Monday, March 08, 2010

Song of the Enchondroma, plus bonus Boot-Wearing Excuses!

Today has been a great day.  I took off from work and Kel drove me to Berkeley for x-rays, which I then hand-delivered to my podiatrist, who told me I was healed-up enough to stop wearing my massive velcro boot.  You gotta know, this is big news for Chuckles!  I’m back into wearing two shoes at the same time, ON MY FEET!  I can walk up and down stairs, haul in the garbage cans, and bathe the boys (non-euphemistically speaking)!  Such a sense of freedom.  Such a sense of relief. 

What do you mean, what the hell am I talking about?  Where have you been?  For Gods sake I have been going on about my damn surgery for months now.  But no - you couldn’t be bothered to read any of that, could you?  You were waiting for the movie to come out.  On Blu-Ray.  Well that ain’t gonna happen, chum.  Something about European copyrights, and the Hague Convention, and people not caring very much.  However, you are in luck: I wrote a poem about it instead.  Yes, a poem!  Podiatrist-approved and as gripping as a prehensile toe!  So let me lay it on you so you can keep it forever in your mind:

Song of the Enchondroma

The enchondroma is a cyst
that’s rather cartilaginous
it grows inside a fellow’s bone
and there it lingers all unknown
until persistent low-grade ache
obliges you x-rays to take
Podiatrist or orthopod
will tell you with the voice of God
that you could choose to let it be
and try to live in harmony
with something that will keep on swelling
how much larger, there’s no telling
In time you’ll find that it’s outgrown
the little space inside your bone
Integrity will suffer lossage
just like some overstuffed bone sausage
Better then to cut it out
and biopsy to quash all doubt
and verify that it’s benign
so surgeons thoughtfully design
to drug you up and cut you open
and scoop the sucker out, you’re hopin’
Of course once this has been achieved
of enchondroma you’re relieved
but now you have a vacancy,
a hole where bony stuff should be
but which instead is empty space
so bony stuff they must replace
While you are laid out on your dorsals
they’ll drill some little bony morsels
from someplace you’ve got bone to spare
(the lower tibia won’t care)
So while you’re lying drugged and prone
they stuff those little bits of bone
back into the gaping maw
the tumor occupied before
then stitch you up and send you packing
Enchondroma now you’re lacking
The next six weeks you’ll spend on crutches
and powerful painkillers such as
formulary vicodin
and don’t forget that you are in
a velcro splint to be protective
of the bone erstwhile defective
two months, then you’re finished healing
Doesn’t that just sound appealing?
And that brings me to where there’s no more
to say about the enchondroma.

Now that’s poetry, in the same way as the dog foods that “make their own gravy” actually make gravy.  Which is to say, shut up.  I don’t see you writing any poems about your surgeries.  I think that puts me in the lead. 

Now that I’m finally out of my boot, I will admit that I was getting pretty tired of explaining it to people.  They always figured I’d done something while skiing or skydiving or busting my way into a crackhouse or something, and I always had to explain that it was because I’d had elective surgery, that I hadn’t hurt myself, that everything went great, that I am even more boring than they’d given me credit for.  It’s not like I didn’t have better excuses to wear the boot - I just didn’t have the chutzpah to use them.  But now that it’s all in my past, I think I can share with you some of the reasons for wearing my massive compression boot that I failed to tell anyone while it might have counted for something:

* Lost my foot in a bear trap and it’s only just now growing back
* Related to my second career as a drug mule
* Just a little bit of a podiatric velcro fetish, baby
* My other rocket boot is in the shop
* Built-in metal detector pays for itself in found bus fare
* Right foot is just so powerful that I kept crushing the sidewalk, and wearing the boot is part of my settlement with the city
* Cyber-zombie ninjas got me with an electro-necro shirikin
* Milan couture, dorkbreath

Instead, now I get to say, “what boot?” Unless I’m wearing boots, of course, in which case I’ll say nothing.  In fact, I’ll start now.  Later, dudes. 

