Former U.S. soldier droppin’ some Truth about this bullshit war in Iraq. Do your self and your conscience and your country and your fellow human beings a favor by watching this and then doing something about it.
Tag: heavy
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link roundup
Best of Craigslist: “From an Angry Soldier” – a must-read.
Songbird, a “a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up” – have not tried it yet, looks promising!
Awesome contraption a la Rube Goldberg!
Some Dayton, OH YouTube-ness. (Bonus: look for some great Brainiac live footage!)
Some things never change: what my mom’s been up to lately. (This last apparently involving something along the lines of stealing cable.) (Also i found some interesting busts from the early 90s here, including petty theft, unlawful use of property, and drug abuse.)
Information relating to the indictment (for involuntary manslaughter) of my good friend Derek Bayes, a kind and gentle fellow musician, who, according to anecdotal personal testimony, was defending himself against his girlfriend’s enraged, blind, shotgun-wielding estranged husband (or something very similar), when he accidentally choked the guy to death. According to some mutual friends, when the ambulance and police came, he was still on top of the guy and was crying when they took him away. A trumped up case, especially after the local media got ahold of it and spun it the wrong way round like the bloodthirsty vampires they are. I know Derek, and he is a harmless and sweet man with a good heart. And he’s still sitting in prison, with a couple years left on his nine-year sentence. (Don’t let his mug shot fool you, he was obviously having a very, very bad day.)
Another good friend of mine: Dee, who shares my birthday and who is yet another extraordinary kind human being who was caught up in some bad circumstances. Thankfully, Dee’s free again.
Historic South Park District in Dayton, OH (where we now live).
We’re thinking about buying the house we’re in, and this information has been pretty helpful thus far. Also, knowing more about bad mold can’t hurt!
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moving soon
We’ve rented a new place! It’s a gigantic house, with two floors plus a basement. Nine foot ceilings! It’s in pretty ratty shape, but it’s over 130 years old, so there ya go.
Of course, being a very old house means that there are probably no more than ten power outlets in the entire place. We’ll just have to stock up on power strips and try not to overdo any one outlet.
And the landlord is sooooo friendly. I certainly don’t expect anything extra from him just because we get along… it’s just so nice to actually have an interesting and friendly person as your landlord. I once worked a corporate job where the ironic in-house motto was “easy to do business with,” and this nice man seems to embody just that. And his wife is an artist! She works with oils, and does Manet Impressionism!
So, if anyone wants to help us fix the place up and move, let me know. I can’t promise reasonable reciprocation, but if you like beers or i can do anything for you, we’ll work something out.
It’s huge. I cannot state this enough. Gargantuan. Nice area, too.
And pets? Way, way allowed. Very cool.
Unfortunately, we are stuck paying rent where we’re at until mid-July. Oh well. It’ll be a little tougher for the few couple of months, but we’ll be okay. I plan on starting moving over to the new place as soon as possible, though.
I can’t wait to start recording regularly and working on guitars. I plan on eventually making it a sort of hobby business. Eventually, i want to start turning out my own custom guitars.
Also, i did get my PC back from the shop… but it still has restart/power-down issues. I can live with it. At least i can work on it without it going all wonky in the middle of anything at any time.
And… the 1-month mensiversary of my grandfather’s exit was yesterday. Foul, foul day it was. I am still heartbroken, natch.
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black hole
it’s starting to really hit me. the initial shock and numbness is done with. today is somehow different. it was already really bad for me (it’s been a deepening pit of hell for 2 1/2 years now, with the absolute worst part of it starting just two weeks ago). but now it seems even harsher somehow. i feel like i’m trying desperately to escape the immense gravity of a black hole.
it’s sinking in.
hell, i’m sinking in.
someone i knew and loved, lived with and shared experiences and conversations with for years and years… dead. gone. forever.
no more talking. no more sharing. no more gestures or hugs or ironic smiles. ever.
i should point out that, as a devout agnostic who leans rather heavily towards atheism, i do not believe in an afterdeath of any kind. extraordinary claims, after all, require extraordinary evidence. so this is… difficult. to say the least.
life. gone. over. finished. done. kaput. a fire is snuffed forever.
this may be even worse than when my poor sweet grandmother died in 2001, if only because now, the other shoe has finally dropped. it’s like the floor itself has been pulled out from under me, and all that exists is empty space underneath for me to fall through. the bottom, as it were, has dropped out!
i am starting to freak out
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terrible happiness
My grandfather’s back home now. We’re all, basically, on Death Watch. He’s home; home to die. I hope he knows he’s home, anyway.
