October 2007 Archives

Yesterday, drove the old Volvo down to Brother Dan’s, left it parked outside his place, and gave him the keys.  Hard to believe I have had that car since 2001; I got it for 800 bucks, and I think it a pretty amazing car.  It’s got 170000 miles on it, but you turn the key and it starts.  I suspect, with minimal maintenance, it will go another 50000 at least.  Not that it doesn’t have flaws; it’s an ’86 sedan.  The paint is flaking off; the fabric on the ceiling is almost gone because at one time somebody left the sun roof open during a rain.  The leather seats are split; one of the windows doesn’t go up and down anymore; the radio antenna got broken off, and when you lift up the trunk it won’t stay up, so I put a golf club back there to hold it up.  Also it smells pretty bad.

But I drove it down to Brother Dan to see if maybe Nephew Dylan would be interested in registering it and getting a license and learning how to drive.  It’s hard to know what interests Nephew Dylan these days or as was once said “floats his boat.”  He’s 16.  Carol and I have met a number of people who say the most awful things about their 16 year olds, male and female.  Things like, I can’t stand to be in the same room with him.  Or, she has made my life into a living hell.

I was buying a tomato at the farmer’s marker and the young tomato girl launched into a rant about 16 year olds being the worst because they think they know everything and it’s impossible to talk to them. She looked about 18, so I guess she knows whereof she speaks. And she has a younger sister who is 16.

What happened to sweet 16:

Sixteen candles make a lovely light

But not half as bright

As your eyes tonight

That’s a song I heard when I was about 16.  Let’s see, that would have been 1961 or so, and come to think of it I had a pretty hard year.  I almost got kicked out of English because of the stuff I wrote about the teacher in my book reports.  Also the coach almost kicked me off the basketball team because he said my attitude was lousy, though I didn’t know what he was talking about, and years later Joan said they had thought of sending me to see somebody because I refused to talk the whole year.  Honestly, I don’t remember not talking.

At sixteen, the damn adulthood thing starts looming over your head; the idea that you can stay kid forever seems increasingly remote.  Of course, at 16 you don’t know that this is bumming you out completely….

And getting that first car is one of the symbols of the adult world that awaits…like the jaws of a bear trap.

Well, I got it wrong.  Carol’s mom remained frozen not because the cremation place was shut down by the fires, but because, the very day its scheduled yearly maintenance the cremation thing broke down.  How ironic?  Or perhaps merely coincidental?  So they had not only to do maintenance, they had actually to fix it.  Unless there’s more to a cremation apparatus than I think I have to wonder what the hell could have broken.  Isn’t it like a fiery oven?  There’s not much to that.  Maybe the pilot light went out.

I lie down to take a nap but can’t because of this banging sound.  It’s coming from a ways off but still pretty damn loud because it starts and stops.  The sound is coming from a pile driver I can see out the condo window.  It’s less than a mile away but I can’t figure out where exactly it’s located so I can’t figure out what the hell it is doing or why it’s there banging away.

So yesterday, when we were taking a plant to Carol’s office, we turned off on a road we thought might take us next to the pile driver.  It didn’t but we did get a closer view.  It was banging away at the very edge of the gold course where a concrete wall was constructed with an opening through which water could flow to keep the golf course from being flooded.  When it  rains a lot—and it has been a bit since it has done that—the golf course gets flooded like a shallow lake and has on one occasion, when we had the El Nino, come awful close to our back fence.

Away it looks as if they are doing something to the drainage ditch from the golf course that runs off into a slough that is a bird refuge.  At one end of the slough is the golf course and at the other a small inlet that allows ocean water to lap into the slough at high tides.  And usually there are birds hanging out there.  In fact, Santa Barbara has a considerable diversity of birds because there are both sea birds and land birds.  Sometime birdwatchers from foreign countries come to SB to look at the birds.  Once, when I could still bike, I crossed a little bridge lined on both sides by Germans with binoculars.

I was disturbed to hear from Carol yesterday that she had found out that her mother’s corpse is still in refrigeration and not yet cremated. She got the paper work off in time I think but then the fires down there intervened and somehow the cremation place did not get all the information they needed for the death certificate.

I don’t know what the big deal is with that damn death certificate.  But they can’t get rid of a body legally I guess until it is somehow fully confirmed that the body belongs to the person people say it belongs to.  So as of yesterday Carol’s mom’s corpse had been hanging out in the refrigeration unit for two weeks.

Can that be? That Carol’s mom died two weeks ago.  It feels longer ago than that what with the leak in the roof, the dehumidifiers, five days in a motel to get away from the dehumidifiers, people coming and going with dehumidifiers and hanging new dry wall where holes were cut in the walls, and finishing the dry wall, and now it seems the whole chore will not be completed, as I may have previously said, until this coming Friday.  So more people will be coming and going all next week.

The big chore will be the carpet cleaning people.  I need to get as much stuff off the floor as possible so they can get to as much carpet as possible.

And since last Monday, in the middle of all this mess, I have been trying to respond to fifty student papers.  I say “respond” since I don’t like to say “grade.”  But actually I am grading, and my response gets all warped by the need to grade.  In fact, my response becomes mostly a justification for the grade.  I mean true I am also trying to explain how the student might improve his or her writing, but even that explanation feels more like a justification of the grade than anything else.

Sometime I really wish I were teaching math.  Then I would not have to write any justification.  I could just add up the number right or wrong; and that number would justify the grade.  Some teachers do try to run a numbers thing; like 20% for organization; and 20% for unity; and 20% for sentence formation; and 20% for something else.  So that it all adds up to a 100%; and then they can add up all the percentages and come out with say, 85%, a solid B and hope the student will not complain because they are used to numbers with grades and know that 85% is a solid B.

But I have never been able to do that because I am no good at numbers and also because giving 20% for organization, for example, means that I have to be able to define what organization is and how that might be different from “unity” and both different from “sentence formation.”  And frankly I can’t do that.  I guess I am too philosophical or something.  But I really don’t know what organization is or how to distinguish good organization in a student paper, from what the students have been taught is good organization: an introduction, followed by three points, followed by conclusion.  The five paragraph essay. 

I don’t know but grading student papers is a lot harder than a person might think it would be. It’s tough work and always wears me out.  But thank god, I am almost done with this “batch.”

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A couple of days ago the sea and sky looked really strange from the dust in the air and possibly also dust on the ocean.  While these are actually pictures--or representations of real things--the sea and the sky--they strike me as looking quite a bit like abstract art I have seen over the years.  I think maybe I will monkey around with these pics to see if I can produce a piece of abstract art to hang on my wall.  Maybe I could take images over to Kinkos and see how large an image they could produce...maybe... 

 Video clip test

Yesterday—Thursday—Brother Steve wrote:

The evacuation was lifted at 10 this morning, and they started letting people drive up the grade around 12, and I got in the line around 12:30....it was a long line....you had to have an I.D. that said "Escondido"....if it said Valley Center or anything else, they turned you around.  But everything is fine here, and I'll go back to work tomarrow....what a week!

The grade to which he refers is a steep grade that runs up to Valley Center.  Apparently they were checking ID for two reasons: to keep out looters (if you can believe) and also to make sure people were going into areas that had been cleared for re-habitation.  Apparently there were concerns about fallen power lines and exposed gas lines….

