Punchless

"I remember throwin' punches around and preachin' from my chair." - The Who, Who Are You?

Sometimes I get so pissed, I just want to hit someone, but I’ve never been a punch thrower, so my blows, while deserved, will remain virtual.

On November 30^th a 59-year-old female crossing guard was guiding about 20 children across the street in Florence, California - that is to say L.A. - when a Ford Expedition refused to stop at the crosswalk. The Expedition is in a line of Ford SUVs that include the Explorer, the Excursion, and if the naming convention continues presumably coming soon, the Exaltation, the Exasperation and finally the Excretion. The crossing guard said something like, “The children come first” to the driver of the big stupid boat and before she could get back to the safety the curb, that driver’s girlfriend jumped overboard and started punching her. The driver joined his lovely partner and the two of them punched and hit the crossing guard to the ground, and then stole her whistle and stop sign, I suppose as souvenirs. They have been arrested and charged with robbery, but for some reason not assault.

Some speculate that the charming couple was suffering from road rage, as if road rage a virus that can be breathed in to settle in some corner of the brain, ready to cause tomfoolery. I think they are suffering from being insufferable narcissists. Especially when you consider that he was unwilling to stop for the children crossing the street, but had no problem stopping to deliver a beating to a woman 6 years from retirement, making $9.50 an hour to see those same children safely to school, because she disrespected the authority of his truck.

When I read about this charming couple I wished I could start throwing punches but I’m sure both of them have been on the receiving end of beatings before and likely failed to understand whoever was delivering them, considering how poorly they seem to react to mundane daily obstacles, and another beating would hardly equal the devastation their attack caused to the crossing guard. She had a mild heart attack and has since quit her job. They will probably end up in jail for awhile, and then get released into the wild, free to attack the next poor soul to have the audacity to “dis” them or their car. And what the hell is it with cars anyway? I’ve owned a few but none whose honor I would defend with physical violence. Aren’t cars just appliances like toasters or washing machines?

Punch: Expedition driver and girlfriend.

This month a 23-year-old woman in San Francisco went to the San Francisco DMV to change her name and her gender on her San Francisco addressed California driver’s license. I mention San Francisco several times in the preceding sentence because most people think of San Francisco as the most gay friendly place in our nation, even more than professional wrestling, and what happened to this woman when she made these requests of the DMV seems very unfriendly, to say the least.

The DMV clerk, Thomas Demartini, processed her request and it should have ended there, but it didn’t. Mr. Demartini then sent a letter to the woman’s home telling her that her homosexual behavior was "an abomination that leads to hell," as if a day spent at the DMV isn't already hell. He also sent her name and address to his church, The Most Holy Family Monastery, who then sent a DVD to the woman, arriving the same day as the letter. The DVD, it has been reported, warned of “eternal damnation for anyone ‘possessed by demons’ of homosexuality.” Included in the package with the DVD was a charming little pamphlet that showed hearts torn from bodies. Pardon my texting but WTF? The DMV suspended Mr. Demartini and said his actions were unpresented, although this same man reportedly refused to process a gender change on a license for another woman in 2009. Mr. Demartini has since resigned.

I work at a place where I have access to our customer’s private information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, logins, passwords, and even social security numbers. I had to go through training and sign a paper saying that I understood if I divulged any of this information I could/would face criminal prosecution. I would think employees of the Department of Motor Vehicles would go though similar training and most likely sign a similar document. Also, if there is a form or process to change your gender at the DMV, then it is outside of Mr. Demartini’s authority to deny these requests. The DMV is currently investigating this and will come to a decision soon. But what is soon for the DMV? Nothing less than criminal prosecution is acceptable. Oh, and Mr. Demartini, considering your views on homosexual behavior, you might want to keep a tight grip on that soap in the jailhouse shower.

Punch: Thomas Demartini.

Texas Rangers pitcher Cliff Lee just signed a $120 million+ contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. A lot has been said about him turning down a contract for more money, $30 million more, to play for the Yankees. But that was for more years and the $120 million he did get is still quite a bit of money. In fact, if he is so inclined, he could purchase 2 private jets with what he will earn the first year. His lowest paying year. Also, when his contract is over with Philly he could negotiate a deal with them or another team at the 2015 prices, which should be considerably more. So there is no need to put Mr. Lee on a pedestal as the first professional athlete to turn away from greed.

