You craic me up

I just sent out an email to everyone that is in our email list asking for donations to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, as I am going to limp the Santa Barbara 1/2 marathon this October. I upped my walk yesterday to 3 miles, and training begins in earnest now. So if you didn't get an email from me, go here http://pages.teamintraining.org/los/sbhalf09/jfioressjf and make a donation that will help to save lives. Quit worrying about the mortgage and the job, and boost your karma with a donation to a good cause! If you prefer offline, send a check payable to Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to me at:
4392 Wavertree St.
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401


I now see there were more comments on the post from June 6; thanks for those kind words Pete, and Pat, I am going by Big 5 today to see about the boogie board they have on sale, is it big enough for a skinny fat guy. I could use the extra cramping that a cold water workout will bring, because leaping out of bed in the middle of the night and jumping around to quell a cramp just isn't enough. I want to cramp with drowning as a consequence! The goal is to get back in paddling shape.

I was thinking about fatherhood, thinking about my dad and your dad and what we learned from them, and what my kids learned from me, and I wrote this with artistic license:

Knucklebusting

My father taught me how to work with hand tools. He grew up in the depression, and he had all the tools any righteous and worthy man of the time would have – planes, levels, drills, saws, wrenches, hammers, vises, screwdrivers, soldering guns, socket sets, hex keys, and much more. He had inside tools and outside tools – rakes, hoes, edgers, spades, shovels and floats. He had all the paints, stains, wood dough, sandpaper and chisels needed for every job. He assigned me big jobs in the summers, painting the house, or digging a trench to a big hole for grey-water, or working on cars that did not want to run, ever again. I did those jobs and learned to not fear any job nor any mess, but instead to dive in and get dirty.

He also taught me how to swear like a Catholic when busting a knuckle. Most jobs that require hand tools also require a sacrifice of blood, often when the tool slips and the fingers are driven into a chunk of metal or cement. My dad was a salesman, a very smooth talker, but he felt compelled to swear in Italian, which he did not know, at these times. ‘Fongool a bona bouton,’ or just ‘Fongool,’ which I now know is a misconstruction of ‘Va a fare en culo,’ meaning ‘Go f*** yourself in the butt.’ I have no idea what the ‘bona bouton’ was intended as. Instead of ‘Jesus Christ’ he would say ‘Cheese and crackers,’ or smack his head and say ‘Oooh dee,’ which was ‘Oh God.’

My Mom lives in a condo now and misses the strange swearing. Deep in the building’s basement she has a storage area that is fenced in with chicken wire, and the remnants of my Dad’s hand tools are still there. Not the tools that had any usefulness, because my siblings and I have already put them back to use, but the obscure or past-by tools, like hand-drills and trouble lights, are still there. When I cleaned this area for my Mom, I left those tools there, to be treasures for somebody after me, for one of my son’s maybe.

I wrote this too, but my Dad didn't teach me this.


Smoke and Fire

So many times, the fathers die young,
their hearts failing to handle the stress of
not making more babies or
making too many babies,
or is it money not babies?
They carry this pent-up bile,
this magma, from listening to their bodies,
and they try to be good dads and husbands,
but so many can’t.
They try not to lust, not to care whom
is alpha male,
try to be good sports, try to play nice,
try to be faithful.
The poisons build up in there
and things start to heat up.
Like a big pile of used tires,
they catch fire spontaneously and
burn for years and cannot be stopped.
The doctors and shrinks try to fix them
but so often it’s no use, the systems are
overwhelmed, no longer relevant,
fright or flight not so important,
nothing to do with all that adrenaline
but suppress it or let it burn.

Woke up at 5 this morning, as usual. Much is the same, but I am back swinging an occasional golf club and my hip has calmed in its anger toward me. In 2 weeks we are leaving for England, Scotland and Ireland, so I am trying hard to suppress all my OCD habits with 5 of us in the house right now. Funny how the house is not so neat and clean as it was when I was the only one here all day. I have a chance to play St. Andrews ($300+) and a chance to see a day of the British Open at Turnberry ($100), but I am not committed to either. Och and begorra.

The world is an oyster

Mike and Nicole

John and Mike

It's been a momentous week! Mike graduated from San Luis High yesterday, and we had a great party with 5 other graduates' families at the Bruington's lovely house. We congratulated each other many times on having gotten this far, and on how wonderful and talented our kids are, and on how the future is out there for them to grasp. Henry Bruington, younger brother of Annie who graduated and one of the theater gang, made movie trailers with each of the graduates that were really funny and well worth a peek. They are at http://vimeo.com/user1145284/videos/all/sort:newest. Mike is in a couple of them. Plaudits to Henry, a masterful job.

All of this smiling and potential and sweetness and melancholy started me to remembering when I graduated, but I don't recall anywhere near the depth or power of those emotions from that time. The fog of war has clouded over the emotions of 36 years ago; perhaps it was all there then as now, and we were full of promise and possibility. I'd like to think there still are a lot of possibilities, but it has been pointed out to me that most of those have been right in front of me for years and nothing has happened.

