status quo

my favorite poet, john ashbery, is 80 today. so, happy birthday to you, john. i love your work.

but i don't really want to talk about my own writing now. i mean i do, but i don't, so i'm not going to. i'll just say it's not going great at the moment and i'll leave it at that. for now. still, i'm not saying die.

speaking of death, it looks like there's going to be none of that for max quite yet. kara took him to the vet yesterday afternoon and his wound looks fine. he's going to be on antibiotics a while longer. it's possible, and perhaps likely, that the abscess did stem from the sagan attack of june 4; infection might not have been totally eliminated and gravity might have pulled the pus to that one spot under his chin, forming the abscess. a theory.

they're doing more blood work on him. his blood work has been, as i have said, consistently good over the years. all the pain meds he's on, though, could be hurting his liver or kidneys. we'll see. we have on record a sort of living will for the guy, and basically if anything else goes wrong with him ever, that's it. we'll do wound care and minor diagnostic studies (like blood work), but no x-rays, surgeries, or aggressive treatment for anything. he's just on the palliative care. i suppose we'll hear the results from his blood on monday or tuesday.

i've been doing some yard work this morning involving a reciprocating saw, and that was rather fun. i like my reciprocating saw. but now i'm going to have a shower and then i'm going to run some errands. it's saturday today.

unsteady

kara has been with max since he was just a few weeks old, and he's 16 years old now, so i know this is hard on her. he's still a little dopey, or something, this morning, more than 14 hours after the sedation. i don't think he's supposed to still be dopey. i mentioned gingerly to kara that the clinic visit yesterday was $200 and when his lacerations were repaired last month it cost us in the neighborhood of $700. if his wound doesn't heal the way it's supposed to, do we really want to shell out another $500 or whatever on another surgery? i feel bad even mentioning money when it comes to this dog, but soon, especially as he's still very clunky this morning, so long after his clinic visit yesterday, we might have to help him along to his end. at this point, no decisions have been made. we're still in wait-and-see mode. kara's trying to get some sleep at the moment. i'm going to try and get a little writing done.

sagan attack sequela?

this afternoon at about 1:30 from my office upstairs i heard max barking. this is not in the least unusual these days; several times a day he falls down and can't get up. i go downstairs and pick him up, give him some friendly pats, then go back to work. but at about 1:30 today when i went downstairs, he was lying by his food bowl and there was blood all over him, coming from a hole just under his chin. i kept my cool, picked him up (he started walking around right away, dripping blood everywhere), and called our regular vet (and was told all the doctors were at lunch, which i don't think is good planning), then kara, then the emergency clinic. i bundled a towel around max's neck and put him in the car. if you want to be seen right away at an animal emergency clinic, carry your pet in your arms with a towel wrapped around her or his neck. indeed, we were seen right away.

apparently an abscess had ruptured. maybe it was from when sagan attacked him last month? maybe one of the dozens of times he fell down outside (or inside) since, he cut himself somehow? maybe yellow swatted at him and made contact, made a nick? unknown.

max doesn't much like the emergency clinic. he was shaking, panting, barking; terrified. i honestly thought he might have a heart attack and die right there. i don't want that for him, not under such circumstances, but it's weird how nothing kills this guy. i held him as tightly as i dared, but the vet couldn't clip the hair around the wound without doping him up, he was so jittery. so she took him into the back for a while.

and now he's fine, you know, relatively. he's home and doped up pretty good. he's lying on the floor of the living room, in front of the couch, a towel under his head to catch the leaking serosanguineous fluid. see? the wound is draining; no drain was put in place today because the wound is on his ventral side and gravity is in effect. there's some puffy red skin surrounding the wound and if in the next couple of days this turns black, he might need surgery. we hope that doesn't happen. antibiotics, warm compresses, keep an eye on the wound, see the vet in 2 or 3 days.

