Counting Crows

Last night, we were watching a PBS show about how smart crows are. We’d seen it before, but the alternative was to converse, and we can’t have that, now can we?

UCC:  We’re coming to the part where there is a crow with white on her wings. She dies before the research experiment ends.

We come to that part.

TCG:  White wing dies, right?

UCC:  I may have mentioned that.

WISIMH:  I may have a hearing impairment but you have a listening impairment.

A Midsummer Comedy in Three Acts

Act One - Mid-May

UCC: Did you know that DOB’s truck has three flat tires?

TCG: Yes. It’s been like that for a while now.

UCC: Well, I just noticed it because I was working in the front yard. Why don’t you inflate the tires?

TCG: Well, I can’t start it because the battery is dead.

WISIMH:  Non sequitur altert!

UCC: Which means the tires won’t hold air? Who knew?

WISIMH:  Battery died because you can’t manage to run it for a few minutes each month like you used to do.

UCC: Then either get it running or get rid of it. We already have one derelict vehicle crapping up the carport. I won’t accept two.

TCG: OK. I’ll take care of it.

UCC:  I’ll depend on it.

WISIMH:  There is no longer any point to this. It’s as far beyond my waning powers of imagination to envision a scenario where you will actually accomplish something as complicated as inflating some tires as it is for me to imagine the dawn of a day when the urine smell from DB’s room will not waft violently down the hall like screaming banshee on a flying broomstick when the door to her room is opened. It’s breathtaking - and not in a good way – to actually venture into her room when I have to pick up her dirty laundry once a week. Inevitably, posted by her doorway (where it will have maximum effect as an air unfreshener on my side of the house) is always a garbage bag waiting for the trash gods to take it outside. TCG will take care of the trash too, eventually. Don’t put off until tomorrow something that you can put off until next week are the words we live by here in the Fortress of Attitude.

Act Two - Mid-June

UCC: Can you give me an Estimated Time of Action on the truck tires?

TCG:  (Checking his day planner on the iPhone)  July 27.

UCC:  Be still my beating heart.

WISIMH:  By which I mean: Dear My Blood Pressure, Please stop pounding so heard it feels like my head will explode. My right arm is going numb again, and I was planning on using it to beat someone senseless with a chair. Fondly, UCC.

Act Three - July 30

We managed to get to the store yesterday where TCG bought an electric plug-in air compressor to inflate the tires. En route home:

UCC:  So, did you talk to your sister J2 about giving her the truck since she needs a vehicle and we don’t need more than one derelict car in our yard at a time?

TCG:  (Non Sequitur Alert) Well, you know I talked to DOB about this (since the car was technically registered to her before he stopped bothering to renew the license tags making it impossible to drive on the street even if it didn’t have a dead battery and flat tires).

UCC:  Yes, I was there. That was last month. Have you talked to your sister?

TCG:  (Second Stage Non Sequitur Alert) That would be a good idea. Let me get the tires taken care of first.

UCC:  Sure.

WISIMH:  And let me have another evening trip to the ER with chest pains. Another good idea since we’re on the subject would be to save a date for actually inflating the tires. And then, since we all know the car won’t start, setting a date for replacing the battery. By the time all this happens, in the event it doesn’t just happen in my fucking dreams, J2 will have left town again to live with her daughter in Lime Disease, MO for several years or until she again needs to move back to her spouse’s gun and ammunition stocked trailer to use his health insurance. So I ask myself, why do I bother? The side effects from my latest heart medication make me feel like a crack whore who has been beaten up by her pimp, but without the preceding crack high. It’s actually not dreadful hyperbole to say I’m losing the will to live here. A stroke might be preferable to being squashed to death by a poorly balanced pile of hoarded crap while threading my way between the teetering piles trying to get to the shower before being overcome by the poisonous fumes from the DOB’s lair.  Or suffocating to death by the CO2 from the large volume of scented candles necessary to permit me to use the shower - a mere two rooms down the hallway from the entrance to said lair. Or being led away in handcuffs, blood-soaked and laughing manically to a nice quiet room painted in calming institutional green and smelling like pine-scented cleaner instead of piss. Alas, what stinky fools these mortals be.

The Dark Side of the Spoon

So SIL visited for 2 weeks. You might imagine those initials stand for Sadly Insane Bitch, but actually, I refer to my sister in law, DOB’s daughter, who is bossier than Sister Alice Maureen, passively aggressiver than a delusional middle eastern dictator - but without the endearing cult of personality, and has forgotten more about whatever you’re trying to do than you ever tried to learn.

DOB, whose powers of rational thought rival those of a detoxing hobo with end stage Parkinson's, typically reverts to nap-deprived stubborn 2-year-old mode when requested to do more than lift her own spoon. SOL is maliciously depriving DOB of alcohol, which is one of her meager remaining pleasures. Did I mention: cranky?

