Category: Personal

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Amicable and Neighborly

I’ve been busy lately. Reason in the Rock is fast approaching, and the last minute details are time-consuming. I’m doing some research and reading to aid those involved in various aspects of the West Memphis Three matters, and there is a lot of stuff there. On top of that, my family is in the process of selling the family farm. After 100 years of deeds being swapped among four generations and various family-owned entities, there are title issues enough to make a saint swear. My brother and I are working on the title issues, and we are far from sainted. I’ve even had to reopen the long-closed probated estates of both of my grandparents and one of my great aunts to resolve matters.

And yesterday, taking a well-deserved break to engage in a little church-related activity, which is always good for the soul, I stumbled across a float of the Flying Spaghetti Monster created by the Seattle Atheists.

 

 

I want it.

The Arkansas Society of Freethinkers needs one. Can’t you just see it in the annual holiday parade here in Little Rock? We freethinkers can dress in our clerical vestments – that is, full pirate regalia  – and toss packages of Ramen noodles to parade watchers. It’ll be Christmas, Mardi Gras, and soup kitchen all rolled into one. We would be able to touch so many people with his noodly appendages!

And I have nothing else to do but figure out how to build a working model of our amazing deity. Really.

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But wait!  What’s this? In my inbox is a missive from the company that manages the condos that lie on the other side of my back fence. Gracious, whatever could they want?

Dear Ms. Orsi:

I obtained your contact information from a mutual friend, David Simmons. I am writing on behalf of the Townhouses-in-the-Park Property Owners Association. I have been asked to contact you in reference to your swimming pool and the manner in which the water is being drained. The POA Board believes that the chemicals in your pool water are killing the ivy and eroding a French drain located below your pool on the TIP property. The POA Board wishes to handle this matter in an amicable and neighborly fashion. Would you please contact me to discuss this issue?

Thank you, in advance, for your cooperation.

 

Mr. Bill
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Not again. This is, sadly, not my first rodeo with these “amicable and neighborly” people.

I clicked on the attachments.

 

 

I swear by the noodly appendages and meatballs of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and by all else that is holy, that these two photos are what I was sent as proof of the evildoing of my swimming pool.

I fumed a bit. I needed to collect my thoughts before I called the email’s author, because I was more than a little irked.  I tend to become extremely sarcastic when I’m annoyed. Sarcasm is not “amicable and neighborly,”  or so I’ve been told. So I called Mom and ranted for about 20 minutes.

When I finally calmed down, I called the contractor who had installed the offending pool in 2009.

“Jimmy,” I said, “you aren’t going to believe this.” I told him what was up. He sighed, and said he’d come take a look.

When I calmed down some more, I called the author of the email. She was out.

A few days later, Jimmy came. He looked. We both peered over my fence onto the hillside between my pool and Townhouses in the Park. He scratched his head. “So, where’s the dead ivy?” he asked. Unable to answer his question, I peered over the fence again. Nope. No dead ivy could be seen.

“What do I do?” I asked him. He shrugged helplessly. He outlined the possibility of draining the pool higher up the hill, still on my property, of course. I asked him for a bid. He left, shaking his head. We both know that the mere existence of my pool bugs the crap out of the Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association. We’ve been down this road before.

Dad, Summer 2002, on the lake in his boat

My beloved father, whose ashes were spread into the Cache River on our family farm over a decade ago, wrote what our family calls “John Letters.” Sometimes he sent them. Usually, Mom, Susan, Jay or I edited them to remove the most sarcastic and offensive parts. At times, to Dad’s chagrin, we’d edit them into starchless, plain vanilla, politely worded protests that in no way resembled what Dad really and truly wanted to say.

The city of Des Arc was the recipient of at least one unedited John letter a few years before Dad died. The city was not amused. Dad was proud of himself. He was such a clever wordsmith.

I’ve written a John letter to the property manager representing Townhouses in the Park. Oh, I’ve edited it. I’ve refined it. I really, really want to send it. I’m proud of myself. I am such a clever wordsmith.

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Dear Ms. Jackson:

The Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association is fond of complaining about my swimming pool, which apparently exists mostly to annoy them. While I was in the process of building it in 2009, Townhouses in the Park reported me to Little Rock Code Enforcement for building not just one, not even two, but three swimming pools in my back yard. Seriously.

After that, they said that the drainage from the pool was washing out the soil from beneath their asphalt and would cause their parking lot to collapse. Yes, they really said that. To alleviate their concerns that my pool would wash Townhouses in the Park all the way down Cedar Hill to the Allsopp Park tennis courts, I installed a drainage system that diffused the backwashed water over a very large area on my property.

Then, on a Saturday night after a pipe had burst that morning and been repaired, they decided to come over to my house when I was having a dinner party to complain, in front of my arriving guests, that there was too much water in their parking lot. They must really hate thunderstorms.

Next, they claimed that the three year old masonry wall of my pool which faces them, and which they cannot see without coming into my yard beyond the wooden privacy fence that separates my property from theirs– and which even then they could not see since a second retaining wall blocks even my own view – was crumbling and collapsing in decay. It wasn’t.

In their latest complaint, Townhouses in the Park apparently believes that the al Qaeda sleeper cell that is my swimming pool suddenly awoke after one of the hottest, driest summers in memory to unscrupulously assassinate what appears to be a two foot spread of ivy hanging over a wall, presumably just down the hill from my property.

As Townhouses in the Park is aware, the backwash from my pool, which amounts to about a bathtub’s worth every week or so, is eliminated on my property through a perforated pipe about 15-20 feet long into a French drain that is even longer. The diffuse drainage is unlikely in the extreme to have zeroed in on that unsuspecting bit of ivy after four years of peaceful coexistence. From the vantage point of my property, I am unable to discern any dead ivy; I cannot tell where the photo was taken. The plants on my property that are even closer to the point of drainage are alive and healthy. Even the ivy.

But, in the interest of resolving this matter in an amicable and neighborly fashion, I had the contractor who installed the pool and drainage system come to look at it. Unsurprisingly, he said there was no way my pool’s backwashed water was the cause of the dearly departed’s demise. Had my pool water been inclined to murder unsuspecting plants such as that particular patch of English ivy, it would do so from the point of drainage all the way to the wall; it would not have the necessary intelligence or purpose to target a single spot at least ten feet away from the point of drainage, leaving all plants between the drain and the target unmolested. That’s just how terrorist swimming pools and their affiliated suicide bomber drainage systems roll.

