Stimulus

10:08

I want to complain about being tired, but when I get to that point, to even whinier than usual, I have to think of my mother.  She's dead.  I'm not.  Tired is OK.  There's a line, of course, where you need therapy because you're working all the time and not sleeping because your deceased relative doesn't have the opporunitity to, but I don't think I've crossed it.  I'm not even close.  I keep myself motivated by thinking of all the plans my forty-something mother had before the last ten years of her life were dominated by brain surgeries and tubes.  I always think of the tubes.  They weren't near as prevalent as the drugs or the seizures, at least in my memory, but I think of being in a deep sleep, the kind only a hospital can put you in.  And in the mist you think of all things you'd like to do.  Your unfettered mind runs amuk with opportunity. With no kids or bills or muddy footsteps in the kitchen, you can think and dream of whatever you want.  When you emerge you're groggy and a little out of it, but after a shower you'll be ready to take on the world.  You try to get up and an alarm goes off.  One of the tubes fell out.  Here comes the nurse to put you back down again.  You're going to get a lecture on taking it easy. 

But you'll get to your life after this surgery.  After this infection.  After this grand mal.  After this misdiagnosis.  After this tumor, again. 

And then you're in the tubes. 

My mom couldn't wait to break out and do all the things she thought about doing.  She had a lot of time to think, and everyday something new she wanted to do. 

When I'm tired I see my mom's dream, and it's colorful with tubs of art supplies for the little kids she watches at the beach resort in Tahiti.  The air there has been so good for her.  Her skin has never been so beautiful.  The rich vacationers all want to take her home with them, even the French, who can't understand how they're unable to not like her. 

Her trip to the island of Moorea actually, just south of the mainland, was at first harrowing, but ultimately a breeze.  She'd have to ween herself from the Tegretol and the Lamictal.  She'd never miss the Dilantin, and she was pretty sure the anti-dementia drug she was taking was only making her dingy.  She'd imagine she'd have to suffer a seizure or two.  She had a sense of when they were coming, and would just have to find a comfortable place to flex every muscle in her body as many times as does a runner in a marathon.  But in 30 seconds.  She shuddered at the pain, but she'd had enough of the tubes. 

It was funny, she thought, how none of the nurses asked where she was going.  She'd set off the alarm trying to go the bathroom, and a nurse followed the noise to be the friendly reminder of risk, and it was then, during the conversaton with the sweet woman (overworked, too) when my mom realized she needed to look weaker than she was.  She needed to, for once, accept some help.  In doing this, the word got around that Ann in 5-4152 was pretty bad.  And time would only tell.  With the reputation of a dying woman, no one noticed she'd slipped out of the ICU and down the hall to the elevators.  It was here where she was so surprised that no one seemed to care where she was going.   This was all in retrospect because it wasn't until she looked in the reflection in the window of a parked car she saw she had all those staples in her head.  She'd pulled off her head bandage to get on her civilian top--her favorite sweatshirt--but she had neglected to think about what was underneath that. 

Later in a McDonald's bathroom, she traced across 52 staples from temple to temple and imagined it was her running halfway around the globe.  And then it was dark. 

She hadn't anticipated that one.  She twisted on the tile.  Her eyes locked at the underside of a sink.  The warmth she felt was vomit and it strung from her face to the floor.   There was a time in her life when she was a teacher, a beloved wife and friend.  The warmth then was company and the roaring wood stove that kept her and her husband's house so toasty.  Today, from a bird's-eye-view she needed to be mopped up. 

Still she has no idea how it happened.  Sometimes she attributes it to her resolve.  Her thought process had changed from survive to thrive, she thinks, and that's how she came to leaning against the counter and comforting two teenage girls who'd walked in on her.  She was just a little sick she'd tell them, while holding a wet paper towel to her forehead.  To the girls on lunch break from Fort Collins' high school, she was just cooling herself off. 

And then she'd steal.  She'd never stolen anything that she could remember, but a Navy veteran left his hat with his newspaper.  While he was getting coffee, she was out the door, a proud sailor who'd served on the USS Nimitz. 

