to clear them from hooking a compressor up to the drain line and blowing it clear to attaching the garden hose to it and flushing it out.  At the hardware store, everyone there told me what they do.  

I'm about to give up and spend the grand on putting in a pump and new drain lines through the attic.  

Meanwhile, I still have to get the carpenter back to my house.  And I've decided to get a new roof.  Mine is only ten or eleven years old, I think, but it has never been a good roof and I see no benefit in waiting a few more years.  

Cha-ching!

"What else are you going to do with your money?"

Nothing, I guess.  I'm just sitting with my mother waiting on the apocalypse.  

Are you out there having fun in Trumplandia?  Are you able to ignore the cacophony and get on with living the dream?  

The MAGA dream is of med beds (link).  The MAGA faithful believe they exist.  How they can look at Trump and think such a thing is true strains credulity. . . but I want one.  I need one.  Good god, my fortune for a med bed.  

Rather, I must ready myself for an early morning trip to the doctor's office.  Well, not to his office, but to the place where he will do the epidural.  It is not surgery.  She will not be put under.  She will be awake with a local anesthetic.  The entire thing, they said, should take an hour.  We'll be back before lunch.  

And then I may go back to sleep.  People tell me I look tired.  I think it is more than that.  

Bad Saturdays

Bad Saturdays continue to haunt me.  I still look forward to them, but they hardly perform for me anymore.  Yesterday was no exception to this sad rule.  I had hopes.  And then I had none at all.  Nothing tragic, just more of the hideously mundane.  

At nine-thirty my mother was still in bed.  I should say, she was back in bed.  She got up at eight screaming in pain, shuffling through the house with her walker and baggy underwear.  She looked at me with urgent eyes crying, "I won't be able to go to that doctor's appointment early in the morning.  You are going to have to cancel it.  Oh. . . oh. . . .oh. . . . "

There is nothing I can do to relieve her pain, and so I have had to become inured to it.  She takes four Percocet a day and three Gabapentin.  The only thing I can think of is to keep her permanently on morphine, but I haven't the ability to do that.  

She took her pills and went back to bed.  It was Saturday, and I had plans that didn't include staying inside at my mother's all the live-long day, so I told her I was leaving and asked if she needed anything.  She looked at me in a panic. 

"Where are you going?  Oh. . . oh. . . oh. . . ."

I got her settled down and left, but I was carrying a lot of it with me.  

I thought about going out to breakfast, but I have become a bit of a penny pincher of late, so I decided on an "egg a muffin" as Eddie Murphy dubbed it, instead.  Back home with breakfast, I took a look at the milk in the fridge.  There was no way it could still be good, right?  I looked at the sell by or good until date on the carton.  Nov. 4.  No way!  I smelled it, then poured some into a glass.  I stuck my tongue in it.  I took a small sip.  It seemed fine, so I filled the glass and drank it with my egg a muffin.

What are they putting in the milk, I wonder?  

It was still morning.  I decided I needed to get out with my camera, so I jumped in the car and drove to a spot I thought to park and walk, but when I got there, nothing intrigued me.  Maybe Gotham.  I drove on.  Gotham was dead, the sidewalks empty, the shitty businesses shuttered.  Downtown Gotham has become a gangsta crime scene at night, and it looked like many businesses had just closed up shop.  Entire blocks.  There was no use stopping.  I drove by the big lake park where the Farmer's Market is on Sundays.  The day was overcast.  Nobody was moving.  Onward, toward a small hipster part of town.  Nope.  I turned toward home.  

I'd driven a big loupe through Deadsville, but it had given me time to digest my breakfast, so when I got back to my house, I changed into my gym clothes and put out my yoga mat and went through the core exercises I started doing a week or so ago.  I am so bad at them, I will only do them at home.  I look truly hideous but I feel better afterwards, so I suffer through them with some small notion that I will get better.

When those were over with, I head out the door for a long walk.  Well. . . long for a cripple man.  3.3 miles.  I limped down my street to the lakeside sidewalk, then on to Country Club College.  Nobody was out.  I limped across campus painfully trying to walk upright without much success.  My back, hips, knees and now one ankle were sharply painful.  

I thought about my mother.  

Leaving campus, I crossed the busy four lane road against the light hoping I wouldn't see a car in the distance that would make me need to hurry.  

I didn't.  

Onward down the long street that parallels the Boulevard past the Palm Beach sized mansions, or at least, in some cases, reasonable approximations.  Here was the Heath Bar heiress' house.  Here the house of the descendant of an old cattle family.  And here, a new house built by the "kids" who lived across the street from me years ago, she the daughter of the man who started Netscape in the early days of the internet.  By the time I passed the former NBA player/now announcer's house, I was close to the golf course where I cut over along the fairway and through the old Gamble Rogers mansion that is now a city venue for weddings, etc.  

Then down the Boulevard back home.  

Clomp, clomp, clomp.  I walked on the park side looking across to the shops and restaurants.  First past the Catholic Church, past an alleyway to the Hidden Garden shops where a good bar and restaurant is tucked.  There was my buddy's hippie shop and further up my friend's new place, a pub-like restaurant with live music in the evenings, this next to my ex-wife's jewelry store, a big, expensive place where we were once registered for our own wedding.  Further, past the good new bar that I go to with "the boys" across the street from a hit and miss sushi restaurant.  Then back across the big four lane road and onto the college campus where once I taught.  Half a mile now until I'm home.  

The point?  It is a town I know, a town where I'm known.  It is home.  Almost everyone I know wants to leave the state, but most of them are not so rooted, I think.  People move to the new hippest places if they can, or near to them if they can't.  But where they go, the locals complain.  

"Austin (or Nashville or Santa Fe or a thousand other places) used to be so such a great place.  Now all this outside money is moving in and the city is just sprawling.  You can't even drive here anymore. It is impossible."

I don't know.  Maybe it is better to be the new people ruining the old place than vice-versa.  

"Oh, we just love it here.  They have great shops and some really high end restaurants.  This town is booming." 

Ten years down the road, though, they will be complaining, too, and looking for the next good place.  

I don't know, really.  I'm just saying.  

