If you’re not into the whole brevity thing

Watched Savage Grace last night. You know, the based-on-true-events-and-some-we-made-up flick where Grandpa made a fortune in the plastics game, but a couple generations later the heirs have become kind of shiftless? Julianne Moore stars as the long-suffering wife of a Baekeland scion* played by some probably British guy who looks like a cross between Jeremy Irons and George Harrison. They both smoke, so they have that going for them, but he’s cold — he undercuts her at dinner parties and unleashes surprise buttsex on her. And that’s just the first reel!

“Trapped in a loveless marriage,” she turns her attentions toward her only son, played by (at various times) a guy who looks like a young Thurston Moore, a ten-year-old kid, and a baby. Mommy and Tony become very close as they traipse through Paris and Mallorca and some early-Ibiza-type town whose name I can’t recall. I don’t want to give away any of the plot, but eventually they have sex and he stabs her to death after getting upset about a dog collar.

Goofy recap aside, I actually liked the film. Julianne Moore (no relation to Thurston) could never be bad. The father and son actors are all right, and the cinematography (or was it the mise-en-scene) is quite good. But you want to hear the real reason I liked this one?

Because it was over in under three days!

The imdb clocks this one at 97 minutes. That’s pretty tight for a story that has a lot going on in it — the book on which it was based was more than 500 pages long. I don’t know offhand what the typical pages-to-hours ratio is, but (to reach for more surprise buttsex) Ang Lee got more than two hours from 65 pages of “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx. Jack, I swear…

[This is the part where I would go off into an Andy Rooney tirade about films being too long in general these days, and how can it take two and a half hours to tell the story of a guy in a cape fighting a guy in a green vest and purple jacket, but I don't want to sound like Andy Rooney, so this paragraph isn't here.]

There you have it folks. Savage Grace: Good-looking, short and perverted. Just like Tom Cruise.

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* No easy synonyms for “heir,” are there?
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Let be be finale of seem

Reason #412 not to read the news: Not only is the news always bad, it’s also badly written. Maybe I’m a churl, maybe I’m a schoolmarm; maybe I’m a lonely man but baby, I’m amazed at how bad the writing is in front-page, mainstream news.

Exhibit A: Today’s insightful AP article headlined “Analysis: Obama on his way toward election win.” First impressions, without even reading the article: Gee, ya think? You guys are talking about his campaign against Senator Clinton, right? The race against McCain has been over for maybe two weeks now, but the AP is only now getting around to conceding.

The article itself, I don’t know where to begin. The beginning, I guess. The first graf is tolerable enough, a straightforward sentence saying Obama appears to have locked up enough electoral votes to win on Tuesday. Then we get this:

Even if McCain sweeps the six states that are too close to call, he still seemingly won’t have enough votes to prevail, according to the analysis, which is based on polls, the candidates’ TV spending patterns and interviews with Democratic and Republican strategists.

Seemingly? Seemingly? Wow. You really have a lot of confidence in this exclusive analysis of yours, don’t you AP? One second you tell us who’s going to win; the next, things only seem a certain way. Oh okay. Next the Times will be telling us they have a funny feeling the GOP will lose seats in the Senate but they can’t put their finger on why.

In fairness, the AP has to hedge its bets because they can’t be seen to be favoring one candidate over the other. Wait a minute — of course they can. This article comes with the FDA-style warning “Analysis” in the headline. They can present, how you say, an interpretation of the news, dare we say, an analysis. We’ve analyzed the race and it looks like that one’s going to win, and the other guy’s chances don’t look so hot. There you have it.

But “seemingly” is just the first hedge in this bold, provocative article. Soon we get this:

It’s still possible McCain can pull off an upset. Some public and private polling shows the race tightening nationally. And, roughly one fourth of voters in a recent AP-GfK poll were undecided or said they still could change their minds. It’s also still unclear how racial feelings will affect the results in voting that could give the country its first black president.

And, the word “and” isn’t an independent clause, so don’t give me this “And,” jazz. And, “Some public and private polling” is right up there with “Some people say,” as in “Some people say Obama is a Muslim who dances on the graves of Jews.” And, how about that last sentence that appears to be a reference to the Bradley effect, but is so vaguely written that the reporter might as well have said “And, hey, this guy’s black, I mean, who knows what’s going to happen?”