With his signing the Phillies have a very powerful starting rotation in Halladay, Oswalt, Hamels, and now Lee. Most, hell all, of the baseball reporters at ESPN have ordained it as the best in baseball and one of the best of all time. The only thing left to speculation is who they will face in the World Series in 2011. But the lowly Giants, just happened to win the World Series in 2010 by defeating Halladay, defeating Oswalt, defeating Hamels, and defeating Lee twice. Sure, the Phillies have and amazing rotation and will most likely be around in the playoffs, but to anoint them all the way to late October, or early November without a single pitch having been thrown is just lazy. Or is it just the East Coast bias that is as much a part of ESPN as rehearsed banter and migraine inducing set design?

Punch and pile driver: ESPN and all other baseball “journalists” who wrote “Phillies National League Championship 2011” in stone.

Berets, Bill Nye, and Arthur C. Clarke

"The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

I was probably a 14-year-old Boy Scout when I first became CPR certified. I remember putting my official CPR card in my Velcro wallet where it would be easily accessible should I ever come across someone in need of my newly acquired services. I imagined that I would whip it out, flash it to bystanders like Jake Blues flashed a pack of Chesterfields to “The Good Old Boys” band in the Blues Brothers, and make a path to the lucky recipient of my heroic ability to save a life. “Who was that boy in the jaunty red beret and the yellow neckerchief?” the nameless multitudes would ask. My plan was to tip my cap wade through their applause, and off into the sunset.

Fortunately the opportunity never presented itself.

Years later, maybe 8 or 9, when I had a newer CPR card in my now grown up leather wallet and I worked on search and rescue boats in Southern California, the opportunity, unfortunately, did present itself. A boat full of scuba divers, returning at the end of the day, capsized in the entrance to our harbor. All the divers, still in wetsuits, just swam to a nearby sailboat that stopped to help. But the skipper of the boat was trapped in the pilot house.

When we got on scene we found a sailboat, greatly over loaded with shivering divers who were all standing on one side, looking over at the keel of the capsized dive boat; like mourners at a grave site. My partner and I jumped in and found the skipper of the dive boat, pulled him to our boat, and handed him off to other crew members who laid him in the stern well deck. On the ride back to our dock, just a couple of hundred yards away, the two of us performed CPR on him.

I think the ride too maybe three minutes. When we got to the dock there were paramedics waiting for us. They came aboard and instantly pronounced the skipper dead. Later I found out he had a broken neck and had probably been dead before we even got the call. So our efforts at CPR would never have worked, but for three minutes I thought I was going to save a life.

Right here I must apologize for neither remembering the name of that boat or my partner.

This week I got CPR certified again. I don’t think my certification has lapsed since my days of Velcro wallets and red berets. Also this week Bill Nye of the educational TV show, “Bill Nye the Science Guy” collapsed on stage during a lecture at the University of Southern California. He got back up and continued his lecture, but after slurring some words and stumbling he was removed from the stage and turned over to L.A. County Fire Department paramedics. I understand he is now doing okay. He was passed out for what one witness said was probably 10 seconds. Probably because he had made a late night speech the night before. What is unusual was that during the entire time he was unconscious no one, not one person, went up to him to check on how he was. Now I know 10 seconds doesn’t seem like time enough to offer help, but for many of the students watching the lecture, it was plenty of time to text and tweet about it. Yes, texts and Twitter tweets flooded across the Internet, describing what happened to the Mr. Nye. There are even videos.

These young men and women, at the same age I found my self when I tried to save that dive boat skipper down south, decided that texting their most trvial observances took priority over just touching a fallen man's shoulder and asking if he was okay.

Now I am neither a fan of texting or the greater Los Angeles area, but come on! Could not one person put down their IPhone, Droid, or other device and at least stand up? The quote at the top of the blog today was written by Mr. Clarke in 1969, and I can’t believe how accurately it seems to describe the technology that allows Twitter and other forms of social communication. Amazing technology / trivial and depressing content.

Can You Hear Me Then?

