the dirty dozen {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register}*
Suspicious person/circumstance. 10:19 p.m. A male subject was sitting with a hammer in his hand.
Disturbance. 5:12 p.m. An informant in the principal's office at Hidden Hills Elementary said skateboarders were using picnic tables.
Disturbance. 6:59 p.m. A woman called about a 7-year-old child who was abusive to her dog and her daughter.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:15 a.m. The caller reported finding two cash registers on his lawn.
Disturbance. 6:29 p.m. The caller said six children are throwing rocks at nine ducklings along the bike trail. The caller yelled at them and is a little concerned they may come after him next.
Suspicious person. 10:46 a.m. A woman was pulling plants out of people's yards.
Suspicious person. 4:47 p.m. A gallon size plastic bag was attached to a street sign. The caller said it looked like pencils inside and said it didn't look normal.
Disturbance. 9:25 p.m. A caller reported that someone threw a gallon of milk at his house 10 minutes ago. He doesn't know who did it but there are three people standing nearby in the dark in a hallway.
Citizen assist, 3:28 p.m. Someone reported people handing out religious material to students coming out of school.
Keeping the peace, 7:42 p.m. A man said his neighbor was giving baseball lessons in his own backyard and it was too loud.
Petty theft. 10:49 a.m. A man said someone used a rock to break into the candy vending machine at a construction project he supervises and stole $50 in candy. The damage to the machine was $100.
Shoplifting. 9:05 a.m. An employee of Ralphs said a man took a 24-ounce can of Budweiser into the bathroom and drank it without paying. The loss was $1.94.
*previous installment here.
08.20.13
When the group broke from the conversation around the table to pose for a family photo outside, they continued their easy patter on books and pop culture. Joe's corgi, McMurtry, named after the novelist Larry McMurtry, was insistently present, so that someone catching snippets, from a distance, of the family's conversation into the yard would have heard something like this: "Neil Gaiman ... Spielberg ... McMurtry! McMurtry! ... Cronenberg ... Matt Groening ... McMurtry!"
"Did you see that picture of John Irving that ran somewhere—he was coming out of some swamp with his shirt off?" Owen asked. "He looked like a ninja."
(from susan dominus's "children of the pen," on stephen king's family)
08.15.13
the dirty dozen {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register}*
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:47 p.m. The caller said a pizza delivery guy came to the door with a pizza but she didn't order any.
Found property. 5:10 p.m. The caller said he was using a metal detector and found a knife.
Disturbance. 10:47 p.m. The caller reported four men smoking out of a bong at the community center softball field.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:12 p.m. The caller said a "big-time drug dealer" is going to be doing a huge drug deal at the In-N-Out.
Reckless driving. 10:55 a.m. The caller reported a woman in a Jetta "hugging" the curb and hitting the sidewalk.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 12:21 a.m. The caller said all lights are on at Carl's Jr. and it's a 24-hour drive-through, but there are signs on the doors saying "closed, sorry for the inconvenience" and registers are wrapped in black trash bags.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:01 a.m. The caller said a man set up a tent in the Little League first base dugout area.
Keep the peace. 4:15 p.m. The caller said he negotiated a purchase of a printer on eBay and was told by the owner to drive to Beverly Hills and pick it up. When he got there, a woman was standing there with the printer and said she's handling the sale, but she's not who he spoke to and she's denying knowing that person. The caller said it's very shady.
Disturbance. 11:55 p.m. The caller said his drunken friend is not acting normal.
Assist outside agency. 6:30 a.m. A bobcat or mountain lion reportedly was spotted in a resident's back yard.
Citizen assist. 6:25 p.m. A woman said she left her driver's license and credit card in her lover's trousers. Her lover then went home to his wife, who was angry and now had both her ID and credit card, she said. She called sheriff's deputies in an attempt to retrieve her property, officials said.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 1:42 p.m. The caller reported two men mowing the lawn and thought it was suspicious because they're driving a small U-Haul instead of a truck.
