The · River

Christmas day, I spent in the hospital. I've been spending every day for the past week in the hospital. My mother, see. The words they used were "necrotizing fasciitis." In her leg. Diabetes related.
She told me that it wasn't my grandmother who abused me. She told me it was my babysitter, like she was solving a mystery. She's wrong, but her evidence for this is an episode with a piggy bank when I was 4 that made her raise her eyebrow. She suspected, but didn't do anything. Merry Christmas, Charon.
She's also been in jail for writing bad checks. Spent a day in jail back in April for that, and decided to tell me last Monday when I got here while she was in the ICU.

As far as the outlook for her I'm not optimistic. Surgeries clean out the wound, but she's the only one who can clean out her brain. That's not being done.

At least she has a view of the Confederate White House from her hospital bed.

S, DC, and I were sitting at the kitchen table in S's house. We were smoking, talking, and we were 17. S's mom was at the computer typesetting and his father was also at the kitchen table, fudging his logbook. He was a bus driver, you see. DC was going on about something and flicked his ash in the vicinity of the ashtray. It missed completely. S's father looked up at him over the half moon lenses of his reading glasses. "D," he said quietly and deliberately, pushing the ashtray towards him, "this...is an ashtray." I laugh about it now.

You see, S's father died last Tuesday. I found out about it in the restroom of a Starbucks in Madison, Wisconsin on Wednesday night. The email was there from DC. Sudden...unexpected. S's father was like a second father to me. I even called him "dad." He was morbidly obese. It's true. A couple eight years back he lost a kidney. He's been living on borrowed time for a long time now. Thing of it is, though, to know the man, you wouldn't assume he'd ever die. He was one of the most direct and dynamic characters I have ever known. He told you how it was and didn't fool around with eggshells. I will miss him greatly. It affects me more than it probably should.

I haven't seen him in close to 10 years.

I got a call from my mother tonight. She told me that she visited the hospital about a boil she has, and they wanted her to stay in the hospital. I don't know why they would want her to stay in the hospital for a boil, but they did. She mentioned something in passing about white blood cell counts being through the roof. She, the obstinate old woman she is, decided to go home tonight. So she called me to tell me that she is sick enough that she was supposed to stay in the hospital but didn't because she had to pay bills. I'll know more tomorrow. It is an irony that my father died from a lack of white cells, and my mother has enough, apparently, for a small African nation.

Is this how it starts? Trips to the emergency room that turn into hospital stays that turn into death? Why am I even asking? That's exactly how it starts. 30 November 2009 is the beginning of the end for my mother, and I'm not completely OK with that.

DC is working towards becoming a Rabbi. He officiated the funeral for S's father on Sunday morning. We talked tonight. He told me that tonight, in his class this semester, they talked about the "when bad things happen to good people" scenarios most rabbis are faced with. He had personal experience with this sort of ministry this weekend, and said as much. He said, "This is what is happening now, and it sucks."

There's no need to question why God would do something like take S's father away. At least not in the middle of it. Question it later, when the sting goes away. For now, deal with the sting. Tonight, while talking to him, I realized that he is turning into a very wise man. He grew up well. I, for one, am honored, and grateful, to be able to call him my friend.

So, in honor of DC: This is what is happening now, and not all of it sucks. Not all of it.

The Bermuda Triangle: Bullshit.
Atlantis: Possible. My guess is Antarctica.
Sentient life outside the Solar System: Without Question.
UFOs: They can't all be planes, meteors, swamp gas, or clouds.
Aliens among us: The dreamer in me says yes. The realist says no.
Aliens designing the pyramids: I think maybe we underestimate the mathematical prowess of our ancestors.
Jesus Christ the son of God: He was a teacher. I find it interesting to juxtapose Jesus and Socrates. Both teachers who threatened the state that killed them. Socratesian doesn't roll trippingly off the tongue, though.
Ghosts: Absolutely.
Orbs in pictures: Really?
Angels: Preposterous.
Hypnosis: Sure. The mind is a cavernous place.
The Loch Ness Monster: Nope. I don't look down on believers, though. Cryptozoology is fascinating. One word... Coelacanth.
God: Nope. Unless it's going badly for me. Then maybe.
Nature of the afterlife: Reincarnation preceded by judgement.
The devil: He's inside us all.
Bigfoot: Nope.

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

-A. Bartlett Giamatti

1. The fieldstone fence.
2. The walkway behind the house where I dug up earthworms and was actually like the wooded backgrounds that they used for GI Joe commercials.
3. The weeping willow.
4. The dead end barricade at the end of the street. That was only the beginning.
5. The old lady at Wendy's who spoke the order into the microphone.
6. Climbing up onto the train platform to take a shortcut to school.
7. The smell of a neap tide.
8. Being too late for the 7:47 but missing the 7:51.
9. Doing number 8 with a large coffee, light.
10. Coffee, light.