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Photos that Look Good, Photos that Make Me Look Bad, and the Kids Who Always Look Great

Let’s start with the plug.  You know about the plugs, right?  There are two kinds.  First you have the shameful ones, like nickle, hair, and toilet.  But then there are the shameless plugs, with their auroral glow and harpsichord accompaniment.  Everybody likes the shameless plug - so here’s mine:

Longtime readers - or the odd actual person from my life - will remember the inestimable Cosmo The Dog.  I wrote about him every so often while he was part of my family; he ran out his time in 2004 and I miss him to this day.  Well, turns out there’s a contest for the best essay about how a dog has changed a person’s life, and I have an essay in it about Cosmo and another dog named Roselle, who together taught me in a burst of awareness what true nobility is.  Here’s the really fun part though: WINNER GETS MONEYS.  So if all, oh, seventy million of you reading this blog (give or take) were to vote for my essay, I would be a big winner and surely appreciative and would gladly reward you all with glorious ribbons of internet cybercoupons (actual value of coupon is below computation).  Vote for Cosmo!  Vote for Chuckles!  Vote for dignity!  And do it like it’s burning a hole in your shorts while you’re wearing them!  (contest ends at the end of the month.  gratitude lasts forever.)

Maybe cybercoupons are not a sufficient draw, for those of you seeking a more tangible benefit than, um, nothing.  Well, how about some entertaining visuals to entice your goad?  Here, suck on these and tell me what they taste like:

Let’s start with the wetlands - wide acres of shining sand ringing the bay and rife with life.  I’ve always loved the way it looks and smells at dusk, when the crepuscular shift seems to bring out the richness of life and beauty.  I snapped this photo from the passenger seat while on my way to a feast of Polish food in Berkeley a few weeks ago.  It’s not quite the same as being there but it gives you a place to start imagining what it would be like:

Wetlands… waterfowl… DINNERTIME.  There’s our segue.  Not long ago we went to Clement Street and picked up, at Zach’s wise suggestion, a roast duck - one of these guys:

I stripped out a bunch of meat for some delicious fried rice, and then we mixed some more into a salad and some other dishes over the next few days.  Then I took everything that was left and boiled it into a rich consomme out of which just this past sunday I made some amazing polenta.  And there’s more where that came from.  Thanks, duck.  We wasted nothing.  Plus, you make a very striking composition, visually and gustatorialy.

Let’s go from the gastromorbid to the sublime.  After we got our duck we decided to take the long way home.  Clement Street is two blocks from my house but we were in the car anyway so why not drive to the top of Twin Peaks and just, um, peek?  And thus was it so, except the photos I took of the trip and view were sort of extremely not good.  Except for one, of Sutro Tower, whereof I lately even here have written.  I tried to instill with my words a sense of its austere grandeur but maybe I should just have started with this:

Yes, it’s a little fuzzy, but still lofty and imposing.  JUST LIKE ME.  And now let’s stick with the Sutro beautyshot at dusk theme: here’s a cameraphone photo I took this past weekend at Sutro Park, on the cliffs over the northwest corner of the city, overlooking the Pacific.  The site was once home to a mansion but all that remains of it is a retaining wall, in which recent rains left this puddle to catch the gleam of reflected sunlight as it poured across the underside of clouds that blanketed the sky like veins of granite:

And now finally, or at least finally for the natures mortes, is this study in color, geometry, urban decay and cosmic renewal: at a vacant lot near City Hall, next to an old brick building painted red, grows rich verdure.  In that raunchy crotch of the mid-market backwash, I was deeply moved by the implacable power of life, by the texture of human handiwork, and by the balance of forces of stopping and going, the green and the red:

Oh that was nice, was it not?  Images like those, they feed the soul.  And I know what you’re wondering: how does a man like me, a man of such depth of literary understanding and nuanced humor, also have the sensitivity to capture poems visually, not just in flowing words?  Oh yes, it’s a good story, and one I’ll tell you if you buy me a fancy meal with expensive wine.  But I can begin by letting you in on some secrets - secrets I thought I’d hidden even from myself.  But when I finally uncovered them a few weeks ago, wedged in the back pages of a photo album I mostly filled up in 1977, the fact I’d hidden them so well filled me with a burning desire to share these unspeakable secrets with the whole world, so you’d better look quick before I get wind of what I’m about to do and pull the plug on the whole ugly affair (that would be one of the shameful plugs, as referenced above):

ITEM: I began life freelancing as a nerd, before I decided to make it both vocation and avocation.  Here is a document that proves it if nothing else does - my A.D. certificate, signed personally by none other than Peter “the Eube” Uberroth, and if you don’t know who I am talking about, well, me and Carl Lewis are very disappointed in your ignorant millenial ass.  Don’t tell me you don’t know who Carl Lewis is.  This is just sad.  Okay, check this out, then.  It will tell you everything you need to know.  About everything.  Meanwhile, the rest of us aged brainies can feast our eyes on this bad boy:

(note: yeah, I photographed the documents instead of scanning them.  That’s because I don’t have a scanner.  And that’s because I’m not cool.  It’s not exactly the same as being a nerd, since many nerds have scanners, but it really doesn’t help, either.)