He is now beyond being able to communicate. I remember this part all too well from when my dear sweet Grandma was at death’s door. It’s the most frustrating thing. You sense that they want something but have no way to determine what and give it to them.
Not only that, but it seems like my grandfather is thinking on an infant level. Maybe not; in a way, though, that would be preferable. I hate the thought of him knowing full well the extent of the damage to his verbal and motor skills. But the oxygen deprivation from last Thursday’s terrible ordeal virtually guarantees that he’s brain damaged.
It’s horrifying, and heart-shattering, and there’s not a god damned thing that anybody can do.
The poor guy has been through so much. To think that he’s laying there with his ribs all broken, just fading out, piece by piece… I’m completely heartbroken.
Sometimes, when he’s awake, he’ll just stare and stare at you. No words. No words. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know if he knows who I am. My bud, my lifelong best friend, my teacher and mentor… is he in there somewhere?
So I’m trying to get on FMLA so I don’t lose my job. After giving them 50 hours of every week of my time, I have earned a whopping $0.30 raise, which I do need, since Dayton-area employers seem to think it’s completely fair to pay a person with over 10 years of call center experience $9 an hour. Unfortunately, I have to prove that he was my legal guardian.
Much easier said than done.
So I’ve been digging through countless drawers and boxes of memories. Ever have a moment of terrible happiness? That’s seeing a picture of my grandparents, young and sweet and smiling, knowing that one is gone forever, and the other is leaving soon.
My grandparents raised me, so this has been exactly like losing parents to me.
But I cannot prove it.
I think that I am going to lose my job very soon.
What could be worse than that?
I know that I am going to lose my grandpa very soon.
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Tides
Two and a half years ago, my grandfather suddenly took ill. I will never forget the late-night phone call. This was a couple years after his triple bypass. Up to that day, he was a completely normal person, as healthy as you’d imagine an 84 year old ox of a man to be. He’d forget words now and then, but was otherwise just like you or me.
He’d had leukemia for over thirty years, mind you.
After he took ill, he was never the same. Greene Memorial Hospital did everything wrong. Every little thing. They tried to put him in their nursing home (his doctor Taylor has a stake in that facility, FYI) over and over, where he only continued to do worse. They did not allow him the chance to get any better. And he didn’t!
In that system, he has lost his ability to walk and to swallow. Almost 100% of the life on this planet survives largely because of those two underrated skills. But what do I know?
His general health has declined steadily ever since. He became confused. So much that I am not 100% positive that he knows exactly who I am anymore or how we are related. He doesn’t seem to know his general layout in the universe anymore.
Which brings us to now.
Last Sunday night, he was having some trouble with breathing and a very rapid heart beat. We called a squad to take him to the hospital (not Greene Memorial). He had some pneumonia. He stayed in ICU for a few days.
Thursday: I was sitting with him, trying to make some kind of conversation (he’s a man of extraordinarily few words these days, alas), when he said “help me.” I got a nurse and she said that he was “guppy breathing” (exactly, more or less, what you would imagine a guppy breathing like) and he had some crap in his throat they found difficult to suction out.
His blood oxygen level was dipping below normal. When it fell below 85%, a doctor advised that they would have to put him on a ventilator, which itself could be fatal, due to his weakened condition and his low platelet count.
They ushered me out of the room to put the tube down his throat. There was an undeniable sense of emergency to the situation. I called my dad and paced around in the hallway outside of the ICU. About a half hour later, the doctor came out and informed me that they got the tube in him, but that his heart had stopped.
He had died. Died.
CPR was performed, which, par for the course, broke some of his ribs from the compression. He came back and was breathing with the ventilator.
When we went in afterward, his blood oxygen was well below 90%. He was not looking too good. In fact, he looked real bad. His left shoulder, I noticed, was gray. He made no movements or sound.
We all gathered around, my dad and his wife and I, plus nurses and doctors and a clergy woman. We had a terrible time. I cried and grieved and told him how much I loved him and how good he had been, etc. His blood oxygen bottomed out at around 45%. There would most likely be brain damage if he managed to survive at all, which was not likely at all.
He slowly became more responsive, and was eventually looking up and down with his eyes, and moving his arms. He’d take his arms and push them out above him, as if punching the air in slow motion.
I think now that he was saying: “God damn it! Stop talking to me like I was dying! I’m not dying, you bunch of assholes!” I think he was scared and more than a little pissed off.
