INVERTEBRATIA

Def: A condition the result of which a vertebrate becomes an invertebrate

I used to be afraid that I was spineless,so I took up karate and kickboxing and messed up my knee.

First I walked with a cane, then with a four wheeled walker,lately not so much at all.

One calls it spinal Stenosis,another says it's too deteriorated to fix.

It's amazing what I can do in four and a half feet of water. But I don't aspire to become a tadpole. I'm looking for a chrysalis. I want to fly someday.

THIS IS MY BRAIN ON ARICEPT

Yep, that's right. The Old Woman is on Aricept now. What does that mean, you ask? She doesn't really know. She just figures she should expect some changes, hopefully very gradual, but no guarantees. So she's considering reactivating this blog as a kind of Alzheimer's diary. Maybe if she writes a little, say once a week or so, it will be possible, retrospectively, to discern the slope of the decline. Of course, that will have to be someone else's project, since, by the time it's worth doing, it will be beyond the capability of the Old Woman.
What an adventure!

Changed My Mind

This is my new, improved stomach. Amazing how changing a stomach can change a mind. Age no longer seems so important. The difference is, for the first time in 22 years, I can eat a normal meal without puking; I can sleep lying back; i.e., I don't have to sleep sitting up. Whoa, wow and whoopee, who'd a thunk it mattered so much.
ABOUT CATS, SPECIFICALLY, THE CONCEPT OF THE AUXILIARY CAT
Poor Fina has been the "other cat" for two years. Now, suddenly, she has accepted the term "auxiliary" and her outlook has greatly improved. She has declared that she will henceforth be called Fifi, a name that suits her personality. Let Calliope, aka Pyepye, be the Queen. Fifi will be the Princess. Let Pyepye get first dibs on the lovey love chair. Pyepye is such a demand bitch that she will eventually become petulant and leave; and in the lovey love chair seconds ain't so sloppy. Bottom line, contrary to popular opinion, the human can be shared.

The Old Woman In Hiding

First let me say that today was, for those who don't mind cold and raining, magnificent. The birds were skipping from tree to tree like flat rocks across a pond.

That's the upbeat part of this post. Now let me makes some random observations about life. Or death, which is the same thing. It's like this. I make a joke of being the Old Woman with Walker. But the walker is not a joke. It's real. I use it because I can't walk across the room more than about three times without it. I work it for the astonishment and sympathy people afford me. I decorate like every day is fiesta. I use it to carry things; that's convenient. But on the whole, it sucks using a walker. But nobody wants to know that. Nobody wants to see that. I make them see the walker by making it a joke.

Likewise, nobody wants to hear that I'm at a place in life when I count the past by the time I may have left. Sure, I'm not old old. But I'm in, at best, the last quarter of my life. And I don't want to hear "You're only as old as you feel", because guess what, boys and girls, the Woman with Walker feels old. And I don't see any percentage in trying not to feel how I feel. I mean, I'm not gonna die of it. But I am gonna die. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everybody's gonna die sometime. But I'm gonna die sometime relatively soon. That scares me. It pisses me off. It intrigues me. So if there's anybody out there who feels that way, or wants to hear how that feels, I'd like to talk about it.

The First Day of the End of My Life

I wasn't home the day Dylan died on the living room couch. Leila, who was visiting, had been in and out all day. She had made several trips to the hospital to see me. I was due to come home the next day with my new titanium knee. Early in the evening she called to ask how to change the way Dylan had the stereo/TV set up. He had been playing with his X-box; she just wanted to watch TV, and hear it. I couldn't explain it over the phone, so I told her to ask Dylan. "He's asleep," she said. "Well, wake him up," I said. I heard her call his name a couple of times; then she came back to the phone and said, "He's not okay. I need to call EMS." She promised to call back, but after what seemed a long time she hadn't. So I called the apartment. "Ginger, he's not okay," she said. "He's dead." Just like that--he's not okay, he's dead. We had some kind of conversation after that and then I hung up the phone and started to scream.
Later I found out that while she waited for EMS Leila sat holding his cold hand and stroking his cold face and scolding him for leaving me. When the paramedics got there and confirmed that he was surely dead and had been for some time, she still tried to persuade them to try resuscitation. For months any time her hand felt cold she remembered that time holding Dylan's cold hand and stroking his cold face.

The Coroner's Office didn't think he meant to die. They called it an accidental overdose. He had a heart condition neither of us was aware of and, according to his best friend, whom I trust, heroin was a new drug to him. He just made a mistake.

I of course never saw him dead on my couch. When I did see him at the funeral home several days later, because we did not have him "prepared" for public viewing, his scalp had not been sewed up after autopsy. So they had a towel, golden in color, wrapped around his head. It fell about his face at angles, making him look like a pharaoh. He had a devilish little smile on his face that seemed to say, "I know something you don't, Mom." The undertaker assured me that he had not altered Dylan's face since he came from the Coroner's office, that that was in fact the expression he bore when he died. It figures. He always liked to have one over on his Mom.

I lived on the couch for months while I recovered from knee surgery.

I love him. I live.

The Moon Is Dead

Driving out 281 toward a shot in the knee
I heard the news
The moon is dead
There was no hesitation, no doubt
This was good news
Contamination no longer an issue
No need to pick up trash on the moon
License for astronauts to sneeze
or even puke on its face

I have an affinity for the dead
an impulse to chronicle decay
every day I snap a photo
a cactus morphing in the alley
indifferent partner in the dance
of weather and neglect

Dylan is my favorite dead person
his Bubba my favorite dog
I keep an altar
in his room and in my heart
and sometimes see them rambling
on the slant side of vision
peering into the window of the library
from the salivating darkness
I almost hear
"Must have tacos"
as I unlock and re-lock the door
and step into the storied night

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TURNING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Last night for the first time since I bought this beast, I turned it off because I was tired. Until then it's been like a drug or a really good book; once I started it up I would keep going for a ridiculous length of time, wearing myself out ad getting no sleep. And yet, it often feels like work?
What makes the computer so compelling. I watch children at the library and they're transfixed. Their parents try in vain to break their concentration; I hear them pleading with their children to go out on the playground. Hopefully, I think, this concentration is good, this ability to focus. But is it, or is it like the mindless focus on television that captured their predecessors and made of them couch potatoes?
As for myself, I have no answer. I do not focus. I wander. There are too many possibilities here. It's like being in the grocery store trying to remember what I meant to buy.