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! 

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Take Me Higher

It feels like I’ve been down for long enough.  I’m not going to rush the pace of my recuperation, but I’m ready to move on now.  And since, despite that readiness, I actually am destined to remain cooped up here for another week at least, maybe I can inspire myself with a few aspirations.  Or whatever.

This is a city obsessed with self-image.  Its architectural history and avant ethos both struggle against a status quo that is deeply entrenched and even more deeply fascinated with itself.  New buildings look much like old buildings - in height, in cornice, in materials, in roofline.  Exceptions occur, but they are exceptional.  Mostly it’s pretty repetitive.  The new plans to install a series of towers in connection with the Transbay Transit Center’s redevelopment project reflect more of the same - thirty to fifty unbroken stories, flat roofs, flat faces.  For a city so interested in how it looks, it sure isn’t updating very effectively. 

There is the proposed Transbay Tower itself, of course, which might top 1200 feet and would redefine the skyline as by far the tallest building in town.  But if it does so I think it will just amplify the sameness and flatheadedness of most of the other buildings downtown.  From a pedestrian perspective, it’s a pretty good town, but in terms of stimulating, variegated skyline architecture, we typically just don’t reach high enough. 

Of course, when you ask people what’s the highest built thing in town, the clever ones, who have boned up on this blog posting, will know that it’s not the BofA Building, the TransAm pyramid, Coit Tower or even the 746-foot-tall Golden Gate Bridge Towers, didn’t you think you were sly for coming up with that one.  But NO.  It is none of these.  It is the Sutro Tower, undisputed champion of San Francisco Height Records (the laurel for which is known as the height ashbury.  tyvm.).  Look, here’s a flickr stream with a relevant tag to show you what I mean, and you are now very welcome as well. 

How much taller is it than anything else hereabouts?  Darn good question, me.  If you were to take a pier from the Golden Gate Bridge and put it up next to Sutro Tower, but please don’t, there might be traffic consequences, but if you were to do so, the tower would dwarf the pier by more than 200 feet of height.  The tower’s base is 834 feet above sea level, and the tower itself is nine hundred and seventy-ever-lovin’-seven feet tall above that.  It’s so much taller than anything else there is just no use discussing it.  No, there isn’t.  Stop arguing with the Chucklehut, you know it knows best. 

Sutro Tower, the summit of our city, the muse that has inspired… well, basically nothing.  A flickr photostream, and that’s about it.  No popular songs, no burgeoning postal-card trade, no novelty snowglobes or anything.  Okay, there’s a website, which, okay, is charming, but for gods sake they gave ME a website, it means nothing.  This massive, city-mastering structure is so inexplicably under-the-radar that one of our favorite shirts for the boys when they were tiny (so, for Jesse, about 20 minutes) was the tower in white on a black background, over the word “local.” Only locals seem aware of it overhead, twice as high as anything else we’ve got. 

And now there’s more!

With basically no fanfare, they actually went up and made the towers taller.  The conversion from analog to digital caused the friendly folk who run Sutro Tower to put on an additional 58.5 feet of antenna.  I can see the difference from anywhere in town.  The towers went from 918.5 feet to 977, and that’s something.  First, there’s the fact that our highest is higher, that the ceiling has been shattered again.  It’s our ingrained nature to exceed our limitations, and this tower just proves once more that records are meant to be broken.  And on the other hand, there’s the audacity of sending some enlightened being up with the responsibility of placing a higher piece of antenna on top of the highest antenna in the whole bay area, which, honestly, covers a lot of territory.  Making the highest higher, right under our very noses.  Anytime someone reaches such heights, we should sit back and take notice, I think.

But I don’t recall anyone paying much attention to this project when it was happening, or when they finished, or anytime really.  They seem much more focused on getting a strong digital signal than on noticing the evolution of the apex of their landscape.  I am okay with that, I suppose.  Just so long as I keep noticing it myself. 

and just because it was cool, is going down kitty-corner from my office, and is likely to make my hobble to work a lot easier within a few weeks, here’s a video on the temporary transbay terminal and their plans to make the area a park once the main center opens and takes over.  so cool.  of course, it means Mission Street will replace Market as the city’s most important street, which is an incredible historical shift in and of itself.  well, we’ll see if it happens, right?

