This blog is dedicated to the memory of David Weintraub, who took on insidious astroturfers and won.

Friday, August 3, 2012

The Unbearable Triteness of Blogging


The patient sat silently, staring down at the shoes dangling from the examination table. His wife leafed through the fashion magazine she'd brought along with her from the waiting room.

After a delay, the doctor came in with a laptop tucked under his arm. He sat down and began to peruse the patient's medical record, making a few brief notes with a pencil as he tapped and clicked on the keyboard with his other hand.

Finally, he looked up at the patient.

= It's been eighteen months since your last visit. Everything OK?

The patient shrugged his shoulders but said nothing. The doctor looked over at the woman.

= I should make it mandatory that every man bring his wife along to the appointment. So, whats up with him?

The woman put down the magazine. Tears formed in her eyes.

= He's like this all the time now. He's not working, he's not eating. Nothing seems to interest him. He just sits and stares.

= Still smoking pot?

= He even smokes it while he's driving now! He's been arrested twice this year, once for possession and once for DUI.

= Don't forget to tell him about how I totalled your car when I got drunk...

The doctor made a face.

= Let me make a note of that. Totalled wife's car in drunk driving accident. Accident did not sever vocal chord. Injured?

= No. He passed out at the wheel and ran straight into a wall going forty five miles an hour and walked away unharmed. Thank God no one else was hurt, either.

The doctor stood up with his penlight to begin the routine ear examination.

= Parents still living?

= His father, yes. His mother passed away last summer.

= I remember your mother. I treated her for the flu once, didn't I?

= Yeah.

= Very nice woman, your mother. That was many years ago. She seemed healthy at the time. Did she stay in Texas?

= Went back to LA after my son started preschool.

= Cause of death?

= Lung cancer.

= Are you smoking?

= Just the green ones.

= OK, Good. No tobacco products. Did you get a chance to spend time with her at the end?

The patient stopped responding, having vacated the moment.  Mom'd been given less than six months after they discovered the cancer had spread to her liver. She held on, cheerfully and brave at first, for two more grotesque years.

Sister became very angry with him when he'd not visited as much as he should have.

= Get your butt on a plane and get out here, Pete. She's only holding on for you now...

He heard a lifetime of accumulated pain in her voice.

When he arrived he instantly wished he hadn't. She was no longer recognizable, a pale, withered, smelly, toothless hag weighing no more than seventy pounds.  She was barely conscious at all, and then only for short periods between the moaning and the speaking in tongues to phantoms. She no longer knew her only son.

He sat in the kitchen by himself that night, drinking beer and smoking his nephew's weed, until well after the others had gone to bed. For the first time in his charmed life, he realised there was nothing could be done.

Finally, he tiptoed into the living room dimly lit by the television's gloaming, and knelt before the misshapen mass slumped haphazardly before him in her favorite chair.

He wrapped his arms around her and held on tight. From somewhere far from himself, he heard an urgent voice take command.

= Let's go, mom. It's time to go. Everybody's waiting for us back home.

She stirred slightly and buried her head under his chin. They stayed entwined for as long as he could stand it. Her breathing began to labour. Reluctantly, he let go and sat back in the sofa along the opposite wall. The coo-coo clock chimed thrice.

Sometime before daylight, she slipped away.

13 comments:

Tokyo Shemp said...

I haven't read this yet but look forward to it. Unfortunately I am unable to blog today due to burn out issues. Otherwise one of my favourite hobbies used to be pounding out entries to knock you off the front page.

Tokyo Shemp said...

Dude, that was pure brilliance. It's definitely a topic I and most people can relate to.

As a kid, we went visiting a great aunt who was like that, very skinny and at the end. No one could tell if she still knew who we were.

Then what do you know, when she saw my older sister, there was a glimmer in her eye. My sis had been her favourite.

Thank God for weed and morphine.

Anonymous said...

This is an oldie but a mouldy, rewritten several times, at least, once after the original was whitewalled at Political Flesh Feast, and also at FSZ and the late unlamented Writing in the Raw'r.

Yes, I posted this as a test of your desire to knock me quickly down the page heading.