When I got back to the house, I was ready to collapse in pain.  I drew a hot bath from my new tankless water heater.  Endless hot water.  I sank into the tub and fell asleep.  When I woke, I ran more hot water into the tub.  I don't know how long I soaked, but I could have stayed all day.  

After a soak and a shower, I got dressed for the day.  It was past noon now.  Maybe I'd go back for more boiled peanuts and a beer.  Or maybe I should go to the Irish pub and try to make some pictures.  I went into the office and sat down at the computer to check my mail.  I began going through hard drives looking at photos.  I was lingering.  No. . . I didn't have it in me to go to the Irish pub.  Not today.  

When I got out of my office chair, it was 2:30.  Holy smokes.  Time to go.  I'd drive by the liquor store and get more Negroni juice, then head on to the brewery.  I would loop back by the good bbq place and pick up a rack of ribs for dinner.  I had my Leica.  Maybe I'd get lucky.  

By the time I'd gotten the car to the end of the road, it began to rain.  And then to pour.  And then it was a monsoon.  The sound of the rain on the car overwhelmed the stereo.  It was a downpour and the streets were running streams now, soon to become rivers.  I drove slowly.  When I got to the liquor store, all the spots in front of the door were taken.  I sat in the car and waited.  After five minutes, someone walked out, then back in.  The rain was horrible.  Finally someone ran to their car and backed out.  I turned into the space. . . and waited.  But the rain was not letting up.  It was only getting worse.  Nervous, I couldn't wait any longer, so I slid out of the car and limped toward the door getting soaked along the short way. 

There was no use in going to the brewery at this point, I thought.  And so my plans made a sudden turn.  I drove on to the bbq joint to get the ribs.  The handicapped parking near the door was empty, so I pulled out my mother's hang tag.  

Don't judge me.  I should have one of my own.

It was just after three.  I was the only one in the restaurant.  I sat at the bar and waited for my order.  Some of the staff kibitzed with me until the ribs were ready.

"Be careful in the storm."

Back out into the monsoon and across town, back through my neighborhood and onward to my mother's.  Even on the main highway now, cars were throwing up rooster tails.  The rain, it seemed, would never end.  I knew that certain streets would be flooded, so I went the long way around to get to my mother's house without taking any chances.  

I pulled into my mother's garage.  And just like that, the deluge was done.  

Shit piss fuck goddamn.  

I hadn't eaten since the "egg a muffin," so. . . fuck it.  Early dinner.  

The ribs were good but greasy.  I was covered in pig grease real quick.  My mother picked at a few ribs to get all pig slick, too.  I'm getting too old for some things now, and really fatty pig grease is probably one of them.  After only two ribs, I was full.  It was four.  I had the Negroni juice.  I made a Negroni.  

The rain began again, not the torrent it was, just rain.  It came in waves now which made me feel a little better about being in.  I asked my mother if she wanted to sit under cover in the garage and watch the rain.  Nobody was walking now, of course.  We looked at nothing but slick green lawns and shrubs and hedges.  We talked about old times.  

The rest of Saturday would be watching television and an early bed.  

And that's it, darlings.  That is all I have to report.  I did take photos, a few, of lights shining through rain splattered car windows.  I just liked the feel of pressing the shutter, of winding the film.  It is very satisfying and the disappointment of making a nothing photograph is delayed rather than immediate.  Only later when the film gets developed and scanned will the nothingness of those photos be apparent.  For the moment, though, after the shutter snaps, there is still the hope that you have made a masterpiece.  

It is rainy this morning.  It will be rainy all week.  New construction now is all in low lying areas, and they are beginning to flood.  That is, if you are not in the wealthy parts of town but have come to live here recently and have bought in one of the bright and shiny new developments with their own Walmarts and Targets and Publix grocery stores and the same chain restaurants you see lining the highway everywhere.  You have been duped by corrupt politicians and con men developers, and now the city or county or state will have to try to bail you and them out with more and better drainage that may or may not alleviate the problem.  You might take solace, though, that this is happening everywhere in one way or another.  

It is time to get my mother's morning meds together.  She takes around twenty pills a day now, half of them in the morning, for they fall into three categories: once in the morning, morning and night, and three times a day.  All three categories, of course, are taken in the morning.  Her afternoon doses are far fewer.  

She is pushing her walker down the hallway now, so I must go.  Maybe I'll go to the pub today with the Leica.  

Wouldn't that be something?  

Crazy Larry

It's not a long nor complicated story.  It's about boiled peanuts.  This is Crazy Larry.  Give me a minute and I'll make the connection.  

At the gym. . . yea, yea, it's about all I have outside my mother's house anymore, so give me a break. . . I was talking to a big guy about old Florida and how much things have changed.  He asked me if I'd ever been to some places that no longer existed in a Space Coast town fifty miles east of here.  I couldn't remember for sure.  I talked about some of the places I had been.  He said the town sure had changed.  I said that when I was a kid, we used to drive to the beach and the road there would be full of little roadside stands selling watermelons or strawberries or smoked mullet. . . tomatoes, citrus, preserves. . . and boiled peanuts.  Oh, he said, I love boiled peanuts.  

"Have you ever been to that brewery on the corner of Bumby and Robinson that has the great boiled peanuts?  They have them with multiple toppings.  Man. . . they are awesome."

After the gym, I was hungry, but I had gotten a late start and after showering it was mid-afternoon.  I decided that lunch would be a beer and boiled peanuts.  I'd met people at the brewery before for lunch or a beer, always in the daytime, mostly C.C., but I'd never driven across town to go there alone.  Then I remembered that Crazy Larry was a regular there.  This is the same Crazy Larry from the Dancing videos I've posted shot by my mountain buddy out in Yosemite.  Larry goes out to stay with him and his family several times a year.  

I met Larry long, long ago through my dead ex-friend, Brando.  Larry was a pretty competitive marathon man and he had hooked up with Buz for his mountain adventures.  Indeed, when I got to know Larry first, I think, was the time Brando and I partnered up to take people on a climb of Popocatopetl in Mexico.  But that is a whole other story.  