The seepage pipe in the wall is similarly unaffected by me backwashing my pool. By the time the water gets from the drain to the wall, it has gone through soil at least ten feet wide, twenty feet in length, and ten feet in depth. There is simply not enough water concentrated in that area at any given time to cause the problem complained of.

Townhouses in the Park should be aware that in the event there ever really is a problem that I don’t already know about (and haven’t promptly taken reasonable steps to address), I may not take them seriously. There is a story about a little boy who cried “wolf.” The Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association should familiarize themselves with the moral to that story.

 

Should I?

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Oh, hell. I know I shouldn’t. But I really, really want to.

 

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Family Home

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I grew up in this house. So did my mother. My grandparents built it in 1940, the year my mom was born. They hired prominent Little Rock architect Maximilian F.  Mayer, who, at the same time as he designed their house, was working on a significant project to preserve the territorial and early statehood buildings that now comprise the Historic Arkansas Museum. The year after the initial construction was completed on my grandparents’ home, Max Mayer would design Johnswood, the home of Pulitzer prize-winner John Gould Fletcher and his wife, Charlie May Simon.

When my grandparents moved to Little Rock in 1972, my parents, moved into the house with my brother, sister, and me. They lived there for 30 years.

It sits on an entire city block on Main Street. In addition to the house, there were outbuildings: an old servants’ quarters (a two-room building with a bathroom that was used as an office), the children’s playhouse, a large tool shed, and a small greenhouse, a lath house where camellias were grown year-round. My grandfather and mother worked with prominent landscape architects to cultivate the grounds, and they had a landscape crew working daily. Specimen plantings, intricate brickwork, and careful planning groomed the city block where the house sits.

My mother and grandmother grew flowers and arranged them for the two living rooms, the mantels, the foyer, and the dining table. They rarely bought flowers, and the local florists knew that any they delivered would be rearranged once they crossed the house’s threshold. In early spring, daffodils of every imaginable color and configuration filled the backyard. Ancient oaks towered over the grounds. Crepe myrtles, plum and crabapple trees, quince, figs, apples, and pears grew around the property. The vegetable garden covered nearly an eighth of the property and divided beds with brick walkways. Except in the dead of winter, we had fresh vegetables and fruit from our own yard.

Then, my parents moved from Des Arc to Little Rock ten years ago, and the house was sold to at least two successive owners who lost it in foreclosure. No maintenance was done, and from the looks of things, the place was completely abused and neglected.

I’m shocked by how quickly the house deteriorated due to termites, moisture damage, and neglect. I’m even more shocked that this former showplace of a home now shows how it was abused after my family left.

Significant pieces of the landscape are already gone. The formal English rose garden is forlorn, almost bereft of roses. The reflecting pond and raised goldfish pond sit damaged and dirty. The vegetable garden is denuded of fruit trees and flowers. The privet hedge surrounding the property, which kept it private despite its main street address, is overgrown in spots and spotty in others. The camellias that filled the hothouse are mostly dead. This is what the death of a lovingly maintained property looks like, and it didn’t take long.

The public high school is next door, and the school district recently bought the property for $45,000 at auction. The school will tear down all the buildings.  The plants aren’t far behind.

It was a gorgeous house with beautiful gardens. Its loss is a travesty.

 

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Twinkies

twinkies
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Because someone mentioned it in comments on my Facebook link to a recent blog post, I am now compelled to discuss the pros and cons of Twinkies, that sweet treat adored by stoners and other kids everywhere.

The Twinkies Legend ramped up a few years ago when the fried Twinkie was introduced to thronging sophisticates of fair fare.  People drove for hours just to taste it, and the initial purveyors of this particular fine food sold 26,000 fried Twinkies in just 18 days. The magic was not obvious to those watching from the sidelines, but no one can deny the faithful. We, personally, have never tried this delicacy. According to reports, the famous creamy filling melts and soaks into the cake, giving it a souffle or pudding-like texture. It was an instant hit.

twinkies cookbook
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Deep-frying isn’t the only way to get Twinkies into your family’s diet. There’s an entire cookbook, 112 pages long, containing more than 50 recipes with Twinkies as an ingredient.

Never get between Americans and their Twinkies. In 1987, teamsters who delivered Twinkies to New York City and its New Jersey suburbs went on strike. Area Twinkies lovers panicked. The reaction was “not unlike smokers who start to tense up when they run out of cigarettes and all the stores are closed.”  Twinkies addicts called distant friends and relatives to send in emergency supplies. We imagine the airlifts resembled Berlin in 1949.

Disaster struck again in March of 2000, when the teamsters’ strike closed bakeries all over the Northeast. The Internet came to the rescue during this “Great Twinkie Famine of 2000.” eBay made out like a bandit, selling 20 batches of Twinkies for over $5,000.

Twinkies are popular, no doubt about it. According to Hostess Foods, 500,000,000 Twinkies are produced annually. In case you got cross-eyed counting zeroes, that’s half a billion, with a B. America’s population today is a little over 3.14 hundred million; America is pi, and Twinkie is the ubiquitous cake that radiates among us.

pi, twinkies, and fat captain america
Source, Source, and Source

You might think that with popularity like this, the company that concocts Twinkies would be sitting on a big pile of money. Not so. Just this January, Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy protection – the second time it has done so in the last ten years.  Yesterday we learned that negotiations with its unionized employees might result in the employees owning a piece of the action. Twinkies lovers everywhere hope that out of these bankruptcy negotiations will come the ingredients for Twinkies’ success.

Twinkies ingredients
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Like so many of our favorite mass-produced foods, the ingredients of Twinkies cannot be identified by the common consumer. In fact, they are so mysterious that a guy named Steve Ettlinger wrote an entire book about these ingredients. It turns out that Twinkies come from mines. That’s right. Twinkies ingredients are mined (limestone, gypsum), drilled (petroleum), refined, and synthesized into those tongue-twisting polysyllabic compounds that are printed on the package.

Upon learning about these ingredients, we were bemused to realize that it is necessary to chill Twinkies before frying because plastic melts at high temperatures. And that creamy filling? There’s no cream in it. It’s sugar and shortening. Maybe even made from beef – so vegan Twinkies lovers, beware. When confronted with the truth about the sources of ingredients, David Leavitt, Vice President Snack Marketing at Hostess said, Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to deconstruct the universe. We think the millions of people … would agree that Twinkies just taste great.”

