Woops

July 8, 2010
Avascular necrosis is the death of bone tissue due to a lack of blood supply. Also called osteonecrosis, avascular necrosis can lead to tiny breaks in the bone and the bone's eventual collapse.

For reasons unknown, I have it and I could be on crutches for months. Let me express a great big crapola.

July 10, 2010

I’ve been wrestling with God all my life. I suppose it was only a matter of time before touched my hip.

Avascular necrosis.

It’s the death of bone tissue due to lack of blood. In more graphic layman’s terms, I’ve got a hip joint rotting in my left leg. It is extremely painful if I walk on it. It’s painful just to sand up, to move to joint at all. I’m taking vicadin, however you spell it for the pain. I’ve been on some kind of painkiller for six month now so I’m not sure how it would feel au natural, but I get twinges just sitting. So I’ve had a stroke. I’ve got a couple tears in my rotator cuff, a hernia, and now this.

A friend of mine would ask me, “What is God saying to you in all this?” Jackie thinks He’s telling me to finish my novel. For me, that came through loud and clear with the stroke. So other than things don’t necessarily only come in threes, I’m not really sure.

I am avoiding talking about the good possibilities, like after the touch comes the blessing. Maybe He’s about to bless my socks off and He’s telling me to get ready. I’ve been reminding Him a lot these days He promised not to give me anything to heavy to bear. Maybe he’s telling me I can carry a lot more than I think I can carry. Wait. Now that I think about it, that doesn’t fall into the good things category.

July 13, 2010


I’ve been dreaming of a new life. Me and Jackie chucking it all and movingt to Italy. Perhaps understandable since the life I’m living now involves all my recent medical irregularities. The newest one is my left hip joint beginning to rot inside my leg. Unfortunately this is not an exzadurate. The medical term is avascular nacrosis. It’s the death of bone tissue due to insufficient amounts of blood leading to deterioration and eventual collapse. In some cases, with treatment the bone can regenerate. At the other end you get a new hip. So I could be on my way to becoming bionic.

July 20, 2010

So what I actually have is called an impingement on my left hip. I also have one on my right hip but that’s not bothering me now. They’re going to treat it with a shot of steroids to the hip joint. If I was younger they would do arthroscopy surgery a shave the little lump of bone that’s screwing things up but, apparently, in us old folks, it has a tendency to make thing worse. So I have to get the shot every six months or so.

I’m scheduled for the injection on Aug 11. It’s a tricky shot and the have to do it through radiology so the can see were to place it. I forgot to ask the implication of getting radiated every six months. Right now I’ll assume it a very low level dose and I don’t have to worry about it.

They said I can’t do damage by walking on it and I’m under no restriction so, if I can stand the pain, I’m allowed to do it, which means I’m off the crutches. I’m going to try walking for a day or two and if that works I’m going to try a go back to work.

This is all very good news as the alternative is a new hip and six months of rehab before I could work. With this, I could be back to work in a few days and at worst in about a month.

Woo hoo, praise God, and all that good stuff.

Fear And Trembling

Jackie, my wife, has encouraged me to write about this depression thing with out a censor, so if your squeamish or the sensitive type or easily upset by foul language you probably shouldn’t click the link for my blog, or if you did, you should probably quit reading now.

I can feel my throat tightening as I think about doing this and anger welling up. I’ve learned to be sociably acceptable, to tone myself down and sanitize my language, for my Christian brothers and sisters yes, but also for the rest of the population. Some of this is good, trying not to offend my weaker brother or sister or children.

The reality of me, Mike Lipuma, Christian man, is not pretty. Don’t get me wrong. I know I am redeemed, loved by God, but I am not talking about that side of me right now. I am talking about the side of me that makes it a good thing for me His mercies are new every morning.

Just a bit ago I wrote something to post on Facebook, a simple little statement, and several words were misspelled. (In the interest of clarity I will be censoring that part of me that can’t spell) Anyway, in my endeavor to get into the uncensoring mood, this rift of familiar condemnation went through my head wondering what the fuck I thought I was doing, trying to write when I still spelled like an imbecile, something like that, fucking imbecile was there.

Now I’m spiraling into something about shutting my mouth because I really don’t have anything to say and it’s all a bunch of narcissistic bullshit and I ought to quit bothering people. That bothering thing has been with me for a long time. Every time I want to make a phone call to somebody I know, it’s there, and especially if it’s somebody I want to know. (I’m re-reading this now and I caught myself thinking, God, how pathetic) When I see two people talking, it doesn’t matter where, it’s always a battle to get myself to say something. The idea of what I have to say not being important enough to speak, I’ve had to learn to circumvent. These days it’s a God thing that allows me to open my mouth. My thinking goes this way. God made me to be who I am and to be visible in the world, to speak what is true for me. When I do not speak the truth in love, I am telling God to go fuck Himself because I refuse to be used. Speaking is an act of obedience for me. It is, by the way, a sobering and humbling thing to admit I tell God to go fuck Himself on a regular basis. Maybe I don’t use those words, but you know what they say; actions speak louder.

Every once in a while I tell God things would be a lot easier if He would arrange to put a stray bullet in my head, or maybe a car accident, most typically after a fight with my wife after one of us has said something no spouse should say to the other one. Sometimes I am just so tired of struggling to be alive that a bullet seems like a viable option. Don’t get all freaked out now. I’ve always been too much of a chicken shit to kill myself and if I haven’t done it by now I’m not going to.

I feel like such a cliché now, a whiney little fuck.

Sometimes I wish I could just weep. Sometimes I think if I start I’ll never stop. Sometimes I think I’m not worth the tears. Christianity is sometime such a paradox for me. It gives me hope, but it doesn’t necessarily get rid of the despair. I so want to leave that behind. There is talk of the “now” and the “not yet;” the not yet of the coming kingdom and the now of living through the process of getting there.

In the now we get glimpses of the not yet in the Amish community in Pennsylvania befriending the wife of the man who murdered their children, or in my church helping us out with our mortgage while I convelesce from my stroke, in people like Desmond Tutu leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, or the part Christianity played in the Solidarity Movement in Poland or the Civil Rights Movement here.

I’m sure I don’t have to mention examples of the other side of the coin. You can come up with enough places where the world and its people are broken all on your own. If you are willing to look, you can find the places where you’re broken. There are plenty of times in life when it is appropriate to weep. I think we all have much to grieve. After all, it is in the now with all it’s fucked up shit that we all have to live. Before conversion I used live trying to make sure things didn’t suck much more than they already did before I died.

I’ve been a Christian for at least twenty years now, all that time learning how to hope and not lean on my own understanding of things, to understand that my despair is not the truth about how things are. Christianity is not opposed to the concept of the yin and yang. My despair, which I despised with a powerful hatred for a very long time, I have learned, is also a coin with two sides. It’s like the theory of relativity: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As much as I have despaired, so I am capable of that much hope. As much as I have felt abandon, it is with that much sureness I am found.

I don’t know if despair and sorrow is where everybody’s art comes from, but it is the source of mine. Slowly I learn to see beauty and hope, that my despair is the mirror I see through dimly. But in the now, the sorrow will always be there, it is the cross I am commanded to pick up. It is the weight giving the rest of my life substance. There is a book I’ve called the most terrible, beautiful novel I’ve ever read. It is called The Last Of The Just. It was written after World War II by Andre Schwarz-Bart, a French Jew trying to come to terms why so many willingly walked into the gas chambers.

Christianity is like that, terrible and beautiful at the same time. Some one said, “Life is hard if you do it right.” I don’t know where my next statement is, theologically, so keep that in mind. I don’t think Christianity is for everybody. If you want a nice easy life with no troubles, my advice is for you is to run the other way as fast as you can. On the other hand, if you want something real and you're willing to put up with some shit, I don’t know a better place to find it. Keep in mind; it’s not no bed of roses. Biblically speaking, there are very few out right commands; you know, do this, don’t do that. One of them is, “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” Note it is in present tense. Now. In fear and trembling. Doesn’t that make you just want to jump on board?

New Mercies

The people with a spiritual bent of the medieval period tried various methods of self-piety and abasement to find their way to holiness. Pebbles in their shoes, hair shirts, ice water baths, and self-flagellation were some of their methods. Anchorites used to wall themselves up with only a little hole to pass food and excrement through. Some ascetics sat in trees, tying themselves in. For some, over time, the coarse ropes would rub and chafe on the skin, dig it self in. They would try and out do each other, going higher in the tree, staying up longer. One famous ascetic stayed up long enough for his skin to grow back over the rope and his cloak, like a tree gown into a chain link fence. When I think about dropping my guard against the depression, I feel like that ascetic: the guard grown into the fabric of my being.

I remember a dream. There’s this pretty little storybook house with closed swinging barn like doors to an upper loft. The house was not taller than I am and as I reach out to the upper doors, they burst open reveling an enraged, terrified little boy. In his fist he’s got a grade school protractor made out of steel, its curved edge a sharpened blade and he’s swinging it at me wildly, screaming, “Get out. Get out. Get out.” The boy is very young, four or five, and of course, he is me.

That’s how the guard works, indiscriminately keeping everything out. I used to live my life with two rules: Don’t fuck with me and we’ll get along,” and “I don’t come out and you don’t get in.” I’ve made considerable progress over the last twenty years, bit by bit opening myself to others with the help of the Holy Spirit and those He has brought into my life; principally the Safe Place/metanoia people, my work groups, New Adam, and by no means last or least, Jackie my wife. But it seems there is always more darkness to bring into the light.

When I was about the age of the boy in the dream my uncle, a fat grease-ball in a suit, watch fob and all, would sit at the head of the kitchen table. He was my father’s older brother, the one who bullied him into adult hood. The man he worked for. He’d come over in his late model Cadillac, walk in like a fat prince. My mother made his something to eat. My father sat at the table with him and poured him shots of whiskey, and call to my mother when they needed a beer. A place setting was set before my uncle and then he would call to me in Italian, “Miguel, vin aquee.” Something like that.

