Draining the Swamp in my Innards

Some what know me well know that once a year or so I give over my bad habits and try and give my corpus a chance to clean itself out and set itself straight.  Last year was the intestinal flora rebalancing diet.  The year before was the allergy elimination diet.  Both were hard, and took several weeks, but did wonders for my body, which I appreciated, since I've only got the one and it's lost a touch of its native resilience what with the punishment and the aging and such.

This year I'm going back to my roots, and working my way up to a fast.

I've done several over the years.  It's a nice way to give my body a break from digestion and let it process out some buildup.  There's a fair bit of controversy over the practice, with the western medical establishment pretty decidedly anti- on the one hand, and many individual anecdotes on the other side quite fervently pro-.

Initiatives, Referenda, and Joint Resolutions: a Guide to Washington State's Midterm Ballot

As an American, I feel it is every citizen's duty not only to vote, but to inform themselves as to the choices they have in the voting booth, and the consequences of those choices.  But I also understand that not everyone has the time or inclination to dig into it that I do.  So, as a public service (or possibly just a cry for attention), I have spent the afternoon going through the Washington State Voter's Pamphlet, reading through the wording, the consequences, and the statements for and against, and I have assembled this handy guide to how I think you should vote and why.


Please note that this is only a guide to Initiatives to the People, Referenda from the State Legislature, and State Senate and House Joint Resolutions.  I may or many not have time to write about the races for federal and state political office later this week.  I feel like people are probably already pretty set as far as the types of candidates they support, being that people generally know where they stand on the political spectrum.  But ballot initiative and the like take a little more unpacking, I think, and I wanted to devote a little time to figuring it out for myself, and apparently I've decided that you want to know what I think, too.  So here it is.


The Quick and Dirty Version:


I-1053:  NO
I-1082:  NO
I-1098:  YES
I-1100:  YES
I-1105:  NO
I-1107:  NO
R-52:  YES
SJR-8225:  YES
HJR-4220:  NO


Reasons why below the jump, for those who care to know.

On Dying, and What Happens After

About a month ago, my grandmother passed away after a long period of mental and physical deterioration.  She was ninety-six, and had had a good long life, with children and grandchildren and even a couple of great-grandchildren who gave her great joy.  She died peacefully in her sleep, and we buried her next to my grandfather not far from where they'd lived their lives and raised their children.

She had a Catholic funeral, since she was a devout Catholic her whole life (her last words, so far as I know, were near-endless iterations of Our Fathers and Hail Marys), and we all agreed that it was right and proper, since she remained strong in her faith to the end, even if none of us really shared it.

And that's the thing I'm wrestling with.  Not the funeral, but her faith, and, I guess, what (if anything) it means for her after death, and what that means for me.

For Kendal

When I was driving home, I listened to this album a lot, and every time this song came on I thought of her.

There's much in this world that's savage and horrifying, that will break your heart and confound your understanding and shake your faith in the justice and beauty and rightness of things. But there is also magic and wonder and days when the sun bursts through the clouds and suddenly the grey is silver and the silver becomes gold as the gathered clouds are scattered and flee beyond the horizon. Days when levity overcomes gravity's ineluctable pull and loads are lightened for reasons the conscious mind isn't really equipped to understand or make sense of.

I had such an experience recently, and I would like to tell you about it, if for no other reason than because it happened and I can't tell you why, though it may very well have saved my spirit and soul from the muck they were mired in. It was, perhaps, just a coincidence, something that just happened. Something for which there is and was a perfectly logical, rational explanation, that I'm making more of than is really there to be made.

The possibility is very real that that is the case and that I'm just grasping at straws for my own (understandable) reasons. I'll let you decide what to make of it for yourself. Here is what happened:

After my mother's death this past summer, we held a memorial service in her honor, which was well-attended and considered by all to be a success. The arrangements were mine to make, along with some help from my aunt, and we did our best to honor the spirit in which Mom had lived her life. There were pictures, and flowers, and a eulogy, of course, and I and others spoke afterward, celebrating her life and the ways she had touched us all, and afterward many of us retired to her favorite haunt and raised a glass or two in her honor. I think she would've been happy with it, had she been there. And who knows? Perhaps she was.

