I Neglect My Blog

Here's the start of a story. Know me now before The New Yorker makes me famous.

President Hugh C. Macklin closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and contemplated political suicide. It felt good. He opened one eye long enough to glance at the clock. If he made the call now, he could be the lead story on the evening news.

"That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia," he sang aloud to the empty Oval Office. "That's the night that they hung an innocent man."

There was a pack of Pall Mall filters in his desk drawer. Macklin toyed with the idea of lighting one, put it aside. His desk bleeped.

"Go ahead," he said automatically, wincing at the interruption.

"Sir?"

Macklin sighed. "No, Frank, this is Elvis. What?"

"Line three -- it's Mrs. Macklin."

"Thank you, Frank. Put Ol' Sparky through." No time like the present. When opportunity knocks, and all that. He opened his desk drawer and pawed for the pack of smokes. His desk made a blippety sound and then the voice of his wife blared forth.

"Honey, I'm in Baton Rouge at that thing with those people and I don't think I'll be back in town tonight because the weather's really bad and there's this reception that you KNOW will drag on forever and Curtis and and Nisha think it'd be easier to go directly from here to LA rather than having to fly back home and then leave again in the morning."

Macklin heard in the background a sussurus of conversation and the clink of glasses, then the unmistakeable "pop" that comes only from an inexperienced person opening a bottle of champagne. She was in a restaurant. No, that was being naively charitable. She was in a bar. Baton Rouge is to bars like houses are to termites. He lit the Pall Mall and gratefully sucked down its calming, cancerous smoke.

"Okay. Be safe, and call me when you leave for LA," he said, then realized he'd chickened out. "Oh, and honey? I want a divorce."

"Wh..." He hung up. There were no ashtrays in the Oval Office. He tapped the ash into his hand and wiped it on his suit pants. What the fuck. Step One complete. Step Two required further shoring-up. There was a cut crystal decanter half-full of some exotic decoction on the sideboard. Macklin hadn't touched it in in his two years in office, and he hoped it wasn't some sort of colored water. He opened it and sniffed. Ah. Some sort of brandy or cognac. Armagnac, maybe. He left the stopper on the sideboard and brought the decanter to his desk. When he hefted it to his lips, it rolled down his throat like hot honey. Delicious. A fire lit deep in his belly. He thumpoed the decanter to the desk and watched the amber liquid slosh through the crystal facets. He turned his attention back to his cigarette. The penultimate drag, he thought, exhaling, is always the best. People think it's the first drag, but it's not. It's that next-to-last drag.

He addressed the desk. "Frank?"

"Sir?"

"Find me some weed."

I'm sor..." He hung up again. Presidents could do that. Hang up on underlings. Issue orders. Start shit. He had the desk page his appointment secretary. She was away from her desk, so it took a message. Sometimes, even Presidents get voicemail. "Sue -- cancel all my appointments for the afternoon, even the one with whats-her-name from Australia. If they ask, tell them I'm drunk."

He took another slug from the decanter and smiled.

Zombies! And Spelling!

Zombie Letters from e-zombie.com


I'm spellin' with zombies!

Hooray Connectivity

Haven't been online in over a week and I'm jonesing like a junkie for a fix. I lap up some higher mathemetics at the Times, and zip over to MetFilter for a little netly nebbishness. Then to the wonderful Arts & Letters Daily where I find I can serendipitously indulge in that easiest and most satisfying of online endeavors, Coulter-bashing.

I love the Internet.

The Casual Violations Of Alzheimer's Disease

We're private people.

Except for me, braying my woes about teh Intarweb, my family has always favored discretion over disclosure. This seems to me a perfectly sensible policy and Dr. Phil can go fuck himself, because we all know that too much familial truth is perhaps more unbearable than not enough. Hell, I was a teenager before I discovered my paternal grandfather had sired seven kids and then hied his sorry ass to Texas. I was in my thirties before I knew my mother had had a brief (and, I'm sure, tempestuous and romantic) marriage to a French soldier at the outset of WWII, before she met the man who would father me and be her husband for 52 years. Neither of these facts are particularly relevant to anything other than filling out the parental backstory, so to speak, no matter how much psychologists would like to believe otherwise.