That’s right. He said it. Food doesn’t actually have to be made of food to taste good.

Science has weighed in on the Twinkies question. The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project at Rice University subjected Twinkies to a series of strenuous tests to determine their properties. T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. is an acronym for Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations. Dedicated researchers jolted Twinkies with electricity, dropped Twinkies from staggering heights to replicate Galileo’s experiment, exposed Twinkies to radiation, plumbed the depths of Twinkies intelligence, subjected Twinkies to rapid oxidation, tested the density of Twinkies, and more.

The Twinkies Project
We were not able to find peer reviews of these experiments, so we cannot herein vouch for them.

At this point, we are hard-pressed to find anything positive about Twinkies except their taste. We thought that perhaps the nutritional value would be positive, since we heard rumors a couple of years ago that someone once went on a Twinkie Diet and actually lost weight. It turns out that what the guy essentially did was starve, so don’t replace your amphetamines with Hostess products just yet. If you want a hypoglycemic rush, Twinkies are your tool.

So what about the rumors of the eternal shelf-life of Twinkies? Turns out this is in error, too. We can attest to the lie. When we helped our teenage son empty the trunk of his car once, we found a box of Twinkies that had been bouncing around back there for quite some time. “In case I need a snack,” he explained. Sure. Boys get hungry. We understand. So we removed one of those delicious golden snack cakes from the box. It felt funny. It was hard. Like, brick-hard.

“How long have these been back here?” we asked.

Our progeny shrugged. “A few months, maybe.”

We were glad he hadn’t been on a crime spree. Had he needed to use the Twinkie Defense, he’d’ve broken a tooth.

Source
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Litterbugs Litter Butts

So today was the day for the Adopt-a-Highway litter pick-up.

Sign for the Adopt-A-Highway mile of the Freethinkers of Central Arkansas

The sign says “Freethinkers of Central Arkansas,” but that group was one of several that merged with the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers a couple of years ago. Somebody in charge of the organization really ought to do something about getting the name on the sign changed. Somebody? Somebody? Oh. Wait. That would probably end up being me.  Therefore, it’s fine the way it is – for a little longer, anyway.

We do our highway clean-ups on Sunday mornings, because, well, it’s not like we go to church. It’s the one time in the week when people in our group are apt to be available. We met at 9:00 a.m. today, before things got too blazing hot. The mile we adopted is in downtown Little Rock, on State Highway 10 near the state capitol. It’s part of LaHarpe Boulevard where the highway crosses a railroad and becomes Third Street, then crosses the railroad again a couple of miles before it officially becomes Cantrell Road. Little Rock’s primary roads don’t tend to keep a single name for long distances. Don’t ask me why.

trash, cigarette butts, litter, gross
This patch of the side of the road is about two feet square.

Litter along this street doesn’t tend to get too out of hand. I don’t know if that’s because the property owners along this stretch tend to be conscientious about keeping their sidewalks clean. (I’m especially giving you nods of approval, Dillard’s Corporate Headquarters and Episcopal Collegiate School.)

In the years that I’ve participated in the highway cleanup, I’ve noticed one thing to be consistently true:

Cigarette smokers are some trashy, nasty, litter-bugging sumbitches.

And I don’t mean just a little trashy, either. If you count the actual number of things picked up today, far and away the most numerous were cigarette butts. If I’ve counted correctly, there are about thirty pieces of litter in the photo to the right. Twenty-six of those are cigarette butts. I circled the litter butts in red so you could see them better. The non-butt pieces of litter are circled in blue.

Do cigarette smokers realize that their butts are not biodegradable? Do they understand that when they throw their butts out of the car window they are really and truly littering? Do they know that the rest of the world really doesn’t want to look at their trash?

I guess not. I may be a little sensitive to this, seeing as how just this morning I spent an hour and half with about 15 other folks on the side of the road picking up mostly cigarette butts discarded by thoughtless smokers. Cigarette smokers litter butts like breadcrumbs through the forest paths of their lives. Why?

cigarette butts
This is my HOUSE, dammit!
trash, matches, liltter
We do have trash cans.

I don’t smoke. I am allergic to cigarette smoke. My throat closes up when I spend to much time around it. I can’t breathe. So I am grateful for the modern courtesy of people going outside to smoke when they are in my company. Smoking indoors caused me lots of unpleasant breathing issues before it became customary for smokers to go outside. I will provide ashtrays for my guests who want to smoke.

Smokers who come over to my house and toss their nasty butts in my yard are pretty friggin’ rude, in my book. Do they think no one picks up after them? Do they think I want their ugly butts to just sit there, waiting for some archaeologist to come along in a couple hundred years to dig them up and think that I lived on top of some trash heap? Damn litterbugs.

After I got home from the highway cleanup today, I went out through my son’s basement bedroom to the patio. The photo to the left shows what was on the steps outside his door. I circled the cigarette butts – five of them, and those are the ones I didn’t have to look for. They were just thrown, or carefully placed, right there on the steps leading down to the yard. I didn’t circle the matches in the photo on the left, but I was pretty appalled at the collection I found, and the photo on the right shows more matches that were apparently used to light those cigarettes. The matches were tossed onto the stoop. They are wooden, so they are biodegradable, but that doesn’t mean I really want them littering my damn deck. and we’ve got a serious drought going on. I don’t want my house to burn down, either.

I have a couple of family members who occasionally smoke at my house. I suspect that one of them left those butts outside the basement door. Another of them is my favorite youngest male first cousin, who I’ll call Paul, because that’s his name. Paul doesn’t litter cigarette butts at my house anymore. There’s a reason for that.

Paul came over one evening, and we spent a pleasant few hours chatting. Paul has spent many hours at my house, and he knows I can’t handle cigarettes inside. Off and on throughout his visit that evening, Paul would go out onto the deck to smoke. He took a can with him. I don’t remember if it was a can of beer or of soda, or if it was empty or full. He did not ask for an ashtray, though, so I assumed he was using his can as his ashtray.

hanging plant
The new hanging plant on the deck

“This pot is kind of cool,” Paul said. “But why does it have a hole in its side?” He was standing on the deck looking at the hanging plant that graced the door to my living room.

“A what?”

