広島

6th of August, 1945.

You know he thinks it secretly
That you're gone to often,
he stays to long
and the late night calls

He's a year older
and works in the city
he has a wife,
ignorant of you as of herself.

Your husband loves you
He swims in his love,
drowning in pools of hate blended well with happiness
Do you love him?

He loves to dance
his wife hates it
dancing with you across your secret hardwood floor
he doesn't love you.

No one swears it,
but you are slowly shattering everyone's shared heart
blame placed on you
because you are the woman, and yet...

I thought I had to go to court today, but I didn't, so here I am, writing again. Last Wednesday, I was on my way home from a meeting, feeling light as a feather, when I stopped for a light on a T intersection. Proceeding cautiously on my bicycle, I zipped forward....

...just in time to get mowed down by a Jeep Grand Cherokee, being driven by a young Hispanic fellow, who had thought to run the light, just a little, and make a right turn.

Having dealt with this situation before, I politely refused to be helped up, citing extreme shock and a sore leg ("which might be broken, I'm not sure...") sprawled in front of his vehicle, until the police and ambulance came. (Hey, I'm a lady, but not dumb.) To make a long story short, I spent the rest of the day in the ER, where I was told my leg was going to be a bit sore for a few days, but ultrasound showed I had a large (benign) cyst on my ovary, and....oh, you DO know you're sick as a dog?

--Um....no....
--No problems urinating, no lightheadedness, no weakness? Your white blood cell count is through the roof! Surely you should have noticed?
--Ah....
Actually, I had. I'd fallen off my chair at the kitchen table twice, while having a glass of wine and reading...(my roommates blamed the Chardonnay, I blamed the heat). I'd been having dark pee (dehydration, most probably), pain (same idea, I should cut back on colas), and I had been feeling run-down and a bit daffy (it's been hot).
--Well, we can fix that. Eat this pill, and get more. Congratulations, you've just qualified for Cipro!

So, now I'm sick. With Cipro, more than the cystitis (now I really feel sick). I thought antibiotics made you feel better. But it's made me thoughtful about my grandfather's parents.

I don't have any pictures of them, but they were apparently a charmed couple of The Gilded Age. They were young, they were rich (his dad invented the hacksaw, he was the untainted-by-actual-industry heir), they were attractive and smart...and doomed, being simply lousy with tuberculosis.

Back when I was a self-dramatizing teenager, I used to fantasize about how they spent their last years (they died around the time of the First World War), both elegantly thin and pale and interesting, he an aristocratic Arrow Collar man, she, clad in the languid fantasies of Paul Poiret, living in a convalescent hotel near Saranac Lake (the American Magic Mountain, although that name is used for a ski area elsewhere). Every cold I got, I'd fancy myself consumptive, until my mom got wind of my fantasies and knocked the wind out of my sails -- tuberculosis isn't romantic, it's a serious disease, and besides, no one gets it any more (this was the early Seventies). Since then, I've only used my Camille act for bronchitis, two bouts of bacterial pneumonia, and the occasional allergic attack, when I've gotten extra-tender loving care from attractive young gay male nurses while getting Ventolin. Otherwise, I tend to just soldier on.

And then...

One night at Cafe Nine, I was discussing the African situation with a young doctor from the region studying at Yale. I began to cough, loudly.

Kashl, kashl, kashl.
--You sound awful!
--Allergies.
Kashl, kashl, KASHL, kashl.
--You sound really bad. You should have it checked!
--Allergies!
Kashl. kashl. kashl.
--You sound tubercular.

I must have looked at him VERY strangely. (I think I was trying for disbelief.) He looked at me jovially, as if he'd found out I was left-handed and a natural redhead.

--Well, don't worry, nothing to be ashamed of, and most cases are very readily treatable...I know it's considered a disease of the poor, but...have you had any...have you considered this before?
--Oddly enough, I have...in my teens...
--That's very characteristic! Primary infections often occur around then...they can come back to haunt you, long after...Well then. Now, can you remember if any of your family ever had the disease? Succeptibility to the bacillus is genetic, you know.
--Grandfather's parents?

Luckily, I don't have it, but it made me think... What determines the social class of a disease?

Seems to be all downhill from here


Yet another daylog about my mother. Disclaimers? You don't need disclaimers. You need good reading, yeah!


I should write something witty or semi-intelligent here, I guess. But it's hard.

Senility or dementia - I'm not sure which if not both - is an odd state of mind. It seems to me as if a senile person is living in a dream where odd things that happen make no sense, since there is no real context. Like the way you, in a dream, suddenly find yourself in another place than you were just seconds ago, and you may wonder for a moment but then you move on.

