The Dog Needs His Meds

Or at least that seems to be the reason the Ignorant Slut can't go into an in-patient program. Her dog is medicated for hyperactivity: clearly a job only our heroine can perform. Something like that. Also, she fears that rehab won't let her stay on methadone. Oh, wait. You didn't know she was on methadone? Neither did anyone else, until now that she mentions it. That explains everything, right?

Well, no. You start to wonder if there's a drug she isn't stuffing down her gullet. You start to wonder how she's getting hold of all these drugs. Do her friends let her use their bathrooms? Have they counted the contents of their pill bottles lately?

Does this sound alarmingly like a (bad) soap opera? Wouldn't you turn it off, after an incredulous 3 minutes or so? Why should real life imitate a soap opera,which isn't even art?

I think she knows she could lose custody, even partial custody, if she doesn't get rid of the drugs. She has apparently started playing the blame game with the kids: it's their fault they were so scared when she was passed out and unresponsive that they called 911 and she wound up in the ER and now she can't see them without supervision. Nice.

It's possible that she was just bored with daily life. She definitely is a drama queen. The divorce proceedings have been over for almost a year. She hasn't been working for a whole lot longer than that, in order to maximize the support my son pays. So she has no forum except the kids and her friends. Some people might have taken up bungee jumping or learned Swahili. Fists full of prescription drugs? How very last year!

One Shoe Dropping

No news is not necessarily good news. Especially when you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. Where do we find the Ignorant Slut, Queen of Unreality, today? Has she docilely agreed to enter an in-patient drug rehab facility, the best her insurance - thoughtfully provided by her ex, no doubt - will allow? Does that mean she'll get to swap lies with Lindsay Lohan and Rob Lowe? Next step, mentions by Perez Hilton! Wouldn't that be fun?

Not really. Whatever else we want or don't want, everyone wants to see the IS coping again. So, much rides on what happens right now. Maybe. Maybe only if you're a linear thinker, as I am. She is a fabulist. Always has been. It is entirely possible she will convince all the medical/psych personnel that she's got the thing knocked, that those four ODs were only an accident and absolutely will never happen again. That of course she's capable of detoxing by herself, while taking care of the boys. And it'll all be downhill from there.

The kids have been protecting her for quite awhile, it now appears. There is no doubt that they know how to do that and will continue, if that's their situation. The IS has her family so buffaloed that they would probably sink back into their fearful lassitude. Court proceedings are probably the only answer, but not a good one.

Sigh.

Screaming in the Wind

And the beat goes on. The more I think about it, the angrier I am that no one in that lovely little, fog-bound town, no one in that dessicated family found a way to let my son know things were spinning out of control in the lives of his kids.

Did the neighbors, the IS's family not notice? Did they notice and think she had flu or PMS or not enough protein for breakfast? I mean, please! What is the responsibility quotient? What about the fact that the IS was driving places, often with children in her vehicle? Would they have hesitated to sue her if their own children had been hurt or killed by her drug-infused driving decisions? These silent, complicit enablers: will they let their kids go to the senior prom in cars driven by drunks? Will they avoid talking about the perils of attention afflicted people behind the wheels of cars because ignoring the issue will mean it doesn't exist? Come on!

And one step further. What do you want for your own kids, you friends of the abuser? Shouldn't the kids at least have a chance at not having to keep such heavy secrets? Shouldn't someone have at least called the Dad, if not Child Protective Services? Isn't the point of having children to raise them into healthy, functioning, responsible people? Because, if all it's about is making you - the parent - look good, hang it up, folks. Let someone raise the sprouts who loves them and will truly protect them.

End of rant, for now. I'm not done being pissed off.

Not The Last Chapter

OK, yes, I did refer to her as the Ignorant Slut. I was not kind in my assessment of her raging monomania. Did I wish her ill? Yes, but only in an intellectual sort of way: that she would come to realize the prodigious wrong she had done her sons and their father and would regret it, maybe even apologize.

