Of MS, Stem Cells, and Other Musings...

Drugs

2012-01-23T23:00:00.013-06:00

I know that the title of this post has a lurid allure, & I will try my best to adhere to a strictly scientific description. I'm just kidding; that would be boring as shit, & disingenuous. In college, I completed the litany of drugs listed in the Queens of the Stone Age song, "Feel Good Hit of the Summer." Unsurprisingly, I went to rehab about six years ago. (Quizzical addendum: upon my release, my then-girlfriend took me to a bar. A bar! That same day! I remind myself of this frequently. Seriously, a bar!) One of the tenets that I was taught was that all drugs were bad. I subsequently adhered to a strict regiment that followed this dictum. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter I was diagnosed with MS, & that rubric went out the window.

First, I was prescribed amantadine for fatigue, which did absolutely nothing for me. Then, I was given Provigil (a "wakefulness" agent that is regularly given to fighter pilots in order to keep them alert), which helped for a little while, but it soon became clear that it only precluded sleep. I wanted to nap, but couldn't. It did nothing to the lingering need to sleep; it simply stopped me from doing so. After it became clear that the crux of the underlying fatigue was not being treated, my doctor prescribed Adderall. It's an amphetamine that combats the awful fatigue that's one of the most common symptoms of MS. Over time, I've been forced to increase my dosage because this lack of energy has grown. Besides that, I did not enjoy the same allure that it offered recreationally. Without it, I'd remain unconscious for the majority of the day. Not voluntarily, mind you. The need to lie down has grown even stronger over the last year or so. Adderall doesn't make this need abate, because the impulse also stems from a lightheadedness that it does not specifically address. Nevertheless, it provides me with a steady infusion of energy that allows me to function reasonably well. (The extended release does this; a regular tablet provides a short burst of energy, followed by...nothing.) Whereas before this had been used recreationally, now it's used pragmatically.

The same can be said about marijuana. Yes--marijuana. In college, it had never been a major part of my day-to-day. It was available, mind you, but I never particularly cared for it. After all, alcohol was prevalent, so I stuck mainly with that. When I was diagnosed with MS, I familiarized myself with literature about it, & nearly everything I read mentioned marijuana as a beneficial supplementary form of treatment. I gave it a whirl (my exposure to it was gained by a now-forgotten avenue; interestingly, I make bizarre connections without really trying very hard), & experienced firsthand the medicinal attributes that I had read about. It really did help spasticity, & dramatically helped my appetite, which disappeared once I began the stem cell rigmarole. (I was hospitalized for two weeks, & there was a period of about a week where I ate no solid food, & subsisted on Ensure solely. How crazy is that?) While in the hospital, one of my doctors prescribed Marinol, an unimaginatively-named pill that contained synthetic THC. Imagine marijuana without any of the psychedelia, ie fun.

Mainly, it just made me sleepy, which I was anyway. An insurance change made Marinol unavailable (because the price was exorbitant), which was fine because I didn't much care for it. I was subsequently forced (really, "allowed") to go back to the non-pill kind of marijuana.

That brings us pretty much up to date. I still rely heavily on it to deal with the everyday minutiae that is actually onerous to me.

& I still hate reggae.

"And--Finished knowing--Then"

2012-01-14T20:08:00.006-06:00

(I had to check the capitalizations, because they're rife in Emily Dickinson's poetry, & are assigned, seemingly, arbitrarily. "Is" can be capitalized at one point, &, at another, it's not. What you think may be capitalized, isn't, & vice versa. Perhaps it's best not to dwell on such trivial matters, but I can't help it--I notice these things, both because of an almost-autistic, pathogenic attention to detail, & because of my hyper-vigilance born of my degree in English, which demanded an acute eye due to its repeated use of close reading. This is not altogether a good thing, because something as fickle as a capitalization takes on way too much meaning. "Why are those two words used here & not here?...& why is it not capitalized there, but not here?" Welcome to my life--at least a little snippet of it. Imagine that carrying on in perpetuity, sporadically, each day, everyday. I dare you.)

I know it as "Sunday"

2012-01-01T01:30:00.006-06:00

I've always said that I loathe "New Year's," & since I've stopped drinking, it stands in high relief as "Amateur Night." It's an excuse for people who don't drink to drink & act like idiots, & for those who do drink to overindulge. It exposes previously dormant issues to be revealed by the night's overcharged spirit of bacchanalia. This can translate to physical violence, which outside of sports looks very boorish. (This is my problem with the UFC. I can never take it seriously, because without heavy boxing gloves, it just looks like two drunk guys fighting. Yes, they wear gloves, but they're comically light--they're almost unnoticeable. I don't want to sound boorish, but it has always seemed to me to be very homoerotic--two men without shirts grappling.). And, anyways, the history of the calendar disinterests me as much as the explanation of Back to the Future, Part III, which simply makes no sense to me because... I stopped caring, already. I know the names "Julian," "Gregorian," & "equinox," but my knowledge ends there. & I think that is more than most people...ooh, LNE just told me that True Grit is on Netflix Instant. More later.

I just wrote an entire post about subjects as seemingly disparate as the Republican caucus in Iowa, the NFL, The Hurt Locker, Full Metal Jacket, my complete disinterest in science & math, & the total arbitrariness of the concept of recorded time, & now it's gone with the wind, as my great-aunt would have said. Oh, technology, it does have its drawbacks.

I know it'll anger me, but I can't resist watching the results of the Republican Iowa Caucus. The candidates are all insane, & the wholly bland Mitt Romney is a perfectly vapid-enough person to lead the pack. Newt Gingrich? He sounds like a Dr. Seuss villain. Ron Paul? A story about his past statements on race will rightfully sink his fledgling campaign. Rick Santorum? The dead baby thing can never be extricated from my mind. Rick Perry? Please--I think we've had enough of Texas governors this century. Michele Bachmann? She makes Rick Perry look like a Rhodes scholar. If there's anyone else--oh yeah, Jon Huntsman--he doesn't have a chance, so it's not worth mentioning.

Do you know how frustrating it is that that post is gone? Ugh.

R

Melting

2011-12-24T23:19:00.011-06:00

As I continue to get worse, I was trying to think of an adequate analogy to describe my continuous, active permutations related to MS. I've mentioned it several times before, but the example of Jean-Dominique Bauby seems like a logical comparison. He was a writer for Elle & the eventual author of The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, which was eventually made into a movie directed by Julian Schnabel. The book was composed after he suffered a massive stroke, by which he was rendered motionless & speechless, & with the help of others, he used a technique called "partner-assisted scanning," whereby he blinked when the correct letter was recited. This example is a little hyperbolic because I can still move & speak, & depressing, so I came up with another one that's anthropomorphic & somwhat scientific. I mean this in the most rudimentary way, so it should be palatable, but not entirely correct. (After all, you're speaking to an English major, so in college I avoided science classes as much as I could. Needless to say, I took no chemistry courses.) My condition is like water, & its variability.

My symptoms have proliferated regularly, continuously. I first started off with a cane, then moved on to a walker, & now have a wheelchair/power chair. Perhaps the best barometer of the current state of the disease is my face. At first, nothing seemed awry. Then, the right upper corner went numb. About a month ago, the lack of sensation moved across my forehead. Now, unfortunately, in the last few weeks it crossed the median line, & now also affects the left side down to my philtrum, the indentation in the middle of my upper lip. I would say "upper lip," but it seems to have halted just before it, at least for the time being... I used to think, "At least it can't get any worse," because it invariably does, unfortunately.

Now, I've mentioned before that I have no cognitive deficiencies, & this is still true. I know that this must be hard to believe, considering my constant physical decline, but I assure you that, mentally, I'm as sharp as ever. Maybe moreso, because, like a blind person develops other senses more acutely to compensate for the lack of sight, my brain remains unscathed (this is very counterintuitive because MS is a neurological ailment), & subsequently, cognitively I've grown stronger. This doesn't mean I can effortlessly can do math now, but my thoughts have become more lucid & pliable.

Seriously, my ex-girlfriends would find it hard to recognize me. I assure you, though, that I'm still me. Ice may melt, but the chemical compound remains the same. Frozen water is just that--water. When it melts, it's still water. It is, chemically, unchanged. Of course, my prior self was stronger, physically, but not mentally, & certainly not emotionally. Ice may seem stronger, but the Grand Canyon was forged by a river, not a glacier. Outwardly, a block of ice looks strong, but it can easily be broken up.

MS has pulverized my physical self, but the broken bits belie the strength of my inward self. Eventually, those hard, frozen shards melt. The new lack of fortitude looks like weakness, but actually a simple change of state has occurred. Like melted ice retains the chemical makeup of the water when it changes into liquid, I'm still the same person, although I may look different. (I think the strength of this extended metaphor makes that clear.)

&, actually, stronger, because water's hydrogen bonds are stronger than usual. At least, that's what I remember from high school chemistry...

PS--Merry Christmas.

RIP GOP

2011-12-18T21:24:00.011-06:00

The GOP has really imploded. Bush II was a godawful president, & most of the criticism stopped there. Yes, he was dumb--very dumb--but it's overlooked that he was a Republican. In 2010, stupid Americans voted to return control of the House of Representatives to Republicans. Americans elected these awful politicians, & now they're angry that they're doing what they said they were going to do. The latest stunt by House Republicans revealed their priorities as insalubrious to the middle class. In fact, it's worse than simple insouciance, because now they've finally shown that their ire really is directed, pointedly, at the middle class. I can't see it any more plainly than that.

The payroll tax cut is actually a social security tax cut. Hence, it's really a pointed middle class tax cut, because the cap on social security contributions is on income up to $106,800, & income below $20,000 will be unaffected because they're not required to contribute to social security as it is. So, it's actually a middle class tax cut. Republicans maintain that it will only contribute to the debt. This is the height of hypocrisy because they love giving tax breaks to those outliers who they call "job creators," aka rich people.

Republicans against a tax cut--such hypocrisy only exposes the truth, like the longer daylight hours would do to a vampire in Alaska during the summer, by simply showing the GOP's disdain for the middle class. This is the real class warfare, & we know how that always ends up--ask Marie Antoinette. Those who seek to hamstring the middle class do so at their own peril. I would love nothing more than to see John Boehner's head on a pike, but it's best to keep these visions to my imagination.

The old Republican panacea of tax cuts (& then more tax cuts) has reached a critical watershed moment. At this point, they're quibbling with what they consider to be minutiae. Like any simple quadratic equation, Republican clamors for more tax cuts have reached a point where they have gone as far as they can actually go without reaching zero. Okay, that's not true, but they are historically low. It's so old to hear them carp about high taxes.

Also, how is it not abundantly clear that higher taxes mean a better economy? Republicans constantly pine for Reagan, who lowered taxes. Sure, Communism fell under his watch, but otherwise he was an awful president. He cut taxes, & the economy would have tanked had he not recklessly borrowed from China to help pay for his disastrous economic policies when the bill escalated. So, the debt skyrocketed. When Clinton came into office, he confronted a daunting economic legacy that first began because of the terrible domestic economic record of Reagan & Bush I.

Many see this time as the height of Republican politics, but I see it as the beginning of the end. It really is hilarious that the parties essentially switched roles due to inevitable social changes with regard to race.

(By the way, it drives insane that something as beneficent & benign as "progressivism" has received a negative connotation. I'm sorry (not really), but its root is "progress," which is not at all a bad thing.)

Anyways, the spendthrift orgies of war & deregulation have consistently yielded dismal results with regard to the economy. Yes, the evidence has been clear for decades, but only recently have the awful results been so plainly conspicuous that the public notices. The American people are slow, but tenacious. This latest action has been noticed because of its flair & sonorous clarion call, & will be remembered with the tenacious jaws of a pit bull. (You know, the ones that Sarah Palin referred to.)

--Maybe I was premature to announce the death of the GOP, but only by two months.

"Blame Yourselves"

2011-12-17T21:45:00.007-06:00

Over two months ago, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said, in some interview, that poor people should "blame themsel[ves]" for their various travails. A lack of upward mobility stems from laziness, was the inference. This idiotic brand of true elitism is frequently espoused by Republicans when it comes to, you guessed it, taxes. I take a different approach, which refers to constituents, in this regard. I'm sick of politicians glibly saying that the American people are smart. No, they're not. They keep going back to Republicans when it comes to leadership. They elected Barack Obama for president, but when it took more than two years to fix the devastation left by George W. Bush, they turned back to the Party that started the whole mess. We are a nation of geniuses. If the sarcasm there is not immediately palpable, I'll say it quite plainly: the American people are stupid. As I have no aspirations to run for office, I'll say it again quite bluntly: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE STUPID.

One needs to look no further than the presidency. This man was elected twice, & at least once without the voting intrigue surrounding the Supreme Court. How can someone have lived through that & not draw the conclusion that Americans are stupid? (I'll say it again: I will never run for office, so I could not care less about angering the electorate.) Now we have Barack Obama tasked with the unenviable charge of pulling America out of the ditch that it drove itself into.

True, Obama was elected, but this was because America had appointed an oligarch & plutocrat who, in eight years, had turned a record surplus into a record debt. I remember watching Bush get re-elected & resolving to get blisteringly drunk (this was when I still drank) in order to begin to deal with what we had just condemned ourselves to. Then, four years later, we elected Obama, &, when he didn't meet our unrealistic goals quick enough, we elected Republicans to Congress again. Why? Because Americans are stupid.

Yeah, I said it, as Chris Rock would say. I really don't like being subject to the whims of a populace that is as fickle as a toddler. The American people bounce from Republican to Democrat to Republican to Democrat. It's beyond maddening. One would think that, after several election cycles, we would have learned our lesson. I blame such volatility on Baby Boomers.

Yeah, I said it. Sure, the '90s gave us the Era of Clinton, but these voters also gave us the Eras of Reagan, Bush I, &, worst of all, Bush II. Clinton was successful because he merely(!) had to clean up after the disastrous '80s. Reagan was nothing when it came to Bush II. He ballooned the deficit by outsourcing our debt (mainly to China), but Bush II used the demagoguery of the horrific 9/11 attacks in order to legitimize his dismal record, & subsequently our surplus swung right back into a deficit, to a very disproportionate degree. Any graph of the national well-being of the country shows a surge when it comes to Democratic presidents, & a sharp nosedive when a Republican enters office.

After so many years of this clear bipolarity, you'd think we'd know better than to entrust our national health to the cancerous Right. Newt Gingrich, whose name sounds like a Dr. Seuss villain, is the Republican front runner. If you took all of the fat from the bountiful meat of the Clinton years, you'd have an approximation of Newt Gingrich. He always has resembled the pink blob left by Willow when he tries to use his wand on a troll, erroneously.

Seriously--that I even have to consider him as a viable presidential candidate should signal the inevitable implosion of the GOP. It's like the incorrect bolt that destroys a machine completely.

What should Republicans do? Blame themselves.

R

"I dropped down, & down--"

2011-12-13T14:23:00.006-06:00

A phrase popped into my head recently as I was bemoaning the undeniable proliferation of my symptoms, noticed most prominently in my barometric measurement of my facial numbnness. Previously, it was alarming, but negligible. It started becoming fairly noticeable about two weeks ago when it crossed the median & began affecting the other side of my face. On one hand, it might balance out the effects on the right side, thereby negating the outward conspicuousness there; on the other, it continues also to reinforce the hard fact that my condition is worsening. As I gave up looking for an irritating eyelash recently, I thought of Emily Dickinson's poem "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," & the line "I dropped down, & down--" in its final stanza.

When I was first diagnosed, I kept thinking that it couldn't get worse. I thought this as I moved from cane, to walker, to wheelchair/power chair. Needless to say, I've stopped saying it altogether, or even thinking it. I think an interesting barometer that I can use (for now) in order to determine the status of the disease is the numbness on my face. As soon as my fingers' dexterity grew worse, I just stopped certain activities. No harm, no foul, considering how people in my vicinity were actually relieved. Using a pen, it was fine not to be able to write effectively. I had a keyboard, but even that became onerous. Now, my iPad fulfills the crevice left by not being able to write on that due to my increasing reluctance to remain upright for continuously extended periods of time. (Very "meta," by the way.)

So I can scratch that off the list, at least until an awful confluence of events causes me to communicate, like Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, via blinking. One of the few good things about the ailment is that I have virtually unlimited time in which to expound on seemingly trivial minutiae (my specialty). Up until fairly recently, I had felt frustrated by my inability to communicate such issues that warranted my critical eye, such as...anything, really.

Luckily, we live in remarkably amenable times, so I can do things that previously were unthinkable. If this had been even five years ago, who knows how I would have been able to communicate? I have absolutely no talent for photography (I could never draw, so I just skipped to photography), so my options would have been very limited. Like the old man in Breaking Bad, I would have been reduced to ringing a bell in order to express myself. I'd almost certainly grow frustrated & throw it against a wall.

So I have stopped wondering what may come next. I "Finished knowing--then."

R

Plinko

2011-12-10T11:58:00.004-06:00

So I was talking to LNE about the vicissitudes of life. That sounds so mundane & hackneyed, I know, but she now faces one of those inevitable moments where a decision needs to be made about one's professional career--(un)fortunately, I don't have to make that decision, what with the continuous pall of MS. I can't remember the specifics of the conversation, but it may have been about her imminent start at a downtown law firm. She has a bachelor's degree in biology, as well (mine is within the lucrative domain of English), so her domain is fairly wide with regard to what she wants to do. I have no interest in science, so until I entered college, free of the requisite courses of high school, I entertained a generic curiosity of a career in medicine. It's laughable now, but, among the things I unpacked upon arriving on my college campus were two MCAT study books. I went to a fairly basic biology course during our "shopping period" (so named because of the non-binding nature of the commitment), & it was abundantly clear that I had no interest in physical science (those courses were bundled beneath the mantle of Group IV, which also included mathematics, another area I clearly had no interest in). I said something offhand, but the profundity of it was lost at the time. It just seemed like a nice analogy to use; only later did the unfolding layers of cognitive reason there begin to assume the indiscriminate but definite amplitude of phyllo (or "filo").

You know the game Plinko on The Price is Right? The arbitrariness of the concept of fate, along with the whim of chance, is on full display there. Now, one can start anywhere, but it's advisable to start near the middle. Similarly, I thought a career in medicine (it's so funny because it just seems insane now) would vastly improve my chances of reaching that middle jackpot of $10,000. The thing was, though, that you could just as easily end up in the "0"s on either side of the big money. Everyone tried for that, though, & nearly everyone was disappointed. You could take the easy sure thing & end up with a modicum of money, but doing so meant a kind of preemptive defeat. It was just boring.

The same can be said of my aspirations of a career in medicine. (It's still hilarious to contemplate. Seriously, could you imagine? Just hilarious.) As awful as it is to admit, the money side of it appealed to me. By far, the most "successful" of my family was an aunt that married a gynecologist--really, how funny is that? This was a good person who demanded profound respect. My aunt...that's a different story. Okay, enough--before I bore even myself, I'll move on.

Now, I wanted to avoid the foreseeable obstacles that would prevent me from garnering easy cash. However, I couldn't bear the prospect of becoming a minor cog. In the machine, man. Before I start sounding like Dennis Hopper (RIP) in Apocalypse Now, I'll simply say that I refused to adhere to any predetermined path. Now, it's important to note that this aspiration for a conventional life is not foolish. Quite the contrary; it's admirable & pragmatic. It's just not for me.

Quick sidebar: an ex-girlfriend, from college (if you know me, you know who I mean), used to say that she wanted "to be famous." Not a good painter or actress (of which she was both), mind you. Famous. This always deeply troubled me. Like an itch that you know is there, but can't reach. It's perceptible--you know something is uncomfortable, but you can't get to it. Finally, I couldn't ignore it anymore, & I found a tree & went to town. I honestly have no idea what the tree would be in this metaphor. Oh well, whatever, nevermind...

Now, what with the limitations of MS, & the effect of stress on my symptoms, thankfully I didn't pursue this extremely kinetic & onerous path that was supposed to be safe but was, more accurately, a constant weight on your mind that, silently, could spread like insidious cancer. Anyways, going for the safe money is BORING. No one likes to watch somebody who settles. Like in Plinko, the exciting thing is to risk ruin. I would boo the shit out of someone who started in a corner, because the odds are that you'll end up with something--anything, really. I think it's better to take a risk. Strategically.

Sure, the odds are greater that you'll come up with nothing, but it helps to have a little ammunition (see: talent) at your disposal. If you are a bad actress, for example, the odds are infinitesimal that you'll hit it big & win the jackpot. Unless, of course, you're a Kardashian.

R

Suspect Foul Play

2011-12-06T22:30:00.002-06:00

I don't want to sound alarmist, but it's really more conspicuous if I don't mention it. "It," as awful as it is to contemplate, is suicide. A recent study reminded me of how obvious it is that MS & depression go together. I have such a reaction to facile "studies" that concern such tautologies. We're dealing, after all, with a degeneraive neurological ailment.

Luckily, I guess, I have no cognitive issues. Ironically, I have actually grown both more magnanimous & perspispicacious, as my malfunctioning immune system & ravaged spinal cord have rendered my motor skills less & less viable. Reading MS literature (which I rarely do, because it can make one intolerable to be around, & can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as wallowing leads to hypochondria), I became acutely aware of the prevalence of depression, & subsequently suicide, among MS patients.

I aim to tell you not to worry about this possibility, because I would never do that. If, for some awful reason, I die prematurely, I urge you to assume foul play. Don't believe a facile coroner's report that reaches the conclusion of suicide, because it would never happen.

I don't believe in God, so I don't hold onto a fantastical notion that "heaven" will be waiting for me after I die. It's why jihadists/suicide bombers seem so idiotic to me. (Well, one of the reasons...) I don't feel free to leave a trail of carnage behind somewhere, although many people might be troubled by how fickle I view their lives. Since I don't think that a deity would commend me for getting rid of infidels, I see absolutely no point in troubling myself with getting rid of anybody. If I ever feel a murderous inclination, I'll know that I need to take a nap. Warren Zevon may have written a song called "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," & it may be a popular colloquialism, but, as someone else probably has said, I'm not taking any chances. I'd like to get in all the zzzs I can before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Some have romantized the notion of suicide. Hunter S. Thompson, always laudatory of Ernest Hemingway, shot himself in the head over six years ago. In much the same way, many other talented people have taken their own lives. Kurt Cobain (to name someone mildly contemporary), Hart Crane, & Virginia Woolf (2 of my favorite writers) have committed suicide, just to name a few off of the top of my head. I, however, think it's an obscenely dumb thing to do.

One of the reasons I loathe guns of any kind is that even a simple accident could end in my demise. (I thought about using the less selfish "your" there, but I realized that I'm simply not concerned with the death of someone else in this instance. Hence, "I.") &, with my clumsy motor skills, I'd probably unintentionally shoot myself. Not in somewhere that I could claim came from a hunting accident, mind you–-more like a Plaxico Burress-esque bout of stupidity, like in my leg or foot.

& everything else is just gross. I mean, slitting your wists--gross & messy. Pills--boring.

See? I've already run out of steam. & I got bored. Whats's on the telly? Tuesday TV sucks...

R

Indiana, aka Valhalla

2011-12-02T14:46:00.009-06:00

I lie here on my bed, preparing to be magically whisked away to...Indiana. Ugh. Even saying that fills me with dread. It's like reaching the crest of the first, monstrous hill on a roller coaster. I know it's going to suck, but I'm trying to remind myself that it's going to be over soon. I live in Chicago, & my impetus for going back is a haircut. I know that that sounds insane, but it really is easier to do than going here, because my mother has a car. & the staff is aware of my physical limitations, so it's an entirely painless process. Plus, I have an easy rapport with them, so an otherwise mundane task is actually quite pleasurable. Best of all, I don't have to explain, arduously, how to cut my hair. Secondly, I've curtailed my profanity, which previously was totally uncensored, & "I let fly like Mussolini from the balcony" (as Kramer would say on Seinfeld).

However, getting this done requires going to Indiana. Now, I was raised in Indiana, so I know what it means to me... I'm not being dramatic when I say that I have an adverse physiological reaction to it. Even now, anticipating going back, the prospect gives me a sinking feeling. I know that, once I cross the border, my muscles will tense, & refuse to release, only doing so when I see that highway sign that says "Welcome to Chicago" (which was shown, from the other direction, in the beginning of the sitcom Perfect Strangers).

I didn't come to this reaction through a stance of ignorance. I was born in (Crown Point,) Indiana, & raised there. I left for college, in Connecticut, in 2000, when I graduated from high school. Crossing the state line, into Ohio, I remember feeling the immense relief, knowing that I was, officially, out. Almost two decades of pent-up frustration were lifted off, as if they were an albatross. "Finally" was the implication.

I'm not trying to be cruel, but I think that denizens there, voluntarily, remain simply because of ignorance. I know that this has a negative connotation, but I mean that they simply do not know any better. If they did, they would be stupid. (They almost certainly are, but I'm not saying that.) I do not understand how someone could grow up there & think, "Well, I think I'll stay." I'm not kidding when I say that passing the "Welcome" sign on the fringe of Chicago causes me to relax, finally.

I grew up in Hobart, which directly borders Gary, where I spent the early years of my life. The new city was like the complete opposite of the old. I mean this in the most literal, boorish way possible. Think of a photographic negative. Whereas previously everything seemed black, now it was all white. (It was "urban," which is to say "black," & Hobart was more "suburban"/"white.")

The public schools were dreadful, so, thankfully, my mother set out to entrust my education to parochial schools. Hence, I was able to establish myself away from the lowered expectations that ran rampant there. &, also, restrict my wardrobe to the dictates of the dress code, which vastly limited my options. For the most part, I strictly (pardon the pun) adhered to dress shoes, a blue button-down Oxford shirt, navy blue pants, &, up to second grade, a plain navy cross over, one-button tie.

Girls, of course, got around this code by wearing intentionally short skirts & untucking their blouses, & also unbuttoning their cuffs. (&, for high school, leaving open the first few buttons of their blouses in order to entice their male schoolmates.)

(New development: in the last half hour, it became clear that we weren't going, due to scheduling conflicts. Even though this means postponing the inevitable, I can comfortably relax, at least for a few days.)

Since I won't be going for a few days, I feel I nevertheless should celebrate this brief reprieve.

R

To Each His Own

2011-11-26T13:35:00.007-06:00

I was thinking about how I don't believe in God, but I also thought about how I really don't care that others do. As I've said, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks," Gertrude's remark in Hamlet, really does hold true. & the old bus campaign belies the ethos of atheism. By adding flame to the fire of religious contention, raising a ruckus only draws attention to the conflagration, & thusly the luminescence attracts eyes while the core gets destroyed by unseen cancer under the skin, to mix metaphors.

Don't get me wrong--it used to piss me off royally. I attended not 12, but 13, years of Catholic school (I'm counting kindergarten. & my brother went to preschool there too, so add that up while we're using incredibly faulty logic.). As if almost daily Mass (this invaded my bloodstream like a virus, & thankfully was significantly stressed only during my elementary school days. My high school only had it like once a month, & everybody loved it because it meant an adjusted schedule with only half-hour classes. Thinking back on it, it was actually quite awesome.) weren't enough to poison the punch bowl, so to speak, there were incredibly short-sighted pro-life simplistic arguments & thinly-veiled right-wing propaganda meant to marginalize whole swaths of people under the guise of the infallibility of a charismatic but very dangerous leader (who does that sound like?).

Nevertheless, I have since learned not to devalue the inherent & undeniable beauty of certain imagery because of condescension & subsequent virulence. I mean--again, don't get me wrong: the entire premise is ludicrous, but as long as it's kept away from legislation, it really doesn't bother me. This has been & will be the ultimate downfall of religions that assert moral superiority, because the subsequent & inevitable hypocrisy then gets placed in high relief.

Catholicism offers an especially despicable example of officious entitlement hiding beneath the dubious dogma of psychological misanthropy. Molestation is not a simple aberration; it's horrendous criminal activity. Certain things are simply pragmatic, & should not be viewed as anything less than criminal. Child abuse is just always wrong, & ignoring the seriousness of it only makes the problem all the more conspicuous. If you ignore an asteroid, it may eventually take us down, especially if Jerry Bruckheimer is involved. I know it looks down on science, but the Church refuses to acknowledge that sometimes an infused rose is an infused rose, & no amount of justifification can validate how disgusting the behavior is.

That being said, it makes no sense to protest vociferously against a convention that is broadly accepted. It's better to temper certitude with a little elasticity. Being so staunchly pugilistic negates your point of view, even if it's supposedly meant to be beneficent.

R

A Tale of Two Friends

2011-11-25T18:47:00.004-06:00

I'm compelled to start this post with a predictable quote from Charles Dickens, like "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," but it would seem hackneyed, so I'm much more willing to use easily-decipherable aliases, like, say, "Neil" & "LNE." Like the hilariously obvious "Lisa S.," & then, "L. Simpson," in The Simpsons, I chose pseudonyms that are similarly transparent. Anybody with a pulse can clearly make out who I'm talking about, so, since I won't be bad mouthing either of them, I'm content to let the paper-thin aliases stand. They know who I mean, anyways, so I'm fine with being lazy.

The first, "Neil," is someone I've known since high school. We took many of the same classes, & quickly became friends. We have similar senses of humor, so getting to know him was a slam dunk--effortless, in fact. What's truly incredible is that he's the one person that I remain in contact with from that period. Sure, we have many of the same friends, but, oddly, none of them went to the same high school that we did. You see, we attended a parochial school, because the public high school, at least in my hometown, was terrible.

We took many of the same classes, because we were both intelligent, & fell in the same advanced ones. Many a night in high school was spent renting (that's an obsolete option) & watching movies, old & new. We also had siblings that were the same age, so that made our friendship all the more easy. When I was first diagnosed with MS, I had no qualms about disclosing it. For one thing, it was a hard fact, so I never thought about hiding it; also, I didn't even consider concealing it, because the manifestations were not something I could deny. Hence, I was okay with disclosing it.

The same could be said about LNE. We shared an office at a large downtown law firm, so I was preternaturally inclined to tell her about the diagnosis as well. There's an old adage that says that "familiarity breeds contempt," but I had no issues with her at all. Plus, she was (& is) exceedingly nice, so telling her was not a big deal.

Quick digression: she's Greek. Very Greek, in fact. When I once inspected a book she was reading, the text looked alien. Greek characters resemble, well, Greek, & outside of physics, I refused to believe that the letters had meaning outside of that context. It's hard to believe that anyone, let alone someone my age, could see assembled words, & even sentences, amid that insanity. & not only does she read Greek; she speaks it fluently. When she spoke to her parents on the phone, it sounded like gibberish. It was like she was talking to them in an obsolete language; I'm pretty sure Nell would have thought she was just bat-shit crazy. Now, I took Spanish in college, but nothing seemed discernible to me. Even before college, my grandparents spoke Spanish to each other, so I had some familiarity with a language other than English, but this sounded as strange as African bushmen conversing in Swahili. I had nowhere to start, so it just sounded like nonsense. I half expected to hear a nondiscriminate series of clucks & whistles.

For about ten years, niceness seemed anathema to me, so seeing somebody act genial filled me with reactionary repulsion. I didn't actively seek out misanthropes, but being consistently agreeable seemed unnatural. I viewed affability as a cover for stupidity, but neither of these people were dumb. In fact, they were both incredibly smart, & no matter how contumacious I was, this was a stark fact.

I think that, over time, one finds that he need not attribute geniality to stupidity. In fact, I think that doing so in itself is stupid. Ironically, thinking so is, actually, quite stupid. Therefore, when I thought being mean was something of a badge of honor, I was thinking like an idiot.

R

Return

2011-11-25T01:39:00.010-06:00

Whew--it's been a while. Around two years ago (I think it was actually like a year & a half), I went on indefinite hiatus with this thing for a number of reasons. The first was that I felt like I was grasping at straws for material. Yes, not every day presents material that needs to be recorded, but I shouldn't simply have continued, because, as I've said before, I emphatically did not want to emulate Proust & write about sleep. Honestly, no one gives a shit about your dreams, unless they somehow involve the other person. (In my case, this would not make it more tolerable, because the odds are that I killed you in the dream.) I think enough material has sufficiently built up to prattle on about, but first I'd like to bring you up to speed on the current state of my union.

First of all, I have zero cognitive defects, & actually the physical difficulties belie the fortitude of my mental capacities. It's a strange inverse development: my physical symptoms have grown worse, but mentally I've never been sharper. For instance, I cannot sit at my computer for very long before my lightheadedness becomes intolerable. I've tried to describe this before, but I think it's still a bit unclear. You know how you feel lightheaded going down a small hill? It's like a prolonged sensation like that, but without the weird stomach feeling. It feels like all the blood is pouring from my head, like sand in an hourglass, & only by lying down am I restored to a state of equilibrium. This has made it very uncomfortable to do much of anything, because nearly everything involves sitting erect. Going to the movies, for instance, fills me with dread because I know that I'll have to sit up for at least 90 minutes. Same thing with restaurants: I generally eschew dessert (well, not really) because I just want to lie down quickly.

This is where the iPad is invaluable. I can lie down & write, like I'm doing now. & something else, too, about the iPad--it makes reading so much easier. Prose, at least. I figured out how to turn off the percentage thing next to the battery icon. It's nerve racking to see that number tick down a percentage point while you're in the middle of a page. Now, without it, I'm free to read without that peripheral icon judging me, & me constantly waiting for the number to tick down another percentage point.

I still have a problem when it comes to poetry, & you can see why: a few weeks ago, I downloaded a collection of verse by my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson. Now, I've read her poems innumerable times, & I was perusing some of her more popular ones when I came upon "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," when I immediately recognized that a stanza was missing:

Or rather-He passed Us-
The Dews drew quivering and chill-
For only Gossamer, my Gown-
My Tippet-only Tulle-

I knew instantaneously that it was conspicuously missing, because the "My Tippet--only Tulle" part has been etched into my brain for like 15 years. When I quote that poem, for instance, I almost always say, "My Tippet--only Tulle," because it's alliterative & contains references to abstruse, sartorial terms. I remember thinking, "What the hell is a 'tippet'? &, for that matter, 'tulle'?" So that I saw as an inexcusable transgression, & am resigned to stick to prose.

I have several dozen books now, & I've yet to find such a glaring omission in them. True, such an excision would be much less noticeable, but I've read "Hamlet," for instance, dozens of times, & my electronic version does not seem to be missing anything. (Yes, I know that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter primarily, but even in Sir John Falstaff's bits, which were written in prose, nothing seems to be missing.) Even in longer works, such as Blood Meridian (which I've also read multiple times), nothing is conspicuously missing.

Oh--I cannot tell you how crestfallen I was to find that stanza missing.

Anyways, so my iPad now continues to reveal more amazing innovations when it comes to reading. You know how you used to have to angle your body toward a light source in order to see text adequately? No more. The device's internal illumination means that you can, literally, read in the dark. Priceless.

These accommodations offered by improved technology do not negate the hard fact that my disease is, pardon the pun, progressing. My face, for instance, serves as a kind of barometer of the current status of the disease. In the beginning, there was minimal facial numbness. Then it spread to my right eye, & stayed relegated mostly there. Over the last few months, though, it has proliferated to the left side of my face. & I've moved from a cane, to a walker, & now, to a power chair. When I go outside, I mainly like to be pushed, so I don't have to worry about capsizing, or running into things, be they stationary (fire hydrants, parking meters, etc.) or not (people, animals, & the like).

The most prevalent form of MS is relapsing-remitting. It's now quite clear that I have never had a period where my symptoms, um, remitted. I remember sitting in the exam room when Dr. Burt, the immunologist at the helm of the stem cell study,made a stair-like gesture, & then an up-&-down flapping motion with an arm. Now, I may be an English major, but I knew that he was giving a representation of a chart that showed how I perceived that my disease was progressing. I knew that the stem cell transplant had no effect on primary-progressive, but I also knew that there was no treatment for it, so, in my mind, I had nothing to lose.

Which brings us pretty much up to date. So, even though I'm not as garrulous as I used to be, I'm also more deliberate in my choice of words, & my newfound avenues of expression allow me to communicate more effectively. I don't mean to be morbid, but if Roger Ebert can still write regularly, so can I.

