the passing of time

My mother called this afternoon. "I've got pneumonia," she said between coughs, followed by a deep wheeze just before another cough.

"Why aren't you in the hospital?" I asked.

"Don't need to be," she smarted. Clearly, she had made up her mind. It reminded me that a smart ass tone is sometimes inherited. 'The apple does not fall far from the tree', as they say. Listening to her is sometimes like listening to myself, and that we sound eerily alike, makes it all the weirder.

"Well," I replied, "alright then," resigned to say no more.

"Mabeleen Barker died. I reckon I can't go tonight [to visitation] but I'll probably go to the funeral tomorrow. You remember Mabeleen, don't you?"

"Oh heavens, yes, I remember her. Bless her heart, what happened?" I asked sympathetically.

"You know she always thought the world of you. Loved you to death. Always did. You remember her?" She asked again.

"Yes," I repeated, feeling that same, oh-so-familiar smart she'd just handed me well up in my throat "Of course I remember her. What happened?"

"Oh honey she'd been sick for years. You know, Keith [her oldest son] is down there in the hospital and she died in the hospital at Ashland."

"Well," I said, knowing full well there was no point in asking again. She may or may not ever tell me exactly what happened to Mabel and, frankly, I was surprised she didn't tell me all about Keith's problems. Instead, she told me something worse.

"Your daddy come home from the bank today and said Gary Skaggs is in the hospital down there real bad off."

"He is? What's the matter with him?" I asked, hoping for better results this time.

"Had a stroke yesterday. Said he's got a blood clot in his spine. They don't think he's gonna make it I reckon," she said rather matter of factly.

It was a blow I hadn't expected. I grew up with Gary's wife and all of his in-laws. I'd known Gary since he and Regina married 25 years before - back in the days when they had nothing.

They first lived in a rented trailer down the road from her parents. She was barely older than I was when she had her first of three children. She loved little Josh but I could see she was itching to live a little. When Gary got a job in the mines near his native Louisa, they moved into another rental house just down the hill from his parents in a little hamlet called Blaine. Blaine's favorite son was Gary's brother, Ricky. They looked so much alike there was no mistaking they were brothers though their journeys had taken very different paths even then.

I used to drive over to Blaine on weekends and take bags and bags and bags of food to them. Mining didn't pay much and I was bored as could be going to school at EKU. Regina was frighteningly skinny so I bought large cans of protein shake mix to fatten her up. It didn't work. Gary was all muscle, of course, from working hard labor and slept a good part of his time at home. Regina being away from family was lonely so we were the friends we needed to be for one another at the time. It was a hard time for them and an unsettled time for me. It was the kind of time when you're young when true friendships are born that, despite time and distance, never fade.

In a few short months I dropped out of college, got myself in a rock-n-roll band and started touring and recording constantly. After that, we drifted apart, only seeing one another at the county's annual Sorghum Festival or someone's funeral. With time, Gary got tired of the mines and started doing road work for Ricky. They moved three or four more times. He wasn't happy on the road and went back to the mines. They got a divorce, then got remarried [only after she married and divorced some other man], then had another son and daughter. In the meantime, I came off the road, went back to college,was a self-supporting artist among other things before finally landing a job at UK. I don't think any of us did what we thought we'd do way back when we were thick as thieves.

The last time I saw Regina was in a hospital less than a year ago; she was staying with her father who had just suffered a heart attack and I was visiting an uncle who suffered a host of problems. I can't remember the last time I saw Gary - at the festival probably 10 years ago. He was always a handsome, handsome man and loved his family more than life itself. He reminded me a lot of my dad - a guy that would sacrifice time and again to provide for his family. It just about killed him when Regina went off with that other man. I saw her only once during that time and misery was written all over her. A few years later when she and Gary had remarried, I finally saw in her an adult; a woman who finally understood what mattered.

"They said they don't know if they'll do surgery to remove the clot or not but, said no matter what, he'll be a vegetable even if he lives," mom said.

