gravitrue's Journal

11:58pm: Fuck.

9:00am: Words of the Dying
I told him the test results. We, my stepmother and I, wanted him to find out at home, from us, not trapped in a cramped cold office with clinicians in their priestly vestments. Not told by the oncologist; my stepmother says he's like a tortured monk, brilliant and always serious with only the rarest flash of dry humor. We'll torture him enough tomorrow, asking if there is the slightest chance, a surgery, another drug.

When I told him, my father said softly,

"I had hoped we would do better."

He asked how long he had, but that will have to come from the doctors' radiation enhanced augries. We live in an age so advanced, we can read our futures in our own bones and entrails while we're still wearing them.

"I guess we won't need the lift then"

In the summer of 1995, a brilliant medical researcher in her early forties lay dying. "At least I won't have to use Windows 95" she said. We may well need the lift, though, at least a few times.

"No hope"

Picture a bundle of uncooked spaghetti, the thin hard dry strands of pasta. Now, make them out of glass. The bundle is bent, and you feel some of the strands cracking and breaking, sending out tiny shards and glass dust. I felt that inside.

An hour later he had pancakes with ice cream on top, but it was a bit longer before I could eat anything.

The wound is too fresh right now to post this. By the time you read this, this will be the past, perhaps only a few days, perhaps much longer. But gone. These moments and their burden of pain down the time stream / conveyor belt / toilet bowl of passing moments. Already he changes, now chuckling, now moaning, now sleeping.


[It is now fifty-seven days since I wrote the above. Dad snuck off yesterday, a few days earlier than expected. Sunday we'll bury him somewhere near his parents; probably won't be enough of us to shovel the whole grave full, but he won't mind if we have the cemetery staff finish up, he never was one for formality.]

6:45am: I can't believe this video doesn't have like 2M hits. I mean, geekery, retro intertitles, nudity, and under two minutes long, what's not to like?
And yeah, the creator knows people we know.

( Cut for infrared nudity, click through and watch... )

3:55pm: Well, I stood up for myself for, depending on how you count it, perhaps the first time in 17 years. And I didn't lose; got some acknowledgement about the present. Not the past, but then I'm kinda crazy for caring about that. So I guess I won twice. Families are so much fun.

Disappointing that she doesn't trust me and is too scared of me to stand up for herself and tell me so without a roomful of people. Some leopards don't change their spots I guess. Still hurts to love someone (even if not especially like them) and be viewed as a scary scheming threat even as I ask if something needs to be fixed, carried, lifted.

I thank the universe that my sister is here.

3:52am: Dance of steel and flesh, Ratio of motion, Repetition
Some people are born engineers; they take apart their toys as soon as they can hold a screwdriver, write code soon after they learn to read. Others are born to dance. They bop to beats in the womb, roll and shimmy in their cribs, they become hip-hop poppers, flamenco stampers, hippie earth children whose bare feet boogie, flappers and hoofers with clicking taps.

( Butch was born to direct traffic... )

3:19am: Factoid: My great uncle Lou was so honest in his business dealings that he was known as "the White Jew".

5:41am: Repeatability
My father was a young man working in New York, several of his college friends drafted. A coworker told him he could volunteer for induction into a local entertainment reserve unit, which would be unlikely to see combat (a generations old dodge; apparantly dad's uncle spent his part of the first world war playing clarinet on a battleship in the Carribean). The only war at the time was Cold, but you never knew when that might change, and getting sent off to type reports in Abilene or build bridges in Biloxi hardly seemed appealing. So my father applied, and failed the induction physical, his fallen arches rendering him unfit for service. "That's that", he thought.

( but it wasn't... )

2:31am: Jersey Boys: It happened the last time
( I've been back in Jersey for almost two weeks, so it's past time for more... )

3:29am: Just how horribly geeky of me...
There are 270 google hits for "colostomy bagpipe". That's way more than for "theodolite hero".

So I guess it isn't all that crazy of me to have suggested installing reeds in a stoma so that the gas escaping to the colostomy bag produces harmonica notes. Glad the owner of the stoma in question has a properly twisted sense of humor.

5:28pm: Life, backwards or This is for your own good
I see him trying to stand or move about, unsteadily, and there is an urge to help, to not stand idle while he struggles. To spin in place and put his legs on the floor, to shove back a bit when he's slipped down the bed (so tall and gangly, his feet always hang off the end in adjustable beds, the angle making him slip down; he suggests duct tape to keep him in place).

If I help, the muscles will atrophy more, and it will get more difficult for him. I sit and watch, trying to force myself to wait until he's stuck or asks for help. I usually can't. Still, I use as little force as I can.

When he walks, he uses a walker, and I have my arm holding his back, keeping him upright so he won't bend like an upside down letter j or a < symbol.

"Get my back" he says, and I respond "I've got it."