Shortly after that, I left town and went home for a couple of weeks. It'd been exhausting, all those days and nights in the hospital, all those decisions and arrangements that I had to make, and I needed more than anything to just be away from it all. It was during this time that my mother's wishes were fulfilled and her body cremated, the cremains, as they're called, delivered to the funeral home for me to come and retrieve.

Luckily, another aunt was able to retrieve them for me, and so they were waiting for me when I returned to begin the process of unwinding her life, of going through Mom's things and fixing up her place, and generally taking care of the business at hand. I knew, somewhat, what I thought Mom would want, in terms of a funeral, or at least what seemed to me to be the thing to do, and who should be there, but for one reason or another, it just never seemed the right time, and so Mom remained with me there, set up on a little shrine with some pictures and other mementos. I would talk with her, sometimes, and make her drinks here and there when I was having one, and weeks and even months passed in this way while I lived and worked in her home, getting just a little crazier with each passing day.

It was a difficult time, for lots of reasons, and as the days and weeks passed the pressure inside mounted until I was sure I would burst. It got to the point where I made the decision that I needed just to go, even though there were projects left to do, and so I made arrangements to have them done and prepared to start the long drive home. There was just one thing left: Mom's funeral.

She hadn't said, in her Last Will and Testament, how she wanted her remains to be disposed of. Though she was clear she wanted to be cremated, she'd left it up to me the what to do with the cremains. I'd decided early on to give her back to the ocean. She'd grown up on the water in Riviera Beach, just north of West Palm, and spent her childhood on the beach and in the water, back when Florida was still an underpopulated paradise, before Disney and the developers came and turned it in to what it is today. Indeed one of the things I'm most grateful for, though it makes me cry to remember, and probably will forever, is that I was able to take her to the beach one last time at the end of my penultimate visit, before the end became imminent and she began the business of dying in earnest.

I'd thought at first of renting a boat for the day, whenever it was, and doing the whole burial at sea thing, but it didn't seem quite right, and would have involved getting the various brothers and sisters together in close proximity with no escape for anybody. They're a fractious bunch, and while I'm sure they have their reasons I'm also sure that that was not the vibe I was looking for for my mother's funeral. So I decided that I would give her back to the ocean, but that the ceremony, such as it was, would be held on the beach. My aunt and uncle suggested Phil Foster park, a place where Mom and her siblings had spent a lot of time during their childhood, but when I went there to scout it out it just didn't feel right. It's essentially a giant, paved-over boat ramp these days, and while there is a beach of sorts there, it's under the bridge, and dirty, and just wasn't the place I wanted it to be.

So I did some looking around, and found John D. MacArthur park, a mile-and-a-half stretch of virgin Florida coastline just a little ways north of Riviera Beach, a place where you couldn't see any hotels or beachfront development, without a foot of pavement or big crowds of sun-pinked tourists with their radios and umbrellas and screaming packs of kids and old folks. It was exactly what I was looking for, and I knew as soon as I set foot on the beach that this was the place.

I called the relevant people and let them know, and my uncle did a little research and discovered that the outgoing tide was early in the morning, and so on the day after Halloween we all met in the parking lot at 9 am. I'd been up very late the night before, drinking too much and talking with Mom on the patio, with the fence open so we could see the lake and the sounds of revelry here and there in the distance, but I still managed to be the first one there.

I think Mom would've been proud. She always did want me to get up earlier and be more on time to things.

It was a beautiful day. The sun was out and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The beach was lightly populated, and we only had to walk a few dozen yards to be away from what few people there were. We said what little there was left to say, and I walked her out into the waves, fully dressed, and laid her as gently as I could in the water. We threw a dozen roses in with her, and though the waves were wild and the ocean was rough, only one came back, washed up on the beach to await the next tide. We emerged, dripping with sea water, and that was that.

Now comes the magical part.

It's windy at the beach. Always. The air over the water and the air over the land are different temperatures, and the differential means that the hotter air over the land rises, drawing the cooler air over the water inland. Now mind you, today was not the windiest day, but there was a noticeable breeze even down low near the ground, and I expect that up high it was even windier.

Some friends of the family had brought a mylar balloon, and we'd all written our last goodbyes on it in the parking lot. We said goodbye, and each of us touched it in turn. Then we released it, and something I can't quite explain happened.

Despite the wind, the balloon rose, straight up into the sky. We'd all expected the breeze to carry it inland and out of sight quickly, but instead it floated, almost purposefully, straight up, until we could only just barely see it.