I looked at the pot. Sure enough, there was a hole in the side of the pot. I had just bought the flowers in that pot a couple of weeks before, filled the empty pot with a coconut coir potting mixture, and planted them. For a moment I was confused. I didn’t remember it being the type of pot with holes for strawberries or herbs to grow out of its sides. I reached for the pot and turned it to see if there were more holes on the sides, which I had just missed because of a psychotic break or something.

“That’s weird. It’s smoking,” said Paul.

“Shit!” I dashed for the water hose a few feet away.

After playing Fire Marshall, I looked at Paul, who looked very sheepish.

“Um,” he said.

“I guess you weren’t using that as an ashtray,” I said, nodding toward the can.

“Yeah. No. No, I wasn’t.”

“That pot didn’t originally have a hole in its side,” I said, because at that moment it dawned on me that the hole had just materialized.  Or dematerialized. The plastic had melted, mysteriously.

“No, I guess it didn’t.”

“Paul, we’ve discussed smoking pot,” I said gently. Because we have, lots of times.

Pots really shouldn’t smoke.

 

(Paul, you know I love you. Don’t hate me for telling this story.)

 

 

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Another Day Gone

This is My Brain on Migraine
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I wake up; the pounding in my head forces me to. I drag my sandy eyelids up and try to focus on the clock. 4:45 a.m. My mouth tastes like dirty socks and my stomach wants to heave. I make myself sit up and the room reels. The telltale rush of saliva into my dry mouth warns me that I don’t have much time. When the room stops moving I put my legs over the side of the bed. Somehow I’m vertical and staggering toward the bathroom.

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I keep the shots of Imitrex ready to go. Finding the injector in the dark is not a problem. The container is on the bottom shelf of the bathroom cabinet, right where it’s supposed to be. My fingers fumble and pry up the lid on one of the twin ampules. The only reason I can do this now is years of practice. When my doctor first gave me the shots I was slower. The novelty meant I sometimes couldn’t prime the injection device properly and a spray of precious triptan would shoot across the room instead of into my flesh. When the headaches are really bad, sometimes that still happens. Migraines steal fine motor coordination. Gross motor skills are pretty much out the window, too, but it’s the fine motor I need now. And the dismay of seeing an injection that costs over a hundred dollars wasted into thin air has no equal. This morning I manage to load the syringe and press it to my flesh. My thumb hits the button on the end of the device and I can’t help but hiss as the sting of the medication hits my intramuscular tissue. It takes a couple of tries, but I manage to cram the injector into its holder and prime it for the next shot. Then I stagger a couple of steps to the sink.

Surely I will feel better if I get those nasty gym socks off my teeth. My hands tremble as I load my toothbrush. Applying toothpaste to my toothbrush takes extra time and effort. It’s hard. I turn the water on and wet the brush, then bring it to my objecting mouth. No sensation is good, because every sensation is amplified with a migraine. The sharp taste of minty-fresh explodes in my mouth and I rinse the brush again. I just want to peel off the cotton that coats my mouth, not breathe on anyone. I don’t want to sanitize myself yet. I just need to get rid of the grimness of first waking up.

Afterward, I grip the sink with both hands. The Imitrex still isn’t working, and even the slightest head movement is agony. Maybe if I lean here for a moment the drug will kick in. But not yet. The jack hammer in my skull subsides with stillness. When I think I can bear it, I move tentatively toward the toilet. Whether or not I really need to go, I need to sit down, and, at a distance of twenty feet, my bed is too far away. I miss the three-foot-tall stacked cube shelf that I used to have in my bathroom. I could sit on the toilet, pull it close, and rest on it, my head lying on my folded arms. Sometimes I would drift into unconsciousness that way and my husband would call to me, asking me if I was all right. If I had assumed that position, I was never all right. Now, though, the shelf lives at his house and the twelve-inch distance to the tiled wall is to far to lean, no matter how good the cold tiles might feel on my skin. I sway as I sit there.

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My eyes are closed. I lose track of the minutes. I beg the drug to start working. I wait for the sensation at the back of my neck that signals its effectiveness. Nothing happens.

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Eventually, I think I can make it back to bed. The nausea is a reminder that the meds aren’t working, and I know that on my way I need to get the Phenergan. Dr. Archer has prescribed it in a cream. Philip at the Drug Store compounds it and puts one dose into a syringe without a needle. A plastic cap at the tip of the syringe keeps the cream from drying out. It’s hard to get those caps off. I dread the effort, but I know it is necessary. If I start throwing up, I won’t stop. Vomiting with a migraine doesn’t make anything better.

I stand before the door of the medicine cabinet again, reach into the Ziplock bag that contains the Phenergan cream syringes, pull out a syringe, and start wrestling with the cap. Not only do I lose coordination with migraines, I lose strength. It takes me more than a minute to pry the cap off. With a grateful sigh I push the plunger and spread the cool cream on my wrists. I aim the syringe at the trash can and let it go. Of course I miss. I’ll pick it up later. Now it’s time to stagger back to bed and hope that the combination of drugs will stave off the nausea.

Too late, I forget that I have a bead of blood on my skin from the Imitrex injection. I know I smear the sheets with red as I lie down. I hope it has dried and I can brush off the crumbs of blood easily. I washed and changed the sheets just yesterday, using strong spot remover on the blood stains from last week’s migraines. They never seem to come out completely unless I use bleach. I care, but not enough to do anything but pull myself into a fetal position. My pillow is too hard. There’s nothing I can do about it except keep very, very still. My body is covered in a sheen of sweat from the nausea. I don’t want under covers yet. Warmth amplifies the pain. When the Phenergan kicks in, the sweat turns clammy, then evaporates, leaving a salty residue. Once my skin is dry, I find the coolest spot on the smooth sheets. I tug the top sheet over me, and a few minutes later pull up the quilt, too. The Imitrex still isn’t working. I am grateful for Phenergan’s fortunate side effect of drowsiness. I lie there, waiting for the Imitrex, and waiting for sleep.

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Sleep evidently came. I am wake again. It’s 7:40 now, and the Imitrex has only dented the migraine pain. The nausea is mercifully gone, but even though every shift of my head doesn’t bring waves of agony, a full-blown migraine still actively assaults my head. I try to sleep again, lying still and letting my mind drift hypnotically. It’s no use. I’m awake and alert, pain and all.