Okay, maybe that’s actually kind of cool, with the Eube’s real-deal John Hancock and those snazzy stars and such.  How could I been a nerd when I was awarded this kind of style?  Especially in a time when Carl Lewis was considered cool?  Oh, I had extra nerd stores saved up.  Let’s cue up Exhibit 2:

It is my Certificate of Participation Recognition for the Logotherapy Essay Contest.  My theme, apparently, was “The Pursuit of Meaning for Youth in the 1980s.” I was awarded this handsome piece of calligraphed construction paper (with foil badge!) in 1982, so this was in the nature of predictive essayism.  I think I said that the search for truth would be conducted by the light of whale-oil lanterns, with long pointed sticks for beating the brushy moors till truth got scared and ran for it, and then we could hunt it down for sport and sustinence.  This is because MTV had only been on the air for two years and there were still only like five teevee channels total.  Yeah, I didn’t win the contest.  That would actually have cut into my nerd cred.  Winning anything is cool.  Losing the logotherapy contest?  You gotta know that’s nerdy. 

And yet somehow, I managed to eke out a bit of coolness that emerged despite my years of nerdy prep.  Here, let me show you it.  But first, cast yourself back into the murky lukewarm seas of my coming-of-age.  I was at Northwestern University for five weeks of intensive theater training before my senior year of high school.  I learned mime and modern dance, sang in harmony while touching other boys, and wore high-cut shorts with contrast piping.  One would think I’d given up any chance of being cool - and I’d have agreed with you, up until that fateful night in late July when I found myself enjoying a conversation with three friends late at night.  That’s truly all it was - conversation, friendship, a laugh and a sigh.  But here’s the crazy thing:

TWO OF MY CONVERSATIONAL PARTNERS WERE FEE-MALES.  I was even in their actual room, with the beds in it where they slept!  Yes, me and some other dude were so cool we just spent a whole night in there talking.  With girls.  One of whom happened to be, as I recall, Jamie Gertz, but that’s just the way that turned out.  She was actually really nice.  And I got busted for it.  I saved the disciplinary slip all this time as proof of some imagined coolness that the paperwork erroneously implies.  Jamie and me, we were just friends.  And I paid the price for it.  And I’d do it again.  But not right now.

Because now it’s time to wrap this up with Insulin Shock Theater: can you withstand the eye-melting cuteness of my brood?  Look upon these punims, and despair!  Or just pinch their pudgybunny cheeks!  It’s all good when you’ve got…

okay what have you got there, son?  Zach off his pushbike at the Sutro Park carriagehouse, securing his marbles.  I particularly like how the duck on the helmet is sharing the joke with you. 

Let’s give Jesse a turn.  Here he is taking the car for a little spin.  You think he doesn’t know how to drive it?  Okay, you are probably right.  But that will not stop him.  NOTHING WILL STOP HIM.  Look at those eyes - fear runs from him.  I’m just glad he’s usually on my side. 

Okay, Z got shorted on that exchange, since he didn’t get to smile for the camera in any way you could see.  Let’s make up for that with a two-shot: Z and the steam-table chickenfeet, which actually looked really good:

That is enough for now.  If I have not persuaded you to vote for my Cosmo story, I have no more persuasion left with which to, um, suase you.  I give and I give and this is the thanks I get.  You break my heart.  Me and Jamie and Carl don’t need that kind of treatment.  We’ve still got the 80’s, dammit.  What do you have?  No don’t tell me.  I’m feeling a little fragile this morning.  Time to search for more meaning, I guess…

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Prison Shower Buddy

Let’s start with the reference section.  Saturday night is the beginning of Purim, the holiday that asks the question, “Are you drunk enough?” For anyone who’s not been bludgeoned by my magnum opus on the subject, Rashamontashen, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up.  Preview: read the biblical Book of Esther.  I rewrote it from the perspective of each of the four main characters.  Rash your graggers!  Turn it into a drinking game!  Or don’t!  It’s all up to you, my friend.  As are so many of life’s rich offerings. 

