Holly Northrop Blog

Three shots of morphine later I asked for the Percocet well before any of the morphine had even begun to wear off. All I said was that I was crampy and they offered it up. Who am I to refuse? It was such an automatic response. Do you want a Percocet? Why yes, thank you. Do you want some air to breathe? But of course. In my head, it's that easy no matter how wasted I already am.

It didn't matter that I couldn't feel the leg things they put on you after surgery. I didn't even know they were there until an hour later when I noticed that my legs were sweating and I pulled back the sheets to see why.

"Wow, what's on my legs?" I managed to slur out of my mouth.
"Those are those compression stockings they put on you so you don't get blood clots." Martha sighed.
"I'm hot, take them off." I said sounding like a fussy five year old.
"You're a junkie, I swear to god. Why don't you sit up, you look ashen. Let's TRY to get it together so we can go. I want to go home." Martha pressed.

Even though I was moving at a snails pace, I did understand her point. We had been at the hospital for four hours, the last three of which I had been happily fucked up, Martha, not so much. I just had trouble getting my body to work. I barely remember her dragging me down the hall. I sort of remember waving at the nurses station. I have a vague memory of waiting in front of the hospital for her to pull the car around and I think it was raining but after that...

Some clarification is needed here. I am not a junkie, nor am I a drug seeker, as they are sometimes called. I do not loiter around the hospital waiting for a chance to be fucked up. I look at it this way. I am not going to pass up the opportunity for a good buzz and I mean really, if someone is going to scrape my uterus then the least they can do is fuck me up for the day. Right? I didn't get a drug doggie bag so really, all I had was what I could eat there.

The new calendar is here!!! It's supercool, on different glossy stock and $50.00 bucks a pop BUT here is the deal. If you break it down, wait let me get the Sharp Solar Powered Calculator...

Okay, if you break it down $50.00 ÷ 13 (that is right folks 13 months not just 12 but 13!). Where was I? Right $50.00 ÷ 13 = $3.85 a photo, a month. What a deal! I know it is like the death of our evil consumer ways but you gotta have something to look at all year long. You need somewhere to write down all those interview dates and doctors appointments. Think of the spooky black and white pleasure my little calendar could bring you for over a whole year. That is 395 days (remember, 13 months) of happiness, or 0.13 cents a day people!

So Tuesday, right, voting. Jesus Christ, I'm scared.

On Tuesday, I'll be over at the American Legion Hall, (a stronghold of the republican party for sure), working the polls;

(No Jasmine slow down and reread the sentence. I did not write that I was working the pole.)

Side note: That reminds me of a moment at my fathers weirdo funeral when the creepy Mason's were standing in front of his open coffin reciting their weirdo Masonic Funeral Service, specifically the part where the 'Master reads the Sacred Roll'. He said, "Wayne Schneider was a Master Mason." Jasmine thought he said Wayne Schneider was a Masturbator.

Only an advanced stage of Alzheimer's is going to make me forget that.

Good lord, anyway.

I volunteered to work the polling place for three hours on Tuesday. I am a poll watcher. I have to write down the name and party of each registered voter. I'm not supposed to talk to anyone, chat with voters or use my cell phone. Sounds perfect.

I must say I'd feel a tad better about our political process if there weren't four typos on the instruction sheet. Oh sure, I have typos out the ass but I'm not trying to make sure the presidential election voting process works seamlessly.

Later on election evening, we are having (gasp) friends over to hang out (bigger gasp) to watch the results. We are all going to be either very happy or very sad. One way will be joy and happiness and the other, according to Martha, will end with her sobbing uncontrollably in the fetal position in a dark closet.

I'd rather the neighbors not see that, but hey, that's part of the charm in getting to know us.

Ah yes, week four of our home renovations starts out with the siding people still here. The creamy yellow siding is all up; gone is the flapping foil and chunks of demonic wasp nests. That's right, I'm not just fucked-in-the-head over wasps, there really was an infantry of horror behind the old aluminum siding. The boys, (as we now call them), pulled out big slabs of nests all along the back of the house. Some still had wasps in them, but because it was cold, they died upon exposure. If only it were that easy. I can think of a few people that if all I had to do was to rip them out the house onto the front lawn where they would die from exposure, well then Martha, fill up the Prius 'cause we are going on a road-trip.

So what did we learn here? Sometimes, I am not as zany as I may appear to be. I am kind of like that warning on the side view mirrors; objects may be closer than they appear. Just because I'm freaking out about something does not mean that it isn't real.

Anyway, now all that is left to do on the house is the window treatments and all the other little details, which if I remember correctly, is where the Devil lives; in the details.

On cloudy days, the house looks (no doubt about it), yellow. On sunny days, it blends in more with all that damn sunlight and seems to be more cream.

Every part of the outside of the house has been hammered to death. What that means is that all over the inside of the house is dust and little one hundred year old dirt particles. Mostly the dirt crumbs are all around the edges, window frames, outside wall baseboards and any furniture that is against any outside wall. So pretty much everything. I've been trying to keep up with it but it's just useless. So once they leave, (hopefully by Tuesday) I have a immense whole-house cleaning to look forward to.

On the other side of torment, somehow, I ended up on a peculiar mailing list at work. Roughly twice a month I receive a package with a God book in it. I'm on a Christian mailing list. Of all the things that could come to the Voice it is hardly one for the record books. The fact that this package is addressed to me is odd. Someone out there decided that I needed to get my God on.

So far, Thomas Nelson, Inc. from Nashville, TN has sent me:
The Trouble with Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises
Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion back
Finding Our Way Again: The Return of Ancient Practices
And, from the Ancient Practices Series: In Constant Prayer

I've made a little shrine for all these books over my desk. Seeing how I really don't have much personal stuff there anymore. I have been putting up 'my flair' with either weird things I find around the office from past employees cubicles, or things that come to me, like the god books. Up until a few days ago, I still had hanging there my 20 x 13 photo of dead Pope John Paul II that Gianni Giansanti took and that I personally think is one of the top ten amazing shots of 2005, but I brought that home because I didn't want anyone else to snag it.

In addition to all the Jesus crap, I have a Sexual Harassment pamphlet thumb tacked to my cube wall, a webby award that the old web team won back in the 'tail end of the days' when we did shit that was cool, and a copy of a TPS Report.

Walking by my desk one would think that I am some kind of crazy religious dyke with the conflicting protestant and catholic concerns.

While poking around the Thomas Nelson's, Inc. from Nashville, TN website, I noticed a few interesting things. I particularly liked the menu on their homepage for the first three sections; Fiction, Non-fiction and Bibles. It is interesting to me that they find a difference between them. Upon closer look, the line between them all is pretty fuzzy but when you start using the term Non-fiction in reference to anything having to do with Christ aren't you already blurring the lines of reputable classification?

The reference section is more like self-help on how to read The Bible, which furthers my belief that all self-help books are bullshit. In all of the reference section this book: Captivating Heart to Heart Study Guide: An Invitation Into the Beauty and Depth of the Feminine Soul, bothers me the most.

Here is the first paragraph of the books description:

"Every little girl has dreams of being swept up into a great adventure and of being the beautiful princess. Sadly, when women grow up, they are often swept up into a life filled merely with duty and demands. Many Christian women are tired and struggling under the weight of the pressure to be a "good servant," a nurturing caregiver, or a capable home manager."

Eww, eww and yuck.

It's like Haiku:

little princess girl
capable home manager:
tired woman's dream

What the hell is a capable home manager? Is that what they are calling housewives these days? Well, by that classification, my mom was an incapable home manager with a "slight" prescription drug problem, but hey, maybe she just needed a little more GOD in her life or to be dragged out on the front lawn.

In the video section, I found out that James Brolin stared in a A Dramatic Presentation of the Birth of Christianity.

James, (Marcus Welby; Amityville Horror; Barbara Streisand's husband), Brolin plays Peter. The guy who put the Reagan in The Reagans. I hated Reagan so much (still do) that I just wanted to punch the TV anytime he was on the screen. Judy Davis was awesome as Nancy and the reason that I watched it in the first place. I remember thinking at the time that her version of 'Just Say No Nancy' reminded me of my nightmare of growing up in a house of republicans.

