DAMMIT. I have to go back for the SECOND time to that creepy fucking clinic and have wires stuck all over me AGAIN and have some technician monitor me all night so I can spend a thousand fucking dollars on a goddamn machine to help me sleep better.
Or maybe, more pertinently, to make my wife sleep better.
I, of course, won't care if I die in my sleep. I'll be dead. Darkness at the top of the stairs, etc. But my kick-ass wife et al might bum on that, and meanwhile, while I DON'T die in my sleep from Sleep Apnea, my wife wakes up when I start sawing down the rain forest. So fuck it. Hopefully I'll sleep THIS time.
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
Mompocalypse-Alzheimer's is a bitch, and Death ain't much better
It's been building up to this for some time, but yesterday's attempted visit with mom quickly turned violent. We are setting up a new care plan meeting but our visits only agitate her and she hit both Blythe and I and went of on an obscenity laden tirade. She had to be restrained by staff.
Later that day, 9 Below Zero played at an interesting event for a guy named Bill Niswander. This is a guy who was a fixture around town for many years on the blues and jam scene primarily. I don't really know him or know if we ever played together at a jam or even really met. Recently he received a sudden terminal cancer diagnosis.
Sunday's event at the Player's Pub was both a benefit and an awareness event, but it also served as something of a living wake.
I did not want to go after the scene at the nursing home. But Mom, when she was still REALLY Mom, the person she no longer is, was a firm believer in nothing so much as "the show must go on," and so I put my depression on a back burner and dragged my ass in to Player's. It was pretty full. Bill is obviously a man loved by many people, and if there is any mark of of the worthiness any human being that is it. I got there in time to see quite a bit of Bill playing with David Baas, Cathy Spiaggia, and 9 Below Zero's own Paul "Wine" Karrafa. As they ran through a set of songs by Dylan and the Band, Pure Prairie and others, I was extremely impressed by Mr. Niswander.
Here was a man getting up to play music with his friends for quite possibly the last time. And there were tears in the audience, as any such event combined with booze will do, and who's to say those tears weren't fitting or appropriate? But from the man himself, I felt nothing but calm and dignity, and when he sang happy birthday to his son, who turned thirteen yesterday, a sense of real joy and gratitude tha he'd brought this young man into the word.
Love, dignity, and sharing music. No ego, no self pity, no anger. A mighty lesson; the end comes for all of us one way or another, quickly or prolonged. Love your people while you can, and face the darkness with your head held high.
Later that day, 9 Below Zero played at an interesting event for a guy named Bill Niswander. This is a guy who was a fixture around town for many years on the blues and jam scene primarily. I don't really know him or know if we ever played together at a jam or even really met. Recently he received a sudden terminal cancer diagnosis.
Sunday's event at the Player's Pub was both a benefit and an awareness event, but it also served as something of a living wake.
I did not want to go after the scene at the nursing home. But Mom, when she was still REALLY Mom, the person she no longer is, was a firm believer in nothing so much as "the show must go on," and so I put my depression on a back burner and dragged my ass in to Player's. It was pretty full. Bill is obviously a man loved by many people, and if there is any mark of of the worthiness any human being that is it. I got there in time to see quite a bit of Bill playing with David Baas, Cathy Spiaggia, and 9 Below Zero's own Paul "Wine" Karrafa. As they ran through a set of songs by Dylan and the Band, Pure Prairie and others, I was extremely impressed by Mr. Niswander.
Here was a man getting up to play music with his friends for quite possibly the last time. And there were tears in the audience, as any such event combined with booze will do, and who's to say those tears weren't fitting or appropriate? But from the man himself, I felt nothing but calm and dignity, and when he sang happy birthday to his son, who turned thirteen yesterday, a sense of real joy and gratitude tha he'd brought this young man into the word.
Love, dignity, and sharing music. No ego, no self pity, no anger. A mighty lesson; the end comes for all of us one way or another, quickly or prolonged. Love your people while you can, and face the darkness with your head held high.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The Most Miserable Motherscratcher of the Morning...
was a punk driving his SUV on the B-Line between Kirkwood and 6th streets. He was apparently avoiding the construction on Kirkwood. He was grinning and thought he was pretty clever.
