Centering My Thoughts

In/on a world of inter/inner fighting/competing species/states of energy sits a creature looking for a buffet of insects readily available in trimmed lawns interconnected in a suburban landscape.

Kelli smiles.

She serves a few customers in Pizza Hut on a sunny Thursday morning at the edge of town.

A Sysco food delivery truck passes by.

The old National Guard armory and recruiting center sits empty.

Land cleared for a shopping centre when times were good and plans for moneymaking schemes flowed like fool’s good out of city fathers’ minds grows weeds without profit in mind for insects, birds and wildflower watchers.

The local university extension campus attracts those who hunger for knowledge and better job prospects.

A mansion holds its aristocratic head high.

Kelli perspires while the billionaire Olsen twins appear on TV as time-rewound youngsters “acting” in a studio to resemble life in a full house.

Government authorised murder takes place around the world, the leaders denying and in denial.

Hyphenated hyena housesitters host herbal henna hen hosemakers happily hopping hats hissing hissy fits, fittingly fxed.

Suddenly, the Bob Newhart Show comes to mind, reminding one that two generations of sitcoms and one generation of Internet/web sensation videos have slipped under the bridge since this writer attended the UT/ETSU Kingsport extension center.

Time to wish Kelli well and pick up a repaired Siemens hearing aid with one-year warranty for 200 buckeroos.

What?

Asked Medicare inspector to write down my comments about treatment of mother in-law.

She told me to have a nice day.

What else did she not write down today?

Who inspects the inspectors?, I wonder introspectively…

What are their credentials and do they follow their own procedures?

Where’s a good whistleblower when you need one?

Horatio, sound the horns! We’re off to Sri Lanka to bait some Chinese junks.

Compra Aqui, Paga Aqui

Cryptic sign du jour: SI-VN11.

What about Janet, who couldn’t sit for a moment waiting for a hairdo change ahead of me at Smart Cuts?

Her loss was my gain.

I sat with a cheerful young woman who scissored my follicle output down to a summer trim, serenading me about her future attempt at making a SpongeBob sheet cake for her four-year old daughter’s birthday (“I’ll use a melonball cutter to carve out the sponge holes. What colour should the holes be – darker or lighter than his body?”) and something about a dinosaur train show on the tellie.

Her ex-husband is still a good friend.

She wants to take an f…lobotomy…no, a phlebottomoose…well, a class on needles and blood in order to become an EMT. Her stylist coworker wants to finish her academic studies in nursing.

Later, observing drivers, passengers and automotive transport machines parade past while scribbling notes in a carpark between Riverside Avenue and Fairview Lane, I contemplated titling this “Road Closed to Thru Traffic- Bump Ahead” to honour road construction crews dealing with unruly, roadsign-ignoring drivers.

A nod to Sullivan County EMS – Paramedic Unit, Country Tyme Primitives, and the tie-wearing friendly employees of La Carreta #3 who will have Bohemia beer in the future for those who want what they want and don’t have to ask twice.

Thanks to Holly and Robert at Walmart, Linda H at Walgreens.

On a side note, interesting to watch my dyslexic typing, an indication that I can’t easily resubstitute family matters for central nervous system locations (including external clues) I normally use to feel the rhythm of the universe around me.

Dadgum, these here emotion-like neurochemical states of energy are a mess to deal with, sometimes.

On the Front Porch Across the Fence

While maple helicopters fly through the air, I listen to pledge pleaders with ducks and geese sunning in the hot spring heat at the river park in front of Netherland Inn.

Meanwhile, a double cheeseburger and fries churn in my belly after a Dairy Hart fuel’d conversation with Teresa Carpenter, a Kingsport Times-News correspondent who writes the Tuesday column “Across The Fence” in the voice of a neighbour who chats with passing neighbours.

She and her hubby, former CTs (crypto techs) for the U.S. military, speaking Spanish (more Panamanian than Cuban) and German/Russian, have lived around the world, including Japan, Vietnam, Germany (two tours for total of seven years), U.S. and almost Italy.

At Church Hill H.S., he dealt with a principal who ruled like a former Marine that he was. In high school, she attended a speech class which operated a mock model government that debated snack food and drink, an excuse to eat and drink in class.

He left Church Hill and joined the military to get out from under the Carter’s Valley shadow of his father, who knew everyone and everyone knew him. She remembers when she was a kid hearing sonic booms in Aberdeen and stopping in Kingsport at a diner with pretty peonies when her family was heading north up Hwy 11W and I-81 to visit family in New England.