Let's call him "Corey." His last name is the same as a famous one, and not the Corey who drove off with Heather Graham in "License to Drive." I told CoRey something tonight, and it made me a liar.

I hate being made into a liar. I also didn't have any good answers to his good questions. I hate that, too. The freakish woman with extremely small hands and thick wrists came in and tried to pillory us for not letting the client know the flight was diverterd, but that was another issue and I was too busy dealing with Corey to get into something involving someone who wasn't named Corey.

I hate being pilloried.

Hell, Saturday isn't even a day I normally work. I was in for the pretty one, who worked for me last week. She can keep Saturday. All it did was make me drink.

So the starting left fielder cuts himself on a steak knife last night... Stop me if you've heard this... The center fielder swings at a pitch, only to have it bounce off his knee. Meantime, he's the first guy up in the bottom of the 14th or whatever. Up comes the backup catcher who knocks one for a base hit. The hurt center fielder limps over to second. The shortstop comes up and walks. Bases loaded. Up comes the pitcher. He's like 0 for 923 or something and the manager tells him not to swing on pain of death so the next guy (an actual hitter) can get A shot with the bases loaded.

Did I mention the score was 4 to 1 bad guys? Bottom of the 14th? The pitcher draws a walk. Score is 4 to 2, with but two outs left to play. The joker comes up. Class clown, creative with the facial hair. Bases still loaded. First pitch a strike. Second pitch... Ends up in the good guys' bullpen. Did our hero stop to watch it sail over the fence? No. He ran like a mother sucker for home because that's where you go when it's all over.

I'm not going to convince anyone of anything. Not that we need universal health care, not that the designated hitter is a neccesary evil, not that 500 days of summer was a good movie.
It's too much work to convince anyone of anything. No one's listening. I'm not being self pitying; I'm merely stating the truth. It's not worth the effort.
I have never made a habit of griping about work in my ElJay. There's a first for everything, I suppose. No one's listening at work. Everyone is shouting as if they want to be heard, but everyone is shouting louder and louder because everyone is shouting and the only way to be heard is to shout louder and all I have is a god damned headache, except I was one of the people shouting earlier. So I did it to myself.
Ever argue with someone you agreed with to the point that they think you are diametrically opposed to them in practically every way? I've done it twice in my life. Once with the Commie poli-sci prof in Minnesota and now at work. "What about a union?" she asked. "You signed a paper that said you wouldn't even mention it," I said. "I'm pretty sure that's illegal," she tossed back. "Still, you signed the paper," I hurled.
I miss the days at Acheron when Anubis cut out articles from the paper to connect with his kids. I miss plying the river Acheron because there, I was only skirting the gates of Hell.

I've posted before about my tendency toward right-wing talk radio as an extension of my penchant for baseball broadcasts on the radio. Nine times out of ten, the baseball is on the radio on my way home from work. The one time out of ten that it isn't, however, I get stuck listening to a jackhole by the name of Gunny Bob. Apparently, he's heard in thirty eight states. Or he was up until last night. Monday night was his last broadcast. Good riddance, you Nazi fuck.

I had a lot more to say earlier today. I've never been good at writing about politics. Never. I'm glad that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are coming home. I'm glad Bill Clinton got to flex his diplomatic muscle. I'm not a guy who prays for anything, but those two women were never far from my thoughts. The North Korean gentleman still visits me in my dreams from time to time.

The question of the Birth Certificate is born of Racism. It's not something we asked of our previous 42 presidents, one of whom may have been born on Canadia (Chet Arthur). We didn't ask to see Chet's birth certificate.

B and I went camping this weekend. Up in the mountains. I melted a bottle in the campfire and a four-legged mammal of some type scurried through our campsite. It may have been a fox, a coyote (3 syllables or you are a douchebag), or a mountain lion. It was not afraid of us or our fire. Across from us was a couple of hippies in a school bus painted blue with paisley wall hangings in the windows. Everything happened on the bus. They waved to us as we left on Sunday morning.

It was very cold on Saturday night.

There's a video sitting on the TV stand in my mother's bedroom (along with fifty others) wherein my father is filming a glider flight we took when I was six. It was in Hawaii, and i remember clearly sitting on the seat next to him. I'm not in the film; it's just scenery and voices. I hear him and me and the pilot talking. While I was watching it, I could feel him pressing against me (the seat was only for one person). It wasn't a bad feeling. It was a strange feeling. Throughout the tape, I can hear his voice, talking about how we knew all about the Bernoulli principle, and me explaining it.