This is that movie that the Republican Party got all pissy about and threatened to boycott. But I'm confused here, it's network TV. Who the hell cares if a political party decides to boycott anything that is broadcast on network television? What is the larger message here; does the Republican Party own Nielsen TV Ratings?

Anyway, CBS caved to this threat and moved it on over the Showtime. Showtime, the channel that has always excelled in stupid programming and will run the sloppy seconds of HBO in a heartbeat. This explains to me not only why The L Word ever made it on the air, but why it is in its (gag me) fifth season.

Right, okay, let us see I've covered God and the Devil, home renovations, politics, mom issues, lesbian sex and drug use. Is there anything else I'm not supposed to write about? Why yes there is, but for now I'm good. So I guess I'll go flip back and forth between a little mind numbing girl-on-girl no sex/stupid sex, and the Nielsen TV Rated Oscars, while abusing a just a little bit'o prescription drugs.

Right out of the gate, actually it was well before our gate at Albany airport and deep in the bowels of TSA Checkpoint Charlie land, I was yet again, made to stand off to the side, away from the herd and forced to do weird things. The folks over at Homeland Security are as friendly as a bag of rattlesnakes. So I was all the more delighted when a guy wearing the standard issued white shirt with the big Helvetica Bold lettering TSA on the back, grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me off line. He broke my number one rule —do not fucking touch me. He told me to leave my shoes on and to come with him.

'I'm going to put you in the puffer." He said.
"The what? A puffer? No." I pulled away.
"Yes. You're going in 'The Puffer'." He demanded. Honestly, he could have been just a tad nicer.

I looked at him and he had the classic 'do not give me any shit bitch' look and I threw my hands up in the air and laughed, because for whatever reason I always seem to warrant a second look and I obviously give the impression of being someone who knows how to handle explosives.

So there I was standing in a clear plastic phone booth type box, wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt and a bad attitude. Three or four puffs of air blew my hair straight up, like an allover fluff and then there was total silence as the explosives trace detection portal analyzed my particles. Super Sexy.

Once we were actually on the airplane things moved along rather seamlessly. The planes were on time, the rental car was there waiting for us and did not stink to high hell. Things were good.

You Know Martha, It's a Dangerous World Out There
Driving over to Winston-Salem from Greensboro I noticed that while it is technically fall, the overall color of the leaves were dull and brittle. The woods were so dense with dead underbrush that it looked as though they could burn for years, much like an underground Kentucky coal fire.

When we got to the hotel I pulled my suitcase out of the back of the gas guzzling SUV that we had rented (having forgotten that I had been digging around in my suitcase earlier looking for gum and not zipped it back up), I then proceeded to spew the contents of my travel life all over the parking lot. Along with my underwear, socks and a Jesus Loves Me shirt, my digital camera, the holga and my 1940's Brownie Reflex camera hit the ground hard.

After a quick survey of possible breakage, Martha helped me shoved all my shit back into my suitcase and onward we went.

Later on that evening and after a speedy visit with Gen we went to scary downtown Winston-Salem to a little café for some tea. Walking back to the car, I was holding my digital camera in my left hand when it became tangled up with my purse strap. I was attempting to untangle it all when my lens cap sprung off, rolled down the sidewalk and straight into the sewer grate. Had Martha not seen it with her own eyes she would have never believed me. Go ahead ask her.

"How does this shit happen to you!?" she yelled.
"What do you mean, this IS my life!" I laughed.
"Oh Jesus Christ Holly," she said as we both stood over the sewer looking down at my lens cap resting nicely on the comics page of the local paper.
"Okay, all we need is a big stick and some gum. Do you have any gum?" she asked.
"Yep I got a bunch of gum and why don't you pull that big stick out of your ass and we'll be all set."
"Only if you kiss it first."

We started walking back to the car to drop off our teas and purses, all the while looking for something stick like to use. First we walked towards a garage door that looked as though there might be plastic tubing on the ground in front of it but upon a closer look we noticed that the plastic tubing was coming from the garage door like for some kind of ventilation, like you might find in say, a meth lab. So we moved away from the garage door. Across from the meth lab was pile of broken up wooden pallets. Perfect, now I just needed to chew a bunch of gum. We get back to the car and I stick one piece in my mouth and start chewing. I wait a few minutes and then put another one in there, chew for a few more minutes and I put the third in when Martha looked at me and in a snarky tone said, "I think two is enough." I opened my mouth to say something snarky back and half of the third stick of un-chewed gum fell out of my mouth and landed on the sidewalk.

"Okay, well two and a half should be good" she laughed.

I frantically chewed gum while we walked back to the sewer grate. The gum couldn't be too sugary otherwise it wouldn't be that sticky. After a few more minutes, I stuck the gum on the end of the stick and Martha proceeded to poke at the lens cap. She was able to get the thing stuck to it but when I would try to grab it, it would fall back to the paper. After a few attempts, a passerby asked if we dropped our keys.

"No, the lens cap to my camera", I replied, and within seconds this guy was on the ground, in the gutter, helping Martha navigate the stick over to the side that had more space. In the blink of an eye, I was holding my sticky dirt cover cap.

The guy started to walk away and I asked him if he wanted some hand sanitizer. Sure, he said as I squirted a big dollop into his palms. "Thank you so much, I hope you have a wonderful life." I called out as he walked away.

I never know if I'm blessing someone or cursing them when I say that.

Weird Sushi Drug Breath
The next day at the Assisted Living place from 10:30 until 3:00 was Glamour Shots Day. For $50 bucks you could have your photo taken against a lovely Seasonal backdrop. A stylist could do your makeup or if you chose, you could do your own. It is understood that there are no Glamour Shots of Gen. You know that, right?

This was the day that we took Gen to the mall to get her a pair of shoes. I'm not sure I can accurately describe the whole rotten ordeal other than that she's got a bunion on one foot and the other one is half a size larger. She wanted laces but she can't tie her shoes anymore but was hell bent on ignoring that fact. All she did was bitch and by noon, I already had a whole Xanax in me and was periodically licking another one just to take the edges off the edges. By mid-afternoon once we were safely back in the comforts of Assisted Living, I ended up taking a two-hour nap on Frank's bed.

I think this was the night that Martha and I decided to try the Japanese place that we had driven by about a zillion times over the past year. Actually, there are two, but the big one looked to be the better choice, until we got in there and realized it was more like a Benihana then anything we might be interested in. The last thing I want to ever do in my life is sit in a room full of southern Christians under florescent lights, unless there is some kind of old-time revival snake handling thing going on and I have a camera. I most certainly don't want to be stuffed around a large round table with a Japanese 'chef' cooking the shit out of my food while juggling knifes and pepper shakers in front of me.

So we drove down the street to the other Japanese place and what do you know they had a sushi bar and by first glance it appeared to be normal. But in a matter of minutes, good feeling gone. A totally out of control Wake Forest drunken college jackasses were over in the corner. There must have been ten of them and then another eight or so came in to join in. They did this sake!, sake!, sake!, scream and then slammed the table when they were done chugging shots of...sake. It was beyond loud.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked Martha when there was a break in the screaming.
"I weep for our future." She said.

For Christians, They Sure Do Raise Hell with Each Other
Our last day in Winston-Salem my spirits were high but my back gave me the finger. It was done. It now hated me and was going to punish me anyway it could. The last day was difficult mostly because I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there. I was so impatient with just about everything. I kept zipping and unzipping my drug pouch and at one point, while looking inside it I said to Martha, "I'm just going to eat everything in here and spend the day at the hospital."

"You're sick", Martha said laughing as she hovered Pecan Sandies at quite the velocity. I lifted my head, smiled and rotorted, "It's either that or vodka, right?" She shrugged her shoulders agreed and shoved another cookie in her mouth.

At one point Martha and I went to Tanglewood's Festival of Lights. I can't seem to remember what night that was but it was fun in that creepy the earth is doomed kind of way. Of course, only I see it that way because I'm such a cynic, but whatever, it was disturbing and after a few days of listening to Gen spout out things like, "I used to know this area but since I've been incarcerated I've lost all that knowledge." I was a little drained in the warm fuzzy sector of my brain. Good feeling gone.

