Sometimes when I look at this journal, or, you know, that one, I feel kind of stupid. It is an opportunity to document things. Last week this Indian (like from India) cardiology intern was explaining (I’m forgiving him by calling it explaining, he was pretty damn patronizing, and if the circumstances were a bit different I would have taught him a valuable life lesson about trying to teach me a valuable life lesson) that, well, shit, come to think of it I haven’t a clue what he thought he was trying to explain. He couldn’t have possibly been trying to explain to me that cardiologists are arrogant assholes who really either don’t give a shit or don’t know shit about anything else besides cardiology. It should be obvious by the look I always wear on my face that I already know that.
I said something about mild cognitive impairment, I was Doc blocking him from taking my Dad’s answers to “How’re you feeling?” with anything less than a very large grain of salt, and he said, almost verbatim “Mild cognitive impairment just means some memory loss. I have some and I’m only in my thirties.” I may or may not have said ‘He doesn’t have some memory loss, it’s dementia. How often a day do you, doc, ask whether your siblings are still alive.’ However, here in my very very late thirties, heh, I have some memory loss. So, shit, you know, maybe every now and again I should do things like add dates and times to shit instead assuming I’ll know what I was talking about.
I don’t have any great love for the month of August, but it seems to bear almost as much significance in major life events to me as February. Today is my sons 31st birthday. I was married, the first time, in late July, and arrived in Portland with the intent of living there in August of 1980, a mere three months after Mt. St. Helens blew, well, the big blow was in May; we saw the clouds of ash over Montana. My son was born in August a few years later.
In August of 1999 I drove to Coer D’Alene to get married for the second time. If the world has the same poor sense of humor it’s always had I should likely be divorced in August of this year. Oh, I missed an August. I moved to Portland in August of 1980 and I moved away from the NW on August 30th 2012. I’ve been here almost a year. I think, perhaps, “I have mild cognitive impairment in my thirties …” took a lot of destiny power points to not get an eye dotted.
If OD was running right I could probably confirm that Herschel was put down in August too.
If I thought real hard about it I could probably figure out August milestones in my childhood too. It doesn’t take much to figure out the tail end of August means school will be starting soon though, which is pretty much a bummer for a kid. Wait, no, I was the kind of kid it was pretty much a bummer for. It’s an important distinction.
I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about this recently, but I have; for a team of humans to successfully perform a task you need disparate backgrounds, personality types, perspective. Homogenous groups never do a task quite as well; they’ll all miss the same flaw in the plan. Yeah, I’m not going any further with that, I mean I could, but by thinking about it I just mean the idea has been coming and going, not that I’ve been exploring it. There’s another stupid idea that seems to keep leaving the fridge light on to; the lower the budget is on an apocalypse the more hair products the survivors wear. I think this is probably true too, check out your b-movie apocalypse collection. If you have enough hair products, perhaps, a homogenous group works just fine. Of course too many hair products and one survivor is bound to giggle and say “Heh, heh, heh, he said homo, genius.”
Didn’t mean to spin off on a tangent from my tangent; I wasn’t the kind of kid that looked forward to school. There’s lots of reasons why a kid might be a kid who looks forward to school kind of kid, put them altogether in a big bag and I wasn’t any of ‘em. I was the kind of kid who spent summers with scabs on my knees and elbows, worm guts under my nails, and bicycle chain grease all the hell over everything. I’m not trying to suggest I was normal or that a kid like that is normal, I’m just saying you have to wash up for school and if you get scabs on your elbows and knees learning how to write …? You’re doing it wrong. I mean I can see the occasional sharp pencil in an eye, or being stabbed by Jordy Ascher with a pencil in one knee or elbow, but you can only go so far with coincidence. I’m not saying if you didn’t lose body fluids as a kid you were a sissy. I guess I’m really saying is that Jordy Ascher started it and he smells funny, like used butt.
Any how, August, you know. August is a bitch and then you die or poke an eye out.
And I’m spent.
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