“Your uncle’s calling you,” My father would say.

Eventually I would be standing along side him, just tall enough to see over the table. He made me get him a knife, usually sending me back for a sharper one. The he’d start telling me how much he liked me. In fact, he liked me so much he wanted to eat me up. Fork and knife ready in his hands, “Put you hand in the plate,” he told me.

“He just playing with you,” was all my father said. My mother stood staring into her pot at the kitchen stove.

After much stern cajoling my hand would be in the plate. I wouldn’t jerk it away when he reached with the knife and fork. He’d mention how plump a juicy my fingers looked and witch knuckle he would start cutting at and he put the knife to my finger so I could feel it’s sharpness, and he would say something about not spoiling his appetite and how I was probably to stringy anyway, a scrawny little thing like me. My ma would bring him his food. My father poured him another shot.

“Come on now. Don’t be a baby. Your uncle’s just playing with you. Char? Give him a piece of bread and butter.”

What I wonder is, if I remember that, is there more I don’t remember? Is there still something behind the doors of the storybook house the little boy is afraid to let me see?

I‘ve been thinking about the dream, that the protractor maybe means school, which would fit with the storybook. At Saint John’s, I flunked second grade, every subject, and every category, without exception. I received an unsatisfactory in every little box on the card save one. I don’t remember the exact wording, but basically, it said my grade were satisfactory considering what the child was capable of.

In second grade sometimes we were put in the coat closet/storage room for punishment. I remember hiding in the coats, a wet fur winter smell, and the fur against my face. All the other teachers I had at Saint John’s were nuns. My teacher for second grade I remember as a young girl. I pretty sure she pulled down my pants to spank me now and then and sometimes I got sent home for peeing in them.

It’s hard to tell that far back what is memory and what is a story I’ve cobbled together over the years or if it even makes much difference when you go that far back. I don’t know if I can go deep enough to get to the bottom of thing. When it comes down to it, I don’t know if there’s a bottom to get to. To paraphrase Paul, who will save me from this retched body of memory? Thanks be to God, Whose mercies are new every morning and Who makes broken things whole.

Sunday's Coming.

I don’t really want to write about this, but my wife, Jackie asked me to. She said it was important for me to write it while I was in it.

I’ve fought depression all my life as far as I know. I know some have it a lot worse than me, or I tell my self that. I really don’t know what it would be like if I didn’t fight it and now I have theses pills that are supposed to make it better in a week and a half so I’m trying to let myself feel what I feel, to stop fighting enough to really get a look at it and that’s really scary because I know enough about it enough to know it’s a place of hopelessness, the opposite of faith. It’s the opposite of my faith, anyway.

A guy I knew, or I knew as well as you can know anyone who is really depressed, a fellow believer as far as I know, on a Easter morning, I think, waved to an El train conductor right before he jumped it front of the train. I talk to people afterward to see if I could figure out if we failed him somehow. From what I could tell people better than me, more compassionate than fearful anyway, bent over backwards to try and be there for him. He chose, or did not know how to chose anything else, not to receive the help.

I’ve been telling Jackie I’m waiting for the Zoloft to kick in. To her, it sounds like a choice I’m making. Yesterday she asked me if I was still on my island, giving me the metaphor to describe it. Immediately I saw the island, deserted, bare, and surrounded by treacherous waters breaking on the rocks. I’m still here and I don’t know how to get off. It’s a perpetually gloomy place, with occasional barrages of thunder and lightening. Do you know that opening for ”Mystery” on public television where it’s a graveyard and there’s thunder and lightening and there’s a damsel running back and forth going, ”Oohhhh. Oohhhhh,” really plaintive and forlorn like? That’s sort of what it’s like, if you take all the humor out of it.

So I’m here waiting wondering if I really let my self feel if I’ll just start sobbing and cry all over my laptop enough to short it out. I’m making jokes. I’ve got a very dark sense of humor. I’ve often said, maybe not so bluntly, I make jokes when the alternative is sobbing, when my feelings of helplessness and despair are ready to overwhelm. I’ve known for a long time now, the sobbing I carry very close to the surface, maybe so I can keep an eye on it, so it can’t sneak up on me in public. I’ve learned to compensate in sociably acceptable ways.

That makes me wonder how much of myself I’ve missed. Maybe this is where the grief comes from, the parts of myself I’ve learned to indiscriminately kill. Christianity teaches me I supposed to die to self. It never occurred to me the alternative to that is what I have learned to do, rather then letting Christ put to death those thing that keep me from being fully who I was intended to be, I’ve taken a slash and burn approach. It is no wonder I perpetually feel the desire to weep.

Don’t get me wrong. I know there are many things in this world besides me to weep for. I don’t know maybe we depressives view them as a black hole of grief we dare not get to close to. I know I do guard myself. Vigilance is something I am used to, an old habit hard to put down. Maybe that’s what I’m waiting for, lowering my guard and finally letting others into places not even I’ve been to?

A while ago, before I was married, almost a decade ago, I remember God saying to me, “It’ time.” When I met Jackie, I thought, that’s what He was talking about. Then I thought it was getting married. I keep thinking, oh, that’s what it was about, and then a little time goes by and I realizes it was just another step along the road to a place he will show me, each step needing a bit more faith than the last one. I don’t know. Maybe this is what He was talking about, time to look at these last dark spaces inside me. Even as I write that I know they are not the last ones, just the next ones.

If there’s always more, maybe the Zoloft is like the seventh day. Maybe they’ll give me enough peace with myself I can begin to accept the Sabbath, a day of rest. That would be nice.

Resurection

I use to work at the North Suburban Postal Facility, a two-city block long mail warehouse in River Grove, Illinois. Sometimes I’d work in a cubical in front of a compartmented stand with slots for all the north suburban zip codes. Somebody would come by with trays of miscellaneous mail that did not get sorted by the letter sorting machines and I would sort it manually. If you’ve read Post Office by Charles Bukowski you have some idea of what that was like, but that’s a story for another time.

I think of the brain as somewhat like that stand of compartmented slots, each with a category to store information. In the stand at the PO was a miscellaneous slot for mail I didn’t know what else to do with, say a piece of mail from Peotone, clearly not north suburban. I figure there’s a miscellaneous slot in my brain, too, for information I don’t know how to categorize.

I used to have what I called blank spots. In them I was very confused and I couldn’t figure out what was going on with me at all. When I came out of them, days, weeks, sometimes months later, it seemed I had figured things out I didn’t know before they started. Eventually I figured the blank spots were my brain shutting down because the miscellaneous slot in my head had got to full. At the PO, someone came around to empty the micsilanious slot every now and then. In my head I figured the way it got emptied was for my brain to kind of go off line, except for the thing that got me through my day, and reexamine all the information and experiences and reshuffle and make new categories to fit and explain the new information and how it related to the old.

Thinking this, I had an idea. What If I could induce the blank spots artificially? Wouldn’t that make me figure out thing faster? I decided to give it a try. Better living through chemistry, I figured. Work or not, it became my rationalization for getting extremely high every now and then, once or twice a year or so, until the experiments gradually merged with my everyday life style. I ended up in Wisconsin in a crummy farmhouse with retreads on a car that wouldn’t start without a jump. For a while though, from my perspective the self-induced black spots actually seemed to work.

A word of warning, though; along with the bad car in Wisconsin, I figure I lost ten years of economic productivity doing this, so it is not something I would recommend, not to mention the risks involved when not thinking clearly in the blank spots and the very real possibility of overdose. I consider myself very lucky to have survived my experimentation and one of the reasons I undertook them is I probably figured it would be no great loss if my brain shut down permanently.

That said, I hadn’t noticed a blank spot for a very long time, decades. Now, looking back, I think I’ve been in one for quite some time and I’m wondering if it started with the first stroke. If this is so, the implications are quite astonishing, especially when I think about the Christian walk and brokenness and resurrection. Add to this the Zoloft, which is, for the first time, supposed to take away the negative aspect I’ve been putting on things all my life, and give me the ability to concentrate more and think more clearly. This puts me on the verge of the biggest paradigm shift and leap of understanding I’ve ever been through.

I find it quite exciting and interesting to be in the unusual position of witnessing my own resurrection.

Invisible Monkeys

Depression is something I have acknowledged fighting all my life. My stroke has exasperated these struggles and so I sought a prescription of sertraline, the generic name for Zoloft. A friend of mine in my men’s group mentioned it after hearing of my emotional response to my wife and having a similar response helped by the anti-depressant.

My stroke rehab doctor prescribed 25MG a day and recommended I see a psychiatrist in conjunction with it. I figured why pass on free therapy from the VA?

I had my evaluation on Monday. It was, to say the least, an eye opener. The first thing the psychologist I met wit first mentioned is that this is not my first stroke. The MRI’s I had taken while in the hospital showed a previous stroke on the frontal lobe. Apparently, sometimes they don’t tell you. It was the neurologist decision, I assume, so as not to freak me out. My rehab doctor did not know. There is no way to tell when it was, only that it was old; three months, three years, they can’t tell.

I’ve talked to my wife about it and we think it happened during the spring of last year, when I lost all my patience and started feeling really tired all the time. I also remember some confusion at work and an inability to concentrate.

The previous stroke was revelation enough, but it was also suggested that I have long term, low-level depression. It was first broached as a possible negative aspect in my view of things, the question being weather it was long term or brought on by the strokes. In the men’s work I do we often as each other to try something on, to see if a thing fits. As soon as I heard it, I knew it fit.

I can best describe it as a nagging question, a constant asking if I am enough, and the answerer being, not quite. You can see where the fatigue comes from, the never ending striving for something jut out of reach. Is it Sisyphus? Or is he the guy continually rolling the rock up the hill? I looked it up. He’s the rock guy. All day long her rolls the rock up a hill. Every morning it’s back at the bottom. I think there another guy chained just out of the reach of food. Same difference. A never-ending, never fruitful labor.

