I have no business mocking anybody’s appearance, but

I am a very small man.

Ladies and Gentlemen — Count Bankula!

I vann to suck your riyals

That’s right, some unemployed trust-fund punk is making fun of the head of the biggest bank in Qatar. Like I would have any idea how to dress in the Middle East. (My Andy Warhol shoes would be right out.)

I’m a terrible person. Guess I’ll go watch t.v. and cheer on Dexter.
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Protesting Work Ethic

Unbelievable! Another week and hardly anything posted. You guys deserve a refund. Mail your requests to Henry M. Paulson Jr, Department of the Treasury, 1500 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington D.C. 20220. For expedited service include a note saying your prime brokerage is on the skids.

It’s not like I’ve been busy being a productive citizen. I can’t even blame doctor’s appointments — I had one that lasted about ten minutes. Nope, just spent the week pissing around, memorizing two-letter Scrabble words (sh!), watching the death spiral / Phoenix-like resurrection of the Mets. I used to follow the team pretty closely and I can give you some expert analysis. Ready? Here it is: Their bullpen is shit. Thank you. Thank you very much. If Paulson sends you any money gimme some, I earned it with that.

Yeah, the mets are really giving me a lot of pain lately. Not the Mets, the mets, the metastatic lesions on my lungs. Evidently they’ve swollen just enough to cause the excruciating, stabbing pain that’s throbbed underneath my rib cage the last couple of weeks. I thought the chemo was supposed to shrink these bad boys? Oh wait, I’ve only gotten three chemo treatments since the mets were found out, because I dicked around with this fancy schmancy New York doctor instead of taking care of business here and now. By ‘now’ read ‘last November, when it would have done some good.’

All right, all right, I’ll quit complaining. I meet with Dr. Sunshine next Monday, and treatments should resume shortly thereafter. Then it’s onward and upward for me. Wish I could say the same for John Maine — his doctors are worse than mine.

Fuck! My shoulder!

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Badlands – NDE #3

August 2003, Kansas. I can’t specify what town in Kansas, because I was, more literally than ever, in the middle of nowhere. We were finally moving back to the Bay Area after some tough years in Kansas City. We’d loaded up the U-Haul and headed west. But the truck didn’t seem so sturdy somehow. The ride started out bouncy and after ninety minutes you noticed a definite swaying back and forth. Maybe 120 miles from K.C. we finally got rocked by a blowout. Those things are loud, by the way.

I kept a steady hand on the wheel and edged the truck to the side of the road without incident. The repair crew did their thing without incident. We drove off and found a motel without incident. We got to the Mill Valley apartment without incident later that week. We turned around and moved back to Kansas City two days after that… not without incident.

It doesn’t sound like cheating death, and maybe I didn’t. But the farther I get away from this episode the more I think how easily the truck could have spun out of control, rolled onto its side; how we could have been stuck out in the late summer Midwestern heat for hours with no water or anything else; how we could have killed each other driving back, arguing about why we were.
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Learn something new every day

From the health desk here at Goodbye, a public service announcement. Folks, listen closely. If you take prescription medicine on an empty stomach, you may vomit.

Oh, yeah. For real.

Your fearless editor put his life on the line and tested this out the hard way, gulping down a Cipro at nine in the morning last Tuesday. I was headed straight to breakfast but I figured I’d beat the traffic by taking the pill at home so I wouldn’t have to carry that heavy prescription bottle with me. I mean it’s not heavy but there’s just not a good spot for it in my purse.

I almost got away with it; I didn’t feel anything until the moment the food came to the table. But the sight of that sausage and eggs kick-started my stomach and sent me sprinting to the john, where I spat up, basically, the pill and a glass of water.  (I know what you’re thinking — how’d he swallow the glass?)  At least I didn’t have to go to the hospital afterward.

Oh wait, I did. I was up early (i.e. the wrong side of noon) to get chemo from Dr. Times. He saw how sweaty and pukey I was and nixed the session then and there. That’s probably the last I’ll see of him now that I’ve decided to get chemo here in Kansas City with a non-celebrity oncologist. Goodbye is too good a word, Dr. Times, so I’ll just say fare thee well. And thanks for almost killing me with the Avastin earlier this year.