At a recent Chinese dinner with SIL, DOB and TCG, I made the executive decision to order a third bottle of crap white zin to give me the divine inspiration and strength to keep the conversation from veering into side roads with signposts such as Angry Drunk Avenue, Change Your Diaper Drive, Why Am I Alive Avenue, and Leave Me the Fuck Alone Lane. And don’t get me started about How Being 92 Doesn’t Entitle You to Be Nasty You Stupid Fuck.

So that happened.

When a DNR is Not the Answer

Notwithstanding your DNR, it is becoming increasingly unlikely our friendly neighborhood EMTs would be able to determine the precise point you stop weaving in and out of polite, not to mention rational, discourse and actually slip into unconsciousness wherefrom we can then elect not to reanimate your corpse. 

Let’s Play “Beg That Question”

You forgot to remind me to put my teeth in before I went to the barbershop.

Your sister-in-law in Florida calls moments after you sit down with a lemongrass and ginger tea martini. She says your mother-in-law has fallen down trying to make it to the bathroom ahead of her diarrhea – unsuccessfully as it turns out. Mother lives two rooms away from your martini.

The hospital social worker calls at 21:30 to say they want to discharge your mother-in-law tonight after 2 hours because, though she had fallen and been taken to the emergency room dozens of times before for durations averaging 36 hours, this time she has diarrhea.

She put her dirty diapers in the cupboard next to her clean bath towels to cut down on odor.

Your spouse and his mother engage in a confusing dialogue about a plant on her dresser that has been rat-gnawed and/or rat-infested, after which he reports back, and then you ask if he placed said pot outside, and then he replies that he was going to but blah blah blah, and then there is much consternation at your precipitous action to take the fucking pot and put it outside the fucking door.

Before you tossed the rat pot, did you determine whether the rat was in it?

Is this all part of your diabolical plan to murder your wealthy relatives in cruel and lingering ways and to live in luxury thereafter on your ill-gotten gains?

At what point did you realize you were living with hoarders-in-waiting, and all that stands between you and a public spectacle in which the term clinically insane appears in lurid headlines describing your psychotic break and subsequent killing spree are the following: your medical marijuana card; your excellent cooking; your adorable kitty; and the happy place in your mildly morbid imagination?

Before I go on a magical quest to clean her commode and commode chair, I want you to see that this is actually chocolate ice cream in this large plastic tub I intend to use to put in the wash water to clean said appliances.

She objects to being told she has to spend an indeterminate number of days in a skilled nursing facility because her roommates are too ill to clean up her shit, by which I mean her shit.

Why I Won't Own a Gun

In other news,  I spent my 64^th birthday in a place with room service.  Had breakfast in bed the next day. Then lunch. Then, I paid my $50 co-pay and was discharged.

I had gone to the emergency room the evening of my birthday with atrial fibrillation. They kept me overnight, so someone in unfortunately patterned scrubs could wake me up three times in the night to be sure I was getting a good rest. Although I would have preferred to return home and sleep, I was discharged in time to attend the weekly sushi lunch/torturous conversational feedback loop with TCG and our demented roommate.

I returned home from the hospital with a case of intestinal flue that kept me running between the bathroom and bedroom for the next 24 hours, and wishing my Mommy was there to hold my forehead to check my temperature. So, I got a thorough intestinal cleanse as a free birthday bonus.

Of course the same bug then felled TCG, only he suffers much more dramatic symptoms, and prefers to have a sympathetic audience for his distress. When I am sleep deprived, my shoulder and neck muscles spasm and clench. It feels like a pit bull is gripping me by the back of my neck. I spent my first night back from the hospital sleeping on the couch - which was preferable to being awakened by TCG’s frequent noisy trips to the toilet. Thank Allah for vicodin.

The second day of TCG’s “24-hour” illness, this happened.

TCG:  (Dialing DOB’s cell phone for the third time because he’s too contagious/lazy to go and see how she is doing.  Wrt/phone, she usually can’t react quickly enough to answer on the first try, but mostly manages to figure it out by the second) Figure it out and answer your damn phone.

UCC:  You might still be contagious, want me to go check?

TCG:  (Dialing the home phone intercom) Hello? Hello? This is your son. Are you ok? Why don’t you answer your cell phone?

Pause, while we all assume DOB is trying to process a reply but succeeding only in babbling some repetitive phrase that might as well be: You have reached a non-functioning brain. Please re-think what you’re doing, after first disregarding any lingering assumptions you may harbor that the person you are calling can exercise any cognitive task more challenging than blinking while drooling.

TCG:  I have to see DOB.

Pause, while the earth spins silently on its axis, and me and the cats hold our collective breath for the next shoe to drop. Finally TCG huffs and puffs his way back to our side of the house.