Today—Friday—Brother Steve writes:

The evacuation is lifted, but the roads are closed again....if you go down into town, you can't get back....there are boulders in the road, and they have to inspect any bridges....so it looks like another vacation day for me....I'm not going to go down to work this afternoon if they won't let me come back home at night....some people have been using the Jeep trails, but they are more familiar with them than I am....no smoke here, clear, calm, and cool right now....but Paradise Mt. is still closed, it's still burning somewhere between Hellhole and Mesa Grande....

So while the fire danger is abating, things down in San Diego are quite a mess.  I have had a couple of students not show for my classes this week; I expect they were down in SD when the bad fires hit and got stuck there.  I know for a fact that one student was heading down that way Friday a week ago.

The air here, while much, much clearer, is still not completely clear from dust from the windstorm and smoke from the inland blaze that is now I believe contained.  More than the usual numbers of students were hacking up a storm.  Also they were pretty de-energized, especially my three o’clock class, making it a pretty hard row to hoe yesterday.

This weekend the big Halloween bash occurs in the student ghetto of Isla Vista.  A decade or so ago, this bash was nationally famous; people actually drove from out of state to participate in rampant drunkenness and drink sodden casual sex.  Over 60,000 people were in IV one year; fights broke out, along with other rampant rowdiness.

The next year they clamped down.  I happened to be in IV the Friday before the start of “festivities” and saw this most amazing line of cop cars pulling into the area, along with police on horseback and riot vehicles.  Man, it was sort of scary.

This year, in addition to the massive police buildup, they are outlawing parking on the residential streets within walking distance of IV.  I don’t think this is legal frankly; but they are doing it anyway.  As one drives towards campus, there stands one of those mobile flashing signs reading:  OBEY ALL LAWS! MAXIMUM ENFORCEMENT!

Next week will be impossible; 80% of the students will still be wasted from hangovers on Tuesday. Many students will also contract veneral diseases and be arrested for such things as public drunkenness and urinating in public. Some of the students sitting in my class will be fresh out of jail.

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1. dusty red sundown from dirt and smoke

2. sundown on sand

3. sundown with nearly invisible dophin fin

4. tiny sundown

5. moonrise over golf course 

The temp has dropped.  Yesterday, it hit 88 here in SB; pretty darn high for this time of year.  But the Santa Ana winds will do that; I remember a Christmas where the temp was over 80.  The winds too have dropped.

Brother Dave wrote saying he and Sister in Law Teresa were just fine, that Brother Steve was OK and had tried to get back to the Resort but had to turn around and go back to Brother Dave’s what with the traffic being completely impossible.

Brother Dave had a cancerous cell removed from his cheek.  It was a squamous cell; it takes a long time for them to metastasize and they caught his plenty early.  Still to make sure it doesn’t come back they cut out a good deal of flesh skin around the cancer.  Dave says he has a lot of stitches.

I had one of those on my lip years ago.  I don’t think we were meant to be out in the sun a lot, genetically speaking.

The condo is still a mess.  The new dry wall has been hung but now it has to be finished and the work on every thing will not be completed till next week. Meanwhile all surfaces are covered with a thin layer of dust and grime from the fire and the dust storm.  I guess we will leave this stuff there till the repairs get done.

I remember reading JP Sartre, years and years ago, and he said something like, “There is no such thing as a natural disaster.”  That blew my mind back then.  What is the idiot talking about?  Then I saw his point was really simple.  No law says people have to build their homes right on a fault line or in the middle of dry brush.  He is right.  Sure the winds were tremendously high, but people have foresight, or prudence, and they could have exercised it by not building in the middle of a flood plain or something, but that would run contrary to the California way of life which is to build, build, build with minimal or no zoning.

If a natural disaster is something inevitable, this wasn’t or at least the degree of the destruction wasn’t.  I do believe Sartre would accept (though he is now dead—death being truly an inevitable natural disaster) having the world destroyed by a meteor might count as a natural disaster.  But then there would be nobody around to think about natural disasters.  So who cares?

I want to say, crisis averted.  But that’s not the case really.  Brother Stephen did have to evacuate and last night he emailed saying fires had kicked up again in the area where he lives.  So his home may still be in danger.  But Sister in Law Teresa said she would be sure to call us if they had to evacuate from another fire that was burning in their area.  She hasn’t called so far, so maybe they are OK.

And even if the California Tingles were spared relatively speaking, many people were not.  One report says nearly a million people have been displaced.  The roads must be a terrible mess, and from what David and Teresa said yesterday, we got the feeling that the entire SD area was closing down. People were not or just couldn’t get into work.

We got an email from his son saying that Carol’s former step father is OK and had a good night’s sleep at Charger Stadium.  Possibly he will be moved back to his home today, though who knows.  The winds are still high and not expected to go away completely until tomorrow.

Carol and I finally got back into our condo yesterday.  The place is a complete mess.  Junk everywhere and dust from the winds and dirt from the repairs.  Damn!  The touch up guy will not be able to get here till tomorrow or Friday, so we will have people coming and going, in and out, for at least two more days. 

The condo association people have decided to take temporary steps to curb the leaking problems in our building of 8 units while they continue to consider ways—all very expensive—to tackle the larger plumbing problem for all of the units.

Things are going not so well for the California Branch of the Tingle Clan.  Brother Steve had to evacuate because of the fires yesterday to Brother Dave.  This Tuesday morning Brother Steve reports that Mt. Miguel burned (a mountain nearby) and south Spring Valley (where we CA Tingles first lived) is being evacuated as of now.  This means that Brother Dave, Brother Steve, and Sister-in-Law Teresa may all have to evacuate.  Thankfully, they have their motor home, but who knows what the traffic will be like.

They say 300,000 between LA and San Diego have had to evacuate.

The home where Carol’s mom died had to be evacuated.  This means Carol’s former step-father, Morty Berk, who is 95 years old had to moved down to the football stadium where the Chargers play.

Santa Barbara is in no danger at the moment; also the winds here have dropped though the skies remain thick with dust.

In some terrible way, we can’t help but be relieved that Mrs. Press passed away two Saturdays ago.  The thought of her alone, displaced, and being kept in the bowels of a football stadium would have just driven Carol crazy.

We are going to move back into our condo today no matter what, after five days of camping in a motel.

More later—as it eventuates…..

 Brother Steve was forced to evacuate his home near Rancho Bernardo near where Joan and WB previously lived, and also Carol's mother.  At the moment, Brother Steve is safe with Brother Dave far from the flames.  Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes...and last night fires were popping up all up and down the coast.  In Santa Barbara, for the time being, there are no fires, except in the back country.  The winds also that brought the dust storm described below have died down in our immediate area.

Meanwhile Carol and I remained displaced in a motel while the drying out of our condo continues. 

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Adding to the strangeness of our displaced status—I was at a stop sign on the way back to the pet friendly room in the motel when I looked up and noticed what I thought was smoke kicking up from the backside of the mountains.  The winds were high and I thought “fire,” though that didn’t make much sense since that whole area was burned to the dirt with the zaca fire.  So then I thought dust which made more sense.

Sure enough.  Winds of 20 to 30 mph were blowing back there and gusting to 60 mph.  The result was an ever expanding dust cloud that by late afternoon had spread over the entire area.  Really sort of miserable.

That was yesterday.  Saturday.  Today, Sunday, we woke to find a fine dust all over everything.  And predictions are the wind will continue to kick up through Monday.

