Happy Fun Comment Thread!

EDIT: Well, apparently you guys are all well-stocked with Blue Star Ointment or something, because no one seems to be itching to comment after all. So I'll just let this post slide down into electronic obscurity like the rest of them, and may flights of angels something something something.


Hi everyone! I bet there are a lot of you who are just ITCHING to put up a little comment like, "Hey y'all, how's it going?", or, "Howzit goin' down there in the ATX?" or, "Please cease and desist before we are required to take further legal action.", you know, whatevs!

But you're held back by the fact that you don't want to post something unrelated to the topic, or you feel like you'll say something stupid and everyone else will laugh at you. Well, your thread is now HERE!

So post anything you want, and we'll just keep this at the top of the page for a while and see what comes up. Let your mind lead, and your...uh...not mind will follow, or something. Or maybe it won't follow, and you'll end up walking around doing stuff with no mind. Either way, it'll be a good time for everyone involved.

Personal post!

I haven't been real big on putting up personal stuff on here, unless you count the 142,000 posts about one of our animals, but I thought I'd share a little medical stuff that I've been going through lately just to see if we can all get a good laugh out of it, or something.

So I've had hypothyroidism for a while now, and it seems as though now my thyroid gland has decided to ENLARGE itself (2nd level mage spell, I believe) to the point that my endocrinologist ordered an ultrasound on it. Turns out I have MULTI-NODULAR GOITER, which, besides sounding like I contracted it in 1845 along with consumption and the vapors, means that nodules have formed on my thyroid gland as well, the two largest of which they decided they wanted to biopsy!

Now, I don't know about you, but nothing puts a shine on my weekend like hearing the word "biopsy"! Luckily for me, my doctor said that the nodules in this type of situation are almost never cancerous, and even if they were, the treatment success rate would be extremely high, so there's almost no chance that this will affect me in any meaningful way, except for the fact that I'll be writing posts for a while going forward from debtor's prison, due to the huge bill even AFTER my insurance. I hope they have Macs in debtor's prison!

Anyway, yesterday I got poked in the neck a bunch of times with a really thin needle, and today I'm back at work, busting my hump for the almight dolla. Good times, good times. I'll keep everyone updated once I hear back about the results, of course, and feel free to post well wishes, homeopathic goiter remedies, tales from your OWN successful bouts with cancer (Randy, Lance Armstrong), or general derision at the fact that I've obviously already reached the age where I'm having "procedures" every couple of months. If I can just keep that daggum lumbago from acting up...

And Your Voice is Everything (pt 1)

I guess I should start with the first time I saw her away from the stage. She was still wearing the uniform (tattered baby-doll t-shirt worn ironically over old-school jeans that were obviously faded by a combination of time, cigarette smoke and spilled beer rather than some corporate dipshit’s prized chemical “treatment”), but it looked shabbier in the mid-morning sun. She looked shabbier too, or maybe just older – the sun was unforgiving to lines that cracked outward from her eyes, her mouth.

Maybe that’s why I could talk to her then, with her mantle of divinity obviously cast aside for the morning, sipping on a Dr. Pepper and looking over the selection of omelettes and pancakes like any other regular bar patron on a Sunday, nursing a hangover that wasn’t quite as bad as they’d hoped it would be. Or maybe it was the lack of the deafening throb that ordinarily would have been interfering, rendering any attempt at speech at least inaudible, if not completely meaningless.

“I’m sorry if I’m bothering you…I just wanted to tell you that I think your music is amazing,” I said, and I meant it too. The last time that I had seen her play (with her band, Pedophile Smile), I had experienced something like an out-of-body, near-death, epileptic’s epiphany sort of moment, and it wasn’t even brought on by high doses of pharmaceuticals. She could just pull you in with her, to the middle of this vast emotional maelstrom of merciless drums and pounding guitars and her voice (always that voice) and hold you there until you were desperate for some kind of release. It was like holding your breath late at night as a kid, knowing that eventually you’d have to let it out but imagining that somehow you’d never need to, that you could just exist forever in some kind of strange stasis that would exclude aging and death and God and all the other things that were making it impossible to sleep in the first place. At least, that’s how it was for me.