*previous installment here.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:47 p.m. The caller said a pizza delivery guy came to the door with a pizza but she didn't order any.
Found property. 5:10 p.m. The caller said he was using a metal detector and found a knife.
Disturbance. 10:47 p.m. The caller reported four men smoking out of a bong at the community center softball field.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:12 p.m. The caller said a "big-time drug dealer" is going to be doing a huge drug deal at the In-N-Out.
Reckless driving. 10:55 a.m. The caller reported a woman in a Jetta "hugging" the curb and hitting the sidewalk.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 12:21 a.m. The caller said all lights are on at Carl's Jr. and it's a 24-hour drive-through, but there are signs on the doors saying "closed, sorry for the inconvenience" and registers are wrapped in black trash bags.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:01 a.m. The caller said a man set up a tent in the Little League first base dugout area.
Keep the peace. 4:15 p.m. The caller said he negotiated a purchase of a printer on eBay and was told by the owner to drive to Beverly Hills and pick it up. When he got there, a woman was standing there with the printer and said she's handling the sale, but she's not who he spoke to and she's denying knowing that person. The caller said it's very shady.
Disturbance. 11:55 p.m. The caller said his drunken friend is not acting normal.
Assist outside agency. 6:30 a.m. A bobcat or mountain lion reportedly was spotted in a resident's back yard.
Citizen assist. 6:25 p.m. A woman said she left her driver's license and credit card in her lover's trousers. Her lover then went home to his wife, who was angry and now had both her ID and credit card, she said. She called sheriff's deputies in an attempt to retrieve her property, officials said.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 1:42 p.m. The caller reported two men mowing the lawn and thought it was suspicious because they're driving a small U-Haul instead of a truck.
*previous installment here.
08.13.13
it was nearly summertime when i passed the stacked cages of kittens at the southern end of the union square greenmarket. the rescue group's volunteer turned to me as if we were reentering a conversation much older than our acquaintance: "you'd make a good mama," she said slowly and somehow regally, and i hurried into whole foods and let the frosty air shrink me until i was small enough to hide behind the pineapples and cry.
as when jude died, years ago, petfinder was how i reminded myself that mourning wasn't the only thing: so many cats needed homes, and if i found the one who was supposed to come home to us, joe and steve and i would know what to do with the feelings that had no place to go after chuck died. i found cats who looked just like steve did when he was a baby, hemingway cats with miraculous extra toes, cats whose shelter reports were barely believable as country songs. in june i found matty.
back in march i cancelled our trip to visit my sister in southern california to stay in new york city as chuck died. matty was born in southern california then—not too far from where i myself was born—and i can't tell you how good it felt to trade in those useless plane tickets last month and fly out to bring him home.
i think sometimes of how joseph campbell describes the psychological, pedagogical functions of myth—how it carries us through crises, and helps people 'grasp the unfolding of life with integrity.' we atheists are like caddisfly larvae when it comes to myth, boy; in the absence of a collective narrative, we'll build shit to protect ourselves out of anything. at a birthday brunch in downtown los angeles, my sister's friends blinked at me: "you know there are homeless cats in new york city too, right?" "what if someone said, 'we really want to adopt a kid who's norwegian'?"
matty's foster mom named him matisse, so we called him matty in the weeks between when she told us we could adopt him and when i flew out to meet them both. it became clear that we weren't going to be able to call him anything else—he just is a matty—so we started chewing on names. matthew barney? matthew arnold? mathlete? he was found skittering around a parking lot in anaheim, his foster had told me, so we named him the matterhorn. in my myth he was in this photo all along, waiting for us.
as when jude died, years ago, petfinder was how i reminded myself that mourning wasn't the only thing: so many cats needed homes, and if i found the one who was supposed to come home to us, joe and steve and i would know what to do with the feelings that had no place to go after chuck died. i found cats who looked just like steve did when he was a baby, hemingway cats with miraculous extra toes, cats whose shelter reports were barely believable as country songs. in june i found matty.