The new information answerers a lot of questions for my wife and me, like why, from my wife’s point of view, I went off the rail last spring. I didn’t catch it. I notice now in retrospect. For my wife, she doesn’t have to take my moodiness and outburst of anger personal. It’s a brain thing. Chemical imbalance, maybe. She knows it’s not directed at her.

For me, I can understand she was not making everything up and, with the sertraline; I have something of an answer on the horizon. I’m actually beginning to be excited about it. It seems I don’t know what it’s like not to be depressed, that learning to live with it, to function in a basically sociably acceptable way is not the same thing as living. I had been asking myself why I couldn’t figure this marriage stuff out, why I couldn’t get hold of my emotions.

I don’t like finding out I’ve been carrying this low level depression thing all my life, like an invisible addiction I couldn’t quite make out, a nagging suspicion I’d catch glimpses of every once in a while, a monkey on you back is one thing. An invisible one is something else. There’s something wrong but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You suspect sometimes you’re just making shit up to give yourself an excuse. I recognize knowing is better than not, but I feel like the hole I sometimes suspected I was in just got confirmed and it’s a lot deeper than I thought it was.

The up side is the sertraline. They increased my prescription to 50MG. I’m wary of it, but they say it’s supposed to help; it addresses the chemical imbalance or whatever. I have this idea that it’s going to fix the not quite, that for the first time in my life I’ll like myself with out reservation, that I’ll be able to trust myself, that my thoughts will be clear and not a confusing jumble I’m forever trying to sort out. That’s a scary thought. I think I’m on the edge of it. But I’m not there yet and I don’t know how to live over there and I feel like for the first time I’m about to find out what I really think.

Ready or not, hear I come.

Rau Wood

Rau Wood

For the past several years I have been a part of a weekend Men’s retreat held mostly at the Rau Wood Retreat Center on the banks of the South Harpeth River west of Nashville, near Franklin, Tennessee. On May 1st, Saturday about one o’clock, half way through our retreat, the lights went out at Rau Wood. This gave us time to pause and asses the situation, take note of the rising river, current Doppler radar, a massive line of rain storms coming at us.

Scott, our designated leader for the weekend, made the call. We would leave. I thought the decision premature. I was not the only one. But it was Scott’s call. There was no dissention. We had thirty-one staff, and ten, what we call disciples. We bill the weekend, more or less, as an initiation into Christian manhood. Since we started, over 160 men have gone through the weekend.

It was a chaotic departure in the downpour. Later that day, on the news, I would hear it called a once in 500 years rain. We sent the disciples on ahead to a grade school one of the staff leaders worked at in Franklin. We loaded up cars, suv’s and pick-ups, with as much of our gear as we could; we left five or six guys behind to finish packing up. I got in the back seat with Scott and Steve. The most direct route was a straight shot up highway 96. Scott and Steve were locals and, knowing the roads, chose a different route over higher ground. I sat in the back staring out the window at roadside ditches turned into rivers, occasionally crossing over the road. A half an hour after we left, those who remained behind, with water beginning to come into the kitchen of the main building were we all met, abandon what was left of our equipment and gear and drove out through knee deep rushing water while they still could. About a half hour later the South Harpeth River reached record flood stage, inundating the Rau Wood Retreat Center.

After about a three and a half hour interruption, with tornado sirens going off and rain pounding on the roof of the school, figuring we were in the safest place we could be, we went on, as best we could, with our retreat activities. They stopped for the night that Saturday around midnight. We sent our disciples to one of the local staff’s house near by. Closed roads were an issue. Then we searched all the cars for something very important we could not find. The search of cars and trucks and our trailer was fruitless. Most of us scattered to different local houses and a group of four, in the best suv for the job, went back to Rau Wood.

They could not make it all the way in as a huge tree had fallen across the long gravel drive. The main building, where the staff slept, was full of mud. Water had come up to the light switches, maybe five feet. Our sound system was trashed, as was a motor scooter. In the kitchen the refrigerators were on their sides and an island counter was shoved against a wall. The two-story, log bunkhouse was missing two outside walls and the upper story, where the disciples would have slept, was sagging down. The four who went back did not find what they went to look for. They only found devastation.

We met back at the school at 9:00 AM, Sunday morning. Considering what we’d lost, we thought the disciples would want to end the weekend. Unanimously, they chose to complete it. Some of us tried to go back to Rau Wood. We all failed to make it because of closed roads due to flooding and a mudslide on 96. The scope of the ongoing disaster was becoming apparent. A good section of Franklin was flooded, water rushed over the roads at every turn. It was still raining like mad. I 24 and I 40 were closed. There was a video of a building floating down one of the interstate pushing cars out of its way and braking up next to an inundated semi.

We finished our retreat, ending on time at one o’clock in the afternoon. It was a good weekend for the disciples. I was supposed to fly out at six-thirty that evening. Reports were that all the magor roads were closed and the authorities were telling people to stay off the streets. Flash floods were predicted in three states. Rivers and creeks were raging and rising over their banks at record levels everywhere.

Another staff guy from Kentucky was going to try and make it home in his pick-up. He had to go by the airport. Some flights were getting out. He offered me a lift. I took it. Things were still getting worse and if I declined the offer I didn’t know when I’d get out. We all said our good-bys, half of us not knowing if we could get home, some of the locals not knowing what they’d find when they got there.

Trying to make it to the airport, in retrospect, was a stupid thing to do. Route after route was blocked by high rushing water. We made contact with two staff guys who had made it out to I 65 by car and they told us how they went. We made it to the interstate airport. It was drizzling. Many flights were canceled. My flight took off about forty-five minutes late.

I’ve seen current pictures of Rau Wood. The only thing left of the bunkhouse, a rather substantial log building from the 20’s, was the foundation. I keep wondering what would have happened if the power had not gone out when it did. I imagine someone noticing the water creeping over the floor, the forty of us braving the strong current to take refuge in the second story of the bunkhouse, and the exterior below us giving way to the rushing water and our weight bringing the second story down. Though I did not see it, the image of that building collapsing, I keep seeing over and over. Images of Franklin flooded and Nashville flooding, water rushing over the roads, keep running through my head. I hope they stop soon.

Learning To Stand

A stroke disconnects the pathway between thought an action. It cuts off the everyday, every moment things we never think of, cutting off the pathway to muscles that do their job without conscious thought. New pathways need to be learned. Consequently, I’m learning how to stand

When the full effect of the stroke took hold, my brain still told the muscles in my right knee how to hold me up, what pressures to exert in the complex mechanism of sinew and bone enabling it to bare my weight. My knee did not get the message. On the third morning of my hospitalization, I got up to go to the bathroom, took a step, transferring weight to a leg that no longer new how to stand.

With my job I have learned over the years how to fall, twisting through the air, riding falling ladders to the ground in ways that would make Michael Jordan, going up for a basket, proud. I managed to fall into the chair besides my bed with a minor scrape on my back. It earned me a color-coded bracelet meaning I was a fall risk. I did not get out of my bed with out help or supervision for the next three weeks. Wherever I went, it was in a wheelchair.

I learned to transfer my self from chair to bed, locking my chair, weak side close to the bed, sliding out on to the edge of the chair to get my center of gravity, pushing up with my arms, pivoting to the bed on my good leg, lowering my self down.
Even now, almost four months later, if I forget to pay attention and try and stand without thinking, I feel my instability, I hesitate, freeze in a moment in fear, abandon my attempt to stand, and I fall back in my chair.

It’s a nice metaphor for life, don’t you think?

All the things I fear making me hesitate or not even begin the attempt, feeling my instability, my lack of confidence, having learned over the years, through trial and error how to fail without too much damage.

There is something in learning to stand akin to the American Indian who went into the battle and staked himself to the ground, a powerful message to his adversaries this was where he was making his stand, was prepared to die for what he believed. Yet it also acknowledged hisfear, acceptance of his fallen nature, the human propensity to cave at the critical moment.

Life is a constant invitation to stake oneself to the ground, committing not be moved, to live in integrity, to be married faithfully, to love my wife and treat her with respect, to walk humbly with my God.

I still run from so many things, so many commitments I have not yet made, so many ways I am still learning how to stand.

The Immigration Debate

I’m getting tired of the immigration debate. First off, unless you’re pure bread American Indian you come from immigrant stock. And even they came over that lanbd bridge.

As for the Mexicans, a third of this country, from Texas all the way up to Oregon used to be a Mexican province or state or something called Aztlan. Some of the right wingers out there claim there is a plot of flooding those states with illegal Mexicans in order to annex it back to Mexico. Some of those right wingers want to annex Texas and Oklahoma so maybe they ought to put them selves on there list of people out to destroy the country.

So everybody fess up. We have to quit pointing fingers. We all got skeletons in the immigration closet. You people who have grandmothers who don’t know how to speak the language, know who I’m talking about.

And some body ought to do something about those people on 18th street; along with all the other Mexicans in the eastern two thirds of the country before they figure out they missed the boat to Aztlan, so to speak.

Oh, and I got a beef with Polish carpenters. Some of them are really good carpenters so some of them have been getting hired instead of me... I mean instead of Americans. I think we need to change this whole supply and demand thing, you know, you do a good job and you get paid a good wage. It’s clearly not working. I mean how many Americans are out of work because we treat these immigrants like people. Putting them in shitty neighborhoods and letting them kill each other off isn’t any more efficient than it’s been for any of the other foreigners we’ve let in. Eventually they become assimilated and then sometimes it’s almost imposable to tell them apart from the real Americans.

Take the clue from Arizona. It’s time to quit pussy footing around and fortify our borders, and start checking people a little too swarthy or shifty-eyed. We’ve got plenty of our own poor huddled masses we can’t to get rid of. We don’t need any more from someplace else. Let’s tear that foreign statue down and replace it with one of our own pointing back out to sea.

And don’t forget to clean out your own closet.