NOW THEN.  Let’s get into the meat of today’s offering, or today’s offering of meat.  This time, it works both ways.  And that’s the way I like it. 

Feb 11:

My previous prison shower buddy relationship started a couple of months ago. It ended this morning, when I dumped him for a new prison shower buddy. I’d better fill in some intermediate details here. I wouldn’t want y’all thinking I’m some kind of prison shower slut. I’m not even fickle. I just used the first one up, and there was nothing left to do but replace him.

A couple of months ago, when our story begins, I was in the market for shaving lotion. As a dude with a hirsute face and a clean-shorn head, shave lotion is an unguent of great significance for me. A good one makes my personal destubblification process far quicker and less onerous. A bad one, on the other hand (or head), will leave me bleeding, with patchy unshaved areas and an overall disheveled appearance. I tend to slice myself up pretty badly while shaving - a consequence of the classic combination of a rough beard, a tender delicate babyface, and a shaving style which might be referred to as “comatose hackery”: I basically go after the whiskers the way zombies go after brains, making up in enthusiasm what I lack in delicacy. So it’s not so unusual for me to finish up a shave looking like something from a slasher flick.

In my ongoing efforts to staunch the gouts of my own blood, I’ve become quite particular about my shaving products and process. First, I need to do the deed in the shower, not at a sink, for maximum humidity and hydration; also, it’s easier to clean up the gory aftermess that way. I have a decent electric shaver for dry usage, but it takes too long to get the job done and does not shave as closely; sometimes it even yanks a hair clear out of its follicle just for spite. No, it’s steel blades for me. I tend to prefer triple-blade action, if not quad - doubles dull up too fast. I like a nice heavy razor handle; it moves with more authority and gives me better control. And of course, selection of a topical unguent is always a matter of numerous complex considerations. Standard commercial foams do nothing for me but clog my razor and obscure my view of the action. Foam-up gels are no better, though they are admittedly a bit more fun. I even got a fancy specialty shavecream once; it not only clogged my razor, it also clung so tenaciously to my face I had trouble shaving it off.

No, for maximum efficiency and effectiveness, my choice, after years of painful trial and humiliating error, was hair conditioner, and specifically, the pale blue stuff that comes in a giant CostCo storebrand 2-pack. It goes on quickly with even coverage, it adequately softens the steel wool emerging from my face, and it washes off pretty easily. Okay, it also clogs the razor, but not as badly as some other products do. Cheap and almost unscented, that was the standby stuff for quite a few years.

The only drawback was that you could only get it at CostCo, which doesn’t always have everything I’m looking for every time I go there, which isn’t even that often anyway. I only needed to get the stuff once a year or so, but when I needed it I really needed it. And, not so long ago, I did, in fact, really need it. So when Kel came back from a diapers-and-seltzer run without the hefty twinpack of cool blue goo I’d requested, I was in a depilatory pickle. I had to resort to using Kel’s hair conditioner, which may be fine for her mane but wasn’t doing my skin any favors. I was shredding flesh and exsanguinating something fierce with every shave session. I was officially in the market for something new and smooth. It is thus, after all, that I roll.

In this way I found myself one morning at the jumbo downtown apothecaritopia that sits near where I de-bus on my way to work. I figured they’d have a decent selection of razoring accouterments, and I was right. A profuse and well-stocked display awaited my bleary browsing eye, with more creams, foams, lotions and facial lubes than I’d ever be able to try. After having so painstakingly identified the best shaving lotion option already, I felt that overthinking this choice wouldn’t help me make it. Every product says it’s great; most of them probably aren’t, at least not for ol’ Bloodyjowls here. I just needed to grab something that met my basic criteria and then get out before I froze up under the onslaught of commercial proliferation. All I knew for sure was that I wanted nothing I’d already tried and rejected, it should be basically odorless and low-suds, and if there was some reason to think it would treat my dome right, that would be alright with me.