I can dose myself with Imitrex again. After two hours, if I don’t have relief I can take one of the tablets. I carefully leave my bed and make for the bathroom. The blackout curtains in my bedroom don’t close completely, and the shaft of daylight stabs my eyes as I pass through it. I need a ladder to reattach the last drapery hook to the rod.  Not now, though. I can barely walk steadily. Climbing a ladder is out of the question.

Imitrex’s packaging is intended to be impossible to open. Insurance only pays for nine pills a month, and they come in paper and foil-backed blister packs. Normally I take all the pills out of the blister packs and transfer them to a pill case as soon as I get home from the pharmacy. Stupidly, I neglected to do so this time. It’s a new box of pills, and I fumble even to tear away the box top to get at the blister pack. I still have no fine motor coordination, and tearing away the paper and foil backing is beyond me. Finally I stab the back of the pack with tweezers to get it open. The pill breaks as I extract it. It will leave a horrible taste in my mouth because of that. I swallow it anyway, and take a long drink of water to wash away as much of the residue as I can. Now for the other weapon in my migraine arsenal.

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Hydrocodone. I hate it. I love it. I hoard it. Dr. Archer allows me twenty pills a month, but I rarely use them all. It scares me. The last thing I need is an opiate addiction. My tolerance to it is high. For all I know, I’m already addicted. I don’t know. What I do know is that hydrocodone is an extra lifeline for when the triptans don’t work. Today, I need it. Maybe I can go back to sleep. It will be an hour before either it or the Imitrex tablet will take effect. I shake the fat tablet into my palm and wash it down with water. I go back to bed.

I doze, but I don’t go back to sleep completely. After an hour, there is no change. I am tired of my bed. The cats have been anxiously head-butting the door and crying. They’re hungry. Their water dish is probably empty, too. I debate taking another hydrocodone tablet, but decide to wait. I want to see how the effort of climbing the stairs affects me, and if I take one now it will make me itch. Of course, I can always take Benedryl with it. The antihistamine will help with the itching and make me drowsy again. No, I’ll wait.

I should have taken the second pill. In my kitchen, I sink onto a stool at the breakfast bar and lay by head on my arms. The cool granite of the counter feels wonderful. The pounding in my skull does not. When it subsides, I reach for the bottle of hydrocodone I keep on my lazy Susan. The cats are sitting next to their empty food bowls, expectant. “Just a minute, guys,” I whisper. I run water into a dirty glass sitting in the sink and swallow the pill. I stand at the sink for a moment, waiting for the pounding to start again because of the movement. Thankfully, it does not.

The cats’ food dishes are on the floor. I squat slowly, not wanting to bend or even tilt my head for fear that blood will rush into it and the throbbing will begin again in earnest. I nearly lose my balance, but I’ve thought to hold the edge of the counter to ease myself down, so I have a lifeline. I’m shaky as I rise. The three steps to the bin of cat food in the pantry go well. I scoop food into one of the bowls. No wet food this morning, kitties. Sorry. I can’t bend over to get the can, and the smell of it would destroy me. I can smell the litter box across the room, and I know it needs attention, too. There’s no way. Not now. Not yet. Please understand and don’t do your business in the house plants, I beg them silently.

I sit on the stool again to recover from this round of activity. I need to eat something. Lack of food will only make things worse in the long run. I keep coffee in the fridge. Caffeine sometimes helps, sometimes hurts. As bad as this headache is, I decide to give it a try. Iced coffee with a bit of hazelnut-flavored sweetener and a dollop of milk. It isn’t as sweet as Starbucks, but then nothing really needs to be. My sister says those sweet coffee drinks from Starbucks are “a candy bar in a cup.” She’s not far wrong. I sit and drink. It tastes good. I feel stronger after sustenance. I mix myself another iced coffee, and munch on a few strawberries. The carbs will give me strength and energy.

It’s 8:25 now. I move to my computer, which sits in an alcove off the kitchen. I bring my coffee with me. I can sit relatively still, reading blogs and news, and wait for the hydrocodone to do its magic. Eventually, the itching starts. I keep a back scratcher next to the computer because my perpetually dry skin always itches. Itching from too much opioid  is not satisfied as easily. I read. I sit. When I get up to forage for more food, my head reminds me that I need to stay still. I return to my computer chair with a small chunk of Havarti cheese and rice crackers.

A little after eleven, my phone rings. It’s Jan, wanting to go to The Full Monty at the Weekend Theater. She’s not sure we can get tickets. Tonight is the last night. Even though I tell her I am not up for it, she is determined to go. She will have to drive in from Hot Springs, so if the show is sold out then she’ll have a wasted trip and an hour’s drive home. I turn down the volume on the phone, because the conversation is unnaturally loud. I tell her I’m not feeling well, but that she is welcome to come by if she can’t get a ticket. I hope the show is not sold out. I hope she can go. I realize I need to go back to my bed. We hang up, and I take a deep, slow breath to steady myself. The phone call has brought back the raging throb.

(source)

I get a glass of ice water before descending the stairs to my bedroom again. I climb into bed. The sheets are smooth and cool, and I think again that I need to rehang that drapery hook so the curtains close completely. The shaft of midday sun coming through the opening stabs my eyes. My head hurts too much for me to turn my back to the windows. Besides, the light bounces off the wall; it doesn’t really go away if my back is to it. I close my eyes and hope for sleep.

I haven’t yet started to doze when I hear the garage door open. Jack is home. Lora is with him. They’re going to hang out in the basement. He brings me an icepack. I’m glad he’s come home, because I can really use that icepack. I drape it over my forehead, pressing its ends to my temples. The kids go to the basement. They know to be quiet when I have a migraine. Poor Jack. His whole life, his mother has been sick. Sometimes, she’s sicker. Like today. He has told me that by the time he was eight, he could read the labels on my meds and even spell hydrocodone. I don’t doubt it. I sent him to get them from the cabinet often enough.

I doze, and finally I sleep. It’s almost 5:00. The migraine has receded to the back of my brain. It’s still there, but right now it’s not attacking me. It doesn’t hurt. I go upstairs again. If I don’t eat a meal, I’ll suffer for it. I need protein, vegetables. I make a sandwich and chew it slowly. I don’t really want it. I’m not hungry. The consequences of not eating will be worse than forcing myself to eat now. I sit at the kitchen counter and read a  magazine while I take unenthusiastic bites. I hear the kids come upstairs. They’re leaving. They chat cheerfully. Their good moods and the sandwich have combined to lift me up. Lora tells me she’s reading The Princess Bride, and I am delighted. It has been my favorite book since I was sixteen. I refused for years to see the movie, because I was so afraid that Hollywood would ruin it. I shouldn’t have worried. William Goldman wrote the screenplay for his own great book, so everything was as it should have been. Miracle Max and Valerie. Fezzik and Inigo Montoya. The Man in Black. Buttercup. Prince Humperdink. The Six-Fingered Count. Talking about it with Lora, I feel animated for the first time today.