She pushed her sunglasses down over her eyes, releasing a small cascade of black hair that had been aimed at jet but had ended up somewhere between burnt umber and crayon black. “Do I know you? Are you friends with Jay?”, she said, and while that was hardly the most encouraging reply in the world, it sure beat “fuck off” or a hasty gesture to the waiter for help.

“What, Jay like ‘Jay and Silent Bob’? I always kind of wanted to meet that guy, you know, just to sort of bask in that whirlwind of energy - but now he’s apparently given up drugs and all that, so I bet he’s not nearly as fun to be around anymore.”

She half-snorted. “No, Jay like one of our roadies. His friends are always coming up to me at random times and saying random shit like that. I think, for those guys, it probably is the drugs. So…what’s up? You want me to sign your tits or something?”

I thought back to the last time that I’d done more than five push-ups without stopping. “No, it’s cool, I’ll leave you to your food and everything, I just wanted to say, you know, that I think that what you do is worth doing, you know, and I hope you make it, you know, if you want to and everything. To say ‘good luck’, I guess.”

And in a burst of eloquence, I was gone. At least I had had the foresight to pay out before I went over, otherwise I would have had to imagine her bemused half-smile following me around the place for minutes instead of seconds.


read part two of the story

Road Trip!!

Heyya! Nadi and I went on a road trip to see my parents recently, and I took a few crummy photos. I wish I were more the photo-journalistic type, but I'm kinda not. So here's a few, just to give you an idea...
Turli and Trogdor are ready to go! This was Turli's first trip in the Scamp! Trog's peeking out to make sure everything is safe and we're not being attacked by food-stealers. That's his job.



This is how Turli rides in the truck, asleep in Nadi's lap. She weighs a thousand pounds... I wouldn't let her sleep on me very much when I was driving. But she's a big Daddy's Girl so she really didn't care.
This is probably the coolest place we camped. I think it was in Tennessee. Every Single Campsite was like this, where you camped out on a pier type thingy. Trog is usually REALLY scared of bridges and so on, but he was o.k. w/this for some reason.
So, that's really all I got. Told you I suck. There were poppies all along the freeway in N. Carolina but my pics of them are lame, you couldn't really stop so I had to resort to the old "take a shot out the window while you're driving" method, which doesn't really work. ah, what the hell, here's one of those. Good luck actually seeing a poppy!

There you have it! Just to tantalize you further... there MAY be some very exciting surprise photos up after this weekend... we shall see! And check back soon for my new column to (at least temporarily) replace my "Peeve O'the Week"... Guaranteed to shake your brain right outta your head. I just have to take a nap so I can write it...

new story for May (final part)

read the first part of the story...

Derek paced into the hallway, into the den, and stood in front of the couch for a moment, not sitting but not not sitting either, exactly, just in a kind of stasis until gravity caught and pulled him down. He had just been to give his blood sample two days ago; he hadn't expected anyone to call about it so soon, he wasn't quite ready to hear what they had to tell him. It had been raining, two days ago, the silvery parking lot walk reminding him very much of the night they had met, the downtown streets mirroring all the lights that had then seemed so exciting and so endless, hiding all the dirt and the everyday and leaving just a reflection of the night sky perfect down to the smallest of the stars that were out, now that the rain had passed and the clouds had fallen away.

He hadn't been quite ready either, that night, to see her walking toward him arm in arm with a girl he couldn't have described later beyond her gender, even to save his life, as they stopped in front of what just happened to be his favorite bar, on that street at least, but he was ready enough to follow them in and lose himself in watching her over half a beer, and ready enough to walk over to their table and say an entire evening's worth of anythings and nothings in a desperate and unparalleled (for him) fending off of what he couldn't help feeling was inevitable, when she would go home and he would go home and the next time he looked down at the wet streets he would see only the oily mud and the cigarette butts.

