Hey There
As August wears on Mr. BC's mom wonders what is wrong with that boy and his blog. Doesn't he have anything to say? He mumbles in response, no ma'am not really. She taps the table with her coffee mug and says I can't hear you, did you say something? No, I didn't. Well, what are you doing? I'm just looking at the shirts hanging in the closet. Why?
They are freshly laundered.
Is your arm broken?
Nope.
Tummy ache?
No.
Stub your toe?
I think not.
Lose your rhyme and reason?
Not really.
How about that swine flu?
Yeah, it's really something.
Are you still feeling remorse over that mole you shot with the bb gun at Lake O' the Pines?
I think about it from time to time.
How long ago was that, must be...?
About 40 years ago.
Think maybe you should move on, get over that?
I am going to work it out very soon.
Well don't wait too long.
I am in North Carolina, getting ready to go to the Duke Medical Center for a routine follow up for that kidney stone I passed a few weeks ago. Then I have to go order some roofing supplies and set up a delivery for next week because I got a guy who said he can put a new roof on this rental house I have been puttering around with over the last year. I finally got my passport in order and am going to Italy for two weeks in September. I have never been to Europe or any other place that requires a passport. I lost my previous passport thirty years ago and never got around to getting another one. My last trip to Europe in 1980 ended after hitchhiking from Austin to the Dallas airport where I lost my non-refundable one way standby ticket to London. I had 200 dollars in cash and a belief in adventure. Some have argued it was probably better that I lost that ticket, others have suggested that I lost it on purpose, and still others have implied that maybe the hand of God reached down and swiped the ticket, which was bookmarking my place in The World According to Garp. I had only been out of the bathroom for a few minutes when I realized I had left the book there and when I went back it was gone. My attempts to retrieve it proved fruitless. I was nineteen or barely twenty and the drinking age in Texas at that time was 18 so I went to the airport bar and had three shots of tequila, then phoned a friend who picked me up and let me spend the night at her mother's house, because I hadn't really told my own mother that I was in town, much less that I was going to Europe one way. I told her about it later though. Boy, I used to put some worry on that woman. You can't really blame me for her gray hairs though, because as you know she was pretty much gone gray when she had me, and certainly was by the time you met her, five years after she brought me into this.
Sometime this year I have to get to New Orleans and do a little maintenance on my house there but I haven't figure out exactly when that will be. In the meantime I'm finishing up this NC house and acting as absentee manager of your son's weekend property in the Shenandoah foothills of Virginia. And slowly, ever so slowly I am gravitating towards New York to spend more time with my sweetheart, Bernadette. We both occasionally wonder how that's going to work as one of us is pigheaded and the other muleheaded. I'm not sure which of us is which but in the end I will be whichever one she tells me to be. Give my regards to the Mister, hope you are both doing well. jml.
...more recent posts
Life: Scene 2, Take 1 Or 2
It's sad really only if you think it is, the image of a man standing in front of a pedestal sink, pushed up a little on the balls of his feet and leaning forward so that his penis, held lovingly in his hands, will clear the ceramic edge, him searching expectantly the flow of urine into a screened funnel for foreign treasure. Like panning for gold he picks through the paltry particles remaining on top of the fine mesh with a sliver of oak shaved from a scrap plank. "Is that a speck of dried blood?" he wonders aloud as he picks it out and sticks it to the side of a plastic specimen bottle. Hardly seems possible that it could be dried blood but it's dark and the doctor had said there was blood in his urine. He harkens back to his days as a junior hobo when in San Francisco a thorazine carrying Vietnam Vet was trying to school him on how to cheat the government out of assistance dollars. "The surest way to get disability dollars is to prick your finger and put a drop of blood in your urine specimen bottle." At the time he was just a middle class kid, dropped out from college, trying to travel on the cheap, and he had opted for the less deceitful and smaller payoff of the Mission District blood bank.
In the present he spies another minute specimen resting on top of the mesh and picking it out with the sharp oak point it appears gelatinous, with a fine thread of a tail and he wonders if it could be his unborn son. Can sperm be in your urine? It seemed plausible but as he had not had sex, or masturbated in...?...well, too long, it seemed not so likely. But what did he know about it? A screened funnel, a sliver of oak, and a specimen bottle does not a doctor make.
The first day he thought it was just food poisoning. The second day, with only two hours of severe pain, seemed an improvement and reaffirmed his food poisoning theory. The third day, with two separate pain sessions lasting multiple hours, he began to worry, and while not exactly hallucinating, his world view, small as it was inside the nearly finished 800 square foot renovated rental project, changed, and his vision became sharper and his sense of smell was registering every drop of mouse urine in the house. Later when he saw the mouse poke it's head up through a hole in the floor (holes a past renter had drilled to run extension cords or speaker wires), he threw a water bottle at it and then positioned a paint can over the hole. And cans of stain over three similar sized holes in other rooms. He made a mental note to plug the holes, as he should have done when he refinished the floors. On the fourth day, which started at 4 in the morning, for now his days were measured only by the onset of pain, he started to worry in earnest and began plotting out a trip to a doctor. By eight the pain had subsided enough that he thought he could drive without blacking out and crashing into a tobacco barn and he set off for the thirty mile drive south, the tobacco fields along the way showing mature crops with bottom leaves yellowing.