You want more? Bad writing or bad analysis? Writing: Referring to “Traditionally Republican” areas is okay but “usually GOP states” doesn’t do it for me. Analysis: Saying McCain still has a chance in Pennsylvania, “where public polls show Obama leading by double-digits, though McCain aides say it’s much closer.” Uh huh. I think these are the same McCain aides who vetted Sarah Palin for him.

The article goes on and on in this vein, repeating itself a few times before eventually unraveling. Somehow the kicker got buried in the midsection, where McCain’s lead pollster displays the audacity of hope: “All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.”
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Another health advisory from “Goodbye”

Here’s a tip. If you’re feeling a little off before bedtime — soreness in your back, say, combined with tightness in your stomach — and you take an Ativan (0.5 mg), a Hydrocodone (5 mg), a Zofran (8 mg), and 600 mg of Dilantin all at once, you will get a good night’s sleep.

Really good.
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Bleed Out — NDE #5

March, 2006, Kansas City. I was home after the surgery that had gone so well. Well, not so well. I was about 20 pounds underweight and weak as a — as a cat? At least a cat can shit on its own. I was the opening verse to “Consoler of the Lonely,” but it wasn’t the ear that had a constant buzzing in it.

It was my ass.

Something did not feel right *down there*. It hurt somewhat even if I was just lying around, but when the wife and I would go out to get my “senior citizen walking the mall”-type exercise, well then it got sexy. How can I put this delicately? It felt like there was a golf ball-sized cheese grater in my rectum, one that danced with every step. Stand up, it hurts. Lean on something for support, it hurts. Sit down? Not on your life.

The mystery was solved (sort of) one night when I was in the shower.* I was rinsing away, barely able to keep my head up, when it felt as though I was about to pass gas — not something you do when you have a colostomy bag. I relaxed the sphincter and found myself pushing out something solid. I reached around and pulled on a rubbery, well, rubber — that’s what it seemed like, anyway.

Of course it wasn’t a condom, it was a condom-sized piece of my own flesh being rejected by my body — with bits of surgical wire and maybe 20, 30 surgical staples to boot. I freaked out (can’t imagine why) and got on the toilet, which I proceeded to fill with maybe half a pint of dark, purple, not-meant-to-see-the-light-of-day blood.

That didn’t do a whole lot for my energy level — I went to bed and almost died passed out. (A nurse who heard the story recently was surprised to hear I hadn’t lost consciousness.) Later I called the surgeon’s office where his nurse told me the doctor “was fine with it.” Whew! That was my top priority, the emotional status of the sadist that carved up my rectum and left some heavy metal behind.

I did have an appointment with him a few days later. I brought the condomy staples joint, which had been residing in a Ziploc bag in the freezer. I asked him what this was all about. He told me the staples were supposed to come out naturally once the wound healed over — strangely enough, he hadn’t mentioned that before the surgery. Hmm. Then, showing foresight that I lacked, he pointed to the Ziploc bag.

“Can we throw that away now?”

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*The ladies demanded it.
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You think it’s easy coming up with snappy headlines once a week?

Wow, here it is, October more than half gone and only four posts on Goodbye. I’m starting to wonder if this is not a blog so much as an ongoing apology for the lack of a blog. In fairness, there’s just not a lot of breaking news here in Kansas City. And you know I have other demands on my time — family members visiting, therapy, facebook, driving to get take-out, being sick, playing Scrabble ™ on the iPod — this is a busy and fulfilling life I lead over here!

What can I tell you. Voted for Obama this week. Biden too. I keep hearing these stories about gobs and mobs of voters lining up around the block weeks before the election, and I’m glad. But this is the third time in Missouri I’ve voted ‘absentee,’ i.e. early, and every time I’ve been the only person in the room. Well me and the poll workers who can’t believe the way that young feller McCain has made a mess of things.

I wonder why that might be. I reckon the local election board just isn’t promoting early voting so much. Of course it’s not as though they want to increase voter turnout — you know TPTB want us as disenfranchised as possible. You know how the whole story about how Ohio allotted, like, two or three voting machines for all of Cleveland in 2004, forcing people to wait in line until 3 a.m. to cast their provisional ballots that got thrown in the trash anyway. (The “two or three voting machines” is an exaggeration, but the 3 a.m. voting isn’t.)