While watching the extra content on a DVD of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus,” an Irish filmmaker says he has discovered what looks like a woman talking on a cell phone, in 1928. Of course cellular phones had not been invented yet so the likelihood that she is having a “can you hear me now” moment is slim. So did this woman have access to some sort of pre-1940s walkie-talkie, or pre-1970s cellular phone wireless communication device, or is she just a time traveler?

The time traveler scenario has taken some hits online because the necessary infrastructure to support cell phones was not in place in 1928. Namely, cell towers. Also the walkie-talkie was not to be invented for 12 years, and when it was invented and used extensively in World War II, it was the size of basset hound and had an antenna that could double as a fishing pole. What this woman is holding up to her head is no basset hound. But as any conspiracy theorists worth his salt will tell you, time travelers have extremely sophisticated communication devices that not only don’t need cell towers to operate, but they are powered by nuclear fission, can broadcast through wormholes, and have very reasonable family plans that let your kids text free. Or so I understand.

But I still don’t think it was a time traveler for a different reason. If you could travel back in time to anywhere, why would you go to the set of an obscure silent movie in 1928 Los Angeles? Why would you travel back in time to Los Angeles at all unless it was to kill Sarah Conner? Would not there be more interesting places you could visit? What about the birth of Christ, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or Willie Mays’ catch in the 1954 World Series?

What we are probably looking at is a woman who is walking along just taking out loud, to nobody, and happens to have her hand to the side of her head. With the miserable invention Bluetooth, the people talking out loud, loudly, in public, are movers and shakers. They are tomorrow’s entrepreneur working the deal. Back in 1928 they were just considered nuts and when you came across one you just crossed the street.

The Della Effect

In physics there is the term “The Observation Effect.” What it means is sometimes just observing something can have an effect on that thing. I’ll use an example from my job. Sometimes I have to watch a router to determine why it may be using too many resources to provide the services for which it has been installed. It may have been purchased to translate IP addresses from our private network to the Internet’s public network. A process called NAT. So I’ll crank up that router and start the NAT process, and see how much memory or CPU usage it uses for that process. The rub is, I have to start another process to observe this, usually a debug process, and it uses these same resources. There are ways to calculate out the debug’s usages, but I’m just using that as an example to show how watching something can affect it behaves. Here ends the technical portion of my essay.

This Observation Effect shows up in other disciplines. For instance park rangers tranquilizing bears, interrupting their behavior, to take samples; and mechanics measuring the pressure of a tire, releasing some of that pressure, to read it on a gauge.

There is another place where the Observation Effect happens but I can’t prove how. Most of my family believes that the act of observing a Giants’ baseball game has an effect on the outcome. We get this from our maternal grandmother Della. She wasn’t actually our grandmother, but a great aunt, but we called her Grandma Della from the moment any of us could speak. Kind of like calling 2000 the first year of the 21^st Century, it’s not technically correct, but most people understand what you mean.

Our Grandma would turn off the radio when the Giants would fall behind, and then later turn it back on to check to see if they won. As if somehow her listening, and later in life watching, affected their play. But how? Could it be that the players, knowing that thousands, millions, were watching became either nervous or amped up and it changed their play? Could it be that somehow radio and TV signals changed the electricity of the atmosphere, causing minute changes in the physiology of the players that affected pitches and swings, or perhaps the path of the ball? Does glove leather interact with radio waves to change the structural integrity of the mitt turning soft-handed Brooks Robinsons into an iron-fisted any dodger?

Here’s what I think. I figure that the baseball gods, seeing that she had a stake in the outcome of the game, punished her, as gods are want to do, by having easy grounders doink off of shins, fastball strikes right down Broadway called balls, and monster fly balls suddenly bend their trajectory and drop into outfielder’s gloves. How else? Ulysses ran afoul of numerous disasters until he finally admitted that the gods controlled his destiny. So maybe if we Giants fans admit that the baseball gods control the destiny of the good old Orange and Black, the winds of fortune will blow them past the Girl Horses from the City of Brotherly Love and on to victory over the Evil Empire in the city formally known as New Amsterdam. It couldn't hurt.

