Brittleness

A man we have only known casually for a few months flew 1500 miles to visit our town and meet some of our friends over this past weekend. I have checked with medical professsionals to confirm this, and it is no exaggeration to say that he was near death in our bedroom Sunday night. Nobody was shooting coke or smack or meth or anything illegal. Nobody had drunk any alcohol and nobody had in fact done anything they were not supposed to. Yet the fragile state of his internal metabolic insulin and sugar balance tipped dangerously to one side; so much so that our dogs had picked up the indicators of doom and were hiding in the bathroom. Like a cruise ship with broken ballast tanks and all the passengers lined up on one side to watch whales, he was tilted and listing and taking on water faster than we could discern the nature of the problem. Though I work in a doctor's office, I have never stuck a needle into human skin. And not knowing how to take a blood sugar level or effectively deal with whatever the reading might have been, I did what all frightened people do. I dialed nine one one. One good thing about living in the midst of a great metropolis is the rapid response time from such a call. If four minutes went by between the call and the arrival of two EMTs, it seemed like two. These men whose names I do not know posed a few astute questions of me while taking my friend's vital signs. They got a nearly instant piece of critical information that only modern chemistry can provide: Blood Glucose Level was 35. An IV bag of sweet stuff hooked to a vein in my friend's arm produced nearly instant results. Like a diver finally freed from a deep sea entaglement and desperate for air, my friend was paddling hellbent for the surface where he could perceive some vague light drawing him up. From about the halfway point between stupor and awareness, he did manage to get a good look at the twenty-something hunk working earnestly to revive him and blurted out: "God, you're cute!" This was about the same time the dogs came out from under the furniture to welcome my friend back to the pack. On the EMT's instructions, we made a midnight snack for our friend and watched him eat it. With a modicum of equilibrium assured, the crew left. It was all over in fifteen minutes with a discarded needle guard on the dresser the only evidence that a miracle had just happened here.
Two days later, I am still prone to shaking and emotion when I let my thoughts go back there for a moment. I have put off calling my friend who returned Monday morning to his world of detailing cars, selling houses and taking care of his aging mom in Seattle The problem is that I don't know whether to browbeat him for not taking care of himself, for not keeping close tabs on his glucose levels, for being in denial about the severity of his diabetes. Or to just tell him I how much I want him to go on living, to come and see us again soon, to keep searching for a solid life partner and to set the world on fire with his intensity and decency. It might be easier to just have him read this. Maybe everyone who has the so-called manageable form of diabetes could read it too. Lest they perish in a hotel room far from home and all alone with no one there to call for help.

Bush Resigns, Cheney in Cardiac Arrest

As expected, George Walker Bush resigned effective noon today after the unprecedented Vote of No Confidence which swept through both houses of the newly sworn in Congress two days ago. That action came precisely ninety nine minutes after the session had begun last Monday; the promise by the incoming leaders that there would be an aggressive agenda for the "first one hundred hours" proving eerily prophetic. Since the election last November which terminated control of the committee chairmanships by the GOP, Bush and Cheney have by most accounts become more strident, shrill and according to some observers, irrational as the time approached for the official hand over of power. Attempts by the President to strong arm the lame duck session into a variety of actions seem mainly to have backfired, as demonstrated by the defection of long time allies of his own party to what Bush has lately been calling the "disloyal oppposition." That session ended in disarray the week before Christmas with little legislation passed beyond 76 billion dollars in highway construction projects mainly in Florida and Texas. Senior Capitol Hill sources who spoke on condition of anonymity stated they had gotten word from White House staff that Bush had instructed Attorney General Gonzales to draw up orders to impose Martial Law in the thirty five border counties that form the US side of the Mexican border from Texas to California as a dramatic show of force designed to "shock and awe." These same sources stated it was "the last straw, or you could call it the last nail in the coffin" that put Congress on the path it ultimately took.
No sooner had the world gotten word of this development did a second jolt hit Washington: the confinement of now-President Dick Cheney to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland for what his office is calling a "cardiac event." Press reports confirm what his office is saying to reassure the rest of the world: he is lucid and in control of all his faculties as well as of what amounts to an electronic war room established in his secured suite. Official word came directly from Secretary of State Rice on live nationwide TV where she cued display of still photos taken earlier in the day at the hospital. Rice then abruptly terminated the short briefing and left the press room. The only two images the world has seen depict the newly sworn in President sitting up in an elaborate hospital bed looking stern and alert with the Attorney General looking on. Mr Gonzales himself had administered the oath of office minutes before the photo was snapped according to wire services. It has since been confirmed that Cheney's automatic defibrilator had triggered numerous times over the last forty eight hours as events in Congress rippled up Pennsylvania Avenue and sent the seismic waves of potential political upheaval out across the country. A known computer hacker in a Montgomery County suburb of Washington had been monitoring various digital channels he had stumbled across some months back using a modified digital high definition satellite TV receiver box. When he showed the unusual signals to a FCC field engineer, his equipment was confiscated and the young man "detained for debriefing at a secure location in Virginia" according to a FCC spokesman. Released on bail this afternoon, the hacker is a minor whose identity the media is obliged to conceal. His attorney stated that the intercepted signals were from a device Cheney wears to notify government officials and doctors that his defibrilator has self-activated. Media efforts to determine Cheney's whereabouts were being stonewalled by the White House and the VP's staff as a near panic swept over Washington that he had become the victim of the very sort of undefined terrorism his boss had used to justify his actions over the last five years since 11 September. It fell to John McCain, the Arizona Republican Senator, to step before the cameras and quell speculation that in fact "no crisis of leadership" was at hand despite what he called "irresponsible news reports." It was also McCain who confirmed the substance of the reported facts surrounding the unauthorized interception of medical telemetry.
While it is far too early to know how effective Cheney can be from a hospital bed over the short term, it is clear to seasoned Washington observers that if he remains there more than a few days, he would be obliged to step down or at least aside. Speaker Palosi's office is refusing to talk with the media on the record, but Senate Pro Tempore Robert Byrd issued a statement through his spokesman that "The Constitution which as my constituents well know is literally so close to my heart provides continuity and clear instructions for these circumstances." Byrd is next in line after the House Speaker for Presidential succession.