"I hate to hear that." All fairy tales end I guess.

blue 2.0 continues

del.icio.us is bloody brilliant! I've heard about this for some time but had no real concept of what it was and what it can do. Now that I've explored it a bit I have to say it's...well....bloody brilliant. How many times have I blown up my machines only to reload myriad browsers and have my bookmarks lost - oh sure, you can "save" them but that doesn't always work. But del.icio.us does much, much more than simply save your bookmarks - it puts them in some kind of logical order that's a helluva lot easier to find than having them strewn about in folders. Then there's the whole tagging business which just heightens the experience. If I get nothing else out of Blue 2.0, I have learned the joy of blogging and del.icio.us - worth the price of admission for sure.

Now, there may be other del.icio.us-like products out there but I'm not familiar with them (like I said, I never gave this sort of thing much thought before now) so I can't say whether or not del.icio.us is the do all and end all of social bookmarking. I have to admit, "social" is a little scary - I mean, I like the convenience and all but I don't know just how much of me I wanna put out there - kinda like this blog - I would never say something here that I might say in a diary - God knows the world is full of freaks and you just never know what someone is gonna read and just freak out over. But I digress....suffice it to say, I remain concerned with the worldwide social aspects all this great technology offers. It reminds me of how much I loved the wild west when I was kid and wish, even more now, that a person could just ride off into the sunset and create a whole new life and have it be possible nobody would ever see or hear from you again. Fat chance of finding that kind of privacy now - big brother is ever creeping closer to our bedrooms and the wild west is long gone. Unless I can grow gills and live 3000 feet below the water's surface I think that fantasy is just that - a fantasy. Listen to me - I'm digressing again!

ok, ok, moving on - Google Docs - I've known about this for a long time now and played with it a bit back when I first heard about it. As I recall, I had some tech issues with it at the time- saving wasn't very safe i.e. it didn't save whatever I had written - but it's working now (chances are, I was the problem - I usually am). If I were in a position to share writings Google Docs would be good. For now - I'm sticking with local clients. However, this goes a LONG way to stifling Microsoft's monopoly over Office docs and there can't be anything bad about that. I'm all for freeware - if you're going to be social, dammit, go all out.

And with that, I close - del.icio.us rocks!

everybody's working 4 the weekend

Ya know, years ago when I was playing covers (I'm talking the early 80's here), "Everybody's Working For The Weekend" was on the set list. Visions of rednecks drinking Bud out of a can streaming to the lake or some dive of a bar who just spent their entire week frothing at the mouth for Fridays. I just never much understood that sort of life, it seemed horribly pathetic somehow - that you do some menial job just to live a little on the weekend. Now that I work a "real" job, I understand it a little better but that doesn't mean I have to like it and it surely doesn't mean I have to get used to it.

I've learned a couple of important things this week:

1. Just because I have allergies doesn't make me useless
2. Just because I'm 10 years older than some of my co-workers doesn't make me slower (in some ways I'm actually faster than I was at their age)
3. I really need a vacation and not some 3 day weekend I pass off as a "break"
4. I'm uncomfortable with the way I look and it's pissing me off
5. I will never have another dog as long as I live - never, ever!
6. I love my house and I love spending time alone with it
7. I don't much think of myself as a photographer and neither does anyone else apparently
8. People who thought of me as a musician apparently still do (I guess that's something)
9. I really miss Oklahoma
10. I'm hyper even when I'm sitting still
11. I get bored much faster than I used to
12. I'm working for the weekend so I can work on all the things I don't have time to work on during the week
13. See #3
14. Did I mention I really miss Oklahoma?

another week

Hello dear reader (you must be totally bored by now)....