R

Resignation

2010-03-18T15:55:00.010-05:00

It's been a while since I've mustered the will to write something new. Partly this is because I have no job, so this has been my outlet for "work," and I decided to give myself a vacation, so to speak, and partly I needed to wait for something to build up so I could write about it, lest I start to emulate Marcel Proust and begin to write about sleep, which I've often said is a self-indulgent, lazy topic of conversation that you can be sure that I will tune out. (No one gives a shit about your dreams, everybody--FYI.) I could have, and arguably have, forced my words in the past. However, I'm voluble by nature, so talking about minutiae has never been an issue. Even now, with neurological issues that threaten to stymie my tongue, I manage to eke out grumblings about idiots who TiVo shit like Two and a Half Men (have I mentioned how much I loathe that show?).

I've subsequently occupied my time by perusing The NY Review of Books and The New Yorker. I have subscriptions to those, along with Harper's, and, if you think those are pretentious, ESPN Magazine. I enjoy Bill Simmons's columns, as well as Anthony Lane's movie reviews. David Denby can be too priggish for me to stomach at times, along with various professors from Princeton who fecklessly try to convince me of Toni Morrison's aesthetic attributes. But I digress.

One thing I discovered--a little late, admittedly--is the great AMC show Breaking Bad. I've seen Mad Men, and I can't get into it. It comes off (to me, at least) like a vapid period-piece of the advertising world of the 1960s. Breaking Bad takes place in the present, but this is not why I find it so compelling and, uh, addictive. The writing is pitch-perfect and the storytelling is not cloying. It doesn't demand your attention, but you find yourself drawn to it. Bryan Cranston (the dad from Malcolm in the Middle, in case you didn't know) plays a high school chemistry teacher stricken with incurable, advanced cancer. He, along with a 20-something kid who guides the distribution of the crystal-meth that they produce and amass, deals the drug beneath the attentions of his wife (Anna Gunn, who played Mrs. Bullock on Deadwood, my favorite show of all time), son, and brother-in-law, who happens to be a DEA agent. I've reached the end of the ongoing run, and look forward to watching its resumption coming up on Sunday.

I was also grateful for the release of the recent documentary of the Canadian tour of The White Stripes, Under Great White Northern Lights. It has a distinct Eat the Document (the unreleased film about Bob Dylan's 1966 tour of England) feel, without the Dada-istic digressions or someone--like John Lennon did--needed to temper the acerbic frontman. Jack White is gentlemanly and gracious, even to the nursing home residents who have no idea who he is. And he brotherly-ly watches over and guides Meg, the other half of the duo whose emotional tenuousness and fragility necessitated their subsequent, and currently unbroken, hiatus. Decry the shenanigans and the apocryphal "brother-sister" thing all you want, but it's obvious that he cares about her. The gentle way that he consoles her by putting his arm around her after playing a tender "White Moon" on a piano shows that he empathizes with her. The seamless way that she intuitively follows his leads on guitar with her drums shows that she does, too.

R

Oscar Picks (The Hurt Locker: Better Than Avatar (But It'll Lose))

2010-03-04T12:53:00.005-06:00

I've seen both The Hurt Locker and Avatar twice, so I feel qualified to make this distinction. So, for that matter, are Inglourious Basterds (I always have trouble with the title, because I can spell) and A Simple Man, although both have won Oscars before, and I haven't seen Precious yet, but I assume it's as good as I've heard (& thus also better than Avatar too).

It's not that I dislike James Cameron's movie, even if it was a bit long. I enjoyed it and its technological innovations. Plus, I'm someone who has Terminator 2 on DVD (after I had it on VHS), so I'm quite receptive to anything James Cameron. The most recent blockbuster was entertaining, but there's no way it's better than a handful of the others.

This year's obscenely bloated ten nominees for Best Picture are all good, I assume, but there are ten. This year has twice the amount of usual prospective winners because, I think, the Academy is trying, nostalgically, to resume the long list of nominees of early years. I'm pretty sure this will be a one-year trial. Anyways, here are my picks that almost certainly won't be very accurate. I'm sticking to a rigid "Here's Who Will Win" versus "Here's Who I Think Should Win" because nobody cares.

Best Picture: Avatar.

Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow (she and ex-husband Cameron might swap awards for Picture and Director, but I'm sticking with this, for now).

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges (he's due, which I understand is a foolish way to pick winners, but whatever--this isn't the Emmys).

Best Actress: Sandra Bullock (Meryl Streep is nominated every year, it seems, and Helen Mirren--although I love her--has also been nominated before and won in the past).

Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (almost a lock--damn he was great in Inglourious Basterds).

Best Supporting Actress: Mo'Nique (I'm told this is almost as inevitable. Plus I really want to hear her thank God first and, I hope, point to the sky like P. Diddy).

Screenplay (Adapted): Precious (again, I'm told it's good).

Screenplay (Original): Quentin Tarantino (he already won this for Pulp Fiction when Forrest Gump took home that year's Best Picture honor, maddeningly).

The others, like the ones for Cinematography and Editing, will probably go to Avatar. It deserves something more, and will win other technical shit against the others. I hope I'm wrong.

R

--6/8. Not bad...

Sometimes I wonder, "Who am I?"

2010-03-02T15:07:00.002-06:00

That question is the title of a recent, great Lou Reed song. It came up recently when I used the Shuffle function on my iPod. It briefly threw me into an inevitable ontological examination. Then I turned it off when I saw that Rocky IV was on, and wanted to hear Apollo Creed's trainer/coach tell Balboa to "hit the one in the middle."

It's not like I was on the verge of a great metaphysical breakthrough. A moral inventory always degenerates into a litany of bad things and regrets. And like the song popularized by Frank Sinatra, I reach the same conclusion: "I've had a few/But then again, too few to mention."

Every so often, I look back on my former self and marvel. It's not a stance that connotes impressiveness; rather, I'm more often incredulous. I can't believe what I said or did, and this most recent, focused example is no exception. A few years ago, I made the observation that past actions look ludicrous after a while, and I acknowledged that I would probably come to disavow my mindset then.

I did, of course. After a year or so, I now think about certain actions and behaviors and can't begin to validate them. It's possible that MS has sped up the time of my recognition/identification of such epochs, but I think it's more of a natural development of age. When you're a teenager, such a realization might embryonically make sense, but the import does not crystallize. "Yeah, yeah," you might say dismissively, but you don't really grasp the concept.

I scoffed and was mildly insulted when an ex-girlfriend's sister made this observation a while back. It was imperfect, and more aimed at someone's youth comparatively. She was 23 or so, and I was 21 or 22. In fact, the accusatory, judgmental tone should be faced inward. (It would have been nice to have had this rejoinder, but I felt besieged since I was younger by more than a year. Plus, I was only 21 or so, and such modes of thinking were elusive.)

Simple age isn't enough to assert one's superior maturity (which of course sounds condescending and pedagogical). Numerous idiots with whom I was in rehab had stunted their personal growth with drugs and alcohol. They were stuck in the mindset that they had whenever they began their destructive abuse of whatever their preferred substance was. (Unfortunately, this was very young for my dad, who always seemed like an immature teenager to me. Not just a teenager, mind you--an IMMATURE one, which sounds redundant but, I assure you, is not.)

I wouldn't even know what to call myself now: Mach 5? At this point, such temporal divisions are impossible to count. Obviously that's not true, because I'm still in my 20s. The truth is, I'm lazy and don't want to count. Plus it'd probably be imperfect.

I acknowledged before (not here, until now) that I am an unreliable, imperfect voice (anyone who's seen me karaoke might say "No shit."). Never, of course, has this seemed more true. I've clearly said it before, but now I mean it more emphatically than ever: don't listen to me.

But do.

R

2 Things I Don't Get

2010-02-25T20:16:00.007-06:00

There are many things I don't understand. So it's almost futile to try and enumerate them, except in a few egregious instances. That I don't understand them is not wholly complete. I hate them--I passionately dislike them--and I can't remain in a room where they are. In many cases, these days, I'm grateful that I downloaded various games onto both my cell phone and my iPod. (As I've mentioned, I have a Touch because I have way too much music to fit on a phone. For a myriad of incoherent reasons, I don't have a true iPhone and this is one is the most vindicating, although a Touch is simply an iPhone without the calling capacity.) When the Winter Olympics or Two and a Half Men comes on and someone else wants to watch, I retreat to that before I remove myself altogether.

Mostly this is because MS hinders my true intention, which is to shoot out of the room. Eventually, though, I can't stand any more Bob Costas or Charlie Sheen, and have to leave somehow. Occasionally I find myself stuck in a living room that I can't escape, and I have to endure the hackneyed commentary of the former or the banal dialogue of the latter.

The Olympics don't really assault my sensibilities. I just find them boring as shit. Who the hell wants to watch white people brave the daunting snow and/or slide on skates? This is my way of saying that they're mildly racist. Of course there are black athletes, but you never think of one's name. There is nowhere where this is more apparent than figure skating, which has been the butt of many jokes but mostly this concentrates on sexual orientation more than race.

Wait--that's not true, because actually it's very perceptible in every sport. Similarly, whoever prefers The Sopranos to The Wire is a racist, I'm convinced, however faint their racial biases are. The Wire is so much better, and The Sopranos was based on the earth-shattering (sarcasm again), trite premise of a mobster in therapy. It's not bad, though, especially in comparison to a piece of shit like Two and a Half Men.

The glib quips of jackasses like Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer (the "Two" in the title) are met with canned, fake audience laughter that only highlights how unfunny they are. I'm not totally averse to laugh tracks, mind you, because Seinfeld and a few other great shows of the past had them. I suspect, too, that a studio executive insisted on them, much like Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall protests while someone at a soundboard inserts the sounds of an audience's laughs.

That only becomes noticeable when the script is unfunny. I nearly forgot that Seinfeld had one because it was funny. Two and a Half Men is not. I know that various protests may lie in the subjectivity of humor, but in this case the show is objectively unfunny. Charlie Sheen swirls the ice cubes around in a tumbler of whiskey, mutters an inane comment, and the audience laughs, against their better judgment. Jon Cryer says something patently unhip, and the audience laughs. The fat kid says something--anything, and the more incredulous the better--and the audience laughs. This wouldn't be a problem if any of these things were funny, but they aren't.

I know I run the risk of being labeled a snob, but anyone who lobs that insult perfunctorily would never know what that means--"perfunctorily," to clarify. Also, they're dumb enough to watch Two and a Half Men voluntarily and regularly, so their opinion holds no sway with me.

I really don't care. That shows sucks unremittingly. Objectively.

R

A Deflection Aimed at Palin

2010-02-22T23:42:00.004-06:00

I suppose I should offer an explanation for my recent two-day hospitalization, but I don't feel like it. (To sum it up, I'm on Trazodone for sleep and back on Zoloft, for better or worse.) Not now, anyway, because I again saw that Family Guy clip that made fun of Sarah Palin. If you watch the show, which you should, you already understand that that episode defamed her more than her daughter, who has Down syndrome.

Predictably, the Right, in this case exemplified by Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin (I only just now connected the Fox News dots), took umbrage with a recent episode of Seth MacFarlane's brain-child that cast someone with Down synndrome to play a date of Chris's (the fat son who is voiced by the show's other Seth, Seth Green). Of course she didn't like the snippet, although it's another example of her opportunistic hypocrisy that she let Rush Limbaugh go (physically easy for that tub of goo) for doing the exact same thing.

Her, and his, excuse was that he did it in the name of "satire." Obviously she, and he, doesn't watch the show because everything gets lampooned, and Karl Rove and, uh, HE were on an episode recently (their animated avatars were their physical presences, of course, although I wonder if either of them could fit through a studio door--because they're fat).

I have to go off on a tangent again, because I have friends who watch Fox News ironically and an uncle that listens to Rush Limbaugh without irony. I must say that, as I've said before, irony has its limits, and Glenn Beck, even though he may make me laugh with his stupid, nonsensical chalkboard and maudlin displays of outrage and continuous copious crocodile tears, wields immense power as a television demagogue who exploits the bigotry of anyone who nods in agreement. I can't watch it for more than the few seconds it takes me to realize that I accidentally landed on the channel. I avoid it like an allergen, because I could be moving my head up and down and someone would think I agree with whatever bullshit is on the screen. And also, I love it that Limbaugh, with his cochlear implant, was on a show that also has an episode with a greased-up deaf guy.

But anyway--back to how much I hate Sarah Palin. I tried to think of a less direct adjective to describe my feelings toward her--loathe, despise, dislike, abhor, detest, etc.--and, though I do feel all of those ways about her, I settled on "hate" because it's short and sweet. Ever since McCain completed the destruction of his reputation by picking her as his running mate, I have had to endure her idiocy. For that reason alone--that he gave her national prominence--his honorable service during the Vietnam War has evaporated. Now I rue that the VC didn't complete the job. I realize that that sounds puerile, but I don't care--he sold himself out 40 years later. (Also, there's no way that she could exploit my brusqueness because she would never know what "puerile" means. And McCain, I'm sure, has no idea how to use a computer).

She is obscenely dumb, and seems to revel in it. This always drove me nuts when someone would cite Bush's simple mindset as an attribute and neglected his simple-mindedness. We should accept the fact that she is a moron, and move on.

R

Bye Bayh

2010-02-18T12:10:00.004-06:00

When I heard that Senator Evan Bayh was leaving his post at Congress, of course I suspected another more prurient revelation that had not been disclosed yet. He cited Washington's "dysfunction" as the primary factor behind his decision. No shit--Congress was a cesspool way before he took office in 1999, so this is not exactly groundbreaking stuff. In case he also didn't know, McDonald's is bad for you. You'd think he'd be less shameless and reluctant about making such obvious observations.

His resignation has been touted as another blow to the Obama presidency. It is, clearly, but the Administration has not exactly set the world on fire with its massive reforms. As I've lamented, he really hasn't done anything. There have been several minor legislative victories, but he hasn't closed Guantanamo, nor has he passed health care reform. Bush never had the majority in Congress that Obama's had, and yet he still managed to drag us into two quagmires/wars, oversaw the worst economy since the Great Depression, and supported the most relaxed financial regulations that Reagan could only dream of. (Etc.)

He warned of "catastrophe" when Scott Brown began surging in the Massachusetts's polls, but didn't explain just what this would entail. Yes, the GOP is a party of obstructionists, but is it not the job of the majority party to find a way around this? Democrats' modus operandi was to use their huge congressional majorities to pass things. The problem was, they didn't to begin with. From the start, they relied on their supermajority to avoid a destructive, potential filibuster that never came. I'm not saying that Republicans wouldn't have blocked numerous bills, but they'd then be forced to explain to their constituents why they did what they did. I suspect that, especially in the South, logic would elude them anyway, but they'd have to try, at least. Wringing your hands is understandable, but eventually you have to throw a punch. Preferably in the face of that worm Joe Lieberman.

When Bayh announced his imminent resignation, I really didn't care. In fact, I thought "Good riddance" and even had the Green Day song of the same name stuck in my head. By the way, that song stands with "You Look Wonderful Tonight" and "I'll Be Watching Your" as the most misunderstood, although it, along with the former, might be difficult to discern based on the banal title. It's actually titled "Good Riddance," though, and "Time of Your Life" is the parenthetical subtitle. Anywho, he labeled himself a "centrist" even as Congress was inching farther and farther to the right. Common sense becomes "socialism" to Republicans. Such is the sad state of the US...

I joke and say that Bayh, with the "blue dog" Democrats, is really a Republican with a sense of electoral pragmatism. Now, though, the influence of the pathetic middle will really be felt. It's disconcerting to think that they wield more power than ever. Obama's pusillanimous clamor for bipartisanship was always nice in theory, but it doesn't work when the other side thwarts it nonsensically and continuously.

Bayh has been a reliable Democratic vote in the Senate, but that means less and less with each uneventful passing day. He is an alumnus of St. Albans in DC with a degree in business economics, so I'm sure he's familiar with a concept that has thus far typified the Obama Administration: diminishing returns.

R

Don't Shrug Me Off

2010-02-16T22:30:00.004-06:00

The past few days have been immensely frustrating. I cannot fall asleep. It's not even a dubious claim like many people make, only to find out that they've been asleep for hours, like on Dateline and its cameras with night vision. I remain conscious at all times--painfully so.

I used to scoff at the ails that come with insomnia. "Just go to sleep!," I thought. The problem is that I try try try, and fail unremittingly. It's not an example of unaware twilight sleep, where you sleep and don't remember, and thus don't know it. I had my wisdom teeth pulled a few years back, and know that the phenomena are quite different. In one, you're knocked out and awake nearly imperceptibly, and in this one, I'm very awake at all times. There was a funny (not ha-ha) instance where my uncle came into my grandmother's room earlier today and thought that I had fallen asleep because I was supine and motionless. I heard him, though, and remained frustrated that I was still awake.

I've said before that my anticlimactic experience with Ambien in the past left me wary of taking it again. At this point, though, I'm willing to give nearly anything a whirl. I chalk that up to misremembered dysfunction, sort of like the appeal of a bad relationship. The adage is that hindsight is 20/20, but this is foolish. Actually, memory is selectively forgetful, ironically. "It'll be different this time" is a mantra repeated by many a battered wife, and it has become a cliche. Truthfully, sadly, history nearly always repeats itself. Every once in a while, though, actual change creeps in. Or I could be delirious from sleep deprivation, which is wholly possible. Like I've said, I also took Restoril, and was wiped out for much of the next day, so I remain averse to it but think, maybe, that I exaggerated its effects.

My doctors, I feel, cannot grasp the extent to which my inability to fall asleep is an issue. I'm not fucking around, though, and even though I previously touted their prowess, I am now sufficiently frustrated to cast them aside. When I delve into the particulars of this, I understand that this is a foolish and prime example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm obscenely angry, though, at my body's refusal to go to sleep easily. Similarly, I'm supremely pissed at their insouciance with regard to it.

One of the things I'm told is that sleep deprivation can exacerbate some of the symptoms of MS. Why, then, do my doctors not seem to take it as seriously as I feel it? You'd think that they'd be jumping at the problem, scrambling to rectify it. Not so, strangely. I feel insane because of the vehemence I think I'm saying that it bothers me, only to get little response. Really, WHAT THE FUCK? I'm not a frantic, panicky hypochondriac, so take me seriously.

It's become such an issue that propofol crossed my mind. Any time you empathize with Michael Jackson should disturb you. He had a chronic difficulty sleeping, and went so far as to employ a doctor who administered the local anesthetic used in major surgery just to knock him out. I always end up thinking of the absurdity of it, but the fact that I even lapse into thinking about it at all freaks me out. Luckily, I don't have millions of dollars at my disposal to consider such an idiotic gambit.

I like my doctors, but the fact that I even have to worry about this makes me think twice about my thoughts about them. Really--WHAT THE FUCK?!

R

Paid in Full

2010-02-11T23:12:00.004-06:00

I don't believe in God, because I find the whole concept and precept aboriginal, but I wish I did (much like I wish I were gay) because it would make everything so much easier. However, I am susceptible to certain philosophies that use the idea, at least tangentially. I don't embrace and espouse them, but I sort of see how they make a modicum of sense, at least. Karma appeals to me in theory, but, like tenets of monotheism (and, for that matter, polytheism--any theism, really), gets a little silly when particulars are discussed.

I've acknowledged it before, but I think, if there is a divine presence (theoretically, of course), my accounts have been balanced and finalized. To continue the financial metaphor, I am in the black, even if I were in the red for a while. I won't cite particulars (sensational and juicy as they may be), but the truth is that I have done things that may have warranted the pall of MS. The atonement period expired months ago, however.

Now I'm amassing credits that I don't believe will ever be redeemed. The awful difficulties that I face every second of every day should get me a plush afterlife. Unfortunately, I don't believe in one. I really wish I did, so I no longer resent theists--let's call them Christians, to make things easier. They blindly throw their faith behind a deity that they cannot substantiate (pardon the pun, Catholics). I'm fine with this, because it doesn't affect me.

Like I said, the concept of karma appeals to me, but not, admittedly, in the purely benevolent sense. What I endure is an unremitting (even if the ailment does remit) torture that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Actually, I probably would if I didn't have to experience it myself so acutely. It would be an undeniably enticing curse to bestow on someone. Just not me...

My theological beliefs, although they are really nonexistent, center on Hunter S. Thompsons's "Great Magnet." This differs from synchronicity because it places a moderate amount of influence on the individual (& it's not an album by the intolerable Police). So, I accept a certain amount of the difficulties of MS, but I think those stumbling blocks have been accounted for, and then some. Now I'm taking whatever else emerges from this annoying, debilitating disease on credit.

I wish someone could convince me of the existence of a deity. Any attempt at proselytization, however, is immediately disregarded. It's just not a purely selfless gambit. Sure--someone may insist that it is, but actually he or she is actually trying to validate their own foolishness. I can hear protests from numerous acolytes of various faiths, but, like John Stossel says, "Gimme a break."

Like many a narcissist (an ex-girlfriend insultingly gave me a copy of Alexander Lowen's book, simply titled Narcissism--thanks, he said sarcastically) would avow, back to me. Being stricken with MS eradicates any mystical ties that religion could offer. This might seem like the opposite would be true, but actually it only has cemented my aversion to magical thinking. In Catholic school, we were told that God embodied three things: benevolence, omnipotence, and loving. If this were true, how to account for something that contradicts all of these? I realize that I sound like Job, who lamented his constant travails, but, again, gimme a break. Anyone who believes such simplistic nonsense clearly cannot conceive of such suffering. I always thought that that story was utter bullshit. He should have been pissed, because what all-benevolent being would subject one of his, uh, subjects to the multitude of tortures that he had to abide? You'd have to be a monumental prick to foist such horrors onto someone. Or a negligent, ignorant child with a magnifying glass who roasts insects willy-nilly. And don't give me any nonsensical, passionless explanations that emphasize humans' intellectual inferiority.

If logic is so mysterious, doesn't that mean that the vast majority of us is insane? Actually, that doesn't seem so unreasonable.

R

Technical Geography

2010-02-07T22:30:00.008-06:00

Technically, I should be upset that the Colts lost to the Saints tonight in the Super Bowl. I was born in Indiana, raised in Indiana, went to school in Indiana, and all of that. As I hope I've made abundantly clear by now, though, my allegiances lie with anything linked to Chicago. I grew up cheering for the Bulls, White Sox (Indiana informs my identification with anything on the South Side), and Bears. Therefore, I never gave a shit about any team with "Indiana" in its name--Pacers, Colts, or Hoosiers (although I like Bobby Knight and Larry Bird).

I don't like it when somebody looks incredulous when I say this. I understand it, so someone who's not from the state might not comprehend why I feel the way I do. Most people from "The Region" (aka NW Indiana) get it, though. I've said it many times, but I grew up watching local newscasts from Chicago, as well as all of the sportscasts that centered on those teams. Never did I see a Pacers game unless the opponent was the Bulls. I was aware of Reggie Miller, but more because of his jagged teeth than his three-point prowess. Or whenever the Pacers played the Knicks and there was drama that usually involved John Starks somehow--but I'd had my fill of that weasel when his team repeatedly got trounced by Michael Jordan & Co.

Likewise, I have no real affinity for the Saints. My limited knowledge of them lets me know that Mike Ditka, another hero of Chicago, coached them for a few seasons at the end of his career. That's it--other than their much-publicized acquisition of the vastly overrated Reggie Bush. His most noteworthy contribution as a professional athlete is his ultimately boring relationship with the, uh, boring and untalented Kim Kardashian.

However, I vociferously despise another Bush (W.), and took great umbrage with his idiotic and unbelievably horrid handling of Hurricane Katrina. Yes, I went to college with his daughter, but I notoriously asked her, drunkenly, if she'd had an abortion, so a friendship was not exactly in the cards. (This was no big loss for me.) At my graduation, I came very close to running her mother, First Lady Laura, over on the way to my seat, and my only regret about that situation is that I didn't. I'm sick of hearing about what a nice person she is--she married W, so she's a fucking idiot by default. Partly because of my hatred for Bush, I love New Orleans.

I don't like college football, but I was acutely aware that quarterback Drew Brees played for Purdue because a lot of my friends went there and mentioned it frequently. For anyone who scoffs at my preference of the NFL, or Brees Mach 2, over the NCAA should know this so I can disregard their protests. The BCS is an irrevocable mess, and the revolving cast of players makes it almost impossible to follow. I like basketball and March Madness more, but I still would rather watch the NBA. My mind can only hold so much information, and a constantly shifting roster much like a lizard's tail that regenerates every few years leaves room for little else. (At least, that's part of my rationalization.)

When the Bears played the Colts in the Super Bowl a few years ago, I disingenuously asserted that I'd be covered no matter the outcome. Truthfully, I really really really wanted the Bears to emerge victorious, even if I immensely disliked QB Rex Grossman and his cloying, Cheshire-cat grin. This year was different. I adamantly and vocally wanted the Saints to win. I knew this was a long-shot, and Vegas complied with a five-point victory projected for the Colts.

Amazingly, New Orleans overcame these odds. In recent weeks, their limp defense could not keep up with the dynamic offense. Tonight, though, when it mattered the most, it kept Peyton Manning at bay, even if this is a nearly impossible feat. He still passed for 333 yards, but his performance was marred by a costly interception that resulted in a Saints touchdown.

I know he's good, but I still want him to lose. His disappointment is only that much sweeter because of the Colts' loss, and the Saints' win. Plus, head coach Jim Caldwell's infuriating decision to bench Manning and assure the only defeat of the Colts' regular season at the hands of the Jets only looks worse with a Super Bowl loss. It might not have been dumb, technically, but now it really looks very foolish.

R

Insomnia: Not Just a River in Egypt

2010-02-05T16:24:00.002-06:00

That makes no sense, but lack of consistent sleep makes me unimaginative and The Office-esque because of my penchant for misnomers. Because of this, I'm willing to settle for middling everything. There are limits, of course. I emphatically won't watch something as trite and dumb as Two and a Half Men. God I hate that show... What's more, I'm more willing to act brusquely or to curse copiously, which I do anyway. The problem is that my frustration has reached a point of super-saturation. Anything minor can set me off--sort of. Like I've said, I'm lazy by nature and this only excuses it.

When I was in the hospital, the nurses gave me Ambien, which did nothing for me. I might as well have taken a sugar pill, or some other placebo, because I was still up past 5 AM. My doctors settled on Restoril, which sounds like the drug manufacturers tried to think of a juicy name, but then gave up. Restoril worked, I guess, but turned me into a zombie the next day. It's been a while, so I can't detail exactly how it fucked me up, but I remember telling myself not to take it again.

Now, I've reached the end of my rope with regard to this shit. Nothing exciting happens at 5 AM, so the world should be thankful it's unconscious. For the rest of the day, my energy level, which is already low, is indistinct. My reluctance to get out of bed sounds like a telltale sign of depression, but it's not. This conjecture becomes irrelevant so early/late in the day. I can't do a goddamn thing.

Writing even becomes more arduous than usual. It was never a pleasant walk in the park to begin with, and I always viewed it like exercise--a necessary evil. Now, it's an extraneous absurdity. I still do it, obviously, but I'd rather not. In fact, now I insist, like a drug addict or alcoholic, that I can stop at any time. And I can.

See?

R

I Really Like My Doctors

2010-02-02T16:36:00.010-06:00

When I was first diagnosed, I accepted the status quo of just about everything, and, ironically, this included my choice of doctors. Part of this was my own fault, partly because I had to operate within the confines of an HMO. For most people this is not a problem, and I thought I fell in the overwhelming majority. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I actually was part of a small minority (a concept that had heretofore been okay, but now sucked). The doctors that I had prior to my diagnosis weren't bad, just ill-equipped, in their respective specialties. Now, though, I can access the finest in neurology, etc., without having to worry if they're "in-network" or not.

My neurologist is Dr. Roumen Balabanov, an Eastern European transplant (pardon the pun) with an accent oddly close to Dr. Charles Nichols of The Fugitive. He even mildly looks like Jeroen Krabbe, although the accent might make me think that. After all, he doesn't have the opportunistic guile of that character. Both, though (the character and my doctor), work in Chicago, so that too can account for my tone-deaf alignment of a Dutch accent and one from Bulgaria, where I think Balabanov is from (I could do a Google search, but I don't feel like it).

In conjunction with the aforementioned Dr. Richard Burt, the two guide my treatment scheme with regard to my involvement with the stem cell whathaveyou. I hesitantly keep everyone at arm's length as it is, so I'm especially wary of doctors. I have a strange relationship with them, though, in that I get along with them preternaturally well. Appointments are not nearly as uncomfortable as they could be, and I delude myself by thinking that this has to do with my nice rapport with them, born of my above-normal intelligence. Really, I think it has to do more with the supercilious attitude I exhibit with them.

I always shook my head at the rampant stupidity of guests/dumb performance artists on various talk shows when they scoffed at marriage as a bureaucratic institution. Mostly, this happened because I knew that they couldn't conceive of two words, back-to-back, that each had four syllables. At a certain point, though, I too espoused their poses and misgivings--not just for marriage, but for advanced degrees. I still remain suspicious of many master's degrees or doctorates. Every so often, however, an example of a truly useful one comes along, mostly with regard to medicine. Without an MD, a "doctor" looks crazy or felonious, or both, with a prescription pad.

Improbably, I have two capable doctors that work on the vanguard of my neurological issue. For non-math majors like me, I'm pretty sure that's 100% more than one. Even one is more than most people get. Like I said, this is not an indictment of the abilities or knowledge of previous doctors I've had. My old neurologist's practice seemed to focus more on issues related to Alzheimer's. Therefore, I wasn't personally offended by what I perceived to be a deficiency in his expertise. However, his aversion to steroids did piss me off. I assume he had a bad experience with another patient, so he empirically disregarded them as treatment, which I thought, and still think, is foolish and an idiotic way to practice medicine, but I digress...

I chalk this up to inevitable multiple stabs at finding the right doctors. Like the song by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles advises, "you'd better shop around." Loyalty should not enter one's mind when picking a doctor. I understand the impulse to stick with a doctor, but the odds are that the first one will not be the best one. One needs to make an informed decision, rather than one made impulsively. For most people, I don't think it's as big of an issue as it is for me. When something as momentous as MS comes up and throws a wrench into your life, decorum becomes irrelevant. This is not to say that I'm rude about it, just cutthroat about who does and doesn't make the cut.

It's almost like I'm just doing my job. Hurt feelings mean less and less to me, and they were already pretty low on my list of considerations as it is. As Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) whispers after he risks the life of one of his subordinates when he shoots the guy holding him hostage, "I...don't...bargain."

R

Pragmatism, Not Pessimism

2010-01-29T17:23:00.004-06:00

Often, I get labeled a "pessimist." This is not wholly absurd, but it is inaccurate. In the recent past, I understand how such a moniker could fall on me. Any positive event would diminish due to my grumbling, no matter how fickle or momentous. To the untrained eye, perhaps, not much has changed. This is not true. I do have an excuse that would make pessimism acceptable--multiple sclerosis is a bitch, so I can bitch. Ultimately, this gets old and boring, and I recognized this and changed my mindset. I'm certainly not a pie-eyed optimist, but I am a staunch realist and, subsequently, a pragmatist.

I still don't wantonly revel in good news. This would not only be disingenuous but foolish. The hammer could come down at any time, and rather than be prepared (which would necessitate a fatalism that would bring me down consistently), I am removed and dispassionate. I received some "good news" earlier today, because my recent MRI didn't display any new lesions on my brain. Like a dentist always telling me that I had cavities (until recently, after I had been using my Sonicare), I have come to expect a doctor telling me that there were new lesions (by the way, I still think of Tom Hanks's character in Philadelphia when I hear that word). Each time I saw a doctor after an MRI, I expected to hear news about a new finding. Or findings. Not this time. Yippee--but it's still early.

That's not necessarily a negative thought. It actually shows an acknowledgment of a possibility, rather than an inevitability. I would not have been stunned if such news had been given, but I was relieved when it wasn't. This shows the crucial distinction between the two mindsets, because a pessimist would have expected only the worst.

One could hardly have been blamed, though, since MS only affects 0.001% of the population. That minuscule wrench has to come from somewhere, or someone. Since whenever I first became formally diagnosed (I have forgotten the exact month/timeframe, because I can and don't want to dwell on precise dates), I have become only more aloof and lazily accepting of the fact that I could be that one aberration, and am, in this instance. Like the Al Franken book of the same title, I proceed with the attitude of "Why Not Me?"

I didn't want to hear about new lesions found on the MRI, but I was prepared to accept them. Next week, I have an appointment with a neurologist at Rush University Medical Center, and would only have added a "Where do we go from here?" inquiry to my litany, which almost certainly will be forgotten. One such question surrounds Tysabri, an intravenous drug administered once a month. It has been fatal in at least two patients, and may cause multifocal leukoencephalopathy--a long medical term, which is never a good thing. I figure, though, that if you're unlucky enough to be struck by lightning once, twice would be poetic overkill. Yes, some people have died, but the numbers are incredibly small and inconsequential, so I've come to regard them as negligible. Furthermore, chemo is more likely to be fatal, and I've already done that, so another brush with remote death seems nowhere near as frightening as it might once have been.

Like Hillary Clinton and later John McCain, I've adopted a "kitchen-sink" approach to my treatment. I figure that's less disturbing than "scorch the earth," although I recognize the natural inclination to do that.

R

"I'll Take the GOP to Block"

2010-01-28T01:05:00.004-06:00

Earlier tonight, President Obama gave his first "State of the Union" speech. It didn't have the florid rhetorical flourishes or powerful turns of phrase that he, as an orator, is known for. Those are more representative of his contentious primary battle with Hillary Clinton. After that arduous campaign, as well as the sniping of the national romp that ensued against John McCain & Co. (with Sarah Palin used shamelessly as a blunt tool powered by stupidity), he could hardly have delivered the same Lincoln-esque eloquence each time he walked up to the microphone. What he also hasn't done much of, so far, has been to use his tongue as a cudgel to confuse Republicans (not very hard, really) and take them on.

Tonight hopefully marked the end of the reticence that has plagued the administration so far. I've been extremely critical and fatalistic about Obama's remove from the act of actual governance. Sure, he, like about every politician that sat in the House Chamber of the Capitol's rotunda listening to the speech, has chosen to parse his words strategically, but this particular moment in American history calls for hard talk to his detractors. The GOP, though, has selfishly placed its own party ahead of national interests.

With their tolerance and indulgence of idiotic ideologues like Rush Limbaugh, etc., the GOP squirms like a frantic insect moments before its inevitable death. It's extra-disturbing, though, because it has chosen to burn anything down that emanates from the pen of Democratic legislators. I forget who it was specifically--let's say it was House Minority Leader (by the way, I wonder how xenophobic Republicans feel about being labeled "the minority") John Boehner, from Ohio--but someone explicitly urged his fellow Republicans to act like recalcitrant brats and foil any attempt to pass anything in Congress. So far, this frustrating strategy of defiance has worked quite well. Take the health care bill, for example--earmarks of tepid, craven Democrats have made it disgustingly bloated, like the gluttonous murder victim in Se7en. I want to dismiss it wholly like Matt Taibbi, but realistically something has to be passed so I find myself grudgingly agreeing with the "pass something--anything" argument espoused by numerous pundits and commentators like Paul Krugman. Too much time has passed to do nothing.

That's what the GOP would like to do, though, and attempts at meaningful bipartisanship have failed. Now, with the election of Scott Brown over Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race, further compromise looks inevitable. Who knows, though? Maybe Brown will be the maverick that McCain never really was, although I doubt it so much that the mere idea of a Republican crossing the aisle in the name of pragmatism is ludicrous. I remember when John Roberts was going through all the confirmation rigmarole that ended anticlimactically with him being named the new Chief Justice. People optimistically (see: foolishly) thought that maybe he'd vote against his political affiliations. Lo and behold, he hasn't, and now oversees a dangerous razor-thin conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

The Court's recent decision to allow corporations to contribute nearly heedlessly to political campaigns served as a stark reminder that a reckless Republican agenda is still very much alive, and needs to be quashed. Obama campaigned on the hope of bipartisanship, but it has become clearer and clearer that this is an impossibility. Lest we forget, many Americans are really fucking stupid and their opinions should be immediately disregarded and jettisoned. Anyone who's ever seriously participated in a "Tea Party" that didn't spring from the mind of a puerile girl should face a firing squad. Now.

It was heartening to hear Obama talk tough to a divided Congress. I hope he continues to do so, and doesn't lapse into the same pusillanimous mindset that led him to leave health care up to Congress. Bad idea.