Big, big day last Wednesday. I ended up going to the emergency room in Hudson. Late on Tuesday and while working from home, I started having a little dizzy thing happen. I felt sick to my stomach and considering that I wasn't dealing with anything other then normal work stuff, I figured that it wasn't my job that was making me nauseous (as is usually the case) but that it must be something else. I noticed that if I turned my head to the left or right I'd get dizzy.

I stopped working around 5:30, went downstairs cleaned up a little bit and took a shower. Then around 7:00 pm I rolled back on the exercise ball and wham!, my ear popped and my head started spinning around and around. Not horizontally but vertically. Everything I looked at spun around clockwise in front of my eyes, not that I think direction would have mattered much.

I had full on vertigo complete with spinning fisheye lens. I was even unable to lie on the couch without everything spinning around in front of me. I sat up and with a ridiculous amount of effort, I made it into the bedroom where I took a bunch of drugs and went to bed.

All night, every time I moved my head the room would spin, actually waking me up. At one point, I had just enough wits about me to make it to the bathroom and back before I passed out on top of the bed. Somewhere in the middle of the night Martha and I had a conversation about how if I'm still a mess my the morning, she would take me to the hospital.

So at 7am Martha drove me three blocks to the hospital. I was barely able to walk in the door and once admitted my ass was put in a wheelchair. After admitting me, the nurse wheeled me into an ER stall with a table and all the things that would be needed to save a life. There must have been roughly twenty of these stalls all around the whole floor. After first putting me on a table where the back kept falling down, spinning me around even more, we changed tables and they stuck an IV line in my arm, covered me in warm blankets and turned the lights off until the doctor could see me.

Moments after the nurse left me the woman in the stall next to me started vomiting. Vomiting, vomiting and vomiting. She was unbelievably loud and her voice was so low that at first Martha and I just assumed it was a man. Her vomiting went on for several minutes, (and I mean like ten), before she got it together. A nurse came over and started asking her questions.

"When was the last time you ate?" asked the nurse.
"Last night I had a bowl of cereal about 7:00." she replied. That is correct, something bad happened to all of us at exactly 7:00pm, I thought.
"In the past five years have you had any major surgical procedures?" asked the nurse.
"Just a hysterectomy three years ago." she managed to murmur out before she started vomiting again.

Martha, who had been leaning on my bed rail and petting me, mouthed to my face "That's a woman?"

It did boggle the mind and give me pause to all that hysterectomy chatter that I am prone to. Would a hysterectomy make my voice sound like the Ohio trucker that I already talk like? I pondered that as I laid in the cold dark room staring at a tan wall, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, trying not to throw up all over myself. I heard the doctor order a CT scan with contrast for the woman next to me.

After about an hour, a doctor came over to see what my deal was. He looked in my ears, (which looked fine) and we chatted about the whole head spinning, unable to walk thing. He briefly went over the types of things that cause vertigo, trauma or tumor, and everything else. He ordered blood work and nausea medicine then he said he would check on me later.

The anti-nausea medicine was awesome and why that shit isn't on the market I'll never know. My stomach hasn't felt that normal since I was eight and when the nurse came around I mentioned to her that she might want to give the woman next to me some of it. She just looked at me and smiled. Yeah, sure, it sucked for her but at least she was able to walk away. Martha and I were trapped and I felt so sorry for Vomit Woman.

I kept drifting in and out of sleep but I woke up to hear a Bambi like nurse trying to give Vomit Woman two big things of barium to drink. I looked at Martha and whispered, "That's not going to work, I mean fuck, she's going to puke that right back up." Vomit Woman, understandably pushed back, saying there is no way she's going to be able to drink it, but Bambi persisted and told her to try.

So the woman tried and after about ten minutes of her making a low growling noises she started vomiting again. It was so loud it reminded me of an old SNL skit with Bill Murray at the Roman vomitorium. All Martha and I could do was look at each other and smile at the absurdity of it.

After a few hours of sleep, vomiting and a rather difficult bathroom break, the doctor came back around and asked me how I was feeling. I felt the same, except now my neck and back were killing me and I had a wicked headache. Quite possibly the worst headache I've ever had, I mentioned.

The doctor ordered a CT scan, (thank god, it was not an MRI) and told the nurse to give me something for my headache. Fifteen minutes later the wheelchair shows up to take me to the CT scan but the nurse, who was down the hall, told the wheelchair girl to wait; she wanted to give me something for my headache.

A few minutes later, the nurse shows up with a syringe full of Dilaudid, only my favorite drug on the planet. I want to make a t-shirt that reads, I (heart) Dilaudid. As she injected the medicine into my IV, I felt that welcome wave of warmth and that wonderful euphoric high that only clean, clean narcotics can give. Within seconds my headache was gone, my back felt great and I didn't even notice the spinning room around me. I had all the answers to the universe, I just wasn't able to tell anyone or move into a wheelchair they wanted to put me in. All I could do was lie there with a big fucking smile on my face.

"Why you were never a junkie, I'll never know." Martha said to me later when no one was around.
"Fear of needles." I slurred out of the side of my mouth.
"That's it, right?" she asked.
"That and watching my friends shoot junk and turn into trash."

After a CT scan determined that I did not have a brain tumor and blood work indicated that there was no meningitis, they loaded some instructions and a prescription on Martha. The doctor told me not to drive (ha ha) and sent me home where, fully doped up I climbed into bed and immediately I fell asleep half sitting up. I slept in that arrangement for about an hour. Martha made me lunch and I tried to eat some soup and a Pepperidge Farm Goldfish but threw up the goldfish and fell asleep again.

The pills they gave me are for nausea and/or vomiting. The prescription reads: Take 1 tablet by mouth three times a day as needed but I read it as take 1 tablet when needed and have been motoring through them at quite a clip. All they do is make me sleepy but they are making me dream weird.

Well I suppose I always have had weird dreams but my conscious brain seems to, as of late, not be protecting me as strongly as it has in the past. It's not that these dreams are horrible it's just that they are fairly disappointing. Things like, I'll dream about my ex-husband and that we are still friends, or I'll dream about my mom and not only is she still alive but she is, to some extent, normal. I dreamt about an old boyfriend and in the dream, we were just hanging out laughing. In all these dreams, there is laughter, something that has not happened in my waking life with these people in decades, and that is a hard plural meaning numerous decades my friends. Laughing is also a clue within the dream that makes me realized that I am in fact dreaming. Once that 'reality' enters the dream, the dream moves on to another improbable scenario where it flows around normalville, until it occurs to me that I'm dreaming. Not only is my physical balance off, my mental one is becoming sloppy. Super.

I have to see an ear, nose and throat guy on Tuesday. The hospital seems to think that I might have a rip in the membrane between my ear and my inner ear, or somehow, particles/fluid got in there and are brushing against hair follicles telling my brain that I'm moving but my body says that I'm not. Or I have an inner ear infection. Or I'm just fucked in the head.

In what was supposed to be a low-key Thanksgiving weekend with Jasmine turned into a total cluster fuck, consisting of hospitals; doctors; social workers; hospice workers and general frustration all wrapped in the cranberry sauce of sadness.

Martha's dad was admitted to the hospital the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with shortness of breath. After draining fluid in his left lung the word came back that there was nothing they could do, the lung was full of tumors, (as was Frank) and for us to come down and to go ahead and set up hospice care. However the fuck we were supposed to do that.

Before we could cut our visit short with Jasmine, we had to find someone in our little town of Hudson that could look after the cats. We didn't leave enough food out for an open ended stay away. Nor did we even begin to bring enough clothes. Martha called a friend of hers that have a part-time house in the next town over. They have two friends that actually live three houses away from us and while, yes we have met them once or twice, they have never been in our house. Martha called Paul and set up cat sitting services while we had a spare key made. We then sent the key overnight to people we do not know with hand written instructions on where shit is and what to do.

We left Jasmine, and drove ten hours south to Winston-Salem, NC, stopping every two-hundred miles for gas and a bathroom break. We had to be in Frank's hospital room by 4:00 for a family meeting with the cancer doctor.