I've not had time to check in for over a week. I don't really have time now but I'm actually working on other things in the background whilst I write. Suffice it to say, I am my usual busy but, for whatever reason - the stars are aligned and Venus is in my quadrant or some such astrological speak as that - things have been exceedingly good this week. It's been filled with laughter and fruitful meetings where everyone has come to the table with great ideas and positive attitudes. My pal, sk1, has returned to work from a bad week away as did my pal, Marie, who had been away ill... and there were no tornadoes. Mind you, we had snow and ice, but no damaging winds to speak of.

And so, I bid you adieu for now as I carry on and hope to get to this week's Blue 2.0 assignments by the weekend. Onward...............

windy wednesday

last night reminded me two things: the great tornado outbreak of 1974 and the aftershocks of the 1987 Whittier, California earthquake.

The '74 outbreak. I was 8. It was April. I had a mini-bike and a red leather jacket. It was probably Naugahyde. I longed to ride every day after school...wearing the red leather jacket, of course. It smelled like dye. Naugahyde.

That day my mother had a doctors appointment in Lexington. I went to school like I always did, got off the bus at my Mamaw Adams' house in town (that being West Liberty), and waited for dad to pick me up to take us both home to the country (Malone it's called) where I could ride my mini-bike.

Mamaw had a thing for weather. It was the same thing she has for colds and diseases; they are things to be feared yet immortalized in some fantastically obsessive way. As if talking about them in the worst light will make them go away, not realizing it's more like that game where you whisper a sentence to someone and marvel at how inaccurate it is by the time it gets to 10 people. A simple cold is suddenly a death sentence.

And so it was with the weather that day - as Mamaw tended to her chores around the house listening to WLKS 1450 (one four five o) and their up-to-the-minute weather reports. They were streaming in slowly but surely - unusual given the lax communication in the mountains in the early 70's. But even an 8 year old could feel something amiss that day. It was saucy. The birds were still. The clouds were evil. Everyone spoke in whispers. I was assured mom was fine more than once, not by Mamaw, of course, since she tended to fear the absolute worst. Dad reassured me.

And so, once I was home with dad's reassurance, I rode my mini-bike to Mark's house. I rode it in the tobacco field across the road. I rode it down Jones Creek, hitting pot holes on purpose. I stopped on the old iron bridge, turned the motor off and looked up the holler to the west. The world was tight just over the ridge. Even the chickens at Ade's farm buckled down early. I rode more. As afternoon turned to late evening, claps of thunder rumbled in the distance, wisps of rain slapped my red leather jacket like the devil's tongue. It stung my face. I loved it.

But when I had had enough riding and yet mom wasn't home, I began to panic. Mind you, I wasn't prone to panic - that was Mamaw's job. In fact, she was to be avoided in certain situations...like illness and weather. So it was particularly odd that I broke form and took on "Mamaw" traits. I tried to maintain composure and dad helped me do that with his reassurances that everything was fine (I always, always believed him).

The evening news; Walter Cronkite announced a day of deadly storms from Texas to Canada. An event like no other in recorded history. More panic. Xenia, Ohio, home to my mother's Uncle Randy, suddenly appeared on screen...in pieces. It didn't even look like a town. It didn't look like anything except scared people in a garbage heap. Panic panic. Quickening of the breath, heart rate up, too-much-Vietnam-over-dinner images running through my head. Poor Uncle Randy. Mamaw calls, once, twice, Uncle Randy, where's Shirley?, Uncle Randy, Where's Shirley?

Just when I couldn't eat one more bite of my Swanson meatloaf TV dinner (a la aluminum tray), mom pulled in our gravel driveway. I bolted. Dad kept eating (he rarely broke form). Mom stepped from the car surprised at a swift welcome home. It's not like she was oblivious to the weather, she just didn't know how bad it was. She absolutely didn't know I knew how bad it was. And she didn't know about Xenia. She had sat through heavy rains and wind, heard news of bad storms in Ohio and Tennessee, but that was about it, she explained...as she casually pulled from the back seat bag after bag of Hills, K-Mart, and J.C. Penney goods. I still had on my red leather jacket. It smelled like dye. The air was deathly still.

