Personal Pieces posts

Much of last year was spent sorting through the belongings of dead loved ones.

After our mother's stroke in 2016, my brother Chris moved into her 55-and-over condominium in Richfield, Minn. She died in 2019, he in 2023, and both had a bit of the pack-rat gene, so there was stuff to sort through. The toughest part, as anyone who has done it knows, is deciding what to keep (for family/friends), what to donate (mostly to GoodWill), what to throw away. Occasionally it wasn't awful. Occasionally it was, “Oh my god, I remember this!” But then you'd want to share that joy with the loved one who was no longer there. Whose thing it was.

The only time I felt a sense of triumph was with Chris's old copies of Metro Student News.

An alt-weekly published in the 1970s, Metro Student News was, as its title suggests, written and edited completely by high school and junior high students from the Twin Cities—Chris among them. Unlike most everyone else in the world, Chris kept his copies. He carried them through the decades and had a stack of them in a file cabinet in his bedroom closet, along with leftover stationary with the MSN letterhead. I was assuming these would wind up in the “throw away” pile, but one day in June I sat down and looked through them. There were cover stories on the growing apathy of the baby boom generation, interviews with Al Franken and Tom Davis—local comedians who had made the leap to writers and actors on “Saturday Night Live”—and interviews with Iranians forced to flee when Ayatollah Khomeni came to power. All of these stories felt historically and culturally relevant. They were snapshots of a long-gone era that took in the zeitgeist and wrote about it smartly. Surely they were of use to someone. 

A library would be the proper place for them, right? But which library? We had one near our childhood home, Washburn Library on 53rd and Lyndale, which Chris and I used to go to as kids. Maybe them? Then I remembered a friend recently worked for The Minnesota Historical Society, and she gave me a way to query them. I think it was through their website, and the first response was the generic one: Thank you for contacting... Our curators undertake a rigorous... We are not able to respond directly... So I wasn't holding my breath. Everyone thought their old thing was historically relevant, or unique, when it wasn't.

But not 12 hours later, I got an email from an actual person. They wanted them:

Thank you for reaching out with this thoughtful donation of your brother's collection of “Metro Student News,” and my condolences for your loss. Our Curator of Rare Books, Maps and Print Culture is very interested in taking a look at these to add them to our collection. 

More emails were exchanged, and eventually a day/time agreed upon to drop them off at the Society's St. Paul location. I arrived early on a Friday morning, and stood in the sun next to my car. The area was green and well-landscaped, with benches, and a few people coming and going. It was a quiet moment amid an unquiet month amid an unquiet year. Eventually my contact emerged from the building, I gave her the bag, she thanked me. I reminded her that the donation should be in the name of my brother, not me. She understood. Two weeks later, I found more copies of Metro Student News, twice as many, in fact, so I did it again, this time with a different rep. In August they sent me a copy of the “deed of gift,” along with a thank-you letter, mentioning that Chris's donation would be added to the Gale Family Library Collection. I was told it would take a while—a few years, maybe—but they would get added. The newspapers wound up where they needed to wind up. They had a home.

Iran in turmoil, 1979, donated during a year America was in turmoil.

It's been a week, hasn't it? Cue R.E.M.

I thought it was bad on Tuesday when we got a Trump press conference out of Mar-a-Lago, and Fuckstick didn't rule out military-economic force to take over the Panama Canal and/or Greeland and/or Canada, which led to a New York Times headine about a “reinvigorated” Trump, or some such bullshit, because there's never been a right-wing politician whose boot the Times wouldn't lick, or whose false machismo it wouldn't pump up. (See: “confident” Rick Perry and his “shot of vigor” from 2011.) This was also the day Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the release not only of Jack Smith's special report on the classified documents case (her jurisdiction) but Smith's Jan. 6 case (not). She's obviously doing what she can to run out the clock and tarnish and weaken the rule of law in this country. Where is she from again? Colombia? Can we send her back with the first wave? That'd be some nice irony. How do you like them manzanas? We're truly sending back all the wrong people.