We were only 15 minutes late, simply amazing if you ask me, considering I had us turn off the highway too soon, (the only map we had in the jeep was more of a general United States atlas thing). We drove in on a bunch of Appalachian back roads, in what I consider the first of many unnecessary tension-filled moments. But the doctor was late too, actually we were on the same time seeing how we followed him into the room.

While I am sure it cannot be easy to tell someone that they are dying and there is nothing that can be done, I know there has to be a better way then what happened next. The cancer doctor didn't want to say the "dying" word, and instead inserted all kinds of other words. When in doubt he would reference the word "Hospice", which neither one of Martha's parents understood what that meant nor was Mr. Cancer Doctor wasn't going to explain it to them either. Not talking about it probably has something to do with not giving up hope but you know what, if you are too PC with breaking bad news then not giving up hope leads to inaction, (especially with this crowd), which is the last fucking thing that needed to happen when the hospital is kicking you out.

All Frank wanted to do was go home; he didn't care or understand what was being said to him about hospice care.

Finally, after a bunch of phone calls, in-room meetings and the handling of Martha's mother, Frank was disconnected from the IV, given a script for some antibiotics, a mother load of Oxycoden and released from the hospital. After five days of lying in bed he could barely walk.

Martha's mother, ever so disgusted that we were there and completely resentful that Martha moved them into assisted living, was for the most part, cranky and thought we were pushy. This woman is going to be the primary care giver once we leave yet she can't really follow the simplest of instructions and has a bitch fit if she feels slighted. When Frank's tongue swelled up overnight, she bitched at Martha for calling the doctor the next day. Frank had horrible night sweats one evening last week and she told him to remember his prayers instead of calling the hospice number. This is the same woman that asked me, "Tell me dear, is Christmas on the 25th this year?"

Yep. It is that easy to land in the hands of the totally crazy as your guardian. Frank, I love you, good luck and please take the Oxy like Pez.

I spent five days on elderly time. Lunch at 11:30, dinner at 4:30 endless hours of just sitting; no reading, TV or talking, just staring into the air; or trying to remember how to add; or if you've taken your medicine; or what the emergency magnet on the refrigerator is for; or what fucking day Christmas is.

DRUGS AND A PUMPKIN MUFFIN
I could never work there, at the Assisted Living place. No matter how nice and clean it is and how adorable the apartments are. Christ, if I worked there, everyday at the end of my shift I would run screaming from the building to my beat-to-shit ten-year-old grey Buick, lighting cigarette after cigarette while pealing out of the parking lot, driving to the nearest bar, (probably an Applebee's) where the staff, without asking, would know what I drink.

Once seated at the horseshoe bar, encasing myself in the comfort of FOX News and classic rock, I'd drink myself stupid while hoovering my way through Boneless Buffalo Wings and a big bucket of Baja Potato Boats. Every night I'd finish it out with a helping of Triple Chocolate Meltdown™ and a pack of Marlboros.

The all day game of "Who is that? What are you talking about? Why is she on the phone? When is lunch?" every two-fricken-minutes would drive me to be a fat-as-fuck, two pack-a-day, alcoholic. I don't know how these people work there and I know that we, the collective, democratic we, will never pay them enough money to deal with Assisted Living Land.

I was under such odd stress that I would tell anyone who would listen that I wanted a cigarette and when Alison, Martha's sister would go outside to smoke, I would join her and stand an uncomfortable ten inches from her face. Interestingly enough, at the Assisted Living Home out in front they have several rockers and a full-blown smoking section, complete with elderly smokers, most of whom were women.

Once we left Winston-Salem, the overwhelming desire to smoke went away, and thank god as I was just about a day away from making some kind of screwy deal with Martha involving a carton a Marlboros and a case of beer.

We managed to bring home a piece of furniture from her parents' house that Martha had wanted to have but we could never figure out the logistics of it all. Now that we had the Jeep in town we put a beautiful chest of drawers in the back and covered it with a 5 x 8 oriental rug that Martha's mom gave us. At first glace it looked like a casket covered with a shroud. Actually at first, second and third glances it looked like a casket and there was nothing to be done about it.

We finally left Winston-Salem on Wednesday afternoon, deciding to split the thirteen-hour drive into two days. We drove for five hours north to a Hampton Inn in the middle of Virginia, where I THOUGHT we had reservations. We didn't because Martha never imagined we would make there. They were sold out and we had to spend the night at a fricken Best Western that was attached to a Perkins.

I didn't even want to walk up the outside steps to the second floor of the motel. My tired and over stressed mind kept replaying some very awful Ohio memories. Martha, ever the optimist, sweet-talked me with, "I'm sorry if this reminds you of your childhood. It will be all right, we are making NEW memories."

"I hate it when I know that I am going to be able to quote you." I smirked, dragging my suitcase behind me.

I was on edge the minute we stepped into the room, and I was convinced the place had bugs.

Unable to sleep even after a Xanax and a Benadryl, I was lying in bed with the lights off watching John Stewart fawn all over Tom Waits. I was clearly fucked up and enjoying myself, when out of the corner of my eye I notice a large black spot on an otherwise white lampshade, just a few feet from my head. Upon closer inspection, it moved and so did I. I jumped out of bed and ran, yes ran, over to the other side of the bed where Martha was out like a coma patient. I called her name and as her eyes shot open, she screamed at me, "My god Holly, what's the matter with you?"

"There's a big bug on the lampshade." I whined.

Glaring in my general direction because she can't actually see me without her glasses, she shouted, "Well kill it! What the hell is wrong with you?"

"It's big and I can't tell what it is." I yell back. This was true; it looked like a dino-bug. You know, been here about a million years before us and will be here a million more after we are gone. Those things creep me out. Plus, it was the size and shape of the toenail on my big toe.

"What the hell am I suppose to do?" Martha yells just as she grabs the yellow pages and from roughly ten feet away she throws it at the lamp. The shade goes flying off the lamp and the whole thing slams against the window, but does not break. I look down at the carpet and there is the bug - dead. I was laughing so hard I could barely say... "We're making NEW memories."

The rest of the drive home was long and for about an hour very foggy. Once home and semi settled in, Martha and I went out for a sushi dinner.

When we returned from a lovely dinner, our key didn't work—at all. Martha walked down the street to Paul's house but... he wasn't home. We had no choice but to break into our own house. I remembered that the window over the kitchen sick was unlocked. So there we were, standing on the slanted metal cellar doors in the dark with the wind blowing the gate door that is just out of backyard light range, clanging it around in the dark and heightening an already stressful event, I picked up Martha and shoved her thought the small kitchen window. She crawled into the sink and onto the floor and finally, we were home.

On an airplane ride home to Jersey and the journey is a little bumpy, to say the least. An hour before, at the airport terminal we watched a massive hailstorm move through the runway area and freak out most folks waiting on airplanes. The odd thing is that storm was roughly the third hailstorm I have seen in just as many weeks. I'm telling ya, it's the end of the world.

Oh well, at lease I'm closer to God. We are on a puddle-jumper and boy howdy it certainly is jumping. Martha is convinced that we are going to crash. She's had a death grip on my left arm for a while now, her eyes are dilated and she's whispering to me "We're going to crash, we're going to crash." loud enough that the guy across the isle from her keeps frowning at me. I give him my best version of my smile, fuck off, hair-flick look and shift around so I can stare out my window.

Sliding around in the air above Greensboro, NC I look out at God's country and notice that at some point in this airplanes history a Ladybug has died, having been trapped between the two pains of window glass of my window. Now this concerns me on a few levels. First, how did the Ladybug get there? I thought these things have to be sealed, not drafty. Okay I understand we're not going into space here but isn't there that whole 'pressurized cabin" and air mask demo thing? If so, then how did a bulbous shaped Ladybug squeeze through a seam and why, if there is a seam, wouldn't the unseen seam cause a pressure problem? Shouldn't my window crack and then blow out along with my seat and the back half of the plane? Secondly, what does a dead Ladybug stuck in my window mean? I don't like the metaphor, you know, luck and all.