old man

max's moaning kept kara up all night last night as well as the night before. she's working right now, as she worked yesterday, operating on very little sleep. i was able to sleep through his insomnia somehow, though i did get up fairly early this morning. we don't know what's troubling the old man. his sagan-inflicted wounds have healed and look good. we don't know why he's not sleeping. he's on all the pain medications our vet seems to think he can handle, but he might still have pain. when he moans we don't know what he wants. does he want to be picked up? sometimes he can pick himself up and sometimes he can't. his back legs, his hips, are very weak. is he just lonely and wanting attention? kara goes and pets him for a few minutes and returns to bed, but soon he's moaning again. we don't know. i don't know if he's deteriorating suddenly or if this is just a phase, a mood. i wish he could talk and tell us what he wants.

mirren in a dream

i had a dream this morning involving dame helen mirren (that's her, of course, there on the right), whom i love. (and i'm still patiently waiting for the cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover to come out on dvd. when will it happen?!) in the dream, she and i were friends and we worked together in some sort of office. when i found out, in the dream, that she was a suicide bomber and had already exploded herself (hurting, i believe, no one else), i was quite broken up as well. it was a scary and disturbing moment in my sleep, a dream element probably brought about not only by current events but also by the scene in clint eastwood's latest dvd release - the japanese side of the story of the battle of iwo jima - which kara and i watched yesterday afternoon, in which several soldiers held live grenades to their chests and blew fatal holes in themselves in rapid succession. that was a scary and disturbing scene in a film that had many scary and disturbing scenes. anyway. there was more to my dream than ms mirren blowing herself up, though the details are fuzzy. please know, however, that i don't want her to blow herself up. that it happened in a dream was terrible enough. i want her to keep acting, to make more films! please!

beer bottles and a miracle whip jar

i had to be careful when carrying this recycling tub to the curb last evening, as there was a snail in it. (click image to enlarge.) i didn't want all those empties to crush the little fellow. the land immediately surrounding this house seems to be something of a haven for gastropods. they're everywhere. i rather like them, but sometimes we kill them accidentally. i gingerly carried the tub to the curb and a bit later kara and i went out. when we passed the tub, the snail was gone. i hope it got out all right. i don't know that the city people would have taken care to ensure the safely of the creature.

nice for me

i got my biopsy results back from my colonoscopy of the middle of last week. no cancer. that's good. the report says there are "minimal changes" that are not significant. all in all it's a good result. i have no complaints at this time.

so i worked today, put in my 8 hours of typing those medical reports, after 2 weeks off. now i have a weekend before me. life is so hard.

adios fugue

today i'm faced yet again with nostalgia. it's our last day of vacation. back to work we go tomorrow. it's a rainy day today. we had a good time off; we knew it would pass too quickly. things, i think, are finally going to get back to normal, after a strange month and a half. it's going to be hard to be working again, at first. part of me looks forward to normalcy, work, real life. part of me likes the strange fugue state of having nothing really imperative to do. but maybe it has gone on long enough.

we still have today, though! i don't yet know what we're doing today. as i say, it's raining. we might stay at home. we might go to doyle's for a drink, see if that cute girl is working at king's. but there's nothing at all we have to do, and i do like that.

worst news

i guess it's not a surprise that the 12-year-old girl who was grabbed up right here in tacoma on july 4 would be found dead if she were found at all, but yeah, she was found dead yesterday. here's a short article from a local tv station's website, without a great deal of information. this is another of those stupefying things that happen. i'm very sad for her family. it's about the worst thing imaginable. what else can i say? i guess nothing. so i'll just shut the hell up.

postop

it's over. it's done. everything's fine.

the prep wasn't even all that bad. sure there was plenty of nastiness coming out of my person, largely fluid, but i didn't have cramps or anything. and i slept from about midnight to just before 6 this morning, which was a lot longer than i had expected. and i wasn't even all that hungry until about noon today, after having been on nothing but clears for 22 hours.