Oh, right. That was also the day Mark Zuckerberg got rid of fact-checking on his platforms—a policy implemented by him in 2017—in advance of Trump's presidential lies. What a worm. The more money the man, the weaker the spine, apparently. Some have argued it's less kowtowing to Trump than using the election as an excuse to do what libertarian, “open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science” Silicon Valley wants to do anyway. Either way, I prepared, yet again, to leave Meta, this time Instagram and Threads, as I'd done with Facebook in 2019, as I'd done with Musk and Twitter in 2022. Some people have to flee countries, I just have to flee social media platforms. I count my blessings. You can find me at: @elundy.bsky.social.

And then we got the LA wildfires. I have friends and relatives living there, including in hard-hit neighborhoods, and though their homes haven't been destroyed, as of now, their lives have been upended. We can't go a month, it seems, without some natural disaster hitting us, but this one hit me harder than most. It was the friends and relatives, sure, and the impotence we all felt, but it's also what LA means to anyone who cares about movies. It's the birthplace of our national stories. That night and the next, I watched “Chinatown,” as I tend to do when the Trumps of the world rear their ugly heads, and I wondered what neighborhoods I was watching that might be gone now. The fact that the movie is about the politics of water—who gets it and why and how money is made from it—as modern LA was a tinderbox—well, that just underscored everything.

But the news that hit hardest was personal. On Tuesday, the prosecution in my my brother's murder let us know that they now agreed with the defense that the accused is incompetent and won't stand trial. It's not unexpected, it's just ... “So that's it?” Yes. For now. It will be reviewed again in six months. The notice made me imagine the final moments again, and ... He's gone, and that's it. I could go on and on about this but I won't. Intellectually I get it. Emotionally, it's something else.

Anyway, that's one week down in 2025. Stay safe, as they say.

Last fall, the place I work and all its people were sold to a corporation in California, and with the transition came a change in insurance. We went from Insurance A to Insurance B. Let's call Insurance B “Benighted Health Care.” This insurance began for us on Jan. 1. I'd already chosen which insurance plan I wanted (basically I'm paying more for less), but I also had to sign up on Benighted's website. I did that yesterday.

Afterwards, I noticed an oddity: It knew my prescriptions (levothyroxine, etc.) but not the name of my primary care provider or PCP. In fact, the one designated to me was incorrect—a doctor I'd never heard of. “How did I get Dr. Z?” I wondered. “Where's Dr. A?” I attempted to change my PCP to Dr. A., who was in-network, but the website wouldn't let me do it. Why? Because, I was told, Dr. A. wasn't accepting new patients.

“But I'm not a new patient,” I muttered at the website. (More and more of my days are spent muttering at websites.) 

Eventually I had to call Benighted. 

Turns out assigning a doctor I'd never heard of isn't a bug at Benighted, it's a feature. Dr. Z was “chosen” for me by proximity and availability. As for changing the PCP back to Dr. A? That took work. The poor schmuck I got at Benighted tried to help, but he seemed to be doing what I'd tried to do, and failed like I failed, and then blamed my doctor for not accepting new patients rather than the insurance company for assuming new Benighted customers didn't have existing PCPs. To be honest, I didn't even know who to blame. Benighted? The new boss? The medical corp. to which Dr. A. belonged? All I know is it took an hour. 

Meet the new year, same as the old year.

The memorial bench was my sister's idea, and we had many family discussions about what to put on the plaque, but eventually we opted for simplicity:

Chris loved Zeppelin, and the above, from “Stairway to Heaven,” made sense given where we placed the bench: in south Minneapolis, between Dupont Avenue and Girard Avenue, amid the thin woods on the south side of Minnehaha Creek. It's a spot both shady and sunny. He loved the Dupont Bridge but it already had its share of benches, so we went further west, closer to John Burroughs Elementary School, which we attended in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We usually took the alleys to and from school, but if we hadn't, if we'd walked by the creek, we would've passed this spot.

I'd like to thank everyone who contributed: Adam, Kristin, Daniel, Stuart, David, Deb, Dean, Karen, Brenda, Sullivan, Peter, Ward, Margaret, Becky, Elaine and David. Also: Charles, Robert, Michelle, Katy and Kevin, Abby, Ruth, Anastacia, Paul, Jessica, Elisabeth, Becky, Brooke, Chris, Jeffrey, Kermit Susan and Tod, Bruce and Shannon, Marj, Karen, Cliff, Randy, Derek and Suzanne, Lynn and Jon, Margaret, Sandy, Jon and Leslie, Karl, Rita, Stacy, Latricia, Mike, Barb, Peter, Debbie, Michael, Amy, Lisa, Karen, William, Frank and Peggy, Ray and Gloria, Kay, Robert, Ruth, Tom, Cindy, Ruth and DaveMary Ellen, Peg and Kris, Marilyn, Annette and Peg.