Previously, the Republican/Democrat dichotomy was summarized as "the party of bad ideas vs. the party of no ideas." Over the past year, that has confusingly switched to "Democrat vs. Republican." Obama sounded like he's finally ready to acknowledge this, but his struggle will be even tougher now with the possibility of a filibuster.

TS--the party is over, you are President, so now you have to do something. Like, oh, be President. And Republicans--get out of the way if you can't/won't lend a hand. This isn't Hollywood Squares, and your "no no no" attitude needs to be thrown out as violently as I always wanted to toss Whoopi from the center square.

R

When Redolence Becomes Cloying

2010-01-21T15:39:00.008-06:00

I watched a bit of Ghostbusters yesterday, and one line in particular jumped out at me. Actually, dozens of snippets of dialogue stood out, but the one that seemed particularly relevant was when Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray stand outside a particularly hulking building on the Columbia campus. After they've been told by the dean that the board has voted to revoke their grant, the two discuss what they're going to do next. Murray's Peter Venkman is blase about their prospects, and Aykroyd's Ray Stanz is worried about being fired and pessimistic about the future. "You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results." Unfortunately, this is now more pertinent than ever.

Anyone who has done comparably little in his job (I count myself among those in these ranks, because no matter how you spin it, a Bates label is just a sticker) understands this, and since the inauguration it has strikingly been applicable to President Obama. I've said it before, but Bush Mach 2 was easily the worst president in American history. At the very least, though, he DID things. They were short-sighted, stupid, and altogether reckless, but he made sure that they got done. Obama, on the other hand, means well--and his influence stops there. The immediate picture that I have of him in my mind shows the bottom of his shoes. "Oh--they're scuffed!," we thought then. Now, though, I'm more struck by the fact that his feet were even up. I dismissed this sort of square thinking a while ago because he had so much to do and such a gesture was the least of the problems he faced.

He hasn't faced them, though. Obama perpetually seems to have his feet up. Take health care, for example. He made it clear that reform was a major concern for his administration, but then punted (feet still up--in the air) to let Congress deal with it. Congress has now become the "vast wasteland" that Newton Minow, then the FCC chairman, said television had become in 1961. The bloated (I wish I could call it "bombastic," but pages of dry legislation hardly warrants it) bill now contains so many earmarks and disclaimers that it now should be used as the valueless wallpaper it so closely resembles. And what do we get from Obama? A metaphorical shrug presented as more eloquent words. This has become incorrect, because his speeches have become less and less impactful, both in their poise and in their message. Whereas during the campaign we had great speeches on various issues like race and the future of America, now we get fortune cookies that deliver the same message as during Bush's term.

The 2010 Senate election in Massachusetts, which pitted Democrat Martha Coakley against Republican Scott Brown, underscored how removed Obama has been. Sure, it's a Massachusetts election, and Coakley blundered many times in her repeated gaffes, but it's truly an affront that Ted Kennedy's long-held seat will be occupied by a Republican for the next six years (at least). Coakley said things on the campaign trail that were reminiscent of Dan Quayle--like referring to Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling as a "Yankee fan." She obviously was an awful choice to take Kennedy's place, but it's not as if her Republican counterpart was any better. Brown infamously posed nude for Cosmopolitan in 1982, and the photos could have been an example of one mistakenly inserted into his roll by George Costanza. This didn't matter, evidently, because Brown beat Coakley (about 52% to 47%) and will take over Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. I know that a lot has been made of this, but it's still not nearly enough. Ted Kennedy's seat will go to a REPUBLICAN.

Just before the election, Obama went to Boston to campaign for Coakley. With his track record of uselessly campaigning for the Olympics in Chicago, his lack of pull and utility was wholly evident when she, too, lost. Remember Teddy Roosevelt's credo of "speak softly and carry a big stick"? Obama has seemingly misheard it and changed it, in a year, to "speak flowerily and brandish a twig." The pen may, aphoristically, be mightier than the sword, but the sword can leave some unrecognizably disfigured. With Obama, neither his pen nor his sword intimidates me.

The "cool" tag for Obama has frozen over. Now he just seems like a dick. Careful deliberation seems like he's stalling. Occasional whiffs of contemplation are fine, but his jaunts of insouciance now register as arrogance rather than thoughtfulness. Doing nothing is easy--ask him. I always hear people say things like, "It's only his first year. Give him a break." Siren songs don't have to be symphonies, though. Once they do their job, the rest happens imperceptibly.

I still hope that he'll surprise me somehow, but so far he's lulled me to sleep like the poppies in The Wizard of Oz. (Almost. My conscious brain functions as the snow that vanquishes the danger of the opium.) Bush did terrible things, but at least I was always awake and alert to marvel at them incredulously. With Obama, I just want to nap.

R

Haiti: Not the Time for Sadism, or Schadenfreude

2010-01-19T16:50:00.005-06:00

Leave it to shameless partisans (on the right) and religious lunatics/zealots (also on the right) to politicize a natural disaster. Shit happens, and cannot be attributed to anything other than dumb luck--bad luck. When a jackass like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson spews anything controversial, it cannot be dissected. This would validate the inanity of its sensational idiocy. It only gets worse when an insidious loser like David Brooks throws his hat into the ring. I refuse to offer a link to his column for the New York Times, but I will provide access to Matt Taibbi's pointed, blunt rebuttal.

Amid such complete disaster and horrors, it's an easy, and cheap, rhetorical sophistry to use something atrocious as a blunt, awkward cudgel to illustrate a point. The problem, though, is that it reeks of bad taste and utter insouciance to do so. Limbaugh is an idiot, and regularly says nonsense that his listeners frequently follow. So I wasn't surprised to hear that he said something uncouth about the tragedy, although I was disgusted with his coldness. And just him in general.

The same goes for Pat Robertson. He has attained the tolerability of age, but this does not mitigate the crazy proclamations he makes. He said similar despicable things about New Orleans and its denizens when Hurricane Katrina hit. That disaster was horrible, but the earthquake in Haiti makes it look like a fickle rainshower (the mind can hold something that results in dozens dead, but thousands is incomprehensible, especially when the culprit cannot be embodied. The Holocaust was more devastating, of course, but at least it could demonize, rightfully, Hitler & Co.). So translating it into religious terms is both irresponsible and infuriating.

Both disasters exposed the rampant incompetence of those who responded. FEMA, as run by Michael "Brownie" Brown, did little to contain the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the hard-hit poor of New Orleans, and it's hard to think of one person who could be held responsible for the Haiti earthquake--although someone, no doubt, will. In the early days after the calamity, awful images regularly still flash on television screens. Turning the earthquake into an instrument of propaganda is a cheap, crass gambit that should shame whoever wants to do it. Yes, this happened and that should have happened, but it did and that didn't, so move on. Sitting in front of a microphone and talking is easy, and listening is easier, except when what is being said is an affront to decency. Irony runs out when something is as offensive as what any of these people said. We're humans, and it's wrong--just wrong--to think dismissively about such desolation.

You may wish harm on someone else, but this has its limits. No one who's not a reckless psychopath can envision something as, pardon the pun, earth-shattering as the earthquake and its fall-out in Haiti. I could never develop a scenario as big and terrible as the one there. Perhaps this also says something about my limited imagination. On the plus side, though, I'd never subject anyone to sitting through something as inane as 2012. I might not think up such catastrophes, but I can--and do--wish them on those who choose to use it as an opportunity to air their dumb political thoughts and inclinations. Limbaugh is deaf, and relies on a cochlear implant, but he can still talk, which is heaven for a moron. You can talk and talk and never hear the audible objections from rational dissenters.

Not once--even for an instant--did I think about fantastically switching places with a Haitian resident who, unlike me, does not have MS. There is irony in mentioning something and then denying its potential existence, but screw it--I'm chalking it up to empathy and not to aloof selfishness. I, clearly, do not even consider this a possibility. I do, though, recognize that the impulse toward that sort of magical thinking exists.

Sadism and schadenfreude may not be acceptable with regard to victims of capacious natural disasters, but they're oddly applicable to tone-deaf asses like Limbaugh or Robertson. Or intellectual charlatans like David Brooks.

R

I'm Not Kidding

2010-01-14T00:27:00.002-06:00

Often, I get the impression that people don't believe me when I say that I don't care. In the past, this may have been a shrewd stance to take, because I was probably acting or saying things histrionically just to gauge reactions. Now, though, I really don't give a shit. I'm almost geriatric in my complete nonchalance. Old people have stopped caring about impressions because they realize, in their advanced age, that whatever they say or do could be misconstrued, and so they have resolved to be as they are, for better or worse. Certain societal pleasantries strike them as absurd, or simply extraneous, and so they cut them out or off before they have a chance to take hold.

The problem with this is that some choose to express their remove with insults or barbs. Luckily, I've curtailed this impulse considerably. I can still be acerbic, but now I am content to be aloof. The mental image one has when the word "aloof" gets thrown around is an oaf shrugging. This connotes confusion (born of stupidity), which, I assure you, is not the case. Either that, or someone napping springs to mind. I may be more willing to nap than usual, but am frequently prevented from doing so because of Provigil. I used to resent not being able to sleep, but now it is like a burner under my ass that makes me get up and move. If not, I might really be the picture of a typical depressive.

It irks me when someone mopes around noticeably. Trying not to be noticed ironically, and hypocritically, is its own form of attention-seeking. This is one of the reasons that the goth look is bullshit. You can't really espouse a "don't look at me" attitude wearing a dog collar and jackboots. Flamboyance always attracts attention, and nail polish is actually no different than shouting at the sky, a mohawk, or a Harley Davidson. This last one annoys me considerably in that it gives tools a platform and a megaphone in the form of a loud sputtering tailpipe, and I'm so glad that South Park (which also made fun of goths' ethos of nonconformity, which of course becomes its own form of conformity) chose to call these enthusiasts just what they are: idiots. (Or something more crude that I've grown out of saying since high school.)

As you can see, I'm not totally without boundaries or guidance. This is what drives me insane when it comes to condescension from theists. Like I've said, I'm an aloof nontheist. So when somebody associates not believing in God with a sociopathic, or psychopathic, streak, it's insulting. You know what keeps me from walking into a mall and killing dozens of people with some sort of gun? 1. Guns scare me, and 2. That's fucking WRONG. Beyond being an indicator of severe mental illness, mass murder takes a lot of effort. I've said it before, but I'm lazy. I'm also not (some may disagree, but fuck them) crazy.

I do a lot of things that may seem rude. I may not immediately say "Hello" or respond to someone's inane question. In fact, though, I likely am trying to orient myself and so miss such overt cues to speak. It still occurs to me to do things that I don't, but now some impulses disappear like dust in the wind (to quote Kansas, of all horrible bands. I just saw Old School again, though, so that song permeates my psyche way more than it ever should. And Red Dawn was on cable too, so I might shout, apropos of nothing, "WOLVERINES!")

Last Friday, I got sufficiently sick of waiting for the stem cell procedure results to be felt and seen, so I gave myself a shot of Avonex. The point of the procedure was to render that mode of treatment moot. I still adamantly believe that interferons are ultimately deceptive and insufficient in their treatment, but I figured, "What the hell?" The injection is traumatic in its application--the needle is huge, as I've shown--and horribly annoying when it comes to the twelve-hour flu-like side effects that are the trademark of any interferon. Still, I gave myself the shot because I thought, "Why not?" I thought about the stem cell study and how this may cloud the findings, but I quickly dismissed this apprehension and adopted the attitude that, I'm guessing, a lot of prospective mothers have before they decide on having an abortion: "What the hell? It's my body."

It's unclear whether the noticeable improvement I felt was the result of the shot or the procedure, but both can coexist as far as I'm concerned. I told my nurse that the two should not be mutually exclusive. I understand that one may pollute the findings of the other, but I'm really not concerned with the purity of the study at the expense of my own personal health. It's my body, for better or worse, and I'll do with it what I please--which is a limited smorgasbord of options as it is. This may sound like the callow Cartman--"I do what I want!"--and it may be querulous, but whateva. I do what I want!

I refuse to be beholden to parameters that have been set up by the directors of the study. I have nothing against them, and understand why they would rather I not do this. However, I did what I did because I wanted to do it. This sounds bratty, but, with multiple sclerosis and other ailments, it's important to do whatever you believe will help you. In my case, it was starting Avonex again.

It's not like I enjoy taking the shot. Everything about it sucks--the needle, the blood, the side effects, etc.--so it's not as if I took it because I like it. That's crazy, and I'm not a clinical maniac. Anything that may improve my quality of life will be tried. Except Farmville.

It may upset some people, but I don't care. I'm not kidding. I DON'T CARE.

R

The Bittersweet Playoffs

2010-01-11T03:30:00.004-06:00

Often, I do not blindly enjoy things while they are still happening, because I know that everything will end eventually. I've gotten better at recognizing the ephemeralness of, well, everything. Sometimes, though, an imminent deadline will knock me on my ass. I was shaken back into coherence this past weekend when I remembered that the NFL regular season is over, and now the playoffs are under way.

The playoffs themselves are great. What else could they be? Each year eclipses the year before, and really the previous 16 games. Nobody remembers that the New England Patriots went undefeated in the 2007 regular season. Well, obviously not nobody, but that achievement was diminished because of the team's loss to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl. The Giants' win was that much more astounding because they beat an unbeatable (until then) team, and I remembered it recently thinking about the exemplary play of then-heralded but now reviled Plaxico Burress. He's a moron, no doubt, and I wish that everyone who owns a gun would be so lucky as to shoot himself in the leg. He did, though, catch the pass that beat the Patriots, so I irrationally overlook the obviously deplorable circumstances of his future idiocy. The same goes for my willingness to turn my head at the despicable Roman Polanski. I mean, the guy made Chinatown. And his fiance was killed by the minions of Charles Manson. I know that nothing excuses his terrible treatment of that 13-year-old girl, but he also survived the Holocaust, so I sometimes let this tidbit obscure his "alleged" brutality. (After such a rash act like his evasive flight from the country, possibilities harden into facts, in my mind.)

Earlier I listened to Patton Oswalt talk about the prowess of Gale Sayers. (Really.) He said that even if you could never do anything that compared to his running, you can still appreciate the grace and indomitability of his technique moving with a football. It is one of the most immediate gratification available these days, on YouTube and the like. I understand that about Sayers, and also feel that way when I see Adrian Peterson rush. Sometimes. He didn't exactly set the world on fire this year, but Brett Favre did. When he turned 40 last year, subtle insults from commentators came pouring in. "Does he still have it?" He's 40, you asshole, not 400.

Here's the thing, though: the playoffs remind me that an imminent hiatus is immanent. From February to August I'll have to rely on the NFL Network to satiate my thirst for the NFL (college football, as I've said, bores me). There's baseball, I know, but watching the MLB is like getting a fistful of methadone when you're a heroin addict. It's absurdly insufficient. So I've been told.

I get to watch teams that have tried to be elusive. I still don't give a shit about the Bengals, but I respect the Saints, even if they have lost some of their luster in recent weeks after losing their perfect season. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise (see: the 2007 Patriots again.) They get to play Kurt Warner & the Cardinals next, and I hope that Drew Brees makes the older QB look even older.

What's funny, too, is that I actually watch the NFL so I know what the hell the commentators are talking about. Except Troy Aikman, who's replaced Bill Walton at the head of the line of sports analysts that should never be allowed near a microphone. My favorite quote of Walton's was his trenchant observation that "The Lakers need to put the ball in the basket" during the 1991 Finals against the Bulls. Joe Buck is no Marv Albert, though, and every time he opens his mouth I get Vietnam flashbacks of irrational rage. All you need to know about Joe Buck is that he's probably looking forward to the upcoming baseball season. So am I, sort of, but for a very different reason: I don't have to endure inane commentary, although I do have to put up with 162 games that cannot convince me of the beauty of a perfectly-placed bunt. Yawn. What Al Michaels or Cris Collinsworth says, though, I pay attention to.

Joe Buck deals with such luminaries as Troy Aikman, though, so comments like "The [insert team name] need to win this game" go unchecked. Also, in case you're wondering, the team with the most points wins.

Aikman gets a pass because he admirably served his time in the league. Buck represents the worst of nepotism. His dad was Jack Buck, the famous voice of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Again, that's baseball. Ugh. & I'll be really crestfallen if a threatened lockout happens, & squashes the 2010 NFL season. I may even start watching European football aka soccer.

Just kidding--that would never happen.

R

Better Late Than Never

2010-01-02T17:32:00.004-06:00

Yesterday I listened to Blakroc's eponymous album, and was blown away by its accomplished fusion of hip-hop and rock. A few years ago, I remember when such pairings were all the rage. Early examples went as far back as Run-DMC's collaboration with Aerosmith on "Walk This Way." Then, there were terrible other examples that became grouped under the awful heading of "rap/rock." Think Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, but not for too long. The idea itself, though, should not have been disregarded because early stabs at the mixture of distinctly different genres were abysmal.

Around this time of the year (ie New Year's), we have to endure endless lists that gather the "best of" the previous twelve months. If December 31st happens to signal the end of a whole decade, these months usually become years. In 2009, this happened like, pardon the pun, clockwork. One particularly egregious list came from David Wild, a hack music critic who regularly contributes to Rolling Stone. He reminds me of Wallace Shawn, but more fat and repulsive. I remember seeing an episode of some TV show where he interviewed Lou Reed and I kept waiting for Reed to silence him, but he indulged Wild's inane requests. I think that he was being polite by obliging Wild's annoying clamors for demonstration. He could have leveled the dumb "journalist," but instead spared him. I wish, though, that he had released some of the vitriol I'm sure he felt.

Enough of that--if I think about David Wild for too long, my muscles clench and subsequently receive no release in the form of a swift punch or kick to his teeth. I did read, however, a bunch of year-end lists that didn't piss me off. For instance, Jim DeRogatis, of the Chicago Sun-Times, delighted me as he normally does. He's not a great writer, but his opinions of popular music don't cause me to chortle as much as others do--I'm thinking of Greg Kot of the Tribune, and his dependably annoying quota of world music that he places on his lists. DeRogatis put Ida Maria's Fortress 'Round My Heart at the top of his list. When I saw this, I nodded approvingly, even though it really came out in 2008.

I didn't see one mention of "Blakroc," though. It's an album with tracks controlled by the two members of The Black Keys, with a rotating roster of unappreciated emcees. I myself came to it late, but at least I appreciate how awesome it is. There are at least two distinct types of blues: Delta and Mississippi hill country. The former adheres to the predictable I-IV-V chord structure. The latter also may use only those inimitable three chords, but it chugs along rather than punching the changes emphatically.

This framework, championed by such artists as RL Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and other artists on the Fat Possum label, works amazingly well with the grooves of hip-hop. I can't believe that a worthwhile collaboration took so long to materialize. The Black Keys stay away from the histrionic, flashy solos that come along with innumerable artists, both good and bad. Sometimes, in the case of The White Stripes, this showboating works, and, like the aforementioned Aerosmith, it can be a disaster. Either way, bands have tended to forget about blues without a reliance on the screaming scales. The Black Keys, though, have not. They have always played blues without the popular crutch of gaudy solos, and perhaps because of this have not enjoyed the success of several of their less original peers.

With Blakroc, it appears that they have finally broken through, and now command the ears of several less-well-known hip-hop acts. This is the culmination of attempts at maturation. It is probably good that it took so long for this merger to take place. Kinks were subsequently avoided, like the grandstanding that's so prevalent in hip-hop. It may have taken long to happen, but several easy missteps were dodged. Eventually, though, it's time to move along.

I don't mean neglect, but bold action. Too often, people are too concerned with their reception, and this fear renders the inevitable inaction, along with all of its dilatory dithering, pathetic and empty. Deadbeat dads, you know what I mean.

R

Deadwood v. The Wire=Shakespeare v. Euripides=The Rolling Stones v. The Beatles

2009-12-31T00:45:00.006-06:00

Since I had trouble breathing and other telltale symptoms of an allergic reaction, I spent the last few nights at my grandmother's. This should have connoted an earlier, more reasonable, bedtime, but I became enmeshed in an article that I found online. It was a gushing, but not saccharine, and intelligent interview with the great David Simon, creator of The Wire, in Vice Magazine. In it, Simon discusses numerous topics, including politics, and I found myself astonished by his articulateness and trenchant points. In one snippet in particular, though, I couldn't help but feel beleaguered when he extolled the societal attributes of Greek literature and contrasted it with the exultation of the individual in Shakespeare.

I speak English, so I'm incredibly biased about this. When LNE busts out the Greek literature, I cannot believe that she, or anyone, for that matter, can scan what look like pictograms to me and make sense of it. Truthfully, it's quite impressive that she can grasp what is being communicated there. Furthermore, I understand that restricting myself to Latin-based alphabets severely limits my grasp of linguistics. I'm American, though, and branching out culturally is not exactly what the US is known for. So I felt a little uncomfortable when Simon spoke of his appreciation for Greek literature and the huge debt that The Wire owes it. Let me clarify: my ignorance makes me defensive. I can't do, so I disparage. Not brutishly, but primitively and reflexively. I know this. I've read Medea and the four parts of Oresteia, but I only view them in chunks, rather than the minutiae that make up those larger bits. I do, however, love Euripides, and I'm sure this is because I can make out what he means to say.

I understand the full complications of the whole foreign aspect of the language, and have similar difficulties with the screenplays of both Deadwood and The Wire. The former adheres to a loose proliferation of blank verse not unlike Shakespeare's, while the latter uses a vernacular that shouldn't be that difficult for me to understand, but is. Both shows are in English, but the former is easier for me to hear and process than the latter. I know that there may be a racial implication here, and all I can say to refute it is that I know this. Since I'm not a vapid amoeba, the willingness of my brain to process one brand of English much more easily than the other can't be dismissed. It is what it is.

A similar matter of preference applies to music. Well, good music--you can't talk extensively about why Journey is the best band there ever was without sounding like a complete idiot. You can, though, stand in the parallel camps of Beatles' fans and Rolling Stones' fans and see why the other side thinks the way they do. Both are great, iconic bands. The Beatles expanded the impact of the recording studio while The Rolling Stones modernized blues in a way that previously had not been done, and consequently came out with a different version of something familiar--and as a result etched their own stamp on the genre. I appreciate the technical innovations of Sergeant Pepper's, but I thoroughly enjoy the technique of Exile on Main Street. This is not to say that either band didn't cross over and do what the other began (see: the disturbing subject matter of "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and the expansive rhythms of "Sympathy for the Devil").

Both television shows depict graphic violence and harsh language. It takes some getting used to both, but I appreciate the grandeur more with Deadwood than The Wire. This is probably because I see a standoff as more romantic than a shootoff. One is dramatic, while the other is just scary. What makes Deadwood interesting is that it adds a poetic bent to these things, and The Wire resists being maudlin by crudely recording a devastating act with the flippant realism of a photograph. Deadwood isn't exactly a book, but its rugged formalism comes across as forced, whereas The Wire's apparent slang ethos actually shows the florid grandiloquence and hard truths of the streets.

Some things are a matter of opinion, but I've always said that subjectivity is objective. I love both shows, for different reasons. The reasons that I love each of these separate things invalidates my own opinion, ironically. Somewhat. Neither is According
to Jim.

R

A Night in the ER: Cold or Allergies?

2009-12-28T23:22:00.007-06:00

For the past few days, I had a premonition that the sore throat that I had would escalate into something more problematic. I take Zyrtec regularly to stave off allergic reactions to the dogs that my mother has, and until recently it worked without a hitch. About a week ago, though, I had to cease popping it due to strange chest pains I had. I switched to Alavert on the advice of my immunotherapy nurse, and didn't have any problems. Then, last night, I had troublesome asthmatic symptoms when I breathed, and I couldn't simply ignore them.

Earlier that night, I had similar symptoms and acquiesced to an ER visit. I don't like emergency rooms, and have always thought of them, unfairly, as repositories where inexperienced interns cut their teeth. Maybe I've seen "ER" too much, but I envision neophyte doctors, like Noah Wyle's Dr. Carter, dispensing expeditious remedies to problems that can't be treated simply with aspirin and bedrest. I didn't immediately pinpoint my absurdly simple treatment because it made sense. Okay, so I had an allergic reaction, and the treatment for that is, I think, Benadryl and epinephrine. Simple, no?

Quick digression: when the doctor told me that I'd get a shot of adrenaline, I immediately thought of Pulp Fiction. In one particularly "trippy" scene, Uma Thurman's Mia Wallace ODs on heroin and requires an adrenaline shot to her heart to revive her. When I heard that I'd need one, I expected a similarly huge needle and a stabbing motion that would allow it to penetrate my breastplate.

Thankfully, this didn't happen. I received two quick subcutaneous shots in my left tricep, and eventually went on my merry way. I hoped that the ordeal was over, but, alas, it was not.

A few hours passed with nary a hitch. After a while, though, the wheezing returned. I tried to ignore it, as I had the night before, but several hours passed before I admitted this was futile. I don't like emergency rooms because I consider them quick resorts for panicky mothers, old people, and/or drug addicts. No matter how much I loathed the idea, I was headed back there. First, I roused my mother awake and told her the unavoidable truth. Then, I tried to alleviate my symptoms by leaving the house and going outside to the back porch. Admittedly, this was a bad idea since it was cold outside and the bench was covered in snow, but I went nevertheless. I had no other options, so I bided my time and waited for a stronger reaction from my exhausted mother.

This came quickly, and I didn't even try to rationalize my rash behavior. I piled into the car, again, and returned to the ER. Again. This was late, so there was no wait, and minimal other patients to wait behind, so I received my own "room." Previously, I sat on a bed parked in the main hallway. Now, though, I had my own partition!

My breathing had worsened in the interim, and the doctor now there heard this. He gave me a breathing treatment that consisted of a medicinal vapor that helped to clear my airway and steroids, which is also a normal treatment for an MS attack but also helps stifle an allergic pathological reaction. My wheezing abated, but I insisted on going to my grandmother's, which must have been a painstaking but unavoidable annoyance for my mother, who drove me.

Eventually, I fell asleep (around 5 am). Now, though, away from contact with "hypoallergenic" dogs (this is a bit of a misnomer, because it really doesn't exist. There are dogs that don't shed, but you can, and I am, still be allergic to errant dander or contact with their saliva.), I began to consider other possible reasons for my symptoms. The most obvious, of course, is the common cold intermingled with the cold air.

I heard this possible diagnosis before, and disregarded it. It has been several years (I think) since I've had a possible cold, so I don't really know the telltale symptoms. Of course, I've had numerous ones in the past, but the absence of them for the last year or two has totally made me forget what they're like.

I'm pretty sure they're like this though, because I've been away from animals long enough to render them irrelevant. My wheezing remains, and I still reach for the inhaler like a true spaz. Once again, my cane comes in handy because it nullifies such dismissive judgments. I just look like a piqued, enervated shell.

I'm fine with that. I'd rather be seen as an old man than as someone for whom a coma would be a cozy respite. At least, that's how I feel about certain nyerds. Is this wrong?

Probably, but I don't give a shit. Where's my inhaler, anyway?

R

Incremental, Indisciminate Improvement (Is Still Progress)

2009-12-24T01:09:00.005-06:00

Like the procedure itself, my own personal improvement will take time. I remember when I first had the stem cell transplant and watched Dr. Burt diagram stairs to illustrate the sort of progress I could expect. The good news is that there are no valleys in the rudimentary drawing. The unfortunate but realistic outlook prepared me for the uphill (no pun intended) slog that lies ahead--for the next few years. Furthermore, I have a sneaking suspicion that the study's early findings, which were culled when some of the older, first patients started, in no way should construe expectations. Patience is both elusive and obnoxious, but a necessity.

Small instances of different behavior creep up every so often. To anyone else, I may appear to be the same as I was before I checked into the hospital. I have not emerged from that exercise in suspended animation as a new person. I still have most of my old symptoms. I still have trouble with fatigue, but apparently this is standard when it comes to this thing. To be more explicit, I still also would rather not walk for an extended period of time, and my poor muscle coordination validates suspicion of something wrong pathologically.

However, I've noticed a few behaviors that my body mechanically does in order to expand its sensory parameters. I am much more willing to perform certain motions than I was before. For instance, here in the Midwest ice is a problem from December through mid-March. (It could be more or less than that, and I'm only guessing as to the length of winter.) I've dealt with enough black ice to know that appearances can be very deceiving when it comes to ice and asphalt. Ice forms on roads, and can be so thin, translucent, and hard that it is impossible to discern. It may show up when you assumed it's not there. At this point, I assume everything is black ice, so I cannot be surprised by its existence anywhere. The other day, prior to occupational therapy (in the same place that I had physical therapy), I rolled my eyes at the blast of cold air that hit me once I stepped outside. There was definitely ice outside, but I would not let apprehension regarding its location keep me sequestered. I had an appointment to keep. So, I stumbled cautiously to the car.

I moved easily to the door, and sat down eventually, having traversed the opposite but equally perilous equivalent of hot coals. It was a bitch, but I have only really contemplated the danger in retrospect. One foot moved (moves) in front of the other, and I did this again and again without contemplating the implications of a traumatic incident. This kind of bold, automatic movement happens at various other times, as well. If I'm brushing my teeth and pitch to one side, I will grab a wall or reach a hand out for an available stationary object that I can clutch. Most of the time, I encounter no problems, but every so often a reference point may move. When this happens, my legs shift quickly to prevent me from falling down. (I've said it before, but I have not fallen, and I get asked that question a lot.)

Some exercises in occupational therapy do this as well. Even though I've only been going for a week now, I do things more effortlessly and easily than even I did a few days prior. One exercise, in particular, drives me nuts but I still do it. For one thing, I figure that I have nothing better to do. For another, it actually helps. There's a plain wooden board, not unlike one for cutting, with holes drilled into it. I have to place three different components into each one. First, there's a long, thin stainless steel (all of these things are stainless steel--which gets annoying with the pragmatic magnet at the bottom of the dish that holds them) rod that I stick in the hole (get your snickers out now). Then, a small, thin washer goes over that, followed by a short tube that goes over everything and is the last component to this stubby construction. I switch fingers for each set of pieces, and then I alternate hands at the end of each row.

There are about 25 holes for each hand, and I then remove each bit individually once I finish. My therapist told me that she caught one of her other patients overturning the board in order to expedite the tedious exercise. I get this--I would be lying if I said that I didn't have the same impulse. At the same time, I feel that I'd be cheating myself. Yes, it's annoying and tedious and all of that, but I still do everything to its full completion. Who would I be kidding if I didn't? It's true that it's a pain in the ass, but I can't fake progress at this stage.

That's not entirely accurate. I can, but what would be the point? She doesn't time me, because it would likely be a futile tactic of intimidation. I don't care about the particulars of my progress, but I know that it's there.

R

We Carry, & Use, A Big Stick Abroad, But Not Here

2009-12-20T02:53:00.004-06:00

I saw the great new movie Avatar today, and kept thinking of the travesties that are the Wars in the Middle East.

This came up between stunning displays of CGI that, in the past, have made various movies look comical and completely fake. Both good movies (Minority Report) and bad movies (Armageddon) looked absurd when they tried to show a fantastical image, and Avatar finally found a way to blend technological advancements and film. Nevertheless, the overt theme was the futility of force when placed against a resilient, steadfast society.

It is a fairly explicit theme throughout the movie that outsiders (humans) have no business meddling in another society's civilization. The planet Pandora's Na'vi people share a Native American fondness for beads and loincloths, as well as an ethereal pantheistic understanding. As the big, bad Americans (it's strange to root against America so vociferously) attempt to dominate the society, I was reminded of the violent, ugly plight of Indians. When they were forced to fight for their different civilization, though, in the face of brash American military force, I shifted gears and aligned the Na'vis with Iraqis.

Many people have expressed disgust with the brash entitlement of America, and, therefore, with its politicians. President Bush was perhaps the perfect archetype of an "Ugly American." It never occurred to him to try to empathize with the countries he baited. I am the first person to deride the hypocrisies perpetuated by rulers of a "theocracy," but I also am a staunch proponent of American isolationism. I go as far back as "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine, not merely the Monroe Doctrine that first explicitly advocated a non-interventionist strategy when considering international affairs. Saddam Hussein may have been bad, but it was hardly our concern that he oppressed his own countrymen.

This gave Bush an adequate excuse to invade the country, even though he really wanted to avenge his slighted, but still rich, father. We forgot that Bush, Sr. was a dick, much like Hamlet's father was a violent brute. Both probably deserved the acrimony that came their way, but we could not have surmised that Bush, Jr. could have emulated the vengeful Hamlet. It was a terrible impression that W. put on for our display, and due to his ineptitude thousands of men marched to their deaths.

Now, it is equally discomfiting, in a different way, that Barack Obama insists on throwing more troops into Afghanistan. He has done all of the doleful motions that a President who supports war must do, like honoring dead soldiers' coffins when they land. However, these gestures come across as vacuous, maudlin crocodile tears when he approves an escalation of troop presence in a country whose populace poses a scant threat. Evidently, he has no problem brandishing Theodore Roosevelt's "big stick" when it comes to the Middle East.

What's baffling is that he refuses to engage his own countrymen when it comes to crucial domestic policy. His reticence when it comes to healthcare is frustrating. His attitude of silence when it comes to Congress may be strategic. After all, he doesn't want to do anything that would jeopardize his reelection in 2012. Screw career politicians--by doing everything to cover their own backs, they ironically end up doing nothing. I've got news for Obama, though: treading water may ensure reelection when the opposition looks crazy, but it ultimately puts nothing in your "Win" column. Refusing to play may appear intelligent pragmatically, but it solves nothing.

Legacies of presidents are judged, in retrospect, by what they did. Bush did horrible things--some that are just now coming to light, and doubtless more will surface still--but he DID things. Obama hasn't really done anything. His administration would disagree, I'm sure, and could cite several examples of piecemeal legislation. These are tiny, and everyone craves something substantial when it comes to his mode of laissez-faire governance.

His ardent supporters--myself included--get constantly slapped in the face with his seemingly aloof attitude toward important issues. On the other hand, he has made up his mind to continue fighting a boondoggle of a war whose progress is as unrewarding as someone trapped in quicksand. The US thrashes about in panic and ire, but somehow has forgotten that the primary objective is to leave, and not to get further enmeshed in a suffocating nation-building endeavor that neglects the main target: Osama bin Laden. We hear his name now almost as a trump card that is supposed to nullify any scrutiny.

If we have to hear this load of bullshit when it comes to Afghanistan, Obama should be as fearless when discussing healthcare. Even better still, he should apply the same attitude of determination when it comes to domestic policy. I understand that the President is the "Commander-in-Chief," but this appellation does not apply only to foreign policy.

Obama should step up to the plate and bravely command Congress, and not just the military.

R

Metric at Cubby Bear (Psych!)

2009-12-17T02:15:00.007-06:00

In the past, leaving a concert early was a preposterous fantasy. Furthermore, bailing prior to the act taking the stage was unfathomable. There have been various instances of waiting an obscenely long time for the main act to take the stage. Neal and I recounted a few such concerts and marveled at our ability to remain patient. We stayed, thankfully, when Patti Smith took forever to mount the stage outside the Tribune Tower at the "Rock the River" festival. We (along with my brother, who I think also attended the aforementioned Patti Smith show) also stretched when Kinky and, finally, The Flaming Lips waited an eternity to play at the Aragon Ballroom for the "Unlimited Sunshine" show. Now, though, I'm reluctant to wait for an extended period of time.

Part of this has to do with an unchecked rudeness that I won't abide. I can cut the band some slack for not being prompt, but nary a whimper for a 9 PM show at 10:30 is just wrong. And rude. If some extenuating circumstance prevented the band from playing within two hours of the time on the ticket, a rep should at least let the crowd know. Otherwise, their (the crowd's)/our ire will not abate, and only proliferate. At the Chicago Theatre, Leonard Cohen emerged within minutes of the ticket time, and Bob Dylan has likewise decided to begin his concerts promptly. There's a bevy of snickers to be heard with regard to these two (because they're old, and they need to squeeze as much time as they can out of their respective dwindling hourglasses, or they want to finish their shows before their early bedtimes, etc.), but they start within the day on which the ticket promises, at least.

Then there's the MS imposition. I might (might) have waited a bit longer, but I can't stay upright for that long with nothing happening to hold my attention. It feels like blood refuses to remain in my extremities for long. My hands and feet get cold quickly, and stay that way unless I lie down and allow the blood to propagate throughout my body. Without such a reprieve, my head will almost float, and not in a good way. Everything on the periphery of my vision melts together like the cryptic letters in Sneakers that change into readable text. Like when the code gets broken, but in reverse.