back in march i cancelled our trip to visit my sister in southern california to stay in new york city as chuck died. matty was born in southern california then—not too far from where i myself was born—and i can't tell you how good it felt to trade in those useless plane tickets last month and fly out to bring him home.
i think sometimes of how joseph campbell describes the psychological, pedagogical functions of myth—how it carries us through crises, and helps people 'grasp the unfolding of life with integrity.' we atheists are like caddisfly larvae when it comes to myth, boy; in the absence of a collective narrative, we'll build shit to protect ourselves out of anything. at a birthday brunch in downtown los angeles, my sister's friends blinked at me: "you know there are homeless cats in new york city too, right?" "what if someone said, 'we really want to adopt a kid who's norwegian'?"
matty's foster mom named him matisse, so we called him matty in the weeks between when she told us we could adopt him and when i flew out to meet them both. it became clear that we weren't going to be able to call him anything else—he just is a matty—so we started chewing on names. matthew barney? matthew arnold? mathlete? he was found skittering around a parking lot in anaheim, his foster had told me, so we named him the matterhorn. in my myth he was in this photo all along, waiting for us.
08.09.13
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
babayaga (book). toby barlow's book-length werewolf poem introduced me to a new breed of supernatural fiction, and i was thrilled when his follow-up novel materialized here at my office. scrappy eastern-european witches and noirish spy types in postwar paris, you guys! smoking owl pellets, turning policemen into fleas, and, er, developing ad campaigns (i'm probably ready for TB's other career in marketing to stop informing his novels)! this one (in prose, except for the witches' songs) is also wildly inventive—the subplot about the policemen who become fleas is particularly lovely, and the magic is fascinating and brutal—but it is also seriously patchy. the central love story falls kind of flat, and the main character, he of the ad campaigns, is so undercharacterized that i had a hard time caring about what happened to him. while i still think barlow's work is umpteen times more interesting that your average summer murder-in-paradise pop fiction, i also think he needs to crank up the lyrical spookiness with his next project; it's still the most exciting thing about his work.
the bling ring (film). sofia coppola's latest, based on a vanity fair true-crime piece called "the suspects wore louboutins," follows emma watson and several other sweet-and-sour young things as they burgle* their way through star-spangled los angeles. hey, there they are in paris hilton's house (seriously, coppola filmed there)! it's megan fox and brian austin green's unexpectedly-tasteful stuff! it's gavin rossdale, "acting"! i suppose one could argue that the film's anemic plot and abrupt ending double down on its characters' superficiality and junior-varsity existentialism, but let's call a spade a spade: the bling ring is exquisitely-composed television,** not a movie. i miss lost-in-translation-era sofia c.
the comedy of errors (play). shakespeare in the park is playing to the groundlings this summer: both of the public's 2013 offerings are comparatively short (90 and 100 minutes, respectively), intermission-free comedies, and the second (love's labour's lost) is a musical by the folks who brought us bloody bloody andrew jackson and peter and the starcatcher, which is probably why joe and i haven't been able to score tickets via the virtual line (for three goddamn weeks we've been trying! get out of my line, broadway types!). comedy's goofy double-mistaken-identity plot is perfect for extra-broad, scooby-doo-times-three's-company hijinks, and the cast was up for it. hamish linklater and jesse tyler ferguson are accomplished clowns, and it was satisfying to see them with a full show's worth of the sort of material shakespeare usually hands them for short riffs. 90 minutes of, like, the pyramus-and-thisbe slapstick from a midsummer night's dream is not the sort of thing i need to see every summer, but this summer it was grand. also, it began with "sigh no more" performed as a forties-era torch song! that was as satisfying as watching a nun hand out licorice (grand street, i salute you).
