Where the day takes you.

Life has taken on a surreal flavor these days. Ever since the EYOC wound up in the hospital back in early September, any semblance of a regular day has gone out the window. It’s not that it’s bad, it isn’t. I don’t mind the kind of free form structure the day takes on, as a matter of fact, it’s more akin to the way I like to live.

So, since the day doesn’t really have structure, there’s more a running list of things needing to get done. Sure, you have the ordinary, sundry things that are just part of life maintenance, the cleaning, the laundry, the things which must be fit in each week but, there’s also the “fireman” aspect of getting a call in the middle of the night alerting you to the fact the EYOC has been moved to a hospital ER or even worse to a hospital ICU.

It’s happened twice in the last two weeks, the trips to the hospital.

Just when it looked like he was getting better and I was beginning to think he’d be coming home sometime soon, I went to bring him something at the rehab (read nursing home) facility and arrived to see a fire truck sitting in front of the facility with its lights going. Sure enough when I got back to his room he had quite the small audience in attendance as they were preparing to wheel him out to an ambulance for a trip to the ER.

There was a strange coincidence in my arrival. My timing couldn’t have been more opportune as I walked in and he was being treated - imagine the eye of a hurricane and you get a sense of the moment. A big storm is passing and there is the momentary lull, in this case the pause between the EYOC having a bad day and getting progressively worse and arriving at the ER itself.

The night in question, I was hemming and hawing over going up for a visit thinking I would put it off to the following morning when suddenly I just felt this overwhelming pull telling me I had to go that evening and immediately at that - strange how these things work.

Well, that was a two weeks ago and we‘ve since been to the hospital and back and then back to the hospital again. Last week was probably the worst of it since the whole ordeal began. There were moments when it looked like EYOC making it to the morning was a long shot.

Still, here we are a few days later and I’ll be damned if he hasn’t improved a bit. It’s amazing, really, to watch someone become so fragile that you sense their life could slip away with a strong breeze. I am not overstating things in this case either, there have been times in the last few days when I’ve walked out of the hospital wondering if I would get a phonecall.

So, back and forth we go. In the interim, in the gaps besides the life maintenance, there are the phone calls to make to family and friends, the benefits two step - a dance between insurance companies, Medicare, hospitals, doctors, the nursing home, billing departments, managing his finances (not pretty) and taking care of my own - sorting through the accumulation of clutter and crud which has built up over the years, it’s quite a bit to keep track of. Every time I start to think I have a handle on things, I get another curve thrown at me, his condition worsens and the focus shifts back to the crisis of his immediate state of health.

Now, I’m trying to explore funeral options. I don’t mean to be morbid and it certainly isn’t meant to convey some diabolical design on the situation as a whole, it’s just I had been warned by some family members to prepare, ‘just in case’ because it really is a lot harder to have to organize all these things after the fact and under the gun.

I’m doing laundry the other day, a nice sunny afternoon and while the clothes are in the dryer, I’ve walked up to the post office to pick up the mail, I decide to check out a funeral home to see if I can get some idea of what is involved with the funeral thing. I don’t dress up to do the laundry so, it’s not as if I’m at my level best when I walk up to the place to speak to one of the funeral directors standing out front having a smoke.

The meeting takes about 45 minutes and I’m presented with a list of options - it seems very similar to the experience of buying a new car. You get a sense there is the funeral equivalent of rust proofing being added but, you are damned to know exactly what and where that is.

Then, there’s the discussion of caskets, which strikes me as funny because hearing a funeral director try and sell you on the finer points of a box is interesting, “Well, imagine you’re buying a piece of furniture... something made out of mahogany is of better quality and will last longer than something say of particle board with veneer over it.”

Suffice to say I can’t see digging up a casket on a regular basis to show off to friends and to sit upon so, I’m a bit oblivious to the hard sell.