He hadn't heard a sound from the kitchen for ten minutes, twelve minutes, and he slowly pushed himself up from the couch with his right arm and walked back, into the kitchen. Martha still had his cell phone open in her hand, the screen helpfully informing no one about its status and remaining battery life while her face leaned against her upturned wrist below it, fat tears running down the side of her chin and falling to her arm, running down to the top of the table and pooling, shining like the silver parking lot or the city night in the reflected light of the toaster and the cheap chandelier.

She shook soundlessly, his hand on her shoulder now and the sobs starting to come alongside the inevitable curse words, the recriminations against an idea of fate or luck or something else even that she wouldn't have believed she could create there in a moment, out of whole cloth, but for the words from the phone and the way they had just changed everything, changed everything in a moment like a chance encounter except that this time there wasn't a jukebox and there wasn't a beer to buy or a girlfriend's arm to hold, this time there was just the bottom falling out and the cursing, shouted now, and his hand on her shoulder and in her hair and pushing out the small pool of tears into a patch of pure shine to remind him of the city street and the smallest star and to catch the light that was retreating far too fast from the kitchen, now.

Nostalgia

Remember when everything was just like it is now, except crappier?  You probably don't, even though it probably was.  That's the way we all are, remembering things as being better back then before we all sold out to the man, etc.

Well, sometimes you have cold, hard proof to back up your idyllic remembrances, and sometimes you have what I now have, which is cassettes of your old musical "performances" that you can now dump onto your computer and share with the world.  The mp3 player at the top left of the blog is now filled with six of our earliest "demos", back when we were calling ourselves Disturb the Universe.  Listen at your own peril.

Just to add insult to injury, the seventh song on the playlist is a medley of "The sound of silence" and "Bridge over troubled water" that Randy Wuensche, Chris Wenz and I did for our senior year band/choir recital type night.  The best part is the piano playing, which was actually done by another student, not a teacher,  I can't recall her name at the moment, but she was really good.  Maybe Mark will chip in with a comment and give us her name...

So, listen and weep, chumps.  : )

New story for May (part 1)

The smell of honeysuckle was not overwhelming, at 11 am, but stronger than you would think given its proximity to the street and the residual exhaust fumes and the glare of the Texas sun. Honeysuckle is a plant of the evening, of the morning, of gentle breezes through quiet backyards or of stifling southern humidity, but as the man walked by in the near heat of almost noon, the smell made him mentally catalogue the pungent yellow-orange of the overly ripened flowers and the white-yellow of the newly opened, each with their own scent that he could not describe but remembered intimately, like the position of his boots by the bed in the morning or the pull of his belt as he fastened it at the third notch.

He was a man of the south, raised in the suburbs that were slowly turning everywhere into anywhere but hadn't yet, couldn't ever fully, I think; and so the honeysuckle, and the crawdads in standing water in his front yard during week-long summer rains, and the hint of an accent that he still carried as he reached his front door, unlocked the deadbolt and entered the house.

"Martha," a question without a question mark, a sound to reassure the speaker as much as the audience, answered from several rooms away with, "I'm in here, sweetie, what is it?"

The tone of the answering voice was as complex as the honeysuckle scent, with notes of fear and hope rising slightly above a pervasive musk of fatigue and despair.  Martha emerged from the spare bedroom with several towels on one shoulder, dried and awaiting folding, her eyebrows pulled slightly together into a universal sign of concentrated attention.

"They called me at work, on my cell phone, and left a message saying how to call up this number and get the results, but I..."  Derek's voice trailed off as he fished his cell phone from the pocket of his work khakis and held it out in an open hand, an electronic oracle that he couldn't bring himself to consult.

"Well jesus christ, Derek, give it here and let me call...what's your voicemail password?"

Emmett

So this was Emmett, he lived for about a year and was rescued out of a tree in Dumas, TX, and he did a lot of stuff that cats do and brought immeasurable joy to the people that met him, and now he's gone. He ate part of a lily that was brought home as part of a bouquet, and died of acute kidney failure due to the extreme toxicity of lilies toward cats.