He recovered from death. Unfortunately, little, if anything, can be done at this point, should his poor sweet old heart give up again.
This Sunday, a few days later, they took him to a room near the ICU, but out of it. His blood oxygen has been ~100% ever since a couple hours after he died. Later today (Monday), we will be taking him to Hospice for a week. After that, assuming he is still with us, he will go back to his home, where he has lived, off and on, for 35 years. He does not know whose house it is, but he will be home, with his poor broken ribs (which he has yet to complain about), where he can die, hopefully peacefully, and in relative comfort among his family.
I am 100% not ready for this. I love this man so much that it’s just killing me. He and my grandmother raised me. The flood of memories that assault me constantly is overwhelming. I drown in them hourly, revive, and drown again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
My poor father, who has been taking care of him for the last two years, is beaten and it’s showing. I worry for him. He has beaten a lot of odds himself, and is a fine, good man. In sheer kindness, my father is second only to his dad – who is lying in a bed, unsure of his world, and dying.
The floor is dropping out of this family. There are no more kings or queens in our domain; only two princes and a minor count. We are haphazard and spent, our empire having fallen to dust.
My grandfather is exhibiting end of lifecycle signs. My dad told me last night that he’s been having some rapid breathing episodes, among other things, which some nurses have agreed are signs.
Signs never have good news. It’s always warnings, bad portents of some sort. “Don’t come here,” “Ingredients: poison,” “Keep away,” “Bad juju involved,” “No more running over retarded children allowed,” “The end is nigh!” and the like. You never see a sign that says “Today is not so bad when you think about it, is it?” or “Welcome invaders!”
Last night we had him ambulanced to Grandview for uncontrollable bleeding around his feeding tube and congestion, which the hospital now tells me is pneumonia. My work is probably not going to let me take any additional time off, but we’ll just have to wait and see. My grandfather was my primary father figure in childhood and until he took off later on, raised me with my grandmother, who died about six years ago now (i was there when she left).
Between being overworked and working over to compensate for the expenses we have with an uninsured diabetic, Holly and i have not been able to be around my grandfather much. On my days off, i have been taken over by an unshakable funk which prevents me from leaving the apartment, much less going over there. Plus, there’s some guilt and shame for not having more time off to help my father and grandfather, and the general weird vibes re: his caretakers, who are all very nice; it’s just that i really wanted him to have licensed health care professionals, from an agency, people who could take shifts so nobody would have to sleep on the job – but we’ve had so many complications in that department. So there’s a lot of complicated feelings swirling around within me, not the least of which is a deep, deep feeling of regret for not having spent more time with him, especially back when he was more coherent.
One last thing: it’s been utterly, utterly heartbreaking watching his health decline. He is so incredibly skinny now. I mean you could wrap a single fist around his thighs, for fuck’s sake. I’ve always known him to be this big strong powerful (and cogent) ox of a man. Now he thinks it’s 1975 and he’s not sure what the President’s name is, and looks as frail and helpless as an infant.
These next few weeks are going to be pure, absolute hell no matter what.
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Fantastic manuscript
I just got done reading my friend Jackie Corley‘s manuscript. Devastated. Trust me, this will blow you away. When it gets out there onto the shelves, finally, you will need to take a deep breath and plunge right into the raging torrent of a story this is. It’s tragic, moving, and crazy good.
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Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson, extraordinary thinker and writer of such classics as the Illuminatus! Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger, is not doing so well these days. He’s currently under hospice care at home with his family. Unfortunately, he is not as well off as you or I would like to believe. You can PayPal his account at [email protected] to help with his financial burden.
Project Censored has just released their annual Top 25 Censored News Stories. They are:
- Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
- Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
- Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
- Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
- High-Tech Genocide in Congo
- Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
- US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
- Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
- The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
- Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
- Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
- Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
- New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
- Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
- Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner
- Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
- Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
- Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
- Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
- Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
- Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
- $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
- US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
- Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
- US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region
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Diabetes
Holly now has diabetes. That’s not all. She’d been getting worse and worse over the last week, so she got the bright idea to get a blood sugar monitor. Thank holy living fucking hell, because the first reading (early this morning) was 448, while a half hour later it was off the meter (600 ).
Normal range is under ~100. The go-ahead-and-freak-out-now point is 250 .
She’s in hospital now, where she’ll be overnight, possibly two nights.