Much love.

Photo by Deborah Ellis.

This is a story about the stupidity of our online/AI world—meaning it’s annoying to experience and dull to hear about later. You’re hearing about it later but I imagine you’ve experienced it elsewhere. Either way, apologies.

Last month, I got an email from the Google Search Console Team informing me that a post on this website had been flagged for copyright infringement and would be removed from Google search results. When I dug further, I discovered the complaint had been filed by Owego Co. Ltd., on behalf of author RJ Kane and his magnum opus King of the Underworld. How had I infringed upon Mr. Kane? By writing a review of King of the Underworld … the 1939 Warners Bros. movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

Did I quote Mr. Kane in my review? No. Did I mention him? Of course not. Did I have an inkling he existed? Please. His book, and the 1939 Warner Bros. movie, shared a title. As near as I could figure, that was the infringement. 

I wasn’t alone. Owego flagged 29 other websites, including Instagram, Etsy, and The New York Times. But I did have recourse. Google told me I could hire an attorney. Or Google might reinstate my review into its search results “upon receipt of a DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] Counter Notification.”

That's the direction I went, but on the site I was immediately asked for the reference ID for the flagged material. “The reference ID,” they mentioned further down, “is provided in the notification you received when we restricted your content...” Right. Except there was no reference ID in the email. I took a few guesses—maybe this bunch of numbers? Maybe those?—but kept getting “Invalid ID” responses.

At this point, I did what you do in situations where you have no recourse: I went on social media and bitched. I live a fairly marginal existence on social—fewer than 100 followers on Threads—but the post blew up: 25k views, 1k likes, much commiseration, a few suggestions of what was really going on. One of those, from an RPG tabletop publisher, made the most sense to me:

My read on this is Owego Co. Ltd. is attempting to increase search results for their client by removing other references to the title from Google’s index. It’s a sleazy but clever hack, made more clever because Google is playing along with it.

I was almost flattered. They wanted my review out of the way to improve their Google search results? Who did they think I was?

None of this is a bug, by the way; it’s baked into the system. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is strong on copyright but weak on liability for online service providers. Meaning Google is not liable for including my Humphrey Bogart review in its search results, and it is also not liable for removing my Humphrey Bogart review from its search results. It doesn’t know. And it doesn’t want to know. Knowing takes time and thought. And Google is too busy making money to think.

Several days later, I tried Google’s Counter Notification site again, and the glitch—if it was a glitch—was fixed. Afterwards, I received a no-reply email which reminded me Google was a busy entity: “We will only be able to provide you with a response, if we determine your request may be a valid and actionable legal complaint…”

Two days later, I got this:

We have received your counter notice. We’ll forward it to the user who requested removal of your content. If we don’t receive proof that they have filed a legal action against you within 10 business days, we’ll reinstate the material in question.

Meaning Google still hadn’t done due diligence. I don’t know if Google can read but surely Google can search? For, say, anything copyrightable by RJ Kane in my review? Instead, it kept playing arbiter determined to know nothing but the process—a process, it should be added, that is particularly burdensome to the accused.

In the end, 10 business days passed, Google apparently didn’t receive proof that the publisher of RJ Kane’s books was suing me for writing a review of a 1939 Humphrey Bogart movie, and my review was reinstated. Now, if you search for “King of the Underworld,” you can see my review again. Eventually. The first few results are about RJ Kane’s series of books, while no. 3 is the IMDb page for the Humphrey Bogart movie. But if you keep scrolling, if you keep hitting “next,” you’ll get to my review. It’s 90th with a bullet.

“In Wiley Hall [on the University of Minnesota campus] the eletronic board that tells the time as well as the news has been stuck—the news part anyway—since June. It's comforting in a way. Nothing ever changes. The July 13 shuttle mission is still on schedule. The New York Times has still reported that Madonna and Sean Penn will marry in August. The NAACP  is still meeting in Texas with its chairman saying it's up to black people to pull themselves up. 

