february seeping away

i have not done much posting this month. variety of reasons, the main one being: no real reason. busy w/ a couple different creative pursuits (film, book) and just generally getting my act together. the pursuits are going well though. gathering form and heft. there will be further reports in the coming days on those fronts

however, due to a deafening roar of insistence and curiousity from my blog audience (ie, mom, sister) i feel compelled to toss something up here. i could talk about that cia book i finally finished reading but it would depress you. you should read it though. but it will depress you.

oh, wait! here's two different things that have some bearing on my life:

1) finally (!) got copy of radiologist's notes from my MRI. they use a lot of real impenetrable science and medical language (axio-facial, gerby, flap-bits etc) but all is well. meaning the mass in my head is unchanged. stable. i've been waiting an interminable duration to learn this and, being neurotic, allowed my mind to move to these catastrophic endings that acc. to these notes, are not to be. which is nice.
speaking of catastrophes:
2) in a fit of boredom i googled myself and found this fascinating account of my performace on Jeopardy! several years ago. this was just after film school ended and all i wanted to do was win alot of money to tide me over until the trucks w/ movie studio cash bricks arrived. in other words, i desperately did not want a day job and my game-show appearance was to help in that. however, without a day job i would never have health insurance which can come in handy (see item 1).

chicago v. portland 2/6/08

we needed to win this one (esp after losing that heartbreaker to denver earlier this wk) and so we did. Roy and Aldridge were impressive and m. webster had a good game too, including a dunk that made things loud. oh, plus at half-time a woman on a unicycle threw bowls on her head from her foot. yes, she did. the crowd went wild for it. just nuts.

a couple funny red meats

click on strip to read if it's too small for you

day of the dog

every morning I walk Maxwell (he's the one in the photo) around the neighborhood. today, as I stepped across 79th Avenue, right near the freaky neighbors with the enormo-RV and the six vehicles I remembered an event from a couple months ago:

an off-leash dog darted from the freak-neighbors lawn at us. Like some vaudeville routine, I shouted to the cigarette-smoking lady on her cement porch ‘can you call your dog?’ and she shouted back ‘that’s not my dog’. I was petrified, awaiting dog melee (max does not love other dogs). Oh, and it was raining. The stray had a collar and tags on and it was running in wide elliptical motions across lawns and into the street. He was following us, kind of lunging at Max periodically but in a non-threatening way. I was able to trick him into our backyard. I shut the fence. I brought Max into the house through the front door. I went inside and got the cordless phone. I went into the back yard and in the rain the excited dog was springing about, not staying still, not sure what was going on and finally I was able to read the phone number on his tag and call his owner. no response. left a message. I looked at the tag again and realized that the house was several blocks away, on Woodward. I grabbed a leash and walked the dog over to the address. no one home so I put the dog in the backyard and shut the gate which was open. I walked back home and hit redial and gave the owner my phone no’s – work and home – and went to work. I expected to hear something from the owner but no. no oh thank god, no thanks, no nothing.

so, back to today: as I’m walking by freak-neighbors I think back to that months-old memory. Don’t know what triggered it per se as I’ve walked by there scores of times since but I found myself contemplating that stray dog as I walked Maxwell. We took a right on 78th and headed up toward Division. We passed one house, then another. Then I heard a sort of jangling behind me, a noise that reminded me of a shopping cart. I turned to look and, at the corner of 79th and Clinton saw the stray, the very dog that I had just been contemplating, the very dog that I came across many months ago. There he was racing up the sidewalk at us, lunging playfully at Max again, tearing across lawns and streets again. Max was behaving so I turned and started to walk down the hill toward Woodward, hoping the stray would follow. He did and I was able to get him back to his owner. However, that is the kind of twisted stranger-than-fiction type moment that I find myself experiencing from time to time. Am I dead? Or in some dream? Did I intuit the stray or create it? Random coincidence(s)?

I went home and told mm and she reminded me that yesterday she had me pull a medicine card and I pulled…DOG.

update: just remembered that saturday i read this quite devastating account of michael vick's dogs. A sort of where-are-they-now piece
that manages to destroy in present and past tense both. the horrors that they endured and the boundless kindness in their lives now. how does that tie in? maybe it's all just meaningless, i grant you that, but at minimum this collection of events is really effing weird.

happy anniversary

this Sunday is the 3 year anniversary of my 1st brain surgery.

As much as I desperately want to let it all go, pretend it didn’t happen, feign indifference, I cannot help it, marking time in this way. Looking forward and behind - the brain tumor year the marker, the dividing line, the before and after. Staring backwards at the point in time where time itself began to mean other things. Like gazing at the remnants of a long-fallen alien civilization.

In this sense, bound to this process of re-identification with every moment, I am forever altered (but that’s not so surprising, is it?). the criteria for everyday life has shifted and so in turn other aspects of my own awareness have shifted too. relationships mutate, the worth of random things inverts, distorts, distends. favorite films are stripped of meaning, widely-celebrated books about, say, office life or multiculturalism don’t resonate at all: they wash ashore and i read them but they don’t reach me. they're not written for me. It's like reading history about a parallel world that isn’t even there. Competing fictional accounts of actual things that were built upon other deeper fictions. A complex and massive edifice of sand.

Bells ring and alarms sound and it takes me a moment to discern if it’s in present or past tense. Is this happening? or Did it happen?

Hmm. Does this mean I should get out more? Or less?