They wish for high-speed Internet access in Stanley Valley not depending on bouncing signals off orbiting satellites because ADSL does not reach them and dialup is inefficiently sufficient.

Two kids – one married and one in school.

Thanks to Church Hill EMS, Jackson Lawn Service, Hawkins Co. Gas Utility, Crown Vending, Bullseye Guns and Supply, radio replay of the 1920s Bristol music sessions, Hawkins Co. Courthouse bee movers and Michelle Hensley of Dairy Hart.

Teresa interviewed me -let’s see if she columnises me or mentions me on her blog, http://southernfriedtravel.com.

This is Rick, not Nina Totin’ Burgers, reporting from the streets where you live, as opposed to the rare and fried air of supersized supreme benchsitting judges. Thanks to river game warden patrols.

Cowboy bikes and catching big fish

A list of thanks to start the day: Sir Randall, Grainger County Keith and Charleston Zach at Express Oil Change; smiling Harvey the dedicated Rehab Tech, Justin, Lucy Barnett, Rachel Ellis, Tasha-Marie Olinger, Courtney Camper and all the other helpful people at Asbury Place; Medicare/Medicaid inspectors; Cherry Murray for her [cough, cough] rational/logical presentation of oil vs. nuclear industrial safety issues to a committee (the Committee will remember you well).

Lottery numbers for the day: 003KLY, 241RTS/Catch22.

How long do I ignore the obvious; that is, that credit rating agencies have stopped serving their purpose as objective rather than politically-motivated organisations beholden to a group of profit-mongering…

I apologise for that outburst. The Committee has reminded me that I can no longer claim to be a man of the people now that they have their clutches on me in the form of the NDA I signed to not be able to tell you more about the unexplainable.

They’ll release information proving I’m just as much a profit mongerer as the best/worst of them if I insist on the preletariat social program re/revolutionary reform movement line of reasoning.

But seriously, who’s watching the people who run the credit agencies and the perks they get in after-hour dinner parties, golfing holidays and casual lunges…err, I mean lunches at fancy restaurants?

Do people buy china in China?

My mother in-law learned to love her daughter in-law even though she almost didn’t bless her son’s engagement to a person without a college degree and/or a hefty dowry to offer (but who ended up being a good intellectual companion).

Now she faces a similar situation with her grandson, not wanting to attend a wedding for a marriage that in good conscience she cannot bless for the same reasons at this time, wondering about college potential, or academic/intellectual curiosity.

I’ve tried to assure her this is a normal social practice of the woman or man seeking to improve his/her social situation through the legal auspices of consensual cohabitation, often assuming a chemical/quantum formula called love.

We sit here – she is napping and I am watching the traffic jam of popular rehab personnel exercising the patients patiently up and down the hall.

Thanks to the City of Kingsport nonpotable water street cleaning crew.

Time to close. Family issues take priority over global economic management concerns. Time for a breathing treatment, lunch and rehab evaluation/summary with Rachel Ellis (goal: return to independent living, reached one occupational step at a time, helped by Jill and others).

The mirror in the mirror is staring back at me

I step away from the Committee and look what happens. They’ll just have to wait.

Yes, this country’s governmental legislative leaders are caught in a vise of shrt-trm visions.

On one hedged bet, revive the economy with government bloat.

On another, restore solvency to prevent disaster.

To whom/what are your leaders most loyal?

In a global economy, any entity can legally line your representative’s retirement account with golden threads.

Does a country really matter to a person like me with investments spread around the world that leech like a parasite the profitable skin off workers’ backs?

If you don’t care to follow your representative around 24 hours a day to see what that person is doing to save your country from going bankrupt, who will?

How secure is my stock portfolio if my country isn’t?

Buy your beer with your interest, not your principal.

What are your principal principles?

To think the way I do requires few friends, unfortunately, because my thoughts are fanned out and filled with impossible-to-resolve contradictory sub/cultural belief structures.

My wife is the only person I trust and with whom I trust myself.

All else is illusion to match my literary output to a global social structure we call reality.

Long ago I grew bored with the interplay of ordinary lives in a social structure we call the workplace.

Another Monday of rehashing weekend sporting events with coworkers. Another joke about Wednesday being hump day. Another comment that Friday gets us two days closer to Monday once again.