the dog stars (book). a world-devouring superflu has killed almost everyone on earth; now a man flies a prop plane around colorado with his trusty dog, occasionally feeding him the survivors they encounter. on paper the dog stars sounds like a touchy-feely post-apocalyptic cross between illusions and the road, and it...is, but that's not such a bad thing. peter heller is a widely-published outdoor writer, and he writes like a guy who's spent a lot of nights in a tent (i recognize this type because i spent a lot of nights in my backyard in a tent). he also writes like a guy who really loves dogs, like a guy who's taken care of a white-muzzled dog or two, and the way he describes old jasper, man-jerky-eating aside, breaks me right in half. i don't tend to recommend novels i've enjoyed to joe—raymond chandler is maybe the only writer i've gotten under his skin—but i might have a go with this one; it's an elegant alternative to those child-contestant-killing and brain-chomping ends of the world you hear so much about these days. it is also, predictably, solid in-flight reading.
great plains (book). ian frazier, dear reader, is a motherfucking delight. i think i have a crush on his curiosity: he knows just when to ignore a story's paved route and crash through the laundry lines in someone's backyard. i came out of his travels in siberia nearly as besotted with the place as he is, and this earlier account of how he cobwebbed across the US in a nasty old van in search of ghost towns and crazy horse's people makes me want to bully my stepsister into letting me drive her car to california.*** he presents watching the beautiful robinson sisters of nicodemus, kansas perform a founder's-day dance in church-lady clothes to prince's "when doves cry" as an unironic peak life experience (or platonic anamnesis, depending on where you're sitting?), and i totally buy it.
the master builder (play). i like both john turturro and ibsen, and i made the mistake of thinking i would like john turturro in ibsen (as halvard solness, the titular builder). i'm almost alright with having made this mistake, for katherine borowitz**** as his bereaved and thrown-over wife was fascinating, if not as fascinating as ibsen's other ladies. solness is supposedly tormented (the next generation is clawing at his heels! his erections, har har, are few and far between! he has an annoying and probably imaginary young friend in a petticoat!), but turturro just seemed irritated, like a guy who promised himself he'd remember to buy coffee on the way home last night and woke up to a cupboard of weird old tea. fortunately my theatregoing ladydate kinda hated the show as well, and collective indignation is a hallmark of our friendship, so the evening ended on a high note.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you ever gotten into trouble in mexico?
02 what would your version of "sigh no more" sound like?
03 blood meridian was unreadable for me. should i give cormac mccarthy another chance and read the road, or should i move on and read some young-adult vampire novels instead?
04 how many nights have you spent in a tent?
05 do you pass books on to significant others?
06 team joan or team ian. pick a side.
*emma watson's "i want to rob," pronounced in her best unskilled-british-mimic's-approximation-of-a-so-cal-accent, is funny but misleading: robbery is, say it with me now, the taking of property by force or threat of force.
**call it an extraterrestrially-gorgeous episode of the OC, perhaps one of the ones where marissa cooper gets into trouble in mexico.
***joan didion, she of the languid cigarette and the white stingray on a thousand pinterest boards, never brings me along on her "secular communion" with freeways. i'm turning into the sort of reader and perhaps the sort of writer who needs generosity in her nonfiction. and muchness.
****turturro's offstage spouse, as it happens.
babayaga (book). toby barlow's book-length werewolf poem introduced me to a new breed of supernatural fiction, and i was thrilled when his follow-up novel materialized here at my office. scrappy eastern-european witches and noirish spy types in postwar paris, you guys! smoking owl pellets, turning policemen into fleas, and, er, developing ad campaigns (i'm probably ready for TB's other career in marketing to stop informing his novels)! this one (in prose, except for the witches' songs) is also wildly inventive—the subplot about the policemen who become fleas is particularly lovely, and the magic is fascinating and brutal—but it is also seriously patchy. the central love story falls kind of flat, and the main character, he of the ad campaigns, is so undercharacterized that i had a hard time caring about what happened to him. while i still think barlow's work is umpteen times more interesting that your average summer murder-in-paradise pop fiction, i also think he needs to crank up the lyrical spookiness with his next project; it's still the most exciting thing about his work.
