Blowholes and Blowhards | roughy d 2

Yesterday's post has me wanting to explain the use of the word "retarded" and why I felt comfortable using it. It's here where I should talk about my father, and how he's inadvertently made it OK. You see, both he and myself could be considered emotionally retarded, and I say that with great comfort, and without once wincing over offending anyone, because anyone considered developmentally disabled who's more honest with their emotions makes anyone of a fuller capacity seem just plain, well, truly limited.

My dad gets dragged into this because, well, he's my dad. He dealt with shards of shattered things working their way out in random emotional outbursts. Do I know this for sure, or do I even know him all that well since I was a kid at home twenty years ago? Maybe not, but dads do leave one hell of an impression. I'd go back to a tired guy coming home, dropping his lunchbox on the counter, and just wanting to get dinner and make some headway through some bills. But only a few feet into the house he'd realize he was tracking mud, and just that tiny infraction would set him off, and I could feel his frustration shock wave throughout the house. The dogs would find their places to hide. Being one of the most sensitive humans on the planet, I'd absorb every last ripple. 

It's 3am and I can't sleep. 

I'm not going to drag my father or anyone else through this. I'll go to another place, with my mom at a stoplight in Fort Collins (and she'll not be dragged, but carried lightly on fond memory.) 

I cringe thinking back to my final months with my mother, and instead of celebrating life with the gusto of a thousand Ricky Martins, I drained my poor mom with droning on about how I wasn't doing enough with my life. Now this is possibly the last thing a mother needs who's counting on her son to take care of her. In an incessant cycle of complaint and apology, I'd remind her that my spending time with her was the best possible thing I could be doing, and then drift to some place where this white middle class kid believed he was suffering. 

So let me get literary here, or at least visual, instead of journalistic (or whatever I'm doing.) But I'm at a stoplight with this amazing woman and I've just stolen her from Poudre Valley Hospital. Stolen, yes, I took her. They'd left a hole in mom's head. It's one thing to give someone a blowhole, but another to treat me like an asshole when I tell them about it. So it was kind of personal but oh so grand when I cut down the hour drive to thirty minutes to show them the blowhole. We'd all lose in the end because they'd have to do another surgery to make sure their wasn't another infection. Still, though, they gave me the gift of empowerment: I learned that in many cases I could do better for my mom than a PhD. So after everything was sealed up again, I rolled my mother away in a wheelchair. She woke up and complained I hadn't given her anytime to tie her gown. "It's okay," I told her. "We're going to give someone else a chance." 

Swedish Hospital is only a few minutes away from our house. It would be where we'd go until the end. The finale was just over a year away. In cancer time, that would be about thousand millennium. 

It gets better.

Pro Tip: We Put the "Men" in Developmentally Stunted | roughy d 1

I have to tell women something that I hope will be comforting: if a dude is struggling with his professional life, he won't mind making everybody miserable. There's a lack-of-accomplishment thing that sails ever onward ahead of the outstretched arms of every man. Every man that cheers on football--who cherishes a spectacular catch in slo-mo and then savors the same play shared in ten episodes of the same Sports Center--is seeing what he believes success must feel like. That moment, outstretched and actually physically grasping the goal. Only if he'd tried harder in high school.

This is supposed to be a good thing for you to hear, dear female friends, because it's not you. Guys should know better than to make it seem that way but, at least in my case, there's a total system shutdown that comes with disappointment in one's self. I can hear my wife now, "Well...should I throw the football for you?" And I'd laugh because it's true. Because in that quick-witted quip I'd hear my ever-the-internal wife express in humor a hot coal burning somewhere near her distaste for mustaches and unease with large groups of women. Now granted I've made some large, presumptuous leaps here, and there's a chance I'll land like Prince Fielder trying to get back to third, but at some point it will fit. At some point you'll feel the cold, yet be able to exhale and say, "Oh, right, you're emotionally retarded."

to be cont'd.

Government Shutdown is about People, stupid

I'd like to write about my kids. The boys had a big weekend at the Mini Makers Faire in Loveland. I'd also like to write about my wife. Despite being 8 months prego she chose to rough it in the mountains so I could live out my chainsaw fantasies. But my brain is frozen in frustration. It's spinning hot about how irresponsible our elected officials (and corresponding constituents) have become.

It seems that the government was shutdown long before it closed its doors. It's riddled with right wing sociopaths who claim it's their constitutional duty to spend three years on the taxpayer's dime deconstructing what a country wants and desperately needs. And now we see hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned into what has been in the works for months. The shutdown isn't a last-minute attempt to save the country from the Bogeyman; it's been the plan, the notion behind the smirks, to hijack a democracy and subvert the will of the people.

Some of my people.

The media seems to get confused (and/or intimidated) and besiege the spectacle over the person. Even if there is a person, they'd better be a spectacle. But, in the end, this government shutdown is about people, stupid. 

I'm people. You're people, too. And it's here, in an attempt to be a savvy rhetorician, I'll invoke my dad, who was cutting down dangerous beetle kill trees before the shutdown pushed him off the national forest. He just laid off four people.

More people: Sarah's work is cutting back.

Turns out I am writing about my wife and kids.