As they say, never a cop around when you need one.
But this is the third very stupid and very dangerous thing I've seen "young-people-who-certainly-appear-to-be-students-but-jeez-don't-want-to-label-anyone-unfairly" do in the last 12 hours (the first two being guys running stop signs... also in SUVs), the fourth possibly-accident-causing bad driving (the other being a person in the right turning lane who went straight... not so bad unless you're illegally merging into a single lane with the person who is in the correct lane.
Two days ago, while on my bike, a pedestrian and I were crossing on the crosswalk at 2nd and Walnut (with the "walk' light on for us, after we waited for the eastbound lane's green arrow to change) and some lady turning north on Walnut (and on the phone, driving one handed) forced her way past us. I'm sure that the cursing I leveled at her was loud enough for the person on the other end of the phone to hear. I certainly hope she hasd a nervous breakdown, or cried herself to sleep, or whatever.
Most of which adds up to just plain stupidity and highlights the fact that most people just shouldn't be driving. But the jerk this morning, quite obviously pleased as punch with himself for his clever rebelliousness, just needs his clock cleaned. That is the kind of dangerous arrogance that threatens bicyclists everyday.
Are bikers annoying? Yes, many are, and many exhibit their own brand of hubris and dangerous behavior. I sincerely feel sorry for any rational motorist who runs over some stupid biker who blows off a stop sign or whatever. But being two-wheeled and self-propelled most of the time these days I do see a lot of really ridiculous behavior from people in cars. Not to mention that we still haven't put our foot down as a society on people who are simply too old to be driving anymore. This IS a hard one; I know, I've had to take the keys from my own mom. But them old folks is dangerous.
As they say, never a cop around when you need one.
But this is the third very stupid and very dangerous thing I've seen "young-people-who-certainly-appear-to-be-students-but-jeez-don't-want-to-label-anyone-unfairly" do in the last 12 hours (the first two being guys running stop signs... also in SUVs), the fourth possibly-accident-causing bad driving (the other being a person in the right turning lane who went straight... not so bad unless you're illegally merging into a single lane with the person who is in the correct lane.
Two days ago, while on my bike, a pedestrian and I were crossing on the crosswalk at 2nd and Walnut (with the "walk' light on for us, after we waited for the eastbound lane's green arrow to change) and some lady turning north on Walnut (and on the phone, driving one handed) forced her way past us. I'm sure that the cursing I leveled at her was loud enough for the person on the other end of the phone to hear. I certainly hope she hasd a nervous breakdown, or cried herself to sleep, or whatever.
Most of which adds up to just plain stupidity and highlights the fact that most people just shouldn't be driving. But the jerk this morning, quite obviously pleased as punch with himself for his clever rebelliousness, just needs his clock cleaned. That is the kind of dangerous arrogance that threatens bicyclists everyday.
Are bikers annoying? Yes, many are, and many exhibit their own brand of hubris and dangerous behavior. I sincerely feel sorry for any rational motorist who runs over some stupid biker who blows off a stop sign or whatever. But being two-wheeled and self-propelled most of the time these days I do see a lot of really ridiculous behavior from people in cars. Not to mention that we still haven't put our foot down as a society on people who are simply too old to be driving anymore. This IS a hard one; I know, I've had to take the keys from my own mom. But them old folks is dangerous.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
A Very Nice Apocalypse- Justin Cronin's "The Passage"
I think I got a heads up on this book from one of those online retailers always trying to read your thoughts. They turned out to be right.
This is a vampire book, but not your namby-pamby Mormon tweener vampires fruitbats or your trailer park vamps or any of those other loser vampires. This is actually cool.
Cronin does characters, let's get that established right away. Some characters don't even have a spoken line in the book and make only a brief appearance but Cronin is able to create a very cogent idea of who this person is and what makes them tick. Or maybe the key is that your imagination is able to take the crumbs he gives you and fill in the rest. I guess it just depends on what kind of crumbs the author throws you.
So while this is a vampire book and an apocalypse story and while there is plenty of action, it is the parts between the action-which is exciting and well-written, also- that treally makes this book shine.