I had a party at my house before the climb.  At the time, I had my half malamute half German Shepard, Wiley.  She was allowed to roam and she just mingled with the crowd trying to cadge a snack here and there.  But Wiley had a "bullshit" detector.  She really didn't pay much attention to people, but when someone a little "off" would walk by in the street, her radar would go off and I'd have to corral her.  And I have to say, she was always, always right. 

The night of the party, I heard her in back of the house going nuts.  I ran out to see what was going on, and there was Larry on top of one of the parked cars.  Wiley had "treed" him.  

Larry was a NASA engineer who wanted to be an astronaut.  He never got to be one, of course, but they used him for all the tests before they tried them on the candidates.  

"They put me in the centrifuge and spun me around until it felt like my guts were going to come out of my mouth," he once told me.  They didn't take the centrifugal force up as high after that.  The astronauts got an easier ride.  

At the time, Larry ate once a day.  He went to work and spent his lunch hour in the gym.  When he got home, he'd put on his shoes and run ten or so miles.  And after that, he'd have dinner--a fruit and cheese board and two bottles of wine.  

Every day.  

When I got to the brewery, I saw Larry at the counter looking like a bum asking for change.  I ordered my beer and peanuts at the other end, and by the time I got them, Larry was seated alone at a big table working on his scratch off lottery tickets.  This is what he does every single day, so I am told by my mountain buddy.  He comes to the brewery with a bunch of lottery tickets and drinks beer until five.  Then he gets some dinner to take back to his house, eats and goes to bed.  Early.  Drunk.  

I decided to sit with Larry.  

At first, he didn't know who I was.  He asked me some questions that made no sense to me, and then he said, "Wait. . . I've got the wrong person."  

Larry was already shot.  He pointed to the beer.  "This puts holes in my brain," he said.  Indeed it has.  Like my dead ex-friend Brando, his years of drinking have lowered his tolerance.  He's already drunk after one beer now.  

Years ago, my mountain buddy had started his own travel business and was taking people to climb all over the world.  One spring, he asked me to come along on a trip he was taking in the Sierras.  He wanted me to babysit a rough fellow I knew who had signed on for the ten day trip.  

"Just come out and keep him out of trouble," he said.  

I did.  

This fellow was a real handful, a drug addict coke head I'd known from the old steroid gym since he was a teen.  He'd had a rough life and fell in with the wrong crowd, but he was world class strong and later a champion kick boxer.  But he got himself in trouble with Johnny Law on a bad coke deal, beat up two policemen, and ran away.  He did a few years in prison for that one. 

Crazy Larry was on that trip, too.  For a week, we bushwhacked through the wilderness, obviously the first into the backcountry that year for we saw no tracks other than this of animals in the winter's snow.  It was a rough trip, but Crazy Larry was always on my mountain friends' heels and the cokehead was always on mine.  

At the end of the trip, we were in Fresno at an Italian restaurant.  That's another story, too.  I'll skip ahead.  Larry and the cokehead had been too long without their meds.  Larry drank far too much and he laid down in the hallway to his room when we went back to the hotel.  My mountain friend dragged him down the hallway and into his room and put a pillow under his head on the floor.  It was midnight.  

Larry had a flight home early, and at five, he was out running his ten miles.  I'm just saying, Larry was tough.  

"Do you still eat once a day?" I asked him.  

He nodded.  "I don't get hungry until around seven," he said.  

"You've been doing that your whole life."

We recounted some stories, Larry having trouble remembering details.  He told me in agonizingly slow and confused time about his last trip home from Yosemite.  Multiple legs, multiple delays and cancellations.  

"Larry, you're rich.  Why are you taking cheap flights.  You can fly direct into San Francisco from here, and then into Fresno."

"That's what I'm doing next time.  I'm flying first class direct."

"Are you still putting in your miles every day?"

"Yea.  I walk.  I can't run anymore, but I walk."

And so it goes.  

Larry scratched off another lotto ticket.  

"Fifteen dollars," he said.  

"What's the most you've ever won with those scratch offs?" I asked him. 

"Five thousand.  You have to go to a special office to cash one over five hundred.  It was a pain in the ass.  When I won five-thousand the second time, I gave the card to the owner of the brewery.  I didn't want to go through all that again.  Now I get hugs when I come in," he smiled.  "They love me, and. . . " he lowered his voice," I get free beer!"

Fucking Crazy Larry.

Beer and boiled peanuts gone, I said, "Larry, I'm going.  Let me get a picture to send to our friend."

And this is what I got.  

That was more than a minute, I know.  

Oh. . . I guess the cat is out of the bag.  What happened to Sober October?  Yea.  That beer in the afternoon was too good.  

Saturday.  I have my film Leica.  I'm determined to make some photos.  The film Leica is fun.  I will try to get to the Irish pub today and see if I can make something "noir" in there today.  Maybe.  I've lost so much of the old chutzpah, it is always "maybe" now.  But I am determined to "do photography"again.  

I just need to find some of the old mojo.  

"I need to visit soon and do another Photoshoot with you."

Indeed you do.  

Voodoo for Sure

Did I ever suggest I am under some sort of voodoo hoodoo curse?  I might have.  Do I have proof?  Not solid, no.  But experiential?  Let me tell you.  

Yesterday, I was to meet the carpenter at my house to look at the next expensive repair.  I had time to get to the gym and home before we met, but it was raining and was to keep raining, and the carpenter was at a doctor's appointment, so I asked if he wanted to push the time back.  His response led me to believe he was one who didn't read carefully, so I didn't know what was going to happen.  I finished up my workout, just a simple two mile hill climb, all aerobic, or as the boys tell me is less "gay", cardio.  

I didn't know Jane Fonda was gay.  

When I got home, I had time to shower.  When I got finished, I looked at my phone.  The carpenter had written something obscure.  I still didn't know if he was coming, so I sat down to some other business, calling doctors, finding appointment times, checking out websites for the V.A.  I even called my ortho to schedule another gel injection in my knee.  One for me!  

By afternoon, it was clear the carpenter was not coming, so I, having not eaten breakfast, decided to get some lunch, and having nothing in my own home now, I needed to go out.  It was late for lunch given the need to make dinner for mother, so I went to the closest place, a Chick-fil-A.  I took my Xterra as it had been sitting in the driveway for a few days and needed driving.