The Big Hurt

"Now It Begins" is how this hit from 1959 starts. I refer to the change in the leaders of Congress, only "now" is really January. But will it prove to be just a Big Pain having the Senator from Nevada otherwise known as Mr Mormon Republican "Lite" in charge of the upper house? Taking a cue from the original milquetoast Democrat Daschle; Reid has walked quietly, talked softly and carried not so much as a matchstick for the last several years. Thinking people everywhere are less than enthused about what is to come from his gavel and rightly so. Nancy might have enough testosterone for two leaders; we can only hope she continues sticking it to the man who struts and prances and grimaces and smirks his way through a press conference pretending to lead. His latest strategic statement on Iraq policy change? "I am all ears" or words to that effect are apparently designed to shift blame to those whose voices he has been deaf to for forty four months. Now it's everybody else's fault for not making alternative ideas heard? Too little, too late, too stupid and too cruel for words. A half a million people are dead by his hand, and he now claims to never have heard any constructive criticism. He is a walking crime against humanity.
The Ideal Big Hurt would come from a bullet between his eyes that would flash then quickly fade from his consciousness as he bled out.

Tectonic Plates

All the ink and air the election results are producing make little sense this early. Yet the futility of adding my voice does not prevent me from saying something good. For a change. If Karl Rove had the ability to change the outcomes electronically of various counts, he most certainly would have used it to his advantage. The veiled speculation that computerized Machiavellian-ism had reached new depths has at least for now been relegated to the realm of paranoia.
If the Democrats can avoid shooting themselves in their collective feet, the next twenty four months will be at least endurable if not earth-shaking. Find something to hold on to. Fasten your seatbelts. With any luck, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Giant Sucking Sound

If you don't know anybody with a trick vacuum tube hi fi system, find such a person and make a new friend. Then take some records over to his/her house and play them on his/her-- you know what? I don't care about this PC nonsense. I never met a female audiophile so I will use the male pronoun. Go to his house and listen for reverb you never heard, for texture in the voices, for plucking on the instruments and for talent in the music making. When you then realize that Bell Labs and Sony and all the rest of the solid state pushers spent a small fortune to wean us from our tubes and buy their rock-filled amplifiers so they could make some big fortunes for themselves and leave us scratching our heads wondering where the Hi Fi got away to, find a used tube amplifier at a thrift store and bring it back to life in your music system. You will feel again the therapeutic effect which music has always had on the savage beast but which has been lost for the last forty years. Transistor sound might even be causing some of this insanity by grating on everybody's nerves so badly as to make us lash out randomly. Banish it from your life wherever you find it. If you have one of those MP3 toys, smash it to bits because it is even worse than a CD playing through a monolithic power amp chip.
The vacuum tube is one hundred years old right now. Celebrate its contribution and renew the love affair we had with it as kids which we did not even know we were having until it was too late to find it had been taken from us.