(source)

The kids leave and I return to the computer. I need to sit still. If Jan comes tonight, I need to be functional. I’m functional now, but I don’t know how long it will last. I start writing this blog post. I feel myself tiring, but Jan calls at 7:30 to say she could not get a ticket to the play. For the last hour I have been checking the clock, wondering if she will call. About fifteen minutes ago I had decided that she must have gotten in, or I would have heard from her. “No, no, it’s fine,” I tell her. “Come on by.” I go downstairs to get the skirts I need to alter for my niece’s school uniform. They are hand-me-downs from her sister, who is shaped differently. As Jan and I visit, I rip out the hems. By 9:30, she says she’s tired and is going to get back on the road. I’m glad, because I’m fading, too. The headache isn’t back, but it’s skulking in the recesses of my skull, waiting to strike. And all those meds exhaust me. I’m happy to have seen Jan, though.

After Jan leaves, I rip the hem out of the last skirt, and I head downstairs with a fresh glass of ice water.

I read a little in Sacré Bleu, the newest book by Christopher Moore. I’ve had it since its greatly anticipated release, and I keep getting distracted from it. I love Chris Moore’s books. I wish I had his wild imagination. I want to keep reading, but my brain won’t let me. I’m too tired.

(source)

Another day sacrificed to migraine. Another day, gone.

(source)

 

 

 

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“It’s Your Mission on Earth”

This is the text of my first book club presentation this month on Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

When the protagonist of the book, a Spanish shepherd named Santiago, was sixteen, he told his father that he wanted to travel. His father objected, saying that all the travelers who pass through Andalusia, where they live, are the same as the Andalusians, and say that they want to come to live in Andalusia.  In his words, we hear the echo of what we ourselves have said on vacation: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live here?”

Obviously, Santiago’s father is proud of his home. He cannot imagine why anyone would ever want to leave. The only Andalusians who travel are shepherds because their job requires it. He gives Santiago three ancient Spanish coins as part of his inheritance, telling him to buy a flock of sheep. The older man thinks this an “acceptable” way to travel.

The boy could see in his father’s gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world – a desire that was still alive, despite his father’s having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat, and the same place to sleep every night of his life. (pp. 9-10)

Reading that passage, I had to wonder if Santiago was projecting a bit of himself onto his father. We do this to our parents, and for that matter, to other people we think we know – or even those we simply encounter. “If this makes me happy, it will make you happy, too,” we tell them.

My mom and sister, for example, tell me that a busy social schedule would make me happy. Frankly, the thought of being as busy as they are, without time to sit and write, would make me miserable. I get exhausted and need a nap after just glancing at their calendars. Then again, sitting and writing for the three to five hours a day (or longer when I’m on a roll) as I do would probably drive them nuts.

The impetus for the story happens when Santiago spends the night in the ruins of an old church and dreams a dream he has had once before. Both times he has awakened from the dream before he reaches what he thinks should be the end. In the dream, a child comes to play with his sheep. Suddenly, the dream child takes Santiago’s hands and transports him to the Egyptian pyramids. “If you come here, you will find a hidden treasure,” she tells him.

Once he begins his journey, Santiago encounters Melchizedek in the plaza of the first town he visits. Melchizedek tells him that the greatest lie is one everyone comes to believe:

[The greatest lie is] that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. pp. 17-18)

According to Melchizedek, someone’s Personal Legend is what they have always wanted to accomplish. When people are young, they know what their Personal Legend is and the path to it seems clear. Anything is possible because young people are not afraid to dream. “But as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it is impossible for them to realize their Personal Legend.” Then he tells Santiago,

To realize one’s Personal Legend is one’s only real obligation.”  (pp. 21-22)

Coelho tells the story of Santiago’s journey to find his Personal Legend in the form of a fable or morality story. Perhaps because of my mood when I read it, I received the message. This book is one I will buy multiple copies of and insist that my friends read.

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Historic Flooding in Des Arc

There is a great tragedy unfolding in my hometown. Des Arc is experiencing the worst flooding in 75 years – maybe longer. I-40 is closed because of the flooding. Parts of the county were evacuated last week. The National Guard is there, and two highways into town are underwater. People have lost their homes, businesses are deep in water, and farms are in the middle of a vast, wild river. This disaster is as great as any tornado in Alabama or any hurricane in Florida.

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CV for a Cemetery

Mount Holly Cemetery, Little Rock, Arkansas
Photo by David Habben, www.findagrave.com

 

My mom wanted me on the board of an historical cemetery. I thought it would be awesome – it’s a great old place with lots of ghost stories and locally famous – and infamous – people buried there. Including a truckload of my ancestors.

“I need your resume,” she told me.

“Mom, I hardly think that my work history has anything to do with why I might be qualified to serve on that board.”

“So dress it up. Emphasize your genealogy research and your history research. Talk about your volunteer work.”

In other words, she wanted me to re-craft my resume entirely.  Therefore, I did exactly what I always do when given an irritating assignment: I procrastinated.

A week later: “I really need your resume.”

Two weeks later: “If you don’t get me that resume I can’t nominate you.”

Three weeks later:  “I need it today.”

Crap. And I was having so much fun putting it off.

“Just write something. I’ll rewrite it to suit our nomination style.”

Had she said this in the first place, I could have whipped off a few relevant paragraphs and been done with this a month ago. But she said she wanted a freaking resume. So after lunch, I sat down and wrote:

Anne has a keen interest in genealogy and history, and has done research on both in this particular cemetery, once regrettably denting the side of her car as she took a turn too sharply around a certain walled plot in the northeast corner of the place.  Her interest in these disciplines began in high school, when in 1976 she won the esteemed and coveted Annual Ninth Grade History Award at All Saints Episcopal School in Vicksburg, Mississippi, mostly to prove to a certain boy that she was smarter than he was. It must have worked, because that intimidated lad has refused to this day (over 30 years later!) to come to class reunions. Her interest was fed her freshman year at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, when given the task of charting the genealogy of Zeus’s progeny she instead charted the genealogy of the entire Greek pantheon. While mostly accurate, her work earned her a C for failing to follow directions. Her professor was not interested in reading that much. Anne didn’t really care, since being right was all that mattered. When she graduated from Colgate in 1984, her major was English, not Greek.