After an hour, I wondered how I would make it through the whole main set. It didn't take long, though, for me to forget about that. After an hour, I began to plan my exit. The place was relatively full, but I easily could make out the exits clearly.

One word about the Cubby Bear. I will say that, although the normal clientele and location across from Wrigley Field should place it on my list of disregarded things, it's actually not that bad of a place. Of course, it was a skeletal version of what I know that I abhor, but it didn't bother me so much.

I wonder how much of this was the calm result of deflected anger at Metric for making me wait. No matter, because I got the hell out of there before the band could redeem itself.

At one point, Neal commented on how many concerts I've been to. It's true, and I even make up band names if someone rattles off an obscure punk band. Once, during Spring Break, I dragged my friends to an Eyeliners concert in Orlando. Some kid who was trying to assert his "credibility" went through a litany of bands he had seen at the venue, which I don't even remember. Sick of hearing names that I knew I didn't know and never would, and subsequently didn't care about, I started making up band names. "Oh yeah--they're great. Do you like The Metal Batons?" He admitted that he hadn't heard of them, and neither had I.

I've seen Metric before at Metro (my favorite venue), with my friend Jess. Afterward, we agreed that it was a terrific show. This show, a block away at the unfortunately named Cubby Bear, may have been equally as good, but I didn't see it so I have no idea. Nor do I care.

In five years, I'll probably say that I saw the concert. In my mind, at least. Memory is subjective, anyway. At least so hopes the Catholic Church.

R

Slackers! (not the Jason Biggs movie)

2009-12-14T23:43:00.004-06:00

The utter nonchalance of Congress, especially with regard to dismembering Joe Lieberman (who I've never been able to stomach, and who now makes me unremittingly nauseated--which I don't need because MS and chemo aftershocks have taken care of that), is enough to disgust me wholly. It has help, though, in the form of this year's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and its inescapable forebear, 1991's Slacker.

Richard Linklater wrote and directed Slacker. Then, of course, he went on to such cinematic classics as Before Sunrise (& Before Sunset, which came out nearly ten years later). In case you can't tell, I'll say that, yes, I'm being sarcastic. I can't watch those movies, and bridle whenever I try because of the obscenely pretentious dialogue. Only Waking Life is tolerable, and mostly this can be attributed to interesting animation, which superimposes images onto footage of actors, you know, acting. Nevertheless, I cringe at the mental image I have of Ethan Hawke talking about his dreams to some truly unfortunate woman.

I've said it many times, but nobody--nobody--gives a shit about your dreams. George Carlin, in his last HBO special, It's Bad For Ya, talked about he could not care less when someone talks about his/her kids. Luckily, I've been able to dodge such conversational skids, for the most part, but I have had, mentally, to remind my eyes to water themselves on more than a few occasions when someone has launched into a needlessly long description of a dream. "A gigantic Reese's Peanut Butter Cup?" "Four forks? The hell you say." I've endured my fair share of inane banter--and even produced a ton of it--and not once has a dream been interesting unless A) it involves me or B) there's a ton of blood involved. Those two cross paths more often than I'd care to admit or know, I'm sure.

However, in the hands of Linklater, an interesting exposition ends up mired in pretentious language that is unbelievable. (That is, it is not to be believed.) Nobody talks like one of his characters. Even if someone did, I'd inevitably walk away and refuse to listen to any of the pompous dissertation that always accompanies such bombastic and boring digressions.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a movie directed by John Krasinski (Jim on the US version of The Office, on NBC), based on David Foster Wallace's book of the same name. It's a thoroughly forgettable movie, due in no small part to the turgid dialogue taken from Wallace's stories.

A few years ago, I tried to read Infinite Jest, Wallace's magnum opus and the flagship of his literary output. Of course, I failed. I got a few pages in before I could no longer tolerate his writing. Thankfully, I stopped early because the book is looooong. Writing complicatedly is fine, but there's no excuse for it in dialogue. No one talks like he writes. I've read apologists for the movie explain that Wallace's words were meant for the page and not the screen. This is bullshit, because I've perused his books and I can say, unequivocally, that his words do not become more believable in type. They say never to speak ill of the dead, but I refuse to give Wallace a pass just because he hung himself.

As I watched Krasinski's movie, I kept guffawing to no one in particular. It was a familiar sensation that I last experienced when I tried to watch Linklater's 2006 movie, A Scanner Darkly. It stars, strangely, Keanu Reeves, who I'm sure understood less than half of his lines.

I am not a film scholar, but at least with regard to literature, I can authoritatively say that it's the periphery that counts. Nothing interesting happens on the fringes of the screen of the movie, however. I've seen enough of Wallace's writing to know that the cloying bombast of the movie was the result of a faithful adaptation.

If only Linklater and Wallace spared us their words by being silent, unlike the former's loquacious, effusive, annoying slackers.

R

Indiana, A Firmly (& Infuriatingly) Conservative State

2009-12-10T21:51:00.007-06:00

Yesterday I finished Bill Simmons's painstakingly capacious The Book of Basketball. It chronicles the history of the NBA, for the most part. Simmons frequently lapses into long digressions on any topic (& is prone to romanticizing figures associated with Boston, a city I abhor). I appreciate this, because I'm equally prone to switching subjects frequently. Mostly I vacillate between Sylvester Stallone and Patrick Swayze movies, like Simmons, but I also pontificate dismissively at length about politics, other movies (with and without Hulk Hogan--I've seen No Holds Barred, but also The Dark Knight, if we stick only to Tom Lister, Jr. movies) and music, for the most part. However, one sentence in particular troubled me: "The heart of Indiana doubles as the heart of basketball."

Okay, I, like most everyone else, love Hoosiers and A Christmas Story. I, like (sadly) Boston fans and anyone who, like me, grew up in Indiana, also have a tepid fondness for Larry Bird. There, my association with the state stops. Although I admit that I was glad that Indiana voted for Barack Obama, it still houses many legions of racists, which still shocks me as a viable mindset. It may technically be a blue state now, but most of the votes that changed the political affiliation of it came from urban areas that contain most of the black votes. I watched Brian Williams decree that Indiana was a blue state, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking, with more than a modicum of schadenfreude, about the despicable living room that I spent a night in when I was in high school. These morons used horrible, obsolete barbs that they clearly learned from their equally stupid parents, and I had to bite my tongue. Instead, I listened with a huge awareness of the irony that these idiots clearly had no idea that they displayed.

You see, I grew up in a city just south of Gary, which has an enormous black population. My high school was half black, and I'd never felt a twinge of the deep-seeded racism that they unabashedly displayed. Some members of my family would use certain epithets, so I wasn't wholly ignorant of the existence of racism, but generally I ignored these as blind, "experiential," circumstantial instances of unfortunate, learned thinking.

Gary lies at the northwestern corner of the state, next to Chicago. To boot, it was south of the city limits, so I liked the White Sox and not the Cubs. I still think that you can adequately assess someone's racial attitude based on whether or not they rooted for one or the other. At least, this holds when applied to Indiana denizens. In the city itself, it's a little tougher, but not much. There are hardly any black Cubs fans, for good reason.

Everyone agreed, though, that the Bulls were awesome. More accurately, Michael Jordan was amazing, and Chicago was lucky to have such an iconic player. Even when he was still active, Bulls' fans knew that Michael Jordan stood out among anyone in the NBA. He did things on the basketball court that were inexplicable, and everyone nodded proudly and grinned knowingly when he sank six three-pointers in the first half of Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals and shrugged sheepishly after draining the last of these.

This is only one snippet of Jordan's reel of captivating moments. We all watched when the Bulls played a Finals game, so it perturbed me that latent racism could hypocritically transmute into similarly ignorant cheerleading when they played in June. It was as if someone had pulled blinders over their stupid eyes. Some people deserved a dismissive wave of the hand when they proclaimed their allegiance to the Bulls while wearing a Cubs hat and living in the 219 area code.

I love it that Indiana is a blue state, but we must remember that its two senators are Richard Lugar and Evan Bayh. They belong to both political parties, sure, but neither could be called "liberal." Lugar is a Republican and Bayh is a conservative Democrat, which, as I've said, should make no sense. There's a picture of me standing next to Bayh when he came to break ground for a municipal lakefront project for my town. I take pride in the fact that I'm wearing a Miami Hurricanes t-shirt (not because I liked the team, but because I liked the design).

I was young and easily ambushed. Also, Bayh was then the governor, so he could never have noticed that I dressed inappropriately because I doubt he then had the savvy to inspect every photograph that he was in. However, I'm convinced his shirt and tie obscured his wolf's exterior.

Indiana is "The Crossroads of America," because, as I like to say, everyone walks all over it. Then, they leave, which is a shrewd move.

R

It's Nice to be Sick

2009-12-07T22:28:00.002-06:00

For the past few years, I haven't been sick. Well, I haven't had a typical, run-of-the-mill seasonal cold or flu. Obviously, I had MS, which sucked. Perhaps one of the main advantages to this annoying and cloying malady is that (& I've said this many times) it precludes normal infectious diseases. In the parlance of my beloved football, it's like a wide center who snaps the ball and then stops nearly everything that tries to get through (unless, of course, you're a Chicago Bear, in which case you likely forgot that that's your objective). In addition to attacking anything and everything, including my own body, it staved off the common cold and flu and similar commonplace ailments. Everyone that I knew would catch the flu, but I could shrug at their warnings of "better not get too close."

Actually, I'd use such a warning as an excuse to validate my own reluctance to bask in their company. I still do this, for the most part, but chemotherapy has effectively destroyed my immune system and, thus, my body's main mechanism of defense against pathogens. The other day, I noticed that I had a sore throat--perhaps my first in two years. Or around that. I'm notoriously bad with dates, and this is no exception.

It had been so long since I'd had a cold that I felt surprised when I developed a sore throat a few days ago. "What's this?," I wondered. "Oh, right." It didn't take long for me to recognize the symptoms of illness, but it still shocked me nonetheless. I had grown accustomed not to getting the usual predictable seasonal stuff, so when it happened, albeit routinely, I couldn't comprehend it. With regard to the MS nonsense, I would go for weeks or months with double-vision, unbeknown to anyone else. It wasn't an outward physical manifestation of the internal turmoil that my defectively wild white blood cells (or leukocytes, if you want to get clinical about it) wreaked, so I could get away with acting like nothing was wrong. No one could tell, and since my MS isn't painful, I didn't have to risk displaying a grimace when I'd forget to stifle it.

It still is an uncomfortable feeling to be sick, but at this point I welcome anything that signals a departure from the slog I feel daily and unremittingly. To anyone else, a cold or flu would be a huge drag. For me, though, I'm actually excited to have one, because it means that my autoimmune bullshit has subsided enough to allow my body to be corrupted. I realize that I sound like a psychopath to embrace a cold in such a way, or at least a battered, delusional wife.

"This means he loves me." Actually, it means that he loves himself to an unhealthy degree. Yes, getting sick means some germ has invaded my bloodstream (at least I think that's how this thing works--remember, I was an English major). It also means that my immune system has taken a breather, which is good because it battered me around enough for a good while.

I'm always amazed at the calories burnt by certain despicable people. Why hit when you can nap? I've napped more than enough for this lifetime, though, so I'm content to lie down and get ravaged.

That sounds like a glorification of rape, which disgusts me. One of my favorite songs of the year, by The Raveonettes, decrees that "Boys who rape/Should all be destroyed." I couldn't agree more, but, with regard to commonplace germs, I embrace prosaic disease.

It still sucks to be sick, but this fever means that my body loves me. Ironically.

R

I Radiate & Emanate Stoicism

2009-12-03T16:58:00.004-06:00

Every so often, I will do something that causes any witnesses to raise an eyebrow, at the very least. Not "say something," because I do that frequently enough as it is. A breeze might surprise me, or an unexpected shriek from a random source could cause my ears to perk up. At this point (and I've mentioned this before), nearly anything in any forum, and consequently everything, gets disregarded. Unfortunately this fatalism does not apply to emotional ramifications, so I have to be especially vigilant with some bits of my unfiltered internal monologue.

More often than I could exaggerate, I'm sure, I say something that offends somebody who hears it. This doesn't mean that what I say is xenophobic or irrational in any way. If anything, it elucidates the latent caveat that should be inferred, like when I scoff at hair gel. That's about 20% of the time--for the other 80%, I'm probably bitching about the Bears or talking randomly about Nicolas Cage's aimless career, which reads more arbitrarily than a U2 discography (seriously, they all need fearless management to tell them when they have a bad idea).

My bumbling attempts at rudimentary tasks could reduce even the most stone-faced codger to a heap of gasps. In a certain way, my halted actions do just that--they halt--and I/everyone should be grateful for my deliberation in this regard. However, I'm still rash. Don't exaggerate my apparent laziness when it comes to certain things. I refuse to sit still when Fox News lingers on a television screen for too long, and nothing can impede my body as it hurdles toward an untouched remote control if it, or some programming that's similar, stays on the screen.

Sometimes my movements, though, don't go as planned. I could be doing nothing (and anything, again--it's fascinating how one does not abrogate the other) and I could lose my balance. This renders any accusation of inebriation laughable and wholly absurd. I could simply be walking a few dozen feet to a waiting car when I'll begin to pitch to either the left or the right. In this regard, I'm decidedly not partisan.

Rather than emit some form of high-pitched squeal that only dogs can hear, I do nothing. Up to now, nothing unexpected of note has happened. I could imagine that I'd be more skittish if I had something comparable to measure it against, but alas, I have never broken a bone. I have torn my ACL in my left knee, so I recreate the paralyzed feeling of utter abandon that accompanies such a fast traumatic event that a wince is a mere afterthought. All this happens in my head, though. I've never freaked out verbally. At least not by wailing or bursting out.

The fortunate thing about my own personal brand of stoicism is that I can easily separate the voice from the panic. I have dealt with hysterics constantly throughout my life, and so I've learned not to shout or utter a nonsensical emanation. In these situations. Any other time, this could be fair game. When I start to tip and have to summon someone's attention, volume and timbre must be controlled, lest they modulate alarmingly.

This gets transferred. Usually, I'd expect someone to yelp at certain, infrequent, points when my body forgets where it is in space and my brain notices its lapse and reminds the body to compensate. This happens from time to time. I'll be walking simply and then my sense of balance will fail me. I view such instances in a positive light, and think that it's simply an indication of confidence creeping back into my muscle memory. So I've gotten used to occasional moments of faulty movement and see them as a good sign, like my body is trying to recalibrate its place in space. It reminds me of when Robocop had to use his partner's aim to adjust his own. He had to rely on her uncorrupted sight and targeting prowess in order to know where to point, and I do the same thing when it comes to moving. Sometimes I just need a little freedom afforded by relying on someone else's senses.

By doing this, I learn how to move. It feels like I'm taking my first steps sometimes, and in a certain sense I am. It's not as dramatic as a paraplegic standing up, but the sentiment feels similar, although greatly diminished, obviously. You'd never know it, though, because I will never display any sort of satisfactory expression on my face. And when I trip, I won't grimace or pout. The internal frustration suffices. Plus, a tantrum could lead to further abandon, manifested externally and internally.

R

Kitsch Has Its Limits

2009-12-01T02:17:00.006-06:00

I am an advocate for kitsch, across various realms. Rocky movies, Gone With The Wind, and several professional sports franchises have attained a sufficient level of broad acclaim, but objectively these should never entice me. They do, though.

Everyone immediately thinks of the first Rocky as the beacon of the franchise. I'll admit it's good. This was, also, reminiscent of a era of yore when Sylvester Stallone did not challenge Mickey Rourke for the mantle of the most absurd, plastic-looking male movie actor. For my money, though, I'll go with Rocky IV as the most enjoyable and watchful of the bunch, of which there are five. (I'm not counting Rocky V as a full addition to the batch, and am grudgingly accepting Rocky Balboa. The absence of Talia Shire is palpable, but she wisely walked away after the street-fight debacle of the fifth movie, with the HIV-positive zephyr Tommy Morrison. Hence, I'm combining the two as a bruised example of the last installment.) A call I can't make, though, is which 80s movie I like better: that or Die Hard.

The first one was an exciting, relatively comical, action movie. Bruce Willis plays John McClane, a NYPD officer who battles a gaggle of thieves (NOT terrorists) that take over the Nakatomi Building, where his wife, from which he is separated, works in LA. It contains numerous bursts of great dialogue--it's hard not to with Alan Rickman, who insists that he is an "exceptional thief." Bonnie Bedelia is his potentially ex wife, and every time I see her I wonder what happened to her. Hopefully at some point she plays herself tongue-in-cheekly, like Elisabeth Shue did in Hamlet
2, which I maintain is underrated (just ignore the cloying presence of the guy who plays the teacher's pet). You can't hate anything with Steve Coogan--he's like the inverse of Matthew McConaughey.

Lest we forget, though, the last one was riddled with insane CGI effects and the third one, even though it had the always-stellar Jeremy Irons, buckled under the histrionic outbursts of Samuel L. Jackson. Dave Chappelle's impression of him is great in that it appears like an exaggeration. In fact, though, it's spot-on, and maybe even a little understated. (I still like him, though, and always watch The Negotiator when it's on. And, of course, Pulp Fiction is astoundingly great.)

The same early appreciation and later mire plagues U2. I frequently double back on myself, so I understand the possible ephemerality of broad proclamations, but I'll say it--U2 sucks now. This wasn't always the case. Their early albums--from Boy to War--had fist-pumping anthemic songs that reached maybe the broadest expression with The Joshua Tree. They also, though, had interesting sonically experimental songs like "An Cat Dubh."

I draw the line, though, at the vapid messes that the band has cranked out over the last few albums. Besides "Vertigo," How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was forgettable. Then came whatever the last one was called, and its unlistenable "Kick Off Your Boots" single. That band has wasted my cache of patience, and it would take a great, great release to make me give it anything more than a dismissive shrug. (LNE, an avowed U2 acolyte, won't even try to argue, or validate whatever the band has done in the last five years, and that's a bad sign for them.)

The Harry Potter books and also the Twilight series, likewise, irk me. The series are beyond trite. I won't even cite examples here because I refuse to look them up. One potential validation of them is that "At least they get kids to read." True, but I doubt that adults--parents and teachers included--asserting their aesthetic value bodes well for the child's intellectual development.

I too read crap when I was younger. In grammar school, I loved RL Stine. I was ten, though, and now wouldn't even think of picking up a Fear Street installment without irony. Now, though, mothers proudly clutch the latest Twilight tome. News Flash: that makes you look dumber than the kid next to you.

John Waters may claim that kitsch has an intrinsic, ironic value, but remember: he directed Cry-Baby and, more recently, Cecil B. Demented. Pink Flamingos may have been interesting once, but its time has passed.

R

When Defense Becomes Defensive

2009-11-25T02:42:00.005-06:00

Last night I watched Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen's mockumentary about a flamboyant gay German fashionisto who wants his own television show. All of his characters--Bruno, Borat, Ali G--want their own American show, and they participate in any event that involves them. Each scene that ensues places him and an unknowing celebrity or private citizen in a situation that make all of the active participants look ridiculous. I remember someone taking umbrage with Bruno's homophobia, but that person, along with GLAAD and PETA and the ACLU, doesn't understand the implicit irony of the whole thing. Yes, Bruno is a caricature, but his exaggerated stereotypical attributes are not strictly a homophobic cartoon of homosexuality. His depravity and shamelessness are as much, if not more, statements about Germany. (I've said it before, but that country's due for a roast.) Or, for that matter, the befuddled reactions of American rubes. It doesn't matter, because he doesn't care.

Baron Cohen's brazen shamelessness and chutzpah are trademarks of all of his characters. In the same way, sort of, I do not care about reactions to me or my words. What's the old adage? Sticks and stones? Well, prove it. I've become impermeable to anyone else's criticisms, so I instantly ignore anything hurled at me that I can otherwise ignore. In this respect, I envy the senile (I was repeatedly taught that this means simply "old," but I think everybody now, reluctantly in the case of some editors, accepts the popular definition of "old person plagued by Alzheimer's."), because nothing gets through their cranial shell. Unfortunately, I have to process what enters my head. Then, I disregard it.

I've said it before, but this does not connote or condone rudeness. It may seem like a fine line, but the distinction is important. Once someone reacts in a way that reveals their true core, I see nothing wrong with poking him until this core is visible, if it's rotten. I have been besieged by MS, and there's nobody to blame (unfortunately, MS is not genetic, so my parents are safe, in this regard). I wish I could take the limitless obstacles of the disease out on somebody, but I can't. Hence, it's not really an option. So I concede the reality of the situation, and thus forgo a number of possible rants aimed at someone else.

The embattled target invariably cries that he (or "she" or "they") is being unfairly focused on, like an insect with a magnifying glass poised inches from its body. I grasp this reaction. It turns from justified anger to undeniable insanity, though, when the "target" sees things that aren't there. Isn't that the definition of "crazy"? At one point, a middle-aged man in an orgy becomes incredulous and then indignant at Bruno's contextual advances toward him. If anything, the swinger looks defective by virtue of being a swinger. Bruno only inserts himself into the mix to underline this, as well as to instigate a reaction that reveals the target's true self, which, in this case, is a homophobic hick who is also sexually perverse.

Like Germans. When someone describes something as "German," odds are that they're talking about something prurient. Conversely, they may also be referring to efficiency and precision.

Context means everything.

R

Don't Ask, I Don't Want To Tell

2009-11-18T20:51:00.007-06:00

I understand that a menial way to begin a run-of-mill personal interaction is to ask, "How are you?" In my case--even before MS overrode everything--I loathe such ham-handed ice-breakers. The answer used to be bland and innocuous, but now a simple "Fine. You?" does not suffice. First of all, I really don't care how you're doing. I realize that this makes me sound supercilious, but at least I'm halfway honest. Plus, MS has provided all sorts of twists and digressions that a simple and laconic "Fine" won't do. And also, it would generally be a lie. In both senses...

I don't have any pain, luckily, so I'm not susceptible to lashing out just to shut you up. Well, less so... A lot of people assume I'm in pain, but I can assure you that my particular brand of MS does not come with pain. Or cognitive impairment. Mainly it fucks with my equilibrium, makes me lethargic, and attacks my muscles. I can hold a pen, but what forms on paper will likely not be legible. I can walk, but a) I don't want to because I'm too tired, and b) I move like the Tin Man before he gets oiled.

My patience is at an all-time low when it comes to social courtesy. If I don't say "hello," move it along, because nothing can shame me into walking over and shaking a hand. It's not that I despise the act. I do, but that has nothing to do with it. The simplest gesture is difficult, and fraught with potential landmines that could further impair my restricted mobility. So, I have no patience with regard to anything, but manners in particular.

Other people in my position can bore you incessantly with uninterrupted complaining. I may spin verbally into any number of topics, but not about my personal bitching. I could prattle on and on about certain symptoms, but I'm positive that this would get extremely annoying. And depressing. Nobody wants to be stuck with the proverbial stick in the mud. It sounds fatalistic, but the stick eventually drags other people into the mud. Nobody wants to provide the platform that allows someone to springboard from, because eventually the afflicted person burdens the unafflicted and dominates the conversation with personal complaints. I've encountered this phenomenon, and I resolutely refuse to be the one who makes quicksand a, pardon the pun, diffuse disease.

Having said that, I implore you to reciprocate. Leave the flood walls alone. If you provide the smallest opening, I understand why some people jump on the opportunity to unload numerous, and ultimately innumerable, complaints. I understand this more than I'd care to admit. I complain about even the smallest minutiae, but I stay away from MS stuff because I'd rather bitch about the GOP, and its alarmist modus operandi, than my optic neuritis.

Both impulses exist, but I stifle the latter. It's tempting to say that I'm overcompensating for my silent misgivings about my shaky vision, as well as a number of other things, but, as I've said, I'm fine cognitively. Hence I can sense and sympathize with a reluctance to be a mere sounding board.

In exchange for not boring you with an endless diatribe and discourse on my impaired neurological function, I would like not to be bothered with an empty pleasantry. In the words of the idiotic and insultingly homophobic military policy, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Don't ask, because I won't tell. Now that's courteous.

R

Stand by Me, Just in Case

2009-11-16T21:01:00.004-06:00

Last week, one of my three weekly sessions of physical therapy ended and I walked out of the building. One of my therapists--whose name I can confidently now say is "Amber," although I'll never say this aloud (I never say anyone's name, and am taken aback when someone else does. Why? Some of the reasons are obvious--"just because" and so on--but I rarely say anyone's name. This is probably a defense mechanism that allows me to continue forgetting/not caring/etc.)--walked next to me on the way out the door. This happens frequently, and I suspect this is because the other patients, for the most part, are boring and/or too dumb to say anything interesting (I have the same relationship with all other vocational professionals, be they doctors, nurses, hairdressers, cooks, priests, and so on.) This easy rapport can be attributed to what one of my ex-girlfriends, somewhat rudely and insultingly, attributed to my sense of entitlement. It's not that I feel superior to anyone. I might, but that is neither here nor there. Actually, I am not intimidated by, well, anything. Who gives a shit if someone has a graduate degree or some other worthless accreditation? Anyways, let's get out of this skid. I steered into it by indulging myself and now it should be safe to proceed.

So I exited the building after another arduous hour of physical therapy and felt myself pitch to the left. Without thinking, I reached over and steadied myself by grabbing my therapist's left arm. I can't confidently say that nothing would have happened if I had done nothing, but she was there so I reached out and defused the situation before it became pitiful. Luckily, she was standing right next to me, so grabbing her arm was as natural to me as "taking the arm of an elm-tree," as Emerson said of walking with Thoreau.

In the glass of the doors through which we were headed, I caught my reflection as we passed through. I was walking fine, and even confidently. I've grown quite accustomed to walking with my arm inside that of another. I even have a joke about this. Once, my brother was walking with me, and I looked at him and said, in a genteel Southern accent that was straight out of Tennessee Wilson, "Do you think we're dressed okay for the cotillion?" Like Blanche DuBois as played by Vivien Leigh, grabbing someone's arm does not bother me.

It might be possible that my reliance on someone's arm for balance is entirely mental, but I don't want to find out. The short walk from the gym to the car could have been disastrous. Theoretically, I could have tumbled over, but nothing this dramatic seems to happen, thankfully. In fact, I get asked this question a lot by medical personnel: "When was the last time you fell?" I have never fallen, although now I may have cursed and doomed myself. In a month, I'll probably be in a cast. However, I have never broken a bone, nor been stung by a bee. Knock on wood.

I'm not worried, though, because I've witnessed innumerable bee stings, or at least heard stories of them, and have yet to be stung. Ditto for breaking a bone. This evens out in the end because of my use of a cane, of which I have six (I think) and also "Preferred Customer" status at FashionableCanes.com. As I've said before, I use one mainly to deflect accusations of drunkenness.

I would love to be tethered to a zip-line that runs over my head wherever I go. Not a leash, mind you. Semantics, you say? Well, I was an English major, so sometimes semantics is all I have.

R

The White Noise of Obstruction

2009-11-13T17:03:00.005-06:00

When I finally turn on my iPod in the day, the structures and intangible imaginative variations can influence the way in which I move. A blast of drums or horns can topple me, and a flute can subdue me and render me totally static. These are the extremes, obviously, but they are also perfect examples of what I've found necessary to drown out.

Don't get me wrong--if I have no plans to move (which is generally the case), I can play anything I want. In fact, sometimes the brasher the better. It's weird that I'm more likely to listen to "Jesus," though, than "Sister Ray" when I'm lying down because, confusingly, I'm really trying not to fall asleep when I'm horizontal. Those are both songs by the Velvet Underground, by the way, and if I have to explain the difference between the two, I do so begrudgingly.

"Jesus" is a quiet, minimalist ballad built around two notes, with some, but not much, variation. Lou Reed mimics this melodic figure with his already limited range. It's hard to tell whether he rewrote the song to account for his voice. Four tracks earlier, with "Candy Says," he handed over the lead vocals to the precociously sweet Doug Yule (who unwisely took over the reins when Reed fled to Long Island when he was 28, and continued to tour under the name "The Velvet Underground," with pity from all. But I digress.). Nevertheless, the song stands up strongly today.

I still don't get the song. I mean, Reed is/was not exactly the embodiment of Christian virtue. Thankfully. That would make him boring and, ultimately, stagnant. Instead, he writes atmospheric ambient pieces for, I kid you not, Tai Chi. And this comes after decades of debauchery and then decades of sobriety. His polarity can place him easily on the emblem of any "Yin/Yang" t-shirt or poster.

When I met the man, a few years ago in the Union Square Barnes & Noble upon the release of his album The Raven, I told him how much I appreciated "Fire Music," an extension of his notoriously impermeable Metal Machine Music. There was no way I could have known how prescient I was being.

When I get up and move around, I usually have headphones on. This is not a new phenomenon, and one which is unlikely to go away. If I walk around with Motown playing, though, I'm much more prone to a startled stumble (I still haven't completely fallen yet--knock on wood). At least with drone and ambient feedback (anything eventually becomes a drone, if repeated enough), I know what to expect. It's hard to be startled with something that sounds no different from the previous ten seconds. If I head to the refrigerator at two am, I know when to expect the explosive chorus of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" by Wilco. This is a skill I learned to hone in college, and, like a high school typing class, it has paid dividends. Three minutes and fifty-seven seconds after I press play, it will kick in. Then again at 7:41 and one last time at 10:09. I think that's right. Before and about twenty seconds after these times, I can do what I want because the song drones. But I'm sure to be seated again when time runs out once more.

To anyone, the initial blasts can be overwhelming. This is especially true of "Fire Music," which is sandwiched between a spoken-word interlude and a quiet, almost silent, acoustic song like "Guardian Angel." After the first shock dissipates, a constancy lulls you in in a way that is salubrious. You get used to the noise, because it keeps you alert but also relaxes you. It is a very different sensation from the unremitting pokes that the latest Flaming Lips album give.

It may seem crazy, but this is my "ambient" music. I don't fall asleep, but can move fluidly (relatively) from the bathroom to the living room. Brian Eno has nothing on Lou Reed when it comes to providing the soundtrack to my treks to the kitchen.

R

Dumb Actors (& Actresses)

2009-11-10T15:57:00.010-06:00

This may seem like an excuse for me to be bitter and vindictive. In college and afterward, I dated actresses. I assure you, though, that I'm not trying to slip in a snide barb directed at their pipe dreams. As a matter of fact, I'll focus primarily on male actors and their inferior intellects. Some former girlfriends would take issue with my use of the word "actress" to refer to female actors, but screw it. I hate political correctness when it renders certain subjects objectionable when there is nothing to object to. Hence, female actors are "actresses." Get used to it, even though I'll talk about the other gender.

Everyone mentions Robert DeNiro as one of the great actors of his generation. Fine. I have no issue here, but you must acknowledge that he's also one of the great boneheads of his generation. Thankfully, he doesn't give many interviews. I suspect this is due to his publicist, who understands that you might realize, finally, that he's as dumb as a canary. If you ever watch him in the middle of an interview, you can see the wrinkles of confusion form on his forehead. He doesn't know how to respond to a simple question, and instead recites, by rote, an answer that doesn't really reply to that question.

When politics get involved, watch out. I like Sean Penn, and admit that he has performed remarkably in a few of his movies. However, any cache of credibility that he has built up gets leveled when he opens his mouth. The man cannot give a weighty interview without looking like an idiot. His reticence hides any overt, glaring idiocy that may spill from his lips. Nothing he says about national politics has new insight. He simply recites, by rote, a handful of buzzwords and trite cliches that are meant to whip the crowd into a frenzy. When Bush was president, we heard about Katrina and economic inequality and Iraq. Yes, he was an abysmal president, but you should be able to speak articulately why this is if you're courting the cameras of the national media. When you're Sean Penn, and prone to repeated catchphrases as much as the man you're lambasting, you should at least be able to form a simple declarative sentence and deliver it easily. Without maneuvers of distraction that you're criticizing Bush for.

I had an innocuous exchange with my friend Jess about the true stupidity of actors, which motivated this post, and I felt the need to say, finally, actors are dumb and worthy of mockery, not adulation. They get accolades like Academy Awards &/or some other golden trophy of distinction. My simple rejoinder is that Gary Busey has a Golden Globe. Game, set, and match.

People frequently think about actors as untouchable emblems of art. This is bullshit, and actually insulting to the person who actually wrote the words that the actors are reciting. I constantly hear about Marlon Brando's iconic performance as Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan's film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. He did a fine job of delivering Tennessee Williams's words, but we should not neglect the brilliance of the playwright.

This happens all the time whenever I'm forced to suffer through a dramatic production of a Shakespeare play. Any interpretation of his words make them lose some of their impact. The worst unflappable demolition man in this regard is Kenneth Branagh. His glib, over-the-top but still insufficient movies never make you forget that a much better version of the debacle you're watching lies on your bookshelf (if you're halfway literate). I can't watch more than thirty seconds of his Hamlet without jumping for the remote control. Less infuriating, but just as pathetic, is his musical version of Love's Labours Lost. I won't elaborate, but you'll have to take my word for it that it's a steaming pile of shit.

I haven't figured out whether or not this phenomenon applies to actresses. Meryl Streep, for instance, is constantly offered as the high-water mark of acting. This may be true, and this is edified further by her reticence and shyness when it comes to press interviews and, thus, politics. I also don't think she has written a banal children's book, so she may also have dodged that entrapment that has caught so many previously-esteemed actors.

Julianne Moore, I'm looking in your direction.

R

Heathen

2009-11-08T22:07:00.005-06:00

I articulated my views on God and other tangential mythologies while I was in rehab in Maryland. There, we had to recognize a "higher power," and I thought this was a stupid, pointless, and ultimately fatalistic exercise. For most people, who, as I petulantly thought, had drunk the Kool-Aid, this was easy. They only had to say "God," and that was that. Unfortunately, I dismissed this as so much insanity that I wouldn't deign to acknowledge. Instead, I kept my mouth shut and let their delusions wash over me.

I say I was "petulant," which connotes childishness, not because I dismissed such ridiculous theology, but because I said nothing to contradict the insanity I faced. Some would probably interpret this as honorable and mature. Let's get serious, though. A few crazy Christians may act okay with non-belief, but really they hide their supercilious air of superiority and privileged absurd "knowledge." It drives me insane when someone looks at me condescendingly and says something like, "You'll come around." No, asshole--you're a mindless sheep without a brain or hint of intellectual curiosity in your sieve-like head. I don't believe in any of your bullshit. I emphatically will not drink the Kool-Aid. Furthermore, they need to be argued with, because a) discourse would confuse them and b) their claim to moral superiority is both arrogant and directly insulting.

Earlier, I was watching The Godfathers, and was struck by the cloying religious overtones. At the same time, such instances were interspersed with episodes of violence and blood. It's important to note that the two episodes had nothing to do with the other, besides the obvious moral hypocrisy constantly voiced by proponents of religion. They then advocate, and have advocated, massive campaigns of subjective (I'm being gracious) totalitarianism. It is such a cliche, but that doesn't mean it's wrong--innumerable deaths can be attributed to a, so I was taught, all-benevolent, all-knowing, infallible, and invisible deity. "That's man, though," might be the objection, with nary a hint of consideration of their beloved Ark. Or the annihilation of the citizens of Sodom & Gomorrah, whose most glaring crime was the objectionable (to them) practice of homosexuality, and who've been caricatured in our minds and the media. Lest we forget, we are the supreme culture that keeps visual lobotomies like Jerry Springer, Two and a Half Men, and Flavor of Love on the air. I watched Idiocracy and thought, "Is this supposed to be a parody?" To me, it looked like more of a documentary.

Before, I've stated that I'm an atheist, but this is not accurate enough. In rehab, I encountered the question of what I believed in constantly. Well, I'll tell you. I believe in what I can see, feel, hear, touch, and smell. That's what I "believe" in. The concept of faith comes up whenever I say this, and I can't help but laugh at the specious untruths of empty platitudes like "Believing is seeing."

However, I'm not simply an atheist. I am more of a non-theist. I'm not so concerned with convincing anyone that there is no "God," because that perpetrates the concept. "God" is such a primitive notion that I cannot even consider it as a valid one. I said then (in Maryland), and I say it now--I don't even think about a "God." There is too much beauty, both in nature and in the minds of others who ironically probably believe(d) in a "God," that to credit an invisible guy in the sky would diminish the accomplishments of the very real human(s) that deserve the attention and recognition.