Strangely enough, I had been surfing awhile back and came across a category of ‘vessels’ up on the CostCo website. My first thought was there would be some catchy alliteration going on: CostCo/Kirkland/Caskets - lots of heavy ‘K’ sounds. It may be an option but, just seeing that CostCo is also in the casket business only adds to the whole bizarre nature of this experience.



Oh, and by the way, I’m not really sure if this will come across in bad taste or not but, like the song goes, ‘what a long strange trip its been.’ If I do wind up offending a reader (family that is), you’ll excuse me I hope.

All in all, another brick in the wall?

This little jewel caught my attention today:

Issued by the FBI without review by a judge, the letters are used to obtain electronic records from “electronic communications service providers.” Such providers include Internet service companies but also universities, public interest organizations and almost all libraries, because most provide access to the Internet...

...The Patriot Act provision involving national security letters was enacted permanently in 2001, so it was not part of Congress’ debate last summer over extending some Patriot Act provisions.

As the Dec. 31 deadline has approached for Congress to renew provisions of the act, the House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense.

Mmmm... last time I checked, weren’t we the ones supposed to be fighting for the cause of freedom? So, explain to me how giving up our own civil liberties fits into the battle?

Reminds me of the story I heard about the different ways to cook a lobster - throwing the beasty in a pot of boiling water is a tremendous shock but, putting the animal in luke warm water and slowly brining up the heat isn’t quite as noticeable.

Bit by bit, I think we are witnessing the days of personal privacy and civil liberty fade away.

Those crazy French!

In case you hadn’t noticed, it seems as if there’s been a bit of a problem going on in France these days:

Arsonists burned 1,295 vehicles nationwide overnight Saturday, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said, adding that police made 349 arrests.

For a second night, a helicopter equipped with spotlights and video cameras to track bands of marauding youths combed Paris suburbs, and small teams of police chased rioters speeding from attack to attack in cars and on motorbikes.

“What we notice is that the bands of youths are, little by little, getting more organized,” arranging attacks through cell phone text messages and learning how to make gasoline bombs, Hamon said.

Police also found a gasoline bomb-making factory in a derelict building in Evry south of Paris. They confiscated 50 devices, fuel stocks and hoods for hiding rioters’ faces, senior Justice Ministry official Jean-Marie Huet told The Associated Press. Police arrested six people, all under 18.

I surpress a certain amount of glee over the current predicament of the French, it seems even though they are often at odds with our nation’s foreign policy decisions, they still have managed to find themselves beset by many of the same problems our society encounters. How’s that superior attitude working for you guys now?

The new breed.

Yeah, I have my moments. I haven’t been able to write much lately because of how hectic things have been so, I mainly find myself surfing, leaving comments on blogs I frequent and just sleeping when I can.

One of the places I regularly check out is Audacia Ray’s Waking Vixen blog. I discovered quite by accident. I think it was one of those instances where you click on a link, arrive someplace and click on another link and so on. An experience somehow akin to getting in the car and setting off on a drive with no particular destination in mind - something I have been known to do on occasion.

I like what ’Dacia has to say.

Well, maybe I should qualify that, I find what she has to say interesting. It fascinates me in a way difficult to convey. I can’t say I’ve ever been truly comfortable with sexuality. I like sex but, having had that hard-core, blue-collar, east-coast urban catholic upbringing there’s always the lurking guilt of enjoying sinful copulation, of indulging oneself completely in hedonistic pursuits. Usually it’s not during the act itself but, more of an after-the-fact kind of guilt. It’s the remnants of upbringing leading to the use of the words sinful and pleasure in the same sentence too often.

So, one of those guilty pleasures is Audacia’s blog as she fumbles around trying to come to grips with her own likes and dislikes. It makes for interesting reading, that and the fact I’m a sucker for a woman that looks good in frilly lingerie.

Fugue state.

The pace of life is such lately I find myself floating through it for lack of a better word. I don’t keep to any kind of regimented schedule, life has become an unstructured series of events - there are things to do, things that are done and that is pretty much about it.