My mother can no longer really function on her own, but she does not realise this. She has no idea how far gone she is, and that makes it even harder. She forgets everything, and forgets that she forgets. Not so long ago she still remembered that she forgot, but even that is gone now.

I don't want to be the one who has to explain to her that her race is over, still I know I cannot escape this task. She has three children, and we are the ones who have to take care of her now, the way she took care of us through our childhood. It's time to give something back.

As a noder kindly reminded me yesterday the longest part of my life is probably behind me, and the realisation that my mother is no longer the strong person she has been all through my life has shaken me more than I like to admit. It makes me feel old in a way I didn't before. But life comes full circle this way. It's how it is. I just hope I can do my bit.




Incidentally, no, my pipelinks do not make sense, a lot of the time.


OH HAI IM IN UR DAYLOGS PIMPIN UR NOADZ

Now guys. I'm not trying to make you feel bad or nothin' here. But some of you have honestly not been trying very hard.

Sarah? Revelation? Weeping willow? PLANET MOTHERFUCKER???

Of course these writeups are awesome. You know how I know? Because they are all on the list of Everything's Best Writeups (which would more accurately be titled "Everything's Most C!ed Writeups") (and which, for reasons I still fail to understand, is hidden to all but staff). This quest is about LOST writeups, not already overexposed writeups.

I tried to limit my choices to things that had under 5 C!s, but they are all things from back in the day that made a huge impression on me. Some of em are at 18C!s or something by now. Sue me.

We start with Now is the time when I start: Drink by akatchoom, which is a very fun name to say. Perhaps it's meant to mimic a sneeze. This is her first writeup, and even though she only has four total, that doesn't really matter, because this one has a whole goddamn universe in it. Was YOUR first node anything like that? Mine wasn't.

I was Christian for a day by claypenny is great if you like things that rip your heart out and throw it on the floor and stomp on it, which I do. The sister mentioned in there grew up to be witchiepoo, who wrote I pray to God I can find the other sock, which is the first thing I ever read here that turned on my waterworks. If that is not obscure enough for you there is also Making it in a world without enough candy. Between those three they tackle a lot of the Big Themes.

Mitzi removed all her writeups for a while. She reposted the best of them when she came back in 2005, so now they only have a fraction of the C!s they used to. My favorites of that batch are Boo, age two and a half, Graveyards make me wet, and for when I feel very very dirty, and somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.

For unmatched ironic cleverness, check out The tragically broken hip, full release diet soda and the outstanding Soda in a Martini Glass by Mr. Hotel.

For dark and brilliant searches for meaning in a corroded corporate wasteland, check out Three McDonald's: The Viability of a Third-Party Candidate and Temporary: Monday by Igloowhite. Look what I did: both of those are Part One of several! You will be reading about cubes and french fries ALL DAY.

ideath doesn't write here anymore because she considers herself too much of a generalist. Though she's too humble to let you know up front, she is also a poet. Please read Dear Willa (from Portland), game of essences and November 17, 2002. I did not want to have to include daylogs but that one is special to me.

The way Halspal writes about golf, I can almost believe I'd enjoy it. Here are two: Heads or tails? and Play it where it Lies. With him, as with most of these folks, it's all gold. Just pull up the last fifty and go straight down when you're done with my recommendations.

ToasterLeavings is a true genius of language. I am serving up and weildering triple secret fat ass flaming wisdoms, shit aint availing you, lamers of Edom! (which is the third installment in the "you noders suck" trilogy) and his ode to Shakespeare, I dedicate all my love to your hot inner beauty, fill me with the EPIC LULZ.

And lastly we arrive at the esteemed, the peerless, the bittersweet, the simply magical junkpile. If I had my way, the Sarah dream would be Garfunkel and Every shiny fish is floating, floating, and every dark fish is at the bottom, at the bottom of the sea would be Paul Simon. That one blows me the fuck away. Joy here we are again. Hello Albert is also very important to me. And I should mention that when I was in Ohio, tandex-Jared and I agreed that if there was a fire, and we could only save one node (this is a metaphorical fire), the node we would pick would be Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. Because it is the perfect encapsulation of all we've accomplished.

As a bonus and a thank you to tandex (and also for having the balls to tell me I should cut my damn hippie hair), I will point you to his My regret sits on the floor like someone else's polaroid photos. And hey look, you get a stand/alone/bitch writeup along with it! Score.

You see how talented these folks are? How they can take all the bad pieces of their lives and the good pieces of their soul, and fit them together into a beautiful mess with just the right details, and make you glad to know they're out there in the world? You see how they have unique voices and styles?

Try harder.

Tonight I will pour out a 40 oz. on the curb for the ghosts of: thefez perdedor yossarian mat catastrophe disgruntledwren

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