We landed in Nashville this morning. Early. I am working from here today and tomorrow. Saturday night is our friend Emily’s birthday party.
There’s an excellent doughnut shop next to our hotel in Nashville. Parlor Doughnuts. Amazing.
If you want to see what a maple-pecan croughnut does to blood sugar of someone who is a type II diabetic, then see the chart below. Worth it of course.
Mom and dad came for dinner the other night. It was surreal. Neither can hear worth a damn. And when they do hear, they mostly just get this word or that one and then assume they have grasped the essence of the conversation.
I said ‘I have to take my car to the shop tomorrow’ and mom replied ‘Oh, what’d you get?’
‘What’?
‘What kind of new car did you get?’
And so it goes. Us talking in bits and bobs and circles and guessing and dad asking to repeat everything we say and then 3 minutes later asking for the 5th time where I am going this weekend.
‘Nashville.’
‘Ah – Nashville.’
‘Where are you going this weekend?’
‘Nashville.’
‘We have good friends there’ he says. The good friends actually live in Memphis. I make the connection and let it go, but mom cannot pass on the opportunity to correct him. After 70 years of being corrected and talked over, she has the leverage now and presses. She’s relentless.
It’s not helpful, but is understandable.
Hard of hearing and dementia are a cruel combination for all involved.
Dad asks me ‘what do you actually do for your work’. He has no concept of ERP software or cloud software or systems, so I simply say ‘I mostly herd cats’. A common enough idiom in my world but foreign to them. They do not ask a clarifying question but instead mom says ‘there are so many stray cats around.
She caught the word cat and off we go in a whole different direction.
She says, ‘there’s a black cat that lives next door in the junkyard that is john’s backyard. I swear I’m going to turn him into the health department someday if he doesn’t clean up his yard. But that cat is cute. There’s a white one too but I don’t know where it lives. There’s lots of stray cats around.”
‘What is it you say you do for work?’
‘Computers. I use a computer to scam old people out of their life savings’.
‘Ah, yes. Computers are the future. Good for you.’
I’m not prepared for my mom to be irrational. She’s 90, but rock solid. Maybe soapstone; mostly solid.
Seeing her mind slip away, a little more each month, breaks my heart.
I took her shopping the other day and we chit-chatted as we went up and down each aisle. She has a list and we scratch through each item as we find it and drop it in the cart. She tells me about recipes she’s clipped and wants to try for dinner. New pie recipe’s for Terri’s restaurant. She tells me for the 10th time that Trent’s grandfather ordered a butterscotch pie. ‘He loves my butterscotch pie. Even better than the Amish he says. But I don’t know about that.’
She is mostly blind and picks up each item and studies it with her face nearly right up against the packaging, looking at ingredients or attributes. We observe the absurd prices at every item. ‘I remember when I could get baking powder for a quarter, now look at it.’
We discuss the dangers of processed foods and additives and preservatives and how things were different in the olden days.
Mom complains about dad giving Maggie, their dog, too many treats and she’s getting fat. She tells me this as she loads six bags of dog treats into the cart.
A few aisles later, we hit the candy section and she tells me how dad wants to lose weight but he grabs a handful of candies every time he comes in the kitchen. I helped her load the eight bags of different candies and treats into her cart so she can keep her bucket-sized candy jar overflowing.
Ice cream aisle, same story, this time two tubs of ice cream.
When I was a kid, we never had candy or pop. Those things were bad for us we were told and besides, we had no money for such things. We had ice milk, which if you don’t know how terrible it is, just stick your gallon jug of milk too close to the back of the refrigerator and you will get a sense.
I pop into the liquor store to get dad the bourbon he likes and a few things for my home bar. The guy at the counter (Tommy according to his name tag) rings me up. Every time he scans an item with his handheld RF device, he makes a sound like the guns the Star Wars troopers use when they shoot their laser weapons. Pqquuuu. Pqquuuu. Pqquuu. He appears to be a grown ass man in most ways but clearly the mind of a child. Maybe some sort of work program for the feeble-minded?
The sounds annoy me more than I think it should which compounds my annoyance because why should I care? But annoying it is.
If I truly lose my shit someday and start shooting, I’m gonna start with Tommy. Pqquuuu mother fucker.
But I held it together and escaped with my goods without confrontation.
Mom mostly shops to get out of the house. A break from dad’s mania and constant needling and meddling. He’s obsessed with his memory loss. He still has enough awareness to know he is losing his mind and needs to talk about it to process. He still occasionally asks me to pick up a book on dementia — ‘maybe there’s something I can do to reverse it’, he says.
I don’t tell him that ship has sailed, but instead promise to get him a book.
He alternates between sitting on the couch, the porch, and the back deck. He is the primary sentinel of Summit St. and dutifully reports out on happenings. What time the mailman and garbageman came. He jots down what time the street lights come on and tells us the days are getting shorter. The neighbor got a new car. A squirrel got hit. Those damn cars drive too fast on this road. Things like that.
After dinner we sat outside but it was chilly. I got mom a blanket for her legs and dad a sweater. He said ‘I have an identical sweater at home except it has short sleeves, lighter material and is a different color. ‘Yes’ I say. ‘Identical.’