Cronin's narrative is seemless, even when he jumps a century into the future. We step effortlessly from the end of our world (which ends, at least for some with something like a wimper) into a world of the future that remembers us and is clinging to life using the corroded threads of our knowledge and technology. One of the most masterful constructs in "The Passage" is The Colony.
As a viral plague (of vampirism) is wiping out the U.S., starting at a military base in Colorado, California and Texas both secede. California sets up a series of fortified colonies to keep out the "virals," "jumps," "flyers," "smokes," and "dracs," as they are variously known. The Colony is one of those Cali collectives. By A.V. 92 (92 years after the virus) the residents of the Colony have long lost contact with all of the other colonies and believe they might be the last survivors in the world. Cronin provides us with the Colony's "articles of incorporation" and social structure. There is no mistaking that these people are the good guys; they work hard, and they cherish their "Littles" to the point that they hide them in "the santuary" (a former elementary school) until they reach 8-years-old, to prevent them from knowing the true horror of the world until they are past their formative years.
As the title suggests, this is also a story of a voyage, though the titular reference in this case is a bit deceptive. In any Odyssey, Ulysses has got to meet some weirdos. In this case we get creepy collaborators, Texas tough guys, a stray dog, massacre survivors and a whole nation of ghosts. No disappointments there.
The vampires are not completely sentient. They are glowing, superhumanly strong gargoyles, occasionally with shreds of their former identity clinging to their new bodies, like a bunch of rings stuck on the fingers of what was previously an old woman, or a shock of ragged, dyed red hair. Through one major character, we hear their thoughts, which mostly consist of "Who am I?" with fleeting glimpses of the people they once were. So these vamps ain't sexy, but they are oddly sympathetic as well as scary.
And the great thing is, there is so much more going on between the characters; love, rivalry, hatred, grief, loss, hope, it's all there.
I do hope that this isn't the start of a trilogy or something though. It would be like "Stephen King's The Stand II." The story is told here in as complete a fashion as it needs to be told. This is a vampire apocalypse book that is epic in scope and character, with battles, heroes, villains, the works, but it completely avoids becoming pulp (pulp is great, but everything doesn't have to be pulp) fiction of the sort that rehashes the same characters in the same or similar situations over and over. If Mr. Cronin's resume serves as any indicator his next book will be nothing like this one, but then again, with the mad skills he's showing here, if it is a sequel, he may have some new tricks to show us yet..
This is a vampire book, but not your namby-pamby Mormon tweener vampires fruitbats or your trailer park vamps or any of those other loser vampires. This is actually cool.
Cronin does characters, let's get that established right away. Some characters don't even have a spoken line in the book and make only a brief appearance but Cronin is able to create a very cogent idea of who this person is and what makes them tick. Or maybe the key is that your imagination is able to take the crumbs he gives you and fill in the rest. I guess it just depends on what kind of crumbs the author throws you.
So while this is a vampire book and an apocalypse story and while there is plenty of action, it is the parts between the action-which is exciting and well-written, also- that treally makes this book shine.
Cronin's narrative is seemless, even when he jumps a century into the future. We step effortlessly from the end of our world (which ends, at least for some with something like a wimper) into a world of the future that remembers us and is clinging to life using the corroded threads of our knowledge and technology. One of the most masterful constructs in "The Passage" is The Colony.
As a viral plague (of vampirism) is wiping out the U.S., starting at a military base in Colorado, California and Texas both secede. California sets up a series of fortified colonies to keep out the "virals," "jumps," "flyers," "smokes," and "dracs," as they are variously known. The Colony is one of those Cali collectives. By A.V. 92 (92 years after the virus) the residents of the Colony have long lost contact with all of the other colonies and believe they might be the last survivors in the world. Cronin provides us with the Colony's "articles of incorporation" and social structure. There is no mistaking that these people are the good guys; they work hard, and they cherish their "Littles" to the point that they hide them in "the santuary" (a former elementary school) until they reach 8-years-old, to prevent them from knowing the true horror of the world until they are past their formative years.