Friday, January 15, 2010

Hey, Wanna See My Scar?  Curretage of an Enchondroma of the Hallux, SEXY VERSION!

So it’s been a month, and basically, no, a week.  A week?  What the hell?!!  This is what one week is like, when all I have to do all day and night is stagger around on a massive compression boot, or more properly, off of it?  I’ve had more fun having foot surgery, people.  Which isn’t saying much.  As I am wont to not do. 

Let’s get specific, for it is thus that I roll.  The surgery went fine, I remember everybody being almost disconcertingly nice and professional, and then there were the circus clowns and their tiny yugo full of nitrous, and kindly Dr Nelson running halfpipes with Susan Boyle, and then they worked me over with their podiatric mumbo jumbo, and I left that night with minimal discomfort and a big-ass bandage on my foot, like this:

And yes, I do have more explicit photos.  Your SASE gets mine.  Or you can just scroll down.  Tell you what, I’ll hide the most gruesome ones a little bit.  For the sensitive souls among you.  Heh. 

So, that’s what I looked like for the first weekend, during which I ate a lot of painkillers (Norco, for those who want dirty details, 10 mgs) and floated pretty comfortably through my days.  “Don’t let the pain get ahead of you,” they warned me.  This just roused my competitive spirit and I’m delighted to report that I CRUSHED pain.  It stood no chance.  My spaced-out ass felt pretty much nothing for a full weekend.  And can I tell you?  It did not suck.  Man, I needed that rest. 

But after three days I was ready to get back to my crump classes and kickboxing, so I returned to Kindly Dr Nelson to have my dressings changed.  Why bother?, I asked myself at first - then I noticed that, inside my splint, the bandaging actually looked like this:

In the words of the ancients, I know, right?  So I decided that new bandages, ones that weren’t soaked in days-old blood, might not be such a bad idea after all.  And certainly they’d give me a smaller splint, too.  I mean, really, that first one was elephantine.  Blood-drenched or not, it was just too damn big.  So I arrived to KDN’s follow-up with a light heart, if also with a swollen, splinted, exsanguinated foot.  Then they removed my bandages and I got to see what they’d actually done to me.  And here’s where I’ll do you the favor of just allowing you to click through if you actually want to see some fairly clinical photos of unremarkable surgical sites, stitched up, brought to you by the Chucklehut POV cam:

my ankle

my toe

So that was cool, to see how I’d been violated and fricasseed and just slapped back together like someone’s trussed up thanksgiving gobbler.  But in this case, the delicious stuffing crammed in the cavity was my own morselized bone.  So again, very cool.  I was delighted to see what actually had happened, and significantly more so to see how tidy and regular all the incisions and stitches were, and how cleanly the recovery was going.  It looked a lot more significant, and a lot better, than I’d anticipated.

And then it came time for me to get my new, lightweight, adjustable, maneuverable, super-mobility splint.  This would be the fun part.  I was counting on something with rocket assist, or at least retractable wheels like a decent piece of luggage for gods sake.  So you can imagine how I was not expecting to be sent home wearing this delightful LBD:

In this case, LBD stands for Lugubrious Black Device, of course.  It’s really heavy, has large metal components that get really cold at night, and its six thick velcro straps may be adjustable but are not actually comfortable.  Yes, I wear it when I sleep.  But no, I can actually take it off to bathe, which I finally did yesterday.  That was my big excitement from yesterday: I bathed, with the assistance of a plastic stool in the bathtub, a handheld shower head, and a leg condom that unrolled over my (lightly re-bandanged under the massive splint) foot and ankle.  The sheath’s small stretchy orifice tightly gripped my massive gastrocenemus, protecting me, prophylactically, if you will, against the fell scourge of bathwater. 