I go into the closet office to take stuff out and am in there about ten minutes and start sweating profusely because it’s got to be over a 100 degrees with those two dehumidifiers pouring out heat.  And then the whole condo starts heating up—the downstairs has three dehumidifiers going full blast, and so the kitchen area and our living area are intolerably hot unless we open all the windows to cool the place down which seems to defeat the purpose of the dehumidifiers which is to heat up the place to dry it out.  Plus that, there’s the noise from those things.

Carol and I decide the place is uninhabitable and probably a health hazard which we tell the people of the condo association so they will know how much we have been put out by this leak and all the other leaks which we want them to know because it is their job to make sure these leaks don’t happen.  Maybe they will get scared and do something because otherwise we might sue them.  Which we won’t because we know they are trying to do something because the plumbing in all of the 80 or so units is starting to go because this particular condo complex was built in 1973 and the problem is bad enough now that the insurance company that insures the whole complex says something must be done or they will no longer insure us…because of all of the leaks and the costly repair that follows.

So Carol gets us a room at a nearby motel that we have checked out some other time for some reason because we know it has “pet friendly” rooms, by which they mean rooms that you can have pets in and that will cost you a lot more, plus you have to sign a document saying you will pay extra if the pet poops or something.  So we throw some stuff in some luggage and go to the motel and check in, so now we are officially displaced persons.  And because we are displaced I start thinking about Hurricane Katrina and how all those people were truly and totally displaced and I start getting all bummed out by that again and so on top of all the other cursing I am doing about the leak I am now also cursing the government also…and getting more depressed and frustrated by the second.

But we don’t take the kitty-cat even though we have a pet friendly room because, as it turns out, the one habitable room in the condo is the bedroom.  If you close the doors and open the windows the room is not half bad and that’s the room where the kitty-cat spends three fourths of her day anyway.  So we leave her food and water and her pooper thing and the next day when we come back to open up the place for the clean up people she seems perfectly happy because she is like 12 years old and mostly just sleeps, though she seemed happy to see us when we entered her room.
 
This is a good and sweet natured little kitty-cat though somewhat stupid.

So we decide just to leave her in the room for while she might miss us some we think she would probably be more upset if we took her out of her familiar room and off to some damn pet-friendly motel room.  So we are displaced but the kitty-cat is not.

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1. hole in closet office that will have to be fixed and will require forever to do so.

2. view from the tiny patio of our pet-friendly motel room unit. 

So what with a plumber banging around in the ceiling, I couldn’t call it a night’s sleep and in the morning some guys come who do water damage clean up and, aside from having the condo swept away by a flood it’s about as bad as it can get.  The main guy, Danny, goes around with this little meter he sticks in the wall that tells him how wet the wall is and this thing is going off—beep, beep, beep—like it has discovered uranium or something.  The little pantry wall is saturated, as is the carpet on the floor.  Also water ran out from the little pantry onto our new white carpet in the living area and it too is saturated…and as for my office…it’s a damn mess.

They start bringing in these damn machines they call “dehumidifiers” which are like air conditioners that give off heat—I mean they blow out hot air and they make a significant low grade, but irritating noise.  So I start moving stuff—that I have just put in—my little office and they bring in the machines…and then, I can’t believe, Danny says those machines—four of them, by this time, will have to be on for five days.  And probably, given the way the damn little beeper is going off, he is going also to have to take out one wall in my little closet office so he can get to the insulation behind the wall that he believes is completely saturated.

I am like totally and completely fit to be tied.  I am pretty pissed off too because this is the third time, three years in a row, that we have had major water leak problems.  Two summers ago was the slab leak right in the middle of the kitchen area—so for like weeks and weeks we have people coming and going and a big hole, and then dirt, and finally concrete (that can’t be covered because it has to “cure” properly) in the middle of the kitchen.  And last summer when we get back from SC we start smelling a smell in the little pantry that alerts us to the fact that the wall has been saturated from a bad leak, while we were gone, in the utility closet, and the repair of that drags on for over a month….And now this…

What a freaking mess—we were finally starting to get things back in a little order and now this.  Chaos again.  Junk everywhere.  A place for nothing and nothing in its place.  And I have got to go teach. 

Poor Carol, in the middle of all this, gets a call from the people who are cremating her mother’s remains saying they have not received some signed documents from Carol which they haven’t because they faxed the documents to Carol’s work place and nobody told her they had arrived, so she has to rush right over there and get the documents and sign them immediately because if she doesn’t, well, her mother will have to be frozen for eight days like a popsicle because the cremation place is about to close down for 8 days for its yearly cremation cleanup.  But she gets the documents in on time and as far as we know her mother was cremated right on scheduled and is not sitting in some freezer frozen like a Popsicle.

We get a good laugh out of that—Bertha, the Popsicle, I say—because, what the hell, it is too grotesque not to laugh.

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1.  damn dehumidifier in closet office.

2.  kitty-cat in chaos

3.  downstairs chaos

4   chaos continued 

Let’s see—not last night—but the night before that I go into the brand new little closet office that we have created for me and my computers to turn off the lights and note that water is dripping down from the ceiling around the outlets for the lights.  It’s not a flood, just a drip.  But what the hell is water doing dripping out of my ceiling at 930 at night.  I feel fit to be tied.  I woke up that morning fit to be tied, and now I feel even more fit to be tied.  I feel that I am going to crap my head out my anus.

I am deeply disturbed to find at 930 at night water dripping from my ceiling.  So Carol gets on the phone and I go break into the utility closet that is right below my new little closet office because that’s where the turn off is located and the water heaters.  And I break in with a screwdriver because only certain people are supposed to have the key to the damn utility closet though it would make terrific sense for us to have one since we live right next to the damn thing, and sure enough hot water is dripping down the wall.  I turn off the water to the whole building, that would be 8 units of people without water.

But then one of the guys from the condo board shows up with the key to let in a plumber and finds me standing there with my screw driver and we decide the problem is just the hot water, so I turn the water back on, and he sets out to turn off just the hot water which he doesn’t know how to do and I don’t blame him because the pipes coming out of the water heater and going into the wall have been repaired so many times and replaced they are like some weirdedassed Rube Goldberg machine.  But he gets the water off, and another condo guy comes by and I say I am worried because while we have turned off the water, the problem is in the ceiling of my two story condo and I cannot figure out how the hell a person gets up into the ceiling above the condo into the crawl space. 

Well, he says—and of course I know—some units have an hole in the ceiling a guy can crawl through.  He knows because they have been trying to replace the TV cable in one of the units and the TV cable people keep sending out fat repair persons who cannot get through the hole in the ceiling.  I mean they get stuck trying to.  And Carol who has got the business manager for the the condo complex and has called the plumber with the OK of the business manager says she believes the unit at the end of our building with 8 units in it has a way into the crawl space.  So we go disturb this person I have never met before and she does have a way into the crawl space at the top of her stairs hidden behind a large pull down light fixture.

But I am still troubled because the units are not like in a neat row; some are set forward and some are set back and it’s a long way from that unit to our unit and I just can’t see with the way the buildings are situated that a plumber, one small enough to get through the opening, could crawl from one end to the other.  I say this to the second condo association guy who has showed up and he says he thinks he has a list back at his place of the units that have openings to the crawl space.  So he goes to get that and finally comes back after the plumber has arrived, and gone through the opening we have found, and says he can’t get from that unit to our unit, and with the list we find out that there is a way into the crawl space in the unit right next door to ours, so we have to wake up our neighbors at 1030 at night because they have to work the next day and they let the plumber in so he can crawl into the space.