And then it stayed there, directly above us, lingering as we watched, as if Mom were watching us from up there, saying her last goodbyes to us just as we had said them to her. For minutes on end we stood there, just watching in wonder and amazement as it floated there above us, watching us back, it seemed. It moved a bit, yes, but there it remained, almost directly overhead, while we all stood, shading our eyes from the glare of the sun, almost unbelieving that such a thing could happen. It was a very Mom thing to do, that lingering, because we were the people she loved best in all the world, and I knew that she would want to watch us for as long as she could, just as we wanted to hold onto her.

And that wasn't all. As the balloon rose, I felt the weight of the weeks and months that had passed since her death lift from my shoulders with it, as if Mom were taking it with her, a final parting gift to her only son. At a time of great sadness, when by all rights I should have been bawling my eyes out (as I am right now, writing this), I felt as light as the air and as free as the the wind, all the stress and sadness that had weighted me down made light and fluttered away on the breeze.

We waited and watched, the nine of us there on the beach, our grief forgotten in the sheer amazement of the moment, until some strange subliminal signal had passed and we found ourselves back on the beach, looking at each other, all of us knowing somehow that it was time to go. We looked back up, to say one last goodbye, but the balloon was gone. She'd slipped away while we weren't looking, off to whatever was next. Which was also a very Mom thing to do.

On the Subjective Nature of Objects

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.
-Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

I've been thinking about things a lot lately.

I don't mean that in the usual sense of the phrase, that I've been thinking about the various happenings and vectors and relationships and narratives in play at this stage of my life, although I've certainly been doing that, too. No, what I mean is that I've been thinking about things; about objects, devices, and artifacts; and most especially I've been thinking about their capacity to take on subjective meaning in the context of their relationship to myself and others as perceiving beings who appear to persist through time. I generally assume that the way it works for me is much the same as for others, but given the wall of unknowability that lies between each of us and the world I'm going to let that particular philosophical sleeping dog lie and presume a certain degree of, if not universality, then at least applicability, in what follows.

Take this, for example:


This is my Pentax K1000 35mm camera. Now, to someone else, this is just an old (some might say classic) 35mm camera, and one's reaction to seeing the picture of it is, if not determined, then at least colored by one's relationship to photography, its history, technology and the history of its technology; by fascination with or lack of interest in old things; by nostalgia for days gone by and a time when technologies were simpler and, paradoxically enough, more difficult to operate; or by any number of possible considerations, which are too numerous in their possibility to even begin to enumerate here. Suffice to say that the object, while remaining itself, provokes different reactions in different people, thanks to each's individual world-view, associational chains, and particularity in space, time, and history.

For me the picture and, more importantly, the object it depicts have a significance that can't be surmised by an other just by looking at them. See, I have history with that camera, and not only that specific one. Allow me to explain.

When I was thirteen, I started working as a soccer referee on weekends, for a number of reasons, not least of which was that they paid me. Now, at that age, having money of your own is (or at least seemed to me at the time) a strange and wondrous thing. Others, perhaps, have had a different experience of life, but for myself the notion of buying things for myself, with my own money, without having to ask my parents to buy them for me, was a new and mysterious thing that I didn't, honestly, quite know what to do with. Being that my needs were simple, I spent very little on myself, and would give anyone in the lunchroom who asked a couple of bucks to buy whatever from the cafeteria. What the hell else was I going to do with my money? For all I knew, money was just for buying things, and there weren't enough things I needed or even wanted to spend all of my newfound wealth on. After all, video games were still just a quarter back then.

But I did buy one thing, one big thing, that I remember and kept and had forever and ever, and that was a used Pentax K1000 camera very like the one in the picture above. I spent $100 on it, a huge sum to me at the time (never mind adjusting for inflation) at a used camera store my father took me to.

It was the first big purchase I ever made on my own behalf, and I used, abused and treasured that camera for many years. I loved it. Loved the weight of it; the old school credibility it exuded in the face of what were at the time incredible new innovations in 35mm photography, things like autofocus and autoadvance of the film in the camera. Loved taking pictures with it, loved the quality of the shots and even the difficulty of having to balance aperture and shutter speed and focus before taking each one. I took it on adventures, documenting strange peoples and the faraway lands where they lived. And though I never really delved into photography as a craft, I loved dabbling in it as an amateur, and I loved my camera, both for what it was, and for what it meant to me. It had, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, taken on an aura, a particularity and authenticity that was unique to its presence and history in space and time, even if that aura was perceptible in full only to me.