Zebra Mussels Save Detroit

"She can shift more gold than the king of Peru."
Worse Than Detroit – Robert Plant

Here is California we are in the midst of a gubernatorial campaign. Why it’s called a gubernatorial contest and not a governatorial one is something I may ask one of my English professor brothers some day. And since we’re on the subject, can I call the winner Goober instead of Governor?

One of the candidates is billionaire –billionairess?- Meg Whitman. Ms. Whitman is worth around 1.3 billion bucks and has spent, the last time I looked, $119 million on her campaign, but spending that much doesn’t make her any more qualified for the post, just like it doesn’t make her any less qualified. It just makes her someone who really, really, really wants the job. Personally, if I had enough money that I could spare $119 million, you would never see me. I would change my name to Awesome Powerman, get hair implants, and move to Samoa or AT&T Park. But Meg wants to be Goobernor and that is what this blog is about, kind of.

Today in the paper there is a quote from her where she compares the California city of Fresno to Detroit, Michigan. The quote, out of context, is, “Fresno looks like Detroit. It's awful." Now first of all, Fresno looks nothing like Detroit. Google “ruins of Detroit” and you’ll get photo after photo of elegant and majestic houses, office buildings, theaters, schools, factories, hotels, and concert halls that look as if after the last concert was played, the last guest checked out, the last move credits rolled, and the final student went home for the day, the doors were shut and everyone just walked away, never to come back . Fresno has nothing like that.

The closest thing Fresno has to those ruins is the Fresno Hotel. Built in 1923, the brick hotel is done in what is called the Beaux-Arts architecture style, and sits empty. That’s one building compared to bunches, and despite the French architectural pedigree, it is rather plain. At first I thought sure, Fresno ain’t no Bakersfield or Glendale when it comes to true beauty, but Detroit? Come on. I looked at Detroit online. Detroit sits next to Lake Erie, which I understand was so polluted at one time it caught fire. I figured okay, burning water is a bad thing, but then I read where a critter called the zebra mussel, which can filter water, was introduced to that lake and now it is a lot cleaner. So if Detroit is cleaning up her act, and water, why is being compared to her so bad?

Besides, Detroit is just next to Canada? It’s like being next to a foreign country. Fresno? Fresno is next to Clovis, which is like being next to a suburb of Fresno.

The Whitman talking heads have suggested that their candidate was speaking about Fresno’s economic woes and not her looks. But the beauty, or lack thereof, of Fresno or her unemployment rate is not the issue here as I see it. The issue is that none of the folks that are upset about the Goober hopeful’s comment, nor any of the gang that are shrugging it off have any problem with Ted Nugent’s hometown being held up as the standard for what a lousy city is like.

I’ve only met one person from Detroit in my life. He was in boot camp with me and if I’m remembering correctly, he finished first in our company and as such, had first choice from the list of available units for his first assignment. He chose a tugboat in Detroit. I was tenth and got Honolulu.

So from a Fresno boy to those who love the Motor City, please accept my most humble apology and let me say that I do not judge Detroit for her lost beauty. I do not filter the ugliness of any assemblage of buildings and streets through a Detroit filter before judgment. Let Detroit be Detroit in all her glory or condemnation and let Fresno be the same.

Signed Awesome Powerman, future king of Pago Pago.

Only Mostly Red

As he fell slowly into sleep, Pippin had a strange feeling: he and Gandalf were still as stone, seated upon the statue of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind.
-The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien




I am a lousy driver, but unlike most of my fellow Americans, who are pretty much all lousy drivers, I know I’m a lousy driver and that makes me an excellent driver. At least that’s the way I see it.

You see, we are taught defensive driving; to look out for the other guy. But that’s only half the job. I do look out for the other guy but I also look out for yet another guy who while driving has little use for lane management and an attention span shorter than Michael Jackson’s restraint at a Cub Scout swim party. (Too soon?) This other guy I look out for is me. So I’m doing twice the work out there and I think that makes me a better driver. It certainly makes me a snobbish driver. Yes, I’m a lousy driver but I good at it.