How many friends and family members have reminded me that life within our species is essentially the art of small talk?

And so, here I am, the primary caregiver for my mother in-law who needs the comfort food of small talk more than anything else to ease her general starvationlike condition of loneliness.

She’s eating up all the attention she gets at the skilled nursing facility right now, supplemented by visits from her hometown church and neighbourhood friends who are like family to her.

She has commented more than once that she must be boring me.

She is a sophisticated smalltown lady with proper manners and a relatively clear mind for a 93.5 year young person.

Basically most everything that I am not.

I am a clever suburbanite with contriteness and a fuzzy set of thoughts at almost 49, old in mind if not in body.

She thinks like an aristocrat while I think like a … well, like whatever strikes me as funny.

To hear her break down family/friend backgrounds by social class and economic job category would add great character studies to a Jane Austen novel of the 21st Century.

She needs a home healthcare person from the equivalent of a smalltown upper middle class family of the 1920s and 1930s, if I read her thoughts correctly, or one used to working for such a family. Preferably one who is licensed, bonded, insured and not on the skids.

Definitely not a guy like me who’s willing to sacrifice friends and acquaintances for the sake of barter exchange efficiency and a good joke, hopefully one that is innovative, inventive and funny.

Maybe my mother in-law is right and the desophisticated, unthrifty habits of modern American living is the country’s undoing.

Some people are born into upper/middle class and some wouldn’t know a good classy lifestyle if it was given for them to live frugally but wealthily. Some become academic snobs.

This Ol’ Rocking Chair in An Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual

How often do I take the time to sit and rock?

Dulled by too much stimuli sometimes, I forget the pleasures of small/no talk while atop a rounded fulcrum of sorts (not hardly a perpetual motion machine).

Have you ever worked in a pet kennel, zoo, prison, stockyard or institutionalised healthcare facility?

I reckon I haven’t, either. Own an aquarium, though.

You said you have? Sorry, my tinnitus is acting up today, my brain’s nerve endings excited by the musical-like chords of life on this planet.

What’s the difference between caring for our species and caring for other species?

Have you ever written a symphony using solely the sounds of lawn maintenance equipment for percussion and musical notes?

A touch lamp came on in the master bedroom of my mother in-law’s house.

If I don’t believe in apparitions, what do I make of the electrical connection spontaneously heating a wire element in a vacuum tube and getting my attention?

Ghosts, angels, ninjas, thieves or spies?

Faulty wiring or swamp gas?

A dream or optical illusion?

Humourous anecdote.

How many people of Mountain City have never left the political entity (county) or geographical feature in/on which they live? Brenda the patient pill sorter might know.

I observed a person who told me the person’s spouse was an officer of the law. The person has several finger-sized hematomas on one arm. Anecdotally, members of military/law enforcement are more prone than the general population to express their emotions physically on their families.

Conclusion? Not enough information to propose a strong hypothesis.

Watch how a person handles a pen in conversation and you learn a lot nonvebally-speaking.

Cryptic signs for the day: GY8883 and GU4045.

Congrats to Andrew on his new house – welcome to the indebtedness of adulthood!

Thanks to the staff for playing musical patient beds. Thanks to Jimmie for moving clothes and Becka for attention to details of cleanliness; Lucy for processing paperwork and arranging things behind the scenes.

My sister (a school counselor) and my mother in-law (a former teacher) are in awe of the ability of healthcare workers to maintain a positive attitude in their hard jobs.

Watch some workers tiredly walk to their cars after shift change and you’ll see the healthcare superheroes are human like the rest of us humble folk.

I’ve swept the driveway and sidewalks, cleaned out the garage, called the homeowners insurance company about hail damage, eaten lunch, put the newspaper crossword puzzles on the porch for a neighbour (which reminds me to mention my mother in-law misses reading the Wall Street Journal that the family had delivered to the house when she was a child), and arranged housecleaning for the week.

This casually-compensated errand boy is taking a nap – plenty of time to be my harmlessly bold and forward-appearing character later on (exercising my right to arrange my states of energy any way I please, letting others sort out the reality from the fiction on their own time and cultural scale).

Rock a-bye baby, in the treetops…

Besame mucho

Correction: Kacie, not Casey.

A nod to Brian Lamb interviewing Andrew Ferguson, author of “Crazy U.”

Have you ever sat and watched house power meter gears turn?

A best college visit wish to Maggie and her mother, Maggie.