It’s not a bad thing, certainly I’ve found myself in much worse straits through the years, it’s just I find myself drawing a blank when asked if I’ve been working lately or if I’ve been busy. I haven’t been working but, there seems to be an abundance of things to do.

A few things fall by the wayside (the blog for one), not because I lack things to write about but, because I find myself so easily distracted. I imagine putting together some kind of pie chart displaying where the day goes but, I can’t find it in myself to even exert the effort in that direction.

It makes me think about how people deal with crisis. What happens when a person is confronted with an event that is life altering, dangerous or both?

I’ve had a few of those through the course of my life - people putting guns to my head, seeing some violent things reminding me of how fragile we are, all kinds of myriad strangeness. Whenever this has happened, everything slows down. I don’t have the grasp of physics of an Einstein or Hawking but, I can’t ever remember seeing anyone touch on our own subjective view of time.

You’re a kid and each and every day crawls by, weeks take forever to pass and a month is an eternity. Of course, measured by your time on the planet, it truly is a bigger number, a bigger fractional value. You get older and time begins speeding up, days pass in an instant and you are amazed at how quickly the seasons change. The only time everything slows down is when something bad happens, and then we go into life’s equivalent of slo-mo replay.

I’m not in slo-mo replay but, that surreal aspect is there. Between the frantic journeys to hospital ERs, the other loose ends I find myself handling it is a somewhat unusual way to be living.

In the meantime, I came across this on the This American Life website which is an interesting listen:

In the hospital, we give up our normal schedule and sleep patterns; we give up our normal food and clothing; we’re in a place that has its own rules and its own language and its own customs. And in the midst of all this, there’s this complicated human interaction we have to negotiate: we have to deal with doctors and nurses to get the care we need. In this show we hear stories of those delicate and sometimes-not-so-delicate negotiations.

By the way, if you’ve ever listened to the FREE real audio feed of This American Life, you might want to consider making an online donation here. Imagine for just $15 you can get a cool piece by Chris Ware!

I can’t believe this picture of Scarlett Johansson naked!

I came across this amazing picture...

It’s of Scarlett Johansson’s sister actually. As much as I’ve had a thing for Scarlett Johansson since I saw her in Ghost World - I still thought of her as being that obscure object of desire - the age thing and all that. Then, I saw this picture of her older sister Vanessa and you can see that good looks just run in the family. So, I can pine away for another of the Johannson family ladies (another hopeless crush).



Anyway, the closest thing I ever did see to nude picture of the aforementioned Scarlett (letch that I am) was seeing A Love Song for Bobby Long. Never really got such a good view of her though. I did want to try a little experiment though and see how many hits I could generate with an entry titled like this one is. Just curious after looking through referral stats after I wrote a brief snyppet about Evangeline Lilly. I guess sex does drive the internet (or at least we’ll see).

Perspective.

Today or yesterday, I’m watching TV and there’s some news show or something on, your basic talking head kind of thing. The interviewee is one of those pseudo religious bozos who is commenting on how people should be sitting up and taking notice of the horrible shape the world has managed to tumble into. The increasing number of natural disasters, the breakdown of society, you get the drift. All these incredible horrors which signal (cue the clap of thunder, please)... THE END OF DAYS!

(we should immediately grip our heads in both hands and run around the room screaming at the top of our lungs in horror)

Yes, life is horrible, horrible, horrible according to our pious friend!

Then, I stop for a second and I wonder to myself, mmmmmm. So, the days when Europeans were shipping Africans across the ocean by the boatload, these were our salad days?

The nazis, rounding up people towards the middle of the last century, our sunshine years?

The middle ages, full of plague, the inquistion and all kinds of other suffering, blue skies?