But now it's different. As I daily dig through layers of stuff that Mom has accumulated, I find the kind of personal reminders and notes-to-self that give me an insight on my mother that I never had before. For instance, my Mom has sorted, stacked and tied with string every Sierra Club newsletter she's recieved in the past five years.

Mom has never recycled a can in her life. We brought him an injured baby bird home once, but the cat ate it.

And not just the Sierra Club. The Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy, Give Guns To Pandas, you name it. I haven't asked her where this eco-consciousness is coming from, because I fear that the answer is she probably sent one or more of them money and now she's on their sucker list.

And other things. A drawing. A smiling cat sketched on the back of a white paper bag. Broad, sweeping strokes. Beneath the portrait is written "Suki!" in curly girlish letters, the spike of the exclamation point bouncing on a a squat fat heart. I don't know who drew it. Mom didn't remember. Who knows how long it had been there.

And this is the surface. I've just gotten out the whisk broom. Wait'll it's time for the shovels. And Mom feels this, I think, as a violation. An intrusion, a meddling in her affairs. She squawked about me cleaning off the kitchen table today.

But just on that table I saw the sad neglect that comes with a mind newly unraveling. This all happened so fast. Last Christmas she was in my kitchen with my mother-in-law, clucking over the sweet potatoes and telling me I'd put too much salt in the green beans.

Eight months later, she can't remember what she had for lunch five minutes ago and is agitated when I tell her I've already brought the mail in. You're sure? Did you check? I checked. You're sure? Really, I am.

This will only get worse.

I Love Lester Bangs, And I'd Like To Emulate Him, Except For The Dead Part

A reconsideration of the greatest essayist of our age.

Don't Push The Button

See, I told you not to push the button.

Also, Don't Shoot The Puppy.

We Must Defend Our Search Engines

Unbelievable.

I write heartfelt posts about life-changing family crises, and no one comments (hyperbole). I criticize ask.com and two snarks appear almost immediately. This is just like MetaFilter.

Teh Intraweb: Land'O'Perspecative.

I presume that I'm being pwned because ask.com actually has a picture of d if you query "d boon" and google does not. How nice for them. Irrelevant. The question wasn't "who is Mike Ness?", it was "how tall is Mike Ness?", a better test of the underlying search heuristics.

The second comment claims that google doesn'tr know who d is. I beg to differ, using the same damn screen.

Assholes. Posting anonymously, of course.

A Reason To Love Google

So we're driving home from Weezie's house (Who's Weezie? That, my friend, is privileged information.), and the question arises: how tall is Mike Ness? Rather, how SHORT is Mike Ness? We know he's no giant, because he refers to some height issues in the live Social Distortion CD that's spinning as we drive (referring to fights in the parking lot before shows, he sez something like "Well I was only four foot nine in tenth grade and I kicked the SHIT outta 'em!" thus exhibiting the classic Napoleonic traits of Short Man Syndrome). But how short is short?

And I've been watching this stupid reality show on NBC called "Treasure Hunters" (fuck a corplink) and in a heavy-handed example of product placement the contestants are always saying things like, "Let's try 'Ask.com'!"

I figure "how tall is Mike Ness?" would be a great test of their search algorith. So we get home, I fire up Ol' Sparky, and I type "how tall is mike ness" into ask.com's search box. I get this. No help.

I go to Google. I type "mike ness height" and I get this. Bam! I don't even need to click through. He's 5'7", surely a candidate for Short Man Syndrome. Theory confirmed. Elapsed search time: seconds.

Then I figure, well, that's not really fair to ask.com since I refined my search term before googling it. So just for shits and giggles, I try "mike ness height" at ask.com, resulting in this.

See why Google rules? That's just BETTER.

Driving Miss Crazy

So I've figured out what Mom likes to do: ride in the car.

As long as we're in motion, she's engaged. She reads the road signs, the bumper stickers, signage on shopping malls. Every few minutes she asks, "Where are we going?" and I tell her (lunch, the doctor, Sam's Club for toilet paper and cat food, Mars, Cambodia, it really doesn't seem to matter what I say). "Oh," she responds, "That sounds nice."