Memories

One time there was the screech of tires on pavement and then that unmistakable crunch. It was loud. I followed the sound. I was small, still in short pants, but with a little ribbed dago’t. I’d run a little, then walk, then run a little more. It took me forever to get there. The ambulances were gone. The cars were there. They were under a viaduct.

One was a big, boxy Buick, or Oldsmobile maybe? There was a dent in front, enough to crack the radiator and leak it to the gutter. I can’t remember the color the fluid was back then, but I remember it dripping from underneath the car. It didn’t seem all that much damage to me. It was back a car length from the other car, a little sports car it had hit head on.

I was fascinated by the way the front end was folded up and over the back of the little convertible. It seemed impossible to me the two car were in the same accident. The big one was barely damaged. The little sports car was completely destroyed. There was glass everywhere aroud it and inside on the seats. Only the taillights were still intact. Everything else was broken. I remember squinting through my glasses, crooked on my face, seeing my shattered image, like a Picasso painting in the side view mirror.

In the back seat were a decapitated armless doll without any clothes on and a crumpled magazine. On the passenger side floorboard was a scrap of a woman’s blouse in a pool of blood.

I told all my friends about it, described in detail the small V dent in front grill of the bigger car, how it almost looked like it was just parked. I told over and over how the little car looked like it had been in a different accident and there wasn’t a piece of glass on it that wasn’t broken except for the back tail lights. I told the way the car was folded over on itself like a U on its side.
I left out the scrap of blouse it the blood.

I can still see it. It was a white, silky material, a few folds up above the watery blood. I remember staring at it for a long time, how my eyes kept coming back to it, how it stayed with me afterwards like the firemen and the dead cats with the maggots crawling out of their eye sockets and nose. It’s the same way, if I want to, I can “look” and see a taught mooring line with the water drops squeezed out and dancing, and the line breaking, folding back through the air, striking like a monstrous snake, lifting a sailor off the deck of a tug and slamming him into the steel bulkhead behind him.

There’s a lot back on Peoria street to remember and sometimes it’s hard to look, to see Pete’s bloody head, to here Trixie’s toenails on a warn linoleum floor, to remember the sickly sweet smell of the plastic’s factory. You get the good with the bad I guess, like a tray of fresh baked long johns cooling in a window sill of the bakery, rosting potatoes in a campfire pretending to be hobos one night in the back corner of the truck lot with my cousin Wayne and his friend Angelo, or Old Pete coming down the street with puppies in his pockets.

I Guess

It has just occurred to me I may be living in a constant state of fret, at least while I’m writing. It’s a low level worrying. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It’s probably more accurate to say I live in this fretfulness when the subject of writing is anywhere near.

I know I worry about the right word. The problem is I believe words, at their best, are inaccurate symbols. For object, words can get pretty close; there is a certain agreement about what objects are called. For instance, we can all agree what a square box is, but anything beyond the most basic description becomes problematic. A heavy square box or a big square box dark square box opens things of to the matter of subjectivity, if I know what that means, if you think it means the same thing as I do, the words heavy, big, and dark are subject to the experience of the person reading the word.

An Olympic power lifter, and my wife, Jackie would have different opinions and experience with the word heavy, and probably also with the word big. They could have similar thought around the word dark, though you never can tell. Context helps as neither one probably would not think the box had dark thought.

So worrying about the right word is one thing. Another is fretting about whether anyone will care. Some of this goes back to childhood and is just dysfunctional nonsense, hoping people like me and all that stuff I’ve made a great deal of progress living behind. Some of it is legitimate. I’m by far not the best speller in the world a spell check helps, but knowing how to spell is better. I do know there are dictionaries, but I am a creative guy and my ability to misspell a word is legend. Some times I give up because I can’t find them. For those of you with a similar affliction there is a little book put out by Random House called THE BAD SPELLER’S DICTIONARY.

Then there’s vocabulary. Mine’s not bad, but it’s not the best either. I know the general rule is to write as simply and clearly as you can and I try not to use ten-dollar words, but sometimes when you’re trying to talk about complex things or you need to make subtle differences, you pay what you have to pay.

And then, whenever I talk writing, it’s like I’m talking about it for the first time, waiting to hear what come out of my mouth to see if I still agree with after I’ve said it. Come to think of it, that’s true whenever I talk. Sounds like I’m still afraid of saying the wrong thing, I guess.

mm

Truck Lot Boys And Hula-Hoops

We were truck lot boys. We played often in the cinder covered lot across the street where they parked semi trailers, backed up a against railroad ties. The trailers were parked in the form of a U bordered by Pumpilio’s garage on Huron, the elebvated Soo Line, the furniture factory, where they made office desks, and the brick two flat where Yudock lived on the first floor and Angelo on the second.

Next to the two-flat was a four-foot deep ditch littler with rubble from another brick building and years of accumulated trash and broken glass from half pints. There was room to walk between the ditch and the trailers. The trailers stopped just beyond the house. The ditch opened to the lower, grass sparse back lots behind the two-flats on that side of the street.

Behind the first two flat just down the slope was a little shed with the fifty-gallon drum where Yudock’s Mother chopped scrap wood. The grassy area ran fifty yards to the back of a furniture factory. Back in the corner of the truck lot by the factory, a two bay viaduct led to the street on the other side of the Soo Line.

There was also room to walk between Pumpilio’s high brick wall and the back end of the semis, a secret canyon path we often took through the truck lot when we were up to no good, we didn’t want to be seen, or were looking for a trailer that’s been broken into. One time we found one full of hula-hoops, the regular size, and the smaller. They appeared on the street gradually at first, a kid from the block here, one there.

“Where did you get that?” parents asked.

“I found it in the truck lot.” Technically true. We were little Catholic kids, skilled at bending the truth, leaving out details that would only complicate. Besides, it was a poor industrial neighborhood. Certain items, end tables, couches, console stereos, sometime “fell off the truck” and ended up in our living rooms.

The hula hoops, green, purple, orange, multi colored, multiplied, one little girl spinning three around her waist, another topping her, adding small ones around the arms. Pretty soon it became a contest to see who could spin the most at once, ten fifteen kids out, spinning as many or more hula hoops, some with so many going you could barely see the kid doing the spinning.

We became inventive. We played hula-hoop toss. We chased each other and used them a lassos. We swung each other around with them. We cut them apart, tied them in knots, used them as ropes and whips. We grew bored with them.

Pieces of them started to appear everywhere, in the gutter and gang ways, on the sidewalks and the truck lot to be run over by the semis, ground into the cinders until everywhere you looked were tiny little pieces of plastic mixed in, returned to the truck from where they came.

Old Pete

Old Pete lived at the bottom of the cinder pile across form Pumpilio’s garage on Huron. He lived in a hot and stuffy six by six, tin roofed shack smelling of dog, body odor, and smoke. His cot, with a moth eaten green wool army blanket hanging to the floor, took up the wall opposite the door. Sitting on the cot, Pete, forever needing a shave, lifted a flap of blanket revealing Trixie in a bed of rags suckling a litter of still blind, snuffling and mewing pups. “You can’t hold one yet,” he said is his wreak of a voice. He dropped the blanket. “Still too young. Maybe next time, after their eyes open.”

The tin plate of stew my mother gave me sat in front of him on a small round wooden barrel next to his butcher knife. He ate the stew with a big spoon he gripped like a hammer. We each had a battered tin cup he got from a medicine cabinet with no door tacked to the wall.

He had poured me water from a ceramic moonshine jug he kept on the floor next to the barrel. He drank coffee he heated on top of a little potbellied stove in the corner. Tin stove pipe ran out and up the side of his shack capped with tin, belching an occasional puff of smoke like a shack in a cartoon. He held his hot tin cup with an old wool sock.

He shoveled his stew in his mouth like there was someone looking over his shoulder. He talked with his mouth full, shoving food back in his mouth with his fingers stained with grime.

“Your, ma’s a good cook. Good woman. You listen to what she tells you. You hear.” I nodded. My seat was a metal milk crate turned on its side with an old towel for a cushion. Between swallows, Pete huffed to get a breath in. “Sure ya do. You listen to your ma. You’re a good boy. She’s learning you right. You’re lucky. You tell’er I said so. Old Pete.” He sopped up the gravy with a chunk of crusty Italian bread, sucking his finger clean one by one. “Old Pete,” he said again, looking off somewhere. “Been a long time. Poor old woman. You’re old man?”

His tone of voice turned colder. It scared me when he got angry. “He don’t hit you none? You tell Old Pete. That weren’t right. Old Pete knows. He knows how t’take care a things, too.” He wiped his mouth with the soiled sleeve of his overcoat, swallowed the rest of his coffee in a gulp.

“You get out of here now. Pete don’t want no more company. You gonna cry now? Go on. Git.” He grabbed his bottle of gin. I got up and hurried out the door. It was almost dark. I ran a little way and stopped to look back. He stood in his doorway gripping his gin by the bottle's neck. In his other hand was the tin plate. “Think this is?” he yelled. He pointed at me with the gin. “Git.” He threw the tin plate after me. "Think I got time t'mess with the likes a you?"

This was before the Old Polack hit him in the head with the baseball bat and he turned mean.

Alchemy

Alchemy

So, what to blog today? I’ll start writing and see what comes out. It’s how I deal with writers block, as I believe there is no such thing or at least I believe what Ralph Keyes says in “The Courage To Write”. It’s plain fear. It may be a different fear for some, but it’s fear.

For me, when I don’t want to start hitting the keys at all, it’s the fear that I’m about to write something stupid that I have no business sharing with the rest of the world. If you got it into your head to write me back to say this proves that my fears were accurate, then I’d like to thank you for proving me wrong as it at least exposes you as an ignorant person with no literary sensibilities or knowledge as to what actually goes into writing.

I suppose the next fear is that I’ll say something offensive, like calling some one and ignorant SOB, causing me to self censor myself like I did, because, getting down to the real fear, the cliché of all fears, I fear that I’ll expose myself, like some literary flasher, reveling the writer has no real words, that I’m just a fraud and a pretender and I have not faced up to the fact that all those people of yesteryear were right and I am just a dumb, scared little shit who needs to get out of the way, shut up, and stop bothering people.