Once she got home she needed to figure out how to get some money.  She lived in a basement apartment.  On bad days she thought it as the hole she dug with years of denial, on good days it was her hiding spot to plan her next move from a dissolved marriage.  Today was a good day, but she needed help.  She couldn't call her know-it-all son to ask how to access her savings account.  Just the lecture on how to use the Internet alone would take half the day, so she went upstairs and struck up a conversation with the college students who lived above her. 

She thought she smelled cigars or a pipe, and to her she thought she felt better because they reminded her of her uncle way back east.   It was actually marijuana.  The college kids were on their best behavior trying not to look stoned.  Not only did they help her with the computer, but they fed her, gave her a coat, and shared with her their plans to start a microbrewery where everyone was paid equally and all its required energy came from solar panels and the methane produced in the fermentation process. 

She swelled with new life.  She loved kids, and she drank up their energy.  Walking out of their apartment she thought she could hear her phone from below.  She closed her eyes and sent a lifetime of comfort to her children who by now had been notified by the hospital. 

She slept for nearly three days at a hotel.  Her brief waking hours spent planning a trip to the sun. 

Her final day in Colorado was marked with the world shrinking beneath the plane.  So too would her tumors. 

She had no plans, but she was Ann--or maybe, Baker, her middle name--and she was a hit with the guy sitting next to her.  He knew people in the South Pacific and loved her idea for an art school for vacationing kids.

She leaned back into her seat and smiled.  And tried her hardest to believe that the oxygen hadn't just slipped out of her nose. 

I am not tired. 

11:04

Everybody just needs to stop so I can catch up

It's busy.  I've been sick for two weeks.  When I'm not coughing up a continental shelf I'm working or playing.  SO, in an effort to better ourselves, a friend and I are each challenging ourselves to do something we'd rather not.  He's out meeting new people (something he's not fond of which could be the only reason he's stayed in contact) and I'm going to write for an hour.

It's 9:54.  No more Internet, I just need to start writing.  I'm overwhelmed with things to write about.  The kids--wonderful as they are they fill up a page fast, and that means I don't go much deeper than the latest potty training story.  But if I may, I just want to share a microcosm of parenthood.  It started with Quin kicking me out of the bathroom.  He goes by himself now but sometimes when it's too quiet for too long I get concerned.  Much of it is for Quin's welfare, but there is that selfish nudge from not wanting to the be the idiot parent on local news.  "Did you see this idiot?!" would be the subject line of the email that'd get passed around for years to come.  So I went to check on him and he gave me the boot.  He's two and three months and already I'm a liability.  I'm the old guy he's come to replace; I'm the obstacle to a good time.  Yet after getting kicked out of the bathroom, I peered back in to see if he could accomplish what he was trying to do: put on his pants.  Quin's a skinny kid. His pale skin and big, blonde head looked so cold on the tile floor.  He sat there on his bare bottom trying to tug one pant leg over both of his.  They were also inside out and backwards.  Yah, with both feet he was going up the ankle end of the garment.  I asked again if he needed help.  He denied me with a "Go daddy!" and scooted behind the toilet.  Who wants to be on the floor behind the toilet?  Often, when I'm peeing, I look down at those corners and think that's gotta be a good reason not to drink anymore.  How many times, too drunk to care, have you been so close to the build up of human hair and exhaust that builds in the intersection of moist porcelain and moldy wood?  Whenever I pee I'm so happy I have shoes, and I'm urine stream away from piss-splattered neglect of the space behind the toilet.

But that's where I left my son.  I walked out to Sarah with my head shaking.  I told her I didn't think he could do it.  He had--and this is an accomplishment in itself--found the point furthest from getting pants on successfully.