I mean, what the f is this idiot talking about? Or any of these other people trying to foist off this load of turd on the public, intending to scare them somehow. Are we talking about a bunch of glass half empty pessimists or what? Man, all I can say is nothing makes me dive for the remote faster than seeing one of these guys with the beautific if vacant smile equating crappy weather and natural disasters with some kind of divine retribution out of the old testament.

I keep waiting for a divine sign in some kind of boom or light rigging to fall on one of these idiots during their pronouncements. At the very least if not a divine sign the workings of a lazy stagehand.

Gotta love Bobby V and Matt Franco!

The Chiba Lotte Marines crushed the Hanshin Tigers 10-0 yesterday in Game 2 of the Japan Series, that country’s baseball championship. Chiba won Saturday's Game 1 by 10-1.



Being a Mets fan, while I was happy with the way the team performed this season under Willy Randolph, I still think Bobby Valentine got the short end of the stick for Steve Phillips’ goofs when he got canned. Regardless of how the media might have portrayed him, Bobby V was certainly a favorite of mine and I think he got the most out of his players as a shrewd manager and a good motivator. So, it’s no surprise to hear the recent news:

The Marines, once a Pacific League doormat, have excelled since Valentine returned for his second stint with the club.

When they face the Central League champion Hanshin Tigers in the best-of-seven championship starting Saturday, the Marines will be bidding for their first title since 1974, when they were known as the Lotte Orions.

It will be Valentine’s first trip to a championship since he went to the World Series in 2000 as manager of the Mets. They lost to the New York Yankees in five games.

“The Marines and the Mets of 2000 are quite similar,” Valentine said. “If it came down to a question of bullpens, I would say the Marines are better.”

Former Mets Benny Agbayani and Matt Franco, who were with Valentine in 2000, had productive season and are expected to play a key role in the Japan Series.

Valentine, very popular among Lotte’s fans, is the first foreign manager to reach the Japan Series since Hawaiian-born Wally Yonamine in 1974.

Fresh from the pages of Ooh Laa La magazine:

The Kanye West video for Gold Digger, simply awesome - Real Player and fast connection required. Alternatives at the Kanye West website.

Take drugs with an open mind.*

People always wonder what designers do. I came across this article in New York magazine awhile back and clipped it out to save. Designers impact our lives in ways we can’t begin to imagine and when they do their job well, it benefits all of us.



By the time an object, or an apartment, or a company hits the half-century mark, it’s usually been through a redesign or two. Yet the standard-issue amber-cast pharmacy pill bottle has remained virtually unchanged since it was pressed into service after the second World War. (A child-safety cap was added in the seventies.) An overhaul is finally coming, courtesy of Deborah Adler, a 29-year-old graphic designer whose ClearRx prescription-packaging system debuts at Target pharmacies May 1.

* – As spoken by an ex of mine. Copy she had written for a PSA she taped while going to broadcasting school. Needless to say it was one of those things which looked better on the page than when it was spoken into a mike.

In praise of Gentleman Gene.

Nice column, worth the read by Eric Larsen on the work of Gene Colan whose work I have loved and admired for years.



One of the many things we don’t have in comics is motion. Motion, sound, smell, taste — most of the big ones — we don’t do. In movies, characters move. In comics, we can only approximate it, at best. Gene comes about as close as we’re likely to get. Gene’s characters are often a blur of motion. I’ve heard he’s a big movie buff and it shows on every page. While most of us struggle to make a guy in a suit look like anything other than a mannequin standing in a store window, Gene pulls it off with ease. His characters live and breathe.

More signs I need to start dating again.

Taking pictures like this, just not pretty.



Yes this is actually in my office.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

I’ve heard a bunch of babble lately about all the calamity affecting the world - psunamis and hurricanes and diseases, OH MY! Well, I just ascribe it to our world being a much smaller place then it used to be and the fact we can now watch cable news 24/7 and become disaster junkies. I did find this article a bit interesting though and thought I would pass it along.

It is the virus’s tendency to make mistakes when replicating itself that makes it so dangerous and unpredictable. Here are some facts about H5N1 avian influenza.