A friend, Floyd, living with his mother as a part-time assistant, not cost-free handyman, because his mother’s mobility is much decreased in the second half of her life, said, in relation to dating women, “Mom, I’m going out tonight and will be late. If I’m lucky, I’ll be home really late.”

We adult men parental caretakers are still men, after all.

My mother in-law hit rock-bottom this afternoon while I sat at my parents’ house.

She couldn’t bend over to pick an item up off the floor and had the worried thought that maybe she was permanently weakened, panicked we had put her in a nursing home without letting her know, because she had heard us say she was only there for physical therapy but no therapist had shown up yet.

Minutes later, Justin the therapist arrived, sent by God in answer to prayers/thoughts, my mother in-law surmises.

Her spirits are lifted.

So are mine.

The role of patient, loving mother/father is not one this hermit cherishes.

“You mean I really am only here for physical therapy?”

Yes, I reply for the decadozenth time as gently and kindly as if for the very first time.

“I won’t have to pay $42,000 a month for nursing home care?”

No, I reply once again, explaining in as simple a detail as I can without shouting too loud to her deaf ears that she keeps substituting 42,000 for either 2,400 or 4,200 we mentioned a long time ago after we checked prices when she asked us if we’d be okay IF SHE chose to enter a nursing home and that her finances are fine no matter what because of her Social Security benefits and Medicare insurance with supplemental coverage.

As the therapist told her, she’s being too hard on herself -she’s a great lady with a beautiful smile, sweet disposition and inner desire to heal.

Meanwhile, she troubles herself about her post-therapy future.

I’ve asked her to focus on improving her strength so she will have the ability to make the choice she wants as opposed to what any of us will have to choose for her if she remains weak.

As always, I am humbled by daily experience.

Healthcare workers – floor nurses, home health workers, etc. – you have my biggest respect.

We may write history books about business, military and government leaders but the people in the fiel such as nurses, LPNs, CNAs, nurse practitioners and physician assistants deserve the greatest kudos for keeping us well and helping heal the sick.

Is Eleven Years In One Place A Childhood Home?

Sipping/chugging a dark wheat lager brewed with winter spices after picking up tree limbs off my parents’ yard…

Could be watchin’ NASCAR motorised vehicles in a circular bang ’em up ballet.

Could be neighbourly, spreading the message that a Christiane Armed-n-poor led round/oblong table projected, or the message that the Pepsi CEO’s facial expressions/twitches implied.

Blue skies and breezy day call my name.

A rabbit eats dandelion blooms in the backyard while contemplating Richard Adams and Watership Down.

I can speedread text but not video. Dragging the progress bar or fastforwarding is not the same.

Sitting by myself in the church sanctuary, safe from UV rays and whatever else faces me in the great outdoors, I felt alone and helpless this morning, unable to sing hymns with my usual joyous man/boyish booming voice of enthusiasm because I didn’t have my wife there to entertain with octave changes and hold her hand during congregational prayers. I miss her deeply/dearly.

Going solo at my in-laws’ and wife’s hometown church on Palm Sunday, I had no role to fill except messenger, quickly completed.

And then I was invisible again.

The prism.

The funhouse mirror with no persons peering at me to see their distorted image reflected back for comic relief.

If I cannot or do not reflect, what am I?

What is a social being without a social connection?

Best line I heard, emanating from a dementia patient in a bathroom: “Oh my God! What is coming out of my butt?!”

I want to be that person one day, forgetting what a BM is and entertaining random passersby with insightful age/scatological humour.

What if I already am and don’t know it?

If so, would someone please let me know by magically turning on a lamp next to me in this instant?

Oh well, no magic lanterns and no voices in my head telling me what to do after I lose an argument with myself.

Stuck with sanity and reality one more day, it appears.

Thanks to Jeremy at Fatz; Lynda, Tina and Christina at Dollar Tree; the soldier walking into the west Kingsport Walmart; Pam and Casey at Baysmont/Asbury Place, if I haven’t thanked them already.

Would a sitcom based in a skilled nursing facility generate enough episodes for TV syndication? Or would an Internet video series find a profitable ausience…sorry, audience?

Brain is slipping. Best sign off before it falls. Adios.

Time to contemplate the role of a comic preacher-in-residence proselytising to patients in a nursing home with a mixture of dementia and physically frail archetypes aided by witty nurses, therapists and CNAs battling with budget-challenged administrative types.