the bling ring (film). sofia coppola's latest, based on a vanity fair true-crime piece called "the suspects wore louboutins," follows emma watson and several other sweet-and-sour young things as they burgle* their way through star-spangled los angeles. hey, there they are in paris hilton's house (seriously, coppola filmed there)! it's megan fox and brian austin green's unexpectedly-tasteful stuff! it's gavin rossdale, "acting"! i suppose one could argue that the film's anemic plot and abrupt ending double down on its characters' superficiality and junior-varsity existentialism, but let's call a spade a spade: the bling ring is exquisitely-composed television,** not a movie. i miss lost-in-translation-era sofia c.
the comedy of errors (play). shakespeare in the park is playing to the groundlings this summer: both of the public's 2013 offerings are comparatively short (90 and 100 minutes, respectively), intermission-free comedies, and the second (love's labour's lost) is a musical by the folks who brought us bloody bloody andrew jackson and peter and the starcatcher, which is probably why joe and i haven't been able to score tickets via the virtual line (for three goddamn weeks we've been trying! get out of my line, broadway types!). comedy's goofy double-mistaken-identity plot is perfect for extra-broad, scooby-doo-times-three's-company hijinks, and the cast was up for it. hamish linklater and jesse tyler ferguson are accomplished clowns, and it was satisfying to see them with a full show's worth of the sort of material shakespeare usually hands them for short riffs. 90 minutes of, like, the pyramus-and-thisbe slapstick from a midsummer night's dream is not the sort of thing i need to see every summer, but this summer it was grand. also, it began with "sigh no more" performed as a forties-era torch song! that was as satisfying as watching a nun hand out licorice (grand street, i salute you).
the dog stars (book). a world-devouring superflu has killed almost everyone on earth; now a man flies a prop plane around colorado with his trusty dog, occasionally feeding him the survivors they encounter. on paper the dog stars sounds like a touchy-feely post-apocalyptic cross between illusions and the road, and it...is, but that's not such a bad thing. peter heller is a widely-published outdoor writer, and he writes like a guy who's spent a lot of nights in a tent (i recognize this type because i spent a lot of nights in my backyard in a tent). he also writes like a guy who really loves dogs, like a guy who's taken care of a white-muzzled dog or two, and the way he describes old jasper, man-jerky-eating aside, breaks me right in half. i don't tend to recommend novels i've enjoyed to joe—raymond chandler is maybe the only writer i've gotten under his skin—but i might have a go with this one; it's an elegant alternative to those child-contestant-killing and brain-chomping ends of the world you hear so much about these days. it is also, predictably, solid in-flight reading.
great plains (book). ian frazier, dear reader, is a motherfucking delight. i think i have a crush on his curiosity: he knows just when to ignore a story's paved route and crash through the laundry lines in someone's backyard. i came out of his travels in siberia nearly as besotted with the place as he is, and this earlier account of how he cobwebbed across the US in a nasty old van in search of ghost towns and crazy horse's people makes me want to bully my stepsister into letting me drive her car to california.*** he presents watching the beautiful robinson sisters of nicodemus, kansas perform a founder's-day dance in church-lady clothes to prince's "when doves cry" as an unironic peak life experience (or platonic anamnesis, depending on where you're sitting?), and i totally buy it.
the master builder (play). i like both john turturro and ibsen, and i made the mistake of thinking i would like john turturro in ibsen (as halvard solness, the titular builder). i'm almost alright with having made this mistake, for katherine borowitz**** as his bereaved and thrown-over wife was fascinating, if not as fascinating as ibsen's other ladies. solness is supposedly tormented (the next generation is clawing at his heels! his erections, har har, are few and far between! he has an annoying and probably imaginary young friend in a petticoat!), but turturro just seemed irritated, like a guy who promised himself he'd remember to buy coffee on the way home last night and woke up to a cupboard of weird old tea. fortunately my theatregoing ladydate kinda hated the show as well, and collective indignation is a hallmark of our friendship, so the evening ended on a high note.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you ever gotten into trouble in mexico?