Lunch over, I got back into the Xterra and turned the key.  Nothing.  All the gauges came on and I could play the radio.  Hmm.  I took the car out of park and put it back in.  Nope.  I got out and rocked the car back and forth.  I'm not exactly sure what moving the gear shift and rocking the car does, but it does something.  

I just looked it up.  It does something to the starter.  Whatever.  None of it worked.  I opened the hood to see if the battery cables were tight.  They were.  Nothing to do but call AAA.  

Luckily the weather was nice.  It was cool after the rain and now the sky was blue.  I rolled down the windows and sat back to wait.  

When the AAA truck showed up, I waved it in.  A young black man, a kid, really, got out.  He must have been twelve.  At least twelve.  He did what they all do to check the battery.  It was fine.  

"It must be your starter," he said.  "I'll get a tow truck sent out.  Where do you want to take the car?"

I looked up the address and typed it into his phone, then said, "Let me call the mechanic to let him know we are coming." 

The mechanic told me he was swamped and that the car might have to sit outside. . . did we tap on the starter?  That might work.  

"No. . . I just have the battery guy here right now. . . ."

Behind me the kid said, "Oh, thanks. . . JUST the battery guy."  He was smiling.  

"You don't even know where in the fuck the starter is, so. . . ."

"O.K.  Fair enough."

He didn't and neither did I.  We had spent ten minutes trying to figure it out with no luck.  When the kid was leaving, he said, "I'll be honest with you.  I don't know how long it will be before a tow truck gets here.  Might be an hour or more."

"Great."

So I got back in the car and sat.  But I got lucky, and before long I got a text that the tow truck was on its way.  

The tow truck guy was super friendly.  First thing he did was hand me a bottle of water.  I told him about the kid and the mechanic, and he said, "Let me take a look."  He turned the key and said, yea, it was the starter.  He told me to get into the truck, then he put my car in neutral and pushed it out of the parking spot and into the traffic lane.  He backed his truck up and to my great surprise got it hooked up without ever getting out of the truck.  WTF?  He had an idea.  So he pulled the car out of the parking lot and across the street into another that was not busy.  He lifted the car up and got under it.  For a bit, he too couldn't find the starter.  

"I would think it has to be close to the battery," I said.  It just made sense.  

He looked around some more and just before giving up, he found it half hidden behind a cover.  He told me to get in the car and when I heard him tap on the starter to try it.  

Boom.  That worked.  

The fellow was about fifty years old, maybe, and super friendly.  He didn't have to crawl around on the ground looking for my starter, but it was like a game for him.  He let my car down to the ground and unattached it.  I jumped into the drivers seat and was ready to go when he said, "Don't forget our stuff."  My bag and Leica camera were sitting in his passenger seat.  

"Oh, man, you would have liked this camera."

"I have some nice cameras."

"Do you have a Leica."

"No, but I guess that one cost a couple thousand dollars."

"Try seven."

"I have some nice cameras but they don't cost that much."

He pulled out his phone and began showing me pictures.  Cuba.  And he WAS a good photographer.  His photos were brilliant.  He told me stories about his Cuba trip and I wondered, so I asked him where he was from.

"Puerto Rico." 

He showed me more photos from other trips and told me stories about driving for six weeks across America.  This guy was genuine.  He asked where I lived and told me where he lived.  

"Maybe we'll run into each other," he said.  We didn't live too far apart.

Why I get along best with workers I can't say.  But I do.  I guess I am just not a fan of privileged pricks.  Privileged women. . . O.K.  But not pricks.  I always hear in my head, "You want to eat, you gotta work."  

I decided to drive to the mechanic's shop and tell him since he was only a mile or two away.  He said that tapping the starter might work, but it meant that the starter was going bad, so I would probably need a new one.  I told him I'd make an appointment with him.  I needed to have my brakes done, too.  

The Xterra is costing me more than the car is worth.  

By now, my day was shot.  I had brought the Leica because I wanted to try photography again that afternoon.  I wanted to roam a bit and then go to the cafe and get a hot cup of tea.  

Now. . . my day was over.  I had to get back to my mom.  

Voodoo hoodoo.  I can't get a break.  

I think I'll get a Covid shot today.  I'll wait a couple weeks before I get a flu shot.  Last year I got them together and was deadly sick for a week.  I may feel a little funky this weekend, but I hope it won't be bad.  I take my mother for an epidural injection on Monday.  Fingers crossed.  It it works, she might get off the Percocet.  

That's all I have, I think.  If there is more, it will be lost in time like all things we don't record.  That almost all the events of our days just drift away never to be thought of or remembered again is truly frightening.  What portion of our lives are we truly aware, truly living?  

I'd say if you don't write or record in some way. . . barely any of it at all.  It is just gone one day, as they say, like tears in the rain.  

I'm a freak about it.  

Oh. . . one more thing.  I got a text this morning from my Miami friend.  She had an idea.  She still runs the social media for the Irish bar she worked in when she was here.  Did I want to go in and take some photos for her?  "Just a thought," she said.  

It is very sweet of her.  The thing is. . . I thought about it for a minute.  I know the photos I would take would all be very strange and noir and not at all what the bar would want, but I could take some stupid publicity pictures, too.  

I only thought about it for a bit, though.  I don't want to be the media photographer in my own hometown.  

Still. . . blurry, seedy noir?  

The Minimal Temperance League

Day one of Sober October:  I couldn't get anyone onboard.  Everyone I told about it said to fuck off.  I am now considered to be the town's Temperance League.  

"Temperance has always been a bad idea.  It gave us Joe Kennedy," said a conservative retired judge I tried to recruit.  

The pretty woman who walks her two big dogs in my mother's neighborhood just started laughing and said, "Oh, no."  

And so. . . I went it alone.  It was surprisingly easy.  I didn't get the shakes or the bends, not the jitters nor the jags.  Instead of having a Negroni for Happy Hour, I drank an Athletic non-alcoholic beer.  Fine.  Then, per usual, I prepared dinner.  I prepared dinner absolutely sober.  It was the worst dinner I have made in years.  Even my mother, who doesn't throw any food away, agreed that I should just chuck it all.  