And then there’s all this nonsense about how the Republicans want to prevent “voter fraud” by insisting that everyone (in cities at least) show up with two forms of ID and can pass a literacy test. Voter fraud yet. Half the time you can’t pay people to vote in America even once — you think people are actually waiting in line, punching out the chad, then going around the block and showing up again with a fake mustache? Come on.

Well, Obama looks like he has it sewn up right now, if you believe the gambling web sites that show him with an 80% chance of being #44. If he loses the GOP must have gotten up to some skulduggery to surpass Florida ‘00 and ‘04, and even Ohio ‘04. But it ain’t gon’ be Missouri’s fault not with Robin Carnahan as Secretary of State. That’s one reason to feel good about living here at least.
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Blood and Guts — NDE #4

February 28, 2006, Kansas City. Only a few months after a tumor had been discovered in my rectum, it was time to take it out. I’d had a few weeks of chemo and radiation to shrink the bastard down, but this was the main event. This was the operation that would save my life.

Simple procedure? Not really. Low anterior resection involves cutting out the part of the rectum that houses the tumor; reconnecting the rectum to the end of the colon; and shaping a new rectal ‘pouch’ out of the joint. Oh, and they tear you a new one — they pull your intestines out through a hole in your abdomen and leave enough exposed for you to eliminate into a bag. But that’s temporary — that should only be there a couple of months. After that, good as new.

My primary care doctor, Robert Neihart, assured me that Dr. W. Edwin Conner of St. Joseph’s Hospital was “the best in town” for colorectal surgery. But I guess the best wasn’t good enough. He removed the tumor all right, but he also mangled my GI tract something fierce. I was able to see it when I was getting an X-Ray the following year; the “pouch,” meant to resemble a normal rectum, looked as convoluted as Lombard Street. A surgeon I saw in New York later told me that I could look forward to a dozen bowel movements a day (along with anal leakage) if I wanted to get rid of the bag and shit like a normal person.

In other words, I would never shit like a normal person again.

And I haven’t. Any time anything gets eliminated anally*, there’s blood in there somewhere. We’re gaining on three years there.

Why is this listed under near-death experiences? Because I barely survived; I came out the other side a ghost. The procedure was meant to take four hours but lasted six. When i came to I was in enormous pain; it felt like I’d been worked over by the baseball furies, with a bear trap clamping on my midsection for good measure. (Every operation I’ve had since then has been a breeze, and being revived feels like awakening from a year-long nap.)

A couple nights after the operation I staggered to the toilet in my hospital room. In the mirror someone new looked back at me, someone with a foot-long scar down his middle, draining bodily fluids into three separate bags. He was hideously underweight, the ribs under his skin modeling for H.R. Giger.  I thought to myself, “He doesn’t stand a chance.”

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*Eliminated Anally – that’s the name of my thrash metal band
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Getting a bit tiresome now…

Okay, okay. The U.S. financial system is in a total DEFCON 1 meltdown, with the Fed cutting rates to, what, 0.0%, and the Treasury nuking the piggy bank and giving a heads up to Obama that he won’t be able to afford to fund, um, anything. So, stocks go down, sharply, momentum picks up, panic selling, fine. Seen it all before.

And I accept that commodities are getting spanked too. Slower economies worldwide, less demand, all making sense. It’s sad to see my paper profit in DBC burning like an Iraqi oilfield, but what can you do. No reward, no risk, no crying over spilt blood, no big deal in the long run, right?

But this, this is just getting obnoxious. Humble, reliable bond funds getting clocked like they’re some dot-com pretender on the wrong side of 2000 ? Not fair, not fair! These are my safe havens, man, they’re where I’m parked when I throw in the towel on this whole equities racket. These are the boring investments, the ones that just sit there. They’re supposed to earn a paltry 4% a year, not go down 4% in a day. Criminy!

All right, all right, they’re closed-end funds, so people who are just getting their September statements are finally liquidating their accounts indiscriminantly. So yeah, if they have NUV or NIM or MIN or CXH they’re not going to listen to a broker tell them “You know these are trading at an 11% discount to their true value, you might want to hold on for a week and see if you can get a better price.” Nope. Sell yesterday for whatever you can get.