These little puddle-jumpers remind of me of MRI machines. I love to fly and usually don't give a damn about anything as long as I can sit near a window. But after a year of constantly being shoved into a little metal tube, apparently now, I get a little claustrophobic. That little mind game reared it's ugly head last Friday morning after we had been in our seats for over thirty minutes but still on the ground and not going anywhere. Everything was too close to my face, too tight and it felt like there was no air. Panic set in, and not being one to fuck around with panic, I chewed a Xanax and silently talked myself down until the sweet relief of the modification of my GABA_A receptor. Gaba Gaba hey!

CARE
Martha's Mom and Dad are old and crazy. That is the short answer to "How was North Carolina?". Martha's sister came up and while we all had a lovely time together, I didn't sleep more than a combined total of 5 hours in two days. The second night there I ended up on the recliner. I can no longer sleep in a double bed with another person, in particular Martha, who is long and likes to lay diagonally. It was super great and with her sister there, the only other place I could have gone was the passenger side of the PT-Cruiser that we rented. It was a serious consideration at 4am Saturday morning but it was also storming outside so I thought against it.

The long and strange answer to the NC trip is that Martha's mother isn't doing so well. What's making her sick is a drug she is on, Coumadin, also known as RAT POISON. She is having a rare and deadly reaction to it and steps need to be taken to get her off the drug. When the choices are gangrene, open sores that will not heal, possible limb removal and liver failure or the quick click of a stroke, I think I would take the stroke, Bob.

But I'm 43 and what the hell do I know? At 87 and when you were raised to believe in a doctors care and blindly go along with what is recommended regardless of the effects, this concept of challenging your doctor and making end of life decisions is quite daunting, depressing, discouraging and over all a big fucking drag. It pains me in new and different ways to see her in so much discomfort. I feel for her and I love her with all my heart. I love her like a Mom.

I did mange to do a few things over the holiday besides lay around and watch movies. I cleaned up, or more likely messed up, some of my code; added a new logo thing and did some general site maintenance. Real boring stuff. I pulled work for the Krappy Kamera Contest and Toycamera.com has me as the featured artist. I'm not sure for how long I'll be on the homepage so the gallery link is here.

Miss Simon came through here Tuesday-Wednesday and then again on Saturday night. She has her very own version of travel hell that only underscores our decision to stay here and have the rest of the country clog the nations highways. Why travel when New York City finally clears out and one can move about without too much annoyance? Shave a few million off the total and things become quite nice. So nice that a trip from Jersey to Queens really wasn't that fucked up even with the 7 train running on a screwy schedule.

Jasmine went to Grandma Northrop's house in Tennessee. According to Jazz, grandma has been sick and therefore the two of them didn't do much. Jasmine spent the majority of her trip to the deep dark south hanging out with the twenty-three year old neighbor boy and his friend, smoking dope and getting drunk at an all-night bowling alley. The crabapple certainly didn't fall very far from that tree. She stayed up partying all night Saturday and then boarded a 8:30am flight to Charlotte where she had a small layover until her flight to Pittsburgh dropped her off at her fathers. By the time he saw her I can only imagine what she smelt like. I am so glad I was totally out of the loop on all of it. It's way funnier over the phone then in person.

Thanksgiving was different this year. Well, wait, Thanksgiving has always been a little different seeing as how I haven't played the roll of 'daughter coming home' in twenty-five years.

As your average disgruntled fucked up kid of the 1970s, Turkey Day was always my favorite day to do a shit-load of drugs. That is if we did not go to Grandma Schneider's House. Grandma lived on a hilltop full of black snakes, about 15 miles outside of Midway, PA. She had a chicken coup and every year slaughtered her own turkey. Grandma Schneider's house was crazy scary and anything stronger than a joint was NOT recommended. The coolest thing at Grandma's house was her black and white dog named Zippy. I hung out with him as much as I possibly could.

If we stayed in Ohio, I would hang out with dad all day while he watched hours of football. It was the one safe place to be, even if he fell asleep. Mom would never mess with a day of sports and I would lie on the floor between the TV and my father, reading horror novels. (I became the dog.) Salem's Lot and football saved me from my mother and myself.

The last time I "went home" for Thanksgiving was in 1980. I had been away at college for the five months prior and after eight hours on a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh, I arrived in Cincinnati with a duffel bag full of neurosis and a head full of acid. I was having a good day and it was precisely because of the drugs that I was able to be pleasant.

It is almost as though my dilated pupils had taken a photo of that particular day. I remember the image of dinner so very, very well. Probably because it was the last time I ever went home for a holiday. I remember it better than I remember any actual conversation that most likely happened between the three of us. The image of the turkey candlestick holders that caught the wax drippings from the candles, their light flickering off of my mother's china and for a brief moment, everything seemed comfortable, still lingers in the shadows of my psyche. I recall how my eyes followed the light around the thin gold rim of my plate and then looking up to my left at my mom just as she smiled at me. I then shifted my eyes over to the right at my father and caught a glimpse of him watching her with his crooked, Dick Cheney grin.

He had good reason to keep an eye on her. My mom could go from semi-happy and laughing to yanking her lit cigarette out of the beanbag ashtray and pointing its red ember at my nose, murmuring strange things about Meadville, marijuana, abortion or my 'rotten friends'.

Yes, well enough of that silliness, she is dead now and her china sits in a moldy basement in Butler, PA. C'est la fucking vie.

Thanksgiving was different this year. I made Filet Mignon and Martha ate almost a whole homemade pumpkin pie. We watched the fine cinema of Fritz Lang with his masterwork M and we took naps. A little bit of German horror, a nap, extended family floating in and out, and turkey lunch with friends in Queens. It all sounds pretty perfect to me.

After completely dropping out for eight days, I now have 11 messages on the answering machine, over 200 personal emails, 2 feet of postal mail and 300 work emails. This is just one weeks buildup of crap. Nothing of any real importance lives within these messages; this is the information overload that I have somehow grown accustomed to. No wonder I constantly feel drained at the end of any given day. I should just erase all of it and start over. Reboot.

But, for eight wonderful days I managed to stay as wasted as possible and take a zillion photos. Many, many, many photos of the beach, sand dunes, birds, deadwood, beach bungalows and of course, Martha and Sheri.

Apparently, it rained in New York the entire time I was gone. Martha and I drove out of our New Jersey parking garage and into a monsoon at 6:00am on October 8th. It rained hammers almost the entire way down I-95 and by 7:30am, I had to take a Xanix just to be able to sit in the passengers' seat without repeatedly slamming by head against the window. Four and a half hours later, when we arrived in DC it was still pouring as I packed up Sheri's beach stuff into the back of the Jeep. Somewhere around Richmond, Virginia, it stopped being so fucking torrential and just drizzled. By nightfall, the rains had moved north but the flooding was apparent. Martha and I had been in the car for 12 hours and we were just a little loopy. I became twisted around with the directions the last leg of the drive and couldn't find the beach house. But after a little bit of yelling and a couple of U-Turns we finally pulled into the driveway of our new, blue bungalow. Another problem came with the front door. The combination lock wasn't working and Martha, crazy-eyed and pumped full of adrenaline, combined with Sheri's determination, pushed open the door. I don't want to say they broke the door because technically they didn't. It still worked; we just couldn't lock it anymore. This speaks to just how small of a town we were in. We would go to the store and NOT LOCK THE FRONT DOOR.

Although we were isolated on a non-tourist beach town, Sheri had a shinny new PowerBook with wireless internet, so certain parts of life could move forward if one chose to move them. Martha was able to test drive a MAC and I think she is possibly sold. There are some things that she isn't too crazy about but who isn't? So Martha and Sheri were posting photos of beach stuff and running slideshows for all to enjoy at the end of each day. I think I checked email twice but became despondent almost the second I logged on. One time I actually felt nauseous while hold the laptop. The nightly news had the same effect and by mid-week, I stopped all attempts to stay informed.

But with an active internet connection online shopping took place. Martha bought me a LUBITEL Russian 6x6 camera. It is coming from the Russian Federation and will be here in roughly three-weeks. All it really is is a cheap Russian toy camera but it does look fun to play with. The shipping costs just as much as the camera for a grand total, in US Dollars, of $40 bucks.