”For people who feel life moves too fast: Wiley Hall."

-- Journal entry, fall 1985.

This year, after sorting through my brother's and mother's stuff, I decided to try to minimize that task for whoever followed me, so I've going through old crap, including journals, and throwing away what I can. Most of the journal entries are embarrassing but I do like this nugget. We could use a Wiley Hall news kiosk these days—set to some time before 2015.

This morning, I walked the several miles down to Lake Washington. I usually do it in the afternoon but, you know, late-summer heat wave. Plus let's shake things up a bit, Erik. Write another time. Get off your keister.

Since I walk east to Lake Washington, I was walking toward the rising sun, partially obscured by morning fog and/or mild wildfire smoke, so it looked like a big red ball in the sky. It also meant, when I got down to the lake, I got to see the light glinting off the waves in ways I didn't normally see at 3-4 PM. It was quite lovely. So I sat on one of the benches at Madrona beach and just watched the light glinting off the waves and tried to find some inner peace.

And then them.

Their noise was distant at first. A couple talking? No, arguing. It was a black couple arguing very loudly in a very white area of town—most areas of Seattle are very white, but this area was super so—but as they got closer I realized they weren't the man-woman couple I envisioned but two guys. Dave was the guy with the bag and he had something the other guy, Donovan, wanted. (They kept using each other's first names in their discourse.) I guess Dave had several of whatever the thing was. At one point they almost brokered a deal—Dave was about to give Donovan one of the things but then Donovan had to be rude about it and so Dave held back. I'm pretty sure it was beer. Dave had a beer, open, and he had more beers, but he wouldn't share them with Donovan. It was 8:30 AM. Neither man sounded drunk.

Dave wanted to be left alone, too. He kept walking and Donovan kept following. And where did Dave stop walking? Right near me, of course. He stood on the lake side of where I was sitting, while Donovan remained behind me, out of my vision. And for about five minutes they argued over me. The same words. Round and round.

I'd been sitting there trying to find some inner peace because it was already a frustrating day amid a sad and painful year. I'd woken up in the middle of the night (again) and then our kitten Maise woke me up at 6 AM (again). She's in the habit of crawling under the bed and scratching at it, like a scratch pad, to get us up, and probably because she likes doing it, too. She wants us up but not in the way cats normally want people up. It's less FEED ME than LET'S PLAY. It's the feeding that's the frustrating part. She needs gastrointestinal canned food because of a tendency toward looseness (which killed Clem), and even then we mix it with a probiotic, and even then it's only successful 50-70% of the time. As a result, the other cat, Griffey, has to have the same canned or she'll go for his. He's bigger and stronger but she's alpha. It's the oddest thing—particularly after Jellybean, who could never get enough food—but you often have to place Griffey physically in front of his dish before he'll dig in. And lately he hasn't been digging in. Lately he'll take a sniff and walk away. So it's been frustrating.

Last night Patricia suggested giving him some other canned food but then what do we do with Maise? Plus we'd tried different canned food before and Griffey didn't go for it. Patricia had forgotten that. Even so, this morning I tried one of those other canned foods, some beef puree thingee, and again physically set him before his dish. He sniffed at it and walked away. Maise, meanwhile, made a beeline for it. Something new! So I had to put it in the fridge. The kibble bowl was empty, so, at some point, I thought, Griffey will get hungry enough and we'll try again. But then Patricia got up and filled the kibble bowl and Griffey chomped through it. So we argued. The same words. Round and round.

Eventually Donovan and Dave moved off. Or Dave moved off and Donovan followed. When I left, they were still in Madrona Park, still circling each other, still reiterating the same excruciating minutiae, still drawing worried or annoyed looks from people who just wanted to walk or run down by the lake on a Saturday morning and now had to deal with all this. Hell, they're probably still circling each other, still at it, on a different part of the lake or in a different part of the city. But they helped me this morning. They helped me find the humor in it.