If you don’t remember the Avastin saga, just wait for the future installment NDE #5, which explains it in lurid, disagreeable detail. Then again it might be NDE #6 or #7, I can never keep track. Almost dying, like everything else, is an art. I do it… I wouldn’t say exceptionally well, more like, regularly.
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State Line Road Blues – NDE #2

May 1993, Kansas City. You’d think NDE1 would have created a cautious, defensive driver, but my motto has always been “Live and don’t learn.” I’ve gotten more speeding tickets than I can remember, literally; my license was just suspended last year. In my mind, I’m entitled to drive faster than almost anyone else, because I’m smarter than almost anyone else and make an effort to drive quickly, safely. The police have yet to grasp this concept; I must be smarter than they are as well.

But the crash of ‘93 wasn’t a result of my lead foot. I was driving north through an intersection at a reasonable speed when an older guy headed south made a left turn right in front of me, leaving me no time to react. My mind had a nanosecond to process the situation and flashed a gigantic red FUCK!! in front of my eyes before everything went black. I came to, screamed, mumbled the word “ambulance” to the samaritan who came to the car door, and I got my first trip to the ER, but certainly not the last.

We weren’t wearing our seatbelts and we both hit the windshield. (That’s right, Betterhalf has been sharing in my good fortune for decades now.) Apparently I had a decent-sized flap of skin flopping loose from the top of my head. In the hospital I could feel them washing the broken glass off my skull; it seemed like someone rubbing bb pellets across my brain. Then they pulled the two sides of flesh together to sew up the wound and I could feel the skin tighten everywhere from the neck up. A week later I went back and told them to take a stitch out of my temple. It turned out to be a piece of glass about the size of a grain of rice.

I still don’t wear my seatbelt.
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Eight Miles High

Flying back to New York tomorrow for a friend’s wedding on Saturday and a meeting with Dr. Times on Tuesday. Sporadic posting to follow, a break from the regularly scheduled updates you’re used to receiving. By the way, before I forget — how ’bout those Lehman preferreds, eh? Wonder why the yields are so high on those bad boys this week? Hmmmmmm.

Well, see you next Tuesday!
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The Fast and the Furious – NDE #1

All right, since you asked, I’ll run down the other times I faced off for a chess match with Death and dropped a bingo on a triple word score for the win. First in a series, and my first excuse to begin categorizing. Big day here at Goodbyecorp.

Spring 1990, Newark International Airport. It’s as good a place as any to die, I guess. My mom asked if I could drop her off at EWR and then drive myself to school. Does an 18-year-old have to think about whether he wants the keys to the car? Does an 18-year-old know what happens when you take that first turn at 80 mph? In this case you lose control of the Honda, which fishtails all over the two-lane parkway, causing even the take-no-prisoners Jersey drivers to slam on their brakes and give you plenty of room to destroy yourself.

After perhaps a quarter-mile of floundering the car ended up coming to rest about six microns away from the highway divider. I took a moment to place my heart back in my chest and reel my eyeballs back into their sockets. It wasn’t so much the thought of dying in a car accident that frightened me. It was the idea I might have wrecked the car, survived, and had to answer to Mom. That’s the death I was afraid of.
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No, We Can’t

What the fuck happened? Seems like only last week Obama wasn’t just president-elect, he was conquering Europe. The Daily Show wasn’t making fun of him, it was making fun of how perfect he and his campaign were. McCain? Who cares what that ol’ cuss is up to? Three months’ time he’ll go back to the Senate where he and Hillary will pretend this never happened.

Now it’s Obama’s turn for the “Who he” treatment. He could announce plans to cut taxes in half, double taxes, tax the rich, tax the poor, tax left-handers south of the Mason-Dixon line — nobody cares. He’s the Invisible Man.

Apparently this reversal of fortune is all because of a 44-year-old grandmother who has barely accomplished more in life than I have. Though I am impressed with the way she parlayed “Miss Wasilla” into “Mayor of Wasilla.” What does it take to win a beauty pageant in a city with 3,000 women? Remembering where to show up?

Oh, this is bad. See, now the GOP’s got a story that can be understood by morons who read US and People. Once you lose that moron vote in America, you are screwed. I hope Obama enjoys the view from the Hart Senate Office Building. He can e-mail Biden to let him know how traffic is flowing on Constitution Avenue.