I never got a sufficient answer for my question of how the glider pilots find the updrafts. The pilot let me work the flaps, though, and I turned them up, which sent us hurtling downwards to the roiling ocean below. He brought sanity and control back to the glider though, for which I was grateful.

Should the subject come up at parties, the result is inevitably a pissing contest. "Oh? That's awfully interesting. I am related to Guy Fawkes on my mother's side, but I am related to Henry VIII on my father's side." You know the type.

I am incredibly interested in the lives of my ancestors. I don't speak about it much because it smacks of self-import, and braggartry, which leads to blowharditude (not a word, but you get my drift). I am interested in it because I love history. That I am related to John Wilkes Booth (braggartry) is not nearly as interesting to me as the story of the Big Lick Massacre, in which my ancestors, through the virtue of kindness to the native tribes in Kentucky in the 1700's, survived while a settlement some miles away was destroyed.

The summary of my extraction is as follows. My mother's side: her father was 2nd generation English; her mother was 2nd generation Italian. Her mother's parents met on the boat coming here; dad was from Milan, mom from Naples. Her father's father was born in Halifax, England. He was a steward on various British merchant ships in the 20's. He got off the boat in Boston (his Sailor's book is somewhere in a box) and became a big shot real estate guy. Her father's mother remains an enigma to me. I know her last name was "Spencer" and they had money. Other than that, I know she lived to 98 and loved watching wrestling on TV. On my father's side: My father's mother had a 2nd Generation German mother and a mysterious father who fought in WWI. His mother died in 1978. His grandmother died in 2001. His grandfather died in 1935. My great grandmother was a widow for 66 years. My father's father was adopted. There is some question as to whether his biological father adopted him from the biological mother who was not married to him. It is that line, my father's father's line, that we know the most about. At some point one of my relations converted to Mormonism. I guess the Mormons like to go back to cleanse sins of the ancestors. This relation traced the family name back to the 1660s. My ancestors have been on the North American continent since the 1660s.

It's interesting to me that as of late, certain choices have been made that make things go full circle. My mom and dad (and I, by default) moved to Minneapolis (ostensibly for my dad to be closer to home, but still close to his ancestors home in the early 20th century). Uncle Fucker (my mother's brother...I've written about him. Go look) ended his days in Quincy, Illinois. Quincy is the closest city to a nexus of my father's family's activity in the mid 19th century. My mother moved to Richmond, Virginia. My father's ancestors came from Virginia, and an offshoot not related directly to me stayed there.

Upon her move to Richmond I was reminded of the illustrious career of one of those relations that I had heard was buried in the same cemetery as John Marshall, the illustrious Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Two trips there I looked; two times I came up empty. Last week, mom found it with the help of a cemetery guy. She sent me pictures. He was a representative for Virginia in the U.S Congress, and was also the leader of the League of Southern Unionists (or whatever high highfalutin' name they called themselves). I'm not clear on his views of slavery, but it looks like he was one of the good guys. Mom found his grave. This guy started impeachment proceedings against John Tyler (the first president to become president due to the death of an elected president), who happened to be a fellow Virginian, and is buried across town in Hollywood Cemetery. Because of my relation, John Tyler has the dubious distinction of being the first president to have impeachment proceedings started in his name.

I guess I bring this up because it's history my blood is part of. I think my grandfather was my great grandfather's biological son. It's history that's part of me. Ancient gravestones bear my name and quietly reflect the accomplishments of my forebears. I wonder if I will have something interesting to add to the family history. Maybe not. But I told the tales. I did it quiet, though. I'm no braggart.

There's something primal about creating something from nothing. Today, after conjuring wild yeast out of the air and into a soup of flour and water, I created yeasted, raised English muffins. The results were less than spectacular, but still.

I feel like the first time I lit a fire without a match. I feel kind of like a bad ass.

It's Miller time.

"Know what happens to nosy fellows? Huh? No? Wanna guess? Huh? No? OK. They get their noses cut off."

I'm gonna have a scar. On my face. It will be bad ass looking, and I can tell people about the knife fight I had in February of ought-nine in T or C, New Mexico. Or maybe it was in Bisbee, Arizona.

The cautery portion of the afternoon went on for about 30 minutes. Zap, wipe. Zap, wipe. Zap zap zap, tug, pull, wipe. I was the Guy Who Would Not Stop Bleeding. I told him before he started I bleed forever from there. He wasn't listening.

I asked how many stitches he gave me. He told me it was the "equivalent of a lot of stitches." They come out in eight days. There was also the "equivalent of a lot of blood."

He didn't say that, but I did. About the blood.

At least it doesn't hurt that much anymore.