At some guy's house near the Uptown area. I was using the house as a quiet place to study and then bounced downstairs into the living room to announce I was heading out to get something to eat. The house owner, watching TV, was abrupt. He seemed angry. Do you want something? I asked. Yes, he said, with an “About time” air. I was dispatched to get him a Clark's sub.

Turning the corner, I watched as a drunk mildly terrorized a couple in a car, throwing bricks, then staggered down the road, where, way in the distance, a cop car drove by. I turned into a diagonal street like they have in Taipei: dirty, hustles and bustles, crowded with Chinese people. In a restaurant, Prof. Solotaroff was making food. He offered to make me some, and I accepted, thinking it would be for there. Instead, he packaged it up rapidly and told me I could eat it anytime—just follow the directions on the side. I made a move to leave, realized I hadn't paid, reached into my back pocket. But he indicated no, it was free. Out of guilt for assuming it was free, I kissed him on the cheek.

At the doorway I came across a tiny, tiny baby, crawling and wailing. I picked it up and tried to calm it. Prof. Solotaroff and I tried to get the attention of the Chinese family that had just entered to see if they knew whose it was, but they seemed preoccupied.

-- from a journal in 1989. When I was in Taiwan, in 1988, I'd heard that some Chinese people believed deja vu was simply visiting a moment in time that your dream self has already visited, and so I began to write down my dreams with the hope that, in the future, I'd recognize the moment: “Wow, this is me in 1989 describing a moment I'd be living through in 1998!” I'll let you know if that ever pans out.

Earlier this week I woke up in the middle of the night with a song in my head. This song:

I'm the morning in your morning
I'm the morning in your evening
I'm the morning in your silvery moon

It had a tune, too, but I don't recall the tune. I don't think it's a real song, just a pastiche of sentiments. No idea what it means. I'm the fresh part of your day? Or is “morning” also “mourning”? That would fit the state of my world for this week/month/year. 

Coleridge takes a nap and gets:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Right: I ain't Coleridge. I'm lucky I got anything. I also like “silvery moon.” 

This is my first Father's Day without a brother and the first with my father in a hospital with serious health issues.

I'd actually bought him Father's Day gifts last month, before the current shit storm, as the ideas came to me: a biography of Washington Senators shortstop Cecil Travis, who led the AL in hits in 1941, the year Ted Williams hit .406 and Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games, but then lost four years to WWII, and maybe some sense of touch in his extremeties to frostbite during the Battle of the Bulge. He seemed on a Hall of Fame trajectory but came back and wasn't the same; he was gone from the game by '47. A class act, he never blamed the war or the frostbite. He said you lose a fraction of your talents and you're done. Ted Williams, for one, thinks he belongs in the Hall. Cecil was Dad's favorite player growing up.

The other is a T-shirt of a baseball diamond with players' names from Abbott & Costello's “Who's on First?” routine at each position.

I gave him the gifts early, a week and a half ago, in the ICU at M. Hospital: the Travis bio as maybe something to do, the Abbott & Costello T-shirt because the occupational therapist needed a shirt to work with and no other was available. I don't know if he remembers the T-shirt. I'll give it to him again today. Meanwhile, I've read him the foreword of the Travis bio a few times. Would be great if he could feel strong enough to read it on his own but we're not there yet. 

He's no longer at M. Hospital. They moved him to a long-care type facility: R. Hospital. Its title includes “Minneapolis” even though it's in Golden Valley. He feels stuck in a system whose goal is to move him forward as he progresses even if he doesn't progress much. Yes, like kids who can't read. At M., he even seemed to regress. R., meanwhile, feels lesser. It feels a little low-rent. It's a place with the various therapists (occ., phys., speech), and he gets all of those weekdays but none of them weekends. The physcial therapist can move him from bed to chair but no one else can; the attendants have to use some lift contraption—to avoid slip-and-falls and litigation, one assumes—but it feels unhelpful and dehumanizing. He needs to use his stuff (mouth, arms, legs) to improve, to move on, but the lift contraption, which can barely fit into his hospital room, just lifts and deposits him. He is without agency. An apt metaphor. 