02 what would your version of "sigh no more" sound like?
03 blood meridian was unreadable for me. should i give cormac mccarthy another chance and read the road, or should i move on and read some young-adult vampire novels instead?
04 how many nights have you spent in a tent?
05 do you pass books on to significant others?
06 team joan or team ian. pick a side.
*emma watson's "i want to rob," pronounced in her best unskilled-british-mimic's-approximation-of-a-so-cal-accent, is funny but misleading: robbery is, say it with me now, the taking of property by force or threat of force.
**call it an extraterrestrially-gorgeous episode of the OC, perhaps one of the ones where marissa cooper gets into trouble in mexico.
***joan didion, she of the languid cigarette and the white stingray on a thousand pinterest boards, never brings me along on her "secular communion" with freeways. i'm turning into the sort of reader and perhaps the sort of writer who needs generosity in her nonfiction. and muchness.
****turturro's offstage spouse, as it happens.
07.31.13
the dirty dozen-ish {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register}*
Disturbance. 12:52 p.m. The caller reported a man and a woman making out on the grass and said it's not appropriate.
Illegal peddling. 7:36 p.m. The caller reported a man going door to door and arguing when he's refused.
Disturbance. 11:37 a.m. The caller reported an argument with 16-year-old grandson over a computer.
Citizen assist. 12:46 p.m. The caller said someone is spitting on his car every morning. The caller thinks it's a neighbor who lives behind him.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 7:57 p.m. The caller reported a boy smoking marijuana behind the electrical shed.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 8:00 p.m. The caller said people are possibly lighting something on fire in the park.
Vandalism in progress. 12:27 p.m. The caller reported a woman lying down on the bus stop and writing on it with a pink marker.
Disturbance. 5:45 a.m. The caller reported inviting a woman over and said she is now refusing to leave.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported someone trying to get into a wedding party as an uninvited guest.
Disturbance. 1:26 p.m. The caller reported a man eating yogurt, yelling about the government and using bad language.
Disturbance. 11:37 p.m. The caller reported loud people who have hopped the fence and are in the pool.
Disturbance. 10:39 p.m. The caller reported four people on bicycles being loud.
Defrauding an innkeeper. The caller said a man drank $100 worth of alcohol and left without paying.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported a drunken man sleeping in the planter. The caller said there are newspapers all around him.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported hearing someone knocking on the door twice. The caller's husband turned on the light and saw shadows.
*inspired in part by chelsey johnson's excellent incident reports from park rapids, minnesota.
Disturbance. 12:52 p.m. The caller reported a man and a woman making out on the grass and said it's not appropriate.
Illegal peddling. 7:36 p.m. The caller reported a man going door to door and arguing when he's refused.
Disturbance. 11:37 a.m. The caller reported an argument with 16-year-old grandson over a computer.
Citizen assist. 12:46 p.m. The caller said someone is spitting on his car every morning. The caller thinks it's a neighbor who lives behind him.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 7:57 p.m. The caller reported a boy smoking marijuana behind the electrical shed.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 8:00 p.m. The caller said people are possibly lighting something on fire in the park.
Vandalism in progress. 12:27 p.m. The caller reported a woman lying down on the bus stop and writing on it with a pink marker.
Disturbance. 5:45 a.m. The caller reported inviting a woman over and said she is now refusing to leave.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported someone trying to get into a wedding party as an uninvited guest.
Disturbance. 1:26 p.m. The caller reported a man eating yogurt, yelling about the government and using bad language.
Disturbance. 11:37 p.m. The caller reported loud people who have hopped the fence and are in the pool.
Disturbance. 10:39 p.m. The caller reported four people on bicycles being loud.
Defrauding an innkeeper. The caller said a man drank $100 worth of alcohol and left without paying.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported a drunken man sleeping in the planter. The caller said there are newspapers all around him.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported hearing someone knocking on the door twice. The caller's husband turned on the light and saw shadows.
*inspired in part by chelsey johnson's excellent incident reports from park rapids, minnesota.