One thing that drives me nuts is the glib criticism that to contradict religion, one invariably ends up quoting religious "literature." Yes, it's true. Someone could also cite numerous scientific facts, but the most effective way to illustrate absurdity is to use the same blunt tool as the faithful. For Christians, this means the Bible. I guarantee that nobody who takes it seriously even considers how patronizing it is to call the first and second halves "Old" and "New." If I were Jewish, I'd be pissed. I guess, though, that silence is golden, for the most part, for them--not in the Middle East, though.

Another thing that confounds me is the sadistic pleasure that one of the "faithful" feels when confronted with opposition or aversion of any kind. Someone may not say anything, but you can see and feel the smile that they have in the pit of their stomach. (That's if they're polite.) Such a smug provocation would not occur on a darkened street, I'm sure.

I wish that religious fanatics, overt or quiet, would have to deal with an arbitrary spate of violence. Something tells me that martyrdom is a concept that they would not tolerate. They shouldn't, because it is another dumb notion.

Conversely, converting out of fear would make it impossible for me to look in a mirror. I'm not going to convert out of fear, like Constantine did on his deathbed, and hopehopehope for a divine cure for my MS. Shit happens, like the bumper sticker says, and you/I have to roll with the setbacks.

I sure as hell won't be bored weekly for an hour (if you're lucky) in church and hope for a divine resolution that won't come.

R

Between Thought & Expression

2009-11-06T01:54:00.007-06:00

One of the frequently cited symptoms of multiple sclerosis is cognitive impairment. I don't have this. I have nearly everything else, so you might think I'd consider this trade-off a push, but I'm relieved that I have none of the cognitive difficulties that many others have. This can manifest itself in various ways, with memory problems, aphasia, and malapropisms being the chief signs. Fortunately, I remember everything, remain articulate, and choose my words deliberately.

Occasionally my memory can be burdensome. Nobody should want to remember half of the nonsense I do. For instance, it must be nearly intolerable to watch Rocky IV with me, because I know and recite the dialogue of the movie while it plays. The same goes for countless other movies, but this is the most humorous example I can think of right now. (This is probably due to Dolph Lundgren's recent cameo on Conan, which I can't seem to expel from my mind.) It's hard not to remember nuggets like "I must break you." Or "If he dies, he dies." Or "You will lose." Or "I cannot be defeated." Okay, I think those are all of his lines as Ivan Drago, in English at least (he also says "I win for me. For me!" and "He is not human. He is a piece of iron," but those lines are in Russian.). That was off the top of my head, by the way, so I think I've proven my memory acuity simply with this little aside.

It may seem at times like I'm stalling while my mind tries to catch up to whatever is being thrown at it. Again, this is not entirely the case. In fact, I'm considering what to say, and scanning my mind for the best words to use to express myself. I understand that, at times, especially in this ADD culture, impatience may set in, but TS--you can wait two seconds while I think of the word that I want to use. Sure, I can call you a "moron," but "dolt" is much more blunt and concrete.

Also, my mouth resists what I want to say. I have to twist my tongue deliberately in order to form the words I want to use. I can still be effusive--don't get me wrong--but I am less prone to rambling. This is a matter of opinion, because I'm still quite prone to ranting. Some may think that my thoughts on the interminability of a baseball game or the whole season, or the utterly boring spectacle of a soccer game, are aimless. Those who would object, though, probably love baseball, so they should be use to enduring pointless acts, like a strikeout in game 53 of 162.

Another aspect of recall comes when I hear a name or see a face. I probably shouldn't disclose this, but it's okay because I can just deny it later. This happens quite frequently with my friend Neal, who I went to high school with. I wish I could forget the bulk of those four years, but the fact is that I remember most everyone he mentions. It may take a few seconds to conjure a face mentally, but often I come up with one. Since I don't want to hear about kids or nuptials, because they are truly, truly boring, I'll furrow my brow and feign aloofness if he or someone else mentions some random former classmate. If I went to college with you, though, I was probably intoxicated with any chemical (this includes, notably, alcohol), so my lack of recognition might be valid. Plus, now with MS, I really don't care.

I say this constantly, but I cannot emphasize enough how little I care about mundane personal anecdotes. I assure you--I'm all there, so any perceived forgetfulness is really indifference. I find that I stop listening to boring stories immediately. Oblivious raconteours even get a chance to develop a soporic story into something interesting if they drag from the outset of their telling, and I see no enticing disclosures on the horizon. I know that this can be interpreted as dick-ish on my part, but again, I must repeat that I don't give a shit what impressions I leave behind. Whereas in the past my eyes might glaze over and maintain eye contact while I would think of an excuse I could use to exit the conversation, now I'll abruptly change the subject to something interesting. I don't care about your phone conversation with your mother, but I absolutely love Neko Case--don't you love this song? That last sentence actually was said by me, I think, like a year ago to my then-girlfriend. Needless to say, that relationship ran its course...

If what I am about to hear could be interesting, I'll gladly wait. My appreciation for words chosen carefully has peaked recently. This may be due to my fascination with oral constructions of language, which I've always had, that I've been allowed to indulge in considerably over the last year, or in my mildly pretentious love of good poetry (no Maya Angelou or Jewel here, in case you were wondering). However, I must reiterate that I've become aware of this just in the last year, because I wouldn't do trade interviews for my awful, debilitating, soul-wasting last job. I might love language, but I don't love it sickly enough for me to take pleasure in some anonymous person's recitations of sales figures of toilet paper or wet dog food. Ugh--whenever I think about that job I shudder. It was insane to me that my company expected me to write eighty or so pages of insipid single-spaced analyses of various sectors of industries in which I had, honestly, no interest.

One good thing about the MS is that it gave me an excuse not to suffer through little bursts of common (see: dull) trifles. Little perks such as this have to come to the forefront of my mind whenever I want to lament the limits that MS has placed on me. Sure, I can't play basketball, but I don't have to work for the man in a job that I would, definitely, resent.

This is where you should envision me weighing invisible scales in either hand, trying to think which one holds what I'd rather have.

R

The Preposterous Health Care Boondoggle

2009-11-02T15:51:00.006-06:00

I've tried to contain my urges to scream at the television whenever I see someone opposed to universal health care. For the most part, I've succeeded. Sometimes, though, it's hard to ignore the extreme ignorance and paranoid xenophobia that accompany calls for no-brainer legislation like this. Hearing about nonexistent "death panels" and seeing Sarah Palin add her own two cents (she's so dumb that she probably thinks this is an actual denomination of currency) have riled me up enough to scream, inside my head, at the ease with which these morons eat up television air-time.

It is insane to pay for health care as a US citizen. It has become a cliche, but the notions that we have a middling system as well as one that demands that we pay for it are maddening. But doesn't that sound like socialism? YES. To morons who don't even know who Joseph McCarthy was, this is insidious. To them, they think of scary Russian, Communist leaders. It goes without saying that they could name maybe one--everyone knows Stalin. There's no way these chimps could name Brezhnev, and the ideological spectrum would not register a blip of recognition in their puny minds. That doesn't stop them, though, from defensively slinging barbs that actually make them look even stupider. Case in point: that stupid woman who was against universal health care and wrote a letter to President Obama decrying the socialist bent of government-ru health care and then saying, "And don't touch my Medicare." This woman embodies, in a faceless quote, what people make fun of America for. She's brash, crotchety, and stupid. I refuse to elucidate, again, the reason that she's stupid.

Often, when I think about this issue, I find myself arguing the same point with myself. It's the purest form of tautology: Q. Why are Americans so stupid? A. Because they/we are. I don't even want to devise theories of explanation. We elected Simple Jack twice to the highest office in, arguably, the world. We're not dumb? I can hardly think of George W. Bush without cringing.

So I shouldn't be shocked when mentions of death panels and socialism fail to make me laugh. People believe that nonsense, and freak the fuck out, then stall, if not doom, the entire process. Congress echoes the fecklessness of its constituents, unsurprisingly. Representatives and senators should immediately disregard the paranoia of the populace, but the irony of democracy is that they need to resort to demagoguery in order to rally their respective gaggles of voters. Politicians horde those votes, and court and guard them like an abusive husband who shields his battered wife because he fears that she may wise up and leave the prick. Likewise, we need to abandon elitist Washington politicians. Republicans famously labeled John Kerry as "elitist," with no sense of the old "pot/kettle" joke, nor how it should have been turned inward.

I've mentioned how much I hate the Blue Dog Democrats, and how they call themselves "Democrats" but typify none of the modern attributes of the term. Because of their hesitation, the health care bill now puts forth an "opt out" clause that allows state legislatures to decide whether or not they want to participate in the public option. Really, I should like this stipulation because ultimately it could potentially lead to the deaths of thousands of Republicans. However, I recognize that just as many pragmatists could die with the disposable, stagnant conservatives. Many reasonable people live in treacherous states, for whatever reason. Lest we forget, we are supposed to be "united," no matter what anachronistic secessionists say.

As I've said, universal health care should be a slam-dunk. Since we have to tolerate the intolerant, and intolerable, America deserves the limp bill it will get whenever Congress gets around to voting on it.

I especially don't give a shit now that I'm on the socialist Medicare program for the disabled. Without it, I could never have received the stem cell procedure because of its exorbitantly expensive cost and my former insurance company's repeated refusals to cover it. With it, I can afford not to care as America eats itself, like the proverbial snake that chews its own tail.

Furthermore, who would've thought that Benjamin Franklin's political cartoon from over 200 years ago would still be relevant--acutely literal, in fact--today?

R

Delayed Chemo Effects

2009-10-31T17:27:00.006-05:00

I had a massive amount of chemotherapy in a short amount of time. Five infusions of cytoxan coursed through my veins via my PICC line in as many days. Some people on my floor lost their hair or exhibited other expected side effects of chemotherapy. My appetite disappeared, and that's about it for what I felt prior to the stem cell re-infusion. Even in the initial weeks after I left, I didn't display the usual outwardly visible effects like hair loss. The last two weeks, though, have been a different story.

After my first round of chemotherapy, a month before the hospitalization, I saw that my hair had begun to fall out. And onto my pillow. Because I knew that I had a lot more where that came from, with regard to the chemo regiment, I shaved my head prior to my admission. My hair stopped falling out noticeably while I was in the hospital, though.

Before I knew it, my stay ended. I still had much of my closely cropped hair. Recently, however, I've noticed that my hair--on my head and in more "intimate" areas--has started to fall out prodigiously. It's probably good that I shaved my head. It definitely has minimized the squeamishness that I'm sure I'd feel as I looked at my hairy pillow.

Since college, I haven't showered frequently. When I was in college, of course, I started to miss days here and there. Then, I strung along several days. When I was first diagnosed, then, I took it as an excuse not to go through the hassle of bathing. Soon, I cut back considerably, and now back-to-back shower days don't happen. It's too arduous to position the chair that I now use like a feeble old person, and then to fidget with the tap controls until the water is a reasonable temperature. Now, because I have no hair, I find that I don't have to shower ever. I don't smell, and this is both a blessing and a curse. It's nice not to have b.o., but showering is more of a chore than ever before. When the chemo ended, and I was discharged, I was relieved to shower. Since then, though, I've noticed that I emerge from the bathroom with less and less hair. I'm not totally hairless, but I can easily feel my scalp with my fingertips.

Then I have to check my eyes, because generally an eyelash or two has fallen beneath a lid. For the most part, I have my eyebrows (thankfully--that's a hallmark of chemo, and one of the ways in which to discern between chemotherapy and general baldness). Every so often, though, I peel back an eyelid and see a preternaturally long bit of hair there. This is a piece of brow, obviously. While I scoop that out, I make sure to check for other strands of hair. Most likely, this is an eyelash. I've always had long eyelashes, not unlike Dumbo, so I'm used to doing this, but never before has removal of one from underneath my lid been so certain. There's bound to be at least one.

At first, the nausea was manageable. It took a few days--after the re-infusion, really--for the telltale feeling of unease to come up (pardon the pun). When it did, I didn't eat anything for a week. This was normal, I was told. Nevertheless, it was unsettling that, for a week, I ate nothing but Ensure &/or Boost. I felt like Kanye West, without the facial disfigurement. Eventually, my doctor prescribed Marinol--a synthetic form of THC. Or medical, pharmaceutical marijuana. It sucked, and only made me sleepy, a reaction that my friend Sophie warned me about but which I shrugged off more as an extension of her light-weight-ness. Not so, it turned out. Marinol erases any psychoactive or psychotropic side of marijuana, aka the fun of it, and replaces it with Ambien. Or, in my case, Restoril (Ambien does nothing for me). Now, my nausea comes and goes. It's impossible to predict when I'll have that feeling, so I need something close to counter its effects.

What's more troubling is that there seems to be nothing to assuage the dizziness and exhaustion I feel after being upright for an extended amount of time. How can the big bad drug companies not have something that will quell this? I've mentioned this feeling several times to my doctors and my physical therapists, and still they have no response. A simple "Whatreyougonnado?" would suffice, but they seem to dismiss it like they didn't hear me. When I lie down, it goes away. Sitting up for more than half an hour causes it to increase exponentially, it seems.

Hey, Big Pharma--mach schnell! I know you're good for nothing altruistic, for the most part, but make something that will allow me to sit in a chair for more than an hour. You've done the Viagra thing, now do something less comical. Forget about curing cancer and everything else that should have been done already, and just let me sit upright.

R

Near-Perfect Stoicism (Days 2 & 3)

2009-10-28T03:12:00.005-05:00

I forgot that I had physical therapy again today. Usually, there's a day off between appointments, but not today. I went on Monday and had a typically uneventful session with my normal guy, whose name I still don't know. Today, though, he switched with another therapist, so today I had her. Her name escapes me, shockingly.

I had the same basic regiment: 10 minutes on the bike to warm up, then exercises on the parallel bars, and then it's over to the table, where I do more exercises. It doesn't vary much, except the speed, ease, and fluidity with which I complete this routine. Since this was only my third proper session, nothing exciting or earth-shattering happened. Except my utter stoicism after groping my trainer.

Over the last year or so, I've almost perfected a look of complete stoicism. Part of this can be attributed to my mind's preoccupied concentration on menial tasks, but now it's my default expression because I simple cannot be shocked, and it's difficult to surprise me with a joke. Most of the time, I see it coming. This is not to say that I have silenced my internal monologue. Often, my face won't move but my head will tumble, either with laughter, appreciation, or even horror, among other things. Today, I realized that I may have broken down that let bit of self-consciousness that causes a face to contort.

When I was between the parallel bars, I grabbed my trainer's boob. I don't mean that this was an incidental brush or run-in. No, I squeezed. In my defense, I was wholly unconscious of this. What happened was that I was in the middle of the bars doing some balance exercises and my eyes were intently fixed on the door in front of me, per her instruction. She told me to try the exercises with my eyes closed, and with my hands off of the bars that I used for balance. I began to do this when I felt my body start to roll to the right, and I reached for the bar in order to right myself. I always scan a room and look things to grab, and I thought I was reaching for part of the steel construct. The thing was, though, that I didn't grab the bar, but her left breast.

It took a good five seconds before my brain fully processed what had happened. Five seconds, as in "One, Two, Three, Four, Five." All I knew was that that was not the bar. She ignored the whole event, thankfully. Then I began to think. Does this happen routinely? This clearly was not the first time that someone had accidentally grabbed her boob. She's not (how you say) mildly chested. (She's not overweight, either.) Did she view this as a hazard of the job? Like, "Yeah, whatreyougonnado? My boob was grabbed again"? Even if this were so, I couldn't imagine getting used to that. If someone accidentally grabbed my crotch, it could never be a run-of-the-mill interaction.

She didn't mention it, but I knew immediately what I had done. And I knew she knew I knew. It wasn't exactly difficult--steel bars and breast tissue are fairly disparate, texturally. Rather than call attention to the awkwardness, I chose to ignore it and proceed with my exercises. It wasn't like she could tell that I was actually cringing, because my face remained still and steady.

I've never had a face of rubber. In the past, though, such an event would cause me to furrow my eyebrows inquiringly, then hoist them in shock and recognition. Not so, today. I kept my eyes focused on the door and calmly removed my hand and resumed the exercise. The incident was over, even though it pierced my thoughts for the next half-hour, and still, obviously, lingers.

So maybe my impassivity is only external, for now. I don't think this is a bad thing, because once it becomes internal I could become really boring. And posts like this wouldn't exist because they wouldn't occur to me.

R

Football Is Absurdly Epic

2009-10-25T21:40:00.008-05:00

I'll try not to lament the demise of my beloved Bears too much. I almost can't help it, though, because I can't stand Lovie Smith or his constant quizzical facial expression. No--you're not getting a treat, Lovie, so wipe off the blank hang-dog look. It looks like he's too dumb to feel anything beside carnal pain, which I wish someone would give him unremittingly. But I'll not dwell, other than to say that the Bears need a coach, finally, that is competent. I used to attack quarterbacks and running backs for their seeming ineptitude, but I think now that the problem lies with the coach. Jay Cutler may not be Tom Brady, and Matt Forte not Walter Payton, but they cannot be as disposable as they look in games. Formerly unremarkable Cedric Benson's 188 rushing yards confirmed this today, as the hapless Bears lost to a very beatable Cincinnati Bengals team, who they made look like Super Bowl contenders. I digress, though...

Many people shrug off football as yet another display of machismo and nothing more. They would have a point, but there's no way in hell they could play a game. Neither could I, for that matter. That's what I love about the NFL. I know I could never play in a game. I could step onto baseball field, and most likely could vanish into the periphery. This sentiment goes beyond the obvious MS restrictions. I could hardly play a boring game of European "futbol," aka soccer, and there's no way I could move in shoulder pads, ao clearly I couldn't play football. Even if I wanted to, though, I would have to be a freakish example of anatomy and resiliency. Since I'm not an evolutionary or eugenic marvel (far from it), I could never play professional football, and I'm fine with this. I never have the thought, "I wish I were in this game," or "What I would do is...," because I could never survive a single play in an NFL game.

Nothing else gives you the feeling of pure spectacle like an NFL game. Even the promotional music and that of the programming itself sound like everything belongs in the Roman Coliseum. I cringe when I hear Faith Hill sing the intro for Sunday Night Football, but I love the upright horns that nearly make me stand before a commercial break. Honestly, who okays the intros for this programming? That Faith Hill song is so bad that even wallpaper curls when it plays, and Bocephus's "Are You Ready For Some Football?" on Monday Night Football, before it went to ESPN, induces only feelings of laughter and mild nausea. The brass blasts that signal the end (or maybe the beginning) of a commercial break cut through anything and everything, though, as if to signal the entrance of an emperor.

The idea of 80,000 people, give or take, gathering for a sporting event may seem crazy, especially in this age of HD. I actually prefer to watch a football game on television, but I understand the gratification of physically being present in a stadium. If you watch the crowd, its cheers look like they emanate from an alien civilization. This is more of a phenomenon that's visible during a college game, but I am confident that you can skip this. You don't need to feel the displaced air from thousands of waving tentacles to know that they are there.

Nevertheless, people gather to watch these huge gladiators run into each other. They do a lot more than that, of course, but I'm playing devil's advocate.

I'd pay handsomely to see someone who criticizes football's brutality get on a field, with pads, and wait to get knocked down. You'd have to be insane to endure what these players walk into, voluntarily, each week. This is true, but you also need a little finesse to make it look good. A very tiny number of people can do this for an entire season, and even less for multiple seasons.

This is the reason Brett Favre's decision to shirk retirement only makes me shrug and shake my head in confused admiration. He doesn't have anything else left to accomplish, but still he won't disappear in the entrance tunnel.

As a Bears fan, his indefatigability puzzles me, but I can't turn this into derision. He may be most famous as the leader of the Bears' chief rival, the Green Bay Packers, and now is at the helm of division leader the Minnesota Vikings. He brings it, though, and oddly refuses to fade away.

I wish Lovie Smith would not do the same, however.

R

The Flesh Is Weak (Sort Of--The Mind Gets In The Way)

2009-10-22T01:58:00.003-05:00

I had my first appointment of physical therapy earlier this evening, and it went about as I expected it to go. I warmed up on the "bike," and I insist on putting that in quotes because this "bike" is not a true exercise bike. There are no wheels, and the pedals only push down like a StairMaster. In truth, this is what it is: a recumbent StairMaster. The contraption even has metal handlebars that you grasp, and they too go back and forth while you climb fake stairs while you sit. Talk about irony. It was over in ten minutes, though, and then it was on to the parallel bars.

Think of male gymnasts, and how they have to contort and elevate themselves on this thing. Now remove the twisting and contorting, and you have what I had to walk through to complete a series of simple exercises. As I held on to both sides, I worked on coordination and muscle memory by raising alternating legs to a plastic chair. Easy enough, right? Then my therapist, an Indian guy whose name I forget five seconds after it's uttered, let me rest.

This isn't so bad, I thought. Then I fumbled through a batch of exercises that reminded me of how fucked-up my muscles really are. It's hard to ascertain how much of this has to do with MS, and how much can be attributed to the weeks of idleness that my muscles had to, literally, sit through while I lay in the hospital bed. First was an exercise whereby I had to reach, and touch with my toes, for complementary ends of a half-circle made of black tape on the floor. I get distracted easily, and I couldn't help but think that I was reaching for a large protractor. One of those half-ones that come in zippered plastic packages of school supplies. Do they even still have those? Anyway, this was more difficult than I anticipated. My body kept veering off to one side, so I had to clutch my trainer's arm. Then he waved me over to a table, and I breathed a sigh of relief because this meant I could sit.

As I lay flat on my back, I had to thrust my pelvis up and hold that position for five seconds, then lower it back down. I'm good at this, so infer from that what your sick mind will. Then I flipped over and propped myself up by my knees and hands before I stretched out one arm and kicked back the opposite leg. Both extremities would be held aloft for five seconds, and then I would switch sides. I was all right at this, but the narrow table bothered me. I felt like I could fall off either side. Luckily, I didn't, but this unease stayed with me for the next round of exercises. I sat up and faced the opposite wall, and stood up and then sat back down slowly. My trainer has a thing about inhibiting your vision, and he wanted me to do this without looking down (or holding the table for balance). He told me to keep my eyes on a fixed point on the wall.

These exercises are all pretty simple, but I was shocked to feel sweat rolling down my face. Again, I was reminded of how inactive I had been during the hospitalization, and how this idleness had eaten away my muscles. Whenever I'm examined, doctors, and even this therapist, have expressed shock at how strong my muscles are. Yeah yeah, I always think dismissively, and rightly so. The muscles themselves may be strong, but they do not move with ease and grace. Instead, they plod and plop. I struggle to control them, and the stream of sweat conveyed this. Luckily, the trainer noticed, which I'm sure is especially hard to do since I don't breathe with an open mouth, and assured me that I was almost done.

The last exercise was a basic standing push-up against a wall. I think mostly this was supposed to be a stretch, but at this point everything was an exercise.

What I gleaned from the hour was that the strength is there, but I have to learn to ignore any internal monologues of warning or hesitation. I can do these exercises, but my brain keeps getting in the way of their full completion. Don't get me wrong--I still complete them, but I have to silence my own caveats. I feel like a schizophrenic sometimes as I quash voices inside my head before I set out to complete simple tasks.

They get done, and afterward the effort is only an afterthought. The problem is with forethought. I must extinguish doubt before it has a chance to infiltrate my psyche, and subsequently doom whatever it is I want to do.

I detest it whenever someone quotes the Bible, and in this case it's maddening to think of that oft-quoted verse in Matthew: "the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." I have to go Zen when doing certain things. Unfortunately, I can't stop objecting to the inaccuracy, or at least incompleteness, of phrases like this.

In my case, the flesh is willing, but the mind gets in the way.

R

Bad Books Make The Most Watchable Movies

2009-10-19T14:30:00.007-05:00

The Shawshank Redemption ended about half an hour ago, and I shook my head when I considered how many times I've seen various parts of the movie. It's one of those movies, like Rocky IV , III, II, or even the first one, where you can watch certain parts of it for eternity. I can't think of another more pleasant "hell" than one in which I'd be forced to watch Ivan Drago beat Rocky to a pulp, only for the eugenic Drago to say, "He is not a man. He is a machine." about Sylvester Stallone. And then, the Russian premier gives Sly a standing ovation, to Dolph Lundgren's (who plays Ivan Drago) chagrin. It's such a horribly dumb moment. I can recognize this, though, and still appreciate the kitschy sentiment. The same goes for 1994's The Shawshank Redemption.

One of my verbal treatises, with which I annoy numerous people (I'm sure), is that bad books make the most watchable movies. Two examples just from the '30s spring to mind to contradict me. The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind both came out as iconic movies of that decade, so I won't toil to make these movies fit into my offhand theory. Nevertheless, for the most part I'm right. Have you tried to stomach the movie of The Great Gatsby? Robert Redford ached to be put out of his misery there, so his ultimate demise should be refreshingly welcome.

The Shawshank Redemption, of course, is easily the most successful movie on cable regularly, and the story itself comes from an awful Stephen King novella. There are several instances in which some hackneyed lines come straight from his pen (I'm sure--I'm not going to read the small book to find out). The warden, played evilly by Bob Gunton, refers to Indians, or Native Americans if you want to be feebly P.C., as "Injuns." It's painful to see him utter this stale, anachronistic line. I know he's supposed to be cruel, but the warden doesn't also have to impersonate Yosemite Sam. Later, when Red (Morgan Freeman) speaks of the long night of uncertainty that precedes the truth about Andy (Tim Robbins, the main hero of the story), he says, "Time can draw out like a blade."

I know that you're not supposed to dissect each bit of prose until it loses meaning, but that is really trite. Mind you, I was an English major, so I'm very conscious of bad phrases that get dashed off with nary a consideration. Like a blade? Ugh--that is so stupid. Maybe it would make more sense if I were a samurai, but alas, I am not. It may sound okay, but that line makes no sense if you think about it for more than five seconds.

The same goes for Morgan Freeman's narration, as Red, that says that Andy Dufresne had been imprisoned for "nearly twenty years." Is it that hard to say exactly how long he was in the pen? "Nearly twenty" means "not quite," so you're far too close to saying, "Well, at least he wasn't in there for twenty..." Nineteen years and change sound mildly do-able when put next to this round, non-prime number. At least he didn't reach the 20-year milestone...

The lynchpin for Andy's prospective release comes in the form of Gil Bellows's glib story of a talkative inmate that he used to live with, some guy named "Blatch." The name is an onomatopoeia for something bad. He might as well be named, "Creep-erton." Of course, Blatch murdered Andy's wife and her golf-pro lover, the crime for which Andy was convicted and now is serving time.

Family Guy has made the point that Red most likely forgot the name of the Mexican town that Andy wants Red to add at the end of his itinerary, but I think the cartoon gets ahead of itself here. There's no way Red is going to remember to go to Zihuatanejo, but his location of the rock and letter that Andy left for him is equally crazy. During the same conversation in which he drops the long name of this Mexican city, Andy also tells Red to go to Buxton, Maine, and find the tree where the letter is buried. I'll let Red find the tree, because Andy describes it so eloquently as "like something out of a Robert Frost poem." At that point, I don't think a convict would be aware of the revisionist history of Frost's legacy as a poet of pastoral nursery rhymes and whimsical catchphrases. Beside this, the rock that Red finally picks up when he reaches the tree is wholly unremarkable. Dust and dirt cover it, so there's no way for Red to see what makes it so different from the other stones. Why does it jump out at him?

There are many such leaps of logic that the movie asks of us. For instance, what shoes does Andy wear while he crawls through the sewer? Forget that, for now. I defy you to change the channel if you land on The Shawshank Redemption. Or, for that matter, Misery or The Shining.

Or even The Green Mile. Yes, it's too long, but why would you watch the whole thing from start to finish? Pick and choose wherever the dial lands, like I do with Shawshank. Whether it's the scene in which Brooks feeds his similarly incarcerated bird, or he swings after having had enough trouble bagging groceries, I'm confident you'll forget whatever horrible reality show you were watching.

As someone who spent a summer bagging groceries, I can say that suicide doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

R

Drone In These Dog Days

2009-10-15T01:21:00.005-05:00

These days, I try to fill my time during the day. Not with anything, mind you. I want the pages of the calendar to flip and fall to the floor, like in old movies. I'm not depressed--just impatient. Since I cannot catalyze the effects of the stem cell procedure, I have to bide my time and wait.

This is immensely frustrating, and sometimes my toes tap the ground like an impatient kindergartner. My sight still bobs back and forth, so reading is more of a chore these days, and my balance still thwarts my legs at, literally, every turn. So, until my symptoms become more normal, or at least level off after the trauma of chemotherapy, I must wait. And wait. And wait, as the unseen narrator's voice in Casablanca says.

Earlier, I didn't know what to do with myself. Today, as on most days, the afternoon made me sleepy. Luckily, I made a wise choice not to take my Provigil, which is an "anti-sleepiness" pill that really makes it nearly impossible to fall asleep. After I woke up, though, I still didn't know what to do. I could have gone back to sleep, but I'm not depressed, so I actually could not have. What soothed my mind was music, but not of the soporific variety, nor of the histrionic, explosive type. No, it was drone that did the trick.

I refer not to a Don DeLillo-ish, ambient hum that acts like a sedative, but to a sustained buzz that keeps you awake but doesn't annoy you. A good example of this is The Velvet Underground's magnificent, epic "Heroin." It has only two chords (for most of it--there's a third at the climax), but they are more than enough to fill the space. As Lou Reed keeps punctuating the song with them on his electric guitar, drummer Moe Tucker's tribal drumming punches through the chords until it sounds frantic. Of course, there's the more in-your-face effrontery of the band's "Sister Ray," but that song urges you to pay attention, and that's not what I'm going for just then.

Drone music does not have to poke you in the ears constantly for its efficacy to be felt. Instead, it's content to lie back and be, confident that you'll stay awake. Perhaps the standard by which I measure this kind of music is Kraftwerk's nearly 23-minute "Autobahn." It replicates perfectly the phenomenon that any good 15-year-old Driver's Ed student knows as "highway hypnosis." It's 23 minutes long, but it sounds, to me at least, like a whimsical pop song. I don't mean this in the Joanna Newsom sense, because she annoys me. With her caterwauling and erratic shifts in dynamics, I could never be hypnotized by her. Kraftwerk, however, might as well be spinning a pocket watch in front of my eyes, because I get completely entranced listening to "Autobahn."

Both "Autobahn" and "Heroin" drone successfully, but in very different ways. Kraftwerk, like the German literalists that they are, repeat the same figure of notes over the lyrics, "Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn," which I assume countless people have taken to be a Beach Boys-ish "Fun fun fun on the Autobahn." They're wrong wrong wrong, though, and don't realize that Kraftwerk is really saying, "We drive, drive, drive on the Autobahn." Or something close to that. I don't speak German, and I'm too lazy to Google the literal translation, but that's the gist. All the while, an A Clockwork Orange-type sibilation rides on top of, and underneath, the quiet rustling and subdued whistling of the other instruments. The song sounds like, well, driving down a long highway with your windows up, then down, then up again.

"Heroin" opens like a reluctant, blooming flower. It doesn't want to open, but the drums almost overtake the song with relentless pounding. This doesn't happen, though, because each possible crescendo stops abruptly right before it seems to be on the verge of explosion. Instead, we hear a prospective implosion that never comes. Ever time that it sounds like a loud bang is around the corner, the song stops. There's no BANG, but there is a hint of collapse. It never happens, though. Then it starts again. Then it ends, after over seven minutes.

During the day, I prefer Kraftwerk's brand of drone to The Velvet Underground's. This probably sounds counterintuitive, but to me it makes sense, especially with respect to late afternoon and late night. I need a continuous, pulsing stream of sound to sustain me during the day, whereas at night it helps to get poked every once in a while, especially after a day of fighting lethargy.

I wonder if, like Whistler in Sneakers, I could successfully identify a stretch of road by its whoosh. I doubt it, but I might be able to come close.

R

More Baby Herman Than Swee'Pea

2009-10-13T00:22:00.003-05:00

While I was in the hospital, a fair amount of my remaining hair (since, as I've mentioned, I buzzed off most of it preemptively) fell out and rested on my pillow. Each morning, a fresh batch of dark gossamer sprung up, and I could only shrug. I've written before about how my hair began to fall out from the chemotherapy, but now the extent to which this has gone is nearly complete.

I haven't lost all of my hair. Many cancer patients who have to sit through the ravages of chemotherapy lose all of it, but I haven't. I look more like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'s Baby Herman than Popeye's adopted son Swee'Pea. It's hard to tell, though, how much hair Swee'Pea actually had, because the drawings were so crude and he always seemed to be wearing a bonnet, which I suspect existed merely as an excuse for the animators not to draw hair. Anyways, I still technically have most of my hair, but it now has the awkward patchiness and pathetic vestigial presence of a junior high student's pitiful peach fuzz.

I'm glad I shaved it, unlike a few people I saw who opted not to do this. Like I've said, they came to look like newly indoctrinated cult members. However, the problem is that it's fall--my favorite season, by far--and the brisk air necessitates a hat. It doesn't matter if I'm outside, with occasional gusts of wind, or inside, with nothing going on but what I can feel from heating vents. The slightest hint of a change in air currents can make me shiver.

Throughout the day, I will wear a plain black knit cap at different times, depending on how cold I am. You know that old grammar school teaching that says that something like 75% of your body heat comes from your head? I always scoffed at this, and thought it was just another manipulative ploy to make kids wear hats. This may be true, but I must say that a high percentage of palpable body heat comes from your head. Remember--I'm not totally bald, but I may as well be. (I just had to reach for the hat, by the way, because I'm fucking freezing, and I think it's around 70 degrees in my room.)

Realistically, a tonsure would provide at least a little more warmth than a completely shaved pate. Honestly, I think this is why Hare Krishna acolytes are scarce when compared to Franciscan monks. Maybe it's also why the former love airports so much. The air is controlled, for the most part. Now that I think about it, though, I'm not sure if Franciscan monks even do the tonsure thing anymore.

The allure of a tonsure vanquishes any brand of pity I may have felt for balding men. They don't need it. If anything, these guys are very shrewd not to hide their baldness by shaving their heads because they aren't completely freezing when the temperature drops. Besides this, guys who shave their heads to cover up their dwindling hair tend to be dicks.

My wisps of hair provide some insulation, I'm sure, but it is not nearly enough to make me comfortable consistently. It's only fall, mind you, and the biting cold of winter in the Midwest is right around the corner. Hopefully by then, though, I'll have enough length to guard my skull reasonably. Plus, I'd wear a hat anyway, because it gets cold, and I'm way beyond the too-cool-for-school phase of adolescence.

Until then, I'm stuck with a combination of the knit hats and the hoods that I pull over them. Just so you know--I'm not the reincarnation of the Unabomber or a member of some outlying religious faction.

I'm just cold.

R

More
than

"Today I Settle All Family Business"

2009-10-11T22:02:00.003-05:00

So said Michael Corleone in The Godfather, played by a young Al Pacino, who kept his volatility behind his eyes rather than behind a strong exhale and an explosive tirade that has become the old Pacino's trademark. He had just presided as godfather at his sister Connie's son's baptism, an occasion that he used to "settle all family business." This meant murder. Vengeful, anonymous, quiet (for him, at least), murder. I'd like to do him one better and eschew the messy killing, but I still want to settle my own personal business finally and forever.

I will no longer hold any grudges. This is really easy for me to do, because I honestly have no grudges. Such is the beauty of apathy. You learn not to give a shit about most everything and anything. Why preoccupy yourself when it's so much easier to forget? You're thinking, "Don't you mean 'forgive and forget'?" No, prig, I mean the latter only. The former is not practical. Let's face it. You can't decide, apropos of nothing, simply to forgive an atrocious transgression. It's not real. If someone who you really want to strangle flashes you a smile, I figure you have two options. You can pretend not to see him/her, or you can flag him/her down and deliver a healthy open-hand slap in face. Or you can ignore the gesture completely and go on your merry way. Actually, that's three.