I may not be a sober cook.  Or, perhaps, drinking makes the food more palatable.  

I am not fully committed to a dry October.  I went in with the idea it might be damp.  I don't want to be ideological about it.  But man. . . I DO need to slow down.  It has become my anesthesia while caring for my mother.  I'd be better off with ether.  

That said. . . who wants to give up the romance of. . . well, that picture at the top of the page. . . you know?

That is from a photo I took long ago.  Of a sudden, I have the feeling I have shown that here before, for I was about to speak of the incredibly beautiful colors in the frame.  Some memory of that drifts about the periphery of my consciousness.  Whatever.  It is pretty enough to show again.  

O.K.  I'll give you one I know I haven't shown before. 

Two, actually.  I couldn't make up my mind.  Similar colors--Hopper colors--with a smoother brush stroke and less atmosphere.  Obviously, these didn't come from any photos I took.  They came from my attempt to make a series which turned into the video "The Giant Woman's Audition" which I posted here awhile ago.  Hopper-esque, but kind of "Lonesomeville," too.  It reflects something we all know.  They are "statements."  The Male Gaze and more.

Reality is bad, we all know.  The government shutdown will have a ripple effect this Christmas, I believe, or should I say "this holiday season."  Money will be tight.  Trump's idea of giving fewer gifts will come to fruition.  He didn't mention food, but I think that, too.  A NYT poll shows that a large majority of Americans think the political divide in this country is too large to fix.  They don't believe that ideologies can be reconciled.  If they are right. . . well, I loved living in old America.  It sure was fun.  

To escape, people aren't turning to art, of course.  Art is bad.  Rather, they make fake videos of themselves and their friends.  

Sora, released by ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is a social app where every second of audio and video is generated by artificial intelligence. Users can create fake clips that depict themselves or their friends in just about any scenario imaginable, with consistently high realism and a compelling soundtrack complete with voices. OpenAI said the app is initially available only in the United States and Canada, but that access will expand.

Have you used it?  One of my pals was showing me clips he made at dinner with his buddies one night.  He asked Sora to have his homophobe friends holding hands and kissing in the restaurant where they were eating.  Real time.  I was speechless.  

But, as with all new things, someone has to put on the brakes.  

The company also has added extra guardrails to the app when real people are featured in videos meant to block nudity and graphic violence. 

And I'm like, "WTF?  Nudity???"  

Calvinism lives!

I must say, many of my lesbian friends have The Male Gaze, so I'm not sure the term is all encompassing.  

I wish I had a camera that would make photos like that image at the top of the post.  

I had other things to say, I'm sure, but now it is time to get my mother's meds together, run to the drugstore to get more, then beat it over to my house to meet the carpenter.  I should be up for it all. . . being sober and all.  

 

I Guess I've Done It Again

Think this is A.I.?  Think again.  This is a photo I downloaded from a photography group called "Still Life."  It is a light painting, something I have never tried.  Usually, I associate light painting with images like this one by Paolo Roversi.  

Not a fan.  I love other Roversi photos, but not the light painting.  It seems far too artificial, technical, and bizarre.  But that still life. . . that's another thing.  It truly does look like a painting.  

So does this, but it ain't.  

I want to try to do what the still life photographer did, but I have a big problem.  When I arrange a still life, it isn't pretty.  I don't know why I have such a hard time with it, but I do.  It looks simple enough, but like a lot of things in life, I tend to fuck it up.  

I just found out I fucked up a relationship with someone most important to me without ever knowing it.  I mean, I could feel the chill, but I didn't know I had done something objectionable.  It was, I have only just found out, something I wrote here on the blog.  This is not the first time, I know.  I've lost countless readers and friends for writing something to which they object.  I have no idea who reads the blog unless they tell me, and then it is frustrating because I have to watch what I say.  Even then, however, my insouciance is often seen to be a slight.  I once lost a dear reader for using the word "retarded."  Apparently, she had a daughter.  

Selavy.  

So it was only yesterday that I found out why I have been relegated to a chillier level of ardor.  Pictures and writing have never caused me anything but trouble.  I don't know why I continue.  

Yes I do.  

But I do know the trouble it causes me.  And still, in spite of it all, I use words and images to my own detriment.  

Q found out the trouble they will cause and wisely decided to pull the plug and enjoy a more placid life. 

But me?  I continue on in my less than amateurish way.  Longevity has been my only real talent.  

So let me be careful from here on and not write anything that will cause me to lose more.  I haven't much left.  

Let me be positive.  Congratulations to all you anti-government people on both the left and right.  We don't need no stinking government.  But oh, wait.  I think that is a misnomer.  Mail deliverers may not get paid, nor people working at the VA, but the president and congress won't miss a paycheck and they can still do things to you you may not like.  They will still pay the soldiers and the cops.  I guess that is all the government we really need.  

Just be thankful if your name isn't Pedro.  

Why is it that everyone Trump appoints seems like a high school student at a talent show or debate contest.  Take Karoline Leavitt.  Wow!  Apple doesn't even like the way she spells her name.  It keeps autocorrecting me.  But take her, anyway.  And take her seriously if you can.  I don't know how to do it.  I've never seen anyone in a $180,000 a year job who seemed so silly.  Or Hegseth.  He's like a little boy playing army.  

"This is how a soldier acts, mommy."

He was the one, I'm sure, who got all the younger kids in the neighborhood to be in his platoon and bullied them around the way he thought an officer would.  

And of course there is J.D. Vance.  He is just a bot.  He will tell you all you need to know about how difficult it is to graduate with a Yale law degree.  His best friend was a jr. college dropout who liked to pick fights with kids who hadn't dropped out yet.  He was a moron.  And there you go.  Vance thought him a great intellect.  

And of course, there is Trump himself.  

If Harris had won the election, I would be dissing on her and her staff, I'm sure.  But they didn't, and so we must turn our gaze and shout, "The King has no robe!"

I'm trying not to report on my daily life.  I'll merely say that I may have been at my lowest point so far yesterday.  I am no longer enamored with living.  At this point, all I can do is numb myself until I find oblivion.  

BUT. . . here's an idea. 