Our next door neighbors are nice and polite and we wait till the plumber comes out of the ceiling and says he has indeed found a leak and that it will take about two hours to repair, which he can do right now at 1030 at night or come back in the morning.  And what should he do.  And for some reason everybody is looking at me maybe because I am the oldest and clearly the most pissed off—should we wait and leave people without hot water when they get up in the morning to take their damn showers—or should we go ahead and just do it.  So I ask the young lady who lives next door what she thinks since they are the ones who are going to be most disturbed as the plumber goes in and out of their unit and crawls into the roof, and she says do it now because that would be best for everybody, and I say sure OK.

So the plumber goes to work at 135 dollars an hour at about 11 at night.  Now usually I am in bed and at least trying to get to sleep by 11 at night.  But that is clearly not going to happen because I am increasingly fit to be tied as I see more and more clearly that the way things are going in all likelihood they are going to have to go in, once the plumbing repair is done, the attic, take out the ruined insulation and probably have to knock out the sheet rock in the roof of my new little office closet and replace it and this will require I take out all the stuff I have put in and will take forever with people coming and going—and lord knows, how the hell long getting the repercussions of this damn leak taken care of…

 Because additionally, it has become crystal clear by this point that the carpet of the little pantry closet we have downstairs has been completely saturated with water from the leak, which is coming down through the walls and that too will have to be pulled out and replaced.  And I am fit to be tied thinking about that because we had to go through that last summer when water from the water heaters saturated the wall of that closet and all the sheet rock had to taken out because of mold growth and we were stuck for a week with a damn demolding machine howling away in the closet generating heat and noise and that just went on for damn ever—with people coming and going to take out the sheetrock and put in new and recarpet the floor.

So maybe it’s 11 and we are sitting next door with our neighbor and Carol mentions that her mother just died—which the neighbor didn’t know—and she just starts laughing, which is not as impolite as it sounds because Carol has told our tale of woe about all the deaths and stuff that is going on with us.  And she says she is sorry but she doesn’t know what else to do when she thinks of all the crap that has been raining down on Carol and me lately.  And I say, go for it, because it certainly is damn funny in some way.  I mean, I am not laughing but I can see how it might appear funny and is a sign I guess of the weird state I am in because I really am not offended when somebody starts laughing when a person says my mother just died.

And maybe if I were not fit to be tied I would be laughing too because really it is a damn howler.

When I finally get out of the doctor’s and back to my car, a meter person is ticketing the car right behind mine, and mine would have been next since it had that white chalk mark on the tire, but I get in my car and drive off with a prescription for a sleep disorder study, another to get my cpap machine recalibrated and with an elongated uvula.  Of course I had that before I went to the doctor but didn’t really know it.

I am not sure about the surgery thing on my uvula.  As far as I am concerned hospitals are death traps.  But this would be out-patient.   And as for the uvula itself, well, I don’t know.  What the hell is it good for?  Well, we use it speaking; people who are born with no uvula have an unpronounceable condition and can’t say certain words and speak through their noses.  So the uvula plays a role in vocalization.  What if I got my uvula chopped and came out talking like Minnie Mouse.

But I don’t have to think about that till have the new sleep disorder study.  Then we will see.  In the meantime I have a prescription to get my cpap machine recalibrated to a lower level; maybe with less air pressure from the machine I won’t breathe in so much air.  So when I get back to the condo I call the place that recalibrates the cpap machine.  They are an outfit that contracts out to my HMO and are located clear down in Oxnard.

I get this person on the phone and ask when they can send somebody up to recalibrate the machine and she says, oh, we don’t do that.  You have to bring the machine in.  This means I have to drive 40 minutes down to Oxnard and 40 minutes back, and while the traffic to Oxnard is not full on LA Traffic, I would still give it a 6.5 on my scale of terrible traffic with 10 being the 405 go home traffic.

So I start getting real pissed off at this receptionist person who sounds like she is about 13 years old and doesn’t know shit from shinola.  But I am polite and say OK and just hang up.  I mean we have been through this before—about having to drive 40 minutes there and 40 minutes back—and Carol called the HMO and they got pissed and called the cpap outfit and, boy, did they change their tune real quick. They are supposed to drive up to SB but they don’t tell people that.

I am boiling because it looks as if we are going to have to go through all that crap again.  Be damned if I am going to drive down to Oxnard to have some idiot person put two fingers on two buttons on the cpap machine and in about a minute recalibrate the cpap machine.  I mean any idiot can recalibrate the machine, but there is a method to it having to do with plugging and unplugging the cord to the machine that I don’t know how to do but which I observed when the tech a while back recalibrated the machine for me.  So to get the damn thing recalibrated you have to have a doctor’s prescription and then you have to drive 40 minutes to Oxnard to have a person push down on two buttons because they don’t want you to know how to do it or the doctor would not be able to write a prescription.

So I hit the web and in about 10 minutes I pull up the official manual for my particular machine that is for the reading pleasure of the creeps in control because it tells you how to recalibrate the machine (the directions are pretty clear) and in the margin in caps and bold it says something like:  Don’t let the patients know how to do this so they won’t “tamper” with the machine.

So following the directions, I push the two buttons with my own two fingers and get the menu to recalibrate and drop the number to six ALL BY MYSELF.

A good half hour to 45 minutes late, the pulmonary doctor who is going to look into why I am breathing in air finally comes through the door.  He is about my age I guess.  A little younger and recently arrived in SB from Texas about two years ago.  He is a new doctor for me because, as I said, my previous pulmonary guy died on me in his sleep in his apartment, alone, because his faithful dog had died not long before he did.

Anyway this guy is OK and I do believe spends about 30 minutes, maybe a few more, actually talking with me and getting a fix on my condition—which is pretty amazing.  I mean I am not used to the red carpet treatment, doctorwise.  And finally he says something like all that weight loss may be the cause of the problem and maybe I don’t even need a sleep apnea machine anymore.  So he says he will prescribe another sleep study thing at the sleep disorder clinic for me.

Then he decides to check me out physically I mean, which I don’t like, and for which I have to take off my shirt.  So he does the chest tapping thing and the chest listening thing with the stethoscope and then he says open wide and looks in my mouth and says something like Sweet Jesus or Eureka and has to stifle a laugh because he says, “You have one enormous uvula!”  He even calls Carol over and says take a look at this, and she looks in and says, “My God.  You have one enormous uvula.”  I mean I have been living with this woman for nearly 30 years and she has never noticed my enormous uvula before.

Of course, I have never taken a good look at her uvula either; so the pot shouldn’t call the kettle black

But then I go to the mirror and look in my mouth and I have to say—I hadn’t noticed either—that I have one enormous uvula.  It starts out normal looking enough at the base—a bit wide, I guess—but then it just keeps going and going and disappears clean out of sight behind my tongue.  Twist and turn as I might looking into the mirror I can’t see the end of it.

I tell you I feel a bit weird looking at the damn thing.  I don’t know if I was born with it—if it’s genetics or something—or if maybe I stretched it out somehow.  But of all the weird things a person might have to be weird about: like huge hands to play the guitar with or huge ears or other huge things—I don’t really appreciate or understand why I should have a weird uvula.  I guess there is no rhyme or reason to it.

Now a weird or elongated uvula can be and frequently is one of the causes of sleep apnea because if you are a back sleeper the damn thing can easily flop back and block the airhole, so while he said we would wait for the result of the sleep study, there’s a strong chance the doctor will recommend that I get my uvula chopped in about half.  This is a very minor procedure, he says, out patient with a local.  I could be in and out with a shortened uvula in about 30 minutes.