Yesterday I was there about five hours, 11 to 4, and it was nice that he had many visitors, including several old newspaper colleagues, who are fun and funny and no bullshit, and around whom he perks up significantly. I got him to sing yesterday, too, which feels like it'll exercise mouth muscles, and while I served up the first few lines of his favorite Beatles song (“Across the Universe”), he went with Gilbert & Sullivan: “Tit Willow” from “The Mikado.” He'd played that part, KoKo, several decades ago, and was cracking himself up during this rendition. When he was done, he said he was laughing because he was remembering Groucho sing the song on the old Carson Show.

We'll try more singing today.

The other day, after visiting my father at his new post-stroke facility in Golden Valley, Minnesota, and driving south on Hwy 100, I figured crosstown would be rough at 4:30 on a weekday so why not take the 50th/Vernon Ave. exit and just take 50th to my sister's place near Lake Nokomis? I mean, why don't more Minnesotans do that? Avoid the freeway awfulness. See the neighborhoods. See people. Fun!

Famous last words.

After the exit I took a left onto Vernon and immediately ran into a snarl: two lanes merging into one. Then I realized, no, wait, we're also being detoured. Vernon Ave. was under construction and didn't go through. The flow of the traffic, bumper to bumper, stop and go, wound right and around, and to my eye it almost seemed to be going back onto Hwy 100—but north this time—the place I'd just come from. But that couldn't be. As I inched along, I kept trying to figure out where the detour went.

And that's where it went: back onto Hwy. 100, heading north. 

Had I missed an alternate route? A path that made more sense? Nope. It wasn't a bug, it was a feature. If you exited Hwy 100 south the way I did, taking a left onto Vernon Ave., the only path for you was to get back on Hwy 100 heading north. Isn't that astonishing? The old joke is there are two seasons in Minnesota, winter and road construction, and this was that, but I'd never seen anything so stupid in my life. 

And it didn't end there! Consult the map. Since the detour sent me back north I had to take the next exit, the Excelsior Blvd. exit, but the path I was on, the detour path, was packed and slow-moving and infuriating; so at the first opportunity I tried to get far from the madding crowd. Or, to use another literary allusion, I tried to take the road less traveled. But Edina/Minneapolis wouldn't let me. I might have a clear path for a few blocks, but then I realized why I had a clear path. This road didn't go through, either—construction was everywhere—and I'd have to double back with my tail between my legs. Sheridan didn't go through. Thomas didn't go through. Neither did Upton, nor Vincent. I had to go all the way back to Xerxes just to get to 50th, just to try to get home. It took me an hour.

It's Friday night at 6:00 and I'm with my 92-year-old father in Room 715 at M hospital in the Twin Cities. I call it the Henry Aaron Room. Dad gets it if not many others do. He's sleeping. We were watching “Jeopardy” but he'd been sitting up in a chair for three hours and that proved wearying.

Last week, Dad had a mild stroke and the paramedics took him here. I had been at the Mariners game in Seattle, had called him with the good news of the Trump convictions (“Guilty on all counts!”), and got his wife Ingrid instead with the news that he was being loaded into the ambulance. Initially, I thought: “This again.” Six weeks earlier, maybe eight, he'd had something similar—suddenly unable to lift his left arm—and been taken to A hospital, where they'd determined that it wasn't a stroke but a TIA. You can look it up—I had to. He recovered from it pretty well. This wasn't that. The paramedics determined this was a stroke, and took him to the nearest hospital, which was M hospital.

I left the game early, and called Ingrid when I got home. On the phone his voice sounded very, very slurred, and I flashed back—not to six or eight weeks ago—but to 2016 when my mother had a stroke in her apartment over the weekend and wasn't found until Monday morning. She lost the ability to speak for the last three years of her life.

“Was he given the TPA drug for immediate stroke aftermath?” I texted.

“I haven't seen the doctor yet,” Ingrid texted back, “and the nurses can't tell me. But the paramedics told me this is a top stroke management hospital. Wish you were here.”

“I'm just googling it. Apparently it's called tissue plasminogen activator.”

“Yes, I know about it, but he doesn't have an IV. Great stuff if you can get it.”

That back-and-forth took place around 6 PM Minneapolis time. At around 6:40, an emergency room doctor burst in on him and Ingrid, demanding to know when exactly the stroke happened because they were thinking they were reaching the outer limits of when the TPA could be given safely. The trouble was, there was no “exactly.” He'd had lunch, felt off, went to take a nap, and when he woke up: this.