The beginning of October means sobriety for some, but what happens to our bodies when we go teetotal for a month? Flic Everett shares her experience of temporary sobriety and speaks to experts about the benefits of taking a break for Sober October.

There's a big maybe.  But. . . what about Octoberfest?  I have the next few hours to consider it before cocktail hour.  

Hour?  

Could I stand the constant moaning and shouting out in pain if sober?  Should I become a pothead?  

But enough of that.  You get my drift.  

I have been trying to read here in my mother's house, but so far I have not been able to connect to the words.  They don't enter me.  They mean nothing.  I know I am in bad shape when I've lost the ability to read.  I've lost the ability to photograph and my ability to write is disintegrating like a sugar cube in a thunderstorm.  Now this?   

For Camus, the only philosophical question, or maybe just the first, was suicide.  Why does a person, naked and surrounded by the meaningless void, go on?  Why not step off the ledge?  

He never really had to face the question.  He did, of course, as all do, but he didn't.  He died in a car crash at the age of 46.  He was looking up instead of down at that point.  

I'll ask my 93 year old suffering mother what the meaning of life is today.  She'll surely have an uplifting message.  

Don't know why I haven't thought of that until now.  

Random Thoughts and Misdemeanors

I guess I should not have asked for a lightbulb, eh?  That was an accident.  I was adapting this from a portrait I had done in the studio.  It is so odd, though, I'll just leave it.  It makes the image more interesting.  

Maybe not. 

My health is failing me now, I'm afraid.  No, really.  I'm afraid.  The life I'm living is literally killing me.  My mother's neighbors tell me I look tired.  I am.  My body functions are beginning to fail.  I threw up in my sleep last night.  I am afraid to check my blood pressure.  I've developed some tremors in my hands.  My hips and knees and back barely support me now.  I hurt.  I hurt all the time.  

I have no one for emotional support.  Don't get me wrong.  People are nice.  But I am going through this all alone.  

Then, this morning, I read this (link).  Don't bother.  I am just living a life that assures that I will develop dementia.  

So. . . don't expect much from me here.  

Yesterday, I used the rented carpet cleaner.  I did the whole house, of course.  You can't just clean a spot.  My mother has wall to wall to wall to wall carpeting.  When I finished and went to empty the tanks, the take up tank that was supposed to hold the water sucked up from the carpet was bone dry.  The carpet was damp.  Since I am not a tool guy, I guessed I had done something wrong.  I looked at the machine over and over.  It seemed simple enough.  I called the hardware store and told them what happened.  

"Where'd the water go?" the guy on the phone asked me.  Dumb fuck.  

The across the street neighbor is a handy guy and was outside with his wife and another neighbor talking to my mom.  I called him in.  We assessed the situation but found no solution, so I packed the thing up and drove back to the hardware store.  They gave me another machine.  

So I came back to my mother's and did it all again.  This time there was a little, very filthy water in the take up tank.  

There are very good reasons not to have wall to wall carpeting.  Carpets are filthy things.  

When that was done, I packed up the machine, put it in the trunk, and got dressed for the gym.  I'd workout before driving the carpet cleaner back.  It was a matter of distance and time.  

Everything done, I went to my house.  The carpenter had called me that morning.  He will meet me at the house at ten a.m. on Thursday.  He'll tackle the next big job, I think.  For money, of course.  

It stresses me out.  

"Oh, honey. . . it is going to be fine.  We just have to do what we have to do."

Yea.  That would be nice.  

I showered and sat down in a chair.  When I woke up, I was late for getting back to mother's.  

We ate the Leftover Stew once more.  

Fascinating you say?  Try this.

This is what I have been watching with my mother.  My gosh. . . so long ago on a different planet.  For all of it, I have to say I'd ask Boom Boom to marry me right now.  She's what I would call a dream.  She would be my mother's age now.  I wonder how her life turned out.  

When one episode is over, we watch another.  

The thing that strikes me is Groucho's casual treatment of the women who in most cases are the smarter ones on the show.  Well, if you call getting these answers right smart.  But again, the second pair of contestants in this episode. . . Betty O'Hare is quite something.  I can't imagine the frustrations smart women had to endure "back then."

Yes I can.  

Holy Moly--I just looked her up (link)!  Lari Lane the Boom Boom Girl was actually an actress in films.  A degree in journalism.  She was the Playboy Playmate of the month in May 1958. 

Her life went the way many do, I guess.  

I went a little bit down the rabbit hole.  

In 1975, Laine made headlines after she was kidnapped from her home, though she was released unharmed after her husband contacted the police.

O.K.  Maybe not "like so many do."  

Today will be like yesterday and the day before that and the day before that.  Whenever I think I might have some free time, something pops up.   I have appointments to keep.  It's o.k.  I'll cook something good tonight and then we can watch some more "You Bet Your Life."

I think I have.  

Stress and Silly Things

One of my big takeaways from the AARP seminar on Family Caregivers was that stress is a silent killer.  Stress causes inflammation.  Stress causes the production of cortisol.  You must learn to manage the stress of being a caregiver.  

Duh.  

My expanding waistline is all the evidence I need of my overproduction of cortisol, and by the time my next physical rolls around, I will have aged ten years.  But hey--thanks for the info.  

Stress follows me wherever I go now.  I can't leave shit behind.  Even in my dreams.  Last night, I had made buddies with a cool black dog.  He was somebody else's, but he really took to me and I to him.  We became real pals.  I don't know where this all took place.  We were on a trip, maybe.  I wasn't at home.  There was a girl somewhere in the mix, but I can't remember who.  

Oh, God. . . am I telling you my dreams?  Sorry.  I was trying to get to the part where I watched an alligator eat my little buddy.  It didn't happen quickly.  The dog fought it, but it was useless.  I woke in a sweat.  

At least it wasn't my dog.  

But what do you make of that, doc?  What do you think it means?

That part is telling.  People don't fully remember or can't fully recount a dream, and yet Dr. Freud thought they were revealing.  I may have repressed a major component of the dream that would change Freud's unravelling of my tale.  

But surely. . . the black dog. . . you know?