12:21am: Needed: comedies, geek tv, and windows vista media
Dad is watching too much CNN. I need lighter stuff for him to watch. In particular, I want comedies which have no mention of death but are not bland 30s-50s society flicks. A Fish Called Wanda was great except for the eating the live fish scene and the doggie funerals. Details like that are pretty important; please don't think "Oh yeah, Fargo was hilarious" without remembering how many characters end up dead. (When Harry Met Sally should be safe, right? Been a long time since I've seen it). He's got netflix. Suggestions?

The other idea I had was geek stuff. Anyone got copies of Monster House, Secret Life of Machines, Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars? Recommendations or disk loans for similar shows? Stuff having to do with machines and home renovation are likely the best choices, but Connections and Scientific American Frontiers might also work.

Also, I've been asked to fix a wedged Windows Vista laptop. It's a got a license sticker on it, but the owner doesn't have the OS disks. Anyone got media I can use? I'm not sure which flavor it is, or indeed, how many flavors there are...

I'm in Boston for most of this week and can come pick stuff up.

1:02am: Newest Bad Idea
My latest bad idea...

Amusement parks often do a Halloween thing in Sep-Oct, dressing up the rides with spider webs and spooky figures and such, a way to squeeze in a few extra folks at the end of the season.

Today I realized waterparks could do the same thing: they could dye the water red, have employees dressed as zombies floating around on the inner tubes grabbing for the patrons, have a fake body or two floating in the pools, maybe occasionally throw a human-like form from the top of a waterslide staircase. 'Cause everyone likes to get dyed red for Halloween, right?

1:51am: In the future, everyone will be in Delaware for fifteen minutes.

4:31am: So much to do
Time alternates now, between dense and styrofoam. In dense time, two days of effort scours out (most of) four decades of attic cruft, grandparents' passover dishes, cassette walkmans (walkmen?) with meditation tapes, office art, dead baby squirrels, great-grandmother's dresser mirror with the peeling backing on the painted section with the outline of an oil lamp. Enough small objects and memories to keep me typing a day just recording it. Boxes of tile and wallpaper are Craigslisted, appointments made, broken, kept, things gone. Bags and bags filled for the dump, taken to the dump, the dump is closed, men with a truck are called and appear, cruft vanishes. Dense time is con time, festival time, burning man time.

In styrofoam time, days go by with a few things done each day, many of them important, but somehow a whole lightweight block has passed with so many things undone, so much time used inefficiently. Brains too fried to contemplate mutual fund portfolio accounting systems, stairway rebuilding, slide sorting, check tracking, car repairs, comparison shopping stare at movies or CNN. I'm concerned for the lost opportunities, the moments slipping away, and yet I treasure sitting in a room with them and not having anything that needs to be said; always more work to do, it may not all be completed, but we can be tired and speechless together.

Perhaps you haven't spent enough time with someone until you can sit with nothing to say.

I go home soon, for a few days. Back to my main life, as opposed to the one I'm spending most of my time in right now. So many worlds; we contain multitudes. I hope there will be time enough when I get back here.

I opened a book with a satin cover, a baby book with places to write height and weight at various ages, first words, and early playmates. I opened it expecting to see things about myself as a child, but then I saw my grandmother's handwriting. My father had champagne on his first birthday, and liked it.

5:17pm: Jersey Boys: Mike, of pendants, used cars, and a knife
Mike was a good guy. We were all freaked when he got stabbed that time he went to buy weed behind a low-end shopping plaza near the Newark border. He was in the hospital for a week or so, his liver got nicked but he survived. He said later that the kid who stabbed him looked tentative, almost terrified, as he did it, just the slightest little darting motion, like he was touching an exposed wire or a hot frying pan.

Later, Mike worked in a jewelry store in New York. My girlfriend and I were breaking up, and she wanted back a piece of jewelry, a pendant, that she'd given me to wear. Sometimes you're not happy when someone wants the collar back, especially us switches. I had Mike make a copy of the pendant for me. Being a good guy, he did it, kept his mouth shut, and got me a good price on it. I even got to keep the casting mold.

After two or three years, he got canned from the jewelry store over some stupid interpersonal stuff, and was bitter about it. He'd been thinking about a career in jewelry, but his next job was selling used cars. Just as well, since the World Trade Center fell on the jewelry store; maybe his former boss was there that day.

My ex-girlfriend never did follow up on getting that pendant back from me, which probably taught me some things about letting go, about control, and about spite. If I ever see her again, maybe I'll tell her so, and give her both copies if I can find them. She wouldn't want the mold.

9:50pm: google suck ratio
I have devised a new metric: the Google Suck Ratio, otherwise known as the GSR.
This is the ratio between the number of google hits on the name of a company (or person or whatever), and the number of hits of the form "company_name sucks". There is also a secondary metric, known as the "posse ratio".

Let's investigate sucking on the Internet (yes, I know, you'll get packets in your teeth and your dentist will tell you to cut down on the RTSP, but still...)

( Read more... )

1:34am: Jersey Boys: Maxie: You win some and you lose some.
Long enough for a cut...