In the meantime, while we wait for the study, he gave me a prescription to get the calibration on my sleep apnea machine reduced to help fight off the gas from breathing in too much air.

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Ellwood in the evening with a tiny sliver of a moon. 

Back to the pursuit of a good night's sleep.  Carol is doing well,

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So it’s about 900 and the open slot to see the pulmonary guy for my problem breathing in air and burping and farting and to get a prescription for a new autocpap machine is at 10.  I am running a bit behind because the guy says for me to come in 15 minutes early to do the paperwork.  Being the hyper punctual guy I am I get in the car and bomb down the freeway only to find the exit for the doctor is closed for repair and the sign that told me that was located just past the last turn I could take before the closed street.  So I drive by the closed street and go to the next turn off and turn round to get back on the freeway to get to the street and what do you know, but it’s closed too. And then I can’t find a spot in the parking lot, but I do find one on the street, and finally get there at 5 till 10 to do the paperwork.

And of course, I am such an idiot, I am still sitting on my ass there in the waiting room at 1020 when Carol, who is driving through town on the way to LA to attend a convention, comes in to sit and wait with me.  Now, I want to make it perfectly clear.  I am not some big baby who needs his wife to come with him to the doctor.  Sure doctors make me like incredibly anxious and my blood pressure is always elevated consequently.

When years ago Carol first started asking me if I wanted her to go to the doctor with me I would resolutely say no and I would go ALL BY MYSELF.  But then after the doctor visit she would want to know what the doctor had said and half the time I couldn’t remember what he or she said exactly and I would forget to ask some question she suggested I make sure to ask, or I would just be pissed off and not want to talk about it all.  So she stopped asking if I wanted her to come with me and asked instead if she could come with me because that was the only way she was going to get an accurate view of what the doctor said and make sure I asked the questions that needed to be asked.

So I said, OK, she could come along since it seemed she didn’t seem to think I was a Big Baby but simply wanted to come along for efficiency of communication and accuracy of report.  And now I like to have her come along with me if she can because that gives me somebody to talk to while I wait in the big waiting room and later in the little waiting room with that table thing you lie on.  So I hope I have made it clear that I am not a Big Baby or anything like that…just terribly anxious and scared to death of doctors.

Especially pulmonary doctors, because each time I see one of those I get to thinking they will look down my throat or something and say my but that’s a mighty fine cancer you have growing there from those 40 years of smoking that you have so irresponsibly done.  So not only am I scared about the idea they may find cancer but I have to deal with the immense guilt I feel—every damn day—at the fact that I have smoked for forty years and have in all likelihood, as a consequences, consigned to myself to an early grave preceded by the slow torture of emphysema because I am a hyper rational guy and actually believe what the doctors say about smoking killing a person.

So given all the inward turmoil I go through just to get to a pulmonary doctor, I must have been feeling pretty fed up with all the burping and farting to agree so readily to zoom down there to fill in for the cancellation.

Carol’s mom died in the late evening of October 13, 2007.  She had been nearing death for a couple of days and was, so they reported, becoming agitated.  They gave her some anti-anxiety meds and then Carol got a call saying her mom had died.

Carol called her Uncle Bernie who lives in Las Vegas to let him know his sister had died; Bernie was a dentist and during his time going to dental school had lived a while with Carol and her parents.  He told Carol he knew that her parents had been very, very difficult people, but that she, Carol, had survived it whole and had been, in his opinion, a great daughter.  He even said he could not have wished for a better daughter himself.

An incredibly nice thing to say.  That was the only thing that made Carol feel like crying because she has been preparing herself for some time for this occasion and has done a good job of it, I think.

I never had what you might call an intimate conversation with Carol’s mom.  She liked me OK I guess because I married her daughter.  It was very important to her that her daughters be married, so I filled the bill on that score.  Also she liked the way I scrambled eggs because every time we visited there, after Carol’s father died, she had me scramble the eggs which honestly I did better than she did because hers came out hard and dry.

Those were probably the best moments I had with Carol’s mom sitting at the kitchen table eating scrambled eggs.  She also always had cream cheese and bagels on hand.  And purple onion.

But I didn’t have a doctor to write me a prescription for one of those new super autocpaps.  I used to have a doctor; he was a pulmonary specialist.  He was the guy who ordered the original sleep study and prescribed the original cpap (so that my insurance paid for it).  But he was dead.  He died just a week or two before the last time I was to visit him.  I was told then by somebody that I should get another pulmonary guy to monitor my sleep apnea, as well as my newly discovered asthma and my potential lung cancer.  But I was also told they didn’t have many pulmonary guys and when you did get a guy it might take a couple of months before you could get an appointment.

I had other things on my mind and slacked off I guess.  So there I was, having had 4.5 hours sleep, burping and farting up a storm, at like 540 in the morning, with the sun not even up yet, and feeling damn frustrated because I didn’t have a doctor to write a prescription for one of those new super-duper autocpap jobs.  But I think it was later than that because Carol was up and suddenly I heard her shout, “You have lost 30 pounds!”  I was about to shout back, so, the fuck what?  When I realized she was suggesting that maybe my having lost 30 pounds of ugly, unseemly, and possibly death producing trunk weight had something to do with the fact that now for no apparent reason that I could think of I was breathing in air all of a sudden.

I didn’t know if it made physiology sense or not, but she was right about something.  I couldn’t think of anything else that had changed that could have produced a change.  Of course, I had not lost 30 pounds in six weeks (about the length of time I have been breathing in air).  I would probably have dropped dead doing that, but maybe like when I got down to 170 which happened pretty recently and which was the lowest I had been in over 15 years something had happened to provoke the wind problem.  Maybe when a person has 20 pounds of gut sticking out they tend to sleep in a different position or something.  I have no idea honestly. 

But it made some sort of sense.  I had indeed lost 30 pounds.  In fact, yesterday I weighed 164.5 on my insane digital scale.  I say insane because it’s damn erratic.  Still I think the 164.5 was corrected since I doubled checked it with the scale at the club, one of the old fashioned non-digital kind. So assuming both are accurate, as of yesterday, I weighed less than I have in 25 plus years.  I haven’t weight less that 165 since the very early 80’s which is a damn scary thought.  But then in the spring of 2006 after I got back from SC where we had buried WB in the Ora Cemetery, I weighed 202—the most I had ever weighed.  I had to buy fat pants at Costco.

So anyhow I had lost weight over a year and a half period which should have made me feel better but didn’t because the will power required not to eat was draining me of all my energy, and irony of irony, I was getting less sleep than ever because of the air problem.

So I yelled to Carol that I just had to get a pulmonary doctor or something, and what was the number.  But she called for me since she knows I get really, really irritated being put on hold.  But what do you know, she got right through, and they had an opening that very morning at 10 because they had a cancellation and wanted to know, did I want the slot.

I got only 4.5 hours sleep Tuesday night not only because I couldn’t get to sleep what with all the burping and farting from breathing in air from my sleep apnea mask but also because my brain has taken it into its head, for about a year now, that I am supposed to wake up at 5 am.  And by 5 am, that’s what I mean.  I will wake, look at the clock and it will not be 459 or 501; no, it will be exactly 5.  How my brain should know while I am completely unconscious that it should be 5 I don’t know.  But it does, right down to the second, apparently.