I had a million things to do when I left my mother yesterday.  I hung out with her until eleven and knew I'd be back in a few hours, but those hours were worrisome.  I drove to a pharmacy to get drugs.  I went to a hardware store to rent a carpet cleaner.  I sprayed my lawn with insecticide.  I did laundry.  What I WANTED to do was go somewhere with a camera.  It was three and I still had clothes in the dryer.  I decided to hop up to the Cafe for a mimosa if I could get one.  

When I pulled into the tiny parking lot, it was full.  It was full but for the handicapped space.  I pulled in.  A man, maybe my own age but probably much younger, with hair as long as mine but thin and very greasy, stared at me through his thick lenses.  He stared hard, but I have learned that is what people have to do when their vision has gone to shit and I don't take as much offense as once I did.  I reached into the glove box and pulled out the handicapped parking hang tag and slipped it over the rearview mirror.  

He quit staring.  

When I walked into the cafe, there was a long line to the counter.  It was hot.  But I hadn't been here for a long time and I needed to write something and I wanted the mimosa.  Maybe I wanted to write something and needed the mimosa.  Either way. . . I waited.  And when I turned around, the greasy thinning long haired man with glasses was standing in line behind me.  He was in ragged clothing, disheveled.  We stood for a very long while but as we moved forward, he moved up beside me.  Strange.  I was one person from the counter when he moved up ahead of me.  I thought about saying, "What the fuck are you doing, pops?" but I changed my mind.  I decided to relax and see what he was doing.  And when the fellow in front of me moved, so did the greasy fellow.  He had a little open daybook with all sorts of numbers scribbled in it.  He was humming and shuffling and showed the girl behind the counter some numbers.  The little daybook looked ancient.  The counter girl leaned forward and nodded and started making him a coffee.  He took out a wad of bills and counted out four dollars.  She handed him back a quarter, which he put into his pocket, grinned, and said, "Keep the change."  The counter girl giggled.  

It was "my" girl, the cute cafe con leche girl who makes me Sunday mimosas.  

"Well, hello you."

"Is my dad o.k.?" I asked nodding toward the back of the greasy fellow.  

She didn't giggle or smile, just nodded.  

"Is it too busy today for a mimosa?

"Not for you.  Maybe for somebody else, but never for you."

I know it is a game, but fuck. . . .

She got a couple of oranges and a bottle of Prosecco and headed to the juicer.  The line behind me was long.  In a bit, she came back with a big glass of mimosa juice.  

"How have you been?" she asked.  

"Bad.  How about you."

"The same."

"Bad?"

She nodded in the affirmative.  

"What's wrong?"

"Just life stuff."

"You break up with your boy?"

"No."

"Do you want to?"

"Maybe.  I don't know." She laughed.  "God, I shouldn't say that.  Don't tell him."

It turns out that she went back to school and didn't tell her boss, and now she is juggling her time.  

"Do you still go to dance classes?"

"I cut it down to once a week.  I used to go to the gym five days a week.  Now I get there maybe two." 

"I thought you looked a little soft."

"What?!"

"Kidding."  

This whole time she was trying to run my credit card.  

"This machine is slow today.  Your zip code is ________, right?"

"What the fuck?  Are you shopping online or what?"

She knew my zip code?  How.

"I saw you running one day on the Boulevard."

"No, I would never.  I was on the next street over."

"Well, I remembered and figure you must live in that zip code."

Yea. . . it's just a game, but fuck. . . . 

The girl already has a bachelor's degree and she works in a jewelry store as a silversmith, but she said she wants to be a nurse.  I shook my head no.  

"I don't want to work in a hospital.  I want to be a midwife."

She's like a new age hippie.  I kept shaking my head no.  

My card finally went through.  And so. . . . 

When I got back to my mother's house, she seemed to be doing o.k.  She was watching the news.  Fox.  It seemed to make her happy.  I tried not to listen, but oh, my. . . what lies those people tell.  I began making dinner.  I was going to use all the leftovers we had to make a "Leftover Stew."  I took the chicken from the night before and put it in a pot of water to boil.  It was a whole chicken without the legs which we had eaten the night before with our lentils and rice.  I chopped carrots and celery and potatoes I'd brought from my house which would just sit there and rot if I didn't use them up.  I put them in the pot with the chicken and seasoned them.  Then I made a cocktail.  My mother decided to come sit outside with me.  We chatted and when my cocktail was done, I went back inside to check on the soup.  She followed me back in.  After about an hour, I took the chicken out, deboned it, and put the chicken meat back in the soup.  Then I got the half bag of spinach I had brought from my house and dumped it into the pot along with leftover garbanzo beans and the brown jasmine rice and lentils from the night before.  I stirred the pot until the spinach had wilted, then tasted the broth.  I seasoned it a bit more and turned off the burner.  

Leftover Stew.  I was proud of myself.  All of that would have gotten thrown in the garbage in a few more days.  Nobody would have eaten any of it.  But I have been shocked by the grocery bill lately, and I am becoming a thrifty food guy.  The stew was good--but I should have had an onion or two.  Still, it was really good.  

After dinner, I went to the car an dragged out he rented carpet cleaner.  It looked complex, and I sat reading the instructions for awhile to figure it all out.  And when I had, I said, "I'll do this in the morning.  I don't want to do it at all, but tomorrow I will."

I cleaned up the kitchen and poured a drink.  Outside, the sun was going down.  Of course outside.  I got my mother's many pills together in a little cup.  She took them at eight.  At eight-thirty, she went to bed.  

I watched something on YouTube, but not for long.  I checked my emails and texts.  The wedding in the far north went well, I was told by both mother and son.  There was a text form my Miami friend.  She's been on a long romp in Scotland with her mother and sister.  They were in London now.  She's been sending me pictures.  Tonight's was a Photo Booth headshot of her.  Silly girl stuff that I have never tired of.  I will never, I think.  My intellect developed more than my emotions, I'm afraid, but my emotions are often in the driver's seat going far too fast through the curves.  

"Don't be stupid," my intellect cries from the passenger seat.  

"Shut the fuck up. . . I'm driving now!!!!"