In certain instances, I am not opposed to physical violence. Sometimes you have to go a little crazy because you're so pissed off that words could not possibly do what you want them to do. Unless you're like me, and possess an acerbic tongue that can unflinchingly release a trenchant, perfectly placed, devastating insult. In that case, words work as well as fists. Wait--I think that makes a fourth option. Whatever. You get my drift. If not, you're too dense to drift, and will remain perplexed, furrowing your brow in non-thought.

But I'm done with all of that (for the most part--if provoked, I will reflexively react). My new modus operandi is staunch apathy. If I've done anything to piss you off, get over it. Rub some dirt on it, as a high school football coach would say, and resume whatever it is you were doing.

The other side of this is that I'll do the same, though this will be very easy for me to do because I already don't care. One of the things I've been told to avoid, with regard to the MS, is stress. "Can do" was my internal interjection when I was advised to do this by my doctor. For better or worse, I don't care about petty squabbling or backbiting. Why bother?, I figure. I honestly can't think of a reason to get all hot and bothered over something that someone else says. Does--well, that's a different story.

Words, though, don't bother me, for the most part. Say what you will, because I truly don't give a shit. If this whole MS onus has taught me anything, it's to ignore anything that may trouble me unnecessarily. Thus, prattle yourself into a fugue state, but know that I stopped listening, and caring, a long time ago.

Therefore, I have to insist on your forgetting about any grudges you may hold against me. I've done a lot of stupid shit over the years, so if you'd like a personal apology, I'd advise you not to hold your breath while waiting for one. Because it's not coming.

There is no acrimony in this sentiment, though. Apathy sounds like a very juvenile attitude. It may be, but it's the most true one that I can offer. I'm not going to apologize, and I don't expect any such apologies in return. In fact, I can't think of a particular one that I would hope to hear, because I have, most likely, forgotten what it is I'm supposed to be angry about.

So today I've decided to let whatever frivolous quarreling may have existed in the minds of others (as I've said, I don't care one way or another). And I promise that you won't be shot in the eye while getting a back massage. Or strangled with garrote wire when you think you're in the clear.

You're in the clear--I swear. So am I, for that matter. I've decreed it.

R
--I think I'm uncharacteristically buoyant, though very characteristically aloof, because I finished my first book today. For the most part. I'll leave the editing to others, and hope the release won't be relegated strictly to posthumousness.

Obama's Nobel: Like My Procedure, & Some Swing State Voting, It's Too Close To Call

2009-10-09T14:56:00.009-05:00

This morning, I received an email from my mother that I quickly dismissed as probable spam, or at least the rudimentary beginnings of a bad joke. It declared that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Her work email address is relatively safe, I think, and she doesn't have that sophistocated of a sense of humor. No one does, really. What would the punchline be here? A hackneyed "NOT"?

I like President Obama, but I've written before about how his administration has not exactly set the world on fire with regard to his policies. Evidently, though, I was wrong. His win of the Nobel Peace Prize proved this, but I remain adamant that his presidency is too nascent to garner such an accolade. As such a young president, both in terms of his term duration and physical age, I scoff at this award.

I understand the urge to slap Bush in the face with this. He was, simply, the worst president in the history of the US, and this is no small feat in a country that elected Nixon. Twice. And Reagan. Twice.

Mostly, I think that this award is a slap in the face to any and every moron who voted for Bush in either of his electoral wins. Lest we forget, America, you voted for that dumbass. I can hear the caterwauling and whining of limp progressive voters protesting that this is a lie. Well, his first win was bullshit, but his second, over the pontificating John Kerry, was legit, though not exactly resounding. In the end, it didn't matter. He was reelected, and viewed his win as a "mandate" to enact some of the worst policies, both foreign and domestic, possible. Ugh, he was such a terrible president.

With the election of Obama, it looked like America had finally inhaled the smelling salt and been brought back to coherence. So far, it only looks like a good prospect. Nothing tangibly different has really changed. Numerous pundits think, and say, that this award is more of a clarion call to action for Obama than a current reward for diplomatic success.

I would agree, but not now. I would rather wait until some real results can be seen, and so far Obama's policies have been too cautious and not very bold. Maybe in a while we will feel and witness his greatness, but now not much is there.

The same dilatory patience is needed for my stem cell procedure. On Wednesday afternoon, I was told that it could take as long as two years for the full effects of the reinfusion to be felt. I expected this, and didn't expect to be running marathons within the month. This sort of thing takes time, and was never meant as a quick-fix solution.

Still, no one has thrown a sash around my neck that says "I BEAT MS" in big bold red letters. You know why? Because concrete results remain to be seen. In this terribly ephemeral, Twitter-centric world of instant gratification, we all need to slow down a bit. The monumental bunglings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be fixed overnight, and we have to learn to wait before bestowing awards for the hope of accomplishment, as opposed to actual action, or else such honors lose their meaning. For a community that came to scoff, rightly, at Bush's stupid "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" declaration, is it not premature to bestow a Nobel onto someone who has not done much of anything? This distinction is far too premature, and Obama shouldn't let it lull him into complacency and a false sense of accomplishment.

Likewise, I have to wait until I can declare victory over MS. It's frustrating, especially for someone like me, to know that I have to wait, but c'est la vie. Sure, I would deign to accept a prize for defeating it just because I had the stem cell procedure. Don't get me wrong--I'd accept it, but I'd know I didn't deserve it. Yet.

The same goes for Obama. He can travel to Sweden and wear the brass ring, but he must know that he hasn't earned it.

Yet.

R

The Palliative Properties of The Sun

2009-10-08T11:39:00.007-05:00

Sunlight rejuvenates, which is weird for me to say because I hate the sun. Actually, I think I hate all of the accouterments that go along with what is generally associated with bright, glaring sunlight. I'm talking about the sand, which inexplicably always finds a pocket to hide inside of, and the sunscreen, which never fails to make me crave a shower (& that in itself is quite a feat), and the conglomeration of people whose exterior shell runs the gamut from The Thing's unnecessarily chiseled abdomen to the consistency of moist bread.

Then, there are the sunbathers. They bask in the harmful ultraviolet rays of the battering sun and shun the protective sheath of the water. As a Lake Michigan local, I don't have to deal with the disgusting layer of salt that invades your pores when the dust, or, in this case, salt, settles. Freshwater is really the way to go, but I digress.

Each morning that I was in the hospital, the sun would hit me in the face until about ten, when it would be out of my line of sight. Then, I could finally appreciate the comfort and beauty it would both foster and, obviously, illuminate. Sunshine is like a draped blanket. It may miss certain corners and crevices, but ultimately it covers everything that wants to be spotlighted. For the most part, if you want what it has to give, it's there.

Ever since I was discharged, I have come to understand a new brand of the beauty given by sunlight. Ralph and my mother recently bought a house in the country, with picturesque, pastoral views visible from both the front and back windows. From the back porch, I sit on a swing and stare at the scorched-match rows of soybeans that begin just where the backyard ends. I've never seen anything quite like it. It looks like the backyard lies at the rim of a million paintbrushes whose tips have been seared.

This is not to say that I was immune to the nearly overwhelming brilliance of the sun in my hospital room. The way in which the buildings seemed to bend toward the sun's rays was breathtaking. At dusk, the mirrored top of the Prudential Building looked positively transcendent, as it reflected, harshly at times, the waning but still-vibrant sunlight.

To prove that I am, at bottom, a city boy, I loved to gaze upon the skyline at night and tried to think of an adequate metaphor to describe it. Eventually, I had it--sort of. I couldn't think of the name of the toy that I was thinking of, but luckily my friend Colleen--who I hadn't seen since college but who was incidentally visiting her sister, a patient for a different procedure at the same hospital--named it. The Chicago skyline, at night, was a massive Lite Brite screen.

Lite Brite, for those who don't know, is a black screen that gets lighted by small plastic pegs that glow upon insertion. After a few minutes, though, these individual torches recede into the larger picture that the child--it's a children's toy--is trying to depict. The same phenomenon happens with the Chicago skyline. At first, you can pick out individual windows, or pegs, but eventually this becomes impossible because they melt together until a building looks like a giant-sized fiber-optic battery. (Is that right? Remember--I was an English major, and know nothing about electrical engineering.)

Pretry as that is, it's an illusion. The buildings could look ghastly in daylight. Like Detroit (I couldn't resist). Fortunately, though, Chicago has the most beautiful skyline in the country (sorry, NYC, but it's true), so the sun merely has to shine and the beauty emerges.

This it does. Even on cloudy days (see below), the sun will shoulder its way through the clouds and flash the skyline. Like a camera, and not like a sunbathing co-ed on Spring Break.

So, even though I marvel at the fields around this house, I know that another, more resplendent, menagerie lurks a mere 30 miles away in Chicago.

R

Another Note From My iPod (w Phone Photos to Follow)

2009-10-07T14:06:00.001-05:00

Different Kinds of Light: Urban vs. Rural
Electricity vs. The Sun
At night, a huge Lite-Bright configuration
Then the edges recede & the buildings look like fiber-optic batteries
Lou Reed's "New Sensations" ultimately falls to his "Dirty Blvd."
Paintings impress more than photography, though
Daylight makes the buildings glow duller and fuller
Natural light enlivens the skyline as much as the electric kind, but in a different way--externally, not internally
Sunlight washes over everything like a draped blanket
Electric light discriminates, & glows where it wants, as light switches pinpoint illumination

Sent from my iPod

A Preview, Courtesy of the Notes App on my Touch

2009-10-06T14:23:00.002-05:00

Transcendent Corn Fields
Raveonettes
Writing in my head & on my iPod
Love the Notes app
I feel like David Hockney & the Brushes app article in NYReview
Scorched-match rows of soybeans
From Raveonettes to Ronettes
Phil Spector almost reminds me of Roman Polanski in my near-willingness to excuse
Almost. Spector had no Charles Manson
Or Holocaust
Now I want to annihilate Germany, but I'll settle for "Helter Skelter"

Sent from my iPod

The Re-Infusion (& Some Neutropenia)

2009-10-06T00:16:00.007-05:00

After nearly a week of chemotherapy, which had decimated (again, not annihilated) my white blood cell count, it was finally time for my stem cells to be reintroduced to my body. As I mentioned previously, these stem cells had been inflated in number by multiple subcutaneous injections of Neupogen, a drug that does that sort of thing. A centrifuge had separated them from the rest of my blood, and now here they were, squeaky-clean and primed for action.

And smoking. Some dude in a lab coat that looked like the prototypical “mad scientist” wheeled in a white barrel that held my stem cells. Once he removed the lid, a diffusive cloud spilled from the chasm. Dry ice had been used to keep my stem cells cold and ready for the re-infusion. The anonymous scientist--I’m sure he had a name, but I don’t know it, and I don’t think he ever said it--reached a gloved hand into the smoke and retrieved a small red-orange bag that contained my stem cells.

Truly, the entire process was a bit anticlimactic. My favorite aunt (a small feat with regard to my “dad’s” side of the family, and marginally more difficult on my mother’s--mostly because most of them live quite far away), Terri, had come with my mother to watch the procedure, which lasted approximately twenty minutes. Maybe a few more, but the whole thing definitely did not run longer than half an hour. The bag was connected to my PICC line, and the stem cells flowed from the bag into my blood. It was a simple one-way transfusion, and nothing more.

The only minor bit of action happened when my face turned crimson after a few minutes. Apparently, this was expected, but for a moment I felt like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka. Except, you know, red. And pre-juice-inflation. My body or face did not grow tumescent to mimic the globular shape of a tomato, but my cheeks turned comically cherry-red. "Ruddy" would be an understatement.

Then, after not even half an hour, it was over. So that’s the big stem cell story.

What did happen, later that night, was that I became severely neutropenic, which means that my white blood cell count plummeted, and, as a result, I became quite weak. So weak, in fact, that I had no idea that I would not be able, later that night, to walk to the toilet for a routine round of urination. When I stood up, my legs crumpled immediately, and I fell to the ground like The Bride in Kill Bill when she emerges from her coma and tries to walk. Like her, I hit the floor, but luckily my cane was close by, and I was able to grab it and use it to reach the nurse call button. In the interim was a pathetic display of urinary incontinence that I had no control over.

Finally, the nurses arrived with a hydraulic lift that picked me off the floor with the help of a thick sling made of green fabric. It lifted me up and deposited me onto the toilet, although I didn’t need it at this point because most of what was meant for it had already been disseminated onto the floor by then.

I did have a new word in my vocabulary, though, which may have made the whole pitiful scene worthwhile: neutropenia.

Say it with me: new-trow-pee (very apt by then)-knee-uh.

R

Defending My Life

2009-10-05T13:02:00.009-05:00

I had seen Defending Your Life before, at the urging of a (now ex-)girlfriend, but viewed it mostly as another whimsical, though disposable, Albert Brooks movie. I just finished watching it again, and saw it through the prism of the stem cell procedure, and its long hospitalization, I recently completed, and now have a new appreciation for it.

In the movie, which came out in 1991, Albert Brooks's character gets hit by a bus and dies. He then finds himself in a pre-Judgment, Limbo-esque resort town that looks weirdly like a generic vacation spot. It's not really a vacation spot, thouigh, because he's only there for the duration of a trial that examines his life in order to determine if he's ready to move on or go back to Earth and try again. Apparently this is his ninth such "trial."

"Fear" comes up repeatedly as the main thing that holds most people back from moving forward. In this context, considering the continuous batterings of the stem cell trial, I think--nay, I know--that I would have no problem moving forward through the trial. The one in the afterlife, I mean.

I've mentioned this already, but the incident where I was told about the possible side effects of chemotherapy should vanquish any criticisms of fear that the prosecutor would lob at me. Dr. Burt sat across me while I was on an examination table and went through all of the side effects I could expect from the chemo--like baldness, sterility, and diarrhea. Blah blah blah. One possibility, though, should have rattled me. Which one? Death.

It wasn't probable, but it was possible. I shrugged it off immediately like a flake of debris that had fallen onto my shoulder. Not to toot my own horn, but this prospect really did not bother me. Fuck it--I'll toot my own horn anyway, because death honestly does not scare me at all. I would take a polygraph to confirm this, but I'm lazy, so you'll have to take my word. This may seem morbid, but I can think of nothing more peaceful. Since I don't believe in God, I also don't believe in a heaven or hell. "Give me a break" is my terse rejoinder to any talk of that. The entire concept of an afterlife seems primitive to me, a way for those who fear death to deal with mortality. I'd rather, as a pragmatic adult, face the facts. Yes, facts.

My regiment of chemotherapy was extremely aggressive, so I'm told. I had five infusions of cytoxan in as many days. I still have my hair--sort of. One funny thing was when I finally got released and my mother drove me away from the hospital. On the way, I would pinch my face around my beard, and remove my fingers to reveal a few strands of hair. It was admittedly disgusting, but comical in the ease and simplicity of the gesture. At least I didn't have to shave.

This reminded me yet again that I had been through quite an ordeal. Whatever. No Pain No Gain, like the refrigerator magnet maxim says. I don't think, through everthing, that I ever felt a twinge of fear. Really. This may sound like so much machismo, but it's the truth. I am not afraid of death, or anything, honestly.

Except maybe having to attend a high school reunion. Luckily, I have a choice with regard to that, and I will not go. Sorry, but I refuse to reminisce. I'd rather forget that whole ordeal. If I want to talk to you, I'll do so without the context of an organized reunion. If not, which is much more likely, I wish you well.

No hostility or acrimony is in this sentiment. Just indifference, which is my overriding modus operandi.

R

Chicago: Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears

2009-10-05T08:50:00.007-05:00

My computer is fucked and currently sequestered in the Apple Store, and I’m forced either to wait a week until they fix what I blame on my brother or use the piece-of-shit PC he bequeathed to my mother. He installed work software that rendered my computer completely useless. He insists that he deleted it, but that’s not the point. Ockham’s Razor, everybody: my computer worked, he monkeyed with it—including deleting files that evidently were crucial in order to clear room for the software he needed for work--and then it didn’t work. Pretty simple equation. Anyways, this computer has no left “Shift” key, and subsequently infuriates me each time I want to capitalize something on the right side of my keyboard. This is because I took word processing in high school, and that’s how I learned to type correctly.

Eventually I’ll chronicle the whole stem cell trial process, but for days I’ve been itching to say how thrilled I am that Chicago lost the 2016 bid. No sour grapes here, I assure you. Quite the opposite. When Chicago was eliminated in the first round, I sighed with relief from my hospital bed and grinned like a Cheshire cat as I saw Chicago get elimininated immediately. I'm now out of the hospital, and will detail that experience in the future, starting tonight (probably).

I can’t say enough how much schadenfreude I felt when I saw one older woman cry pathetic crocodile tears at the announcement. Only part of this has to do with the fruitless campaigning that the Obamas and Oprah did in Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago to win the bid. The former has come to represent everything feckless about the current government, and Oprah just annoys me. In vociferous Oprah voice: Your celebrity meant NOOOOOTHING!

This mocking tone that mimics Oprah is meant for both parties, but primarily for Obama. I’ve mentioned before how I think his administration is turning into a Jimmy Carter symbol of vapidity. I’m pissed at Obama. He has been in office for more than six months, and has done approximately dick. There was an opening skit on this week’s Saturday Night Live that laid out, in a stark checklist, what he has accomplished. Needless to say, everything fell in the “No” column. As in, “Has this been done? NO.”

Beyond my anger at the effectively lame-duck presidency of Obama, who still has three-plus years to make up for his administration’s lack of life thus far, I’m glad Chicago lost the Olympics because I live in Chicago. As a resident of this great city that thankfully slides under the radar, I could foresee the logistical nightmares that the Olympics, a truthfully dead franchise, would pose in five years. The already-slow and clogged traffic would rival that of my least favorite city (Boston, which I maintain is a non-city) during the debacle that was the Big Dig. It might be better now, but I have no idea and do not care enough to check.

Plus, the influx of more people like, I’m guessing, that female Cubs fan who cried would only stoke my anger. She had to be a Cubs fan, because she clearly needed some idiotic dubious thrill to make up for her reliably disappointment of a team. Ugh, the suburbanites would descend upon the city and marvel at ugly structures they know nothing about, and ignore the truly beautiful ones that comprise most of the skyline. Needless to say, the hybrid beauty of the Tribune Tower would not make an impression on their puny minds, which would undoubtedly be adorned with a visor above a bright Day-Glo orange “Chicago 2016” t-shirt, and, below that, a fluorescent fanny pack.

So, bullet dodged, Chicago. Let the decrepit and scarily dangerous Rio deal with that nonsense. We won’t watch, because no one watches the Olympics anymore anyway. Revel in the fact that we denizens can bask in the warm blanket of protective xenophobia.

Plug up your tears, because they piss me off, and enjoy the beauty of the lakeshore and the skyline. It’s ours, and we don’t need validation from anyone whose main form of exercise is stumbling through a shopping mall. It’s ironic to think of this when you consider the commitment and athleticism of Olympic athletes.

Stop crying, suck it up, and enjoy what our exquisite city is and has. We’re the best, and don’t need the validation of the limp IOC to know this.

R
--Before you condescendingly deign to assault my grammar, and my use of the non-word "ain't" in the title of this post, know that I'm aware. FYI--I'm quoting Bob Dylan's song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," so step off...

A Little Break

2009-09-23T02:37:00.002-05:00

I just had a very difficult time making it back to my bed, where I've spent most of the day. Earlier, the big stem cell transplant took place, and I'll describe that whole process eventually.

As for now, more sleep is on my docket. More later...

R

Bach on the Eve of the Transplant

2009-09-21T21:38:00.009-05:00

I wrote before about how I know nothing about Greek music. That is true. I know almost as little about the realm of classical music. Don't get me wrong--I've listened extensively to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and his complete harpsichord pieces, as well as Shostakovich and Mozart and all of what you'd expect me to say. But that's the thing, though: I've only listened. In White Men Can't Jump lingo, I've listened but not heard.

Earlier, I was watching House (like I do), but I was truly transfixed by one of the patients playing a Dvorak concerto. I'm not sure if it actually was a Dvorak piece, but I was stunned nonetheless, and was moved enough to listen to Bach's cello suites. I actually had these in my iTunes already, but, again, I had listened but not heard.

As you might be able to guess, I'm in a plaintive mood. Tomorrow's the big stem cell transplant day, and I have decided to relax. Usually, this would mean some Astral Weeks by Van Morrison or even some Magic & Loss or something else by Lou Reed, but I've decided to retreat to classical music, and Bach in particular.

In college, I wrote extensively about the transformational powers of popular music, and I still stand by Lou Reed's credo, that "I was made for rock 'n' roll." Lest we forget, though, in his terrific song "Women", he sings the line, "play a little Bach for us, and then we make love." Plus, we mustn't forget that Reed, although he may plead ignorance and at times assert cool passivity toward certain classical music, is actually well versed in the sweeping constraints--not an oxymoron--of it. You need only listen to Street Hassle's "Street Hassle," and I think the point is made.

Occasionally, often even, I'll shrug off classical music as a pretentious staple of academia. I'm not totally wrong in thinking this, but I would be a liar if I didn't say that some of it is really mesmerizing. As I listen now to Bach, I almost feel myself slipping into such pompous reverie. This is the problem with music journalism. One feels that one has to adopt an attitude and stick with it. You can't alter your pose, or else you might lose some bullshit street-cred that you think you've amassed, either with regard to pop or even classical. One posture is snotty and the other is snooty. The two ethos actually sprout from the same stance of blind idiocy.

The truth is, though, that there comes a time when beauty cannot be denied. In the same way, you don't have to sneer at classical music for the sake of rock. Three chords may be all you need, but arpeggios sometimes add that certain something that's missing. Like a pinch of paprika can make all the difference in a messy dish, a touch of cello can enliven a previously dead array of notes. I think we can all agree that Bach's Brandenburg Concertos translate into absolute bliss. If you take a closer look inside his oeuvre, or "cookbook," I promise you that more wonder lies underneath. And don't say you're bored, because you'll then be a real boor.

So shake off the attitude, get a little more receptive, and rock with some Bach, not unlike Falco did with Mozart. I'll do the same, and revel in the washes of his Cello Suites.

If you're not up to the challenge, then go fuck yourself. See--I can still strike a pose with the best of 'em.

R
--If you are not watching President Barack Obama on Letterman right now, you should be pummeled. If you can't, catch it later.

Embrace the Bombast!

2009-09-20T23:31:00.012-05:00

This is/was my last day of intensive chemotherapy, and it started out relatively rough. I blame the change in sleeping pill options that I tried for the first time last night. Previously, I had taken Ambien, which really did nothing to readjust my nocturnality. Last night, though, I took Restoril, and experienced the opposite end of the spectrum. Whereas Ambien did nothing for me, Restoril wiped me out for the bulk of today. I could hardly stay awake throughout the Bears' dramatic 17-14 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers, last year's Super Bowl Champions. Somewhere near the end of that game, I emerged from underneath the Librium-esque zombie coma that had rendered me inert for most of the day.

Then something clicked when Robbie Gould kicked the game-winning field goal. So I'm still an unrepentant Bears fan. However, for some reason I maintained my enthusiasm throughout the evening, and even became ecstatic when I watched the Dallas Cowboys' first regular-season game against the New York Giants. I've never, contrary to what you might think, hated the Cowboys. In fact, I like almost all steam-rolling professional teams, with the only glaring exceptions being the Detroit Red Wings (who I've come to tolerate because the city is an utter shithole beyond redemption, like Gary) and the Boston Red Sox. This started with the indomitable dual three-peats of the Chicago Bulls in the '90s, led by the immaculate Michael Jordan. Even later, with the repeated runs of the New York Yankees, I admired the team's prowess. I still hate the Red Sox, though, so I'm not completely willing to embrace certain successful franchises.

One would think I'd hate the Dallas Cowboys, even more now that they have a new stadium that looks like the Titanic. That's the thing, though: I don't. I don't love the Cowboys, but I appreciate and subtly embrace the hoopla and deafening enthusiasm of the fans and its team. I felt sorry a little bit for Jordin Sparks, whose rendition of the National Anthem could scarcely be heard amid the ambient white noise of the stadium, but she thrust her booming and piercing voice through the static as well as she, or anyone, could. From camera shots overhead, the new Cowboys stadium looks absolutely, well, crazy. It's huge. It dominates the landscape, and from the inside some of the upper tiers resemble the ill-fated Tower of Babel. But that's the thing that makes the NFL great: the enthusiasm of the fans and their embrace of the bombastic. Seriously, that stadium is a monster, and this says nothing of the over-the-top HD jumboscreen that hangs over the field.

This all sounds like the height of American extravagance, and it is. But it's only around for a little more than four months, which is more than enough time to marvel at it, and not nearly enough to gape at it and fall down, dizzy and disoriented. This is the NFL, not the endless and, honestly, tedious MLB. I'd take 16 mind-blowing football games versus 162 wearisome, and ultimately meaningless when taken in small chunks, ones that comprise the baseball season. The fanfare, the enthusiasm of the fans, and the explosive but still safe--safe, I'll say it again, because the behavior of football fans is not nearly as boorish as that of MLB enthusiasts--atmosphere of an NFL game is enough to reduce me to a drooling mess not unlike, to quote Patton Oswalt, that of "a retarded kid with a sparkler."

In the same way, I'm now enthralled with the sounds of Greece. LNE is a tremendous guide through this realm of foreign music that I know nothing about. I've learned not to fear the strange, though--I mean this in the xenophobic sense, and not just "weird." A few nights ago, she played some song by Manos Loizos, and I fell into a fugue state. Mind you--I know almost no Greek. I know some curse words LNE taught me, and I occasionally laugh when I stub my toe and blurt out, "Malaka!" The entire pictographic language looks like just that--pictographs--to me. Last week she showed me what she was reading, and I thought that maybe it was a horrible Jonathan Safran-Foer book (again--redundant). Lo and behold, though, it was in Greek. Now, it's not that I'm unwilling to learn; it's that I can pinpoint and recognize my limitations. I'll never be able to play the violin, or perform a tuck from a 50-foot-tall diving board, or read Greek. You know the old aphorism, "It's Greek to me!"? After perusing her book of what looked to me like an assortment of crazed doodles, this has never been more of a literal cliche for me.

Nevertheless, I don't speak Portuguese, and that hasn't stopped me from listening to, and loving, Os Mutantes. In the same way, now I think I'm standing on the edge of a rabbit hole that will lead me to music from Greece. Again, I have no idea what's being sung, and I'll definitely have to find translations, but the vertiginous scales and the remarkable aptitude/exactitude of the musicians boggles my mind. It is truly impressive.

I'm listening now to this link LNE sent me that plays a song featured on The Wire, Stelios Kazantzidis's "Efuge, Efuge." It's so good that I easily forget my Latin caveat (another redundancy, I know), paraphrased from Virgil's "Aeneid": "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts."

I implore you: embrace the bombast, even if it might overwhelm you at first. This means acceptance, with respect to the Cowboys, and full approbation of trilling (in a good way) Grecian scales.

You just have to, as the Tom Waits song says, which is also The Wire's theme song, "keep the devil way down in the hole." But this doesn't mean you should shrink from going in, too.

Plus, baklava is awesome, and should really bridge the divide and become a staple Sunday football snack. Blasphemy, you say? Too difficult? A little too much?

Maybe, but you must embrace the bombast!

R

Patrick Swayze: The King of Basic Cable

2009-09-20T00:55:00.005-05:00

Now that my fourth day of chemotherapy has passed, without incident, I feel content enough to reflect on the death of Patrick Swayze. I have a new-new nurse tonight, so I might seem preoccupied because I can see that my bag of urine is getting more and more tumescent. Still, I thought a respite from concern would do me well, and I recently finished watching Point Break again. This is the second time it's been on today, but I think that after the numerous problems I had with my old catheter, as well as the expected travails that go along with this stint in the hospital--like what I perceive to be my atrophying leg muscles due to my limited mobility, now not specifically a symptom of the MS but an added nuisance afforded by my reluctance to deal with the tangle of cords that coil out from my IV tree, which has grown from a fledgling sprout to an overgrown evergreen on the lawn of a senile old cat woman (how's that for a colossal mid-sentence digression?)--I deserve to bloviate a bit on two Patrick Swayze movies that I cannot help but watch whenever I come across them on cable: Point Break or, better yet, Road House. (The nurse just came in to switch my bag, so I'm good to go.)

Keanu Reeves is really the protagonist of Point Break. His truly horrible acting is at the forefront of the movie--replete with timelessly bad deliveries of lines like "I am an F-B-I agent!" or the hilarious "Vaya Con Dios..." at the end, when he uncuffs Swayze in order to allow him to ride one last deadly wave. However, it is Swayze's shaggy appearance and his unquotable surfer slang--I can't even count how many "brahs" he utters--that tempers my disdain for Keanu. In the end, when he rides that last wave to his certain demise, Agent Johnny Utah (Reeves) watches silently with regret, as we all do. I could go on some more about how that was how we should all remember Swayze, but that height of maudlin sentimentality I simply cannot scale. Instead, I turn to the hilarious camp and unrestrained violence that, if you think about it, typified a lot of '80s throwaway movies, but none quite like Road House.

Swayze plays Dalton, "the best cooler in the business." I know you're probably thinking that I must be mistaken, because William H. Macy was clearly the best cooler in the business. In fact, he was the "cooler" in The Cooler, but this is not a movie about gambling. Road House is about "The Double Deuce," a rollicking dive bar somewhere in the sticks of Missouri. Dalton is a head bouncer, the best there is, and somehow the guy in charge of the Missouri bar has heard of him, and wants him to calm his chaotic "Road House."

The place is really out of control, as Dalton observes the first time he enters the bar and drinks his coffee while fight after violent fight breaks out. This leads to a small aside here: Dalton evidently doesn't drink, not while he's working at least, but he chainsmokes like a '40s actor. Plus, he downs pot after pot of coffee, and that can't be good for the controlled movements of a Tai Chi practitioner like himself. We find this out later, as he does his Eastern thing on the lawn of the loft he rents across the lake from an evil Ben Gazzara, who wants to take over the town in an absurd gambit of rural domination. The "Double Deuce" is in a town in Missouri, but even they have laws, which Gazzara sidesteps without the finesse of Don Corleone. He hates the town, and its inhabitants, and at one point looks on with amused, quiet resignation while a fight breaks out one night, instigated by one of his disposable henchmen. Dalton eventually steps in to back up the reliably weathered-looking Sam Elliott, who plays Dalton's mentor and who calls him "amigo." And oh yeah--he falls in love with the doctor (the wannabe mother from Curly Sue who takes in Jim Belushi and his sort-of daughter, the title character) who stitches him up after he gets cut, to whom he says the unforgettably glib, but unforgettable nonetheless, "Pain don't hurt."

The movie ends with the "law" of the town, and several of his Keystone Cop-esque deputies, siding with Dalton in a humorously over-the-top battle royale at Gazzara's compound. Forget about the plot, because it is really forgettable next to Swayze's great quotes, which are too numerous to recount. Here are only a few of his gems: "I want you to be nice until it's time to not be nice," "Take the biggest guy in the world, shatter his knee, and he'll drop like a stone," "You're too stupid to have a good time," and the immortal "Pain don't hurt."

Forget about Ghost, which severely damaged the great song "Unchained Melody," in my opinion, or that other saccharine chick-flick that is unwatchable, at least for me--Dirty Dancing. When I was getting re-catheterized, I could only repeat one thing to myself mentally as I stared at the ceiling of my hospital room:

"Pain don't hurt."

R

More Kvetching About My Catheter (aka Wanna Fight About It?)

2009-09-19T00:27:00.009-05:00

Last night, it became startlingly clear that the catheter I had had inserted was not going to work out. The one that I originally had was the product of other patients' bitching about the original's large size. I, though, am not Hank Hill, and my urethra can easily accommodate the evidently uncomfortably wide catheter that is Northwestern's favored method of invasive urine removal.

This stark fact grew even starker last night. My mother and brother came over to my hospital room and stayed to watch NBC's impressive Thursday prime-time lineup. Over the two hours that covered the broadcasts of the "Saturday Night Live Weekend Update Thursday" edition, "Parks and Recreation," "The Office," and the new "Community," my catheter had been leaking unremittingly. On what looks like my version of a city dog's "Wee Wee Pad," a formidable stain had formed on my bed underneath my butt.

Something had to be done, because the plastic tubing through which my urine was supposed to flow and then empty into the translucent plastic bag did not show that a leak had sprung. I called the nurse's station, and it soon was obvious that the problem lay in the entry of the catheter into my urethra. As I said, the catheter I was given was Northwestern's own concoction. Several other patients had complained that it was too wide. They were wimps, as it turned out, and/or bitched that their puny urethrae (yeah, I still know my Latin--wanna fight about it?) could not handle the normal catheter that the hospital had on hand. Subsequently, the hospital assembled a thinner version. Unfortunately, it was insufficient for my formidable urethra.

Yeah, that's right. I have a wide urethra--wanna fight about it? Since it's normal, as I like to say humbly (and nobly, if I do say so myself), the measly, ramshackle one they gave to me leaked substantially enough for me to summon my nurse with a grand pounding of the red button that called the nurse's station. She taped up what she thought was a typical aperture around one of the valves. This did nothing to stop the deluge that emerged from my pee-hole and ended up on my Wee Pad. In the morning, it displayed the urine-al equivalent of the producer's bed whose sheets and comforter were covered in blood in The Godfather. I, like that man, am not made to look ridiculous, so I bothered the nurses again.

By this time, it was well past midnight, so they said that they would call my doctor in the morning. Until then, I packed my crotch with numerous towels. When I was finished, it looked like a sumo wrestler's diaper/wrap. Eventually, I fell asleep. Around like six. AM.

I woke up relatively at peace with my problem, but I knew that it would have to be dealt with. The issue reached its breaking point when my grandma and uncle came to visit in the afternoon. We watched some television and talked a bit. All the while, though, a puddle of urine had been forming and then expanding to such a diameter that I knew I could not ignore it. Since I had to eschew the underwear that I had worn the previous night, I had had to ask my mother, who stayed at my apartment in Logan Square, to bring me some shorts or underwear that I could wear. Unfortunately, there was no clean underwear there because I have been staying in her house in Indiana--another issue that I don't completely enjoy. The dogs are there, sure, but they have ceased to be entertaining and now just annoy me with their repeated demands to be let outside. If you give a mouse a cookie... Over the past two weeks, I've learned to ignore them, but Shadow's bark is so loud and cloying that sometimes it's impossible to do this.

But I digress. I told the nurses again about the problem, and they spoke with one of my doctors and finally ordered the regular catheter that had filled the other patients with immense trepidation (wimps--I'll say it again. Wanna fight about it?). Over the next few hours, I sat in what I described as the equivalent of a kiddie pool, only filled with urine as opposed to water. This is more accurate than you think, because since I had no clean underwear in my apartment, I had two choices: swimming trunks or washcloth-sized boxer briefs that either belonged to my lanky brother or to Anthony, who is slighter than Ryan even, so I didn't stand a chance with these wristband-sized pair of underwear. (This is not meant to be insulting; I can't help it if my junk won't fit into a Dixie cup. Wanna fight about it?)

After what seemed like an eternity filled with repeated deposits of urine onto the wee pad, the nurses finally came through with the normal/bigger catheter. I pulled off my trunks, which really did their job since they were bone-dry while the rest of the area around my core, as the yogis say, was drenched with piss. It was mostly clear, though, so it wasn't as disgusting as you'd think. Actually, it probably was, because the saline drip, as I've said, makes me pee a comically prodigious amount, and I definitely had not spilled a Big Gulp on my sheets.

At last, my nurses delivered the "real" catheter, and shoved it into my urethra with a disturbingly small amount of topical anesthetic. At least, that's what I thought. I've said it before, but I'd gladly take my chances with Michael Jackson's beloved Propofol when it comes to having a sword jammed into my pee-hole. But since then, my sheets have been drier than Mel Gibson on Easter (on second thought, this might not be a great comparison). I even felt masculine enough to buy Mariah Carey's cover of Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is," at LNE's urging, admittedly. (By the way, we also perused the awesome mix I made for her upcoming marathon, and I must say, it is exactly that--awesome.)

As a matter of fact, I'm listening to it right now. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker--I like Mimi's cover of "I Want to Know What Love Is."

Wanna fight about it?

R
--Also, my nurse tonight is named "Sylvia," & I insisted on playing her the refrain of Lou Reed's "Heavenly Arms," which is, appropriately, "Syl-vi-i-i-uh-aaa," repeated three times. I'm like a pop music Rain Man.