So Wednesday morning found me with a cup of coffee at about 520, with it being completely dark outside, sitting in front of the computer, burping and farting, while looking around the web for some way I might relieve myself of the same.  I found that on sleep apnea bulletin boards the topic of breathing in air came up quite a bit, though people tended not to speak of farting but of  “breaking wind” or as suffering “wind” as a result of breathing in air.  Honestly I don’t know what produces such prudery; frankly I think calling farts “wind” is an insult to wind, which usually, at least does not stink.

But while there was much talk of wind, I could find no solution to it.  I found talk of elevating the upper body, and of not eating three hours before you start breathing in that sleep apnea air, and also of loading up on Gas-x and stuff like that.  These seemed to me desperation measures, rather ad hoc with more hope behind them than any solid grasp of the situation.  One clear thing did emerge though more people seemed to suffer this air inhalation problem if the machine that blows the air into the mask was set at a high calibration.

Yes, these machines are calibrated, based on a sleep apnea study, to the needs of the individual sufferer.  While you are sleeping, during the sleep study, you are monitored by any manner of wires stuck to many parts of your body, and when you show signs of sleep apnea the techs who stay up all night doing this stuff monkey around with the calibration of the machine to see how much “wind” the person needs to make the sleep apnea episode go away.  Some people, I was amazed to see have their machines calibrated to 25 and above.  To me that is unimaginable and would be the same as having a small hurricane blowing in your face all night long.  No wonder these people have “wind.”  How they get through a night I can’t imagine.

My machine which sits atop a desk next to my bed was originally calibrated to a mere 8. Later, without a doctor’s prescription, a tech who knew how to do it, calibrated my machine up to 10.  But honestly, I didn’t think the calibration was too high. Though perhaps my machine was defective.  How the hell would I know?  Then I saw they had come up with a whole other line of cpap air blowing machines called autocpap machines.  These have little computers in them that monitor your in and out breathing as you sleep and actually auto adjust to your “wind” needs depending upon whether you are having sleep apnea episodes (these it can detect because no air comes out of a person at all, at least from the mouth and nostrils while an episode is taking place.)

I decided that I wanted one of those machines; they cost over 500 dollars, but what the hell.  The only problem was to get one I actually, if you can believe it, needed a prescription from a doctors.

These doctors have gone ape-shit crazy with their prescription pads; but of course their livelihood depends on those little pads.  If they didn’t have those, people wouldn’t go to see them at all expect for real important stuff like open gaping wounds or heart attack.  Otherwise doctors are a pretty useless bunch. So they exercise as much as possible the tyranny of the prescription pad.

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Above: Ellwood in a very light rain plus snowy egret on seventh hole. 

I have had “sleep issues” for years.  I can’t remember the last time I got 8 hours.  And maybe years ago when there was a time that I did, I would still wake up tired because I was depressed, and sometime in there was the three or four years I drank myself to sleep…what I called my “situational” alcoholism.  And then three or four years ago, I became aware of the sleep apnea stuff.  I snored like crazy and would trash about at night very restlessly.

The sleep apnea machine did help.  I wasn’t sleeping very long it seemed, but the sleep I did get was more restful because I wasn’t waking myself up multiple times at night at an unconscious level because I was sufficating myself with my own uvula.  But that’s what happens in sleep apnea.  If you are a back sleeper and snorer, the uvula, and the fleshy tissues in its general area, will flap back and cover the air hole, the one that lets air get into your lungs.  So you start suffocating and your body becomes aware of this and wakes you up.

Some people have 40 episodes of this in an hour of sleep.  This can really screw up REM sleep which seems important to resting the brain, and the medical people have concluded this stuff, because it strains the heart, can shorten life.  So I got the sleep apnea machine, as I said, and have suffered with it four two or three years now.  I say suffered because the damn machine and the mask you have to wear to get air pressure is a real pain in the butt.  The seal will break and all of a sudden it sounds like a helicopter is taking off in your ear.  That tends to wake a person up and of course there’s the cord that feeds the air to the mask.  I woke up once with the damn thing clear around my throat.  I don’t know how the hell I did that.

So I have had plenty of ups and downs with the sleep apnea mask.  Like it’s a paradox.  It helps you to get better quality sleep but it can also make getting to sleep a real pain.  And about a month ago something new started happening.  I started swallowing air.  That’s when the air that goes into the mask that is supposed to go into your lungs, decides to go down the stomach hole rather than the air hole.  I started waking up in the morning with pains in my tummy and really powerful flatulence because of the air buildup in the stomach.

Then I started having trouble getting to sleep because I was taking in so much air that I would start to burp.  So there I would be, falling off to sleep, and I would burp.  Burp.  Burp.  Burp!  Constant burping is not a good way to go to sleep.  So I tried sleeping on this side or that side and elevating my head.  But still burp, burp, burb, flatulate, flatulate, flatulate. 

So Tuesday, I guess it was, I dug out one of the old masks I have and spent an hour or so adjusting it and lying on the bed in an awake state experimenting to see if I could find the right position and seal for the mask.  And it did seem better.  But that night, well, it was worse than ever.

I got maybe a total of 4.5 hours of sleep that night and that has cast a pall over the whole damn week.

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Above an illustration of a cpap mask for sleep apnea and the horrible head gear you have to wear to keep the thing in place.  Some people refuse to get treatment for sleep apnea becaue the idea of wearing such a contraption to sleep seems very undignified, not to mention, down right appauling. 

As her mother nears death, Carol has been trying for a week or so to pay attention and integrate, as she puts it, the good things of her mother into her self.  To acknowledge them, I guess.  She seems to mean by good things: good memories.  Moments of affection or tenderness or intimacy, or like the time her mother got angry at a waitress for refusing to give a new cup of coffee to a black man when the cream he poured into his first cup curdled.

I tried doing this, remembering the good things, happy moments of intimacy or affection of Mother Joan and drew a blank.  Zip.  I couldn’t think of a single moment.  True, I am pretty damn forgetful, but surely you would think I would remember something “good.” This failure may indicate I have amnesia or am simply one of those selfish, ingrate, no good children of the kind Joan seemed to indicate I was.

I mean yes of course I appreciate the fact that she wiped my disgusting filthy little ass when I was an infant, and I appreciate having been fed too of course.  She didn’t have to do that, I guess.  But what Carol is thinking of and what I am trying to remember is something that has less to do with the mother as mother and more to do with the mother as person or something as other than mother, though in Mother Joan’s case about the only excuse she had for the person she was—was, well, being a mother.

And I guess I must have been turning all this over unconsciously because as I was walking across the golf course the other day back from my daily walk to Ellwood.  I was crossing the seventh hole I guess, I suddenly out of nowhere remembered that Mother Joan liked stupid robber stories.  I think she read every scrap of the daily paper, the Union/Tribune or Daily Nixon I would call it, and she would find these stories about stupid bank robbers.
 
The stories seemed to tickle her, though I can’t remember her having laughed while telling them.  But she would tell them to us or maybe WB and once when I was talking to her I realized she knew a whole bunch of stupid robber stories.  These stories are of course about stupid robbers, or stupid bank robbers.  Those were the one’s Joan preferred.  The bank robber say who goes charging into the bank, fails to notice that the glass door is shut, hits the door and renders himself unconscious.  And the door is closed, of course, because the bank is not yet open…because, of course, it was closed down over a month ago.

And then there are the variations on ridiculous “demand” notes, like the one where the guy writes a demand note and signs it, along with a contact number.  Or the one where the bank robber sees there is a reward out for him, and decides to turn himself in for the reward. 

