Drugs

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.

R

"And--Finished knowing--Then"

(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"

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

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...

R

PS--Merry Christmas.

RIP GOP

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.)

R

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

"Blame Yourselves"

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--"

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Return

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.

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Resignation

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.

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

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.

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--6/8. Not bad...

Sometimes I wonder, "Who am I?"

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.

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2 Things I Don't Get

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.

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A Deflection Aimed at Palin

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.

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Bye Bayh

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.

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Don't Shrug Me Off

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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