I sat down to some football hoping for the best, yet waiting for my hearkening.  It didn't happen.  In about the time it took a team of grown men to drive down the field and miss a field goal, my son stormed down the hallway and into the living room.  He'd gotten his pants on.  They were backwards, but he was so proud.  My heart squeezed some tears dangerously close to my eyes.  I couldn't believe it.   Quin shouted "DADDY!" and leaned his run towards my waiting embrace.  I picked him and over his shoulder betrayed the moment by mouthing to Sarah, "I can't believe it."  And then I went about over-explaining my pride to him.  It's one of those problems I have: I see a car accident, for example, and I get so excited to tell the story I work it into a mess of adjectives and undeserved hype that has busy, impatient people summarizing my story for me.  "So you saw a van hit a Camry."   Yah, but it was crazy how...and I fade realizing it really wasn't that crazy at all.  And veer towards adding a little lie, just a tiny fib, to make the event better than it really was.  "Then a woman had a baby in traffic."    But it's all unnecessary because the story would have been incredible had I just said, "I saw a van hit a Camry," because then imaginations take hold without mine doing it for them.

In this situation with Quin, I was so taken by his achievement that I wanted to make sure he knew how proud I was.  But three "prouds" in and I think he caught on that I didn't think he could do it.  It's like the old adage about celebrating a touchdown in football.  Any coach will tell you not to celebrate too much because you need to "act like you've been there before!"   Well, in my high school's case, we hadn't, so there was quite a to-do, and nearly twenty years later I thought about that as I bounced my son on my knee.

Then the mood changed.  Maybe it was my fault, maybe I'd shaken his confidence, but mere moments after our excessive pridefest, Quin asked for some of my tea.  I handed it to him and he spilled it all over his pants.  I quickly yanked them off and set my poor son back, actually all of mankind, with millions and billions of years of evolution left to crawl back behind the toilet.

I know, you're thinking "TEA!?"  It had been hot, but was nearly cold by the time I handed it to my son.  And it was less than luke warm because of Quin.  He likes tea, or at least the idea he's going to get some honey somehow, so the whole gas-heated production gets one sip before it's yet another forgotten liquid vessel.   I then get the seconds.  And that's where I can go now--with my microcosm of parenthood ending with the spill--to give Quin credit beyond his sitting naked on the bathroom floor.   Quin's got class.  He likes hot tea, prefers olives to candy and his favorite cartoon is a French-inspired vignette of an old man playing chess in the park.  I'm often holding the football waiting for someone to play with.  So he's money to be somebody important, and once he's amongst his swanky colleagues he'll have to be polite enough to only wish away his geezer dad who's telling everybody that even dashing, successful Quin puts his pants on one leg at a time.

In 9 minutes I'll be done with my hour.  It's not so much the hour of writing that's the challenge.  It's the doubting the thought process that gets me in trouble.  I thrust away at sentences but back off before I finish the line.  I stop and think of some better way, some better pronoun placement, and the stream gets backed up.  Shiny, brilliant fishies go belly up at the blockage.

I need to give my hands a turn at making the words and the sentences right.  My brain is pouring them down the pike and I just need to let them flood the page.  I've been told by more than one person to write THEN edit.  It might seem impossible, but I usually do it backwards.  (I'm suppressing a comparison to my son and his pants.)

One other challenge is communicating with Sarah.  She'd give me a year to write (well, she has, more like twelve) but I never tell her when I need the time.  I'm embarrassed.  It's weird, but even when she walks in the kitchen and she asks what I'm doing, instead of a simple, "writing" with a kiss on the forehead, I snap off a "Nothing."    I know why.  It's because I hate to be seen trying.  Forever I had it in my head that people perceived me as someone who got things right the first time.  I wished someone had long ago tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Uh, you're a dumbass."  With some hints from my wife, I figured out that I was a perfectionist.  But not the kind of perfectionist that has Edison in the history books.  I didn't want to work at anything that didn't come naturally.  SADLY, NOTHING HAS COME ALL THAT NATURALLY.   And now after years of struggling to write, Sarah seeing me at work is someone hearing the tree fall in the woods.  I've been caught trying.  The manifesto will not magically appear after all.  It will take a lot of work...a lot of doing.

That could be another reason I'm so damn proud of my son.

10:57.

Sunday

Local Baby is Scared

Like when his older brother was a baby, Otto has one face for the camera: fear.  In a past life there were snipers.

This one I can understand (below) as he has no idea what he's getting is actually a gesture of love, we think.

