Ice Cream I Scream Eyes Cream & A Bobbledy Bobbledy BOOM To You

I close my eyes

& see my mother, slumped over & unconscious in her wheelchair. I kneel in front of her & try to bring her back. She momentarily opens her eyes, stares at me with a blank & uncomprehending gaze and then slips away once again.
I begin to cry.

I close my eyes

& see my mother, 2 days before she died. We're getting her out of bed and she says, quite loudly, "Good morning, Richard," It's the first intelligible thing she's said in days. It's also the last thing she ever said to me.

I close my eyes

& see my mother weeping in her wheelchair, betrayed by a body that is now concerned only with unwinding itself, like a spring that has lost its tautness.

I close my eyes

& see my mother's eyes as she realizes she can no longer speak, only croak unintelligibly.

I close my eyes

& see myself squirting 20 ml of morphine in my unconscious mother's mouth as her breathing becomes shallower and shallower.

I close my eyes

& see my mother's dead body. Moving closer, I touch her face. It has become stone or, better yet, cold, hard clay.
Her mouth is frozen in a wide O donut hole O
& I can't get her eyes to shut.

I close my eyes
and secretly wish
that I'd just stop
closing my fucking eyes.

Rest In Peace Dorothy

At 8:24 a.m. this morning, 2 days before what would have been my deceased father's birthday, my mother took her last breath.
Words cannot express my sorrow.

Death Race 2009

Now wouldn't that be cool? My mom hurtling around, tempting death, and doomed to a fiery end. Instead, we have Death Watch 2009. Exactly one week ago, I realized that the doctors weren't exaggerating by calling my mom's cancer "aggressive." I also realized I'd never talk to my mom again. Oh, she still spoke at that point, but the combination of pain-killers and toxins that weren't being processed by her failing liver, formed a very successful brain scrambling stew. Our conversations had come to resemble surreal Abbott and Costello routines.

My mom: What did you do with the key to my house?
Me: It's on my key ring.
My mom: Why'd did you do that?
Me: Do what?
My mom: Throw it away.
Me: I didn't.
My mom: What did you do with it?
Me: It's on my key ring
My mom: Why'd you do that?
Me: Do what?
My mom: Throw it away.......

At one point, things turned hallucinatory when she stared at a Godzilla drawing my six year old gave her for a full 15 minutes. At different points she seemed to be pulling the drawings off the page and examining them.

Since last Tuesday, it has been one very quick decline. 3 days ago she stopped eating. Yesterday, she couldn't open her mouth enough to drink from a glass of water. We spent the day making vain attempts to get water in her with a syringe. I sat with her for three hours, holding her hand, with my 6 year old in my lap, quietly watching night descend. I'm glad I did. Today, the nurse told me we wouldn't be able to get her out of bed any more. She replaced my mom's oxycodone with morphine sulfate. Apparently, our entire job now consists of keeping her sedated and comfortable until she dies.

About 15 minutes ago, the death rattle started. In reality, it's just a thin layer of mucus that's formed over her airway due to accumulated saliva she is no longer swallowing. Still, just the same, with everyone in bed, and that sound as my only companion, I'm a bit unnerved by it all.

Fuck, I've spent the last week unnerved.
Why would today be any different?

Mike Huckabee, 3 Christians, & A Sanctified Fart Walk Into A MegaChurch...

This photo of Mike Huckabee has been haunting me for the last few months thanks to these folk over at Christ Church of Grove Farms.

I can be driving to work,
or driving to the hospital,
or driving to my mom's,
or just driving to the goddamn grocery store,
and there's Mike's over-sized melon head grinning down at me from some billboard courtesy of the holy rollers at Grove Farms.
I can't imagine what gems of wisdom Mike blessed the crowd with that he hasn't already unleashed on his CNN TV show.

Evidently, the Grove Farmers find that spending their money on massive amounts of billboards to be a spiritually edifying pursuit.
I wonder if Jesus would be proud of their efforts.

About 6 months ago, they did the same thing with this guy:



Although, I prefer Ollie like this:




I wonder what spiritual lessons a convicted coke smuggler like Ollie had to impart on the "non-denominational Anglicans" over at Christ's Church.

Maybe he still has Nicaraguan connections for cheap coke.