when i got to the place and was called back, a nurse put an iv catheter in. this was actually the bit i was most worried about, me and my needles, but it was fine. i walked with her to the procedure room. i got into the bed and all sorts of monitoring equipment was attached to me. the doctor came in and said hello. i rolled over onto my side. another nurse took off my glasses for me. she then attached the sedative to the catheter and said it would work in about a minute.

i remember seeing fleeting images on the monitor of the insides of my tubes. the next thing i knew i was in the postanesthesia care unit and it was all done. my glasses were on my face again.

it was weird. the loss of time was weird. i'm a little bit creeped out by that. there were about 30 minutes that i lost. i don't even know that a full minute elapsed between when the nurse pushed the plunger on the midazolam and when time left me. or when i left time. i don't recall traveling from the room where the procedure took place to the pacu.

i don't even remember what the first thing i remember is. i don't remember suddenly becoming awake. i was just aware at one point. a third nurse asked me what kind of juice i wanted and i said orange. i drank the contents of a tiny can of orange juice through a straw. then i was directed to a bathroom where i could put on my clothes again. i felt like i was walking funny, slowly, unsteadily. then kara was in another waiting area, waiting for me. and then the doctor came and talked to us.

everything in the scopy was normal. from rectum to ascending colon to transverse colon to descending colon to appendix to terminal ileum. normal. no polyps, no hemorrhoids, no bleeeders, no tumors. a couple of biopsies were taken, and histology should be back in a week or two. but as far as anyone can tell, i'm fine. so that's good.

okay then. on to the next adventure, whatever that will be.

impending

my scopy is tomorrow at 2:15. so after 2:15 today i cannot eat anything. likely i will be grouchy due to this. at 6 tonight i drink one of this fleet dealios and at 6 tomorrow morning i drink another one. usually laxatives don't make me terribly happy either. of course i understand that my inner tubing has to be as empty as possible, so they can clearly visualize the hemorrhoids, polyps, cancer, or whatever they're going to find. (i know they probably won't find cancer. i'm not really worried about that.) everyone i've talked to about these sorts of scopies says this bowel prep is far and away the rotten bit. the scopy itself is a cakewalk. so that's fine. my doctor says i won't remember anything about it anyway. the only thing i fret about regarding the appointment tomorrow at this point is the intravenous line, because i still get wiggy about needles. i know that will probably be fine, though. i just need to remember to ask for pictures of my tubing. kara's coming with me; because of the sedation i will be considered an unsafe driver. i will need conveying. so anyway. the first half of today should be fine, actually probably the first two-thirds. i don't have much in the way of plans. once i get hungry and poopy, things might go downhill. wish me luck.

outline, crafts

the first few days of writing went pretty well. i banged out a few thousand words and i felt good about them. then suddenly i felt stymied and without a place to go. i had no idea about the next scene and i felt sunk. this has happened to me many times before.

but then, somewhat reluctantly following the advice of former college buddy and 2-time published novelist mailman, i decided to tighten up and make an outline. i was resistant because i like so much the idea of the seat-of-my-pants style of writing - that's exciting to me, not knowing what's coming next, constant surprises. but, obviously, that hasn't worked out so well for me in the past, except (arguably) in those 50,000-words-in-30-days whirlwind november marathons. (those were fun and i met the deadlines but i hesitate to say they were actually good novel[la]s.) so yesterday i looked on some websites on the subject of outlining novels and then i did some freewriting about my main character and what i think i want him to go through in this story. that was already more planning for a fiction-writing project than i've ever done. and this morning i hammered out an outline of a 13-chapter novel, soup to nuts. (i guess i find the number 13 lucky.) at this point i have between 2 and 4 sentences describing each chapter, so there's a lot of room for exploration of character and those sort of things that make writing fun for me. but i am thinking that this skeletal structure will be a helpful thing. so at the moment i'm pleased.