This kind of thing just pisses me off these days, makes me fighting mad and the way I fight is by punching one key after another, building word upon word into coherence, thoughts others can identify with and then we can become allies in the great war, fire great salvos against those who tell little kids they’re stupid or don’t matter or nobody cares what the hell they have to say.

We can stand up together and shout, flood the world with our words, proclaim these kids matter, they’re important, they can survive and flourish. We are proof and witnesses that their pain can be summoned and crafted and turned into turned to something else.

So all you naysayers out there keep it up. You may destroy some of us with your belittling comments about our worth, but some of us survive. Some of us are alchemist. We take the lead weight of your words of destruction and write them into gold.

Peoria Street Memories

Peoria Street Memories

Sam Weller, an old classmate and Current Author and Writing instructor at Columbia College, has proposed on Facebook a 500 word a day writing regimen towards a novel for the summer. It’s supposed to start on May 17 and go through August. I don’t know about a novel or writing on Sundays, but I’m starting now and I’m writing about Peoria Street in the early to mid 50’s where I lived. It will be a fantastic exercise and exploration of material I’ve only dabbled in.

Whatever material comes out of there, it will be very gritty and bottom-end working class. It was a block of immigrants, hillbillies, and a lot of relatives in a very industrial neighbor hood. One of my friend’s mother was unwed and of dubious background, possibly a hooker. I lived in the shadow of a shoe factory, across from a big cinder covered truck lot. Across Huron was a big cinder pile guarded by a alcoholic we called Old Pete, who liver in a six by six shack with his always pregnant mutt Trixie. At the other end of the block was a scrap metal yard and just beyond that was a big ditch that would become the Eisenhower Expressway.

There’s a lot of stories from back then and it will be very interesting to see what comes up, how much I’ll remember when I start looking at it. Like right now I can see Youdoc’s mother, a big boned polish immigrant with a babushka and peasant clothes, out behind their flat next to Pumpilio’s truck lot. She standing before an empty, over turned fifty-gallon drum swinging a hand axe with both hands and chopping wood on top the drum.

Byron’s older brother Robert, tall, thin, half Puerto Rican, maybe twelve years old, comes running at her. “Hit my Little brother,” he shouts, swinging at her. She drops the axe and grabs her broom, standing her ground to fend him off with the straw end, yelling back at him in Polish. “How do you like? How do you like it?” Robert grabs the broom and yanks it from her and starts swatting at her, chasing her around the drum. She’s covering the back of her head, blubbering now, and flees to her flat. Robert throws the broom at the door. He comes back to the drum and snatches up the axe as a trophy. “I’ll take that.”

Sometime after that a bunch of us were sitting on old car tires we used to push and roll for fun. Youdoc was sitting on one and I didn’t have one. He got up and left and I sat on the tire he was sitting on. He came back and told me to get off his tire. I told him he had left it and now it’s mine. He left again and then came back with an old mop handle and whacked me in the side. I grabbed the stick from him and chased him home. I found a paper bag and filled it full of dog shit and rocks and threw it through his front window.

About five years ago I learned Youdoc was a Jewish name. It was somewhere about 1958 when I threw the bag of shit through their window.

As Sure As Hell

Yesterday was discouraging as far as my shoulder getting better. Maybe I was already discouraged from Thursday when I went for a doctor's evaluation to determine if I’m eligible for disability. The doctor examining me said I’d hear in a few weeks. We need the income, but I’m not looking forward to being officially classified as disabled.

And then working out the other day I think I pulled a muscle in my back, trying with both arms to lift all of sixty pounds over my head on a biangular shoulder press. If the right shoulder is getting better, it is a very slow process. I’ve got an appointment with my occupational therapist to look at my shoulder to see if it's getting better.

I might have a rotator cuff tear. If I do, it means an operation, which they won’t do until July because they don’t want to take me off aspirin, which I’m taking as a blood thinner to prevent another stroke. They said an operation would take the shoulder out for six months. This would reduce me to typing with my left hand, at least for a while. A whole new level of hunt and peck.

I have my moments of discouragement. I don’t know how people with out faith get through things like this. I said discouragement and not depression. Depression is a state of hopelessness. I spent much of my life depressed, hoping to get through it without it sucking much more than it already did. It’s a bad place to live.

I’ve been rather amazed at my reaction to having a stroke. I've felt all the things you would imagine, especially during the first three days when I got progressively worse and the head neurologist started using words an phrases like major stroke, paralysis, and possible ongoing event. These are not heartening terms. On the forth day I stopped getting worse. After about a week I was very excited when I moved my big toe. What amazed me through it all, I was never without hope, even on that forth day when I told my wife, Jackie, maybe I might not get any better.

We both are people of strong faith. Life gives tests. Jackie has MS. She is familiar with life’s tests. Strange as it may seem, all through the events surrounding my stroke, along with the fear and discouragement, tears and anger, there has also been an excitement about what is to come. My wife and I believe in a God of restoration. I have been profoundly broken and with all the shitty stuff that goes along with that, I am looking forward to who I will be when my God puts me back together. I don’t know what that will look like and the fear of moving into that unknown is not insignificant.

In the old days, before my God called and took hold of me, along with the depression, I lived with a soul deadening boredom of the monotony of self-loathing. Now I definitely still need improvement, but I sure as hell aint bored anymore.

Cat Got His Tongue

I am a deeply flawed man. I would like to be more outgoing than I am, able to say with my mouth the things I can say on the page, but I don’t have the luxury of time when I’m talking. When I’m writing I am allowed to think before I speak, my hesitation and clunkiness appear as only tiny spaces between the words. My gruffness of manner is only visible when I want it to be.

On the page I can be deliberately vulnerable, and when I miss-speak, which is often, I can delete. I can rewrite for the proper amount of tenderness.

When I was younger I often would say nothing. I ran possible scenarios of speech through my head, rejecting one after another as flawed, stupid, bothersome, and not close enough to what I was trying to say. After long years I have learned to shut that off, allowing myself speech, a voice. It is that censor I probably fear the most, still hear it’s incessant voice telling me to shut up less I say the wrong thing.

I would like to be a more complete person than the one I am. I would like to appear tender to my wife, to speak freely of intimate things, person to person. I never learned how to do this. I was taught instead my thoughts and feelings were beside the point.

The page is the only door to the cage I’ve found, or if you buy the God thing, I was given. Over time I learn little by little to open my mouth. I once taught someone how to cry, to open their mouth and let out inarticulate sound, the groan to deep for words. That, I am good at. It’s the words that stick in my throat.

Woe Is Me

In November of last year I traded in a Harley Davidson 883 Sportster for a Root beer Softail Custom. I had a sissy bar, bags, and a windshield put on. It’s got two miles on it and was in winter storage at the Harley dealer in Glenview. It’s still there.

As I mentioned I was at Lake Como on a writing project over the weekend. Pete and I called our buddy Dave and asked him if he would consider coming out so we could pick his brain, as he is familiar with our subject matter. Not only was he willing to meet us but he said he’d buy us lunch if we met him at the Starbucks in down town Lake Geneva. It was a very nice sunny day. We ate at Egg Harbor on Main Street. I had this Italian chicken sandwich with artichoke hearts, tomato and something else. It was very good, which is, for those of you who have known me for a while, an amazing thing.

But the reason I bring up Main street in Lake Geneva is because it was filled with the unmistakable rumble of Harleys going by every time I blinked, Sporsters and Fat Bobs and Dyna Glides, Street Glides, Road Kings, and of course, Softail Customs, all of them trying to pull my eyeballs out of their sockets.

Why, you ask? Why, if I have my very own Harley, why was I watching other people on there’s. Why am I not right now getting ready to ride on this soon to be sunny, eighty-degree day? Are you ready for the sad part of the story?

Last Thursday I went to Hines VA, on Roosevelt road. I’ve been going to Jessie Brown in Chicago, but Hines is where they do a driver evaluation to find out if a person can drive after he’s had a stroke, lets say. I passed my evaluation. I can drive a car. The Secretary of State was informed. There was nothing legal about my driving restriction. It was the doctor’s recommendation. It was explained it’s more precautionary. Like say I have an accident and I’m getting sued and they look in my records that it was recommended by my doctors that I not drive.
Well I’ve been officially cleared to drive a car now. My Doctor also recommended I not drive the bike until July.

I just called Glenview Harley. They said there wouldn’t be any problem leaving my bike there until July, except for the fact I cannot ride it.

Woe is me.

Chance Of Showers

I am recovering from a hard, emotionally draining, very good productive four-day weekend at a cottage in Lake Como, Wisconsin, four miles from Lake Geneva. I feel very privileged that a friend of mine has asked me to collaborate in a writing project that we expect to take, hope to take, three months to finish. I don’t want to give away too much what it’s about, but it’s about how a bunch of really screwed up people do life together. It’s something I’m very curious about, considering I’m a very screwed up person trying to figure out how to do life. There seems to be a shortage of useful manuals and the ones I do find are often very cryptic to me.

Not that we’re going to write one. Were writing fiction. We’ve spent the weekend coming up with some screw up people and there stories that got them screwed up and their motivations for screwing up some more. Then we had one of them screw up real bad and we started putting the rest of them in the same room to see what would happen. This would be all fun and games if we weren’t serious about what we’re doing, but since we are and we want to make our character believable we have to use are own screwed-upness to inform our characters and how they react to each other.

My recent stroke was help. It turns out that having a stroke effects your emotions and my stroke has brought my emotions very close to the surface. We were using me as a barometer to gauge the emotional truth of our characters reactions to the situations we put them in. The more I cried, the closer we were getting to the truth, sort of. We did quite well if you willing to trust our barometer.

So now we got a really messed up situation we’ve started bringing them to one two or three at a time, each one throwing there mess into the mix. Then we’ve got one of them to tell it all who is either the most screwed up or the least, but his particular brand of being screwed up makes him very reliable to tell what is going on in the place we put them.