It felt really good to clean up a little, even with one leg out of the tub altogether, and in the meantime I was able to work on one of my creative projects for the duration of my recuperation, which henceforward I will refer to as my recuperduration, and to hell with spellcheck for saying that’s not a word.  (Hah, it says spellcheck isn’t a word either!  Noetic existentialism!  or something!  maybe not noetics, I just looked it up and it seems to mean something else, but it’s metaphysical so I’ll just let it stand in for whatever idea I thought I was having.) The point here, people, is that I got to work on my craft project: A NOVELTY MUSTACHE.  It’s still in the beginning phases and isn’t seeming so very novel, actually, but I’ll see how far it gets before my wife takes matters into her own hands.  I only see it in the mirror, which I generally successfully avoid, but she is faced with it all the time.  Brutal.  And I’ll be honest, my defenses are down.

The other creative project I’ve been working on is that short story, which I’m done writing and am now editing.  At this point it actually takes a bunch of time that looks non-productive because the output hasn’t changed in quantity, but the quality thing is worth some time on its own.  It’s been gratifying but I’ve held off a lot of other smaller writing projects, and this blog, lo, this blog has suffered for it.  Which is really what it’s for.  I can be so cruel sometimes.  But let’s see if I can make up for it a little bit with this little morsel of an amazingly sweet life:

It’s Zach, elbow-deep in decorating gingerbread.  The fellow in the background, lying by himself on the tray, with the orangey bits, that’s the one they made to represent me.  I will save it forever.  Today is Jesse’s 2nd birthday; we’re having a tiny gathering here on Sunday, but I’m totally useless so it’ll be a sedate affair.  Drop me a line if you want to check out an advance version of The Dreydelmaker.  I wouldn’t lay it on ya unlessen’ you were ready for it.... 

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Day of the Graft

It’s the end of an era.  I tend to be a bit late for some things, especially here, and as my increasingly-lengthy hiatuses (or “hiati") may suggest, I’ve been busy.  That is to say, I’ve been busy, dammit.  As far as I’m concerned, the new year starts tomorrow.  I’ve been busting my butt and getting huge amounts of everything done, working from my too-early mornings to my get-the-hell-to-bed nights.  It’s been a long hard slog since New Year’s, but I’ve persevered - and tomorrow I get to reap the benefit of my personal inner strength: I am going in for foot surgery.

Food surgery?

No, that would be interesting.  Me, I’m having foot surgery.  A cyst.  In my toe.  Not so interesting.  But it will be serious, I’ll be put out under general anesthesia, and afterwards flat on my chaps for several days, relieving myself into a garden hose hung out the back window and chewing anti-inflammatories just for the flavor.  It’s not the mere cutting, people - it’s the drilling.  They drill into the ankle to get bone to graft into the toe.  Graft.  Drill.  Two surgical sites.  The doctor’s initials are already written on my foot so he knows which one to cut and drill and graft when I’m unconscious.  I can’t eat again till I wake up tomorrow evening, and by then I’ll be on crutches for two months.  Right now everything seems basically normal - I’m fine except my foot hurts a little when I use it, or a lot if I bend the big toe back.  Tomorrow, it’ll feel very different.  Vacant.  Irrigated.  Clean.  Tomorrow, life begins anew - a cystless life, in a newly-grafted universe.  Plus, I get some fun new scars.  Does that not verily enhance my coolness? 

To prepare for this great event I’ve been cleaning, cooking, working longer hours, clearing out old things that were just dusty and in the way… it’s been gratifying, but it’s been loads of work.  Each day I’ve wanted to take a few minutes and close out 2009 by dumping a bunch of little bits of the literary tourettes I’ve inscribed into my memopad, as I do from time to time when my fascination with my own inherent wittiness grows too intense to bear.  Well this time it’s not because I’m so gol’durn wittish, that I want to offload these shimmering fruits of my ferbrile mind.  It’s because, as of this time tomorrow, they’ll be from my past.  They’re cystic words, from a time of cyst.  I can’t take them with me.  I need to start afresh.