One thing that I did at the beach house was I turned the half-bathroom into a darkroom. I've had this pinhole camera kit forever and I thought it might be fun to mess around with it in a low-to-no pressure situation. At home, I can't get any room totally dark without altering something, (hell, we can't even see the stars at night) but at the beach house it was so simple. So for several days I took pinholes, made paper negs and printed contact prints using a light bulb and my arm as an enlarger.

On the nature front, two different crabs bit me on my foot within five minutes of walking along the waterline, completely freaking me out. Those little fuckers hurt and they weren't the cute sand crabs either. These were the crab, crabs. It was then that I made the decision not to swim in the ocean and to wear flip-flops while walking on the sand. But I was able to frolic at will in a hot tub overlooking the ocean under the moonlight, so that more than made up for the lack of oceanic action.

Biggest lesson learned is no real surprise; laughter is the best sound and medicine in the world. Well, almost. Drugs are good too and the sound of our cats purring as they ram their heads into me is pretty fantastic.

WOW. Okay THAT was so fucked up. Surgery is no joke, not that I thought it was and just in case I happened to forget all the little frightening parts from Jasmine's birth, all those years ago, this whole adrenal thing slammed it all back home for me. Abdominal surgery is fucked up no matter how you look at it. Just because they drilled four little holes in my belly (laparoscopic surgery) instead of a nice and lumpy eight inch, incision does not mean that they treat the insides any differently.

Jesus Christ, I feel like my gut has been used as a bowl for scrambling eggs in. And the eggs were my innards and wolves ate the resulting omelet.

Oh, but let's talk about the drugs.

I was on Dilaudid ® every three hours for three solid days. To sum that up so we can all better understand the level of pain here, that is 24 shots of synthetic heroin every three hours over a seventy-two hour period. Some would call that "the Mother load" and I would be one to agree with that observation. Now, a great many of those hours, that delicious drug was the only thing that kept me from passing out from the shear pain in my back, shoulders and neck. For two days, I was so fucked up that I could not see past my nose. I displayed in front of my partner, daughter and best friend just about every revolting thing a human body can do except shit the bed. The only reason I didn't do that, was because all opioid-based narcotics cause constipation - thank God. Poor Jasmine, she not only witnessed me crying, an act upsetting all by its self, but she had the added bonus of watching me cry out in pain and seeing me naked. For her, the big mystery as to my natural redhead status has been completely answered, even though she never asked.

The reason my back was completely out of control I didn't find out until Sunday afternoon when this totally hot Anesthesiologist chick stood at the foot of my bed and explained to me just exactly what the hell they all did TO me. I have four holes in my belly. Three along the bottom starting on my left hip area and moving toward my belly button and the fourth one is very close to my left breast at the top of my rib cage and very near my diaphragm. One of the holes was used to pump large amounts of Carbon dioxide gas into my abdomen. The idea being to EXPAND my torso and get a better look around. The trouble is that we humans cannot handle large amount of C02 and in fact, too much can kill us or make us kill ourselves, which, come to think of it had I been strong enough I just might have attempted on Sunday because the pain was god awful.

Carbon Dioxide gets in the muscles and while it eventually works its way out of the body, until it is gone, it is a nightmare. Think bubbles in all of your muscles, tummy, neck, brain and all around your innards. Burping and farting are good but nothing but time moves the C02 out or your muscles. Time and a whole bunch of Dilaudid to pass those days away.

Now, I was dealing with a weekend staff at the hospital so you know things didn't move as snappy as they do Monday- Friday. The night shift was probably the worst and the first night there was fucking horrible. I had to insist, through tears, that the fucking nurse give me a catheter. She was hesitant because they didn't give me one in surgery so why would I need one now. The doctor she was trying to reach wasn't calling back and my bladder was so full that it was making me sick. Let me just say here, you know you are in a fucked up scene when you personally have to beg for a catheter. Finally, she listened to me and well, I was so fucking right and she was so fucking wrong as her nice white nursing shoes aren't so white anymore. After our little interaction that night, she pretty much stayed away from me and I hissed at her whenever she came into my room.

I had a roommate for one night, the first night, also known as catheter night, and although I never saw her nor do I know her name, I wish to apologize to her wherever she may be. That night sucked for both of us and I am so glad they let you out of the hospital the very next day. You definitely drew the short straw that night and I hope you have a great life. I am so sorry that I cried like a baby and that our night nurse sucked ass.

From then on, the karma gods saw fit to let me stay alone in a double room. It was a total score but the price was pretty high.

So now what? I am home and I have nothing to do but drugs, nap and write. We are waiting on test results and I have a slew of doctor's appointments both this week and next. Eventually, I will have to go back to work and life should return to normal. Hard to remember just what the hell normal is, but I am looking forward to finding out.

The reason my surgery has been moved to Friday is because of one person. One doctor, my Endocrinologist, whom I tried for three weeks to get a hold of but he never returned my calls. Finally, my M.D. got in touch with him a week and a half ago. He said that my medications were fine and that he didn't need to see me and good luck with the surgery. THE DAY BEFORE MY SURGERY, that fucker call the hospital saying that my surgery needed to me postponed because he wanted me on yet another drug.

From then on, shit hit the fan and at one point, I was on a 4-way conference call with Martha, my M.D. and the surgeon. My M.D., who rocks so hard, negotiated with the hospital for me to have the surgery on Friday as long as I take these bright red pills that not only fuck me up like crazy, (they are tranquilizers) but also have the unfortunate side effect of plugging my sinuses up like cement.

I have fired my Endocrinologist and I am actually considering filing a complaint against him.

Sheri is here until Sunday, Jasmine has the entire week off and I am too wasted do anything. So now, Friday is the day. Yeah, right.

RAMBLE ON HOME
Okay, here is the deal. I am supposed to have surgery this Wednesday at 10am. We shall see. My doctors have increased my medicine again to the point where I am now a walking zombie. It is a little tough to do anything and that includes staying awake.

Going to work last Friday, after spending hours at the hospital, was a HUGE mistake. A mistake that I fully did not appreciate until it was way too late. I was only at The Voice for three hours and that was three hours too many. I was spent before I got there and only kept walking down the street towards the building because I had to go to the bathroom. I have a lithium shuffle in my walk now and crossing a street is down right dangerous. Hmm, the idea is that I am going to work on Monday but then I'll be off the rest of this week and then the next. I just don't have the days that I need, to take the proper amount of time off. Fucked up isn't it? I wasted all that time in February for nothing.

Energy comes in spurts with no indication of duration. Saturday, Martha helped me shoot the West Village for The Voice. We did it early and it all worked pretty well until a headache took over and my right eye kept going in and out of focus. So we called it a day and when I finally got home, I slept for three hours. Sunday, I didn't get out of bed until almost 4:00. I like to lie around just as much as the next lazy fucker but even I know how ridiculous all of this is.

Last week was all the doctor prep work: blood, urine, EKG, psychological work up (shocker, I passed), etc., and while the ramp-up is quite impressive, I am hesitant to get on board with the program. I just don't trust that it will happen. The hospital is pleasant and everyone is all about the operation. I am a special thing so it is all very "watched". The good news is that I am to take Valium from now until the minute they knock me out with anesthesia. That works for me.

Karen, the bug-eyed women who is the Head of Anesthesia at the hospital, went into graphic detail about what all is going to happen to me and from the sound of it; I am going to be completely violated. I will have a central line, a catheter and a breathing tube. My heart, lungs and brain will be continuously monitored by state-of-the-art equipment. My blood pressure will remain the constant topic of conversation in the operating room. Afterwards, Martha and Jazz can come to Intensive Care to look at me and try not to flip out, (good luck with that) but hopefully, I won't be in there too long. If the doctors fuck up and there is a problem, I'll be in there for a while. Yet, if it goes well, I'll be in a shared room, lying on my right side, trying not to dry heave and white knuckling my self-inducing morphine drip. Hopefully, by dinnertime, someone will give me a Jell-O cup to lick.

I have a few concerns. Well, I have about a zillion really, but one of the big ones is that, while they may take my left adrenal out, that still might not fix the problem. I might have another pheochromocytoma somewhere else. I could wake up from surgery and still have all these fucked up symptoms. I have been sick for almost two (2) years; I do not even remember what I am supposed to feel like. The last time I felt normal was when I was smoking and that cannot be right. Or maybe it is. Maybe I am just one big hunk of white trash and I am supposed to smoke two packs of Marlboro a day, weigh 235 pounds and drink a fifth of whiskey every two days. Maybe, by fucking with that winning formula four years ago, I altered the core of my Ohio raised DNA.