If you know anything about writing characters you know you become emotionally attached to them and they don’t always do what you want them to do. They surprise the shit out of you sometimes and when they get hurt it tends to hurt you.
All this to say and warn you if we run into each other over the next three months or so and me eyes are red or I’m crying my eyes out, you don’t have to worry. It just means I’ve been writing.

Getting My Hands Dirty

I was down in the shop yesterday. I can sweep. I started cleaning up and putting thing a way. I lasted about an hour and a half and I now have a cordless drill shelf. I think I have eight or so. The fairly new little Milwaukee with the chuck is around $160 but well worth it. If your not a pro you can get away with something cheaper, but that’s what you’ll be doing, getting away with it. Pretty much, in power tools, you get what you pay for and if you’re a pro, buying top of the line is cheaper in the long run.

One of the problems with my shop is it’s too small. Usually I have a fair amount of tools “on the job.” I put this in quotes because that might mean it’s some one I work for regularly and my tools are there for an extended period of time. I had a potable table saw, among other things, for over a year. Transporting tools are the bane of a carpenter’s existence. Well, okay, maybe it’s busted up and cut knuckles and fingers. But hauling tools is up there along with bumping your head and skinning you shins and can be a real bitch. So I’ve got duplicates and triplicates. Now, with the stroke, there is no “on the job.” And I’ve been at this for quite a long time.

Over the years I’ve acquired specialty tools, you’d be surprised with the number of tool I’ve acquired over the years. I’ve already mention clamps else ware. You can never have enough. In construction, you can never have enough of a lot of things. Besides those cordless drills I have, I have six or eight corded drills, and there’s more I can still use. Like I said, I’ve been at this for a long time so I know how to get away with out them, but having them, when I go back to work that is, will make my life a lot easier and more efficient.

All this to say, I have a lot of tools, almost none of them are light, and they’re all in my shop. Don’t get me wrong. I have a decent size shop. I can push a full sheet of plywood through my table saw, but it is in my basement. I built a library down there. I started cleaning and organizing. I barely made a dent. Still, it was good getting down there again and getting my hand dirty. They’re the best they’ve looked in years.

The Not Yet

This Easter, as with every Easter, I find myself in desperate need of resurrection, with the added metaphor of having had a stroke three months ago today. They tell me in three more months I’ll have an indication of, after having had my life pulled out from under me, how much of it I’m going to get back. So I’m living through a little scaled down version of the now and the not yet, the position of every believer. I’ve seen some resurrection, but have not yet arrived at the fullness of my recovery.

It is, to say the least, disconcerting to live in the the not yet portion of my stroke. To put it bluntly, my right arm doesn’t work right and I’m doing good to lift five pounds over me head. Right now I am living with the feeling of having no identity. I used to be a carpenter. Right now, true or not, that seems impossible to me and I look ahead not knowing what the future holds. Tomorrow I’m planning on going down to my shop and start by cleaning up. It’s pretty much in a time warp down there, frozen on January fourth. I don’t even know if I can handle sweeping, if the pressure of pushing the broom across the floor will be too much for my shoulder.

Yes, I know, I am a child of God. However I have just as much confidence in my ability to clean up my life as I have in my ability to clean up my shop. “Who will set me free from the body of this death.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Hear we start a new paragraph, a new thought. Unlike not knowing what my recovery from my stroke will be like three months from now, I know though faith what my recovery will be like from my body of sin and death. Through faith, with the help and by the power of the Holy Spirit, I make my way through the now towards the fulfillment of the promise of the not yet. I live in the tension between death and life, moving toward life everlasting through faith that two thousand and some odd years ago the stone rolled away and an empty tomb was revealed.

Happy Easter.

Easter

Easter is coming. Resurrection. This is the Gospel, the good news. He is risen. He is Lord.

They used to proclaim the gospel when a new Caesar came to power with the same words: He is lord. The good news was the empire had a king. Legionnaires went thought out the empire with the gospel that the new Caesar was Lord. It didn’t matter if you believed it or not, the legionnaires were prepared to prove it at the point of a spear.

We proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord with the belief it doesn’t make much difference to His Lordship weather it is believed or not. I admit it is a foolish idea if you’ve not had personal experience with Him. I can’t give you proof He exist
Any more than I can give you proof the sun will come up tomorrow. I believe both things by faith. I have seen the sun come up day after day for almost sixty years now and I make the reasonable leap of faith it will do so tomorrow.

In the same way, over the years I have seen the Godhead manifest Him self or Them selves, some of it very mysterious and I make no claim to understand any more than a very small portion. Anyway, I have seen the Godhead manifested an astounding number of ways and times in the lives of fellow believers, my own life, the lives of those around me, and in the world where I live. From this I make the reasonable leap of faith and proclaim the Gospel that Jesus is Lord.

The difference with the gospel of the ancient Romans and the upstart counterpart and followers of The Way, and Christians of today if they understand the great commission they are called to, is that proving the Gospel at the point of a spear is done in direct opposition to the Gospel of Christ. Jesus said,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are downtrodden,
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

And so it is. Amen.

A Conspiracy Of Fear

I guess I think people don’t get along good enough to hatch a grand conspiracy. What’s the track record for sustaining a secret over a long period of time? The idea there are puppet masters pulling the strings makes sense as fiction but the problem is, real life doesn’t make sense. In Fiction you need cause and effect, a leading to b leading to c. Real life doesn’t work that way. Real life follows Murphy’s Law. You know; if any thing can go wrong it will.

This is one of the things the novel WAR AND PEACE is about, all the variables it is impossible to take into consideration.
Take 9-11. The make the claim this is an inside job. Who would have to be in on this? Anybody that has to do with monitoring the skies on the east coast, air traffic controllers, civilian and military and eyes on the ground, all the people who had anything to do with the films, the people who launched the supposed missiles and their support structure, The cell phone people who over heard the calls from flight 93, Osama and the jihad’s over seas and their families, Whatever chain of command and logistics over here involved in plotting and carrying out the covert operation. And all these people would have to be willing to take out the World Trade Center, take a swipe at the Pentagon, and bungle the flight 93 part, and all of these people would have to keep it quiet before, during, and after, not a peep. What are the odds?

But that’s just part of the conspiracy we are expected to believe. It’s a plot to turn us into a police state, put us in concentration camps, and they’ve got the microchips waiting to be injected. And bankers control it all; you know what that’s code for, don’t you? And it goes back years, tens, hundreds, thousands, in depends on whom you talk to.

Now, get this. It’s been kept secret all these years, except from these guys, and they have proof, documentation, eyewitnesses, affidavits. They have all this proof. They brought it to every one they can think of, congressmen, senators, law enforcement, the media, and not one of them has examined the evidence, and said, "Holy shit. We have to do something, I know some people we can trust.” The reason people don’t do this, because all of them are either in on it or too scared to buck the system. This is the most unsupportable link in there argument.

Humans as a whole are notoriously corrupt and unable to get along over extended periods of time, but as individuals we can rise above ourselves and put others before us. The first responders, who ran into the WTC, argue against them, Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Steve Biko argue against them. The thousands fighting in Afghanistan, the police and firemen who risk their lives every day argue against them. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner argue against them. Morris Dees argues against them.

They rail against the politics of fear and they are its worst offenders and finest practitioners and their own fear has led them to construct a boogeyman for adults. Hide under your beds if you must. Most of us are called to something greater than to live in a conspiracy of fear.

Zealots

2000 years ago, there were many players on the stage leading to the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. Among them were the Roman overloads and their lackeys, the priests, Pharisees and scribes, the mob, zealots, the disciples, and the Christ.

The zealots dreamed of the coming Messiah riding at the head of an army driving the Romans out of Jerusalem, and reining in there place. What they mostly did was attack people whom they considered sympathizers to the Romans, in other words they attacked those they claimed to be fighting for, much the way modern terrorist routinely attack what they consider soft targets. Some scholars believe Judas, a zealot, betrayed Jesus in an attempt to force Him to start this final war.

It is sad the Hutaree, the so called Christian militia making news this last week, did not learn the lesson Judas offers them. Evan if everything their paranoia led them to believe is true; they still chose Judas as a model for their actions. Evan if they plotted to kill no one, they still advocated buying guns for the coming battle and taught themselves to kill. Give them every benefit of the doubt and they still betray Christ and give fuel to all who would discredit Him. They ignore the command “Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.” Eph 6:10,
And the admonition, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” Eph 6:12a.

Repent, you zealots, turn from your own fear and fear and trust in the Lord. It is the beginning of wisdom for you.

Thou Shall Not Lie

In the eighties I lived in a little town in Wisconsin about sixty miles north of Madison. I used to go to this dinner on highway 51 to drink coffee where in the corner James Wickstrom used to sit, holding court, recruiting for the Posse Comitatus, a pre cursor of the militia patriot movement.

They believed in the threat of a New World Order led by a cabal of the usual suspects, bankers, and politicians, the U.N. They held that all federal authority was in cahoots with, or were at least unwitting goons controlled by the cabal and therefore enemies of the people, i.e. the Posse and like-minded individuals. They called on all God fearing patriots to rise up against this insidious plot. They particularly didn’t like the DNR (Department of Natural Resources) and judges, particularly the ones that their members came up against in a court of law and found them guilty of various crimes, or the ones that had a liberal civil rights record or pro DNR rulings.

I remember a mimeographed flyer in particular showing a judge lynched from a light pole and something about citizens rising up in righteous indignation. The Posse also had connections with some group called The Order, if I recall, advocating the use of black people as farm animals and killing Jews out right. The thing that all these New World Order nut jobs had in common was the belief in the Jewish bankers behind it all.

Do I have to say it? These Hutaree people are whacked. God does not call anyone to arm themselves for the coming end times.
Thou Shall Not Kill. There are no exceptions made in the command. There is no arming one’s self just in case God changes his mind. Plea self defense, plea anything you want, but it is not a Christian act to arm oneself with assault rifles and practice killing in the name of God.