And for the duration of the drive she is happy.

So I've taken to going the long way 'round. Extending every drive to its maximum, even inventing destinations so we can drive more.

"Let's drive by the movie theater and see what's playing," I suggest.

"Oh! I've never seen a movie!" Mom beams in anticipation.

Hmm. I know for a fact that Dad and I went to see a Charlie Brown movie (the Great Pumpkin?) while Mom went to "A Clockwork Orange", but I say nothing. I also remember rapturous retellings of "Gone With The Wind" that she went to at the Alabama Theatre. I briefly reflect on the fact that the last movie I saw with my Mom was when she took me and a bunch of my friends to the Alabama Theatre to see the 1976 "King Kong" and Michael Rasberry bought Ju-ju-bees and Mom thought it was strange that the boy didn't buy chocolate and popcorn like a good right-thinking American. Now there's nothing at the suburban gargantu-plex that catches her eye, and there's not even anything I want to see. We were hoping for "A Prairie Home Companion" but it's nowhere near our end of town.

We drive away and do our shopping. Back at the house, Mom is irritable. "The heat! It got to me. I'm going to sit in front of the fan." I unload the TP and paper towels and sundries. I marvel again at the power of the warehouse store: 72 rolls of toilet paper, divided among three people, for only $15.00. That's 4.8 rolls per person, and how long would it take me to go through a whole roll? I was assigned one in jail, guarded it zealously, even slept on it, and still there was plenty left at the end of my thirty-day sentence. Of course, the whole shitting-in-public thing kinda weirded my bowels, but still.... So one roll for one persom for one month. That's a TWO-YEAR supply for our little threesome, for only $15.00!

Of course, I also bought a box of frozen White Castle cheeseburgers, a month's supply of Glucophage and Pravochol, enough paper towels to cover a sizeable portion of Alabama's navigable waterways, and an ant trap.

(I applaud the young woman at the pharmacy who gamefully volunteered to check us out and then demonstrated her competence with one of those cord-free barcode scanners. She was a real time-saver.)

"I have to go home. There's raw chicken in the trunk and it's 100 degrees out here."

"I don't want you to leave," Mom said.

"I know, but I'm getting all my shit packed to move back in with you, and the sooner I get that done, the sooner I'll be here," I say.

Mom smiles.

And that's really all I can ask for.

Best Mel Gibson Headline So Far

Excuse the bandwagon-jumping, but this made me giggle.

From Defamer.com: "Hollywood's Power Jews Pause From War Planning To React To Mel"

Now THAT'S funny.

When In Doubt, Blog About Sports

NFL training camps started this week, so I checked in with my Birds to see how it's going. I find some guy named Mo who has a blog. He manages to blog every single minute of his day and say absolutely nothing. I can achieve this by blogging weekly, ands with much less expenditure of time and effort. The Falcons look...well, better this year. Roddy White is going to be a great wide receivcer. Maybe if I say that enough it'll come true. Vick will learn to plant his feet. Vick will learn to plant his feet.

The offense might be suspect, hinging on the mercurial Vick, an aging (but brilliant) one-cut-and-go running back in Warrick Dunn, and the recuperating Crumpler and Duckett; but the defense will be good, maybe better than good. The addition of Lawyer Milloy in the backfield and John Abraham on the line is huge. Funny, though -- they couldn't stop the run last year so the strategy this year is to dare teams to run at them? Hmm. Just win ten games, guys. That's all I ask. Win ten games and get a wild-card spot.

In other NFL news, this sucks, whether you give a damn about the Browns or not.

I Sleep Late, Yet Get Shit Done

Mom and I met today with LB and I'm feeling somewhat reassured. We tied up loose ends re living wills and POAs, and I noted with naive satisfaction that the accompanying files, most of which we never touched, made a pleasingly thick two-foot stack on the conference table. It's been my experience that the more burdened with files an attorney is, the better your representation. Ever been standing before a judge when your court-appointed schnook comes flying in late, holding a blank legal pad and a ballpoint pen? I have. That's a bad feeling.

