One of the many perks to prosebox is that my family lurkers haven’t quite discovered it yet. I have this thing about staying public. I’m sure there’s more than a pinch of conceit in that stew, but mostly it’s the whole ‘why stay private on a public site?’ I know there are plenty of good answers to that question; very few apply to me and the ones that do I know good and god damned well the best way to keep something quiet is to keep your mouth shut (or fingers still as the case may be, Hmmm, as the case is. I have a feeling it won’t be too long before storage and novelty make ‘talking’ blogs the cat’s tits --- sorry I wanted to type cats tits --- the standard for blogs. The Windows platform came into broad use when it copied the Graphic Interface idea that Mac’s had all along. Though the processor, CISC, was always much clumsier than Mac’s RISC processing, eventually they figured it out.
Shit. Tangents. No, it’s not a writing style, I don’t “do” style on journal entries, I just type merrily along and things take shape. It’s the chaotic state of my mind these days, dopey smiley chaotic, I don’t do anxiety. Wait, no, I do the shit out of anxiety, but I have a bunch of blue pills that’ll see anxieties chaos and raise it two dopey smiles. It’s more the untethered feeling; I am untethered. If I were in that famous colorful little French child’s film, I would not be the boy; I’d be the red balloon.
I spent half my morning and the lion’s share of my afternoon in the motherfucking Emergency room, and whereas the first cocksucker in Khaki (huh, that’s fun to say) let me out the ambulance bay doors to smoke, the other khaki Khocksuckers got bent out of shape, so I had to go around and come back through the fucking metal detector, because god knows, a motherfucker who’s been hanging out in the ER might just come back with something automatic and two clips taped together (I’d go for the Uzi, much smaller footprint) just because a few hours in the hours saps any will to live you might have come in with.
No, I wasn’t a patient. They probably don’t give patients a smoke break. Folks around here like obeying rules. In one respect it’s the biggest culture shock between Oregon and Michigan. Oregonians are apologetic ‘I’m sorry, it’s my job. You know you’re not supposed to smoke in here. That’s the last one, Kay?’ The Oregonian conscious is pioneer, lawless; the petty infractions are to keep tourists in line. Here people seem to fill in empty spaces with rules. It’s a general observation, I could be mistaken. I miss my Oregon.
So, see, here’s what happened; The kids (a bit older than me) who took over my dad’s gig when he turned a million years old and the university invoked the million year old retirement law, have, for years, taken my dad out to breakfast one Wednesday a month. My mom cancelled two Wednesdays in a row because my dad has been wonkier than usual. She and I had a long discussion about whether or not to call off yesterday. We had short discussion over a three week period that made it like one long one. I championed the idea that these are reasonable guys and we did kind of need an acid test on his ability to be out in public, and better those two mostly functioning grown men than my duct taped, spit and sealing wax put together grown ass trying to manage him and my the-wheels-done-fell-off mom.
So they are at breakfast having what passes for a normal conversation and my dad puts his head in his hands and does the wonky shit we’ve just come to ignore (after a few ER trips and several regular bi-annual visits to doctors, ignoring seems the rule, covered by the panacea; That’s not what’s going to kill him. I’m a novice at ignoring, but I’m getting better at it). They call 911 “He’s unresponsive! It might be a stroke!” Honestly that was the perfect thing to do, I mean; it’s what I’d do. If, for instance, you see someone having a seizure, you call 911. You don’t know that the epileptic is tired of good Samaritans calling out a grand worth of hospital taxi cab every time they have a seizure. I’m just saying that, like the epileptic, the incident is over long before the ambulance arrives. But, you know, you’d have to know the guy. I would never suggest that people should ignore what looks like a really bad reaction. I didn’t warn them that could happen. Wouldn’t have been much of an acid test.
I was up here in the attic with wet hair and a bathrobe when one of the kids knocked on the attic door. He was really apologetic, I mean to a fault. The people close to him must ignore that all the time. He wouldn’t let me say shit like “You did the right thing, I should have warned you” when I did he apologized even harder. It’s like one of those fights over who gets the honor of picking up the bar tab. It never ends until someone just raises their hands in defeat. I guess I also wanted the guy to feel bad about ruining my day, because, although I dodged going to the hospital with him, he talked my mom into it, and though the “kids” spent two hours in the ER, nothing happens in under five hours in an ER.
So I had to go there and wait for the really slow nothing to have a definitive answer of nothing. And yeah, they had a diagnosis that they apologized about, in fact they tried not mentioning it all, except that the intern asked me if I was a comfortable with taking him home. I snorted and just out of the sort of cussedness that makes the metal detector a good idea, I said
“What if I said no?”
“We’d admit him overnight.”
“For what?”
She ducked her head and said --- oh shit, I forget the real word, syn something --- “Fainting”
We had a brief futile discussion about how he hadn’t fainted or had a stroke or anything, that’s just what the “kids” called on. My mom throwing in curve balls like “Fugue State! No!” just added to the five hours of nonsense. My dad was singing, every third time he asked what he was doing in a hospital, of course every third time he asked I’d say something rude like “Cause these fucks don’t know how to catch and release” and so the song would go something;
I ask you why, oh why am I here, if you please
Cause dumb fucks can’t, they just can't catch and release
I liked the nurse, my dad cracked her up. He was trying too. He used to be better at it and worse. When he wasn’t demented you’d see the punchlines coming, you don’t expect the rare moments of grand lucidity to be spent on a joke or a song. Hmmm, that makes it sound like he’s out of his mind. No, he just isn’t in his mind quite as much as --- someone more in their mind. At least not in any demonstrable way. He did think “Are you comfortable taking him home?” was a grand joke. It was, but he was the only one who could reasonably laugh at it. My snort might have a snort too far, but what would they do, take custody because I snorted?
Oh, I’m past done. It’s nothing but a chicken wing.
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