Given these parameters, I chose as efficiently as I could - a tube of goo for “Bald Guyz,” per the product title. I didn’t know how good it was but the tube wasn’t so big that I’d wind up living with my mistake, if I’d made one, for too terribly long.

The next morning, I cracked open the tube and slapped a handful on my shower-soaked scalp and face. First impressions were favorable: barely scented, clear, slick without being goopy, and a good viscosity that spread quickly and smoothly without getting too thick to be effective. Subsequent impressions bore out the initial ones - shaving was easy, the blade didn’t stick or divot, and the stubble rinsed right off the blades exceptionally quickly. I was mostly sure I had found a winner, except for one thing: I didn’t like the way it was looking at me.

The tube is a vibrant blue color which I associate with police cruisers in Philadelphia. The product title is boldly emblazoned in white lettering across the top of the package, the lower portion of which depicts what I can only imagine the manufacturer considers to be an iconic user of this product: He’s a beefy, thick-necked, broadshouldered white dude, head bereft of all hair save eyebrows, reedy mustache, and a chincap goatee. He’s shown from mid-chest up in a grey t-shirt that strains to contain his turgid bulk, and he’s grinning out at the world with toothy enthusiasm. Superimposed over the bottom of this image, in black numbers, is the volume of the tube, depicted in both metric and English measurements that spread across his massive pectorals. It had reminded me of something when I picked it out in the store, but in my efficiency I hadn’t dwelt on what. Once I was standing in my shower, though, stark naked, dripping wet, and clutching my blades, I figured it out.

In my shower we have a soap caddy stuck to the wall for push-button dispensation of soap and shampoo (for those who use such stuff). My razor sits atop the caddy together with a small mirror wherewith I can see how badly I am cutting myself up. My new tube of shavegoo went there too. It’s high enough on the wall to leave the gootube product model just a little above my eye level.

So, I look up in the shower and see a big guy in a grey t-shirt with numbers on it, bald and leering at me.  Hmm.  I think I remember this from Escape from Alcatraz, and in that movie it didn’t turn out well. If I were Clint Eastwood I’d have been forced to jam a bar of soap down his throat. But - brace yourself - I’m not Clint, nor any other sort of Eastwood. I didn’t feel like picking a fight with my tube of shaving gel. I just delicately turned him to face the wall and tried to ignore him. But I really couldn’t. I knew he was there, smirking at the steamy tiles. Often enough I’d forget to put him back properly oriented away from me, so I’d see the corner of his eye out the corner of mine.  That was almost worse. It instilled a paranoia, as if he were just waiting for me to turn around to loofah my glutes or something, so he could pounce on me like some overaffectionate inmate looking for a special bathtime friend. That is to say, he wanted to be my prison shower buddy, and I could be his prison shower bitch.

But weeks passed without untoward bathtime incident. Eventually I grew inured to his hungry smile and biker-gang styling choices. Every time I got into the shower he was there waiting for me; every time I left the bathroom I knew I was turning the lights off on him, leaving him leering vapidly into the darkness. He was a creepy guy but he was two-dimensional, and anyway the shaving gel was a good product.

As slowly as I worked my way through the tube of goo, so also did I slowly come to an accommodation with my prison shower buddy. He stopped making me think I was one dropped bar of soap away from a fearful rogering. I got used to him hanging around. I never grew to like him much, but I did learn to view him with mitigated anxiety.

My reconciliation with the burly bald bomber in my shower pretty much tracked my gradual exhaustion of the lotion I was squeezing out of his lower end. By the time I’d emptied the whole tube, I felt fairly committed to the product, and I’d also learned to ignore the grin of my prison shower buddy as easily as I ignored the alarm when I hit the snooze button upon awakening - as something that was there but not meaningful, a deferrable reality. When it came time for me to toss the empty tube, his broad smile held no dread for me as it beamed up impotently from the garbage bucket. When I went to replace it, I didn’t think twice before getting another identical tube, with an identical shower buddy smiling out at me from it. He’s up on my soap caddy even now, waiting patiently for me with his carnivorous smirk. So now when I take that tube in hand at the time and place of my own choosing, I can’t help but ask him, only semi-rhetorically: Who’s the bitch now, Bitchy McBitcherstein? But of course I say it only to myself. I wouldn’t want to antagonize anybody.  I am a bleeder, after all.