( Read more... )

12:27am: Jersey Boys: Steve
Steve and I just rubbed each other the wrong way. It wasn't a hatred, there was some mutual respect, we'd show up to each other's events sometimes, we just didn't get on. A musician with long dark hair, a seducer of beautiful women, popular and his older sister even more so, he just emanated "cooler than thou" at me.

One time we had to do an improv sketch together where I was his dad telling him that I was gay. Although it did wander into some interesting territory as I explained that his mom was gay too, overall it had no chemistry.

At a party, this guy Kev was melting down, laying in bed in an upstairs room crying because he felt unimportant. Steve barricaded himself in there for forty-five minutes, emerging only to ask for some water for Kev and eventually letting some other folks in there to help coddle him. It was the sort of thing I often looked after, so it was odd to be shut out. I've no idea why, really, Steve did something so selfless. I don't know what in Kev's crisis evoked such a strong, territorial, and whole-hearted response, what resonated.

I saw Steve once after years had passed. Dressed in a black blazer with black jeans and a black t-shirt, running a small recording studio, he's still cooler than me, more personable, especially if you're female, and we still have nothing to say to each other. The only thing I mind, really, is that his hair, long, dark, and lush in a pony tail, is still better than mine. I hate that.

5:56pm: Take as much time as you want,
there's more time than life.
--doorman at hospital in NYC

1:23am: I must admit it was kinda creepy and haunting to hear a pair of 74-year-olds and their wives sing their college alma mater...



Here's to those olden days,
Here's to those golden days,
Here's to the friends we made



and in the "no wonder college is so damn expensive" category:
Apparently when my dad was at college, the windows of his frat house's bedrooms were kinda broken and didn't close, so during those upstate New York winters, students woke with a light coating of frost on their blankets from their own breath. Somehow I suspect today's American undergrads would take issue with this level of accommodation (but then for current tuition prices, they probably should... can we say self-perpetuating cycle?)

On the upside, when they wanted to have a beach party, they simply had several tons of sand delivered and then shoveled into the basement. The trick was that they had to shovel it out again afterwards and find a way to get rid of it. The next time they had a "hay roll", it being much easier to fill the basement with hay. But hay is a fire hazard. One of the frat members had a dad who owned a chemical company. He came up with a fire-proofing formula for hay, and sent a batch over with some hand pumped spray guns.

4:16am: Jersey Boys: Dave, the stoner's Lone Ranger
Next one.

( Read more... )

3:08am: Jersey Boys: Davy
Davy used to run with that first post-high school crowd of mine sometimes. Slight and black with something between an afro and a flat-top, and usually a sunny smile.

One time I was giving him a lift home and he asked me to pull into a park we were passing. I was mystified, but did as he asked. Then, he asked if I was gay, and if he could go down on me.

I said I'd wondered if I was bi, but no thank you. He got a scared look and begged me not to tell anyone else; he wasn't out. None of that crowd were openly gay, and the person I most suspected of it was a homophobe who joked about gay bashing (though we knew he was full of shit). I assured Davy his secret was safe with me.

He relaxed and said, "Well, then, now you know you aren't gay" and I drove him home.

12:56am: Jersey Boys, first in a series
Jackie's dad was a cop. Threw him in a cell once for a couple of days to teach him a lesson about something or other. Jackie used to buzz the police station at 70 mph or more, and if they gave chase, he'd take his motorcyle through the pedestrian railway underpass. No more than about 5'5", Jackie had a bit of a Napoleon complex. He also had a deathwish; picked that up when he and a close friend, someone he'd taught to ride, were racing. His friend went under the wheels of a truck, looked at Jackie, and died. Jackie would drink and go riding, at least once he passed out and fell over at a traffic light, just lay there till a passing motorist woke him up, thinking he'd been hit.

Jackie used to frequent this dive bar in Irvington, I'd go along with the gang sometimes. The owner (or maybe he was just the bartender) never bothered to card Jackie's friends (I mostly didn't get carded until after I was old enough to drink). Jackie screwed my girlfriend in the back of Maxie's car one time. We were poly, but she had a habit of cheating. She didn't tell me about it for a couple of years, we hadn't seen Jackie in a while by then, but it didn't really matter.

I do wonder sometimes if he's still alive. And if he is, could his life still have any edge to it, does the pain still drive him? Could he have ever reached forgiveness and release? It's more poetic if I don't find out, but then I have to ask myself if the map of stories is more or less important than the territory of life.

1:03am: My stepmother softly sang

I hear a Sound,
A Wonderful Sound

as my father's crap fell into the bucket.

Sometimes the ability to poop is to be treasured.

6:36pm: Hospital Floor lyrics
The chairs aren't too comfortable so
I'm sleeping on the hospital floor

Waiting for the I.V. in the chemo ward
Sleeping on the hospital floor

Will I catch some rare disease?
Sleeping on the hospital floor

How will people feel if I snore?
Sleeping on the hospital floor

It's lemony fresh linoleum
Sleeping on the hospital floor

Back next Wednesday, coming in for more
Sleeping on the hospital floor