Poor sweet thing… she’s suffered so much. I thought i could handle this until that very thought crossed my mind driving home to pick up some stuff. I choked up a little on that.
She’ll be alright, though. She’s at a great hospital and they’re doing good with her and she’s slowly starting to feel better.
Three words: STEM CELL RESEARCH. Make it happen, Mr. Bush.
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Dead Earth
If this video of what would happen if a giant meteor were to crash into the Earth doesn’t give you lifelong, recurring, and probably increasingly violent nightmares… nothing ever could. My god, did you see the ___ed up _____ ___ at the end? Chilling and creepy.
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This weekend. (R.I.P. Mark Hild)
The funeral for our old buddy Mark Hild was today. The viewing was yesterday. Attended both. Got no sleep. Saw Grandfather. He looks like he weighs all of 75lbs and is sweating like a pig in that inferno of a house. Extremely depressed over both situations.
Yesterday, Mark’s wonderful mother Alice remembered me (my god, the woman is superhuman after all!), and said that Mark had been on a breathing tube for a few years, and that he’d pretty much lost control of everything but his brain and mouth. She said that he was ready, that he was done with being sick. She looked remarkably at peace, and i am incredibly glad. What a sweet, yet strong, woman. Today i thanked her for being such a good mother for our friend.
Friday, i cried. Then, i was numb. Today, i’m crying again. Mark had a helluva Will. He Intended to keep on keepin’ on, until there was nothing left to keep. And he damn sure did just that. He did exactly that. Kid was a fighter, a tough MF.
Just a few short years ago, i honestly thought that he could beat that Muscular Dystrophy shit straight to hell. I really thought that he was Neo or something.
I noticed that the word “shame” was bandied about in regards to MD (unless i was hearing wrong, which may well be the case… i hope). I’ve never had it, so i have no right to any opinion on that, but i’ll give it anyway: Where is shame? Show me shame! All i see in people with MD is passion, sweetness, love, and some serious freakin’ people skills. I guess if i had it, i’d feel pretty self-conscious, and maybe even shame. But as a free-standing man who takes his health for granted, i can tell you that i have never once associated that foul word with Muscular Dystrophy, or any other disease. The very idea makes me think of those sick freaks who get all offended by the site of someone with a different physiology than their own. And to them [i say]? “Fuck you.” Seriously. “Fuck you.” Who cares what idiots like that think, who barely even deserve to walk freely at all?
I called out from work today again. I’ll go back tomorrow. Today is just a little… heavy for me.
These are just words, really. I’m just pouring them out of me with my tears. Sorry if i offend. I’m emotional. Go read Dale Huffman’s great story about Mark instead.
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Today in 1989…
An old friend of mine named Mark Hild grew up with Muscular Dystrophy. Word on the playground was that he probably wouldn’t live to graduate from high school. I knew him back when it barely took two hands to count my age.
On Tuesday, he went into cardiac arrest and suffered some really serious brain damage. His brain stem could no longer function enough to keep him alive. Last i heard, he was to be taken off his ventilator this afternoon. So, right now, he’s probably gone.
A fond memory of mine is of this goofy greeting we used to do for some reason. I can’t remember why or who started it, but when we were in grade school or junior high, we used to do this big, wide, window-washer wave. Like a “Hiya, Spanky” kind of thing. It was innocent, and pretty retarded, really.
“Hiya, Mark!”
“Hiya, Jeremy!”
…and later, when leaving, more ridiculous Little Rascals waving:
“So long, old pal!”
“So long, old buddy!”
Last time i saw him was in 2002, at an all-classes reunion out at our old high school. He had a breathing tube (a la Christopher Reeve) and was in his powered wheelchair, but was hardly looking like the years had touched him at all, and in fact looked for all the world like a hundred million god damn bucks. We exchanged pleasantries, and i felt sorry that we’d grown up and grown pretty far apart, but it was the greatest thrill to see him again. He was a good guy. A gentleman all the way through. I’ll never forget how happy i was to see him looking so relatively healthy. At that moment, i was thinking, ‘He’s made it this far – look at him! – he’s really going to beat all the odds and live to be an old man just like anyone else!’
I’ve never once said that i wasn’t naive. But he sure did beat a hell of a lot of odds. A hell of a lot of odds. He didn’t lose. Not really. He fucking won. He won better than any of the rest of us ever could have. And – except for a brief stint during high school when he maybe took advantage of his situation a little bit by being a little demanding of his friends, which honestly was really more comical than tragic – never did he ever display any self-pity. Not a hint. Not once; never. He pretty much acted like anybody else. You hardly ever even remembered that he was even in a wheelchair with a terminal disease and a grim overall prognosis. He just didn’t make you feel aware of it at all. He was one of us, through and through. A brother to the core.