And then, shortly after college, or maybe in my later undergraduate years (memory fails me as to the details), I passed through South Florida to visit my mother, and discovered that the lens that I'd bought with the camera had become stuck.

I remember that I'd just returned from some grand adventure or other, maybe the road trip to Central America, or one of the many cross-country jaunts I was so fond of taking at the time. I had lots of film shot, and no money. Mom of course was more than happy to spring for developing the pictures, and I of course was happy to let her. We were getting along pretty well in those days, which we hadn't always. My mother and I did not see eye to eye on some things. It wasn't so much philosophical disagreement as it was a certain incompatibility of temperament, and it had dogged our relationship for most of my conscious life. We'd spent a couple of years not talking during my late teens, when my upswelling adolescent rebellion ran smack into her difficulties in accepting that I was no longer a child, and it was not until a couple of years after I had moved out that we were able to reconcile and grow to love one another again, or, rather, remember the love that was always there and that almost always exists between mother and child.

But the fact remained that there were things about each other we just didn't get, that didn't jibe on a fundamental level. Yes, we were able to work around them in our personal relationship. We were able to get along, and spend time together, and enjoy what we could of one another. But the things we valued and the ways we approached the world remained somewhat at odds, and my camera and its eventual fate became a perfect illustration of the phenomenon.

Like I said, the lens was broken. The metal around the rim had gotten bent somewhere along the way (an unsurprising development, given the cavalier attitude I tended to have in those days towards my things), and the focus was no long adjustable. Or maybe it was the aperture. I honestly don't remember. It's not important. What's important was that I didn't discover that it'd happened until the last day I was visiting. I went to take a picture and found I could not, and I was, as you might expect, not happy about it, as I was broke at the time and could not afford to have it fixed or buy a new lens.

So when Mom offered to get the camera fixed and send it to me after, I was, if not thrilled, then at least pleased. I say that not to belittle Mom's generosity so much as to indicate the degree of entitlement I felt at the time. Of course Mom would get my camera fixed. That was what moms were for, along with laundry, food, care packages, and unconditional love. That she would offer to do that fit perfectly with my understanding of the world and while I was grateful I was also able to sort of shrug it off without recognizing the generosity for what it was.

A week or two later, the package arrived in the mail, and almost as soon as I opened it I realized something wasn't quite right. That wasn't my camera. Sure, it looked like my camera. Was an identical make and model and functionally indistinguishable from my camera. But it wasn't mine. The scratches that made it particular were missing, or in different places. It felt different in my hand. It was, in a word, wrong. I called Mom to see what'd happened and found that she had, in fact, replaced my camera with a different one. I don't remember the details, but the guy at the repair shop had talked her into exchanging my camera, the one I'd bought with my own money in middle school and taken on countless adventures, whose sole flaw was a lens in need of repair, for another just like it. Perhaps it was in slightly better condition. I really don't remember, and I never understood quite what possessed Mom to do what she did. But she'd traded away one of my most valuable possessions for a simulacrum, a copy, however identical, that was most emphatically not the camera I had bought with my own money so many years before.

I know she meant well, and that there must have been reasons. And I decided, there on the phone, to leave it, and never told her how I really felt. But I was furious inside. How could she do that? How could she not understand what that camera, that particular camera and not just that kind of camera, meant to me? I knew she had things that she'd had forever and that she treasured. How could she not understand, intuitively, that I did, too, and that this was one of them? It was further evidence to me of the fundamental alienness of our different natures, and though I felt very mature just dropping it and not making her feel bad, I also mourned the camera's loss, and mourned a little that my own mother did not understand me.

I could, perhaps, begin my philosophical musings at this point. After all, the ultimate purpose of this piece of writing is to think about things in their thingness and how that thingness interacts with the perceiving subject's experience of the thing and its aura. There's certainly enough to work with already, drawing the distinction between the camera as you, the reader, may experience it and the camera as I experience it, with the weight of my personal history crouched upon my shoulders and warping the experience the way that a large gravitational mass warps the fabric of space-time around it. But there's more, a whole new order of meaning that has recently called itself into existence and settled itself athwart this collection of plastic and aluminum and technical know-how.