Mom was in a sunny mood despite the sweltering heat. She ate all of her hamburger and stole half my fries at lunch. I saw her sneak a splash of sweet tea into her iced tea on the way out the door, but I figured she's taken her meds for the day and I've combed her house for sugary snackitude, so I let her pull one over on me. Sometimes it does a body good to feel like you're getting away with something. I hadn't intended to dine chez Ronald, but we got a late start and I wasn't exactly sure where LB's office was, so I wanted to allow enough time to get lost in the wilds of the Tiny Kingdom. Homewood, actually. Then I drove right to it and we were twenty minutes early. Oh well. On the way, we passed a sign directing people to The Islamic Academy of Alabama, which I didn't even know existed.

So I pick up a copy of US News & World Report as we settle in to wait and I see this article, positing a link between Alzheimer's disease and diabetes. Interesting. Everything is connected.

Now I've got to start packing this house, a dreadful prospect that brings out the packrat AND the neatnik in me so I agonize over throwing everything away versus saving and labeling it all in logically organized boxes; this leads to the worst of all comprimises, where I just start stuffing shit randomly into whichever box will hold it and then hope to sort it all out later, which of course never gets done and leads to an attic piled with dusty boxes marked "Books and Skillets" or "Bathroom and Patio" while downstairs I spend a vexing week looking for my favorite spatula before giving up and buying another one.

Of course, I have the luxury of not really having a timetable, and I can take the time to do it right. In fact I'm blessed in many ways. We have an attorney, long-term care insurance, a house that's paid for, and enough residual income to keep the lights on and the phone bill paid. Things could be a whole hell of a lot worse.

Until Inconvenience Do Us Part

I think I'm about to be single. Or, at least "separated". Lady declines to join me when we hafta move back into Mom's house.

"I can't be a nursemaid, and I can't bear her times ten following me around and digging through my stuff," she sez.

Overwhelmed by her empathy and compassion, as well as her can-do spirit and commitment to our almost 13-year-old marriage, I say little. Inside, I fume.

I could write a caustic diatribe on how this is a betrayal on every significant level, but I won't. I won't point out that when she was diagnosed with MS I took it in stride. I won't mention that in one of his last acts on this earth my dad had a wheelchair ramp built around the side of the house for her, anticipating the day that the house would be ours. I won't point out that Mom made the down payment on our nice little condo as a late wedding gift. I won't point out how fucked-up and selfish it is to abandon the person you ostensibly love right when things get tough.

I love her more than I've ever loved anyone. (Not true. I loved Laura Billings more, but she's dead, by all accounts. Lupus. I have a knack for picking the afflicted, I guess.) But still, I love my wife deeply and sincerely, but this pronouncement makes me question everything. Maybe she's off her meds. Maybe she's just on the rag. How sexist is that? Yeah, well.

I was implicitly counting on her help. I need her. For her hands and back and brain, sure, but also for her delight in the Simpsons, her love of the New York Dolls, the smell of her hair. For the way she makes the best coffee on earth. Her unerring ability to locate anything I've misplaced, a trait we attribute to "the homing uterus". For 13 years of in-jokes and do-you-remembers.

At the moment, I'm kinda numb. In a way, I feel liberated. Unfettered. But I also feel very, very alone. I've become accustomed to being half of a dyad, and this is going to take some getting used to.

I love her. I wish her the best. But without her, I'll be better able to make snap decisinos, to suffer minor indignities, and to grit my teeth and push on through.

So I tell myself.

Roald Dahl Puts It In Perspective

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to go to work…. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope, and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

Not that I'm a writer or anything. But it's cool to think about being one.

1337h4rdc0r3m0th4fuck4

I spent more than one hundred hours playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

This guy beats it in under ten minutes, no cheats used.