Fast forward to 1987. October 1, 7:42 a.m. Whittier, California suffered a 5.9 on the Richter scale. A month later I was sleeping in the Beverly Comstock Hotel (same hotel where Freddie Prinze killed himself...same room for all I know). I awoke to see the walls breathing like a human. In, out, in, out, slow, rhythmic, fluid. The TV was dancing across the table. The windows were rattling. The bed was bouncing like a cheap hotel quarter bed. I looked at the clock. 7:31 a.m. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up at 10, I asked my roomie if they noticed anything odd that morning since, after all, when I woke up the walls were intact, the TV still on the table, the windows in one piece, and no quarter slot for the bed. That's when I found out I had just slept through a 5.1 aftershock.

Last night, as the unusual tornado outbreak bore down on my house, literally, I heard the cop sirens at 12:30 a.m. That in itself is pretty remarkable. I woke up, turned the TV on, went right back to sleep. I would have slept through the whole thing had a friend not called from her closet to wake me up an hour later. I looked out the window. It was raining so hard I couldn't see the end of the garage. I went back to sleep. 30 minutes later another friend called to say she had a twister go through her back yard. Two trees down, fences missing, garages torn apart, siding peeled like a banana skin. I went back to sleep.

Trauma = sleep.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the uncle in Xenia - here's a picture of the store he was in when it hit. Groceryland.

As he tells it, the sky looked ominous and green. He stopped at the grocery for a gallon of milk before heading to the bowling alley for League night. As he neared the front door of the store, someone yelled to him that there was a twister headed down main street. He turned to see it barreling at him. He ran into the store screaming at everyone to get down. Being a grocery there really was no place to hide. One guy made it to the walk-in cooler while my great-uncle and the other customers lay one atop the other against a block wall in back. He was laying on a small boy, maybe 10 years old, he said. Women were screaming, glass was breaking, the wind was whirling, then nothing. Dead silence. When he looked up all he saw was sky. Every person in that store walked away without a scratch. He found his car sandwiched vertically between two others. He walked home.

phat tuesday

Mardis Gras - Fat Tuesday - Super Tuesday - voting, drinking, bribing, drinking, driving, drinking, food, food, food. The phat fact is, I'm not on vacation, my state is not part of the primary, the only thing I'm drinking is root beer, and what should be winter is more like a spring storm with winds and hail and lightening.

I think next year I'll make it a point to be doing something fun on Fat Tuesday even if it's calling in well and taking myself for a nice lunch somewhere.

Today's bastardization - Mr. Kopana - woe be to the charity that sends their beg-a-thon goods addressed as such! It's one thing to get the name wrong, it's something altogether worse to mistake the gender (did these people never go through business school?).

inebrates create original names

Last night I attended a winter fund raiser for the local NPR affiliate. This particular party always involves lots of drinking and food. You can imagine the number of drunks versus sobers by the end of the night. I heard a higher number of mis-interpretations of my name than usual at this party.

The best one, and this may be one of the best ever, was Praetora. In fact, I had to ask the woman to repeat herself three times just to be clear about what she was saying. She was, indeed, saying Praetora. It turns out that the Roman guards to the emperor were called Praetorian Guards, as explained to me by another woman guarding the door to the bar for no apparent reason, wearing a leopard skin dress and dark, dark, dark sunglasses, speaking to every soul that came and went within earshot.

That's all fine and well but, if you can explain to me how one gets from Kopana to Praetoria, I'd like to hear it! And I might mention that this woman, when sober, actually knows me! She's known me for several years now. And while we don't generally co-mingle anywhere but the station, she does, never the less, know what my name is. Or, at least, I thought she did. But who knows if it was the result of a long standing mistake or that bizarre blue drink she was nursing.

The other name came from three very drunk people, none of which ever, ever, ever said my name right. The closest they got was Kopaeta or Kopeta...I think I even heard a Kopepa in there somewhere. Needless to say, I couldn't leave the party fast enough.

Powered by ScribeFire.