Maybe the Christ Church-ers just like a good blow infested hoe-down for Jesus.
Although, I can see how huffing a few pounds of marching powder would lead one to see God.
Of course, it can also lead one to see armies of imaginary insects burrowing under one's skin.
Still, there's something decidedly odd about the whole affair.

I guess that the folk in Queensryche were smarter than any metal band has the right to be when they said:

"Religion & sex are power plays
Manipulate the people for the money they pay
Selling skin, selling God
The numbers look the same on their credit cards."

Another Apocalypse Goes PHZZZZZZZZZZZZT

According to some Dutch scientists , it appears the 2012 ending date for the Mayan calendar is off by a whopping two centuries. The new date is approximately 2220.

"On 2012-12-21, the sun will appear where you would normally be able to see the 'galactic equator' of the Milky Way; an occurrence deemed special because it happens 'only' once every 25.800 years, on the winter solstice. However, even if you ignore the fact that there is no actual galactic equator, just an observed one, and that the visual effect is pretty much the same for an entire decade surrounding that date, there are major problems with the way the Maya Calendar is being read by doomsday prophets."


Bummer. I wonder if all those 2012 books came with money back guarantees?

Although, I suspect this little blip will not deter the majority of doomsayers one itty bit.


Logic rarely deters anyone. Just witness the hysteria that still surrounds 666, the mistaken Number of the Beast.

I think it's cool that Satan has two numbers. Maybe one's His cell phone while the other is His land line.

It's a pity about 2012 though, because my favorite Christian prophecy doomsayer

Jack Van Impe

has recently hopped aboard the 2012 express.

A few weeks back, Jack gave his frothingly illogical reasons why 2012 is looking like Christ's return day. Jack's wife, Rexella,



turned to Jack, and said, "Jack, do you mean to say that the Mayans knew about Jesus?"

Jack's answer was a big YEA VERILY. Nothing like revising history. It seems to work best when your target audience has never read any history. Hell, it works even better when your target audience can't read.

To be fair though, I'm almost sure, given the joyous exuberance that Mr. Van Impe displays while recounting any recent instances of human misery, that Jack masturbates to news reports of war, genocide and natural disasters.

Evidently huge amounts of human corpses are the surest indicator that Jesus is finally ready to shit or get off His apocalyptic pot.

I'm almost equally sure that Rexella is living proof that the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection is a reality.

Rexalla was better known in her previous incarnation as

Vampira

Happy Halloween

Hate and Rage and Rage and Hate and Cancer of the Soul Oblate (another episode of advice taken or promises broken)

Sitting in the hospital, waiting for my mom's colonoscopy to be completed, I was treated to a thrilling episode of Night of the Living Dead Dr. Phil. I mean that. The guy looks like an embalmed corpse.



One segment dealt with a born again Christian woman's desire for her non-practicing Jewish husband to convert to Christianity.
She said, "If he would do this, it would make our marriage so much better."

As I watched the Christian disease seek to infect a new host, I began wondering how a similar scenario might play out. Picture the husband telling the wife, "Honey, if you'd drop about a hundred and fifty pounds of that jiggly blubber, it would make our marriage so much better."
After much female wailing she'd stutter out around sniffling snorts, "Why...can't...you...accept...me...for...who...I...am?"

Good advice that many women seem genetically predisposed to ignore when it comes to any acceptance of their hubby's foibles.

Then, after much pointless conversation, Dr. Phil had this jewel of insight to offer the husband, "This is something you'll have to figure out on your own someday."

I can see why Dr. Phil gets the big bucks. He offers vapid cliches to a nation of ghosts and ethereal ciphers who have all the substance of fog.

As Dr. Phil spouted his cliched inanities, an army of women sat nodding their heads as if Dr. Phil's puddles of gibberish were the deepest oceans of wisdom. I wondered if their heads were removed and then bowling balls with pasted on smiley faces were glued to their shoulders would anyone be able to tell the difference.

No doubt these empty husks with breasts have husbands and lovers hiding somewhere.
I'd pity the boys but I'm sure they are as ethereal as their mates. Most likely straddling a couch somewhere as they watch other people being athletic. Inside they convince themselves they love "sports" but what they really love is having a soft ass perch to park their over wide posteriors on and a non-stop barrage of inconsequential video imagery to drown out reality.

Or, at least, the reality of themselves. The doubts. The fears. The mile wide insecurities that haunt them when the TV volume sinks below deafening.