Instead, she's apparently become an out-of-control prescription drug abuser. And has overdosed four times in the last month. Most recently - the second time in two weeks that she's been taken to the Emergency Hospital - Child Protective Services got involved, made an unannounced home visit, found the boys in the house, her on the couch inarticulate, unable to stand. The boys told the social worker this was one of their Mom's better days. She could open her eyes.

She and the kids live in a lovely, bucolic little beach town, south of Santa Cruz. People in town knew she was slipping over the edge. Kids were teasing the boys at school about their mother being a drug addict. Finally, one of the dads called my son: "I know this'll get me in a whole lot of trouble but you should know. . ." And now, both the IS and the man's wife are not speaking to him. Takes a village to raise a child? Not that village, thanks anyway.

No, I wouldn't have wished this on her, despite her high position on my least favorite persons list. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. And I am appalled at the idea that on any given, nothing much day, the boys could come home from school and find their mother dead on the couch. Where do you go from there? How does anyone stay safe?

Eclipse of The Heart

While I was washing dishes a few minutes ago, and paying special attention to the thumb nail that is partially torn, about half way down, and now held together by some exotic combination of fake nail and clear polish, I suddenly had a little epiphany and now I think I understand how the Ignorant Slut (IS), also known as XDIL, rationalizes her behavior. Assuming, of course, that she feels any need for a rationale. . .

Goes like this: she did not want him to go to medical school. Not clear what she did want him to do, probably more along the lines of Physical Therapist or Personal Trainer. She really, really didn't want him to go to medical school and made that very clear. They went to counseling. She held her line. He told her there were two things in his life that he loved: her and medicine.

Folks, she's not a good loser. Losing has never been part of her plan. Her sister could talk about that at extraordinary length. She had to realized that he wasn't going to give up on her or on med school. So, she made it as hard as she could. Hated Syracuse so wouldn't travel there to see him, causing him to be the frequent flier. Said she'd move to LA if he got accepted as a transfer student - thought she was safe because they take almost no transfers. But they took him. She reneged. At some point, during the LA part of the story, he threw his wedding ring off a freeway overpass. Later that same year, he asked his sister to design a ring for the IS. Gold and diamonds. Done and done. He tried and tried to keep on loving her.

Long intro to a short theory. My new conclusion: IS thinks she's justified in hijacking almost all the money my son earns and continuing to estrange the kids from their father because he went to med school and she didn't want him to, so now he has to pay for it. There's a little piece in there about how he's supposed to love her, regardless, and was never supposed to leave her and he did stop loving her and did leave her and so there's heavy dues to pay for that.

Well, just as long as there are reasons, huh?

In Praise of E-Cards

Today, April 13, is my younger grandson's 13th birthday. As is my custom, I have sent him a mildly funny e-card. Period.

This particular manner of acknowledging the grandson birthdays came into use when I realized they weren't getting the real paper cards, money enclosed. Or, if they were getting them, they were instructed not to respond. Or to burn the cards, unread. Or to rip them into tiny pieces of confetti and bury them in the dark of the moon. Who knows what method of disposal that person who makes their decisions for them favors?

As most of us have come to realize, e-cards rock because you get to find out whether the recipient (or some ignorant slut acting on his behalf) opens the card. Don't waste money on betting whether my grandsons open their cards. They don't.

Do I have correct e-mail addresses for them? Who knows? If I send a regular e-mail, I don't get one of those HaHa Sucker, you lose messages. So, somebody has those addresses.

So, he's 13. Soon he will be a bar mitzvah boy - er, become a man (Man?) and therefore be held accountable for his actions. Really? as my friend with the Vishla named Monster, for her cyst-covered body and her relentless Notice Me! attitude, would say, with just that you-are-such-an-idiot sneer in the mix. There is no mitzvah about any of this, including that his religious maturation happens to coincide with Passover. Why is this different from any other rite of passage?