Grumble Grumble Grumble

Bush's decision to veto the stem cell bill is politcal hypocrisy of the rankest sort, distasteful and amoral in every way. Thousands of frozen embryos are destroyed every year by fertility clinics. Each one of those embryos is a source of human stem cells. Either mandate that fertility clincs keep their frozen embryos in perpetuity, the morally rigorous position (and the end of fertility treatment); or, since you've already allowed the sixteen extant stem cell lines already propagated to continue, admit that the use of these embryonic cells for medical research is the right thing to do.

Hey, I Know, Now I'll Lose My Job

Fuck 'em.

I can make more oney grubbing for aluminum cans on the side of the road, if it comes to that. Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em. I just can't deal with that clusterfuck for one more minute. Took yesterday off with an eye infection and was told I needed a doctor's excuse to return to work. Sure. Can I afford to go to a doctor without health insurance? I don't think so. So.....fuck 'em.

In other news: townhouse for sale by owner, great location, 3 BR, 2.5 BA. Close to schools, churches, shopping, and interstate. Quiet community, great nieghbors. Priced to sell! Owners must go!

"I Think I'm Going Crazy"

My Mom has Alzheimer's disease.

We found out two weeks ago. I was at work and I got a call from my wife. She said, "Call your Mom. She's acting funny, and it kinda scared me." So I called Mom (hey, look, I used the work phone to make a personal call. Fire me, asshats!) and asked her what was up. She said, "I was going to the store and I backed out of the gararge and then I couldn't figure out how to close the garage door. I think I'm going crazy." I asked her if she lost the remote. She acted like she'd never heard of a remote control. She was concerned that if she got out to close the garage door, then she'd be locked in the garage and the car would be running on the other side of the door. Without stopping to unravel the knot of irrationality contained in THAT statement, I told her to leave the car where it was, go in the house, and I'd be right over. When I got there she was flustered and upset. I calmed her down and put the car away (and took her car keys). I asked if she'd been taking her medicine, and again she looked at me like I was speaking Chinese. "I'm not on any medicine," she snapped, somewhat affronted by the suggestion. I went to the cabinet and looked at her meds. It looked like she'd been ignoring them for days, if not weeks.

We scheduled a doctor's appointment for the next morning, and he took one look at her and put her in the hospital. She stayed three or four days, and came out feeling better, with her blood pressure under control and her blood sugar regulated. A CAT scan showed moderate brain atrophy consistent with senile dementia.

The doctor asked her questions. "Who's the President?" She didn't know. "What year is it?" No clue. Now, my mom reads ten newsmagazines a week, is glued to CNN, and last year could probably have told you the name of the assistant undersecretary of the Department of the Interior. She follows politics like I follow the NFL; that is to say, closely.

I felt ice water drip down my spine when I watched my mother struggle to come up with the name of the president she loathes above all other politicians and then fail. She knew something was wrong. But she didn't know why, or how, or what to do. She looked frail, and scared, and vulnerable. It was wrenching. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hug her and make everything better. I wanted to run screaming from the room.

A trip back to the doctor this week confirmed the diagnosis. After the appointment, I took her out to lunch. The hospital is in a part of town near where she grew up, and my friend Adam recently bought a restuarant nearby that is famous for its fresh vegetables and home-made pies. On the trip there, Mom wold look out the window and say things like, "My first boyfriend lived down that street. He rode a motorcycle and my daddy thought he was dangerous. He died in the war."

"That's the church where your uncle got married. The first time. He doesn't talk about her. It was a pretty wedding, even though it rained. They had the reception at the Elk's Lodge. Can you imagine?"

"The trolley ran through here. You could ride it to downtown for a nickel."

"Don't turn left here. If you go up one block, you can turn on a one-way street that takes us right where we're headed."

Perfectly normal, even knowledgeable. Then she'd ask, "Did we already go to the doctor?"

At lunch, Mom demonstrated that her appetite is as yet untouched. She cleaned her plate (fried snapper, squash casserole, green beans)and hungrily eyed my roast beef until I gave her some. We ate well (though we skipped the pie: Adam, I'm coming back for a piece of lemon ice-box when I don't have a diabetic with me).