and yesterday was tacoma's art on the ave thing, basically a craft fair with food and stuff, taking up several blocks of 6th avenue. our friend kristi came over. it was sunny but not too hot. we saw lots of jewelry and other crafty things. we saw a demonstration of roller derby girls in action, and that was fun. kara bought some tie-dyed tee shirts. i got crazy sunburned, because i'm an idiot that way. we ended up in the wine bar that's right across the street from our house. it was a really good time.

so today i'll do some more work in the yard and then i'll probably read and reread and futz with my new outline a few hundred times (as i am wont to do whenever i write anything, including these silly blog posts). and kara's got a paper of her own to write today. after my yardwork is done for the day and i've had my shower, i'll probably relax and see what's recorded on the tivo. after all, i'm on vacation here.

wet eliot

i don't have much to say this morning; things are fine. i was looking for a pry bar in kara's truck yesterday and came across this photograph there. it was taken in our old house, so it's at least 2 years old. we had evidently just given eliot a bath, because he's wet and pissed. this might be before we started having him shaved. and i don't know if rumble is reaching for him to help out or if she's cleaning herself real quick so the same fate won't befall her. and yellow's watching in the background. anyway. i like the photo. so here it is.

catastrophe, not mine

here's a 4th of july whoops for you. that's the bad thing about taking a vacation right after this particular holiday. i'll miss out on all the dumbass emergency room fireworks-related injuries. this one, though surely dumbass, is also, of course, sad.

anyway. i actually had an okay day of writing yesterday. and today's writing is going all right so far too. yeah, things are going well. i don't know where they're going, quite, but that's all right.

but my own writing isn't what i feel like talking about now. i'm still working my way through hopeful monsters by nicholas mosley and i'm really liking it. it's one of those "novels of ideas" or "intellectual novels" that i periodically find myself drawn to. i'd love to be able to write this sort of thing myself, but i'm totally not at that level. i don't know if ever i will be, but that's okay. i can write my sort of thing, whatever my sort of thing is, and mr mosley can write his. i reckon there's room for both of us.

it's one of those books that seems to be about everything. love, physics, biology, relativity, fascism, sex, communism, anthropology, war, philosophy. it's nearly overwhelming. plus it's funny.

i know mr mosley isn't for everyone, but i do recommend his books. give him a try. he's got a bunch. this one is the last in a series of novels he calls "catastrophe practice," and i know i'm messing everything up by reading this one first, but it's been on my shelf for years and it was calling to me and there was little i could do. here's a brief article about it that appeared in the stranger back in the day.

okay. now i'm going back to work some more on my own, notably less complicated, intellectual, or original, story.

lights on

i had some trouble getting to sleep last night because i was thinking about this. i'm going to start writing again tomorrow. my track record as far as writing goes has been quite poor over the last 14 years. i'm a quitter. it's my history. how do i know i will not quit again this time? of course i don't. at the moment i have a character, the beginning of a situation, a bit of his personal history. i have been advised regarding the merits of an outline, of outlining, even in broad strokes, the plot arc. but i rather like not knowing what's going to happen. my fiction-writing instructor in college said - and she (nee he) may well have been quoting someone else - when you're driving at night, all you can see of the road is what is illuminated by your headlights, maybe a 15-foot span in the blackness, but you can drive clear across the country that way. i like that. i like the idea of writing a draft of a novel before november. and maybe then i'll do nanowrimo for a 3rd time. that's 4 months away, 4 months to write a draft of something. i just hope i can stick to this project here, get a story down, commit. i might look into making a bit of an outline.

washing

happy july! already things are looking up. the purchasing of a new washing machine yesterday couldn't have gone much smoother.

it's a bosch nexxt, of the 500 series, and it's snazzy. the folks at lowe's treated us fine. the only thing we don't like about the machine is the color - it's quite white. but kara's talking about painting it!

it was delivered this morning, just before noon. there's already a load in it. it will take another week to catch up on all the piled up laundry, but that's okay. we're off to a good start.