I knew about this back-and-forth because I was on the phone with Ingrid. During a pause, I asked what the tests suggested and were they sure it was a stroke? No, they weren't sure. Everything was too inconclusive, and in the end they didn't administer the drug. Instead they ordered an MRI. Which told them—the next day—yes, it was a mild stroke. Therapists (occupational, physical, speech) were assigned to him.

And then things got worse. Over the weekend he kept coughing when he tried to drink water. He ate cut-up meals just fine—so Ingrid and my sister Karen said—but the water was problematic. Too late the hospital staff ordered thickened water. By then he'd aspirated something into his lungs. Now he had pneumonia. Now he was on oxygen. Now he was in the ICU. And I booked a flight to come out to Minneapolis.

I'm still not over this initial fuckup. If you have a stroke patient, even one with a “mild” stroke, how do you not guard against aspiration? What precautions are taken? That seems like the No. 1 thing to watch out for. But they didn't. And things cascaded down. They took a semi-healthy man with a stroke and within days brought him to death's door.

People kept showing up—now PT, now OT, now the nurse to check his blood sugar, now the nurse with the nebulizer, now the RN to move him in bed. Strangers kept waking him up, screaming “BOB!” in his face. They keep asking the same questions:

• Do you know where you are?
• Do you know what month it is?
• Do you know what day it is?

To see if he regresses in his answers, I'm told. But it bored and annoyed him. He's a sharp man in a weakened body. Dad doesn't suffer fools gladly and now he was being treated like one. One time, he was so bored telling them “June 6,” he just said, “D-Day.”

There's so many of them, and they never seem to know who he is. “BOB! HOW DID YOU GET AROUND AT HOME? DID YOU USE A WHEELCHAIR OR A WALKER?”

Dad, through slurred speech: “I walked.”

A feeding tube was ordered but that was another disaster. On Wednesday morning, the nurse inserted it before I arrived but X-rays indicated it wasn't in the right place. Or it was kinked. So she did it again. I was standing outside the door and could hear his cries of pain. But they still didn't get it. And the third time wasn't right, either. My sister to the nurse: “Should we get someone else to try this?” Even the fourth or fifth go, which seemed OK, didn't work. It got clogged. The processed food wound up overflowing onto the machine. They wound up turning it off and inserting his tube the next morning via X-ray. Fifth or sixth time's the charm.

He still has his sense of humor. We were watching the Twins play the Yankees other night and a nurse interrupted to give him a blood-thinning shot in his stomach. “BOB, I'm going to give you a jab, it'll be a little painful, and then you can go back to watching the Twins!!” Dad: “I don't know which is more painful.”

I keep wondering over the illogic of so much of what they do. When his oxygen levels go below 88%, his monitor beeps, and sometimes someone shows up to investigate; other times nobody shows up to investigate. I asked why. “Oh, we can see it back at the nurse's station. We're monitoring it.” Got it. After she left, I wondered, “So ... why do you need the monitor to beep in his room then? You already know what you need to know. And isn't that keeping him awake?”*

* Apparently they have readings and alarms from one of the monitors (breathing, heartrate, etc.) but not from the feeding tube. Point still stands. 

They reduced the nebulizer from four to two times daily. Why? Because he's improving, they said. Is he? I said, listening to his wet cough. We take shifts—Ingrid has the brunt of it—so he has an advocate. So the medical staff gets a sense that it's a person there.

I envision a horror movie, Kafkaesque, about someone entering a facility and slowly, bit by bit, losing mobility, health and agency by a staff of cheerful, chipper people who think they're doing good. They're not evil. They think they're helping. But they keep blowing it. Until there's nothing of him left.

That's all of us eventually.

Increasingly it feels like nothing works anymore.

Yesterday afternoon I was meeting a friend at the Mountaineering Club, a rooftop bar atop the Graduate Hotel in Seattle's University District. It was a beautiful day, Seattle's first 80-degree day of the year, and I drove over, parked, starting walking, then ran into what we often run into in Seattle: a bit of unpleasantness. This time it was a shirtless, shoeless man, 30s probably, vociferous and angry, sitting on the sidewalk. Was he talking to me or just talking out loud? I could see blood on his forehead and blood on one of his bare feet and he was asking me to call 911. It was more demanding than beseeching, but I stopped, took in the scene. Yes, he seemed to be bleeding. Yes, I guess I should call.