See, my mother just recently died, and so now everything I associate with her has taken on a new significance. Tempting though it is, I'm not going to poke around the edges of that particular wound right now, not here anyway. But it's added a new layer to the aura of the camera above.

I've had the new camera for years now. Taken it overseas, out in town, and out into the woods. Taken pictures with it that have great significance in my personal life story. It has its own history and chain of associations, which now have taken on an even greater depth than what they had before. Because now the camera is not only a symbol of the place where the Venn diagram of Mom and me failed to meet, it is also a thing that she gave to me, made more valuable now that she's gone, and an object of deeper contemplation for the richness of its meaning to me.

But to the imagined other that you, the reader are to me, the same object doesn't, even can't mean the same thing, even after I've told you the story and explained the history. And, in my long-winded and roundabout way, that's the thing I'm trying to get at.

You see, we rub off on the things around us. Leave a psychic patina of ourselves, the sebaceous oils of our being, if you will, on every thing we contemplate and touch, live with and use. It's not so much that objects are mirrors in which we see ourselves reflected, although it's tempting to go down that road (After all, brain scientists will tell you that your brain will pick out the patterns you are used to perceiving, no matter what the stimulus, and so the act of perception can be characterized as a reflection, since you can only see what it is in you to see, and thus an argument can be made that you only see yourself). But to me this permeability of objects to personal meaning speaks to a similar permeability of ourselves. There's a bond that grows there, not so much a bridge as an intermingling, invisible perhaps in space and time, but there nonetheless. The things around us shape us, just as we shape them, as if Einstein's theory of General Relativity (which is, at bottom, the notion that, through the mystery and magic of gravity, every discrete particle in the universe has a special and personal relationship to every other discrete particle in the universe and affects it, however minutely) also applies to this squishier psychic realm, in ways that haven't yet been explored.

There's no answers here. To those, if any, who've gotten this far in hopes of some amazing insight into life, the universe, and everything, I apologize. I've only really begun to think about these things recently, in response to the process of going through my mother's things. I was amazed at how many of them I recognized, how many were the little boring everyday things that make up any household, but that were the boring everyday things that made up the household I grew up in, that spoke to times long past, subjectivities I'd forgotten, thrown into new and starker contrast now that my world has a Mom-shaped hole in it. I'm still not sure, honestly, what I'm trying to do here, but the persistence in my mind of these things and what they mean to me, and how they come to mean them is something I can't seem to put aside. Perhaps it's only grief, a desire to bring Mom back, or at very least to grasp at the traces she left on the world and thus hold on to what little is left of her. I couldn't say. It isn't possible to untangle all the threads in the fabric of right now and see which is what and why. But we all pass through many selves in the stories of our lives, inhabit many subjectivities, each an outgrowth of all that came before, and just as a song or a smell can bring us back to a self we've left behind or grown out of or even just away from, so too can the things in the world around us take us back, preserve that connection to our histories and those we've shared them with, and there's something there worth exploring, I think. So here we are, and here we go.

Starry Night

The Starry Night has been my favorite painting since college. I've always been a fan of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and of Van Gogh in particular. Several years ago, when I finally got around to doing the backpacking through Europe thing, I visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, along with many many others, and got to see a fair sampling of his work in person. Then, on my way home, I stopped through New York to visit some friends and attended the opening of MOMA Queens, where I got to see The Starry Night.

I'd always loved Van Gogh's work, for many reasons, many of which are intuitive, even visceral, and thus very difficult to put into words, but the underlying fuzziness and feeling of motion and movement inherent in the techniques of the time and the particular school of which Van Gogh became something of an exemplar have always appealed to me greatly. The bright daylight colors of Vincent's Bedroom at Arles and the various Sunflower paintings feel like a sunny afternoon encapsulated on canvas, a moment in time made manifest for the ages in such a way as to transport the viewer not there so much as to a sort of higher, vaguely Platonic realm of there-ness. It's the same for his more nocturnal works, like The Cafe at Night, and especially The Starry Night. I have a poster of it in my room to this day, a bit worn around the edges, since I've had it since halfway through college, and it's one of the first things I see when I wake up there. Being a naturally nocturnal sort, I've always had a certain inherent sympathy with the night paintings, and The Starry Night, with its hazy stars and the sense of movement in the air, like the way the air moves when the pressure drops and a storm's coming in, never fails to transport me. And when I saw the thing itself, the actual painting rather than just a mechanical reproduction, it absolutely took my breath away. The thing about Van Gogh that fails to translate in prints and posters is the sheer texture of the work. The man really slapped on the paint. It's almost as if he painted with a putty knife instead of a brush. It was all I could do not to reach out and touch it, though I didn't, of course. But powerful as the poster in my room has always been to me, it pales in comparison to the real thing, in the way that a picture of the woman (or man) you love pales in comparison to her actual presence there with you in the room, her skin available to your touch, her scent on the air, all the tiny secrets of her body there for you to learn and to know.