Gay This, Gay That; I Am So-o-o Tired of Gay

Talk about eating their young; could these Foley and Haggard episodes be any smarmy-er? Is it any wonder straight America looks at gay america with fear and loathing when gay America behaves this way? Or is straight America just setting such incredibly high standards (on paper) that "normal" gay behavior just looks so smarmy by contrast? Does anyone, gay or straight, have a self-righteous mandate to hand out citations to grown ups who play hide the wiener with other grown-ups in ways that violate some rule book?
If it sounds like I don't know what side to take, it's because I don't know what side to take. Let's wake up tomorrow in the Star Trek future where nobody cares.

Apology to Esquire

This is getting to be a country where anything can happen and nothing can be said.
I'm not talking to God much right now; he has a lot to answer for.

Whether those two sentences were in one article or two a few years back in Esquire Magazine, I can't remember. But the points are well taken and getting to be timeless. The piece(s) had been about one of the earlier transgressions of the far and near right, I think. Or at least I projected that onto it (them). And now here we are with this gay sex religion scandal from Colorado erupting before us. I guess while I am quoting other people, I should also pay homage to Susan Powter (sp?) who cried: "Stop the Insanity!"
Apparently there is no bottom at the well of hypocrisy that should be sucking the ditto heads underground but is not. Yet.
Hope. Pray. Oh wait, I already disavowed that. God can't help us out of this mess anyway even if he were so inclined. Push one of them into the well if you have the chance. Every little bit helps.

Count Me In

Gary Lewis' hit from 1960-something notwithstanding; the unsettling feeling that electronic voting is a way for the republicans to alter the course of history lingers. No, it's strengthening actually. From the corner of my ear, I thought I heard Katie Couric say that a third of Americans doubt their vote will be counted this time. Search as I might, no confirmation of that statistic can be google-d today. My 70 year old neighbor woman today asked rhetorically why people are not literally up in arms. She quickly answered that thinking people are so afraid of being prosecuted under the patriot act they are staying mute. If a million person march were to descend on DC next week after the surprising "results" show the Democrats could not prevail in the Diebold Universe, there would not be enough prosecutors in the D of J to round everybody up for torture. Might as well buy your plane ticket now; the die is being cast at secret terminals in Cheney's bunker even as you read this.

Shot Through Gauze

Have you watched High Definition TV? It promises six times more detailed pictures than old TV; never mind the TV stations are only giving you about four times more and your HDTV is only giving you about four times more and no that is not sixteen times more. Still for all its artificacts, pixelizing, freezing, muting and blacking out with no warning, HD is a step forward. When it's working, it brings you a lot closer to the action and the actor's face which is after all the main tool used to convey the content of the script. The audio is better on HD too, so the net effect can be way more intense. So with all the new cameras, satellites, transmitters and TV sets in place, Candice Bergen needs to have her closeups softened on Boston Legal. Watch closely: you can see them dialing back the resolution on her face shots compared with everybody else. Even Shatner is coming through warts and all but not Miss B. Hey Candy, let it hang out. You earned those lines. You're better for being older. And what have you got to lose, really? Eighty percent of the people with HDTVs are so ignorant they are watching in LOW DEFINITION without knowing it.

Why I Hate Computers and the Internet

Trying to put an image of myself on here has become a nightmare. (Wait till you see the image!) Since I don't have my own site, I had to post my pic as a post then use the created URL it made as a URL. But the blogging software does not like long URLs (which the blogging software made) and BAM: hit a brick wall. So then we "join" the google blog help group where we have to post a message and wait for reply. With free advice being worth its cost; the ideas I got were nice but worthless. So if you wonder what I look like, find the as yet untitled post that has a guy standing by a refrigerator scowling. It turns out to be the perfect pose for how I feel about almost everything, especially the computer age.

Close to the Vest

What are David Letterman's politics anyway? Most of the people who have jobs like his skewer all politicians equally for cheap laughs. Lately though, he seemed to be taking exceptional pleasure in twisting the knife in dubya's gut several times a week. I figured he was on our side. But now tonight, he landed some low blows on Kerry to the apparent delight of the audience. I think I feel a bit like LBJ did when he "lost Cronkite" on Vietnam. If the left can't count on Dave, who can we count on?

My Physiognomy

All Talk, No Action

A woman I was dating thirty five years ago complained that most guys were just that. Not much has changed. The amount of hay made during the last 36 hours of this election cycle proves it. Somebody threw a drink at Barbra Streisand during her show; why doesn't somebody throw a rock at Tony Snow the next time he starts lecturing from Dubya's podium about how veterans are supposed to behave toward each other? How would he even know? All this handwringing and no takedowns. Oh wait: there was the thing in Floriday yesterday. Did a bunch of republican bouncers beat up somebody who yelled back at their candidate? I guess that has to count and I am just sorry it had to be them against us.