So I did. I explained to the female operator: I'm passing by, a guy on the sidewalk, bleeding—sotto voce: he might not be all there—and he asked me to call. 50th and 11th. Then there was a bit of a delay. She was asking more questions than I'd anticipated and eventually a male operator got on the line, too.

Male Operator: Are you near the Fire Dept.?
Me: Yes, it's across the street.
Male Operator: Well, can't you just walk him over?

I was a bit stunned. Was 911 part of the Fire Dept.? I thought it was—I guess cops? Or its own entity? Plus I'd never heard a 911 operator make this kind of request before. Wasn't it usually “Wait there.” Instead I got: “We're a little busy, how about coming over here instead.”

Me: Well, I...
Male Operator: Can he walk?
Me: I guess? It's just...
Female Operator: Sir, do you feel safe?
Me: It's more—he's not very responsive. I don't know if he would go. Again, he's not really all there.

Mostly I didn't relish the idea of trying to convince him. Because I didn't care that much. I wanted to do bare minimum. Plus, as I looked over, he no longer seemed to be bleeding from his head. And the blood on his foot seemed pretty red. Too red? Like fake? Was the whole thing a scam?

But I walked across the street, rang the doorbell of the Fire Dept., explained what was up. Everyone seemed confused by my presence, and in the end it turned out an operator had already dispatched someone, and that was that. Just another odd moment in another odd day in another odd, awful year. Walking away, I had this thought: “Even 9-1-1.”

Today is my brother's birthday. First time he's not around to celebrate it. He would've been 63.

I talked to my sister the other day, and she has a bit of a phantom-limb thing going: “I should see if we should pick up Chris on the way to Dad's.” That kind of thing. I don't. For most of the last 30 years, Chris and I didn't live in the same city, so there's not those automatic thoughts for me. I'd say I'm painfully aware that he isn't here but after five months it's more numbly aware. I also know, more than before, that Death doesn't stop to let you lick your wounds. It doesn't care. It keeps going. And going. And it'll get to you soon enough. And it's not personal. Life keeps going, too. That litter box still needs cleaning. Groceries still need buying. 

Here's what I keep thinking: “I wish Chris were here to see this.” “I wish I could talk to Chris about this.” “I wonder what Chris remembers about this.”

There's no real point to this post. Just another day where I feel like I should do or say something and don't know what that is.

The other day, walking around a city that is increasingly full of homeless drug addicts, Bob Dylan's “Tryin' to Get to Heaven” came on iPhone shuffle, and these words hit me in a new way:

When you think that you've lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more

Chris and Jellybean last fall, Clem last month. And, as the man said, it doesn't have to end there. There's more to lose. “Not single spies but in battalions,” as another man said.

And here's yet another man, Craig Wright, who, the other day on his SubStack, gave us an ode to living with uncertainty and a warning about its opposite.

“...every time I've seen a properly sad and searching human being stop searching quite so desperately because he believes he's finally found enough of what he needs that he can rest his soul for a bit, I've seen those human beings lose some of their human being: most pertinently, their ability to listen. The machinery in them that used to be for listening gets repurposed...

”But I have some news for you, those of you who are (thankfully) still sad and searching, who don't quite believe what you believe and have no place to rest: you're supposed to be sad and searching and there's no time to rest. You're doing great! If you're doing your job as a real human being, the job should get harder. You should know less every day and move with ever more caution and quiet through a landscape about which you should be increasingly suspicious. That Grief that children (and inner children) want to flee should look bigger and more unjust as we grow in awareness, and nothing that claims to quell it should be trusted because that Grief is actually where the Hope and Love we need most to keep searching forever live.“

That is a balm to my soul—assuming I'm still a sad and searching human being, as opposed to just sad. Either way, it spoke to me. In a way, it was better than Dylan's or Shakespeare's lines. Theirs are basically ”Tough luck, kid.“ Craig's is ”Welcome to the party, pal," but he means it. He wants us at that party. Because the other party is just assholes.

I recommend the whole article. Pass along if you know someone who could use it.