Trouble Man

I got a message last night from T in Nashville.  Buck Mason wants him to model for their web catalog.  He's modeled before.  He said he wants me to take some pictures of him when he gets back.  Have you ever looked at a Buck Mason catalog?  The photography is not very imaginative.  I think I could do that in my sleep.  However, and it is a big "however," I also think I'd suck.  I wrote back a cocky text saying, "I made better pictures of you with my phone under a street lamp."  I think I did, but they sure as hell wouldn't use such an image in their catalog.  Those commercial photographers have a different kind of brain than I do, and as I always told my charges, "You do best what you do most."  

So I add another drop of poison to my confidence.  But good for him.  

I took my mother to the pain management doc yesterday morning.  We were among the first appointments.  We sat and waited in a little room for over an hour.  But, you know, you're not walking out on the pusher man, right?  They got you by the balls.  Well. . . it was my mother, not me, but you get my drift.  We sat looking out a third story window at the residents of the big apartment buildings across the street waking up on a pretty Saturday morning, walking dogs, going for coffee, taking the morning run.  That is how most people in this metropolis live now, in big apartment complexes, the expensive ones conveniently located, the cheaper ones on big highways or overlooking the parking lot of a Walmart somewhere on the county borders.  It's just "city life," I guess.  Once an area of sprawling suburbs, now a city of sprawling apartments and, for the more fortunate, condos.  

The New American Dream.  

From where we were sitting, though, it didn't look all that bad.  

When the doc finally came in, he chatted for about five minutes and wrote a prescription for 150 Percocets.  

"Let me know if these aren't working," he said.  "There are other things we can do."

We made an appointment for two months hence.  

My mother's primary care doctor makes her pee in a cup if she is going to get any narcotics.  "It is required by law," the nurse told us a few days ago.  Either she is a liar or this doc is a renegade.  No blood, no urine. . . nada.  

My mother and I had an early lunch, then I had to bolt to get to my AARP seminar on Family Caregivers.  I got there just on time.  It was in a room with big round tables and one of those big white paper tablets on a stand in the front of the room.  

"Oh-oh," I thought.  "This is going to be like the trainings the factory made us go to all the time."

Those things were a horror.  A "facilitator" would chat you up, have you introduce yourselves, and then do some dumb fucking warm up like, "Take a penny from your pocket and make a wish."  Alway something inane, but there were always morons eager to participate.  

"Can you tell us what you wished for?" the facilitator would ask some grinning chimp eager to please.

"I wished that we could end the global conflicts and that people could live their lives in peace!" the chimp would say looking around the room for a Nobel Prize.  

Most times, the facilitator already had figured out I was not a person to ask, but once in awhile one of them would brave it.  

"Well. . . I know I am supposed to end world hunger or some other suffering thing, but I wished I'd win the biggest lotto in history," I would beam.  That usually set the tone I hoped for, dividing the room between titters of disapproval and those stifling appreciative laughter.  

I was told to take a seat at one of the tables in the front and shown the buffet in the back.  They had put out a nice spread for the attendees, but I don't take my chances with food that has been handled by untold numbers of people.  As attendees came back to my table with overflowing plates, I looked slyly around and faux-whispered, "This is the AA meeting, right?"

That got the expected response.  

Everyone ate and we chatted as I perused the booklet we had been given.  I looked at the day's agenda.  Holy shit. . . I was right.  This was going to be like the torturous mandatory meetings.  

Just as people were finishing up lunch, the facilitator came and tapped me on the shoulder.  

"Would you mind moving back to this table," she asked.  "I want to even out the numbers."

"Sure," I said with irony.  "I was sick of these people anyway."  

And again, the expected reactions.  

I was the only white person at my new table.  I looked around.  The room was kind of segregated.  I introduced myself to my new "team," and in a bit the session began.  

All I wanted to know is where I could get some resources to help me as the sole caregiver.  It seemed I was one of only two in the room who was doing it all by himself.  Everyone else talked about getting help from brothers and sisters, mostly not enough, and from their friends and churches.  Most of the information was about that.  

But. . . I was at a good table.  After the initial facilitator spiel, we were to talk amongst ourselves.  Ho!  That's how these things always go.  My table, though, talked about all sorts of county and state programs that they had used.  The "Fixit" program, for instance, had come out to one of the women's home and spent an entire Saturday fixing things around her house--her printer, some electrical wiring, fence repair.  

"It was a real godsend," she said.  

One woman had gotten a longterm care nurse to take care of her aunt.  Medicare stops after one hundred days, but Medicaid will take over. . . after all your money runs out.  

"My aunt had $17,000 in her bank account, so I spent that on her burial plot and funeral, so she had only $1,000 left.  That is when Medicaid kicks in."

Clever.  But it won't help me.  

The one thing I got out of the day was the name of the person to call at the VA to see what my mother qualifies for because she was married to a WWII vet.  

I met a bunch of nice people I will never see again and spent two and a half hours of my life I will never get back.  

I went home and checked on things and took a shower.  

And when I got back to my mother's house, she looked like a mad woman, greasy hair sticking straight up, crazy eyes. . . . 

"I lost my mind," she said.  "I had to call someone to find out if it was A.M. or P.M." 

"Down and down I go, round and round I go."  

This would be my Saturday evening.  I made a cocktail and started the lentils and rice cooking.  I'd bought a roasted chicken so I wouldn't have to cook.  My mother did not have her hearing aids in, so I yelled a few things to her.  I went out to sit while the lentils and rice cooked.  

"Baby, you've gotta come out and see me."

Yea, yea, yea.  Everyone knows I can't.  

Misery and joy.  Of which is there more of in life?

"It's just your turn."

Trouble, man.  

"This I know.  This I know."

 I have to get away for awhile today.  There are things that MUST be done at my house, maintenance that I HAVE to do.  But it scares me more and more to leave my mother alone.  She doesn't seem any more together this morning.  

When the session was over, I told my table, "I'm not complaining.  I still have t.v. and good food and liquor."  

They all shook their heads at that.  

"That's why I asked if this was an A.A. meeting in the beginning."

It was just what I always did in the classroom.  The seemingly non-sequitur opening line of the day was brought full circle by the end of the lecture.  Eyes popped in recognition.  I always thought it was fairly genius.  

As I was walking out, one of the people from the table I left stepped up beside me and said, "You should have stayed at our table."  

I've always had a knack for knowing how to tilt a room.