Please, beloved, do not be silent about this, about some one on Facebook playing lip service to the idea that this is God fearing, that the idea of a Jewish cabal behind the destruction of the World Trade Center is anything less than racism, that it was an inside job is anything less than right wing paranoid propaganda. God does not call us to shoot abortion doctors or excuse people who do. We are not called to vilify our political opponents. Quit listening to these blow hard radio people who exhibit the opposite of Christian values. Baring false witness is sin. Spreading unfounded propaganda is baring false witness.

You who call yourselves spiritual, leaders of the church, or at least your congregations, call sin a sin, be a light in the darkness, do not listen to false prophets and say nothing.

Happy Birthday Julie

Today’s blog is dedicated to Julie, my fabulous occupational therapist who heals people and makes them smile at the Jessie Brown VA on Damen, with out which my fingers would not be able to negotiate these keys allowing me to write a coherent sentence. She is an angle, though if she’s wearing a disguise, I can’t tell, although she might be dressed as a flower child from the sixties.

Happy birthday Julie from a great big fan.

Being Civil

In an unprecedented move, Christians from both sides of the isle signed a document pledging civility towards one another. They further agreed not to disparage each other with lies and innuendo.

The admonition to “love one another” was brought to their attention by its stark absence in the health care debate. “That’s right,” said one surprised follower of Christ. “We’re supposed to be nice to each other, aren’t we?”

With the mention of Glen Beck, a prominent Mormon and commentator, it was disclosed mister Beck is outside the pale and therefore not covered by the Civility Covenant, allowing him to be disparaged with impunity.

In an opposing argument some well-known Christian leaders sighted The Almighty’s wraths and judgment over blatant sin.

"Look what happened to Haiti and Godless New Orleans. “If you love me, you will obey my word.” They said, quoting such prominent personalities as Charles Manson and David Koresh. “It’s a passing fad. I’m sure in due time we’ll return to the fundamentally rigid views of our past. This notion of tolerance of views in opposition to the right ones has got to stop.”

Calling

So, I haven’t written in the blog for days and now I’m getting guilty and that just makes things more difficult. I start thinking I’m somehow betraying somebody or myself because I feel this supposed to vibe.

Of course it’s me giving it out, maybe all the time, thinking there’s always something I’m supposed to be doing that I’m not. The problem is I think that’s accurate, that there’s always some call I’m not heeding, always some lack in myself. Understandable seeing I am a finite being and woefully incapable of understanding everything and, to my way of thinking, it’s kind of silly to think I’m not screwing something up, proceeding with not enough information down a path with a fork in the road every time I blink.

I mean, isn’t it true? I face countless decisions every day, probably most of which I don’t even take the time to notice I’ve decided anything at all, doing things because that’s the way I do them, living life with a mostly unconscious, barely examined, or even acknowledged pride in my own way of thinking.

I am a man, after all. I’ve been around the block more then a few times and have gained a certain amount of street smarts, some bit of gut instinct that, in all honesty, has helped out quite a bit over the years. However, the statement falls apart if examined even a little bit. We do not use the words we use by accident. They have meaning beyond our intended discourse. To use a literary term, we are unreliable narrators of our own stories, leavening unintended clues behind often disclosing the opposite of what we claim. This phrase, “I’ve been around the block a few times,” used to convey a wider understanding then that of the average Joe, totally misses the fact “Been around the block” is a uniquely individual and local event and fails to acknowledge the wider world I have not been around. It doesn’t matter how big the block is, it’s still just my block lived in isolation. The truth is, everything I know is suspect.

The truth is I will never have enough information, will never run out of things I’m supposed to be doing, there will always be something I’m called to that I haven’t started yet, always a place to go He will show me.

That’s a good thing. It would be kind of boring otherwise, don’t you think?

A Wing And A Prayer

I’m trying everything I can think of, including this blog, to find a freelance writing gig. Professionally, I have no experience. I have been writing for over thirty years, have a degree, had a few thing published. And now here I am, flying on a wing and a prayer.

In my experience with life and spiritual things, God likes sudden death overtimes. He likes to wait until the last moment before He sends in the reinforcements. I hope that’s not what He’s waiting for. I hope more He’s not giving me over into the hands of the Philistines, another thing He has been known to do. The trouble with delusion is, you’re deluded and you don’t recognize it.

That’s also the trouble with being human. We are finite creature trying to decide the right thing to do with only a tiny fraction of the facts. We delude ourselves, sighting our supposedly big brains and reason and science and our five senses into believing we can figure at least some of life out. We think since we know that one and one make two we can jump to the conclusion that one thing and another thing make something we can define categorically, systematically naming its parts and catalogue it and write every thing in a book so we can tell ourselves we have the facts, inconvertible truth that we know what we’re talking about.

The difference between people of faith and those not making the claim is not that people of faith don’t claim to know, but that we make it with the knowledge our claim is suspect, that there is something greater out there than us we hope is good or at least benign. If we understand at all we try and live with the idea it is only in part that we know and there is far more mystery than understanding.

So I don’t know. Maybe I was given time to write. Maybe I’m just taking it because I can’t figure out anything else to do? I’m taking it on faith that all things work together for good for those in Christ Jesus. I don’t get to know before hand. Sometimes I don’t get to know after. Frankly I don’t always have enough information to recognize the good if it did happen.

I think if you’re honest with yourself, neither do you. How many times in your life have things you thought sucked turned out to be the best thing ever. I think living by faith is part of the human condition and we only get to choose what we have faith in.

So I'm open for employment, having faith I've at least demonstrated my talent for creative problem solving and writing a coherent sentence.

Process Talk

I’m editing a first draft of a typical first week aboard a SSBN. I think that stands for submarine ship ballistic nuclear.
I’m doing a lot of slashing and burning, which is probably good. I don’t want it to bog things down but I need to let the audience in on how things are done and where thing are, give them a general overview of sub life so later on it doesn’t distract from what’s going on.

It’s been a very long process writing this novel and it’s kind of a relief seeing an end in sight. I’ve been working on it maybe ten years, off and on. Life and work kept getting in the way.

It started out as a first person thing. I was thinking Moby Dick. The first line was even, “Call me Paradise.” And I started out following Melville’s movement. I didn’t follow it close, but I thought about Moby Dick all the time. It’s still there floating around somewhere in my brain when I work on this, which might be the same thing as saying, when I’m awake. I don’t think my book would have been possible with out it. So, thanks, Herman.

I got 198 type-written, double space, 12 point pages before I decided it had to be third person. For one thing Danny Paradise couldn’t get the parts right when he got too drunk. There were also forces working behind the scenes that I wanted to comment on Danny knew nothing about. Danny is little more than a kid grappling with issues far beyond him and from his point of view he is just stumbling through. First person was too confining for the story I’m trying to tell.

I started over at the beginning. No cutting and pasting. I had the first person draft, which I had spent time polishing, at my side, but I retyped every word. Switching to third person opened the novel up far beyond Danny's ability to describe or comprehend. I think it will make for a better, weightier novel. Hopefully you will be able to tell me some day in the not to distant future.

Out And About

Last night was the first night I went out by myself since the stroke. Sunday my wife dropped me off at the story week events on Lincoln Ave, but all I had to do was cross the street and Patricia McNair drove me home so that doesn’t count. Last night my wife Jackie dropped me off at the Brown Line stop on Belmont and I took the el to see Joyce Carol Oates, who is a funny lady.

It started at six. She read a piece of fiction based on the rape of a friend, adding that the friend was okay with the story. She talked a lot about her process. It gave me hope when she talked about a fragment she kept glancing at over the years eventually becoming a novella, I believe. There was a novel inspired by Jon Benet Ramsey where she changed her into a little ice skater and a novel spurred on by thinking about OJ’s kids. It was reveling how her life and thought pushed her art.

The event was held at the Harold Washington Library. It’s a gorgeous place with a lot of marble and granite and escalators. I’ve developed a phobia for going down on an escalator. It’s not severe. Going up isn’t as bad as going down. The first time I had to go down one was at the Barns and Nobel at Webster Place. I went up to the second floor to get Steven King’s ON WRITING. It’s pretty good. He doesn’t pull any punches.

Anyway, I’m at the top of the escalator looking down, way down. The metal stair teeth are hurtling toward the bottom, grinding whatever it is they grind beneath them. Fresh out of the hospital with my new cane I watch the stairs one after another spinning by. I screwed up my courage and there at the top I fidgeted. I hemmed and hawed. I let an older woman go in front to me. I stuck out my foot, made my timing judgment, and took the plunge. I rode those stairs like an incompetent skier looking for something at the bottom to stop me after the stairs spit me out. I survived. I felt pretty good about myself when I took the escalator down to the auditorium to see Joyce Carol Oates.

One of the thing you might not know about a stroke is it messes with you going to the john. One side of the muscles you use doesn’t work right so you can never quite get it all out. You wind up going to the bathroom a lot. After Joyce, I had to go to the bathroom. It was on the third floor.

Before I go on, I want to tell whose ever asinine idea it was not to put a john on every floor has effectively barred my wife and who knows how many other people with disabilities from using the public library, so I hope you feel real good about your self and someday come to some form of repentance for your narcissistic ways.

So I got to the third floor.

“It right over there next to the elevators.” The third floor is as low as the elevators go. “They’re cleaning them right now. You have to go to the fourth floor. They’re in the same place, right above the other ones.”

Four floors of escalators. On the way down I didn’t have to let anyone go in front of me, but then again, there wasn’t all that many people using the escalators.

Out side it was dark. I made it back to Belmont fine. I walked east on Belmont feeling weak and vulnerable. I got a double-tall latte at the Starbucks on Clark, and then I went and caught the grad reading at the Schoolhouse. They’ve changed it since I used to read poetry there, years ago. Some time back then I might have known Achy Obejas as a fellow poet reading around town, at the Mill, or Weeds, or Estelle’s.