A Life In Ten Lines

Turned out to be a good process, obit writing. Sooz's kid didn't much care for my noun-driven description of his Mom, so he was thereby motivated to write his own description, amended and fleshed out by Sooz's main art friend, back around to me and we did it! Proud of ourselves, I hope. Doesn't bring her back but keeps her close.

She isn't coming back, that's the hard part. All that fight to survive, to beat the damn cancer, and now there's an empty space where she used to be in residence. A bleak and sterile kitchen. A lonely cat. A house stripped of valuables so, if it gets burgled, all that's there is outdated computers. Ain't that a paradigm for modern life?

Oh and does everybody know that you pay for obits? Pay a lot, unless you are a newsworthy personage. $16 bucks a 30 character line, for our main local paper, the Chron. 30 characters is about seven words. Keep that in mind as you compose.

How Does It End?

Time to write an obituary for my friend Sooz. Even though the papers charge for it, it seems important to get the word out, to get the damn word out when someone you know had juice, had moxie, had issues, had breath, dies. But every time I tried over the past two days, my mind boinged away from it, like hitting a trampoline. Even though I wrote a romance novel about her once, which she and I are the only people that ever read. Even though I love to write.

Ever tried to write an obit? I tried to talk my Mom into writing her own, a few years before she died. She didn't go for it. Thinking about dying was involved, somehow, and she wasn't going there.

My mom wanted to die in her sleep. Translation: I'd say she probably wanted to have had a lyrical day, visits from the great-grand kids and their parents, a fond, familial meal with rare roast beef, artichokes, a splash of wine, chocolate for dessert, witty conversation, and then off to dreamland. Forever. Instead, she got a bladder infection, was briefly hospitalized and then just slept more and more, breath rattling, head back, antibiotics and Ensure percolating and then, after too agonizingly long, she stopped breathing.

And then there was the rest of it. Living after she was gone. Why didn't I ever tell her how valuable she was to me? How much I, just as much as she, depended on our daily 4:30 p.m. phone calls? How nice it had been to be so approved of when I was a coltish, gawky adolescent? How imbued I am with her sense of style, even though, in later years, she gave in to polyester pants? How hard is it to let go of stuff that your parent no longer remembers?

Fine, stop dissembling. I tried, earlier today. I came up with nouns to describe my dear, dead friend: Advocate. Optimist. Fighter - but then I changed it to Warrior, which says it better.

Dylan Thomas said "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" and that is exactly what my friend Sooz did, right up to the time when she just couldn't, anymore.

Not Even

My best friend died yesterday morning. She has been dying by inches, visibly, for the past six months. Well, the last five years, really, but there were hiatuses in the first years. Times when her hair grew back - mouse brown instead of graying blonde, straighter than a stick, but kind of elfin and cute. Times when she gained some weight back onto her 5'9" frame: got back up to 130 lbs and regained a butt. Bought flattering new pants. Time when she went back to work, but that didn't last long. Times she could eat at mealtime and wash her food down with a luscious glass of wine.

The last time she tried radiation/chemo, to try to reduce the new lump in her chest, she had to wear a mask during the radiation app. It made her claustrophobic, so they gave her Atavan or Valium or something, to take the edge off the panic. And then they burned her chest, so severely that it took months to heal. And the tumor grew, began blocking her esophagus. She had trouble swallowing, trouble breathing.

Earlier in this obscene parts harvest, she'd lost a portion of her intestines. That time, the radiation scarred the area such that her intestines couldn't be reconnected and she was left with a colostomy bag. Late last summer, because of the swallowing difficulty after the latest radiation scarring, the doctor inserted a feeding tube. In December, when the swallowing of mucous began choking her and her breathing was gurgles and gasps, she was given a tracheotomy. Only there was too much scarring in her chest for the insertion to take place where it ordinarily would. As a result, the placement was precarious and could potentially fall out.

All she wanted to do was go home to her cat and her own bed. Home she went, with 24/7 nursing care, machines that rattled, rumbled, hissed and sighed, non-stop, to keep her breathing. The cat wouldn't come into the room where the machines lurked. She couldn't get comfortable in her bed, even with a donut cushion to sit on and a ton of pillows for back and side and neck support. Because of the tracheotomy, she could no longer talk. Increasingly, writing her requests and comments tired her.