Of course, the other big worry is that they just might kill me on Wednesday. A valid concern, but a highly unlikely outcome. My freakazoid M.D. did the risk factor and I am at a zero (0) for something bad to happen. But, that chart she used didn't have my disease on it because it is so rare. (In the general population, 0.001 - 0.01%, I think I have better odds winning Mega-Millions.) Yes, yes, I know, zero (0), but it still does not make the 'kick the bucket' idea leave my troubled mind. Then there is the fear that it will be called off again because of, well, God only knows what but I am sure it would involve another scan.

There is no way to describe the absolute joy and jubilation that comes from knowing that Jasmine's PET scans are all clear. I didn't even realize just how fucked in the head with worry I truly was until the word came that she was fine. I started to cry at my desk at work. Tears of relief. Then, within two minutes I suddenly was exhausted and in dire need of a nap. But, in the middle of a newspaper deadline, I stayed chained to my desk.

Jasmine is learning the fine art of first apartment furniture gathering. She has already snagged an end table from the clutches of the trash room and then, last Tuesday, she found herself with a day off, wandering around Macy's furniture liquidation sale. She bought an entertainment stand for eleven dollars. That's as good as any yard sale or Goodwill. I have trained the young grasshopper well.

The only catch was that she had to get it home all by herself. So, she carried it through Newport Pavonia mall, drug it on the Light Rail at rush hour and then walked it three blocks to the apartment. There really isn't any place to put this 4ft by 2ft thing so it is currently shoved up against the window in the living room. There really isn't any place to put anything in this apartment and we don't have a storage space. We have eight weeks until move out and the stacking of crap has already started. The office is a disaster zone.

Plans are in the works for Miss Jasmine's 21st birthday. They now include a fancy water front dinner at The Chart House and she is busing in college backup in the form of a boy from PA to help her celebrate. Oh sure, Martha, Sheri and I are just great and all but we tend to wrap it up kind of early. We'll get tired and cranky and the talk will turn into a three-way mom fest with no end in sight. At least with one of her own kind around we'll instinctively back off, not so much to save Jasmine but more of a not letting the others see how ridiculous we can get.

But yes, back to the idea of company in our cramped little domicile. He is gay and will be Jasmine's roommate next year. Horror of horrors we are having a boy in the house. Hmm, does it count if he's gay? Well, the cats will let us know.

CUT ME OPEN
Well, hey what's this I see? A surgery date has been confirmed...and why, yes, it looks like...July 27th at 10am in the morning they will be taking my left adrenal gland out. We shall see. I have to jump through all those hoops that I jumped through in February so let the games begin. I'll believe it when I wake up in the hospital doped up and hallucinating. At least all this time has made Martha and I deal with some adult stuff like Living Wills, Power of Attorney and the all-important Last Will and Testament. Hey, they are going to put me under so we had to go there. Thank you to Olivia for the use of her super cool Notary stamp.

AMERICA: THE MOVIE
Why has 60 Minutes been nothing but reruns for the past several weeks? What the fuck? Isn't there ANYTHING to report on? I mean the whole cancer sniffing dog thing was cool but honestly, they should be ashamed of themselves for phoning it in like every other news and entertainment program. What about Sandra Day O'Connor? (This country is so fucked) What about Live 8? What about the Increase in the Number of Documents Classified by the Government. Or National Organization for Women pissing and arm waving at Bush over abortion rights. It's not just 60 Minutes either. Dateline and 20/20 are just as useless. I don't get it. How can so many of us not care? My own newspaper has turned into something I no longer recognize. The Village Voice is not what it used to be that is for sure and the word "evolve" isn't what I'm thinking of. The right is the new left and the true left are a bunch of sky is falling fruit loops.

What? Everything is fine, the economy is great; don't worry about healthcare, or jobs. Where's my fucking iPod? Katie Holmes said YES! "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." -George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

And you know, Freedom ain't free, biatch.

EVERYTHING ABOUT ME SAYS GO AWAY
Sunday night, a little after 5:00pm and I had the apartment all to myself for about the two hours. Jasmine was at work and Martha was out doing the most social of activities. She was golfing with two other lesbians. As predictable as that is, it is just as unpredictable that I won't play along and be the fourth wheel on the lesbian golf cart. I'm just not that kind of girl, although I happen to like a girl who is a golfer. I love to nap to golf and I really do dig Annika. But it's more than just golf that I won't partake in. Martha explains it away with excuses that I'm not very social and "that's okay", which, I suppose, it has to be.

She and I had a conversation about how if anyone ever needed a mentor in life it was I, because almost everyone I've ever known has turned up full of shit and exclusively self motivated. I did have a teacher once, senior year of high school that I trusted and gave me basic life stuff. She was part of that new Hippie way of Team Teaching and insisted that her students call her by her first name, which was Cindy. She treated all of us like adults, even if we fucked up and skipped class to go smoke dope in the parking lot. At the time, I thought she was cool because she was the first adult to vocalize to me that my mom was probably insane and not to pay too much attention to her. But, by that point, it was a little late in the game and I was out of the state of Ohio within three months, regardless of whatever horseshit my mom pulled. I would have thumbed to college if I had needed to. My mom hated Cindy and constantly told me so, but it was the only time I ever got straight A's in high school.

This was also around the same time that I met a girl that was a little older than me named Jenny. We both worked the nightshift at Frisch's Big Boy and became fast friends. She lost her right eye when she was a small child via her little brother and a tree branch and she now had a glass eye. One slow night when I was bored out of my skull I asked her if I could see it. She responded by popping it right out of the socket and holding it up in front of my face. Both of my eyes shifted focus between the marble eye in the foreground and the dark hole of her eye socket in the background. From that moment on, I thought she was the coolest girl I'd ever met. That single act of unconscious behavior blew my mind.

Ah yes, but that was a hundred years and countless buckets of whiskey ago and unfortunately, the basis of my bullshit detector rests somewhere within the seeds of my youth. Over the years, I have met some of the finest folks under the strangest conditions and I have watched some of those same folks turn the strangest. It really is tragic when you fail to live up to someone else's expectations.

Whether its lovers, family or friends, you think you are all on the same page but then the page changes and you realize that some of those that you love can't keep up. You recognize that they are in remedial reading and stuck on junk that was never who you were in the first place. Or maybe who you were for one day, on acid and walking around with a camera but not who you are all the damn time. But in their head, that's how you have been filed so now you are stuck living out somebody else's absurdity. Oh sure, some fake it real well and a have glazed over understanding of the words that are coming out of your mouth. They fake it until they can't follow along anymore and either walk away or blame all their heartache on you. Others act out in aggressive deeds of hostility in the hopes of showing you just what an asshole YOU are. That is when you start to realize that blood is thinner than water and everyone is apathetic unless it directly relates to themselves.

Ah, I have a point in there somewhere but who cares.

Yeah, so that is what I did when left alone. Write and listen to my new Say Hi to Your Mom CD. (Everybody send love to Eric in Brooklyn.)

Fuck it, and chalk it up to being so fucking overworked that I'm nuttier than normal. Siren is so up my ass that all I dream is green. Let's just say that this year is particularly painful and I spent the majority of my 4th of July weekend working on it. I like the site though but I am also fried. I keep telling myself that it is for the greater good of the collection of hours and another portfolio piece. I'm collecting my overtime to cash out for my surgery. It would be nice to use that instead of ALL of my vacation time. We do have that beach house thing in October that I daydream about daily. Last week was just downright ugly with the Union threatening to strike and then pulling me into there little circle of strange. That's right, I'm now a Union employee. God help us all.

