Anything with the brain can tire one out. This has certainly been my experience with my traumatic brain injury. And it has also been Dad's experience with his Lewey Body Dementia. He falls asleep easily in his chair when watching television. I don't mind so much. When he does, I sit quietly. When he wakes up, we continue talking about politics or cars or relatives.
I love my Dad and it is sad for me to watch the spiraling nature of his cognitive and physical decline. I remember to love him in the ways that he wants to be loved. I cherish every moment that we have together. And I hope for him what I hope for all of us, that he will die in his sleep one night or peacefully napping in his chair.
sapphoq on life
(The pic is of my cat on a bedspread yawning with a caption that says, "I needz mai naptiem. Go 'way." I took the pic, I reserve all rights to the pic, and I own the cat too. So copyright police, you can go away now).
"One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected....That they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly."
H. L. Mencken
Dude lived in Baltimore and admired Friedrich Nietzsche.
I've never lived in Baltimore (yet?) and I admire B.F. Nietsche.
Dude knew Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser.
I met Jonathan Kozol ["All the money spent for public education in America ought to come from federal taxes that are equitably distributed with adjustments only for greater or lesser costs of living in various sections of the nation and the greater educational needs of certain children."]-- yes, that Jonathan Kozol-- in Boston in January 1978. It was after a Marshall Tucker concert. I found his number in the phone book and he answered. This led to him picking me up at the Little Copley and taking me to his brownstone where we spent several hours engaged in deep conversation. This meeting was after he'd been to Cuba. He showed me a poster from Cuba which authorities had allowed him to bring back to the United States after he explained that he needed "it to understand the Cuban people."
Dude loved Huck Finn and so did I, albeit I suspect for different reasons.
Dude wrote under various pseudonyms and so do I.
Dude's pseudonyms were never spoken of as "sock puppets" and mine certainly have been accused of being trollish in purpose. [I neither embrace nor deny my inner troll nature in this post.]
Dude had a chemistry set at home when he was a boy.
My dad gave me one of them for Christmas one year but my mother decided that it was dangerous and threw it out. [To my mother, almost all Christmas presents from my dad must have been somehow "dangerous" because she threw out almost all of them].
Dude like photography as a kid.
I got to know and love my cheap digital camera as an adult.
Dude was a famous writer.
I am a non-famous blogger.
Dude is one of the people I would love to have coffee with, along with Oliver Sachs [#1, sorry H.L., I hope you don't mind being #2], and Martin Millar and my paternal grandmother.
So, H.L. Mencken, here's my shout out to you. I'm sorry that you still aren't around but I'm glad that you lived. Thank you for being you!
sapphoq itching for a coffee before engaging in life
When I was living in Baton Rouge, my friend Irene and I drove down the east coast of Texas to visit her ex-boyfriend Lee's parents. On the way, we stopped in Freeport to see my friend Madeline's two aunts who owned a wonderful little Mexican restaurant. We also overnighted at the Holiday Inn in Corpus Christi (in the parking lot, a sort of shelter-in-place if you will, in the car).
After our brief introduction to Corpus Christi, we continued to South Padre Island. I was astonished to find a collection of cars and campers on the beach. We did indeed join them, after a brief foray to the bay where we found a guy who basically lived there.
What was notable on the oceanside was a rented Winnebago (no infringement of copyright intended, but it was indeed a Winnebago) full of Minnasotian snowbirds who did not have the sense to remove themselves from the rooftop where they were baking their sunburns into a crisp.
From Lee's parents, Irene and I parked the car-- which was full of sand, pot burns, and remains of marijuana smoking and beer guzzling-- at the shoe store parking lot in McAllen. This was where all the hippies left their cars in order to walk over the border to Reynosa on the Mexican side. To our credit, we also had the sense to leave our blue jeans and our shorts in our duffelbags and donned sensible but hot corduroy pants for our stroll.
Once across, the sight of taxi cabs driven much as their counterpart in New York City are reassured me. The little beggar kids who followed us imploring us to buy a wooden salad fork and spoon for our americanos dolares were a new experience for me. We stood in the hot sun drinking a Tecate apiece. Cervesa in Mexico was allowed to have twice the alcohol content that the equivalent in Texas was, so that was a big deal to us. Then we went off and bought the vegetables from the street stand that Lee's parents had requested us to purchase for dinner.
http://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/Analyst-Desktop-Binder-REDACTED.pdf