TCG:  (Waving his hands to indicate he can’t speak yet, but being sure to get my full and undivided attention while we all wait.) She found where the rat is that’s been reportedly visiting her in the night… That plant J sent for some unexplained occasion? That’s sitting on her dresser? You know, in the basket. That plant…

… There’s a nice neat hole chewed in the back side and a nice burrow tunneled into the dirt and roots of the plant…

WISIMH:  And she got you up from your sickbed to show you this? Is she insane or just thoughtless? The incoherent warp of her babbling begins to sound like a wind chime in a zen garden. You're still at the semi-cogent state that remains intermittently coherent. I receive a blinding insight: O wait. She’s insane AND thoughtless. You're almost as bad. (Two insights, actually.)

TCG: … That’s where the rat has been…

UCC:  So you put the plant outside, right?

TCG:  I was going to, but I was laying (sic) on the floor because I was out of air.

UCC:  Jaisus in heaven. (Going to DOB’s room, confirming which is the rat’s basket, opening her door and putting it outside)

DOB:  You put the plant outside?

UCC:  Yes. Is that ok with you? (Not waiting for an answer,  closing the door on the smell of fresh urine and returning to the kitchen, bringing the full garbage bag that has been sitting by her door waiting for a magic spell to take it outside)

TCG:  I was going to take the plant out. I couldn’t breathe. Why did you take the trash out?

WISIMH:  Because the likelihood of you doing so is about as remote as Miskatonic University in Arkham MA is from this hellhole full of loonies.

UCC:  Are you shitting me? Because garbage attracts rodents. Rodents in the house are not ok. Then, there's the smell.

WISIMH:  Ya gotta draw the line somewhere with these hoarders. They think nothing of leaving crap on any horizontal surface that holds still longer than it takes TCG to start pissing. I am slowly losing the battle to remove accumulative hot-spots like the coffee table adjacent to TCG’s lazy-man recliner with the broken spring that sheds lumps of yellow crumbling foam to mingle with the potato chip dust and cookie crumbs marking the perimeter of TCG’s territory. The infected coffee table is likely to spread its clutter elsewhere if I leave it, but I’m just so fucking tired of living in a cluttered house that smells of only urine on a good day.

TCG:  I was going to do it as soon as I caught my breath.

UCC: The absence of initiative in this household is daunting.

WISIMH: The absence of initiative in this household is inversely proportional to the irregularity of my heartbeat. It’s more daunting than flaked coconut stuck between back teeth. “Lisa, you’re tearing me apart!”

We all managed to get to the eye doctor the day before I got sick, and I got a new prescription. Problem was that I chose to leave my good frames to get the new lenses, so I’m trying to wear a pair of backup specs from at least one major prescription away. The result is that I suffer from major eye-strain and am unable to escape into a book or three by reading to distract myself from things than my real life. My nearsighted life is less like a soft focus slow mo over new age music, than a blurry jumpy confusion of light and shadow. Or then again, maybe those two brownies for breakfast are talking.

Yesterday, I made some killer soup in the crock-pot with a smoked pork shank and some cannellini beans. Today I went to my primary care doc for the hospital follow-up, who referred me to cardiology after an irregular ekg showed I have a long qt interval. Today, DOB has come down with the same shit we had, so I’m bringing her juice and bullion. I have refused to perform any shit-cleaning duties in DOB’s room, claiming my heart condition and general unwillingness to perform any task the futility of which is comparable to rolling a stone up a hill and watching it roll down, over and over.  So, unless there really is a magic fairy looking over us, the shit smell is sure to spread across the DMZ of the back hallway and into the room where I sit and type.  Go. Save yourself.

Postmaturation

There’s premature, and immature, but I’ve discovered a new kind of mature. Actually it’s a new kind of lack of maturity. I’m calling it postmature.

Postmaturie is a behavioral pattern adopted by elderly sufferers of intermittent dementia and chronic forgetfulness, often accompanied by belligerence and paranoia. Onset and duration of symptoms are exacerbated by alcoholic consumption in public.

Diagnosis: Aberrant behaviors observed include: making faces, repeating “no!” and behaving generally like a nap-deprived, ill-mannered serial tantrum-throwing brat. Advanced cases include additional symptoms of incontinence, staggering and falling down, crossing arms across the chest, lowering the chin, and other body language of unreasoning defiance.

Undisciplined young children, the self-absorbed, the mentally challenged,  those with a very weak sense of situational awareness, weaker powers of reason, few inhibitions, appalling manners, and those with few redeeming or endearing characteristics are all at risk of Postmaturity.

Caregiver Qualifications: Must be a survivor, not a victim. Self-medication is a survival skill. Being deaf is a blessing. Hiring preference to those with other sources of intelligent conversation. Qualified applicants will demonstrate a well-evolved inner life, excellent imagination, creative craft hobbies, and/or one or more adorable cats. Postmature Persons’ Caregiver status qualifies for prescribed Medical marijuana by prescription in California.