Anyway these stories seem to tickle Joan and I guess it was good to see something tickled her because come to think of it I can’t remember her ever laughing or at least I can’t remember the sound of her laugh.  

As it turns out a web check reveals a large number of sites devoted to stupid criminal jokes.  But Mother Joan was devoted to the sub-genre of the stupid bank robber joke.

Sunday morning started off sort of bleakly when I read an article on the front page of the LA Times about the UC and its slide into mediocrity.  Roughly, here are the figures:
 

In 1970, the state spent 6.9% of its budget on the University of California. Today it spends 3.2%. In 1965, the state covered 94.4% of a UC student's education. Last year it paid 58.5%.

Students are paying more because, of course, the system is receiving less from the state: 

This year, California will spend an estimated $3.3 billion to operate UC. It will spend three times as much -- $9.9 billion -- to run the state's prisons.

In 2000, 160846 people were in CA prisons.  There are more now and conditions are worse.  They are warehousing prisoners, one of top of another.  The situation is so bad the federal government is looking into “correcting” things.  What they may do is order that a bunch of prisoners be released.

And why not, the great bulk of prisoners are there for minor drug offenses and then they get stuck there 25 years to life because of the Draconian three strikes and you are in there 25 years to life laws that the state government and the people of CA passed over the last two decades in an effort I guess to make CA safe for tourism.

So who knows maybe there really is no money for those Venetian blinds in that classroom I was complaining about.  Maybe, I guess.  Surely the funding levels must be restored.  But if the UC is so damn broke why do I keep seeing buildings going up all over the place at UCSB like mushrooms.  All sorts of buildings and fancy parking structures though the number of students at UCSB has remained constant, by law, for about 20 years.

And who gets stuck with the bill for all this crap but the students.  The article is all about how the UC is deteriorating as an educational system, while it would seem, given all these buildings that it is flourishing as a research institution.  Let’s face it.  Students are getting screwed in part because of UC priorities.  The guys who set these priorities of course can argue back that they have to build these buildings to have the labs to do the research to attract private money so they can go into business with business.

So the article suggests the UC may go the way of the University of Michigan which has in effect privatized itself.  So what’s the deeper problem?

Long gone are the days when Californians were willing to pay taxes to build three new UC campuses in a five-year span and subsidize annual student fees of less than $250.

"There is this myth out there that citizens can get better roads, cleaner air, get their garbage picked up twice a week, be protected by police and fire and it won't cost them anything," Reed said. "People have been singing that song for 20 years."

The very people who went around saying there was no such thing as a free lunch are exactly the people who don’t want to pay taxes.  They want something for nothing.

Welcome to the consumer society where you can have your cake and eat it too constantly.

So finally I get to the club for my daily torture, and as I am disrobing, Just-Call-Me-Jay, from Merrill Lynch, where we put the Tingle Trust money, sticks his head around a row of lockers and says, “Well, now I have got it.”

Pretty cryptic, but since mostly we have talked over the last year or so about my tales of woe, of one kind of another, I figure maybe he has some “woe,” and like got it from me, “So I say, Ray, good sir, what’s up?”

Where the hell did that “good sir” come from?  But I said it, and he says, “I have prostate cancer.”

And I say, damn or something to that effect, and he says, well, it could be worse. His father had it and died of it, and so he has his PSA checked every six months and so they caught it in the early stages.  It’s just a tiny thing he says, way inside the prostate, so it hasn’t spread and there is a specific procedure that a couple of doctors in LA have done about six hundred times between them for just this kind of situation, and they are good and can get in there and get it out with no nerve damage…

Because Jays says, “I don’t want to lose my hard-ons.”

And I say, Yea, good sir, it’s important to keep those hard-ons.  Life without them is not the same.  So we are talking away about hard-ons and getting them and not getting them and erections and our peckers, and a couple of other guys in the locker room keep sticking their heads around the corners of the rows of lockers to see what these two guys are going on about with their hard on appreciation time, but they disappear behind the lockers when they figure out we are talking about prostate cancer.

But really that’s a good thing, I think, about Jay; he is a pretty straight talker and doesn’t hold anything back and give me the opportunity and I don’t either.  So I find out he is a bit worried because these doctors are so damn good they are all booked up and he may have to wait three months before he gets in, though, and he repeats himself because one repeats things like this to comfort one’s self, it’s way inside and right now it’s very, very small.

So as he is walking out, I am walking out too but up to work out, and he says, “Man, I don’t want to lose my pecker. It has given me a lot of fond memories.”

And I punch him on the shoulder, real macho-like and say confidently, “Don’t worry, man.  You will make more memories.”

So now, where do I find a get well card for prostate cancer?   

Over the summer—sometime or other—I wrote an article/essay called “Death and the Writing Instructor.”  As if that was something of significance.  I mean who cares about the death of the Writing Instructor or what has death to do with Writing Instructors anymore than say police persons.  But I wrote it because I think death was and is still on my mind.

I liked the title, “Death and the Writing Instructor.” I think it’s pretty dramatic like War and Peace.  Lots of people write titles with colons in them.  That’s the big thing these days.  Something like “The Death of the Writing Instructor: The implications thereof for the realization of the pedagogical imperative.”  Or something.  But “Death and the Writing Instructor”—I think that gets to the point.  I am a dying writing instructor.

I wasn’t sure though I would try to get it published.  It’s sort of an academic thing, with quotes in it from academic sources and it’s kind of about psychoanalysis and anxiety.  But, I thought, hell, you wrote it.  Send it out, but then I saw it didn’t have enough citations.  You have to have enough citations or somebody might think you thought it up yourself or that you are claiming to have had some thoughts of your own, and that’s a strict no-no.  Also citations say you are part of a “community.”  The community of academics, what a joke!  But I found some quotes and stuck them in so I could have more citations.  I also thought about making up some citations so I wouldn’t have to read anything.  But I didn’t do that.

So this is a pretty screwed up article.  It’s a bit personal; I mention myself some and it’s academic, so I couldn’t figure out where it would fit.  What journal might be interested I mean, in such a hybrid thing.  So I sent it off to this guy I know whose work I have read and respect and who is into psychoanalysis to ask where I might send it, and he wrote back that he didn’t know, but that he liked it.  And, funny, that was like enough.  I forgot about sending it off because he had liked it ok and I figured that was enough. 

I noticed that he had dedicated his latest book—he has written a number—to his parents.  His mother died recently and his father who died a decade or so ago was born the same year as WB, 1917.  We are about the same age and he wondered if other writing instructors too—many of us are baby boomers—might be going through the same sort of thing, and he happened to mention that his parents were religious fundamentalists and he had been raised in Texas.  So what is this connection between people raised in the south with religious backgrounds and psychoanalysis?

My argument in the article is a little bizarre.  I say teaching is a temporal act (what act isn’t) that involves the passage of something from one generation to another, from one that is fading or dying and one that is coming into being or growing, and that right at the center of this view of education is DEATH.  I am teaching students now who will be around long after I am long gone, and even as our futures have little in common, so now do our pasts.  My past has almost no connection that I can see to theirs.  They were born around 1988, can you believe.

Anyhow, a couple of days ago, I gave the article a final read, and sent it off to a journal that might possibly be interested.  Who knows.  But I no matter what think that’s a great title, of particular interest to those who are Writing Instructors, and also possibly to people in general who die.

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The last couple of days we had some big winds gusting to 30 mph.  They wiped out the footprints at the beach and left their own pattern. The ocean too was more vigorous than usual, with a few slight whitecaps. 