As the title suggests, this is also a story of a voyage, though the titular reference in this case is a bit deceptive. In any Odyssey, Ulysses has got to meet some weirdos. In this case we get creepy collaborators, Texas tough guys, a stray dog, massacre survivors and a whole nation of ghosts. No disappointments there.
The vampires are not completely sentient. They are glowing, superhumanly strong gargoyles, occasionally with shreds of their former identity clinging to their new bodies, like a bunch of rings stuck on the fingers of what was previously an old woman, or a shock of ragged, dyed red hair. Through one major character, we hear their thoughts, which mostly consist of "Who am I?" with fleeting glimpses of the people they once were. So these vamps ain't sexy, but they are oddly sympathetic as well as scary.
And the great thing is, there is so much more going on between the characters; love, rivalry, hatred, grief, loss, hope, it's all there.
I do hope that this isn't the start of a trilogy or something though. It would be like "Stephen King's The Stand II." The story is told here in as complete a fashion as it needs to be told. This is a vampire apocalypse book that is epic in scope and character, with battles, heroes, villains, the works, but it completely avoids becoming pulp (pulp is great, but everything doesn't have to be pulp) fiction of the sort that rehashes the same characters in the same or similar situations over and over. If Mr. Cronin's resume serves as any indicator his next book will be nothing like this one, but then again, with the mad skills he's showing here, if it is a sequel, he may have some new tricks to show us yet..
Thursday, August 5, 2010
24 years ago today
I foolishly ran a motorcycle into a parked car at somewhere between 40 and 60 miles per hour. Luckily, I got out of the deal alive.
It's a good thing stupid shit like that mostly happens to us when we're young and strong enough to survive it, maybe.
But it makes you wonder why, even though we cry over the fatalities if they're close to us, or shake our heads in abstract sadness if they're not, why we tolerate 40,000 or more deaths on the road every year?
Unfortunately, the answer is obviously money. Oil companies and auto companies stand to lose too much from sanity, or regulation of "The American Way" of limitless freedom. Buy your 16-year-old a car. Make sure they drive everywhere.
GRIST online ran a somewhat weepy but nonetheless interesting analysis of how bicyclists are treated in film. Basically, if you're on a bike and not in a car, you're a loser. Now, I drive too, and "I'm an excellent driver," unlike most of the rest of the world (and most of the rest of the world believes themselves to be "excellent drivers" also. They are not.), but I love biking and I'd love convenient (more convenient, I should say, it's not too bad in Bloomington) mass transit. One car per family SHOULD be enough. But until infrastructure catches up, we're pretty much stuck.
Infrastructure won't catch up until politicians do. Politicians won't catch up until we do. When we're ready to vote for people who aren't just whores for oil and big business, maybe fewer people will die. Maybe.
It's a good thing stupid shit like that mostly happens to us when we're young and strong enough to survive it, maybe.
But it makes you wonder why, even though we cry over the fatalities if they're close to us, or shake our heads in abstract sadness if they're not, why we tolerate 40,000 or more deaths on the road every year?
Unfortunately, the answer is obviously money. Oil companies and auto companies stand to lose too much from sanity, or regulation of "The American Way" of limitless freedom. Buy your 16-year-old a car. Make sure they drive everywhere.
GRIST online ran a somewhat weepy but nonetheless interesting analysis of how bicyclists are treated in film. Basically, if you're on a bike and not in a car, you're a loser. Now, I drive too, and "I'm an excellent driver," unlike most of the rest of the world (and most of the rest of the world believes themselves to be "excellent drivers" also. They are not.), but I love biking and I'd love convenient (more convenient, I should say, it's not too bad in Bloomington) mass transit. One car per family SHOULD be enough. But until infrastructure catches up, we're pretty much stuck.
Infrastructure won't catch up until politicians do. Politicians won't catch up until we do. When we're ready to vote for people who aren't just whores for oil and big business, maybe fewer people will die. Maybe.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
I need a couple of burritos.
Watched a George Carlin clip yesterday or so which made me miss the guy. It was a typical Carlin rant about how we are owned by the bosses, and it was 100% correct- they want docile workers who don't bitch about how we're getting screwed.