I also have some more excellent entries on Syria to further stultify your dwindling audience but I can seem to make the HTML linky thingie tags actually work...the equations show up instead of the links. Can you help out a fellow American there?

Anonymous said...

Oh and thanks for the praise.

I believe that may be a first time for one of my litry entries.

Tokyo Shemp said...

To put in links substitute < >for {} ... {a HREF="url"}description{/a}

Tokyo Shemp said...

Or it could be the change in blogger. I think you need to switch off html or something, to make it manual.

Tokyo Shemp said...

That's odd. I went into edit and fixed the first link. You might want to just go back to edit and put in the right characters.

Tokyo Shemp said...

The thing I don't get about fairleft and many bloggers is how they portray themselves an expert on every single topic. Hmmm. How can someone know everything? How can someone be an expert on Honduras, Syria, immigration, on and on?

There's never any nuance either. There's no room for dialogue. Vox asked him wtf was up with one of his entries and got chastised for it.

I remember fairleft going off on Amanda Knox then conflating it to some other case. That pissed me off. Amanda Knox was innocent. I proved that Italy was seeking UN aid to wipe egg off of its face.

The internet sucks!

Tokyo Shemp said...

There was a strange story out of the Olympics I noticed on Yahoo. I think we had our first African-American gold winner in gymnastics. Then NBC went directly into an ad of a monkey doing gymnastics. It may or may not have been done on purpose. At a minimum that's some hard core incompetence. At a minimum it shows how racist we are that something like that could happen in fricken 2012.

Anonymous said...

The intenet sucks or Fairleft sucks?

That is the question.

check out the coterie of My Fascist Defense League Loosers attempting to equivocate Assad's self-defense by attacking his own people with Lincoln's defending the Union during the Civil War and Sherman's supposedly civilian murdering march to the sea in Georgia.

I'm sure they got their history of the burning of Atlanta from re-runs of Gone with the Wind.

Yeah, its got something to with HTML on/off. I'll work at it.

Its much easier to insert links at FDL, which I believe is WordPress.

Anonymous said...

I have a really hard time watching woman's gymnastics or the Olympics in general for a number of reasons.

1. Those are women?

2. Bela Lugosi Karolyi

3. Bob "Cheetah" Costas

4. Synchronised anything

5. Professional basketball/tennis/hockey players soon to be golfers...how come no pro boxers?

6. How about synchronised professional wrestling?

7. Volleyball

8. Beach Volleyball

But yeah, good to see the little afrochick kick some ass...

also, how about the Chinese swimmer chick who swam the last 50 of her rrace faster than the male winner of the same race.....and then immediately was attacked for PED by the ugly Americanss?

Tokyo Shemp said...

Fairleft claims all this support at FDL while you have none. But then I actually went there, and he was getting tattooed by plenty of people.

I'm off of the Olympics. Gotta agree there is something wrong with female gymnastics. It was socratised decades ago, and you mentioned the chief culprit Bela Lugosi someone.

I like these kinds of topics. This is the kind of stuff I expected more of on the internet.

I read a long time ago that body wise women should eventually be faster than men. I wouldn't assume there was some sort of PED going on.

It was fricken obvious back in the day with the East German swimmers.

How about Dwyane Wade? He might be on roids. There's something up with his jaw. He has transformed from a nice great player into a dirty one.

I watched a great Spaghetti Western last night and thought of you. It was with some dude named Steve Reeves. Great music. Great action. Puts Bonanza and Audie Murphy in their fricken places. Alan Ladd too, though Shane is a must see.

I honestly don't know what's up with Syria. I trust what you've been posting. I remember the Joo haters from my college days. When things get polarised, thinkers are forced out of having any influence. That's Lyndon LaRouche territory. Though I don't trust Noom either. I lobbed him a softball to share his opinion of Yitzhak Rabin. He came up with nothing. Nothing I sez.

Anonymous said...

I forgot badminton.

When will they add croquet?

Curling is a great one. I heard recently that the Olympic villages where the athletes live during the games, except of course for the big stars and pros who can afford better, are non stop sex hook-ups during the games. Not so much for the competitive athletes but the hordes of qualifiers who have no real chance at medaling.

Someone did a survey and they deternined that the wildest, hardest partiers by sport were the......curlers!

RIOTOUS!