Anyway, The Starry Night was today's Astronomy Picture of the Day, and so it was one of the first things I saw when I woke up this morning and turned on the computer, and it made me very happy, and made me think of that poster I've had so long, and the time I saw the original there on the wall in Queens, and I thought that I would share it with whoever might happen by the blog today. Enjoy. I know I do.

Here's the Email I Wrote to My Senator

Senator Cantwell,
It is my understanding that as a member of the Senate Finance Committee you are participating in debate today over the inclusion of a robust public option in the health care reform legislation being written by that committee. I want to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to vote yes on the Schumer/Rockefeller amendment, and include a robust public option in the bill. Without a public option to provide a benchmark of fairness against which insurance companies would be forced to compete, I fear (and expect) that the current trend of insurance industry rapacity will continue. We as a nation and a people can no longer afford to spend so much money to prop up an industry that's protected from competition and yet still fails to deliver on satisfactory outcomes, both in the countless individual cases we hear about on the news every day, and in the larger national sense.

Please, vote yes on the public option. And please understand that this constituent's continued support is contingent on that vote.

Thank you,
Dallas Taylor
Seattle WA

I also called. Her number in DC is 202-224-3441.

Going to the Dump: A Comparative Analysis

Today I made three trips to the dump in Palm Beach County, Florida. Now, usually I like going to the dump, for a few different reasons. First off, they have big machines that crawl over the piles of waste and move them around, and I like watching big machines crawl over and move shit, cuz big machines are just cool (I used to fantasize about owning my own backhoe, back in my twenties. I didn't really have a plan for what I would do with such a thing (aside from never have to worry about finding a parking space), but I really wanted one anyway). Second of all, in Seattle, where I live, when you go to the dump, you get to back the truck up to a concrete overhang and just chuck your shit over into the pile and watch the bulldozer down in it move it all over to where they load it into trucks and take it to the actual dump (what I, as a civilian, think of as the dump is actually called a transfer station). It's fun. And though it always pisses the guy off and he hand-signals you not to do it anymore, it's also fun because you can chuck your shit at the bulldozer and not worry, because it's a bulldozer, and they build those things solid. All of these things make my inner punk-rock teenager clap his hands with savage glee.

South Florida, well, not so much. It's a perfectly well-run operation. I give them props for that. I was in and out in twenty minutes all three times. But it wasn't as much fun as Seattle, for a couple of reasons.

The first thing was, you just dump your shit on a concrete floor, and the bulldozer's there with you, pushing the shit over to the edge, where a backhoe loads the trucks below. So you don't get the feeling of throwing your shit over a cliff. And it smells in there. Oh Em Eff Gee does it smell in there. It smells so bad that just the little bit of the gook that sticks to the bottoms of your shoes from walking around on the concrete floor makes the cab of the truck stink the whole way back, so you have to open the windows to air it out while you drive back, even though it's hot out, although it's not so bad if you grew up here, which Heidi and I both did.

Still, more than enough to take the fun out of the experience. And I guess it did distract me from the fact that I was throwing away the couch my Mom sat on and loved since I was in like 9th grade. I used to hide my furtively-recorded Skinemax Friday after hours softcore under that couch. Why I didn't keep it in my room I'll never know, except that teenagers are dumb and don't think things through.

dealing with jokers takes cards out of my deck

Today I received my new debit card. I have been waiting on it for more than a month.