07.24.13
conversations at the corporate refrigerator {I}
1: are those little...gifts?
2: homemade pickles, actually.
1: is that how one usually wraps...?
2: i had all this painter's tape, i didn't want them leaking on the subway, and...here we are.
1: no one wants pickle juice on...
2: no one.
1: are those little...gifts?
2: homemade pickles, actually.
1: is that how one usually wraps...?
2: i had all this painter's tape, i didn't want them leaking on the subway, and...here we are.
1: no one wants pickle juice on...
2: no one.
07.18.13
conversations with doctor omnibus* {omnibus on the road}
doc: not that you'll remember this because you won't come in then, but i'll be out the week of august 12th.
LMO: oh, are you going somewhere fun?
doc: the coast of oregon.
LMO: your daughter lives there, yes?
doc: she won't come and visit me because i said something she didn't like.
LMO: what did you say?
doc: i said, 'you were born on third base and think you hit a triple.'
LMO: sometimes daughters need to hear that.
doc: [...]
LMO: she'll get over it.
doc: [laughs merrily] like i care!
*have i ever mentioned that he's seventy? he's seventy.
doc: not that you'll remember this because you won't come in then, but i'll be out the week of august 12th.
LMO: oh, are you going somewhere fun?
doc: the coast of oregon.
LMO: your daughter lives there, yes?
doc: she won't come and visit me because i said something she didn't like.
LMO: what did you say?
doc: i said, 'you were born on third base and think you hit a triple.'
LMO: sometimes daughters need to hear that.
doc: [...]
LMO: she'll get over it.
doc: [laughs merrily] like i care!
*have i ever mentioned that he's seventy? he's seventy.
07.11.13
People have gone to extraordinary lengths to coax rain from the Great Plains sky. For example, an experimental cloud-seeding program sponsored by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Montana used high-speed jets to chase down and seed small clouds which often had a life span of less than thirty minutes. The program had plans equipped with laser probes, suction samplers, and armor plating against hail. In 1910, C.W. Post, the cereal magnate, began an ambitious rainmaking project on his 200,000 acres of the Texas plains. Post had noticed that in accounts of wars which he had read, heavy rains always seemed to follow artillery battles. He believed that with enough explosions he could produce rain. He blew off boxcars and boxcars of dynamite on the plains around his town of Post City, Texas. The dynamite was laid out on the ground and fired at intervals designed to simulate artillery barrages. Post and his staff kept at it for several years, and produced drizzles and one or two rainstorms, which encouraged him.
(ian frazier, from great plains)
07.06.13
it's taken me some time to come around to writing about how chuck died. when we first started dealing with his cancer, it fortified me to think that talking about my research and how we used what we learned might benefit someone in a similar situation; i wanted so badly for his suffering to mean something. after failing so utterly to protect him - after losing him so quickly and so suddenly that i feel like a great hand came together out of nothingness and simply took him, he was taken - i don't know that i have the right to talk about guardianship at all.
back when our week-long trip to california and arizona to visit family still seemed like a possibility, i cancelled our plans with our customary petsitter and arranged for a vet tech from our oncologist's office to come take care of chuck and steve. though she seemed wonderful and had much more experience with veterinary chemo patients than we did, it didn't feel anything like right to leave chuck, and i dropped out of our plans. i spent a morning on what felt like grief burlesque, calling hotels, rental car companies, and airlines to explain that i needed the indulgence of a refund because my cat was dying. you don't know me, but i'm about to fall apart on the phone to you because my cat is dying. i should be the one to call everyone, joe said, because it's harder to refuse a crying woman. he was right, i suppose, as everyone but jetblue agreed to let me out of my portion of our commitments. they had lost animals too, those representatives in phoenix and los angeles, and they were so sorry. my voice was gone by the time i took down the last cancellation number. it was such a relief to know i wouldn't be leaving him, that my vacation could be a week with him in our apartment.