The crazy thing is I actually switched a couple of these funds around earlier this week for some tax-loss harvesting. (That phrase is becoming too common for my tastes any more, I could do with harvesting a fucking gain once in a while.) Already the newer funds I bought are down so sharply they look like they’re candidates for a tax-loss swap themselves.  Like Michael Jackson said, these stories are crazy!
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Punchy kicker, punchy kicker, God I know there’s one in here somewhere… Damn it!

Big Bottom

Great news, America! The financial crisis is officially ovah! No, not because Bernanke’s cutting interest rates to a level low enough to stimulate the economy. (I’m guessing that would be around -3.0% at this point.) And it’s not because the Treasury found a trillion under the sofa cushions. No, it’s because of a change-up at the real focal point of the U.S. economy.

Me.

That’s right, I sold the last of my equities this week. This can only mean that stocks are poised for a furious rally starting, oh, an hour from now, or as soon as word gets out that I got out. Seriously, this happens all the time. Why do you think stocks finally put in a bottom in late 2002? Because of talk they were going to slash the capital gains tax rate? Nah. Because I dumped all my ETFs and put it all in munis.

My preferred method of forcing the market back up is to sell some naked calls against the S & P 500 Index. I could show you some evidence, some instances where I went short at noon and the market went wild right around 12.30, ending a weeks-long plunge. But to do that I would have to invest a lot of time looking through all my old statements, and that would just bore the two of us. Also I’d probably need a Bloomberg terminal.

Just take my word for it folks. I mean, who would brag about constantly mis-timing the markets? Who would telegraph that he keeps forgetting the maxim “If you’re going to panic, panic early?” Bottom line, when I bail out, things start to look up. Trust me.

Oh and I dumped my commodities fund too, so the price of gas is probably going back up too. Sorry.
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Moves in mysterious ways

Whew! Barn burner of a day over here at Cancercorp. Where to begin. How about with the early morning puke? Like many of my technicolor yawns,* this one came out of nowhere. One second, chewing on the first bite of my everyday lunch, the powerbagel toasted with peanut butter. The next second, calmly walking past my better half on my way to the toilet, hoping she doesn’t notice my face is green. And doing a Satchmo. HUUULP!

Very disappointing on a number of counts. A, it’s too early in the day for me to blame this one on anxiety. Secondly, I haven’t had chemo in a month, literally a month, so I can’t blame it on that. ( III ) I specifically eat the powerbagel because it’s a dense-calorie food, so I get a lot of protein and calories in a meal that’s usually small enough for me to handle. Lastly, the maids just came and cleaned the toilets yesterday.

Welp, wife didn’t notice (I used the back bathroom and there was only a bite to give to the porcelain gods**) so I went back and finished the thing as if nothing had happened. Which it didn’t. You didn’t see anything, nobody saw anything, they can’t prove anything, etc.

Next, we went shopping for a lamp. My premonition was that we’d drive all the way to Urban Outfitters (I’m still an undergrad, right?) and not find anything in the store, then look on their web site and find l’lampe juste. (I don’t speak French.) I was half right; on the way there we began ‘debating’ a subject that some couples have some problems with, but I won’t specify the subject here. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. The mood ring turned blacker with every mile. It didn’t look good.

And neither did the lamp! You think I like this? Ugly like Dan Uggla. But she had dropped me off and I figured I should grab something quick. By ‘grab’ I mean ‘lug up two flights of stairs, wheezing like a guy who has cancerous lesions in his lungs.’  When she saw the lamp, do you think she went with “That looks great!” or “Well, it’s your lamp” ? Answer C, the silent death stare. Only 1.30 and the day is not looking good.

Happily, fate intervened. I put the lamp in the backseat of the Jetta, or tried to. I was having a hard time getting it to fit all the way. I thought, Well I’ll just cram it in here — it’s supposed to bend anyway.

It bent all right. PING! The screw where you bend the lamp (intentionally) broke completely off. The lamp was now two lamps connected by a wire. Its value had gone from $68 to $0 in seconds; AIG joke goes here. Or Lehman. Or Freddie Mac. Or Fannie Mae. Or Washington Mutual. Or Wachovia. That joke isn’t getting funnier yet is it?

Drifting home, I breathed a sigh of relief. If I hadn’t broken the lamp we would be arguing about it to this day. “Let me get rid of it.” “No, you wanted it.” That kind of drill.

Shit, where’s my kicker! God damn it!

*Admit it, you love the Preppy Handbook
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