As my mother lay dying in the hospital, back in late July, I was obliged to leave her side and take care of some business. I'd dropped everything to come here, and made it just in time, but I was flat on my ass broke and living off of my mother's bank account, which she didn't mind, being that money had become pretty unimportant to her, what with the cancer and all. I had Power of Attorney and all (hat tip to Mom for having her shit together), but we hadn't actually registered it with her bank, and it was going to expire when she did, anyway. When that happened, things were going to get complicated. So I had to take care of it before she died, or risk, being shut out from her checking account, which money I was planning on using to live on and to pay for her memorial service.

So, four days after we'd moved her into the hospice center, where she could be away from the loud noises and obnoxious staff on the regular floors of the hospital, I was obliged to run around talking with bankers and paralegals and so on, and ended up running to the hospital to get a note signed by the doctor that Mom was no longer able to make financial (or, indeed, any) decisions, so that I could get my Power of Attorney recognized by the bank and get the money out of her account so I could continue doing all the things that had to be done.

All well and good, and I made it happen. Problem was, my bank has no branches within twenty miles of Lake Worth. None. And I needed the money pretty much right away. So I decided to set up a checking account there at my Mom's bank, SunTrust. Everyone was very nice, and made all the appropriate noises and made things happen with relatively little hassle (it's amazing how nice people are to you when you tell them your mother is dying). I was able to withdraw the bulk of Mom's checking account, and deposit it into my new account. I ordered checks and a debit card, and got myself set up to do online banking. I got starter checks right away, and was told I'd get a debit card in five to seven business days.

Shortly thereafter, Mom died. Not long after that, I decided I needed to gtfo and I went back to Seattle for a couple weeks, assuming my new debit card would be waiting for me in the mailbox when I got back. I even got my uncle Mike's new wife Diane to check the mail for me a couple of times.

Suffice to say, upon my return I discovered that my debit card had not, in fact, been delivered. Which was not terribly convenient, as I was keeping a good-sized chunk of my living money in there. So I went to the branch and talked to the guy, who'd said that my first card was undeliverable for some reason and ordered me a new one, saying, again, that it would be here in five to seven business days.

Kendal came, and on the sixth business day we went over to the west coast so I could introduce her to some family and show her around New College. By the time we got back, it'd been two full weeks (and 9 business days) since I'd ordered the card. The card I needed, for all the things you need a debit card for. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the card was not in the mail. So I got on the phone.

The first option they offered me was to cancel the card that was presumably still in transit and order a new one, with the attendant five to seven business day waiting period. When I expressed my displeasure at the notion, I was informed that there was an option for expedited two-day shipping from FedEx, but that it would cost me $25.

I waited until I'd been passed up the chain to a 'specialist' before I blew my top. I'll spare you the details, and I did refrain from profanity (difficult though that was), but after I'd made clear my amazement at their incompetence and my willingness to take my business elsewhere, the line went very quiet for a minute (during which time I assume that someone up the chain from the 'specialist' hopped on the line, unheard by me, and authorized her to do the right thing), and the bank agreed to cancel the card in transit and order another, and to eat the expedited shipping cost. That was Thursday, and now, finally, I have received my debit card, so that I can actually spend the money I have deposited in their bank. Calloo callay.

Oh, and the extra hilarious part? The card they cancelled, the one that was already late when I called them and pitched my fit? Got here yesterday in the mail.

Fucking jokers.

Chew Toy

According to every woman I've ever dated, and every dentist I've ever seen, I bite and grind my teeth in my sleep. Loudly. Hard. Like wake-the-girl-up hard. So I've taken, recently, after many years of encouragement to do so, to wearing a night-guard while I sleep, which I like to think of as my own personal chew toy. Sure, it makes me feel like an amateur boxer as I lay me down to sleep, but at least I know that my precious enamel will be safe from its own predations for those six or eight hours while I shuffle off to dream-land.

The only thing is, is I think that having the thing in my mouth makes me bite and chew more. I think. For instance, I woke up today, after a full night's sleep with the damned thing in, and my jaw's as sore as a toothless man's on Thanksgiving. I know I woke up, more than a couple of times, and was acutely conscious of the thing (although I am, slowly, getting used to it), and I think that a great many of my dreams were of an unsettling nature, but I can't figure out which way the arrow of causality is pointing. Do I sleep not so well because I've got this chewy piece of molded plastic in my mouth, or am I chewing more because I'm not sleeping well?

In case you're wondering, there isn't a point to this post. I just felt like writing about something besides why right wingers are jerks or why Barack Obama is starting to frighten me.