God (or rather, noGod) knows I LOVED me some George Carlin. He was right about most of the things he ranted about, and this bit was no exception. However, he was sometimes wrong, too. When he bitched about environmentalists, he was on target in regard to preachy assholes who are holier than thou and who think donating to Greenpeace can or will save the planet. But he was wrong in saying we can't do anything to affect the planet and that the planet will scratch itself one day and we'll be gone, and the planet will be just fine. Or at least, he was wrong in asserting that his stated outcome is INEVITABLE, and dead wrong in stating we can't do anything to harm or heal the planet.
Some yahoo wrote a column in the HT recently making a seemingly "reasonable" plea to not take "drastic" actions like carbon caps and to look for other "solutions" to the "possibly": man-made global warming problem. Obviously the science hasn't caught up with everyone yet, but the reality is that while some other options are available to augment emmissions reduction, the fastest, easiest, and most sensible way to reduce carbon is to reduce emmisions. We can seed the clouds, sure, but wouldn't mass transit solve many more problems as well.
Dumb fucks.
Anyway, back to George, the other problem I have is that nihilism has never really been my thing. George would say enjoy yourself, because your fucked any way you look at it. I don't have a problem with that, but why not at least try to be decent about it while you're at it? Fuckin' start a compost heap, man, you'll live longer (a recent study shows that men who stare at boobs live longer, too. I'm definitely giving that one a try).
Since we started 'postin', we have gone from two and sometimes three trash cans per week for pickup to one not-even-completely-full-can. Which means saving money. Which means more beer to drink. Which means a happier Deke. And so on.
Plus I'm going to be eating organic onions, tomatoes, 'taters, eggplants, corns, and swiss chard from my gharden next year, feelin' healthy, and so will my fams. So, fuck it! Do something good, compost, stare at some boobs, eat some good food, and THEN tell the powers that be to go FUCK THEMSELVES. With a buzz on you got from the extra beer you were able to afford from not having to buy so many goddamned trash stickers.
God (or rather, noGod) knows I LOVED me some George Carlin. He was right about most of the things he ranted about, and this bit was no exception. However, he was sometimes wrong, too. When he bitched about environmentalists, he was on target in regard to preachy assholes who are holier than thou and who think donating to Greenpeace can or will save the planet. But he was wrong in saying we can't do anything to affect the planet and that the planet will scratch itself one day and we'll be gone, and the planet will be just fine. Or at least, he was wrong in asserting that his stated outcome is INEVITABLE, and dead wrong in stating we can't do anything to harm or heal the planet.
Some yahoo wrote a column in the HT recently making a seemingly "reasonable" plea to not take "drastic" actions like carbon caps and to look for other "solutions" to the "possibly": man-made global warming problem. Obviously the science hasn't caught up with everyone yet, but the reality is that while some other options are available to augment emmissions reduction, the fastest, easiest, and most sensible way to reduce carbon is to reduce emmisions. We can seed the clouds, sure, but wouldn't mass transit solve many more problems as well.
Dumb fucks.
Anyway, back to George, the other problem I have is that nihilism has never really been my thing. George would say enjoy yourself, because your fucked any way you look at it. I don't have a problem with that, but why not at least try to be decent about it while you're at it? Fuckin' start a compost heap, man, you'll live longer (a recent study shows that men who stare at boobs live longer, too. I'm definitely giving that one a try).
Since we started 'postin', we have gone from two and sometimes three trash cans per week for pickup to one not-even-completely-full-can. Which means saving money. Which means more beer to drink. Which means a happier Deke. And so on.
Plus I'm going to be eating organic onions, tomatoes, 'taters, eggplants, corns, and swiss chard from my gharden next year, feelin' healthy, and so will my fams. So, fuck it! Do something good, compost, stare at some boobs, eat some good food, and THEN tell the powers that be to go FUCK THEMSELVES. With a buzz on you got from the extra beer you were able to afford from not having to buy so many goddamned trash stickers.
Friday, September 18, 2009
R.I.P Dale Cassiday
Dale was the husband of the forever drama teacher at Brown County High School, Janice Cassiday. He was a fixture in the ciommunity and ever present at High School and Civic theater productions. He was a sweet guy and a great father and husband and a good friend, and he will be missed.
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