march in my desk calendar is full of mysterious initials; i haven't referred to it in months. i continued giving chuck mirtazapine, his appetite stimulant, for a few more days, and started him on zofran, an anti-nausea medication, which did little to keep him from throwing up prednisone, his oral steroid. on our oncologist's orders, we stopped giving him leukeran, the oral chemo that works on 80 percent of cats with lymphoma (but not ours). on thursday, march 14, i begged a livery cab driver not to kick me out of his sedan for having a cat in my bag - he was so sick, i just needed to get him to his vet for a follow-up ultrasound and a flow cytometry test (a last-ditch non-biopsy attempt to diagnose small-cell lymphoma), he wouldn't leave any kind of residue in the car - but we returned to the cold and the curb anyway. you've got to go, mami. on friday, march 15, joe flew to arizona and i brought chuck back to the vet to take a chance on elspar, the $500 one-time subcutaneous chemo that, if effective, would confirm for us that he had large-cell lymphoma. more prednisone and zofran that weekend, and no change from the elspar. posters on the lymphoma message board told me i needed to educate myself about "assisted feeding," so i watched a bunch of youtube videos of a woman who assured me her cat wasn't traumatized in the slightest. on st. patrick's day, without joe's knowledge or consent, i bought high-calorie food and three impossibly huge syringes from the little pet shop near our old apartment in hell's kitchen. i stayed in bed all of the next day, curled around the limp C of chuck like the border of a copyright symbol.
our oncologist called on tuesday to tell me that the flow cytometry had confirmed once and for all that we were dealing with small-cell lymphoma. i took the train back up to her office for cytoxan, a different oral chemo, and more zofran. joe came back from arizona on wednesday, the first day of spring, and we steeled ourselves for new, more serious treatment. there are notations for C, C3, and CER smattered across that week in my calendar - i think CER was a different kind of appetite stimulant? - and little Vs for each day chuck vomited. there was no vomiting by thursday or friday of that week, as i think he'd stopped drinking water at that point. he was holed up at the back of my underwear shelf in the closet, back where i used to accidentally poke him in the nose because i couldn't see him when i reached for a bra in the dark.
on saturday morning i pulled him from that cubby as gently as possible, and he staggered when i set him down. i unwrapped one of those horrible syringes and the food i tried to coax into chuck's mouth didn't even make it; he couldn't close his mouth. we took one last black car up the west side highway to one of our oncologist's colleagues, who made it clear that leaving chuck to be stabilized at the clinic overnight would be a long shot at best. my chuck, the thought of you dying alone in a cage in that place crumpled me like a tissue.
we were ushered down to an underground room with a leather couch. chuck came back to us in a little plush donut of fabric, arranged to look as if he could stand up whenever he felt like it. i thanked him for taking care of jude for so many years, and for teaching steve how to be a cat. i told him i knew we were for each other at the shelter in san francisco when i turned back to see his little black ears crest the bottom of the window, when he stood watch for me for the first time. i told him i was so lucky to have a shadow, and i told him i was so sorry. we pressed the little buzzerless button to summon the vet back.
a thin young guy with a beat-up acoustic guitar boarded the train home with us at bryant park and sang.
wouldn't that save you?
wouldn't that save you?
wouldn't that save you?
a few weeks later i got a call about picking up chuck's ashes. the bag with the box and our vets' notes of condolence included a little plaster piece with the impression of chuck's paw, something i consented to before they left us and that they made after he died. CHARLIE BRONSON stamped around the edge. they'd gotten his name wrong at intake a month earlier and i never corrected it; i'd told myself he was at the doctor's with an alias, and that nothing could happen to him if they couldn't call him by his name. i want to throw it in the river.
07.03.13
I did not know one person in Montana. I sat in the house and tried to write a novel about high school; I went for walks, drank quarts of Coors beer, listened to the radio. At night, a neighbor's horse shifted his weight from hoof to hoof out in the trees, and sometimes cropped grass so near I could hear him chew. The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks.
(ian frazier, from great plains)
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