I’m writing about driving because I think about it a lot, especially when I’m driving. I wonder why there is traffic. Why do we group together like packs of wandering, colliding dogs who weave back and forth from one dumpster to the next, from one odor to the next, instead of like school of fish who move in perfect synchronicity without so much as touching, just inches from one another? Why is it that on the highway we change from a smooth-as-silk flock of starlings into a mosh pit as soon as someone puts out an orange cone? And of course I wonder why is it that the last guy to see the red light turn green is the guy at the front of the line?

My commute is 22 miles. About 13%, just under 3 miles, of it is urban. The rest is rural. The urban part, the part with traffic lights, is on one road in a straight line. There are 14 traffic lights along this 13%. I can’t remember ever hitting two green ones in a row. I’d bet good money that I hit at least 10 of them red every day. I can get to work in 25 minutes, but 10 of those minutes are spent on lucky 13.

Then one day something changed. One morning I was rolling along, fully expecting to be brought to a halt at the first of my 14 intersections where a blackjack dealer traffic light would be dishing out reds, yellow, greens, and LED arrows like cards from the bottom of the deck. I expected to be sitting at the limit line of the crosswalk seeing red and seeing red. But when I got to the light it was only mostly red. What I mean is it was flashing red.

Suddenly the place that up until that moment had every morning been a noisy, helter-skelter, mishmash of steel and exhaust, brake lights and turn signals, and angry, frustrated drivers, had turned into quite, self-organized, self-governed crossroads. You stop first, you go first. What could be more democratic, more just plain fair than that? I waited my turn and then went.

I made my way to the next intersection refreshed and with a renewed faith in my fellow man. Then surprise number two reared up. The next light was flashing red too, and the next, and the next, and so on for eight lights. Gone were the malevolent traffic dictators, hanging over each junction like Wells’ Martian tripods, judging who will stop and who will go. Banished to a dull memory was the technology that enslaved us to the rule of the painted line and the clicking workings of the steel box on the corner that held the antiquated computer system. Released into the wild were the wolf packs. Erased were the short attention span exploiting mash of static reds, greens, and yellows that held prisoner those unlucky enough to be caught third, forth, or worse in line.

Every intersection had magically become a four way stop but the magic didn’t stop there. Through this same magic I became the sleepy 7-year-old in the third seat of my father's Bel Air station wagon, rolling through flashing red lights, as all lights became after midnight back then, coming home from the drive-in after seeing Ice Station Zebra.

Like a teen-aged virgin with his new license, alone behind the wheel for the first time, the world was open for me through my windshield and all possibilities presented themselves with abandon. I had no past as a motorists, only a future. The road became a faint, smooth black river without rapids or rocks, flowing out behind me.

The Taco Bells, McDonald’s, IHOPs, bus stops, and motorcycle shops blurred into a Monet’s Lilies pastel slurry of colors and streaks across my side windows. My grip on the wheel became loose and comfortable, like a batter just before he hits a solid single just over third base, allowing my knuckles to regain some of their color. I had reached the Zen of the commute. A place I only dared conjure up in my most fog-addled dreams. A place that has no place in the California Vehicle Code.

But alas, my Shangri La was gone on the return commute. The immortality it brings only lasting for a short while. When I got back to what now was the final 13% of my drive, all the lights had been “repaired” and everything was too large, too loud, and too much. Had anyone else seen what I had seen? Were the people locked in their “shiny metal boxes” all around me feeling as violated as I from having that all too brief glimpse of paradise stolen from them while they toiled away the work day?

The row of flashing reds has not returned. Whatever work was being done that necessitated their existence has most likely been completed. Now it’s back to a stressful commute that kills me a little every day. Now I am detained at nearly every intersection like I’m a traveler in a totalitarian regime where at any moment there might be a knocking on my window and a dark and shady man saying, “Papers please.” Now the radio seems to only play lousy Aerosmith elevator songs and the CD player only plays the soft beep that alerts me that it isn’t working.

Please bring back the flashing reds. Please return me to the mystical land of stress free driving and a surprise Jeff Beck song on the radio. Tear out the skulking traffic lights and replace them with zero-energy stop signs, not just on my 13% but around town, up and down the State, and across the country. Let us rule ourselves, for we have seen the promise land and it is Shaw Avenue from Fruit to Golden State.