We’ll switch back and forth between notes I wrote and cell-phone photos I took.  They all must be purged.  The future is too big for me to paint it with the colors of the past, whether with words or pixels.  Like Lucky Charms, it is magically delicious.  But unlike Lucky Charms, this time it comes with bone grafts and drilling.  Let’s dig in.

It is unfair to leave Miette bags lying around, without their having Miette products inside of them.  One should be required to place disclaimers on empty bags.  Or, preferably, french macaroons inside them. 

This fellow was found at Ft Funston, in the Spencer Battery.  He was scratched into the moss.  But then again, aren’t we all? 

Zach is too small to be Doc Octopus.  He is well-suited, however, to being Doc Cuttlefish.

Also at Spencer Battery, rebar and concrete.  It doesn’t have to suck. 

Promotional copy painted on the window of a local dentist: “Opalescence Boost - The Power of a Professional White.” And here I’ve been being white for free all this time like a yutz. 

Last one from Ft Funston: near mr mossyface above, this little ode was carved into the living carpet of the walls:

Who wakes up from anxious dreams to discover he’s been turned into a hard-sided suitcase?
Gregor Samsonite!

Here’s a little more verse for those who like their literature inscribed on the walls of public places.  I found this beauty while getting a burrito with a friend after work.  I rather like the imagery, once I get past the fact that the medium itself is a bathroom wall. 

Jobberwocky Tech Support - for when you need the Mome Rath’s upgrade.

These guys hang out in children’s playgrounds!  Won’t somebody think of the aliens? 

The other bald guy in a black jacket at the bus stop, giving me that “Step the hell away from me, you O.B.G.I.B.J.A.B.S.” look. 

Here is my eldest at the spidernet playstructure outside the bug museum at the SF Zoo, flush with the thrill of leaving a room filled with bugs the size of my massive podiatric cyst. 

Spaulding Voit: sporting goods scion

I took this shot shortly before christmas.  It’s full of holiday cheer.  You can’t have any, though.  So get lost.

Only humans feel shame.  And even then, only the shameful ones.

Jesse, actually, took this shot of Zach.  Yes, Jesse will be two in two weeks.  Yes, I’d blown four shots trying for one this nice.  It’s at the Academy of Sciences aquarium.  It otherwise speaks for itself. 

Finally, my holiday litany: Here’s a roundup of what went down during the xmas-nye nexus this year.  It felt like a lot. 

Made: Egg nog (heart-cloggingly luxurious), egg nog pancakes (highly recommended), egg nog cake (also not bad at all).  Gingerbread house; gingerbread men; gingerbread blobs.  Borscht, with cubed beet, shredded beets, shredded parsnip, shredded carrot, cubed celery root, chopped skinned tomato, beet greens, beef stock, caramelized onion, and chopped leek.  Just to counteract the other stuff. 
Museums visited: Academy of Sciences, Hiller Aviation Museum (actually pretty cool and fun), Ft Point (always extremely cool and fun)
Cleaned: large portions of house, thoroughly, including four hours on hands and knees scrubbing kitchen floor
Kindergarten Applications Submitted: one, but it was a biggie. 
Resolved: Problem with iTunes occasionally deciding to playing from a library that’s about two years old.
Watched: LOTR1, LOTR2, Volcano High.  One of these was a very goofy, basically unintelligible jumble of idioms from other more successful movies; the other two had hobbits. 
Waiting for me during recovery: Team of Rivals, a fat book by William Whyte about factors determining the success of different public spaces, Bubba Ho Tep, LOTR 3, The 300.  Plus a whooooole bottle of generic vicodin.  I’ma work on my short-story-with-gigantism, a few other writing projects I’ve been putting off, and I may even grow some fresh bone in the new hole they’ll be drilling into my ankle tomorrow.  Who can say.  I only know this for sure: the day of the cyst is behind us.  Long be the day of the graft.