Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Marlon
The funny thing, and I mean funny in the sense that nobody will ever laugh at this, is that a blog is essentially a longitudinal document, a tracking of a life, a fascination, a fetish, whatever. It is a study of something over time - something, be it only the person who writes it. There are blogs about knitting and dog parks and arbor day and pretty much anything you can think of. This here particular blog has had many subjects over many years, from photography to creative writing to politics and public administration to, oh, lists of things, to food, to my own pointless peregrinations and the dustbunnies of thought that grow up under the davenport of my genius. When a blog is about so many things, it turns out it’s just about the blogger. So here’s my funny thing, and no giggling:
I have not been doing anything. A blog about the things I see on the way to work, or the dinner I cooked, or pretty much anything I do, is going to be less interesting when what I do is basically reduced to sitting on my ass eating solid gold chocolates and thinking about my scars. I could fill you in on the highlights - AND I WILL - but it’s funny to me, and now you must stop giggling, really, how the things about which one writes on a site such as this are such a function of circumstance. This could have been, for example, a really interesting post. But instead:
FLASH: I have named my mustache.
Yes, this is what I’m reduced to. My novelty mustache is now long enough to trim and as convincing as anything cut out of a cereal box and tied beneath the nose with a length of twine. I burst with pride.
So, another exciting event was that Zach and I broke out his kid’s science experiments set and made some zombies and a trebuchet. One of the most funnest [sic] parts of the kit is that the acid they use for demonstrating acid-base interaction (btw that’s really the best name ever for a hippie crash-pad talk show) I SAID, the acid they use to demonstrate these simple reactions is citric acid - which is, yes, the active ingredient (next to sugar) in pixie stix! I kept on spilling a crystal or two of it and then picking it up with my finger and licking it off. It was industrially sour, good people, and I salivate even now to think of sneaking off and getting a few crystals more - but no, I think I have the self-restraint not to raid my child’s science kit for the raw ingredients of junk food. At least, until he gets the Twinkie Baker Play Factory. If that thing comes with creme, I am totally appropriating it.
One delightful side effect of my convalescence has been that we’ve been the beneficiaries of a lot of fun food. Friends have brought over blueberry muffins and soup and amazing roast tomatoes and a complete spaghetti dinner, they’ve called us up when they’re going to the store to see if we want anything, they are making sure we’re provisioned and I love them all for it. And some who are not close enough to bring over a pot of chili or a fresh-baked pizza in person have sent their recuperative juju to me via mail order baked goods concessionaires. The Wolferman Company is a favorite among the inlaws, and for good reason - they’ve done a delicious job with everything I’ve ever tasted from them. They specialize, however, in one of my old favorites - English Muffins. I’ve always enjoyed these and ate them throughout my childhood, back in a time when, believe it or not, they sort of shared the market with bagels. Now bagels have totally taken over (in the great Bagel Takeover of 1983) and the muffin has been relegated to a secondary status. But Wolferman still does a big, yeasty muffin in lots of great flavors and it’s always fun to get a few in the mail. I guess my surgery was pretty serious, because we got a total of nine packs of four muffins each. Hail Britannia, eh wot? I’ve been munching them down without restraint and it truly has been therapeutic. In fact, I’m going to have one once I finish this post. That’ll motivate me.
I’ve been passing the time, in part, by reading Team of Rivals, the gripping story of Abraham “Lincoln” and his band of merry pranksters, who, in the early ‘60s, took over a huge white house in D.C. and led America on a crazy trip. It’s a bit disconcerting, really, to be so caught up while reading it in things that happened nearly fifty years ago. In fact, I just picked up the book again and it turns out it’s one hundred and fifty years ago, which makes it affirmatively nerdish for me to be rushing back to get a few more pages read whenever I can. I’ve also been reading Nurtureshock, The Book That EXPLODES Parenting, and I’ve found it readable and compelling. Turns out most kids kept in small terrariums actually keep growing anyway. And I just learned that from the dustjacket! Of course I’m also reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory aloud to Zach in 20 page increments before his bedtime, and he is really getting into it. He’s now reading pretty much everything non-scientific he sees (he got caught up on “fructose” recently, but who among us hasn’t been?). My last current book is City, a review of sociologic research on behavior in and around city locations to assess what makes a place successful on a human scale. This book is really interesting on a lot of levels for me - it’s an expansion of studies that formed the basis of a NOVA episode I saw in the 1980s that really fascinated me, and I’ve been turned on to this stuff ever since. But the book was written in 1988, and it’s getting more and more obvious as I read that that’s a very long time. They talk about payphones, and independent merchants making unilateral decisions, and they don’t talk about self-isolators on cellphones or with ear buds… it’s almost a study of a past culture. It’s fun to read anyway, though. I need a little something like that to mellow me out when I get all overheated reading about the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Recovery Update: I went to the DPM Monday and got my stitches out, which apparently they still sometimes do. The doc says everything looks good and he put me in an ace bandage but left me in the compression boot, re-emphasizing that I really should be wearing it as much as possible, including in bed. It’s really hard to sleep in it though, so I’ve been RECLAIMING MY POWER by taking off the monstrous eight-strapped velcro beast at night. Well, when he gave me that “serious doctor” look, I resolved to try to wear the damn thing while sleeping. Instead, about an hour into my sleep that night, I sort of imploded with a crushing pain across the whole top of the front of my foot. It woke me up and drove me out of the bed and out to the living room where I tore off the boot and just writhed for a while. It’s happened three or four times since. I asked the doctor and his office advised me that I had nothing to worry about, this was fine, just ignore it. Right. It’s like ignoring a safe occasionally dropping from a neighboring rooftop onto your foot. Just think of something else. It goes away. So I do, and it does. On the plus side, I was able to wash my foot for the first time in three weeks. Details have been repressed, but it feels much better now.
After the dr appt we went to the DMV so I could get a temporary handicapped placard. I was excited to get it, and you can see the extent of my isolation when I get excited about a trip to the DMV. It really is sad, in a “point and laugh” sort of way. Anyway I hitched my crutchly way up their stairs and pushed my gimpy self through their swing doors and there right in front of me was the line that I needed to stand in first, and it wasn’t even very long. And then, two guys stepped out of the line at the back and I moved up closer, pleased enough that these two guys were not in my way. One seemed unassuming, but the first looked a bit rough - skinny and wiry. I stepped up and then they got back in line behind me. “Were you guys in line?,” I asked them. “Oh yeah, but you can go ahead of me,” the wiry dude told me, “you’re handicapped.” That just felt like I was taking advantage of them and I felt bad, but not so bad that I refused the spot in line. I appreciated the gesture but I felt I had to minimize my condition. Handicapped? Me? Sure, I’m here for a placard and everything, but this foot thing is gonna get better quick. I’m fine, really. ‘Handicapped’ sounds like other people, not me. It didn’t feel like it fit. I moved forward in the line, shrugged and said to them, “Sort of...”
Well it’s probably time for that english muffin. I’ve been listening to the Toe Jams mix my friend Andrew put together (110 songs about feet, toes, and doctors) and I think I’m ready for my infusion of butter and jelly. There’s a Cherries Jubilee just begging for my toaster. And hey, next time, I might just have something coherent to say - you just can’t tell anymore!