With no immediate better use to put an English major, Anne returned to her Arkansas roots the following year to go to law school.  Anne clerked for Justice David Newbern at the Arkansas Supreme Court, then worked for a state agency or two until her secretary, one Gennifer Flowers, decided to hit the front page of the papers and not return to work. Anne opened her own law practice in 1993 and has remained in private practice ever since. Today, after 16 years in the trenches of litigation, Anne is a managing member of the law firm Almand, Orsi & Campbell, PLLC, which handles civil litigation.  Both she and her cousin and law partner, Donald K. Campbell, III, have generations of ancestors buried at this cemetery, stories about whom they occasionally pull out, dust off, and tell to their children and other passers-by, whether or not such innocents are especially interested.

Anne has maintained a moderately noticeable profile among local bar and statewide bar associations. She joined a whole slew of them in 1988 immediately after getting her J.D. from UALR Law School and passing the bar.  In 1993 she was made Parliamentarian of the Arkansas Association of Woman Lawyers, then served as  Vice President in 1994-1995, and as President in 1995-1996. She remains a member of the group today.  She has been a member of the Pulaski County Bar Association since 1988, and served as co-chair of the Hospitality Committee in 1995-1996. Likewise she retains her membership in the Arkansas Trial Lawyers Association, for which she chaired the Domestic Relations Division in 1997-1998. She was a member of the American Bar Association from 1988-1996, when membership became prohibitively expensive. Most of her bar activities have been through the Arkansas Bar Association, for which she has served on numerous committees, including the Real Estate Committee, Probate Law Committee, Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare Committee, Women and Minorities in the Law Committee, Mock Trial Committee, Online Legal Research Committee, Civil Litigation Committee, and Access to Justice Committee.

Very conscious of the fact that not everyone has access to the legal system in a meaningful way, Anne donates her time and expertise through two of Arkansas’ legal services organizations. The Center for Arkansas Legal Services helps clients in the central Arkansas area, and Anne is one of the attorneys who accepts legal representation of clients in need who meet low income guidelines. Anne volunteers in rural areas of the state for Arkansas Volunteer Lawyers for the Elderly, another legal aid program that ensures that senior citizens with limited assets and income can access the legal system.

She has served on the boards of other historical societies, including Scott Connections in Scott, Arkansas (Director, 2007-2008), and the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in Arkansas (Director, 2006-09; and Board of Managers 2009-present). This spring Anne was selected to be the state’s Regent of Gunston Hall, the Northern Virginia home of founding father George Mason, a position she will hold for the next four years.

Anne is active in several of her family’s businesses. She is on the board of directors of ARNO, Inc. and Pioneer Farms, and has served as Chairman of the Board of Three Rivers Title Services, Inc. since 1999.

For pleasure, Anne loves to grow herbs, read, and write short stories. She maintains two blogs: one is purely for pleasure and the other is purely for work. She is also working on three novels, none of which she ever expects to finish unless the Fountain of Youth is found and she drinks copiously from its non-Stygian depths.

 

“Very amusing, my dear. I will extract the pertinent information to send out to the rest of the Board, omitting the humor, sad though that makes me.”

She will extract the pertinent information? That means most of what I wrote will end up in the trash.

And I worked so hard to get it to her!

Sadly edited in 2012 to remove links to the defunct law firm of Almand, Orsi & Campbell, PLLC.

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Medical Malpractice and Tort “Reform”

I’m riding my white horse today.

As a lawyer, I know that people get harmed through no fault of their own by other’s people’s negligence and failure to pay attention to what is important. Whether it’s a car accident, a doctor who ignores symptoms, or a vicious dog who attacks a child, the person who is hurt should not have to pay the price for the injury. The court system cannot give back the things these people have lost: time away from work which leads to the loss of their careers, the pretty face that existed before the dog mauled the four year old girl, the mother who was killed by a drunk driver, living without constant pain caused by the injuries in the accident, the cheerful contributions to her family that the coma patient used to make before the doctor ignored the pulmonary thrombosis that led to her vegetative state.

When lawyers screw up a case, clients want to sue them and recover their losses. And they should. They should also be able to sue doctors, negligent drivers, and other people whose failure to pay attention has hurt them.

Unfortunately, “tort reform” usually means “medical malpractice lawsuit reform.” People think that lawyers are mean to doctors, who are just doing their best to heal people who probably can’t be healed in the first place.

That is not the case.

Look at the statistics in a recent Huffington Post article. Only 2-3% of ALL medical malpractice results in a lawsuit. That’s not 2-3% of medical care cases; that’s 2-3% of actual malpractice situations. Is such a number of lawsuits really excessive?

Caps on punitive damages is the issue Obama is expected to embrace, though. Punitive damages don’t reimburse someone for money they are out. Compensatory damages cover that. Punitive damages are intended as punishment – hence, the name “punitive.”

Why would someone require punishment for a screw-up? Think about how we decide how and whether to punish our children for negligence. Let’s say that Susie and Jenny are at a birthday party for one of their classmates and it’s cake and ice cream time. Susie gets excited explaining something and throws her arms wide, knocking over Jenny’s glass of punch, spilling it on her and ruining her party dress. Of course, Susie has to apologize to Jenny, and she has to get Jenny another glass of punch. She has to help clean up the mess, and if Jenny’s party dress is expensive Susie’s mom might offer to pay for it to be cleaned. These actions are compensatory in nature. They compensate Jenny for the loss of her glass of punch, her clean and dry dress, and her hurt feelings.

If Susie knocks the punch over because she was dancing on the table, though, Susie will be punished. Punitive action will be taken to ensure she doesn’t dance on the table and spill someone’s punch again.

Maybe we put Susie in time-out. Maybe Susie gets a spanking. Maybe Susie is grounded from her Barbies, or she is not allowed to go to any parties for the next month.

The point is not that Susie is being punished for doing something intentionally. She did not. She did spill the punch while being grossly negligent, though. She should have known that if she danced on the table where Jenny’s punch sat, the punch would spill.