Inevitably every conversation with mom and dad comes around to who has died and who is near death. In today’s episode, it’s our 2nd or 3rd cousin, Bill Hall, who is ancient and an alcoholic. Nice guy but he definitely is now near death. We know because each time he comes around he tells us he is dying very soon now. I believe him.
They spend a lot of time at funerals. Mom and the other old war-horses cook up casseroles and soups and desserts and gather to honor the dead as people have done since we came down out of the trees and got to work building bigger brains and an understanding of our mortality.
If it’s not clear to everyone already, the world is well and truly fucked. Where to begin? Is there a single data point or trend we can grasp onto for hope?
Jane Goodall clips (god bless her soul) on my Facebook feed tells us we must maintain hope. But she was always an optimist.
How do you maintain hope when bandits chop the hands and feet off a magnificent silverback mountain gorilla you have known since he was a baby, just to sell them to the Asians for souvenirs or cigar trays.
I have no evidence it was the Asians, but given their penchant for whales and shark fin soup and rhino horns, it seems a good bet. No animal is too precious the it cannot be destroyed to satiate their grotesque cravings.
Climate change is almost certainly past the point of no return. Our only job now is to try to limit the damage and find creative ways to deal with the effects.
Wealth inequality in all corners of the world is at extremes which reduces social cohesion and stability and ultimately results in social uprisings.
Trump has neutered or dismantled nearly every aspect of programs designed to ensure public safety. CDC, NIH, FDA, FEMA etc. This means our food supply chain is woefully unregulated and un-inspected and food-borne sickness will keep increasing.
When the next global pandemic comes, and that is inevitable, it will be many times more devastating than COVID due to our inability to prepare and react. Our medications are not inspected with the same rigor and new medicines are approved without appropriate scrutiny. We are developing new medications for lifestyle convenience rather than saving lives, because those drugs pay better. US pays the world’s highest prices for medications because we bow to the corporations that own the patents, which they developed with money from huge tax incentives or federal grants.
When hurricanes and tornadoes and forest fires come, as they do, we no longer have an agency capable of providing immediate and life-saving aid.
We’ve cut social welfare programs to the point where the wealthiest country on the planet has the highest per capita impoverished population among developed countries. We have more people in prison (per capita), by far, than anyone else.
Under Trump, the withdrawal of the US from providing diplomacy and other types of support to the world order has left a vacuum that countries like Russia and China and other dangerous nations are quietly stepping in to fill. We have not been this close to a global war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A world war today would not remotely resemble WWII. Drones, AI, and other technologies means any country is within reach of chaos or massive destruction by small states or rogue gangs. 9/11 would look like a car accident if North Korea, China, and Russia started seriously attacking our infrastructure and food suppliers in California, Mexico, and midwest and knocking down satellites. They could fairly easily poison water supplies and release chemical weapons at scale. We would of course retaliate but then it is a world war.
There will not be a winner. Only survivors and the dead.
Many millions of species on this planet. Only one is actively, aggressively, selfishly, trying to destroy the entire world simply to satiate the greed of a few.
Seems weird to be living through what is likely the death of our own species and probably most of the others and personally not feeling any pain or experiencing any drama at the moment. I am one of the lucky ones.
Enough of that nonsense. What are you gonna do, kill yourself out of despair. Good enough reason as any I suppose.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials, because
The Revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be televisedThe revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts
Without commercial interruptionsThe revolution will not be televised
Gil Scott-Heron
I’m still tinkering with SV2SA. Probably around 60% through now with the updates and copy edits. I was hoping to have this re-release out by December but that seems unlikely now. Maybe more like March. But we will see. Depends on how I proceed with editing and publication. Still thinking on that one.
And the voice recording for the audio version — that intimidates me.
I had a terrific week at Black Dog Ridge. It’s so peaceful there. A calm island in a sea of chaos. It’s my Valhalla.
When I showered the last night before I left, I was a dirty mess. On my shirt and shorts and legs and arms and eyebrows and cheeks and hat brim was hydraulic fluid, Diesel fuel, wood chips, blood, flour, tomato sauce, cigar ash and I think a splash of bourbon. Remnants of checking fluids in the tractor, cutting trees and splitting and stacking firewood, making pizza dough and sauce and then enjoying the evening.
All in a day’s work and evidence of a life well lived. Or at least an adventurous Friday.
In Lewisburg for the night, I had an excellent impossible burger with fries at the new restaurant where Hill and Holler used to be. I also ordered meatloaf for take away and the bartender seemed perplexed. I told him I was vegetarian but my dog was not. She’s not bothered by the plight of other animals or the welfare of the world in general.
I told him if I showed up without some kind of meat I would have to sleep with one eye open.
I admire her ability to focus on her own happiness.
Mom was having some dizzy spells for a while. We thought perhaps mini-strokes. They never arrived at a conclusive diagnosis but the spells went away after they changed one of her meds.
When I got home from Black Dog and walked over to have coffee and a chat, mom told me Terri was having some dizzy spells and so perhaps something was going around.
I said ‘I don’t think dizzy spells are contagious’.
Mom said, ‘Oh no, not contagious, but going around’.
Let’s leave it there.
Humbly Submitted
Robert Myres – Flanker, Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club (ret.), writer, nomad, comic genius