New York poster?

I want to make a poster out of this! When I saw it it had me laughing my ass off (ouch)!



I came across the thing looking through the referral logs for the blog. It was up on what I thought was a german language blog, awholedifferentstory (but which didn’t seem to translate through Babblefish) but the image is actually hosted on the Jeepster’s webpages.

Say it isn’t so!

She’s well-spoken, but her complaint is much the same as those of most every other girl I’ve spoken with: “SuicideGirls is the Wal-Mart of alt-porn.” She’s said the same at her page on the site, but you won’t find the comment there; it’s been purged, along with just about every other critical comment any Suicide Girl has made has made about SuicideGirls.

Alas the myth of Suicide Girls debunked.

Small pictures.

The image below is linked to a larger image but before clicking through be sure to read the entry below it.



I came across this website over the weekend. The website is called nowthatsf*ckedup.com. It’s basically a porn site in that it has pix of wives and girlfriends, pretty standard stuff. I’m sure everyone will be shocked that men actually like to look at pictures of naked women. Here’s the hook though, the site gives service personnel serving in combat free access in return for posting pictures taken during the course of combat ops.

Now, I think a lot of people here at home have this somewhat sanitized view of war and that’s a bit of a problem. I’ve seen some fairly gory things during the course of life even if I never worked as a part of the PD or EMS.

Three things that come to mind are:
1) Finding a detached limb while working at a metro area beach.

2) Seeing a women get decapitated right in front of me while walking along a Manhattan street.

3) The overall carnage surrounding a 30 plus vehicle accident that I was in the middle of but managed to walk away from totally unscathed.

My point is, I still carry these things around with me to this day. However, as gory as these things might have been, they pale by comparison to what a generation of Americans are experiencing on a daily basis in the service of this country. The reason this comes to mind is a conversation I had over the weekend with my friend Kevin. Summed up, it was about the current state of affairs domestically in this country and a general dissatisfaction with the direction our leadership has taken us.

Kevin expressed a very genuine fear whatever damage our nation incurred over these two terms of faltering stewardship would wind up being irreparable. I don’t think that’s the case though. First off, we’ve suffered through far worse during the course of the nation’s history. Second, there is going to be a generation of people who will be returning from all over the world after having served their country - in general, these will be people of conviction and a strong sense of what they think our country should be. These veterans will not suffer the fate of the Vietnam era veterans in that their contribution will be diminished because of an errant foreign policy decision. They will return, perhaps jaundiced by what they have seen, but determined to return to a society worth their efforts.

I imagine many of the next generation of leaders may in fact come from their ranks.

Kevin had referenced the movie Wall Street as a point in our society when the prevalent view of the rich changed (greed is good). Something we can recognize when The Apprentice or Survivor are the popular entertainment of the day. The question is can we really believe a generation of returning veterans who embraced the concept of personal sacrifice, will not challenge the values of an ethically vague society where greed is promoted as a positive trait?

Before she was Lost:

Want to see what Evangeline Lilly was up to before she became the star of Lost? Click on the image below and find out:

When worlds collide.

Andrew Parker, an urban planner and professor of public affairs at Baruch College, and his wife, Suzanne, a technology consultant for artists and arts organizations, have lived in the house since 1974, and raised two daughters there.

Short article about the Parker family of Forest Hills and how Spider Man impacted their life.

The glass is half full?

Yeah, I’m amazed at the days of unending overcast weather we’ve been having up here in the Northeast lately. Wednesday my neighbor was out in the street screaming at the village worker because of the two feet of water making it’s way into his garage (again, nothing new over the last decade). However, even though I count the days until we see the sun again - we needed the rain as local governments were just beginning to plan for ways to deal with the drought.

Friday kitty fun.

Shauna’s adventures part 2 continued from last week (click through for larger size).


Bought to you courtesy of the auteur:


The man responsible for bringing you the adventures of Shauna.