Then we went shopping for those items that are perpetually on the list: cat food, kibble, and litter. At the big-box warehouse store where we go to buy cat food by the metric ton, we lined up to wait in line to check out and Mom suddenly becomes agitated. "I lost my car keys! Where are the car keys?" I showed her that I had the keys, reassured her that the car was OK, that I was driving today, and that everything was all right. Then, as I loaded our cart (home delivery of cat food and litter would make someone a lot of money, I think), Mom paid. Twice.

Or, she tried to. The nice woman at the checkout, a zaftig, smiling, round-cheeked young lady with beautiful mocha skin that a supermodel would kill for, looked at me quizzically. I took back the second credit card and put it in Mom's wallet. Mom sighed. "I guess I shouldn't go shopping alone from now on," she said sadly. She looked at me with such unconprehending despair that I think I died a little bit.

"It's OK, Mom. I'm here to take care of you." I tried to smile, but it felt like a rictus and I'm sure it looked as false as it felt. I took her home, got her settled, gave her her meds, came home, told Lady she had the helm, and drank myself insensate. (OK, five beers

So now wheels are in motion. Doctors and lawyers and insurance agents squawking like carrion birds over a still-twitching roadkill. I shouldn't say that. I'm going to depend a lot on these high-dollar professionals in the coming months and years. But as someone who's always believed that the least trustworthy individual on the planet is a white man in a suit, I have a sinking suspicion I'm about to live out my worst nightmare.

Gee, BOP, sucks for you -- but how about your MOM?! How about HER living out HER worst nightmare? This woman watched her sister descend into abject dementia. She saw her little sister go through what she's now facing, and she saw that it was sad and ugly and undignified and protracted and hellish. What's THAT gotta be like?

And when I'm speaking and my words get tangled up or I forget my point before I get to it or I momentarily blank on a name I've known for ages, what's that? Is it the normal blips of aging and wear-and-tear, or is it something much more sinister tapping me on the shoulder and daring me to turn and face it?

My mother met her sister's death with remarkable equanimity. She had been fading for years and the end, Mom felt, was a blessing for her and her family. Mom had already said goodbye, though she continued to visit her and check in and do all that, she knew her sister was essentially gone long before her physical shell gave out. At least that's how she acted. My family reserves the melodrama for inconsequential tiffs, and meets the important stuff head-on with stoic shrugs and determination.

In a very important way, she's provided me a template.

I hope.

I think my blog has a new topic.

Goddammit.

Proof Of The Imminent Apocalypse

Read my book! But first, "The Dance Of Love"! Hit it, boys...

The Sports Draught

Gone. All gone.

And Wimbledon doesn't count.

We have reached the nadir of the sports broadcasting cycle. ESPN has nothing better to show during the day than bowling. Sure, I can watch the rest of the World Cup and pull for Italy (and Ghana! as Jon Stewart said, "not the most malnourished country in southwestern Africa."). And there's maybe one major league lacrosse game somewhere on some channel at least once a week, if I'm lucky enough to find it.

And then there's baseball. It's June. Who gives a damn until September and the Braves suck this year anyway. I like Ozzie Guillen, though, and I like him even more for calling Jay Mariotti a fag. "Pompous, bloated toad" might have been more appropriate and less offensive, but I can't quibble with the sentiment.

And after watching Esera Tuaolo tonight on Big Idea with Whatshisname I thought, you know, if gay men in pro sports want to be able to come out to their teammates, they're going to have to win a few locker romm fistfights in the process, and wearing a lime green shirt and whining about acceptance won't get them there. A lot of noses, mostly black ones, but a few white ones, too, got bloodied during the Civil Rights movement, so I think these guys have to be willing to pick a few fights. I mean, Tuaolo played fucking nose tackle. I'm sure during his nine-year career, playing on one NFC Championship team, he had occassion to hear some 5'10" 175-lb cornerback crack a gay joke. Then he should have kicked the guy's ass and said, "You just got beat up by a fag. How's that feel?"

Strength respects strength, and two weeks later they'll all be singing Kumbaya and Tualo will STILL be enduring gay jokes, but they'll be told much, much more respectfully.

That wasn't even what I wanted to blog about but now the connection, she flickers.