The Disappointing Catheter

2009-09-17T15:03:00.009-05:00

This morning my nurse inserted my catheter. Again, this is what you think of when you hear "catheter." Not like my previously mentioned PICC line, but a "regular" catheter. Right in the urethra.

I'm not gonna lie--I was looking forward to this. Ever since I saw an advertisement for an everyday, portable catheter, I've wanted one. David Sedaris also yearned for one, and was disappointed when he got it finally. It worked, but he soon realized that he smelled like urine when he had book signings and wore it. I don't have that problem, because this is a "catheter" catheter. It goes right in the ol' pee-hole, and empties into a large, thick, plastic bag on my IV tree, which now qualifies as a beast of burden.

In his short essay in When You Are Engulfed In Flames, Sedaris writes about his own portable one that is attached with tenacious glue that effectively shellacked the catheter onto the head of his penis. I don't have that. What I have is your typical catheter, with the rubber tube emanating from my urethra. My pee then ends up in a thick plastic bag that joins other tubes from my IV line on the tree. If my IV tree were a garden, I'd fire the gardener because he clearly had not been trimming the hedges and now they're overgrown and out of control.

Believe me--I'm the first person who should have a catheter, because I pee like an OCD child turns on, then off, then on, and then off, lights. This, though, is sort of a pain in the ass, and makes me consider ripping it out like Tom Cruise's Vietnam vet in Born on the Fourth of July. I won't, though, because a) I'm too lazy and b) unlike Cruise's character, I'm not paralyzed and that would hurt like hell. Maybe I'll get used to it, too, like Ron Kovic (Cruise's character), or Lieutenant Dan, eventually does.

The procedure itself is a prospective nightmare, in the same way that a mention of a vasectomy makes any man cringe. Conveniently, though, my nurse gave me a local anesthetic to minimize the pain--you can guess where, since it's "local." That hardly registered, because I kept staring at the mustard-colored tube that I knew was going in shortly thereafter. Really, though, it's not that bad. When she was shoving the tube into my penis, I just looked up and waited to hear, "Done." I didn't even need something to bite down on, but that is not to say I wouldn't have chomped down on a wooden spoon...

The tube then connects to a thick-ish (I think--I haven't touched it yet) clear plastic bag that looks like a translucent whoopie cushion. So now that has joined my menagerie of other IV bags already on the tree. One of these little trinkets is a novelty sized bag of saline, which of course makes me pee even more.

I don't really know what's going on down there, though. Every hour or so my nurse comes in and empties the bag, and each time I'm surprised by the amount of urine that had amassed in it. Also, I constantly feel like I have to go, so it's unsettling to see that I already went. Or am going. Any conjugatiion or tense fits. I pee, I am peeing, I peed, I will pee, and so on.

Sometimes it feels like I have to go, and then I look down and see a prodigious amount of urine in the bag. This is how I imagine women feel when they have sex, especially if they're under 30. For men, it's incomprehensible for a woman not to orgasm and be fine with it. In the same way, I see that I peed, but I have none of the resolution that comes with being done. Again, I'm a man, so my analogy might be frustratingly incongruous.

Plus, I'm not sure how this thing stays in place. Another woman, an orderly I think, gave me an elastic bandage that holds its cords in place. I still move deliberately, though. It's not like I'm going to do somersaults or anything, but I might be overly careful with my constrained movements. I move slowly as it is, slower with the IV tree, but now I'm like a three-toed sloth. At least when I use the plastic urinal, I know what's going on. With this, it's like a retarded ghost keeps filling my bag with urine as a prank, and he thinks it's high-larious.

With this enormous pillow-sized saline bag, though, I would probably pee constantly. I'd fill the urinal, and then look for other receptacles to pee into. I have never empathized more with Howard Hughes, and his train of milk bottles that he filled with urine.

R

The Big Hospitalization: Day One...Half

2009-09-16T22:40:00.006-05:00

Today was the first day of my long hospitalization (around two weeks, I think). Not much happened, other than my frustration with the television.

The problem is that when I came in before, for an overnight intro round of chemotherapy, my television worked primarily with a standard remote control. Now, though, I have to use that handset shaped like a back massager (not one used purportedly as that but actually works as an autoerotic vibrator for women). To anyone who's been hospitalized or visited someone in a hospital, he knows what I mean. That thing shaped broadly like a cross, with buttons controls the television, and delivers audio like a drive-in speaker that you hang inside your car. It comes, too, with a keyboard that can plug into it, but, as I learned from my first stay here at Northwestern, it doesn't really work. It plugs in and everything, but it is an ergonomic disaster. The keyboard is frustratingly small, and the cursor on the screen jumps around like a possessed Ouija board planchette.

So, I've given up on that piece of junk. Last time, it dominated my thoughts and turned me into an acerbic, pouting ball of anger. That was only over an overnight stay, and now I'll be here for around two weeks, so I've decided not to explode over an ineffective electronic controller. I'd like to spin off into a fugue state, but I'll learn to cope.

The only major thing that happened was an insertion of a PICC line in the crook of my right elbow. This dangling flipper will be the main line through which I'll receive the cytoxan, a form of chemotherapy I mentioned previously, and with which, as I've said, Ms. S. is quite familiar. I'm repeating myself, because I talked about PICC lines before, and this is more like the ultimately useless one I had when I was kindasortamaybe diagnosed with Lyme disease instead of multiple sclerosis.

So I had that inserted. I like the PICC line because its small plugs at the end/beginning of it serve as the main port through which things go in and come out, like blood. There was a funny moment when a nurse collected like six vials of my blood through one of these ports. What makes a PICC line so strange is that this happens without needles. The nurses simply plug and play. Six vials of blood filled up, unbeknownst to me, and I saw them resting on the bed before the nurse gathered them in her hands. I had felt nothing, but multiple tubes filled with my blood were on the end of my bed. I said to her something like, "Are you sure you got enough? I think my feet are hiding some blood, if you want." Then I thought that it felt like I was being drained, like some meanies do to a vampire, or several vampires, on True Blood. I was about to mention this observation, but the nurse was filling in for somebody else, so she had to hurry off to another patient's room. Oh well--there went another little opportunity to crack wise...

Then, though, two more medical personnel personalities (I don't know if either was a doctor, or if both were, or both were nurses) of (I'm going to guess here) Indian descent arrived to administer an antibiotic breathing treatment. I'm still not entirely sure what this was, and I was preoccupied as it was because the female one kept referring to it as a "prophylactic." Because of my limited medical vocabulary, I only think of condoms when I hear "prophylactic." Evidently, though, it means something specific that applied here. Whatever--to me a "prophylactic" is a condom.

The vapor that came out of the apparatus for this tasted very acidic, but the female doctor/nurse informed me of this and I was prepared with an arsenal of hard candy that I popped into my mouth to mask the bitterness. By the way, I had a moment of brief panic when I concentrated on the flavor of the vapor and concluded that it tasted like bitter almonds. I may have read too many Raymond Chandler novels, but I know that arsenic distinctively tastes like bitter almonds.

Before I thought about this too much, I realized that I couldn't contain my laughter and had to struggle to keep the mouthpiece in place because an old episode of The Simpsons was making me quiver. To all you young'ns out there, The Simpsons used to be funny back in the day, before it was infected by the pathetic attempts of humor that Harvard graduates churn out today.

That ended, and then I ate my dinner with my mother, my brother Ryan, and Anthony. Then I railed against Stephen King again because The Shawshank Redemption was on. King sucks, epically, but the film adaptations of his works--"works," I should say--are so much better than the shit he spews onto the page. This all goes back to my theory that great movie adaptations work for pieces of shit, and great works of literature are bound for failure as movies. Even No Country For Old Man works here. That is a great movie, but most Cormac McCarthy enthusiasts, like myself, know that that book was a only a middling novel of no intrinsic literary value.

Anyway, an hour ago I took an Ambien, to which I'm frustratingly immune, and now might try to sleep. I fear I won't, though, because the last time I had Ambien here, I was up all night. Maybe they'll up my dosage.

Or knock me out with propofol. Like Michael Jackson. Only, I'll be watched closely by qualified medical personnel. That is definitely, emphatically, not like Michael Jackson.

And tomorrow I get a real catheter (a penile one) and my first (second, really) big infusion of cytoxan, so wait for that...

R

Murray Street and The Sopranos: One Underrated and One Overrated (Take A Guess Where I Fall On This One)

2009-09-15T13:28:00.006-05:00

On the night before I go to hospital for the long hospitalization, I thought I'd put forth a brief question. You can take your time with this, but I think the answer is pretty obvious and easy to ascertain.

The Sopranos reminds me of "The Buried Life" in terms of its "emperor's new clothes" status. I mean, Matthew Arnold in general and "Dover Beach" specifically are passable, but "The Buried Life" is just conflated and bombastic. In the same way, The Sopranos sucked for most of the last season. Then, all of a sudden, with its open ending, ambiguous resolution, contentious stance it forced its audience to take, and altogether annoying lack of answers or crazy interpretation, it comes back and generates a huge amount of buzz.

Umm, I'm not saying I don't enjoy The Sopranos, but it is really is just a show about the mob...with a hackneyed twist. I once had an ex-girlfriend tell me this, and I knew those days were numbered. Her exultation of the show lay with its inclusion of psychoanalysis and therapy as its big groundbreaking innovation. I hate to tell the world, but this is not exactly new material. John Lennon went through that "Primal Scream" therapy with Yoko and came out with some truly squeamish shit. Then, he made a phenomenal record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, that was imbued with a combination of anger, resignation, some of which still degenerates into that old, exhausting ""John" or "Paul"?" hypothetical. At the time, I think McCartney was in Wings or something. Must I elaborate?

Murray Street, on the other hand, made me say to myself, "Holy shit, this is fucking good..." as I drooled in awe. The hypnotic swirl of the songs and the shoegazer quality of some of the sound injected with the barbed wire of the guitars entrance you but keep nudging you to pay attention.

In the HBO equivalent, around then, (remember John From Cincinnati? I hope not.), Tony's teeth fall out or he hallucinates when he does and doesn't take peyote with one of his dead nephew's reliable hook-ups whenever he was in Vegas or he dreams under general anesthetic after he gets shot by his senile and demented uncle, who used to be Tony's boss but then was a symbolic head of the family and, ultimately, an afterthought. Got that?

Reward yourself after pondering this dizzying synopsis of The Sopranos and put on Murray Street and get swept away by its majesty.

R

My Pillow Looks Like a Mogwai

2009-09-14T15:11:00.008-05:00

Earlier today I was watching Louis C.K.'s most recent stand-up special on Comedy Central, called Chewed Up. In it, he talks brutally honestly about the physical vicissitudes of aging. He does a bit about Cinnabon that rivals the already hilarious one of Jim Gaffigan (Chesterton native!). He weaves this into his routine, which focuses at length on the uncontrollable changes that happen unexpectedly to the male body as it grows older. Women appear on the edges of the bit, but mostly it centers on men, and the unavoidable hard realities of aging. Mostly he talks about weight gain and the overall nonchalance with which he sees his advancing decrepit, and simultaneously swollen, body.

One thing he doesn't mention, though, is balding. This bothered me somewhat because I couldn't stop staring at his disappearing hairline. His hairline now resembles either a cartoon supergenius or the bumpy one of a Klingon. Or, if you want to be more poetic and less pop-oriented, it looks like a newly exposed, empty seashore after the tide recedes. I may have been overly sensitive to this once I noticed, last night/this morning, that the typical loss of hair that goes along with chemotherapy had finally begun to affect me.

I had been warned that this would probably happen, so I wasn't surprised by it. In fact, I asked my nurse about a week ago why I had not yet lost my hair. She, too, expressed curious wonder that this had not happened by then. I had heard, and seen in various popular culture references, that my hair would likely fall out. I even shaved my head both to lower the shock of others and not to look like a cult member out of Lord of Illusions. Upon my first hospitalization, a man walked by my room before I entered it myself and I remember being mildly disgusted that he had not opted to shave his head. Random strands of hair fell across his head, hardly covering the bare scalp underneath his nauseatingly pathetic "hair."

As I've mentioned before, I decided to mitigate the element of surprise that goes along with this side effect of chemotherapy by shaving my head. Herein lies the problem: I had not done enough, because a mere buzzcut does not go all the way. A minute but palpable layer of hair still grew perceptibly on my head, so I ignored the stark fact that it too would be gone.

Last night, I washed my face and acknowledged the abnormally high number of small hairs that had fallen onto the handtowel I used. I shrugged these off dismissively, as well as the small wreath of brown hair that had appeared on the cushion that I used on the sofa while I watched television, supine of course. Then I got up in the middle of the night to meander over to the bathroom by my bedroom. Before I flicked off the light I had turned on before I peed, I saw what looked like a small animal on my pillow.

I couldn't tell if I needed to go into a defensive stance or not, because it was unclear whether or not this was an innocuous being. One thing was clear, though: this was a Mogwai, straight out of Gremlins. Whether it was the fairly innocuous brand of Gizmo or the toxic, ugly, fricassee-ish batch that rips up the town in that movie was unclear. I approached cautiously, but was a little disappointed, and a little disgusted, to find that the mass of hair on my pillow was my own.

All the warnings and astonished proclamations of "You haven't lost it yet?" from my nurse had convinced me to forget about this little side effect/inevitability of the chemotherapy. But there it was, and here it is, so be prepared for my bald--totally--pate if we cross paths.

By the way, too, they don't tell you about the prickly soreness that you feel with the baldness. Doctors and nurses warn you about the hair loss, but they neglect the tender scalp that comes with this.

It may not be uniform, and some may not feel it as acutely as others, but it'll be there if you should be so lucky as to have your immune system pummeled by chemotherapy. Trust me. Throughout a prolonged medical procedure, medical personnel seem to shrug off the possibility of such inevitabilities, but I think they should prepare you for the worst and act bewildered when you don't sprout wings, for instance.

Oh, awesome--my fingers are still attached to my hands! I would gladly broadcast that histrionic response to obvious absurdities rather than hold onto hopeless hope for unrealistic expectations. I'm a pragmatist at bottom, and many people misconstrue this realism as pessimism.

Hope is fine, and even preferable to despair, especially for those with terminal diseases (or those of us who refuse to vote Republican), but MS is not terminal, no matter what uninformed dolts think. Call me crazy, though, but I prefer the practical to the improbable.

R
--PS Urlacher's out for the season for the Bears. Great. More later--I need to sustain a sigh for the next few hours.
--PPS My beloved Dalton, the best cooler in the business, aka Patrick Swayze, is no more. Sad.

The Chicago Bears: A Reliable Disappointment

2009-09-14T00:14:00.004-05:00

Being a Chicago Bears fan is not unlike being a battered spouse who consistently returns to her (I'm saying "her" because men are normally the accepted perpetrators) abusive lover. I don't know why I'm surprised each year when my hopes are dashed by a thoroughly incompetent team.

I hate to say it, and haven't thus far because it may come across as racist, but Lovie Smith needs to be fired. A few years ago, he led the team to the Super Bowl, but that was mostly a confluence of flukes. I mean, Rex Grossman was the quarterback then, and he has since sucked to an almost unfathomable degree. He sucked then, even. We all knew it. As long as the team kept racking up victories, however, we didn't care. Most of these, though, came about because of turnovers capitalized upon by the defense.

The Bears' offense has always sucked. Let's get real. Even when they won, they were mediocre at best. Jim McMahon & Co. were the last collection of offensive players who could be called competent, but they had the great Walter Payton. Matt Forte keeps disappointing me with his piecemeal runs, especially since it's obvious to me that he can do better. It's been about twenty years since the team has had a viable offense. In recent years, Bears fans have had to suffer through the shit-eating grin of Grossman, and numerous other quarterbacks who glimmered with promise but ultimately failed miserably. Remember Cade McNown? Exactly...

In retrospect, Erik Kramer doesn't look so bad. Actually, he had moments of greatness, but these were negated by his inability to deliver in the post-season. Still, lest we forget, he has the highest passer rating of any Bears quarterback in history, including McMahon. Then came the aforementioned Grossman, whose Cheshire cat grin always incited blinding rage within me. It should be mentioned, begrudgingly, that he did lead the team to a Super Bowl, but, again, this was mostly a fluke due to the consistently astounding performance of the defense. After his abysmal failures, Kyle Orton and his neckeard took over. For a while, he looked okay, but he too was mainly a workhorse and not exactly a marquee player.

Now, with Jay Cutler, I thought perhaps Chicago had a bona fide quarterback. Based on tonight's play, though, it appears that I was mistaken. He compiled a treacherous three interceptions in the first half alone, and another on the final drive that could have brought the team back into the game. Granted, this may have been wishful thinking on my part because he had less than a minute to put something together, but the fact that this ended in another interception just twisted the knife in my back and made me feel the full extent of my disappointment.

I know that this was only the first game, but it almost completely annihilated my hopes for the season. Even Brian Urlacher, the superstar middle linebacker who left early with an injury that looked minor even if some of the commentators speculated that he may be out for the season, could not arouse my deflated faith in the team. Early in the game, I said "he looks old" to my friend Neal. He doesn't, though, and Neal knocked me back into coherence by telling me I was wrong. My pessimism has reached such astounding heights that it has almost no regard for reality.

I think this sort of cynicism is healthy, though. It's the mark of a true fan that I can be disappointed continuously and still look forward to redemption next week.

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm still pissed off. Lovie et al. need to get their shit together, or face complete obliteration. At times, I think the Bears deserve utter destruction as the only way in which the organization can pull itself together. It's like how I feel about Gary. It has been so devastated that to start an unstoppable conflagration, and to do this deliberately as a concerted, complete undertaking, might be the only way to rebuild the broken entity into something that isn't an absolute abomination.

An infernal inferno might be the hard truth of the path to redemption. I hope this is an exaggeration on my part, but I'm getting very close to waiting rapt in anticipation to yell, "Burn, baby, burn!"

R

Patience is a Virtue (& I don't have it)

2009-09-11T22:20:00.007-05:00

Nor do I want it, in certain situations. I've heard this palliative banality numerous times over the years, and I really don't need to hear it now. Patience is okay for a while, but eventually it becomes a siren's song that can woo you into inaction.

I thought about this today when I reflected on the fact that it's the eighth anniversary of 9/11, and then had to swallow a potential spit-take when I realized that we are still in Afghanistan. Obama ran on a platform that he would refocus the mismanaged "war on terror" and increase troop presence in Afghanistan while lowering that in Iraq. It sounded good during the general election, but I think most of us progressives/liberals didn't fully grasp what this entailed.

This new tactical reconfiguration means that attention would shift away from Iraq, which was perhaps the worst foreign policy decision made by a president ever. Certainly, most would agree that it was the worst foreign policy enacted by a sitting president in our lifetime. But really, though, it was the worst foreign policy in the history of the US.

As I've said before in what has become a perfunctory disclaimer that you have to preface every criticism of the military with, American troops have served admirably and blah blah blah.

We can all agree on this. We can't seriously assert, though, that America has returned the favor. Bush and his cadre of morons, either evil or not (mostly the former), forced us into war with relentless lying, and subsequently thousands of these soldiers have died. Call me crazy, but I don't think this means that Republicans love the military as much as they claim. Okay, I think we can agree on this too.

Now, though, we need to put an end to the madness. It's a cliche, but you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. It has been said by countless pundits, but some societies can't really handle democracy. Sometimes, an iron fist is all that they know and understand, so I hate it when delusional Americans extol the virtues of democracy and then try to force reluctant societies to accept it. Is that not, in itself, the height of hypocrisy?

And no, I'm not a wimp willing to forget about the atrocities that Bin Laden encouraged and ultimately perpetrated. He needs to experience the full spectrum of human pain, like that "Sloth" victim in Se7en.

At the same time, we need to agree that health care should not be a privilege, but a right. As I watched Obama's address to Congress last night and heard that galactically stupid (to borrow a phrase from A Few Good Men) outcry from Joe Wilson, that obscenely dumb senator from South Carolina, I understood completely and finally that the president needs to brandish a sword and threaten morons like that with decapitation.

Intolerance is a door that swings both ways. It can be ugly, in the case of Bin Laden, militant Islamic extremists, and Republican congressmen. It can also be sweetly satisfying, but we have yet to grasp this because Democrats still insist on pusillanimous mutual identification. Once they grow a pair, I think Democrats, including Obama, will understand that they don't want to, nor should they, compromise with the lunatics of the GOP.

I'm done with holding my breath and waiting patiently for a simple resolution to a number of issues that can be dealt with easily by ignoring Republican demagogues and their caterwauling.

Fuck them, and their politics based on selfishness and all sorts of bad things. Composing a litany of their bullshit would be both exhausting and futile, because I'm pretty sure many loud Republicans can't read. That sounds dismissive, I know, and it should. I hereby dismiss the ideology of the right.

Totally. I've mentioned Woody Allen's tactic of violence with regard to dealing with Nazis, and I think it applies to hopelessly churlish Republicans as well. Devastating satirical pieces are one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really get to the point, and I think we should all be at this breaking point finally.

President Obama, use the bully pulpit aggressively, and brandish something behind it if you'd like. The sharper, the better.

R

2009 Can Finally Begin

2009-09-11T00:33:00.003-05:00

According to most calendars, 2009 has been going on for over eight months. For me, though, the year doesn't truly begin until the opening kickoff of the first NFL game. In the same manner, 2008 didn't end until Super Bowl XLIII was over on February 1, 2009. The Pittsburgh Steelers' victory over the Arizona Cardinals was bittersweet, because I really wanted the Steelers to lose, but quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's winning pass to Santonio Holmes with only two minutes left in the fourth quarter was undeniably impressive.

I have a visceral negative reaction to the Steelers, mostly because they recently have become the Red Sox of the NFL. They're reliably good now, and enter the playoffs as favorites perenially. You'd think I'd align them with the Patriots, because both are football teams, but I don't hate the Patriots nearly as much as you'd think. This is mostly because the Patriots belong to the whole of New England, and not just the giant cesspool that I consider Boston to be. Man, I hate Boston. This shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me remotely because I make it a point to disparage that bullshit city whenever I can. I'll steer clear of smearing it now, because I'm not confident that I'd be able to stop ranting.

As I was saying, I absolutely love the NFL. One of the reasons I don't like summer so much--beside the havoc that the humidity wreaks on my MS symptoms--is the lack of exciting sports. Sure, there's baseball, but MLB is tedious. Each game lasts at least three hours, normally, because the pace is beyond slow. I've said it before, but the main reason I like White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle is that he moves the game along at an incredibly rapid clip. Whereas most pitchers hurl baseballs with the frequency of a musket shot, Buehrle throws a barrage of pitches not unlike a machine gun. He sprays his pitches, and everyone else leisurely drips them.

Football, though, is always dramatic and exciting and altogether thrilling. It is propulsive, so even a low-scoring game can be captivating. I used to lament its overtime policy of sudden death, but now I like it. It may seem absurd that the outcome of a game should rely on the toss of a coin, but this is not really the point of the sudden-death overtime. The team who loses the coin toss should be able to use their defense well enough to stop the offense of the opposing team. If not, then they could lose. Tough shit if their offense doesn't get a chance to even the score...

Tonight's game was between the aforementioned Steelers and the Tennessee Titans. I'm not a Titans fan, but I was by default tonight because of my disdain for the Steelers. Pittsburgh ended up winning 13-10, which was a disappointment, but I was so overjoyed to watch the first NFL regular season game that I hardly cared. Plus, as I said before, I'm not really a Titans fan, so I wasn't very disheartened that Tennessee lost. I was just happy to watch the NFL, finally.

I know a lot of people who prefer college football, but I could not possibly care less about any NCAA game. This includes basketball, by the way. Each March, when I see brackets everywhere, I simply sigh and think of next September.

As for now, I could not be more content with the prospect of the new NFL season. The Bears look good--not merely okay, as they usually do--and they even have an actual quarterback this year in Jay Cutler. I'll be in the hospital for a game or two, but Northwestern has such immaculate facilities that I'll be able to watch games on a large flat-screen TV. I think this is much more preferable to being physically present at a game, and, again, this is not simply because of the MS and the physical restrictions it imposes. More often than not, it's better to watch games closely on a high-definition television than to freeze in the biting cold (which can be incapacitating, like a prolonged, full-body ice cream headache) and act like you know what the hell is happening on the field.

I get an inappreciable amount of satisfaction from seeing incontrovertible evidence that can deflate a crowd's incredulity, no matter how vociferous their blind, ignorant indignation.

Unless, of course, the crowd is in Chicago.

R

Tori Amos & The Cutting Edge: An Appreciation

2009-09-09T16:18:00.010-05:00

The other night I was watching HBO and saw Juan Manuel Marquez drink his own urine, and almost vomited. I saw him sit in a chair and sip from a cup and grin strangely at the camera, like a child caught with his hand down his pants. I thought, "Great. He's retarded." I had been so close to being on his side before this unsettling and disgusting spectacle. Then I watched Floyd Mayweather, who I've never really liked, get a pedicure, and I was caught in a dilemma. The two discomfiting images, juxtaposed, represent both ends of the spectrum of stereotypical "masculinity." Which side do I fall on, I wondered?

The middle, thankfully. I realized this today because I was about to watch The Cutting Edge and then picked up my iPod and saw that it was paused on an old episode of "The B.S. Report with Bill Simmons" with Mike Lombardi as the guest, and they were talking about the upcoming season of the NFL. I nearly began to salivate.

Then I saw that there were less than thirty seconds left, which meant I'd listened to the whole podcast already. I then scrolled through my list of artists whose albums I have on my Touch, and settled on Tori Amos. From the Choirgirl Hotel began to play, and I got to "Iieee" before I noticed the opening credits of The Cutting Edge had begun to play. That was fine by me, because I had to hear "Talula," one of the tracks I deemed worthy of my Touch. It's on Boys for Pele, which is a double album with a lot of fat that I cut from my iPod. Let's face it: no one needs to hear "Doughnut Song" more than--well, ever.

Truthfully, though, once you get past the "fairy" weirdness that she believes, as well as the army of faithful dramatic lesbians that comprises much of her fanbase, you have to admit that Tori Amos is amazingly talented. Her songs can break up into mini-suites inside of the main melody, and then return seamlessly to the chorus. At times, she shows the, uh, cutting edge avant-cool of some of The Beatles' later recordings. They sound nothing alike, but a fearless experimentalism runs through both of the musicians' recordings.

But wait! Moira Kelly (who ranks near the top of my "Underrated Hot Actresses" category, along with Famke Janssen, and I think this is due mainly to her limited filmography of note) and D.B. Sweeney (who's your typical male schlub) had just gotten into the Olympics and were about to celebrate with a night of drunken revelry. At the end of the night, she tries to woo him, but he reluctantly, though nobly, refuses her advances because her judgment is not pure. Eventually, he leaves her room, scorned, and ends up drinking more, alone in his hotel room. The American female half of the other qualifying team then knocks on his door. Surprise surprise--they sleep together and Moira Kelly goes in the morning to his room to apologize, and is incredulous when the other female skater opens the door.

When he finally confesses his love right before they skate, she consents to the dangerous "Pamchenko Twist" maneuver (brilliantly lampooned in Blades of Glory with the finale that previously ended in decapitation when it was introduced in North Korea) that heretofore she had dismissed from the routine. They nail the reconfigured routine, kiss on the ice, and the credits roll. It's a sweet moment, saccharine really, but I've learned to do what Cameron Crowe says, and "embrace the cheese."

Tori Amos, meanwhile, is not cheesy, but she lies on the opposite end of the spectrum of feminine predilections. She is the Mayweather to Moira Kelly's Marquez. However, there is a huge difference between the two sets: Tori Amos doesn't flout her girlishness, and Moira Kelly doesn't drink urine.

R

Size Doesn't Matter

2009-09-08T23:44:00.003-05:00

I'm not referring to phallic length or girth, so forget about that. I'm speaking of cell phone technology, and the morons at Verizon.

Recently, I upgraded phones. I went from a standard flip with serious battery issues to one that is basically a hybrid of a Sidekick and a Blackberry. It flips, but not in the way to which I'm accustomed. The side opens to reveal a small but comprehensive keyboard.

For the life of me, I can't figure out what this is for. I text-message copiously, but the iTap function was easy enough for me to handle. Now, with this new waste of engineering, you'd think that the keyboard would expedite the non-urgent ramblings that really comprise the bulk of my texting. Not so. I never use it, nor do I foresee an instance in which I would come to see it as indispensable.

Here's another thing: this phone is not MS-friendly. Cracking open the manifold is a pain in the ass, and the keyboard, would it not be utterly useless, does not make anything easier. So prying open the phone makes no sense. I'm not sending scrolls of text with the thing, and the tiny buttons do nothing but infuriate me, and would preclude this anyway.

What do I like about this phone? The flash for the camera. That's it. My old phone, to which I'm going to revert once the idiots at Verizon technical support get their shit together and make this possible, has no flash, but it is not bulky or rage-inducing. It does what phones are supposed to do.

Plus, with it I can act like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Departed and send surreptitious texts from my pocket.

And it has internet access already, so I can breathe with less rage and still keep my street cred by using it with my Touch, although the entire debacle makes me more willing to sell my soul and get an iPhone.

Seriously, fuck Verizon. That company needs to atone for the unnecessary anger it incites in me.

R

What Day Is It?

2009-09-07T12:40:00.005-05:00

When I went into the hospital for my first round of chemotherapy, the nurse would ask me a few questions in the morning to test my cognitive faculties. Simple questions, like "What's your birthday?" or "What year is it?" or "What do you want to accomplish today?" or "What date is it?" All were fairly innocuous, but the last two of these troubled me.

The first, "What do you want to accomplish today?," bothered me--actually, almost totally so--due to my mother's intrusion. I took the question literally, and answered with something like, "Take a shower." She, however, extended its import to an obnoxious extent. "No--come on. You want to write. You have lots of things that you want to do." Thanks, Kreskin. You forgot "world peace" as a vapid aspiration. We were not in a beauty pageant. We were in the hospital, and I think the nurse's question applied mainly to the immediate future--as in, the next 24 hours, after which she'd ask me the same question again. I don't think I'll be able to win the Nobel Prize by then.

When the nurse asked me the date, I took a beat. Then I took another. I was actually perplexed. This was not like when I took the plastic peg test with the main nurse during the initial tests to ascertain whether or not I would be eligible, and became fixated on the sphygmomanometer and its humorously long name. This was not like that. I really didn't know the date. I could say that it was Tuesday, mainly because the duration of the stay was only overnight, and I remembered that the first day was a Monday. And I knew it was August, because that is the month of my grandmother's birthday and it hadn't come yet.

(Btw, she's 81 and just had open heart surgery for aortic stenosis and a few bypasses, and is more spry than most people I know. She also quit smoking, too, after approximately 50 years. Her verve both inspires me and pisses me off. At exactly three times my age, she makes me look like an enervated slug.)

The actual date was not something I'd had to consider for a long time. Even now, if I have to fill out a form, I normally wait for my mother to grab the board out of my hands. Not having to know the date is a fairly small reward I get for this, because in reality I have an incredibly difficult time writing anything manually (which sounds redundant, but isn't. I'm typing this, relatively easily, but cannot pick up a pen and start scribbling.).

It's strange to consider, but recently I had to fill out a form by myself and was on the verge of sweating. I could imagine a late Marlon Brando doing this, but not me. The blood drained from my face when I got to the line that asked for the date. Luckily, I could see a calendar from where I was sitting.

Part of this ignorance comes from preoccupations and stress, but a lot of it comes from not working. I'm like a less eccentric DaVinci, in the sense that I can understand his choppy, incremental sleep schedule. Not with regard to his output. I might be able to think up tons of shit, but there's no way in hell I'm going to make a diagram. Plus, I can't draw. I've never been able to, really, so this is not MS-related. Sometimes I look at Picasso's paintings in his African Period, and think, "Yeah, I can do that." But I'm quick to add, "That's about it." And, finally, "Am I kidding? Not a chance in hell."

Another problem is that I don't wear a watch. I never really have. This has become less of an issue in recent years, because I always have a cell phone with the time. Incidentally, now, though, Ryan, Anthony, and my mother left to get new phones, and they took mine to get a new one as well. Luckily, we have clocks and such, but I disturbingly feel like a drug addict on the verge of withdrawal. I keep haplessly reaching for my phone, like an amputee with phantom limb pain.

For now, I do know that today is a Monday, because it's Labor Day, which now means absolutely nothing to me. Seriously, it is like Urdu. I know it exists, and millions of others use it, but I can only muster a half-hearted shrug of utter ignorance when I consider its existence. And maybe a nap.

R

Harvest (-ation or -ing?)

2009-09-04T18:45:00.012-05:00

I'm not sure which spelling declension to use for the procedure, so I'll stick with the Neil Young version. Plus I don't think "harvestation" is a word.

On Thursday I had my stem cells collected at Northwestern. First, I had to give blood yet again. If I had a card punched each time I went to have blood drawn, a la Subway, I'd be due for one of those six-foot-long party subs by now. Then I went for the main event: my own stem cell harvest.

I know you're dying to know how this is done, but I have to digress for a second on Lyme disease. A PICC line had to be inserted prior to the actual harvest. I'd had one of these before, in my arm, for Lyme disease. I know you're asking, "How did you get Lyme disease?" I had the same thought, and rest assured that I did not, lo and behold, have it. Diagnosing Lyme disease is not an exact science, ironically. But evidently I met several criteria, and so my doctors wanted to be able to scratch that off the dry-erase board before focusing on the MS. (Here's another digression inside this digression. Think of it like a Matryoshka doll. My current medical team, as opposed to my previous one, is like Dr. House, whereas before they were like the interchangeable residents under his tutelage. I think we could have safely assumed that I did not have Lyme disease--idiots.) So I had to endure this reasonably substantial length of tubing that came out of the inside of my elbow for a month, for what turned out to be no reason. I'm not blaming the doctors on this one; I'm saying that there needs to be an actual test specifically for Lyme disease. There has to be a way, no?

Back to 2009. After having blood drawn, I went to some outpatient operating room where my PICC line was to be inserted. I know it's taken a while for this clarification, but PICC stands for "Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter." By the way, I know that "catheter" is technically correct, but we lay people think only of bladders whenever one is mentioned. Apparently, it's a broad term. So medical personnel inserted this PICC line into my neck. Like I said, I had one previously at the bend of my left arm, but the neck was new to me. And what frustrated me further was that no one got my repeated references of Regan MacNeil, especially when some huge white cube hovered over me while technicians poked, prodded, and pierced my neck. Come on, now--The Exorcist? Those primitive tests she had to go through before there was no diagnosis did not strike a bell with anyone in that room? Nary a nod or murmur of assent. Kids...

When my PICC line was secured, I returned to the room where the harvest would take place. In this room, there was a vinyl blue recliner where I would sit while my PICC line delivered my blood to the cell separator machine, whose technical name I don't know (picture below). What I do know, though, is that this hunk of machinery reminds me of the supercomputer in Willy Wonka that scientists want to use to figure out the exact locations of the remaining Golden Tickets. The computer, though, thwarts their intentions by refusing to divulge this information. Anyways, the separator reminded me of the cinematic supercomputer because it too had spinning dials and digital readouts that delivered esoteric information that I did not even try to understand.

I understood the gist, though, of its function: my blood flowed into the machine, which separated my stem cells from the rest of my blood cells by using a centrifuge, and then my "clean," stem cell-less blood returned to my blood vessels via the same PICC line from which it was sucked out.

I sat in this recliner, hooked up to the separator, for three or four hours. My concept of time, already weak, cannot allow me to make an accurate estimate. All I know is that I sat for a long time, only to fill a bag, unimpressively I thought, with what looked like a redder version of the "orange juice" antiviral serum that saved thousands of lives, including Rene Russo's, in Outbreak.

Finally, I was finished, and had only to wait for the verdict from the lab. The procedure required 2 million cells, and most people come up with 10. Me? 12. That's right--I exceeded expectations (for the first time in probably a long time).

(I'd better have done well, because the previous day mostly consisted of me trying to ignore the white-knuckle pain I felt in my lower back and then my legs--see below.)

So now I have a week off before the long hospitalization and more aggressive chemo. In anticipation, though, and after a phone call with my nurse when she expressed little surprise that my hair had not yet begun to fall out, I had Ralph (my mother's aforementioned fiance emeritus) shave my head like someone with lice, or, less humorously, a white supremacist. I assure you, though, that I don't have--and have never had--lice, nor do I dislike black people irrationally.