The grad reading started at 9:30, my usual bedtime these days. Chris Deguire drove me home. I hope I spelled his name right.

Rehab

Rehabilitation is a bit fat pain in the butt, but you got to do what you got to do because if you don’t you don’t get to do much of anything.
Right now I’m trying to achieve lying flat on my back. The first step is getting to the floor. It seems I don’t remember how I used to get down. All you wise guys that are snickering and thinking to yourselves that I never really knew how in the first place, point taken. But you know that’s not what I’m talking about that.
I’m going through a paradigm shift, physically, mentally, and spiritually - a complete reworking of how I used to do things, how I used to be, how I made myself manifest in the world. That I had to relearn how to walk and talk is an indication that the work is starting back at the basics and what’s coming for me is a new way of being.
It’s a bit daunting, realizing it’s still early on in the process. I realize I’m making a fantastic recovery from what the head neurologist at the VA called a major stroke. I also have a long way to go. I don’t know how people without faith do it. It would terrify me if I had to do this alone.
Don’t get me wrong. I am overjoyed and thankful to have a strong community behind me. But if that was all I had, I think that would scare me more than doing it by myself. No offence. It’s that we humans don’t have a really good track record for pulling together for an altruistic cause. So I’m really grateful for a God that is, above all, loving and good. It also helps that He’s big enough and bad enough to do what He wants.
So even though I’ve got a long road ahead of me, and I don’t know where He’s taking me, you wise guys better watch out. On the other end of this I’m going to teach you a thing or two about how to get down. I know you know what I’m talking about.

Coloring Outside The Lines

My old English teachers still mess with me, especially when reinforced by somebody’s good intentions, a person who thinks writing is all about being proper and following the rules.

It’s a hard thing to struggle against. We are raised in a culture where rules are important, where you get rewarded for following them: good grades, good schools, good jobs. If you keep to the straight and narrow, you got your path laid out in front of you: career, marriage with 2.5 kids, vacations, retire to Arizona, a European cruise, reasonable health care. It’s a life with no adventure.

It’s a life with no faith. Nobody in a rule driven life can go to a place they are yet to be shown. That’s not being careful. You cannot be careful and move into the unknown at the same time. Faith is a risky business.

So is writing. Real writing is putting words on the page one at a time, not knowing where you will end up. It is a courageous act of discovery not suited to the faint of heart. You have to be willing to break a few rules, get your page a little messy, be unafraid not to clean it up too much you take all the gristle and bone out of it.

If you do it right, what you will write is a living thing, going where it wants to go. You might have a leash on it, but there aint no choker and the better it is the bigger dog you got hold of following its nose. You got to put your trust in something besides yourself and what you know about writing. You got to trust it knows where it wants to go.

It’s just like faith when you put your trust in something bigger than you are and trust where He’s leading you. It’s not about right and wrong. It’s about who you are and where you’re going. There are times when you need to ignore those old teachers and not be afraid to color outside the lines.

Take Your Best Shot

I feel like I’ve gotten the rest of me back, the part I laid aside when making a living and providing for family became a priority. I squeezed in writing when I could, which was not often.

It’s odd that along with the stroke I’ve gotten the gift of time. I’m writing six plus hours a day. It’s not been much over a month that I’ve been doing it. I feel like I’ve still got a bit of rust to shake off. But I don’t know how to say how good this feels. Time to write. I’ve been dreaming about it, praying for years. I thought maybe when I retire. Maybe?

Now here it is, the shot I’ve always said I wanted. I feel very blessed. I think most people, for one reason or another, don’t get their shot. I guess I think most people don’t get as far as dreaming about a shot they would like to get. And here I am early into it.

Another thing I think most people don’t get is to know if they had the shot, would they take it? And having taken their shot, did they make it?

Well, I’m in the process of taking it. I know that much. But to carry it through, that’s another question. Back when I was going to Columbia College, near the end of the school year, I read SONNY’S BLUES by James Baldwin. My reaction to it, besides it being a fantastic story was “Holy Shit.” It was my first clear realization of how hard I was going to have to work if I wanted to write the way I wanted to write. I didn’t know if I wanted to work that hard and I didn’t right at all that summer. I went back to school in the fall and in my naiveté, I answered yes.

It’s maybe fifteen years later and here I am In front of that question again. I have to answer it every day. I’m always surprised how closely writing, for me anyway, parallels my faith. I am not so naive anymore. It’s the same question but I hear it a little differently now. If I want to write to the standard I want to write, am I willing to work that hard whether I make it as a writer or not?

I’ve got my shot. I’m going to take it. It’s a faith thing. I don’t get to know in advance. But, whatever happens, I’ll know I took the shot. I can live with that.

Interesting Times

My stroke fully manifested itself in three days affecting my right side. I am right handed. Along with the surrounding muscle my not insignificant bicep, I was after all a construction worker, turned into jelly and sloshed down to the under side of my forearm. After that, if I concentrated real hard, I could make my arm twitch. It lay at my side my hand curled into a fist.

I started to get movement back quickly. After a couple of days I could open my hand and my elbow started to work again. My upper arm, however, did not want to move. It eventually started to move with a lot of pain.

The thing is, one of the curious things about strokes is there is no pain associated with them. In me a small part of my brain died were working nerve connections had pathways that I used to tell different muscles what to do. The stroke, more or less, bulldozed those paths and I had to learn new ones.

There was a complication which explains the pain. Apparently I have an old rotator cuff injury. I’ve had trouble sleeping for over a year due to pain in my right shoulder. While I was still working, I was using the shoulder, keeping it moving. When I had the stroke, it stopped moving. It had time to freeze up.

I’m moving it now but I’m limited in my range of motion because of pain and that is interfering with me making those new pathways. It amazes me now how weak it is. It’s almost nine weeks after the stroke. I go to Bally’s three times a week. I’m working on the arm, but it’s slow going. I’m using the different machines to help strengthen the right side of my body. Everything is progressing really well, strength and movement wise, except the shoulder. With most of the shoulder machines, I can’t reach the handle. The one that I can reach, if I use it with the least weight possible and I start it out with my left hand, I can push it up about eight or nine times.

I got a cortisone shot about two weeks ago. It was supposed to help. I complained after a week it wasn’t helping very much. The orthopedic doctor told me to give it three weeks. It will be two weeks on Monday. At first they said it would maybe take a couple days to work.

They also said I might have a rotator cuff tare. That could mean surgery. Surgery means going off aspirin. They won’t let me do that for another four months. The usual test for a cuff tare is loss of strength. They can’t tell that because of the stroke. So I guess were waiting for the cortisone shot to officially not work and then they can schedule the much more expensive MRI to determine if I have the tare, in which case they can do something about it July.

So, just another reason that the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” is no longer my favorite.

Sucking Up To Health Care

I’m having trouble making up my mind about the health care debate and it occurs to me the reason is: I don’t know whom to trust. Maybe I should rephrase that. I am afraid to trust any of them.

It’s the divide down the isle. They seem to have fortified it with trenches and barbed wire and a machinegun nest. Middle ground is a no-man’s-land where everybody dies.

Think about it. The Republicans disagree with everything the democrat’s say and visa-versa. There is no give and take. According to each side the other side is a bunch of imbeciles waiting to drag the country down to the gutter given half a chance. They accuse each other of being self-serving narcissist with only their own interest at heart.

I can’t help but wonder if they really believe anything their saying or if they’re all just trying to keep their paycheck coming. It seems they traded serving their constituents for pandering to them.

Some of the issues are hard to figure out, granted. But Canada has figured out how to sell us drugs cheaper than we can get them here. There are countries that give their citizens decent health care at a reasonable cost. It may not be great or the best, but it’s decent. I have to tell you, decent health care is better than health care that sucks. Right now we have health care that sucks. You don’t have to pass the mother of all health care bills. Please stop trying. Please stop painting your opponents in the worst possible light so you get a good sound bite on the boob tube, though I’m beginning to think you all belong there.

If you want to look good and get reelected do the whole country and yourselves a favor. Suck it up and work together.

Books Win

I went to a round table discussion last night about the Internet and the future of publishing. One of the main questions is online publication killing print. It seems I’ve heard this all my life; nobody reads anymore.
The idea that books, I mean pages between too covers, will ever die out, is absurd to me. I myself am a case in point.
I started reading comic books, Superman and Archie. I still remember my earliest notions of lust directed toward Betty and Veronica. Then came Mad Magazine and Weird Tales and the like. Finally by first real book, The Illustrated Man.
The problem was, I was a working class kid. Reading was all well and good, but eventually you had to go to work.
“Okay, come on, now,” my dad said. “Put down that nonsense.”
Then there was grade school. “In the third grade I wrote a poem for a class assignment. I remember in it I took exception to that poem about little boys being made out of snail and puppy dog tails. My beef was yes, but so much more. Apparently my teacher was quite charmed with it.
One day in class she mentioned in class how one of the poems our classmates wrote was very good and she decided to blind side me by having me read it in front of class. Shy kid that I was, this was horrifying. I read it to the twitters of my friends. Mind you this was the fifties and they all razzed me for the nice little faggy poem I wrote. I don’t remember the teacher ever encouraging me to write another.
About that time my spelling abilities went the way of the dinosaurs and from then through high school failed attempts at spelling were all that was brought to the attention of the class by my English teachers. Reading became this secret, somewhat shameful thing I did.
I think It all changed with 1984, the book, not the year. I found someone I could identify with, like me, reading in secret. After that I didn’t care. I had survived childhood by becoming a non-conformist. I started to read in earnest. I’ve been reading ever since.
I write and read against all odds. I started writing in 1973; bad love poems about a co-worker at the North Suburban postal facility in River Grove, Illinois. I haven’t stopped yet.
So I’m not worried about our culture killing books. It brought all it forces against one working class kid and tried to kill the idea of reading and writing.
Books won because the good ones give us a place to go that the powers that be cannot touch and they have no weapon against.