I don’t know where this week went.  It sort of slipped by me or something, but here it is Friday.  Maybe that night with four hours sleep put me in a waking coma, or maybe I was absorbed in getting through the first week of classes.  I just don’t seem to have been thinking about much of anything.  I can’t remember doing anything in particular either but here it is Friday.

I can’t tell much about my classes yet.  Well, probably there isn’t much to tell.  After 27 years of doing it, they seem pretty much the same and all blur into each other.  Yesterday, I am in this class room with a bank of windows along one wall.  It’s good to have windows because that’s ventilation and some of the other rooms in other buildings don’t have that. But this is an old building and one side has windows running from about four feet up to the ceiling.  Lots of windows.

They have Venetian blinds—I think that is what they are called—and none of them work.  They just hang there.  Some of them are rolled half way up and are just stuck there—with the little blinds open, and others are hanging all the way down with the blinds open and I tugged on the string this way and that and couldn’t get them to move. I got one to move and it went up on one side but not on the other and when I wanted it to go down, and I couldn’t get it unstuck.

This wouldn’t matter but I want to show part of a documentary on the development of the consumer society.  Just 30 minutes or so and then we will talk about it.  But it's late afternoon, about 4 and the sun is streaming directly into the window.  Really bright.  So when I turn on the DVD you can hardly see the documentary on the screen.  It’s like ghosts swimming around on the screen…the light is so damn bright from the windows. 

People have complained about those blinds over the years.  I have complained about those blinds.  But nothing happens; they remain dysfunctional.  I console myself by thinking that sometime in October the clocks will change and it will be dark outside when I want to show my DVD.  At least I think the clocks will change sometime in October.

This is kind of absurd though really.  Over in my old parking lot they are throwing up a multi-million dollar building, but they don’t seem to have any money for Venetian blinds.  Or more exactly they don’t have the money for Venetian blinds for a classroom where students sit.  It’s a little diddly thing I know, but symbolic, to use a big word, of the general attitude of the UC towards students, undergraduate students I mean.

They just don’t care much for them or about them.  If they did care at all really certainly that room would have had new Venetian blinds by now.  I just don’t get it.

The windows of my office have not been washed in ten years and the Venetian blinds there don’t work either.  But then I am a teacher.  I expect neglect. Also my office smells of mold, but I open my window and turn on the fan I bought and the smell goes away.

So I get up and check email and have emails from three students saying they tried to enroll in my class with the approval code I gave them but couldn’t get in because I gave them the wrong codes.  Which it turns out, now that I have checked, was true.  I have two of the same class, back to back, and in the same room, and I didn’t even look and gave the guys in the first class the codes for the second class, and the guys in the second class the codes for the first class.

Usually, I don’t do stuff like that.  I mean I can still remember the basics, usually.  But the night before last I slept for crap.  I mean maybe 4.5 hours if I was lucky.  I don’t know what the problem was, but once it started there was no end to it.

I was tense about something, I remember, and then just as I start to drift off this sound like an airplane taking off goes off in my ear because one side of my sleep apnea mask comes lose and causes this roaring sound.  So I readjust the mask, and I start to drift off and it happens again.  So I tighten the straps on the mask, till I have about cut off all circulation to my face and scalp.  Maybe if I tighten it enough I will cut off all the blood to my brain and just pass out.

So it happens again, and there I am fumbling around in the dark because I realize that the mask is killing me, it’s so tight, and I have forgotten, from fatigue, to apply this cream Carol gave me to my facial skin to keep from leaving red marks all over my face from the straps from the sleep apnea mask, and I am fumbling around because I can’t find the little tube of cream.  I am reluctant to turn on the light because if I do, sure as crap, I will be fully awake, not that I am not fully awake and becoming more so by the second because I am pissed off at not being able to find that little tube of crap I put on my face so I don’t get red marks on my face.

It’s like one in the morning.  So, damn it, I decide to take a sleeping pill Carol has a prescription for and see if that does the trick.  But 30 minutes later I am still tossing and turning, so I decide to readjust my approach completely and stack two pillows on top of each other to keep this pain from occurring in my neck and lie directly on my side, and what do you know the new position works.  I go to sleep for a bit but then I wake up because I start to roll over in my sleep, but I have managed to put the tube that brings air to sleep apnea mask UNDER the two pillows so when I try to roll over I can’t.  So my body is going one way and my head the other.

By that time I am really pissed off, and being pissed off I have found is not the way to go to sleep.  But then I do (go to sleep) and what the hell but I wake up at 5 am.  5 am!  For some reason my body has decided I am supposed to wake up at that ungodly hour.  And it knows what it is doing too because I swear I wake up, I look at the clock and it doesn’t say 459 or 501.  It says 5 on the freaking button.

So later in the day I screw up and hand out the wrong approval codes.  I also forgot to bring my lunch and I spilled coffee all over the inside of this bag I pull around behind me.

Brother Dave sent an email saying a guy we knew from back in High School had died.  He was just 56.  He was one of three brothers, and two of them have already died.  Dave also knew the brothers in another family; there were three or four of them, and I think three of the four have already died.  One of them had a parachute fail.  A couple of years back I got a call from one of the Wasko’s as we called them—the rest of their name being Polish, quite long and unspellable.  There were three Wasko brothers and he was, he said, the last one.  He called to report that the Wasko I knew best had been found dead in his house surrounded by automobile parts.

That’s a lot of dead brothers.  I didn’t think of us as having come from a particularly rough neighborhood.  But then I remembered a time way back when I worked for an organization called CAMP (college assistance migrant program).  Mostly these were Latino/a people from out in the rural stretches of the Central Valley.  I was talking to this one guy and he said about half of the guys in his graduating class were dead from drugs or having crashed their cars into aqueducts.

Compared to these guys, we—Dave, Steve, Dan and I—didn’t come from a rough neighborhood.  Still that’s quite a few dead brothers from where we did come from, East County San Diego, which was pretty much the equivalent back then of the wrong side of the tracks.  Of course, that was a suburban wrong side of the tracks and not an urban wrong side of the tracks.  The people there might have been mostly working class but they owned their own homes (or were trying to) and we didn’t have gangs, as I recollect, though we did have plenty of drugs.

We did have this one guy who would put a thumb over one nostril and blow the most amazing amount of snot out of the other, right there on the road.  He was from Oklahoma.  What was that guy's name? 

But I guess I am thinking about some article I recently read that offers numbers pretty much showing that lifespan is correlated to income level.  Poorer people don’t die necessarily violently of course, but more piece by piece from bad nutrition, no exercise, lack of education, and not enough medical attention.  Good food costs more than bad food.  In some areas of LA you simply can’t find a “super-market.”  Instead you have rip-off mom and pop operations with high prices and yellow lettuce.

So I guess we are lucky—Dave, Steve, Dan, and I—to still be alive and kicking.  Sometimes when I am talking with my shrink about where I grew up and what I went through, she says, “Neek, you are lucky to be alive.” (or not in jail or in an insane asylum).  She even seems to think I should feel proud about what I have “accomplished.”  Funny, but I don’t feel a damn thing.  I am glad she feels that of course; but for me it’s water off the duck’s back.

What does she know anyway?  She’s a loonie French woman. Her family for a while at least owned an actual castle on the coast of Brittany (that’s a place in France).  A damn castle.  How did I end up seeing a shrink whose family owned a castle?  People from the wrong side of the tracks don’t own castles.

She said the damn thing was really hard to heat.  The castle, I mean.