But here you just want to hug him.  If that would work.

But, again, it could just run in the family.

V

I’m so excited “V” is back.  Some kids won’t remember the 80s miniseries about the invading aliens but it was a defining moments of my childhood.  I don’t know what exactly it defined, other than we were very bored and easily entertained, but it left a mark.  I don’t think kids today would be all that affected by a woman swallowing a guinea pig whole, but when I saw that in 1983, I was awake for a long time wondering if the airplanes flying over were spacecraft coming to charm us before eating our pets.  

I might have just given something away, but for god’s sake it’s a network TV movie.  These are not the pantheons of surprise entertainment.  But for the Ewy kids growing up in the boonies, V was such a big deal.  We didn’t have running water.  We didn't have other kids our age for miles.  And we had one good channel: CBS.  The first TV we had was a hand-me-down from either my aunt or my grandma.  With enough precision antennae positioning we were able to make out Bo and Luke Duke of Hazzard County through the haze of television static.  It also involved my brother standing on a buck fence and a lot hollering out the window.  He’d get the aerial just right but we couldn’t both watch and yell at him fast enough to have him stop rotating.  So that meant we’d all gang up in jeers of disapproval.  Then Pete would get pissed and that kind of emotional instability wasn’t good for the steady hand needed to see if the Duke boys were going to make it.

Before the dark day when a cow would catch her hoof on the cord to the aerial, thus dragging the TV off the table and across the living room, its untimely end secured by my dad's ridiculously tightened screws, we would get a shot at seeing V. 

Well, we would have, if Pete could have reeled in a decent NBC signal.  So we had to take a family trip to the KOA Kampground to watch Earth’s demise.  Jerry and Dorothy owned the KOA, and they had great television reception.  They also had showers, and we’ve never smelled as good as the three days of V.

The 80s were the hay day for the television miniseries, but they were often low budget dramas pulling people in with the promise of “Jo from Facts of Life in her first serious role,” and Gerald McRaney.  The Civil War movie The Blue and The Gray was pretty intense, but that meant every episode was followed by a lecture from our father about how we were lucky we weren’t in a war and if he ever found out we didn’t think we were lucky he’d kill us.   There was one other miniseries I got my parents to let us stay up late and watch.  I don’t remember the title but it was about a long-shot baseball player who makes it big.  I was into it, but in the first twenty minutes the slugger and his wife bickered over their kid getting suspended for “chafing” in the bathroom at school.  My parents didn’t like my line of questioning so put us all to bed.  Which, btw, if your kids are asking about chafing, bed is the last place you should send them. 

So when V came along, it was all the buzz.  Epitomizing the hype was our bus driver, Mr. Atz, a tattooed Navy veteran who'd have all twelve of the Highway 14 route standing at the front of the bus to hear what he knew about V.  Mr. Atz had one of those early satellite dishes that blocked out the sun.  In exchange for vitamin D, he claimed he got some special channel that showed him episodes before anyone else got to see them.  He knew about the baby, yah, the lizard baby, before anyone else.  I don’t want to screw it up for you but there is a lizard baby. 

I don't think I'll watch the new V.  For one, they've extended the remake into a series instead of a "mini series".  This means they'll stretch it into a pale husk of ratings oblivion.  And since I no longer have to bathe in a bucket in the kitchen, a trip to the KOA just seems superflous at this point.

 Prepare to be horrified...

MY LORD I LOVE THESE GUYS SO MUCH BUT LOVE IS A STUPID WORD THAT REALLY MEANS NOTHING SO I HUG THEM A LOT WITH HOPES OF TRANSLATION

Q Tip of the Day: Easy Ways to Make Your Life Easy

Quin has simplified by recognizing only one possible state of existence for any one thing. 

"Quin, is that yogurt yummy?"

"No, it's mine."

Nothing can be more than the sum of its parts, which in every case adds up to one thing:  mine.  It is an interesting linguistics study.  The subject and verb shouldn't be confused with more than one object, so if something is already "mine"  then there's no room for it to be yummy or fun or even yogurt for that matter.