I’ll leave it to Stephen Colbert and Times op-ed geeks to delineate why she-who-must-not-be-named would be a dangerous choice for actually, like, being Vice President, even though nobody knows what it is exactly that the VP does every day. Any air time, even phantom blog air time, is too much for this woman.

But I will point out that her nickname needs fixing. Sarah Barracuda may have sounded bad-ass back in high school, but to me it sounds like something a baby would find in a Dr. Seuss book — and reject as “too singsongy.” The nickname you’re looking for here is Sarracuda, all one word. That’s a little more sleek sounding, I think.

There. I’ve finally done some volunteer work for the Republican Party. I can die now.
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But when you owe $100,000 or a million, you just laugh!

Longtime readers of Goodbye recall the author’s tearful* surrender of his acoustic guitar earlier this year. Now first-time callers can enjoy the picaresque tale of the sale of the second guitar — the $500 “hybrid” Traveler Guitar. Rock on!!

For those of you who aren’t rock stars, a hybrid guitar is an acoustic and an electric guitar in one; it looks like something Joan Baez would have bored people with in the Village in the 60s, but you can plug it into an amp when you hit the big time and play the Meadowlands. Hybrid was in quotes in that first graph because the Traveler model I had was shaped like an electric guitar and didn’t really hack it as an acoustic. But whatever.

So yeah, the Traveler was sitting in a closet in the New York apartment. I finally had an afternoon free in the city last week and prepared for my exciting journey into New York’s bohemian district, a place called SoHo. That’s where the cool people and artists live. I had carefully written down directions to the used guitar shop by bus and by subway. I figured I would take the subway, because it would be so much faster.

If you’ve already read enough “Rube can’t figure out the New York subway system” stories, then get bent — that ain’t my fault! Anyhow, I caught the V at 53rd and Lex and got off at what I imagined to be the stop closest to Houston and First. Gotham veterans can already guess that the rookie meant to get off at “Lower East Side” (I mean, could there be a bigger hint?) but actually disembarked at “Broadway and Lafayette,” a good fifth of a mile off.

Oops!

I clambered up the stairs and properly oriented myself: That’s north. This is south. That’s north. This is south. My directions say I need to go three blocks east from here, so I go…. this way. Off I went, waiting to see confirmation that I was where I should be: Allen Street? Orchard Street? Ludlow? Come on Ludlow, help a brother out.

No such luck. I was seeing Mulberry, Mott, Elizabeth, the streets where Betterhalf used to inspect the boutiques that get written up in Paper or Nylon or Flaunt or the like. After four or five blocks I made one of many fatal mistakes in my life. Well, I’ve given this direction a good shake, he thought to himself, I must be going the wrong way; I’ll turn around.

You know where I’m headed here, although at the time, I sure as hell didn’t. I think some lobe back there was flashing the warning siren but I wasn’t listening. I was too confused by seeing street names that sounded familiar from visits six years ago (Mercer? Is Mercer near Ludlow?) and trying to figure out how the temperature had risen 11 degrees in the space of an hour. Also wondering how I was always on the sunny side of the street regardless of which direction I was headed.

After about five minutes of this, I knew there was a 0% chance I would sell that guitar that day, or ever. The cement was already drying on the “And after all that, I couldn’t even sell it!” storyline. I would have just left the thing on the street, but the Village** streets were choked with the daring members of the demimonde, and I was too embarrassed. Besides, I had to live up to my end of the bargain and see it through, see what excuse God would come up with. We don’t sell that model? We’re going out of business? Store closed for Ramadan?

Cue the $10 taxicab U-Turn. Wait for the dude with the beard to finish the hard sell on a pick (that’s right, a pick) to another aspiring Page. (“Its like the guys in ZZ Top that use a quarter to play, man” — dude, I’m in!) Now play the part of Steve Set-up.

“How can I help you?”

“Yeah, I just wanted to sell this guitar?”

“Yeah, our buyer’s not in today, he actually won’t be back until Thursday.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

I walked out and noticed that a neighboring apartment building had its door open, presenting a clear view of an empty alleyway.  I hoisted the guitar up to shoulder level and heaved it shot put style a good thirty four feet. It wasn’t quite Pete Townshend but at least no children were harmed.

I’m never playing the guitar again.

* For your information there’s an inflammation in my tear gland.

** Was I in the Village by then?
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