This state of sentient being, this state of knowing that we are travelling through time from birth to death, paralyzes us at times, analysis paralysis, with all the roads that lead from where we are and not able to see the end until the end. I would like to have a hovercraft instead of a car so I could look out a little further and take some easy shortcuts.

I went to see the doc this week, and the mucositis is advancing a lttle, effecting my eyes as it does Bill's with dryness. I keep having flakes of skin fall into my eyes at inopportune times, such as when driving through downtown SLO. I am like a shark, and my extra eyelid closes over and everything goes milky translucent. Not great for driving. My liver numbers are mixed, with some way up and some normalizing, which is typical 6-9 months after BMT.

The steroids continue to wake me up early, 5 this morning and most mornings, so I am getting by on 7 hours of sleep which is OK. I am a party pooper though, show me my bed by 10 pm please, maybe 11 if I am being wild. I actually had a drink last night, a margarita, it was good, I hope the liver didn't care, maybe it needs flushing. I do get lots of work done around the house, but things are breaking as fast as I fix them. Dana's work on the roses is really paying off, and I have done some trimming and feeding and potting, so the garden is looking very nice, except for the foolish young animals on fire in the background.

I am writing this with a new PC, as the motherboard died on the old one. Plugged in the old HD, and I have a new rocket machine, quad core CPU, 600 gb hard drive plus the old HD with 280 gb, 4 gb RAM, 350 GB of external HD, and I can still only type 30 words/minute and peek a lot. The weak link is me.

In some of my early morning ramblings to myself I have been trying to wrap my arms around what the past was like for people such as my dad and his generation. I see so much different for my kids than it was for me, a whole new world of distractions plus all the old ones, and nowhere near the work ethic that was drilled into my generation by depression-era parents. I ended up on the phone with my Mom prying her for information I should have gathered twenty years ago. Her memory is great, but the people I should have asked for more details of their life are gone now, rest their souls.

So I am embarking on a genealogy project to see what is out there. Bill McNiff, do you know of any family tree work out there? Does anyone have any advice of software or sites to use?

Emotional breakthrough

Nothing left to say, nothing left to do. I've been too busy doing nothing to write a blog post. So, nothing doing from a do-nothing.
What has happened since May 10? Much ado about nothing. The damn mucositis has flared up more, so I am back on steroids, 20mg/day, and maybe for a long time, a year or two. The doc believes this is my gvhd, and I have to agree, and that is fine if all that is left is no hot or spicy foods. Minty toothpaste is like fire-eating. Sharp edges, as in chips and toast, are also painful. Consequently eating is not all that pleasurable and I am stuck under 160 pounds, even hit 155 if I don't focus.

I wrote this Tuesday morning, early:

'I woke at steroid-early, time to take some jangle extender, read the nonsense, and watch dawn in the chemo-red sky. I lie there pondering more sleep, but my brain is jumping through memories. I watch myself stand in the radiation booth and think, 'Don't move, be steady, hold on.' I don't want any stray bullets piercing my lungs. The machine across the room reminds me of the mouths of the sand worms in 'Dune' or 'Tremors', but it's the sound that sticks your hair on end, a sound of thousands of gees at work, and they will just do their work if you just stand still. I hold on to the handlebars and stay as steady as I can.

My wife is moving large volumes of air, so I think I can rise without waking her. I take a right at the foot of the bed, aiming for my sweats in the closet. Sometimes I get lost and end up at the door, and she wakes while I fumble around, and says 'What are you doing?' I tell her I am lost, but about then I find the closet and my sweats, then out the door and downstairs to start another day.'

I should be doing more stream of consciousness writing in the early hours.

I played 30 holes of golf back in May, and on hole 30 my left hip left in protest, and has been very slow to recover. No golf since. I have some plays on a ten-play card, but after those I will retire from golf until I get a hip. It was taking too much time and money, a fickle mistress that didn't put out, so what was the point? Humility? Despair? Hopelessness?

My house looks good now, since I have all this time for doing chores. I treated the older wood floor areas with a revitalizer, and they look great. I pruned up the trees by the creek and cleared out a lot of brush, improved our views, repotted a slew of pots, pruned a bunch, and organized John and Laura's stuff in the garage so I can still get to the weight set. I fought the dragon of Adobe Photoshop until I submitted to an upgrade, man I hate that program but I am committed now.

Last weekend (5/29-30) was the high schools 24 hour relay, and I was volunteered to be a parent participant, which meant being there for 25 hours straight and trying to stay out of the way. Imagine a few hundred kids drinking mass quantities of energy drinks and trying to impress each other, some for the last time. I tried to read and sleep, but it was loud and cold. Mike and some fellow musicians threw together a band and played a 45 minute set, Hendrix, King Crimson Epitaph, Leggy Blonde, War Pigs, Wanna Be, and more. Some of it rocks, some of it looks like a band that practiced twice. That is Mike on stage in the green shirt.

We have been busy also going to things like end of school year awards and concerts. Mike received a Golden Tiger for Outstanding Senior Choir student, Best Actor in a Musical, and then Outstanding Vocalist for 2009. Man, I am swelling up with pride.