And now he’s gone from our lives forever. But not from our memories.
I don’t believe in life after death. I don’t believe in heaven or hell. But i do believe that the collective memories of those who knew you keep your personality – if not your actual consciousness – as alive as a thing could ever really be. Our personalities, each of us, is made from bits and pieces of others’. We live on, in a way, through other people, even gradually filtering our way down generations and into the ages. Through love, we keep a part of our loved ones with us, in our conscious minds, and pass a little bit down to people who never even knew those who inhabit us.
I’ve found it increasingly hard to say goodbye to the living, and especially, to the dead. But it needs to happen, as it always does. Death is inevitable for us all.
Goodbye, Mark. Godspeed.
“So long, old pal!”
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You may have a case of the humans!
Three Legged Legs – “Humans!”
A hilarious and depressing short animation about the scourge upon Earth that is humanity.
Today i went over to see my grandfather. He seems confused, as usual, and asking him a question requires waiting around for at least a minute before he figures out how to say the answer, if he remembers what the question was at that time. So that’s nice and depressing.
But a really weird thing happened. We were sitting there, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, when suddenly a little toy Douglas C-47 (a metal/plastic replica of the troop carrier my grandfather was in through all four Market Garden missions during WWII; about 3 inches long, something like this one) that was sitting on top of the television set came flying off and crashed onto the carpet about 5 feet away, right at my feet.
…As in, “WTF”!
I tested it to see how far it would bounce if it had just fallen off on its own due to the vibrations of the television. It landed directly in front of the television, bouncing a few inches at the most. That’s not five feet, i thought to myself.
My dad and Charlie (sp?), the caretaker for the night, said that this had happened before. She said that she herself hadn’t seen it happen, but was extraordinarily nonplussed. She told me that Jennifer, another caretaker, was sitting on the floor in front of the sofa (just about where i was when it happened tonight), when the exact same thing happened.
…As in, “WTF”!?
And then i remembered that my friend Tony once stayed over, not terribly long after my grandmother had died, and had stayed in her room. He reported the next day that he had seen someone in the room with him. I told him at the time that, in the darkness, and in his drunken state, it had probably only been his own reflection in a mirror. He vehemently denied any possibility of that. My friend Tony, who’s pretty skeptical about anything even remotely implausible…
So… now what? I’m a skeptic, goddammit! I do not believe in ghosts! How am i supposed to reconcile this event with reason? I mean, there simply MUST be a logical explanation for this, other than that my grandmother is haunting their house.
i work for a major lingerie retailer that you’ve heard of. i work in Internet Services. i take phone calls, and e-mails, and very occasionally answer the TDD phone. (i have nothing to do with their actual website.)
today, i received the following e-mail:
please remove my daughter N***** from your catalog mailing list. she passed away last July.her address is:*** *. ******* **.
**** ******, ** *****
**** ******, ** *****
i located the account. we are supposed to note the account with the request. because there is no account-level notation function in our green-on-black mainframe system, we just have to hope there’s an order and note the most recent one.
she had three orders. the final one was dated to something like July 8th, 2005. it was a backordered 2-piece lime green swimsuit. i did not look at the size – not for any particular reason, it just didn’t occur to me. she would likely not have received it until sometime up to the 22nd. or rather, it would not have arrived until then.
i sat there, staring into the screen, past the green pixellated Lucida Console fonts that spelled out the question: did she get to wear it at least once? did she see it at all? did it even arrive before her death? i knew that the chances were pretty good that she had died before it had even gotten across state lines. something sank, deep inside of me; i was deeply moved by this event which was so small to me yet so gigantic to her family. a longing to touch her cheek, to see what she looked like, to tell her that it would all be okay somehow. i wanted to console her, to forgive her post facto grief. i felt such sadness for that dead ex-customer then.
life is pretty fucking precious when you realize how thin of a string our mere existence swings by; how lucky we all are to be here and be aware in the first place. and how easily and how permanently it can be shattered for all of eternity.
my “human-level response” was excellent on that one. i thanked the mother for her e-mail (as always), told her that it saddened us to hear of it, and asked her to please accept our sincere and humble condolences for her tragic loss. something along those lines.
i’d never meant anything like that in a business e-mail before.