Punitive damages in these cases are intended to stop gross negligence. They are not appropriate where there is no gross negligence – where the punch spills accidentally due to something unforeseen or where the negligence was minor. Punitive damages are for those egregious cases where the doctor ignored clear warning signs of his patient’s impending doom and did nothing.

Punitive damages are not awarded lightly by any jury. If a jury awards an amount in the millions, it is because the defendant in those medical malpractice actions has the resources to pay such an amount, even if it hurts. Punishment is not intended to kill, and punitive damages that bankrupt a company or a doctor aren’t appropriate. Punitive damages are supposed to hurt, though – just like being grounded from birthday parties hurts. And just like Susie, the idea is that punitive damages will hurt for a little while, but the defendant will get over it – hopefully to go forth more carefully in the future.

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Après la Chirurgie

Did you hear? I had a softball-sized tumor removed from my neck three weeks ago.

I noticed it about a year ago and shrugged it off, thinking it was a little lipoma that wasn’t any big deal. Then I began having trouble turning my head. The lump was getting bigger – about the size of a golf ball – and I couldn’t comfortably wear turtlenecks or even mock neck shirts. I named my lump Esmeralda and patiently waited for her to gain sentience.

When Esmeralda started aching, I decided to go to the doctor. I hate going to the doctor, especially if I think I’m going to get bad news. I’ve had cancer twice, so having a tumor made me think that number three was here. If I pretended it didn’t exist, it would go away.  I’m a very bright girl in these matters. I knew exactly what I was doing when I ignored the wretched thing for so long. Really.

My doctor looked at it and said that there was no question that it needed to come out. Clearly, it was causing me trouble. Even if it was probably just a lipoma and not something devastating, it was in a bad place. And, he said, even for a lipoma it was, well, kind of big. There was definitely an asymmetry to my non-gazelle-like neck. A bump about the size of half a golf ball hung off the side it.

I knew all this before he told me. I knew he’d have to refer me to a surgeon. That’s why I was there, right? So, deep breath, I got the referral and made the appointment and went the next week to see when I could divorce myself from dear Esmeralda, who I was beginning to think of as my dicephalic parapagus conjoined twin.

He sent me to an otolaryngology clinic. Otolaryngologists  cut on people’s necks when the spine isn’t involved. I was glad my spine wasn’t involved, although I did wonder if that was because I simply didn’t have one. What kind of person, being possessed of a spine, was afraid of what was probably just a harmless little lipoma?

At the otolaryngology clinic, I got a CT scan of my neck. Back in the examination room, the surgeon pulled up the scan on the computer screen. “Wow, it’s really big!” he exclaimed. He showed me what to look at. The difference in the two sides of my neck was obvious. One side of the screen looked like what you’d think a neck should look like on a CT scan. By that I mean it had not much flesh and a big amount of bone. At least, that one side did. The other side? Well, it was different. Waaaay different.

lipoma-scan
There was a vast blackness that took up a lot of space on the right half of my neck. It looked as though Darth Vader himself had taken up residence there and his helmet was pushing things around.

The doctor pointed out how my muscle was stretched over this dark growth, how my nerves and blood vessels were pushed out of place, and how much space the thing took up.

“It’s sooo biiiig,” he said again. And again. And yet another time, just in case I hadn’t heard him before. That’s right.  Only I could have a freakishly large tumor in a place with as little flesh as my neck and not notice it for years on end. Evidently, I can’t see a damn thing with my eyes full of sand.

Lipomas usually grow just right under the skin and are fairly simple to remove. Unless they become bothersome, it’s not necessary to remove them at all. Mine was different. It was under the muscle, which, the doctor graciously postulated, was probably the reason I had never realized it had been growing there for so long. It was also pressing on important nerves and blood vessels. There just isn’t a lot of room in a neck, and there’s a lot of important stuff there. Like, say, the carotid artery, which feeds blood to the brain. Which my lipoma had shoved out of place. In fact, it had shoved things so far out of place that I was in danger of soon looking like the Elephant Man.

Surgery wasn’t just an option; it was necessary due to both the size and the location. If Esmeralda really did get large enough to become sentient, state law would forbid me from removing her. I mean, I could already forget about using federal funds. Her presence could no longer be disguised with loose clothing or makeup. I had to act, and act quickly.

The problem was, the size and location of the tumor meant that a different doctor needed to do the surgery. Someone who specialized in cancers of the head and neck.  Swell. The”C” word again. Fortunately, I liked the new surgeon. I liked the old one, too, but the new one was quick-witted, funny, and personable. And probably married. (sigh)

My family rallied around me. My sister went with me to the pre-surgery appointment. My mom took me to her house after the surgery so I could be pampered. Jack came to see me that night.  I felt pretty raw, and my throat, complete with a drainage tube, wasn’t pretty either.

scar
Wanna see?

Three weeks later, I’m still a little tired, but I’m fine. Some mornings it’s harder to shake off the latent effects of the anesthesia than others. Of course, staying up until 1 a.m. to finish a novel I can’t put down sort of contributes to the problem, but I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do. (The books are really good. Brent Weeks is a new, young author and he has time to grow. I can’t wait for his next offering.)

night-angel-trilogy
My son, Jack, has demanded credit for cajoling me into reading this series.  Here you go, son.

I have an awe-inspiring scar on my throat. I can come up with plenty of tales to explain its presence.

I’ve told the story of Jack the Ripper to my wide-eyed nieces and youngest nephew (they’re 11, 8, and 6). I have the scar to prove that I narrowly escaped him.

Next, I plan to work up a tale of the Bride of Frankenstein for their entertainment. I’ve already got the white hair at the temples going on, so between that and the scar, I’m not going to have to spend a lot on costuming.

bride-of-frankenstein

The surgeon said that the tumor had to have been there for a very, very long time to be as large as it was. How the hell does a softball manage to hide in a neck for years and only show up as a golf-ball sized bulge?

The size of the thing was apparently really impressive. Every time I call his office his nurse exclaims, “Oh, you’re the one with that really huge lipoma!” Every time. Every stinkin’ time. I’m beginning to wonder if I ought not to have saved the damn thing and taken it on the road. I could have made a living in the sideshow as the girl with the softball in her neck.

Maybe I should have had the thing cut in two and used it for a boob job. Next time, if there is a next time, I’m going to think that through carefully.

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