Just Tyler Perry, because every once in a while I'll land on TBS and have to endure, briefly, his unfunny sitcom replete with a laugh track that sounds faker than an Ashlee Simpson b-side. That's not an irrational hatred, I maintain.

R

From JFK to FDR

2009-09-03T00:48:00.011-05:00

First, let me say that I'm not referring to the respective legacies left by both Democratic presidents. Numerous books have already been written about that, and I hardly could say anything new. No, I'm talking about the chronic pain that plagued both men, and how Neupogen has made me feel like both commanders-in-chief, first the later one, and now the earlier New Deal-maker.

The nurses at Northwestern warned me about possible pain that could arise due to injections of Neupogen. I have to give myself two shots every morning, and they are quite simple (see picture and relevant post below). This is to increase production of red blood cells, and consequently stem cells to be transplanted later. The good thing about Neupogen is that it negates the need for stem cell collection from my bone marrow, which, as anyone who's seen an after-school special or made-for-TV movie about cancer and bone marrow operations knows, is an incredibly painful procedure. After the past two days or so, I'm not so sure I wouldn't go the traditional route--at least it's over relatively quickly, as opposed to the Neupogen regiment, which lasts about a week.

Until late Tuesday night, I had no pain whatsoever. I even emailed my nurse and told her that the injections were going well, and that the pain I was supposed to feel was nonexistent. Not five minutes after I sent the email, though, my lower back started to throb. It was like she had stabbed a voodoo doll immediately after speaking to me. At first, the pain was subtle, though constant. Soon, though, it grew in intensity to almost comical proportions. I wasn't laughing, though.

You know how, when you stub your toe, the pain is excruciating but you know it'll be brief? Or a brain freeze, when you're nearly apoplectic from blinding pain, but then it subsides and you gratefully are back to normal? Well, imagine both of those types of pain, but without the brevity and quick resolution. This morning, my lower back felt exactly like this. I felt like I imagine JFK felt due to his chronic back problems, and only kept thinking of an image that I have seen many times, but most recently on that MSNBC documentary on the Kennedys: his face as he lay on a board while he was being carried out of an ambulance. He wanted to grimace, I'm sure, but the cameras forced him to keep a blank expression.

Although I had been warned, I assumed most of these caveats were part of simple medical protocol. This morning, though, I was in the throes of such throbbing, relentless pain that I felt I understood, for the first time, exactly how Kennedy felt on that stretcher. Goddamn, I was in pain. Eventually, the nurse came through on a prescription for Norco, aka Vicodin, and I received some relief from that.

Then, after a long siesta that has come to be a daily ritual, I awoke to find that the pain had left my lower back. Energized and overconfident, I stood up only to realize that the pain had simply migrated to my legs, specifically my thighs. I still can hardly stand without scowling. Admittedly, this is not much of a change from my normal expression, but now its cause is pathological and not simply due to a cantankerous temperament.

So now, I feel like how I imagine FDR felt late in his presidency. Everyone knows he'd had polio, and subsequently had to use a wheelchair, but I don't think people know how much pain he was actually in. Sure, his legs were mostly numb, but he still endured, silently, sporadic spasms of pain. Likewise, I don't put up much of a fuss, but I assure you that my legs--thighs and knees, mostly--hurt like hell.

Maybe now I can call my pain "presidential."

R

Chemotherapy: The Ultimate Miracle Diet

2009-08-31T21:32:00.008-05:00

As I've said before, I'm not really exhibiting the full array of negative symptoms associated with chemotherapy yet. I still have my hair, for one thing. And today I revisited the lovely fertility clinic, since I was in the area because I had to have more blood drawn. By the way, someone needs to point out that, judging by the pornography ready there, that either the clinic has a disproportionately high number of black patients, or someone has a voracious predilection for brown sugar, and I don't mean heroin. Anywho, I then forced myself to eat, which is becoming the most noticeable side effect of the chemo at this point. I really have no appetite.

Not a small one, mind you. None whatsoever. Furthermore, like some women on an SSRI with regard to sex, it actually disgusts me. The thought of anything edible makes me reel with revulsion. I've said before (again) that I may look like Nosferatu in a few weeks, but that was mostly a joke. Now, though, it seems more and more like a possible--nay, probable--physical reality. To eat makes me cringe. The mere prospect of a future meal nauseates me, and I am already nauseated all the time.

I also said before that I was going to bulk up in preparation for this steep decline in appetite, so it was not exactly unexpected. However, I evidently did not make enough headway, because I have to endure endless admonishments, mostly from my mother, to eat. I was never exactly svelte, but ever since high school I've remained relatively, reliably, around 200 pounds. By the end of this fun little stem cell trial, who knows where I'll fall?

Earlier, I watched some brief commercial/infomercial for some new fad diet. I forget what the actual name of it was, but I remember that it consisted of letters and numbers. In the interest of dark humor, I'll call it the RU486 Diet. That nonsense never works in the long run--everyone I know who went on Atkins or South Beach or something comparable gained back the weight they'd lost.

If you need a gimmicky regimented diet to lose weight, let me introduce the Chemotherapy Diet. You rarely get hungry, the simple thought of food disgusts you, and the pounds just slide off!

Seriously, though, if you're dumb enough to subscribe to any fad diet rather than make simple nutritional adjustments, this may be for you! All you need is to get diagnosed with any form of cancer that uses chemotherapy as a treatment--or, like me, participate in a trial that also uses it--and I guarantee that the pounds will just melt away. Sure, you could die, but wouldn't you rather be dead and thin than alive and fat?

It's sad that some people would probably try this out. The nausea never wanes. (The slow moon climbs, and the dark moans round with many voices. "Ulysses" again...) When it becomes unbearable, and it's time to pop another pill, you feel like fried shit, which is how I've come to describe how I still feel after only my first chemo treatment.

Does that sound yummy? Is it enticing? I thought not. Mission accomplished, chemo.

Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. (I should stop before I get cloyingly pretentious--if I haven't already--by quoting Tennyson some more.)

Try Chemotherapy: The Ultimate Miracle Diet!

R
--Disclaimer: please don't.

Cancer Patients Are Tough MFers

2009-08-30T00:34:00.007-05:00

Honestly, it's been almost a week since I've been discharged, and the effects of the chemo still reek havoc on my body. As I've only received one treatment, and since then I've been nothing more than a ball of flesh, I've come to the conclusion that I'm a huge pussy.

My chemo regiment is aggressive, sure, but it'll be over in a month. Seriously. One month is all I have to endure. I can't imagine dealing with this cytoxan shit any longer than that. Remember, I've only had one treatment, and it's nearly impossible for me to complain because of all the shit I'd start spewing and then get too tired or nauseated to continue and finish. Discarded rants would pollute everything, and might subsequently poison the resolve of someone else. I flatter myself, of course, by thinking that anyone would actually care about what I have to say.

I'm just saying, though, that whoever has to go through a treatment like cytoxan, or some other chemotherapy, is one tough motherfucker. I barely have the energy to type this because I really just want to be asleep. There's an idea I can make happen...

R
--BTW, I also have to give myself injections of Neupogen, which are unbelievably easy compared to those of Avonex (see picture of sadistically long needle below), for a week to boost my production of stem cells. Compared to Avonex, Neupogen is a piece of cake. These needles look comically small next to the huge one I've used for the former. Think a mosquito bite versus a pile driver.

Now I deal with this

instead of this

An Intentional Misreading for Ted Kennedy

2009-08-27T03:50:00.005-05:00

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" was one of Senator Edward Kennedy's favorite poems, as it is mine, and he quoted it often, but most famously in his speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, as his campaign for the nomination against the incumbent President Carter officially ended. He actually misread the poem, which is a brutal rallying cry against the ravages of aging by an aging warrior, or brute, to be blunt. Nevertheless, his misreading of the poem as an ethically pure, inspiring refusal to slip silently into retirement fits his sterling service as a senator. Therefore, I will only quote his favorite quote from the dramatic monologue, and I think it says enough about the man and his incredible resilience in the face of horror:

"Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

R

Day One: The Beginning (At Last)

2009-08-25T17:09:00.008-05:00

It's early Tuesday evening, and I've been at Northwestern Memorial Hospital here in Chicago since yesterday morning. After a week of tests, not to mention months of bureaucratic bullshit, I finally made it into the first rounds of the stem cell trial.

Stem cells are a minor, although integral, part of this regiment of treatment. In a few weeks, I'll sit in a chair connected to a machine while my stem cells are filtered from my blood. The crux of the treatment, though, lies in chemotherapy, and the systematic obliteration of my immune system. Unlike cancer patients, the chemotherapy will not completely annihilate my immune system, but merely decimate it. My stem cells will then be readmitted to my body and will totally rebuild--not reboot, which the forestalling interferon treatments do--this immune system. (Yes, that's three sentences consecutively that explicitly mention my immune system, but get used to it because, since MS is an autoimmune disease, I am quite certain that "immune system" will appear repeatedly.)

But that's still in the future. Yesterday, I checked into the hospital and was taken to my room, which has a separate room between it and the hallway, to minimize outside pathogens. Kids, obviously, aren't allowed--and this does not bother me one bit. All of the hospital personnel that enter have to wear a light-green gauze gown (alliteration!) over their usual scrubs or lab coats.

After one of the nurses inserted my IV line, I first received a saline drip. The problem with this, though, is that it makes me pee constantly, so at night I have to keep one of those handy, hand-held plastic urinals with a cap close by my bed. During the day, when I have visitors, I have to drag my portable IV tree, on wheels, to the bathroom, which is a pain in the ass because it involves unplugging it and gathering the strands of tubes that emanate from my arm and then wheeling the whole thing into the bathroom, where I still have to use the urinal because they want to watch my fluid output aka how much I piss.

Last night I received my first infusion of cytoxan, a form of chemotherapy that Ms. S. knows all too well. Along with that, I received a drip of Mesna, which helps to prevent bladder bleeding (and is also one letter inversion away from the pretentious high-IQ organization). This round of chemo was only my first, so I didn't have any of the typical unpleasant side effects.

Next week, though, we'll take it up a notch, and I can expect all of the expected side effects to kick in, like baldness and nausea and vomiting and what-have-you. I've said it before, but I need Ammo here to shave my head. She never actually has shaved it before, but she did give me quite a few haircuts in college, so I assume this would be a walk in the park.

Seriously, though, this saline drip makes me pee an abnormal amount, so you can guess where I'm headed right now. I have more, less soporific, non-medical anecdotes. But for now, I'm about to be discharged until next week. Since I have until then before we really jump into this thing, there's plenty of time for me to rant and rave about these & other trivialities.

R

Brad Pitt, the Cinematic Palate Cleanser

2009-08-22T23:29:00.012-05:00

Like a good sorbet, Brad Pitt is a remarkable palate cleanser for eminent filmmakers. Big, acclaimed directors use him in their movies to follow up tremendous feats by taking a break from the strain and stress of them. This is not to say that he enables these directors to indulge horrible inclinations. Rather, he gives them breathing room, no doubt to placate the studio, after a strenuous release.

First, I thought of Joel & Ethan Coen, whose No Country For Old Men was an amazing addition to their already impressive filmography. That film, of course, came out in 2007, two years after Cormac McCarthy's middling novel. (Btw--I've often said that the worst books make the best movies, and vice versa. See: The Shawshank Redemption and The Great Gatsby. Think of their disparate aesthetic attributes, and how the film version inverts the literary attributes of its adapted story.) In 2008, the Coens released Burn After Reading, a thoroughly entertaining but ultimately disposable movie. You couldn't even respectably compare it to their previous movie without diminishing the greatness of the latter.

The same goes for Quentin Tarantino. He's a great director, arguably the best working today. I love Death Proof, but I don't think Inglourious Basterds actually follows this (chrono)logically. I think a truer predecessor would be Kill Bill, Vol. 2, which I think ranks with No Country as one of the best movies of the decade, and which first had the superimposed chapter titles on the screen as part of the film. Earlier today, I watched Vol. 2 and was again reminded of how truly amazing that movie is. Inglourious Basterds, which I saw last night, does not come close to that movie when it comes to emotional impact.

Both of these follow-ups to great movies by great directors have one glaring similarity: both star Brad Pitt. He's not, admittedly, a great actor, but occasionally he can surprise you with his abilities. In Burn After Reading, for instance, he was absolutely hilarious as a gym trainer who finds himself way over his head in a farce about espionage and a fairly innocuous "mem-wah" by John Malkovich's character. I still laugh just thinking about the incredulous, shocked dismay on his face after John Malkovich punches him in the nose in the car. I maintain, though, that that was an entertaining movie--very entertaining at times--that let the Coens relax after the amazing achievement of their previous movie, but it was not among their best work.

On to Tarantino. I liked Inglourious Basterds, but I don't think it matches either of the Kill Bills when it comes to overall emotional heft or sheer technique. In truth, it's a farce about Nazis. Don't get me wrong--I'm all for making fun of Nazis, but it's harder to do now, and have the same comic, topical resonance, than before. Chaplin's The Great Dictator came out in 1940, and it mercilessly made fun of Hitler. This movie does not really lampoon Hitler. He cartoonishly rants and raves, sure, but he is off-camera most of the time. Christoph Waltz plays the main antagonist, "the Jew Hunter," a Nazi officer who, ahem, hunts Jews. (I foresee an Oscar, by the way.) Pitt is the Allies' equivalent of Waltz's character, and their oppositional temperaments really undermines Pitt's effort. Waltz is frightening and absolutely merciless, like Javier Bardem in No Country.

The movie as a whole, though, does not leave you with the same wide-eyed "Wow" reaction that either of the Kill Bills. This is not Pitt's fault, but I think the movie does not stay with you like many of Tarantino's other films. I don't care much about this, and am easily prepared to give Tarantino a little pass when it comes to this movie. I don't mean it's bad, but I don't think it has the legs of his previous films.

I also don't think Pitt is bad. Let's face it, though: he's a cinematic sorbet. Even though Tarantino insists in interviews that this is a movie close to his heart, it does not even come close to his past works' greatness.

After serious, difficult, and insanely great movies like No Country For Old Men and Kill Bill, these directors deserve a little Brad Pitt.

R

America, The Pathetic

2009-08-20T10:21:00.009-05:00

Certain issues bring out the worst in America. It's like the country puts a towel over its head (not like the scary Arabs do, though--I mean figuratively), hovers over a bowl of steaming water, and then all of the hideous boils and acne and other dermatological mounds stand out in high relief. Don't kid yourself, America--we are a nation of paranoid xenophobes and vociferous, shameful, and shameless morons. We the people are pathetic.

As a whole, of course. I would never insult anyone so much as to compare him to this lovely woman, who shows her true, deplorable colors when she shouts, stupidly, "Heil Hitler!" at a dissenting Israeli-American at another bullshit "town hall." Some walking lobotomy, aka conservative radio host, had set up this utter sham of a gathering in order to stoke the ire of wack-jobs afraid of national health care, and the troglodytes came out in droves.

One could say that this Israeli man was asking for it. He did go to a place where people were certainly unstable, to say the least. However, I am quite proud of him. After the bitch lobbed that stupid comment his way, he did not ignore it or pretend not to hear it. No, he confronted that seaward. Flatly. And, when he did so, you can see that her shrink a few inches because she's absolutely terrified of the large Jew walking her way. She should be scared. If I were that guy, I would have popped her head off of her neck like a cork in a bottle of champagne.

"These Colors Don't Run." So goes a typically glib bumper sticker slogan favored by lunkheads when talking about American aggressiveness after 9/11. What's funny, though, is that most of these berserk citizens live in red states, mostly, so what are they running from? There's no draft, although I'd be more than happy to reinstate one in the South (or in any state that produces such an abominable human being). Plus, if you're as fucking stupid as any of these loud "protesters," you'd better pick up the pace, because hopefully we on the left (ironically on the undeniably "right" side of the issue) have learned that civil discourse and debate does not work with retards.

I have long run out of rope with regard to the rampant conservative idiocy in this country. If I say, "I'm at the end of my rope" about these people, I'm lying. I was at the end of my rope a long time ago. Who are we kidding? It's gone. Forget nonviolent protests of outrage toward these automatons.

When it comes to loud groups of assembled right-wing lemmings, I am on the side of Woody Allen's character in Manhattan.

Forget about placating these aliens with assurances rooted in reason. Clearly, they're impervious. Cudgels, I think, would be more effective than cuddles when it comes to silencing such histrionic, hysterical caterwauling.

R

From the Living Room Sofa

2009-08-20T01:07:00.002-05:00

This is from a Touch, in my apartment's living room. I might be too lazy to write & exercise tonight, so I may just content myself with flossing. And some "Pineapple Express."

R

Good News re: Stem Cell Trial

2009-08-18T23:06:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure how much I can say, so I'll just say that I'm delighted. Plus I saw Sophie and Gene today. What kind of day? That's right: THIS kind, (without the latent unresolved hostility).

R

PETA is a PITA

2009-08-17T21:45:00.002-05:00

Not the delicious Middle Eastern bread. The animal-rights group is a major Pain In The Ass.

Michael Vick was released this week after a year and a half in prison. Yeah, his illegal dog-fighting league was despicable, but I don't think he deserved 18 months in prison. I mean, dogs aren't exactly humans, no matter what people like my mother would say. Thus, we shouldn't elevate them in status. A dog is a dog. Don't get me wrong--I like dogs, but this is true.

Vick left the Atlanta Falcons finally in the middle of 2007 in the midst of all the hubbub surrounding his indictment. Then he became a free agent, and, after serving his sentence, will play for the Philadelphia Eagles in 2009.

Not to digress again, but this is infuriating for me, a Chicago Bears fan. Hopefully Cutler will prove to be a functional quarterback, but I'm extremely pessimistic when it comes to the Bears and quarterbacks. Even Jim McMahon, the quarterback at the helm of the 1985 Bears--perhaps the most dominant team in NFL history--wasn't a superstar. He was more of a workhorse, but that's the Chicago way: work over luck. Anyways, we haven't had a marquee quarterback, like, ever (Cade McNown was the closest we ever came, but he was a complete dud). Now Philadelphia has two? Remember, Donovan McNabb is still the starting QB. Damn, that's unfair.

Anyways, PETA publicly denounced Vick upon his release. What do they want? The man did his time, admirably. When asked if the organization had forgiven Vick, and perhaps the two could do some joint charity thing, Lisa Lange, the Senior VP of PETA, said,

"We met with Michael Vick back before he went to prison. And he lied to us, as he lied to so many other people, about his actions, basically saying he didn't have anything directly to do with it, that he didn't do anything to his own pets. And later it came out that he actually threw some of his pets to the pit bulls and watched as they were ripped apart."

I'll admit--I laughed out loud at that last sentence. How can these people take themselves so seriously that they can't see how absurd they are acting? I suspect they had miserable childhoods made less miserable because of their dogs/cats/whatever, and now they raise a ruckus when they hear of any crime against their beloved animals.

Put down the knitting needles and the scrap of yarn that will eventually be a doggy snowsuit, and make use of that shiny thing in your bathroom. (It's called a "mirror.") You look ridiculous, PETA-member, so please show some dignity and take pride in your own taxonomic bracket. Humans are fun, sometimes. We can be dicks, but so can dogs.

Someone needs to remake Cujo, and then maybe we'll all give Michael Vick a break (not that he really needs it).

R

Democrats Are Sheep

2009-08-16T22:40:00.006-05:00

Republicans are wolves, so at least they get shit done. When you have a taste for blood, which the Republicans finally got in 1994, you become fearless in your quest for more. More more more--this has become the mantra of the GOP since it gained control of Congress. Even when they finally lost the majority of both houses in 2006, their opposition, the Democrats, haven't done a anything substantial. Those who would disagree could cite all sorts of minor legislative victories that they managed to secure, but those happened most noticeably when Obama took over from the decade of entrail-reading and tarot governance that seemed to typify the Bush years.

It has become a cliche, but the elections that year represented a huge mandate to fix everything that that moron fucked up. So far, not much has changed. Obama signed an order to close Guantanamo, but then acknowledged that providing these humans, and they are human even though they act inhuman, with due process would be futile. He decided it would probably be easier to lock them up permanently, and then forget them.

Now, with the health care issue at the center of America's political stage, Democrats, along with President Obama, are planning to fold yet again. Kathleen Sibelius, former governor of Kanas and now Secretary of Health and Human Services, said this morning that the Democratic leadership (an oxymoron) might drop the public option from the prospective health care bill.

Are you fucking kidding me? Seriously. Are you fucking kidding me?

I understand that it's important to pass something, but, in the words of John Stossel, GIMME A BREAK.

You can't even call the Democrats cowards. I mean, they are, but it's worse than that. They simply don't have the swagger and effrontery that jackass Republicans like Bush or any of his vile cohorts had. They only graze about like brainless sheep, waiting for the next wolf to rip them apart.

Here's the thing, though, pussies: You have a majority across the board, so do something with it. Democrats can't act dilatory and then be shocked when a newly charged GOP tears them apart.

If they don't stand up and deliver, like the students of EJOlmos, they're doomed to a life of bumbling. Not staggering, but aimless bumbling. Or they can continue to get picked apart by the vultures of the GOP, who never stop circling, no matter the circumstances.

Hey, wimps, there is power in numbers (China is starting to understand this). If you actually cared for the whole as opposed to the gaping holes in your heads, you'd understand that those on the front lines may get plowed under, Civil War-style, but those in the rear will eventually stand on the corpses of these martyrs, who will not have died in vain. In the end, America would have a health care system that does not cause the rest of the world to snicker.

Honestly, if Democrats keep waiting around, getting less active and thus fatter, I shouldn't care if they get torn apart by the Republicans. What country is this, again? If it can't pass a no-brainer like a health care bill, who cares if it totally goes to shit?

I DO, MOTHERFUCKERS. Wake up, Democrats/zombies, and realize that a flock of sheep can decimate a Republican party comprised mostly of limp wolves. Let them snarl, but eventually they have to know that their sad lives are over.

Or not. The new Democratic strategy seems to be to let them re-populate, uglier and more nefarious than ever. Like Gremlins: The New Batch.

R

Astronauts and Old-School Intimidation

2009-08-13T23:19:00.013-05:00

Because I love it, I selected "Ghosts of American Astronauts" by The Mekons on my iPod, and evidently accidentally pressed "Repeat" and have been listening to the song nonstop for about half an hour. Although this sounds like the actions of a potential psychopath, I urge you to get it wherever. Listen to it, and tell me it does not deserve to be replayed endlessly.

Follow this train of thought: if astronauts sat down and spoke with Blue Dog Democrats, health care would pass easily. Furthermore, if an astronaut--a Democratic one, so we could be assured there was no residual brain damage from whatever mission--sat down calmly with a crazy Republican (redundant, I know), I'm sure he could convert even that lunatic.

He would still have the buzzcut, of course. Have you seen a current astronaut, by the way? The buzzcut has faded, but I assure you that none of them has a mohawk or even an earring, except the women, but this still applies only to the latter. Plus, he (or she again--let's all assume I refer to both sexes here, so I don't have to keep typing five more letters. Suck it up, feminists.) is physically intimidating beyond the hair. Even if the guy is short, you know he's square (both physically and, most likely, culturally) and squat and immobile and stronger than a lesser primate.

All these town hall outbursts come mainly from morons. Think of only the jackass who brought a gun to an Obama speech, and remember that he never even got near a microphone, at least not at the event itself. The thing about morons, though, is that really they're pussies. Even a giant can easily be toppled, at least emotionally. This guy was reduced to tight-lipped aphasia when questioned aggressively by Chris Matthews. Chris Matthews! He's loud, sure, but he looks like the boy with his thumb in the dike.

Think now of the progress we can make on health care reform if only a tough, taciturn astronaut walked up to a hesitant legislator, or, better, a pompous loud demagogue. He could tap Senator Chuck Grassley, from Iowa, on the shoulder and induce a massive gulp from the idiotic politician who vociferously rallies the ire of his dumb constituents when talking about health care reform. And forget about Palin: she could be knocked over with a glare from Shannon Lucid, who looks like a scary gym teacher, and was one of the first female astronauts.

We need astronauts to strong-arm, with silent intimidation, any bloviating, weak-kneed politician when it comes to health care legislation. I would love to see a "Scared Straight" installment like that.

And, obviously, astronauts are very smart, so even that would scare Palin and any other vapid right-winger.

R

Prologue: Day Three (The End of The Beginning)

2009-08-12T22:49:00.012-05:00

Today was the least exhausting day of the three days of tests I went through in order to confirm my final eligibility for the stem cell/chemotherapy trial for treatment of MS. No shots, though, so that was good. Two separate appointments with my main liaisons, though, who I have dubbed, not very creatively, "The Two Bs": Dr. Richard Burt, an immunologist and the trial's ringleader, affiliated with Northwestern, and Dr. Roumen Balabanov, my neurologist at Rush University.

My first appointment was with the latter of these. Dr. Balabanov has a fun name to pronounce, or, in my mother's case, mispronounce. He is also from Bulgaria, so he has an awesome Eastern European accent. With it he exudes a nice nonchalance that helps him to keep his sense of humor even as he sees a very high number of demanding patients in the Rush MS Center. He also reminds me a lot of Dr. Charles Nichols from The Fugitive with Harrison Ford. Without, you know, the murderous ambition.

He gave me the perfunctory MS neurological exam, and gave me his approval for the trial. His medical opinion weighs quite heavily, and well, with Dr. Burt as a determination of eligibility. It was nice to hear him tell me that I looked great, but I assured him that beneath a veneer of health lay a bubbling, unstable, and downright volatile nervous system. He said he noticed this, and, on a walk we took down one of the floor's long aisles, told me about a brain stimulation procedure that could resolve a slight tremor he saw in my left hand. I assure you, this tremor only comes up intermittently, and since it was early it was probably very noticeable.

This, he said, was an option should I fall into the placebo-ish group during randomization. The great thing about this aspect, though, is that I'd be automatically eligible and approved for the transplant in six months. After all, the study has to include a group of individuals that do not receive the transplant. Nevertheless, they get another, more aggressive form of treatment that is different from the one they are currently on. In the end, it still sucks to be in this group, but hopefully only for half a year.

After he gave me the green light, I headed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Division of Immunotherapy to meet with Dr. Burt. Dr. Burt exudes competence, and I also like him immensely. When he walks into the room, you immediately know that he knows more than you about whatever you're seeing him for. It's not a pretentious, ohyeahdidyouknowthis? arrogance, though. He's quietly confident and confidently smart.

Quick digression, yet again: the nurse who took my vitals here commented on my eyelashes. I, embarrassed somewhat at the unexpected compliment, responded with, "Yeah--wait a month if I get into the trial. Enjoy them now, because they might not be here later." Awesome downer, I know, but I was mildly distracted because I was about to meet with the head of the whole shebang.

When Dr. Burt came in, I could tell immediately that he was not his usual, buoyant, cool self. Something weighed on his mind and diluted his joviality. I think I may have trivialized some of his feelings when he went through the possible side effects of the treatment. Sterility? I knew that. Death? What're you gonna do? I later realized, as my mother pointed out, that he was obviously flummoxed because he saw me right after he had to deny some woman's inclusion in the trial because her MS had progressed beyond the reach of the study. We rode with her in the elevator, and I had no idea why she was so quiet in her wheelchair. Later, I understood her despondency. Nevertheless, he too said I was ready and ideal for the procedure.

I then had to perform a series of cognitive tests with the head nurse of the trial, to whom I referred in a previous post. For the first test, I had to put nine plastic pegs into three rows of three holes in a blue board. Apparently I did well, or so she said, but I confessed that it was hard for me to concentrate because I was so absurdly tired. Three days of tests, totaling 20+ hours, had exhausted me enough to render my coordination lazy.

Then I had to do a mental math quiz. Apparently I did well on this as well, although I'm not sure if she was just being kind. I hate math--shocking, I know--and my prowess really seemed to me to be functional at best. It also couldn't have helped that I was constantly distracted by the items in the room. This sounds like an excuse, and it is, but some things honestly fucked with my head. I stopped listening intently to the voice on the old tape recorder that was giving me numbers to add when I saw the blood pressure thing.

I became obsessed with the name of this thing. I was pretty sure it was "sphygmomanometer," but I couldn't be sure. Was there an extra syllable in there somewhere? After the test, I asked Kristin, the nurse, but she wasn't sure because it had been a while since she thought about it. Fair enough, although I did chide her for not knowing. Mind you--this is the same bubbly woman who remarked on my dry yet scorching (if I may be so bold) sense of humor, so she laughed at my playful critique. In the lobby afterward, she told my mother as much and said that she enjoyed my playful apathy. (I wonder if she knows that I'm not simply feigning my insouciance.)

Then we left, these last three days of arduous, extensive, and intensive assessment finally over. It was bittersweet, as most things are to my pragmatic (some would say "pessimistic") mind, because of the subsequent elevator ride with the aforementioned rejectee and her family, from Ohio.

As for me, I'm just glad to be done with this week of tests. Randomization takes place next Thursday, so I'll know then if I will get the transplant or some other treatment. Again, either outcome will be bittersweet. One option means a few weeks of hospitalization and chemo and all that that entails, and the other points me toward other alternative treatments (but eventual transplantation).

I'll know the outcome in a week. Until then, it's back to my normal modus operandi of tolerance and ignorance (of my onerous symptoms, I mean). So, at least for the next week of uncertainty, I'll keep in mind what the French say (I think--I speak no French): "C'est la vie."

R
--Tomorrow I'll probably be energized enough to express fully my abhorrence of the opposition to national health care, and that fucking moron who brought a gun to an Obama rally/speech.

Prologue: Day Two

2009-08-11T22:44:00.007-05:00

I know that most people have a 9-5 day job, but I honestly, and pathologically, cannot. I go to bed obscenely late, and I cannot help it. I've mentioned this before, but it's been a fact in high relief with these early days in the stem cell trial. Not only is it early in the process, but it's early in the day. It's driving me nuts.

I told as much to the administrator of my first test today, a pulmonary function test. This takes place mostly inside what looks like a hyperbaric, deep-sea-diving chamber, or, as I also related to the technician, inside a 1950's quiz show booth that ensures silence and complete isolation. I had to sit inside this plain little capsule with a plastic arm with a mouthpiece that the technician attached, I assume for sanitary reasons. The test consisted of a variety of different breathing techniques, both deep and short, shallow ones. I couldn't help but mention its similarity to Nick Nolte's hilarious, infamous 60 Minutes interview where he went through a similar evaluation by a doctor and ended up passing out briefly. Just thinking about it now makes me laugh, and I'm pissed that I can't find a clip online.

Evidently, though, I have good lungs, even at an hour when I'd definitely still be asleep. Who knew? I guess I only smoked copiously in college, and then got too lazy to get addicted, which was not a problem in other areas. The only minor aberration was in my diaphragm. The woman assured me that this was probably due to the MS. I already knew this, of course, because I frequently have to take breaths intermittently when I'm rambling, like Christopher Reeves had to do when he was paralyzed and on that ventilator. Otherwise my pulmonary function is tip-top.

Next up was a MUGA, or a Multi-Gated Acquisition Scan. I had to look this up and test the technician for that, who admitted she had forgotten. Because it's a bullshit, impenetrably technical, esoteric but nonspecific name. (It reminded me of a lot of literary criticism--the worst--where you have no idea what the writer is talking about, and suspect that he/she doesn't either. I'm not one to name names, but I'm looking in your direction, Homi Bhabha.) For this test, I had to receive an injection that contained some form of radioactive marker that the machine, a gamma camera, would follow throughout my heart and entire circulatory system. The syringe even came in a lead canister.

After the injection I asked the nurse if, technically, I could say I was radioactive. She said yes, which was enough for me to grin widely. Also, I had a very hard time refraining from constantly pointing and saying, "Watch out, Radioactive Man!" like Bart in that one episode of The Simpsons, which we all know sucks now and does not deserve a litany of the reasons.

Little sidebar: this was like my fifth shot in two days, so when the nurse saw my arm I had to assure her that I was not a junkie. She laughed, but I still said, "No, really."

I then headed for an X-Ray and CT scan. The first of these went quickly. It was for my torso, so I simply turned when told to do so and walked out after a couple of minutes. The CT scan, though, was a different story.

It was about 1 pm, so I was exhausted and antsy anyway, but I had to wait about an hour in the patient area. Luckily, though, I didn't have to put on a gown, unlike the five or so men in the waiting room with me. I also didn't have to drink the powdered concoction that they did. But I still had to wait an hour. A fucking hour. I didn't bring anything to read in the room, so I listened to some boring but occasionally funny stories about the others' days in the army. I would have chimed in at the mention of the GI Bill, but I was too tired to converse.

After an hour, I was called in for my CT scan, and you have no idea how angry but resigned I was when I found that the test lasted approximately twenty seconds. I lay on a tray that slid, slightly, into the machine. Twenty seconds passed, and the technician emerged from behind the glass to tell me that I was done. The irony of the wait and the beyond-brief test was not lost on me, but I was still pissed. And tired. It was about 2:30, and I was due for a nap. The brevity of the test, however, precluded this. As I've said, I like MRIs because I can always get in a good nap, but this was not possible to do in less than a minute.

When I got home, finally, I melted into my bed. Then I went to the gym--go figure. The caprice of MS still confounds and humors me.

I'm done with these preliminary tests, thankfully. Tomorrow I meet with my doctors--Burt and Balabanov, both of whom I like immensely. Thankfully, because I could be susceptible to lashing out after these dilatory, and almost paradoxically interminable, tests.

As Buzz Lightyear would say, "To infinity! And beyond!" (I nearly said "Onward and Upward," but the following reference to a "Christian soldier" made me think better of this.)

R

(I'm too tired to edit, so ignore any typos or glaring grammatical errors.)

Prologue: Day One

2009-08-10T22:43:00.005-05:00

I went to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital complex earlier today for my first day of testing and an informational meeting with the head nurse in charge of the stem cell trial that I'll be participating in over the next two months. (There is a chance I could end up in the "control" group, in which case I won't receive the transplant. Yet. In six months, I would have the option of having this done.)

First up today was a succession of blood draws. I am not squeamish, and needles especially don't bother me since I give myself an injection once a week with a massive one (see below). I sat in the "blood" chair next to a nurse and another nurse with another patient. Not to brag, but they were all incredulous when they saw my utter nonchalance while the nurse filled five vials with my blood. Before I left the room, I thanked them all for the "sincere sensation" of getting drained.

Then it was on to the dentist, who I saw while waiting for another informational appointment with a nurse who tested my vitals and checked my veins. (Happy to report, by the way, that my blood pressure was a strong 118/75, and that I weigh a disappointing 200 lbs. even. I've been trying to bulk up in order to make my post-chemo appearance less gaunt and Nosferatu-ish. Evidently, though, I need to eat more. However, my appetite is like a toddler's.) More good news: no cavities. This makes two consecutive dentist visits without a cavity, which is unprecedented in my experience. I ALWAYS have had cavities, and am convinced that this points to a genetic predisposition. When I was a kid, though, and still had my baby teeth to fuck up without any major ramifications, I once had nine cavities. NINE. I describe my childhood brushing technique thusly: swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Nine cavities seemed about right... (I've only been topped, that I know of, by the Sophster, who I think had ten when we were in college. That's still funny, by the way.)

After that, I had another informational tete-a-tete with the head nurse of the trial. Thankfully, she appreciated my dry and slightly inappropriate sense of humor (which she wonderfully described as a combination of Larry David and Lewis Black, with a dusting of Steven Wright). No, that's not true. Scratch the "slightly." She explained every facet of the trial lucidly and simply, which was especially good for my mother...

Finally, around 3 I went to have my MRI. Some people dread this procedure because of the claustrophobia it can provoke if one is so inclined. I, however, enjoy this test, or, as I call it, nap time. I lay on a board that slides into the main tube with what looks like Hannibal Lecter's restraint mask, or a hockey goalie's helmet, placed around my head. The technicians gave me earplugs, so the constant clanging was muffled enough to let me sleep. I think I was in there for almost 2 hours. It could have been longer or shorter, but I was asleep.

I had another shot in my arm for this, which displayed contrast, and so showed clearly any changes that had taken place since my last MRI. Again my casualness during this injection dismayed the nurse, who had to listen to me talk about my enthusiasm for my impending nap.

All this talk of napping is making me sleepy. (Too bad I have to "write" write now.)

R