There is disease here. There is dis-ease here also.



In 1919, Freud disciple Dr. Viktor Tausk published a paper on the origins of a common delusion suffered by a myriad number of schizophrenics. In this delusion, those afflicted spoke of flat depthless images emanating from a small black box which, in turn, imprinted these foreign notions and images on their minds.
Eventually this alien imagery replaced the victims own thoughts and feelings to such a great degree that they began to lose the ability to distinguish between these pseudo-events and actual reality.



5 years later an infant named television was born. Its voodoo frequency created an ever changing array of loa to ride us while entranced.



Those mad prophets had foreseen our future and it horrified them.



Later, sitting in my mom's room underneath the TV, listening to the dialogue in Top Gun without the attendant video, I was struck by how completely inane it was. How useless it was. While Cruise and company deserve no accolades for their acting skills, they do deserve some recognition for being able to deliver such badly written dialogue without collapsing in guffaws and chortles.



If I'm not mistaken, this utterly dreadful waste of film and money was quite popular. So popular, the Navy used this mannequin love story as a recruitment tool.

Apparently the mass mind is feeble and easily manipulated. Manipulation made all the easier by our docile willingness to escape ourselves. To believe lies as long as they're pretty lies told by pretty people with pretty smiles.

This carefully packaged twaddle is what we choose over our own reflections. This orderly, yet completely empty world is where we pass so much of our precious lifetime, grafting an idealized sugar coating on a reality we are obviously too terrified to look at in all its unadorned and bloody glory. We gather round flickering images of faux death yet turn our backs on the real thing.



Dr. Phil, Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, etc., they're all guilty of making huge fortunes peddling sugar glazed substitutes for a reality that is overwhelmingly bitter, poignant and sad. They are cult leaders no different from Chuckie Manson. They sneeze over a new book or CD or film and its sales spike skyward. Their audience of vacuous voyeurs hunger for something to fill their emptiness. These cult leaders provide the perfect straw-like filler for these modern day walking scarecrows.

Each time I delve into the mass mind, I see sickness. Oceans of sickness hiding behind the bland faces of passive America. What they see as entertainment and wisdom, I see as a disease vector, cutting a swathe through our individuality, molding us into an army of pliant walking Silly Putty.



I'd call this my plea for a vaccine.
But I know the disease is terminal.

Terminal.

The disease is terminal.

Terminal.

I know the disease is terminal.

pancreatic cancer

liver cancer

cancer of the intestine

This Is The End My Friends

3 days ago, my brother received a call from my mom. She thought she was having a heart attack. She wanted him to come home but he was 3 hours away. He wanted to call an ambulance but she said that, under no circumstances, was he to call an ambulance. So he called me. I dropped everything and drove the 40 minutes to my mom's house. She was pale, clammy, and very weak. Quite frankly, she scared the shit out of me. I called an ambulance.
The paramedics ruled out heart problems, but later, at the hospital, they discovered she was anemic. Then they found blood in her stool.

Today, after a colonoscopy & an upper GI exam, they discovered a large tumor on her small intestine.
It had spread to her liver, making it terminal.

She has between 3 & 12 months.

Because the doctor gave her the results when she was in post anesthesia twilight land, and because she is somewhat deaf, she heard none of the bad news.

My brother & I decided to give her one free night, but tomorrow, we have to figure how to tell our 84 year old mother that she's going to die.

I haven't the slightest idea what to say.
I'm blowing huge gobs of steam out of my ass right now. None of it useful.

Because neither of us are wealthy enough to afford good "assisted living" care, & because neither of us believe that we should abandon our loved ones when loving them becomes too uncomfortable, I'm going to bring her here for the remainder of her life.

I've seen cancer patients die & I know it isn't pretty. I'm worried about my kids. But I think it's more important for my kids to know the price of love. It's also important for them to know that we don't turn our backs on those we love, even when loving them becomes painful.

I had a bit of fun with this blog thing. I've enjoyed y'all, whether we've crossed swords or not. You RI-ers know who ya are. Despite our differences, I think you're all basically honorable folk. Stay that way.

But I'm shutting this down. No more rants. No more ha-ha.

Ha-ha has evaporated.

Any RI-ers who do find their way here, I bid y'all a fond farewell.

Quite frankly, I'm fucking terrified.
I don't do terrified real well.

Adios.