He signed in, and waited. There was a woman with a walker in the waiting room, who looked like Whitney Houston, and he wondered momentarily if she had indeed fallen this far. It made him sad to think so. After an hour the pain had come back and he prayed it would not come on full strength because he did not want to moan, or get on all fours, or lay on his back with legs up to his chest, or pace restlessly about the office, or perform any of the other unsuccessful pain management techniques he had tried over the last four days. He opted for an exaggeratedly upright posture with one fist clenched tightly on a rigid arm positioned slightly behind him on the seat. He kept his eyes averted and hoped the little Samoan boy with mother, father and grandmother in tow, would not engage him. The kid was all over the waiting room, pulling on pictures and rolling on the floor, generally seeming way too happy to be sick enough for a doctor's visit. The boy did start crying when his father carried him back to a doctor and the man unfairly took some pleasure in this.
His name was called after about an hour and he was elated but hoped his pants didn't fall down because he had unbuttoned them at some point in one of his attempts at relieving the pain. But it was just for temperature and blood pressure and basic questioning by nurses that he had been called back, and then he was sent out to the waiting room again. One of the questions was on the one to ten scale how would he rate the pain and misconstruing the meaning, thinking they meant relative to what he could conceive and not relative to what he had ever experienced, he said six. Over the next twenty minutes back in the waiting room he realized the more likely meaning of the question so when he eventually did see a doctor he said ten. Later, in the parking lot outside the pharmacist's office, while popping one non-narcotic and one narcotic pain killer, he remembered the time the top half of a faulty 24 foot extension ladder had broken free and slid in free fall to connect with his upright thumb, and amended the pain he felt now to a 9.5.
What the doctor had said was "welcome to the world of kidney stones."
It's sad really only if you think it is, the image of a man standing in front of a pedestal sink, pushed up a little on the balls of his feet and leaning forward so that his penis, held lovingly in his hands, will clear the ceramic edge, him searching expectantly the flow of urine into a screened funnel for foreign treasure. Like panning for gold he picks through the paltry particles remaining on top of the fine mesh with a sliver of oak shaved from a scrap plank. "Is that a speck of dried blood?" he wonders aloud as he picks it out and sticks it to the side of a plastic specimen bottle. Hardly seems possible that it could be dried blood but it's dark and the doctor had said there was blood in his urine. He harkens back to his days as a junior hobo when in San Francisco a thorazine carrying Vietnam Vet was trying to school him on how to cheat the government out of assistance dollars. "The surest way to get disability dollars is to prick your finger and put a drop of blood in your urine specimen bottle." At the time he was just a middle class kid, dropped out from college, trying to travel on the cheap, and he had opted for the less deceitful and smaller payoff of the Mission District blood bank.
In the present he spies another minute specimen resting on top of the mesh and picking it out with the sharp oak point it appears gelatinous, with a fine thread of a tail and he wonders if it could be his unborn son. Can sperm be in your urine? It seemed plausible but as he had not had sex, or masturbated in...?...well, too long, it seemed not so likely. But what did he know about it? A screened funnel, a sliver of oak, and a specimen bottle does not a doctor make.
The first day he thought it was just food poisoning. The second day, with only two hours of severe pain, seemed an improvement and reaffirmed his food poisoning theory. The third day, with two separate pain sessions lasting multiple hours, he began to worry, and while not exactly hallucinating, his world view, small as it was inside the nearly finished 800 square foot renovated rental project, changed, and his vision became sharper and his sense of smell was registering every drop of mouse urine in the house. Later when he saw the mouse poke it's head up through a hole in the floor (holes a past renter had drilled to run extension cords or speaker wires), he threw a water bottle at it and then positioned a paint can over the hole. And cans of stain over three similar sized holes in other rooms. He made a mental note to plug the holes, as he should have done when he refinished the floors. On the fourth day, which started at 4 in the morning, for now his days were measured only by the onset of pain, he started to worry in earnest and began plotting out a trip to a doctor. By eight the pain had subsided enough that he thought he could drive without blacking out and crashing into a tobacco barn and he set off for the thirty mile drive south, the tobacco fields along the way showing mature crops with bottom leaves yellowing.
He signed in, and waited. There was a woman with a walker in the waiting room, who looked like Whitney Houston, and he wondered momentarily if she had indeed fallen this far. It made him sad to think so. After an hour the pain had come back and he prayed it would not come on full strength because he did not want to moan, or get on all fours, or lay on his back with legs up to his chest, or pace restlessly about the office, or perform any of the other unsuccessful pain management techniques he had tried over the last four days. He opted for an exaggeratedly upright posture with one fist clenched tightly on a rigid arm positioned slightly behind him on the seat. He kept his eyes averted and hoped the little Samoan boy with mother, father and grandmother in tow, would not engage him. The kid was all over the waiting room, pulling on pictures and rolling on the floor, generally seeming way too happy to be sick enough for a doctor's visit. The boy did start crying when his father carried him back to a doctor and the man unfairly took some pleasure in this.
His name was called after about an hour and he was elated but hoped his pants didn't fall down because he had unbuttoned them at some point in one of his attempts at relieving the pain. But it was just for temperature and blood pressure and basic questioning by nurses that he had been called back, and then he was sent out to the waiting room again. One of the questions was on the one to ten scale how would he rate the pain and misconstruing the meaning, thinking they meant relative to what he could conceive and not relative to what he had ever experienced, he said six. Over the next twenty minutes back in the waiting room he realized the more likely meaning of the question so when he eventually did see a doctor he said ten. Later, in the parking lot outside the pharmacist's office, while popping one non-narcotic and one narcotic pain killer, he remembered the time the top half of a faulty 24 foot extension ladder had broken free and slid in free fall to connect with his upright thumb, and amended the pain he felt now to a 9.5.
What the doctor had said was "welcome to the world of kidney stones."