Opium Den 2010

"Which is it to-day," Watson asked, "morphine or cocaine?"
Holmes raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.
"It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?"
-The Sign of the Four, Authur Conan Doyle




I woke up when the blood pressure monitor, which carries the heavy-lifting scientific name sphygmomanometer, started beeping in my right ear. You see, unlike the olden days when a person with the sphygo-whatever would listen to your pulse with a stethoscope and look at a dial to take your blood pressure, today’s sphygo-thingies are attached to a monitor, complete with battery backup, blinking lights, and of course an unpleasant beep to alert whomever needs to know that something is amiss. What was amiss was my elbow pinching the cuff of the sphygo-man-eater against the arm of my chair, rendering it unable to take a proper reading. So the machine beeps, the nurse troubleshoots the problem, and blood pressure is again taken and recorded.

Every eight weeks I go into the hospital for an infusion of a wonderful drug called Remicade. I say wonderful drug because I know it has eased the pain I was feeling from rheumatoid arthritis. I can tell that because I no longer wake up with my feet feeling like they were both broken, my hands feeling like I had splints on all my fingers, and my body generally feeling like I fell down a flight of cement stairs, carrying a box of broken and jagged bricks, and landed on Legos. (I tried to find a Lego opium den but couldn't. I'm thinking the carpet in this graphic looks a little Lego-ish).

During this treatment, which lasts about 4 hours, I usually read, watch a little daytime TV (gag), and snooze. This time the only chair available didn’t have a working TV so it was just snoozing and reading for me. I read a few chapters of my book and dozed; for two and a half hours. Had the Sphygo-lama-ding-dong not beeped I might have slept the entire four hours, or if the nurses didn’t need the chair even longer.

So I woke up, my book safely on the arm of the chair, and thankfully no drool on my collar. I looked around the room which consists of 10 chairs like mine arranged in a semicircle. Each chair was occupied and each occupant had an IV and a sphygo-you-know-what attached to them.

The book I’m reading is a novel about Isaac Newton and his assistant investigating a series of grisly murders in the late 1600’s. And aren’t the best murders grisly? They are basically filtered through a Holmes/Watson template where Newton figures out everything by noticing a red hair here or evidence of mercury poisoning there and I’m guessing solves the crime(s) somewhere near the end of the book.

I guess this comparison must have put Holmes’ London on my mind as I drifted off because looking around at my fellow Infusioneers when I woke up, it occured to me that there is a similarity between us lying down attached to medicine to make us feel better, and the patrons of opium dens that featured in Victorian England literature, if you take away the bright lights, the 21st century technology, and the general cleanliness of course. Those people went to those dens to feel better, maybe some of them even tried the drug to remove a little of the discomfort of the very condition which currently occupies my temple. Remember, opium was legal in the 19th century. I wonder what an opium den would look like if it were still legal. Probably a lot like an infusion center except the TVs would probably showing Fantasia on a loop.

As a side note, the infusion center is also the office for infectious disease. In the front office there is usually a person sitting behind the reception desk, ready to log you in. On days when there is no receptionists there is a phone provided with instructions to dial a specific extension to let them know you are there. I’ve used this phone probably four times before finally realizing that it is the same phone used by patients who are there for the infectious disease side of the office.

Ten Little...

Oh I wish I were...


When I roll into the parking lot at the hospital, and after I turn off my car, I don’t get out right away. What I do is place my hands on the wheel, not at ten and two like I’m supposed to do when I’m driving, but at eleven and one, closer together both geographically and chronologically I suppose. I put my palms against the wheel and point my fingers up like pickets made from pale little sausages. Then I lightly put my Oscar Myers together and see how they line up. I perform these little surprise inspections each time I visit my rheumatologist. Yes, I have a rheumatologist, as if it is the most natural thing there can be, like having an accountant or a barber. At some point after I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis I was given a pamphlet that explained some of the possible symptoms of living with this condition. The one that caught my attention was the deformity of the fingers, and I decided that it was the progress, or lack of progress, of this particular symptom that I would use as a watermark to determine how I was getting on and how well my treatments were working.

So I sit in my car outside his office and see which of my fingers have remained loyal and which finger’s loyalty has come into question.