I don't know what else to say, except thanks to everyone who has been there for us through this, the sharing of sadness makes it not lighter, I think, but easier to carry, somehow, and we have been helped more than we could express.

Emmett update

Well, Emmett spent all last night getting IV fluids, and all today as well, and by 3:30 this afternoon, when they did a blood workup on him again, he was doing a little better. Everyone at both vets have been encouraged by how he looks and how he's acting and how his blood work turned out, so we are hopeful.  I think his official prognosis went from "grave" to "guarded", which is probably worse than "serious" but not as bad as "critical", one would hope. So thanks to everyone who's thinking about us and about Emmett, and keep those fingers crossed, and if you have on a lucky shirt or pair of underwear, for god's sake don't change them now!  If you've never considered growing a playoff beard like they do in hockey, that probably wouldn't hurt either.  Unless you're female, or just can't grow a beard, like me.

life is stupid and it sucks

I have had the extreme misfortune to have had the opportunity to write premature eulogies lately to two pets now; one of which became tragically appropriate a few months later, and one which we're still hoping to make irrelevant.  Our cat, Emmett, is at the vet being treated right now pretty much around the clock, and the prognosis is still not good, although he's hanging in there.  What follows is the result of an overabundance of grief and the effects of recently having read William Faulkner.  Please keep Emmett, and Heidi and I, in your thoughts.  I'll update on his condition as we keep being updated ourselves.



it was bright pink flowers and some bright yellow like daffodils and the green of stems in a birthday bouquet and the corpse white of lilies thrown in and it was perfect for what it was and for six ninety-nine or eight it was what it was and the flowers were nice in a vase with the stems trimmed maybe a little too short and arranged to where the white and the pink and the yellow were almost irresistible and so they maybe were on the first night and getting home to the cats' mess of them and the bleed of pink into the water like chum for sharks it wasn't real the bright pink petal was a carnival poster come-on color washing out into a pink like blood in the water and there wasn't much mess after all a little bit eaten and a few petals fallen down now white like paper with the lily white of the flesh damaged too but not much not too much but enough to so the cat (the youngest one) plucked from a tree in a small town in Texas took a mouthful of the lily of the valley of the shadow of a few bites maybe at the most but it was more than he needed and more than he could have known because who could have known and who didn't know that it was in his blood now and it was real now like the pink in the water acute renal failure was what they called it but it was Emmett on the counter and the lily flesh white and the carnival pink and it was real enough now and too late to know too late that lilies for a small Texas cat are pink in the water like blood like corpse white now

short, short story (conclusion)

forgotten what happened in part one of the story?

Richard shifted his weight from one hip to the other while he desperately tried to figure out the thing NOT to say to make the two cops even more interested in him. The trick was, of course, managing not to say it after having thought of it.

"OK, so if I tell you guys where I think he went, will go you at least talk to him and see if I'm crazy or if he is? I'm pretty sure that when he leaves here, he walks down to the Starbucks on Maple, because I've been down there myself a couple of times after seeing him around here, and he was hanging around over there the same way."

"That Starbucks is on Jefferson, not Maple," the older cop offered, and the younger one chimed in with, "Yeah, we'll go by and see if he's there, see what's up with him giving you the stank eye and everything." And in a cloud of amused chuckles, snarling snatches of radio static, and the squeak of new leather, the cops finally left.

Richard went down into the basement that night at home (he hadn't done that in a dog's age) and just made sure that everything was still where he had left it, undisturbed in its peaceful dust and harmless tarpaulining. Maybe it was time to get a storage space for everything, now, with those stupid cops and all...there were still places on the north side where you could rent for a handshake and $25 a month cash, without all those annoying legal documents and required pieces of identification. And if that old guy kept hanging around, staring...well, it just made more sense to do than to not, overall.

He clicked off the light as he reached the top of the stairs, making a mental note to ask around at work tomorrow to see if anyone could swap him a pickup to use over the weekend. The snap of the lightswitch nearly echoed, comfortably, in the endless new restored darkness.