I remember driving through Missouri River bottomlands on the Yankton Sioux reservation on the summer solstice. Dusk faded slowly and the air was full of fireflies as the sun took forever to set. We stopped by a bridge to get our bearings, reading the map by the last rays of sunlight. Somewhere past 9:30 it was finally nighttime and we slunk through Nebraska on the south side of the river in the dark, the air fragrant with loam and alfalfa and slow water.
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Oops.
Undrinking problem
I remember the time a doctor told me I was an alcoholic. But I barely drink, I said. He gave me a look. Denial, he said, was part of my problem. But doctor, I scarcely drink. When I go out to I’ll have a drink or two, and just every once in a while at home. I barely qualify as a social drinker. I’m writing you a referral for our alcoholism counseling service, he said. But I’m not a drunk I said again. It will be OK, he said.
A friend asked if I went to the counseling. No, I said, I’m not an alcoholic. I barely drink. You didn’t go to the AA meetings? Of course not. But this is Hollywood, he said. A former drinking buddy of his met David Bowie that way. I don’t care, I said, I’m not going to go to AA meetings. It’s your life, he said.
Last night
Got asked for the zillionth time last night how we’ve been married forever. Well, I said, it’s been thirty eight years of me mansplaining to an Indian who’s not gonna listen to a white man no matter what. Fyl laughed. The earnest questioner was as bewildered as before. Maybe you think about it too much Fyl marriedsplained, and the tenor player began a gorgeous, perfect Skylark, Fyl closing her eyes as jazz love filled the room.
January 6
Today’s the day that all the Eastern Orthodox kids had their second Christmas. That’s all I knew about the Great Schism when I was a kid, that the Greek kids down the street got two Christmases and the Irish kids just got one. Anyway, Merry Christmas, Greek kids.
Xmas free again
The pad is utterly Xmas free again. Every year there is a Christmas explosion that fills the house, and then just as suddenly it reverse explodes back onto the closet shelf, all of it but the tree (which goes wherever sacrificed trees go), a crazed Christmas party’s worth of stuff reboxed with an inherited Germanic efficiency that my Irish half observes with lazy poetry.
Evolutionary dead end
Apparently if you slip your phone into your shirt pocket without shutting it down and then forget about it for a couple hours strange things happen. I’d retreated to the bar and between songs odd sounds were emanating from somewhere. I paid them no mind as I hang out in weird bars. As the bartendress did not seem especially interested in the story of life I reached for my phone to admire myself in my blog–I used to be so clever–when I realized it was on and the odd sounds I’d been hearing were from an enthusiastic Filipino/Filipina shemale thoroughly bespattered with DNA that had reached its evolutionary dead end. Imagine my surprise. Just as several women descended on me for drunken New Year’s Eve’s Eve hugs I managed to shut that particular window, and noticed between hugs and slurred Happy New Year’s that there were a dozen windows open on my phone screen, all safe for work, one of which, somehow, was my Hotmail spam folder, and either blind chance or fate managed to pop open the email titled “Hot Philipeno shemale!!!” and activate the link. Hence the odd sounds emanating from my shirt pocket. I never look at my Hotmail spam folder, and a good thing too, as it was full of videos of doomed DNA. I deleted its contents, ignoring the metaphor, then closed all the open windows, turned the phone off and thought safe, sweet analog thoughts the rest of the night.
Whew.
How bored we will be.
I’m really beginning to miss my CD player. This steampunk vinyl and just plain embarrassing cassette revival I’ve been living is getting old, and everything downloaded on the computer just gets dull, it’s so easy, an omen of how bored we will all be when computers and machines do everything for us, even posting things like this without any missteaks.
Weird times
Epilepsy snuck up on me a couple weeks ago and left the brain kinda beat up and wiped out. I probably wrote about that. I was writing about everything. Not a neurologically safe thing to do, writing. Gets everything all worked up, spitting sparks, burning up dendrites in a flash like singed hairs. You can tell the next couple days that things were damaged. You’re slower, and suddenly can’t remember things that you remembered fine the day before. So I’m avoiding writing for a few days, letting damage control reconnect what neurons are still in working order. There’s less each time. Not drooling yet, though, or saying inappropriate things. I was totally weirded out by groceries, however. Weird times. Well, they’re always weird times for spazzes. But weird times out there in the real world too. Fire and fury, the pretty news ladies were all saying, fire and fury, fire and fury. I sat on the couch watching the chatter for hours. At some point I reached my limit. Enough of the fire and fury already, I said. So I changed channels but there was Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire and bashing it to smithereens in a psychedelic fury.
Saint Valentine, oh Saint Valentine.
Smell the roses
It was a helluva decade, my fifties, some of the greatest ups in my life and some of the scariest lows. As it wore on, epilepsy inevitably began to dominate, the damage of a lifetime, and memory evaporated, and executive functions, and finally the ability to hold a job and even write articles. If you’re epileptic you know it’s gonna happen, you just hope it waits till later, much later, but it happens early, too early. Hell, it was giving me huge problems in my late forties, just when my life’s ups were becoming so up. I just hid it well, so I could keep working and getting writing gigs and not look like a spaced out fuck up. One of those.
But the real downside is the financial cost. You have no idea how expensive epilepsy is. Between the cost of medication and finance charges incurred taking out loans to buy the damn medicine–I couldn’t function without it, couldn’t drive, would be scary–it has cost us $40,000 in three years. And that was just for the medicine. Figure in the loss of income this past five years and the total cost gets into the hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. She’s already disabled. Still, we went from being a successful hard working middle class couple, completely self-made, to having little more than a roof over our heads and epilepsy incurred debts that suck up every loose penny. And you can’t get disability for epilepsy unless it is incredibly severe…and I’m not, I’ve just got a lifetime of damage that leaves me about as useful as a burnt out computer. You can’t get any assistance at all. No relief on utilities. No nothing. It’s just like being a normal person, except I can’t work.
So we enter our sixties flat broke but with a roof over our head. Rent control is such a blessing. But otherwise we have no idea what will happen next. The last decade was a series of surprises. You get fatalistic. I never was before. I am now. You just expect the worst and when it comes you shrug and deal with it, if you can. Though neither of us have the brain capacity anymore to deal with much of it. We just blink and wonder what to do.
Still, she just came back from the store with a steak and a six pack of beer and a bouquet of freshly picked flowers from the hillside, and there’s a mess of vegetables of all kinds from SuperKing and we’re going to have one helluva birthday feast. Life is good. I mean life is fucked up, even doomed, but it’s good, and we both take it a day at a time and stop and smell the roses.
Let them eat kaczyzm
Let them eat cake, in Polish, and the moment you realize your obsession with linguistics seems just weird on Twitter:
Cool…dig “kaczyzm”, borrowed from English with a complex Old Slavic inflection, in this case I believe the singular neuter instrumental? https://t.co/C1E4q91KRf
— Brick Wahl (@brickwahl1) March 30, 2017
Brick Wahl 