The first time the trach tube fell out, 911 was called and she was transported to the hospital, where the tube was reinserted. The second time, her son was called and he came over, found her flat and unresponsive, reinserted the tube and brought her back to consciousness. That was the day she told him she wanted to die. The third time the trach tube came out, she'd chosen her 4:30 a.m. time well and had managed to slough off this mortal coil before anyone could snatch her back.

I don't believe she's gone, yet. I don't know what to do without her.

Pay To Play, Play To WIN

There never was a way to describe the triumph of absolute chaos before Charlie S gave us "Winning!" I hope we are appropriately grateful. We will certainly never forget him and will continue to fervently hope that he is not awarded a Nobel prize for a T-shirt motto.
So, the Adonis Martian bombed in Detroit, home of the world's largest used bookstore. People booed! Then they voted with their feet! The next night, in Chicago, audience members were clearly given some financial incentive to applaud and to stay for the show, in no particular order. And it was an expletive-laden bonanza for anyone with a penchant for (slightly monotonous) expletives.
Somebody described persistent use of the F-word, in each and all of its forms (verb, noun, adjective), as the spewings of over-the-hill hipsters striving to remain hip. Ya think?
Can you imagine what it must be like inside the Charlie head? How many voices are screaming directions at him and all he hears is blah, blah. Where is Gary Larsen when we need him the most?
Meanwhile, radiation seeps into the ocean, gets into the food chain. Bombs detonate and scatter other poisons into the air supply. We hate people who don't believe the same thing we do. If I, in perfectly good faith, believe I am what I eat and therefore subsist on lollipops, do I have to hate you for thinking you can eat seaweed without becoming seaweed? And so what if we are both a) right and b) wrong?
What if WINNING just isn't that important? What if you choose not to participate in team or competitive sports and get a lot of joy out of your in-line skates? What if my sport of choice is pogo stick? Do people who aren't passionately attached to winning have a home on this planet anymore?

Win Win

Back in the dim distant 90's, my pal Sooz and I used to share office space with a very ambitious person. Sneaky ambitious: she married a union organizer and volunteered her legal service to various non-profits catering to indigents. But they were the Right organizations, kinamean? Not right wing. Right as in correct. Vetted. Membership puts you on the road to greater gain. Someday this woman will be a Judge or Commissioner, but only for long enough to be able to retire as a rent-a-judge, making a lot more money. And still get a pension.

Am I sounding cynical? The Lawyers' Monthly mag did an article about her awhile back, praising her heart of gold. That's gotta be worth something.

Along with her pricey family law services, she was able to offer mediation. She had taken a course or two or three. She had a lot of respect for rules and there were lots of them in place during her mediations. Like anything else, it worked if people let it. She was a big proponent of win/win situations, so she said.

At some point during our tenancy in the building she owned, she asked if we wanted to share the cost of an expensive new family law service for computer. We agreed: we had seen a demonstration and, even though it looked clunky and complicated, it updated regularly, bringing all the new case law to our very desk tops. Well, not exactly.

Heart O' Gold had the only computer with enough memory to install this massive program. For awhile, her computer sat in our tiny library/conference area but then she moved it to the basement, to a new space she had created in an area not accessible from upstairs. To go there meant making a request and her facilitating it. To stay there and work meant feeling her waiting for you to finish and leave. Since it was cold and damp in the basement, there was no incentive to linger. I think I used the program once, for long enough to realize I would need to sit with it and play with it a lot before it became familiar and useful.

Then Heart O' Gold decided to sell the building and gave us a few months to find space to move into. Then we stopped paying for the program we weren't able to use. then she took us to small claims court and won. We lost. At no point was there a compromise offer, though she did offer to let us have - finally - the disks, which were out of date.Somehow, I didn't wind up feeling like a winner.