Starting on my right hand with the pinky, I see that he is as straight and true as a wiener dog that spends his days patrolling under the kitchen table of a large, sloppy family. Next comes the ring finger, who looks fine until I get to the second knuckle, where he leans away from his neighbor finger as if it had knocked on his door and shoved a copy of The Watchtower at him; still not too bad. That neighbor finger, sometimes called the “driving finger”, seems pretty strait although it does look to be rolled slightly to toward the ring finger, maybe inquiring how the Watchtower pamphlet was working out. The index finger is rolled over even more toward the “driving finger” and it is bowed so it only touches it at the knuckle and the nail. There is some daylight between the two.

On my left hand the index finger is behaving pretty much like his twin on the right; rolled and bowed. The driving finger on the left hand looks wiener dog straight if that wiener dog were saddled-backed from being ridden too much, perhaps by a small monkey. And by the way, is there anything funnier than a monkey riding a dog? The ring finger is straighter than his doppelganger but underneath there is a bump over which my wedding ring use to slide. I had to take it off before it had to be cut off. The ring, not the bump. The pinky on the left has abandoned all dog-loyal pretense and juts away from his brothers as if I were getting ready to properly hold a cup of tea.

I’ve been inspecting the sausage brothers for a few years now and I think I can safely say that none have wandered too much further afield since I began. Although I don’t entirely trust the teacup pinky so I’m keeping an eye on him.

You may be wondering about my thumbs. Well my thumbs have been loyal little fireplugs since they were installed. They’re there every morning like little drill sergeants, providing an example to the rest of the regiment, and always ready to give movie reviews or catch me a free ride.

Just so you don’t think my finger inspections are all I use to chart the progress of my condition and its treatment my rheumatologist looks at blood tests and examines my fingers, hands, toes, feet, elbows, and knees, and he says I’m doing very well thank you.

But if the continued, albeit slow, drifting of my digits is inevitable I suppose I’ll figure a way to live with it. It reminds me of a story I heard while listening to baseball on the radio, probably during a rain delay. As the story goes there was this catcher who at the end of his career, and at the end of thousands of balls fouled off his hands and hundreds of base runners motoring around third, was never asked for directions, because by that time he couldn’t point just one way.

I was Only Gone for a Minute

I know God is supposed to see everything. I've heard how He sees the smallest sparrow fall and the insincere man fake piety. But what if He doesn’t? What if He checks in once in awhile just to see if the water is boiling or whether the toast has burned? What if He goes out to feed the meter right when I take His name in vain? What if He misses a sparrow falling and when He gets back, there it is, dead right in the middle of His living room? What if God is out for a minute, and a minute to Him might be a millennia to us? He could leave just as Pilot is washing his hands and come back this Tuesday. Think of all we’ve done since then; we've had two wars that were so big we had to call them World Wars, we killed of entire species of some of His animals, we’ve invented music videos, and we’ve dirtied His water and His air to the point where we have warnings when the air is too dangerous to breathe, and birds are washing up on His beaches wearing a suit of tar.

Have you ever seen The Odd Couple? Not the TV show but the movie with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon? There is a scene in that movie, and I believe the play, where Felix and Oscar are entertaining two women over at their apartment, most likely hoping to get laid. Everything is going fine when Oscar steps into the kitchen to make some drinks or something. While he is out of the room Felix starts pining for his ex-wife and his old life, and eventually starts crying. The two women start crying too. It’s at this point when Oscar bursts out of the kitchen and in the bandleader-at-the-nightclub voice says, “Is everybody happy.” He sees the three of them there, Niagara Falls spilling out onto the sofa, and he yells, “What the hell happened?”

What if that happens to God? What if he goes out into the kitchen to mix us up something really nice? “Here everybody, a brand new Tahiti,” or “I just made a new color! It’s kind of like blue and kind of like sparklers.” So he comes bursting out of the kitchen, just like Oscar, only instead of drinks he has a second Tahiti on his tray, and his tray is blue/sparkler colored, and He says, “Laissez les bons temps rouler.” He is expecting to see everything as he left it but instead his pet parrot is missing and we’ve got feathers on our lips, He is coughing because the air is toxic, and he slips on an oily harp seal and falls on His ass?

If I remember correctly, it was at this point in the movie that Oscar kicked Felix out.