Choosing to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution, Martha and I drove our gas guzzling SUV right through the heart of Pennsyltucky last Friday to pick up princess Jasmine at college and drag her pickled body back home to Jersey City. There is nothing like a road trip akin to that to make a person realize just how much FOX News has a chokehold on the spoon-fed minds of the middle class. Between the Bush/Cheney bumper stickers tastefully displayed on various shades of deep red Buick LeSabres and the 'Support Our Troops' magnetic yellow ribbons slapped on the ass of the basic Ford Taurus, it was hard for me to gauge which one bothered me more. It was easy to tell however which one drove Martha crazy. Every time a we came upon a Bush/Cheney sticker (and there were PLENTY of those, let me tell you) Martha make a 'Uch' sound and flipped into road rage mode as she would flick on the blinker, hit the gas and zoom around them. Those cars can only appear in the rearview mirror.

Ah yes, but Pennsyltucky is almost the same as I left it, a complex five years ago, only now, more of why I left is on display everywhere. One could not help but notice under the deep blue skies and shining sun, flags as big as my entire living room whipping around passionately in the wind as fat-as-fuck natives shuffle between Wal-Mart and Eat-N-Park, their eyes dilated from constant hording.

But back to the task at hand. We made good time getting to Jasmine's small college town and without much fan fair, thank god, we actually moved her out of her dorm and into a storage space under the four-hour allotted timeframe. We even met one of her hippie chick friends (Yes, I got a photo) who was in the process of moving to California. But really the big thing for Martha was the Friday night dinner where we could talk about the "New House Rules" for the summer. All very exciting for Martha but not so much for Jasmine, who tends to get frumpy whenever ANYTHING changes. Turning Jasmine on to closed caption instead of blasting the volume on the TV is going to be hard, but I think it's a good way for her to learn to read.

Traveling in true lesbian form, we needed to stop at the grocery store twice for just an overnight stay. Ah well, there is shit you need and then there is the shit you forget to bring. Besides, who knew our hotel room had a refrigerator? And sweet Jesus, where else could I stand in line at the Bi-Lo and listen to Aerosmith's Lick and Promise while waiting to purchase fat free half-n-half and crossword puzzles. Well, maybe in Ohio, which makes sense if you think about it because those borders do touch. This explains why while I was in line, singing along with Steven, I had a flashback to the summer of 1976 when I spent a few months sniffing glue with a small group of dope fiends that I met in summer school. We would go over to the hardware store next to the Harley shop and buy a big tube of white airplane glue, always making sure to get a brown bag at checkout so we have something to squeeze the goo into. Then, we would scurry off behind the condos on Montgomery Road where the woods was thick and dark. So thick that the sun hardly passed through the trees and the forest floor was covered in cool sweet moss. It was the summer of the Bicentennial and the Seven Year Locust and those crazy bugs were everywhere in the woods, clicking away all around us as we sniffed glue and fried our brains.

Funny what a song can do, eh? It's like one big smear of the bizarre. No wonder I have a tumor.

The drive home was enchanting for about thirty minutes in that I met a friend's mom in Milton, PA where we picked up a wall clock and a bread maker. Weirder small town photo stuff is really the driving force here but Milton was quaint without the usual past religious percussion vibe that most small towns in PA seem to carry. After that, it was around three hours of nothing but studying the black crows hanging out in the barren trees of the Pocono's all along the side of interstate 80, patiently waiting for the next road kill. I guess they view the highway as a 24/7 deli. Just sit and wait, any minute now something is going to try to cross the road. Why do they do it? Only the crows know.

THE WEEKS LIST
What weekend isn't complete without a little trip up the road for some barium and meat? I have to have yet another CT scan at 8:15 Monday morning so Sunday is berry flavored Barium Sulfate Suspension day and we need to go to the grocery store. The chores of life even on Mother's Day.

I spent $700 at the dentist last Thursday where I had to get nine (9) shots of some kind of crap I need to counteract the damage that the tumor and blood pressure medicine are doing to my teeth. My stomach has been killing me for about a week, I have no idea why, probably nerves, but fuck if not one thing would do the job and make it stop. I am actually thinking of drinking whisky just to see if that still works. It was only when I was at the dentist and I accidentally swallowed a big lump of topical novocaine that it eased up for a few hours. The cramping and nausea returned for the following two days but for those few hours it was great.

Big, big week here and only two days of it are going to be spent at work. Aside from the awesome CT scan with 1 mil cuts of my pesky adrenal gland, Martha and I are traveling to NC to visit her unbelievably old but totally inspiring parents. They are both 85 and an absolute joy to be around. I cannot wait to see them. The whole deal down there is so low key that the only big thing of every day is lunch. I'm going to read, nap and laugh my ass off because they are a riot. Actually, it's the three of them, Martha and her parents, that is where the laughter and the love is crazy fun.

Wednesday is Martha's 42nd birthday. She opened her brand new digital camera on Saturday night after we came home. A good chunk of Wednesday will be spent dealing with more doctor horseshit but I hope I can at least take her out for dinner or something.

A year ago, I was down in Ohio dealing (or not dealing) with the death of my mom and I cannot seem to shake the sensation of that icky spectacle. Life after your parents die makes for a strange sense of awareness. In my case a whole bunch of things make it a little more troublesome but for the sake of something normal I'll just state some obvious stuff. I am an only child and my grandparents are dead. The whole cousin thing is so small and distant that I have no idea who is still alive. I was the youngest first cousin and there were only a handful of us. My relationship with both of my parents was, let us just say fucked and I am being kind. The troublesome parts are the anniversary dates, the particular days that seem to stick in my head and remind me of the mountain of bullshit from where I come from.

Bad anniversaries do that I suppose. The whole cancer thing with Jasmine works very similar in my mind but truthfully, what comes slamming back is the fear. She does not worry, I do, and we usually end up yelling at each other about it all. It's a good time for she and I and those within earshot enjoy it too.

Christmas season and weird family shit go hand in hand but when you are a family of three, the strange sticks out more.

LEARNING TO SEW
My mom and dad had a plastic Christmas tree that they kept in a huge Sears box in the basement. Mom hated pine needles, plants, pets and anything living that might make a mess. Likewise, my worthiness was constantly in question. Every year my dad would lug that thing up the basement stairs and assemble the razor sharp wire mess in the family room. He usually did this around the fifth or sixth of December, whatever day fell on the first Sunday in the month. We never went to church (what, are you kidding?) and by that point in the school year I was usually grounded so the whole day was pretty free.

First, he would pull all of the pieces for the tree from the box and lay them around the room. The view from the kitchen looked as though my father had done bad things to an unnaturally green evergreen.

My parents had an old black lacquered stereo console that they must have bought sometime in the fifties. It was in every baby photo I ever saw and there used to be plenty of those. My dad was a photographer and shot a great deal of film of me as a child and mom as a new mother. He also photographed every Christmas up until I was around eleven. Then he just stopped. Anyway, the console had a radio and a turntable that played 33 & 1/3's, 45's and 78's. My dad had a huge collection of 78's, mostly big band stuff but this was the one time of year when my mother removed the lamb from the top of it and opened the lid. Bing Crosby's White Christmas blasted repeatedly, so much so that to this very day I cannot tolerate it.

While Bing would sing, my dad would snap the pieces into the tall green metal tower and by mid-tree the profanity would start. As a small child, I would sit at the kitchen table and watch with wonder. As a teenager, I would sit on the kitchen floor with a head full of acid and attempt to analyze the whole experience.

My mom had the box with the all of the ornaments and crap we put in the front windows of the house. Decorating the tree was my job because I was "the artist" and they considered it a birthday present to let me do it. In a weird way, I was into it. Every year I decorated the tree that dad built.

Dad would finish snapping the last wire branch at the top with a final "fucking thing" statement and then he'd step back, gaze at it, tilt his head from side to side and then glance over at me in the kitchen, clap his hands together and say "Okay, it's all yours" and walk off. Elvis had left the building. He would stomp off to his office not to be seen again until dinner.

At that point, Mom would come on stage with the box of garland, lights, ornaments, tinsel and the white angel for the top. Once she had given me all the props, she would go back to decorating the front windows of the house with plastic Christmas wreaths, the center of which had a single red candle with two white snowbells on each side. They were the prettiest thing, six of them in all and every year I never understood how we ended up with something so understated.

I had a least and hour of alone time with the tree before mom would be back, sitting on the couch, chain smoking and watching me decorate. She never said anything to me; she would just sit roughly ten feet away and keep an eye on me. Calling